A Companion to American Literary Studies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

A Companion to American Literary Studies

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published Recently 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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Edited by John T. Matthews Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh Edited by Keith Wilson Edited by David E. Chinitz Edited by S. E. Gontarski Edited by David Seed Edited by Kent Cartwright Edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley Edited by Corinne Saunders Edited by Michael Hattaway Edited by Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel Edited by Paul Lauter Edited by Gene Jarrett Edited by Julia M. Wright Edited by Charles Mahoney Edited by Nicolas S. Witschi Edited by Pamela K. Gilbert Edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas Edited by Erik Martiny Edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

A

C O M P A N I O N

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AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES EDITED BY CAROLINE F. LEVANDER AND ROBERT S. LEVINE

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2011 © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to American literary studies / edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-9881-3 (cloth) 1. American literature–History and criticism. 2. Criticism–United States. I. Levander, Caroline Field, 1964– II. Levine, Robert S. (Robert Steven), 1953– PS25.C59 2011 810.9–dc22 2011012207 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444343779; Wiley Online Library 9781444343809; ePub 9781444343786; Mobi: 9781444343793 Set in 11/13 pt Garamond by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited 1

2011

In memory of George Dekker, Emory Elliott, and Jeffrey Richards

Contents

Notes on Contributors Introduction Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine Part I.

Forms

x 1

13

1

Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form Russ Castronovo

15

2

The Critical Work of American Literature Joel Pfister

29

3

Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel Shirley Samuels

46

4

The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Elizabeth Fenton

61

5

Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature Paul Gilmore

77

6

Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature Gavin Jones

93

7

Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease Kirsten Ostherr

108

Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies Catherine Gunther Kodat

125

8

viii 9

Contents Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O’Neill Jeffrey H. Richards

10 Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies Mary Loeffelholz 11 After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies Jennifer L. Fleissner

141 158

173

12 Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Nancy Bentley

191

Part II.

209

Spaces

13 Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism Anna Brickhouse

211

14

Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz

228

15

Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History Michelle Stephens

16

Transatlantic Returns Elisa Tamarkin

248 264

17 American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain Shelley Fisher Fishkin

279

18

294

Southern Literary Studies John T. Matthews

19 New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations Sean X. Goudie

310

20 American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy George B. Handley

325

21 Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence Mark Rifkin

342

22

Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History James H. Cox

356

Contents 23

Globalization Paul Giles

Part III.

Practices

ix 373

387

24 Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature Dana D. Nelson

389

25 American Literature and Law Brook Thomas

406

26 Sexuality and American Literary Studies Christopher Looby

422

27 Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War Priscilla Wald

437

28 The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature Ursula K. Heise

454

29 Narrative and Intellectual Disability Michael Bérubé

469

30 Reading for Asian American Literature Colleen Lye

483

31

Untangling Genealogy’s Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions Carla L. Peterson

500

32 Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction Ramón Saldívar

517

33 The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities Matt Cohen

532

Index

549

Notes on Contributors

Nancy Bentley is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Ethnography of Manners (1995) and Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (2009). She is currently working on a study of kinship and the novel in the Americas. Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature and the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent books are What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? (2006) and The Left at War (2009). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (2004). Anna Brickhouse is associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Virginia, and the author of Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004). She is currently completing a book on stories of failed translation and mistranslation in the Americas. Russ Castronovo is the Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Fathering the Nation (1995), Necro Citizenship (2001), and Beautiful Democracy (2007), and the editor of several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook to Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2011). Matt Cohen is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive and the author of The Networked Universe: Communicating in Early New England (2009). James H. Cox is associate professor of English and the director of the Indigenous Studies Graduate Portfolio at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions (2006) and Literary Revolutions: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico, 1920–1960 (forthcoming). He is also the coeditor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Notes on Contributors

xi

Elizabeth Fenton is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in NineteenthCentury U.S. Literature and Culture (2011). Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of over 40 books on American literature and culture, most recently the Library of America’s The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (2010). She is a founding editor of The Journal of Transnational American Studies. Jennifer L. Fleissner is associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (2004) and of essays in such journals as Critical Inquiry, ELH, American Literary History, American Literature, and Novel. Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. His most recent books are Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion (2010) and The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011). Susan Gillman teaches world literature and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989) and Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), and coeditor (with Russ Castronovo) of States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009). She is currently completing a project on adaptation and translation in the Americas context titled “Our Mediterranean: American Adaptations, 1890–1975.” Paul Gilmore is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (2001) and Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (2009). His articles have appeared in American Literature, ELH, MLQ, Early American Literature, and other journals and books. Sean X. Goudie is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. His current book project examines how the “Caribbean American region” became a primary locus for US empire building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Goudie is the director of Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies (CALS), which recently hosted the inaugural conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Kirsten Silva Gruesz is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2001) and numerous essays on nineteenth-century print culture in English and Spanish. She is currently completing a book on the cultural history of Spanish usage in the United States.

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Notes on Contributors

George B. Handley is professor of humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000) and New World Poetics (2007), and coeditor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2006) and Postcolonial Ecologies (2010). His articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, Callaloo, American Literature, and other journals and volumes. Ursula K. Heise is professor of English and director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Her major academic interests focus on environmental culture, literature and art in the Americas and Western Europe, and theories of modernization, postmodernization, and globalization. She is the author of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (1997); Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008); and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (2010). She is working on an English version of Nach der Natur called Cultures of Extinction, and a new project provisionally titled “The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature.” Gavin Jones is professor of English at Stanford University. His books include Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999); American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2008); and an edition of Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret (2009). Catherine Gunther Kodat is professor of English and American Studies at Hamilton College. She has published widely on US literature, music, dance, and film in journals such as American Literary History, American Quarterly, Boston Review, and Representations. During the 1980s, she was the dance critic for The Baltimore Sun. Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Rice University. She is the author of Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (1998) and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (2006), and the coeditor of several volumes, including Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010). Robert S. Levine is professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is the director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), and the editor of a number of volumes, including Hemispheric American Studies (coedited with Caroline F. Levander). He is the new general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Mary Loeffelholz is professor of English and vice provost for academic affairs at Northeastern University. She is the author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (1991) and From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2004); and her essays have appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, The New England Quarterly, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Studies

Notes on Contributors

xiii

in Romanticism, among other venues. She edited Studies in American Fiction from 1991 to 2008, and she is currently the editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D, 1914–1945. Christopher Looby is professor of English at UCLA and president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. The author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (1996), he has also published The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1999) and prepared an edition of Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (2008). He is currently working on a book called “The Sentiment of Sex.” Colleen Lye is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in American literature, Asian American Studies, and Critical Theory. She is the author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (2005), and coeditor with Christopher Bush of Forms of Asia, a special issue of Representations published in 2007. John T. Matthews is professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of The Play of Faulkner’s Language (1982), The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (1991), and William Faulkner: Seeing through the South (2009). He has written essays on a variety of other topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British literature, and is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950 (2009). Dana D. Nelson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches literature and American Studies. Her most recent book is Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (2008). In her new book project, “Ugly Democracy,” she examines alternative democratic cultures and practices in the early nation, with an interest in their legacy and the possibilities they provide to democratic practice today. Kirsten Ostherr is associate professor of English at Rice University, where she teaches courses in film and media studies and medical humanities. She is the author of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005) and Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies (forthcoming), as well as articles on public health films, science fiction, animation, and independent art cinema. Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland, and affiliate faculty of the Departments of Women’s Studies, American Studies, and AfricanAmerican Studies. She is the author of The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria (1986); “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (1995); and Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2011). She has published numerous essays on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture.

xiv

Notes on Contributors

Joel Pfister is Kenan Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Department of English at Wesleyan University. He has published six books, including The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1991); Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies (2006); and the coedited Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (1997). He is completing a book on American literature from Franklin to the modernists. Jeffrey H. Richards (1948–2011) was for many years Old Dominion University Eminent Professor of English. He is the author of Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789 (1991), Mercy Otis Warren (1995), and Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (2005), and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of American Drama. Mark Rifkin is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (2009) and When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (2011). He also coedited Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity: Rethinking the State at the Intersection of Native American and Queer Studies (2010), a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Ramón Saldívar is the Hoagland Family Professor in Humanities and Sciences and professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of several books, including Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) and The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), which won the Modern Language Association Prize in 2007 for the best book in the area of US Latino/a and Chicana/o studies. Among his current projects is a book-length study titled “The TransAmerican Novel: Form, Race, and Narrative Theory in the Americas.” Shirley Samuels is professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Romances of the Republic (1996) and Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (2004), and the editor of The Culture of Sentiment (1992) and Blackwell’s A Companion to American Fiction, 1780–1865 (2004). Michelle Stephens is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (2005) and a member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Skin Acts: New World Black Male Performance and the Desire for Difference.” Her research and teaching interests include American, African American, Caribbean, and New World literatures; diaspora and cultural studies; black performance studies; and the intersections of race and psychoanalysis. Elisa Tamarkin is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008). She is currently working on a book titled “Irrelevance,” on the culture of the news and on ideas of relevant and irrelevant knowledge since 1830.

Notes on Contributors

xv

Brook Thomas is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published books on James Joyce and on the New Historicism, and three on law and literature: Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987), American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997), and Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship (2007). He has also edited a casebook on Plessy v. Ferguson (1997). Priscilla Wald is professor of English and Women Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995) and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008), and coeditor (with Michael Elliott) of The American Novel: 1870–1940 (2011), volume 6 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. She is currently at work on a book-length study titled “Human Being after Genocide: Toward a Genomic Creation Myth.”

Introduction Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

Forms, spaces, practices – these are the key terms that this book adopts for conceptualizing the current state and future directions of American literary studies in the twenty-first century. No longer organized exclusively by author, time period, genre, or nation, American literary studies is developing new paradigms and models that revise many of our standing assumptions about literary practice, literary categories, literary production, and the field of inquiry itself. No longer viewing American literature as a canon to be curated or an archive to be recovered and preserved, Americanists increasingly regard their object of study as a dynamic, multimedia, hybrid textual corpus, deploying a wide array of interpretive strategies and methods that help us to reconceive what we thought we knew about the study of American literature. It is the very dynamism of the field at the present moment that the 33 essays comprising this volume collectively represent. In this way, A Companion to American Literary Studies offers a key and timely point of departure from other recent American literary studies collections. A Companion to American Literature and Culture (Lauter), for example, offers genealogical essays on the history of the field, along with essays on the authors and subjects central to American literary study. Rather than mapping out the various fields and subfields of American literary studies (regionalism, ecocriticism, transcendentalism, and so on), our volume focuses on critical work that is helping to transform the field itself. Accordingly, we include in our Companion essays by newer and established scholars whose thinking addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating American literary studies. The essays represent and respond to changes and reorientations in the field, engage the increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

assess the unprecedented material changes occasioned by emerging digital, new media, and visual technologies. As a group, the essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today; a number of the essays also chart new directions for the field, pointing to future developments and possibilities. With its emphasis on a wide range of scholarly practices, the volume, we hope, can serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in the current state of American literary studies, as well as for anyone interested in the future of the field. We undertake this collection because, at the present moment, the field of American literary studies finds itself at an exciting and potentially revolutionary point of transformation. Gender, race, ethnic, and women’s studies helped to transform the canon during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and new developments in hemispheric, transatlantic, transnational, and postnational studies have raised questions about the very viability of American literary studies (see, for example, Davidson and Hatcher; Kaplan and Pease; Levander and Levine; Manning and Taylor; Rowe). Does it make sense to continue to regard the literature of the US nation as constituting, in Richard Poirier’s well-known formulation, “a world elsewhere”? Questions of race, gender, ethnicity, and nation are at the center of many essays in this collection, as are essays that focus on Native American literature, queer studies, disability studies, postcolonial reconceptions of “early American” literature, and the human sciences. There are surprises here, such as an essay on medical imaging, which links up with other essays in the volume on the increasing importance of biology, genetics, and machines to American literary studies. The new digital studies poses pressing questions about textuality, audience, and nation, as do various interdisciplinary approaches to American literature, whether the focus is on law, history, religion, politics, disability, gender and sexuality, and/or other intersecting disciplinary formations. Taken together, the essays in the volume help us to see how American literary history might be told in the light of a number of new approaches to the field. The essays also help us better understand the histories and workings of the new approaches themselves. But even as the essays point to the future, they are profoundly dialectical, showing the continuing importance of the literary and the national to American literary studies. In essays by Joel Pfister, Shirley Samuels, and many others, the literary itself provides ways of thinking about critical method, or, to put this differently, the literary is seen as a form of critical practice. Virtually all of the essays in the volume have literary works at the center of their discussions, making it clear that even the newest approaches tend to be inflected by an intense interest in the literary. There has been much recent talk about a renewed interest in aesthetics in American literary and cultural studies (Elliott, Caton, Rhyne), and this volume suggests that considerations of literary complexity, artistry, and vision remain central to the challenge of doing American literary studies. Similarly, though a number of essays in the volume raise questions, implicitly or explicitly, about the limits of conceiving of American literary studies solely in terms of the US nation (see, for example, the essays by George Handley and by Susan Gillman and Kirsten Gruesz), the nation remains central to

Introduction

3

numerous essays in our volume, ranging from Elizabeth Fenton’s consideration of religion and American literature to the essays by Carla Peterson and Ramón Saldívar on African American literature and race. All of our contributors have moved beyond a literary-nationalist embrace of US exceptionalism, but that doesn’t mean that specific national histories – such as the role of millennialism in American thought, or the practice of slavery, or attitudes toward poverty in a supposedly classless nation – haven’t had an enormous impact on US literature. As the field of American literary studies becomes more globalized and comparative, the nation continues to exert its power (in all sorts of ways) as a category deserving of analysis. Essays in Part II of this volume, however, ask us to think about the nation in larger hemispheric, transatlantic, and global contexts. We have organized the essays in A Companion to American Literary Studies around forms, spaces, and practices because these conceptual groupings work against the chronological and thematic analytic categories that often make up traditional literary histories. The essays in Part I, “Forms,” address aesthetic issues in a variety of ways, but generally take literary form as either their starting point or an integral concern; the essays in Part II, “Spaces,” focus their attention on geographies and temporalities in ways that raise questions about or revise our understanding of the national, or, better yet, the “American” in American literary studies. The essays in these two parts very centrally are also about literary practice; and the essays in “Spaces” in particular are about new ways of practicing American literary studies. Nevertheless, we have established a third grouping called “Practices” (Part III), guided by the idea that reconceived notions of literary forms and national, geographical, and temporal spaces are central to a number of what could be called the new and emerging subfields of American literary studies, such as law and literature, posthumanism, disability studies, and race studies. It is important to emphasize that our three conceptual sections are meant to highlight or foreground what we regard as the main emphases of the essays, and that we are well aware that our groupings are inevitably overlapping and palimpsestic. Even as we acknowledge that none of the essays can easily be contained within a single conceptual category, we find these categories illustrative of new perspectives in American literary scholarship on what constitutes the literary past, what generates the literary present, and what is possible for the future of the field. Because of these shared interests, many of the essays produce provocative cross-talk between sections. Gender, for example, moves as a dynamic thread linking the nineteenth-century US novel (Samuels, “Forms”) to the worlds of color that become visible when we approach gender within a hemispheric system of meaning making (Stephens, “Spaces”). Approached from a transnational perspective, the labor dimension of gender systems gains a new legibility that resonates with our understanding of social inequality as represented in American literature (Jones, “Forms”). New mass culture modes of literary expression offer another powerful through-line connecting the three sections. Popular visualization techniques for disease (Ostherr, “Forms”), for example, function like and resonate with the unorthodox but deeply meaningful

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transnational text networks that Gillman and Gruesz sketch in “Spaces.” Within the larger context of these kinds of text networks – ranging across time, space, and narrative forms, and, as Bentley illustrates, being long consonant with mass media (“Forms”) – digital humanities can be seen as both an emergent mass culture phenomenon and a natural next iteration of a longstanding popular engagement with the disparate technologies of textual production (Cohen, “Practices”) and the disparate textual productions of technology (Gilmore, “Forms”). We could also note that the issues of performance that Kodat addresses in “Forms” resonate in virtually every essay in the volume, whether on genre (Richards and Loeffelholz, “Forms”), new Caribbean regionalisms (Goudie, “Spaces”), Native American studies (Rifkin and Cox, “Spaces”), democratic cultures (Nelson, “Practices”), or gender and sexuality (Samuels, “Forms”; Looby, “Practices”). And yet, if the individual essays comprising the collection consistently resist, move across, and synergize our three conceptual groups, each section nevertheless has an internal cohesiveness and focus. In this respect, the essays in each section can be regarded as thought-experiments in key concepts central to how many scholars currently envision, teach, and critically interpret American literature. For example, the first section purposefully revisits questions of aesthetics that have proven thorny over the years for Americanists. In his foundational and now somewhat dated The American Renaissance (1941), F.O. Matthiessen studies at great length what he terms “Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman,” while focusing on a limited canon of writers who are presented as having little to do with politics and popular culture. The essays grouped together in Part I, “Forms,” all share an exciting sense of the rich possibilities for rethinking art and expression in the wake of the canon expansion of the past several decades, which did much to unsettle fixed notions of the literary. Recent developments in performance studies and media studies have further expanded ideas of the literary, particularly in relation to form. Moreover, in response to the New Historicism, which worked with increasingly predictable models of subversion and containment, there has been a renewed interest in the power of the literary as well as in the complex and often mutually constitutive interplay between the literary and the cultural. Literary form has traditionally been thought of in relation to genre, but in this section our contributors address not only literary genres but also medical images, films, machines, and other extraliterary forms. In their considerations of form in various literary and cultural contexts, some of our contributors break down distinctions between the literary and social, exploring, for example, the close connections between social formations and literary formations (see, for example, Fenton on religion and Jones on class). Others insist on the sheer power of the literary (see Pfister in particular). With their interests in such matters as material culture, technology, popular culture, visual studies, and performance, the contributors in Part I offer fresh ways of thinking about art and expression and about the place of form, and form itself, in American literary studies. Overall, the essays in Part I can be understood as having a foundational place in our volume, reminding us of the importance of form, or art and expression, or the “literary” (however it is

Introduction

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understood) to any critical foray into how we might think about or reconceive American literary studies. Part I begins with Russ Castronovo on the politics of literary form. Focusing on the propagandistic poems of the early national writer Philip Freneau, Castronovo shows how difficult it is to separate form (and questions of aesthetics) from politics. In the essay’s boldest move, Castronovo urges critics and readers to consider form as content; and in crucial respects all of the essays in Part I exemplify and put into practice the sort of literary-historical and critical work that Castronovo calls for. Joel Pfister, for instance, reads Franklin, Hawthorne, and other American writers as in effect doing their own historicist and critical work when writing about capitalism and alienation. Thus, in a somewhat Emersonian mode, Pfister insists on the importance of creative reading to Americanist scholarship. Similarly, Shirley Samuels, in her discussion of popular women’s novels of the mid-nineteenth century, illuminates how the tropes, figures, and concerns of the sentimental novel, indeed the very form of the sentimental novel, is the content, arguing that women writers of the time can be viewed as the historians and theorists who laid the groundwork for the feminist literary historians of the late twentieth century. The next three essays in Part I examine the intimate connections between literary and cultural forms. Attending to the general neglect of religion in American literary studies, Elizabeth Fenton discusses literary and religious writings, including The Book of Mormon, that work with and against what she terms a “secularization narrative.” Paul Gilmore recuperates what could be termed a “technology narrative,” exploring interrelationships between technological developments and literary expression in ways that challenge conventional notions of the incompatibility of technology and art. Americanists have long affirmed the close connections between democracy and US literary traditions, but in an essay that focuses on what could be called a “poverty narrative,” Gavin Jones argues that class itself can be understood as a formal component of the American novel, crucial to representations of social space in works ranging from Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Genre, performance, and the visual are crucial to the next four essays in Part I. Kirsten Ostherr discusses medical imaging as a genre of sorts – bounded in crucial ways by the body and available technologies while opening up new ways of thinking about the biocultural in a globalized US literature. Attending to the literary dimensions of such “extraliterary” forms as music and dance, Catherine Gunther Kodat points to the crucial role of performance both within and across literary genres, focusing on poetry and also helping us to reimagine ballet and music as part of a more expansive literary history in the twentieth-century United States. Jeffrey Richards and Mary Loeffelholz address genre as more traditionally understood, though performance remains crucial to their analyses as well. Richards’s study of theater from the colonial through the modern period examines the interconnections between social and dramatic performances, emphasizing how both are dependent on the visual (spectatorship). Loeffelholz notes the irony that popular US poetry has always been about the social and performative, but that poetry somehow continues to remain neglected by

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critics interested in cultural history. Why, she asks, is a poet like Longfellow, whose work was so widely disseminated in the culture, and so clearly informed by (even as it shaped) the culture, regularly neglected, along with a host of other popular poets? Like Castronovo, Loeffelholz suggests that considerations of form as content may help to revitalize the study of US poetry. The final two essays in Part I offer case histories of the importance of form to literary and cultural expression during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fleissner takes up the American Romance, regarded ever since Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) as that which defines the distinctiveness of American fiction. Engaging traditional and new theories of American literary history, and in particular circling back to reconsider earlier critics’ insights into romance, she offers, through a close reading of Melville’s Billy Budd, a theoretically reenergized reading of the historical, political, and psychological aspects of the “genre” of romance – a reading that ultimately raises questions about “the romance of progress” in American literary studies. Nancy Bentley’s historicist reading of form during approximately the same period reveals how turn-of-the-twentiethcentury mass-media – such as newspapers, films, advertising, popular novels, and sound recordings – had enormous consequences for literary culture. In the manner of Ostherr, she identifies cognitive shifts brought about by the impact of mass media, especially the visual, which call for new modes of literary analysis. Even as the collection attends to the “forms” constituting the literary of American literary studies, it simultaneously takes seriously the geographic designator “American.” In the last few decades, scholars have become increasingly engaged by the geographic containers that have historically been used to sort and make sense of seemingly disparate literary traditions. No longer used as an equivalent for the United States, the term “American” has come to signify the complex and overlapping geopolitical imperatives at work in a myriad of literary cultural formations. The spaces of the American literary landscape, on the one hand, gesture to the entire Americas as networks of civic, social, racial, and political affiliations that link parts of the United States with hemispheric partners like Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico and at times reach well beyond the hemisphere to Asia and Africa. On the other hand, these same spaces refer to the dense array of regional communities that constellate and often prove to be even more powerful for their members than, what is for some, a hypothetical or intangible affiliation with the US nation. The essays comprising Part II, “Spaces,” approach the “American” of American literary studies from multiple perspectives and with divergent practices. Collectively illustrating that there are no simple answers to the question “Where is American literature?”, the essays in this section offer various ways of addressing that misleadingly simple question. Take, for example, Anna Brickhouse’s analysis of the relationship between Cabeza de Vaca and the little-known Lope de Oviedo. Through careful elucidation of the thus far unremarked relation between these two figures, Brickhouse charts a radical alternative to the literary origins story that scholars have recently been telling about the United States – an origins story that we have, as she points out, often with a sense of self-congratulation revised to include the erased significance of a figure like

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Cabeza de Vaca. Brickhouse challenges us to not simply add more texts to the canon of US literary culture, but more fundamentally to revisit the methods and critical assumptions we bring to the study of those texts. Gillman and Gruesz provide an important case study of how such a reconsideration of our critical assumptions and habits – our habituated impulse, for example, to read Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno within a national or Americas rather than a transatlantic frame – might generate rich new opportunities for understanding familiar texts like Melville’s novella of slave revolt. Arguing for a text-network approach to the study of individual authors and texts, Gillman and Gruesz relocate Melville’s novella within a framework that circulates from Europe to the Americas to Africa and back again. Refusing to firmly locate Benito Cereno within an American or US literary tradition, Gillman and Gruesz illustrate, opens up new interpretive possibilities for reading the transnational resonances and dialogues of which Melville was a key part. Like Gillman and Gruesz, Michelle Stephens reorients a founding fiction of American literary studies – in this case, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – around a transnational scaffolding, exploring the worlds of color that become visible when we approach key themes of Hawthorne’s novel (labor, gender, and race) with an eye to hemispheric echoes and Americas-wide significance. Just as Stephens takes up the full spectrum of geopolitical “spaces” with which a familiar author is concerned, the large-scale significance of transatlantic and transpacific studies in and for American literary studies is the focus of essays by Elisa Tamarkin and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Tamarkin addresses the question of transatlanticism as a category of analysis, charting the myriad ways in which the fact of Atlantic crossings shapes literature, cultural history, and national belongings. Fishkin brings attention to the transpacific as well as hemispheric engagements of an author like Mark Twain, showing how Twain resonates for Chinese writers and scholars as well as for famous Cuban writers like José Martí. Further, she explores how this unacknowledged dimension of Twain’s literary significance reorients what we think we know about a familiar literary figure – a figure that readers have historically equated with US literary heritage and nation-based social commentaries. While many of the essays in “Spaces” gesture beyond the boundaries of the US nation, a number attend to the complex variations within the United States and between US regions and other regions of the Americas. John Matthews provides a nuanced and layered analysis of US Southern literary studies, at once acknowledging the field’s longstanding focus on the US South as a distinctive region within the United States and exploring Southern literary studies’ attentiveness to how this region connects with its southern neighbors – how the US South is part of a transnational, even global southern community with a shared history of slave owning, abolition, and colonialism, to name only a few examples. The interlocking literary histories that embed US writers known for their regionally focused writing (like Cormac McCarthy for the US-Mexico borderland or Sarah Orne Jewett for New England local color) are the focus of Sean Goudie’s and George Handley’s contributions. Taking what we assume to be distinctive regional traditions within the United

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States, like the US-Mexico borderlands and New England, and illustrating their dynamic engagement with places like the Caribbean and Mexico, both essays chart powerful networks of literary production occurring across as well as within regional and national spaces. Relatedly, Mark Rifkin and James Cox ask us to think about the enduring presence of Native American traditions and cultural imaginaries in American literary studies. With an eye toward the complex affective legacy of Native American history for American literary production, Rifkin analyzes such disparate materials as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip,” suggesting that they offer us compelling examples of how Anglo-Americans envision Native peoples and settlement cultures. Cox asks us to approach tribal nation contexts from the perspective of American Indian writers. Focusing on three twentieth-century Cherokee Nation authors, Cox’s essay forms a dynamic dialogue with Rifkin’s, suggesting that regions within the United States have their own claims to nationhood that operate in creative as well as in political, social, and cultural tension with the US nation that surrounds them. Part II ends with a consideration, by Paul Giles, of the meaning and value of globalization for American literary studies. Tracking American literature’s longstanding engagement with globalization, Giles charts an American literary tradition that has been, to varying degrees, always already engaged in global thinking, perspectives, and concerns. From the nation’s origins stories to the hemispheric, transnational, and global networks in which American authors operate, the spaces of American literature, as the essays in this section suggest, are varied, ever changing, and intricately webbed across multiple geopolitical divides. The “how” is as important to A Companion to American Literary Studies as the “what” and the “where” of the first two sections, respectively. And so the third section, “Practices,” explores the integration and implications of those topics outlined in “Forms” and “Spaces” with respect to how we undertake or do American literary studies. To repeat what we noted earlier in our introduction: all of the essays in Parts I and II are about practices as well, but the essays in Part III place an added emphasis on understanding crucial disciplinary fields or subfields, or overarching topics, integral to the larger project of American literary studies. Beginning this section is Dana Nelson’s analysis of arguably the core of US liberal democratic nationhood – the democratic practices that constitute federal order as well as the practices that contest and resist that order. Showing how American literature of the early national period emphasized the contention and disagreement dismissed by consensus narratives, Nelson illustrates how the practice of American democracy and the literary materials that helped to constitute, naturalize, and disseminate it to Americans were far from uniform or universally agreed upon. Brook Thomas carries this interest in democratic literary cultures into the realm of legal practices, charting American writers’ sustained interest in the law and discussing the consequences of that interest on literary form. Through considerations of authors ranging from Charles Brockden Brown to William Faulkner, Thomas reveals that the relationship between the practice of law

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and the practice of literature has been enduring as well as ever changing. Christopher Looby’s essay takes us from the public realm of the courtroom to the more private realm of sexuality, demonstrating that American writers have been engaged with sexual as well as with legal or democratic issues. Focusing on Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Martha’s Lady,” but addressing a number of other works as well, Looby persuasively illustrates that passionate romantic friendships, erotic ties between same-sex partners, and queer identities have been a constitutive rather than ancillary or secondary feature of the practice of American literature. In other words, sexual practice is literary practice, and vice versa. Priscilla Wald, Ursula Heise, and Michael Bérubé, in powerfully complementary essays, observe the myriad ways in which the practices of literary production and representation are biological and biomedical as well as social and geopolitical. Attentive to interactions of living organisms and their physical environments, Wald charts how the fields of both genetics and ecology in the post-World War II period informed American authors’ depictions of the human condition. Human contingency and the uncertain survival of the human species riveted the attention of science fiction writers as well as bestselling novelists like Sloan Wilson, whose The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit limns the close connections between fears of nuclear annihilation and the enhanced cultural prominence of the nuclear family. Heise examines responses to the new technologies of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries that disorder accepted practices associated with being human. Observing that a posthuman imaginary emerges out of surging interest in questions surrounding human life, Heise explores how American literature grapples with the question of how and if we should practice “humanism” – that is, whether we should continue to regard humans as a species apart or if we should adopt posthuman perspectives that understand humans as one of many animal species. Bérubé explores how narrative and intellectual disability are mutually implicating forces in American literature, from William Faulkner to Maxine Hong Kingston to much science fiction writing. Indeed it is the nation’s commitment to transforming nineteenth-century European scientific studies of intellectual disability into a rationale for tracking the American people’s collective and individual progress that makes American literature such a rich site for exploring the challenges and opportunities that narrative affords disability studies. At stake in these three essays is nothing less than the interlocking practices of being human and human being. Similar issues are at stake in the three essays in Part III focusing on race. Given the long history of slavery and white supremacy in the United States, it is not surprising that race and ethnicity remain absolutely key terms in American literary studies, though crucial questions remain about how to approach these terms as categories of analysis. For Colleen Lye, the transnationalization of frameworks for understanding Asian American racial, ethnic, and literary identities reveals that Asian Americanness has always been in crisis, existing as a sociohistorical construct much more than as an identity defined by biological descent. Drawing on recent theoretical work in Asian

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American studies, Lye proposes a nonlinear approach to Asian American literary history governed by fragmentation and disorderliness, and a clear-eyed skepticism about the stability of Asian American identity. Carla Peterson proposes a different sort of reorientation for nineteenth-century African American literary studies, urging critics to return to the archives in order to develop a more complex understanding of the historical genealogies of such concepts as race and diaspora. Challenging the binary that privileges Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois as the leaders who identified the social significance of these concepts at the turn into the twentieth century, Peterson underscores the importance of writings by the less well-known Alexander Crummell and James McCune Smith on black community and race. Crucially, Peterson identifies Smith as an intellectual who could be said, somewhat anachronistically, to have “deconstructed” race as a social construct, pointing the way to the postracial. Ramón Saldívar takes up what he calls “the postrace aesthetic” in recent writings by African Americans, showing how these writers may be some of our best current critics on matters of race. Saldívar’s essay, which speaks to the promises inherent in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, begs the question of whether a postracial perspective, with its often wildly funny deconstructions of race, can trump the ravages of history and the persistence of whites’ antiblack racism. The final essay of the collection comes full circle to questions of form and space and asks us to envision literary production within the context of the digital technologies that are transforming how we write, read, sort, and script American literature via the computer chip and Internet. From colonial writers to Walt Whitman to figures like Loss Pequeño Glazier and Mary-Anne Breeze, American authors have been consistently and enduringly fascinated with codes and technologies of literary expression. Challenging us to see digital modes of analysis and expression as part of a continuum, Matt Cohen reminds us that writers have always worked with form within the context of available technologies. Not an aesthetic pursuit separated from mass culture or technological innovation, American writing, as the contributors to this volume show, is built into the dense fabric of American life – its technologies, its playfulness, and its production of new ways of communicating the vitality of lived experience both within and beyond the nation. Acknowledgments We wish to express our warm thanks and appreciation to our editor at WileyBlackwell, Emma Bennett, who has been wonderfully helpful and supportive through every stage of the project. We are also grateful for the assistance of Wiley-Blackwell editors Bridget Jennings, Sue Leigh, and Cheryl Adam. We would also like to thank the proofreader, Helen Kemp, and indexer, Tim Penton. We are happy to acknowledge material assistance from the Departments of English at Rice University and the University of Maryland; and most of all we would like to thank our contributors for their engaging essays and collegiality. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

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References and Further Reading Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Anchor Books, 1957. Davidson, Cathy N., and Jessamyn Hatcher. Eds. No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Elliott, Emory, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne. Eds. Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease. Eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Lauter, Paul. Ed. A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine. Eds. Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor. Eds. Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Matthiessen, F.O. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Rowe, John Carlos. Ed. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Part I

Forms

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Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form Russ Castronovo

The Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech all exhibit poetic features in phrasing and cadence, but none is poetry. They are prose documents and it seems unlikely that their authors ever considered framing these great political statements as sonnets or sestinas. John Reed, best known for his journalistic tour de force of the October Revolution in Russia, wrote his fair share of sonnets, but few, if any, of his poems give off revolutionary sparks, whether as a matter of content or as formal experimentation. It is not that poetry is unsuited to politics – witness antislavery verse of the 1840s and 1850s or the poetry of the cultural left of the 1930s – but neither are odes to specific pieces of legislation common literary fare. And yet, when poetry does become outfitted for political purposes, the most significant work may be done not in terms of content but in terms of form. This chapter seeks to unsettle such misleading oppositions about the supposedly conventional nature of poetic form versus the socially relevant and political possibilities of prose. In no less a defining statement than What Is Literature? (1948), Jean-Paul Sartre contrasted the prose writer, who uses words as tools for getting things done in the world, with the poet whose abstruse relation to language makes for compositions whose usefulness is puzzling at best. “Poets are men who refuse to utilize language,” writes Sartre (5). Poetry appears to Sartre an insular and reflexive métier, one that makes it seem as if the poet “did not share the human condition” (6). In this view, poetry – by its very nature – seems esoteric, removed from the public and collective settings that provide a necessary condition for politics. Although Theodor Adorno would counter that this emphasis upon worldly engagement forces literature

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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into acceptance of the world as it is, the basic assumptions of Sartre’s view are reflected in certain implicit tendencies within American literary studies. Ever since the cultural turn in literary criticism emphasizing the historical and material contexts of writing, the field has prioritized prose, especially the novel, over poetry as though verse were somehow inadequate to representing political crisis. Never mind that writers as diverse as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances Harper, Walt Whitman, Claude McKay, and Margaret Atwood have taken up poetry and prose with equal facility. Never mind that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poetry written by such luminaries as Philip Freneau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney enjoyed a popularity that often rivaled, if not surpassed, that of novels. To make these points is not to intone a dirge for 1950s-style formalism or even for poetry. Rather, it is to consider how aesthetic choices become political choices, how opting for either poetry or prose itself constitutes a commentary on the social world and its attendant conventions and forms. Of course, it would seem that in some situations there is no choice at all. Opinions on taxes or the treatment of prison inmates demand everyday expression associated with prose. Philip Freneau, a poet of the American Revolution, did not give into these demands, and such poems as his “Occasioned by a Legislation Bill Proposing a Taxation upon Newspapers” and “On a Legislative Act Prohibiting the Use of Spirituous Liquors to Prisons in Certain Jails of the United States” would seem to test not only the distinctions between poetry and prose but also the assumptions about the politics conveyed by each form. While titles such as “The Wild Honey Suckle” or “To a Caty-Did” reveal that Freneau composed verses on traditional lyric subjects, he also wrote poems on a range of nonpoetic subjects in order to express political views beyond the limits of prosaic wisdom. To be sure, Freneau appears in most anthologies of American literature, but he does so only as a poet. The effect of ignoring his prose is significant, not because his essays and newspaper articles have any special significance themselves, but because Freneau’s ability to work in both forms, in tandem with his lifelong indecision about, changing attitudes toward, and strategic deployments of each, suggests something about the nimbleness that political engagement requires. His occasional but sporadic reflections on prose and poetry – What does it mean to frame an appeal in verse? Is prose somehow more democratic than poetry? In the world of public opinion, is poetry an inherently oppositional form? Is prose an accommodation to the world as it is? – offer something like a theory of political form. Examining the work of this revolutionary-era writer thus supplies much more than a new perspective on the boundaries of eighteenth-century discourse; returning to this “lost” American poet enables a broader consideration about forms of expression within democratic public spheres. Or, as Freneau rhymed near the end of his life, “A poet where there is no king / Is but a disregarded thing,” bemoaning that the imaginative, creative qualities associated with poetics seemingly have no place in American democracy (Last Poems 31). His lament remains an instructive provocation to examine how literary form – such as the choice of poetry or prose – engages the nature and meaning

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of politics at a vital level. This focus on form opens out into a reconsideration of the relationship of literature to propaganda, of art to popular culture, and of aesthetics to oppositional politics, and other issues central to American literary study in the twenty-first century. If Freneau’s placement in anthologies suggests that he is a writer who is supposed to help us make sense of national literary traditions, then this renewed attention to the productive tensions between his poetry and prose offers a perspective for reevaluating how form has played an often uncertain but no less determining role in creating the political valences of American literature. Before undertaking this investigation, a few remarks are necessary to set some parameters about the terms prose, poetry, and politics, especially in their relationship to one another. Rather than separating these terms, the next section suggests why discerning their overlap is crucial to understanding the politics of American literary form. No matter how much contemporary culture shies away from explicit political discussion as a show of aggression or bad taste, politics are likely to spring up in unexpected contexts from the dinner table to the office water cooler. But while politics have seemingly unlimited range and can appear just as easily in the private space of the bedroom as the public setting of the classroom, politics are not naturally occurring phenomena that simply appear. Thomas Hobbes and other social contract theorists stressed this point by viewing the state of nature, with its unceasing violence and war, as a prepolitical setting lacking compacts, covenants, or other forms that give shape and security to political life. This point might be elaborated in terms of the settings thus far invoked – dinner tables (the domestic), bedrooms (the intimate), water coolers (the economic), and classrooms (the institutional) – and by remarking that the communication of politics in each of these zones demands still more forms, from table manners to scheduled coffee breaks. These forms are no guarantee that discussion will adhere to a predictable pattern of style; politics in these settings can be avoided or directly confronted, whispered or shouted, delivered as a confidence or as a rant. In American literature, the forms for communicating politics are infinitely more varied and complex, ranging from a story of whaling to a fanciful tale about a Kansas farm girl in search of an emerald city. The first example is, of course, Moby-Dick (1851), which, starting with readers in the 1960s, was often taken as a commentary on the problem of slavery and the threat of national disunion. The second and equally obvious example is The Wizard of Oz (1900), which in its depiction of yellow brick roads, a blustering lion that behaves like a populist orator, and a magical city whose name is the standard abbreviation for “ounce,” recalls the charged political debates over the gold standard at the turn of the twentieth century. With little effort, we might compile a list of novels and poems laden with political messages. In the wake of ideological critique in general and New Historicism and cultural studies in particular, it would be difficult to attempt the opposite and name works that did not communicate some political content. Nevertheless, in making claims about the politics of any poem or novel, we would just as quickly want to stipulate that any truly creative work is more than a crude delivery system for an author’s political objectives.

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The choice of form is paramount not just in conveying content but also in shaping it. To run back through our examples: Why not choose a series of cantos for a whaling saga? Why not choose a realist novel – certainly there were plenty of examples around when Baum was penning Dorothy’s story – to articulate a perspective upon currency debates? Although we know that form matters, authors themselves provide little help in figuring out why one situation calls for poetry and another for prose. Many have speculated, but no one knows precisely why Melville, soon after the commercial failure of Moby-Dick and his subsequent novels, turned to an arguably less popular form than the novel by writing poetry in Battle-Pieces (1866). Is killing men in a bloody civil war somehow a more poetic subject than killing whales? In short, any effort to correlate form and political content must recognize the initial conflict and tension that surround the unavoidable use of a particular form. Literature necessarily begins with this gesture, which, however, is not the same thing as saying that literature lacks form until it takes shape as a sestina, sonnet, or short story. As Fredric Jameson points out, “[T]he essential characteristic of literary raw material or latent content is precisely that it never really is initially formless.” Instead of being purely organic, the building blocks of literature – sounds, words, and images – spring from social considerations shot through with history and concrete material reality. Literary raw materials are “meaningful from the outset, being neither more nor less than the very components of our concrete social life itself” (Jameson 402–3). Whether expression congeals as a poem, novel, or other form entails any number of considerations: the circulation of styles and conventions, the literary historical status of genres, the institutions of print culture, patterns of reception, the specifics of the occasion, popular tastes, an author’s talents or predilections, and so on. These aesthetic concerns could be augmented with broader factors stemming from general economic conditions or historical epochs. Since each of these considerations is likely in flux, conventions or tastes are never fixed or static. In American literary studies, particularly the literature of the early national period, claims about the politics of form lend nuance to what people usually mean by “politics” at the time of the Revolution: the struggles of the Constitutional Congress, diplomacy with France, the danger of factions, the rise of the Federalists, and the opposition of Democrat-Republicans. Considerations of form expand the range of the political. To speak about form and politics, as Jameson does, is not to suggest that literature properly belongs in the domain of what historians or political scientists consider political. Jameson is not asking that literature be classed with more empirically minded disciplines. The goal is not to change the look and feel of literature so that it can appear as social science. Rather, the goal is to shift definitions of politics so that matters like choosing to express one’s thoughts via a poem or a pamphlet are themselves seen as a commentary on social content. In other words, settling on a form is neither a matter of stylistic idiosyncrasy nor a purely creative decision but is instead a political act par excellence. Jameson underscores this point by reversing the conventional wisdom about form and content. As opposed to viewing form as something that sets the initial pattern to be filled by

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content as, say, when wine is decanted into a Grecian urn or words arranged into a sonnet, we should see what happens if we consider form “as that with which we end up, as but the final articulation of the deeper logic of the content itself” (Jameson 328–9). One might go farther still: form is a dynamic process, an ongoing adjustment to and engagement with social and historical content. The choice of the sonnet is itself political even if selecting one form over another seems primarily a question of either functionality (“A sonnet is the best way to express my love”) or taste (“I just like sonnets”) that can be easily put to rest. Just as it makes a difference whether talk of politics at the water cooler or in the bedroom comes as a screed or as a supplication, so too the most fundamental consideration for critical readers is whether literature’s engagement with taxation, prisons (to allude once more to the somewhat mundane range of Freneau’s poetic topics), love, or other issues takes shape as a poem or a treatise. But in what ways do such choices make a difference? If the preference of one form over another itself stands forth as an expression of social content, if the choice of poetry over prose resonates with potential political significance, then what content is being expressed and what sort of politics are being signified? These questions are potentially rather incautious ones, leading to dubious but familiar assertions about the reactionary nature of diatribes or the progressive nature of the avant-garde. Still, such questions need to be asked lest criticism and interpretation seem mired in an approach to form that proceeds on a case-by-case basis, much as New Criticism often tended to fixate on a poem or New Historicism regularly zeroed in on the cultural history of a novel without treating form as a matter of cultural history, too. In his work on “the sociology of literary forms,” Franco Moretti has undertaken this task by linking literary and social convention. Literature, for Moretti, seeks to “secure consent” (Signs 27), and aesthetic forms are useful precisely in shaping and smoothing conflicts and tensions striating the sociopolitical sphere. Form bends people to the bitter facts of existence: it makes us contented, but with the important proviso that since happiness “is increasingly hard to attain in everyday life, a ‘form’ becomes necessary which can in some way guarantee its existence” (33). From this perspective, form is the afterimage of conflict that has been reconciled and managed; it marks a social suture, indicating the “spot” where aesthetic techniques have been called into the service of restoring an image of consensus. The overall thrust of this argument is that literary form serves a generally conservative function, not by eliminating social tensions altogether, but by expressing them in ways that allow people to adjust themselves to economic, political, social, or existential unpleasantness. Literary form, in short, teaches us that everything is copasetic, and if we accept that proposition then, we are more likely to be happy with the existing state of affairs and our place within it. Since advancing these claims, Moretti has approached literary form with more nuance, no longer treating it as pure or unchanging to the point that all form fulfills a more or less univocal political mission of exemplifying consensus. Seeking to understand the distinction between novelistic and poetic form, he poses a question so simple

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and fundamental that it is often left unasked: “Why are novels in prose?” (“The Novel” 111). He begins with some broad observations about the political and formal differences between poems and novels, which bear upon the politicized readings that are so central to American literary study. Like Jameson, Moretti is not focusing on politics at the level of legislation or other specific issues. Instead, he reads for the politics of form, which in the case of poetry, guided by repeatable pattern and symmetry, seems to line up with social interests that have a high stake in maintaining fixity and order. “Symmetry always suggests permanence, that’s why monuments are symmetrical,” he writes (“The Novel” 112). The architectural comparison is telling, as it suggests that whatever order is implied by poetry, it is a triumphalist one. Verse is retrogressive, its pattern and symmetry always returning expression back to the formal properties with which it began. Prose, in contrast, is progressive because of its indifference to symmetry. Prose is thus antimonumental: at a formal level, the progression of novelistic narrative has a political edge that enlists prose on the side of “im-permanence and irreversibility” with an orientation that is “forward-looking” (“The Novel” 112). If verse and prose were electoral candidates, verse would be the incumbent and prose would be the voice of change and new ideas. What to make of the political standoff between literary forms in light of the fact that Philip Freneau, once a much-studied author of the early republic and now a figure who has pretty much faded into critical obscurity, was dubbed both the “father of American poetry” and the “father of American prose” (Clark “Poetry,” “Prose”)? Although these sobriquets date from the 1920s, they still have resonance in making us wonder how theoretically opposing forms, each with a different political valence, could be engendered by the same figure. While people often act from ambivalent motives, the formal divisions that striate Freneau’s work are especially germane because his work, both as an essayist and as a poet, is so strongly identified with revolutionary politics. Acclaimed in his own day as the “Poet of the Revolution,” he has since been called a “literary Minute-man” for his readiness to lend his creative talents first to the cause of independence in 1776 and then later to radical republicanism, a crusade he championed until his death in 1832 (Hustvedt 1). Did Freneau’s political attachments fluctuate with the formal decisions that he made, as he selected from an arsenal that included, on the one hand, satires in rhyme, Horatian odes, elegies, and various types of newspaper verse, and, on the other, prose pieces that ran the range from invective to essays voiced in popular vernacular? To what extent did his politics dictate certain formal choices, and how did his use of poetry or prose commit him to certain political positions? As we’ll see, such questions have resonance beyond Freneau and his eighteenth-century moment. These questions suggest a dialectical approach to the intersections between literary form and political expression. Rather than adopting a unidirectional outlook that would see literary form as determining the type of politics expressed (or vice versa), the tougher challenge is to view both the limits and range of such formal choices as emblematic of a deeper political concern for disseminating information and propagating opinions. Despite their differences, poetry and prose for Freneau each revolves

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around the question about how formal conventions respond to the often unpredictable energies of democratic culture. Though Freneau’s reputation, in Robert Pinsky’s overview, has degenerated from that of a literary freedom fighter in the eighteenth century to “a disreputable hack” in the nineteenth century and now to “an obscure footnote, perhaps an object for that amused condescension the living accord minor writers” in the late twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, his formal and political battles have renewed significance for at least two reasons (10). First, the reaction and response to Freneau, given his avuncular but neglected status, illuminates how American literary history has been shaped by distinguishing literature from propaganda – a line that Freneau repeatedly crossed. Second, and more broadly, Freneau offers new insight into the concerns sketched at the outset of this chapter, namely, the literary forms in which we experience political life today. At first glance, the measured traditions of eighteenth-century poetry seem out of step with the tempestuous demonstrations, impassioned crowds, and newspaper tirades that were a feature of early American democracy. This irresolvable tension between the medium of European court refinement and popular political culture inspired Freneau to comment directly upon the formal inadequacies of poetry for representing the swirls and upheavals of democratic passions. As the story goes, Freneau simply accepted the defeat of his poetic ideals and redirected his energies toward prose by editing a string of unsuccessful newspapers. To keep the revolutionary fires burning, he began editing the Freeman’s Journal in 1781, then moved on to the National Gazette in 1791, which quickly “became the common clearing house for democratic propaganda” and was just as quickly denounced by Federalists as a Jacobin rag advocating lawless republicanism (Parrington 379). Other ventures included editing and contributing to the Daily Advertiser, Jersey Chronicle, and TimePiece and Literary Companion, but no matter the venue his reputation as a partisan political tool had been sealed by Federalists, who never missed the opportunity of attacking him – and, to be fair, Freneau regularly invited these attacks – as a rabblerouser and second-rate maker of verses. “As a journalist engaged in propaganda, Freneau deliberately turned his back on literary aspiration,” writes his biographer, Lewis Leary, who, as the title of his book makes clear, considers Freneau’s career a “failure” (99). The identification of Freneau as a propagandist relies on assumptions about the political content of his formal choices: had he followed his instincts and not wasted his talents upon party politics and newspaper verse, he might have become the United States’ first Romantic poet, an honor that literary critics usually bestow upon William Cullen Bryant, instead of a merely “useful poet,” as he was dismissed in the nineteenth century (qtd. in Leary 329), or as the producer of “applied poetry” as opposed to the creator of “pure poetry,” as he was judged in the twentieth (Clark, “Poetry” 16). To say that Freneau churned out propaganda is not to allege that he gave no thought to form. Rather, it is to say that he gave too much thought to matters of form, specifically which forms would best spread a republican gospel of popular political rule while warning against the rise of aristocratic social pretensions in the infant nation. According to the Romantic ideal of the writer, an ideal that would not emerge until

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the last decades of Freneau’s life, a better, more intuitive poet would not have concerned himself with addressing the masses or adjusting expression to popular tastes. A more accomplished poet would not have wasted precious creative energy considering how verse could be made useful or how poetry could be applied to social and political situations. Only someone with the temperament of an apparatchik and the meager talents of a hack would have devoted so much thought to form in an effort to produce prose and poetry, including verses critical of George Washington, invented satirical speeches spoken by kings, and bits of homespun vernacular calculated to appeal to less genteel audiences. And so it is that Freneau’s work often seems calculating, formulated with an eye to what will prove most efficacious in promoting democratic virtue in the hope that Americans of all ranks and classes would join him in asking, “Should we, just heaven, our blood and labour spent, / Be slaves and minions to a parliament?” (Freneau, Poems 1:145). Written for partisan purposes and laden with rather blatant messages, such verse borders on propaganda or, more exactly, renders the distinction between poetry and propaganda inconsequential. As Freneau put it in the “Advertisement” that prefaced the 1809 edition of his work, “These poems were intended . . . to expose vice and treason their own hideous deformity” while promoting “honour and patriotism in their native beauty,” and it is not hard to see how lines contrasting brave American military commanders with feckless British generals fulfilled this stated purpose (Poems Written 1:3). Attention to form enabled Freneau to think about spreading this message so that popular (in the political sense of issues relating to the public) matters would be made popular (in the cultural sense of art and expression that appeal to the tastes of ordinary people). Freneau’s use of the term advertisement in 1809 is thus perhaps not that remote from contemporary usage that denotes a media spot intended to publicize a product or service. Although the word propaganda was infrequently employed before the twentieth century and certainly not with the negative connotations it has today, Freneau and his staff at the National Gazette were maligned “propagators of calumny” after the paper printed charges that members of Congress were engaged in underhanded financial speculation (qtd. in Leary 204). What remains unchanging is a concern with spreading messages and propagating information. It is common to conceive of propaganda in terms of content, but Freneau shows that propaganda just as importantly involves the formal strategies used to propel content across the social landscape. Much like the advertiser whose job demands more attention to publicizing a product than the product itself, the eighteenth-century poet, if he believes in democracy as both a political movement and a cultural ethos as fervently as Freneau did, is charged with the mission of thinking about form, especially the respective virtues of verse and prose. How best to get a message “out there” before the public so that it will be truly popular? In taking up this challenge, Freneau discovered that the form of expression proved as significant as anything he might have to say. Recalling the insight that form is not some pre-given pattern with which the artist starts but rather a dynamic engagement with social content, Freneau’s work often takes shape as a metacommentary on the possibilities and limitations of poetry

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and prose. Form, in these terms, is never merely a formal consideration but rather the historical articulation of a democratic longing to engage people as widely and as fully as possible. Freneau “became a spokesman for the poor and oppressed and aimed many of his works at the least sophisticated readers,” writes Emory Elliott (136). This aspect of Freneau’s career has often been regretted by critics, leading to the conclusion that the turn to prose assured the defeat of more refined literary aspirations. But the standards important to an eighteenth-century propagandist are not the same as those upheld by modern readers. Freneau’s criteria may today seem quaint and out of date, vestiges of a time when political choices overruled formal concerns. What a more thorough view reveals, however, is that formal concerns are political choices relevant to democracy, not simply as a belief that the people should govern, but as a practice of spreading that belief widely across diverse social strata. Writing about a different revolutionary moment than Freneau’s, Kenneth Burke in 1935 described the propagandist as a “spreader of doctrine” whose central concern should be choosing symbols, vocabulary, and values that will popularize a cause. In “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” Burke seeks proletarian forms of expression that will extend the writer’s “recruiting into ever widening areas”; the literary artist necessarily becomes a propagandist because he or she propagates ideas and information. When the task is to make political beliefs align with “cultural awareness in the large,” the writer’s duty is to employ language that promotes support for and identification with a particular viewpoint (91–3). As an example, Burke feels that because the designation worker is too unromantic and constricted – who, after all, wants to work in the industrial machine? – it needs to be replaced with the people, a term that gives off a more inclusive aura. In contemplating which forms would enable the propagation of democratic values and create “cultural awareness in the large,” Freneau often found that the most inclusive aura lay in an odor of the vernacular, as when, in a rebuke to the loyalist printer of the Royal Gazette, he rhymed “despot” with “pisspot” (Poems 2:124). His wit ran toward New World accents, as when he imagined King George raging like “Xantippe” in reaction to British “losses along Mississippi” (Poems 2:118). No matter how clever, though, these “jingling rhymes,” like “the monotony of metre” and other poetic “trifles,” appeared to Freneau as remnants of a dying aristocratic cultural order (Prose 310). Poetic forms frequently struck him as too thoroughly steeped in rituals of deference and servility to supply the basis for democratic critique. He worried that the aesthetic forms of the Anglo-American world were good only for trumpeting pomp and circumstance as opposed to making a case for the simple virtues of republicanism. Based on his reading of literary history, Freneau predicted that poetry would be used to reinstall a culture of monarchical deference. After the Revolution, when, as Freneau saw matters, a newly independent merchant class was consolidating its authority and financial speculators were maximizing their opportunities, poets who spent their time composing birthday verses for Washington and extolling government officials were unequal to the task of safeguarding the public’s interests.

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In a mock advertisement addressed “To the Noblesse and Courtiers of the United States,” Freneau invited applications for persons of poetic skill willing to sell their talents to the government. Duties included composing verses praising “officers of the government,” but care should be taken since the comparison of the president or anyone in his administration to “any thing on this earth, would be an anti-hyperbole, unsuited to the majesty of the subject.” Behind the irony lies Freneau’s disillusionment with poetry as an antidemocratic form. Hopeful lackeys and aspiring bootlickers wishing to increase their chances at becoming poet laureate would do well to bone up on “the causes of decline of all the republics which have preceded us” so as to be ready to rejoice in the appearance of any signs of decline hastening the end of American democracy. Poems are needed to exemplify how hierarchy and “certain monarchical prettinessses” such as state receptions, court functions, and official titles augur favorably for “American prosperity” conceived, not in terms of political virtue, but as a crudely financial calculus (Prose 294). The content of poetry seems incapable of overcoming the retrogressive nature of its form: in a world where amateur versifiers find work as professional flatterers, poetry fulfills an antipopular function in a double sense, first by being poised against the interests of the people and, second, by appealing to themes over their heads. This advertisement ran in January 1793, and by August of that year Freneau was writing poetry’s obituary as a “declining art” now that panegyrists and other flatterers were no longer in demand. Then, sounding a more hopeful note, he predicted that “real poetry . . . will one day have its resurrection; but its professors will no longer be court sycophants” (Prose 310). This new, real poetry of the future would be guided by “republican virtues,” initiating changes in content, tone, and form. After all, if poetry were ever again to enjoy popularity, its producers had best remember that Americans are a people of “too much cool reflection to be amused” or swayed by poetic baubles dedicated to praising kings and other “crowned murderers” (Prose 310). In short, the problem with poetry is no different than what Freneau that same year decried as the royal trappings of the American theater: just as poetry seeks to amuse rather than to instruct or educate, the stage proffers “alluring amusements, in order to prevent the people from thinking” (Prose 295). By way of a broad social critique, these reflections on poetry and theater stress the importance of popular culture in crafting hegemony. In its capacity both to justify a political order and to forestall criticism or dissent, popular culture regularly acts as a stabilizing mechanism, giving the people bread and circuses in the shape of verse and drama, deflecting their legitimate political concerns into pleasing but empty forms. Freneau, it might be said, scorns dramatic entertainment and popular verse as features of an eighteenth-century “culture industry” that offers popular deception in the place of the people’s enlightenment. Although Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously invoked the “culture industry” to describe the total alignment of film and radio to capitalist individualism in the postWorld War II era, and although the United States in the 1790s certainly lacked the mass media that created a “relentless unity” (Dialectic 96) of politics and culture without alternatives or dissent, the comparison remains useful in spelling the scale of

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the counterrevolutionary threat that Freneau thought he faced from the very poetic forms he had once employed as the poet of the Revolution (Elliott). Unlike poetry that bewitched citizens, prose had an instructive and edifying capacity crucial to sustaining republicanism. For Freneau, prose facilitates popular knowledge, spreading colloquial definitions that enlighten instead of amuse. Such optimism led him to conclude that “as the world advances towards universal republicanism the ideas of mankind have become prosaic” (Prose 310). The only complication to this story of republican prose is that Freneau repeatedly voiced regret that poetry lacked popularity in his postrevolutionary world. Ambivalence resounds in his statement about the “prosaic” nature of republicanism since the commentary on republican form also comes laden with the imputation that political ideas expressed in this manner are dull and unimaginative. Counterbalancing the death of poetry that Freneau predicted in his prose writings, his verse often laments the ascendancy of prose along with the fact that rhyme has no creditable place in a democratic public sphere. The most obvious barrier to poetry as public political expression extends beyond its formal properties to the limitations of an audience, which, in Freneau’s view, seems intent in employing its newly achieved independence and liberty to pursue only narrowly commercial interests that leave neither time nor inclination for more ennobling artistic endeavors. Rhyme automatically dissents from the thinking that aligns the pursuit of gain with the “pursuit of happiness”; the fact that Freneau is on the losing side in this broader ideological war is an injury that he cherishes since the slights and wounds to his aesthetic sensibility allow him to cultivate the air of a tragic and misunderstood visionary. His poetic persona often seems on the verge of giving up: An age employ’d in pointing steel Can no poetic raptures feel […] The Muse of Love in no request. I’ll try my fortune with the rest, Which of the Nine shall I engage To suit the humor of the age[?] (Poems 2:334).

In a day when Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, has no followers and there are no muses specifically devoted to the prosaic business of trade, the poet realizes that his only option is to beseech Melpomene for assistance in producing tragedy and melancholy. For the tragic poet, poetry is itself the source of melancholia. In this new world, poetry lacks creative or instructive power; it appears instead as a passive form shaped by the current climate rather than as a force that can shape the priorities and beliefs of citizens. Still, such self-reflexive content reveals how poetic form registers social action. Poetry, by the sheer nature of its form, is a declaration of opposition to the prevailing consensus that prizes commercialism and limits the imagination to financial speculation. The growing irrelevance of the muses, the threatened obsolescence of verse, and careless regard for lyricism in the early republic combined to make any use of poetic

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form a historical protest, somewhere between a sign of surrender and an act of desperation, against a prosaic age. Poetry counters – which is precisely why it counts. This insight, discovered by Freneau when he stood at the beginnings of a tradition that would later be called American literature, has found echo in the work of contemporary poets. As Rosemarie Waldrop states, “I love the way verse refuses to fill up all the available space of the page so that each line acknowledges what is not” (260). While an entire history of experimentation and the avant-garde lies between Freneau and Waldrop, there exists a sort of convergence around the idea of poetry as an oppositional counterforce. To adduce such an effect from form is not to declare that content is irrelevant: rather, the “not” uttered by poetry becomes a way of acknowledging and engaging the content of the world, but only as a matter of resistance. This chapter offers no defense of the artistic worth of Freneau’s poetry. Instead, the point is that for a writer like Freneau who was equally skilled in poetry and prose, the choice of one medium over another, especially a form such as poetry that seemingly was becoming rapidly antiquated, constitutes an act of self-conscious political decision. Poetry also has an imaginative power that enlivens the popular political realm, potentially elevating citizens’ aspirations while widening the ambit of public discourse. For Freneau, its form keeps republican virtue from flowing into the narrow channels of profit and commercialism, and we might update this stance today with small change by saying that poetic form serves people by refusing to accede to the commonsense world. The paradox is that poetry, unlike prose, is no longer a popular form, but this obsolescence is precisely what makes poetry oppositional and especially conducive to minority viewpoints. With prose in ascendancy, poetry, by virtue of its form, is especially suited to the losing side. In his more hopeful moments, Freneau believed that the United States would produce distinctly democratic verse – even if this development eluded Freneau himself, emerging perhaps not until Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In a 1797 work later recycled as the introduction to the second volume of his Poems (1809), Freneau expressed the sentiment that the United States would one day encourage topics “such, as no courtly poet ever saw.” Here, at last, was the promise for form to match political function, but this possibility for public poetical discourse fades fast in a landscape more suited to the language of business and practicality: The coming age will be an age of prose: When sordid cares will break the muses’ dream, And Common Sense be ranked in seat supreme. (Poems 3:188)

Embedded in this familiar rant against an economic calculus lies an unexpected allusion to Tom Paine, author of Common Sense, who adopted that title as a pseudonym in newspaper pieces attacking the British during the Revolution. In terms of political sympathies, Freneau and Paine were very much on the same side, and each became the subject of vitriolic attacks after finding fault with the Federalist consensus. On

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literary grounds, however, the two had gone their separate ways from the beginning. In Freneau’s estimation, Paine’s success as a prose pamphleteer belies a deeper failure: while the revolutionary politics of Common Sense are beyond reproach, its form is susceptible to hierarchies in which business sensibilities are king. An oppositional politics requires an oppositional form – and that form in a society prioritizing trade and commerce is poetry, a mode of expression destined not only to be on the margin but also to speak the interests of those on the margin. Even though the situation of American literary study now seems far removed from the poetry and prose in Freneau’s day, the revolutionary (and postrevolutionary) moment has much to teach us about the social dynamics of form. Beyond offering insight into the merely manifest content of politics, literary history and literary analysis uncover something more profound, providing a view that is fundamental in addressing how politics are shaped at the outset. By considering Freneau’s tense – and often unsuccessful – negotiations of prose and poetry in the analog era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we may better equip ourselves to understand, engage, and use the digital forms of politics today. The political conflicts that Freneau routed through the now seemingly archaic oppositions between prose and poetry remain very much a pressing concern for American literary and cultural study in the twenty-first century. The politics of form attains renewed significance as American literary scholarship explores new forms, and nowhere today is such a development more evident than in graphic novels that are popping up in more and more classrooms. Whether it is the 2006 achievement of Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (nominated for the National Book Award for excellence in Young People’s Literature) or Toufic El Rassi’s Arab in America (2007), the graphic novel reanimates Freneau’s concerns about spreading and propagating minority viewpoints. Of course, being a political minority in the early republic is not the same thing as being an ethnic or racial minority in the post9/11 state, but the linkage between formal choices and public consumption returns us to questions about poetry, prose, and, now, comic books. Why make literature visual? Why graft minority viewpoints to a form that has such currency in popular culture? If the mainstream appeal of visual form itself may be the answer, it is only an ironic one. For Yang, the combination of a racial coming-of-age story and comic panels provides a cunning counterpoint to the idea of a so-called invisible minority. The irony of visual form is more bitter for El Rassi since Arab Americans often occupy a space of hypervisibility and suspicion. Other examples of this burgeoning genre such as Ex Machina (which makes explicit reference to September 11, 2001) or Y: The Last Man (a catastrophic portrait of gender and sexuality) deeply politicize form by revealing how trauma is, in a word, graphic. Returning to Freneau brings American literary scholarship forward – to the mixture of poetry, slave narrative, and romance that make up the first African American novel, William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853); to the sonnets that e.e. cummings wrote about wartime patriotism; to the bricolage of biography, newspaper reportage, and stream of consciousness that typify John Dos Passos’s experiments in the U.S.A. Trilogy

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(1938). It may be just as (or more) significant to shift the axis of critical interpretation to form so that the import of these works is not exclusively bound up with slavery, jingoism, corporate capital, or other content. Examinations of form necessarily expand politics beyond the domain of content to considerations of style, technique, genre, and medium. Along this axis, the coordinates for critical interpretation extend to the point where writers and readers decide for poetry, prose, or mixed media, which is also precisely the point where politics begins.

References and Further Reading Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Burke, Kenneth. “Revolutionary Symbolism in America.” In American Writers’ Congress (pp. 87–93). Ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935. Clark, Harry Hayden. “What Made Freneau the Father of American Poetry?” Studies in Philology 26 (January 1929): 1–22. Clark, Harry Hayden. “What Made Freneau the Father of American Prose?” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 25 (1930): 39–50. Elliott, Emory. Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1724–1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Freneau, Philip. The Last Poems of Philip Freneau. Ed. Lewis Leary. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1945. Freneau, Philip. The Poems of Philip Freneau, Poet of the Revolution. 3 vols. Ed. Fred Lewis Pattee. Princeton, NJ: The University Library, 1902. Freneau, Philip. Poems Written and Published during the American Revolutionary War, and Now Published from the Original Manuscripts; Interspersed with Translations from the Ancients, and Other Pieces Not Heretofore in Print. 3rd ed. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lydia R. Bailey, 1809.

Freneau, Philip. The Prose of Philip Freneau. Ed. Philip Marsh. New Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1955. Hustvedt, S.B. “Philippic Freneau.” American Speech 4 (October 1928): 1–18. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: TwentiethCentury Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Leary, Lewis. That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1941. Moretti, Franco. “The Novel: History and Theory.” New Left Review 52 (July–August 2008): 111–24. Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. London: New Left Books, 1983. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Volume 1: The Colonial Mind, 1620–1800. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927. Pinsky, Robert. “American Poetry and American Life: Freneau, Whitman, William.” Shenandoah 37, no. 1 (1987): 76–84. Sartre, John-Paul. What Is Literature? 1948. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. London: Routledge, 2003. Waldrop, Rosemarie. Dissonance (If You Are Interested). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

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The Critical Work of American Literature Joel Pfister

For my brother Jordan, who lived and loved the creative life.

For at least three decades, many scholars have approached American literature as a training ground not just for textual analysis but also for thinking critically about society, history, theory, and representation. The political movements of the 1960s, President Richard Nixon’s Watergate disgrace, and President Ronald Reagan’s War on the Poor, intertwined with the academic popularization of European contributions to theory, advances in social and cultural as well as intellectual history, and greater interest in interdisciplinary syntheses, fueled this impulse. Nowadays many graduate students and undergraduates are routinely taught to bring history to literature in order to become socially conscious “historicists” and cultural theory to literature to become politically aware “theorists.” The turn toward what is commonly called “politicizing,” “historicizing,” and “theorizing” literature has been coextensive with a transnational expansion of the canon that seeks to include and value the literary works of social groups that have fought against systematic exclusion from political, economic, cultural, and literary power within and beyond US borders. My writing and teaching have been shaped by these developments, which were a necessary corrective to the Cold War American literary studies that canonized a largely white middle- to upper-class male “cavalcade” of American literature as “free world” proof that the United States had achieved a distinctive culture. At the same time, the postmodern interest in “politicizing,” “historicizing,” and “theorizing” literature has been a catalyst for some curious critical trends. I will

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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mention two. In 1991, the radical sociologist Stanley Aronowitz noted something he found odd: he knew many scholars schooled in literary studies who had marginalized or even written off literature in their work because they had come to consider literature as symptomatic of or complicit with social contradictions. “I have been told by more than one superbly trained literary critic that they rarely, if ever, read novels or poetry,” he observed. “Poetry and mainstream fiction genres [have] become for them a suspicious form that partakes in processes of social and ideological reproduction” (qtd. in Pfister, Critique 227–8). I still encounter this position. Also, beginning in the 1990s critics such as Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue, and Marjorie Perloff felt it exigent to “defend” literary beauty and formalism against “cultural studies” or materialist historicism, spearheading a return to aesthetics and more conventional approaches to literary analysis. As Rita Felski, Michael Bérubé, and others have argued, numerous critics in this group seem not well versed in the significance of form and aesthetics in the history of cultural studies and materialist critique. I would add that such “defenses” of literature risk obscuring the fact that social critique and cultural theory were fundamental literary concerns hundreds of years before they became cultural studies concerns (more anon). Fearing that radical critics were asking literature to do too much, the “defense” group represented literature as doing too little. Many literary authors, from ages past and in the present, might protest that both groups – one dismissing literature, and the other one “defending” it – have shrunken literature’s value. By contrast, over the past century a diverse array of progressive intellectuals and scholars – outside as well as inside literary studies – have made a case for literature’s cognitive value and critical utility. When Van Wyck Brooks coined the term “usable past” in 1918, he argued that American literature – not history, as it was then written – provided a “usable past” for those interested in rethinking what America was, is, and could be. The nascent American studies movement made the “usable past” its rallying cry. American studies founders such as Vernon Parrington, Constance Rourke, and F.O. Matthiessen elaborated Brooks’s and Lewis Mumford’s “usable past” project. In Knowledge for What? (1939), his radical critique of the social sciences, sociologist Robert Lynd held that literature goes “beyond the cautious generalizations of social science and open[s] up significant hypotheses for study” (178). More recently, community organizers Harry C. Boyte and Nancy N. Kari embraced Herman Melville, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison as a few of “the most important thinkers about democratic action” (Building America 7) who have been excised from typical listings of political theorists. Cultural historian George Lipsitz maintains that America’s “most sophisticated cultural theorists . . . during the 1980s were neither critics nor scholars, but rather artists” (American Studies 107), including Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Raymond Williams’s literary studies were a critical seedbed for his development of cultural materialism. E.P. Thompson, the radical historian and political organizer, relied on authors such as William Blake and William Morris, and would have found the proposition that radical critics have good reason to read literary texts mainly as

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ideological mystifications (or shun them altogether) not just preposterous but also politically unstrategic (see Pfister, Critique 122). A variety of important American literary authors and critics have taken complementary approaches. In 1941 Kenneth Burke discussed literature in strategic terms as offering “equipment for living” (304). Lionel Trilling’s “The Meaning of a Literary Idea” (1949) asserted the value of literature as equipment for making ideas: “The very form of a literary work, considered apart from its content, so far as that is possible, is in itself an idea” (283). In “Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman” (1977), Adrienne Rich, the great feminist poet and critic, held that literature is a “material resource” that can teach us to be “acutely, disturbingly aware of the language we are using and that is using us” (274). Indeed, literature can help us “be acutely, disturbingly aware” of the narratives, genres, and tropes that “we are using” – that we are living – “and that are using us.” And in “The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies” (1998), Sacvan Bercovitch distinguished literature as a complex form of knowledge production that other academic disciplines tend to neglect (75–82). Literature’s play of language, form, and narrative detail helps show us that “we are always already more than our culture tells us we are” (82) and “why we are not bound to systems, including those we play by” (83). To counter being “bound to systems,” one must first begin to see them. Often literature has helped make “systems” visible because it has been part of them. I shall return to and elaborate on this focus on “systems.” All the perspectives, trends, disputes, and approaches I mention above intrigue me because for the last few years I have been pondering the implications of the fact that I have consistently returned in my thinking to American literary authors (not just to cultural theorists) to further develop cultural theory, and have steadily returned to these writers (not just to historians) for insight into various kinds of history and to advance my understanding of the histories that still need to be formulated and written. Why should this be surprising? Consider: literature investigated some areas of American social and “personal” experience well before historians recognized and researched these areas as “history,” and it explored key theoretical concerns long before theorists formulated and abstracted such matters as “theory.” Does American literature, read with these stakes in mind, have the capacity to help readers progress as theorists and historians? And think about it: American literature was complexly “interdisciplinary” and “postdisciplinary” generations before the academy had to invent such terms and approaches to counter its own disciplinary fragmentations of knowledge production. Literature is about life, and life, unlike the academy, is not divided into disciplines. What do literary authors not write about? Literature is always moving beyond conventional notions of the literary in form as well as subject. In the 1940s, Matthiessen recalled that until the 1920s, before critics fully resurrected Melville as a Great American Author, the Yale library had catalogued Moby-Dick (1851) under “cetology” (Heart 45; also see 23). American literature practiced versions of American studies long before it became an academic field in the 1930s and cultural studies well before it was academicized as a field in the 1960s.1

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Yet if one can present evidence that American literature has been daringly theoretical, historical, interdisciplinary, and postdisciplinary in its scope and ambition, what do we make of literature’s complicity with social contradiction? Recall that literature’s ideological complicity troubled the scholars whom Aronowitz described. The critique of literature’s complicity has an extensive literary history. American literary authors made complicity – including literature’s complicity – a theme long before literary historians elevated this into a critical preoccupation powerful enough to discredit literature as ideologically suspect. In fact, literature offers many lessons in how to read complicity (Pfister, Critique 121–41). In the early and mid-1850s, for example, Melville published dialectical diptychs – paired stories or sketches – that exemplify the kind of “historical materialism” that Walter Benjamin almost a century later argued should reconnect the critic’s readings of “cultural treasures” to the “anonymous forced labor” that made the creation of such treasures possible.2 In “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” (1854), Melville’s narrator is the guest of the poet Blandmour, who uses language not just to sentimentalize poverty but also to make it palatable by referring to “poor man’s pudding” (a watery gruel), “poor man’s manure” (rainwater), and so on (165–6). The curious narrator plays tourist and samples “poor man’s pudding” when he visits an impoverished, yet hospitable, couple for a lunch they can ill afford to share. He finds that he has no stomach for this “pudding” or the ideological appetite for the sort of well-fed literature Blandmour writes that refuses to examine how the American system makes and keeps people poor. In lieu of a tasty “pudding,” he finds a poor man’s exploitation and a poor woman’s resignation. The struggling wife is visibly injured by the narrator’s use of the adjective “poor man’s” (169), but cannot say as much. Melville suggests that literary authors can be complicit in socializing middle-class readers to read poverty as charming and scenic, and as a way of life that is merely different from rather than produced by the ruling classes. Readers who find the idea of “poor man’s pudding” quaint can feel good about themselves and feel good about poverty. Even worse, the narrator observes that the American ideology of “equality” (172) can sometimes con the poor into feeling ashamed of themselves for their condition rather than encourage them to oppose the ideological, and occasionally literary, camouflage system that romanticizes their unequal condition (poor man’s equality). The “rich man’s crumbs” in the companion sketch are literally the charity “crumbs” the rich leave for the poor – whom the narrator profiles as “a mob of cannibals” (175) – after the annual Guildhall banquet in London. Melville hints that the American and British class systems, notwithstanding America’s democratic disapproval of putting on airs, may not be so different from one another. “Crumbs” make the rich feel beneficent about subordinating the poor and, more insidiously, make some of the poor grateful for this “crummy” treatment. Melville prods readers to wonder which group is the real “mob of cannibals.” In the early 1840s, Ralph Waldo Emerson contemplated whose blood he was consuming when he ingested sugar harvested by slaves in Cuba and asked self-critically if he were “too protected a person.” Melville had no wish to write “too protected” a

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literature. Nor did Richard Wright, who took up literary complicity in Black Boy (1945). Young Richard is shocked when told that the adventure stories he loves, published in the literary magazine of the Chicago newspaper he sells, are surrounded by racist cartoons and articles in the news sections (143–6). He later reads works by “Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis” as “defensively critical of America. These writers seemed to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it” (283). This mix of lessons makes him more, not less, interested in literature. So complicity and literature’s complicity – in the writings of Emerson, Melville, Wright, and many others – was a theme long before it became a postmodern critical preoccupation. Perhaps American literature – with its theoretical insights, its understanding of what should be read as history, its wideranging interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary perspectives, and its scrutiny of complicity – could help radicalize the scholars who have focused skeptically on “the politics of American literature.” While I have learned much from the changes in American literary studies that I sketched in my introductory paragraph, it seems to me that American literature is often ambitious in manifold ways and offers much more than texts in need of historicizing, theorizing, and interdisciplinary rereadings (though these approaches are crucial). My current work focuses on how one might give the critical work of canonical and noncanonical American literature the credit it deserves. Here I offer two brief readings – of a passage in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and another in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – that begin to illustrate the usefulness of this approach. I should stress again that my aim is by no means to read American literature apart from theory and history, but to read more productively so that each might better advance our reading of the other. If theory, historical studies, and interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary approaches can change literature – the way we read and value it – perhaps literature can return the favor. Matthiessen’s dialectical formulation, adapted from T.S. Eliot, remains pertinent: “The past is not what is dead, but what is already living.” Thus, “the present is continually modifying the past, as the past conditions the present” (Responsibilities 6).

Franklin’s Systemic Reading Lessons: Capitalism as Cannibalism D.H. Lawrence’s chapter on Benjamin Franklin in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) scrutinizes some of the more patent ways in which American literature is tied to capitalism. Lawrence’s Franklin is manifestly capitalist, not just secular. He concocted a capitalist God for America to worship – “If Mr. Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better” (10) – and installed a capitalist soul for Americans to busy themselves with: “Perfectibility of Man! . . . perfectibility of the Ford car!” (9). But Lawrence underestimated Franklin’s complexity, especially his self-irony.

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Even in “The Way to Wealth” (1758), arguably the most influential incentivebuilding text in American literature, Franklin both parodies and fortifies his literary power to offer secular, not religious, prescriptions for the way to work, maintaining that they also show the way to wealth. Father Abraham, rather than giving a sermon, delivers a secular jeremiad, a pep talk, comprised of hackneyed maxims – substitutes for Bible verses – from a quarter century of Poor Richard’s Almanack. Yet the jingles fly out of his mouth like products speeding along a conveyor belt: “There are no Gains, without Pains”; “Have you somewhat to do tomorrow, do it today” (189). Therein lies Franklin’s artfulness. Franklin’s tongue-in-cheek caricature of his bestselling pitches has an ironic and unpretentious charm that upends the hard-sell strategy of the Puritan work ethic (the harangue is laughable). His caricature announces that although the “way to work” exhortation is a bit of a scam – it can guarantee neither salvation nor wealth – it remains economically useful. Notwithstanding the secular innovations Franklin made to the shaping of capitalist incentive, individuality, and hegemony, he was also one of capitalism’s most canny whistleblowers. Franklin knew what he was involved in producing and was unabashed about telling his more attentive readers that they were living in a system, and that if they wanted to swim – not sink – in it, they had best learn how to read it. An anecdote in Franklin’s Autobiography (this part written in England in 1771) teaches this lesson. He recounts his first voyage from Boston to Philadelphia, where he would commence his legendary career as a printer, author, inventor, and statesman. Franklin recalls an epiphany he experienced en route, a symbolic vision of the mercantile capitalism he would help motivate and rationalize. When his ship is “becalm’d off Block Island,” the young artisan watches his fellow passengers catch, cook, and eat fish. “I consider’d with my Master Tryon, the taking of every fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter” (87). Franklin’s allusion to Thomas Tryon, a popular English self-help author, links his “Way to Wealth” to the fish fry. In The Way to Health (1683), The Way to Save Wealth (1695), The Way to Get Wealth (c. 1701), and other books, Tryon endorsed vegetarianism, temperance, frugality, self-control, and nonviolence. In The Way to Get Wealth, Franklin probably read with ironic interest his master’s tips on how to select good fish and prepare them, and how to make wine and beer (96–100). He soon tosses Tryon’s “mastery” overboard off Block Island. For it turns out that Franklin had once been a “great lover” – eater – “of Fish,” and, he confesses, the fish “smelt admirably well.” His initial “reasoning” – that because the fish did him no harm, why would he eat them – sounds humane, but changes with his appetite. “When the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” Franklin consumes the cod, quipping, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do” (87–8). One need only seem “reasonable” and appear rational to feel justified. Franklin expands the ideological repertoire – “reason,” not just “God”

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– of useful American alibis. Not just hard work, but also the appetite to gobble up small fries and deem it “reasonable,” may pave the way to wealth. Franklin’s other important allusion is to Block Island itself, a site he did not have to specify in his fish tale. Block Island’s historical significance, especially for a young man fleeing Boston for Quaker City, is noteworthy. The final incident that sparked the Puritan war against the Pequot occurred when Indians killed the prosperous Indian trader John Oldham and several of his crew, hailing from Boston, off Block Island on July 10, 1636. Although the history that led to this war is too detailed to recount here, suffice to say that it resonates not only with the trope of big fish eating smaller fish but also with the rationalization that “if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” New England had become a fish-eat-fish marketplace for all its inhabitants by the 1630s, and the struggle between the Dutch and the English for the fur trade with the Indians was matched by competition between the tribes. By the early 1600s the Pequot had pushed into Niantic territory and severed that tribe into Eastern and Western groups, and gradually posed the greatest threat to the English. The Block Island Indians who killed Oldham may have been allies of the Narragansett, who later sided with the Puritans. But the Puritans had bigger fish to fry and made Oldham’s death a reason to wage genocidal war on the Pequot, who traded with the Dutch. Most of the Pequot were massacred by the English (aided by great numbers of the Narragansett and the Mohegan); some were enslaved in Bermuda and the West Indies; the name Pequot was censored from the lexicon; and Pequot land was redistributed to settlers and Indian allies, as if the tribe never existed. The Puritans used the Block Island killing – one among many in this marketplace-driven conflict – as a rationalization to devour the Pequot whole and profit from it. Block Island, slashed and burned by Boston’s John Endicott and his troops in 1636, signified the pretext for Puritan fish-eat-fish dominance using the old “onward Christian soldiers” rationalization (see Cave, Pequot War 69–167). The secular fish eater sails on, though in the ship’s wake he has left behind something more complex than an anecdote about the human tendency to bracket idealism in favor of self-gratification. His fishy parable is about how a system works: it blows the whistle on a foundational pretext – utilizing “reason,” not just “God” – that America would devise, with Franklin’s ingenious literary assistance, to authorize conquest, colonization, and competition. For modern readers, the parable travels backward and forward beyond its period. It sends postmodern readers back to Puritan fish-eat-fish “God” rationalizations and to Max Weber’s 1905 thesis about the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism. And it raises questions about the unfolding of America’s capitalist and imperial history after Franklin. Almost two centuries later, Louise Erdrich’s (Chippewa) Love Medicine (1984) would portray exploited Indians who see themselves cannibalized in the way Franklin describes. “It’s like I’m always stuck with the goddamn minnows,” King Kashpaw complains. “Every time I work my way up – say I’m next in line for promotion – they shaft me. . . . I move on. Entry level. Stuck down at the bottom with the minnows.” He swears, “One

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day I’m gonna rise. They can’t keep down the Indians.” Kashpaw dreams of occupying a better position in the capitalist “food chain,” despite his censure of “Indians that got up there” who then forget “their own”: “The big fish eats the little fish and the little fish eats the littler fish. The one with the biggest mouth eats any damn old fish he wants” (252–3). Erdrich doubtless appreciated that what Franklin terms “reason” still serves Americans as a rationalization for satiating predatory appetite. It is true that if predation is to operate efficiently, it had best seem “reasonable” and really the fault of those who are eaten (like Franklin’s fish or the Puritans’ Pequot). Franklin saw the fish, smelled it, wanted it, and ate it. And this, his autobiographical advice book implies, is what America is partly about: rationalizing what one wants to do as “reason” and perhaps then feeling a trifle naughty (the morally inexpensive response) rather than remorseful (the morally expensive response). Franklin’s fishy interlude enables postmodern readers to wonder: might Tom Paine’s Age of Reason (1796), written after Franklin died, be reconceived as the Age of Rationalization or even the Age of Appetite? What would a history of the cannibal theme look like? Its literary history would include Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relacíon (1542). This memoir, written by a failed conquistador, proposes a safer and more self-gratifying way to digest natives. Cabeza de Vaca inverts the imperial stereotype that natives are cannibals when he observes that six “Christian” soldiers “came to the extremity of eating each other.” He lists their names to underscore that the Spanish, not the natives, are cannibals. “The Indians were so shocked at this cannibalism that, if they had seen it sometime earlier, they surely would have killed every one of us” (60). He narrates a second incident, again citing the Spanish names: “The living dried the flesh of those who died. The last to die was Sotomayor. Esquivel, by feeding on the corpse, was able to stay alive” (74). Spain’s hegemonic “cross,” the author advises, not the “crossbow,” “will best subdue” (132, 97). Imperial Spain can best “feed on” natives in good conscience not by fighting but by colonizing them with Christianity. If Melville’s “Rich Man’s Crumbs” implies that the rich may be the “mob of cannibals” (175) one has to look out for, his Typee (1846) also hints that globalizing capitalism is in the cannibalism business. The narrator is beset with stereotypical fears that the natives are “blood-thirsty cannibals” (203), and this prompts him to distrust the “happiness” their culture nurtures. But is the narrator’s real “sojourn among cannibals” (123) his unhappy sojourn through his own culture? Are the missionaries and merchants who condemn Pacific islanders to be “dumb brutes” who toil ceaselessly the real “cannibals” (196)? Despite its insipid defenses of slavery, George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! (1857) mounts compelling indictments of “free labor” (21–37) as well-disguised class cannibalism: Northern capitalism’s wage slavery, like Southern capitalism’s chattel slavery, eats workers. Franklin’s fish-eat-fish parable speaks to texts – and to social contradictions – across periods from Cabeza de Vaca through Erdrich. The fish-eat-fish passage does what other American authors do more elaborately: Franklin uses literature to posit a latent self. Seventeenth-century Protestantism’s

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most significant interiority trope was the soul. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s ruling interiority trope was reason. Nineteenth-century sentimentalism’s favored interiority trope was the heart. But does Franklin’s parable imply that if one wants to understand America, and what makes Americans act, one must focus not just on what Americans describe as their essence – “soul,” “heart,” or “reason” – but also on the stomach that often drives them? In the ravenous world of mercantile and later industrial capitalism, latent appetite would often pose as “reason” to rationalize and justify businessman-eat-businessman capitalism. As candid as Franklin was about America’s fish-eat-fish practices, in his lighthearted parable, it was not in his economic interest, or what he considered the new republic’s economic interest, to discount them. His Autobiography records that he eventually devoured the printing businesses of the two City of Brotherly Love masters with whom he had apprenticed, Andrew Bradford and Samuel Keimer. The parable invites readers to ask: is America’s economy a fish-eat-fish sink-or-swim system whose ideological challenge is to make its Andrew Carnegie and Wall Street cannibalism seem “reasonable” and the American way? Even in the mid-eighteenth century, Franklin knew that Protestantized Americans, driven by appetites, would prefer to think about themselves not just in terms of the stomach to get back to the workplace. American workers, to be motivated, would need to imagine selfhood more in terms of “souls,” “hearts,” “character,” and “reason” (and later the “unconscious”) than of stomachs. It was as if Franklin counseled that whatever Americans need to call themselves – “souls,” “hearts,” “character,” “reason” – if you want to assess their motives, do not lose sight of their stomachs. Almost a century later, Rebecca Harding Davis offered the same reading lesson in “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861). Doctor May tours an inferno-like iron mill with several curious gentlemen when his guide, the owner, boasts that he “wash[es]” his “hands” of any responsibility for the workers he exploits. May’s selfish individualism is less overt. He dispenses pseudo-sympathy to feel good about his moral abdication and complicity. But Davis’s sarcasm exposes him, substituting “stomach” for soul: “The Doctor sighed, – a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach” (326). In “What Life Means to Me” (1906), Jack London, like Franklin and Davis, read American incentive as the “incentive of the stomach.” He “look[ed] forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach” (399). Franklin nominated the stomach as the determinative American innerness in an age when ideologies of the inherent provoked much debate and were used to qualify or disqualify whole political and economic systems and privilege or disenfranchise entire social groups. “The faculties of the mind itself,” James Madison acknowledged, “have never yet been distinguished and defined, with satisfactory precision” (qtd. in Curti 109). Yet many Founding Fathers, including Madison, feared that self-interest, or what Franklin termed “appetite,” was capable of devouring “reason.” The Constitutional Convention of 1787 adopted the system of checks and balances and separation of powers specifically to prevent the members of any one branch of government from swallowing the others out of self-interest, ambition, passion, and self-love. Some argued that reason and self-interest “rightly understood” could make democratic

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self-governance possible. Others remained skeptical about mass “democracy” and favored the “democratic” rule of elites. Still others held that inborn appetites made equality impossible. “No lover of equality, at least since Adam’s fall, ever existed in human nature,” John Adams averred, “any otherwise than as a desire for bringing others down to our own level, which implies a desire of raising ourselves above them, or depressing them below us” (qtd. in Curti 120). With this in mind, the Founding Fathers ascribed inalienable “rights” – to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, and even rebellion – to humans, even as they countenanced slavery, the theft of Indian land, severe legal constraints on women’s freedoms, and class divisions that on occasion erupted into mini-rebellions. Would an America that touted itself not just as a land of opportunity but also as a stomach system have seemed too openly crass? Could one possibly recite the national pledge by holding one’s hand over the stomach rather than the heart? The American political system has justified its mission with an ennobling rhetoric: “reason,” “republic,” “democracy,” “liberty,” “equality,” “individuality,” and even “happiness.” But does America’s economic and political history suggest that Franklin’s focus on appetite and his association of capitalism with cannibalism were prescient? If so, did America need more than the trope of “reason” to manage this? And if the provisional answer to this question is “yes,” readers might ask what kind of a history does a reading of Franklin as a historian and cultural theorist suggest still needs to be conceptualized and written? One as-yet-unwritten history might be a study of the cross-period development of tropes – “God,” “civilization,” “reason,” “republic,” “democracy,” “individuality,” “equality,” “free labor,” “free enterprise,” “sentiment,” “progress,” “modernization,” and “national interest” – that have been used as alibis or authorizations to colonize, conquer, and sometimes, as Melville saw it, cannibalize others in various ways. Did America, for instance, need to proliferate self-legitimizing discourses of hearts and hearths – the Holy Trinity of individuality, gender, and the family – to compensate for and distract attention from insatiable appetites? And did such compensatory discourses also whet appetites? By 1851, in The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne probed the redemptive limits of a mid-nineteenth-century middle-class domesticity haunted by a gothic Puritan past originating in predatory practices and offered a chilling one-sentence sketch of fish-eat-fish, sink-or-swim America that still describes the experience of millions of struggling Americans, like Erdrich’s King Kashpaw, today: “In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point.”

Hawthorne’s Systemic Reading Lessons: The Whole System of Society The concept of “totalizing” has come under fire over the past few decades partly because no master-narrative or master-analysis can “totalize” in a literal sense. From

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what point of view or position would one presume to “totalize”? American culture is composed of American cultures, and American literature is made up of American literatures. In 1997 John Carlos Rowe even coined the word “untotalizable” (xii). Every “totalizing” effort must exclude or marginalize something and someone. Yet is it crucial to analyze not just the diverse events, people, ways of being, and constructions of value that have been excluded from cultural representation or historical memory, but also the system in which a multiplicity of groups, texts, and ideas have been included? Sometimes the systemic contradictions that drive exclusion also drive inclusion. Notwithstanding the difficulties and omissions involved, many committed political intellectuals have underscored the importance of reading the system to the extent this is possible. For example, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some British New Left intellectuals took an interdisciplinary cultural turn not because they wanted to be in the vanguard of academic innovations but because they needed to understand Cold War inventions of power. Therefore, in May Day Manifesto (1968), Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall argued that Britons had to overcome the “fragmentation” of knowledge and critique that was a symptom and strategy of capitalism. “All the issues – industrial and political, international and domestic, economic and cultural, humanitarian and radical – are deeply connected” (15). They focused their critical gaze on mass culture and the distractions, fascinations, and self-definitions it popularized to discern why those who were exploited did not identify with one another as a class and organize to change the world. “A new total description, however preliminary,” they were convinced, “is indispensable” (182–3). In short, they tried to read what looked like a system. Fredric Jameson made one of the most compelling arguments on behalf of developing a “system concept” in his seminal essay “Cognitive Mapping” (1981). “The conception of capital is admittedly a totalizing or system concept: no one has ever seen or met the thing itself,” he acknowledged. But “anyone who believes that the profit motive and the logic of capital accumulation are not the fundamental laws of this world, who believes that these do not set absolute barriers and limits to social changes and transformations undertaken in it – such a person is living in an alternative universe” (354). He concluded, “Without a conception of the social totality (and the possibility of transforming a whole social system), no properly socialist politics is possible” (355). Williams, Thompson, Hall, and Jameson, taken together, suggest the following: a society that disables people, even knowledge producers, from perceiving outlines of the system that reproduces them (including differences between them) can better impede them from organizing to resist it. What Jameson termed “the project of totalizing thought” (354) might be considered Hawthornian as well as Marxian. Hawthorne proved himself a brilliant cultural theorist of how Americans are enticed, shamed, or bullied to encode themselves within cultural systems of meaning. In the 1840s, he explored what Louis Althusser in the 1960s conceptualized as “interpellation” (174–5) and what Michel Foucault in the 1970s theorized as “incitement” (34). “The Birth-mark” (1843) features a

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newlywed who is cajoled or interpellated by her husband to reread her facial birthmark as a sign of “sin, sorrow, decay, and death.” The incitement she undergoes shames her into believing that this pathology originates deep within her and must be excised not just on her face but also in her inner self. By showing how the newlywed is allegorized to death, Hawthorne clarifies one link between literary form and social form: culture manages not just how one reads the social world but also how one allegorizes one’s self. Even more subtly, it suggests that the concept of inner essence can render one susceptible to being defined, pathologized, and managed. Conceptually, Hawthorne delved into the cultural histories of the body and of interiority formation before historians recognized these as historical fields. This tale of interpellation and incitement challenges historians to write histories of the production of the limited ranges of selfdefinitions made culturally available to specific groups of Americans in particular moments. In The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne’s interest in the systemic production of a limited register of self-conceptions is more explicit. Historically, he suggests, men have played a managerial role in fabricating, or feminizing, humans called “women.” Zenobia sizes up her more feminized half-sister as “the type of womanhood such as man has spent centuries in making.” His tale and novel resonate with, and enrich, social construction of gender theories that feminists developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Hawthorne’s “project of totalizing thought” was even more provocative two years earlier. If only fleetingly, he gave Hester Prynne a vision of the large-scale social invention of gender difference in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hester’s vision should provoke readers to think systemically about how Americans and their world might be imagined otherwise. In her vision, Hawthorne’s cultural theorist speculates about the purposes that the making of gender difference and hierarchy serve in social reproduction. Hester intimates that gender making and gender hierarchy are structurally requisite in certain forms because they help insure the reproduction of power in particular ways. “Ancient prejudice” – specifically, the “ancient” subordination of women – is somehow necessary to maintain a complex system built on “ancient principle.” She predicts grimly that for women to “assume a fair and suitable position,” three vast reconstructions must occur. “The whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew”; men must modify the “hereditary habit” – the conventional molds of masculinity – that has come to seem like “their nature” but is not their nature; and women must undergo “a still mightier change” in their role, self-images, expectations, and feelings than men. She grasps that the binary classification of sex roles is part of the operation of “the whole system of society” (economic, political, religious, and cultural) and that any tinkering with seemingly “opposite” male-female gender roles (any behavior or idea that contravenes the alleged naturalness of this “opposition”) may disrupt the reproductive powers of the “ancient” system. Here Hawthorne’s cultural theorist begins to practice systemic self-understanding. This type of alienation resurfaces like a symptom in literature written later by the likes of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins

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Gilman, and Susan Glaspell. In Phelps’s “The Angel over the Right Shoulder” (1852), Mrs. Mary James, who feels confined by the cultural self-definitions of “woman,” “wife,” and “mother,” becomes “conscious of yearnings for a more earnest life. . . . Unsatisfied longings for something which she had not attained, often clouded what, otherwise, would have been a bright day to her; and yet the causes of these feelings seemed to lie in a dim and misty region, which her eye could not penetrate” (213). How can she name the problem, no less the cause, when the problem seems to be everywhere and internalized by almost every woman and man in her white middleclass world and simply mislabeled “life”? Likewise, Chopin’s Edna Pontellier in The Awakening (1899) suffers from an “indescribable oppression” that she cannot explain and could not “have told why she was crying” (8). In Glaspell’s The Verge (1921), Claire Archer struggles to sketch the effects of what Antonio Gramsci theorized as hegemonic “common sense” a few years later: “Back here – the old pattern, done again, again and again,” she explains. “So long done it doesn’t even know itself for a pattern” (77). A wide-ranging vision of what holds Hester and other women hostage would be taken up in the 1970s and 1980s by theoretically minded feminist historians invested in reimagining history. Nancy Cott’s The Bonds of Womanhood (1977) led her to develop the implications of conduct books that instructed women to help “absorb, palliate, and even to redeem the strain of social and economic transformation” (70). Countless advice books on how to be a “true woman” confirmed this ideological function. In their capacity as sentimental shock absorbers for middle-class men who competed in the marketplace, women were held hostage not just to femininity but also to the reproduction of “democratic” capitalism. The overwhelming mass-cultural emphasis on gender identities downplayed the attention paid to “democratic” class formation in what was touted as America’s equality system: “In the attempt to raise a democratic culture almost all types of classification had to be rejected, except the ‘natural’ ones such as sex (and race),” Cott observes. “The division of spheres supplied an acceptable kind of social distinction. Sex, not class, was the basic category” (98). In this thesis the reinforcement of gender inequality, what Hester’s terms “ancient prejudice,” served the purpose of preventing class inequality from seeming significant and thereby challenging the claims of “democracy” and “equality.” Emergent middle-class sentimental literary and conduct-book culture pushed gender, not class, as the dominant cultural self-definition through which one would read one’s identity, meaningfulness, and aspiration. Placing Hawthorne, Cott, and Jameson in dialogue, one might wonder: were women in 1850 held hostage to an American capitalism-needs-gender-to-obfuscatethe-perception-of-class system? Any effort to question the gender industry is dangerous because, like a domino falling against other dominos, this questioning “threatens the entire system” that has a stake in having humans encode, read, and allegorize themselves first and foremost as “women” and “men” in a very limited “natural” repertoire of roles. The reproduction of certain kinds of gender roles, in other words, sustains reproductive operations (class identity formation and worker formation) that seem to bear no relation to gender.

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Hester’s relational thinking, if developed, would move toward exposing the reproductive operations of what Hawthorne calls “the whole system” – the domestic political, class, racial, and economic system – of Hawthorne’s America. Cott, writing more than a century and a quarter after Hawthorne invented Hester Prynne, also tried to map interlocking roles within “the whole system.” Hester’s vision of “the whole system of society” – like Cott’s post-1960s feminist analysis – was pressured into being by history. Hawthorne had available to him already in 1850 a tradition of iconoclastic thinking about some of these matters in the work of Claude Adrien Helvétius, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller, and Sarah Grimké. In Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838), Grimké, schooled in the antislavery movement, questioned why her culture made the “distinction between male and female” (42) so ideologically prominent and determinative. She insisted that “there is neither male nor female” (42) and that “intellect is not sexed” (64). God, she contended, created woman as a “companion” of man who is “in all respects his equal” and “like himself a free agent” (32). The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention called the disenfranchisement of women a glaring contradiction in America’s unequal “equality” system. Paulina Wright Davis, editor of the women’s rights journal The Una (1850s), underscored that the women’s movement was “intended from its inception to change the structure, the central organization of society” (qtd. in Pfister, Production 135). Grimké, Davis, Hawthorne, Cott, Williams, Thompson, Hall, and Jameson, read as a group, should challenge literary studies to read the literary text within “the whole system of society” even if imagining every area of “the whole system” is beyond cognition and representation. So how might Franklin’s fish-eat-fish parable and Hawthorne’s vision that there is a “whole system” relate to one another? Why would a fish-eat-fish system require a restricted set of gender roles to be constructed and made available? Did the nineteenth century’s white middle-class “angels in the house” serve not only as palliative symbols of order but also as sentimental worker-reproducers who were trained, rewarded, and constrained to motivate men to reenter fish-eat-fish marketplace competition? This is too complicated to resolve, but I offer some final speculations and questions. If the Hester Prynnes of Hawthorne’s era, and perhaps later eras, refused to play their feminine roles in certain respects, did they jeopardize a dependency-making, incentivemaking, and alibi-making system that in sundry ways lubricated the machinery of fish-eat-fish capitalism? Should we rethink US capitalism as not just an economic system but also a subtle class system – that will seem mostly classless or mainly “middle class” – heavily invested in gender, racial, familial, and emotional reproduction? Do we need a more dialectical history of how the production of personal life is tied to the production of personnel life? From Franklin to the present, the expansion of America – imperial, transnational, industrial, and corporate – was coextensive with the diversification of cultural and mass-cultural discourses of the personal and the proliferation of cultural and mass-cultural means of socializing, motivating, and compensating personnel. Can American literature’s socially grounded “subjective” concerns help

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teach readers to advance history and advance cultural theory – the history and cultural theory that readers bring to their readings of literature – more complexly?

Afterword A Note on the Creative Work of American Literature I can pin down the arguments of Terry Eagleton’s theoretical works and Howard Zinn’s historical contributions and learn from them. But sometimes literature’s playful appeal and critical value are such that one cannot wholly catch its drifts. American literature’s symptomatic, complicit, polyvalent, and indeterminate qualities add to rather than diminish or compromise literature’s usefulness as a critical resource. Much of the American literature I continually turn to, inside and outside the canon, does what Melville described in Mardi (1849): it makes “creating the creative” (491) its project. Literature’s readers – as well as literature’s texts – become “the creative.” Diverse readers – in a multiplicity of interpretive contexts and changing social times – “create” new readings of themselves and their culture as well as the texts. True, some literary authors consciously wrote cultural theory before cultural theory was established as a field and consciously explored some areas of social life historically before historians recognized these areas as historical. It is also true, however, that some literary texts exhibit insights into cultural theory and history that the authors of these texts may never have intended, recognized, or valued as insights.3 In either case, it is as useful to bring our creative readings of literature to our conceptualizations of history, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary approaches as it is to bring history, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to our creative readings of literature. American literature – its mix of what authors seem to have intended and what texts exhibit – offers lessons in thinking afresh about what constitutes a usable literature, history, and cultural theory. Literature’s experiments with writing America have much to teach us about reading America – and learning what is at stake in changing it.

Notes 1.

Ioan Davies observes, “The English, like any other society, had forms of ‘cultural studies’ long before the term was coined” (5). On American literature as American studies, see Pfister, Critique, 17, 125–6. 2. From Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 7 (1940), translated in part by Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 281. 3. Derek Attridge – whose field is not American literature and who does not mention Melville

in “Innovation, Literature, Ethics” – offers ideas about literary creativity that resonate with and, for me, help explicate Melville’s “creating the creative.” For instance, “Creation always takes place in a culture, not just in a mind” (22); “What is foremost in the creative mind is . . . the demand that justice be done to thoughts that have not yet even been formulated as thoughts” (24); and “A creative reading often moves to an articulation in

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Joel Pfister words as if the work being read demanded a new work in response” (p. 25). He quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (1948): literary reading is a “ ‘reinvention . . . as new and as original an act as the first invention’” (p. 30). Attridge’s more recent work on this includes The Singularity of Literature and Reading and Responsibility. Several ideas in my

concluding paragraph were influenced by an exchange with my colleague Matthew Garrett, who reads readers as “writers” of the literary texts they are reading and literature as “meaning more than it says.” I thank Garrett, Robert Levine, and Caroline Levander for reading and commenting on a draft of this chapter.

References and Further Reading Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971. Aronowitz, Stanley. Roll over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114 (January 1999): 20–31. Attridge, Derek. Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies.” In “Culture” and Its Disciplines. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Bérubé, Michael. “Introduction: Engaging the Aesthetic.” In The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Ed. Michael Bérubé. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1994. Boyte, Harry C., and Nancy N. Kari. Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Brooks, Van Wyck. Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years: A Selection from His Works, 1908–1921. Ed. Claire Sprague. New York: Harper, 1968. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Cave, Alfred A. The Pequot War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Chopin, Edna. The Awakening. 1899. In The Awakening and Selected Short Stories. New York: Bantam, 1981.

Cott, Nancy. 1977. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Curti, Merle. Human Nature in American Thought: A History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Davies, Ioan. Cultural Studies and Beyond: Fragments of Empire. New York: Routledge, 1995. Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Life in the Iron Mills.” 1861. In Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Ed. Judith Fetterley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Donoghue, Denis. Speaking of Beauty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Edwards, Mary K. Bercaw. Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Early Works. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009. Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. 1984. New York: Bantam, 1989. Felski, Rita. “The Role of Aesthetics in Cultural Studies.” In The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Ed. Michael Bérubé. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Fitzhugh, George. Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters. 1857. Ed. C. Vann Woodward. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Franklin, Benjamin. “The Way to Wealth.” 1758. In The Autobiography and Other Writings. Ed. L. Jesse Lemisch. New York: Signet, 2001. Glaspell, Susan. The Verge. 1921. In Plays by Susan Glaspell. Ed. C. W. E. Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

The Critical Work of American Literature Grimké, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women. 1838. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. New York: Viking, 1972. Lipsitz, George. American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. London, Jack. Jack London: American Rebel. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Citadel Press, 1947. Lynd, Robert. Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture. 1939. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Matthiessen, F.O. From the Heart of Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. Matthiessen, F.O. The Responsibilities of the Critic: Essays and Reviews. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Melville, Herman. Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. 1849. New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1973. Melville, Herman. “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs.” 1854. In Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Ed. Warner Berthoff. New York: Harper, 1969. Melville, Herman. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. 1846. New York: Penguin, 1996. Perloff, Marjorie. “In Defense of Poetry: Put the Literature Back into Literary Studies.” Boston Review 24 (December 1999–January 2000): 22–6.

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Pfister, Joel. Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006. Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. “The Angel over the Right Shoulder.” 1852. In Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Ed. Judith Fetterley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Rich, Adrienne. “Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman.” 1977. In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. New York: Norton, 1979. Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Sartre, John-Paul. What Is Literature? 1948. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. London: Routledge, 2003. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays in Literature and Society. 1949. New York: Viking, 1950. Tryon, Thomas. The Way to Get Wealth. London: G. Conyers, c. 1701. Tryon, Thomas. The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness. London: Andrew Jowle, 1683. Tryon, Thomas. The Way to Save Wealth. London: G. Conyers, 1695. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1905. New York: Scribners, 1958. Williams, Raymond, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall. May Day Manifesto, 1968. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. 1945. New York: Harper, 1966.

3

Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel Shirley Samuels

This chapter explores key motifs in novels by nineteenth-century US women writers— fame, children, authorial personae, tutelage, danger, and labor—by analyzing details from their lives as well as the plots of their fiction. Critical writing on women’s literary careers has steadily emerged since the crucial work of Mary Kelley, Nina Baym, and many others in the 1980s. Biographies, anthologies, cultural histories, and celebrations of women’s literary productions have been preoccupied with the large and still very compelling question of what it meant, during the nineteenth century, for women to write novels. One way to address such a question is to look closely at the novels that these women produced.

Rich and Famous – and Happy? During a time when the option to labor for money was restricted for most women, writing emerged as a significant route to fame and prestige. In an account of how she became a writer, “Recollections of My Childhood,” published in the Youth’s Companion in 1888, Louisa May Alcott recalled sitting under a tree at fifteen while the crows cawed, and then shaking her fist at the sky and shouting, “I will do something byand-by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!” The strong competitive spirit revealed in this anecdote – where the nascent writer defies the sky as she laments women’s uneven access to money and fame – alternates between work performed in public and work performed at home. To teach and to act are public tasks performed

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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before an audience. The privacy of sewing and writing seem equivalently to support a woman who remains at home, while her work leaves the home and enters the world as an object of clothing or bound within stitched covers of a book. Indeed, for many women writers, their work first appeared next to sewing patterns. Crucially, writing was not only a possible route to money and fame for women, but also the most likely to enable them to transcend class, race, and gender constrictions even as it allowed them to critique the very conventions that might limit their futures. Writing could also appear as a domestic task. During the nineteenth century, the United States saw newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly and journals such as Godey’s Ladies Book offer an earlier and more accessible staging ground for fiction than the hallowed pages of The Atlantic Monthly, for much of the century the preeminent location for aspirants to literary distinction. Dress designs, fashion plates, crochet patterns, and historical events crowd among the columns of fiction, bordering paragraphs with color-tinted fabrics and lithographed smiling babies. The overlap between such commercial and domestic enterprises and the labor of words suggests the tension between understanding women’s writing as fueled by the desire for gain and understanding it as engaged with the literary standards of high culture. Writing can be produced at home, but it also brings the writer face-to-face with the public. In “Recollections,” Alcott conveys her feeling about that public through her sense of childhood fun: “No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences and be a tomboy.” Peculiarly juxtaposing the desire to race faster than boys and the wish to turn girls into “tomboys” – a conversion that suggests not only a gender transgression but also a muscular transfiguration – Alcott’s “Recollections” gestures toward a self that will transcend gender. Her desire for a future self that will be “rich and famous and happy” also provides a blueprint for the incipient young writer of 1888 to think about how the last category, writing, had become the means to fame for women. Even as the success of women writers led to their being attacked as “scribbling women,” the phrase forever associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s envious denunciation of his bestselling competitors, that model of possible fame was valuable not only for Alcott but also for many women who became famous by writing novels, poems, and essays in the nineteenth century. With limited opportunities for achieving fame, women writers often addressed the relation of gender to domestic and public work, and to writing itself. Frequently gender becomes the reason why the writer had to “race” faster than “boys” in producing fiction, and it is not surprising that women writers in their fiction often represented girls leaving home. Gender alliances that reach across lines of race and class often affect the plots of novels written in the nineteenth-century United States. These plots regularly present the world as a place separate from the home. Within that rubric, where domestic ideas of housekeeping form part of the story of growing up, the concept of the threshold acquired extraordinary power. What it might mean to cross that threshold and leave home – or to return home – permeates this fiction. As we will see, the sensation of loss of home, whether the character feels liberated or

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exiled, occurs in narratives ranging in settings from southern plantations to northern farms to western cities. What worlds do women find in the nineteenth-century novel? The worlds for which they were once known – or to which they were once relegated – tended to be domestic. Notably, women leave home as much as – or far more than – they enter kitchens. Many women writers, as well as many of their characters, leave home for economic reasons in addition to seeking forms of safety away from home. Such safety includes the need to leave a condition of enslavement, whether one considers the legal restrictions in marriage or the system of legalized bondage endorsed by the United States until 1865. The legal conventions concerning marriage were codified in William Blackstone’s commentaries on the English law, adapted in various states in the United States well into the nineteenth century. According to these commentaries, a woman who enters into marriage became legally “dead,” and her status as a “femme covert” meant that she was defined by her status as a married woman. As such, she was denied rights to property, inheritance, wages, and even her own children, and could enter into no legal contracts or even reap the rewards of her own writing, should there happen to have been any. Such restrictions remained a persistent fact of all women’s lives, no matter their class or race. Many women experienced even more restrictions on their legal status. Some were displaced persons, dispossessed by the territorial disputes with, for example, the Cherokee or “los indios” in Texas or California during the border warfare that led to the War of 1848, the so-called Mexican War. Such displaced women appear in fiction by southern writers such as Augusta Evans (who wrote about Texas in Inez: A Tale of the Alamo [1855]) or western writers such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (writing about California in The Squatter and the Don [1885]). Other women saw their bodies claimed under a notoriously persistent scheme of enslaved labor whose traces endured for more than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. That racism permeates women’s worlds of fiction should come as no surprise. That the exposure of racial or ethnic prejudice can also have layers of racism might also come as no surprise. The category of racism within reform-minded novels must include, for instance, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don. In this novel, the author exposes a hitherto little explored edge of the United States during national expansion – the pressures against the southern border with Mexico exacerbated by the push west. The fantastic work of railroad barons such as Leland Stanford and Henry E. Huntington is here exposed not simply as an assault on the legal means of acquiring land but also, crucially for the novel’s purposes, as a means of destroying an aristocratic culture of land ownership in California. The assault on prejudice operates at once against the former landowners, Spanish-speaking former citizens of Mexico, and also appears in their indifferent attitudes toward “los indios” who inhabited the land before the Mexican invasion. The woman who sets out to write her way to fame and freedom presents at once a reformation and a reformulation of the fate once ascribed to the madwoman in the attic (Gilbert and Gubar). The fortunate result of such efforts – freedom – might be

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not only the certificate that announces legal freedom, as in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), but also, in a definite substitution for the marriage certificate, the certificate of bank stock, as in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855). To purchase one’s freedom through writing suggests equivalence among these seemingly different texts. As we shall see, the eponymous woman who wins fame through writing in Ruth Hall does so after her attempts to survive through sewing and teaching have failed. Her bank stock certificate appears reproduced in the novel as testimony to the success of her words. The sense that freedom and fame might be aligned through writing cannot appear as a complete solution to writing as an emancipatory strategy, as Alcott’s 1888 “Recollections” suggests (see also Elbert; Karcher). But it does present a beginning to the story that women writers tell.

Children Fiction written by women in the nineteenth-century United States sometimes displays events that expose how, even when children are greatly wanted, the capacity to reproduce can present a limitation for female autonomy. Such a limitation may explain why so many novels end with marriage. To end with marriage presents not only the satisfaction of the heterosexual romance plot but also (and crucially) the recognition that a woman’s life alters so much when she becomes a mother that her very identity as a character will be transformed. The repetition of such a cycle is enhanced in fiction that opens with mothers saying goodbye to their daughters – or training them toward a future repetition of the act of saying goodbye to daughters. Children must and will be cared for, yet their very appearance can betray alternate futures. Reproduction involves the at once ordinary and extraordinary production of humans whose birth reveals (or betrays) the activity of the mother’s body. As mothers watch their daughters cross the threshold, a strange vigilance exists in this fiction. In spite of that vigilance, young women venture across many thresholds, from errands into the wilderness to labor in the cities, from maddening vigils in the attic to voyages across the Atlantic. The wilderness journey, for example, appears in Caroline Kirkland’s portrayal of Michigan, the “frontier” of A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839). Work in the city dominates Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. Vigils by girls or women left alone in the attic feature prominently not only in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents but also in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). In contrast with the enclosed space of the attic, the open space of the ocean might suggest a greater freedom of movement. The journey across the Atlantic Ocean from England has taken firm hold on the mythology of the United States as a journey toward freedom and away from the restrictions of a social order controlled by restrictions on class and religion. Such mythology does not pertain to women. Whether enslaved or indentured or married, laboring women found themselves at the mercy of not only the conditions enacted by contracts for their labor but also the condition of being female. From Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) to the unnamed mother

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of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), setting foot on the soil of the United States brought with it a condition of pregnancy. The mother who survives the forced migration across the Atlantic Ocean in Beloved, Toni Morrison’s twentieth-century novel about nineteenth-century life in the aftermath of slavery, has no name. Instead, she is marked. Taking advantage of a rare stolen moment, the mother of Sethe reveals a brand beneath her breast and explains that by such a mark she and her matrilineal generations might be identified. Later burned for an unspecified offense, her body is indeed identified by Sethe, who rages against the loss of maternal memory, a loss that the claiming practices of a name might have helped her resist. What Sethe in turn endures, as she is punished for murdering her “crawling already” baby, is not only bound up with the cruelest aspect of motherhood in conditions of slavery – that her children are not recognized as “belonging” to her – but also enhanced because the category of human beings as able to belong to one another as members of a family is so helplessly deranged that she might be associated with animals. Until she reacts to the goading from Paul D., who says accusingly that she has “two feet, not four,” Sethe loses focus about the specific relation between motherhood and conditions of slavery. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean operates in a distinctly different way in Susannah Rowson’s early bestselling novel Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794). In that novel, the conniving Madame La Rue has presented the likelihood of a shipboard marriage as a strong reason for running away from home with a naval officer. Seduced and impregnated, the teenaged Charlotte will find herself dying from the combined effects of childbirth and a winter storm. The clarity with which that novel, like many to follow, understands marriage as a woman’s primary access to food, clothing, and shelter anticipated the nonfiction critique a century later in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898). Appalled that women had to depend on men’s labor for their very survival, Gilman thought that if the raising of children were made into a communal enterprise, women would be free to work. Women writers, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Julia Ward Howe, wrote and raised babies at once. Howe once wrote to her editor, “I have written this letter in defiance of an encroaching Baby – pray excuse its careless style” (October 9, 1853; Fields collection FI 2368, Huntington Library). Women characters in this fiction could rarely write “in defiance of an encroaching Baby.”

Names in Public As the historian Mary Kelley noted many years ago, the question of what name to use when appearing before the public preoccupied women authors in the nineteenthcentury United States. The more flamboyant they were, and the more provocative their topics, the more likely they were to appear under pseudonyms. Women writers from Harriet Jacobs (as Linda Brent) to Sara Payton Willis (Fanny Fern) to Susan B. Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell) employed what sometimes may have appeared as a nom

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de guerre as they worked out controversial subjects, from cross-dressing to choosing sex outside of marriage. In contrast, some women writers, such as Rose Terry Cooke, seemed to have enjoyed the emergence into print. Writing to the publishing firm Ticknor and Fields in 1860 about the contract for her poetry, she suggests, “If you wish to put my name in full on the title page instead of the initials which are there and over which most of the poems have been printed, I do not object” (July 21, 1860; Fields Collection, Huntington Library). The shift from initials to a full name claims at once a name and a gender. Perhaps more typically, the English writer we now know as Dinah Mulock Craik insisted, “I have never put my name to my books – simply ‘the author of John Halifax.’ – If you can alter it to this, I shall be grateful” (October 28, 1864; Fields Collection, Huntington Library). In this case, the name of the author exists in a secondary relation to the artifact with which she wishes to be identified, a bestselling novel. After the Civil War, the writer we now know as Helen Hunt Jackson presented a more mournful attachment to a naming practice. As she asserts to her editor that she would “very much dislike seeing ‘Helen Hunt’ in print,” she adds, “I understand that there is no help for it in this disagreeable but inevitable advertizing but could it not be added ‘widow of the late Major Edward B. Hunt U.S. Engineering Corps’?” (October 30, 1870; Fields Collection, Huntington Library). The writer Lydia Maria Child was to publish novels, short stories, advice books, and essays for 54 years, but her first novel, Hobomok (1824), appeared anonymously as by “an American.” Her anxiety over how to appear in print shows up as she writes to her publisher James T. Fields about the production of her postbellum novel of race and reconciliation, A Romance of the Republic (1868). As she tells him, after seeing her name in a long list of authors from Ticknor and Fields, she wants more prominence. She especially does not want to be “at the foot of the ladder” of his authors when they appear in an advertisement for the firm (May 15, 1867; Fields Collection, Huntington Library). Child is certain her new book will sell well for its controversy, especially about cross-racial desire. When she sends the manuscript to be published, she emphasizes the value and the irreplaceable labor of its production: “For pity’s sake, keep it in a Safe” (March 30, 1867; Fields Collection, Huntington Library). Child’s sense of the book’s value is political rather than nostalgic. That value accrues to the title as much as to the author. Child presents Fields with two versions of the title for the book: I did at first think of a double title, thus: Loves and Memories. A Romance of the Republic. But upon consideration, the first part seemed rather sentimental. Dont [sic] you think the simple form is better?

What Child prefers here, in a move that she notes as a turn away from sentimentality, is a title that emphasizes national rather then personal romance. To control what it shall be named is also to control how it shall be interpreted. When Child writes to

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her publisher, it is to suggest that her name is a commodity that needs to be under her control. Finding herself listed in an advertisement for the press when she has not yet signed a contract, Child asks that her name not appear without her permission. She says frostily, “I did not imagine that so polite a man as you are would make public use of my name without saying, ‘By your leave’” (November 6, 1864; Fields Collection, Huntington Library). Resisting the unauthorized public use of a name that has become commodified, Child shows herself aware of the intersections of publication, naming, and commercial value. Of course, in this attention to the use of pseudonyms, I do not overlook such male writers as Mark Twain and Ik Marvel (born Donald Grant Mitchell), whose public personae merged sufficiently with the actual person that there remain many readers who have never heard of Samuel Clemens. For these writers, the manipulation of a persona served more purposes than to conceal gender or to provide an alternative identity. Like Mark Twain, Fanny Fern and other women writers found that a fictional identity came to subsume legal identities. They practically became these names. The embrace of such alternate identities may blend with narrative personae so that the mischief of Tom Sawyer or the reveries of a bachelor are scarcely to be separated from the activities of their creators. Fern’s name was once such public property and so widely visible that it was given to a Pullman train car. The identity of Sara Parton Willis became fully merged with the persona of the author, the flamboyant Fanny Fern.

Tutelage Fiction written by women in the nineteenth-century United States often presents in detailed terms the mirroring and mimetic relation of women writing about women writing. Into what activity does the work of writing insert itself, or what activity does it defer? A classic and indeed parodic example occurs in condensed form in Catharine Sedgwick’s “Cacoethes Scribendi” (1830). In this short story, a tidy New England town is overcome by a bout of writing madness. Daughters, wives, and mothers abandon their domestic duties and turn to writing fiction. Since she was a daughter and a sister, but never a wife or a mother, Sedgwick could afford to mock the very engagement in a literary life that had already made her famous. To teach the lesson of gender in her fiction, as in that of other women writers, is to teach a lesson at once about the manners and habits associated with being female and about access to the edges of those definitions. Stories of tutelage, Nina Baym noted in Woman’s Fiction, frequently begin with the story of a girl left to her own devices. The girl does not have to have been orphaned, but she frequently lacks a mother. Ellen and Gertie, the girl heroines of The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter, find access to learning as well as access to pathos through their male mentors. In some novels, as I shall shortly discuss, the pressures

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of economic distress produce a girl in disguise as a boy, or a girl whose labor overlaps with that of a boy. Alcott described her hunger for writing as a form of tutelage that mixes a desire for a calling with competition in childhood sports. For other writers, fictional and autobiographical writing can simply represent access to an outcome not predicated on marriage, sometimes occurring in the wake of a collapsed marriage, as for Fanny Fern and E. D. E. N. Southworth. A classic scene of such a realization takes place in Fern’s Ruth Hall, where the eponymous character, hungry and with a hungry daughter before her, looks out the window of her tenement to what is clearly a house of prostitution and listens to the “whirr whirr” of some covert labor in the attic room above her before choosing to take up her pen instead of the needle that has brought such slim compensation. Over the weeks that follow, she learns to fight for the value of her words. Publishing the sardonic truth – in telling newspaper commentaries that were to make Fanny Fern the most highly paid columnist in the nineteenth-century United States – the fictional Ruth Hall grapples with how to negotiate with editors and finally outwits them. In the postbellum novel by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (1868), the work of women in mourning becomes a way to keep the effect of the war within the four walls of the home even as the novel posits a heavenly home for the retrieval of heterosexual signifying. That is, because beloved men have died in battle, women must not only have access to a heavenly home of Christian redemption but also give access to an earthly home that they share with each other. To propose a world for women, in other words, must mean to imagine them both as mothers and as women happy alone, a proposal somewhat worked against by Macaria (1864) and St. Elmo (1866), novels by the southern novelist Augusta Evans. In Macaria, subtitled the “Altar of Sacrifice,” the national conflict becomes the altar on which the ennobled Macaria lays her body, but at the same time, she can be joined by another woman in a peculiar mingling of blood sacrifice and marriage. The difference in Augusta Evans’s Macaria is that the heroine will not find marriage as the resolution of the romantic crises of the novel. The simple reason, as suggested by the plot, is that her lover Aubrey dies in her arms from wounds suffered in the Civil War. Yet his discovery of her love for him, in that very scene, relies upon her certainty that he will die. His imminent death frees her to speak words that would otherwise bind her to him and that here, instead, release her. St. Elmo presents a heroine with as much learning and as many survival skills as the heroine of Macaria, but the novel’s epigraph makes it clear what her destiny must be: “the true rule is – a true wife in her husband’s home is his servant, it is in his heart that she is queen” (attributed to John Ruskin). From standing tall as a caryatid at the base of the aptly named Lookout Mountain in the novel’s opening pages, the heroine progresses through adventures that resemble those of Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Unlike Jo, after moving to the city and finding success as a writer, Edna Earl finds herself persuaded to abandon writing as she links herself to the St. Elmo

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of the title, who announces, as the novel’s last words, “Accomplish thou my manhood, and thyself, / Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.” What might it mean for Edna Earl to “accomplish the manhood” of St. Elmo? Since her hands have been taken for the work of manhood rather than the work of writing, Edna Earl’s achievement seems to some readers to have been squandered. Her new husband has proclaimed himself able to “snap the fetters of your literary bondage,” in a clear allusion to the concept that writing for money is simply a mercenary activity representing, as he calls it, “inordinate ambition.” At the same time, and despite the erudition that sprinkles every page with classical references, the novel presents as its victory the vanquishing of sorrow in the sin-filled world of its hero by the sunny Christian resilience of Edna Earl. Her hands have been freed from fetters, yet the suggestion that the work of writing is bondage and that she will now be free seems suspiciously to be involved in an odd absorption of her hands by his and, indeed, of her gendered identity by his in a novel titled St. Elmo instead of Edna Earl. Edna Earl, in St. Elmo, shares with Augusta Evans’s heroine in Macaria a wonderful intellect, but she is shamed through her ardent attention to intellectual pursuits, apparently because they expose her to the marketplace. Her shaming reminds the reader that access to fame as a writer of sensation fiction provided for Jo March a form of sexual shame as she is chastised by her Teutonic “Bhaer” suitor. For Edna Earl, the need to profit from writing is an endeavor from which she needs rescuing by the stalwart force of St. Elmo’s arms. The ambivalence with which such decisions might have been greeted by readers can only be conjectured. The novel was a runaway bestseller. Other bestselling fiction, such as Susan B. Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), seems similarly to present redemptive Christian benevolence in the face of sorrow and loss. Both novels open in an urban setting full of dangers. In both novels, young girls find themselves at risk and discover salvation through rural transplantation. The first words of The Lamplighter – “It was growing dark in the city” – suggest the darkening aspect of its heroine’s prospects. Within a few pages of that opening, her kitten has been thrown into a pot to be boiled alive. As a grotesque imitation of cooking, the act of killing the kitten emphasizes the parody of a nurturing hearth that this kitchen provides. In stark contrast to the violence carried out in the darkness of the city, “in the open country it would be light for half an hour or more.” Once Gerty manages the transition to the countryside and learns to garden, she can anticipate more light in her life, yet that light is linked to a redemptive Christianity that mediates the ending in marriage. The Wide Wide World, however, shows that the country presents as many dangers as the city. The novel opens with the young girl, Ellen Montgomery, sitting at the window and looking out at the activity on a city street, as “Daylight gradually faded away, and the street wore a more and more gloomy aspect.” Soon, however, “light after light” appears in the distance as the lamplighter comes to do the laborious work of producing light from oil lamps. In her own room, Ellen lights a fire as well. This opening scene of a young girl watching for the appearance of light recalls the opening

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of The Lamplighter, where the young Gerty feels that “there was one thing, and one only, which she found pleasure in.” It was the coming of “the old lamplighter,” who can shed “a gleam of joy.” Yet her pursuit of the lamplighter places her at the foot of his ladder and he knocks her down, spilling the milk she has been sent to fetch. His hard contact with her leads to a beating at the hands of “Nan Grant,” the woman who throws the kitten into the boiling pot. Both Ellen and Gerty in their separate paths to Christian redemption move from the city to engage in domestic duties in a pastoral setting. Later in The Wide, Wide World, Ellen declares, “how pleasant it must be to live in the country!” But the labor of the country is more difficult than and not nearly as satisfying as producing light on a city street. Still quite a young girl, Ellen must learn hard physical labor as she works in a dairy as well as doing laundry. And when she engages the possibility of play, the elements of a rural landscape seem to conspire against her. The brook in the countryside that runs by her Aunt Fortune’s house is “the crookest thing you ever saw. It runs over there . . . and then it takes a turn and goes that way, and then it comes round so, and then it shoots off in that way again. . . . I don’t suppose it could run straight if it was to try to.” The symmetry of city streets is here supplanted by uneven boundaries. This same brook proves almost fatal as Ellen falls into it: “poor Ellen lost her balance and went in head foremost. The water was deep enough to cover her completely as she lay, though not enough to prevent her getting up again. She was greatly frightened, but managed to struggle up first to a sitting posture, and then to her feet, and then to wade out to the shore; though, dizzy and sick, she came near falling back again more than once.” The apparent willfulness of the stream that could not “run straight if it was to try to” becomes an element in covering Ellen with at once the wayward naughtiness of Nancy Vawse, who has pushed her into the water, and the dangers of country life. “The water was very cold; and, thoroughly sobered, poor Ellen felt chill enough in body and mind too.” The dizziness that supplements her disoriented baptism in this crooked stream leads to the first steps of her incorporation into a different home as she is put to bed in a cottage nearby. The rescue mission slowly metamorphoses into an adoption into a family headed by an alternative Christian mother, Alice Humphreys, and her brother, a discipline-minded minister who focuses tutelary efforts on Ellen. As in St. Elmo, the education of a willful girl will end in Christian marriage. The necessary morality of such fiction is more often bound up with class migration. In E. D. E. N. Southworth, for example, women attempt to find their way in a world that disenfranchises men as well as women. To present fiction as tutelage appears from the classic novels of sexual humiliation of the 1790s such as Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and The Power of Sympathy, through to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). The lesson, repeatedly, appears to be that to leave home is to encounter danger. In Charlotte Temple, Madame La Rue takes the eponymous heroine down a side street where desire trumps virtue and the excursion kills her. These novels appear to teach safety, but they also teach a form of reading that will enable a reader both to enter

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into the plight of the girl thrust out into the world – or cowering in the room – and to keep from contact with that world.

Danger The scandal-filled life of Capitola Black in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s serialized novel The Hidden Hand (1859, 1868–9, and first published as a book in 1883) has given readers pleasure for the past 150 years. Mothers once gave their baby daughters her name, with what longings for her spirit or wishes for her fortune who can tell. Yet the excitement about her adventures tends to overlook the grim story of her origins. Born a twin, with some hint of her lost sibling in the birthmark remaining on her hand (the hidden hand of the title doubling the hand that bears it), the baby girl is smuggled out while a dead substitute brother remains to be displayed as proof that the power to inherit the family fortune has been curtailed. As the missing legatee of an uncertain fate, Capitola is rightly named. She is at once the head of the family and, in a sort of pun, its capital. The mother left behind postpartum, to be confined throughout most of the novel’s events, appears as a ghost to frighten her daughter on a dark and stormy night that recalls the night of her birth. The helplessness that keeps her mother imprisoned never attaches itself to Capitola except in the matter of boredom. The simple addiction to adventure keeps her mobile and perversely protects her. Capitola’s mother has been discarded. That her mother was married to her father does not prevent her helplessness when Capitola’s villainous uncle locks her in the attic. The crisis that reproduction poses to the chance that a woman can prosper on her own is shown early on through Capitola’s change of gender. The description of Capitola when she is first discovered by Old Hurricane, who finds her on the streets of New York, shows a fair amount of gender confusion. “He was a handsome boy,” as he seeks to carry bags for money. “Thick, clustering curls of jet-black hair fell in tangled disorder around a forehead broad, white and smooth as that of a girl”; the narrator continues, “[A] little turned-up nose, and red, pouting lips completed the character of a countenance full of fun, frolic, spirit and courage.” The face as “smooth as that of a girl” will, of course, turn into that of a girl when the “curls of jet-black hair” fall loose and betray her. Hauled into a court for juvenile delinquents for her gender transgression, Capitola tells the story of her decision. Capitola’s picture of a Bowery boy childhood emerges swiftly. She explains that she has been “[s]elling newspapers, carrying portmanteaus and packages, sweeping before doors, clearing off snow, blacking boots and so on.” None of this employment is available to her as a girl. As a girl, “I was trying to get jobs every hour in the day”; still, she has no luck. “Some of the good-natured landlords said if I was a boy, now, they could keep me opening oysters; but as I was a girl they had no work for me.” In her desperation, “I even went down to the ferry-boats and . . . offered to carry their carpetbags or portmanteaus; but some growled at me, and others laughed at me, and one

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old gentleman asked me if I thought he was a North American Indian to strut up Broadway with a female behind him carrying his pack.” Dismayed, she continues, “[W]hile all the ragged boys I knew could get little jobs to earn bread, I, because I was a girl, was not allowed to carry a gentleman’s parcel or black his boots, or shovel the snow off a shopkeeper’s pavement, or put in coal.” Certain of her skills, but denied employment, “because I was a girl there seemed to be nothing but starvation or beggary before me!” The difficult life for a boy on the streets of New York, a life soon to emerge in Horatio Alger novels, sits at the edge of this story, but the clear danger is that one might fall off the edge simply by being female. As Capitola expresses it, she has been tempted by “want, sir—and—and—danger, sir!” The want is hunger; the danger, clearly, seduction. The suggested transformation into a “North American Indian” imagines that she might be better off on the frontier, since “being always exposed, sleeping outdoors, I was often in danger from bad boys and bad men.” Such danger passes when she transforms gender. In a transition that resembles the happy ending of Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), she explains, “I went into that little back parlor a girl and I came out a boy . . . with my hair cut short and a cap on my head!” The new guise makes work available: “the only thing that made me feel sorry was to see what a fool I had been not to turn to a boy before, when it was so easy! And from that day forth I was happy and prosperous! I found plenty to do! I carried carpet-bags, held horses, put in coal, cleaned sidewalks, blacked gentlemen’s boots and did everything an honest lad could turn his hand to.” The risk Capitola runs is not simply from “bad men,” but also from a replication of her mother’s fate, pregnant at fourteen, giving birth to her daughter at fifteen. The labor for impoverished adult women in a city, as we have seen, often oscillates between sewing and prostitution. Even in the country, the remuneration of sewing is slim and inadequate. The cast-off wife of Old Hurricane “was a very hard-working woman, sewing all day long and knitting through the twilight, and then again resuming her needle by candle-light and sewing until midnight.” Despite the constant labor, she “made but a poor and precarious living for herself and son. Needlework, so ill-paid in large cities, is even worse paid in the country towns, and, though the cottage hearth was never cold, the widow’s meals were often scant.” Her ability to sew is not supplemented with writing, as in Ruth Hall, and yet she does learn to remake her family through drawing others to her with her domestic skills. By contrast, neither Capitola nor her confined mother ever seems to cook a meal. Their domestic tasks are performed through slavery. In The Hidden Hand, E. D. E. N. Southworth provides the absolute thrill that a girl will ride on horseback up to a man who has insulted her, pull out a pistol, and shoot him as he flees. The further thrill, making the first one a guilty pleasure, consists of finding out that the gun was loaded with dried peas so that the effect of buckshot on flesh becomes not only harmless but also a parody of women’s work in the kitchen. There seems little reason to assume that Capitola knows how to cook – even that those peas could ever find a home in a pot. That she can fire a gun to such good effect

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connects her act to the earlier hustling she did as a newsboy in New York City during the novel’s opening scenes. Yet she also betrays extreme restlessness after she adapts to her surroundings. Quizzing herself about the change in her circumstances, Capitola muses that “the little outcast of the city” has become “the heiress of a fine old country seat” with “carriages and horses and servants.” “It’s just impossible!” she exclaims: “For, now I think of it, the last thing I remember of my former life was being brought before the recorder for wearing boy’s clothes. Now, I’m sure that it was upon that occasion that I went suddenly mad with trouble, and all the rest is a lunatic’s fancy! This fine old country seat of which I vainly think myself the mistress, is just the pauper madhouse to which the magistrates have sent me.” In such an alternate world, “The servants who come at my call are the keepers.” Even as she uses her imaginative skills to rework her “fine old country seat” into a “madhouse,” Capitola unwittingly alludes to her mother’s fate. Confined more than once to a mansion that serves as a prison, her mother has come very close to insanity. And Capitola, pampered with “servants,” can express what often seems to be an insane amount of boredom with the very pampered life that she once craved. She complains that she is “just decomposing above ground for want of having my blood stirred, and I wish I was back in the Bowery! Something was always happening there! One day a fire, next day a fight, another day a fire and a fight together.” Faced with the slow pace of life in the country, she complains, “ ‘Oh! I wish the barns would catch on fire! I wish thieves would break in and steal! . . . Ohyah!—oo!’ said Cap, opening her mouth with a yawn wide enough to threaten the dislocation of her jaws.” The real legacy that she is heir to is violent enough: “the landed estate, including the coal and iron mines, the Hidden House and all the negroes, stock, furniture and other personal property upon the premises.” Hidden in the Hidden House is her mother, who turns out to be “the lonely survivor of a French revolutionary slaughter.” After “her father and mother had both perished on the scaffold in the sacred cause of liberty; she was thrown helpless, friendless and penniless upon the cold charity of the world.” The pleasures of Capitola’s transformation from an indigent street boy to an heiress repeatedly fall asunder from reminders of revolutionary violence and the reduction of women to insanity.

Conclusion: Our Nig and the Labor of Women’s Writing It is difficult to summarize motifs that appear in US women’s writing in the nineteenth century, but as we have seen, women’s voice and labor are crucial to a number of novels of the period. Harriet Wilson’s 1859 Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black brings to focus what is at stake for many writers of the period in the creation of voice through the labor of writing. The novel presents a character who sometimes refers to herself in the third person as the claimed entity named in the title; she is also known as Frado. Her first appearance in the novel is very much like that

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of Capitola Black: as “a beautiful mulatto, with long curly black hair, and handsome, roguish eyes, sparkling with an exuberance of spirit almost beyond restraint.” The “exuberance of spirit” displayed here is nearly beaten out of her when her mother, a white woman whose marriage has resulted in the birth of two mixed-race children, abandons her to a white woman inappropriately named Mrs. Bellmont. If she cries, Mrs. Bellmont notices by “applying a rawhide, always at hand in the kitchen.” What is on hand in the kitchen is violence and starvation rather than food or comfort. Frado’s mother has abandoned her to this kitchen because she cannot feed herself or her children on the small funds from the available labor. As she explains it, “I washed for the Reeds, and did a small job for Mrs. Bellmont. I shall starve soon.” With such a legacy, abandoned as a domestic drudge and then discarded when her strength begins to fail her, what happens to Frado when she can no longer work? As Lauren Berlant suggests about the female complaint, perhaps to lament her condition also empowers her to have one. Frado’s dog, who acts as companion and audience, also acts the role of the sympathetic reader. The dog, to paraphrase Wolfgang Iser, is the implied reader, the reader in the text, mutely to be appealed to, helpless to provide real comfort. Acquiring direct access to a self through sympathy with this animal, Frado is portrayed “patting Fido . . . saying ‘you love me Fido, don’t you?’” The dog’s sympathy works where human sympathy does not. Within Our Nig, emphatically not a bestseller, to resolve the problem of survival through marriage proves especially flawed. The sympathy extended to a man who presents himself on the abolitionist lecture circuit as an escaped slave proves to be misguided. Frado’s husband has deceived abolitionists; he abandons her and their child. Forced to find other means to provide than the manual labor that has depleted her strength throughout her childhood, the persona behind Frado turns to writing, as many another female character has done. As Harriet Wilson writes in the preface to her semiautobiographical story, “In offering to the public the following pages, the writer confesses her inability to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens.” Her need to present pages to the public comes from her need to survive: “Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.” To write is to labor, and the labor does not always bring fame, yet it always gives the woman writer a face with which to face the world.

References and Further Reading Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1765–1769. Boyd, Anne. Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

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Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Iser, Wolgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Karcher, Carolyn. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Levander, Caroline F. Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Levander, Caroline F., and Carol J. Singley, eds. The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Weinstein, Cindy. The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Elizabeth Fenton

In the Custom-House where he finds the scarlet letter, the narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) ponders his Puritan ancestry with some measure of trepidation. “[H]e had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil” the narrator says of his early ancestor. “He was likewise a bitter persecutor. . . . His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may be fairly said to have left a stain upon him” (27). Religious fervor, indeed religious violence, is a formative component of the narrator’s family stock. The narrator, however, is little like his “sable-cloaked and steeplecrowned progenitor,” who would be horrified to discover that “the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, at its topmost bough, an idler like myself” (26–7). “A writer of story books!” the narrator imagines the Puritans to proclaim. “What kind of business in life, – what mode of glorifying God . . . may that be?” (27). Generations, it seems, have filtered out the family’s religious commitments and replaced them with literary as well as practical concerns. The narrator deems the scarlet letter an opportunity to jumpstart his “intellectual machinery” in service of his bank account: “do this,” he fantasizes when pondering The Scarlet Letter’s composition, “and the profit shall be all your own” (51, 44). He thus appears to be a rational citizen, one who asserts that a “man of thought, fancy, and sensibility . . . may, at any time, be a man of affairs” (39). Pragmatic, reasonable, and thoughtful, Hawthorne’s narrator is a picture of modernity’s triumph over religious zeal. His idle creativity might mark a decline from the lofty pursuits of his orthodox forebears, but at least he has never hanged a suspected witch (or affixed an “A” to a lonely woman’s dress).

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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In its depiction of waning religious conviction, Hawthorne’s Custom-House preface rehearses a narrative that resonates through much discourse about the history of US religion and literature. That narrative, put simply, is one in which the nation gradually unburdens itself of religious zeal and in doing so embraces a modernity that privileges reason over faith. This is the story of secularization, a story of US culture shrugging off what Linell Cady terms the “yoke of religion” and assuming the mantle of enlightenment (874). This configuring of secularism differs from the notion of a separation of church and state in that it treats the secular as a broader and more diffuse component of culture, one that pervades individual experience as well as institutions. Until recently, much critical work on US literature has taken the secularization narrative for granted. Drawing on Perry Miller’s foundational essay, “From Edwards to Emerson,” twentieth-century scholars charted a trajectory in which science, aesthetics, and philosophy supplanted theology over the course of the nineteenth century. As Joanna Brooks puts it, Miller gave us the gentlest and most elegant way of telling the children that at some point even the best and brightest Puritans could keep it up no longer, that they stopped believing what their grandfathers believed, and that it was, finally, really, okay because it gave us literature. (426)

The secularization narrative has taken many forms in criticism. In Ann Douglas’s famous version, religion evolves into a “feminine” concern in the nineteenth century, the purview of increasingly impotent clergymen and sentimental women. In many studies of US literature, though, the secularization narrative operates simply as the absence of attention to religion – an unarticulated positioning of religion as a concern merely of the religious – and the framing of literature as somehow largely distinct from religion and its concerns. Of course, the story of religion’s departure from the literary realm becomes less stable upon closer interrogation of what, precisely, constitutes the “secular” or the “religious.” New scholarship on religion and literature has brought to light the fault lines in the secularization narrative while also calling into question the very notion of secularism. This work takes seriously Talal Asad’s assertions that “there is nothing essentially religious” and that “the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity” (25). Asad deploys a deconstructive methodology that is common in literary studies of race and gender but remains an emerging effort in the study of religion. The often unspoken reification of the “religious–secular” binary may owe more, Michael Kaufmann suggests, to the status of religion within literary studies as a discipline committed to its own story of secular progress than to literary works themselves. The secularization narrative, he argues, has allowed literary studies “to treat (or ignore) both the secular and the religious as if they were normative, fixed categories” (609). As Vincent Pecora’s work on the fraught relationship between religion and academic criticism demonstrates, the secular has as rich and complex a history as any other cultural category. Though critics often treat it as self-evident, the

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term “secular” has referred, over centuries and across continents, to everything from clerical worldliness, to anticlericalism, to empiricism, to religious disestablishment, to humanism, to modernization, to even cosmopolitanism. Thus it does not merely mark the absence that opposes religion’s presence. Rather, like religion, the secular is composed of historically contingent and ever-evolving sets of beliefs, assumptions, institutions, experiences, and modes. This chapter explores three models for reconsidering the concepts of secularism and secularization in early and nineteenth-century US literature. The first is to recognize the ways in which literary productions of this era complicate both the secularization narrative and the ostensible divide between the religious and the secular. To this end, I examine Charles Brockden Brown’s early novel, Wieland, or, the Transformation: An American Tale (1798), the horror of which emanates, I argue, from its refusal to discriminate between secular and religious epistemologies. Another possible model for inquiry into this topic is a renewed attention to the literary investments of “sacred” American texts. In this chapter’s second section, I read The Book of Mormon (1830) as a set of narratives structured by a logic of prophesy that facilitates the sacralizing (rather than the secularizing) of American history. Finally, a third model for reconsidering the relationship between religion and literature involves interrogating the potentially religious assumptions that underscore literary analysis itself. This chapter’s final section thus reads W.E.B. Du Bois’s rendering of African American literary genealogies as a reflection of an ostensibly secular reading practice with religious roots. In each of these sections, my aim is to demonstrate the contingent and mutually constitutive tensions between not only the literary and the religious but also the religious and the “not religious.” Though each approaches the question of secularization from a different perspective, these sections together explore an American literary tradition in which faith and reason are indistinguishable, and the sacred merges with the profane. My particular area of study – Protestantism, Catholicism, and formulations of democracy in the early United States – frames my approach to this topic, and this chapter focuses on writers working from a range of perspectives at least loosely tied to Christianity. But this is not to suggest that Christianity, or even some vaguely construed “Judeo-Christian tradition,” is the only vantage point from which to consider questions of the secular. Secularism often appears as the gift Christianity has given itself by becoming, in Marcel Gauchet’s words, “a religion for departing from religion,” and thus “the most relevant religion in a post-religious society” (4). Even Charles Taylor’s extensive study of the subject begins with the assertion that the “we” who inhabit a “secular age” are “the ‘we’ who live in the West, or perhaps Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world” (1). Though his terminology is geographic, Taylor’s implication is religious: “we” are secular now, because we have been Christian in the past. New studies of secularism by scholars such as Asad and Gil Anidjar have begun to address Christianity’s unspoken centrality to philosophies of the secular and to highlight the ways in which, as Michael Kiser puts it, “ostensibly universal secular norms are in fact hypostasizations of particular Euro-Christian

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epistemologies and the imperial geopolitical aims that have accompanied them” (335). The challenge facing scholars of American religion and literature is to develop more lines of inquiry that address secularity’s relationship to traditions beyond Christianity while also interrogating Christianity’s own claims of ownership over secularism. This chapter analyzes texts that straddle the perceived divide between Christianity and secularism to show how the two operate in tension and in tangent within US literature.

Thirsting for Knowledge: Wieland and the End of Epistemology Brown’s first published novel, Wieland, opens with a brief tale of religious fervor and spontaneous combustion. Theodore Wieland, Sr. – the sole member of a fundamentalist sect of his own design – falls into a depression upon failing to complete a task he believes his god has demanded of him. “A command had been laid upon him,” his daughter Clara, the novel’s narrator, explains, “which he had delayed to perform. . . . He was no longer permitted to obey.” No one knows the terms the elder Wieland has violated, and thus no one can console him as he spends his days “haunted by the belief that the kind of death that await[s] him [will be] strange and terrible” (14). It is in this unhappy state that the father retires to the temple he built in honor of his god, and then suddenly and mysteriously bursts into flames. When his relatives find him, he is “naked, the skin throughout the greater part of his body . . . scorched and bruised” (18). They take him home, where he smolders for two hours before expiring. Fast-forward two decades, and the Wieland children have not only inherited but also transformed their father’s property. Clara informs readers that she and her brother have converted their father’s temple into a kind of rustic salon. A bust of Cicero has replaced the ultimate burnt offering, and the younger Wielands study, sing, converse, and enjoy fine meals where their father once prayed. Theodore Wieland, Jr., Clara explains, may have inherited their father’s intensity, but “the mind of the son was enriched by science, and embellished with literature” (22). An “indefatigable student” and committed deist, Wieland is not without religious commitments, but he feels most affronted when “the divinity of Cicero [is] contested,” and his best friend, Pleyel, “reject[s] all guidance but that of his reason” (26). Having turned away from religious “fanaticism” and toward secular pursuits, the Wielands have achieved stability and happiness. At first, Brown’s novel follows the secularization narrative that critics have long assumed to structure early US literary productions. Educated, thoughtful, and moderate, the Wielands seem the kind of stock out of which Hawthorne’s Custom-House narrator and his ilk will spring. Intellectualism has made the Wielands so liberal in their attitudes that they even welcome a Catholic into their midst. Catholicism, of course, appeared in much early US discourse as a menacing force, a bearer of despotic

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superstition and violence (Fenton; Franchot; Fessenden Culture; Griffin AntiCatholicism). And yet, when the Wielands encounter Carwin, a Catholic convert wandering around their homes, they welcome him. “It was not easy to reconcile his conversion to the Romish faith,” Clara admits, “with those proofs of knowledge and capacity that were exhibited by him on different occasions” (65). Nonetheless, Carwin appeals to the Wielands, not because he shares their theological commitments but because he is both articulate and mysterious. “All topics were handled by him with skill, and without pedantry or affectation,” Clara notes, but she also labels Carwin “inscrutable” and professes an inability to determine “whether his fellowship tended to good or evil” (68, 73). A desire to understand, not convert, motivates the Wielands’ interactions with Carwin. They thus work to devise a set of questions in service of that aim. Religious difference precludes neither friendship nor intellectual engagement; it operates, rather, as a premise for discussion and exploration. Though the Wielands initially offer a picture of secular contentment, Brown’s novel violently collapses the distinction between faith and reason to suggest that the turn away from religion is not necessarily a turn toward enlightened bliss. Clara’s brother may possess a mind “enriched by science,” but when he hears a disembodied voice demand the sacrifice of his wife and their children, he complies. Testifying at his own murder trial, Wieland reveals zeal previously unknown to his family members. “God is the object of my supreme passion,” he explains; “I have thirsted for the knowledge of his will” (158). Her brother’s quest for knowledge, Clara learns, all along has been a quest for access to the divine. Indeed, Wieland’s testimony calls into question the very distinction between empirical and religious truths. He lists the case’s facts: “You know that they are dead, and you know that they were killed by me.” But these truths, Wieland asserts, are insignificant. Asserting that everyone knows “the soundness of his integrity, and the unchangeableness of his principles,” Wieland asks, “Think ye that malice could have urged me to this deed?” (157–8). The past operates as proof of Wieland’s purity of his motive. When the voice commanded, “In proof of thy faith, render me thy wife,” Wieland argues, he had no choice but to obey: “the decree had gone forth, and nothing remained but to execute it’” (160). Here, the line between empiricism and superstition blurs, as Wieland has ostensibly gathered sensory proof – a voice in the night – of God’s design. Only epistemological certainty and clear thinking, he insists, could explain such brutality. Certainty, however, proves impossible in Brown’s novel. In its refusal to grant narrative closure, Wieland does not merely present religion as a dormant force ready to spring forth from seemingly secular Americans. It instead renders the “religious” and the “not religious” indistinguishable by rendering all epistemologies suspicious. Wieland offers many explanations for Wieland’s phantom voice, but none proves definitive. The court believes Wieland’s account but interprets his testimony as evidence of “sudden madness” and thereby designates his own dysfunctional interior as the source of the voice (170). Clara assigns a different origin to the voice when she discovers Carwin to be a ventriloquist. But though he admits to many ventriloqiual exploits,

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Carwin insists, “I am not this villain” (189). Wieland believes Clara but deems “the being whom thou callest Carwin . . . the incarnation of a daemon” (215). And even when she herself hears the voice, Clara’s account of it defies interpretation. Her insistence that “Carwin’s agency was here easily recognized” is undercut by her simultaneous assertion that the voice is “louder than human organs could produce, shriller than language can depict” (219). The voice, it seems, is most certainly human and most certainly beyond the realm of human capability. Empirical knowledge, then, appears no more convincing than revealed religion. Wieland ultimately offers no satisfying solution to its own riddle of religious violence. It’s not that religion somehow overpowers reason; it’s that reason itself cannot bring order to the novel’s events. Did Wieland really hear a voice? Did it emanate from within his own mind, or was the source external? Did Carwin produce it, or could it have been the voice of God? And what did Clara hear? Was it the same voice, or something else entirely? In the end, Brown’s novel suggests, the answers to these questions are less important than the fact of the questions themselves. “I care not from what source these disasters have flowed,” Clara concludes, “it suffices that they have swallowed up our hopes and our existence” (223). No longer interested in pursuing an authentic or factual account of her brother’s actions, Clara focuses only on their effects. What began as a story of secular progress, then, ends as one in which empiricism fails to resolve narrative dilemmas and religion remains a salient force – one that may hold the key to Wieland’s actions but may just as easily be the product of a brilliant sleight of tongue – despite all claims to the contrary. Writing at the close of the eighteenth century, Brown was an Anglo-American novelist whose work supposedly inaugurated an increasingly secular US literary tradition. But as early as 1798, Wieland evinces a deep suspicion about the progress narrative that many critics have embraced. The reasons for this are potentially numerous. Brown’s suspicion may have been personal, owing partly to the fact that when he was a child, the Continental Congress’ ad hoc Committee on Spies produced a list of people it deemed dangerous, all of whom were Quakers and one of whom was Brown’s father. Viewed as enemies of the emerging state because of their religious commitment to pacifism and their refusal to take oaths of loyalty, these Quakers were forcibly exiled to Pennsylvania by some of the same men who would produce the nation’s founding documents – including future President John Adams. Peter Kafer’s study of the Continental Congress’ terrorizing of Quakers suggests that Brown learned an early lesson about the violent limits of supposedly moderate religion. And he suggests, convincingly, that it is no accident that Brown sent a copy of Wieland to then Vice President Thomas Jefferson, “a deist who designed his Monticello home as the American epitome of classical proportion” (xi). Described thusly, Jefferson, architect of the Declaration of Independence, sounds a lot like Wieland himself. Brown’s novel, then, might be read as a warning to a nation quick to congratulate itself for its religious liberties while forgetting its past persecutions. But whatever Brown’s particular motives, his novel presents secularization as a dangerous fantasy rather than an inevitable step along the path to modernity.

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Prophecy and Sacred American History in The Book of Mormon In 1830, Joseph Smith, Jr., convinced a printer in Palmyra, New York, to publish what he alleged was a history of ancient civilizations that migrated from what is now the Middle East to the Americas. A purported record of the first Americans, The Book of Mormon centers on two main stories: that of the Jaredites, who fled west in the aftermath of the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and that of the Nephites and Lamanites, splinter sects of a tribe that departed from Jerusalem in 600 BCE. The text, Smith claimed, was a translation of metal plates to which angels had led him in upstate New York. Smith said that he spent years attempting to recover the plates, but it was only in 1827 that God finally allowed him to unearth the stone box containing them and take them home. Though the plates were inscribed in an unfamiliar language – “reformed Egyptian” – Smith asserted that he had deciphered them using a “seer stone.” Like the Bible, the document etched into the plates was ostensibly composed of writings by many authors working across centuries. Smith called his translation The Book of Mormon, because, he said, the prophet-historian Mormon had been the plates’ chief editor. The son of impoverished farmers, Smith had spent his youth hoping to improve his lot by finding either buried treasures or religious enlightenment. The plates suggested that he had found both. The Book of Mormon sold slowly at first, but by the time Smith died in 1844 (at the hands of an angry mob), he was the founder of Mormonism, a new and growing American religion. It is perhaps not surprising that when The Book of Mormon first appeared, it attracted the ire of prominent Protestant clergymen. Alexander Campbell, founder of the Churches of Christ and a central figure in the Second Great Awakening, published Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (1832), a volume intended to “notice the most recent and the most impudent delusion which has appeared in our time” (6). Campbell’s concerns were theological, to be sure, but they were also literary, as his critique centers on the form of Smith’s text as much as its content. Summarizing The Book of Mormon’s plot, Campbell begins, “This romance – but this is for it a name too innocent – begins with the religious adventures of one Lehi” (6). Campbell’s implication is that Smith’s book cannot possibly be a sacred text, because, in its tales of daring escapades in distant locales, it follows the conventions of the era’s popular fiction. Smith’s Lehi, it seems, is little more than an Ivanhoe. Despite the fact that the Bible itself includes many stories of adventure, Campbell assumes The Book of Mormon’s generic traits to be proof of its profanity. He also takes issue with the book’s syntax. “It is patched up and cemented,” he writes, “with ‘And it came to pass’ – ‘I saith unto you’ – ‘He saith unto him’ – and all the King James’ haths, dids, and doths – in the lowest imitation of the common version” (15). Here, again, it seems that Smith has adhered too carefully to convention. The Book of Mormon’s English closely resembles that of the King James Bible; Campbell thus suspects it to be a deliberate fraud. Smith’s work, he argues, poses a threat to Protestant Christianity because its mastery of the romance genre makes it appealing, while its deployment of “sacred” language may fool undiscerning readers into thinking it authentic.

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Though nineteenth-century critics approached Smith’s text as a literary as well as theological artifact, critics of our own age have all but ignored The Book of Mormon. As Paul Gutjahr notes in his exceptional study of the book’s place within early US print culture, “Where the book is studied, it is largely examined by those with some connection to its religious tradition or by scholars of American religious history” (276). A simple MLA search bears out Gutjahr’s point: “Joseph Smith” yields fiftyeight results, whereas “James Fenimore Cooper,” Smith’s close contemporary, yields over a thousand. Despite the ever-widening definition of “text” in literary studies, and despite the fact that The Book of Mormon gave rise to one of the most successful and lasting “homegrown” US religions, Smith’s work remains a largely unexamined literary phenomenon. But The Book of Mormon, whatever else it may be, is a work of literature. Smith controlled many aspects of his book’s production, and, as Gutjahr shows, he designed it to look like the bibles already on the shelves in people’s homes. Leatherbound and impressed with gold lettering on its spine, the book looked and felt significant. Produced during a period of debate over whether Christians should read bibles that faithfully translated original documents or those that appeared in idiomatic English, The Book of Mormon, Gutjahr argues, offered readers “a new sacred text translated directly from original source material” (284). As I will demonstrate through analysis of its first two books, it also offered readers a narrative that infused the American landscape with divine significance and thereby produced a history that merges the sacred with the profane. The Book of Mormon converts American history into Christian mythology mainly through the mode of prophecy. Prophecy, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, is a complicated form of narration, because “God is named in a double first person, as the voice of another in my word” (225). Although The Book of Mormon opens with first-person narration, as Nephi describes a series of revelations, the voice that speaks is often configured as God’s voice through Nephi. Smith’s text uses this device to predict its own nineteenth-century publication and reception. Nephi’s brother Joseph describes his interaction with God in this way: Thus saith the Lord unto me: a choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins. . . . And unto him will I give commandment, that he shall do a work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren, which shall be of great worth unto them, even of the bringing of them to the knowledge of the covenants I have made with thy fathers. (66)

For readers uncertain of the seer’s identity, the text provides a pretty clear clue: “And his name shall be called after me,” Joseph says, “and it shall be after the name of his father” (67). Suddenly, the “Joseph” and the “Jr.” in “Joseph Smith, Jr.” take on more than familial significance. The Book of Mormon also anticipates the criticism it will face from people such as Campbell. “And because my words shall hiss forth,” God tells Nephi, “many of the Gentiles shall say: A Bible, a Bible, we have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible” (115). Having foretold its own existence and preemptively refuted its criticisms, The Book of Mormon lays claim to a truth

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ostensibly as divine as it is tautological. Its very existence proves it to be divinely inspired. Through prophetic narration, Smith presents the history of the Americas as a foregone and divinely inspired conclusion. In its initial books, Smith’s text is primarily concerned with presenting indigenous Americans as the product of an ancient Israeli migration. “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me,” Nephi writes of his prophetic vision, saying, “Thou shalt construct a ship, after the manner which I shall shew thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters” (42). Though Nephi narrates, God speaks. And what God decrees sets the stage for the Americas’ future: Nephi and his family will form the genealogical foundation for the western hemisphere. The actual presence of Native Americans in Smith’s antebellum United States might have suggested the text’s veracity – indigenous people become an effect imagined to prove a cause. This is what Ricoeur refers to as “the paradox of a prophecy heard and received post eventum”: Nephi sees the future, but to Smith’s contemporaries that future is a past that has produced their present (264n3). New research in genetics suggests The Book of Mormon’s account to be implausible, as Native Americans’ lineages can be traced to Asia rather than the Middle East (see Southerton’s work for more information on this topic). I would contend, though, that for literary critics it should be less important to interrogate the book’s claim to authenticity than to explore its construction and effects. As a composite work composed of several books supposedly produced at different times, The Book of Mormon is able to narrate both predictions and their fulfillments. The prophecy-as-narrative mode thus allows Smith’s text to present the hemisphere’s history as teleology. Secularism plays no part in The Book of Mormon’s lexicon; there is no distinction between the sacred and the profane in this imagining of the Americas. Although Smith was a contemporary of Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson – indeed, Smith and Emerson began their careers in the same decade – he rarely appears in critical accounts of what F.O. Matthiessen famously dubbed the “American Renaissance.” Donald Pease reminds us that the phrase “American Renaissance designates a moment in the nation’s history when the ‘classics,’ works ‘original’ enough to lay claim to an ‘authentic’ beginning for America’s literary history, appeared” (vii). Until very recently, Smith’s work has been absent from even the many revisions of Matthiessen’s admittedly limited formulation, as The Book of Mormon’s overt religiosity has seemed to distinguish it from the emerging “canon” of US literature. But as new efforts to contextualize Smith have demonstrated, his writing shares concerns as well as narrative techniques with that of the era’s most recognizable literary figures (Neilsen and Givens). Richard Brodhead, for example, shows that, although their aims differ, Smith and Emerson share an investment in prophecy. Noting that Emerson’s 1838 “Address Delivered before the Senior Class” at Harvard Divinity School asserts that “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets,” Brodhead links Emerson’s notion of individuality to the prophetic logic of God inhabiting and moving through the self. Within Emerson’s work, Brodhead suggests, “Jesus’ claim to be the Christ or the Messiah was never meant to be exclusionary,” and the role of the spiritual leader

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is to be “a proud enjoyer of access to the divine who awakens others to their own comparable powers.” This view accounts for Emerson’s command to the divinity students to “cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” (Brodhead, 22–3). Discover the divine within, in other words, and you will be well suited for ministering to others. Smith makes what Brodhead terms a “powerful gesture of literalization” in his treatment of prophecy – after all, he purported to “acquaint men at first hand” with actual holy texts – but The Book of Mormon nonetheless demonstrates the same kind of longing for prophetic privilege as Emerson’s “Address.” It is thus possible to read The Book of Mormon as an expression of desire for individual, unmediated contact with a divine source – a yearning not unlike that found in the emerging transcendentalist tradition. Although Smith’s work lays claim to divine revelation, it often evinces interest in issues far more secular than those at play in Emerson’s Divinity School address. The Book of Mormon’s early books primarily engage questions regarding the status of Native Americans. Through Nephi’s revelations, European colonization and its effects become evidence of God’s plan for the region. “And it came to pass that I beheld the spirit of God, that it wrought upon other Gentiles,” Nephi writes, “and they went forth out of captivity, upon the many waters” (29). Neither trade routes nor international politics motivate the various colonial contingents. Rather, it is divine inspiration, as is what happens next. “I beheld the wrath of God,” Nephi explains, “that it was upon the seed of my brethren; and they were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten” (29). Here, the violence that Europeans and Anglo-Americans enact upon indigenous Americans appears to be the fulfillment of a prophecy made thousands of years ago about a divine fiat that predates time itself. Within this interpretive framework, everything from Cortez’s destruction of the Aztecs, to the Pequot Wars, to Jackson-era policies of Indian removal seems not only justifiable but also unpreventable. God shows Nephi the wrath his brothers’ descendants will incur before Nephi has even built the ship that will carry them west, but for antebellum readers Smith’s narrative confirms colonial history. Prophecy makes it possible for Smith to present Native Americans as Milton’s Adam: always already destined to fall. As many prophecies do, Nephi’s plates not only describe what has happened, but also predict what remains to come. Nephi declares that the Gentiles will eventually “carry [The Book of Mormon] forth unto the remnant of our seed. And then shall the remnant of our seed know concerning us, how that we came out from Jerusalem, and that they are descendants of the Jews” (117). The basic premise of Smith’s work did not shock many of his contemporaries. As Jared Farmer notes, “Theories about the Hebraic peopling of the Americas – the result of the wandering of the Lost Tribes or the Scattering of Babel – were prevalent and uncontroversial” in the 1830s (56). Indeed, while Campbell complained that Smith too carefully copied the style of the King James Bible, some critics lambasted The Book of Mormon for cribbing from this common theory of indigenous genealogy. But Smith’s work differed from others of the period, in that it posited a future in which Native Americans would assume their

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place as God’s chosen people and build the New Jerusalem for Christ’s return. “Joseph Smith reserved a paradoxical place for Indians,” Farmer writes, “They were cursed to be inferior yet promised to be superior” (57). In Smith’s words, “their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a white and delightsome people” (117). The ultimate future Nephi prophesizes, then, is one in which God will eliminate racial difference through revelation. The unfulfilled prophecy becomes as significant as those fulfilled within The Book of Mormon, because it allows antebellum readers to justify, even embrace, the status of the nation’s indigenous residents. The Book of Mormon’s 1830 title page announces it to be proof of “the ETERNAL GOD manifesting Himself unto all nations.” From its outset, then, Smith’s book appears as a sacred artifact and a religious text. Despite its claims to universality and timeless divinity, however, The Book of Mormon is deeply concerned with one nation – the United States – and its narrative of an ostensibly sacred past resonates with nineteenth-century politics. Smith’s book does not merely invite readers to interpret American history through a biblical lens. Rather, it presents American history as a Bible. Drawing on the language of the King James Bible and the trope of prophecy, Smith offers a sacred account of the US landscape and places it within a divine teleology. That teleology, though, centers on the place of indigenous peoples within the United States and offers a justification for the continued subjugation of Native Americans. In this way, Smith’s text is arguably far more “secular” than Emerson’s Divinity School address. Divinity may become a function of the individual in Emerson’s work – “Obey thyself,” he writes, “That which shows God in me, fortifies me” (115) – but his 1838 lecture is nonetheless primarily concerned with spiritual fulfillment. “Faith makes us,” Emerson asserts, “and not we it” (126). Smith’s work, on the other hand, purports to be the word of God while also bearing a striking investment in the political and racial climates of the antebellum United States. Rather than standing as distinct cultural positions, then, the sacred and the secular merge in The Book of Mormon, as the US present becomes the product of a holy past, and the nation’s future appears to bear political as well as spiritual import.

Begetting and Believing: Du Bois’s Genealogy “You misjudge us because you do not know us,” W.E.B. Du Bois asserts in “The Talented Tenth,” his contribution to Booker T. Washington’s 1903 work, The Negro Problem (34). In what follows, Du Bois offers white readers a kind of introduction to African Americans through brief descriptions of historical figures. Though his essay begins with an assertion that the “Negro race is going to be saved . . . by its exceptional men” (33), Du Bois’s list of remarkable people begins with a woman. “In the colonial days came Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe,” he writes, “striving against the bars of prejudice” (36). What follows is essentially a timeline measured with individuals rather than dates:

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Elizabeth Fenton Benjamin Banneker, the almanac maker . . . then came Dr. James Durham . . . and Lemuel Haynes . . . there was Ira Aldridge . . . there was that Voice crying in the Wilderness, David Walker . . . there was Purvis and Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnet, Sojourner Truth and Alexander Crummel, and above all Frederick Douglass. (36–40)

And the list goes on. “Who are to-day guiding the work of the Negro people?” Du Bois asks. His answer: “The ‘exceptions’ of course” (43). In making his case for education as the means of improving conditions for black Americans, Du Bois lists every renowned “exception” he can muster: “Langston, Bruce and Elliott, Greener, Williams, and Payne” (42). One after another, Du Bois’s examples form a train of resistance and triumph. Through his genealogy, readers encounter an American history that privileges the slave who asked Thomas Jefferson to keep his revolutionary promises over Jefferson himself. Such history, Du Bois argues, forms the roadmap for the future; as prominent individuals have led the way in the past, so will a new “aristocracy of talent and character” elevate an entire community and, indeed, nation (45). Although Du Bois’s aim in “The Talented Tenth” is ostensibly secular – his plan for the advancement of black Americans is social and political, not necessarily spiritual – his genealogy has religious roots. In choosing Wheatley as his point of origin, Du Bois conjures African American literary history, to be sure, but he also evokes a theological tradition. The first African American woman to publish a volume of poetry, Wheatley actively engaged with the New England clergymen of her day, many of whom were abolitionists. For Wheatley, James Levernier reminds us, “politics and theology were inextricably intertwined” (23). Thus, Wheatley’s elegy to the itinerant minister George Whitefield presents religious conversion as a means of transcending racial difference. “Take him, ye Africans,” Wheatley’s speaker imagines Whitefield to say, “he longs for you, / Impartial Savior is his title due” (22, emphasis in original). The “he” in question is, of course, a Jesus who favors religious over racial identity. “Wash’d in the fountains of redeeming blood,” the poem asserts, “Ye shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God” (22). “Washing,” here, is baptism, something Wheatley presents as a means of transcending racial difference throughout her canon. Her perhaps most famous poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” concludes, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train” (17). With this, Wheatley both acknowledges and undercuts a common, racist interpretation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which configured blackness as divine retribution for the first fratricide. Playing on the homophones “Cain” and “cane,” the poem presents conversion as a lightening process similar to the refinement of sugar. Whiteness, then, becomes less a function of racial identification than of devotion to God. Adélékè Adéèkò has convincingly argued that religion offers Wheatley a means of critiquing slavery but “avoid[ing] maledictory tropes as she articulates her desires not in opposition to her masters but to untrue Christians” (2). As the point of origin for Du Bois’s genealogy, then, Wheatley inaugurates a history of African America in which the social realm is necessarily religious.

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Christianity is not merely the starting point for Du Bois; it forms the backbone of his survey. This is particularly evident in its positioning of Walker as “that Voice crying in the Wilderness.” Du Bois’s characterization is actually a citation of a set of citations. Each of the New Testament gospels refers to John the Baptist, the figure who prefigures Jesus, as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (see Mark 1:3, Matt. 3:3, Luke 3:4, and John 1:23). This phrasing reiterates that of the Hebrew Bible’s book of Isaiah, which refers to “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,” calling believers to “make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3). The repetition of Isaiah allows the gospels to fulfill the earlier book’s prophecy and in turn imbues the story of John the Baptist with prophetic significance. If John is the one of whom Isaiah speaks, then John’s own cry in the wilderness merits serious attention. In Du Bois’s text, then, Walker takes the form of a nineteenth-century prophet, but he predicts racial upheaval rather than religious revival. Du Bois reproduces a section of Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), which demands of whites, “Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures . . . does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children, cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you?” (Du Bois, 39). The voice that cries in this wilderness, then, is a harbinger of divine vengeance. Thus, although Du Bois’s essay positions Walker as Wheatley’s intellectual heir, it also positions him as one in a line of biblical types stretching back through the gospels to Isaiah. This is a historical trajectory Walker himself might have appreciated, since his own work combines sacred and profane history to assert that “the condition of the Israelites was better under the Egyptians than ours is under the whites” (12). For Walker as well as Du Bois, the history of African American resistance to slavery is as hallowed as it is literary. In assembling his genealogy, Du Bois highlights the interplay between African American social justice movements and religious thought. He thus traces a historical line that is not necessarily bound up in the secularization narrative. But perhaps even more importantly, the genealogy itself – the very frame within which Du Bois situates his argument – has religious significance. Susan Griffin recently has reminded us that “the genealogy is, of course, deeply, typically biblical” (“Threshing” 454). The assumption that lineage matters, that there is interpretive payoff in knowing who came before, lies at the heart of Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament. Consider the opening verses of the Gospel of Matthew: The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob . . . and Jesse begat David the king . . . and Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. (Matt. 1:1–16)

Genealogy forges the link between Genesis and Jesus in Matthew’s account; the book tracks a history of bodies rather than events, and individuals form the nodes of a sacred timeline. No wonder Smith was so concerned with charting ancestry in The Book of Mormon – and no wonder Wieland focuses so heavily on the son’s inheritance of the

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father’s religious legacy. As Griffin notes, the discipline of literary studies, too, often takes genealogy for granted as a matrix of meaning. From Miller’s “From Edwards to Emerson,” to Brooks’s “From Edwards to Baldwin” – a genealogy in its own right – literary analyses (including my own) have configured history as a chronology of individuals. Griffin recommends not that we cease to think genealogically, but that we “become more conscious” of the assumptions buried in our reading practices (“Threshing” 454). This would make it possible also to see the religious forms and frames at work in seemingly secular texts. In tracing a line from Wheatley to Du Bois’s contemporaries, Du Bois does not merely highlight the long history of racial oppression and resistance in the United States – he also produces a narrative resonant with Christian significance. As Jesse begat David, so did Wheatley beget Douglass, and so will Du Bois and his contemporaries beget a new “talented tenth.” The texts I have assembled may appear to have little in common; not only are they generically distinct, but also they serve different aesthetic and cultural aims. Wieland does not purport to be a sacred text any more than The Book of Mormon proposes a plan to improve the lives of African Americans. My goal, then, is not to trace out a genealogy of my own from Brown, via Smith, to Du Bois. Indeed, the chronological organization of this chapter is somewhat arbitrary, although I do wish to show that sequence need not translate into the kind of progress narrative at the heart of traditional accounts of secularization. Smith produced his oeuvre after Brown, but that fact alone does not make The Book of Mormon more (or, for that matter, less) “secular” than Wieland. For all of their differences, however, each of these texts in its own way highlights the perpetually shifting but always contingent relationship between the “religious” and the “secular.” Wieland is a gothic novel that collapses the distinction between empiricism and revelation. Smith’s text deploys familiar narrative techniques and tropes in outlining its sacred history. And Du Bois’s genealogy evokes a biblical interpretive frame in the service of a political argument. Read separately, these works call into question the distinction between religious and nonreligious modes of writing. Read in concert, they offer an opportunity to rethink critical narratives that position secularism as that which follows after religion and progressively eliminates it from US culture and its literary productions. When considering the question of religion’s place in US literature, it is important to remember that “religion,” like “secularism,” is a signifier often left to stand for many things – experiences, beliefs, practices, institutions, and forms – some of which never announce themselves as “religious.” So while it may be true that certain veins of Anglo-American literature relinquish particular doctrinal claims over time, religion as such does not simply fall away from or make room for literature in the nineteenthcentury United States. Neither, for that matter, does literature wholly turn away from religion. Indeed, the line between religion and literature, as discursive modes, is often murky at best. Even Hawthorne’s Custom-House narrator, so far removed from those New England Puritans, experiences “a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat” when he holds the scarlet letter (43). When we stop expecting religion always to herald its own presence, we will be better equipped to recognize

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its impact on and relationship to literary productions. In a similar vein, when we stop expecting the secular to operate merely as the absence of religion, we will begin, in Fessenden’s words, “seeing secularism,” recognizing its contingencies, its pressures, and its function within narrative works (“The Secular” 634). The American literary landscape is not a space in which the religious and the nonreligious coexist; instead, it is a space in which the boundary between religion and secularism is continually contested, renegotiated, and reimagined. References and Further Reading Adéèkò, Adélékè. “Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther.” Research in African Literatures 40.4 (2009): 1–24. Anidjar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Brodhead, Richard. “Prophets in America circa 1830: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner, and Joseph Smith.” In Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries (pp. 13–30). Eds. Reid L. Neilsen and Terryl L. Givens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Brooks, Joanna. “From Edwards to Baldwin: Heterodoxy, Discontinuity, and New Narratives of American Religious-literary History.” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 425–40. Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale, and Other Stories. Ed. Caleb Crain. New York: The Modern Library, 2002. Cady, Linell. “Secularism, Secularizing, and Secularization: Reflections on Stout’s Democracy and Tradition.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73.3 (2005): 871–85. Campbell, Alexander. Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon. Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1832. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977. Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Talented Tenth.” In The Negro Problem (pp. 31–76). Ed. Booker T. Washington. New York: James Pott & Co., 1903. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College,

Cambridge 1838.” In Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays (pp. 107–28). Ed. Larzer Ziff. New York: Penguin, 1982. Farmer, Jared. On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Fenton, Elizabeth. Religious Liberties: AntiCatholicism and Liberal Democracy in NineteenthCentury US Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Fessenden, Tracy. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Fessenden, Tracy. “ ‘The Secular’ as Opposed to What?” New Literary History 38.4 (2007): 631–6. Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Trans. Oscar Burge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Griffin, Susan. Anti-Catholicism and NineteenthCentury Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Griffin, Susan. “Threshing Floors: A Response to Joanna Brooks.” American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 454–8. Gutjahr, Paul. “The Golden Bible in the Bible’s Golden Age: The Book of Mormon and Antebellum Print Culture.” American Transcendental Quarterly 12.4 (1998): 275–93. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1991. Kafer, Peter. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

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Kaufmann, Michael. “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession.” New Literary History 38.4 (2007): 607–28. Kiser, Michael. “Emersonian Terrorism: John Brown, Islam, and Postsecular Violence.” American Literature 82.2 (2010): 333–60. Levernier, James. “Phillis Wheatley and the New England Clergy.” Early American Literature 26.1 (1991): 21–38. Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941. Miller, Perry. “From Edwards to Emerson.” In Errand into the Wilderness (pp. 184–203). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. Neilsen, Reid L., and Terryl L. Givens. Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pease, Donald. “Introduction.” In The American Renaissance Reconsidered (pp. vii–ix). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Pecora, Vincent. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Literature, and Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1995. Smith, Joseph, Jr. The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon, upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi. Palmyra, NY: E.B. Grandin, 1830. Southerton, Simon G. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Walker, David. Appeal, in Four Articles, Along with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those in the United States. 3rd ed. Boston: David Walker, 1830. Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Denver, CO: W.H. Lawrence, 1887.

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Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature Paul Gilmore

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, literature and technology often appear fundamentally at odds with one another. The supposedly transcendent works of the greatest writers to which we devote extended study and time can seem incomparable to the ever new electronic gadgets speeding up the world, enabling us to work and communicate more quickly and efficiently. Yet both terms in my title – “literature” and “technology” – only took on their current meanings less than two hundred years ago, and their parallel development reveals the continuing tensions between the two areas of study and practice. The career and writings of Jacob Bigelow, whose Elements of Technology (1829) is often cited as introducing the word “technology” into modern usage, begin to suggest the deep interconnections and divergent paths of literature and technology. Bigelow’s first publications were belletristic, consisting of a poem on commencing his career as a physician (“A Poem on Professional Life” [1811]) and a satiric “historical romance” attacking President Madison’s conduct of the War of 1812 (The War of the Gulls [1812]). Subsequently, most of his work focused either on medical matters, specifically arguing for the need to let nature run its course with many diseases, or on American botany. Comprising a series of lectures that Bigelow delivered as professor of material medica at Harvard, Elements of Technology epitomizes this eclecticism, as the lectures maintain the classic connection between the mechanical and fine arts, including chapters on “Sculpture” and “Designing and Painting” alongside those on “Arts of Locomotion” and “Elements of Machinery.” The useful and the fine arts thus both come under his rubric of “technology” – that is, “the principles, processes, and nomenclatures of the more conspicuous arts, particularly those which involve applications of science, and which may be considered useful by promoting the benefit of society” (v). A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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By the time he delivered his Address on the Limits of Education at the still-new Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865, Bigelow seems to have accepted the rift between the fine and useful arts that his earlier volume largely avoided and that has become essential to modern conceptions of literature and technology. In particular, he suggests, in a version of what David Nye has called the American technological sublime, that technology has displaced art: “Poetry, art and fiction have sought for the beautiful and sublime in creations which are imaginary and often untrue . . . in the present age fact has overtaken fancy and passed beyond it,” as railroad trains, ocean steamships, and electric telegraphs fulfill “the appetite for wonder” (22). Where technology and professional specialization in general have advanced human happiness, technological developments in publishing have “inundate[d]” the world with more, often useless information, including the “perishable” fictions – which Bigelow equates with the “pseudo-sciences” – that now dominate “modern literature” (11–12). Elements of Technology hints at this distinction between the fine and mechanical arts in terms of historical progress. Classical Greece and Rome largely perfected the imitative arts, “those which required only boldness and beauty of design, or perseverance in execution”; but now new technologies have enabled modern humans to “extend the dominion of mankind over nature” (3–4). While technology is progressive and materially useful, art is natural and eternal. “A musical ear, an artistic eye and a poetic sense are not to be created in any man” (Address 26), but are merely useful in allowing man to “recreate himself” through “intercourse with congenial minds, and at times with the ideal world” (27). Bigelow’s comments in these two works nicely incorporate some of the central themes and tensions running through accounts of technology and literature over the past two centuries. From one perspective, technology and literature are linked, parallel modes for the human remaking of the world, an idea captured in Martin Heidegger’s attention to the shared etymology of techné and poiésis. Yet literature, like all art, seems distinctly different from technology, for while literature, according to many accounts, speaks to either an innate human nature or an ideal realm of imagination, technology progressively transforms the physical world. As Bigelow’s comments on changes in print technology hint, however, technological changes transform literature itself and its production, circulation, and reading. It is only with those technological changes, in fact, that a modern notion of the literary as a special province emerges. At the same time, as Bigelow points out, “The arts of writing and printing, although comparatively simple in their processes, are superior to most other arts in the importance of their consequences” (Elements 5). Arguably, the inventions of written language 5,000 years ago and of the printing press more than 500 years ago constitute the most significant technological breakthroughs in human history. Literature, from this perspective, becomes another product of industrialized technology. But because of its special relationship to technology as (in effect) technology par excellence, literature has the capacity to wrench open our understandings of technology in ways akin to Walter Benjamin’s account of film “burst[ing] this prisonworld asunder” (236) by revealing “new structural formations of the subject” (237).

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Literature and technology linked together thus have the capacity to generate new forms of self-making, what Michel Foucault calls technologies of the self. In what follows, I use Bigelow as a point of departure for illustrating the dynamic relationship between technology and American literature. Focusing on the long nineteenth century, I draw on Heidegger, Benjamin, and Foucault to explore how conceptions of technology as dehumanizing, empowering, and/or revolutionizing the self take on varying degrees of prominence with the development of new technologies, their incorporation into industrialized capitalism, and the coterminous transformation of literary production. I conclude by suggesting how these modes for understanding technology shaped twentieth-century American literature and by reflecting on the current digital and electronic reconfiguration of our sense of technology and literature.

Emerson’s Question Concerning Technology Published less than a decade after Bigelow’s Elements of Technology, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836) has often been read as heralding a truly American literature based in the idea of the United States as, in Perry Miller’s phrase, “Nature’s nation.” In many ways, Emerson echoes Thomas Carlyle’s romantic critique of the era as the mechanical age. In “The American Scholar,” for example, he disparages the division of labor, worrying that humans have become indistinguishable from their tools: “Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things…. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship” (Essays 54). Yet despite his frequent questioning of material improvements, Emerson’s antebellum oeuvre engages to a surprising extent and in surprisingly positive ways with the new technologies of the era. Alongside a romantic distrust of technological improvement as addressing the merely physical, Emerson also echoes a republican faith in technology’s capacity to liberate the world and empower the self, while anticipating a modernist perspective oscillating between aesthetic withdrawal and the recognition of the deep interconnection between modern technology and art. Nature begins by articulating the essential and eternal condition of the self, the relationship between “Me” and “Not Me” (8). Yet in the “Idealism” section, Emerson invokes the railroad – the machine that epitomized the mechanical age – to describe this relationship, declaring that traveling by train reveals “the difference between the observer and the spectacle, – between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt.” He continues by connecting this sublime pleasure with the work of the poet: “In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure…. He unfixes the land and the sea . . . tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought” (34–5). For Emerson, new technologies approximate the poet’s dominion over nature. Yet this sublime pleasure derives not from the mind’s dominance over nature alone but from both the ecstatic fusion of the self with nature and the revelation of the self ’s detachment (the Me) from nature (the Not Me), a paradox best rendered in the famous

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transparent eyeball passage from the first section of Nature: “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (10). Even as the I becomes nothing but a vehicle for the universal being or a part of God, the repetition of “I” insistently reiterates the unceasing presence of that very I. By similarly disrupting our normal way of seeing, by unfixing the world, technologies like the railroad forcefully materialize this relationship. We can turn to Martin Heidegger to help clarify this ambivalence toward technology as both rendering the self a machine and exemplifying the human imaginative capacity to reshape the world. Heidegger is often read as one of the most profound philosophical critics of technology, yet he argues that the possible redemption from technology derives from its essential and deep connection to art. In “The Question Concerning Technology” (Basic Writings), Heidegger denounces the fact that “we remain unfree and chained to technology” (287), but discounts descriptions of technology as merely instrumental. Instead, building on the connection in classical Greek between techné and poiésis as modes for revealing truth, he concludes that techné “is something poetic” (294), its essence lying not “in making and manipulating” but in “revealing” (295). Both poetry and technology reveal a new truth about the world, a new way of envisioning the human relationship to nature. But where poiésis reveals by “bringing-forth” (296), by uncovering the human relationship to the world through beauty, and by treating the world as other – the Not Me – modern technology treats the world, including humans, as a “standing-reserve” to be regulated and ordered. Heidegger denominates the chief danger of modern technology as “enframing,” by which he means the predetermined engagement of the self with the world, for the world “no longer stands over against us as object” (298), but only as a resource waiting to be ordered and utilized (301–3). In poiésis, the human interacts with the world through a creative process of give and take; conversely, modern technology attempts simply to act on the world for its own ends. Yet the poetic encounter with the world has a logical and temporal priority to modern technology’s will to dominate. The world first presents itself as something to be determined by human consciousness (the poet’s ability to toss the world like a bauble) before humans attempt to use technology to render it merely instrumental to their own ends. This point leads to Heidegger’s contention that the essence of technology is not technological, that it lies not in making and manipulating but rather precedes technology and emerges directly from the human confrontation with the world. Heidegger then locates a “saving power” (314) in a realm “that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it,” the realm of art (317). This is because art, like technology, uncovers the relationship between the self and the world through the production of a truth; but without preordaining that truth’s use, it can act as a counter to modern technology’s instrumental determinism, revealing technology’s potential indeterminacy. Even as he also distinguishes art and technology, Emerson similarly suggests that art and technology emerge from a common human impulse to shape the world: “I

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love the music of the water-wheel; I value the railway. . . . There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken” (“The Method of Nature” [1841], in Essays 115). Going further than Heidegger, Emerson upholds the revolutionary potential of technology, when properly framed, to foster the imagining and creation of a new, better reality. Thus, “Railroad iron” is “a magician’s rod”: “The habit of living in the presence of these inventions . . . combined with the moral sentiment” has created a new spirit that has “interrogated every institution, usage, and law” (“The Young American” [1844], in Essays 213–4). Technology unveils the fluidity of the world and humans’ potential to reshape it to their imaginative needs; it reveals, as Marx and Engels would say of capitalism, that “all that is solid melts into air.” For Emerson, in fact, the danger of technology lies in it becoming merely a tool of capitalism: “Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, – to mills, railways, and machinery, – the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey?” For Marx and Engels, those technological improvements are part of a historical march determined by class conflict; their significance lies in their granting humans greater productive power. Conversely, Emerson locates the power of technology in its correspondence with art. Thus, it is art – and the spirit underlying art and placing humankind into “harmony with nature” – that protects us against the dangers of technology, and that renders “the galvanic battery, the electric jar,” the “mills, railways, and machinery” “noble” and “divine” (“Art,” in Essays 439–40). One reason Emerson, unlike Heidegger, still finds a great deal of potential within technologies themselves is that he was working at a time when the production of literature was not yet fully industrialized. As Michael Winship has noted, the technological improvements that would transform publishing – steam-powered rather than hand-cranked printing presses, stereotype rather than individually composed plates, and roll paper rather than sheets – while available by 1840, would not be widely utilized until later in the nineteenth century. This lack of full industrialization parallels the uneven development of industrialized technology in the larger economy and society and helps to explain why Emerson, as John Kasson has noted, at times echoed the dominant view that “hailed the union of technology and republicanism and celebrated their fulfillment in an ever more prosperous and progressive nation” (3). For Emerson, republican technology comes to the fore in his antislavery writings. Slavery and technology often were interlinked in antebellum American thought. On the one hand, writers frequently cited technological wonders such as the telegraph as evidence of Anglo-Saxon superiority and of the ever-spreading dominion of the European mind over the natural world and the bodies of supposedly more natural people. Reversing the logic, abolitionists would contend, as Frederick Douglass did in his second autobiography, that slavery attempted to “reduce man to a mere machine” (Autobiographies 421). On the other hand, however, technology evidenced the progressive march of humanity, leading to greater freedom and power for all. Writing against the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851, Emerson insists that he “cannot accept the railroad

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and telegraph in exchange for reason and charity,” but then gestures to such technological wonders as proof of the certainty of emancipation: “Nothing is impracticable to this nation…. By new arts the earth is subdued, roaded, tunneled, telegraphed, gas-lighted; vast amounts of old labor disused; the sinews of man being relieved by the sinews of steam. We are on the brink of more wonders” (Antislavery Writings 56, 69). Emerson reserves praise for technology in and of itself, but applauds technology’s materialization of the human capacity to transform the world as evidence of the potential for a democratic United States. By 1851, this progressive republican view of technology was already under assault by the grim realities of industrialization and the dimming prospects of new technologies like the telegraph radically transforming the world. Yet a similar utopian vision of technology’s democratizing potential frequently resurfaces up to the present day. To understand this view’s continuing saliency, we need to turn back to the formation of the American republic and its citizenry in technological terms, a formation best represented in the persona and works of Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin’s Technology of the Self D.H. Lawrence famously cited Franklin’s technological self as the root of almost everything that was wrong with American culture, asserting that Franklin’s “automaton, of a pattern American” has led to “America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines . . . shut up fast in her own ‘productive’ machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages” (30–1). Franklin clearly sets himself up as a model through presenting his life story as a book, describing “the conducing means” that led to fame and felicity as “fit to be imitated” (1307). And he pursues his project for moral perfection from a technological framework, intending to publish his method as “ ‘The Art of Virtue,’ because it would have shown the means and manner of obtaining virtue” (1392). Art here, as in Elements of Technology, refers to all techniques for manipulating the material world. Franklin develops his account-book method of self-examination in order to overcome “natural inclination, custom, or company” (1384), just as he develops methods for cleaning streets or lighting cities or organizing libraries to overcome dirt, darkness, or a dearth of books, through a combination of reading, rational hypothesizing, and experimental testing. As with his stove – for which he rejects a patent because “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by an invention of ours” (1418) – he seeks to share his moral program through Poor Richard’s Almanac, which he conceived of as a “proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common People” (1397). In these ways, Franklin parallels Benjamin Rush’s contemporaneous idea that the purpose of education in a republic is to render citizens “republican machines,” so that they can “perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state” (14–15). For Franklin and Rush, mechanical technologies become models for the shaping of the human self.

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This image of the human as machine, as automaton, appears from the eighteenth century onward, usually with increasingly dark implications. But the technological context here suggests a less deterministic pattern than that which Lawrence projects. Michel Foucault’s work on technologies of the self helps elucidate this distinction. Foucault outlines four different types of “ ‘technologies,’ each a matrix of practical reason” – technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, technologies of power, and technologies of the self – “which permit individuals to effect their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (18). Unlike his work on technologies of power and sign systems, Foucault emphasizes at least a limited form of individual volition. Doing so, he traces the movement from classical Greek ideals “for social and personal conduct and for the art of life” (19) to a Christian asceticism, which “always refers to a certain renunciation of the self and of reality” (35). He then demarcates “a decisive break” in the eighteenth century when “the techniques of verbalization have been reinserted in a different context by the so-called human sciences in order to use them without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self” (49). This shift in the importance of giving an account of one’s self, of verbalizing if not writing the self into a new state, distinguishes Franklin’s Autobiography from his Puritan ancestors’ personal narratives and begins to suggest the connection between technologies of the self and technologies of production and sign systems. While Poor Richard’s Almanac works as a vehicle of instruction to inculcate virtues essential to an ascetic Protestantism, it features some of Franklin’s most belletristic and humorous works, culminating in “The Way to Wealth,” where he satirizes the fact that most people will not fully heed his advice and instruction. This sense of human fallibility comes to the fore in his attempt at moral perfection, where he recounts his failures with false braggadocio, as in the speckled axe parable, and in his enumeration of his various errata over the course of his life. The errata importantly return us to the printing context and conceit of the Autobiography. Producing his own life as a book for others, he suggests they will have the ability to reproduce his life without those errors, or errata. Yet Franklin was writing at a time when printing presses were little more advanced than that which Gutenberg had used in the fifteenth century. In this context, Franklin’s printing metaphor hints that his readers will not reproduce his life exactly, as in a highly industrialized, mechanized system, but as new creations altogether. Stereotype plates that preserved the text for future printing lay decades in the future, and in conceiving of his life as a book fit to be imitated by others, to be republished in corrected form by others, Franklin gestures to the necessity of recomposing each sheet from the pile of type. This idea of flexible imitation appears in his own imitation of the Spectator, where in examining his recomposition of the essays he “sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language”

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(1320). Franklin’s use of the word “imitate” further indicates a more fluid mode. Where we might read “imitate” as denoting an attempt at exact replication (the second definition in the OED), the technological context of Franklin’s print metaphors hints that he has the older, first definition in mind, “to do or try to do after the manner of.” This potentially more flexible model relates to a more intricate articulation of art and technology, to an emphasis on art, like technology, involving the reformulation or reshaping of the self – either the writing or reading self, in the case of literature – and the world. Writers such as Olaudah Equiano further reveal the simultaneously disciplinary and emancipatory potentials of such technological figurations. Where technology has often been posited as the domain of white men, either as evidence of their unique capacity to transform the world and its less capable people (then) or as a key instrument in their oppression of others (now), it has also long been celebrated for overcoming all natural limitations, including limitations ascribed to essentialized categories of race and gender. Equiano opens his Interesting Narrative by contrasting the Edenic Africa of his childhood with the European manufactured goods that figure as the snake in the garden, as Africans “were incited” to enslave one another “by those traders who brought the European goods” (25). Equiano is first mystified and terrified by the slave ship and nautical instruments such as the quadrant, and his technological ignorance ironically enables him to connect the new disciplinary powers he faces when, in Virginia, he encounters a slave woman encumbered by an iron muzzle, a portrait, and a ticking watch (44). Up to this point, Equiano’s encounter with Europeans and their technology largely follows the account offered by European explorers and colonists such as Thomas Hariot. In his rendering of one of the key tropes of colonialist literature, Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) reports that the native Indians will have “cause both to feare and to love us” (50), largely due to technological differences: they are so amazed by the Englishmen’s mathematical instruments, guns, books, and clocks “that they thought they were rather the works of gods then of men” (57). But Hariot himself is somewhat discomfited when this amazement and worship are afforded the material Bible rather than its spiritual essence: “although I told them the booke materially & of it self was not of any such vertue, as I thought they did conceive, but onely the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke over all their bodie with it” (58). This apparent fetishization of the book, of the product of print technology, reappears in Equiano’s account of his “great curiosity to talk to the books” as the Europeans did (48). But Equiano learns to read and write as well as to become an adept sailor, mastering the very technologies – ocean-going vessels and nautical instruments such as the quadrant, as well as print – that had once been used to subjugate him. Through a technological process of demystification, he is able to utilize technologies that had once physically and emotionally enslaved him to achieve his freedom and to become one of the most important early advocates for abolition. Over the course of his Narrative, then, technology is

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transmuted from an instrument of slavery to an instrument of emancipation through the production of the self as a free subject. Similar dynamics appear in early accounts of women’s relationships with manufacturing technologies. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, then Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton called for the development of industrial manufacturing in part because “women and Children are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful by manufacturing establishments, than they would otherwise be” (131). Through the Civil War, factories in the United States relied to a significant extent on women’s labor, exploiting ideas about women’s innate tractability, their need for less pay, and their essential dependence on patriarchal authority. Yet works such as Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl (1814), often cited as the first American industrial novel, and The Lowell Offering, a magazine written and published by women factory workers from 1840 to 1845, extol the possibilities afforded women by industrial production. These works overcome objections to women entering the economic realm by connecting their work and the new technologies they use to older domestic craft. Mary Burnam, Savage’s heroine, attempts “to describe the complicated machinery of the factory” in response to “her grandmother’s curiosity . . . [about] what facilitated so much the art of spinning, in which, in early life, it had been her ambition to excel” (14). Mary’s grandmother exemplifies a distinctly domestic technological spirit, as “no one was more pleased to examine and observe the effects of the machines and instruments, that were used in the country business to which she was accustomed; particularly if they were new inventions, or old ones improved” (15). Carrying on her grandmother’s interest in and use of new technologies for old tasks, Mary finds that factory work allows her time for self-improvement and expansion of her ability to help others. In particular, after one of the proprietors of the cotton factory denounces child labor (blaming the “thoughtless parents” who “deprive their offspring of the advantages of education” [37]), Mary establishes a Sunday school for the younger workers. The Factory Girl pictures the industrialization of cloth manufacturing as a continuation of the domestic sphere, as an expansion of the possibilities of feminine self-development and selfless service, an expansion implicitly linked to the newer publishing and reading possibilities enabled by similar manufacturing and technological changes in the print industry. The Lowell Offering frequently echoed this sense of empowerment, linking it to technology’s potential to stimulate the mind: “all the powers of the mind are made active by our animating exercise,” for “Who can closely examine all the movements of the complicated, curious machinery, and not be led to the reflection, that the mind is boundless, and is destined to rise higher and still higher[?]” (63–4). As with The Factory Girl, the sketches and tales in The Lowell Offering envision the selfimprovement enabled by factory life – through increased opportunities for moral and intellectual improvement – as the continuation of one’s family duties. Unlike The Factory Girl, some selections from The Lowell Offering begin to suggest that the workers themselves simply become part of the machinery of production. Contributors

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regularly narrate dialogues in which women complain about being “obliged to rise so early in the morning . . . dragged about by the ringing of a bell . . . [and] confined in a noisy room from morning till night” (160), “just as though we were so many living machines . . . [or] white slave[s]” (161). Other writers reflect on the need to imagine a world elsewhere “not of the crowded, clattering mill, nor of the noisy tenement which is her home, nor of the thronged and busy street which she may sometime tread, – but of the still and lovely scenes which, in by-gone hours, have sent their pure and elevating influence” (138). These intertwining logics – equating factory work to slavery or becoming a machine, and positing nature as an escape or solace – underwrite Herman Melville’s account of a paper factory in “The Tartarus of Maids,” where the women “did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (328). Through its diptych other, “The Paradise of Bachelors,” Melville links the dehumanization and suffering of the female factory workers with the literary production and camaraderie of a masculine coterie. Literature and technology are decoupled, as factory work and the technological developments used there no longer open imaginative, political, or psychological possibilities but detach life from nature, foreclosing all possibilities of an authentic existence.

The Work of Art in the Age of Iron Mills and the Dynamo As noted at the outset, Jacob Bigelow’s lecture at MIT helps to gauge the extent of this disconnection between art and technology as the nation moved into the latter half of the nineteenth century. While techno-utopian visions would become even more prominent in the decades to come, the utopian impulse of aesthetic production was increasingly distinguished from the realities of industrialized technology. Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills (1861) provides one of the best early examples of such thinking. Hugh Wolfe’s suicide near the end of the novella, his self-unmaking with a piece of “tin, not fit to cut korl with” (69), figures the obverse of Franklin’s self-making through technology. In the realm of the industrial factory, Wolfe, his talents, and his humanity are only so many natural resources to be used up and cast aside, like the korl (“the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run” [48]) from which he creates his sculptures. Despite this proto-realist (or naturalist) depiction of industrial life, the conclusion of the story moves between an aestheticism suggestive of modernism – via the korl figure’s ability to represent the unspeakable, to stand outside the realm of technological industrialization as a by-product of its processes – and the utopian possibility of recuperating the human potential obscured by industrial processes through “long years of sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love” (73). Life in the Iron-Mills thus hints at three of the most predominant (and interrelated) tropes of viewing technology and literature over the last century and a half: the mechanization and denigration of human life itself; the utopian possibility or dystopian impossibility of escaping a technologized system; or, along

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the lines of Heidegger, the mutually constitutive yet antagonistic relationship between different kinds of human production. The initial publication of Life in the Iron-Mills in The Atlantic Monthly is suggestive of how these different conceptions of technology corresponded with the changing production of literature itself. As noted earlier, the modern mechanical printing methods that defined publication throughout most of the twentieth century – stereotype printing using machine-powered presses and rolled paper – only became standard in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Atlantic Monthly was perhaps the most important of a number of magazines founded in the middle of the nineteenth century that would play an increasingly important role in delineating a more elite literary culture against the ever-expanding reaches of mass literature and, by the end of the century, mass cultural forms such as film. The Atlantic Monthly and similar publications as well as the novels and books they championed thus emerged from the expansion of print technologies and new forms of mechanical reproduction even as they attempted to define themselves against these very innovations. Davis’s conception of art, through the korl woman, as existing outside, yet within, an industrialized framework, and as allowing readers insight into “a secret . . . that has lain dumb” and that she “dare [not] make” any “clearer” (41), speaks to what would become the Atlantic’s declared position of carving out a niche for true literary art amidst the industrial production of culture. At the same time, through the Quaker woman’s salvation of Deborah at the conclusion of the novella, Davis locates the solution to the horrors of industrialization outside of an industrial economy, literally displaced from the urban setting of the iron mills, in a realm where human relationships can be constituted on a basis of “Christ-love” rather than along class lines and economic contractualism. This displacement becomes central to much of the utopian fiction produced over the next century and a half, as would, to a surprising extent, its concomitant rejection of technological progress as the foundation for social change. In works such as Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3), which imagine a secret, enduring Ethiopian community as an alternative to the racial landscape of the United States, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), which describes a South American society devoid of men, the utopian communities either combine more primitive technologies with supernatural capacities (Of One Blood) or match the advances of western production while depending on new forms of biological reproduction (Herland). Even in temporally dislocated utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), where the technological innovations of the nineteenth century loom large in preparing the way for “a golden future” (65), the central transformations distinguishing the society of 2000 from that of 1887 have less to do with technological improvements, as essential as they are, than with restructuring “the organization of society” (68). Many of the “labor-saving inventions in all sorts of industry” appear as “the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions” (101–2) rather than as the causes of those rational conditions. In Bellamy’s account, the rationalization of society leads to the emancipation and empowering of human nature, a process we’ve already seen at work in Franklin.

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But with the full development of industrial capitalism and the expansion of technologies into every sector of human life – from reproduction and sexuality to forms of cultural representation and mental life – such rationalization often seemed less like an expansion of human nature than its denial. Life in the Iron-Mills begins to suggest this notion of mechanized life – and its utopian and dystopian possibilities – in Kirby’s comment that he wishes the workers were “machines, – nothing more,” for “taste, reason” are nothing but “nerves to sting them to pain” (54). This conception of life as mechanical was central to what the literary historian Mark Seltzer calls “the naturalist machine” (25). More broadly, Seltzer contends, “the links between the body and the machine have focused the American cultural imagination since the later nineteenth century” (4) in three distinct ways: “the notion that machines replace bodies and persons,” “the notion that persons are already machines,” and “the notion that technologies make bodies and persons” (12–13). No work from the early part of the twentieth century so fully reveals the ambivalence surrounding these different conceptions as The Education of Henry Adams (1907). While the most famous chapter of the book, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” is often cited as a diatribe against the technological displacement of human life – the dissolution of a more natural, sacred, and artistic manner of living (the virgin) by dehumanized technological force (the dynamo) – Adams embraces a mechanized worldview alongside his distinct nostalgia. Adams equates the virgin – the religious, sexual power manifest in medieval cathedrals – with the dynamo, for “both energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured” (1074). From the perspective of Adams’s dynamic theory of history, the universe becomes a “chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces”; society “becomes fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motion” (983); and public education becomes “a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind” (792), for the mind itself is a “machine” (754). The mechanical organization of society and the individual’s mind at first seems to distinguish mind and society from nature, but Adams reveals them to be mirroring nature’s own mechanistic, if finally chaotic, forces. Adams, in this way, realizes Seltzer’s three tropes, as the dynamo replaces the virgin, but then the self is revealed to be only a machine itself, as the virgin similarly appears to be only the product of a greater chaos machine, Nature. Occasionally read as the first modernist American work, Adams’s Education provides a bridge between the naturalist machine and a more distinctly modernist engagement with technology. In particular, through the contrast he sets up between the virgin and the dynamo and the way the dynamo desacralizes the virgin, rendering her (and art, sex, and religion) merely another force acting on humanity and the world, Adams hints at something like Walter Benjamin’s account of the technological denigration of aura, which is “never entirely separated from its ritual function” (224). For Benjamin, this dissolution of aura accompanies film’s ability both to shock its audiences and to foster a kind of distracted viewership, as art no longer absorbs the viewer through a mode of contemplation, but like the technologies of modern life itself pierces the normal sense of the self even as it becomes part of a quotidian, if chaotic, reality.

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Unlike Adams, the self-defined conservative Christian anarchist and detached historian, Benjamin distinguishes two political outcomes to the modern technologization of art: the fascistic aestheticization of politics, war, and destruction, and a communist politicization of aesthetics. His hope resides in the expansion and democratization of art, in everyone possibly becoming an author (232), penetrating, as the camera does, “deeply into [the] web” of reality, creating a picture of “multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law” (233–4). Benjamin’s wary optimism about the democratic potentials of technologized art offers a Marxist and modernist update of Franklin’s technological republican selfmaking and Emerson’s romantic theorization of technology paralleling poetry and emancipation. While the kind of technological self-making Franklin exemplifies seems impossible for Adams, stuck as he describes himself as being in the eighteenth century, he foresees a new kind of American, “the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electrical power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined,” who “would need to think in contradictions” and “would know how to control unlimited power” (1174–5). In modernist works by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, and John Dos Passos, the alienated modernist artist represents the new American that Adams predicts will be able to draw on technology’s apocalyptic force as a model of aesthetic discipline and withdrawal from the technologized, mechanical world. For example, Williams defines a poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words. . . . there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant” (54); throughout his oeuvre, he was drawn to the precision, speed, and new perspectives enabled by modern technology, echoing Adams in Spring and All (1923) by arguing that “the imagination is an actual force comparable to electricity or steam” (207). At the same time, Williams, like Adams, recognized the destruction of newer technologies, describing, in Spring and All, how “[t]houghtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. . . . Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth,” before concluding with the line “Someone has written a poem” (180). The poem, as in Heidegger, is both aligned with and contrasted against technology, as the machine represents both technological society’s enslavement and a model for the poet “to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition leads” (235). Williams, like Adams and later American modernists, will not go as far as Benjamin’s call for a specific kind of politicization of aesthetics through technology. Yet he hopefully and suggestively gestures, as Emerson before him, to the politically liberatory potentials of the intersection of literature and technology.

Epilogue: The Digital Future In the latter half of the twentieth century, in numerous dystopian and postmodern works, the emancipatory potential of technology seems to all but disappear as the

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lines between the technological and the natural no longer hold and the question of whether the machine controls humankind or individuals have any control over themselves and their machinery remains unanswered and unresolvable. In the last couple of decades, however, the emergence of new digital technologies has brought a resurgence of the kind of thinking we have seen represented by Franklin and Foucault, Emerson and Heidegger, and Adams and Benjamin. Utopian rhetoric surrounds the political and artistic potential of the Internet and the ever-expanding power of computers. Much attention in the public has focused on the transmutation of print literature into digital forms, whether in the form of academic databases, Google’s attempt to digitalize the world’s books, or new reading devices such as Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iPad. Undoubtedly reading itself and the content, themes, and forms of literature will change as more and more people gather news and information from computer screens or scan poems, stories, plays, and novels from electronic databases or via digital interfaces. More compelling, however, and potentially more transformative of literature are new electronic literary forms, works that mutate old print and oral genres by interfusing them with the aural and visual effects made possible by computer technologies. As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, the emergence of electronic literature – and the possibilities for literature in a digital age – parallels the transformation of literature brought about by the printing press. Even an extended treatment of electronic literature can only begin to enumerate the different forms it is taking, and I can only gesture to a few ways these trends portend even greater transformations to literature than those fostered by the printing press. Perhaps best known are hypertext works, poems, memoirs, and novels that allow a kind of citation and layering through clickable links. More recent developments incorporate elements recalling video art forms, using flash technology as well as three-dimensional representations to enhance and destabilize the reading process, rendering texts more indeterminate by allowing for various different iterations of words, images, and sounds. Artists and writers have begun exploring the social-networking possibilities of the Internet to create communally created works, fictions whose different pieces are produced by writers from around the world, while others have incorporated new technologies such as global positioning systems to create literary forms that interact with the real world. Some interactive fictions begin to approach the qualities of gaming narratives, while other interactive forms simply allow users to manipulate how, when, and where different elements of texts (and often images) are combined. Many of these experimental forms, as Jessica Pressman has argued, recall modernist aesthetics. But they also recapitulate many of the features of the narrative on literature and technology I have attempted to construct. While the overall tone of these works tends to be much darker, more cynical, and more ironic than Enlightenment or Romantic era accounts, many implicitly and explicitly celebrate the potential of new media literary forms to model a kind of dynamic postmodern self-construction. Celebrations of the democratizing potentials of the Internet more broadly and of Internet publishing and circulation of literary materials in particular often echo the

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techno-utopian logics of an earlier era, specifically the idea that new technologies will enable individuals to create themselves more freely and fully while simultaneously bringing together a more harmonious world community. The past two hundred years should make us wary of any such claims, yet the future of technological innovations, the uses they will be put to, and the literary forms they will transform and generate remain indeterminate. And thus, much recent work critically engages with new digital technologies in attempts at counteracting the economic and political ends for which they are typically deployed, seizing, in Benjaminian fashion, on their potential to fracture and trouble our normal sense of ourselves and our liberal capitalist worldview. The future of literature, as was true of its past, will largely be defined by its interaction with – its critique of, its dependence on, and its exploitation of – technology. References and Further Reading Adams, Henry. Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education. New York: Library of America, 1984. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. New York: Penguin, 1982. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (pp. 217–51). Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. Bigelow, Jacob. An Address on the Limits of Education. Boston: E.P. Dutton, 1865. Bigelow, Jacob. Elements of Technology. Boston: Hillard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1829. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron-Mills. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. New York: Library of America, 1994. Eisler, Benita, ed. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840–1845). New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Antislavery Writings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self (pp. 16–49). Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Franklin, Benjamin. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1987. Hamilton, Alexander. “Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791.” In The Reports of Alexander Hamilton (pp. 115–205). Ed. Jacob E. Cooke. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Hariot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. London: n.p., 1900. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Melville, Herman. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Rush, Benjamin. Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806. Savage, Sarah. The Factory Girl. Boston: Munroe, Francis & Parker, 1814.

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Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. 2 vols. New York: New Directions, 1986–1988. Winship, Michael. “Manufacturing and Book Production.” In A History of the Book in America.

Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 (pp. 40–69). Eds. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

6

Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature Gavin Jones

“She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?” These are the thoughts of Oedipa Maas, the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 (150). Oedipa has spent most of the novel attempting to solve the riddle of the Tristero: does a huge conspiracy lie behind Western history, a battle between the empowered and the disempowered waged through competing systems of postal service? Is the nation’s underclass communicating through a secret mail system known as WASTE? Oedipa never knows for sure, but the question she confronts is profoundly significant to our understanding of the nation’s narrative encounter with the problem of social class. Have the horizontal equalizations of democracy, the constant shifts between diverse cultural groups and lifestyles, been ousted by a vertical and binary division of society into the powerful and the disinherited, with an excluded and uncertain middle class in between? This chapter offers a brief history of American narrative that not only confirms Oedipa’s fears but also suggests that the chances for diversity were perhaps never very good to begin with. The influence of Marxist thought on critical analysis has helped to establish the importance of the novel to the emergence of bourgeois subjectivity in the United States. The historical romance and sentimental domestic fiction of the antebellum era, the realism and naturalism of the later nineteenth century, and the modernist tradition that emerges in the works of Henry James have all been convincingly positioned within developing middle-class attitudes and ideologies. Yet, as Leslie Fiedler famously observed, many of American literature’s central characters actively flee this “civilized” life. The horror of feminized domesticity or the attractions of interracial male intimacy may be motivations, as Fiedler suggests, though this urge to run also speaks to the A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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curious instability of a bourgeois center that fails to hold. I uncover in the analysis that follows a persistent narrative interest in the extremes of social inequality, whereby the middle-class space is anything but coherent and secure. Awareness of this literature of the excluded middle tells a significant story about the formation of the United States as a nation of profound disequilibrium where those in the social middle are gripped by status anxiety and the fear of falling. My chapter also offers a history of literary development because this confrontation with the irony of social inequality amid political ideologies of equality disrupts the bourgeois realm in which the novel should be most at home, hence creating moments of ethical and formal shock that set narrative on surprising paths. From this excluded middle emerge formal experiments with first-person narrative in the antebellum romance, with plot in Gilded Age realism, with character in modernism, and with mediation in the literature of postmodernism. By the time we return to Pynchon, the problem is eerily the same – the problem of inequality – but the way of understanding it has shifted. Subjective responses to class difference and the threat it poses to the promise of democracy eventually give way to a more fundamental difficulty: accessing a condition of disadvantage that seems both permanent and structured into the primary modes of viewing the social world. Working against exceptionalistic denials of class conflict in an American context and against powerful traditions of individualism, historians have charted the emergence of a socioeconomic idea of class relations in the United States. If we return to the origins of this class discourse, then we discover not only an inherent instability in definitions of class but also a predominant sense of binary opposition not between capitalists and workers but, more basically, between rich and poor. In Orestes Brownson’s essay “The Laboring Classes” (1840), for example, we glimpse a nation essentially bisected along lines of wealth and property, as Michael Burke has argued. One of the most powerful forces in US class discourse, as I have suggested elsewhere, was the growing awareness of the problem of poverty and what seemed like a permanently poor class. The idea of poverty meshed easily with the national tendency to moralize questions of social position and worth. Against the familiar history of the rise of middle-class forms of identity and consciousness, we discover a class discourse that is curiously obsessed with radical forms of inequality dividing the nation into “Its Upper Ten and Lower Million,” as George Lippard phrased it in the subtitle of his sensationalistic novel New York (1854). By the 1840s, this awareness of inequality and the association of lower-class status with severe social suffering primed the ground for the utopian socialist movements that swept the land in a ferment of reform. A political language of class polarity had emerged, and literature was ready to represent the encounter with a socialist solution on American soil. During the 1840s, Nathaniel Hawthorne participated briefly in the utopian socialist commune of Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and used his experience as the basis for his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852). In his preface, Hawthorne seeks to distance the primary importance of the socialist context, arguing instead that “his present concern with the Socialist Community is merely to establish a theatre, a little removed

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from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives” (3). Yet Blithedale differs radically from Hawthorne’s other romances in its refusal to mix the real with the kind of alternate romantic space that the Puritan past offers in The Scarlet Letter (1850), or that the supernatural offers in The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The “phantasmagorical antics” of Blithedale emerge from a dialectic internal to the mind of Miles Coverdale, our first-person narrator. I turn to this dialectic as the first stage in an American literature of inequality notable for the vacuum it creates at the social center. This vanishing middle is most discernible, I argue, in writers who are less marked by the minority cultural identities and the excluded social locations that have inspired such a radical revision of the canon in recent decades. Hawthorne is a writer very much in and of the middle – a white, male, middle-class writer who became quickly institutionalized as an important representative of the American literary tradition. Ironically, Hawthorne’s centrist position enables a counterintuitive view of the bourgeois ideology then becoming dominant in the era’s more popular kinds of domestic, sentimental, and melodramatic writing. Foreshadowing the other writers who occupy us here, Hawthorne’s literary effort to represent rather than to subvert or sanction the social center brings him face-to-face with a crucial contradiction in American history: the nation’s early investment in fundamental structures of social inequality. It is no coincidence that Hawthorne’s foray into the implications of socialism should take the form of a first-person narrative – indeed, Blithedale is Hawthorne’s only novel in this particular mode. Recognition of the problems that social stratification presented to the nation’s ideologies of freedom and equality worked to upset the personal perspectives of a number of Hawthorne’s peers. At the heart of his essay “Self-Reliance” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson responds in a self-centered outburst to a friend’s suggestion that he has a responsibility to the poor: “Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong” (22). The logic of self-reliance breaks down into enraged, first-person revulsion from any recognition that needs make rights. In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau meets an impoverished Irishman residing in his idealized landscape, and subsequently disturbs the woods with his nativist tirade against imported “shiftlessness” (166). The genteel narrator of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) sees his entire system of values come crashing down when he confronts an indigent individual who refuses to work, just as the narrator of Melville’s “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” (1853) can only crow madly like a cockerel after confronting the destructive poverty of a rural family. The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) runs in fright and confusion from a scene of social and structural collapse in a gothic tale of downward mobility following the destructive Panic of 1837. Blithedale is less dramatic in the story it tells of our narrator’s residence in a utopian commune, though even here the genteel Coverdale’s confrontation with another form of social organization unravels rapidly as Coverdale contracts a fever that throws him into mental delirium.

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Hawthorne’s novel spreads this initial collapse into a more subtle and pervasive tonal irregularity – at heart a narrative unreliability – that comes to mediate an imbalanced social structure. Around halfway through the novel, after escaping from the social reformer Hollingsworth’s monomaniacal efforts to convert him to his philanthropic mission of prison reform, Coverdale leaves the commune and returns to conventional society, taking a hotel room that overlooks a row of fashionable buildings inhabited by families of office workers – a prototypical middle class: One long, united roof, with its thousands of slates glittering in the rain, extended over the whole. After the distinctness of separate characters to which I had recently been accustomed, it perplexed and annoyed me not to be able to resolve this combination of human interests into well-defined elements. It seemed hardly worth while for more than one of those families to be in existence, since they all had the same glimpse of the sky, all looked into the same area, all received just their equal share of sunshine through the front windows, and all listened to precisely the same noises of the street on which they boarded. Men are so much alike in their nature, that they grow intolerable unless varied by their circumstances. (123–4)

Ironically, the equality Coverdale sought in the socialist community is more present in the middle-class Americans he confronts from afar. If upper-class Coverdale cannot fit into the socialist community, then neither is he part of the bourgeois life that opposes it. Recent critics have described Blithedale as Hawthorne’s attempt to work out literature’s new middle-class situation: as part of a public entertainment system that addressed private class needs through represented life, according to Richard Brodhead, or as a fantasy of masculine power that uses the feminine to construct possessive individualism, according to Lori Merish. Yet this middle class is exactly the problem in Hawthorne’s novel. There is no coherent middle-class space from which to narrate. Indeed, such is the crisis of representation when confronted by an incoherent middle class that Coverdale recoils in frustration, and is left with a desire for varied circumstances – for inequality, in effect. The unstable narrative structure of Hawthorne’s novel as a whole emerges from this failure to occupy a middle space of equanimity. Throughout, Coverdale feels that he is either facing a conspiracy, as Robert Levine has argued, or projecting the monster of his own fears. Coverdale’s paranoia, that is, mirrors instabilities of scale. Either he is too small in comparison to a large system that he does not understand, or else he is so large that he has created intrigue through his voyeuristic interest in the romantic lives of his Blithedale companions Hollingsworth, the wealthy Zenobia, and the impoverished young Priscilla, who joins the commune in mysterious circumstances. Coverdale’s social movement, from his conservative upper-class location to his communitarian contact with the low and with radical forms of social thought, sets into play this inherent instability, this movement between error and exaggeration. Hence Coverdale suffers at various times from depression, from an inability to analyze his own mind, and from a proneness to the influence of the bogus. Yet at other moments

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he falls into the delusion that God has impelled him to use his “delicate intuitions” to learn the hidden secrets of others and to judge as he sees fit (132). Coverdale’s unreliability, his vacillation between reality and fantasy, mediates a dynamic of inequality. His failure to command a central and stable ideological location compels him to move between grandeur and abjection. At the end of the novel, the utopian experiment fails after the haughty and wealthy Zenobia drowns herself, apparently dying of a broken heart when Hollingsworth rejects her for the destitute and delicate Priscilla. Blithedale gets occupied by the town paupers – a class of the permanently poor – and our narrator retreats to his wealthy life of ease. Polar inequality has reestablished itself against the attempt at fruitful class contact and socialist reform. Yet Coverdale, who finally abandons his only labor as a poet, still seems inherently anxious about his situation, fearing that his life is all emptiness, having established no separate interest in his own narrative. Hence we have the novel’s infamous ending, Coverdale’s confession of something “essential to the full understanding of my story,” that “I – I myself – was in love – with – PRISCILLA!” (203). He attempts to justify his inactive years, his unsatisfied past and listless future, by instantly generating mystery and depth. Far from establishing a middle-class location or consciousness, this ending resorts to the kind of shiftiness and unreliability we have experienced throughout. Coverdale’s desire to occupy a high location as the holder of special knowledge confronts the debasement of his narrative art, a degeneration into melodrama – a failure in the quality of the narrative itself. Social insecurity brings narrative instability that responds to the novel’s radical inequality: its inability to picture a coherent ideological location between the high and the low. What Blithedale registers at the level of tone and voice is a social incoherence whose psychological focus would become even more confused in the shift from romance to realism’s encounter with the ever-widening structures of the world of business. “It is usually indigent literature which presents itself with these imaginative demands, and I think usually fictionists of the romantic school. I do not know but it would be well for me as a man of principle to confine my benefactions to destitute realists: I am sure it would be cheaper.” These lines, from William Dean Howells’s 1895 essay “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver” (125), suggest the degree to which changes in literary form and genre were entwined with the problems of social inequality then becoming increasingly visible on the streets of New York and other large cities. Howells is describing his practice of offering street beggars only half of what they request, hence giving himself the illusion of making money, though he moves seamlessly from the social to the literary as he describes the demands placed on the imagination by this kind of transaction. According to Howells’s theories of realism at least, the realist text should exhibit fidelity to experience and probability of motive, hence bringing into play a series of epistemological questions that naturally found their correlative in this contact between strangers from opposite ends of the social spectrum. In a genre that purported to replace the coincidences of plot with the commonalities of character, and hence to read and make intelligible the world of social

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appearances, the confessed needs of strangers placed primary demands on the imagination to step into the profound uncertainty opened by the chasm of social inequality. Yet when Howells discovers a destitute “realist” on the streets of New York – an educated man with the potential to do a “perfectly fresh thing in literature” by describing experiences that “mostly happened to the inarticulate classes” (125) – his ability to read the details of character collapses. Despite paying the man to write his story, no narrative appears. The desire to believe a character and hence to access a new and authentic kind of experience is defeated by the epistemological problems of uncertainty within the structure of experience. In effect, Howells wants to trust character, but in the process he becomes victim of a plot. Something is going on that he does not understand and cannot access – a kind of conspiracy that lies beyond the bounds of realistic knowledge. “I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist” (126), Howells concludes of the beggar, moving like Coverdale uneasily between a desire for reality and a realization of delusion. Howells theorized realism as a middling formation that rejected the inherited intellectual property of the elite classes while also rejecting the “low” world of popular dime novels and sentimental romances, which Howells described as symptoms of bankrupt taste. Yet if we turn to Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), often described as the nation’s first novel to describe the rise of a culture of business that cuts across the traditional lines of class affiliation, then we confront again the strange absence of the very middle-class culture that the realist text should naturally embrace. The novel makes the clear distinction between an elite, cosmopolitan class (the Coreys) and a rustic, folksy class (the Laphams). The former are insecure financially (the Corey son, Tom, goes to work in Lapham’s paint business), while the latter are insecure culturally, as their financial rise places them in a world “above” their lowly values. As with Blithedale, anything like a middle-class sphere lies beyond the realms of representation, as becomes clear when Tom Corey and Silas Lapham take the ferry to Nantasket and confront a crowd of “people who were going down to the beach for the fun or the relief of it, and they were able to afford it” (80). Rather than a moment of common experience that embodies the egalitarian ideals of the realist form, the scene throws narrative into crisis. The stress on the commonplace erases the kind of “distinction” (80) that enables these characters to be seen individually. Far from transcending class division with the uniqueness of character, the novel presents instead the opacity of class, and a relationship between Tom and Lapham that is dominated by the tension between class as a cultural and an economic force. The financial rise of Lapham places him in the same social sphere as characters with very different – and seemingly absolute – ideas of cultivation, which creates the novel’s predominant tension that explodes in the famous dinner scene at the Corey home, where the Laphams’ social inexperience ends in Lapham getting drunk and making a fool of himself by haranguing the dinner guests about his Civil War experiences. Class conflict lies at the heart of the novel’s narrative tensions, and it becomes the force that generates interiority, as seen in Tom’s long interior monologue following the dinner, in which he quivers in resentment at Lapham’s “vulgar, braggart, uncouth

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nature,” and recognizes “his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred” (211). What rises at this point in the novel is the possibility of a humorous, ironic point of view – embodied in the voice of Penelope Lapham, whom Tom will eventually marry – to offer a way out of the absoluteness of class difference by promising a middling set of cultural values that can sympathize with both forms of class consciousness: the high and the low. The marriage of Tom and Penelope is the one place of harmony between the two families, yet even this hope is finally dashed by a narrator, who is explicitly and disturbingly sympathetic to the Coreys’ belief that the marriage of Tom to the lower-class Penelope meant “the end of their son and brother to them” (361). So severe are the differences in “manners and customs” (361) between classes that the young couple must travel to Mexico, where Penelope believes she will not feel as strange as she does among her Brahmin in-laws. In a realist genre that allegedly valued common experience and the nonintervening narrator, here we have a moment of narrative intervention that confirms and condones the absoluteness of class inequality. Like Blithedale, Silas Lapham is thus structured by the failure of middling values to hold sway. The novel returns characters to their original situations, and indeed denies anything like growth or development to the extent that “character” itself gets partly emptied of moral content, being influenced instead by environmental location and by the determination of unseen forces. This becomes clear in the chapter that culminates with Lapham’s business failure, right after the Laphams lose the house they are building on the Back Bay, which burns to the ground coincidentally just one week after the insurance policy expires. By this point, Lapham is dominated by a paranoid suspicion that he is becoming victim to a conspiracy. He discovers that a West Virginia company now has superior paint that will force him out of business, yet a final opportunity offers itself: Lapham could invest in the West Virginia company, which would require him to sell a milling property he bought from his former business partner, Milton Rogers – a property whose value becomes doubtful when its adjacent railroad is purchased by a new railroad company, which effectively gains control over the property by controlling its transportation link. Rogers introduces Lapham to some Englishmen who – in a gesture back to the concerns of Blithedale – claim to be agents for a group of English utopian reformers looking to establish a community on American soil. This potential transaction is dominated by uncertainty about the motivations of the parties involved, and uncertainty about who knows what: Something in the eyes of these men, something that lurked at an infinite depth below their speech, and was not really in their eyes when Lapham looked again, had flashed through him a sense of treachery in them. He had thought them the dupes of Rogers; but in that brief instant he had seen them – or thought he had seen them – his accomplices, ready to betray the interests of which they went on to speak with a certain comfortable jocosity, and a certain incredulous slight of his show of integrity. It was a deeper game than Lapham was used to. (324)

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In a novel where the narrator jumps to judgment throughout, this is a rare moment of undecidability. It seems that the choice here is between the modern values of business, “which regards common property as common prey” (325), and the traditional moral codes that would prevent Lapham from selling property he knows could become valueless owing to the intervention of the railroad. The links between causes and effects are extremely difficult to comprehend, and indeed become more so when Rogers offers to intervene and to buy the mills himself, arguing that the intentions of the railroad are as yet unknown, hence absolving Lapham of responsibility. The complication of the plot suggests how these individuals are wired into structures they do not understand – a confusion mirrored for readers in a hermeneutic dilemma. Is there a “plot,” a conspiracy, or not? Lapham cannot simply unmask Rogers; he cannot just walk away from this situation as he would “from the plays at the theater” (325). There are no recourses to melodrama – the solution of Coverdale in Hawthorne’s novel. Something different is happening here. Traditional moral codes are not just confused: they fail to operate altogether. Insecurity is introduced as a narrative dynamic, one that confuses the moral grounds on which choice can be made. “It was for him alone to commit this rascality – if it was a rascality – or not” (326; emphasis added). The confusion in the decision becomes a structure of doubt whereby judgment is moot because the relations of cause and effect are so uncertain. Rather than stressing the significance of individual character over the power of social class or the movements and coincidences of plot, as Howells theorized realism, Silas Lapham suggests – like Blithedale – a radically unequal social world divided between the low and the high. Many of the novel’s tensions depend on this disjunction between economic and social questions of class, and on the failure of a middle space that might hold them together. But Howells does not leave it there. The book takes essentialized ideas of character, based on class and cultivation, and subjects them to a structure of events (the plot) that belies the moral categories of responsibility on which these ideas of character would seem to depend. We do not know in the end which way Lapham intends to act concerning the mills, though in all likelihood he looks set to do the “right” thing and to hold out against Rogers and the (potential) conspiracy. But the final point of this key chapter is that Lapham does not really act at all. He is acted on, by outside forces, when he receives a letter from the railroad, a letter that presumably (we never know for sure) contains their offer for the mills, which they now effectively control. The problem here is not – as it was for Hawthorne – with narrative voice because radical inequality is no longer a moral problem that creates shock. The problem is one of plot, which effectively destroys the value and agency of character, as individuals get situated within a determining social structure that lies beyond coherence or comprehension. In this respect, Howells’s novel reflects formally a historical shift in the economic conditions of American modernity. The situation of panic, with its stress on isolated commercial crises and their destabilizing influence on the individual subject, gave way to a deeper situation of depression marked by the economic instability and financial turmoil that came to seem endemic during the final three decades of the nine-

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teenth century. Numerous critics have noted realism’s fascination with this fluctuating world of finance; according to New Historicists at least, the very possibility of subjectivity came during this period to seem inevitably constituted by the money economy. Howells’s interest in the complexities of plot thus marks a wider concern with the subject’s determination by economic forces that often seemed distant and dimly understood. Take, for instance, Kate Chopin’s “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” (1898), a tale about a village postmistress and failed writer who “never could think of a plot” (274) but who stumbles into a plot of a different kind when she pries into mail intended for a local businessman. Like Howells’s novel, Chopin’s story again pivots on a potential conspiracy, this time between government and business – a conspiracy that remains fundamentally offstage and uncertain, yet nevertheless loses Stock her job and eventually leads to her death. Naturalism’s “plot of decline” is another example of this combined interest in the power of plot over human agency and in the inevitable fall from a tenuous and insecure middle class. Howells’s interest in a polarized social world gets reflected again in the character of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), a character who from the outset is paradoxically both “horribly poor – and very expensive” (31). Lily crashes down from high to low, unable to exist in a middle class that seems like failure. What makes Howells’s novel stand out from these broader concerns is the absolute degree of its structured world of inequality. There is no movement from high to low, merely a return to a seemingly natural and static state of social bifurcation. There is no theoretical “republic of the spirit” in Silas Lapham, no realm between the anxiety of poverty and the ease of wealth that Lawrence Selden describes in The House of Mirth – an exclusively male realm on which Wharton grounds her feminist critique. Lacking this gendered perspective, Silas Lapham turns its gaze solely to an absent center that undermines the middling values on which realism was founded. Realism’s promises of character collapse beneath the complexities of plot. Once more, the excluded middle creates a contradiction with important formal consequences – a contradiction to which the literature of modernism would return and react. On May Day 1919, a party at the New York socialist newspaper, The Call, was stormed by a mob of soldiers and sailors who smashed the newspaper’s offices and sent seven of its staff to hospital. The culmination of rising tensions between troops returning from the Great War and an increasingly vociferous socialist movement, this episode is central to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella, May Day (1920). In its theme and tone, the novella looks back to realist and naturalist novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Both works end with the suicide of a weak male character who gets involved in a love affair that destroys him. Yet gone in Fitzgerald are the moments of obvious plotting or the antiplotting of coincidence that we saw in Silas Lapham and that mark, say, the moment when the safe door inexplicably swings shut in Sister Carrie, leaving George Hurstwood with $10,000 in his hand. Instead, we have what we would perhaps expect from a modernist work: a decentered narrative that seems at the outset radically uncertain over whether it depicts “several – or perhaps one” of many adventures (26). What emerges from this episodic structure is a problem not

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of narrative reliability or of plot but a problem of characterization – both a difficulty representing a protagonist that we can identify or sympathize with, and a deep essentialization of character based on a profound inequality of social power. May Day introduces us initially to two characters: Philip Dean, a figure of success, wealth, health, physical strength, and fitness, and Gordon Sterrett, a figure of poverty, failure, and sickness. The identity of these characters is dominated not by their relation to a social position or to a class habitus but entirely by personal, embodied power. The turn of the twentieth century saw the rise of the scientific philanthropy movement, which sought to analyze the causes of poverty and to reform the poor through well-aimed charity and institutional care. This was a time when dominant power groups came to control cultural images of the poor. Environmental explanations battled with hereditary explanations of apparent differences in social power, but by the 1910s the pseudoscience of eugenics held sway. Differences in identity and social power were reduced more consistently to heredity alone. If Dreiser’s Sister Carrie reveals a conflict between environment and heredity, as Hurstwood gradually weakens in a dynamic process, then by the time we get to May Day anything like environmental development has curiously ceased. For Fitzgerald’s characters, there is no progression or movement of plot. Dean and Sterrett are trapped at their social levels, whose determining conditions have become naturalized, internal, and melodramatically extreme, with no middle ground between wealth and poverty. Character has effectively come to practice a social logic, sanctioning a eugenic ideology that divides the world into the weak and the strong. There is much in May Day that seems reflective of its surrounding ideologies. The urban crowd, for example, seems very different from the crowd on the ferry boat in Silas Lapham. There is no crisis of representation or poverty of exteriority here. The crowd glitters with signifiers: it is all too readable. The crowd has become “the masses,” defined not by their relation to the means of production but by their lifestyle choices and their power to consume (32). This is part of the modernism of May Day. Yet the fluid model Fitzgerald adopts, his decentralized narrative, is confronted repeatedly by a problematic intractability of characterization, which becomes pronounced when we confront two members of the crowd, Carrol Key and Gus Rose, returning troops from the war. “They were ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and without even that animal exuberance that in itself brings color into life; they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a strange land; they were poor, friendless; tossed as driftwood from their births, they would be tossed as driftwood to their deaths” (35). Clearly we are at the heart of eugenic ideology here. These characters are poor because they lack intelligence, and they lack intelligence because they are physically inferior. A signifying chain of causal forces makes them victims not of the social order but of their own inherent weakness. Indeed, these characters are only kept alive by the institution, which allows this devolution to occur. The remarkable point is less the eugenic logic than the absolute nature of their inferiority. Not only are these characters stupid and animalistic to the extreme, but also the construction of character itself suggests

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a lack of subtlety, as the narrator cannot help blurting out the characters’ impending demise. The different worlds of Fitzgerald’s story collide when a mob of soldiers storms the offices of The Call, as seen from the perspective of Edith Bradin, whose brother is one of the socialists: Then the room was a riot. She realized that the soldiers were surging forward, glimpsed the fat man swinging a chair over his head – instantly the lights went out and she felt the push of warm bodies under rough cloth, and her ears were full of shouting and trampling and hard breathing. A figure flashed by her out of nowhere, tottered, was edged sideways, and of a sudden disappeared helplessly out through the open window with a frightened, fragmentary cry that died staccato on the bosom of the clamor. By the faint light streaming from the building backing on the area Edith had a quick impression that it had been the tall soldier with the weak chin. (62)

The figure (presumably Carrol Key) emerges “out of nowhere” and is urged to his death in a strangely passive way. Rather than pushed by an assignable cause, he “was edged sideways” – but edged sideways by what exactly? It is tempting to read this passage in light of the socially Darwinian logic that underscores naturalist fiction, or in light of the eugenic logic then blossoming in the era’s influential “rural family studies”: pseudosociological accounts of allegedly degenerate and dangerous families who have seemingly rejected the moral norms of capitalist society. Nicole Rafter has argued that these narratives would use literary devices such as melodramatic plots and dense symbolism to construct negative images of the poor, which in turn became a means for the newly professionalized, lower-middle-class “sociologist” to construct his or her own sense of status entitlement. A similar argument could be made for Fitzgerald’s narrative. Perhaps Fitzgerald is throwing his own weak side (one of his middle names was Key) out of the story in the ultimate attempt to assuage ongoing anxieties about his own personal weakness. Yet this is too neat an argument about a narrative that lacks a center structurally. We are not presented with any focal moment of conspiracy or coincidence, no moment of unseen plotting, as in Silas Lapham; there is no moment of confrontation with a shady set of connections that determines action by forestalling decision. Here, in Fitzgerald’s decentered narrative, there is no social force that drives action and event. We are left with a much more abstract, unrooted dynamic of power. Either some almighty force shunts a character out of the story in an ultimate moment of intervention, or else this character is so colossally weak that he virtually implodes, taking himself dramatically out of the narrative (he “killed hisself,” says a policeman later [63]). Like Gordon Sterrett, who also takes his own life at the end of the story, Carrol Key is so empty and undynamic as a character, constructed to preclude development, that he simply ceases to exist. Either way, May Day presents again an extreme inequality of power that divides the world into the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, with nothing in between. Distributing its energy among several characters, the story establishes no

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solid hero for us to identify with. There is no coherent middle class, nor any moral center to the narrative. The upper class is not marked by higher intelligence or greater cultural capital. Dean is successful but not intelligent or attractive, nor even really self-made (his wealth is hereditary). There is an upper- and a lower-class variety of speech, yet each is insincere, clichéd, and bankrupt in its own way. Even the socialists share the eugenic beliefs of the capitalist class. There is thus no opportunity for the moral conflict we saw in Silas Lapham, where the vernacular values of character are upset by the indeterminacies of plot. We are left instead with a radically unequal world with nothing to explain differences in power but power itself. Hence the novella features in its penultimate episode the absurd, drunken exploits of Mr. In and Mr. Out, described not as characters but as “vivid personalities” (68). As Warren Susman has argued, the shift in the twentieth century from a culture of character to a culture of personality brought new emphasis not on inherent moral values but on the affective power to gain status by moving others. May Day enacts this power binary as a structural problem of characterization in which a failure of depth and development, across the social scale, turns individuals into items of luxury or waste in a social system that seems increasingly arbitrary in its power to determine the stark alternatives of wealth or poverty. In this turn from class to power, May Day gestures toward a postmodernist politics in which the forms of mediation come to supplant social substance altogether. In 1965, Thomas Pynchon published “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” in the New York Times Magazine – a look at the smoldering unrest in the largely black Los Angeles neighborhood, following the full-scale riots of the previous year. The essay is a barometer of changing conceptions of class in the 1950s and 1960s, marking a growing recognition of a racialized, largely black “underclass” that suffers in special ways from what the sociologist William Julius Wilson would call “social isolation”: structural forces segregating and impoverishing a black lower class. Pynchon’s essay points to the growing racialization of class dynamics, while marking the new importance of mass media to the understanding of social inequality. Of course, the question of mediation was nothing new: the language used to describe lower social classes, and the methods used to access them, have always had a profound impact on how the poor are judged. But for Pynchon, this question of mediation is now of primary importance because the reality of whites, particularly in Los Angeles, has become a wholly mediated phenomenon. Reality has become a fantasy, existing merely on a TV screen. Questions of class thus become defined by access – access not to resources but to information and to knowledge – while communication becomes a primary motivating force in the perpetuation of inequality. Pynchon’s essay ends with an image of a Watts sculpture made in the Simon Rodia tradition: “In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna on top; inside where its picture tube should have been, gazing out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The name of the piece was ‘The Late, Late, Late Show’ ” (84). At once an image of the violence of poverty and an image of the centrality of media to this problem, Pynchon leaves us with a ray of hope in a world

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whose middle class has become a delusional void: an image of the vernacular recycling of waste into a kind of social critique. Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 grows from this mid-1960s moment, though it expands the consideration of inequality away from the neighborhood of Watts toward what may be a global network of disinherited individuals, communicating through an underground postal service run by the Tristero, an organization whose “constant theme” was “disinheritance” (132). Like Blithedale, Crying treats the theme of class tangentially. Indeed, Oedipa never knows for sure whether there is a vast conspiracy, a power structure in place that keeps the wealthy rich and the poor dispossessed – a system that seeks to maintain hegemony by neutralizing any threat of dissent through media opiates and illusions of consumer choice. Echoing the position of Miles Coverdale, Oedipa may be facing a conspiracy or she may be simply projecting a paranoid fantasy by misinterpreting a series of coincidences. Oedipa is in an excluded middle logically – either conspiracy or paranoia – and also socially, occupying a space between the extremely wealthy and the disinherited she encounters on the edges of her world. If Oedipa can never track down the full legacy and business dealings of the wealthy Pierce Inverarity (Oedipa’s erstwhile lover, who dies leaving Oedipa to execute his will), then neither can she easily discover the poor or fix them as an object of study. The dispossessed are defined not by a lack of participation and integration in larger institutions, nor by their silence or inherent resistance to description. On the contrary, they may well be fully integrated into their own organized institution, though one to which Oedipa lacks access. The social problems of inequality in Pynchon’s novel look back to the disoriented social middles we have already encountered, though here the problems are not psychological, moral, or material as they were for Hawthorne, Howells, and Fitzgerald. Oedipa’s social position, in the excluded middle, gets defined not by her access to the means of production or consumption, and not even by her access to literacy, education, or cultural capital. Rather, she lacks access to the means of communication, to the particular media through which rich and poor may be relating to their own social strata. Oedipa becomes trapped not between different social classes, traditionally understood, but between different systems of communication in a world of pure mediation. If May Day resonates with the eugenic view of the poor as a form of social waste, then Crying ties this theme directly to the question of communication. The Tristero’s mail system is known as WASTE, of course, and it suggests the possibility that the system of liberal democracy has essentially failed in its promises of inclusion, and has hence necessitated the creation of an antibureaucratic communication system among the disinherited. This link between the structure of society and the system of information is centralized in the novel’s repeated references to the thought experiment known as Maxwell’s Demon – an experiment created by the Scots physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) in an effort to disprove theoretically the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the words of Stanley Koteks, the engineer whom Oedipa encounters around the middle of the novel:

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The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature between this hot region of the box and any cooler region, to drive a heat engine. Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion. (68)

The thought experiment combines two ideas of entropy. The first is thermodynamic: the tendency of systems to produce waste, which cannot be recycled to improve efficiency. The second idea of entropy is informational: the measure of uncertainty in a system. The thought experiment cannot work, Oedipa discovers later, because of all of the sorting that needs to happen – sorting that involves informational work and hence increases the total entropy of the system. Maxwell’s Demon thus poses a key question that gets to the heart of the novel’s tenuous grip on the social: what is the link between the structure of a system, which through its tendency to natural disorder produces waste, and the world of information, with its tendency toward incoherence or “noise,” that surrounds it? Is the link simply metaphorical? Is it just a coincidence that these two ideas of entropy happen to look alike? Or is there a more radical connection in which structural and systemic differences depend entirely on the communication of information? From a reading of “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” Pynchon’s answer to this last question would appear to be a resounding “yes.” Yet Pynchon’s novel resists reductive conclusions by suggesting but finally refusing to resolve this problem of connection. In so doing, Crying exposes greater problems of connection and a bigger disequilibrium, not least in the relationship between the novel’s discourse – its ironic, postmodernist technique – and the subject matter of its story. To a large extent, what remains convincing about this novel is the excluded middle with all its paranoia and anxiety. What comes to life is the media-saturated world of popular culture, the alienation amid fabricated images, and the discursive world of hypermediation. Less clear, however, is the world of the story: the events, or possible structure of events, which of course may not be a story at all but simply a paranoid fantasy. In this way, Pynchon’s novel shifts questions of representation away from the epistemological grounds exposed in Blithedale and Silas Lapham, which both return to the problem that a middle-class space cannot be known and depicted, unlike the opposed worlds of the wealthy and the poor. Like May Day, Crying is concerned with power, not knowledge, as society recedes altogether as a force determining the unequal positions of the novel’s characters. With postmodernist irony, Crying questions its own seriousness as an effort to represent the real. Hence it raises not epistemological but ontological questions about what literature is as a system of representation, and whether there is any “real” that is not constructed, or ultimately assimilable into an image. Crying raises this classic postmodernist question. Yet it is also curiously in sync with American literature of

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the excluded middle, effectively combining the concerns of the media age with a critique of late capitalism. For Pynchon, inequality becomes essentially informational, and gets structured into the narrative not as a destabilized narrative voice, a plot explosion, or a character implosion but as part of the discursive system itself – part of the nature of its relation to the real and to us as readers. Rather than a retreat from social politics, Pynchon finally fills the gap implied by the works of Hawthorne, Howells, and Fitzgerald. He gives us a narrative that mediates the incoherence of a middle class reeling in paranoid doubt from the shocking recognition that the United States has structured extreme social inequality into the primary ways that the world is seen, understood, and communicated.

References and Further Reading Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Burke, Martin J. The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Chopin, Kate. “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story.” In The Awakening and Selected Stories (pp. 274–80). New York: Penguin, 2003. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, 1900. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” In SelfReliance and Other Essays. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1993. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. May Day. In Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1996. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. London: J.M. Dent, 1993. Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986. Howells, William Dean. “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver.” In Impressions and Experiences. New York: Harper, 1909. Jones, Gavin. American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Levine, Robert S. Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Pynchon, Thomas. “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” New York Times Magazine, June 12, 1966, 34–35, 78, 80–82, 84. Rafter, Nicole Hahn. White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988. Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. London: J.M. Dent, 1995. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994. Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

7

Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease Kirsten Ostherr

For decades now, scholars and university administrators have described a “crisis in the humanities” (Harpham 21–36). Citing the increasing interconnections between the sciences and corporate investment as evidence of the comparative isolation of humanities disciplines from these fields, these critics often note that the major problem facing the humanities is their seeming lack of relevance to business, government, and the general public. While the causes and features of this crisis have been discussed extensively, and various solutions proposed, one field of humanities scholarship has been repeatedly identified as an exemplary exception to the perceived problem of relevance: the field of medical humanities. Just as the “applicability” of laboratory research findings to bedside medical care often justifies the investment of resources in bioengineering, the “applicability” of insights from medical humanities to a doctor’s bedside manner is frequently highlighted as evidence of the “real-world” impact of humanistic practices of critical inquiry, reflection, and sustained in-depth analysis of texts. As taught in many medical schools, undergraduate institutions, and hospitals, medical humanities is composed of a diverse array of practices designed to foster empathy, compassion, altruism, and caring in the doctor-patient relationship, often based in coursework on medicine and society, creative writing, and ethics case conferences.1 The faculty at one prominent program describe their work as follows: “Drawing on literature, religion, ethics, philosophy of medicine, film, history, social and cultural anthropology, and jurisprudence, humanities education is designed to foster habits of discourse on social and moral issues in medicine” (Montgomery et al. 958–9). The most commonly recurring practice within the field of medical humanities is training in “narrative medicine” (also called “narrative competence” or “narrative ethics”). The

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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methodologies employed in the practice of narrative medicine are those of literary study, and indeed, many of the prominent scholars in this field have PhDs in English and American literature (some have earned MDs as well). As a form of literary study that might cynically be seen as offering clear dividends to corporate systems of valuation (improving doctors’ communication skills improves patient satisfaction, which improves hospital profits), narrative medicine also seems to offer a powerful solution to the “crisis in the humanities,” or at least the crisis within the particular field of the humanities known as literary studies. However, much as the application of humanities methods to real-world medical problems might seem to provide a valuable sense of purpose to its practitioners and to the outside world, a related scholarly movement, called “biocultures” (or biocultural studies), has critiqued the production of knowledge within the medical humanities as serving the interests of biomedicine without fully analyzing its complicity in reproducing biomedical epistemologies. Like medical humanities, the field of biocultures is also engaged with the intersections of humanistic and scientific practice, but in the latter case, the scope of inquiry is not limited to clinical medicine, instead encompassing a wide array of practices that intermingle the biological and the cultural, such as research on race and the new genomics, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and stem cell research, nanotechnology, and neurobiology, to name just a few (Project Biocultures; BIOS). Although these projects may not seem obviously connected to literary study, the foundational critical reference for “bioculture” is the work on “biopower” by French theorist Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality and The Birth of Biopolitics), whose influence on American literary scholarship, especially that focused on gender and sexuality, has been extensive for the past several decades. Moreover, biocultures scholarship engages with a wide range of texts; for example, essays in a 2007 special issue of New Literary History on “Biocultures” deal with healing in classical literature, literary adaptation and evolutionary adaptation, a global health video series, representations of breastfeeding in mass media, policy documents, scholarly criticism, the rhetoric of medical racism, tropical medicine in eighteenth-century British travel literature, and the impact of Victorian literature on health policy of that era. This list of contents alone indicates the extent to which the biocultures paradigm expands our notion of the literary and the national to encompass nonfiction and visual texts that can tell us a great deal about the world outside of the university, as well as the world outside of the hospital. As two thriving movements in literary studies that directly engage the question of the relationship between humanities and the sciences, narrative medicine and the growing movement toward biocultures will form the focus of this chapter. After providing a critical genealogy of these terms emphasizing their engagement with the rhetoric of relevance, the chapter will then argue for a broader understanding of narrative textuality that includes the multiple, heterogeneous sites and media through which patients collectively produce meanings about their own health and disease. A central element of this methodology involves paying attention to the flow and transformation of meaning as medical images and texts move through the seemingly

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different interpretive frameworks of science and popular culture. Emphasizing this flow across boundaries of genre, production, and consumption also entails a challenge to notions of spatial boundaries. While bioculture works differently in different geopolitical contexts, it is defined through operations of power that undermine the concept of national specificity in favor of transnational movements of bodies, technologies, and media. The transnational qualities of biomedicine shape the practices of doctors who train outside their nation of origin, the pharmaceutical industry that tests drugs in strategically selected national markets for use in other markets, the bodies of patients engaged in medical tourism, and so forth. Biotextuality thus challenges – and provides new opportunities for – American literary studies by questioning the significance of national borders, and noting the often contradictory ways that these borders signify as sites of bodily surveillance and regulation even as they become increasingly porous at the level of culture. This chapter will thus expand our conception of textuality to include the ways that medical images shape patients’ subjectivity both in conjunction with and in opposition to the meanings generated by national literary histories.

From Narrative Medicine to Biocultures The field of literature and medicine has been taught in US medical schools since 1972, and was founded by scholars including Joanne Trautmann Banks, Julia Connelly, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Anne Hudson Jones, Martha Montello, and Suzanne Poirier, but Rita Charon has arguably done more to establish and advocate for the field than any other scholar. (Interestingly, although some English departments have taught courses in literature and medicine since the mid-1990s, the practice of narrative medicine is still almost exclusively taught within medical schools, not literature departments.) Charon began teaching at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1982, and while teaching in the medical school, she completed an MA in English in 1990 and a PhD in 1999 (National Library of Medicine). Charon first published in the as-yet-unnamed field of narrative medicine in 1989, and founded the Program in Humanities and Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University in 1996 (Program in Narrative Medicine). In 2000, the program was renamed the Program in Narrative Medicine. After more than a decade of publishing articles and teaching on narrative competence to medical students and clinical practitioners, Charon published the groundbreaking Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness in 2006. The book is widely seen as the definitive articulation of the methodologies of narrative medicine, including the practice Charon developed early in her career called the “parallel chart,” in which medical students and other clinicians narrate their own experiences of caring for the patients they see every day (Charon, Narrative Medicine 156). In the fall of 2009, the program launched a master of science degree program in narrative medicine, the first graduate program of its kind, to much acclaim and publicity.2

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In the preface to Narrative Medicine (2006), Charon argues for the relevance of the new methodology she describes: What this field brings to both clinical practice and narrative theory seem to be exactly what each field needs. . . . My hypothesis in this work is that what medicine lacks today – in singularity, humility, accountability, empathy – can, in part, be provided through intensive narrative training. Literary studies and narrative theory, on the other hand, seek practical ways to transduce their conceptual knowledge into palpable influence in the world, and a connection with health care can do that. (vii)

Later in the book, Charon elaborates on the common features of medical and narrative practice, arguing that both are suffused with attention to life’s temporal horizons, with the commitment to describe the singular, with the urge to uncover plot (even though much of what occurs in its realm is, sadly, random and plotless), and with an awareness of the intersubjective and ethical nature of healing. (Charon, Narrative Medicine 39)

Thoroughly versed in literary theory, Charon presents a compelling translation of the insights of autobiographical theory, French critical theory of the 1960s, life writing in identity movements, and postmodernist theories of subjectivity as they relate to parallel developments in medical research (Charon, Narrative Medicine 65–83). In so doing, Charon provides a clear articulation of the precise, highly skilled practices that constitute literary analysis, and by reframing these techniques for medical, rather than literary, readers, Charon invests acts that might be taken for granted by their own practitioners with a clear use-value. Citing and building upon the work of Charon and others in the field of narrative medicine, the Program in Medical Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Irvine, describes its mission: [T]o achieve the following objectives embodied in the concept of narrative competence: stimulate skills of close observation and careful interpretation of patients’ language and behavior; develop imagination and curiosity about patients’ experiences; enhance empathy for patients’ and family members’ perspectives; encourage relationship and emotional connection with patients; emphasize a whole-person understanding of patients; and promote reflection on experience and its meaning. (Shapiro and Rucker 954)

This program and many others across the United States and around the world have founded their practice of medical humanism on the techniques of narrative analysis, offering a unique example of the “applicability” of literary study to real-world, “life and death” issues.3 The institutionalization of these practices within traditional sites of medical education bolsters the relevance of graduate study in English and American

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literature, even while this location within the formative training structures of biomedicine opens the field to criticism from the perspective of biocultures. Following a roughly contemporaneous timeline, but less clearly defined and less institutionalized throughout its history, biocultures has achieved an increasingly distinct identity in the past decade, in part through academic initiatives such as Project Biocultures. Based at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Project Biocultures was founded in 2003 by Lennard Davis, a professor with joint appointments in English and Disability and Human Development, and continues under Davis’s direction today. The interdisciplinary project defines its stakeholders broadly to include the medical sciences, social sciences, area studies, cultural studies, biotechnology, disability studies, humanities, and economic and global environment (Project Biocultures). Davis defines “biocultures” as the activity and consolidation of ideas created when the human intersects with the technological. Along these lines, one can see the biosphere – the earth as it is affected by the human – as the adaptation of the natural to the human and biocultures as the inter-adaptation of the human to the new technologies and ways of knowing characterized by the 21st century’s attitude toward the body. (Project Biocultures)

In 2007 Lennard Davis and David Morris published a “Biocultures Manifesto” as part of a special issue of the journal New Literary History on “Biocultures” (described above). The authors argue that “culture and history must be rethought with an understanding of their inextricable, if highly variable, relation to biology,” and it is this phenomenon of inextricability that they term “biocultures” (Davis and Morris 411). Though written in the manifesto form of a call to action, the authors acknowledge that, in fact, scholars in a wide range of disciplines have been working on “biocultures” for decades, at least since C.P. Snow famously described the growing divide between the sciences and the humanities in his 1959 essay “The Two Cultures.” However, Davis and Morris note that much of this work has transpired without a recognized umbrella term or institutional home (such as narrative medicine or medical humanities) to link diverse research in interdisciplinary fields such as public health, disability studies, African American literary and cultural studies, queer studies, and others. As a result, scholars in these fields have often developed their own methodologies for bridging the cultural and the biological, often isolated from scholarship in other disciplines that also aims to highlight the relevance of crossdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. Thus, the “Biocultures Manifesto” argues for a new methodology, noting, In the end, all branches of knowledge interpret. . . . Biocultures argues for a community of interpreters, across disciplines, willing to learn from each other. . . . What we need now is a way that students in the humanities can learn how to do experiments and that students in science can learn about philosophy and theory. (Davis and Morris 416)

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One answer to this call for action might be the practice of training medical scientists in literary study, as the field of narrative medicine advocates; another might be the practice of training literary historians in the fields of life sciences. Following on these lines of argument, Bradley Lewis, MD, PhD, an affiliated member of Project Biocultures and editorial board member of The Journal of Medical Humanities, presented an invited lecture at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Spring 2009 meeting that was specifically solicited as a “Provocation” on the question of the relevance of medical humanities to “patient care and clinical practice” (Lewis 9). Embracing the opportunity to provoke, Lewis argued that “the crisis in healthcare is the mirror image of the crisis in humanities.” Lewis continues, The humanities, in short, have become increasingly worthless to the culture at large. For humanities to gain value again, they have to contribute directly to solving problems people care about – like helping the culture move beyond its current crisis in meaning regarding living and dying (previously known as the healthcare crisis). (Lewis 10)

Despite the hyperbolic tone of his critique of both the humanities and “biomedical reductionism run amuck and out of balance,” Lewis pushes for a shift from the institutionalized practice of medical humanities to biocultures as a way of rethinking the importance attached to different types of knowledge production. Significantly, Lewis emphasizes the need for more attention to epistemologies through close reading of biomedical truth claims – a practice of literary analysis: “we can’t consider facts without also considering the value context in which those facts come into being” (Lewis 10). In other words, humanities scholarship produced within the normative framework of medical research cannot fully analyze the structures of power that shape what counts as scientific evidence while simultaneously attempting to satisfy the same evidentiary criteria. Instead, Lewis argues, new methodologies from outside the standard practice of medicine must be employed to reshape our analysis of the healthcare crisis, just as the insights of medical research into human subjectivity must be embraced to reshape the research program of the humanities. Lewis concludes succinctly, “The humanities cannot save itself without also saving medicine. Medicine cannot save itself without also saving humanities” (10). On the basis of these three interventions into the “crisis in the humanities,” we can see that, despite their varied approaches, Charon, Davis, and Lewis all identify interdisciplinary methodologies that bridge the humanities and the sciences as the essential solutions to the problem of relevance. For the second half of this chapter, I will discuss the implications of these proposals for our understanding of the future of medicine within American literary studies as it encompasses image-based narratives that circulate both within and beyond the boundaries of the United States. As Nicholas Rose, director of BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics, has cogently argued, the field of biomedicine functions through parallel operations in the developed world, which enjoys maximum access to the latest innovations in

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biotechnology, and the less developed world, which is often the ground on which new developments are pioneered, but which enjoys almost none of the expensive benefits of this research (Rose 5–6). However, despite this imbalance, Rose demonstrates, The two universes are, in fact, linked by multiple circuits of collaboration, exchange and, of exploitation. . . . Circuits of tissues (the global trade in organs), of research (researchers collecting DNA from populations in isolated regions in the search for the genomic basis of diseases), of scientists and knowledge themselves (biomedical science being a truly global activity). And, of course, they are linked by the ways in which pharmaceuticals are licensed and exported from the developed to the less developed world. (14–15)

As the underlying principles upon which the contemporary practice of biomedicine depends, these points of intersection remind us of the complex global networks of power that subtend the production of medical narratives and images within the United States. Moreover, the sheer prevalence of immigrants within American hospitals – as medical specialists, technicians, and patients – underscores the extent to which we must consider the boundaries defining the American literary experience of biomedicine to be continually open to global intervention.

Medicine’s Visual Culture Despite its many advantages, a key limitation in the methods of narrative medicine is the narrow emphasis on written texts. While close attention to the multilayered meanings of words and stories is essential to the practice of narrative competence, the exclusion of visual images limits our ability to interpret the significance of medical imaging as well as medicine’s broader visual culture. The examples offered by Stanley Reiser’s recent book, Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients (2009), offer compelling evidence for the importance of understanding the role of medical images in our understanding of health and disease. Reiser critiques how technologies interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, and consequently interfere with the practice of narrative medicine. In his foundational example, Reiser demonstrates how the invention of the stethoscope began to shift the practice of medicine away from patient narratives (the domain of literary study) and toward instrumentbased evidence. As Reiser explains, “Before stethoscopes, the coin of evaluation was words – the doctor learned about an illness from the patient’s story of the events and sensations marking its passage” (1). The stethoscope “reformulated the relationship between doctors and patients, through the use of an instrument that took the mantle of illness out of the hands of patients and placed it in the doctor’s orbit” (Reiser 7–8). In addition to this example, Reiser also considers the X-ray, ultrasound, and a range of other medical technologies, most of which function as diagnostic imaging devices. The ultimate objective of Reiser’s analysis, “to harmonize the technological with the

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social and humanistic spheres of medicine” (Reiser 201), suggests an implicit affinity with biocultures, highlighting how changes in the practice of medicine itself require an expanded notion of textuality that moves out from the patient’s words to incorporate intervening tools of signification, such as the stethoscope. By opening up the domain of inquiry to encompass both written and visual texts, biocultures offers a fuller, more interdisciplinary engagement with the contemporary global field of biomedicine, without sacrificing the nuanced interpretive strategies of close textual analysis gained through literary study. However, neither narrative medicine nor biocultures highlights the privileged status of visuality in the contemporary practice of medicine, and, as Reiser’s work suggests, without this focus the humanist intervention into scientific medicine lacks a fundamental, historically specific analytical perspective. Thus far, we have attended to the contributions of narrative medicine and biocultures in shifting our thinking about the meanings of textuality and national borders, and our methods for analyzing biomedicine. I now want to argue for the importance of attending to the cultural life of medical images outside of the clinical setting, and their function in shaping doctors’ and patients’ ideas about health and disease. Although it is essential to understand how a specific medical image, such as an echocardiogram, shapes a specific patient’s and a specific doctor’s ideas about the health of a specific heart, my analysis will not end there. Rather, I propose assessment of the broader impact of a wide range of medical images – both clinical and fictional – that we encounter in our daily lives, often without even noticing them. In other words, we must understand the many different visual images of health and disease that patients may take in – both intentionally and unwittingly – which may in turn shape their medical decisions, both consciously and unconsciously. In the course of considering this vast array of images, it is also important to note that the specific types of medical imaging one encounters in daily life will vary widely, and, outside of the clinical setting, these renderings are rarely identified as specific types of imaging (computed tomography [CT], magnetic resonance imaging [MRI], etc.) with specific indications or specific functions. Our attention to the specificity of medical images in this section will allow us to reframe the status of literary study by considering how image-based narratives about health and disease require the methods of both visual culture and literature to engage the full range of biocultural signification at work in these texts. As a method for engaging the images within and beyond the clinic, “medical visual culture” will serve to name the analytical framework for considering how images that are produced in one realm are often consumed in another, wholly different realm that might radically transform their meaning. Adapting the work of Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2009), this section will discuss the conceptual significance of the mobility of medical visual culture in our contemporary image-saturated, digitally connected society, where the boundaries that have historically divided expert production of medical visualizations from lay consumption of those images have become quite permeable. The first point

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to note about medical visual culture is that the term encompasses both production and consumption. In the past two decades, visual art has become a central aspect of medical center design, and many hospitals now host evidence-based programs that help patients produce artworks as part of their healing process (Ulrich 1779–81). At the same time, many visual artists working in studios find the body to be a rich source of imagery, and both sets of art objects are then consumed by patients, physicians, and the general public (most of whom become patients at some point in their lives) in a diversity of settings. For example, curators brought together artists from the Orange County, California, Center for Contemporary Art with imaging specialists from the Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, California, to produce an art show called The Art of Imaging in February 2009, and the exhibit included artworks that manipulated X-rays and CT scans to produce complex images that foregrounded the aesthetic qualities that are inherent in all visual representations but often suppressed within the clinical setting. The second key point is that the term “visual culture” is heterogeneous, meaning it encompasses a wide range of media, including what have historically been termed “high art,” such as the famous Thomas Eakins painting The Agnew Clinic (1889), as well as “low art,” such as pharmaceutical advertisements or episodes of the contemporary television series Grey’s Anatomy. In addition to images whose content is medical, such as the Eakins painting, medicine’s visual culture also includes artworks whose aesthetics are inspired by medical technologies of visualization, whether directly or indirectly. For example, art historians have noted the creative inspiration that Surrealists, Cubists, and other avant-garde artists have gained from X-ray imaging since the late nineteenth century; many have identified Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) as an exemplary artwork influenced by the visual perception of bodily fragmentation produced through X-ray imaging. Indeed, the history of art is full of such examples, continuing in the present not only through art exhibits such as The Art of Imaging (described above) but also through artists such as Eduardo Kac, who uses biological experiments as the process for generating his artworks, producing what he calls “transgenic art” or “bio art” (Kac xi). Kac famously created Alba, the “Green Fluorescent Bunny,” in 2000, through a synthetic mutation of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in certain jellyfish (Kac 266). A final example of recent art that blends scientific and artistic forms of visualization is the Visible Human Project at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is publicized on the NLM website through an image that blends the sixteenth-century anatomical illustrations of Vesalius with the 3D computerized anatomy enabled through this project, emphasizing through the pixellation of the figure’s forearm the essential role played by digital computing in this quantum leap forward in medical imaging. Thus, we can see that an important feature of medicine’s visual culture is that it includes images that are typically taken seriously, such as paintings by celebrated American artists, and images that are typically dismissed as part of the detritus of commercial popular culture. Moreover, medicine’s visual culture also includes scientific images, such as photographs of cell cultures, as well as anatomical specimens,

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such as those collected in the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The final, and perhaps most important, point to note in this brief overview of medical visual culture is that, although the term refers to a vast collection of material objects, it is a fluid, constantly evolving field of representation whose meaning changes over time and in different contexts. Advertisements from the 1940s–1950s that use physicians to promote cigarettes are a clear example of this contextual fluidity of meaning.4 This point highlights the methodological necessity of blending analysis of images and text in relation to their medical and cultural contexts to understand how specific meanings are generated for specific audiences at a specific moment in time. One of the fundamental tenets of the “visual culture” approach to medicine is that the very process of representing the human body, whether literary, clinical, or artistic, and whether based on biology or more abstract philosophical concepts, shapes our understanding of that body, including our perceptions of what is normal and what is pathological, and what is health and what is disease. This concept can be clearly seen in the cultural circulation of medical imaging, and the remainder of this chapter will address the question of how technologies of medical visualization and image-based narratives have shaped the ways that doctors and patients see bodies, health, and disease. From the early anatomical illustrations of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543) to the mid-nineteenth-century publication of Gray’s Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical Theory (1858), the development of improved techniques of medical visualization has often been driven by a combined need for educational and diagnostic tools. All of the now familiar technologies from the X-ray through ultrasound, MRI, positron emission tomography (PET), CT scans, and functional MRI (fMRI) have profoundly altered the way physicians practice medicine, and have resulted in major advances in the ability to diagnose and treat disease. They have also generated a great deal of public interest, as evidenced by the multitude of exhibits on medical imaging at museums of science and by their coverage in the popular press. Indeed, the public and professional interest in expanding the capabilities of medical imaging, especially as a means toward minimally invasive medicine, means that new devices sometimes drive medical practice before their benefits have been proven (Kolata). We might thus question the cultural significance of medical imaging by asking how modes of perception and representation move between medical science, art, and popular culture. We might further ask how we perceive the boundaries between scientific and artistic techniques of visualization. Images produced in a clinical setting are usually treated as carrying objective, scientific data, while art objects are usually understood as providing subjective, aesthetic experiences. And yet the very appearance of medical imaging outside of the clinic makes it difficult to define clear boundaries between objective and subjective, science and art, and data and experience, even when the observational setting provides strong interpretive cues (after all, one experiences an X-ray differently in a hospital than one does in an art gallery, even if the same technology is involved in producing the images).

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One familiar example of imaging taking on extraclinical meanings comes from the fetal sonogram, which has transcended its purely clinical application to become a tool in political debates about abortion, as well as an emotional image often designated as the baby’s “first portrait” (Sturken and Cartwright 366; Taylor). These imaging technologies, like all forms of representation, have a cultural life of their own that exceeds their clinical application even as it shapes patients’ expectations of the clinical encounter. The prevalence of medical imaging as a backdrop in medical dramas and sitcoms on television underscores the popular function of these images as vague but nonetheless powerful evidence of state-of-the-art, high-tech medical practice. These representations promote medical imaging as a diagnostic cure-all that functions narratively to ensure that any medical condition, no matter how rare, can be identified through imaging, and, consequently, within the medical resourcerich world of television, a cure will be effected. Here we begin to see how imagebased narratives shape the production of biocultures through a blend of scientific and popular representations. Popular medical series, forensic dramas, nearly all of the programs on the Discovery Health channel, as well as programs and advertisements that are not directly about medicine all regularly display medical imaging – often as an incidental but nonetheless central element of what media scholars call the show’s mise-en-scène (that is, the lighting, staging, sets, and props). Medical imaging now functions not only as a signifier of the best (equated to highest technology) medical care but also as evidence of an objectively accurate diagnosis that leads clearly and automatically to a cure. Following this logic, another example of how visual images and narratives shape both public response and clinical uses of a medium comes from the popular reception of early scientific findings based on fMRI brain scans. Studies have claimed to identify the neural locations of truth and lies, object recognition, romantic love, partisan politics, and gender differences in emotion regulation, to name a few (Greenemeier; Grill-Spector; Fisher et al.; Knutson et al.; McRae et al.). Such images have been widely critiqued by neuroscientists, but they have also gained enormous traction in the mass media and among the general public. Early findings based on fMRI have claimed to demonstrate how subjects perceive and interpret visual and auditory information, suggesting the potential for this medium to transform humanistic understanding of how we interpret images, narratives, and sounds. While such studies are frequently cited in the mass media for this very potential, the humanistic implications of these studies tend to be connected somewhat loosely to the more technical, biomedical aspects of the experiment, which locate where and when cerebral blood oxygenation occurs under specific circumstances. One key act of interpretation thus occurs in the translation of the researchers’ findings as they are communicated through mass media, in both nonfiction medical journalism and fictional depictions of fMRI on popular television programs. Returning to the question of bridging the humanities and the sciences, we might approach these image-based narratives differently, by asking how we know that these nonclinical representations of medical imaging have an effect on their viewers. The

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scholarly study of media effects has existed since the 1930s, producing a wealth of data – often contradictory – about the impact of print media such as journalism, as well as radio, television, advertisements, motion pictures, and so forth, on their viewers’ thoughts and behaviors. A brief review of some recent studies can illuminate the state of the field today, especially concerning medical media. Not surprisingly, the field of medicine that receives the most attention in this realm is public health communication, as it is primarily concerned with media campaigns to change unhealthy population behaviors to healthy ones. This practice focuses on explicit messages and their effectiveness in producing desired outcomes, and for the most part it is not concerned with the impact of background information on viewers’ perceptions.5 Consequently, no studies have been conducted on the significance of the ubiquitous depiction of medical-imaging technologies in mass media ranging from advertisements for hospitals, pharmaceuticals, mouthwash, cosmetics, and other products to television dramas and sitcoms, motion pictures, print journalism, and, of course, the Internet. Nonetheless, a number of studies have drawn relevant conclusions about depictions of health and medicine in the mass media. One major recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg Hollywood, Health & Society program called “How Healthy Is Prime Time?” confirmed previous studies’ findings that “[f]or many Americans television provides an important, often primary, source of health information” (Kaiser Family Foundation, How Healthy 1). The study elaborates, “Regardless of whether the inclusion of a specific health issue was intentional or unintentional, the health content in entertainment television has the potential to influence the public’s knowledge, attitudes, and behavior – for good or for bad” (Kaiser Family Foundation, How Healthy 1). Two major factors in television’s powerful influence, the study argues, are its enormous reach – the sheer size of the primetime audience on the major networks (even with competition from cable and the Internet) – and its ability to tell stories through familiar, appealing characters who reach viewers more effectively than public service announcements by experts do, even when they are fictional characters (Kaiser Family Foundation, How Healthy 1–2). Although narrative theory only plays an implicit role in this study, such claims clearly depend on the techniques of both visual and literary studies to explain the power of these fictional image-based narratives. Another major factor in television’s influence on viewers’ perceptions of health and disease is the sheer number of top-rated programs that focus on issues of medicine and/or forensic pathology. In these programs, the study finds that “unusual illnesses or diseases appeared more than four times as often as heart disease, five times as often as cancer, and more than 20 times as often as diabetes” (Kaiser Family Foundation, How Healthy 6). This finding also confirms previous studies that have argued that medical television focuses on acute and rare health conditions at the expense of the chronic and common diseases that afflict the largest number of viewers, thus presenting a distorted view of disease prevalence and missing an opportunity to educate viewers on issues directly relevant to their own health.

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A feature of these representations that is not discussed in this study but that I have identified through my own research is the role of medical imaging in enhancing the dramatic potential of storylines featuring rare conditions. In these programs, diagnosis is essential to the production of narrative closure, which, in turn, is essential to a satisfying viewing experience. Medical imaging functions in these shows as an anchor to the real; when a diagnosis is in question, the automatic line of dialogue is “Let’s run an MRI,” and this is equally true in fictional and nonfictional depictions of hospital encounters. Thus, popular understanding and acceptance of new medical-imaging techniques and procedures rely heavily upon a blend of images and narratives that is neither wholly fact nor fiction. Given the inextricability of the visual, the literary, and the larger institutional contexts (medicine and popular entertainment) in which they appear, this example again demonstrates the necessity of blending narrative medicine and biocultures to engage the full spectrum of discourses engaged in shaping our understandings of health and disease. The importance of medical imaging for popular understandings of health care is not a new phenomenon; indeed, imaging technologies have defined high-tech, scientific medicine since the discovery of the X-ray, and this linkage has intensified over the course of the twentieth century. In this context, diagnosis and cure have become inextricably linked to imaging – patients have come to expect that if pathology can be represented, it can be cured. Hospitals themselves use this popular association in their print and television advertising, often showcasing the latest high-tech devices without explaining their purpose. Importantly, pain and the suffering body are completely erased from these fragmented images, though the patient’s experience is precisely what narrative medicine can make available. From the beginnings of television in the 1950s to today, medical ads and programs on TV have shaped viewers’ understandings of the body, health, and disease as well as their expectation that clinical encounters proceed according to a clear narrative from health to disease and back to health, and with a beginning, middle, and end; a dramatic climax; a clear chain of causality; and strong closure. Medical storylines were a steady feature of television programming from its earliest days in both dramatic and educational formats, health care manufacturers sponsored TV programs, and television stars became their spokespeople. These storylines and the iconography they made famous did not solely serve the purpose of entertainment, however. Numerous studies have demonstrated the impact of pharmaceutical advertisements and other marketing tactics on physicians’ prescribing practices, even when the scientific literature contradicted the advertisements’ claims (Avorn et al.; Angell). Other recent studies have proven the effectiveness of breast cancer storylines on Grey’s Anatomy and ER, the impact of an HIV education storyline of Grey’s Anatomy, the neglect of health policy issues on televised medical dramas, the impact of AIDSrelated episodes of the soap operas The Bold and the Beautiful and General Hospital, the effects of an ER storyline about teen obesity and hypertension, and the impact of condom efficacy information in an episode of the sitcom Friends, to name a few (Hether et al; Kaiser Family Foundation, Television; Kaiser Family Foundation, As Seen; Kennedy et al.; Valente et al.; Collins et al.). Meanwhile, hospitals have long produced videos

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for patient education, and many are now actively courting new patients by streaming live surgery footage to their websites, which is then available for later viewing by prospective patients and other surgical voyeurs on YouTube, the hospital’s Facebook page, and countless other websites.6

Conclusion In light of the consensus amongst many social scientists, physicians, cultural critics, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital administrators that medical images and narratives ranging from clinical texts to popular fictions exert a powerful influence on their viewers (whether they are patients or doctors), it is easy to understand how scholarship in this field might seem to solve the purported crisis in the humanities. But an interesting twist on the claims of relevance to “real-world” biomedicine by both narrative medicine and biocultures is the recent publication of research on the role of humanities education in undergraduate premedical and medical education. While support for humanities-based methods of analysis is widespread, and medical humanities courses are now on the curriculum of almost every medical school in the United States, the emphasis on textual specificity – of both words and images – makes these approaches resistant to quantifiable outcomes measures. In our era of “evidencebased medicine,” some researchers have recently argued that it is necessary to prove the long-term benefit of practices such as narrative medicine to justify their place in medical school and residency training (Ousager and Johannessen). In response, medical humanists (led by literary scholars) have argued, The humanities resist the homogenization of social science metrics, for our focus is on the specific and particular, exactly those aspects of human texts that resist reduction. We value fine distinctions, even at the risk of defaulting to an n value of 1. This is precisely why the humanities are so valuable to medicine, for we offer a counterpart to the necessary reductions of the natural sciences. (Belling 940)

We can see from this recent exchange that the debate about hierarchical systems of knowledge production and the relative status of the humanities and the sciences will not be settled any time soon. However, from the point of view of American literary studies, the ongoing discussion of the relevance of broadly defined, multimedia textual analysis to the multidisciplinary fields of biomedicine affirms the value of adapting the reading and writing practices of advanced literary scholarship to the problems of the “real world.” It seems that the scientists are listening. Notes 1.

These examples are drawn from the curricula at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, the New York University School

of Medicine, and the Program in Medical Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Irvine, College of Medicine.

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2.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/ education/edlife/03narrative.html. Although Columbia’s program in narrative medicine is unique, several other important graduate programs in medical humanities, which include training in narrative medicine, preceded its establishment. The oldest PhD program in medical humanities is at the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, which was founded in 1988; see http://www.utmb.edu/imh/ GraduateProgram/gp.asp?show=Rationale. 3. For a thorough review of existing medical humanities programs circa 2003, see Academic Medicine vol. 78, no. 10 (October 2003), which includes both lengthy and abbreviated descriptions and analyses of 13 programs in the United States as well as nine international programs. For an updated list of medical humanities programs around the world, see http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/directory.html. 4. The irony of these advertisements has recently been highlighted on the AMC television series Mad Men, which features a storyline about a tobacco ad campaign that discusses the use of physicians to promote cigarettes. For an excellent selection of historical advertisements and

essays on related topics, see “Medicine and Madison Avenue,” http://library.duke.edu/ digitalcollections/mma/. 5. An exception is the field of public health that analyzes the incidental appearance of cigarettes or alcohol in movies or television programs, such as the “Smoke Free Movies” project at the Center for Tobacco Control, Research and Education in the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), School of Medicine; see http://www.smokefreemovies. ucsf.edu/index.html. 6. The practice of live-streaming surgical video was pioneered by Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 2009, when it webcast an awake craniotomy procedure. For the video, see http://www. orlive.com/methodisthealth/videos/awake craniotomy?cmpid=active_redirect. For discussion of this practice in the New York Times, see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/ health/25hospital.html?scp = 2 & sq = awake %20craniotomy&st=cse. For an insightful and data-rich blog on hospital and socialnetworking media by a hospital information technology (IT) administrator, see http:// ebennett.org.

References and Further Reading Angell, Marcia. The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It. New York: Random House, 2005. Avorn, J., M. Chen, and R. Hartley. “Scientific versus Commercial Sources of Influence on the Prescribing Behavior of Physicians.” American Journal of Medicine 73 (1982): 4–8. Belling, Catherine. “Sharper Instruments: On Defending the Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education.” Academic Medicine 85, no. 6 (2010): 938–40. BIOS. “About BIOS.” London School of Economics. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/About_ BIOS.htm Charon, Rita. “Doctor-Patient/Reader-Writer: Learning to Find the Text.” Soundings 72 (1989): 137–52.

Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Charon, R., J. T. Banks, J. E. Connelly, A. H. Hawkins, K. M. Hunter, A. H. Jones, et al. “Literature and Medicine: Contributions to Clinical Practice.” Annals of Internal Medicine 122, no. 8 (1995): 599–606. Collins, Rebecca L., Marc N. Elliott, Sandra H. Berry, David E. Kanouse, and Sarah B. Hunter. “Entertainment Television as a Healthy Sex Educator: The Impact of Condom-Efficacy Information in an Episode of Friends.” Pediatrics 112 (2003): 1115–21. Davis, Lennard J., and David B. Morris, eds. “Biocultures Manifesto.” New Literary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 411–18.

Narrative Medicine and Biocultures Fisher, H., A. Aron, and L. L. Brown. “Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice.” Journal of Comprehensive Neurology 493, no. 1 (2005): 58–62. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979. New York: Picador, 2010. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1990. Greenemeier, Larry, “Are You a Liar? Ask Your Brain.” Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lie-brain-fmripolygraph Grill-Spector, Kalanit. “What Has fMRI Taught Us about Object Recognition?” In Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives (pp. 102–28). Eds. Sven Dickinson, Aleš Leonardis, Bernt Schiele, and Michael J. Tarr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Beneath and beyond the ‘Crisis in the Humanities.’ ” New Literary History 36, no. 1 (2005): 21–36. Hether, Heather J., Grace Huang, Vicki Beck, Sheila Murphy, and Thomas Valente. “Entertainment-Education in a Media-Saturated Environment: Examining the Impact of Single and Multiple Exposures to Breast Cancer Storylines on Two Popular Medical Dramas.” Journal of Health Communication 13 (2008): 808–23. Kac, Eduardo. Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Kaiser Family Foundation. As Seen on TV: Health Policy Issues in TV’s Medical Dramas. Menlo Park: CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2002. Kaiser Family Foundation. How Healthy Is Prime Time? An Analysis of Health Content in Popular Prime Time Television Programs. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2008. Kaiser Family Foundation. Television as a Health Educator: A Case Study of Grey’s Anatomy. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2008. Kennedy, May G., A. O’ Leary, V. Beck, K. Pollard, and P. Simpson. “Increases in Calls to the CDC National STD and AIDS Hotline following AIDS-Related Episodes in a Soap Opera.” Journal of Communication (2004): 287–301.

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Knutson, Kristine M., Jacqueline N. Wood, Maria V. Spampinato, and Jordan Grafman. “Politics on the Brain: An fMRI Investigation.” Society of Neuroscientists 1, no. 1 (March): 25–40. Kolata, Gina. “Results Unproven, Robotic Surgery Wins Converts.” New York Times, February 14, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/ health/14robot.html Lewis, Bradley. “Provocation: Call This a Medical Humanities? From Medical Humanities to Biocultures.” Atrium 7 (2009): 9–10. McRae, Kateri, Kevin N. Ochsner, Iris B. Mauss, John J. D. Gabrieli, and James J. Gross. “Gender Differences in Emotion Regulation: An fMRI Study of Cognitive Reappraisal,” Group Processes Intergroup Relations 11, no. 2 (2008): 143–62. Montgomery, Kathryn, Tod Chambers, and Douglas Reifler. “Humanities Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.” Academic Medicine 78, no. 10 (2003): 958–62. National Library of Medicine. “Changing the Face of Medicine Biography: Dr. Rita Charon.” http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_58.html Ousager, Jakob, and Helle Johannessen. “Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education: A Literature Review.” Academic Medicine 85, no. 6 (2010): 988–98. Program in Narrative Medicine. “About Us.” College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. http://www.narrativemedicine.org/ about/about.html Project Biocultures. “Rationale.” University of Illinois, Chicago. http://www.biocultures.org/ index2.php?page=rationale Reiser, Stanley. Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rose, Nicholas. “Will Biomedicine Transform Society? The Political, Economic, Social and Personal Impact of Medical Advances in the Twenty First Century.” BIOS Working Paper no. 1. London: BIOS/LSE, 2008. Shapiro, Joanna, and Lloyd Rucker. “Can Poetry Make Better Doctors? Teaching the Humanities and Arts to Medical Students and Residents at the University of California, Irvine, College of Medicine.” Academic Medicine 78, no. 10 (2003): 953–7.

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Snow, C.P. “The Two Cultures.” 1959. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (pp. 1–22). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Taylor, Janelle S. The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

Ulrich, Roger. “The Arts of Healing,” Journal of the American Medical Association 281, no. 19 (May 19, 1999): 1779–81. Valente, Thomas W., S. Murphy, G. Huang, J. Gusek, J. Greene, and V. Beck. “Evaluating a Minor Storyline on ER about Teen Obesity, Hypertension, and 5 a Day.” Journal of Health Communication 12 (2007): 551–66.

8

Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies Catherine Gunther Kodat

For a long time now, the dalliances in American literary studies with subjects not obviously literary have involved deciding which, not whether. The intellectual or political formations understood as enabling such liaisons today – interdisciplinarity, for instance, or transnationalism – might lead us to see this itch to roam as a fairly recent phenomenon. But in fact the peripatetic tendencies of American literary scholars are part of the story of the emergence of literary studies as such in the United States, as the career of Francis James Child (1825–96) illustrates. First to be called professor of English at Harvard University, Child conducted research on Chaucer and Spenser, but he is probably best known today for his work as a folklorist and ballad collector and for his service as founding member and two-term president of the American Folklore Society. When we consider how Child’s extraliterary work was continued and expanded by his Harvard successor, the Chaucerian George Lyman Kittredge (1860–1941) – an expansion that included mentoring the legendary American folklorist John A. Lomax – we might be tempted to propose that professors of English in (and of) the United States are best understood not as donnish guardians of the canon but rather as academic sodbusters, out to stake a claim for the literary cultivation of every neighboring field. To be sure, this reading of the role that extra- or a-literary studies have played in the growth of the American department of English literature is a bit of a back formation: Child’s and Kittredge’s seeming divagations are in large part a function of their training in academic subjects (philology, rhetoric, oratory) that – before their migration or exile into new departmental homes (anthropology, theatre, communication) – were considered native to the land of literature. On the one hand, acknowledging

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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this back formation does the reassuring service of reminding us that literary study in the United States is a historical construct: objects and methods of analysis whose claim to literariness might raise an eyebrow today once had little trouble finding their places in anthologies, syllabi, and lecture notes. On the other hand, it does the perhaps somewhat anxiety-inducing service of reminding us that American literary study (like the study of literature in the United States) is no less historically constructed: almost nothing signified by its central terms – not “literary,” and most certainly not “American” – is self-evident or immutable. This chapter examines one of American literary studies’ most recent explorations of putatively extra- or a-literary subjects and methodologies, the fin de 20eme siècle fascination with “performance.” It adopts a two-step approach. First, I provide an overview of the rise and consequences (to this point, at least) of the interest within American literary studies both in the interpretive uses of the concept of linguistic performativity and in performances as objects of analysis, noting along the way the contested terms and territory lying between literary and performance studies. I then offer a reading of three intimately, if problematically, related early Cold War US works of literature, music, and dance: W.H. Auden’s 1947 “baroque eclogue” The Age of Anxiety; Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (1949), subtitled The Age of Anxiety and directly inspired by Auden’s work; and Jerome Robbins’s lost 1950 ballet, The Age of Anxiety, set to Bernstein’s symphony and taking its action from Auden’s poem. As my choice of works suggests, both overview and analysis share the aim of describing the particular set of anxieties that are both managed and produced by American literary studies’ engagements with performance. These would include not only the extremely longstanding (perhaps constitutive) anxieties informing efforts to define both the American and the literary, but also a relatively newly emerged set of issues clustering around the word “performance” itself as it circulates within the worlds of art, finance, technology, sport, sex, and education. To call this chapter a “performance assessment” of performance is perhaps to name one of the anxiety-producing ways in which these new understandings of performance are making themselves felt within American literary studies.

Ages and Stages First defined and described by the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin in a 1955 series of lectures at Harvard University (lectures posthumously collected and published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words), the concept of linguistic performativity enjoyed a fairly quiet early life, coming of age largely within that AngloAmerican cloister of analytic philosophy concerned with clarifying the role of language in producing knowledge. In a manner very much in keeping with analytic practice, Austin sought to identify and describe the properties of two fundamental kinds of speech acts: constative utterances, which are descriptive and so presumably falsifiable, and performative utterances, “in which to say something is to do something” (Austin

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12; emphasis in original). Austin’s now-famous examples of performative utterances include the marriage vow (“I do . . . take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife”), naming (“I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”), giving (“as occurring in a will”), betting (“I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow”), and promising (one of “the more awe-inspiring performatives” [Austin 5, 9]). Austin wants to explore the relationship these kinds of utterances have to commonsense notions of truth, and this interest leads him, quite early on, to exclude as impertinent to his analysis what he terms the “parasitic” “etiolations” of vowing, naming, giving, betting, and promising when “said by an actor on the stage, or . . . introduced in a poem” (22). These theatrical and literary instances safely set aside, performative utterances, Austin asserts, cannot be true or false in the same way that “the truth of the constative utterance ‘he is running’ depends on his being running” (47). Rather, they are either “felicitous” (“happy”) or “infelicitous” (“unhappy”): marriages are entered into, names adopted, gifts given, bets honored, and promises kept – or not. Over the course of a dozen lectures, Austin systematically refines and elaborates his understanding of the performative in terms of its felicity or infelicity, an endeavor that has the remarkable effect of amplifying our appreciation of the multiple and complex ways in which words may be said to create reality while systematically eroding the fundamental operating distinction between performative and constative utterances. Austin straightforwardly acknowledges this erosion in his final lecture, where he counsels against doctrinaire efforts to maintain “the performative/constative distinction” in favor of a more wide-ranging project of philosophical taxonomy that would identify “general families of related and overlapping speech acts” (150, emphasis in original). Such a project focuses less on questions of performative felicity or infelicity than on issues of context and force, and it would be continued in the decade immediately following Austin’s death by John R. Searle (and, more recently, by Stanley Cavell). To discreetly abandon a distinction, however, is not the same as actively interrogating it, and it is not surprising, in retrospect, that Jacques Derrida saw in Austin’s performative-constative opposition an opportunity to advance his project of deconstruction. Derrida’s 1971 essay “Signature Event Context” (English translation 1977), though in many ways appreciative of Austin’s project, bears down on the philosopher’s decision to preemptively exclude from his analysis those so-called parasitic, etiolated, nonserious, and nonordinary performative utterances that, Derrida observes, chiefly serve to highlight the discomfiting “possibility for every performative utterance (and a priori every other utterance) to be ‘quoted’ ” (“Signature” 16). Whether the impertinent performative is literarily framed or theatrically staged, Derrida notes that “it is as just such a ‘parasite’ that writing has always been treated by the philosophical tradition” (“Signature” 17). This observation opens onto a deconstruction of the performative-constative distinction in a manner similar to Derrida’s famous interrogation, in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968; English translation 1981), of the writing-speech opposition central to Plato’s Phaedrus. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida deconstructs the performative-constative distinction so as to replace the notion that it

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accurately identifies two very different uses of language with an awareness of how citation, quotation, and iterability destabilize the distinction by admitting the powers of fiction in the construction of philosophical truth. In a follow-up essay (“Limited Inc”), Derrida asserts that this understanding of the performative-constative relationship as simultaneously constitutive and deconstructive has political consequences: [O]nce iterability has established the possibility . . . of a certain fictionality altering at once . . . the system of . . . intentions and the systems of . . . rules or of . . . conventions, inasmuch as they are included within the scope of iterability; once this parasitism or fictionality can always add another parasitic or fictional structure to whatever has preceded it . . . everything becomes possible against the language-police; for example “literatures” or “revolutions” that as yet have no model. (99–100)

Among other things, Derrida’s deconstruction of the performative-constative opposition served to push theories of linguistic performativity onto the center stage of “theory” more broadly construed: cast as the lead in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, the newly empowered, highly transgressive, and proudly defiant performative seemed determined to fulfill its potential to make “everything . . . possible against the language police.” Folding political, philosophical, and psychoanalytic insights drawn from the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan into the deconstructive project opened by Derrida, Butler proposes that the various “acts, gestures, [and] enactments” conventionally seen as (constative) articulations of an interior “truth” of gender are, rather, performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. (Gender 173, emphasis in original)

By expanding Derrida’s inquiry into how to do things with words to include an appreciation of how to do things with hair, clothes, makeup, and gesture, Butler argues that gender is nothing more – though also nothing less – than a performative utterance in the deconstructive sense: “neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived” (Gender 180). In a justly famous move, Butler rereads drag, cross-dressing, and “the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities” as staging precisely the sort of gender revolutions that Derrida claimed a proper appreciation of performativity would make possible: “drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (Gender 174). Butler grounds her theoretically developed point in the fieldwork of anthropologist Esther Newton, whose 1972 study Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America does the service not only of providing Butler with an important reading of drag as imbued with revolutionary potential but also of making clear how anthropological approaches to the

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interpretation of culture might link the study of the politics of linguistic performativity – a project that would quickly be claimed by literary scholars, and largely through their readings of Gender Trouble – to the study of the politics of performance: that is, performance studies. Butler’s strongest disciplinary identification is with philosophy, but Gender Trouble owes a great debt to anthropology – signaled, perhaps, by the last footnote of the book, which is not to the writings of Derrida, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Simone de Beauvoir (all of whose thought informs Butler’s project) but rather to the work of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz. If it remains the case today that, as Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it more than a decade ago, “the link between performativity and performance . . . [is] . . . an active question” (8), we might attribute some of that ongoing uncertainty to the larger active interrogation of the nature of the link between anthropology and literature – or, to put it another way (and to name another source of anxiety), between the social sciences and the humanities. In any event, Butler’s linking of the deconstructive understanding of linguistic performativity with an appeal to the subversive possibilities of performance proved enormously fruitful throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century. Certainly the most well-known consequence has been the emergence of queer theory within (or next to) gay and lesbian studies, but literary scholars also drew upon various aspects of the argument to craft new approaches to longstanding interpretive issues in autobiography (Smith and Watson) and in the construction of an authorial self (Watson). There were consequences for more traditional and historicist modes of literary analysis, as well. A key text in this regard, one crucial to a proper understanding of the growing importance of performance in American literary studies, is Jay Fliegelman’s extraordinary revisionist interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a script intended for realization in public “declarations” – an interpretation arising from his analysis, clearly influenced by the new research in performativity and performance, of the eighteenth-century “elocution revolution” and its mission to refashion oratory into a public staging of the private self. Declaring Independence set the terms not only for a transformed understanding of the Declaration but also for a dramatically different kind of scholarly project, realized in Fliegelman’s decision to forgo a reading of the Declaration as an “artifact” (4) “fixed . . . immutable . . . [and] . . . falsely [equated] . . . to formal legislation, legality and permanence” (21) in favor of developing a more wide-ranging, historically sensitive understanding of “ ‘declaring’ as performance and . . . ‘independence’ as something that is rhetorically performed” (4). Fliegelman demonstrated the rich interpretive possibilities offered by performativity and performance not only for an understanding of key subjects, forms, and modes of address in American literature but also for an understanding of the United States itself as a nation conceived in the midst of a “revolution in self-expression” (196) that aimed to make “private and public character cohere in a single, externalized self” (200): the forthright, honest, and sincere American. The national anxieties produced by this impossible “demand that the rule of sincerity be obeyed” (200) in repeated stagings of authentic and transparent declarations of individual independence – a demand that

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white women and all blacks initially were deemed incapable of meeting and that, by the nineteenth century, had become “little more than an existential confidence game” (200) – lead to the anxious task, in Priscilla Wald’s memorable formulation, of “constituting Americans” in literary narrative. It may seem odd to linger over this move within American literary scholarship from an investigation into the performative and oratorical status of “declaring” to a concern with “constituting” more strictly literarily conceived. But the shift exemplifies the unusual blend of eagerness and skittishness informing many American literary scholars’ engagements with performativity when it begins to tilt away from literature toward oral and/or embodied performances. I am not speaking here of the quite real and understandable difficulties faced by any scholar undertaking an analysis of an unrepeatable event (though, as we shall see, questions of rehearsal and reenactment are of increasing interest within contemporary performance studies). Rather, I mean to point to two related interpretive gestures that pop up repeatedly in literary scholars’ work with the a-literary, and especially with performance: either to read “performance” and “performativity” in largely metaphorical senses so as to draw fresh readings from canonical literary texts (arguably detectable in Fliegelman’s account of the Declaration, and obvious in Sedgwick’s splendid readings of Henry James), or to treat actual performances as literary texts manquées, usually by translating gestures, spatial and color relations, sound, visual schemata, and rhythmic passages into narrative. Constituting Americans, Wald’s brilliant and wide-ranging variation on several of the themes sounded in Fliegelman’s study, seems haunted by this second move in its closing pages, which offer a reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Wald identifies Cha as a performance artist, and she is careful not to call Dictée – a published, bound work incorporating calligraphy, photographs, diagrams, maps, typeset text, reproductions of handwritten and typed text, poetry, and short narratives in French and English – a novel, or even a narrative. But her elegant reading of Cha’s work as a contemporary example of a historically persistent literary problematic of “constituting Americans” requires that Wald set to one side those many aspects of Dictée that resist incorporation into a view of it as an “account offered by a United States immigrant of her inscription into history, and of the difficulty of recounting – of speaking from within – that process” (300). These include the work’s many lengthy passages in French; its division into nine sections corresponding to the nine Muses of antiquity; its incorporation of passages from the Roman Catholic catechism; and, finally, its relationship to Cha’s work in visual and performance art. More recent critical engagements with Cha’s tragically small corpus (she was murdered in 1982 at the age of 31) have noted not only the “personal cultural displacement and alienation” (Lewallen 1) so striking to Wald but also her “adventurous spirit” (Park 9). We need not question Wald’s fine reading of a single sample of Cha’s work in order to consider whether the sense of cultural displacement and alienation experienced by an artist who lived not only in Korea and the United States but also in Paris and Amsterdam can best be understood as a function of a struggle to adapt herself to an insufficiently accommodating “official story” of the United States (Wald

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304); it’s worth considering, too, whether the work of an artist for whom “there was no firm distinction between . . . visual and linguistic practices” (Lewallen 2) can be properly appreciated in solely literary terms. If this is to say that Wald’s interest in “the performative qualities and transformative powers of language” (300) as instanced in the oath of American citizenship is perhaps too closely linked to an eagerness to account for “an anxiety provoked by [Cha’s] difference” from a certain conception of “the American,” it is perhaps also to indicate how Cha’s wide-ranging aesthetic practice activates anxieties over her works’ difference from a certain conception of the literary. In what would be her last book, Sedgwick offers a kind of elegy for the losses entailed in construing a “nonlinguistic” performative “phenomenon” in “rigorously linguistic terms” (6), and she does so with remarkable obliquity. Her wistful meditation on beside as a word summoning spatial possibilities of knowing lost to temporally conceived analytic projects welded to “narratives of . . . origin and telos” (“Beside permits . . . a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations” [Sedgwick 8]) conjures up the dance as the exemplary performative spatialization even as it does not speak its name. Despite Sedgwick’s passionately professed wish “to address aspects of experience and reality that do not present themselves in propositional or even verbal form . . . to push back against an occupational tendency to underattend to the rich dimension of space” (6, 9), dance remains an (perhaps the) absent presence of Touching Feeling – as it remains in a great deal of contemporary American literary scholarship undertaken in the name of performance and/or performativity. As literary scholars have lingered in the wings, uncertain of when and how to make their entrance into performance, scholars in what Diana Taylor has called the “postdiscipline-come-lately” (2) of performance studies have struggled with their own set of concerns, similarly clustered around issues of the word and temporality. From its earliest mid-1960s articulations at the intersections of theatre, communication, anthropology, and ethnography, performance studies has striven to maintain a sense of itself as “wide open,” conducting its operations with “no historically or culturally fixable limit to what is or is not ‘performance’ ” (Schechner Performance Studies, 1, 2). Taken together, Richard Schechner’s oft-cited definition of performance as “twice behaved” or “restored” behavior – a definition that rhymes nicely with the iterability and citationality of the Derridean performative utterance – and his equally wellknown assertion that, while not everything “is” performance, everything can be studied “as” performance (Schechner Performance Studies, 29), have worked together to maintain a certain “generosity and porousness” within performance studies, both in its methodologies and in its choice of subjects for analysis (Phelan and Lane 4). This is not to say, however, that there has been little contention and disputation within the field – this is academia, after all. Peggy Phelan’s categorical claim that “performance’s only life is in the present” (Phelan Unmarked, 146) has been put under some pressure in the recent work of Taylor and Joseph Roach, who both seek to replace the

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notion of performance as delimiting a singular, irreproducible event – in Phelan’s later, more forceful, formulation, an event “predicated on . . . [its] disappearance” (Mourning, 2) – with an understanding of performances as “restored behaviors that function as vehicles of cultural transmission” (Roach 13). Among other things, this altered definition has drawn attention to the problem of interpreting events predicated on reenactment – performances imagined as simultaneously unique and repeatable. Not surprisingly, these radically different understandings of performance have engendered somewhat incommensurable scholarly projects within performance studies. Phelan’s wish to honor the ephemerality of the individual performance has led her to forge a critical practice she calls “performative writing,” an effort “to enact the affective force of the performance event” through an approach that would “amplify” (rather than disguise) how performances “sound differently in the writing of them than in the ‘experiencing’ of them” (Phelan Mourning, 11–12). The resulting critical work is like none other: moving in its blending of ambition and humility, and always alert to the ways in which “the very energy of its imaginative making . . . destroys what it most wants to save” (Phelan Mourning, 12). Roach, by contrast, finds his scholarly challenge in the juxtaposition of “living memory as restored behavior against a historical archive of scripted records” (11), a challenge magnificently met as he traces the routes of exchange and practices of surrogation embodied in the performances of contemporary Mardi Gras Indians, the records of eighteenth-century London theatrical productions, the composition of Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest, and the 1992 New Orleans jazz funeral of “Mr. Google Eyes,” the bluesman Joe August. While Taylor offers a similarly recuperative critical enterprise – one that, like Roach’s, means to address a specifically American (for Taylor, hemispheric) history of colonization, genocide, slavery, and the accompanying cultural practices of linguistic, religious, and artistic obliteration, domination, creolization, and resistance – she exhibits an impatience with “the preponderance of writing in Western epistemologies” and the ways in which writing has “come to stand in for and against embodiment” (16) that Roach (or, for that matter, Phelan) does not appear to share. If Taylor’s oppositionally structured heuristic of the “archive” (of writing) and the “repertoire” (of performance) at times seems a reconstituted version of the writing-speech opposition of the Phaedrus, her decision to replace script with scenario nevertheless leaves writing largely intact at the heart of a project that, like Roach’s, means to reveal “debates about the ‘ephemerality’ of performance as, of course, profoundly political” (5). As Mark Franko pointed out more than 15 years ago, encomia to ephemerality have long “trivialized and marginalized” performance “as that profoundly apolitical activity (its deepest nature unplanned, its most essential sense irrecuperable)” (245), so it is perhaps not surprising that Roach’s and Taylor’s wish to bring out heretofore unrecognized political powers within performance leads them to see historicization as the surest means to that end. This was not quite Franko’s move, however, no more than it has been Phelan’s – even though they have both written about the histories of their fields of specialization (Western art dance and performance art, respectively) and are expressly committed to a political understanding of performance. Phelan’s experi-

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ments in performative writing are one means to that end; Franko’s definition of the dance as praxis – as “impermanent but not unstable, under erasure but not as ‘nonsense’ . . . the capacity to perform anew, although always differently, to reproduce by repetitive otherness” and thereby take “forceful action . . . on behalf of what is not” (251–3) – is another. Indeed, recent efforts to historicize performance studies – and so, coincidentally, to make it more resemble currently dominant research paradigms in both its methodologies and publication protocols – have emerged in tandem with expressions of dissatisfaction within literary studies with the positivism and empiricism informing much historicist interpretation of literature. These dissatisfactions have emerged in the recently articulated “unhistoricist” project within queer theory (Goldberg and Menon), in the work of many of the so-called New Formalists (Levinson), and in complaints about a regnant “cultural symptomatology” driven by a paranoid “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Sedgwick 124–5, 138–46; see also Felski). If this is to recast the anxious relations between literary and performance studies in terms of the tensions animating the relations of “theory” and “history” (and their analogs “aesthetics” and “politics”), it is also to indicate how the restlessness within literary studies today might arise from a realization, fostered by engagements with the objects and methods of performance studies, that US literary scholars need to find ways to describe and account for the effects of artworks that, “in a strict ontological sense,” lead “nowhere” (Phelan Unmarked, 148) – or at least nowhere US literary study as currently constituted would recognize without considerable anxiety about the work’s “literariness” or “Americanness.” Not to mention its fungibility in the current economy of high-performance scholarly production. Perhaps, then, the grit in the gears meshing performance and literary studies – the anxiety that structures relations between embodiment and textuality, between the call and its echo – merits attention in its own right. The recent effort to theorize gesture as something common to writing, performance, and visual art – gestures of the pen, the body, and the brush – constitutes one move in this direction, especially insofar as it means to understand the gestural “as supporting the survival of the past while potentially engendering meanings that bear the past toward an unpredictable future” (Noland and Ness x). As Carrie Noland further observes, [T]he gap between the “maintained” gestural routine (produced through training, redundancy, acquisition of impersonal skills) and the “modulated” gestural routine (emerging as a result of the more particularized energies of the performer) suggests that there resides within the performance of gesture a moment of negativity, an unpredictable force of nonidentity in mimesis countering the signifying potential of the conventional sign. (Noland and Ness xiii)

Such an understanding of gesture as immanent critique suggests a middle ground between performance and literature in which both history and the now exist, in Sedgwick’s formulation, beside each other. It is also to suggest the displacement or migration of gesture from one location to another – and here we should imagine

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location in the largest possible sense, denoting geography, language, bodies, and media – as the means by which those claims are made. With this in mind, I turn now to the displacements and migrations that constitute the Auden-Bernstein-Robbins American poem-symphony-ballet, The Age of Anxiety.

Performing Anxiety W.H. Auden immigrated to the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946, the year he completed The Age of Anxiety. Published in 1947, the poem won Auden a Pulitzer Prize. While the 60-page work is little read today, its title lives on as a popular descriptive catchphrase for the early Cold War years of the Red Scare, the growth of the military-industrial complex, and the emergence of suburban conformity and anomie. And indeed the poem was immediately seen as a kind of summative statement of the times, articulating the open-ended fears of the nuclear age while also serving notice of the United States’ ambition to claim global cultural leadership in the years after the Second World War. “One of the most shattering examples of virtuosity in the history of English poetry” (Bernstein n.p.), The Age of Anxiety allowed American letters to claim Auden as its own (only US citizens may receive the Pulitzer) and so shatter the notion that history-making English poetry could only come from Britain. And in truth, a knowledge of the history of English poetry is crucial to understanding the ambition of The Age of Anxiety. In calling his poem an eclogue, Auden situates it within a genre that includes works by Spenser and Swift; in employing as its fundamental verse form the four-stress hemistich Anglo-Saxon alliterative line – the line of Beowulf – he invokes English poetry’s most ancient ancestor. Auden quite deliberately bends this historical framework to modern ends: no Arcadian shepherds, his four dramatis personae encounter each other in a Third Avenue bar during the waning years of the war. To this ironic restaging of the eclogue’s pastoral habit of offering “ ‘under the vaile of homely persons and in rude speeches . . . [a] glaunce at greater matters’ ” (Preminger and Brogan 317), Auden adds increasingly elaborate allegorical layers of characterization and incident. Typological representations of aspects of the fourfold Jungian psyche (Callan), the characters Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble discourse on the seven ages of man before undertaking, through a kind of alcohol-induced mutual hallucination, a seven-stage journey through “a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body” (Auden, Age 371). Leaving the bar at closing time, they share a cab to Rosetta’s apartment and collectively mourn the loss of “some semidivine stranger with superhuman powers,” the “colossal father” who would save humans “from their egregious destructive blunders” (Auden, Age 394). At the apartment, Rosetta and Emble dance; after nightcaps, Quant and Malin make their exits. Emble passes out in Rosetta’s bed, the drunken Quant stumbles while climbing the steps to his home, and the Jewish Rosetta and Christian Malin close the poem with affirmations of religious faith in the face of modern alienation.

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A most decidedly baroque eclogue, indeed. Edward Mendelson’s description of the poem as “theatrical in tone but almost entirely without drama in its action” (244) economically indicates the odd effect of the work for contemporary readers, with its dated Jungian substructure and accompanying self-conscious appeal to a then-fashionable modernist myth making. Today’s dominant literary critical practice in the face of such a work would entail an exfoliation of precisely this theatricality, dramatic slackness, and intellectual datedness in order to analyze The Age of Anxiety as a symptom of a particular double-voiced kind, making clear the poem’s effectiveness in advancing US ambitions for global cultural significance while also drawing out its critical engagements with the nation’s problematic reigning assumptions regarding sociality, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. The concept of repeated gesture as immanent critique, however, opens different interpretive possibilities by bringing forward Bernstein’s symphony and Robbins’s ballet as discriminating contemporary readings not only of Auden’s poem but also of its subject: the role of religious faith in an age of anxiety. Each work took its own, quite different posture toward the concluding affirmations that it seems Auden (who returned to Anglicanism within two years of settling in the United States) intended as sincere, serious, and viable. For Bernstein, the ambivalence toward this affirmative impulse was as strong as the longing it articulated – a longing he would later liken to the “agony of longing for tonality” in an age of dissonance and the “blind” efforts “to recapture it” (Secrest 289). In a prefatory note to the score, Bernstein observed that his conception of a symphony with piano solo emerges from the personal identification of myself with the poem. In this sense, the pianist provides an autobiographical protagonist, set against an orchestral mirror in which he sees himself, analytically, in the modern ambience. (Bernstein n.p.)

That the piano remains mostly silent during the symphony’s epilogue, which corresponds to the poem’s closing affirmation of faith, is certainly suggestive – as is the judgment of New York Times music critic Olin Downes of the work, following its 1950 New York Philharmonic premiere, as “a triumph of superficiality” whose concluding measures amount to “a sort of tinsel, bourgeois evocation of some distant plush paradise” (Secrest 175, 176). Downes touched what already was becoming for Bernstein a sensitive spot: the degree to which his extraordinary facility with affirmative, middlebrow theatrical forms impeded the development of his skills in composing more astringent “absolute” music. Bernstein would later claim that the original epilogue was intended to be ironic, “a mockery of faith, a phony faith” (Secrest 175). But his 1965 revisions to the symphony, mostly all aimed at expanding the piano part in the epilogue so as to bring it more in line with traditional expectations for the concerto form, seem a weary acknowledgment that theatrical grandiosity had prevailed over philosophical profundity. It could be the case, of course, that Bernstein’s symphony simply failed to come up to the standard set by Auden’s poem. That certainly was the

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view taken by the poet, who made a point after the Philharmonic premiere of asserting that Bernstein’s symphony “really has nothing to do with me. Any connections with my book are rather distant” (Secrest 176). But it could also be the case that Bernstein’s symphony made audible a certain grandiosity already within the poem, thus enabling an understanding of the truth of its closing affirmation as more clearly (and problematically) indebted to the citational theatricality of its utterance. A close look at Robbins’s ballet furthers this view of performance as gestural critique. His first major work for New York City Ballet, The Age of Anxiety was an unqualified success for Robbins, a choreographer up to then best known chiefly for his work on Broadway. For the most part, Robbins’s scenario followed the structure of Bernstein’s symphony (which, in turn, was modeled on the narrative schema of Auden’s work) – it employs four protagonists who meet, “discuss” the seven ages of man, undertake a seven-stage journey, and cheer themselves in forced gaiety before finally parting company – but the work closes with the principals bidding each other farewell in a manner reminiscent of the opening scene of the ballet (Balanchine and Mason 12). Robbins’s somewhat circularly structured Age thus simply refused to reproduce the poem’s concluding affirmation of faith that Bernstein found so dangerously compelling. The ballet’s departure from the poem was immediately noted and commented on by the critics, several of whom implied that the dance was stronger for straying from its literary model. Robbins “makes no attempt to lean upon the literary framework,” Doris Hering wrote; the ballet “speaks instead with the infinite eloquence of the kinetic language. . . . that fluid realm where only movement speaks” (qtd. in Reynolds 109). Probably not coincidentally, the critics also predicted that Robbins’s Age would quickly age; its considerable power was of the moment and destined to fade. “It is a work close to our time,” Rosalyn Krokover observed, “a product that could be of this decade and no other. In some respects it is too close, and this observer has the strong feeling that the next generation will find it remarkably dated” (qtd. in Reynolds 109). And in truth the work would not outlast the 1950s. In Taylor’s terms, the ballet passed from repertoire to archive; in Phelan’s terms, it is no longer performance. Not even a shadow of its former self, the work that was Robbins’s The Age of Anxiety is barely evoked in the reviews, published reminiscences of the dancers who performed it, and snippets of film (Nora Kaye) that are the evidence of its passing. Lincoln Kirstein has reported that Auden “disliked” Robbins’s ballet (Kirstein 76, 107). Never one to shy away from critical debate, Kirstein uncharacteristically offered no explanation for Auden’s distaste. A great dance lover and a good friend of Auden’s, Kirstein may have been unwilling to admit that Auden’s reaction could have less to do with the particular properties of Robbins’s work than with the poet’s general disdain for ballet itself. Auden had no use for ballet: it was, for him, a “very, very minor art” (Nabokov 145). We get a sense of the reasons for Auden’s dislike in his short essay, “Ballet’s Present Eden,” a program note written for the winter 1954 New York City Ballet season – a season that saw not only the premiere of the company’s terrifically successful production of The Nutcracker but also a revival of Robbins’s The

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Age of Anxiety. Writing ostensibly about The Nutcracker, Auden proposes a theory of ballet as an art condemned to “a continuous present; every experience which depends on historical time lies outside its capacities.” Because its medium is the human body, Auden claims, ballet can only express “whatever is immediately intelligible in terms of variety of motion” (“Eden” 393). Therefore, he concludes, the ballet cannot express memory, the recollection of that which is absent, for either the recollected body is on stage and immediate or it is off and non-existent. Memory distinguishes between the object and its invoked image; ballet deals only in the object. No character in a ballet can grow or change in the way that a character in a novel changes; he can only undergo instantaneous transformations from one kind of being to another. . . . These observations, it should be said, refer to the forming principles of ballet; as with the other media, tension and excitement come from pushing against the form. A choreographer may take this risk again and again, but he will watch closely, being careful to make himself clear. And he will return in good time to safe ground. (“Eden” 393–4)

When, from this, Auden concludes that the world of ballet is one “of pure being without becoming,” the ethical force of his characterization of the dance – and the degree to which that characterization relies on depicting it as antiliterary – comes clear. Literature’s claim to be the art form of becoming is a historical claim: a claim both for the importance of its becoming through history and for its ability to represent history. It is also a claim for the historical importance of the author as an artist uniquely able to produce works that defy time. Thus, like all sweeping aesthetic generalizations, Auden’s reification of the ephemerality of the dance says at least as much about his own literary anxieties as it does about the ballet – and however artful it may sound, Auden’s distinction between being and becoming is worth interrogating at least as much as Austin’s distinction between performing and constating. The possibility arises, then, that Auden disliked Robbins’s ballet and took his distance from Bernstein’s symphony precisely because they each performed his extremely long and ambitious poem in ways that made clear how its wish to speak through the ages was supremely of its age: an anxious performance of a literary anxiety. There is, obviously, much more that could be said. Here, I have sought to explore the uses of performance for literary studies by limiting myself to readings of each Age of Anxiety. This approach deliberately restricts the scope of the usual historicizing move (avoiding entirely a literarily privileged judging of symphony and ballet in terms of their more or less successful “adaptation” of Auden’s poem) in order to better trace the migration of an initiating affect – anxiety – through its various gestural instantiations in poetry, music, and the dance. As should be obvious, mine is no performative writing in the manner practiced by Phelan. But neither is it limited to detailing a reading of poem, symphony, or ballet that would stress their capacities (or incapacities) to reflect larger biographical, economic, social, and political forces. This is not to say that such readings are not still worthwhile and important. Rather, it is to propose other frames in which those readings might be set – other means of acknowledging, and maybe even working through, our many performance anxieties.

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What the foregoing may also have shown, I hope, is that Sedgwick’s advice to think sidewise, as it were, remains shrewd counsel for literary scholars interested in staging, and engaging, interpretive encounters between performance and literature. In the age of the electronic book, the digital database, and Internet-mediated “live” performance (Auslander), such encounters will only increase, as the already fragile distinction between performance and literature continues to be complicated and compromised. The history of the relationships among linguistic performativity, performance, and literature is, among other things, a history of categorical distinctions drawn, erased, and redrawn elsewhere. Performance studies and literary studies each took shape around distinctive objects of interest and analysis, and certainly the differences between performances and literature matter. How they matter, though, remains an open question – anxiety producing, certainly, but unquestionably invigorating, as well. References and Further Reading Auden, W.H. The Age of Anxiety. In W.H. Auden: Collected Poems (pp. 345–409). Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. Auden, W.H. “Ballet’s Present Eden: Example of The Nutcracker.” In The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume 3, 1949–1955 (pp. 393–6). Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Auslander, Philip. “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance.” In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (pp. 107–19). Ed. Tracy C. Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. 1962. 2nd ed. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Balanchine, George, and Francis Mason. Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977. Bernstein, Leonard. The Age of Anxiety: Symphony No. 2. The Full Score. 1949. Corrected ed. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1993. Bial, Henry. Ed. The Performance Studies Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Callan, Edward. “Allegory in Auden’s The Age of Anxiety.” Twentieth Century Literature 10, no. 4 (January 1965): 155–65. Cavell, Stanley. “Performative and Passionate Utterance.” In Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (pp. 155–91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictée. 1982. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Exilée/Temps Mort: Selected Works. Ed. Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Davis, Tracy C. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. “Limited Inc.” 1977. In Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” 1968. In Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (pp. 61–171). Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” 1971. In Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis. New York: Routledge, 1997. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

A-Literary Companions of Literary Studies Franko, Mark. “Mimique.” 1995. In Migrations of Gesture (pp. 241–58). Eds. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Goldberg, Jonathan, and Madhavi Menon. “Queering History.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 120, no. 5 (October 2005): 1608–17. Jowitt, Deborah. Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Kaye, Nora. In The Age of Anxiety. Video recording. Tri-Star Pictures MGZIDVD 5-2514. New York: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Kirstein, Lincoln. Thirty Years: The New York City Ballet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Levinson, Marjorie. “The Changing Profession: What Is New Formalism?” Publications of the Modern Language Association 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 558–69. Lewallen, Constance M. “Audience Distance Relative: An Introduction to the Writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.” In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilée/Temps Mort: Selected Works (pp. 1–6). Ed. Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. McKenzie, Jon. “Is Performance Studies Imperialist?” TDR 50, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 5–8. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge, 2001. Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Nabokov, Nicholas. “Excerpts from Memories.” In W.H. Auden: A Tribute (pp. 133–48). Ed. Stephen Spender. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972. Noland, Carrie. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Noland, Carrie, and Sally Ann Ness. Eds. Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Park, Ed. “This Is the Writing You Have Been Waiting For.” In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilée/Temps Mort: Selected Works (pp. 9–15). Ed.

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Constance M. Lewallen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Eds. Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1995. Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Phelan, Peggy, and Jill Lane. Eds. The Ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan. Eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph R. Roach. Eds. Critical Theory and Performance. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Reynolds, Nancy. Repertory in Review: Forty Years of the New York City Ballet. New York: Dial Press, 1977. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Secrest, Meryle. Leonard Bernstein: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Seldes, Barry. Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Personal Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

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Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ, 1988. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ, 1982. Vail, Amanda. Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins. New York: Broadway Books, 2006.

Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Watson, James G. William Faulkner: SelfPresentation and Performance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

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Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O’Neill Jeffrey H. Richards

Drama matters to American literary studies – a position not always recognized by American literature scholars or even students of American theatre for whom performance, not play text, is the point of interest. Put simply, the period of 1785 to 1915 cannot be viewed as detached from drama, even though the practice of literary scholarship has for many years largely left drama out of the literary picture. There is no full understanding of James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, or Henry James without consideration of American dramatic and theatrical culture. Such perspectives on literary study as cultural studies, performance studies, and historicism directed toward the long nineteenth century cannot be said to be complete without full consideration of the traces left by dramatists and actors. Regardless of the paucity of criticism in our own time, nineteenth-century drama and theatre were never far from view, at least in the settled areas. Even the colonial period, which begins in a kind of stagelessness, becomes marked by the theatrical in the approach to the American Revolution. Schools in the early republic used drama as a teaching tool. Hairdressers, lawyers, and republican mothers imagined they could write for the stage and did so, although the playhouse did not always welcome their efforts. After 1790, cities became increasingly eager to build the next playhouse that held spectators in the thousands. Villages, steamboats, mining camps, and dusty Western bars supported plays and performances of all kinds. Within two decades of the nineteenth century, the country supported theatrical endeavors of all kinds and remained that way until the next century. Yet by looking at the contents of American literature anthologies or, until very recently, the index of papers given at American literature conferences, one might never know that drama meant so much to American participants in culture. For its status of illegitimacy in the larger scope A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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of American literary studies, Susan Harris Smith in 1997 called American drama “the bastard art.” How does one confront the marginalization of a major genre? After Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee came upon the scene, scholars framed the discussion of drama to exclude drama before 1915 as worthy of critical consideration. There was modern drama and there was melodrama; one was art and one was not. Although the impact of melodrama on modern and postmodern drama and cinema remains, the essential division between an art drama and mere entertainment still persists as a figure of criticism. In early editions of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, for instance, the only play included in the volume(s) to 1865 was Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) – joined recently by Mercy Otis Warren’s closet political play, The Group (1775). The Heath overall is a worthy anthology, filled with writers who 20 or 30 years ago were obscure at best to students of American literature but who now represent voices and trends long ignored. But pre-1900 drama still suffers critical neglect. The Contrast is well worth teaching, but so is Judith Sargent Murray’s play set in the Revolution, The Traveller Returned (1796). When students encounter Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) in the second half of the American literature survey, they might wonder, without some explanation from the instructor, if only two plays had been written and performed before 1917. Nevertheless, the development of performance studies has the potential to revive critical interest in dramatic texts through the broader understanding of performance in culture. In his recent book, Joseph Fichtelberg incisively uses performance as a way of discussing Captain John Smith’s adventures in the New World. He notes the several places where performance-based situations occur among Smith’s negotiations and confrontations with Powhatan and other Tidewater Algonquians, largely as a way of assessing the degree to which Smith engaged risk (“adventure” or “hazard” in seventeenth-century parlance) in establishing the economic stability of Virginia colony (Fichtelberg 14–49). But Smith’s accounts, especially in The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), bear also a theatrical dimension that imagines performance in a wilderness as if it were staged within the dimensions of a playhouse. Back in England, Smith complained about actors mocking his adventures onstage, a sign that his own performancebased accounts of experience in Virginia translated readily into satiric representations of the same thing (Barbour). Nevertheless, many years passed before such representations would present themselves on the American stage. With the revival of interest in Smith in the early 1800s, novels and other accounts began appearing. James Nelson Barker’s The Indian Princess (1808) revived the playhouse Pocahontas-John Smith tradition, but now as a celebration of national founding. Barker’s reading of Smith’s texts extracts those elements that lend themselves to dramatic enactment, suggesting that the theatrical nature of The Generall Historie was not accidental or merely a rhetorical product of the times but something directly derived from a culture that valued stage conversion of the historical to the performative-expressive. As an example of an early American dramatic text with a dense nexus of cultural, historical, political, and distinctly theatrical elements, The Indian Princess performs its

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work on many fronts. As a commentary on how the Jamestown colony was read two centuries after its founding, Barker’s “Melo-Drame,” as it was called, enacts its own mythmaking function through the character Smith and the colonists and Indians who comment on Smith and his exploits. The colonist Walter, a fictional character, observes Smith through admiring eyes, ensuring that the audience for the Philadelphia performances understands the triumphalist interpretation Barker expects from his spectators. At the same time, both Pocahontas and her brother Nantaquas recognize the English imperial power that forces them into an identity of abasement, whereby Indianness becomes an uncertain trope, at once a mask of innocence and doomed brutishness. Through these multiple observer characters, Barker establishes a contemporary politics of modern American imperialism, by which playhouse spectators understand their function as scions of Smith, comprehending identity through both the absorption and destruction of Native peoples. While the play may be light in tone, the themes and implications are significant ones to postmodern and postcolonial literary study. As a further example of Barker’s conversion of Smith, we might turn to the most famous set piece of the play. Staging the famous scene in which Smith is brought to the block to be bludgeoned but ends up providentially saved, Barker inscribes the erotic, moving carefully between Smith as an asexual, godlike being and the captain as potential lover of the princess – a role he forfeits to the character John Rolfe. Ideologically, the play offers the thesis that the erotic is a civilizing dimension; when Indians recognize its potency and submit, they cease to be Indians at all but converted beings whose whiteness will be manifest in future generations. Issues of racial ideology, Shakespearean influence, parody, and gender performance all appear in this mock-execution scene. The performative Smith in the author-adventurer becomes literalized as performing Smith in Barker. The point here is that a play full of comic songs, jokes on Irish sentimentality, demonized sorcerers, and Indian maidens hunting flamingoes – the seeming quintessence of froth and derivation – has a richness of interpretive possibility that belies its status as melodrama with its oft-assumed unworthiness of scholarly attention. Theatre has a way of infiltrating culture by both developing as its own institution and inserting itself into others. The interactions among drama, theatre, and other genres and situations can be intricate and complex and raise a number of questions about the scope of criticism and American literary study. Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner in their 1997 anthology, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, rather provocatively included Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (1689), a play based on Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and staged in London. As a play by a British woman living in the late seventeenth century, it has its location in Reformation literary history. Placed in a text that in essence turned the American of American literature into an idea and not merely a birthplace of authors, The Widow Ranter suddenly takes on new dimensions beyond its Tory politics for an English audience. The widow herself is an American character, a creolized immigrant whose adaptation to Virginia colonial culture provides an interesting touchstone for assessing the imagined America of the play. But even beyond all the things one might say about her and other characters

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– class positioning, Native-English conflicts, and hybridization – the theatrical element has its own story. William Berkeley, governor of Virginia in the 1670s and a main player in the events of Bacon’s Rebellion, had been a playwright in England three decades before, ushering some of his efforts to the London stage, including The Lost Lady (1639). However, once landed on Virginia soil, Berkeley could do little to encourage drama there; perhaps the demands on his position, including the civil war that Bacon’s Rebellion became, made literal entertainment impossible. (The one known public attempt to mount a staged performance in Virginia during the seventeenth century ended with the actors arrested, though they were acquitted of all charges against them.) There is a certain irony in the playwright-governor being erased by Behn in her theatrical account of the conflict; no character represents Berkeley. Nevertheless, contextualizing the play as American by subject, as Jehlen and Warner do, raises a host of critical questions, most notably about our understanding of transatlantic performance and the relationship of drama and theatre to history itself. The theatrical dimension makes drama different from poetry and prose; to enact a text is to make it material, on the one hand, and ephemeral (and often unrecorded, in many senses of the word), on the other. Because of a variety of factors, including likelihood or not of sales, many enacted plays never appeared in print, although some survive in manuscript. At the same time, acting has probably saved many plays that otherwise would never have survived. The actress Sarah Marriott wrote a light piece, The Chimera (1795), and saw it to the stage twice during the 1794–5 season of the Old American Company in New York; as a result of just those two performances, the play appeared in print, a survival of an often brutal system that discouraged authorship on the American side of the Atlantic. Even though The Chimera is unlikely to inspire a doctoral dissertation on its status as a lost classic, the very presence of the text allows us to comprehend what the age saw as failure, without our necessarily having to use such a term in present-day analysis. Marriott was British by birth and upbringing, and 1794 marked her arrival on North American shores. She not unreasonably imagined that her way to theatrical acclaim in the New World was to write a farce in the British style – after all, most of the repertoire performed on US stages originated in Britain. As a member of the New York-based Old American Company, Marriott duly delivered her conventional comedy of English lords and ladies to the managers, who allowed her the performances. In this case, Marriott’s early death in 1795 and her text’s status as a British imitation doomed her play as worthy of consideration by later American literary critics. As a parallel case, the relative success of Susanna Rowson tells us not only about her but also about the fortunes of drama in criticism and literary study. Known relatively widely among scholars of early American literature as the author of the seduction novel Charlotte Temple (1791), Rowson has gained readers in recent years for Slaves in Algiers (1794), a comic drama about Americans and Britons in Islamic captivity. Rowson in Philadelphia suffered some of the same problems faced by Marriott in New York in terms of inserting herself into a repertoire managed by tastes as perceived in

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London. But her ability in her own time to manage those difficulties and her choice of American subjects for her dramatic efforts rather than exclusively British ones allowed her to succeed where Marriott did not. In the reconsideration of women authors that has taken place in the last 40 years, Rowson has found a niche with her mildly feminist treatment. With her text readily available in Amelia Howe Kritzer’s 1995 anthology as well as in Early American Imprints and other collections, Slaves in Algiers can be accessed easily for analysis and study. Chapters and essays have been devoted to the text, allowing us to consider the play from feminist and political perspectives. It forms a subject cornerstone, for example, of Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s study The Gender of Freedom. To be sure, Rowson’s text gives a contemporary reader much more to go on than Marriott’s, particularly with its themes of the Islamic other and self-liberating women. At the same time, her text is also a story of the complexities of theatrical representation that are embedded within a printed version. For one thing, Rowson displays the truly transatlantic nature of American dramatic and theatre cultures. Born to a British military officer who was stationed in the American colonies, Susanna Haswell spent her formative years in Massachusetts. Forced back to Britain by the war, Miss Haswell became Mrs. Rowson when she married a theatre employee in London, William Rowson. Before long, Susanna was following her husband to provincial theatres and, later, sometimes set out on her own as she took up acting herself. When Thomas Wignell came seeking actors for his new Philadelphia company, Susanna and William signed on, only to encounter the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. By early 1794, however, Rowson and her husband were working as lower-tier members of the cast. Despite her low position on the dramatis personae, she managed to use her skill with a pen – she had been establishing herself as a novelist before immigrating back to the United States – to craft a number of performable texts, including Slaves in Algiers (Rust). Rowson faced withering abuse from the pen of William Cobbett, a local critic, but as a cast member who could demand any play to be played on her benefit night, she kept Slaves alive in repertoire, not only in its original form but also as a strippeddown, two-act afterpiece. Whereas Sarah Marriott misjudged her audience, Susanna Rowson responded to it. As an actress, a writer, and even a sometime producer, Rowson showed it was possible for women to be involved with theatre in all phases of the production. Thus, in future discussion of Slaves in Algiers, it would be salutary to include the theatrical history of the play as part of the literary critical study of Rowson’s work. Considerations of race and ethnicity, things that matter greatly to literary studies now, appear in Rowson – the Jewish stereotype in Ben Hassan, or instance, or the Muslim tyrant in Muley Moloch. She merely follows in a long line of British plays that include typing of all sorts. The stage African (or Afro-Briton or African American) had been appearing in plays and the theatre since the Elizabethan period – not only Aaron and Othello, the obvious examples, but also even Rowson’s Muley Moloch, an Islamic variant of the stage African, can be traced to drama of the 1580s, for instance. Popular plays of the late eighteenth century that featured Africanist characters, from

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Isaac Bickerstaff ’s The Padlock (1768) to John O’Keeffe’s The Highland Reel (1788), appeared in American playhouses and form part of American cultural history. Such characters as O’Keeffe’s Benin, who is marked as African in a Highland musical, though, created problems for stage managers in an increasingly racially sensitive era. In playbills of the period, Highland Reel is sometimes played with, and sometimes without, Benin – a choice made perhaps by reason of compression, if Highland Reel was in the afterpiece, but perhaps not, especially when performed in cities with substantial black populations. In any event, criticism of these plays cannot ignore the complex racial politics of performance then evolving in US theatre. Recent scholarship by George Thompson, Shane White, and Marvin McAllister has uncovered the history of the African Theatre that emerged in the 1820s. From original plays, like King Shotaway (1821) by William Alexander Brown, to compelling actors, like James Hewlett, the African Theatre put its mark on New York and American playhouse history. Because many of the contemporary accounts of the theatre are the product of unsympathetic pens, including those by playwright and journalist Mordecai Noah, we are left with having to read the history of that theatre carefully. Unfortunately, we have no surviving scripts from the troupe’s original plays – only accounts of performances. But the fact itself of African American actors desiring to perform in public venues deserves attention. Further evidence suggests that the African Theatre was not the first such organization in the new republic. At least one other black-operated theatre was staging plays in 1801, leaving open the possibility that there might have been even earlier playhouses (or play spaces) operated by African American entrepreneurs. This history of African American organized performance, beyond the rituals (like Pinkster, a popular African American celebration) identified as belonging to folk culture, runs parallel to the development of American versions of British racial types and speaks to stage racialism, telling us that the difficulty of those of African descent to participate in full measure on the white-owned stage elicited responses from them. The rise of minstrelsy in the 1820s and 1830s, then, must be observed from the perspective of an implied critique by African Americans of their access to white-owned theatres and the portrayal of blackface characters onstage. Eric Lott, for example, notes the implications of the unstable signs represented by minstrel performers in blackface – that is, in the mockery of black culture that the shows exhibit, blackness is given a kind of ironic power (29). In other words, why are all these white people blacking up? One history that is often elided from studies of early American theatre is that of labor, although Lott certainly pays attention to the “love and theft” involved in white workers appropriating a black style out of some mixture of envy, admiration, and contempt inspired by African American positioning in racial hierarchies. What has been ignored, however, is the world of black laborers at white theatres, who get little attention in current scholarship. Evidence suggests, for instance, that playhouses from the colonial period on featured African American laborers inside and outside the doors, from oyster sellers on the street to concessionaires in the lobby to workers on the set or others connected to the operations of the house. Managers or more successful actors

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had black servants or slaves; elite audience members sent their African American servants to the theatre on the night of performance; and on occasion, workers of color appeared onstage, either involved in set changes or as unacknowledged supernumeraries in the cast. Our recognition of this presence is crucial to understanding the audience experience of racial typing on the American stage. In other words, in theatres north and south, African Americans occupied seating and earned (or had stolen from them) livings from the white-controlled theatres – or tried to make a living out of theatres aimed at pleasing predominantly African American spectators. For American literary studies, such recognition of black laborers at the theatre urges readers of the drama to expand their sense of theatre’s participatory culture. Being at the playhouse means spectating, and for the most part, theatre scholarship presumes a white viewer and white participant. The black theatrical laborer represents a further complication of the performance of blackness in a culture that acts as if it were trapped in racial binaries it neither made nor can undo. Nevertheless, despite the black presence in the American theatre, the rise of minstrelsy represents, at one level at least, a mockery of that presence. The English actor Charles Mathews engaged in remunerative parody of American blacks when and after he toured the United States in 1822, leading to James Hewlett’s parody of Mathews in England a few years later (White). But while Mathews had the institution of the British theatre as his prop and support, Hewlett had only himself and perhaps the hopes of a few people of color back home to maintain his own hopes. Mathews did not have to answer Hewlett in the same way Hewlett felt compelled to answer Mathews. This Mathews-Hewlett interchange, with all its permutations of rival nationalities and power struggles over the ownership of racial representation, is part of the prehistory of minstrel shows and reminds us of the significance of performance in comprehending nineteenth-century American culture as a whole. To read a play like Samuel Woodworth’s The Forest Rose (1825), then, is to catch a glimpse of minstrelsy before its official founding in the blackface performances of T.D. Rice. Celebrated by some critics as a play of the resourceful Yankee or the innocence of the American pastoral, The Forest Rose has at its heart a vicious mockery of blackness. Among various subplots is the humiliation of a blackface servant character named Lid Rose, primarily by the Yankee, Jonathan Ploughboy. How do we read such a play? It is no surprise to find racism in an American drama; rather, one rarely finds comment upon it in the criticism of The Forest Rose. In place of critique we find celebration of Yankee innocence. Woodworth’s play text offers opportunities in the present to confront the cost of American nationalism in the increasing virulence of racial animosity. We learn about our own reading – whether we see or render invisible the race character, Rose. It cannot be known precisely how much the theatre is a cause or effect of social phenomena outside the doors of the playhouse. In any event, however, theatre participates so thickly within American culture as a whole that literary scholars ignore it at their peril. Certainly, as Heather Nathans has shown in her recent study, contemporary practices, such as the Bobalition illustrations and broadsides (white parodies of black

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aspirations for abolition, often showing blacks mimicking “white” dress), reflect broader attitudes of racial demarcation that can be found not only in theatre but also everywhere in literary and other cultural activities. Theories of minstrelsy explore the relationship between blackface performance and a variety of representations that include sympathetic relationships between nonelite whites and blacks. For example, in the smart-aleck repartee between Tambo and Bones or in the stump speeches of later versions of the minstrel show, one can read a popular expression that gave ordinary white people, represented as absurdly black onstage, a voice in the bigger arena. Certainly the long popularity of minstrel shows, continuing not only to the Civil War but also past it to the dawn of the twentieth century and beyond, suggests that the form offered blackness as a kind of resistance to high culture. Reading that blackness now, though, is troublesome (Lott; Toll). If George C. Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum (1986) and Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled (2000) are any indication, minstrelsy has a continuing and poisonous effect on the lives of actual African Americans. The minstrel costume (sometimes ragged, sometimes formal) was a straitjacket against which an African American person struggled to be authentic – in Ralph Ellison’s term, “counterfeit.” This is not to say that the minstrel show caused racism – it is more likely the other way around – but it is to say that the form enabled a society trying to make sense of slavery not to make sense of it. A citizen might read the paper by day of the travails generated by abolitionists, escaped slaves, and fire-eating congressmen, but by night could laugh and slap a thigh at the antics of the faux blacks at the local palace of histrionic pleasure. Minstrelsy was a roundabout way of turning slavery into popular entertainment. In Hawthorne’s well-known tale “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1835), for example, we find a story about a performer-minister who puts on blackness as both a sign and a mask, at once inviting and deflecting investigation into the depths of the man’s heart. The story appeared in the first wave of minstrelsy’s popularity; it comes as close as any fiction by the writer of blacking up his characters. To be sure, nothing in the tale admits to burnt cork applied to the white clergyman, but there is something uncanny in the author’s use of a black mask as a substitute for a white one at the beginning of the minstrel craze. Curiously, Hawthorne’s admitted source for the story is the account of Handkerchief Moody, a Maine minister who wore a white piece of cloth to hide his shame. In Hawthorne’s telling, assumed blackness simultaneously disguises and exposes. Reading Hawthorne in the context of theatre, then, allows us not only to analyze the short story as infiltrated by the popular stage but also to direct attention to the theatre itself. In other words, Hawthorne may be said to participate in “theft,” even as the story asks about the nature of blackness at all. When his literary friend Melville turned to minstrelsy in such fictions as Benito Cereno (1855) or The Confidence-Man (1857), he mocked the mockery, blacking some of his characters to expose the bloody racism at the core of the (self-proclaimed) genial American temperament. Theatre participates in the construction of social norms, even as it serves its own peculiar interests. The brief period of the noble chieftain type on the American stage

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illustrates how quickly entertainment trumps everything for theatre companies trying to succeed as businesses (Sayre). The American actor Edwin Forrest, seeking to capitalize on his rising fame, sponsored a contest to encourage American authorship of plays on “native” themes. The winner of the first competition, John Augustus Stone, gave to Forrest a vehicle he would maintain for four decades and hundreds of performances in dozens of venues: Metamora, or Last of the Wampanoags (1829). Featuring a Native American hero, an interpretation of the historical Wampanoag leader Metacom, or King Philip, Stone’s play provided audiences what they then wanted: a leaping, bellowing protagonist who dwarfed all other characters onstage by literally forcing them to the sides and the rear. This adaptation to British romantic drama had American repercussions in creating a taste for titanic heroes – ironic, truly, that an early version of this romantic hero is a “savage.” And indeed, Forrest and Stone make clear that Metamora is savage, even if he’s the best person in the drama. The plot urges us to accept his death as the necessary consequence of the Anglo-American imperialist trajectory, as we do Oroonoko’s death or the death of any heroic figure of color on the English or the American stage, by seeing his savagery as a sign of some primitive, unimprovable nature, now beginning to be understood in relation to the emerging discourses of scientific racism. Thus, despite its identification as a history play, Metamora reflects a variety of immediate concerns to both nineteenth-century audiences and twenty-first-century scholars who follow the pathways of racial discourse. Indeed, writers like James Fenimore Cooper, whose forest texts themselves reflect the author’s keen theatricality in their staging of entrances and exits, should be taught with the theatre in mind – Metamora in particular. Andrew Jackson’s notion of democracy meant the intended destruction of Indian nations through a brutal plan of forced removal from the eastern states. Curiously, Metamora played both to and against the passions incited by Indian dislocation and mass death in ways, perhaps, that Cooper does not quite reach. On the one hand, a performance of Metamora provided a certain solace to those far from the center of affected Indian populations; by observing Forrest channel Metacom, audiences in New York or Boston could take the comfort of tragedy: he overreached, he has to die, but we are urged by Walter and Oceana, the young and sympathetic whites, to see something of value in the doomed natural man. Audiences in southern states, meanwhile, took the play as an attack on them: the Indian was too sympathetic, too heroic, for their taste. To read Metamora cold is to encounter what appears to postmodern readers as a baggy plot and shapeless characters; but to read the play in context is to discover that the play is a dart in the center of the target that reads “American Psyche,” and a reminder, ironically, that Indians, contra Cooper, were not about to disappear, Metamora’s death in the play notwithstanding. In the way that blackface performance enhances the privileges of whiteness, particularly for the laboring class, so too in tawny-face performance, whites concomitantly reject and embrace Indianness. The key to reading this and other Indian-subject plays is to read through the texts to the inciting historical actions and observe the interplay between multiple, situated histories and the text of the play among them.

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By 1830 and for the rest of the nineteenth century, drama and theatre mattered. Gulf coast and Western states, expanding rapidly in number, added their playhouses to the national total. A tour by a star meant Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as Cincinnati, Mobile, and New Orleans. Theatres expanded, not only in number but also in size. Many cities supported playhouses that held 2,000 or 3,000 spectators, forcing playwrights and managers to adapt to the doubled or tripled capacity from the theatre buildings of the previous century. This meant more attention to sets and properties to accommodate the larger stage area, and also acoustics: actors had to be able to speak to 3,000 people stacked into three tiers. Some managers mourned the impossibility of raising the public taste for anything but melodrama and farce. The latest British comedy or the hottest English actor was still a draw, but the rise of minstrelsy, the new popularity of an old type, the Yankee, and the emergence of new types, like the New York fireman, turned the theatre into a register of popular response rather than a house of art – or so the critics grumbled. Democratic heroes, like actor Frank Chanfrau’s portrayal of Mose the fireman (B. Baker) or James Hackett’s Nimrod Wildfire (Paulding) or any number of Yankee imitators, were the draws, along with the touring tragedian. The stage embraced cliché and bombast as well as popular taste in songs and music, but reflected back in sometimes oblique ways the state of the nation (Bank). By the mid-nineteenth century, theatre was the most visible institution in the expression of US mass culture. For those of us living in an era where the playhouse is largely seen as an elite or limited-interest space, for the cognoscenti rather than hoi polloi, it is a Forrestian leap to imagine the place of the stage in the era of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. To be sure, neither of the transcendentalists just mentioned were big-time theatre goers, but they could not help but observe or be influenced by the stage. Writers like Cooper, Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Melville can best be understood by reading the plays they saw and recognizing they could not escape the pull of the theatrical. All had their writing shaped by attendance at or awareness of the theatre. Moby-Dick (1851) has long been seen as shaped by theatrical values, but the point is that there is a particular stage being represented in Melville’s anatomical fiction: Ahab may have his origins in Byronic brooders (like Manfred), but the expression is out of Edmund Kean and George Frederick Cooke, those dark and caped actors of the transatlantic stage. In the days leading to the extraordinary and lethal 1849 Astor Place Riot, ignited by the rivalry between the British star William Macready and the American Forrest, Melville took the side of the Brit, who contra the Byronic Cooke had a softer toned Shakespearean hero to sell. For those trapped in the present, where theatre only occasionally stirs public passions, it is important to conceive the mid-nineteenth century as a period when theatre mattered so much that it was a life-and-death issue. The conflict between Forrest and Macready had been simmering for years, not unlike that between Mathews and Hewlett, but on a larger scale. Thus, it seems that working-class citizens, stirred to Forrest by national pride (or the prospect of joyful hooliganism) and class animosities, turned on supporters of the allegedly elite and effete transatlantic visitor and called them out as un-American.

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If this were a victory for American acting over British, or workers over merchants, or performance over text, or just a declaration of theatrical independence, it was a bloody and pyrrhic one. Whatever the precise cause or reading of the riot, in the end, nearly two dozen people lay dead and more wounded as a result (Moody). Melville two years later embodied Ahab with a theatrical power to sway even the most moral of the crew to buy into his hell-fired quest – his own declaration on the allure and danger of the romantic popular stage. Perhaps one of the reasons that study of early theatre has lagged behind that of other genres has to do with the kind of indirection that appears in Moby-Dick. It took several decades of criticism to recognize in Melville a scornful critique of slavery, particularly in Benito Cereno (1855). Slavery as an issue, and not simply as a circumstance of secondary characters, had been largely avoided directly by American playwrights, although in Britain, which had finally brought slavery to an end in its territories in 1834, the theatre could be more overt about it than in the United States. English playwright Shirley Brooks’s The Creole (1847), a source for Dion Boucicault’s slavery play The Octoroon (1859), but a drama that did not appear on an American stage, uses the theatre to mark the end of slavery and, by implication, remind the United States it has failed to make progress on racial justice. The economics of theatre, which included mass audience appeal, made bold social commentary difficult to mount if it meant alienating blocks of spectators. Sometimes, though, the theatre had ways of addressing racial captivity that critiqued existing culture without being confrontational. Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845), a comedy of manners that lampoons a family of strivers, has an African American servant character, Zeke, who, while conforming to the role of the man in livery, also shows an ability to hide behind the mask of his blackness and make his own parody on parvenu white culture. It’s a small gesture, but it indicates that even amidst the comedy of minstrelsy, an occasional playwright could insert a little doubt that minstrelsy represented anything other than white people (audience as well as actors) enjoying a night off from being white. One challenge for literary critics, then, is to read that contemporary topic in texts and entertainments that do not announce them as subjects. Slavery as dramatic topic only entered the American theatre overtly in 1852, with the promulgation of plays based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The enormous success of the George Aiken version, running for over 300 consecutive performances (a record at the time), suggests that American spectators were eager for a performance on the topic of the day. It was a long time coming to the stage, but when it came, slavery entered garbed in familiarity. In the 1840s, it was hard to find a black character who could be called a character at all, other than Othello (but see Nathans); in the 1850s, suddenly, a cluster of blackface characters, some represented with a nod to their humanity, entered the cultural lexicon. Aiken was shrewd enough to dramatize what became the most popular novel in the world and faithful enough to keep most of the main characters and the basic outline of the plot intact. But like most others who embraced the once-forbidden topic, Aiken could not resist the theatrical gimmicks popular at the time. Poor Topsy, a caricature of the abused black

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figure that went back a century or more on the British stage, had her abuse amuse the masses; beaten by Ophelia, she scampers and romps across the stage, a crowd favorite. To be sure, Aiken’s play advanced the stage toward a more overtly political sense of its place in culture, but it could not escape the choking racism that turned a brutal institution into comedy (Meer). The play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, read alongside the novel, illuminates the spheres that novel and drama occupy. Stowe’s novel was the biggest selling American fiction of its era, and in that way reached many readers. Aiken’s play, neither authorized by Stowe nor from whose productions she earned any money, probably reached many more. Which Tom, then, is the cultural icon? Although Aiken is relatively faithful to the main plot and characters, he makes many changes, including adding characters and changing tone. The Topsy of legend is more likely the Topsy of the play than the child in Stowe. Onstage, Topsy was often played by an adult woman rather than a child actor, while Eva, the white angel, was enacted by a child actor. How does such a practice illuminate the reception history of the characters? In the play, Topsy is described derogatorily as something out of “Day and Martin,” a stove polish manufacturer. In other words, her blackness is made a comedic point, whereas in Stowe, the bigger focus is Topsy’s unruly behavior generated by her not being loved. Nevertheless, Stowe’s multiple plots and thrilling escapes met the demands of stage, and even contributed to the theatricality of the novel. In some ways, the two genres meet and speak to each other in this pairing of novel and play. Much has been said about the shifts in taste and the movement away from the mass audiences for post-Civil War stage performance. Bruce McConachie notes the many dimensions to those changes, including the rise of what he calls “business class” spectators (157). Shifts in power and money and taste, not to mention the deep damage done by North and South to each other, forced drama and theatre to adapt. The conditions of the large, mass stage were, by war’s end, not sustainable; a new day of shaping smaller theatres to more specific audiences had arrived. Romance seemed, to some at least, inappropriate to a bleeding, mourning nation. Even that boisterous performer Walt Whitman turned to elegy at war’s end. But melodrama did not go away for a long time. Moralistic plots continued, although over time the expression in those plots moved toward less demonstrative, more natural speech. The drama of the postwar era, however, gets relatively little attention; the amount of criticism generated by individual plays in the period from 1865 to 1900 rarely meets the volume of studies devoted to The Contrast. That may be because the Civil War, oddly, left only a faint footprint on the dusty boards of American stages. With a very few exceptions, notably Bronson Howard’s Shenandoah (1888), playwrights and managers kept the conflict at more than arm’s length. This could be explained easily enough – people were tired of war and did not want to see it when they sought surcease from its memories and pains. But it required something else – an institution dedicated to keeping the people it served always at a distance from the sights and sounds of real life. There was nothing equivalent onstage in the 1860s–1880s to a Mathew Brady photograph of bodies on a field of war.

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That did not mean that theatre people ignored the real world; it’s just that conflict onstage was more likely to be represented as feuding siblings than warring halfnations. Nothing ostensibly seems farther from war than Augustin Daly’s popular sensation drama Under the Gaslight (1867). Daly, an American who helped in the transition from the old-style theatre manager to new-style artistic director, was, like Dion Boucicault before him, a consummate man of the theatre. His most noted contribution – one disputed by Boucicault, who claimed he thought of it first – was the use of the moving train as prop with the heroic rescue of someone tied to the tracks. That in the original it was a man tied to the tracks who was saved by an ax-wielding woman has been largely forgotten in the later Perils of Pauline iterations of this stage spectacle. The main plot features Laura – one of many stage Lauras to come – an elite young woman who, it is discovered, is not what she seems. Condemned by her class to the streets, where, it is believed, she had her origins, she falls to the bottom, but oddly finds a socially comfortable existence among denizens of New York’s slums. Leading the condemnation is Pearl, her functional sister, who feels liberated from competition with Laura but of course, in true melodramatic fashion, must eat crow when the tables are turned at the end. Family disputes, like internecine wars, are best solved onstage with forgiveness, not justice, and Laura, of course, forgives. It is the kind of drama that scholars acknowledge and recognize for its theatrical innovations but rarely turn to for literary study. Even in this sensation drama, with its unbelievable plot (although the constant threat of a fall from class plagued many late-nineteenth-century Americans of the middling strata) and made-for-stage redemption, dark secrets reveal themselves in often oblique ways (McConachie 213–7). One of Laura’s band of street supporters is Snorky, a messenger by employment but also a wounded veteran of the war. Onstage, we see and hear that he has lost an arm in the conflict, and because he is working class, the text suggests of course he can take it – and naturally he will want to help the fair-haired maiden living amongst the slum folk. Snorky is kept in his place by having to be rescued by Laura – just as wounded vets were better off unseen as they walked among the unwounded – but given a token heroism by his general contributions to Laura’s quick rise back to the elite at the end. Rough urban street conditions, armless ex-soldiers, contrasts of wealth and poverty, and a house divided – these were part of the postwar American landscape, and they were part of American drama. It’s just that amidst the cross-cutting plots and sensational train, spectators would have had to think hard about what they had just seen. In other words, for all the kidnap plotting by the working-class villain Byke and the kidnapping and love interest of Laura, the play should also be read in the context of a war just past. Although The Red Badge of Courage is frequently one of the few works read as Civil War literature, dramatists had their own ways of encoding and representing the war a decade before Stephen Crane was even born. When the war was faced directly in Shenandoah, it had to be accommodated to the cultural demands of a squeamish and sensitive people. By the 1880s, the war itself was long over, and so, for many, was its root cause, slavery. We observe in Howard’s

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play that the news of Fort Sumter’s surrender to the Confederacy divides the characters’ loyalties according to birth; afterward, we imagine we are in various points of conflict, notably the campaign over the Shenandoah Valley. But love rules the stage in the nineteenth century, and the usual telltale artifacts of melodrama play their part in this slight shift toward realism. There are no spectacular train rescues, but there is a portrait miniature that carries its story: the prop as character. In the end, characters pair up and the war itself is largely an afterthought. If New York theatre was to be believed, everyone in 1888 just wanted to forget the war and its continuing differences – and did not want to spend time over the lack of justice toward the former slaves over whom the conflict raged. The postwar preference for realism in canonical works of fiction is firmly rebuffed in the theatre for a while yet, suggesting sentiment and sensation retain a strong grip over the cultural imagination in the age of William Dean Howells and James. Plays serve as odd registers of remembering and forgetting. Performances no longer seen are often forgotten, but plays like Gaslight and Shenandoah serve as well as shapers of memory of the trauma of war. Perhaps the emblematic play for a nation eager to forget was Rip Van Winkle (1865). Written with help from Boucicault and played by Joseph Jefferson III for four decades and thousands of performances, Rip Van Winkle is at once an adaptation of a popular American tale and its own entity of memory and forgetting. Rip makes a point of avoiding reality wherever he can. Of course, it famously ends with his return to his village after 20 snoozy years – which in Washington Irving’s original tale covered the American Revolution – and his liberation from the “petticoat government” of Dame Van Winkle. The play gives Rip’s wife some sympathy, and Rip turns out to be a doting father of a girl, all in service of a growing trend toward the sentimental onstage, but it too is a performance of amnesia (McArthur 213–40). Jefferson’s Rip clearly met the taste of the age; the actor, once a versatile member of a respected theatrical family, found wealth and fame in a property that remunerated well but did nothing to jolt his audiences out of complacency with the status quo. Like other actors of his day, most notably James O’Neill and his one-trick vehicle, Monte Cristo, Jefferson took the option placed on his plate. For Eugene O’Neill, as expressed in Long Day’s Journey into Night, his father’s choice – and thus Jefferson’s – was a craven capitulation to money over art. But Jefferson’s own skills as an artist, his understanding of how to make Irving’s story work theatrically (others had tried but with limited success), and his ability to sustain the play’s popularity over many years suggest that the Jefferson play is deserving of being considered as something more than a one-trick vehicle. Rather, it serves as a node of intersection for a variety of scholarly and critical tools that include analysis of depictions of alcoholism, trauma studies, adaptation, performance, and authorship (sorting among Irving, Boucicault, and Jefferson, for instance). Before O’Neill and the Provincetown Players, some playwrights sought to extend familiar boundaries of subject and treatment. Some who had success in the slick and predictable vehicles of fin de siècle theatre, like Clyde Fitch, author of Beau Brummell

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(1890) and The Girl with the Green Eyes (1902), sought to produce texts that pushed at the limits of theatre. Fitch’s last play, The City (1909), is a bold attempt by a consummate entertainer to extend himself into more difficult territory. Like that great lover of the theatre 50 years before, Walt Whitman, Fitch saw the city as one of the great American subjects. In previous plays, he had been content to show the lives of the well-to-do and the city as a playground. In The City, he turned to a darker side, the city as vast, corrupting force. It was as close to naturalism as Fitch had come – and indeed, one laments his early death shortly after completing the play for what directions he might have taken his considerable skills at dialogue. Like Henrik Ibsen and his followers, Fitch peeled the façade off bourgeois happiness to show that rising in the city is a matter of not simply more money, but also a contamination of all family values. The young banker from a small town finds his dream of the city is a nightmare; and while the play does not kick over its sentimentalist traces entirely, it points the way toward a theatre willing to leave the audience in some doubt and darkness about the lives of its ostensible protagonists. Although naturalism onstage appeared later in the United States than it did in prose fiction, it nevertheless can be found before O’Neill. The commercial element of the playhouse should not preclude treatment of dramatic texts by literary scholars. Indeed, issues of commerce and finance, from The Contrast onward, run deeply through American drama (J. Baker 96–112). By the same token, naturalism in fiction reflects its own interests in the theatre. Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1896) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) are filled with numerous references to, or situations having to do with, theatrical culture. If those texts, or similar ones, had their influence on Fitch and O’Neill, the playhouse world familiar to them had its reciprocal influence on the fiction writers. For all the differences of dramatic texts with stories and novels, the genres are imbedded in each other, as both complementary and antagonistic genres. As literary scholars, we owe it to ourselves to recognize the degree to which American culture was a theatrical and dramatic one. Cooper, Hawthorne, Howells, and James each imagined himself at some point in his career as either a dramatist or performance artist (Hawthorne’s wandering storyteller). Literary scholarship has much to learn from and say about the plays and performances in the culturally rich and critically compelling eras before Eugene O’Neill ever penned a play.

References and Further Reading Baker, Benjamin. A Glance at New York. New York: Samuel French, 1848. Baker, Jennifer Jordan. Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Bank, Rosemarie K. Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Barbour, Philip L. “Captain John Smith and the London Theatre.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975): 277–9.

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Barker, James Nelson. The Indian Princess. In Early American Drama. Ed. Jeffrey H. Richards. New York: Penguin, 1997. Behn, Aphra. The Widow Ranter. In The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800. Eds. Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner. New York: Routledge, 1997. Berkeley, William. The Lost Lady. London: John Okes for John Colby, 1639. Birdoff, Harry. The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Vanni, 1947. Daly, Augustin. Under the Gaslight. In American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary. Eds. Stephen Watt and Gary Richardson. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” In Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (pp. 45–59). New York: Vintage, 1972. Fichtelberg, Joseph. Risk Culture: Performance and Danger in Early America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Fitch, Clyde. Plays. Eds. Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1915. Howard, Bronson. Shenandoah. In American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary. Eds. Stephen Watt and Gary Richardson. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Jefferson, Joseph, III. Rip Van Winkle. In The Black Crook, and Other Nineteenth-Century American Plays. Ed. Myron Matlaw. New York: Dutton, 1967. Jehlen, Myra, and Michael Warner. Eds. The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800. New York: Routledge, 1997. Kritzer, Amelia Howe. Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Marriott, Sarah. The Chimera; or, Effusions of Fancy. New York: Swords, 1795. McAllister, Marvin. White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theatre. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

McArthur, Benjamin. The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and Nineteenth-Century Theatre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. McConachie, Bruce A. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Meer, Sarah. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Moody, Richard. The Astor Place Riot. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. Murray, Judith Sargent. The Traveller Returned. In Judith Sargent Murray, The Gleaner. 3 vols. Boston: Andrews, 1798. Nathans, Heather S. Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. O’Neill, Eugene. O’Neill: Complete Plays. 3 vols. New York: Library of America, 1988. Paulding, James Kirke. The Lion of the West: Retitled The Kentuckian, or A Trip to New York. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954. Richards, Jeffrey H. “Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks: Creolism in the Literary Chesapeake.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas (pp. 135–61). Eds. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Richards, Jeffrey H. Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Richards, Jeffrey H. Mercy Otis Warren. Boston: Twayne, 1995. Richards, Jeffrey H. Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607– 1789. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Rust, Marion. Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Sayre, Gordon M. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Smith, John. The Generall Historie of Virginia. 1624. In The Complete Works of Captain John Smith. 3 vols. Ed. Philip L. Barbour. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Drama, Theatre, Performance before O’Neill Smith, Susan Harris. American Drama: The Bastard Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Stone, John Augustus. Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. In American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary. Eds. Stephen Watt and Gary Richardson. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Thompson, George A., Jr. A Documentary History of the African Theatre. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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Tyler, Royall. The Contrast. In Early American Drama. Ed. Jeffrey H. Richards. New York: Penguin, 1997. White, Shane. Stories of Freedom in Black New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Woodworth, Samuel. The Forest Rose; or American Farmers. In Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762–1909. Ed. Richard Moody. Cleveland, OH: World, 1966.

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Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies Mary Loeffelholz

Poetry: “I, too, dislike it,” Marianne Moore offered in the famous opening gambit of her sly modernist manifesto, “Poetry” (35). Sometimes I, too, dislike it – not US poetry itself so much as the banality of the entanglement of nation, gender, and race in the primal scenes of American poetry’s emergence as told by most mainstream twentieth-century Americanist literary histories. Most Americanist literary scholars of the last two, three, or four intellectual generations could probably still recite from memory the script of the vehicle (once starring Anne Bradstreet and more recently remade with Phillis Wheatley) in which the New World’s formally imitative poetry, both literally and figuratively feminine, seeks to prove itself in the judgment of the Old World. In this version of our literary history, Walt Whitman comes along just in time to blow our poetry’s jambs wide open. Breaking the pentameter, Whitman frees our captive feminine verse, and so liberates the United States at a stroke to become nature’s nation. Actual women aren’t essential to this binary nationalist script, since figures of race can do the work of gender and notoriously did in Philip Rahv’s famous 1938 essay on the “Palefaces and Redskins” of American literature. Rahv’s redskin “is a purely indigenous phenomenon, the true-blue offspring of the western hemisphere” (254), whereas the paleface, “in compensation for backward cultural traditions and a lost religious ethic,” cherishes his own “peculiar excess of refinement” (255). Rahv epitomizes these “[f]atal antipodes” in the “mutual repulsion between the two major figures in American literature,” Walt Whitman and Henry James (252). Aside from one passing glance at Emily Dickinson among the palefaces, the fatal romantic polarities of Rahv’s essay are enacted entirely among white men: “Will James and Whitman

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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ever be reconciled, will they finally discover and act upon each other?” wonders Rahv in his conclusion (256). As Christopher Looby explores in Chapter 26 in this volume, the answer at least to the second part of Rahv’s question is, in thunder, yes; and their mutual antagonism was always already a powerful queer erotics of mutual discovery and action. For the study of US poetry, however, what Timothy Morris aptly labels the “resilient bipolarism” (18) of this model of American literary history would prove particularly disabling. Among the poets cited by Rahv, only Carl Sandburg joins Whitman on the indigenous side of the great divide, while “the novelists, who control the main highway of literature, were and still are nearly all redskins,” the great example of James notwithstanding (254). The history of American poetry implied in Rahv’s essay pits a lonely Whitman against the mostly faceless majority of poets still beholden to “the traditions and forms of English literature” (256). Looking forward to the redskins lying down with the palefaces, though, did nothing to challenge the rejection of sociality and history deeply embedded in this bipolar history’s melding of Whitmanian autochthonous poetic experiments to the exceptionalist projects of US nationalism. Surviving a world war, a significant change in the US domestic political climate, and many twists and turns of canonical judgment of individual writers, this resilient bipolarism surfaced again in Roy Harvey Pearce’s influential The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), this time framed in Emersonian terms as the enduring contest between a man-making central canon of American poets and the surrounding “anti-poetic culture” (139). In Pearce’s telling of the tale, Whitman becomes “the supremely realized Emersonian poet” (164) while several of Rahv’s exemplary palefaces, Herman Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson among them, move over to the Whitmanian side of native, originary American strength – for Pearce, understood as “a consciousness of the self defined in terms of its ultimate resistance to consciousness of other selves” (140). Emily Dickinson’s poetry now earns an honorable place in this psychomachia, as it “battles against and wins out over the mass media of the psyche” (185). In the next generation of critics, Harold Bloom followed Pearce in claiming that “Emerson’s insistence upon Self-Reliance made Whitman and Dickinson . . . possible” (52). Bloom grafted his famous thesis of the poet’s “anxiety of influence” onto Pearce’s foundational insight into the mise en abyme of American poetic identity: an American selfhood defined as “ultimate resistance to consciousness of other selves” can only emerge in relation to other selves who are also defined in terms of their “ultimate resistance” to consciousness of still other selves, ad infinitum. As recently as 1995, Timothy Morris could still observe, “The formulations of Pearce and Bloom possess the field of the American poetic canon” (16). Their major mid-twentieth-century challenger, the New Criticism – with its characteristic preference for transhistorical literary forms and aesthetic principles, and its consequent distaste for author-centered literary nationalisms – had by 1995 conquered the American poetry classroom as a pedagogical method of close reading while ceding the ground of canon formation to the Whitman-centered nationalist narrative. As Alan Golding summarized the evolution of the field in his 1995 study, From Outlaw to

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Classic: Canons in American Poetry, the increasing focus of poetry anthologies from the 1950s forward on “literary masters” marked “the point at which, under the influence of New Critical method, the New Critical and Americanist canons started to converge more closely” (112). The terms of this mainstream convergence, however, were markedly divergent from the most energetic strands of Americanist literary studies of the 1980s and 1990s. A canon of master poets producing autonomous works birthed out of heroic resistance, not only to their surrounding culture but even to the consciousness of other selves, could hardly be less congenial to Americanist literary scholars increasingly committed to understanding the sociality of all forms of selfhood and the social situation of all acts of writing. Golding, surveying the “New Americanist scholarship” of his contemporaries, noted with concern their “critical neglect of poetry in favor of prose forms (usually fiction) that have a superficially more ‘direct’ connection to social and historical reality” (xiii). Echoing Golding’s concern, Joseph Harrington pointed in 1996 to the absence of poetry, save for that of Whitman, in influential current anthologies like Philip Fisher’s The New American Studies (1991) as well as in field-defining classics like F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941). In Harrington’s view, “the identification of American fiction as American literature has persisted” to the point that, for mainstream critical purposes, “American Poetry Is Not American Literature” (496). It has persisted and perhaps, in some settings, even intensified. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman’s 2002 The Futures of American Studies evicts even Whitman from the Americanist scene: its American literary canon comprises a wide range of fiction, selected on a wide range of critical principles – from Herman Melville to Toni Cade Bambara, and from Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter to popular anti-Mormon novels – along with drama and film, but avoids poetry entirely. Vanished along with Whitman is nostalgia for the American poet’s Cold War incarnation as the “crucial, lonely, and imperious role as trustee of our imaginative language” (Pearce 539). From the standpoint of scholars interested in US poetry, The Futures of American Studies looks oddly like the inverted image of American studies past, as if the leading edge of present-day criticism had embraced but transvalued Roy Harvey Pearce’s characterization of the United States as the world’s preeminently antipoetic culture. As an increasing number of scholars were reasserting from the 1980s forward, however, the United States as a matter of empirical fact has been anything but hostile to poetry. While the field-defining works of feminist criticism and African American literary scholarship of these decades, like those of Americanist literary scholarship more broadly, remained focused on prose genres (Harris 605), scholarly and pedagogical anthologies of US poetry selected on principles of New Americanist interest – social identities, social movements, and historical representativeness – began to appear in numbers in these years. Although sometimes on different shelves of different bookstores, these anthologies kept pace with the collections of contemporary poetry, organized on competing aesthetic principles, through which the “poetry wars” of the later twentieth-century literary scene were being fought. (On the mutually defining contrast between the “revisionist collection and the canonical teaching text”

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in poetry anthologies, see Golding 30–40; on the contemporary “poetry wars” between experimentalists and traditionalists and their aftermath, see Caplan.) Joan R. Sherman’s African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century and Cheryl Walker’s American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century both appeared in 1992, followed by Janet Gray’s and Paula Bennett’s competing anthologies of nineteenth-century women poets in 1997 and 1998. The 1993 publication of John Hollander’s two-volume American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century by the Library of America – marked by a standing-room-only reading, packed with literary and academic notables, on Harvard’s campus – returned the American poetry anthology, as well as its surrounding social relations, to something resembling those of the later nineteenth century. Ample in its coverage of canonical isolato-masters like Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, and innovative in its particularly capacious selection of American Indian poetry in nineteenth-century versions, Hollander’s anthology also echoed the more catholic selection principles of nineteenth-century American anthologies like those of Rufus Griswold and Edmund Clarence Stedman. Hollander’s choices canvassed US geographical diversity as well as multiple sites and social levels of poetry’s production and consumption, “embracing solitary visionaries and congenial story-tellers, humorists and dissidents, songwriters and philosophers. . . . Parodies, dialect poems, song lyrics, and children’s verse evoke the liveliness of an era when poetry was accessible to all” (Hollander I, jacket copy). Meanwhile, the nineteenth-century United States was not the only era of American history that revealed unexpected fecundity to historically minded scholars of poetry in the 1980s and 1990s. Evoking the liveliness of an era when experimental modernism, insurgent African American writing communities, and leftist social movements jostled with one another for public space, Cary Nelson’s 1992 Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory served as both critical manifesto for and quasi-anthology of a broadly diverse poetry of American modernism. The twentieth-century United States, scholars of the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated, had seen a number of booms in the market for poetry; Harrington’s “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature” offers evidence ranging from Joyce Kilmer’s observation that World War I boosted poetry sales (497) to the “syndicated poetry shows” of 1930s radio (504) to Time magazine’s reporting from the 1960s on the box office success of poetry readings and the healthy sales of poetry recordings (505). Looking back at the same Cold War period from which Roy Harvey Pearce’s argument for the essential opposition between American poets and their antipoetic culture emerged, Robert von Hallberg by contrast saw the 1960s as the decade in which “the poetic avant-garde was drawn into the mainstream of American literary life”: “In one year, between 1963 and 1964, the total distribution of Poetry magazine jumped by almost 50 percent to just under 10,000,” while US federal subsidies helped underwrite library purchases of poetry books (13–15). In Hallberg’s ambivalent tribute, postWorld War II American poetry for better or worse met “a demand in America for those signs of cultural coherence that help to ratify imperium” (28). “If some readers and critics persist in the belief that American poets have made themselves cultural

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outlaws,” Hallberg concludes, “they must do so in spite of a very distinguished group of poets who, it seems to me, have looked more searchingly and fairly at the national culture” (244). Different as these various 1980s–1990s representations of American poetry are in tone and perspective – Cary Nelson’s radical take on the US “national culture,” for example, is a far cry from Hallberg’s liberalism – they have in common a collective turn away from what we might call, after Michel Foucault, the repressive hypothesis of American poetry’s relationship to its surrounding culture: far from being repressed or starved, American poetry has been abundantly produced and consumed. Far from being discouraged, poetry in many contexts – the nineteenth-century schoolroom (Loeffelholz From School 11–64; Sorby 1–98), the nineteenth-century public sphere (Bennett Poets), and the twentieth-century university (Golding xv) – has been all but compulsory. From this critical perspective, the object is to understand the productive (in Foucault’s sense) rather than censoring relationship between American imperium and the making of poets, to understand how “[t]he institutions of American poetry, . . . like any other social institutions, shape social subjects, [and] make a certain range of subject positions . . . possible and available” (Golding 170). American poets themselves, taking stock of their situation, have often remarked on the availability of the poet’s subject position in the United States. Writing on “The New Math of Poetry” in the era of digital media, contemporary poet David Alpaugh recites statistics of “runaway” production: extrapolating from a starting point of over 2,000 journals that accept poetry and a growth rate of “more than one new journal a day,” he calculates that “more than 100,000 poems will be published in 2010” and warns, “If journals merely continue to grow at the current rate, there will be more than 35,000 of them by 2100, and approximately 86 million poems will be published in the 21st century!” – with similar exponential growth rates projected for poetry-book prizes (from one in 1950, the Yale Younger Poets contest, to 330 in 2010, to 100,000 by the end of the twenty-first century) (Alpaugh B12). Compulsive lust after the poet’s subject position, in Alpaugh’s view, is a distinctively American weakness: “The notion that writing and performing ‘poetry’ is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture . . . the new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of ‘publication’ ” (B12). Appalled by the contemporary supply-side economics of poetry, Alpaugh looks back to supposedly “quieter times,” when poetry’s “only significant promoters were English professors who focused on reading poetry for its own sake” (B12). If we look back far enough in these precincts, though, we will find Henry Wadsworth Longfellow looking back at us. In Kavanagh (1849), a village sketch written during his stint at Harvard as a professor of modern languages, Longfellow satirizes the torrential print culture of the early nineteenth-century United States. Asked to contribute to a new periodical, “The Niagara,” Longfellow’s hero is both flattered and offended to have his literary ambitions coupled with those of pushy journalists and poetesses who have “not published anything yet, except in the news-

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papers.” Helpless to enforce his own sense of distinction, he can only sigh, “There are so many poets now-a-days!” (Longfellow, Kavanagh 121). These new and old maths of American poetry suggest that the defining situation of poets and poetry in the United States is not a permanently adversarial relationship to an “antipoetic culture,” but rather a longstanding and evolving crisis of judgment in the relationship between poetry and its publics. This crisis of judgment implicates the relationship between readers and writers, and between writing and publication. Alpaugh proposes, for example, that “in an ideal society everybody would write poetry” but warns that “there is a difference between writing and publishing” (B13) – or perhaps, more accurately, there should be a difference; but who is to secure that difference? Established poets log-roll, university-housed writers ignore independents while flooding the market with MFA-bearing wannabes, and even the staunchest of disinterested editors are unlikely to be afflicted with the ideal insomnia it would take to read all their submissions; and, as everyone apparently knows, the common reader is more likely to make purchasing decisions on the basis of “the sociology of the poet” (Alpaugh sniffs) or the subject matter than for the sake of “the art itself” (B12). If no institutional arbiter can be trusted to draw the necessary distinctions, are we thrown back upon the doubtful self-restraint of the same recognition-craving American subjects of writing who made this pickle in the first place? Authority to regulate the American poetry system, on Alpaugh’s account of it, cannot be legitimately claimed from either the inside or the outside of any of its institutional forms. The problem is, to borrow the terms of the American political system, a constitutional question of legitimacy: by whose consent does someone become a poet? Whence the authority? In 1962, Roy Harvey Pearce concluded, “The abiding questions that American poets have had to ask are: ‘Whence the authority? What is left, ineradicable, when one imagines oneself living apart from the world?’ ” (429). If the second of Pearce’s questions no longer reflects assumptions within which most Americanist critics would choose to abide, the first remains as pertinent as ever. Our present-day answers to this question, as Alpaugh illustrates, will be shaped by the revolution in digital media among other current developments in Americanist literary criticism and cultural studies. These developments prompt us, I think, to envision a literary history of American poetry ordered by transmission, mediation, and media, rather than origin and imitation, as fundamental categories. As former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins declares in the latest Bedford Introduction to Literature (with a provocative nod toward John Ciardi’s mid-twentieth-century pedagogical classic How Does a Poem Mean?), “More interesting to me than what a poem means is how it travels” (Collins 1166). As Lawrence Buell presciently recommended in 1993, Americanist literary scholars will continue to distance themselves from the “autochthonous myth of American poetic history that winds up dancing around a selective version of Whitman, fathered by an even more selective version of Emerson,” in favor of “a myth of American poesis as part of a transatlantic Anglophone community almost as interlinked in the nineteenth century as in the High Modernist era” (119). Deeply interested in what Meredith McGill calls “the traffic in poems,” our histories

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of American poetry will increasingly open up to linguistic communities beyond the Anglophone one, attending to the importance of translation and adaptation studies – as Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz argue in Chapter 14 in this volume – even for a literary genre often thought of as uniquely resistant to translation. Histories of US poetry will attend not only to mighty individual poets but also to poetry’s institutional forms and their recurrent scandals of judgment (English 187–96), and to poetry’s transpersonal figures of transmission, such as the poetess who enacts lyric’s condition as a “medium of cultural exchange” (Jackson and Prins 523; see also Richards). The future history of American poetry will join up with histories of the book, of print, and of media more generally. It will comprehend traditional and popular poetic forms – numbers, verses, and meters – as technologies of dissemination and modes of literacy, understanding resistance and sociality not as the racialized primordial opposites of American national character but rather as turns and counterturns in the rhythms of human exchange. Let me return, then, to rewrite the script with which I began, this time as a story about the transmission of poetry in America rather than its melodramatic rescue from formal imitation. Phillis Wheatley’s 1772 presentation of her work to the worthies of Boston, invited to certify that she was “qualified to write” the verses published under her name (as they eventually judged her to be), is surely “the primal scene of African-American letters,” in Henry Louis Gates’s memorable framing (Gates 30, 1; but see also Joanna Brooks’s skeptical revision of Gates’s iconic narrative). Wheatley’s trials also qualify in every respect as a primal scene for any history of American poetry attentive to how poems travel as well as to how they mean. Published in England and dedicated to the countess of Huntingdon, Wheatley’s poems were addressed to, and rapidly found, a readership not only in the transatlantic Anglophone community but also in France. Trafficked across the Atlantic first as a child of seven or eight (likely “a native Wolof speaker from the Senegambian coast,” Gates hypothesizes [17]), Wheatley in 1773 rode the traffic in her poems to England, still a slave but now also an author and “an acknowledged celebrity among fellow celebrities and English peers” (Robinson 34). At the command of her mistress, she sailed back to the United States, still enslaved, before the notice earned by her poems, including that of the British reviewer who tartly commented of the American independence movement that “the purchase of [Wheatley’s] freedom, would, in our opinion, have done more honour than hanging a thousand trees with ribbons and emblems” (qtd. in Robinson, 40), finally prodded her mistress into freeing her. Wheatley was no stranger to the hunger for fame that David Alpaugh sees as driving the twenty-first-century American poetry system. “[T]he Oprah Winfrey of her time,” as Gates calls her (33), Wheatley both got recognition and, importantly, gave it. She understood poetry to be properly and above all a medium of recognition. Compelled to vindicate her own authorship and her own humanity before an elite white male jury, Wheatley asserted in her poetry her authority, in turn, to recognize others – not only turning the tables on members of Anglo-American white elites in well-known poems like “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England” (qtd. in

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Robinson 157–8), but also extending recognition to other men and women of the African diaspora, as in her tribute “To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works”: To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent, And thought in living characters to paint, When first thy pencil did those beauties give, And breathing figures learn from thee to live, How did those prospects give my soul delight, A new creation rushing on my sight? Still, wond’rous youth! each noble path pursue, On deathless glories fix thine ardent view: Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire! And may the charms of each seraphic theme Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame! (qtd. in Robinson 256)

Formally and thematically derived from a long British tradition, lines like these were repudiated by a long list of twentieth-century African American literary critics (Gates 74–84) and passed over in silence by many a history of American poetry. While its neoclassicism offers nothing to the autochthonous myth of American poetry, Wheatley’s tribute to “S. M.” (Scipio Moorhead, a fellow Boston slave known as a portrait painter) asserts its own theory of the relationship between transmission and original creation. Figuring the portraitist’s art not as creation ex nihilo but as a second birth into culture, in which already-“breathing figures” yet learn to live, Wheatley puns evocatively on several senses of “lab’ring,” doubling the conceiving body of the artist with that of the slave and doubling the horizontal trafficking of Wheatley’s Atlantic world of letters and slavery with the vertical translation, to “landscapes in the realms above,” to which she along with Moorhead aspires. In those realms “Celestial Salem blooms in endless spring,” yet another doubling back upon Wheatley’s Atlantic world: Salem, Massachusetts, was one of many New England ports of the slave trade. “Thrice happy, when exalted to survey / That splendid city,” Wheatley and Moorhead become both denizens of heaven and, decades before Nathaniel Hawthorne stepped into their shoes, critical surveyors of the earthly Salem’s customs of bondage. Acutely for Wheatley, how her poems traveled is inseparable from how they mean. The same held for Longfellow in the next century. Translator of 18 languages, author of some of the most heavily trafficked poems in American literary history, Longfellow, Kirsten Gruesz suggests, helped birth a nineteenth-century “hemispheric imaginary” among US and Latino poets (Gruesz 37). The long poems produced over the long arc of his career – especially Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) – together constitute a sustained and various exploration of how poems travel: in time and space, in translation, and over the mnemonic airwaves of meters. Writing of Hiawatha, Virginia Jackson characterizes Longfellow’s “Indian Edda” (in Longfellow’s own tag for his poem) as the embodiment of “the dream of a

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lingua communis no longer linguistic, of perfect recognition, of infinite transmission” (493). Indian picture writing, Jackson argues, serves Longfellow and his readers as a figure for a magically universal literacy, extensible – like some dreams of the United States as a nation – without limit or hiatus. His best-selling national epics were “made to be read as if they were pictures, as if their elaborate classical meters were really a transparent language” (Jackson 472). In contrast with Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, though, the “perfect recognition” embodied and extended in Longfellow’s American epics is deeply impersonal. Where Wheatley puts her own vindicated humanity toward the individual recognition of another enslaved African in “To S. M.,” Longfellow’s most ambitious poems turn upon the recognition of one language by another: as if Homer’s Greek could recognize itself in Evangeline’s famous hexameters, as if Old Norse were Native American picture writing, as if simply taking in the highly wrought metrical variation of the narrative poems ascribed to Longfellow’s much-travelled characters in Tales of a Wayside Inn offered readers an immediate competence in all the languages of the Tales’ polyglot Atlantic world company. The perfect transparency of one language to another renders all readers equivalent; and in the literary marketplace – as Longfellow both found and made it – where all readers are equivalent, no particular reader or community of readers is essential. In Hiawatha most clearly, Longfellow’s dream of the perfect recognition of one language by another is at once democratic with respect to granting readers access to classical letters in vernacular tongues and genocidal as to the nonnecessity of actual living Indian speakers and authors to this scene of reading. Native American subjects and language communities are not the only ones, though, ghosted by Longfellow’s dream of a lingua communis. Evangeline is Longfellow’s central epic of what we can call, after Russ Castronovo, necrocitizenship. The poem’s formal and linguistic assumption of the perfect recognition of one language by another – classical Greek epic meter rendering a French-speaking diaspora in English – is secured by a storyline of misrecognition, mistransmission, and bewilderment at the level of individual persons, a storyline that ultimately figures the social belonging of citizenship as a community of the dead. Evangeline’s hopeless pursuit of her lost Gabriel – separated from her in the 1755 British expulsion of French Canadians from Nova Scotia – across the length and breadth of the American continent figures the United States as a single vast cemetery: Before her extended, Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its patient way Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered before her, Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and abandoned, As the emigrant’s way o’er the Western desert is marked by Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine. (Longfellow, Evangeline 88)

Mingling Native American ashes and bones indifferently with those of unfortunate European settlers, Longfellow’s minor-key epic simile assimilates each into the formal,

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abstract equality of death. As Castronovo argues and as the symbolic geography of Longfellow’s poem compellingly illustrates, this “ghostly, disembodied polity” registers “tensions of racial embodiment specific to the United States” (Castronovo 2), nowhere more clearly than when her pursuit of Gabriel draws Evangeline and her companions-in-exile into the apparent calm and pastoral stasis of the slave South, where “the houses of planters, with negro-cabins and dove-cots,” stand in a land of “perpetual summer” (Longfellow, Evangeline 89). The sunlight of this scene proves illusory when, “swerved from their course,” the exiles “enter the Bayou of Plaquemine” and lose themselves “in a maze of sluggish and devious waters, / Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction” (89). Longfellow’s simile here entangles the abortive forward movement of Evangeline toward the object of her desire with the steel network of the slave power, extending itself in every direction of US national life by 1847 and strengthened on its southwestern border by the Mexican-American War as Longfellow was completing Evangeline. Longfellow’s own Whiggish northeastern liberalism views the expansionist aims of the slave network with foreboding rather than delight and the immigrants’ westward journey as fatal rather than hopeful. The language and meter of Evangeline, however, transmit this fatality as fated, as one more mode of what Castronovo calls “graveyard politics” (2). In another of the poem’s epic similes, Longfellow compares the enervated bewilderment of the Acadian exiles lost in the Louisiana swamp to the “shrinking” of flowers on the western prairie before the vanguard of settlement: Dreamlike, and indistinct, and strange were all things around them; And o’er their spirits there came a feeling of wonder and sadness, – Strange feelings of ill, unseen and that cannot be compassed. As, at the tramp of a horse’s hoof on the turf of the prairies, Far in advance are closed the leaves of the shrinking mimosa, So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil, Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it. (Evangeline 89)

Longfellow’s contemporaries would have heard in this simile echoes of William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 “The Prairies,” in which the poet turns his ear from his horse’s “sacrilegious” trampling of the grassland’s unknown dead to the colonizing bees: “I listen long / To [the bee’s] domestic hum, and think I hear / The sound of that advancing multitude / Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground / Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice / Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn / Of Sabbath worshippers” (Bryant 162–5). Democratic Bryant hears nothing fearful in his own “dream” of westward domesticity; Longfellow, by contrast, hears in this reverie nothing but forebodings of national disaster. Everything about Longfellow’s critique of Bryant’s expansionism, however, declares it to be national destiny. The very hoofbeats of its fate are those of Longfellow’s own meter, and the heart’s proleptic closing ahead of its own doom is anticipated in the elaborate inversions of Longfellow’s syntax. These overdetermined lines predict the

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poem’s plot: “sustained by a vision” of Gabriel having “wandered” these “shadowy aisles . . . before her” (Longfellow, Evangeline 89), Evangeline presses west; but she too will find that her hopes in the West perpetually retreat before her and that fulfillment of her romantic quest is foreclosed there. The heart’s only available opening lies behind her, in service to the eastern city of brotherly love where, in the midst of Philadelphia’s 1793 epidemic of yellow fever, she will find Gabriel on his deathbed. Laid to sleep “[s]ide by side, in their nameless graves, . . . unknown and unnoticed” (99), Evangeline and Gabriel’s end figures the social deaths of the many nameless others encountered on their journey (the slaves of the Louisiana swamp, the Indian woman encountered by Evangeline, the free black community of Philadelphia devastated by the epidemic, etc.), folding them all into the abstract equivalence of necrocitizenship. In the midst of the Civil War, with the cemeteries filling up around him, Longfellow returned to the twin questions of how poems travel and how they image citizenship in Tales of a Wayside Inn. Unlike Hiawatha and Evangeline, and unlike his 1858 Courtship of Miles Standish, composed in Evangeline’s hexameters, Tales of a Wayside Inn is a metrically varied longer form, in which the individual members of the company gathered at the inn – artists, students, and refugees from many lands – pass their time together reciting ballads and tales, embedded in a surrounding versified narrative frame. In yet another version of Longfellow’s dream of a lingua communis, the Decameronlike anthology form of Tales (Irmscher 101; Loeffelholz “Anthology”) counters the “steel network” of slavery and national politics with a heavily idealized representation of American poetry’s liberal, voluntary networks of sociability and modes of transmission. Tales of a Wayside Inn obliquely acknowledges the Civil War. The first of its embedded tales, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” is a galloping call to national mobilization – “words that rouse” (Longfellow, Tales 185), as Longfellow’s Student comments afterward. And as Christoph Irmscher and others have observed, the longest of the tales, “The Saga of King Olaf,” would have “reminded the most oblivious of Longfellow’s readers of the fratricidal mess outside their windows” (Irmscher 191) in telling of a Norse kingdom torn asunder, leaving only an Evangeline-like nun behind to pray for the living and the dead. As in Hiawatha, Longfellow’s adaptation of his Scandinavian sources in “King Olaf” figures the perfect transmission of one language into another: “It is as if Longfellow were emulating the splendid technical ostentation of the Icelandic skalds themselves, different as his patterns are from theirs” (Arvin 214–5). Longfellow’s embedding of “Paul Revere’s Ride” and the war saga of “King Olaf” within the Tales’ surrounding frame of sociability, though, draws attention to their conditions of transmission in a way that the unframed narratives of Hiawatha and Evangeline do not draw attention to theirs. The frame narrative tacitly invites Longfellow’s readers to ask what is at stake in the transmission of these poems, and whether it is possible to retell these stories in a way that could subdue the glamours of necrocitizenship to the fellowship of the living, to the arts of peace, and to the

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projects of civil society. By way of answer, the 1863 version of Tales of a Wayside Inn concludes with a consciously antiheroic recounting of a New England village schoolteacher-poet’s effort to save the songbirds of his town from extinction at the hands of farmers tired of losing seed to them. The songbirds, of course, are figures for the poets themselves, as the schoolteacher reminds the good citizens of Killingworth. “The Poet’s Tale” catalogs how poems traveled, in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, within the institutions of civil society – the village academy, the local newspaper, the town assembly – and, in doing so, orients Longfellow’s wartime poetry away from “graveyard politics” and toward reconstructing citizenship as the work of his living popular audience. Of all the manifestations of the “quiet Longfellow revival” of the past 20 years (Benfey 4), one of the earliest and most unexpected remains the surfacing of Evangeline within Adrienne Rich’s “map of our country” in the title sequence of An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991): Here is a map of our country: here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin we dare not taste its water This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy This is the cemetery of the poor who died for democracy This is a battlefield from a nineteenth-century war the shrine is famous This is the sea-town of myth and story when the fishing fleets went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the pier processing frozen fishsticks hourly wages and no shares These are other battlefields Centralia Detroit here are the forests primeval. . . . (Atlas 6)

Longfellow’s resonant line echoes more widely through this often-noted Whitmanian catalog, and in Atlas as a whole, than may be evident at first. Like Evangeline, An Atlas of a Difficult World is a story of westering that is deeply critical of the impulse, one that repeatedly doubles back upon itself – as in the geography of these lines – in order to ask what labor remains to be done in the places westering left behind. Like Evangeline and her exile company adrift and benighted in the “steel network” of the slave state, Rich and her partner at one point lose their way among the islands of California’s racialized penal state, threaded together by its great steel bridges: San Quentin: once we lost our way and drove in under the searchlights to the gates end of visiting hours, women piling into cars

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And like Longfellow in The Tales of a Wayside Inn, Rich in Atlas is concerned with how poems and poets travel institutionally. The westering movement of Atlas is in part an institutional translation for Rich, from Rutgers University and City College where she taught earlier in her career, to Stanford University; and the institutionalized scene of poetic instruction surfaces repeatedly in the sequence, from the opening poem’s vignette of the thin-bearded aspiring poet to Section IX’s bitter comedy of a male poet’s vocational manners, “lonely in the prairie classroom with all the students who love you” (19), to the final poem’s glimpse of a reader, in the same or another university town on the prairie, “standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean / on a grey day of early spring” (25) – a glimpse of readership and an image of the poetic marketplace more solitary but not, perhaps, any less idealized than Longfellow’s shadowy cosmopolitan company of the Wayside Inn. “There are so many poets now-a-days,” Rich could have sighed along with Longfellow’s Kavanagh. The solitariness of her imagined readers in Atlas is as much a defense against the recognition-craving hordes of David Alpaugh’s fevered calculations, and against Rich’s own canonical status, as it is a rebuke to the cozy solidarity of the Wayside Inn and its successors in the American poetry system. If Piotr Gwiazda is right that Rich’s core aims in Atlas are “to envision and expand the concept of poetry readership in the United States beyond its traditionally stipulated parameters” (Gwiazda 167) and to trace “ ‘a transfer / of patterns’ among cultures” (Atlas 12; Gwiazda 179), what tradition stipulated Longfellow the bestseller, Longfellow the contagious metrical pattern-master and arch-translator? As Virginia Jackson insinuates, Rich’s dream of a common language runs through Longfellow’s dream of a lingua communis, along with those of his peers and precursors in the word-hoard of the American poetry archive. My point is not to turn Longfellow into the secret linchpin of Rich’s often-noted turn, in her later poetry, toward American history and American literary canons (Witonsky 339–40). It is, though, to urge widening the premodernist range of the genealogy that – in the title of one representative essay – repeatedly traces the continuity of American poetry “From Walt Whitman to Adrienne Rich” (Erickson, in praise of Rich; see also Vendler 50–4 in skepticism). Queer as this splendid pair is, it can never be queer enough by itself to evade the disabling polarities inherited from mid-twentieth-century histories of American poetry, or to let us see how many of our desires for American poetry, like Evangeline’s, lie behind us.

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References and Further Reading Alpaugh, David. “The New Math of Poetry.” Chronicle of Higher Education 56, no. 24 (February 21, 2010): B12–B14. Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. Benfey, Christopher. “Longfellow’s Neglect.” Times Literary Supplement, January 5, 2007, 4–5. Bennett, Paula Bernat. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Bennett, Paula Bernat. Ed. Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Brooks, Joanna. “Our Phillis, Ourselves.” American Literature 82, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–28. Bryant, William Cullen. “The Prairies.” 1836. In American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (pp. 162– 5). 2 vols. Ed. John Hollander. New York: Library of America, 1993. Buell, Lawrence. “The American Transcendentalist Poets.” In The Columbia History of American Poetry (pp. 97–120). Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Caplan, David. Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poets and Poetic Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Castronovo, Russ. Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the NineteenthCentury United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Ciardi, John. How Does a Poem Mean? Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Collins, Billy. “How Do Poems Travel?” In The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (pp. 1166–7). 9th ed. Ed. Michael Meyers. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Erickson, Peter. “Singing America: From Walt Whitman to Adrienne Rich.” Kenyon Review 171 (1995): 103–99.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon/Random House, 1978. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Gray, Janet. Ed. She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Griswold, Rufus W. The Poets and Poetry of America: With an Historical Introduction. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1842. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Gwiazda, Piotr. “ ‘Nothing Else Left to Read’: Poetry and Audience in Adrienne Rich’s An Atlas of the Difficulty World.” Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 2 (2005): 165–88. Harrington, Joseph. “American Poetry Is Not American Literature.” American Literary History 8, no. 3 (1996): 496–515. Harris, Sharon. “ ‘A New Era in Female History’: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers.” American Literature 74 (2002): 603–18. Hollander, John. Ed. American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New York: Library of America, 1993. Irmscher, Christoph. Longfellow Redux. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Jackson, Virginia. “Longfellow’s Tradition; or, Picture-Writing a Nation.” Modern Language Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 1998): 471–96. Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins. “Lyrical Studies.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27, no. 2 (1999): 521–30. Loeffelholz, Mary. “Anthology Form and the Field of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry: The Civil War Sequences of Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54, no. 1–4 (2008): 217–40. Loeffelholz, Mary. From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry.

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Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. 1847. In The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (pp. 78–98). New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1887. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Kavanagh. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1849. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Tales of a Wayside Inn: Part First. 1863. In The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (pp. 181–206). New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1887. McGill, Meredith. Ed. The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Moore, Marianne. “Poetry.” 1919. In Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems. New York: Viking/ Macmillan, 1994. Morris, Timothy. Becoming Canonical in American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and Cultural Memory, 1910– 1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.

Rahv, Philip. “Paleface and Redskin.” Kenyon Review 1, no. 3 (Summer 1939): 251–6. Rich, Adrienne. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991. New York: Norton, 1991. Richards, Eliza. Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Robinson, William H. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. New York: Garland, 1984. Sherman, Joan R. Ed. African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry. Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. Stedman, Edmund Clarence. An American Anthology: 1787–1099. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. Vendler, Helen. “Mapping the Air.” New York Review of Books 38, no. 19 (November 21, 1991): 50–6. Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Walker, Cheryl. Ed. American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Witonsky, Trudi. “ ‘A Language of Water’: Back and Forth with Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser.” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 337–66.

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After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies Jennifer L. Fleissner America, and American literary studies, have long dreamed of leaving the past behind. We understand this as the drama of American exceptionalism, rooted in the image of a New World. For many of the critics of the foundational epoch of Americanist criticism in the 1950s and 1960s, this myth gave coherence to American literary history, explaining the figures to which novelists and poets obsessively returned: the wilderness, the sea, the city on a hill, the “American Adam.” Unburdened by the weight of the past, Americans could imagine themselves looking forward to a glorious future. The first sustained challenge to this conception of American literary history came with the historicist turn in the 1980s, spearheaded by critics who called themselves the New Americanists (a term Donald Pease appropriated from a skeptical survey of the new scholarship, appending it to his own book series at Duke University Press). The effect of this revisionary scholarship was profound. By taking seriously American writers’ engagement with their historical moment, it simultaneously created an enormous new range of reference points for American literary studies, while dramatically expanding the archive of writers who counted as important contributors to American literature. Scholars who focused on late nineteenth-century writing found its practitioners of realist and naturalist fiction, authors grappling directly with the sweeping social changes of their era, brought to center stage after decades of lingering in the shadows of the American Renaissance. In new collections like the Heath Anthology of American Literature, their voices were bolstered by those of slave narrativists, immigrant memoirists, female regionalists, and Native American activists, joining to create a new canvas across which to tell a previously unheard account of American literary history.

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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A quarter century later, that account unquestionably sets the terms for study in the field. Indeed, it may come as a shock to realize we now stand as far from the initial New Americanists’ interventions as they did from many of those of the founding critical fathers of the 1950s and 1960s. Has the time then arrived for the field to take stock once again? At one level, such reflection may seem unnecessary. Far from standing in an agonistic relationship to their predecessors, many current attempts at field reshaping seem, rather, to build directly on the work of the 1980s and 1990s, as in the case of the “postnational” turn. Other emerging ventures – such as digital humanities and cognitive approaches to reading – do not appear at odds with such scholarship; they might in fact be said to complement it, given their similar aim of bringing American studies “up to date.” What if, however, instead of simply moving ever forward, we chose to circle back past the New Americanists to reconsider the critical past? As scholars in other fields have begun to point out (in forums like the Representations special issue on “The Way We Read Now,” ed. Marcus and Best), the historicist practice of ideology critique or “symptomatic reading,” by seeking to diagnose texts’ allegiances as the product of a bounded historical moment, can risk shoring up a self-congratulatory narrative of progress toward our own present. As Americanists, however, we may ironically find that, in so doing, we demonstrate how indebted we in fact remain to the past we would seek to overcome, as so much of that past – both critical and literary – has held fast to the same dream of beginning anew. To begin to develop a framework that might instead acknowledge the continuities between past and present, this chapter returns to the criticism of half a century ago, and particularly to the generic focus so often thought to indicate that criticism’s lack of interest in history: the romance. As I hope to show, a different story might be told about the romance, one that is always already transnational, and that does not disallow a space for meaningful social critique. As we track the progress of romance differently, so might we also begin to recognize the consequences of our own weddedness to the romance of progress. Achieving a critical perspective on the notion of moving ever forward seems especially urgent at present, as it becomes ever harder for universities to conceive of knowledge making in forms that do not involve notions of innovation and discovery borrowed largely from scientific work. Hence, while this chapter makes an argument for a different narrative of American literary studies, its larger horizon is the future (as well as the past) of literary studies itself. Our work differs from that of the sciences, and also from that of the discipline of history, in its ceaseless return to a past that can never be understood as simply past. Our future, I want to claim, depends on our ability to theorize what is at stake when we find ourselves drawn to look back in time. For the New Americanists of the 1980s and 1990s, transforming the “field imaginary” of American literary studies entailed skeptically redescribing the critical founding fathers of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, so as to mark a decisive break that would

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enable the field to constitute itself anew. Both Russell Reising in The Unusable Past (1986) and contributors to the anthologies Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (ed. Donald Pease, 1994) and Ideology and Classic American Literature (ed. Myra Jehlen and Sacvan Bercovitch, 1985) thus gather a broad array of Americanist predecessors – including R.W.B. Lewis, Leo Marx, Leslie Fiedler, Charles Feidelson, Richard Poirier, Harry Levin, and especially F.O. Matthiessen, Lionel Trilling, and Richard Chase – in order to characterize them, as a group, as having been problematically committed to a model of American literature as “escap[ing] social categories” (Graff 106) or “separat[ing]” itself from “the realm of politics” (Pease, “New Americanists” 26). In place of the social or political, these critics argued, the postwar Americanists emphasized the aesthetic, but an aesthetic specifically defined by its interest in subjective interiority, so that individual “human psyches” replaced “economic and political systems” as the most meaningful “ ‘reality’ ” (Reising 95). As such, they upheld a tradition of the American romance: the literary text as a transcendent “world elsewhere” in which, unlike in the public sphere, the “desire for [psychic] wholeness could be fulfilled” (Pease, “New Americanists” 26). By emphasizing historical context, the New Americanist scholars would “desublimate” the political elements not only of the romance tradition, but also, equally, of the earlier generation of critics who wrote about it. After all, as Pease and Reising in particular emphasized, Chase’s Herman Melville and Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, published in 1949 and 1950, respectively, made their “field-defining” arguments against their own predecessors, Progressive 1930s critics such as V.L. Parrington, for overtly political reasons – to make a Cold War-era case for American freedom against the “totalitarian” idea that “literature should participate directly in the economic liberation of the masses” (Chase, Herman vii). As Pease argues in “Moby-Dick and the Cold War” (which sees Matthiessen’s 1941 American Renaissance as prefiguring these anticommunist critiques in opposing the expansiveness of the American romance to Hitler’s fascism) and, later, in his writings on C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, Melville criticism became an especially popular platform for mid-twentieth-century literary scholars to intervene directly in one of the most charged ideological struggles of their time. Looking back after another quarter century, however, it seems fair to say that, just as Trilling did with Parrington, the New Americanists tended to oversimplify their predecessors’ arguments in order to clear the scholarly ground. The Cold War lens assumes that the 1950s critics valorized the American romance, yet the contrasts that Chase and Trilling delineate between the American tradition and the “social” one predominant in Britain hardly aim to favor the former, which even Chase described as “morally equivocal” and obviously lacking in the “complexity” of, say, a Dickens (American 1, 6). Trilling, who in fact once critiqued the antireferential stance of the New Critics by claiming that “literature is of its nature involved with ideas because it deals with man in society,” never celebrated antisocial fiction; instead, he repeatedly championed the nineteenth-century American writer whom he felt most powerfully diverged from the romance tradition and toward the British alternative, Henry James

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(Reising 102). Conversely, Trilling’s infamous attack on Theodore Dreiser in “Reality in America” faults the novelist chiefly for his excessively “literary” language and the fact that his “dim, awkward speculation” concerning such matters as “ ‘beauty,’ ” “ ‘sex,’ ” and “ ‘life itself ’ ” bears insufficient relation to “political practicality” (“Reality” 26, 28). How, then, did writings like Pease’s and Reising’s manage to cast Trilling as the definer of an American literary tradition built on the avoidance of the “world of politics” (Pease, “New Americanists” 8)? In retrospect, the New Americanists appear to have persistently conflated two terms, “politics” and “ideology,” that Trilling (as well as Chase) intended very much to keep distinct – because, in their view, the latter actively worked against the former. (For example, Reising sees it as an unacknowledged irony that Trilling, “opponent of any ideological thinking,” uses literary analysis as a form of “oblique political criticism” [101].) Trilling thus explained in the 1970s that he wrote against Stalinism in The Liberal Imagination because of its “clandestine negation of the political life” (qtd. in Murphy, Politics 369). Like James’s Princess Casamassima in his 1884 novel of the same name, the American left seemed to him to have become ideological in the sense that it substituted moral arguments for political ones; wrapping itself in the cloak of “political innocence,” it professed to operate not in the name of power but only in that of “virtue” (Trilling, Liberal 95). As a result, it could only ever remain blind to the less generous psychic investments lurking behind its own “good impulses” – an argument intended less to undermine the impulses themselves (as Trilling puts it, “There is nothing so very terrible in discovering that something does lie behind”) than to caution that the refusal to acknowledge such motivational complexities could result in an imperious disregard for those of others as well (Liberal 213). It probably served the New Americanists well not to dwell on these features of Trilling’s criticism, since they continue to pose a meaningful challenge to the mode of political criticism that has been the 1980s’ continuing legacy to critical practice. Indeed, Trilling’s remarks here display a surprising commonality with Wendy Brown’s Nietzschean critique of the late twentieth-century academic left for an “ambivalence about freedom” that led to a rhetoric of sheer “resistance,” one that advertises the “moral goodness” and “reason” of its proponents rather than their own political “will to power.” Along related lines, Eve Sedgwick has called into question the “paranoid” stance of ideology critique for tending to “disavo[w] its affective motive and force” and instead “masquerad[e] as the very stuff of truth” (Touching 138). The disavowal of an affective dimension within historicist criticism derived, of course, from the distance it hoped to take from an American romance tradition said to emphasize the psychological – “all those dark, inner, asocial drives of the self” – at history’s expense (McWilliams 74). And yet, as evidenced by the two subsections in Pease’s anthology – titled “The Desublimation of Romance” and “The New Historicist Return of the Repressed Context” – a Freudian vocabulary in fact remained central to the historicist project. What Fredric Jameson, following Althusser, termed “symptomal” reading is, after all, a practice that conjoins Marxist and psychoanalytic inter-

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pretive techniques. In either case, the critic resembles the scientific analyst, whose expertise uncovers the deeper affective logic that the patient’s – or the text’s – representational edifice is designed to occlude. Hence, it is perhaps unsurprising that in many historicist readings, entrapment within a historical “moment” (versus the critic’s own transcendent freedom) can begin to appear as a form of psychological pathology. This is true when the author in question – say, Melville – is critiquing the dominant views of his time, as in Susan Mizruchi’s essay on Billy Budd in Pease’s anthology (where those views appear as “anxieties” if not outright “irrational terror” at a changing social landscape [292]); it is equally true when he himself is said to emblematize the dominant views, as in Wai Chee Dimock’s new historicist reading of Moby-Dick (where Melville himself appears wracked by “obsessiveness” and “anxiety”). The emphasis in Trilling, as in Brown and Sedgwick, then, is less on the hubris of this critical position than on the way it tends merely to “mirror the mechanisms and configurations of power . . . which [it] purport[s] to oppose” (Brown 3) – which, in this case, entails not simply possessing unacknowledged affective motivations (paranoia, as Sedgwick notes, being itself a manifestation of “anxiety” par excellence [128]) but also covering these over, precisely via the discourse that attributes them solely to one’s historical subjects of study rather than oneself. The chief concern for all these commentators, however, is less the potential for critical obtuseness as such than the risk of “scapegoating” (LaCapra 72). In its place, Sedgwick’s “reparative” criticism offers the same alternative suggested by Trilling in The Liberal Imagination: to make our judgment a function not of our moral superiority but of our “love” (Sedgwick, Touching 128; Trilling, Liberal 210). Part of the 1950s critics’ argument with their Progressive predecessors, after all, concerned those predecessors’ tendency to separate out certain writers from what Parrington called the “main current of American thought,” and specifically the broad collective project of “democracy,” via recourse to a psychological vocabulary: specifically, through procedures of pathologization. Thus, Trilling notes that, for Parrington, Poe’s “gloom” was “merely personal and eccentric,” inseparable from his “dipsomani[a]” (Liberal 21). In fact, Parrington’s dismissal was stronger: “It is for abnormal psychology to explain” Poe’s evident “ ‘neural instability,’ ” he wrote – as Henry James’s tendency to project “figment[s]” of his “fancy” in place of the “realities of life” made clear he was “shut up within his own skull-pan” (240–1). Similarly, Chase’s Melville book aims to take seriously the thought of a writer dismissed by Parrington and Van Wyck Brooks as “ ‘morbid,’ ‘pessimistic,’ ” and done in by his own “obscure, abiding neurosis” – at best, “a kind of primitive man – a natural or unconscious genius’” (Chase ix–x). Although Pease argues that Chase valorized romance for its projection of a reassuringly “whole self,” Chase in fact contrasted the American tradition’s production of “fragments,” its “poetry of disorder,” to the “massive unities,” the movement toward “harmony” and the “normative,” that he found in the British novel. Rather than merely celebrate American writing, Chase thus begins from the difficulty of taking it seriously at all, given the tendency to view the romance merely in pathological terms. As he writes of the Americanist criticism of D.H. Lawrence,

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[L]ike all the observers of American literature we are citing in these pages, Lawrence was trying to find out what was wrong with it . . . he thinks that the American novel is sick, and he wants to cure it. Perhaps there is something wrong with it, perhaps it is sick – but a too exclusive preoccupation with the wrongness of the American novel has in some ways disqualified him from seeing what, right or wrong, it is. (Chase, American 9)

The commonality between Chase’s and Trilling’s stance here and Sedgwick’s call for a reparative criticism may in fact be less surprising than it appears. Within the politicized criticism of the last quarter century, queer theory stands out for the tension it must negotiate between projects of collective identification and a suspicion of the normalizing technologies that produce those identity categories in the first place. Albeit in very different ways, recent queer studies such as those of Heather K. Love (Feeling Backward) and Scott Herring (Queering the Underworld) deliberately focus on those historical figures who, like Trilling’s Poe or Chase’s Melville, resist inclusion in larger collectives, dwelling instead in a space of negativity and eccentricity that is inseparable from the achievements of their art. (Less surprising in this context, then, is the casualness of Chase’s admission, nearly 300 pages into his 1949 Melville book, that of course Herman preferred men.) In these construals, it is the demand for collective identification, rather than the turn away from the social to the individual, that goes hand in hand with the insistence on an integrated selfhood. This is actually more in keeping with Geraldine Murphy’s strikingly counterintuitive accounts of the mid-twentieth-century struggles over Melville’s writings – in particular, his late unfinished novella Billy Budd in addition to Moby-Dick – which differ from Pease’s in two significant respects: (1) Rather than narrate a continuum linking the pro-American, antisocial stances of all of the field-defining critics from Matthiessen going forward, Murphy’s essays establish Chase and Trilling as reacting against the stance of American Renaissance; and (2) more provocatively, they argue that Matthiessen, the more Progressive critic, developed what has come to be known as the “conservative” reading of Billy Budd, and that Chase and Trilling reacted specifically against that reading. As Murphy explains, Matthiessen’s Popular Front politics led him not to condemn the hanging of Billy Budd as an antidemocratic miscarriage of justice (as later New Historicists would); rather, he emphasized the story’s ultimate, religiously inflected themes of “unity, reconciliation, and harmony” as the characters arrive at a common understanding (Murphy, Politics 356). (As Gerald Graff comments, Matthiessen realized that “there need be no necessary connection between the [Romantic] aesthetics of organic form” and a reactionary political stance [106].) For Chase, in contrast – as for Hannah Arendt and a number of others who have commented since on Melville’s novella – the character of Billy demonstrates the necessary impossibility of inhabiting a morally “innocent” stance in a political situation. Most interestingly, Murphy points out, Trilling made the politics of reading Billy Budd a core concern not in any of his critical writings but in his lone published novel, The Middle of the Journey

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(1947). Therein, a former Soviet “fellow traveler” turned arch-anticommunist (modeled on Whittaker Chambers, the accuser of Alger Hiss) writes an article on Billy Budd that, like Matthiessen’s reading, simply affirms the story’s conclusion. While Trilling’s autobiographical hero wonders “how someone once so devoted to social justice could now ‘make so impassioned a plea . . . for the status quo . . . the rule of force,’” the novel’s unrepentant Stalinists have no trouble with their political enemy’s reading, similarly affirming that innocent men may sometimes end up sacrificed to the higher purpose of “ ‘Law in the world of Necessity’ ” (Murphy, Politics 370). In his acknowledgment of the commonalities linking opposed ideologies here, Trilling draws surprisingly close to a figure who might easily seem his own opposite, the C.L.R. James to whom Pease has valuably reintroduced present-day readers. In Pease’s own account, James appears as a renegade Melville reader from the same midcentury era that produced the canonical Americanist interpretations – one who, had his words been heeded, could have charted an alternate genealogy for American studies scholarship. Specifically, Pease argues, by integrating his experiences as a deportee on Ellis Island into his study of Moby-Dick, James transformed the text from an American classic into a work with a significance “transgress[ing] national boundaries” (“Introduction” xx). James as described here thus becomes a forerunner of the postnational criticism of the present day. In fact, however, James’s very “postnationalism” can point up how dependent on the category of the nation-state, and specifically on “America,” contemporary scholarship arrayed under the postnational banner can at times remain. The opposition that Pease posits between James’s Melville reading and that of Richard Chase, for example, depends on reading the former as a protest against an American state power that the latter, as a Cold Warrior, wrote to defend. Yet James’s characterization of Melville’s relation to Progressive reform actually well nigh mirrors that of Chase: both see him as, in James’s words, “the mortal foe of any kind of program by which mankind should act to achieve salvation. If he were alive today, he would turn in horror from Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Trotskyists,” and so forth (James 20). In what is very much a paean to, not a critique of, Melville’s text, James quite explicitly asserts that the Pequod’s crew is “not to be confused with any labor movement. . . . They are not suffering workers, nor revolutionary workers” (20, 22). What leads to the critical confusion here? One might suggest it is the very postnationalism of James’s reading. Rather than the American state, James specifically articulates, as the object of Melville’s critique, that feature of transnational (though importantly Western-influenced) modernity that Max Weber would so influentially theorize as “rationalization.” It is this emphasis that accounts for his portrayal of capitalism and state communism as twinned formations, rather than opposed ones. In both cases, a cadre of “administrators” and “executives” works with one aim only, that of implementing “the Plan,” a massive project of rationalized industry, “productivity quotas,” and so on (James 14, 56). The result is a “mechanization” not merely of everyday life but also, eventually, of “human personality” itself (11).

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To recognize James’s chief target as rationalization has at least two important effects. One, it implicates us as readers today. A critique of the anticommunist, antiimmigrant state need not do so; we have politics, we can easily think, while “they” (then and now) have ideology. Yet what is our relation to rationalization? The university, in the years since James and Trilling wrote, has become more and more a business like any other, with productivity quotas of its own. Americanist scholars trained in the methods of the past 25 years must come to grips not simply with our participation in this structure, but also with the possibility that the very critical methods taken on for antihegemonic purposes have in many ways served hegemony’s ends. If we admire James’s arguments, we must admit (as William Cain does) that their highly “personal” mode of presentation, their distance from “academic routine” and imitability, stands as far from our own scholarship today as that of Trilling, if not farther (Cain 270). In contrast, our historicizing practices and eager pursuit of “new” and “leading-edge” scholarly techniques dovetail quite nicely with the transformation of the humanities into a research-driven enterprise modeled on more explicitly empiricist fields. The point is not simply to demonize or abandon such approaches; yet we must recognize their usefulness for a bottom-line-driven scholarly world. Hence, C.L.R. James’s work, with its Weberian focus on rationalization, becomes timely in a heretofore unexplored way, one in which its resonances with, rather than only its differences from, the 1950s and 1960s Americanists can come to the fore. These resonances might lead us to modify Pease’s question about an alternative genealogy for Americanist scholarship: what might that scholarship look like if Weberian analysis were to play a larger role? One surprising possibility is that we might reconsider, with an eye toward its transnational as well as American instantiations, the critical capacities of that category so important to mid-twentieth-century scholarship: the romance. As the French-Brazilian scholar Michael Löwy argues in Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, his 1992 book with Robert Sayre, romance’s quest for a “world elsewhere” may be understood as more than merely escapist or aestheticizing if grasped as a mode of utopian critique; in Löwy and Sayre’s words, “utopia will be Romantic or it will not be.” Used as a term to encompass not only literary Romanticism but also earlier modern references back to medieval romans as repositories of “exalted sentiments,” “the marvelous,” and “extravagance,” romance appears here a child of the Enlightenment that revolts against its parent: specifically, against a modernity defined in distinctly Weberian terms as the “disenchantment of the world,” “instrumental rationality,” “bureaucratic domination,” and “dehumanization” that arise out of the “spirit of capitalism.” Weber himself, of course, strove for “value-neutrality” in describing these phenomena. Yet he shares with his fellow turn-of-the-twentieth-century sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and Émile Durkheim (not to mention with Friedrich Nietzsche) a commitment not only to questioning the self-evidences of progress – the spiritless specialists who fancy they have “attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (182) – but also, in doing so, to taking seriously the losses modernization

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inevitably entails. In Löwy and Sayre’s view, this perspective stands in ongoing tension, in twentieth-century Marxist thought (including, for them, that of the “Romantic critic” C.L.R. James [152]), with a more thoroughgoing commitment to progress as such. The career of Weber’s student Georg Lukács, the great twentiethcentury Marxist critic, is here exemplary: having repudiated his own earlier romantic tendencies to embrace a party-line Stalinism in the late 1920s, he recants again a decade later in works like The Historical Novel, which critiques realism for its inability to look beyond the present moment to acknowledge the “endless field of ruin” and “broken social formations” that were the “necessary pre-conditions” of that present’s coming into being (54). The contemporary critic most influenced by Lukács’s account of literary history has been Fredric Jameson, whose 1981 The Political Unconscious – with its opening invocation to “Always historicize!” – has often been read as galvanizing the turn toward historicist criticism and ideology critique. Yet despite this association, Jameson, too, affirms the utopian capacity of romance to “liberat[e]” the literary text from its “generic confinement to the existent,” to the “real” – and specifically to the “historical present” (Political 104). Interestingly enough, the late nineteenth century, the era most associated with realism in the United States, appears as an especially crucial moment in this regard. On the one hand, intellectually speaking, it indeed represents the high-water mark of positivism triumphant, which for Jameson as for Lukács finds its literary expression in the naturalism of Émile Zola, with its hope of finding deterministic laws equally able to govern “the stones of the roadway” and “the brain of man” (Zola 17). As the “ ‘realistic’ option” thus begins to feel to the seeking imagination like “an asphyxiating, self-imposed penance,” Jameson writes, romance “once again comes to be felt as the place of . . . freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realist representation is the hostage” (Political 104). Yet Jameson’s account also depicts the late nineteenth century as auspicious to romance for a different reason. As he writes, in countries that saw especially rapid industrialization and urbanization during these years, we recognize a “transitional” phase “in which two distinct . . . moments of socioeconomic development” may be seen to “coexist” – such that we see “an organic social order in the process of penetration and subversion, reorganization and rationalization, by nascent capitalism, yet still, for another long moment, coexisting with the latter” (Political 148). This kind of prolonged period of transition is presented as romance’s “ultimate [historical] condition of figuration” (148). American literary history, of course, has rarely associated the late nineteenth century with a “revival of romance” of the kind used to explain the resurgence of, say, Gothic fiction in 1890s Britain. Realism and naturalism have instead been presumed ascendant in these years. When critics such as Amy Kaplan have occasionally acknowledged the glut of titles like When Knighthood Was in Flower on the decade’s bestseller lists, these have typically been dismissed as nostalgic attempts at escapism from contemporary struggles, if not veiled apologias for the government’s imperialist adventuring in “exotic” lands. In sum, the notion of a critical investment in romance as a protest

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against the limitations of a realist era, as Jameson and others describe, has seemed nearly impossible for politically minded Americanists to imagine. An important exception in this regard, albeit from outside the field of literature, was a study published around the same time as the original New Americanist interventions: T.J. Jackson Lears’s cultural history No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981). In Lears’s Weberian account, American thought during these years might best be understood through the concept of “antimodernism,” a “revulsion against the process of rationalization” – “the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique” – and a quest to regain the immediacy and sense of broader meaning thought to be slipping away (7). One of the many enduringly powerful features of Lears’s analysis is how readily it can be broadened beyond both national and temporal boundaries. This does not mean that the turn of the twentieth century does not remain a crucial moment; as Jameson puts it in an early essay on Weber, “Nothing is quite so striking as the simultaneous appearance, within the various national situations at the end of the nineteenth century, of comparable visions of the crippling of energies” (“Vanishing” 5). Robert Pippin, in his still unrivaled Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, similarly dates to “sometime around the latter half of the nineteenth century” the full ascendance of the suspicion (which he, too, recognizes as rooted in Romanticism) that the move from the ancient reflection on “what ought to be” to the modern orientation toward “the way things are” – with its concomitant emphasis on “natural science and technology” and “a progressive, liberal democratic culture” – was in fact “enervating and spiritually destroying that very culture” (5, xii). As we see here, equally common to Pippin, Jameson, and Lears is a period-specific language of modernity as specifically generating distinct psychic disturbances – whether “anxiety,” “melancholy,” or, in Lears’s account of fin-de-siècle United States, the rise of the diagnosis of “neurasthenia,” a condition of breakdown or withdrawal that the era’s own medical men traced to the ravages of modern life. Yet while this reframing of modernity as a “malady” (Löwy and Sayre 251) might seem one of the strongest arguments one could make against the unmitigated salutariness of progress, No Place of Grace remains especially brilliant in its account of how such diagnoses in fact paved the way for many antimodern critiques to dissolve into narrowly “therapeutic” discourses – essentially, precursors to contemporary New Age rhetorics – that collapsed the critique of progress into another kind of progressive storyline. Lears’s account of the rise of the therapeutic has been powerful enough that antimodern or romantic expressions in late nineteenth-century American writing – Sarah Orne Jewett’s sketches of a dying rural New England, for example, or Henry Adams’s paeans to the Virgin of Chartres – have routinely been read as merely attempts at escape from hard historical realities into the soothing balm of nostalgia. We see the same dismissal at work in the New Americanists’ claim that the romance appealed to 1950s critics as a way to recapture “an ersatz wholeness for their authentic selves” (Pease, “Introduction” 8). Yet an opportunity is missed here to recognize that such

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writers – no less than a Lukács or C.L.R. James – might both indulge in a therapeutic vision of wholeness and offer a meaningful critique of modernity’s commitment to planned obsolescence at one and the same time. Understanding this era’s antimodernism as more than merely a historical “symptom” – or, better, understanding, as did William James, the ways our symptoms might augment the work we accomplish rather than merely inhibit it – allows the past to speak meaningfully to the dilemmas of the present. At the same time, it furthers the New Americanist project of imagining a diversely populated American literary landscape – one that could encompass texts from Maria Amparo Ruíz de Burton’s rewriting of Don Quixote to Zitkala-Sa’s School Days of an Indian Girl – that can and should be read in tandem with contemporaneous global writings, from the Latin American historical romance to the studies of Weber and his cohorts in European sociology. In Löwy and Sayre’s words, “That [the Romantics] have often presented [their] penetrating diagnosis in the name of an elitist aestheticism, a retrograde religion, or a reactionary political ideology takes nothing away from its acuity and worth – as a diagnosis” (251). Indeed, one could go farther still, and note, as Gerald Graff did over 25 years ago, that “continued recourse to the Left-Right antithesis as a way of making sense of the cultural situation blinds opposing factions to common attitudes and interests” (105). Thus, one form of conservatism should be recognized as having long been as disgusted by capitalism as its putative opposite on the left. Hence, Parrington’s regret that Henry Adams never met up with William Morris – or, more recently, Kenneth Warren’s at Henry James’s failure to see that his interest, in The American Scene, in uncovering “that part of the national energy that is not calculable in terms of mere arithmetic” was in fact shared at the time by W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, himself a New Englander and a Harvard man, remains one of the few avowedly progressive – and, of course, nonwhite – writers of this period whose work has been recognized as part of a broader strain of antimodern critique. (Shamoon Zamir’s Dark Voices is an especially important study in this regard.) Yet the groundbreaking work done by the historian Wilson Julius Moses in Afrotopia (1998), if taken up by literary scholars, would enable a much broader recognition of the role of what Moses explicitly defines as a utopian “antimodernism” in African American thought from the nineteenth century through the present day. Although much of his study concerns intellectual history rather than literature, Moses does spend some time with Pauline E. Hopkins, whose political deployment of Gothic modes in such novels as Of One Blood (1903) predates Du Bois’s own experiment with utopian fantasy in works like his 1928 Dark Princess. Were such texts to be joined by Charles W. Chesnutt’s conjure tales, one could well begin to make the case for a critically minded “revival of romance” in 1890s American fiction. And one might note, then, that the “romantic” elements Moses discerns in Afrocentric critiques of Western modernity – a celebration of “communalism” and “harmony” with the natural world – do not differ greatly from those qualities for which a “Nordic” writer like Jewett so wistfully longs in Country of the Pointed Firs. In either case, one may critique the nostalgic idealization – or, alternatively, take

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seriously Raymond Williams’s distinction between the “residual” and the merely “archaic,” and recognize the former as a mode of nostalgic thought possessing a legitimate critical force. In fact, however, even in the work of writers often accused of the apparent sin of nostalgia, an antimodern stance need not entail an idealization of some glorious lost past. Indeed, at its most scathing, it aims its barbs equally at past and present alike – ending up, like Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee or Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, affirming above all a tragic view of human relations, a view that others, such as Edith Wharton (not to mention Jackson Lears), have portrayed the Progressive-era United States as uniquely unable to entertain. From this vantage, the greatest distinction of Henry Adams may lie in his understanding that, despite what he termed Americans’ chronic ignorance of “tragic motives” (416), the intractability of such problems as “the fiendish treatment of man by man” (458), if denied by Progressiveera thought, might be explained with terrifying new clarity by the scientific revelations of the same epoch. Put otherwise, modernity might explode its own optimistic premises by pressure not from without but from within. Tragedy, too, has recently received renewed attention from anything but conservative critics such as Terry Eagleton and Rita Felski for the challenge it poses to “modern dreams of progress and perfectibility.” In Felski’s words, if “modern history extends the promise of self-actualization to an ever-widening circle of persons,” tragic texts see therein a democratization of “opportunities for human . . . miscalculation and error,” to say nothing of the “agony of being torn apart by conflicting desires and values” (11, 9). If the pitfall of the tragic perspective might be said to lie in its sense of the hopelessness of any prospects of meaningful reform, this at least allows it to deliver an acute critique of the narcissistic quick fixes of therapeutic culture, as we see perhaps most scathingly in Wharton’s underappreciated late novel Twilight Sleep (1928). For its antiheroine Pauline Manford, the worries of modern life require a round-the-clock schedule of “patient Taylorized effort” combining spiritual and hygienic cleansing (98). She is, moreover, certain that all the world’s ills might be salved were children never to be told they were naughty and were all military toys to be banned. Here, then, we might return at last to Billy Budd, for Melville, writing his final tragic novella in the era of high realism, could stand as the eminence grise of the lineup of antimoderns we’ve been discussing. If so, however, he must be seen as not simply a man out of time, but, as such, as a man of that later moment as well – indeed, even, I hope finally to suggest, of our own. Although it is customary to view the aging Melville as a romantic holdout amid the late nineteenth century, the readings of him by those purported champions of American romance, Chase and Matthiessen, actually share a nearly opposite claim: that the Melville of the 1850s was already speaking toward the turn-of-the-twentiethcentury future. Matthiessen thus conceives him as a proto-Darwinian naturalist whose portrayal in Moby-Dick of nature’s “brutal energies” marked his distance from the more

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utopian Romanticism of the Transcendentalists; yet even as Melville affirmed what would later appear as a scientific rebuke to such Pantheisms, he “could at no point rest content with the kind of truth that was to be found in science” (407). As Chase puts it, Melville already in “I and My Chimney” (1855) was critiquing the “ways of practical science,” or rationalization, that would become firmly hegemonic during the postwar years, in the form of an “unquiet, baneful spouse who measured all things with her meaningless tape measure” (291). In Billy Budd, then, the equal suspicion of a world of measurable progress and its “enchanted” opposite leads the narrator to alternating disavowals of both realism and romance. Unquestionably, however, the text’s own romanticism has always been easiest to identify. From its opening paean to the “time before steamships” forward, the narrative seems obsessively to linger on the glories of a lost past – from the “symmetry and grand lines” of the superseded battleships, their “poetic reproach” to the “ironclads” of the more “prosaic” present, to the heroically self-sacrificing actions of Lord Nelson at Trafalgar, which are depicted as belonging more to an epic tradition than a novelistic one. Yet if Billy Budd himself seems at first like an emissary from an even earlier, prelapsarian moment, we are quickly told his story should in fact be understood as “no romance” – the proof of this lying in the habit of stuttering that will lead inexorably to the Handsome Sailor’s execution. As Arendt and others have emphasized, the stutter represents the hinge where Billy’s pagan combination of “strength and beauty” stands revealed as inseparable from an “elementary violence.” In direct contrast, his highly civilized nemesis, Claggart, derives his menace from a nearly complete self-restraint. His nefarious ends are thus pursued persistently via indirection, even in the accusation scene (“ ‘Be direct, man,’ ” snaps Captain Vere); this, too, the narrator informs us, is a hallmark of the civilized, and specifically an outgrowth of democracy, in that “unobstructed free agency on equal terms,” with individuals whose status is unknown, “soon teaches one that [a] ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness” represents the most prudent approach to social relations. And yet we cannot help but notice that indirection is also, of course, explicitly named as the narrator’s own rhetorical mode. Aside from Billy’s stutter, the other moment in the novella when the narrator explicitly rejects romance occurs during his extended probing of the mystery of Claggart’s motivations. No “romantic” backstory of a past encounter with Billy can account for them, we are assured. And yet, with its scorn for those who would attempt to plumb the depths of “human nature” via mere “knowledge of the world” – not to mention the deleted barb at contemporary “medical experts” who were increasingly wont to diagnose away criminality as brain disease – this section remains equally chary of “realist” alternatives. We must, the narrator states, grasp in Claggart a condition that is “in its very realism . . . charged with that prime element of Radcliffian romance, the mysterious”: “a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason” goes hand in hand here with a “heart [that] riot[s] in complete exemption from that law.” What we find, then, is that this very paradoxical state is what modernity has wrought: “Civilization,

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especially of the austerer sort, is auspicious” to the development of such natures, the narrator affirms – meaning, in effect, that a historical unfolding toward the rational or prosaic seems to generate (or, at the very least, to harbor) that which it is constitutively unable to explain. If in Claggart, then – unlike in Billy or Vere – the “exceptional” is explicitly understood as the pathological, the pathological exception is also at once reconceived as the historically representative. This may seem a near impossibility, until we remember that it is merely the way both Richard Chase and C.L.R. James understood the function of the similarly “monomaniacal” Captain Ahab; as an apotheosis of capitalist modernity, he was, of necessity, mad. The weakness of both readings could then be said to lie in their equal refusal to remain with what they at moments acknowledged as Melville’s genuine ambivalence toward the madness and the modernity alike – in sum, with his darker Romanticism – in favor of a reassertion of the therapeutic alternative: an unfraught commonality, the healing of the social divide. Yet this act of healing comes at a familiar price: James’s portrayal of Moby-Dick’s crew as emblematic of a whole self – a “total, complete being,” characterized by its “sanity” and an “unfailing humanity” necessary to suturing the fragments of modern society – generates as its pathological other a “divided personality,” of the kind exemplified by Ahab and Ishmael, which is explicitly labeled “degenerate” and “diseased” and is more than once specifically aligned with homosexuality. In this light, it is again worth noting the crucial role played by queer theory, in the form of Eve Sedgwick’s paradigm-shifting reading of Billy Budd, in turning criticism’s gaze at last on the therapeutic impulse itself. And yet for all that reading’s power, it is telling how little it (like, indeed, many revisionist accounts from the 1980s and 1990s) can say about Melville’s persistent situating of the drama of the Bellipotent amid the larger historical arc of modernity. The critique of therapeutics, I would insist – which is also the critique of a certain narrative of progress conjoining “old” and “new” American literary studies – requires that arc as well. For the error of therapeutic antimodernism lies in its belief in a harmonious marriage of realism and romance, a seamless merger between pragmatic progress and mystical nostalgia. The more it insists on this merger’s possibility, the more the fundamental conflict between the modern and antimodern worldviews – the subject matter of Billy Budd – threatens to fall away. That conflict remains front and center, however, in “Science as a Vocation,” the 1918 talk in which Weber first used the phrase “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt), along with “rationalization,” to describe the “fate of our times” (155). Lecturing at Munich University, Weber addresses himself to the youth of the day, who have embraced a romantic sensibility, one with which many of Jackson Lears’s antimodern turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans, from Henry Adams to William James, would have been sympathetic: “They crave not only religious experience but experience as such,” “redemption from the intellectualism of science in order to return to one’s own nature and therewith to nature in general” (143, 142). In the classroom,

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these students thus long not for intellectual guidance so much as for a “prophet” who will lead them forward toward the utopia they imagine. What makes “Science as a Vocation” such an enduringly powerful work is that Weber himself understands these students’ concerns. Today, he admits, who indeed “still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?” (142). Indeed, to the extent other university disciplines have modeled themselves on the sciences, they, too, eschew such questions. To the contemporary Americanist, their methods may sound familiar: “They teach us how to understand and interpret political, artistic, literary, and social phenomena in terms of their origins. But they give us no answer to the question, whether the existence of these cultural phenomena have been and are worth while” (145; emphasis in original). Yet perhaps, Weber suggests, this is not such a bad thing. Consider the (again remarkably “contemporary”) case he cites of the American college student, who in no way seems to be suffering for lack of a guru in the classroom: The young American has no respect for anything or anybody, for tradition or for public office – unless it is for the personal achievement of individual men. This is what the American calls “democracy.” . . . The American’s conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father’s money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage. And that is all. To be sure, if the teacher happens to be a football coach, then, in this field, he is a leader. But if he is not this . . . he is simply a teacher and nothing more. . . . Now, when formulated in this manner, we should reject this. But the question is whether there is not a grain of salt contained in this feeling. (149–50)

That “grain of salt” is what the rest of “Science as a Vocation” goes on to adduce. The American, as Weber portrays him, represents all that the German youth are striving against: he is a self-satisfied creature of capitalist modernity. For him, the questions the others are asking cannot arise even as questions. And yet he has apparently also gotten something right. Teachers should not be in the business of telling students how to live, Weber says. This is because, in his words, “the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other,” and thus will “struggle with one another, now and for all times to come” (147). There will never come a moment, put otherwise, when we will be able definitively to “ ‘refute scientifically’ the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount” (148). The task of the teacher, then, is to bring such conflicts, as conflicts, before the student, to enjoin him to give “an account of the ultimate meaning of his own conduct” (152; emphasis in original). It may seem a curious feature of “Science as a Vocation” that Weber brings this task forward as the most important contribution “science” can finally make to society. Earlier on in the essay, he pointedly distinguishes scientific work from that in the arts by stating that the former is “chained to the course of progress . . . it asks to be

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‘surpassed’ and outdated,” whereas “in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense”: we do not say that a later period’s better grasp of perspective renders it of greater value, or success, than a medieval painting (137–8). And yet the model Weber gives of the teacher who recognizes the historical irresolvability of the “value spheres of the world” – for which his ultimate example, indeed, is “science” versus “the holy,” or the modern versus the premodern (154) – scarcely seems in keeping with the notion of science as inexorable progress. Might it not better describe those disciplines that keep turning back to the works of the past, and not simply for data about the way people once lived, or so as to “manipulate [them] by rational technique” – that is, our own? If Weber is right, we should affirm our distance from knowledge production that simply rests on the model of progress, but precisely not in favor of endorsing timeless truth or beauty; that would make us prophets after all. Instead, ours would be understood as the classrooms where, following Weber’s injunctions, the ongoing conflicts of the spheres of value may be made flesh. The struggle between genres – sometimes within a single work – speaks to those conflicts among Weltanschauungen. Such struggles require literary analysis for their detection, the lesson that texts – even texts as reassuringly familiar as novels – are not contourless containers of information or “content,” but full-fledged miniature worlds, shaped by implicit choices about the most fundamental things: what a person is, what counts as making meaning, how to think about space and time. Here we remember what might be a much more lasting lesson of The Political Unconscious and its precursors in novel theory: the living struggles we unearth by taking seriously questions of form. When Weber depicts what we might call humanistic work as a variant (albeit perhaps one now fighting for its life) of the scientific vocation, he reminds us that we, too, are resolutely creatures of a modern epoch. Only modernity’s own “value-freedom” makes possible the perspective that ranges critically over the worldviews of centuries – that which confidently “historicizes” these, and that which might also question the hubris of its own historicizations. Yet how to understand that position of apparent objectivity? As Jameson argues in his own early work on Weber, we must not confuse it with either “that tolerant coexistence ritually invoked by modern liberal apologists” or the “positivistic objectivity” of the sciences (Jameson, “Vanishing” 11). For Weber, we must always remember, a “pluralism” of value systems means not “peaceful coexistence” but the combat of those values across a “Homeric battlefield” (Jameson, “Vanishing” 11). Thus is the novel once again charged with the energies of the epic – the more so, as we uncover those traces within its modern realism of counterdiscourses from another time. This was the “objectivity” (his own term) that Lukács ascribed to Scott’s historical novel, which in his view differed from romance in its sobriety, and from realism in its remembrance of a history when the present we now presume was merely a contingent possibility. In Billy Budd, similarly, because of that feature that reveals it as modern, its “indirection” – the very fruit of mistrust, and of the impossibility of immediacy – modernity has a facet that turns ever awry, even backward, ever consumed with the unfinished work of the past.

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References and Further Reading Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1918. New York: The Modern Library, 1931. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Cain, William. “The Triumph of the Will and the Failure of Resistance: C. L. R. James’s Readings of Moby-Dick and Othello.” In C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (pp. 260–73). Eds. Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William Cain. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Chase, Richard. Herman Melville: A Critical Study. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Dimock, Wai Chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. London: Blackwell, 2002. Felski, Rita. Ed. Rethinking Tragedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Graff, Gerald. “American Criticism Left and Right.” In Ideology and Classic American Literature (pp. 91–121). Eds. Myra Jehlen and Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. 1953. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jameson, Fredric. “The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller.” In The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 (pp. 3–34). Vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Jehlen, Myra, and Sacvan Bercovitch. Eds. Ideology and Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Kaplan, Amy. “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s.” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 659–90. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985 Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Love, Heather K. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. 1992. Trans. Catherine Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. 1937. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Marcus, Sharon, and Stephen Best. Eds. “The Way We Read Now.” Special issue. Representations, no. 108 (Fall 2009). Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. McWilliams, John. “The Rationale for ‘The American Romance.’ ” In Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (pp. 71–82). Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Tales. New York: Signet, 1961. Mizruchi, Susan. “Cataloging the Creatures of the Deep: ‘Billy Budd, Sailor’ and the Rise of Sociology.” In Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (pp. 272–304). Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Moses, Wilson Julius. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Murphy, Geraldine. “Ahab as Capitalist, Ahab as Communist: Revising Moby-Dick for the Cold War.” Surfaces 4, no. 201 (1994): 1–21. Murphy, Geraldine. “The Politics of Reading Billy Budd.” American Literary History 1, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 361–82.

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Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: Volume 3. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pease, Donald E. “Introduction: C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways and the World We Live In.” In C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (pp. vii–xxxiii). Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001. Pease, Donald E. “Moby-Dick and the Cold War.” In The American Renaissance Reconsidered (pp. 113–55). Eds. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Pease, Donald E. “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon.” In Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon (pp. 1–37). Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Pease, Donald E., ed. Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Pippin, Robert. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. London: Blackwell, 1989. Reising, Russell. The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. Trilling, Lionel. “Reality in America.” In Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (pp. 3–21). Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. Warren, Kenneth. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1930. London: Routledge, 1999. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (pp. 129–56). Eds. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Wharton, Edith. Twilight Sleep. 1928. New York: Scribner, 1997. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford, 1977. Zamir, Shamoon. Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Zola, Émile. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. Belle M. Sherman. New York: Cassell, 1893.

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Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Nancy Bentley

What happened to American literary culture in the age of incorporation? To formulate the question in this way is to pay homage to Alan Trachtenberg’s study The Incorporation of America, a work that established an enduring paradigm for understanding turn-ofthe-twentieth-century US literary production. The advent of corporate capitalism, Trachtenberg argues, also brought about an incorporation of culture, as literature, museums, public architecture, and World’s Fair expositions all became part of the gravitational field of a newly centralized private economy. Though often hidden or obscure, a pervasive logic of “hierarchy and control” (133) worked to reorder the cultural material of shared symbols, beliefs, and even the “substance of perception” (7) in ways that favored the moneyed elite. But Trachtenberg’s insights about economic consolidation overlook a crucial development in the sphere of communications. To be sure, the concentration of more capital in fewer private hands transformed the foundations of expressive culture and public speech. But, as media historians have shown, the resulting “industrialization of communication” (Gitelman 13) actually decentralized the terrain of print and image production, giving rise to a wide diversity of newspapers, magazines, and book markets, and at the same time creating mass audiences for an array of visual and aural technologies, including early film. As the media environment changed, moreover, the cultural meaning of public speech and publication became unfixed, and longstanding assumptions about the civic value and emancipatory nature of print and literacy lost their ability to pass as self-evident truths (Gitelman 25–9). Literature faced new and vexing questions. As Henry James put it, the era’s massive “flood” of print unsettled existing protocols for reading and critical evaluation inasmuch as the whole enterprise

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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of literary reading “depends on what we may take it into our heads to call literature” (“Question” 653). Far from imposing top-down control of all things cultural, the new media landscape that emerged from economic incorporation helped introduce profound, sometimes anarchic-seeming changes in sensory perception, print culture, and public expression – with far-reaching implications for literary culture. Trachtenberg’s study, of course, did not ignore the outsized growth of print in this era. Dime novels, mass-market newspapers, and popular crime gazettes are important parts of his story of incorporation. But for Trachtenberg, mass journalism and consumer culture necessarily produced an erosion of lived experience by external, profitdriven streams of information and commercial spectacle. Workers and local communities thus lost the ability to define material reality in their own terms, as everyday life was “invaded” by cultural discourses that had been put into circulation by private capital. Trachtenberg’s emphasis on the category of experience is important; it is one of the signal achievements of his study to have focused scholarly attention on the question of how a new alliance of finance, industry, and culture mattered on the ground, how it reached into ordinary lives and affected modes of perception. But in crucial respects, I contend, understanding lived experience in the age of incorporation must include everyday experience of media and mediation, including the experience – now often estranged or transformed – of the medium of print. If we discount mass-mediated material and commercial culture as providing merely “surrogate experience” (125), we close off any chance to investigate new media as the sites of alternative publics – sites at which a mix of fantasy and reflexivity offered possibilities for negotiating the antinomies of modernity. More to the point for this chapter, recognizing media as integral to everyday sensory experience is also crucial to the story of what happens to literary culture in the age of incorporation. My organizing premise for this chapter is that we cannot understand the literary culture of this era without paying attention to the deterritorialization of speech, sound, and image that occurred through the rise of mass media. Whether analyzing dime novels or the highly cerebral fiction of a Henry James, we need additional compass points: cinema as well as print, the force of the uncanny and the effects of perceptual shock, as well as the regularities of polished literary style and the calm of aesthetic contemplation. Only this wider media context discloses the new “world of dialects” (Vattimo 9) in which literature suffered a crisis of vocation and began to fashion new kinds of literary analysis. In Trachtenberg’s account, the expressive culture of this era affirms the social vision of a corporate elite, putting art in the service of an “artfully composed reality” (231). He astutely discerns that many key cultural institutions in this era perform a kind of advertising; museums and concert halls, highbrow literary publications, public parks, and Beaux Arts architecture conduct an ongoing work of mass persuasion. Beauty and grandeur bespeak the nobility of private wealth. Taste and professional expertise, rather than self-reliant labor, become the dominant symbols of social value. Meanwhile, workers and farmers, though their productive work is slighted, are invited to share in this “ethos of incorporation” (233) when they buy and consume cultural goods. The result is a transfer of authority from a social imaginary organized around labor

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(the freeholding citizen) to one that favors consumption and knowledge work as the real measures of value. Economic incorporation thus raises the stakes on cultural perception, the stuff of sensory experience. Although incorporation is driven by an “unconscious logic” (57) of political economy, it is evinced less in balance sheets or bureaucracies than in a panoply of sights, sounds, and cultural symbols. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is Trachtenberg’s key emblem for the broad effort to “array . . . before the senses” (220) a vision of the nation preferred by the ruling elite – its proper social relations, its artistic and industrial prowess, and its global destiny. Literary institutions in this era aspired to perform their own version of pedagogical display. The highbrow magazines and publishing houses that promoted literary realism, for instance, hoped to offer a picture of social relations and realities that could counter the “fantastic and monstrous and artificial things” (Howells, Criticism 10) relished by popular audiences. Like the new metropolitan museums dedicated to displaying authentic specimens of natural history and fine art, literary authorities promoted the kinds of fiction, critical essays, and poetry they believed could cultivate higher understanding. Such literature would help transform unsophisticated readers “into thinking, knowing, skillful, tasteful American citizens” (qtd. in Trachtenberg 150). Although proponents saw movements like literary realism as a democratic project, the norms used to define what counts as “knowing, skillful” reading and perception, of course, were the norms favored by a fairly narrow elite; other kinds of aesthetic experience would fail to be recognized as such. But if a new economy altered the basis of cultural production, did it dictate the content of cultural stories, signs, and expression? For critics who rely on one or another version of an incorporation thesis, the plots, characters, and imagery that characterized advanced movements like literary realism were ultimately shaped by an underlying “logic” of economic incorporation. Amy Kaplan’s study of American realism, for instance, defines the realist novel as a form that “incorporates competing definitions of the real” (164) so as to confront and then tame “profound social disturbances” (7). Walter Benn Michaels has argued that the “logic of naturalism” (177) is finally inseparable from the logic of corporate capitalism. In these and subsequent studies they influenced, literature wittingly or unwittingly expresses an incorporated culture – expresses, in Trachtenberg’s words, a “composed reality” as well as a “reality composed” (231). But what should we make of the extensive record in this period of literary discomposure? Writers’ acute expressions of unease and bewilderment were not just a reaction to the crowded urban spaces or restive immigrant populations. More striking are the frequent admissions of their own readerly disorientation, a kind of vertigo that writers experienced when confronted with new media and mass-circulation print. One editor confessed that “at the mere sight of a row of paperbacks, I am conscious of a feeling of nausea.” William Dean Howells admitted that he sometimes experienced “impossible stress from the Sunday newspaper with its scare-headings, and artfully-wrought sensations” (qtd. in Bentley 41). Henry James closely recorded and dissected different variations of what he called “ ‘lettered’ anguish,” his keen awareness

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that the sensibilities cultivated by literary reading and reflection were being marginalized if not altogether erased by forces of “publicity.” Edith Wharton drew a sharp contrast between contemplating successful literary form and the “nightmare weight of a cinema ‘close-up’ ” (933). These and other testimonies of mass-media queasiness suggest that even the most influential literary arbiters did not feel they enjoyed a position of “hierarchy and control” in the domain of culture, at least not with regard to shared cultural norms or modes of public expression. Far from suggesting an alignment with levers of power, such statements record a sense of baffled vulnerability in the face of a far more disorderly public sphere. Was traditional literary culture in fact one of the losers of the incorporation process? The idea is in many ways counterintuitive, for the development of the nineteenthcentury US communications industry, perhaps more than any other sector, followed the logic of capitalist incorporation. In contrast with Europe, American law permitted private companies to own and control communications systems with very little oversight by the state. The US telegraph industry, though it took root later than in Europe, had a remarkably steep take-off period, after which regional companies were very quickly linked in a single network. Not long after the Civil War, one corporation – Western Union – had a monopoly on a vast, national market. Moreover, Western Union’s aggressive partnership with the Associated Press allowed that wire service to dominate news syndication, creating the first “bilateral monopoly” in the United States (Starr 165–89). The highly centralized, private development of the telegraph later served as the blueprint for both the telephone and broadcast industries. Meanwhile, print publication, despite its much longer history, evinced the same basic pattern of consolidation and growth. The decentralized press of the early nineteenth century, serving largely local audiences, gave way to an integrated system of newspaper, magazine, and book markets that allowed a good many publications to reach mass readerships (Starr 260–2). These communications systems – highly capitalized, increasingly centralized, and intensely managed – are a strong example of corporate consolidation; together they helped concentrate ownership of the means of cultural reproduction in the hands of the wealthy. And yet this historical development brings a striking paradox: the expansive public sphere that emerged from incorporation was far more diverse, uneven, and ideologically heterogeneous than ever before. For one thing, alongside the new masscirculation publications there emerged a diverse array of smaller niche publics organized around specialized newspapers and magazines. The same cheap paper and technological advances that were necessary for mass fiction and tabloid journalism also helped create and sustain an astonishing number of foreign-language publications: dailies were published in languages ranging from Slovenian, Greek, and Chinese to Bohemian and Japanese. Meanwhile, exclusion from mainstream publications spurred African American and Jewish writers to produce weeklies for both regional and national communities. Labor publications also flourished; there were enough to support a trade organization for the labor press alone. For many households, then, mass-circulation tabloids and Sunday supplements had a place next to issues of a

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populist farmer’s journal or a Yiddish daily (total circulation of Yiddish papers reached 763,000; Starr 250–66). Mass print and specialized publications emerged together; both introduced new assumptions about reading and writing that complicated the idea of a single matrix of literary production as the source of public reason. The results put traditional literary culture on the defensive. Jürgen Habermas has analyzed the late nineteenth-century moment as bringing the “disintegration of the public sphere in the world of letters” (175). This “collapse,” Habermas argues, occurred as the dialectic of private reading and public discussion established in the bourgeois public sphere was now broken by the intrusion of powerful corporate interests. Rather than fostering deliberation and reflective art, public culture was seized upon by profit-driven entities that wished only to garner the passive approval of mass audiences for their prepackaged messages. Like a number of other scholars, I find Habermas’s model of what counts as public discourse too narrow. But his account captures the broader sea change that occurred in the late nineteenth-century United States, change that inaugurated a “postliterary” era when educated literary discourse no longer instantiated the public sphere. In the new “commonschooled and newspapered democracy,” as Henry James put it (“Opportunities” 651–2), the earlier culture of print actually lost authority, ushering in what one scholar calls the “twilight of the literary” (Cochran 14–30). It is this loss of the former centrality of letters that is behind the reported sensations of literary nausea, a kind of cultural disorientation that could even rise to the level of somatic feeling. This media vertigo was quite distinct from other strains of cultural anxiety and dissent. Cultural criticism was certainly a pronounced element of late nineteenthcentury literary culture; even Trachtenberg acknowledges that literary intellectuals sounded notes of alarm about what Howells called “our deeply incorporated civilization” (qtd. in Trachtenberg 185). But criticism of this sort actually presumes a secure public authority to describe, diagnose, and address society, and it was this very authority that writers acknowledged in other contexts to be under threat. The contradiction could be acutely felt. In an era of mass taste, “if you don’t amuse your reader,” Howells complained, “practically, you cease to exist” (Literature 199). Yet it is this very dimension of media-inflected angst, I contend, that can allow us to see the emergence in this era of a different kind of “postliterary” experimentation and thought, a strain of writing that follows neither the logic of incorporation nor a reactionary aversion to mass media but instead exploits its own disorientation to achieve new artistic and critical discoveries. For literary authorities, losing their predominance in print culture could seem like the loss of reason itself. Charles Eliot Norton in an 1888 essay decried the “horde of readers” whose “vicious taste for strong sensations” was fatal to their ability to acquire “intellectual nourishment” from the printed page (qtd. in Bentley 32). At one level, the rise of mass media and their affinity for “strong sensations” helped create a polarized opposition between “intellectual” reading and mass consumption, between meaning and mere sensation. But if we look more closely, this very polarization was also productive: even with the era’s felt opposition between extremes of culture and

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anarchy, we can identify a mode of literary reflection that combines analytic thought and unruly sensory experience. As I try to demonstrate in what follows, the very displacement and disorientation of the literary could also generate its own kind of open, exploratory thinking when writers’ immersion in a dizzying new environment of public signs and unfamiliar perceptual experience spurred new ways of conceiving history and the public sphere. When we focus on this operative mode, literary culture begins to present a kind of inversion or photographic negative of the emerging medium of cinema, the cultural field in which viewers were bombarded with novel kinds of perception and visual sensation even as movie-going opened up new possibilities for public expression and meaning. For writers, the volatile results of incorporation meant the loss of “hierarchy and control,” but it could also mean a new recognition of tracts of experience hitherto excluded from literary culture. Edith Wharton was convinced that “the wireless and the cinema” (“two worldwide enemies of the imagination”) were bad for fiction (qtd. in Lee 737). The verbal precision, nuance, and irony that for her characterized the highest kind of novelistic power were lost on readers subjected to a “long course of cinema obviousness and tabloid culture” (qtd. in Lee 628). But, strikingly, the very opposition she drew between movies and novels was itself critically meaningful for Wharton for the way that cinematic experience could illuminate literary form. In her memoir A Backward Glance (1934), she describes the unnerving effect of trying to dispassionately observe her own literary handiwork. When the artist steps back to contemplate his own creation, she writes, he hopes to return to see “happy glow of colour, or a firm sweep of design,” but the work “often presses on his tired eyes with the nightmare weight of a cinema ‘close-up’ ” (Wharton 933). For avid filmgoers, of course, the camera close-up – however jolting or unsettling – was not a nightmare but a source of pleasure, one of the sensations that attracted them to the movie house. The earliest close-up in film history, the snarling figure of a bandit pointing a gun at the viewer in The Great Train Robbery (1903), quickly became an icon of the visual thrills unique to cinema. For Wharton, in contrast, a close-up held no pleasure, only an unwelcome sense of invasive “weight”; and yet the very sensation was able to function as a species of critical sight, a reseeing of literary form by way of startling sensory experience. For a literary mind like Wharton’s, cinematic experience could be converted into cognitive insight. Was the same kind of critical conversion possible for devoted viewers of cinema? Wharton herself was doubtful. In place of the syntactical complexities of the highest literature, with its patterned meaning created from a skillful weave of innumerable linguistic relations, mass media forms like film seemed to offer only indiscriminate jolts of mental stimulation. When Charity Royall, the young protagonist of Wharton’s Summer (1917), visits a movie theater in rural Massachusetts, reality dissolves into an onrush of sensory experience: Everything was merged in her brain in swimming circles of heat and blinding alterations of light and shadow. All the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of

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palms and minarets, charging cavalry regiments, roaring lions, comic policemen and scowling murderers. (228–9)

Like the phonograph, early cinema exploited the capacities of a new medium to turn mechanical reproduction into expressive form. In doing so, it sharpened the fears of many cultural authorities that the emergence of mass media would allow sheer sensation (“blinding alterations of light and shadow”) to drive out the critical thought and reflective insight necessary for a robust public culture. When Wharton lamented to a friend the decline of literacy in the general public, cinema is her symbol for the erosion of cultural intelligence: the “mental level has gone down with such a rush,” she wrote, that “even in England,” book reviewing “appears to be written by cinemafans in their teens” (qtd. in Lee 695). There is no gainsaying that much mass entertainment traffics in sensation, often the stronger the better. Though his assertion is tinged by panic, Howells was not mistaken when he argued that the “cheap effects” cultivated by popular new forms of entertainment, from dime museums to outsized circuses, had helped generate a brand of fiction “in the service of sensation” (Criticism 52). I have argued elsewhere that much of the impetus behind the efforts by intellectuals like Howells to promote realism was desire to restore literary culture as a unitary site of public reason. Not everyone welcomed the more strenuous intellectualism of what was sometimes dubbed “the analytic school” (qtd. in Bentley 307). But a new emphasis on “painstaking accuracy” and “dispassionate analysis” in fiction and criticism reflected the hope that, in the midst of a chaotic and commercialized public sphere, higher literature could offer a sanctuary for critical reflection and understanding. When Henry James describes literary realism as “a more analytic consideration of appearances,” it distills for us the new emphasis on literature as a vehicle of critical thought (“Daudet” 229). As early cinema began to develop and find an audience, it seemed to fulfill the belief that, as with mass print, new media would supply only the kind of entertainment that James called “irreflective and uncritical” (“Future”103). Slapstick comedy, trick films, melodrama, urban “actuality” films: these and other early genres exploit the technical capacities of cinema to deliver visceral shock and visual surprise. Walter Benjamin would later identify cinema as the aesthetic form in which “perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle” (175). But if mass genres like film cultivated sensory shock, was cinematic experience irrelevant to the public-sphere function of collective reflection on modern life and its possibilities? The thrill of the close-up or a rapid-fire chase sequence was certainly at odds with the aesthetic ideal of sustained contemplation. But the very features that made early cinema incompatible with what Benjamin identified as the traditional “aura” of art – film’s eclecticism and excess, its industrial production, and its penchant for speed and mobility – were precisely the features that made cinema among the most meaningful media for certain populations: immigrants, women, and the white-collar clerical class. Drawing on reception histories and other archival material, film historians contend that the heterogeneous combination of fantasy and reality that characterized

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early nickelodeon programs made movies “an objective correlative of the immigrant experience” (Hansen 108). Lacking the cultural authority or language skills to participate in mainstream public discourse, and often living a mix of fragmented homeland traditions and New World labor regimens, immigrants came to derive both pleasure and solidarity from collectively viewing the multifarious images supplied in early cinema. As one observer writing for the Jewish Daily Forward put it, “[O]ur Jews feel very much at home with the detectives, oceans, horses, dogs, and cars that run about on the screen” (qtd. in Hansen 108). In turn, what theorist Miriam Hansen calls “the aesthetics of disjunction” in early film, its compression of different worlds and disparate images, provided immigrants a means to “negotiate the specific displacements and discrepancies of their experience” (44). In contrast with the more fixed identities developed at length in realist novels, early movies fostered fleeting and changeable identifications with a wide array of screen subjects. Siegfried Kracauer described this tendency toward dispersed subjectivity as the movie-goer’s willingness to be “polymorphously projected in a movie theater”: As a fake Chinaman he sites in a fake opium den, turns into a well-trained dog who performs ridiculously clear acts to please a female star, gathers himself into an alpine storm, gets to be a circus artist and lion at once. (332)

If this mobilization of self was part of what made film an especially expressive medium for immigrants, it was also one of the likely draws for women, a group that responded to early cinema across lines of class, age, and racial background. With its shifting, nonlinear storylines and rapid changes of location and temporality, early cinema programs allowed women and girls to entertain unsorted and contradictory images of womanhood – on screen, women were erotic as well as maternal, adventurous as well as vulnerable, glamorous and charismatic as well as piously domestic. For working women and middle-class women alike, cinema quickly became a part of ordinary life, a space structured by neither work nor family in which disparate subjectivities and desires found a variety of concrete shapes (Hansen 199–241). Similarly, African Americans who migrated to northern cities responded to early cinema as a space “in which Black subjects could see and be seen in modern ways” (Stewart 4). Such a space, of course, was hardly a public sphere in the sense defined by Habermas. Driven by pleasure, fantasy, and desire, the consumer context of cinema gave little weight to public interaction and reason over individual acts of imagining. Yet for groups traditionally at the margins of public discussions (such as women and the young) or with weak access to high literary culture (e.g., immigrants, rural workers, and African American migrants), the profit motive at work in cinema was precisely what made the medium adept at registering experience and needs otherwise deemed too “uncritical” and particular to count as truly public. Despite film’s “industrialcommercial basis,” Miriam Hansen argues for recognizing early cinema as an “alternative public sphere,” a site of collective reflection and speculation for those whose

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experience was “repressed, fragmented, or alienated” by the hierarchies of literary culture and other established institutions of public life (90–1). Like newspapers, early films recognized world historical events (e.g., the assassination of McKinley in The Mob outside the Temple of Music after the President Was Shot; the Boxer Rebellion in Attack on a China Mission). But cinema also registered tracts of interest and experience that were largely elided in other media: new kinds of urban sociality (The Gay Shoe Clerk; What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City), details of everyday self-presentation (Those Awful Hats; Laughing Gas), erotic images and exceptional physical feats (The Kiss; Sandow Flexing His Muscles), sensations of speed and mobility (A Romance of the Rail; Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World), ordinary human types (Boarding School Girls at Coney Island), as well as extraordinary or pathological kinds of subjects (The Fire Bug; The Adventures of the Girl Spy). Shaped as much by audience response as by studio directors, early cinema offered an unstable mix of visual shock, public spectacle, and personal experience as a horizon against which to articulate from below a new set of relations to modernity. In time, stricter oversight by authorities eventually made movies less discordant and more decorous. But in the era before Hollywood, cinema was in effect an uneven, kaleidoscopic formation that conjoined memory, sensory experience, and fragmented narrative, all drawn from disparate social sources – Christian scripture and vaudeville comedy, technological wonders, and Old World folklore. If we judge by the example of cinema, the advent of mass media did not bring a standardized culture; on the contrary, it was perhaps the keenest register of what Gianni Vattimo calls the “irresistible pluralization” of social experience fostered by mass media (68). However, new media did bring mass publics, groups self-organized through the same inventory of unsorted, dynamic images and plots. And mass publics forever transformed what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible,” the allotment of speech, perceptible signs, and visible roles that form the horizon of possibility for a given community or polity. As we have seen, when literary writers were confronted with this new and shifting distribution of sensory signs, they tended to assume that mass genres could only cultivate a “passive consciousness,” the “uncritical” disposition that Henry James associated with “women and the very young” (“Future” 100, 103). Yet crucially, the same welter of deterritorialized signs also spurred new analytic interest in understanding the kinds of consciousness – “passive” and otherwise – that could be glimpsed in this expanded public terrain. At the same time, mass media also pushed writers toward a new reflexive examination of the literary itself, its limits and its new possibilities amid the public proliferation of image, print, and sound. Embracing rather than resisting their own feelings of displacement, writers began to develop a new epistemology of literary disorientation. An important document in the archive of disorientation is Howells’s remarkable novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). The leading US advocate for American and European realism, Howells looked to literature to provide a comprehensive map of social experience. With the arrival of international Réalisme, he proclaimed, “[T]he whole field of human experience was never so nearly covered by imaginative literature,”

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and “American life especially is getting represented with unexampled fullness” (Criticism 68). But Howells’s investment in fiction as a comprehensive genre makes it all the more notable that Hazard of New Fortunes is ultimately a meditation on the representational limits of literature. Literary failure and insufficiency are the novel’s strongest keynotes, and yet by articulating these limits Howells generates a secondorder realism able to register an emergent field of extraliterary signs and meanings. In Hazard, Howells makes literary culture the reflexive subject of his own novel. When the protagonist, Basil March, moves to New York City to help launch a new literary magazine, Howells’s plot tests the existing resources of letters to mediate what one character calls a “thoroughly commercialized society” (154). A staff of writers, illustrators, and financial backers succeeds in getting the publication into circulation; their publicist boasts that he can write a news item about the magazine that will travel “from Maine to Texas, and from Alaska to Florida” (256). But even as the publication is successful in reaching “the American public,” the editor, March, becomes increasingly focused on how literary culture falls short, fixing on the gap, as it were, between his notion of the public and the realities of the social. Whenever “the cause of literary curiosity” (409) sends March out into the streets of New York, the experience is always one of sensory assault. The city presents “uproar to the eye” (163). It wears an “outward aspect” that “shrieks and yells with ugliness” (52). Although March confesses to finding the city’s “savage exultation” at times “intoxicating” (52), his immersion in the “huge disorder” (164) of New York also produces feelings of anxiety and melancholy. It isn’t simply the immediacy of noises and novel sights that brings on March’s unease. The multiplicity of communicative forms he encounters – labor newspapers (marked for him by a “tastelessness” [172] of overheated rhetoric), the “fashionable entertainment” (362) of the affluent classes who prefer light operas and plays to books, the stock ballads sold on the street like apples or chestnuts, the “noisy typography” (376) of the city’s newspapers – these only heighten his sense that he cannot articulate any intelligible meaning for this seemingly “lawless, Godless” world (164). A connoisseur of all manner of irony, March alternates between dryly humorous observations and vague despair. Then, when he happens to witness a violent response to a labor strike, he is horrified and stymied: in the face of this order of event, March’s literary sensibility is wholly at a loss. A literary enterprise succeeds; a literary mind fails. In his reflections and observations, March attempts a “violent struggle to subordinate the result [of modern forces] to the greater good” (164), but the struggle is in vain. The differential suffuses Hazard of New Fortunes with an unstable ambivalence toward its own literary resources. But the troubled reflexivity is itself a species of eloquence. Tracing the limits of this order of the literary, the novel also uncovers an expansive field of emergent experience by simply displaying in fragments what it cannot adequately narrate: “swarms” of Bowery children; the beer gardens of laborers; the new kinds of family life glimpsed through the windows of tenements; the conformity of the “vast, prosperous commercial class” (273); and the “private war” (373) in the streets between strikers and strikebreakers.

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For March all of this seems to be expressive of nothing more than pure “accident and exigency” (164) and threatens a drift toward nihilism. For Howells’s readers, however, these unsorted fragments offer a cinematic display of compelling images and potential stories that materialize a new distribution of the sensible. What Hazard begins to articulate is an aesthetic principle based not on contemplation but on disorientation. The rhythm of March’s life (like the structural shape of Howells’s novel) alternates between the experiences shaped by the literary codes he shares with his staff, and his glimpses of inassimilable experience that exceed those codes. The result is a structure of feeling that matches neither the beautiful nor the sublime. It resembles instead the “continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation” (10) that Vattimo has argued offers us a new basis for defining creativity and emancipation in a media society. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s notion of the role of Stoss – literally, a blow – in the work of art, and on Benjamin’s theory of cinematic “shock,” Vattimo contends that only aesthetic disorientation can adequately illuminate what has become a “world of dialects.” Mass media have forever damaged if not yet killed off “the idea of a single true form of humanity that must be realized irrespective of particularity and individual finitude, transience and contingency.” In its place there has emerged a “world of dialects,” each of which has its own “grammar and syntax” – its own way of making the world meaningful – yet which together make speakers aware of “the historicity, contingency and finiteness” of any given cultural language, including one’s own (9). Only by seeking both estrangement and belonging can art fulfill its capacity “to make us live, in the realm of the imagination, other possibilities of existence, thereby extending the borders of the specific possibility we realize in everydayness” (71). Written at the moment when mass media were usurping the public primacy of letters, Hazard of New Fortunes is fashioned from the disequilibrium that comes from exposure to multiple grammars and publics. Howells’s sprawling novel retains the analytic impulse so characteristic of realism. But in Hazard, as in many other works written in this moment, the impulse to analyze is bound to a field of mediated social experience that both feeds analysis and exceeds it. The resulting gaps and excesses in these works often resemble the kind of transgressive forms we associate with literary modernism. But if we see these ruptures only as indices of an incipient modernism, we risk overlooking the specific social conditions that give works like Hazard their formal shape and thematic preoccupations. Rather than assuming a teleological history of successive formal developments culminating in modernism, we instead can examine the traits and strategies of the literature of this period as different responses to immersion in a new world of dialects. The late style of Henry James, for instance, emerges from experiments in representing the experience of women and young girls – precisely those groups that James once lamented possess the kind of “passive consciousness” that responds to mass fiction. In works like The Bostonians, James imparts a strong dose of anxiety to his portrait of women’s receptivity to commercial culture and public fads (although Basil Ransom does not come off any better, despite his reverence for an older literary culture as

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embodied in a journal with the telling title The Rational Review). In subsequent works, however, James closely examines the seeming passivity of young figures like Maisie Beale (What Maisie Knew) and Nanda Bookenham (The Awkward Age), presenting each girl’s necessarily limited access to knowledge as a crucible producing a new and poignant way of understanding (often more acutely than adults) the modern conditions that structure her life. Even more telling is James’s novella In the Cage (1898), a story that centers on a young working-class telegraph operator in London who learns how to decipher – and, eventually, to participate in – the covert communication between a pair of aristocratic lovers. James was not alone in his fascination with the phenomenon of the female communications worker; she would soon be featured in many “railroad thriller” films like The Grit of the Girl Telegrapher and in D.W. Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator. The new class of “pink-collar” workers themselves flocked to such movies, while few were likely devotees of James’s fiction; he acknowledges as much when he mentions his protagonist’s familiarity with “ha-penny novels” (869). Yet in her ability to master complex codes and to pursue the implications of minute clues and ambiguous messages, James’s telegrapher possesses the serious investment in language and the analytic imagination shared by all of James’s literary intellectuals. In this narrative, moreover, James openly explores how new industries that traffic in information and communication may be making different class dialects more porous – open to usurpation, imitation, and exchange. In their demand on the reader’s analytic ability, the excessively nested, serpentine sentences of James’s late style could not be more different from the quick word bursts of a telegraph. However, giving oneself over to the motion of the Jamesian sentence often means reaching a point where analysis turns into a confused, even queasy sense of immersion in an alien language, an aesthetic disorientation that accompanies James’s representation of everything from drawing rooms and museums to a shabby telegrapher’s “cage.” What has vanished is a sense that any one way of writing, literary or otherwise, will render all such spaces transparent. Literary language thus leads us back into – instead of away from – the communicative welter of the media society. Deliberately cultivating the pressured perceptual “weight” that Wharton found in the cinematic close-up, James fashions an image language out of alternating moments of distortion and recognition. A similar distortion of narrative surface and scale is characteristic of the fiction of many naturalist writers. In their drive to reach what Frank Norris calls the “black, unsearched penetralia” (1169) of human experience, naturalists tend to sacrifice polished social scenarios for referential excess and close-up portraits of sheer sensation. The intensely visual nature of Stephen Crane’s fiction is commonly compared to impressionism. But the surface of a Crane text is less like a composed, painterly canvas than what Bill Brown calls a “protosurrealist” (166) screen studded with a haphazard collection of metaphoric images – a circus performer or football player, flames that turn into flowers that turn into snakes, the sideshow freak and the Coney Island crowd. For Brown, Crane’s distinctive style comes from a largely unconscious ability to register

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the decontextualized objects and “chaotic kinesthesis” (47) that surface in the modern amusement industry. But Brown’s analysis also makes clear that it is mass media that have churned up the debris of images strewn throughout Crane’s stories. Randolph Hearst’s new “sports page,” the billboard and the poster, and “new graphic and reduplicating technologies” all made “the world of amusement appear an integral part of American daily life and the mode through which daily life had become public” (7). The famously uncanny effects of Crane’s style owes as much to the new tumult of public signs and mass-mediated experience as it does to his innovations in literary form. The same might be said of the disjunctions introduced into historiography by The Education of Henry Adams (1918). One of the foremost US historians, Adams confounded many of his friends when he wrote his hybrid book, a discrepant mix of autobiography and historical narrative. William James complained that it was “a hodge-podge of world-fact, private fact, irony (with the word ‘education’ stirred in too much for my appreciation!”) (qtd. in Bentley 251–2). But it is precisely the way Adams yokes private experience with historical fragments that formally shapes what is his central purpose: narrating a pedagogy of disorientation. Adams calls himself a “child of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries” fated to “wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth” (723), and the Education presents this life experience as a mind-bending course of instruction in historical rupture and incongruity. Nearing the end of his life, the author of the nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Jefferson asserts that the subject of history is “in essence incoherent” (994), a verdict embodied in the book’s irregular form and perplexed tone. Witnessing both personal tragedy and historical catastrophe (“the nightmare of Cuban, Hawaiian, and Nicaraguan chaos” [Adams 1045]) seems to play a part in fostering the book’s dominant mood of confounded efforts at historical analysis. In Adams’s darkest moments, rational reflection not only is blocked but also dissolves into sheer bodily sensation – “so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life” (983). More often, though, his descriptions of his own disorientation draw on more playful images that would have been familiar to a mass public, a public accustomed to seeking out sensory experience: “His artificial balance was acquired habit. He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back, crossing a chasm on a slack-rope, and commonly breaking his neck” (1116). Like a slapstick movie, Adams’s trope combines the pleasure of the spectator (Adams admitted his habit of “haunt[ing] the lowest fakes of the Midway” [qtd. in Bentley 253]) with the serious risk to the performer, and thereby articulates a shared historical vulnerability with the masses who will never read his book. Like them, Adams cannot master the ferocious expressions of modern “force” he tries to capture in a historical narrative, even as the failure generates a shocking image of everyday threat: “Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile” (1171). Evoking a chaotic public sphere, Adams’s strange book describes the way an exiled literary subject is tutored by a world of inassimilable experience, and thereby learns to anticipate the future subject – the possessor of a “new social mind” (1175) – who will supplant him.

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Despite his sense of a shared bodily vulnerability, of course, Adams possessed far more security in life than the vast majority of modern subjects. He seemed to acknowledge as much when he once described himself as a privileged spectator of the “circus” of modernity: My lunacy scares me. I am seriously speculating whether I shall have a better view of the fin-de-siècle circus in England, Germany, France or India, and whether I should engage seats to view the debacle in London or Paris, Berlin or Calcutta. (qtd. in Bentley 253)

The image evokes the idea of an educated observer preparing for a form of sensory derangement (“lunacy”) in confronting a brave new global world. But if this form of disorientation – part pleasure, part terror – is the ironic endpoint of Adams’s education, another literary work from this moment reminds us that, for some groups, education begins with a dispossession of the senses. One of the most striking examples of reflexive analysis of literary culture is the autobiographical narrative published by Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin), a Dakota author and activist who as a young girl was taken from her mother’s home on the reservation and educated at a Quaker-run boarding school for Indian children. For Zitkala-Ša, a process of sensory derangement is not the result of literary failure but the devastating origin of her literary success. As Trachtenberg observes, economic incorporation was manifest most overtly in the expansion of industry and communication into the “Western wilds.” Frederick Turner’s frontier thesis represented the East-to-West expansion of “complex mazes of modern commercial lines” as a form of neurological development: “It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent” (qtd. in Trachtenberg 15). According to expansionist ideology, tribal reservations (“schools of industry”) and Indian education policies would allow Native peoples the chance to acquire a parallel development: boarding schools would cultivate the minds and complex nervous systems of youth who possessed only primitive ideas (the “thoughts of civilized life cannot be communicated to them in their own tongue” [qtd. in Trachtenberg 31]). But Zitkala-Ša’s “School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900), published in the Boston-based Atlantic, points to a very different neurological process. She reveals that her education was really a harrowing invasion of her nervous system, one that seemed designed to utterly remake her sensorium. We were led to an open door, where the brightness of the lights within flooded out over the heads of the excited palefaces who blocked our way. . . . The strong glaring light in the large whitewashed room dazzled my eyes. . . . The large bell rang for breakfast, its loud metallic voice crashing through the belfry overhead and into our sensitive ears. The annoying clatter of shoes on the bare floors gave us no peace. (88–9)

Here is the logic of incorporation at its most pernicious. For the Indian, the incorporation process meant a radical reordering of bodily perception in accord with a single set of norms for “thinking, knowing, skillful, tasteful American citizens.”

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Through her retrospective narrative analysis, of course, Zitkala-Ša undercuts these norms by relativizing them – they become the demands of a destructive “civilizing machine” (96). Even as she demonstrates mastery of English literary codes, she uses that mastery to recast her English education as merely one cultural dialect among others (albeit a dominant – and dominating – one). Her education rests on an epistemology of disorientation as profound as that uncovered by Howells, Crane, or Adams. But crucially, the disruptive sensory experience at the heart of Zitkala-Ša’s narrative is the product of neither analytic excess nor mass media ferment. Rather, it is a primal scene of sensory dispossession that colors her very participation in literary culture with what we might call an analytic of melancholy and loss. Her words imaginatively evoke “other possibilities of existence,” to borrow Vattimo’s phrase. But they do so not with the chance of extending the borders of what is possible to realize in everyday life but in order to memorialize the lost world encoded in her original sensorium, the generative ensemble of sight, sound, and touch that had been the somatic inheritance of her Dakota childhood. There is no known evidence that Henry James read Zitkala-Ša’s pieces in Harper’s and the Atlantic (although he published in the Atlantic in the same year in which her essay was published). But in his most sustained meditation on literary disorientation, The American Scene (1907), the figure of the Native American triggers a profound instance of productive discomposure. Visiting the United States after many years abroad, James is struck most by the “acute demand for display” (314) that seems to emanate from every visible object, surface, and body in the American “scene.” His analysis of the pervasive “air of publicity, publicity as a condition, as a doom” (364), anticipates Vattimo’s description of the media society, the milieu in which the hunger of the “information ‘market’” demands that “everything somehow become an object of communication” (6). James does not attempt to disguise his feelings of “ ‘lettered’ anguish” (470) at these conditions. They have pushed to the margins the kind of literary sensibility that defines who he is and what he values – the grammar and syntax informing his understanding of the world. The polyglot populations of American cities, too, bespeak the decline of the “linguistic tradition as one had known it” (471). No other work in American literature shows as acutely how economic incorporation, for all its energies of hierarchy and control, actually served to break up a prevailing understanding of “[l]iterature as the primary reservoir of humanity’s historical spirit” (Cochran 29). For James, literary dispossession means a discomfiting vulnerability to “ ‘modernity,’ with its terrible power of working its will” (484). But immersed in the very crucible of American publicity, he also comes to recognize that the shocks delivered to a “surrendered consciousness” (452) can generate new kinds of knowledge. After leaving behind the clamor of New York City and Philadelphia for Washington, DC, he initially feels a measure of calm when he takes in the solemn monuments of the Capitol and its surrounding grounds. These “sensibly massive” forms seem to dispel the disorienting profusion of signals he experienced in other American cities. Here all he surveys seems to transmit the same “sweeping purpose” drawn forth and

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directed by the state: the prospect of “the great Federal future.” The sudden appearance of “a trio of Indian braves,” however, shatters this monumentalized vista, tearing open the composed scene of national futurity with the intrusion of a violent history (652). The men themselves are not figures of the past. On the contrary, it is their obvious modernity – in wearing bowler hats and carrying photographs and tobacco, they remind James of “Japanese celebrities” – that seems to rupture the scene. These Indians are neither literary objects (they defy “a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales”) nor cinematic red men. Rather, they are subjects – not merely objects – of a media society and its disordered trafficking of images (as well as “specimens, on show,” James adds dryly, “of what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing”). And it is as subjects of disjunctive modern publicity and state power that the Indians shatter the “great Federal future” with a flashback image of a violent past. They seemed just then and there . . . to project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified – reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed one’s eyes, but there, at its highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements of the state. (652–3)

Amid uncomprehending monuments to futurity, the shock of the encounter opens a new form of access to the violence of history. Although national historiography and literary tradition are sealed to this flashback vision, the sight of these “brazen” new figures allows James’s literary analysis to uncover what the state has buried under its spacious grounds and “printless pavements.” The brave new world of media dialects will not be immune to perpetuating the injuries of history, but its ungoverned play of images may still allow sensory experience that erupts from the past as well as new glimpses of future publics.

References and Further Reading Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. In Henry Adams, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education. Ed. Ernest Samuels. New York: Library of America, 1983. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bentley, Nancy. Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Cochran, Terry. Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Mass Media and Literary Culture Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction, and Other Essays. New York: New York University Press, 1959. Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Penguin, 2001. Howells, William Dean. Literature and Life. New York: Harper, 1902. James, Henry. “Alphonse Daudet.” In Literary Criticism. Vol. 2. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. James, Henry. The American Scene. In Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America. Ed. Richard Howard. New York: Library of America, 1993. James, Henry. “The Future of the Novel.” In Literary Criticism. Vol. 1. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. James, Henry. In the Cage. In Complete Stories 1892– 1898. Eds. David Bromwich and John Hollander. New York: Library of America, 1996. James, Henry. “The Question of the Opportunities.” In Literary Criticism. Vol. 1. Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. New York: Vintage, 2007. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Norris, Frank. Novels and Essays. Ed. Donald Pizer. New York: Library of America, 1986. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum, 2004. Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Wharton, Edith. Novellas and Other Writings. Ed. Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Library of America, 1990. Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin). American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings. Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Part II

Spaces

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Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism Anna Brickhouse

The last two decades have seen an increasing familiarity among Americanists with the extraordinary narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a sixteenth-century Spaniard who was wrecked off the coast of Florida during the failed expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez in 1527.1 Over a decade before Hernando de Soto’s famous crossing of the Mississippi River, Cabeza de Vaca traveled for eight years across presentday Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, living among different coastal and inland indigenous groups before he and three fellow castaways made a stunning reappearance in Nueva Galicia (north-central Mexico) to the surprise of the Spanish forces newly stationed there. But if the broad outline of this remarkable story has grown increasingly familiar, few readers of Cabeza de Vaca’s account will recall the name of Lope de Oviedo, a castaway from the same expedition who also survived the initial attempt led by Narváez to explore inland Florida – and who, like the author, also wound up living among a coastal group of Floridian Natives. Unlike Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo never produced a written account of his experiences, nor was he ever “delivered” from his indigenous life or restored to his Spanish compatriots. In fact, we know little about him. Lope de Oviedo makes only a few brief appearances in Cabeza de Vaca’s account before he abruptly disappears from the text, and even among specialists his marginal role in this much-studied narrative has attracted little or no attention. Yet the elusive presence of Lope de Oviedo holds in many ways the interpretive key to Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación. As I hope to show here, Lope de Oviedo provides the account with its most crucial narrative alibi while also embodying the story that Cabeza de Vaca sought most anxiously not to tell: the story of a man’s indigenous acculturation in the New

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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World and his subsequent choice not to return to life among the Spaniards. As a minor figure in the Relación, Lope de Oviedo provides Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative with an indispensable justification for the narrator’s own delay in returning to his European life. But Lope de Oviedo’s story, which is never explicitly told within the narrative and yet reverberates through it, compellingly undermines the narrator’s most emphatic claims about what he called his “sad and wretched captivity” in North America (Adorno and Pautz 1:244–5). More broadly, Lope de Oviedo bears a certain conceptual weight for American literary studies to the extent that most scholarship has consigned him to oblivion. His thwarted, never-realized narrative trajectory – toward indigeneity without return – ultimately represents the limits of not only Cabeza de Vaca’s discourse but also our own. In this sense, the strange tension between the celebrated Cabeza de Vaca and this often overlooked marginal character offers an oblique but clarifying perspective on the current state of the Americanist field in the wake of the so-called hemispheric turn in American literary studies. Indeed, Lope de Oviedo’s very marginality might be productively reconsidered in light of the emergence of Cabeza de Vaca himself as an icon of early American literature. The Relación’s expanded critical presence within American literary studies is due in large part to a groundbreaking critical edition published in 1999 by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz as The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. Even as early as 1994, however, the account showed signs of exceeding its central position within Latin American colonial studies, appearing that year in excerpted English translation in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Since then, Cabeza de Vaca has found a place in each new edition of the Norton – and not only in the extensive offerings included in Volume A: Beginnings to 1820, but also in the shorter, one-volume Norton Anthology that covers only the “core strengths” in American literary history from the “beginnings” to the turn into the twenty-first century. The Relación is now a hallmark text of the early American literary tradition, in other words, and as such it has offered to the field a useful signpost for the literary-historiographical and pedagogical renovation announced by the hemispheric approach: asking us to acknowledge – as we have done, perhaps too glibly – that “American” literature is not necessarily written in English, and that “America” itself does not refer solely to the United States but to the wider hemisphere from which the name was appropriated. At the same time, because many of the events represented in the text take place in Florida and the southwest of what is currently the United States, the Relación conveniently allows the field to retain the retroactive territorial logic that continues, with few exceptions, to define the colonial period (see Bauer, “Early American” 254). In this sense, the Relación provides an index of not only how much but also how little has changed as a result of the hemispheric turn. As Bauer observes, hemispheric American studies is for the most part still driven by the same “multiculturalist metanarrative” that dominated before the emergence of an Americas approach to American literary history (“Early American” 254). Certainly, Cabeza de Vaca’s trajectory as a critical figure would seem to bear out this claim, given that he has been distinctly

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celebrated by American literary studies for the criticism of the Spanish colonizers and the implied opposition to Spanish violence against the Natives that he famously voices at the end of his Relación, where he self-consciously presents himself returning from his New World captivity with a powerfully changed identity, and a putative understanding of and proximity to the indigenous inhabitants of Florida and northern Mexico. In the early 1990s, accordingly, Cabeza de Vaca was lauded as the virtual inventor of “Chicano narrative,” the inaugurator of a new autobiographical mode in which “ambiguity, the essence of Chicanismo, is already present” (Leal 64; see also Bruce-Novoa 12–21). Later critics followed this lead, dubbing him “the first Latino author . . . an intercultural man creating an intergeneric literary form” (Augenbraum 4). By the first decade of the twenty-first century, not surprisingly, the purported chicanismo and latinidad of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación had evolved into the marks of its mainstream and representative Americanness, its status as “the first truly literary document of the Americas, written by a European who has been changed by his American experiences” (Augenbraum 4). In this light, its narrator emerges as “a curious and debatable hybrid . . . [a]nticipating many later heroes and heroines in American literature” (Gray 25); in “becoming American by experience,” Cabeza de Vaca creates, “in essence, the story of America” itself (Reséndez, A Land So Strange 10). In these accounts, Cabeza de Vaca emerges heroically as a “literary pioneer [who not only] deserves the distinction of being called the Southwest’s first writer,” but also indeed provides the “prototype of much American writing to come” (Reséndez 250, citing William T. Pilkington). If such critical accounts retain a multicultural logic now often disavowed, they also serve to enable the early American field’s continuing focus on New England, simply by establishing Cabeza de Vaca as an exemplary prototype – whether Chicano, southwestern, hybrid, or hemispheric – against which the entire Anglo-American tradition may be unflatteringly measured. Thus, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Cabeza de Vaca serves as a benevolent foil to his seventeenth-century counterpart, Mary Rowlandson, the Puritan ex-captive author of the enormously popular narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682). While Rowlandson fails at cross-cultural identification, “insist[ing] that she has been transported beyond the human pale,” Cabeza de Vaca recognizes “linguistic difference” and thereby “makes [the Indians] commensurate with himself, people with whom he can communicate, if not always actually, then potentially” (Jehlen 50). Cabeza de Vaca’s quintessential American strength in such accounts is his ability to “occupy a border area between one culture, one version of experience, and another”: he and the three fellow captives who accompany him are “mixed, New World beings . . . and their tale, finally, is about neither conquest nor captivity but about the making of Americans” (Gray 25). But if American literary studies has found an ideal representative in Cabeza de Vaca for advertising the field’s self-avowedly comparative and antinationalist configurations – a literary-historical conversation that is aiming, now more self-consciously than ever, to become not only multicultural but also multilingual – scholars in

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colonial Latin American studies have emphasized other, more faithfully historical interpretive contexts for the Relación, particularly its participation in the new discourse of imperial “pacification” and its function as the author’s “narrative curriculum vitae” for a leadership role in future conquests (see Adorno, “Introduction” 25; Bauer, Cultural Geography 33–48; Rabasa 31–2). The Cabeza de Vaca of these studies appears as a figure wholly unlike the celebrated border dweller of American literary studies. This more fully historicized Cabeza de Vaca – the one seen from the vantage of colonial Latin American literary history – is no oppositional hero: instead, his call for a “peaceful” colonization in seeming opposition to the greedy, slave-catching conquistadors in Nueva Galicia appears not only utterly conventional and in keeping with emergent Spanish imperial policy but also quite self-serving given his interest in future colonial endeavors and his eventual, short-lived appointment as governor of the South American colony Rio de Plata, where – in a painful irony for the most part lost on American literary history – he was ultimately arrested under allegations of (among other things) mistreatment of the Indians (see Bauer, Cultural Geography 36–46; Pupo-Walker 129). In this light, to read Cabeza de Vaca as an icon of early American multiculturalism is at best absurd, and at worst, as José Rabasa argues, a kind of scholarly “perpetuat[ion of] the culture of conquest” (31; and see Ferens) – or, at the least, a reinscription of its rhetorical violence. In the reading that follows, I take a different approach to Cabeza de Vaca and to the question of what his narrative may ultimately have to tell us about American literary studies, both its current hemispheric impulses and its future potentials. My argument centers around the premise that Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative is the repository for a story that he only partially tells, a story that never achieves form within the larger Relación and its epic elaboration of its own authorial protagonist as a suffering hero returned from the primitive wilderness to protest a civilization that he now finds flawed. This more “literary” Cabeza de Vaca (see Adorno, “Negotiation” 50) emerges in part through the narrative’s suppression of a living person and historical agent – that is, through the story’s elision of Lope de Oviedo as the marginal figure of a narrative tangent. But the never formalized story surrounding this transient character – which begins, I think, before Lope de Oviedo has even entered the narrative – evokes a range of interrelated issues, a kind of unspoken theoretical problematic, that organizes the hemispheric American field: an abiding structure of Western literary primitivism that continues to shape our (mis)readings, including a critical romanticization of the captivity genre that ultimately conceals its most radical possibilities; a scholarly mystification of translational mastery that elides the role of the interpreter and the ever-present possibility of mistranslation; and the almost inevitable academic enlistment of those foundational points of exclusion that guide what we can and cannot see, what we remember and forget. In this sense, Cabeza de Vaca’s example suggests the extent to which the field’s alleged triumph over American exceptionalism has been a mere reconfiguration. The result – what I am calling Americas exceptionalism – is central to how we continue to define the epistemological sophistication, the ethical cre-

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dentials, and the continued modernity of our scholarly work through gestures of inclusive exclusion. First published in 1542, and addressed to King Charles I of Spain (Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire), Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación presents a firsthand account of the main events comprising the failed expedition in Florida led by Pánfilo de Narváez: the departure from Cadiz, Spain, with 300 men, and with Cabeza de Vaca serving as their crown treasurer; the intervening stops in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Trinidad; sea voyages and storms; an abortive attempt to enter Florida on horseback after leaving the ships behind; and, finally, the experience of what the narrator terms a captivity among the indigenous peoples of Florida and later northern Mexico before he and three fellow castaways arrive in Nueva Galicia. Crucial to the failed outcome of the expedition is Narváez’s self-interested abdication of authority in the worst moment of crisis, when the Spaniards on shore are attempting to return to their ships on precarious rafts. The problem, as the narrative stages it, is a conflict between cowardly selfishness (as enacted by Narváez, who flees in the best equipped raft) and an honorable collectivism (as embodied by Cabeza de Vaca, who attends to the sick and wounded after his own raft is left behind). The narrator insists so straightforwardly upon this conflict between cowardice and honor, individualism and corporatism, that it is easy to overlook an arguably more telling conflict that slips into the narrative at this moment before quickly receding. Just after Narváez’s abdication of leadership, the group left behind is stranded without a raft, “naked as the day [they] were born,” and weak from cold and hunger. Cabeza de Vaca, having chased down a group of coastal Natives – and having, he avows, “made them understand through gestures how a raft had sunk on us and three members of our company drowned” – now proposes a possible course of action: “I asked the Christians and said that, if it seemed acceptable to them, I would ask those Indians to take us to their houses” (Adorno and Pautz 1:98–101). The narrative never fully addresses the implications of the proposed plan, but the attempt to solicit group approval here suggests the gravity of the proposition – as does the response it elicits: “And some of them who had been in New Spain replied that we should not even speak of it” (1:100–1). In the ensuing lines, Cabeza de Vaca both undermines and strategically reframes the intensity of this refusal by noting that his companions’ reaction derives, erroneously, from the soldiers’ experiences in New Spain during the conquest of Mexico and their consequent belief that “if [the Indians] took us to their houses, they would sacrifice us to their idols.” This gesture toward the misguided nature of their fears effectively directs attention away from the fact that his proposal has somehow marked a discursive limit of sorts, arriving at or implying what cannot be said. Cabeza de Vaca ultimately abandons the pretense of consensus and concedes that he “did not heed their words, but rather beseeched the Indians to take us to their houses” – a request in which the Natives apparently “showed that they took great pleasure” (1:100–1). Given the vehemence of the Spaniards’ objection, the disagreement proves oddly fleeting within the larger account. Indeed, the narrative moves

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quickly past it precisely because the moment speaks elliptically but unmistakably to the most difficult problem within Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative: how to explain not just the fact but also, far more problematically, the apparent choice of his entrée into native life – how to tell the story of what is essentially a requested captivity. The ensuing narrative repeatedly describes what cannot be specified as consensual bondage. After the Indians are “beseeched” to do so, they convey the Spaniards into ostensible imprisonment: “close to nightfall . . . they took us, and by their carrying us by clutching us tightly and making great haste, we went to their houses . . . so rapidly that they almost did not let our feet touch the ground” (1:100–1). As Cabeza de Vaca continues, memorably detailing the circumstances of his new life among these Florida Natives, the narrative works assiduously to explain not only what the experience of indigeneity was like but also – less directly yet far more urgently – why he found it necessary to remain among the Indians as long as he did. A telling moment occurs in the narrative when another group of stranded Narváez explorers, led by Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, arrives in Cabeza de Vaca’s village, precipitating a scene of distraught recognition – a scene that oddly parallels and presages the famous moment of misrecognition that occurs at the end of the account and precipitates Cabeza de Vaca’s permanent return to his Spanish identity. In this early scene, Dorantes and Castillo appear to have no trouble recognizing Cabeza de Vaca and the Spaniards with him, but they are disturbed by what they perceive: “Upon encountering us, they received great fright to see us in the condition we were in” (1:102–3). Yet by this point in their requested captivity, Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow cautivos have, by his own account, been well fed and “treated . . . so well” that they are far less uncomfortable than before they entered into bondage. Thus, their visible “condition” – which gives Dorantes and Castillo “great sorrow,” particularly their nakedness, because they have “no clothing other than what they were wearing” to offer them – must have been marked not by their general misfortune but by the signs, instead, of an incipient assimilation (1:102–3; see Molloy 447). Once we begin to see the narrative’s oblique gestures toward this incipience – which remains unarticulated because the narrator himself “should not,” or cannot, “even speak of it” – other signs of ambivalence emerge. No sooner has Cabeza de Vaca “agreed . . . to go forward [to] the land of Christians” with the combined groups of Spaniards than he has also convinced them to stay, having “decided to do what necessity dictated, which was to spend the winter there” (1:104–5). Indeed, the entire middle portion of the account seems to revolve around this tension between leaving and remaining: between traveling along the Gulf coast to the intended destination at the Pánuco settlement in New Spain and residing in Florida with the Natives. Not surprisingly, then, the account grows tense and muddled when Dorantes and Castillo finally take the initiative in unifying the 14 castaways, “gather[ing] together all the Christians who were somewhat dispersed,” to travel together along the coast toward Pánuco (1:116–7). The narrative’s palpable challenge here is the production of a coherent rationale, for Cabeza de Vaca, rather than going with Dorantes and Castillo, lingers on with the group whom he now calls “my Indians”:

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As I have said, I was on the other side, on the mainland, where my Indians had taken me and where a great sickness had befallen me, such that if any other thing were to give me hope of survival, that illness alone sufficed to deprive me of it altogether. And when the Christians found this out, they gave to an Indian [a] cloak of sable skins . . . so that he would cross over to where I was to see me. And thus twelve of them came. . . . After they had crossed, the Indians who held me informed me of it, and of how Jerónimo de Alaniz and Lope de Oviedo had remained on the island. My sickness prevented me from following them, nor did I see them. I had to remain with these same Indians from the island for more than a year, and because of the great labors they forced me to perform and the bad treatment they gave me, I resolved to flee from them and go to those who live in the forests and on the mainland. (1:116–19)

In a passage whose most salient feature is its overdetermination, Cabeza de Vaca articulates a range of contradictory reasons for not joining the Dorantes and Castillo group: he is separated by distance from the group, he is too ill to travel with them, the illness has left him with too little hope of survival to care about leaving, he doesn’t know the group is leaving until the Indians inform him of it, and, once again, his illness prevents him – and he never saw the departing Spaniards in the first place. Interspersed within this frantic litany of the multiple, individually sufficient, and collectively self-cancelling causes of his remaining is the significant information that the group has tried unsuccessfully to bring Cabeza de Vaca back into the fold by sending an Indian messenger. As the narrator puts it somewhat paradoxically, Cabeza de Vaca “had to remain” until he “resolved to flee” – not to the Spaniards, however, but to another group of Indians. Lope de Oviedo emerges precisely when the narrative reaches a kind of crisis point in maintaining its logic as a captivity narrative. Recounting his circumstances after the departure of the Dorantes and Castillo group, Cabeza de Vaca offers a vivid description of his own evolving role as a “merchant” within the indigenous groups among which he lives and travels, gathering extensive knowledge as he trades. On the one hand, this occupation confers an obvious narrative advantage, endowing the Relación with a value that may be offered to Charles I in lieu of any material wealth brought back to Spain: it becomes evidence of his superior knowledge, as he puts it in his opening address to the king, of precisely the sort of “information [that is] not trivial for those who in your name might go to conquer those lands” (1:18–19). But Cabeza de Vaca’s role as a merchant also serves him well in the temporal moment of the narrative: because practicing it, I had the freedom to go wherever I wanted, and I was not constrained in any way nor enslaved, and wherever I went they treated me well and gave me food out of want for my wares, and most importantly because doing that, I was able to seek out the way by which I would go forward. (1:120–1)

If this passage establishes the freedom of the protagonist, which in turn enables the production of the narrative’s knowledge-value, it also presents an unsettling generic

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problem for the larger story of captivity. Cabeza de Vaca clearly understands this on some level, for he qualifies this description of his unlimited personal liberty and protection from the problem of hunger during his life among the Indians via a single but telling phrase – “most importantly” (‘lo más principal’ 1:120) – that suggests that leaving his indigenous life is his first priority. It is a priority – “to seek out the way by which I could go forward” – that nevertheless finds only the vaguest articulation even in this retrospective telling of his story. As the narrator concedes within a few sentences, “The time that I spent in this land, alone among [the Natives] and as naked as they, was nearly six years” (1:122–3). This bald statement breaks abruptly into the narrative almost as if someone outside the text – for example, an official recording his legal declaration – had just posed the question directly: how long did you remain there? And, of course, Cabeza de Vaca presumably was asked exactly that question when he gave his sworn testimony, along with Dorantes and Castillo, for the Joint Report prepared in Mexico City in 1536 upon his return to life among Spaniards – six full years before the initial publication of the Relación. He was also almost certainly asked a related question during the production of this now-lost report – a question of potentially shattering implications – for he explicitly answers it in the next and perhaps most ambiguous section of the Relación: The reason I stayed so long was to take with me a Christian who was on the island, named Lope de Oviedo. His companion, de Alaniz, who had stayed with him when Alonso del Castillo and Andrés Dorantes left with all the others, had since died. And in order to take him out of there, I crossed over to the island every year and begged that we go, in the best manner that we could, in search of Christians. And every year he kept me from going, saying that we would go the following year. In the end I took him. And I carried him across the inlet and four rivers that are along the coast, because he did not know how to swim. And thus we went forward with some Indians. . . . (1:122–3)

The scenario oddly mirrors the earlier description of Cabeza de Vaca’s failure to leave with the Castillo-Dorantes party, with the narrator now taking the part of the traveling group and crossing over between island and mainland to urge a departure. What remains ambiguous in the passage – precisely when one would expect the clarity presumably associated with longstanding disagreement and cajoling – is exactly why Lope de Oviedo wants to remain among the Indians and why Cabeza de Vaca agrees to wait for him. To add to the confusion, given that the castaway in question is an expeditionary of lesser rank (whom Cabeza de Vaca has previously commanded as a superior), the narrative’s assertion that Lope de Oviedo repeatedly “kept [him] from going” appears downright dubious. On the other hand, Lope de Oviedo provides the narrative with precisely the scapegoat that is required for explaining why its protagonist “stayed so long.” By the time Cabeza de Vaca reunites with Dorantes, Castillo, and Estevanico – the only three survivors of the party that had earlier left him behind – Lope de Oviedo

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is no longer there to corroborate or deny the story that we now have. For after Cabeza de Vaca has taken the subordinate expeditionary with him – whether by persuasion or force – the entourage encounters a new group of hostile Indians from whom they hear frightening tales and receive “slaps and blows” as well as threats: And fearing this, Lope de Oviedo, my companion, said that he wanted to go back with some women of those Indians with whom we had crossed the inlet. . . . I entreated him repeatedly not to do it, and I pointed out many things, but I was unable to detain him by any means. And thus he returned and I remained alone with those Indians. (1:124–5)

Lope de Oviedo’s purported cowardice, like his inability to swim, allows the narrative to showcase the narrator’s bravery as it earlier established his selflessness – while also providing, of course, a convenient cover for Cabeza de Vaca’s extended stay among the Indians. But Lope de Oviedo is also a kind of doppelgänger, and when he departs the Relación, he acts out the narrative trajectory that Cabeza de Vaca must anxiously abjure: a return to the Indian life that they had both manifestly resisted leaving. Lope de Oviedo’s untold story thus shadows the conclusion of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, and his eventual return to the Spaniards, on multiple levels. Whether it is the protagonist or his marginal double who truly achieves deliverance from the “sad and wretched . . . captivity” is left open to debate given that the final pages of the Relación explicitly call into question the meaning of freedom. As the narrator observes with painful irony, “[I]t is evident how much men’s thoughts deceive them, for we went to [the Spaniards] seeking liberty, and when we thought we had it, it turned out to be so much to the contrary” (1:252–3). In the most general sense, the remark suggests the extent to which Cabeza de Vaca’s New World experiences have brought into sharp relief the deceptive, culturally relative nature of liberty. More specifically, however, this remark points to the active suspicion under which Cabeza de Vaca’s return was held by the Spaniards who encountered him in Nueva Galicia: the ostensibly returning castaways are treated, in fact, as a threat to Spanish security, “sent . . . off under the guard of an alcalde” and “remove[d] . . . from conversation with the Indians” with whom they had been traveling (1:252–3). Cabeza de Vaca casts this turn of events as an outrageous consequence of the Spaniards’ greedy plot to continue enslaving Indians, a plot that was, at the time he produced the Relación, illegal under Spanish imperial policy – and that therefore presents a conveniently unsanctioned foil against which to position his own credentials as the best potential representative of royal Spanish interests, the most effective “pacifier” (rather than enslaver) of the Indians. At the same time, the narrator’s purported outrage at the intended enslavement of Indians – an outlawed but nevertheless ubiquitous Spanish practice that could hardly have surprised him – provides the account with a kind of digressive alibi for the threatening figure that the Spaniards clearly understood Cabeza de Vaca to embody – and also, perhaps, with a kind of narrative mystification of the enduring problem

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of his journey: why he and his three fellow castaways chose to leave the coastline once they had nearly reached their intended destination in Pánuco, forging ahead into the unknown interior of North America where they had no reason to believe they would ever find Spaniards. In casting its protagonist as a kind of conscientious objector who suffers for his principles of pacification, in other words, the narrative subtly draws our attention away from the very possibility that the Spaniards in Nueva Galicia seem to have had in mind when they put Cabeza de Vaca under guard and separated him from the indigenous group with which he traveled: that he was not necessarily attempting to return to the Spaniards when he encountered them, quite by chance, in northern Mexico. Ultimately, the primary narrative work of the Relación may be precisely this performance of distraction. In attending to the text’s virtuosic shifting of the reader’s attention away from the obvious – away from the story that his account has been almost, but not quite, telling all along – we gain a useful vantage on the legacy of primitivism that (as I’ll suggest below) defines the current scholarly predicament of Americas exceptionalism. The Relación achieves its distractive performance and accomplishes a now-celebrated feat of self-mythologizing by presenting a foundational story of Western modernity: the enduring plot of “going native.” This narrative trajectory is not, to be clear, Lope de Oviedo’s, for the narrative structure of Western literary primitivism demands the narrator’s positioning within civilization as its mode of contrast, its production of a return with a difference. It is thus Cabeza de Vaca’s manifestly changed identity – perceived by Spaniards and Indians alike – that differentiates him from, and consolidates the narrative’s suppression of, Lope de Oviedo, who merely remains in his life among the Indians with nothing to show for it. Unlike Lope de Oviedo, Cabeza de Vaca performs toward the end of the Relación upon a stage designed to showcase his postcaptivity difference as the manifest sign of his superiority over the Spaniards who have arrested and detained him. Rather than state the protagonist’s emergent superiority outright, the narrative slyly ventriloquizes it through the speech of the Indians of Nueva Galicia, whom the Spaniards are underhandedly seeking to coerce: The Christians [in Nueva Galicia] . . . made their interpreter tell [the Indians] that we were of the same people as they . . . and that we were a people of ill fortune and no worth, and that they were lords of the land whom the Indians were to serve and obey. But of all this the Indians were only superficially or not at all convinced of what they told them. Rather, some talked with others among themselves, saying that the Christians were lying, because we came from where the sun rose, and they from where it set; and that we cured the sick, and that they killed those who were well; and that we came naked and barefoot, and they went about dressed and on horses with lances; and that we did not covet anything but rather, everything they gave us we later returned and remained with nothing, and that the others had no objective but to steal everything that they found. . . . Finally, it was not possible to convince the Indians that we were the same as the other Christians. (1:250–1)

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The last seven lines of the passage are probably the narrative’s most famous. As many readers have observed, Cabeza de Vaca’s use of the first-person plural pronoun has dramatically shifted by this point in the narrative, marking what seems to be almost a categorical separation from the Spaniards or “Christians.” In a series of antithetical parallelisms emphasized with anaphora and asyndeton, this highly rhetorical speech pronounces Cabeza de Vaca’s divinely ordained transformation: a Jesus-like man who hails naked and barefoot from the East, cures the sick, gives from his poverty – and, crucially, a man with whom the Indians identify and to whom they look as a spiritual leader. In the “sad and wretched” process of going native, the narrative argues, Cabeza de Vaca has achieved profoundly Christian results. But the scene also achieves a secular payoff through the narrative’s larger structure of primitivism: its endowment of the protagonist with the marks of his surpassing modernity vis-à-vis not only the narrative’s guileless and loyal Indians but also the Nueva Galicia Spaniards who mistrust Cabeza de Vaca – and with whose testimony he is essentially in competition as a writer. The moment in which the narrative establishes Cabeza de Vaca’s experience of having gone native – registered in the Indians’ refusal to recognize his Spanishness, or even the potential imperial similitude between him and the “other Christians” – is central to the process of the protagonist’s subject formation: Cabeza de Vaca emerges as a modern man defined specifically by his commitment to the royal law against robbing and mistreating the Indians and by a cross-cultural understanding that is not only more capacious and humane as a result of his primitivism but also, to the Indians as much as to readers, utterly transparent. By contrast, the narrative captures the failed modernity of the Nueva Galicia Spaniards in their inability to successfully translate themselves and their point of view to the Indians. It is at this key point in the narrative that Cabeza de Vaca directly addresses the problem of failed translation for the first time in the Relación and, in doing so, raises more general questions about the coercive and opaque nature of the translation process itself. Up to this point, the narrative has featured numerous episodes of translation, scenes of communication between Spaniards and Indians, all of which have unfolded smoothly, whether via words or gestures. Here, however, the Nueva Galicia Spaniards have “made their interpreter” present their case, and still the Indians believe that “the Christians were lying.” Yet the narrative’s qualification that the Indians were “only superficially or not at all convinced of what [the Spaniards] told them” introduces a note of ambiguity that is hard to reconcile with its larger argument about Cabeza de Vaca’s own cross-cultural prowess and ability to produce transparent communication of meaning. How can the reception of a translation be known and evaluated except by the interpreter – for that matter, how can reception be accurately gauged even by the interpreter, who can only know what the target audience chooses to reveal about his or her reception of information? The distinction between the acceptance and the rejection of a translated proposition appears to be as unverifiable as the process of translation itself.

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In the ensuing pages, Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative begins to make unprecedented concessions regarding the strains and burdens of translation, the possibility of its failure, and his own limited place within a larger translational chain involving multiple languages and interpreters. He and his fellow returning castaways now find themselves, at times, less than persuasive in their interpretive roles, such as when he admits, “We had great difficulty convincing the Indians to return to their homes and secure themselves and sow their maize” (1:248–9). Similarly, when Melchior Díaz, the alcalde mayor, asks Cabeza de Vaca to help with recalcitrant Indians by “hav[ing] them called together and order[ing] them on behalf of God and Your Majesty to come and settle the plain and work the land,” the narrative emphasizes the protagonist’s indispensability in bringing success to the conquest, but nevertheless concedes a significant problem: “To us this seemed very difficult to put into effect, because we did not bring any Indian of ours or any of those who usually accompanied us and were skilled in these matters” (1:254–5). The skills in question are, of course, those of translation; lacking an indigenous interpreter, Cabeza de Vaca apparently worries about his ability to deliver on the implied promise of controlling the Indians. This difficulty of communication, however, is quickly resolved into a scene of seamless understanding by means of another translative chain. Here again the narrative acknowledges the mediation of native interpreters – but recasts this mediation as a mystifying effect of Cabeza de Vaca’s own authority, made manifest when the Indians held captive by the Spaniards first learn about him: these Indians had been with the Christians when we first arrived to them, and they saw the [600 Indians] who accompanied us and learned from them about the great authority and influence that through all those lands we had possessed and exercised, and the wonders that we had worked and the sick people we had cured. (1:254–7)

Cabeza de Vaca’s reputation, in other words, precedes him: by merely arriving on the scene, this redeemed captive (and pretender to future colonial authority) introduces a model of successful, transparent, and utterly persuasive communication with the Indians. The series of interpreters acting on Cabeza de Vaca’s behalf proceeds to address all the Indians and explain Christian theology in some detail before pronouncing the terms of the Spaniards’ demands. The Indian masses, who have heretofore been avoiding the Spaniards, remarkably respond “that they understood everything very well and . . . that thus they would do it as we commanded it” (1:258–61). By his own account, moreover, Cabeza de Vaca uses these powers of communication to “secure” the 600 indigenous people with whom he has been traveling as well as those he meets in Nueva Galicia – assuring them all of their safety among the Spaniards (1:260–1). And though he glosses neatly over it in the concluding story of his ostensible victimization by greedy conquistador villains who cannot understand or make themselves understood to the Natives, Cabeza de Vaca’s cross-cultural prowess is – by the internal logic of his own account – the precise means by which these Indians are ultimately betrayed into the very fate of enslavement that the narrator purports to

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abhor. In the end, then, Cabeza de Vaca’s fiction of mutual comprehension is as selfserving and deadly as the monolingual logic of the requerimiento that he reads before his Indian audience, the infamous declaration of Spanish sovereignty and authority. The violent hallmark of its political mode is a linguistic performance of “inclusive exclusion,” that “seizing of the outside,” as Agamben defines it in his writing on sovereignty, from which the law defines the “sphere of its application” (1:104–5). Only those Indians who understand the language of the requerimiento can consent to conversion, and thus achieve, like all Christian Spaniards, the ostensible guarantee of legal status as “subjects and vassals” of the Crown, “free without servitude,” with all the “privileges, and exemptions, and . . . benefits” entailed therein (“Requerimiento”). Those Indians who do not understand Spanish and do not consent to their subordination to the Crown and Church, on the other hand, are also included in sovereignty’s embrace, but precisely via their exclusion as subjects: they become slaves. The signature accomplishment of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative is thus to establish the ethical superiority of its protagonist through a discourse of primitivism that consolidates his power. This accomplishment, I want to suggest, is relevant to American literary studies qua Americas studies, where a structure of primitivism often similarly conceals its dominating effects under the sign of critique. In the case of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación, the protagonist achieves the ethical foundation for his critique – of modern Spanish civilization and its culture of conquest – by virtue of his experience of the primitive realm, from which he emerges, paradoxically, as more modern, more humane, and more true to the new letter of “peaceful” law than his fellow Spaniards. The effects of primitivism, however, require both the narrative journey into the indigenous, New World heart of darkness and, crucially, the return that separates Cabeza de Vaca from Lope de Oviedo. The narrative’s doubling of Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo requires its subsequent suppression of the trajectory represented by Lope de Oviedo himself, for it is this trajectory – the movement toward indigeneity without return – upon which Cabeza de Vaca’s account depends for its narrative authority. Just as the Indians addressed by the requerimiento must be embraced as subjects even as they are excluded by their lack of Christianity in order to lend political meaning to conquest and genocide, Lope de Oviedo’s trajectory must be enlisted as the narrative’s foundational point of exclusion, the untold story against which Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative return defines itself: his emergence as a protagonist, as primitivism’s modern, ethical hero, borne on the wings of a translated and self-translating authority. But Cabeza de Vaca’s apparent acquisition of translational mastery – an achievement of absolute authority across the linguistic divide separating the Spaniards from the Indians – conveniently elides two problems that are also quite often suppressed within Americas studies: the ambiguous role of the translator and the ever-present possibility of mistranslation. At the same time, if the Relación presented its earliest readers with Cabeza de Vaca’s epic emergence by demanding that they simultaneously forget the never completed narrative trajectory embodied by his double and foil, Lope de Oviedo, the now

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canonical account has induced the same response in the realm of contemporary scholarship – prompting us effectively to maintain the silence mandated by the veterans of the Mexican conquest in the early pages of the text: “We should not even speak of it.” To attend to a story that is referenced but never told requires a great deal of speculation, of course, as well as an open-ended process of noticing what the story is not despite the fact that we cannot know what it is. The untold story of Lope de Oviedo comes into being in a context of Spanish-Native, cross-cultural relations that result not in a mestizo or ladino identity but rather, working in an inverse direction, in an indigenously acculturated subject of Spanish descent for whom we have no term. Provisionally defining this subject by negation, we might draw upon his shadowy figure to imagine the possibilities of cross-epistemic translation that are simply not available within the vast colonial archive to which we have access. Born as a Spaniard, Lope de Oviedo nevertheless embodies the potentials of what Walter Mignolo has called “border thinking,” the new modes of knowledge production made possible by modern and colonial expansion and the enforced incorporation of foreign languages and conceptual frameworks within an invaded culture’s worldview. As Mignolo observes, these emergent conditions did not produce “border thinking” symmetrically: “Europeans, in general, did not have to incorporate Indigenous languages and frameworks into their own” (Mignolo, Idea 9). As one of the many exceptions to Mignolo’s generalization, Lope de Oviedo would have embodied a kind of epistemological threat to the colonial regime perhaps even more acute than the indigenous manifestations of border thinking that existed visibly all around the Spaniards in Florida and northern Mexico – each time, to take a mundane example, that they encountered an Indian who already knew their language. In this sense, Lope de Oviedo’s untold story could not be articulated outside of a new, dual, and improvised way of knowing – a mode of understanding to which Cabeza de Vaca undoubtedly had access, but which he had every reason not to acknowledge or promote in his narrative. To put this another way: By casting Lope de Oviedo’s return to native life as cowardice, Cabeza de Vaca was simultaneously denying any intellectual substance to the decision. To engage with Lope de Oviedo’s marginal presence in the Relación, as well as the concerted unrealization of his narrative trajectory, is thus to look back through layers of historical suppression in order to imagine, despite all the information we lack about his point of view – the conditions of possibility in which he thought and acted as he did. To do so is to entertain an expanded, nonprimordial conception of indigeneity – but without the attendant romanticizing that consistently dogs the scholarly stories so often told about both captivity and “playing Indian” (see e.g. the respective critiques by Deloria and Strong). That there is no story here to romanticize is perhaps a condition of possibility, rather than an insurmountable obstruction, for future scholarship. Cabeza de Vaca’s story, on the other hand, has yielded much material over the last decades for our collective critical romanticizing within the field of US-American studies. But perhaps his self-mythologizing narrative – read alongside the arc of its contemporary critical reception – might also serve as a kind of critical mirror on

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ourselves, an oblique and transtemporal perspective upon the emergent exceptionalism of transnational American studies, particularly in its incarnation as Americas studies. The field registers this reconfigured exceptionalism in a number of ways, though it does so perhaps most clearly in a geographical sense: insisting upon its expanded, border-crossing parameters while placing a critical primacy on the American hemisphere as the origin of the modern world itself – and thus occluding other hemispheres, other continents and histories, to which it is intricately tied. There is also the reflexive exceptionalism of field self-representation, or disciplinary self-description, an idiom that, read alongside the Relación, resonates with the celebratory pronouncement of the field’s new cross-cultural scholarly credentials – a pronouncement that elides the work of translators while drawing upon it to shore up the ostensible distance from its own former parochialism. Perhaps this peculiar and informing tension between the stories of Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo adumbrates our field’s seemingly intractable relationship to the logic of imperialism. As Cabeza de Vaca’s text reminds us, the heady sense of epistemic expansion is not fully separable from imperial desire – an intellectual-political affinity that is symptomatic of the field’s headlong slide from the rigors of institutional history into a largely a-historical anxiety of disciplinary imperialism: the field’s near obsession not only with US imperialism, its primary object of study, but also with its own imagined ability somehow to replicate imperialism itself, which it construes as the dreadful potential, lurking behind every corner, of imperial complicity at the scholarly level. At the same time, even as we declaim the ethical and political dimensions of our expanded purview, our oppositional undoing of the national framework, we often ignore the new exclusions produced precisely by our inclusive embrace of the larger hemisphere. As ideological manifestations, these exclusions will remain difficult for any of us within the field to identify without a collective, sustained, and flexible effort to do so – and without the understanding that such “inclusive exclusion,” as Devon Carbado has argued in reference to black subjectivity and the law, entails not only exclusion via obfuscation but also exclusion via the uses to which the newly included itself is put (639). What purposes do the ever-inclusive parameters of Americas studies serve – what are the uses of its emergent transnational objects of study, imported with ever-growing sophistication and great aesthetic care from abroad? Here again, Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative may offer some insight into the latent primitivism within the discipline’s transnational structure of feeling: its critical penchant for the “alternative” ways of knowing – the indigeneity, the hybridity, the supposed non-Westernness, the “colonial difference,” as Mignolo puts it – of the wider hemisphere (Mignolo, Local esp. 2–11). Transnational American studies achieves much of its disciplinary cosmopolitanism – its scholarly modernity, its ethical platform for critique, its mantle of translative mastery – through the very gestures of inclusive exclusion that it also disavows. The solution to this problem (if there is one) is our own return of sorts, not to the national paradigm, but across the too-easy critical distance we have assumed between ourselves and the texts by which we have come to define the field. Like Cabeza de

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Vaca himself, we may end up suppressing the more compelling and revealing stories in favor of those that consolidate our image of ourselves.

Note 1.

All quotations from the text of Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 Relación come from the authoritative modern edition by Adorno and Pautz (published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1999) and will hereafter be cited by volume and page number. Adorno and Pautz’s three-volume study includes a facing-page English translation of the narrative as well as a study of the author’s life, the multiple historical and ethnographic contexts in which the narrative emerged, and the relation of the narrative to other writings by Cabeza de Vaca as well as other accounts of the expedition. Of particular importance in this study is the

1555 Valladolid edition of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, the Relación y Comentarios, which conjoined a new version of the 1542 narrative with an account by Pedro Hernández of Cabeza de Vaca’s governorship of Río de la Plata. Readers may also wish to consult the shorter Adorno and Pautz paperback edition, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (listed in the bibliography). For the purposes of this volume, I use the term “Americanist” (rather than USAmericanist) as a shorthand for scholars of US and Anglophone colonial American literature (as opposed to, e.g., Latin Americanists).

References and Further Reading Adorno, Rolena. “Introduction.” In The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (pp. 1:1–42). Eds. and trans. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Adorno, Rolena. “The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios.” In New World Encounters (pp. 48–84). Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Adorno, Rolena, and Patrick Charles Pautz. Ed. and trans. The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. 3 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Augenbraum, Harold. “Literary Strategies in Alvar Núñez Caveza de Vaca’s Account.” In U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers (pp. 1–9). Eds. Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos. New York: Mercantile Library Association of the City of New York/Greenwood, 2000. Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Bauer, Ralph. “Early American Literature and American Literary History at the ‘Hemispheric Turn.’ ” Early American Literature 45 (2010): 217–33. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Naufragios en los mares de la significación: De La Relación de Cabeza de Vaca a la literatura chicana.” Plural (February 1990): 12–21. Carbado, Devon. “Racial Naturalization.” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 633–58. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Ferens, Dominika. “Wayward Conquistador or Transcultural Hybrid? Commentaries on Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca’s The Account.” Anglica Wratislaviensia 36 (2001): 21–34. Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Jehlen, Myra. “The Literature of Colonization.” In The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 1. 1590–1820 (pp. 11–168). Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Leal, Luis. “Pre-Chicano Literature: Process and Meaning.” In Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in

Cabeza de Vaca and Americas Exceptionalism the United States (pp. 62–85). Vols. 1–2. Eds. Nicolás Kanellos, Claudio Esteva Fabregat, and Francisco Lomelí. Houston, TX: Arte Publico, 1993. López, Kimberle S. “Naked in the Wilderness: The Transculturation of Cabeza de Vaca in Abel Posse’s El largeo atardecer del caminante.” In A Twice-Told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian/Iberian American Literature (pp. 149–65). Eds. Santiago Juan-Navarro and Theodore Robert Young. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Molloy, Sylvia. “Alteridad y reconocimiento en Los Naufragios de Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.” Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispanica 35, no. 2 (1987): 425–49.

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Pupo-Walker, Enrique. Castaways: The Narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Rabasa, Jose. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Reséndez, Andrés. “Cabeza de Vaca and the Problem of First Encounters.” Historically Speaking 10, no. 1 (2009): 36–38. Reséndez, Andrés. A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca: The Extraordinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked across America in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Silva, Alan J. “Conquest, Conversion, and the Hybrid Self in Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion.” Post Identity 2, no. 1 (1999): 123–46. Strong, Pauline. Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

14

Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network Susan Gillman and Kirsten Silva Gruesz

To judge from the proliferation of adjectives like comparative and transnational in recent American studies, the field seems bent on bringing “America” into conversation with the rest of the globe. These terms, often used interchangeably, signify a will to include more objects in the purview of analysis than those with a clear connection to US nationhood, to get beyond its perceived limits. Yet there are vital differences between comparative and transnational and the approaches they suggest. Imagine a drawingcompass with the sharp, fixed arm resting upon one point while the movable arm extends outward, marking variably smaller or larger circles around that center. Figuratively speaking, the comparative Americanist positions such a compass over a map of the world, planting its fixed arm firmly in the United States, then adjusts the other to encircle a different geographical space – moving across the Atlantic to encompass England, for example, or westward to ponder the relationship between the United States and Japan. But the compass is still centered upon what is unquestionably the point – in both senses – of the comparison: it is the United States from which every observation comes and to which every conclusion returns, as either an affirmation of, or a contrast to, its implied norms. Writing about a similar paradigm shift among historians away from the nation as the default unit of analysis, Micol Seigel cautions against the apparent neutrality of its longstanding replacement: comparative history. Comparison involves naming similarities and differences between two or more discrete units, which “discourages attention to exchange between the two, the very exchange postcolonial insight understands as the stuff of subject-formation.” Rather than diminishing the importance of the nation-state, as a comparative approach might at first seem to do, “comparisons

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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obscure the workings of power,” in particular the conceptual power that comes with being the center from which a comparison is being made (Seigel 65). Seigel favors the term transnational as an alternative method that not only pays attention to such exchanges, but insists on shifting their locus of comparison. To extend our analogy: a transnational analysis would draw multiple circles, replanting the foot of the drawing-compass in different, central points, moving across different scales of observation. In so doing, it aims to avoid what is all too frequently, as Seigel demonstrates, the outcome of comparative analysis: a patronizing affirmation that the Other is different, but essentially just like Us. It could be rightfully objected that not every analysis that calls itself “transnational” actually accomplishes these objectives, or that all those who invoke the rubric of “comparative” necessarily fail at it.1 Our point, however, is that the description and the process are linked, and that it is not mere semantic fussiness to begin by ruminating on how we talk about the United States in relation to the world. Of course, the drawing-compass analogy doesn’t quite capture what happens when we select examples from which to extract comparative contrasts and similarities: we are always delineating what does and doesn’t fall within the perimeter of any study, even if we assiduously try to keep moving its center of analysis. Yet the metaphor does highlight the primarily spatial preoccupation of post- and transnational American studies at this critical juncture: the field’s will to push beyond the nation’s boundaries or (as the rise of border and diaspora studies suggests) to think from their edges and peripheries. The nation has become just one point on the spatial scale of American literary studies along with locality, region, nation, hemisphere, climatic zone, trade zone, and so on. Yet as recent scholars from Wai Chee Dimock to Lloyd Pratt, as well as a host of historians and theorists not identified as “Americanists” (e.g., Peter Osborne, Reinhard Kosselek, and Harry Harootunian), have reminded us, it is equally important to move between temporal scales. How people conceive of the relation between past, present, and future is as crucially linked to nationhood as are geographical boundaries. Drawing connections along the scale of time marks out periodizations and implied causalities through the idea of influence; one cannot think the Americas together, for instance, without considering the discrepant timing of modernity and modernization in Latin America. When we shift from the realm of historical objects and narratives in general to literary-cultural artifacts in particular, we will inevitably be drawn toward texts that thematize border crossings and contact zones, and their attendant challenges to dominant temporalities. But beyond the theme of movements and flows, we should foreground their material conditions: how do texts themselves move through multiple translations, adaptations, and significant editions and republications, each instantiation punctuated along the scales of time and space? Translation represents both one form that this dynamic exchange between nations can take, and a figure for that process. Although we tend to think of translation as involving two distinct vehicles of communication (“English” and “Spanish,” for example), in fact each language is composed of a multiple set of registers, regionalisms, and sociolects of variegated lexical and

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grammatical usages. Those components can also be imagined in a scalar fashion, since language use reflects larger patterns of social influence and power. Translations, too, are positioned on the scale of linguistic authority, usually relegated to a position of secondariness in relation to an original. To model a way of moving dynamically along all three of these scales – space, time, and language – we will discuss a network (as opposed to a singular “work”) of texts clustered around Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855) and an earlier French fiction on what Victor Hugo called the “immense topic” of Haitian slave rebellion, his Bug-Jargal (1826). Our analysis extends backward and forward in time from the two temporal nodes indicated by those publication dates, as well as outward linguistically and geographically to hemispheric abolitionist fiction and to the critical and historical work of C.L.R. James. We will argue that a transnational analysis should multiply situate where a text “belongs” in time and space by noting how it stands in relation to this third scale, language. Having pledged ourselves to pay attention to exchanges and flows and to multiple loci of comparison, we must now admit the inadequacy of the term transnational to describe that analytic. The prefix trans does not analyze the space of the comparison – how the points of scalar connection to be brought together can include nations, colonies, and localities not incorporated into either governing unit – or its time: whether these units antedate or postdate the establishment of nationhood. In either case, something other than the simple trans seems called for. Echoing Siegel’s beef with comparison, Christopher Connery and Rob Wilson write that a comparative study “always suggests the third term: the world itself, the world systemic, not always intelligible in its localized or concretized instantiation, but the ultimate and necessary horizon for interpretive work” (Connery and Wilson 3). They propose worlding as a term for the multi-sited, dynamic process of analysis that Seigel associates with transnationalism: a way of bringing this underlying framework into visibility, not ignoring or wishing away the nation but showing it to be simply one point on a scale rather than the determining unit of analysis. The gerundive form worlding deliberately detaches itself from the nominative world, which for many drifts dangerously toward a totalizing ethos of global homogenization and commodification. From this concern have stemmed parallel criticisms of “world music,” “world history,” and – most relevant to our discussion here – “world literature.” To some, the world-literature concept exerts an equalizing force by recognizing significant works from many cultures. But it also insinuates an equality among texts without attending to the real power differentials between the places they represent, or to the relative influence of their language of expression (global English, unsurprisingly, plays an outsized role in most visions of world literature). Ultimately, then, we want to push American literary studies beyond anti-exceptionalism, beyond comparativism, and even beyond the transnational turn, to think in a worlded way. A worlded analysis would plant the foot of the drawing-compass somewhere and sometime else than an “America” conceived of as the inevitable center and beginning. Further, it would attend to the way that texts move between multiple forms of language usage – native and foreign, dialect and register, Creole and patois

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– that are tied to forms of social capital. Thinking dialectically and translationally about the movements of texts across space, time, and language, such a worlded analysis would map out a network of crosshatched, multidirectional influences rather than drawing one-way or even two-way lines of comparison.

Benito Cereno and the Hemispheric Text-Network Ever since 1993, when Herman Melville and Martin Delany were recovered and paired under the rubric of “New World Slavery” in Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations, Melville’s Benito Cereno has provided continuous service as American literature’s most overtly hemispheric work. Its meteoric rise from relative obscurity as a “minor” Melville text, with limited critical currency from the time of its publication in 1855 up to the 1980s and 1990s, might be explained away as a short-term effect of the then-impending centennial of the Spanish-American War in 1998 and the call that it prompted for more attention to the legacies of US expansionism and imperialism in the rest of the Americas: Melville’s novella was both politically and aesthetically suggestive. But Benito Cereno has proved remarkably long lasting and protean, serving the field of American literature in its ongoing postnational phase as proof-text for a series of innovative geographical paradigms, routinely appearing at the center of studies that call themselves comparative or trans-American, Black Atlantic, circumCaribbean, or trans-Atlantic. For Sundquist, Sterling Stuckey, Rodrigo Lazo, Jonathan Elmer, and a host of other critics who have worked this theme, the novella’s geography maps out a New World or “Americas” history of race-slavery and colonialism, revolt and revolution. Not only does Benito Cereno invite reframings of familiar spatial access points, but it confounds linear time as well. The novella’s chronology reaches back from 1799, when it is set in the midst of the Haitian Revolution, then forward to the expansionist and filibustering mood of the 1850s when it was written, and finally back still further to 1492, when the ship’s “proper figurehead,” Columbus, first set foot on the island. Melville’s notorious manipulation of historical time extends outward to his adaptation of his own sources, as he moved the 1805 events on the ship Tryal that were described in Amasa Delano’s 1817 Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres backward to an earlier point, prior to Haiti’s naming of itself as a free republic. This is only one instance of the way that the linear ordering of antecedents and descendants in (and of) this text is thwarted, as we will argue later. But the name of Haiti or Saint Domingue or San Domingo is never directly uttered in the story, only alluded to in the renamed Tryal, Benito Cereno’s ship, the San Dominick, so the argument that the novella references this key hemispheric event had to be demonstrated by these early critics only by indirection – through an inferential or speculative reading of the references and sources that Melville uses and adapts. Their line of thinking about adaptation across dis-orderly space and time should be extended to the question of linguistic priority, as well: Melville’s text is written in English, but

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Benito Cereno is most evasive in its treatment of languages.2 It is a work rife with evidence of implied, partial, uncompleted, or otherwise inadequate translation, notably most often at the margins, in the intertexts and paratexts. For example, the court depositions near the end, “translated from one of the official Spanish documents” that have been “selected” out of the totality, “for partial translation,” mark the omissions ostentatiously by rows of asterisks (Melville 238). Despite these and other textual hints at the nonsufficiency of American English, language remains a relatively unexplored axis of analysis among the recent scholarship that has turned to this text to rethink nationalist parameters. Even when Benito Cereno is conceived as Melville’s meditation on Haiti and revolutions both past and prospective, the view that is taken of his “sources” is constrained by both our conception of him as an American author and our assumption about the texts that he would have read and the language in which they were written. Melville’s work can readily be paired with Delany’s (as Sundquist does), but never gets put in conversation with Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826). This novel, by a French poet, dramatist, and novelist, perhaps the most global of writers in the nineteenth century, was translated no less than four times into English between 1833 and 1866, and its explicit subject is the Haitian revolution. It’s especially strange to leave Hugo out in the cold given his own compelling view of the “immense topic”: “the revolt of the Saint Domingue blacks in 1791, a struggle of giants, three worlds having a stake in the matter – Europe and Africa as the combatants, America as the field of battle” (Hugo, Bug-Jargal 58). A classically comparativist study might set out to prove that influence, suggesting points of binary contrast and uncanny similitude between two texts that stand in for their respective nations. Instead, we want to suggest that the works we link to and by Melville and Hugo belong to a larger text-network connecting multiple points on the hemisphere’s space-time map and serving as an exemplum of the way that the encounter of Europe with the Americas occasioned modernity and the colonial system.3 When José Martí, that other figure lastingly recalled for service in an “Americas” context by the 1998 centenaries, called his version of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1887) “otra Cabaña” [“another Uncle Tom’s Cabin”], proposing that it spoke out in favor of the Indians as “la Beecher” did for the Negroes, he signaled that his was more than a literal translation: rather a transculturation (anticipating Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s 1940s term), the product of more than one author, belonging to more than a single national literary tradition, that elevates the role of translation to active participant in, rather than mere footnote to, the production of literary and cultural meaning. “Text-network” is one term for this kind of circulation, used in studies of the ancient novel, where it refers to a characteristic and central type of Hellenistic world literature, such as the “Alexander romance.” Bodies of prose composition with no definitive origin and no telos in their dissemination, no known “author” and no definitive form, they exist only as a multiplicity of different versions, in a wide variety of different languages, retailored to fit a host of different cultural contexts, diffused in a multiplicity of directions over much of the Asian-African-

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European land mass. One way to describe them would be as translations without an original (see Selden). Clearly, the classical idea of a text-network would be altered by the rise of print and the flourishing, by Hugo and Melville’s time, of a recognized social space for the author as professional and (however fleetingly for Melville) as celebrity. Nevertheless, the text-network model has the advantage of denaturalizing these potent modern ideologies surrounding the author and the original, and privileging circulation over the post-Romantic fetishization of composition. It makes translation both a material practice and a metaphor for the constant and multidirectional movement of texts through channels that are often not officially sanctioned or legitimated with an acknowledgment, like so many unnamed translators. Another text that has recently been enlisted for repeated “hemispheric” work enters this network as well: C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins. That title comprises a complex web of versions and translations, both of itself as a text (the different editions of 1938 and 1963, including all the paratextual material; and the three Atlanta lectures of 1971) and of its own source texts, as James assesses differently in changing moments of the twentieth century the cultural legacies of the Haitian Revolution – the works of Hugo and Melville among them. Melville’s symbolic temporal compression of the Age of Revolution into the antebellum United States is itself a strategy of translation by which history can be read back into the novel. As subject and object of translation, the “black letter” of the cryptic text of past-eventness that Amasa Delano must decipher also references the longstanding English-Spanish-French colonial rivalry in the Americas, and in turn the ways in which that old rivalry continued to manifest itself in Melville’s time in the form of heated debates about the expansion of the US into territories formerly claimed by the Spanish empire – in Mexico, Cuba, and Central America. Hugo does the same with Bug-Jargal, which addresses events that were then being frantically historicized in France (with which the new Republic of Haiti was negotiating its fateful debt payment during the novel’s serialization) but terminates its action at a point before the Haitian Revolution had even ended. To compound this historical compression, the novel was expanded from Hugo’s first short story, published several years earlier when he was 16. As a completed process, then, the history of the Haitian “event” both is and is not present in the novel. Hugo cryptically alludes to this strange disjunction in his 1826 preface, where he comments seemingly grandiosely, “Events have accommodated themselves to the book, not the book to events” (Hugo, BugJargal 57). Just as Melville and Hugo translate their purportedly nonfictional sources into fictive narratives, they approximate the necessarily multilingual pathways that historical research would have to take by highlighting the many social scales of language use from which these sources might have emerged: metropolitan British and American English, proper and pidgin Spanish, the French of the capital and of the colony, the patois of plotting slaves who had been exposed to all these as well as to African tribal and trade languages, and even more hinted-at symbolic forms of communication. Hugo forces his readers to be aware at every step of the need for if not

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the gratification of translation, as he provides footnotes with translations of all the Spanish, English, and Creole “jargon” that he has to use in the tale. There is no central spatial point, then, upon which our drawing-compass of the hemisphere rests – not even Haiti, a place that has been significantly constituted by the imagination of persons elsewhere, like C.L.R. James. Nor does a single date or year emerge: rather, there are a set of entry points into a text-network roughly bounded by the western hemisphere – and by the babble of incompletely understood conversations that have taken place within it.

Antecedents without Influences: Hugo’s Bug-Jargal Bug-Jargal (1826) was to Victor Hugo what Typee was to Herman Melville: a youthful exercise in writing an exotic romance pitched to sell to readers already primed toward its subject. Addressing a French audience still steeped in the legacy of Jacobinisms both white and black, both metropolitan and colonial, it proved to be one of the best-known and most widely circulated fictions about the world-shaping effects of the events in Haiti. It was immediately popular as well among readers in France’s colonial rivals Spain and England, and in their present and former colonies struggling over the fate of the plantation system whose ideological basis had been dealt such a severe blow by those events. Three distinct English translations – each with a different, telling subtitle – had already appeared prior to Melville’s composition of Benito Cereno, and three different Spanish translations were also in circulation before midcentury; Hugo’s novel was an acknowledged source of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Cuban abolitionist novel, Sab (1840). The most popular rendition into English, the Scotsman Leitch Ritchie’s The Slave-King (1833), expanded and rewrote the original to make it fit more obviously into the program of the transatlantic abolitionist movement. While Melville’s fame took a steady arc downward over the course of the nineteenth century, Hugo’s tracked meteorically upward – a pattern that in the Americas would be ironically reversed a century later. Enfolded within a brief frame narrative, the forward motion of Bug-Jargal begins at one of the traditional origin points of the revolution, on the eve of the Bois Caïman uprising in August 1791. Hugo thus sets out to narrativize that real event, brushing his story with a thin love-and-hidden-identity plot but also insisting on an extraordinary apparatus of footnotes: a true historical romance. Its plot revolves around two central characters who forge an unlikely alliance: the young white nobleman Léopold D’Auverney and the African-born slave he knows as Pierrot, but whose true identity is that of the abducted “king of Kakongo” turned rebel leader, Bug-Jargal. Yet if those two self-sworn “brothers” at first seem to represent a dyad of France and Africa, their story turns out to be significantly triangulated by Spain, which held the eastern half of the island and intervened militarily in the early stages of the power struggle between the French colonials and their enslaved subjects. Like many liberal readings

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of the Saint-Domingue event then and since, Hugo’s novel oscillates between romantic idealization of the dark-skinned hero of the title, and virulent dismissal of the creolized revolutionary characters, who are based on real-life players that Hugo’s French readership would have known. Toussaint and Dessalines play minor roles in the novel, but the bulk of its attention rests on the mulatto Jorge/Georges Biassou, one of the earliest leaders who emerged from Bouckman’s 1791 revolt. Biassou hails from Santo Domingo – the Spanish version of the name that would translate itself into the San Dominick of Melville’s mutinous ship – and allies his followers with the Spanish. Hugo depicts Biassou as a buffoonish pretender, who has taken the worst from both racial worlds and whose hybrid speech – an uncouth admixture of Spanish, French, and Creole – is mocked by the narrator, particularly in the paratextual apparatus. The novel strongly suggests that Biassou and his followers are responsible for turning what was initially a clear-cut struggle for universal human dignity and individual justice into an anarchic bloodbath, laying the blame for that shift on the gens libres de couleur. But Biassou is not the only figure in the novel who embodies cultural and racial hybridity: a major plot twist reveals that another mulatto creole, a “dwarf” named Habibrah who had been a favorite slave of D’Auverney’s planter uncle, is a key plotter as well. In contrast to Biassou’s stark hunger for power, Habibrah’s motives are disturbingly murky. A master of appearing harmless while he is quietly plotting murder, Habibrah takes delight in revealing to D’Auverney how he had been taken in by the placid outward appearance of his uncle’s clown, his family pet. Habibrah then pursues D’Auverney to the end, attempting to push him off a cliff but falling himself instead. In this figure of the short-statured master plotter rests the most uncanny resemblance to Melville’s Babo. Both are creolized, having lived for such a long time in the Americas that they are fluent in the cultural idioms of their masters; both enact elaborate masquerades to terrorize others and to cover their true intentions – performances that exceed the bounds of what is necessary to liberate or to avenge. The uncanny effect of each tale is linked to that excess. Like Amasa Delano (and, presumably, like the youthful creole planter’s son Benito Cereno himself before the insurrection on board the San Dominick), D’Auverney had been incapable of seeing malice in Habibrah precisely because he did not register him as fully human. Again recalling Delano, D’Auverney sees himself as a liberal thinker who is appalled by the conditions of plantation slavery, wincing at the blows his uncle lands upon the slaves and observing the demeaning effects of unchecked power upon the slaveholder – “at what high cost this power is bought” (Hugo, Bug-Jargal 81). He is particularly struck by the cruelty of his uncle’s decision to imprison his strongest and most able slave, Pierrot, possessed of “nobleness and bearing” and “beauty of form” that “could very well have suited a king” (80). The statuesque, coal-black Pierrot stands in a long line of such figures reaching back (at least) to Oronooko and forward (at least) to Melville’s Atufal, “supposed to have been a chief in Africa” (Melville 240): D’Auverney and Delano both flinch as they witness these kingly bodies being brought in chains before a despot. As Hugo’s title suggests, however, Pierrot/

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Bug-Jargal is a central figure in a way that Atufal is not, although one of his main purposes in the narrative is to mirror D’Auverney in something like the way that Delano and Cereno, representatives of New England and New Spain respectively, mirror each other. Just as the closing scenes of Benito Cereno leave us with an almost courtly exchange between Cereno and Delano – debating whose life has been saved by whom, and where the debt of honor lies – so too are D’Auverney and Pierrot/BugJargal shown to be entwined by mutual life debts. Early on, Pierrot had saved D’Auverney’s fiancée Marie (with whom he is also, chastely, in love) from an alligator. D’Auverney pledges his fraternal loyalty and tries to intervene with his uncle to spare Pierrot’s life, but the slave’s escape renders this moot. That debt of honor is deferred during the chapters in which D’Auverney thinks Pierrot guilty of treachery: misinterpreting his gestures during the sacking of the plantation on the night of Bois Caïman as murderous (Pierrot had in fact saved the white family), D’Auverney’s personal anger at Pierrot causes him to join the colonial militia. They are reunited after D’Auverney has been captured by Biassou’s rebels, whereupon Pierrot reveals himself as Bug-Jargal and explains his heroic conduct that night. D’Auverney then feels just as tied to his black “brother” as ever. The two figures engage in a kind of contest of nobility: D’Auverney insists on keeping his word of honor to Biassou to return to his camp as a prisoner of war after meeting with Bug-Jargal, who in turn stages a spectacular rescue of D’Auverney and offers his own life in exchange for that of his followers, also being held captive by Biassou. Due to a mistaken signal, D’Auverney’s troops think the white man has been killed, and go to avenge themselves on the blacks. It is D’Auverney’s own faithful sergeant who executes Bug-Jargal in the final scenes, moments before D’Auverney can speed back to the camp to stop him. Emotionally broken, D’Auverney returns to France, where he guiltily retells this story three years later in an army camp and then throws himself into a suicidal battle, “following his leader” into what we are led to believe is a militarily avoidable, but morally necessary, death. D’Auverney here recalls Benito Cereno, dogged by the “shadow of the negro,” looking in vain for signs about how to navigate their moral compass in a world – punctuated by the Haitian event – that makes such signs newly unreadable.4

Spanish: Everyone’s Language of Conspiracy To the extent that both Hugo’s and Melville’s stories are preoccupied with the role of language in granting or withholding power and agency, the foreign-to-both language of Spanish serves as the register of those concerns. For another striking parallel between the two texts is their attention to Spain’s colonial experience in the Americas as the shadow of the one represented by the protagonist from whose perspective the story is told: France and D’Auverney, and the new United States and Delano. Hugo references the interrelated histories of the colonial powers through Pierrot/BugJargal’s life story: born a king’s son in Gambia, he and his family were befriended

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by a Spanish captain (who “gave me all that useless knowledge that so impressed you” [Hugo, Bug-Jargal 171]) who lured them into slavery. He was transported to Santo Domingo – the piece of land dubbed la isla española by Columbus, the ground zero of African slavery in the New World, divided three centuries later between France and Spain. Footnoting the Spanish “Hispaniola,” Hugo signals the shadowhistory of New World Spain by writing in the double negative, “Our readers will doubtless not be unaware that this was the first name given to Saint Domingue, by Christopher Columbus at the time of the discovery in 1492” (75). It is there that “Bug . . . otherwise known as Pierrot” learned to speak Spanish before French (65). D’Auverney hears Pierrot/Bug-Jargal before he sees him for the first time, when a beautiful voice sings a “Spanish air” in the woods. Spanish is here identified as a language of art, revealing the slave’s aptitude for culture, beauty, and other markers of civilization (not unlike that “true off-shoot of a true hidalgo Cereno”). But it is also their language of fraternité across racial lines, the language they speak when Pierrot is in prison; in pledging his loyalty to D’Auverney, Pierrot/Bug-Jargal establishes a secret song by which the Frenchman will always know how to identify him – a corrido appropriately titled “El contrabandista.” (D’Auverney’s fluency in Spanish is not explained, although Hugo takes care to translate their dialogue into French in footnotes.) But Spanish is also deceptively associated with other conspiracies and secret communications. Whereas Bug-Jargal is a populist crusader against injustice, Biassou’s rebels have allied themselves with the Spanish, and they receive arms and munitions from across the island. D’Auverney, obtuse in much the same way as Delano, is incapable of connecting the linguistic dots that might lead him to recognize Habibrah when he later discovers him, now dressed as a spirit-conjurer, in Biassou’s camp. Both narrators, Hugo’s and Melville’s, are themselves complicit in the uses of language for misrecognition. For Habibrah’s dialogue from the beginning has been presented in a mixture of French and Spanish. He had declared to D’Auverney long ago that the “language that you call Spanish, [was] the first that ever I lisped – when my age was counted by months and not by years. . . . I love that language.” (Hugo, Bug-Jargal 77). D’Auverney is obtusely unaware of the possibility that stubby Habibrah might have been anything but a faithful pet, treated with every privilege by a doting master (“Como un perro!” scoffs Habibrah in response to this, reasserting his humanity [183]). He adamantly denies that the figure before him, respected by all of Biassou’s men, could be the same creature – until he sees his dagger (also, we may recall, Babo’s weapon of choice, secretly pointing at Benito Cereno throughout the charade of Delano’s visit to the ship). Spanish is marked as foreign in both the French- and the English-language novels, yet not so foreign as to be untranslatable – and in that translatability lies its danger. Spanish is a lingua franca in both contexts: the tongue that the two captains, the “masters,” share on board the San Dominick (“Captain Delano sought, with good hopes, to cheer up the strangers, feeling no small satisfaction that, with persons in their condition, he could – thanks to his frequent voyages along the Spanish main

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– converse with some freedom in their native tongue” [Melville 168]). However, as Gavin Jones has convincingly shown, it has also become, on this ship of Africans and ladinos of very different tribal origins, the common language of conspiracy. The mutineers can hold the captain and his sailors in thrall only if they understand enough Spanish to know whether any of them is uttering a word to Delano about what is really happening on board – and they clearly do, since that threat holds the Spaniards in check.5 And it is a language that their ringleader, Babo, also possesses at an advanced competency: it is he who coins the recurring phrase that most marks Melville’s text linguistically, seguid vuestro jefe, follow your leader. In contrast to BugJargal’s tale of transatlantic exile – a happy ending would have him returning to Gambia to reclaim his kingdom – Habibrah and Babo index the far more threatening process of transculturation whereby slaves have selectively appropriated New World culture and language as their own. They are Calibans who have captured another colonial master’s tongue and, as a consequence, know how to curse – even if idealized noble savages like Bug-Jargal can also use it to sing. While Hugo lards his French text heavily with Spanish words and phrases, in Benito Cereno the one phrase, seguid vuestro jefe, bears the weight of its ponderous duality. As many critics have pointed out, Melville turns any naturalized idea about leadership upside down by strategically deploying the image of dogs and sheep. Shortly after noticing the Spanish sentence strangely chalked beneath the ship’s figurehead, Delano first perceives Babo as being “like a shepherd’s dog” (Melville 167), and figures the older black men fancifully as “shepherds to your flock of black sheep” (Melville 180). Delano obtusely compares both Babo and his ship’s boat, the Rover, to Newfoundland dogs: his fiction of fidelity, summoned to keep at bay the ominous thought that the subservient “species” may not in fact be so. The same persistent dog imagery materializes in Bug-Jargal, where the “slave-king” keeps a mastiff, Rask, who is preternaturally smart and faithful (he sends messages between the friends, and pulls D’Auverney off the cliff that Habibrah has dragged him down). In the frame-narrative where BugJargal’s story is being retold in 1794, we learn that D’Auverney took Rask with him when he left the island, as if adopting the last living part of his dead “brother.” Intentionally or not, it was a highly ironic choice to make Rask a mastiff: many of the bloodhounds brought from Cuba to torture and kill runaway Indians and Africans were of that breed (Johnson 83–5). If both narratives of slave rebellion keep returning obsessively to the figure of the dog to compare races within the presumed hierarchy of the animal world, it is perhaps because of its ambiguity in the master-slave dynamic: the sheepdog leads and controls its flocks, but it is a subaltern, subservient to its master. The striking thing about Delano is that he can’t see the slave-hunting dog, the dog ready to maim and murder, as the necessary shadow of the familiar dogs he commands at home. In adopting Rask, D’Auverney may be ignoring the lesson of Habibrah that “pets” may not be as docile as they seem, but he does learn from the transferred trauma of his double. Unlike sunny Delano, D’Auverney’s guilty liberal conscience brings the “shadow” of rebellion home to haunt him, to remind him of what he must not forget.

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The Translator in the Network: Ritchie’s The Slave-King As a commentary on how to judge then-recent events in Haiti, Bug-Jargal can only be read as tremendously ambivalent. On the one hand, D’Auverney’s humanistic, antislavery impulses are affirmed and Bug-Jargal’s inherent nobility goes unchallenged, for in siding with his white brother the African has even waived his right as an individual to avenge the wrongs done to his family (his wife was sexually abused and then, like his children and his father, worked to death). On the other hand, as Chris Bongie has shown, Hugo borrows very selectively from his historical sources to mock the revolution as a social movement, underplaying the magnitude of the event by reducing it to the petty imitations of “real” French civilization by terrifying individual wannabes like Biassou and Habibrah.6 But subsequent translations and adaptations of Hugo’s work would iron out those ambivalences in ways specific to their own place and time: Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, for instance, relocates the drama to Cuba, retaining the doomed-love plot but reversing the polarity of mulatez from negative to positive, and attaching an explicit message of abolition to its frame.7 Something similar occurs with the most influential rendition in English, Leitch Ritchie’s The Slave-King: From the Bug-Jargal of Victor Hugo (London and Philadelphia, 1833), whose title even more strongly universalizes the title character as noble savage.8 The “from” in Ritchie’s subtitle does not quite do justice to the way he literalized the “liberal” in the phrase “liberal translation.” According to Bongie, Ritchie overtly “conscripts Bug-Jargal to the abolitionist cause”: he expands the beginning and ending to clarify some of the characters’ muddier motives; adds descriptive, travelogue-style passages about the island’s beauty; and completely overhauls the character of Biassou, who rather than embodying violent excess serves as spokesman for due process and the rule of law. Finally, Ritchie corrects and supplements Hugo’s 50-plus footnotes with more glosses of his own, as well as a 40-page appendix giving his own “factual” narrative of the Haitian revolution (Bongie, Friends 122). In activist fashion, he “translates these ambiguities [in Hugo’s novel] into the more headlong language of abolitionism” (Bongie, Friends 115). Ritchie’s version, in other words, presents a paradigmatic case of the way a translation can move well beyond its supposedly secondary, imitative status to make distinctive intertextual connections in its own right. Bongie concludes that The Slave-King, in ironing out the ambiguities of Hugo’s text, shows the limits of Ritchie’s liberal imagination when it comes to the undecipherable, almost unthinkably complex phenomenon that the Haitian Revolution represents. And this is precisely what happens in Benito Cereno when the good-natured Delano repeatedly translates the confusing sights and sounds aboard the San Dominick into a story that will better conform to his preexisting convictions. Ritchie was just one of Hugo’s many English translators, and Bongie suggests that we need to see Hugo – who rivaled Scott as the most popular historical novelist in the world over the course of the nineteenth century – as a formative English writer, and Bug-Jargal as “one of the most important works

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of nineteenth-century colonial fiction” in the English-speaking world as well (Bongie, Friends 119). So are the parallels between its versions and Benito Cereno signs of what we are accustomed to call “influence”? In the absence of hard evidence for much of what Melville read during his most productive years as a fiction writer, we can only hazard that one of these apparently popular renditions of the Bug-Jargal story may have come into his orbit. But which translation might he have read? Ritchie’s, with its explicitly abolitionist, pro-Haitian spin? One that stressed the exotic-romance aspect, as in The Noble Rival; or the Prince of Congo? Or one that fed into darker, more paranoid musings on why Haiti mattered for Americans, like The Massacre in San Domingo? The impossibility of answering such a question suggests that we need to think about text-networks rather than sources and influences, to look seriously at multiple versions rather than fetishizing originals. Although the novel’s three central black characters – the African Bug-Jargal and the mulattoes Biassou and Habibrah – all speak both of the island’s colonial languages as well as the local creole, only Bug-Jargal commands them in a way that demonstrates his “civilizable” potential, his affinity for culture and beauty. Biassou’s language use, in contrast, reveals him as a pathetic pretender, “frequently mixing creole and Spanish phrases in with his bad French” (Hugo, Bug-Jargal 121). Much of the middle sections of the novel describe scenes in Biassou’s rebel camp that are peripheral to the plot; this is where Hugo leans most heavily on his sources and seems to be endeavoring to make sense of the event in a larger way. They are also some of the most polyvocal sections, with Biassou in particular making long speeches punctuated by Spanish and Creole sayings that require a footnote from Hugo. Biassou’s “bad French” is played for comic effect, but his butchery of the language also reinforces the idea that he and his followers are animals. The sentences that Hugo chooses not to render in French tend to be folksy sayings on which he performs a potentially explosive exegesis: for example, “El tiempo de la mansuetud es pasado” (translated in Hugo’s footnote: “The time for being meek is over”). Biassou continues in Creole, “We have for a long time now been as patient as the sheep whose wool the whites liken to our hair. Let us now be as implacable as the panthers and jaguars of the lands from which we were torn away” (121). Even as the narrative mocks Biassou’s ragged code-switching, the effectiveness of his figurative language upon his followers is clear – and clearly threatening. Some of this Babel-babble inevitably escapes from Ritchie’s version, as he translates Hugo’s French footnotes for the Spanish and Creole phrases into English, but maintains Biassou’s nonstandard French in standard English – losing the comic effect conveyed to Parisian readers by that character’s dialect. A scene in Chapter 29, which recounts Biassou’s telling of a parable, is a good example. Here Biassou has someone bring him “a glass full of grains of black maize. He threw in some grains of white maize” and then, holding it up for the troops to see, says – in Creole – “Guetté blan si la la.” Hugo’s footnote translates this as “Voyez ce que sont les blancs relativement à vous,” or, in Bongie’s translation, “See what the whites are in relation to you” (Hugo, Bug-Jargal 319). Ritchie’s version, however, drops an accent and shifts a consonant to get “Guette blan ci la la” in the body of the text, which is translated at the bottom as

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“Now look, where are the whites!” (Ritchie 95). Although he maintains the imperative form of voyez, the phrase “Where are the whites!” makes it sound as if the white grains of maize had been lost or pushed aside. The translation loses the sense of relativity and proportion – the entirely logical argument that the whites in SaintDomingue were far outnumbered by people of color. Only Hugo’s version of Biassou’s parable gets across the idea that the minority power typical of the slave system was entirely unnatural. And yet Ritchie’s version, however imprecise it is for a reader not versed in Creole idioms, gets at that unnaturalness in a different way, an uncanny way. How does one “see” whiteness? In the legal documents that are imagined in the latter pages of Benito Cereno, we are told that Babo used a particular form of psychological torture to ensure his hold over the captain and sailors of the ship he has taken over. He stages a ritual of forced looking. Bringing out first the captain and then each of the men, he demands they gaze at Aranda’s skeleton, asking whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white’s; that, upon discovering his [Cereno’s] face, the negro Babo, coming close, said words to this effect: “Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body, follow your leader,” pointing to the prow. (Melville 245)

The imperative to see what is precisely invisible and ideological – whiteness – is directly linked in Benito Cereno to the foreign language, Spanish, through yet another iteration of seguid vuestro jefe, the phrase that the reader has by now been schooled to translate. This much-commented scene of the racial uncanny might also be understood as a translation or adaptation of Ritchie’s “Now look, where are the whites!” Yet another twist to the textual movements of the parable of the maize is that Hugo lifted this scene nearly verbatim from one of his principal sources, JosephFrançois-Pamphile de Lacroix’s Mémoires pour Servir a L’Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, published in 1819. There, however, it is attributed to Toussaint L’Ouverture himself: Toussaint allegedly mixes the grains and says – in Creole – “Guetté blanc ci la la, c’est a dire: Voyez ce qu’est le blanc proportionnellement à vous” [“See what the white man is in proportion to you”] (Lacroix 410). By putting these words instead into the mouth of an uneducated character who massacres the language, Hugo seems to undermine any effort to frame the story of Haiti around a political logic of majoritarian justice or around Toussaint as a heroic leader. That would be a task for John Beard and other early biographers of Toussaint, who followed Lacroix in portraying Toussaint in the role of revolutionary genius and master of liberatory language, his head a “hive of subtlety” (to adopt the sign of Babo’s unfathomable brilliance). Hugo writes Toussaint out of his historical romance. But many of Hugo’s readers would have known that the real Jorge/Georges Biassou, after breaking with Toussaint and witnessing the withdrawal of the Spanish militia (and with it, the reassertion of French as the language of power chosen by the Haitians themselves), fled the island for St. Augustine in Spanish Florida. There he married a fugitive slave from South

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Carolina and disappeared into the history of another former Spanish colony, just waking up to its inclusion in the US nation-state. Hugo, then, was drawn to simplify the confounding early stages of the Haitian Revolution through the vilified, Hispanized figure of Biassou. And while Melville criticism today may have overcome its stubbornly national focus by finally remembering Haiti as the prime historical subtext of Benito Cereno, it nonetheless replicates Hugo’s own binary tendencies by debating the source for the character of Babo in Manichean terms: bloodthirsty Dessalines versus heroic Toussaint (see Beecher). The limitations of that stark choice mirror the analytical limitations of two-way “comparison” between the United States and Haiti. Imagining Babo in light of the shifting loyalties and languages of Biassou, Habibrah, and Bug-Jargal, on the other hand, brings more of the complexity of that colonial world back into our field of vision.

Descendants, Antecedents, and Precedents C.L.R. James in the Text-Network Pamphile de Lacroix, the originator of the parable of the black and white maize, is also a key source of C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins. James tells his own version of the story about the grains of maize – and like Lacroix but unlike Hugo, he attributes it to Toussaint, using it to demonstrate that Toussaint’s genius extended far beyond tactical or oratorical brilliance to the psychological: “with all classes of people he found instinctively the right method” of communication (James, Black Jacobins 251). James does not mention Toussaint speaking in Creole but his own translation of the key line, “See, the white ones only here and there,” stresses the outnumbering of whites by blacks that underlies Lacroix’s original version. James also makes his own, apparently speculative addition to the anecdote that is in neither Lacroix nor Hugo, commenting that the blacks went away, initially reassured by Toussaint’s parable, but then they came to him saying that they did not wish to obey either whites or Mulattoes (due in all probability to some insults or injustices meted out to them by these former masters). Toussaint took a glass of wine and a glass of water, mixed them together and showed the result. “How can you tell which is which? We must all live together.” They went away satisfied. (James, Black Jacobins 252)

Because James does not footnote his source for this incident – as was his wont with Lacroix, whom he often paraphrases at length without direct attribution – we cannot tell whether or not he is speculating about the “We must all live together” ending, but in any case James’s parable complicates the adaptations of Lacroix – via Ritchie’s Hugo, or via Beard’s popular and derivative 1853 history (which also cites verbatim, in translation, Lacroix’s version of this scene) – to which Melville might have had access. What better evidence of the possible intersecting worlds among these writers and sources, their different languages, places, and times, could there be than the parable

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of the maize that they all improbably share in common? Yet James is something of an outlier in the Haiti-Hugo-Melville text-network, not despite but because of the Lacroix connection. As a common source Lacroix poses some real challenges. James, writing in 1938, recommends Lacroix’s Mémoires in his “Special Bibliography” as “indispensable” and “fully deserv[ing] its reputation,” although Lacroix is “biased in favour of the French,” and “modern research has proved him wrong on many points” (James, Black Jacobins 381). So one of James’s important sources, an antecedent on which he relies heavily, is, like most books available to him in 1938, semitainted: “Despite the importance and interest of the subject, it was for long difficult to find in English or French a comprehensive and well-balanced treatment of the San Domingo revolution in short compass” (James, Black Jacobins 381). It almost goes without saying that neither Hugo nor Melville answers the need for such a treatment, and neither is listed among James’s sources in either the bibliography or the footnotes (notwithstanding the occasional references to fictional sources such as Lamartine’s 1863 play Toussaint that James “counts” among the works he consulted). How, then, does James’s celebrated history of the San Domingo revolution help us to think through the network of antecedents, precedents, and descendants that he brings into or on-line? While it is notoriously difficult to assess negative evidence, we know that just as James did not include Melville in the revised 1963 Black Jacobins, he also did not talk much about Benito Cereno in his late writings on Melville during the 1950s. Given the simple fact of their temporal proximity, it’s nonetheless a challenge to establish, not that, but how the 1963 edition of The Black Jacobins relates to the late James works, which take Melville as a jumping-off point for Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953) and the long essay on American civilization completed in early 1950 (“my ultimate aim, and my book on Melville is merely a preparation for it, is to write a study of American civilization,” he writes in Mariners, 160). One way to express the relation is to note that all of these works engage the social and narrative problem of unfinished revolution. James imagines Melville to be the author of a story of revolt that could have happened but instead loomed, unfulfilled, in Moby-Dick: the nonevent of mutiny by the international crew of “mongrels, renegades, castaways and savages” aboard the Pequod (James, American Civilization 75). When James writes about Melville in Mariners, 10 years before he would turn to the second edition of Black Jacobins, he dismisses Benito Cereno as “a propaganda story and mystery, written to prove a particular social or political point” (James, Mariners 112), leading critic Jonathan Elmer to question James’s motives. Why would James seemingly disavow Benito Cereno and turn instead to Moby-Dick, when a text that clearly seemed to reference Haiti was right there before him (Elmer 73–4)? One answer lies in the multiplicity of The Black Jacobins itself, and the way it returns to Haiti differently in the second edition of 1963 – that is, after James’s encounter with Melville. James continually updated and translated Haiti and slave revolt to fit “the history of our time” (James, The Black Jacobins vii), starting with the coming decolonization of Africa that he envisaged in the 1938 edition. In the revised edition of 1963, however, he makes these events anticipate the emancipation of the West

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Indies, through and within the Cuban Revolution: “What took place in French San Domingo in 1792–1804,” James says in the famous appendix “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro,” “reappeared in Cuba in 1958” (James, Black Jacobins 391). His additions to this version, including as well a new preface, footnotes, and updated bibliography, underscore the way that James retranslates his own earlier idea of the ultimate meaning of the Haitian Revolution in response to changing historical conditions, just as he had reimagined the plot of Moby-Dick for Melville. These autotranslations extend forward to James’s 1971 lectures “Why I Wrote The Black Jacobins” and “How I Would Rewrite The Black Jacobins,” delivered at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. Whether one considers these materials paratexts, metatexts, or versions, they, too, may best be understood as translations without an original – as additional pieces in James’s own text-network, which in turn overtly calls forth and reanimates the antecedent texts in this hemispheric network that we have just described. In so doing, James shows the necessity of thinking speculatively and even counterfactually. His “Black Jacobins” (both the work and the force it named, in the words of Robin Blackburn) are open-ended, speculative thoughts. James himself invokes the Hegelian term speculative thought to describe why he wrote The Black Jacobins: “thinking about what is going to happen as a result of what you see around you” (James, “Lectures” 72). In 1938 James wrote his book on Haiti 1789–1803 “in order that people should think about the African revolution and get their minds right about what was bound to happen in Africa.” Then, in a doubly or perhaps triply speculative act, he revised Black Jacobins in 1962 to show how “what took place in French San Domingo in 1792–1804 reappeared in Cuba in 1958,” tracing Castro’s uncompleted revolution of the twentieth century to Toussaint’s of the eighteenth via their common route in and through the West Indies: “West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people in the Haitian Revolution. Whatever its ultimate fate, the Cuban Revolution marks the ultimate stage of a Caribbean quest for national identity” (James, Black Jacobins 391). For James, this speculative thought means that the 1790s constituted an immediate historical context for the 1930s and 1940s: neither simply an important precedent (though it is that) nor a tragically failed past future, foreclosed once and for all time, but an untimely futures past.9 In so doing, he preserves the prolepsis characteristic of as yet unfulfilled, or untimely, history. African decolonization may have occurred by the time of the 1963 Black Jacobins, but that outcome does not change the urgency of futurity, the “bound-to-happen.” And Haiti becomes part of something bigger than itself, “an original pattern, not European, not African, not a part of the American main, not native in any conceivable sense of that word, but West Indian, sui generis, with no parallel anywhere else” (James, Black Jacobins 391–2). If this formula seems to reflect a strange hybrid of both Haitian unthinkability and American exceptionalism, that is exactly the point. Worlding America requires speculative thought: a willingness to let go of its presumed center of analysis, again and again. Melville as a figure was enlisted by James – against the grain and in the absence of his own best articulation of what the Haitian event might mean for the United

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States in Benito Cereno – to underscore the point that Black Jacobins wanted to make about unfinished revolution. Indeed, James’s work may be a model of worlded literary criticism, in that it points to the necessity of finding multidirectional lines of transnational contact, characterized by unanticipated geographical and temporal contiguity across far-flung spatial, national, and linguistic contexts – including, finally, our own present conditions. The links that connect Black Jacobins to Lacroix’s Mémoires, to BugJargal, The Slave-King, and Benito Cereno, cannot be articulated within traditional models of authorial influence, or within comparative mappings (espoused by Franco Moretti, Jerome McGann, and others) of the way that specific genres migrate from one nation to the next. An emerging interdiscipline of network studies proposes that the behavior of mutating cells, stock markets, and wary voters can all be better understood by paying attention to this dictum: stuff spreads in mysterious ways.10 As digital media beckon with a more open access to those old text-networks, we may find not so much a brave new world of Americas literature, freed from the shibboleth of America, our singular object of analysis, as the counterfactual of a literary past that is different from what we thought we knew and that, paradoxically, has yet to materialize: James’s speculative thought, our worlding America.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

A vocal resistance to the “transnational turn” in American literary studies has emanated mainly from scholars located in comparative literature departments; Djelal Kadir in particular has repeatedly taken up this position. While we disagree with many of his conclusions, Kadir’s 2004 essay contributes the useful figure of the compass on which we build here, and sums up the stakes of this argument. See Leslie and Stuckey, 287–301. In his 2008 book, Stuckey moves deliberately away from Sundquist’s insistence on a diasporic framework to a more continentally Africanist one. Barely glancing at the events in Haiti, he presents Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick instead as fictions whose “worlds largely turn on an African cultural axis” (18). This is why we think the term hemispheric still has an analytic utility despite the geographic limitations of western-hemispheric studies: hemispheric lends to transnational American study a continuing stress on slavery and indigenous dispossession as the dominant conditions of a modern worldsystem defined, at its base and core, by the

4. 5.

6.

European discovery and ravishment of the Americas. For a provocative reading of Haiti as “event,” see Elmer (55–61, 64–70). Jones challenges Sundquist’s guess that the mutineers communicated through African drums and hand signals. Spanish, he argues, can’t be a secret or secondary language on the ship because it is possessed by all the masters and most if not all of the slaves, which goes against Sundquist’s notion that Babo was the principal user of the European language. This implies that the mutineers had the power to enforce “linguistic surveillance” (Jones 44) on the Spanish sailors, so the sailors have to resort to unspoken means of communication with Delano, like the tossing of the knot and the flashing of the jewel. We are indebted to Chris Bongie, whose new translation, introduction and notes to BugJargal, as well as his detailed chapters in two books, set the standard for new work on this novel. Citations to the novel are to his translation unless attributed to a different translator.

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7.

Nina Scott’s introduction to her English translation of Goméz de Avellaneda’s Sab notes the author’s indebtedness to Hugo. There was a Spanish translation published in Paris in 1833, just after it came out in French; two others (which may be the same translation) in Madrid in 1834 and 1835; and most influentially for Spanish abolitionists, Bug-Jargal o el Negro Rey, por Victor Hugo, traducida al español por D.M. Bosch. 8. Ritchie’s The Slave-King went through new London editions in 1837 and 1852; a cursory search uncovers at least a few contemporary reviews of this translation in US papers. The other editions that would have been accessible to Melville prior to the writing of Benito Cereno were Bug-Jargal; or, A Tale of the Massacre in St. Domingo. 1791 (New York, 1844), and The Noble Rival; or, the Prince of

9.

10.

Congo. A Translation of Bug-Jargal (London, 1845). There was also a version available in an American compendium of Hugo’s shorter novels in French: Hans of Iceland, Bug-Jargal, Claude Gueux (New York, 1833). All this would seem to back up Bongie’s assertion that in contrast to France, where Hugo’s later novels quickly came to overshadow it, BugJargal “retained a certain life of its own in mid-century Britain and the States . . . it was a novel that mattered to Victorian readers” (Friends 119). See Wilder (106) for the “as if” comment; for other views of James’s proleptic thinking, see Pease and Surin. The summary phrase comes from Gudrais’s overview of recent network theory across disciplines.

References and Further Reading Beard, John Relly. Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. London: 1853. Bongie, Chris. Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Elmer, Jonathan. “Babo’s Razor.” Differences 19, no. 2 (2008): 55–64. Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis. Sab; and Autobiography. Trans. and ed. Nina M. Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Gudrais, Elizabeth. “Networked.” Harvard Magazine, May–June 2010. http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/networked Hugo, Victor. Bug-Jargal. 1826. Trans. and ed. by Chris Bongie. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004. Hugo, Victor. Bug-Jargal o el Negro Rey, por Victor Hugo, traducida al español por D.M. Bosch. Spanish trans. Barcelona: Impr. Manuel Saury, 1840. Hugo, Victor. Bug-Jargal; or, A Tale of the Massacre in St. Domingo. 1791. New York: J. Mowatt & Co., 1844. Hugo, Victor. Hans of Iceland, Bug-Jargal, Claude Gueux. New York: PF Collier & Son, 1833. Hugo, Victor. The Noble Rival; or, the Prince of Congo. A Translation of Bug-Jargal. London, 1845.

James, C.L.R. American Civilization. Eds. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed., rev. New York: Random House, 1963. James, C.L.R. “Lectures on The Black Jacobins.” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 65–112. James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001. Johnson, Sara E. “ ‘You Should Give Them Blacks to Eat’: Waging Inter-American Wars of Torture and Terror.” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2009): 65–92. Jones, Gavin. Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Kadir, Djelal. “To World, To Globalize: Comparative Literature’s Crossroads.” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004): 1–9. Lacroix, Pamphile de. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution de Saint-Domingue. 2 vols. Paris, 1819. Leslie, Joshua, and Sterling Stuckey. “The Death of Benito Cereno: A Reading of Herman

The Hemispheric Text-Network Melville on Slavery: The Revolt on Board the Tryal.” The Journal of Negro History 67, no. 4 (1982): 287–301. Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1986. Pease, Donald. “C.L.R. James, Moby-Dick, and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies.” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 93–123. Pease, Donald. “Doing Justice to C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.” boundary 2 27, no. 2 (2000): 1–19. Ritchie, Leitch. The Slave-King: From the Bug-Jargal of Victor Hugo. London and Philadelphia: Smith, Elder, 1833. Seigel, Micol. “Beyond Compare: Historical Method after the Transnational Turn.” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62–90. Selden, Daniel. “Text Networks.” Ancient Narrative 8 (2009): 1–23.

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Stuckey, Sterling. African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and MobyDick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Surin, Kenneth. “ ‘The Future Anterior’: C.L.R. James and Going Beyond a Boundary.” In Rethinking C.L.R. James (pp. 187–204). Ed. Grant Farred. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Wilder, Gary. “Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia.” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 101–40. Wilson, Rob, and Chris Connery. Eds. “Introduction: Worlded Pedagogy in Santa Cruz.” In Chris Connery and Rob Wilson, Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (pp. 1–12). Santa Cruz, CA: Pacific Press, 2007.

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Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History Michelle Stephens

In the simple distinction between our own and past societies we avoid calling into question our own position, the place from which we ourselves speak. (Žižek, 102)

In literary criticism and scholarship, it is always a tricky enterprise to use the standards and dilemmas of the present as a lens for viewing and interpreting the past. One is afraid of being too presentist, of creating counterfactuals that go against the effort to ground literary texts and authors in their historical specificity. One expects such a criticism, for example, in relation to American authors of historical novels writing before the 1950s, criticized for their inability to place their characters in multicultural or culturally diverse settings. It also arises as a response to feminist critiques of American authors who cannot attribute to their female protagonists the same degree of presence, agency, subjectivity, and freedom as their male counterparts. Our lens in the early twenty-first century is supposed to have broadened to include a notion of American literature as a more gender-diverse and racially capacious space. To the degree that racial segregation and female marginalization were aspects of earlier moments in American society and culture, it is to be expected that those norms would shape the previous literary worlds and consciousnesses of American authors. However, what if we took the very terms by which previous authors saw their world, their America, not as some kind of natural social or historical fact, but rather as they themselves defined it by a set of occlusions and repressions? These occlusions have to do not only with the exclusion of the actual or historical conditions of women and people of color in previous eras of American history. They also exclude the very instabilities produced within the American subject when the narrative frames of nationality, mas-

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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culinity, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and Christianity cannot fully contain the equally powerful fantasies of the self and the Other that made up the space of intercultural interaction in the early American colonies. Another real loss, then, in the exclusion or marginalization of people of color and women in American narratives is the veiling of the problems those Other subjects represented for the white, male, Anglo-American traditionally conceived as the template for the American self. Yet I would argue that this is one of the more fruitful entryways for pursuing the question of Otherness and Others in early American texts. Even in the canonical work of a traditional male author, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), one can read, in those moments when the worlds of men, women, and people of color brush up against each other, a more complex and messy narrative of the prohibitions that were necessary in order to occlude and contain the intercultural relations that shaped both racial norms and sexual mores in the early colonies. As much as distinct, official, community identities and nationalities were created from the economically intertwined, interimperial history of the New World, so too were the very subjects created by those histories also experiencing a variety of destabilizations and anxieties produced by the colonial encounter. These psychic splits and fissures problematized the very question of who or what constituted a standard American from within, producing “forms of suppression and disavowal” precisely in order to contain such identity rifts (Fischer 20). Not surprisingly, sexuality or sexual relations, or, even more specifically, intimacy – the intimacy of proximal relations – is an arena that has much to tell us about this secret dimension of American literature and history, the worlds of gender, color, and labor that the Anglo-American male subject inhabited and was shaped by in both conscious and unconscious ways. The Scarlet Letter is, of course, one of the paradigmatic tales of sexual mores and behaviors set during the era of American Puritanism. And it is toward the end of that very novel that the author uses a word that first struck this reader as oddly anachronistic in the context of the mid-nineteenth century, when the novel was written – the word is “diversity.” As Hawthorne describes a scene in the town of Salem’s marketplace on the occasion of a public holiday in the mid-1600s, he states, “The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue” (148). By retracing the paths this term takes in the text, acknowledging its origin in present connotations and concerns but moving backward to the arena of meaning laid out by Hawthorne’s use of the term, I argue here that the diversity of the American past is revealed in the novel’s veiled references to the more polyglot and polyamorous worlds of gender, color, labor, and sexuality that underlie the narrative’s primary plot. We read the political unconscious of American fictions for the ways the classed, racial, gendered, sexual tensions of the text attempt to resolve contradictions internal to the societies from which they are created. Here I am arguing that “reading for diversity” in the context of early American texts means reading for the intercultural unconscious of such works, that is, reading for the ways the classed, racial, gendered, sexual tensions of the imagined American society emerge in the face of difference from

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without. As such, this reading mimics that of the nineteenth-century critic Jane Swisshelm, who reviewed Hawthorne’s novel when it was first published. As Robert Levine describes, in her clever and ironic “misreading” of Hawthorne’s intentions, her “own uncertainty about Hawthorne’s didactic aims [is] suggested by her repeated use of ‘if ’” when considering “Hawthorne’s conflict between his attraction to the subversive Hester and his desire to contain her” (Levine 278–9). She anticipates the type of “aversive reading” Sacvan Bercovitch calls for that emphasizes “dissent over containment” (Levine 290). I argue strenuously here that The Scarlet Letter is fully amenable to just such a reading, but not for reasons shaped solely by feminist concerns. In addition, a potentially counterfactual reading that begins from the traces of the diversity of the present immanent in the text can also rebuild the very worlds of color, labor, gender, and sexuality in early American history whose tensions and rough edges are simultaneously inscribed on and disavowed in Hawthorne’s imaginary construction of America (Fischer). These tensions reveal the instabilities produced in the early American colonies and later republics by the global market economies and hemispheric historical conditions within which they were situated. As such, the close reading I offer here, of a seemingly innocuous feature of the marketplace that serves as the setting for Hester Prynne’s public exposure and shaming, is intended also as a harbinger for what more aversive, counterfactual approaches in American literary studies can reveal in traditional texts – not so much their subversive or dissenting features as the ways they bear witness to their own inability to contain the diverse elements and forces constituting American social and cultural orders across times and regions.

The Picture of Human Life in The Scarlet Letter In his one-sentence description of the “diversity of hue” present in Salem’s marketplace, Hawthorne encapsulates two of the key features of the diversity of this midseventeenth-century world that is the setting of his story (148). The first is the market-based context within which “cultural diversity” first emerges. The second is the intersubjective nature of a Puritan identity colored by the settlers’ awareness of the differences surrounding them in the other inhabitants of the New World. The marketplace that serves as the backdrop for this colorful scene is suggestive of the public sphere of economic activity and transatlantic trade that is also the determinative force shaping the scene’s motley features. In their account of the early days of the “revolutionary Atlantic,” Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker use the term “motley” to describe the heterogeneous populations involved in and interacting together as part of the seventeenth-century trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Derived from a garment used in Renaissance England, a motley was “a multicolored garment, often a cap, worn by a jester who was permitted by the king to make jokes, even to tell the truth. . . . [T]he motley brought carnivalesque expectations of disorder and subversion, a little letting-off of steam” (Linebaugh and Rediker 28). As

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they continue to describe, “motley could also refer to a colorful assemblage,” not unlike the crowd Hawthorne is attempting to describe in the Salem marketplace – or a “ ‘lumpen’-proletariat,” not unlike the motley crews of the various trading ships crossing the Atlantic in the early days of New World discovery and trade. These ships were populated by a diverse group of laborers, both men and women who “worked as skilled navigators and sailors on early transatlantic ships, as slaves on American plantations, and as entertainers, sex workers, and servants in London” (28). We can follow the routes of Linebaugh’s and Rediker’s Atlantic ships of the revolutionary seventeenth century forward to the world of modern capitalism. At the start of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase “worlds of color” to describe precisely the convergence of “modern imperialism and modern industrialism” as “one and the same system; root and branch of the same tree” (386). Laura Doyle turns our attention to the place of Anglo-American literary history within an “Atlantic modernity reaching from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century” (304). This trajectory also extended into the twentieth century for Du Bois. The word “color” in his famous trope of the twentieth-century color line referred not just to the problem of race as racism but also to the problem of race as precisely the interdependency of national labor relations and global market concerns: “the race problem is the other side of the labor problem [and] empire is the heavy hand of capital abroad” (386). In addition, Du Bois used the phrase “worlds of color” to capture the relations of mutual dependency between empires and colonies. His trope of Europe as part of a network of “worlds of color” is not unlike Sean Goudie’s imagining of the early United States as a “creole” republic where the founding fathers, as invested as they were in political independence, found themselves still as dependent on colonial markets and economic relations as the rest of the colonies of the Americas. So, in the economic trajectory traced by Linebaugh and Rediker and by Du Bois, the diversity of seventeenth-century America reflects a world of commerce and labor that is racialized in ways that continue to shape the relations of dependency between empires and colonies at the start of the twentieth century. In this sense, “diversity” is not anachronistic in Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century world as much as it references the forces that set that very world described in motion – a broader, global, economic context that interpellates multiple subjects in different locations and creates a logic still operative for Du Bois in the industrial world of the early twentieth century. What is different from the twentieth century in Hawthorne’s account, however, is that, to the degree that we associate diversity with the cultures of peoples of color, the second aspect of the “diversity of hue” in his Salem marketplace includes the Puritans dressed in their “sad gray, brown, or black” apparel. Focusing on their clothing, Hawthorne points subtly to their own self-construction not merely for religious purposes, but in addition as a response characteristic of Europeans more broadly when faced with the worlds of difference and color they were newly encountering in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The choice against color that seems so characteristic of the Puritans is as much a racial as a religious choice – a choice shaped by encounters between racially diverse populations. By the nineteenth century, this choice had taken

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on such ideological rigidity that color itself signified as the very essence of the difference between the European settlers and the American populations surrounding them. As the anthropologist Michael Taussig describes, “Men in a state of nature,” wrote Goethe in his book on color, “uncivilized nations and children, have a great fondness for colours in their utmost brightness.” . . . He recalled a German mercenary returned from America who had painted his face with vivid colors in the manner of the Indians, the effect of which “was not disagreeable.” On the other hand, in northern Europe at the time in which he wrote in the early nineteenth century, people of refinement had a disinclination to colors, women wearing white, the men, black. (3)

In What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig pursues this history of color further, offering an archaeology of how we have come to think about color by demonstrating its links to colonialism. Unraveled, color signifies as nothing less than “the making of culture from the human body,” in other words, the implication of the human body and the sensuous realm it inhabits in the manufacture of cultural regulations, prescriptions, attributes, and norms (Taussig 8). Taussig argues further, Even in the West color is a whole lot more than hue. . . . [I]t is the combustible mix of attraction and repulsion towards color that . . . as Goethe’s face-painted mercenary suggests, owe more than a little to the Western experience of colonization as colored Otherness. (9)

If we follow Taussig’s narrative to its logical conclusions, when we state our postmodern truism that race is a social construction, we are also saying that the color of human skin has been embedded with a set of social meanings already attached to the idea of color itself as a racialized construct, a mark of difference; the chicken and the egg, the organic and the cultural, the body and its apparel, become indistinguishable. Lest we think Hawthorne’s notion of diversity differs greatly from most twentyfirst-century Americans’ notions of racial diversity, beyond the first two features of seventeenth-century diversity we noted – the marketplace and the Puritans’ selffashioning of their own sense of difference – the racialization of color, fabric, and the body’s apparel are integral to his continuing description of the diversity of figures in the marketplace. As he remarks, A party of Indians – in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deer-skin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear – stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond even what the Puritan aspect could attain. (Hawthorne 148)

It is the curious place of the Native American in Hawthorne’s text that is my point of focus, however, for explicating the subtlety with which Hawthorne, consciously or not, locates the diversity of an early America. We find this diversity in the novel in

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the traces of worlds of color, gender, labor, and sexuality that Anglo-American male subjects brush up against in their interactions in the New World. In her own situating of The Scarlet Letter within an Atlantic context, Laura Doyle argues convincingly that the “Indian-associated imagery” of the novel represents fantasies in which Hawthorne “himself becomes the ‘removed’ victim . . . identifying with the removed outsider, taking up the very weapons of that wronged figure, but then usurping the place of that figure” in a way that ultimately shores up his AngloAmerican male self (311). For Doyle, while the “story takes place in a colony flanked on one side by the peopled and troubled nation of England and on the other side by the peopled and troubled nations of Indian America. . . . [Hawthorne] largely depeoples these adjacent, interlocked communities,” thus burying the “foundational violence” of the colonial encounter (307). Her interest is in the ways Hawthorne both merges and suppresses “the threat of women and the threat of Indians,” precisely because both could potentially “expel Anglo-American men from their dominance in ‘the field’ ” (314). We can build on her analysis of the convergence between the Indian and Hester Prynne’s “fallen” sexuality if we see this linking not only as a metaphor or instance of deviant colonial relations to be suppressed, but also as the very condition of coloniality itself, a naturalized as opposed to marginal component of early coloniality. The ever present possibility and proximity of miscegenated relations were New World realities that were constantly repressed and disavowed, precisely due to their ability to reveal the instability of racialized and gendered norms in a world of commercial exchanges and cross-cultural interactions. As Lisa Lowe confirms, historically the colony was the space where the lines between the worlds of gender, color, sexuality, and labor blurred: Conjugal and familial relations in the bourgeois home [were often] distinguished from the public realm of work, society, and politics. . . . In the colonial context sexual relations were not limited to a “private” sphere but included practices that disrespected such separations, ranging from rape, assault, domestic servitude, or concubinage to “consensual relations” between colonizers and colonized. (Lowe 195)

Regulatory fantasies of the Other and prescriptive fictions of the Self emerge in the face of the de facto legitimacy of inevitable, inescapable, informal, and unorthodox intimate relations. These sexual relations simultaneously supported norms of patriarchy and heterosexuality whilst undermining them from within. What Hawthorne symbolically prefigures in his positioning of the figure of the Native American in the novel as within the community of the public sphere, rather than without, is the way sexual transgressions reflect the broader instability of the rules governing the European settler community’s sexual boundaries and behaviors in the New World. In other words, colonization and coloniality are revealed in The Scarlet Letter in the moral instability of bourgeois, European heterosexuality itself, given the informal legitimacy of illegitimate intimate relations within the space of the colony.

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As Doyle also reminds us, Governor Richard Bellingham, the historical figure whom Hawthorne places on the scaffolding above Hester Prynne in her moment of public shaming and judgment, in actuality had been “voted out of office, in May 1642, for conduct not so different from Hester’s” (304). His was only one of a “series of sexual transgressions with which the colony elders were grappling in the early 1640s,” scandals involving the colony’s founding fathers themselves. While for many this leads to the criticism that Hawthorne, in not revealing this much messier sexual history of the founding fathers, simultaneously avoids the violent relations between Puritans and Indians by turning our gaze “strictly to intra-community Puritan violence,” it is also true that, without the ominous presence of the Native American as one marker for “wildness” in the text, even the revelation of Bellingham’s and others’ indiscretions could have been read simply as exceptional instances of violation internal to this specific Puritan community (309). In contrast, in the colonial space of polycultural interactions, various relations of proximity and intimacy, power and labor, were the norm, and intimacies developed from the meeting of the peoples of four continents in the New World that are absent from the official colonial archive. As Lowe also describes, The racial classifications in the archive arose, thus, in this context of the colonial need to prevent those unspoken intimacies among the colonized. This other valence of intimacies, then, can be said to be the obverse of the intimacy of bourgeois domesticity. These intimacies are the range of laboring contacts that are necessary for the production of bourgeois domesticity; they are also the intimacies of captured workers existing together, the proximity and affinity that gave rise to political, sexual, intellectual connections. (203)

If we place the figures of Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, and the unnamed Native American within this intimate, laboring world of color, triangulating the relations between colonizer and colonized, we find that the world of color is constituted precisely by those interactions missing from the colonial record but haunting the sexual interstices and moral outskirts of the founding fathers’ domestic narratives. What this reading of Hawthorne’s narrative aims to demonstrate is that what may be missing from the colonial archive can also be present, as a trace, in the most traditional or canonical of American literary texts. This is especially true when these texts, and the sexual relations they reference, are set against the backdrop of an Atlantic economy. While this is not Hawthorne’s primary setting, the Atlantic context is still very much present in the ironic registers of The Scarlet Letter. The trope of the colorful Native American Taussig finds so problematic in European colonial discourse actually functions in a much more layered way in Hawthorne’s novel. The reference to the Native American standing amidst the marketplace crowd actually refers back to an earlier scene in the novel when Hester Prynne appears in the same marketplace for her first public shaming before her fellow townspeople, with the scarlet letter A

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embroidered on her chest. Hawthorne describes this early scene from Hester’s point of view: From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian, in his native garb was standing there. (44)

The Native American, we are first led to believe, is so irresistibly compelling as to distract Hester Prynne from her own unique predicament as a white female being cast out by her Puritan community for adultery. As Hester’s own objectification becomes less fascinating to her, the reader also turns away from the scene of her humiliation to follow her gaze at the exotic American Other – the Native American as the vision of the “colored Otherness” Taussig describes. As it turns out, however, the focus of Hester Prynne’s attention is not the Native American at all. The more subtle dimensions of Hawthorne’s portrayal of this seventeenth-century American world lie in this very simple observation. For Hawthorne actually pushes the Native American to the background as merely another prosaic feature of the landscape Hester is looking out onto, the world of the marketplace that extends well beyond the confines of her own moral and gendered dilemma. The relegation of the Native American to the background is rhetorically underscored by Hawthorne’s use of a colon, which he then follows with the following statement: but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements, that one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne, at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume. (44)

Both Hester’s shaming, then, and the Native American’s exotic presence, two somewhat unorthodox features in this Puritan landscape, are nevertheless represented as two of the more mundane aspects of the everyday relations of community and proximity shared by English settlers, shamed women, and Native Americans alike. By mentioning the Native American and then discounting him, Hawthorne does a double action of both highlighting his presence and then de-exoticizing him as the figure one might presume to be the deviant Other in this setting. The Native American functions instead as a natural part of this scene, but not because he blends with nature. Rather, in the context of the marketplace, both the smaller public sphere of the colony and the larger, developing global economy it is a satellite of, interactions and transactions with Native Americans are familiar enough that they blend with the Puritan inhabitants of the colony themselves. In the earlier scene in the novel, despite the distractions of the main action – Hester’s public shaming – it is neither the sexual deviance of the Puritan female

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subject nor the deviant cultural exoticism of the Native American New World subject that ultimately threatens the foundations of this Puritan community. Rather, the true object of attention in the scene is the possible sexual and cultural corruption of the European male subject, a Chillingworth dressed in his “strange disarray of civilized and savage costume.” He represents by extension the other upstanding men of Salem such as the Reverend Dimmesdale, who is the undisclosed father of Hester Prynne’s child. Like the painted German mercenary Taussig describes, it is the corruption of the white male subject and narrative by the different causal forces that shape interactions and actions in a world of color – forces of difference and desire – that is at the center of Hester’s attention and the focus of the reader’s gaze. When Roger Chillingworth, the white man on the outskirts observing Hester’s humiliation, describes himself to a bystander as the recent captive of his Native American companion, he is told in response, “Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness . . . to find yourself, at length, in a land where iniquity is searched out . . . here in our godly New England” (Hawthorne 45). Of course, the irony of this comment is that, for all the boldness and exposure of Hester’s scarlet A, the one thing the patriarchal community elders have not gotten her to do is to reveal the identity of the man with whom she conceived her child. In refusing to name the father, Hester enacts her own refusal to engage the public ritual of shaming that the prescriptions governing Puritan heterosexuality require. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne’s punishment is crucial then not only as a measure for policing female sexuality, but also as a measure for securing the sexual boundaries and kinship laws necessary if this liminal Puritan community, settled in the borderland between the “wilderness” of the Native Americans and the distant European homeland, is to maintain and preserve in the New World the stabilizing, patriarchal features of the Old World past. It is the very policing of sexuality itself that enables the construction of community boundaries in a world in which those very boundaries are not at all givens, and that once established are constantly in threat of erosion by the very reality of cross-cultural intimacies and proximities in the early colonial world. Hawthorne’s Puritan community remains successfully isolated in a de-peopled landscape only when we read Hester’s dilemma as the exception to community norms, the narrative provided on the surface of the text. However, reading the narrative more aversively, for the traces it contains but cannot contain, the sexual dilemma at the heart of the novel is not the exception but the very norm signaled by the shadowy figures of deviant others and wild landscapes that migrate from the margins to occupy the same central space – of the colony, of the market – as the founding elders themselves. The family arrangements and gendered relations that lay at the core of bourgeois domesticity were some of the most important markers of European civilization preserved by the American colonists. Idealized European family arrangements were often used to define the very meaning of family and kinship for other communities in the colonies:

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bourgeois intimacy was precisely a biopolitics through which the colonial powers administered the enslaved and colonized and sought to indoctrinate the newly freed into forms of Christian marriage and family. The colonial management of sexuality, affect, marriage and family among the colonized formed a central part of the microphysics of colonial rule. (Lowe 193)

Against this backdrop, what we can also read for in early American narratives is the instability of the European family in the face of mobility, miscegenation, and difference. Doyle argues rightly that the scene of Hester’s undoing occurs before the novel even begins, in “the transatlantic migration of Hester alone [to the Americas]. It is this fact that determines Hester’s ‘fall’ ” (301; emphasis in original). We can extend this observation to say that the narrative of that undoing is still unfolding in the New World, as all social and sexual norms are in danger of being undone by colonial life. Using irony and foreshadowing to great psychological effect, what Hawthorne actually establishes in his use of the Native American both in the novel’s opening scene and throughout is his status as a trope or marker for an alternate sexual and intercultural reality that parallels the conventional colonial setting of America’s Puritan origins. The reality that the waves of the transatlantic economy could also shape and reshape white European females’ desires is captured in Hester’s impassioned cry to the father of her child, the Reverend Dimmesdale, that they escape the reprobation of the Puritan community by setting out once again into the wild, marine world of the Atlantic: “Is the world, then, so narrow?” exclaimed Hester Prynne. . . . “Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads yonder forest track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness . . . until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man’s tread.” (127)

Often in American literature, it is women of a “diversity of hues” who find themselves standing at the crossroads between the world of their culture, and a world of color in which interactions with Others are the everyday norm rather than the exotic exception. This world of color lies at the borderland, at the frontiers, at the margins, of hegemonic national narratives. It is the world of the wilderness from which the Native American figure in Hawthorne’s Salem comes, and also a world that Chillingworth, the white man, inhabits because it is the conceptual space where a historical narrative of the material relations between Puritans and Natives – relations of war, commerce, sex, cultural exchange, miscegenation, and kinship – supercedes the more bounded narratives of each as distinct imagined communities. And to the degree that gender and sexuality provide crucial axes along which stable national identities are both defined and simultaneously undermined, women are less the symbols of Puritan corruption, as in the more straightforward reading of Hester Prynne’s dilemma, than the

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bulwark against a deeper fear of the corruption of the European male subject by his own miscegenated desires. To the degree that the interaction with difference in the New World threatened the stability of prior domestic arrangements central to European conceptions of civilization, Hester’s sin is not just a violation of the terms of the Puritan society being established in Salem. It also reflects women’s complex place within the creolizing realities of communal relations forged in an emerging transatlantic economy. Hawthorne, by telling the story of Hester Prynne, tells us about not just a Puritan world but also the economic, sexual, social, and cultural relations within which that world was inscribed. Rather than Hester’s womanhood being merely the symbol of the corruption of a Puritan world, Hester is also the vehicle by which the instability of Puritan society and masculinity, in the face of and surrounded by a world of color, is revealed. As Sean Goudie also describes in Creole America, it was precisely these proximate relations, these near brushes up against difference, which complicated the white male settlers’ efforts to define a New World form of Creole nationality that could be politically independent from European governance whilst remaining dependent on Europe’s cultural identity and the economic influence of the transatlantic market. As much as The Scarlet Letter stands as one of the classics in a national, American, literary tradition, such a text is also to be situated in its hemispheric context since it is very much within this economic and historical Atlantic context – on the ocean – that the alternative landscape of an early American world of color – on land – can also emerge. The history the novel evokes, of adultery and patriarchy within a Puritan community surrounded by the Otherness and difference of early American communities, shapes a circum-Atlantic landscape in which processes of sexual and gender formation in the Americas writ large are shaped by the multiple worlds of color created by labor and transatlantic trade. The moment Hawthorne chooses to return to is, of course, highly symbolic; The Scarlet Letter is set roughly between 1642 and 1649, a mere “fifteen or twenty years after the settlement” of this town of Salem by men who will become in New World history “the founders of a new colony” (36). These men aspired to create a late seventeenth-century “Utopia of human virtue and happiness,” and they will literally become the authors of the myths that will found a new republic (36). The Scarlet Letter’s opening scene is set within the frame of this hegemonic national narrative of white, Anglo-Saxon origin, with an accompanying focus on the patriarchal, religious mission that defined the Puritan settlement project. Hawthorne intentionally evokes this history when he locates Governor John Winthrop, the famous author of the Puritan ideal of creating in the Americas a “city upon a hill,” as an actual historical character whose death is referenced in the text. However, intentionally or not Hawthorne also captures other equally typical, even if less legitimate or hegemonic, aspects of this early founding scene. Both Hester’s adultery and the heathen world of the Native American in the wilderness are the proximate, mundane realities of the surrounding New World that both the public act of shaming and the Puritan text must work to locate at the margins. This is in order

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to protect and preserve at the center an ideal vision of the colony as a “Utopia of human virtue and happiness,” that is, as a site of idealized, Anglo-American sexual and gendered relations. By the later scene in the marketplace, Hawthorne develops much more fully the relations between the Puritans’ will to preserve the integrity of their social and religious community, the multicultural world he rebuilds around them in Salem, and the transatlantic foundations of this world of diverse hue represented in this Puritan marketplace on the occasion of the “election day” holiday. Once again, in the later scene the Native Americans constitute only one aspect of the colorful marketplace. “Wild as were these painted barbarians,” they are relegated to the ordinary when compared with the even more disruptive group whom Hawthorne describes as “the wildest feature of the scene” (148). Unlike the exotic Native American Other, these men hail from Europe’s shores: “some mariners – a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main, – who had come ashore to see the humors of Election day.” Elaborating further on these “rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces,” Hawthorne uses garb and clothing once again to reveal the markers of the mariners’ alternate notion of community, distinct from Puritan social and religious norms. And yet, the narrator complains further, given that these men “transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were binding on all others,” their benevolent treatment by the Puritans was a sign of the “incomplete morality of the age.” “Rigid as we call it,” the age of the Puritans, the Puritan leaders yet allowed a certain “license” to “the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element,” the sea, where they engaged in acts and behaviors closer to those of the pirates (148). As his description continues, Hawthorne does away with even the dichotomy that Linebaugh and Rediker describe in their conception of a revolutionary Atlantic, where pirates and mariners created an alternative network of sea-based states, “hydrarchies,” which operated by their own rules and undermined the powers of the imperial units governing the triangular trade. Instead, in The Scarlet Letter the worlds of hydrarchy and of Puritan social and religious convention became mutually dependent on and interactive with each other. As Hawthorne recounts in a lengthy and dramatic description, But the sea, in those old times, heaved, swelled and foamed, very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land. . . . Thus, the Puritan elders, in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamor and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men. (148)

With this elaboration on the place of the mariner in relationship to the world of the male Puritan elders, now the “old times” of the founding of the Salem colony reflect the transatlantic rather than the Puritan origins of an American world. Thus, in a final twist Hawthorne reminds us that the issue at stake in the novel is not the

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comparative cultural differences between different communities, Indians and Puritans, preachers and mariners, but rather the manner in which economic forces are actually working to undermine those very differences, to make them signify less meaningfully in the face of other imperatives and priorities.

Revisiting the World of The Scarlet Letter Today Because of the work of scholars such as Laura Doyle and Sean Goudie, a strand of American literary scholarship is already engaged in resituating the nation and American literary histories in the creolized space of the transatlantic. However, just as the word “creole” itself derives from questions of mixture and sexual hybridization, a question we can now ask more fully of American literary history is, “Precisely what were the new worlds of sex and gender created by and formed in the crucible of New World discovery?” Can we identify as a strand of the American literary tradition narratives that, in describing the boundaries of defined New World communities such as the Puritans’, have also left clues of the adjacent and equally defining communities within which those Puritan settlements were situated and with whom they interacted? American communities were as much about imagining communal identities as about regulating imaginary and symbolic relations – that is, the more unconscious intercultural relations of desire that occurred side by side with more conscious forms of cultural interaction. It is these circum-Atlantic historical relations, labeled under the stigma and the category of miscegenation, that Joseph Roach reminds us are at the heart of a constitutive amnesia in telling the story of New World formations. In thinking about the place of women in the worlds of color, gender, and labor that characterize New World and American cultural and literary histories, one can read intimacy itself as a globalized relation, with the sexual and gendered identities of both colonizer and colonized read together as mutually constituted by the laboring, multicultural formation of the New World. Hawthorne describes the change in Hester’s development and disposition once thrust outside the boundaries of a regulated, prescribed femininity. She wanders instead, “without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness . . . where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods” (128). What puts Hester in this place without the rule of law is precisely her alienation from the bourgeois conventions that determine the difference between public and private life and a woman’s place in both: For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. . . . The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. (Hawthorne 128)

Hester has not only become a foreigner in her own country with a license to travel in another, the world she looked out on when first spotting Chillingworth and the Native

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American standing on the outskirts of the marketplace. In addition, her exiled condition is shaped specifically by the disruption of the codes and conventions governing sexual and gendered relations in her “country” of origin, the colony. As such, Hester’s individual condition of exile could be said to characterize the parameters of the sexual formations created in the New World as a whole. To some degree, the potential for sexual transgressions of all kinds was the reality shaping the colonies as a world of color, and the very condition of possibility shaping Hawthorne’s text. In the colony, “exile” from gendered conventions and institutions was itself the norm shaping the defining of American gendered and sexual identities, even when such definitions relied on the forceful imposition of gender or intimacy prescriptions left behind in the Old World. The project of an Americanist literary scholarship that takes the Americas as a whole as its geohistorical landscape should be not to discover simply “who got left out” of Anglo-American narrative histories. Rather, we also need to explore the forces threatening early Anglo-American societies and colonies that then created the terms of exclusion that shaped these early literary texts. In other words, if we begin from the presumption that is evident throughout Atlantic history that the Atlantic world was a polycultural world, with various forms of official and unofficial community and individual interactions between peoples of many races, then the question becomes not just who was left out but also who had to be created in order for those other worlds to be occluded and obscured in the first place. The landscape of American history was obviously populated by women and people of color. In American literary history, however, very different models of the white, male, American self can also emerge when he is placed in less regulated and prescribed intersubjective interactions with those women and people of color surrounding him. As much as we find it appropriate to historicize seventeenth-century Puritan relations, or the politics of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century context, as appropriate historical determinants of his novel, so too must we include the sexual histories of New World relations as an equally valid historical backdrop for locating the worlds of color and diversity of hue in The Scarlet Letter. Contemporary authors have created their own answers to these questions by retelling stories of colonization in which, simultaneously, certain notions of the central white male European subject are peripheralized (opening the space for new representations of white, Anglo-American masculinity) and certain unexpected relations between characters of different races emerge (complicating the imperatives of colonial conquest and the civilizing mission). In Toni Morrison’s 2009 novel A Mercy, and Bharati Mukherjee’s 1993 rewriting of Hawthorne’s classic, The Holder of the World, both authors open up the space of the Atlantic to describe worlds of color and labor that were created when the populations from four continents met. In an almost direct confrontation with the nation’s Puritan narratives of origin, Morrison shifts her readers’ attention southward to that other founding American colony in Virginia, and to an interval in the American past just before racial categories solidified. On a small farm, the Vaark estate, four women – a European, a Native

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American, a woman of both black and white parentage, and an African-descended slave – work together to carve out an existence after the death of the main male figure in the narrative, the farmer, slave owner, and husband, James Vaark. What brings them together is their mutual labor. Not only are they forced to work side by side in learning how to make the Vaark farm productive. In addition, females in general function, regardless of hue, as labor – whether as mail-order brides, indentured servants, rescued orphans, conquered natives, bought slaves, or laboring subjects on the farm, as field workers, sex workers, or domestic workers. Similarly, when Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian American woman writer in the late twentieth century, travels back to the same world Nathaniel Hawthorne is visiting when he writes of Salem from the perspective of the nineteenth century, she elaborates on the complex sexual relations of the world that Mary Rowlandson and Hester Prynne inhabit on the outskirts of the Puritan colony and beyond. In Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, too much time in the wilderness not only threatens a European woman’s Puritan faith, but also opens her up to recognizing in an almost anthropological sense that the “savages” possess a coherent culture and worldview of their own. In Mukherjee’s reimagining of such a world, English women who wear the scarlet letter have engaged specifically in the sin of miscegenation with Native Americans, English colonizers negotiate exile by adopting Native American names for their towns, and Christian Indians live with conquest as they return straying English children back to their family homesteads safely. For Mukherjee, the world of the past to be rebuilt is one in which English settlers identify with native Americans not just to appropriate their cultural identities. Together they imaginatively inhabit, if only for a brief interval in time, a shared American community of hardships, expropriations, and deprivations as well as collaborations, negotiations, and cooperation. In both of these instances, authors who share a contemporary vision of a diverse America return to the seventeenth century precisely in order to create a usable, American, multicultural past. What I find more useful about their novels, however, is their grounding of the diversity of that past in the confused sexual politics, mores, and behaviors of early American subjects. I believe a place lies therein for thinking about references to the proximate intimacies of a world of color as the formal place in the early American literary text where previous authors, in reconstructing the nation’s past, could not completely avoid rendering traces of the polyamorous and polyglot new world within which the history of the nation is embedded. Slavoj Žižek’s response to the critique of presentism is relevant here, for as he observes, “Much more subversive than ‘entering the spirit of the past’ is thus in contrast the procedure by which we consciously treat it ‘anti-historically’, ‘reduce the past to the present’” (102–3). Literary scholars are much too historical to take Žižek’s recommendation completely at face value (in the way that authors of fiction such as Morrison and Mukherjee can, for example, imagine and create counterfactual worlds). However, his words should inspire in us the idea that if one looks conscientiously for the seeds of the present in early American narratives, one could find a past that does, in a sense, originate from contemporary concerns. After all, we still live in the aftermath of that

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polyglot, New World modernity that American narratives, whether The Scarlet Letter, A Mercy, or The Holder of the World, all struggle to make sense of, in the context of the worlds of color pressing in on the imaginations of their authors from their own place and time.

References and Further Reading Anderson, Benedict. “Exodus.” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 314–27. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity. 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Worlds of Color.” In W.E.B. Du Bois, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (pp. 383–414). New York: Atheneum, 1992. Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Goudie, Sean X. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005. Levine, Robert S. “Antebellum Feminists on Hawthorne: Reconsidering the Reception of The Scarlet Letter.” In The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings (pp. 274–90). Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The ManyHeaded Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Lowe, Lisa. “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” In Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (pp. 191–212). Ed. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York: Random House, 2008. Mukherjee, Bharati. The Holder of the World. New York: Knopf, 1993. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rowlandson, Mary. “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God.” In The Bedford Anthology of American Literature (pp. 192–228). Vol. 1. Ed. Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press, 2008. Swisshelm, Jane. “From the Saturday Visiter.” In The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings (pp. 271–4). Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005. Taussig, Michael. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso, 1991.

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In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1841), Grandfather tells the story of American colonial history through the history of a chair that moves through it. Carved from a tree in the park of the earl of Lincoln, it crosses the Atlantic in 1630 and passes through a succession of owners who also happen to command a place within the “two or three centuries” of transatlantic history that the chair assumes simply by giving them a seat (209). The chair belongs to Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, John Winthrop, John Eliot, and many others before it belongs to Grandfather; it belongs to George Washington during the American Revolution, but also to the British colonial governors who preceded him in “the chair of state” (32). The figures who occupy the chair link it to the wider world of the British Empire that occupies them and from which they derive their commissions to serve in colonial Massachusetts, for example, or the war with France, or from which they otherwise choose to secede. All the while, we find the story of an antiquated English chair “intertwining” not only with the “great events that have befallen” the colonies on their way to independence but also with the lives of writers, merchants, sailors, and soldiers that help connect the colonies to each other and to the networks of trade, religion, literature, medicine, and politics that extend over and around the Atlantic to Canada, the West Indies, and elsewhere (65). More importantly, for Grandfather at least, his chair’s archaic presence on the colonial scene speaks to the connections and people that are sacrificed to the progress of events but that leave their marks on its worn surface as accidentally as the black slave who, in the act of cleaning it, rubs the “gilding” off this thing that stands in the place of American history (136). The “cold policy” of war drives Acadians from their homes, and Tory exiles cry; through

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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it all, says Grandfather, “here stood the chair” with “its old Lincoln coat of arms” (128, 66). Its persistence “here” from another time and place enlarges our understanding of American progress to include the experience of loss until it finally seems that we have access to nothing less than a “whole history” of the Atlantic struggle for dominion on the North American continent, including the perspective of the subjects who no longer seem to belong there. But, Grandfather says to the children who listen, “I am merely telling the history of a chair” (33). Why does the history of America become the historical romance of a chair? After all, when little Alice asks Grandfather to tell “some more stories about [his] chair,” she really means that she is ready for the next episode in his narrative history of America from sometime before 1630 through 1803 when it leaves off (73). The history that Grandfather tells sounds much like a version of Atlantic history as we have come to understand it. Insofar as it is a “whole history,” it suggests a belief in an immensely complex but still integrated and cohesive field of relations across and around the Atlantic in which people travel, migrate, trade, compete, plunder, exchange, and communicate, and in which both things and people are bought and sold: “Our ancestors,” says Grandfather, “not only bought negroes from Africa, but Indians from South America, and white people from Ireland. These last were sold, not for life, but for a certain number of years, in order to pay the expenses of the voyage across the Atlantic” (109). Events in one place reverberate in others; nothing affects the policy and liberties of the “remote colonies” so much as the temperament of monarchs, the wars in Europe, and the English revolution of the 1640s – even during times when the outposts of its empire were “left to take care of [themselves].” Grandfather speaks primarily of Massachusetts, but since all the North American colonies are tied to each other through their common dependence on the English empire, the children know that he “might have gone on to speak of Maryland and Virginia” as well and that the strength of their interconnection is also defined by their sense of difference from the French in Canada and the Dutch who remain in New York (30). Merchants and adventurers pass over imperial and national lines within an oceanspace that is constitutive of their trading and traveling patterns and also a “deeply historical location whose transformative power is . . . material and real” (Klein and Mackenthun 2). The tales told from Grandfather’s chair, in other words, touch on many of the histories that scholars identify with the early modern Atlantic world and the economies of exchange that pattern the way we understand the work that culture did in its own expanded travels through the period. Most of all, the tales represent an early variation on the performances of memory and creative survival that respond to the impossible recovery of “the submerged and the drowned” records of violence, theft, and trauma in the cross-currents of the ocean (Boelhower, “The Rise” 95). When Sir William Phips, before trying to capture Quebec, charges Indians to dive for treasure in a sunken Spanish galleon off the West Indies – among “the skeletons of the ancient Spaniards . . . whose bones were now scattered among the gold and silver” – Grandfather reminds the children that “there is something sad and terrible in the idea of snatching all this wealth from the devouring ocean” (61). It would be better,

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he suggests, to acknowledge its loss. The gold that Phips recovers explains why, years later as governor of Massachusetts, he has the means to redecorate his Boston mansion and to embellish Grandfather’s chair with the varnish and gold that the black slave rubs off. The children hear not only of people who cross the Atlantic, of their commerce and politics, but also of the diseases they carry: sometimes the smallpox arrives with “poor sailors” or “lay[s] hidden in the cargoes of ships, among . . . costly merchandize that was imported for the rich to wear,” and sometimes it follows in the train of imperial administrators who come over from England (100). We learn that Cotton Mather discovers how to inoculate for it by reading a letter he finds by an Italian physician describing how the method was commonly practiced in Turkey and Greece and also by “the negroes of Africa” (101). Thus the “informal connections” that Bernard Bailyn suggests created a dynamic “mental” network in the early modern Atlantic beyond the economies and politics of empire include, in Hawthorne too, a “flow of ideas that shaped the manifest world and bound it together” (Bailyn, Atlantic 51–2; Bailyn, Soundings 42). Grandfather’s story is a straightforward history in which early events, sweeping forward to later outcomes, explain the progress of the United States in time; but it is also offset by a variety of transnational and transimperial perspectives that reach out laterally in space and give life to the people and things who no longer figure when the nation is independent of them and when Grandfather can only look back from where he sits in his chair. But, again, this is not a national history; it is also not a colonial history that suggestively evokes the density of encounters and conflicts around the Atlantic basin that our scholarship now tracks with increasing momentum under the disciplinary label of “Atlantic studies.” Hawthorne’s history is the history of a chair. If, as Nietzsche suggests, “the final trait of effective history is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective,” then at least we know we can say we have nothing to affirm but the singular perspective of a chair (Foucault 90). As Grandfather’s chair changes hands, it accrues meaning through the way it is used, shared, transported, defaced, and refinished, and from where (a ship, a Tory mansion, a coffeehouse, beneath the Liberty Tree). It is one of the many objects in Hawthorne’s book that circulates in colonial networks of exchange and whose deep and layered genealogy speaks to the way that relations between people are embedded and inscribed in the relations they have to their possessions. Yet the chair in the tale is not only a relic of history but also the figure of history, which is why the children mean that they want to hear stories of America when they think they want stories of the chair and also why Grandfather seems to suppose “that the whole surface of the United States was not too broad a foundation to place the four legs of his chair upon” (30). I could reverse what I said earlier to just as easily say that, in Hawthorne’s tale, it takes nothing less than a “whole history” of the Atlantic struggle for dominion on the North American continent to give an adequate picture of a chair. Hawthorne seems to be suggesting that Atlantic history is a fantasy of relation that is not transmitted across time so much as embraced through the imagined origins of

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material from a vanished world that is neither American nor British in ways that later generations will come to understand the difference between a nation and its antecedent empire. Grandfather’s chair is perhaps the least significant symbol for this wider Atlantic history that Hawthorne can conceive, which is why the unlikely charm of its persistence as a “cultural atom,” to borrow an idea from Erich Auerbach, can express such a textured and diverse network of associations, travels, economies, and politics that brought so many peoples into contact (Boelhower, Atlantic 21). The transatlantic world that returns with Grandfather’s old chair is in part a fiction that tries to recapture the impossible complexities of an historical epoch that can only be possessed through the figures that are left behind as it recedes. Its story suggests not just a teleological progress from the past into modernity, but also a literary romance of fugitive events and individuals once connected by the same geography that disperses them. I will return to the chair below, but it is already possible to see how the most useful term for illuminating the cultural difference we look for when we return to the contours of a “whole” Atlantic world may be an anachronism of it – one that reflects an impulse to imagine histories beyond the presence of the nation that an earlier moment (indeed, Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century moment) has passed down to us. His fiction points to the ways in which any version of the transatlantic we might imagine can only be romantically revived.

Space and Time What is the place of literary studies within Atlantic studies? In the past decade, the question has been hard to answer because, insofar as “the new Atlantic studies” sees its subject as an object that is also a space – the Atlantic Ocean and all that it holds, carries, and touches on in time – no discipline seems more equipped than any other to represent the experience and meanings it suggests. “Certainly,” writes William Boelhower, “there is no urgent mandate to shoehorn the new Atlantic studies matrix into yet another traditional academic disciplinary asset” (“The Rise” 87). At the upper limit of its challenge to what Boelhower describes as the “institutionalization” of historical knowledge within the structure of the university, Atlantic studies rejects the idea that even the most sophisticated and self-conscious scholarship based on traditional categories of humanistic inquiry (national literatures, historical periods, and conventional modes and genres) can capture the irreducible “fluidity” of the Atlantic world. Indeed, such invocations of the ocean and its material form provide Atlantic studies with a powerful symbolic language for registering the degree to which the archive of the Atlantic world itself is shaped by “unpredictable natural flows” that immerse us like “the equinoctial tides.” Thus, studying Atlantic history and culture can become its own version of a “rendez-vous . . . with the sea,” and while we take the poeticism for what it is, the interdisciplinary ambitions and energies of the new Atlantic studies are hard to understand without taking seriously the homology between the unfathomable complexity of the ocean as both a natural environment

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and field of human action, and the “oceanic order” that it conditions across centuries of history (as cited in Boelhower, “The Rise” 98). Like the figure of the “historiantraveler” who Roland Barthes describes, in his work on Michelet, as “swimming” in an archive of materials – “I am rowing,” writes Michelet, “through Louis XI” – scholars of the Atlantic world, trying to navigate the density and expanse of Atlantic history, finally realize that their “plunge involves an incomplete assimilation” of what it yields (22). In recent years especially, Atlantic studies has defined an “epistemological style” in keeping with the diverse ecology of its many archives, which demand a range of disciplines and methodologies not just in the humanities but in the social and physical sciences as well; attending from a sense of what Eric Slauter calls the “inherent multidisciplinarity” of Atlantic history, scholars have sought to incorporate “the dizzying shifts that come from viewing familiar phenomena from different angles, [and] different geographies,” within the texture of their writing by embracing the work of economists, anthropologists, cartographers, oceanographers, meteorologists, and more (161). Almost every scholarly attempt to define the scope of Atlantic studies suggests that the unbounded history of the ocean in its midst requires multiplying points of view. “No one historian,” writes Alison Games, “can have the competence or expertise that scholars desire” (“Atlantic” 750). As Atlantic studies draws on a greater set of methodologies and approaches, the desire for even more flexible responses to an archive whose scale, at last, is oceanic has inspired the sense that its scholarship must operate with an appropriate magnitude. Bailyn observes that in the first years of the field’s development, the urge to formulate outsized intellectual projects of Atlantic history was almost a recursive phenomenon in which the sheer “force of scholarship itself” encouraged a “rescaling of perspective”; he cites, for example, Pierre Chaunu’s “fourvolume interpretation of seven volumes of data” from the 1950s on Seville’s transatlantic commerce as representing, in a phrase that may say more than Bailyn realizes, the only sort of “titanic oeuvre” that could claim to cover at least a portion of the ocean’s massive history (Atlantic 30–2). “Large-scale spatial orbits developing through time,” Bailyn writes of this formative period, “were becoming visible as they had not been before,” and after demographics, statistics, epidemiology, migration studies, and other quantitative methods of analysis began to make significant contributions to the field, many efforts in Atlantic history emerged in the form of censuses and databases that accumulate details toward a vast “panorama” of transatlantic history (30). “The question,” says Wai Chee Dimock of transatlantic and transnational scholarship, “is very much a question of scale” (6). What began after World War II, in Bailyn’s account, as an effort to enshrine a North Atlantic alliance within an historical relationship between the United States and Britain, has been expanded and dispersed into a broadening “matrix” of territories and peoples that meet and collide in North America and Europe, as well as South America, Africa, and all the islands in between (Esty 102). Recently, the areas that surround the Atlantic on four continents have seemed too narrow a frame for representing the imperial flow of people, information, and ideas that also reach past the rims to borderlands, transfrontier regions, and con-

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tinental interiors, where native groups, for example, though “often far removed from maritime littorals,” still feel their effects (Morgan and Greene 13–14). But now critics also are learning that Atlantic commodities circulated in a much larger world and that the laborers who produced them, and the merchants and sailors who transported them, suggest more global currents of trade even in the early modern period. Adventurers, promoters, ambassadors, and ministers circled the planet, conjoining Western Europe to “the rest of Europe, the rest of Eurasia, indeed, Afro-Eurasia,” while conjoining Atlantic routes to Pacific ones in ways that remind us that oceans themselves are interconnected (Coclanis 729). Thus, Atlanticists are always vulnerable to the charge that they have not explored the connections from the connections they have already made. While some scholars are earnestly trying “to assume a scale of analysis broad enough to encompass the entire circuit” of the Atlantic world (McGill, The Traffic 1), others argue that Atlantic history “is a slice of world history,” that other areas impinge on and shape its developments (Games, “Atlantic” 748), and that the Atlantic finally “lacks the kind of coherence” that we need to establish a field of inquiry in the first place (Wïgen 718). “Might the Atlantic,” writes Games, “be too small a unit of analysis?” (“Beyond” 676). “Really, universally,” writes Henry James, “relations stop nowhere.” Perhaps the accumulative impulse is best seen in the massive Transatlantic Slave Trade database, which, as of January 2008, contained details of 34,934 documented slave voyages, an estimated 80 percent of all the ventures that set out for Africa from Britain, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and North America to obtain slaves. The database supplies the information for David Eltis and David Richardson’s comprehensive Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, in which the slave voyages are mapped, along with their destinations, their ports of origin, the coastal origins of slaves, and the links they all provide between Africa and the Atlantic world. The database and atlas suggest a logic of accretion, in which the traumatic history of the African diaspora is vividly reproduced in a scale of information that makes equally palpable the scale of loss. If the African diaspora provides the greatest number of voyages, migrations, and trades around the Atlantic (the British, for example, carried three Africans to the Americas for every European through the early nineteenth century), then it also points to the atrocities that leave gaps in the archive and a scarcity of resources where the statistics speak most. Atlantic studies responds to these absences through the immensity of its efforts to chart them, seeing the proliferation of materials and perspectives as a challenge to binary categories of centers and peripheries – including postcolonial scholarship that preserves them from the peripheries – and other paradigms of knowledge that fail to capture the complexities of diasporic experience. The closer we look, the more we find exceptions to official archives that subsume slaves within slave societies or to earlier histories that only recognize, in Vincent Brown’s words, “violence, violations of personhood, dishonor, and namelessness as the fundamental constituent elements of slavery” (1233). The exceptions include Brown’s sense of how funerary rituals among slaves defy “totalizing definition[s] of slavery” as “social death” (and so make death “as generative as it was destructive”) (“Social” 1239; The Reaper’s 4); they also

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include Joseph Roach’s sense of how performative acts of forgetting substitute histories of violence with the cultural memories that reinvent them. When Ian Baucom calls Atlantic projects “an invitation to assemblage,” he means that the innumerable contingencies that increase our understanding of the ocean world also demand their own textured aesthetic in our work (“Introduction” 7), making it fair to say that Atlantic studies “is more than simply the study of a geographical unit; it is also a style of inquiry” (Games, “Atlantic” 749). For Boelhower, the fact that Atlantic studies aims to resist the inherited blindness and rigidity within institutional structures of knowledge makes our choice of its nontraditional style an ethical imperative. The fact that the particular archives of slavery and the black Atlantic make this need for new epistemologies most obvious signals to him nothing short of an “immediate and utter” call for rethinking the organization of the university itself (Esty 106). In suggesting the discontinuities inherent in Atlantic history, the idea of “black Atlantic” history ruptures the narratives of modernity, national development, and Enlightenment rationality that underwrite a Western system of racial hierarchy. In this sense, Atlantic studies derives from black Atlantic studies in particular its characteristic modality: a provocation away from ideologies of modernity and progress that are put at sea. Like Nietzsche’s sense of the marine horizon, “every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again” (199). The Atlantic is not an empty space against which a series of events unfold, but “a workplace, home, passage, penitentiary and promise” whose experience never conforms to ideas of linear movement – between old and new, past and present (cause and effect), on separate sides of an ocean – that enact a decisive shift forward from one epoch to the next (Blum 670). For Paul Gilroy, the black Atlantic is a “counterculture of modernity” in which movements between Africa, Europe, and the Americas should be appreciated as “configurations” of flows and circuits that often double back to their own points of origin, or that wander far from their intended trajectories (1). The “impurity” of Atlantic history, he suggests, finally prevents it from ever being assimilated for “nationalist or ethnically absolute” ends; he thus charts a dizzying variety of cultural aesthetics and politics that displace both Enlightenment teleologies of progress in which Africa is always behind, and later black anxieties of authenticity in which Africa can never be revisited (2, 15). For Ian Baucom, the “black-Atlantic philosophy of history” is also necessarily a critique of finance capitalism and the perverse “modernity” of the slave trade itself that abstracted human beings into calculable instances of profit or loss (Specters 327). Taking as his central case the infamous Zong massacre – in which sick slaves were thrown overboard so that their owners could recoup their investment under the “jettison clause” on the ship’s insurance policy – Baucom discovers in the cultural responses to the affair a “romantic counterdiscourse” of trauma and melancholy that sets itself “against the tide of modernity” by relentlessly insisting on emotional and psychic losses at sea that no amount of rationalization can move beyond (Specters 33). To the degree that Gilroy, Baucom, and others have accustomed us to think about the Atlantic as a “system of cultural exchanges” in restless movement everywhere

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within its layered geography, they return us to a language that derives from Fernand Braudel, whose exemplary studies of the Mediterranean world set the terms for understanding how spatialized histories can look for patterns that are too slow, too large, and often too pervasive to capture in conventional accounts of change and progress (Gilroy 14). Braudel’s approach to the Mediterranean and the people who lived within its shadow marked a radical turn away from narrative accounts of the region that proceeded by tracing out national histories and filling in the dates that punctuated them over seemingly critical spans of years or decades. Braudel proposed instead that history operated on a scale of time that beggared such small units of temporal meaning, and famously turned his attention to what he called the longue durée in order to suggest both the enlarged scale and slower pace of the events and phenomena that shaped the culture of the Mediterranean over several centuries. More importantly, Braudel refused to slice and subdivide his very long time spans into linear sequences of unfolding epochs; thus, in his most influential work for later scholars of the Atlantic, the densely textured totality of the “Mediterranean world” cannot be circumscribed within the years that technically bound his subject (the age of Phillip II from 1550 to 1600) because this isolated moment is at once layered over with the residues of earlier periods, and also powerfully resonant for the centuries that follow. The “vast, complex expanse” of the sea provides the sense of a spatial constant whose presence across time is, from the perspective of the succeeding nation-states that flourish and then fail along its rim, effectively unchanging (18). Or, put another way, for Braudel it only makes sense to write the history of a maritime world by adopting the temporality of its dominant figure, which is to say, the sea itself. So his own analyses return and overlap within a single cartographic and figurative space from multiple disciplines – geography and ecology, social and economic history, politics and military history – that illuminate different aspects of the Mediterranean world as their various discoveries accrete across the vast expanse of Braudel’s massive books. History becomes visible not as a narrative of superseding events, with the present arriving as the past fades away, but rather as an accumulation of meanings that remain perceptible long after their originary moments. If modernity conceptualizes history as a serialization of causes and effects that advance along strict chronologies of universal time, the oceanic world, to borrow from Bruno Latour, has never been modern: its spaces show too much wear and evidence of pasts that continue to inflect its present; time within the pull of the sea feels asynchronous and uneven, and much of what is lost on one occasion or another ends up returning unexpectedly to bring distant periods and cultures into relation with each other. As early as the 1950s, Atlantic historians incorporated and extended Braudel’s spatial emphases to reconstruct the larger oceanic world that Europe, Africa, and the Americas shared in the early modern period. The new Atlantic studies especially register the extent of Braudel’s importance even in projects that seem far removed from his often empirical accounts of the tectonic patterns that shape cultures and mentalities over long durations. If, as Bailyn observes, the impulse behind Braudel’s project was “poetic,” reflecting his own “love of the Mediterranean world,” it has also

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provided a model for understanding how a sense of asynchronous or spatialized time can capture some of the more harrowing legacies of transatlantic history (Atlantic 5). Baucom, for example, describes the Atlantic as a “form of time” that is, more radically, a “ghost-haunted, apparitional now,” centuries long and still burdened with “the moment of loss” that slavery represents; invoking Derrida’s late turn to “hauntology” to describe the spectral power of past forms in presents where they are clearly anachronistic, Baucom in effect renders Atlantic studies as an expression of melancholia in the place of Braudel’s “love” (“Introduction” 8). In such models of Atlanticism, the geography of the present is overwritten with traces of the past, and nothing that crosses the ocean is ever really lost to time so long as it is remembered somewhere within the larger circuits of culture and feeling that constitute the historical aesthetic of the ocean world. The aesthetic does not need to operate on the largest scale to produce the sorts of temporal discontinuities and anachronisms that Braudel observed; Baucom’s granular account of a single historical incident of the slave trade ramifies out to later episodes in global capitalism’s exploitation of factory workers in Vietnam, which, poetically at least, becomes a phenomenon of “the late-eighteenth- to latetwentieth-century development of an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation” (Specters 80). In The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker similarly expands a single transatlantic artifact – the slave ship as a “wooden world” unto itself – into an elaborately synecdochic construct that materializes not just the whole of the Middle Passage but also the translation of African cultures to the Americas, and the plantation economies that demanded so much human cargo at unimaginable cost. Rediker treats the slave ship as a small world (or microcosm) that contains within it an astonishingly complete reconstruction of the social codes, material practices, and emotional dramas that characterized the space of the Atlantic in its most extreme form (67). Transatlantic literary studies has proven to be particularly well equipped for thinking through the complex field of relations across time and space that Braudel calls the longue durée since literature, always in conversation with other literature, “never inhabits positions of pure autonomy” (Manning and Taylor 21). While literary culture, from the nineteenth century forward, has been central to the expression and constitution of national traditions by providing, as Schlegel describes it, “the aggregate mass of symbols in which the spirit of an age or the character of a nation is shadowed forth,” it is also the case that the literary artifact is never as trapped in its national or institutional moment as Schlegel suggests (Schlegel 1:274). “Literature,” writes Wai Chee Dimock, “is the home of nonstandard space and time,” and by this she means, in her discussion of the “deep time” of American literature for which Braudel provides the model, that literature both in its material forms of transmission and in the ideas it contains travels in unpredictable and often accidental ways (4). In and out of geographies, languages, and cultures, literature binds “continents and millennia into many loops of relation” because the particular timelessness of literary texts – either universal in appeal or adaptable in meaning – works “against the official borders of the nation and against the fixed intervals of the clock” (3, 4). Thus “American literature emerges with a much longer history than one might think” (4): in Emerson, for example, we

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find words and ideas from eighteenth-century Germany in Goethe and, through Goethe, the lyric forms of fourteenth-century Persia in Hafiz. Hafiz affects our understandings of Emerson as much as Emerson adapts and appropriates Hafiz, and so the meanings of both (new and old, present and past) are created at once as each readjusts to the other. It is no surprise that transatlantic literary studies often seems like an expanded version of influence studies in which forms, genres, and language flow erratically between generations, so that multiple and foreign traditions combine to create what once seemed to be a single national heritage. After all, as Stanley Cavell writes, “geographical proximity is a poor, let’s say vulgar, measure of intellectual intimacy” (458). Beyond the idea of influence as a single lineage of great authors within the same tradition – each rising to the challenge or agonizing against the burdens of precedent – the life of the mind that Dimock and others describe admits an open-ended tangle of impressions that are often hard to predict or trace, but whose influence within a single text brings together Emerson, Goethe, and Hafiz or any other combination of people and ideas who would otherwise be temporally distinct. Transatlantic literary studies is also not a version of classic comparative studies in which the literature of one nation exerts cultural force over another, but rather attends from a sense of influence that stays true to the liquid origins it shares with the idea of transatlanticism itself: “In its historical [or etymological] meaning, from which we take our present use,” writes Lionel Trilling, “influence . . . means a flowing-in, but not as a tributary river flows into the main stream at a certain observable point” (187–8). Or, as Mary Orr suggests, By remembering that influence is quintessentially a metaphor of motions and fluids, applied to waters that swell a greater river or freeze as blocks in seas, its many . . . uses need to be reinstated not least for its power to map flow, force, currents, divergence and convergence. (93)

Transatlantic literary studies describes the ways in which “the present is present to more than itself” by tracing the multiple influences and confluences of literary traditions and genres as they criss-cross the Atlantic (Baucom, “Introduction” 8). In the work of Meredith McGill, for example, we see how the practices of reprinting and “piracy” that dominated the antebellum book trade call into question the rights of a nation, both legal and symbolic, to own its literary expressions; books function, for much of the period, as one of many commodity forms whose value was often a measure of how far they had traveled from a lost point of origin somewhere abroad. Both Paul Giles and Amanda Claybaugh chart the mobility of genres and styles that may emerge on one side of the Atlantic or the other – neoclassical poetry, sentimental novels, or novels of reform – but soon come to flourish over great distances and to alternate ends, and are often transformed, upon echoing back, by the material networks that sustain their effects and resonance over time. The literary systems of influence and innovation that they describe are predicated on the lateral dispersion of precedents throughout an imagined geography of shared aesthetics and political purposes that finally cannot

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be mapped onto the story of a single national culture. In Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940, Laura Doyle traces the idea of Atlantic modernity back to a seventeenth-century myth of Anglo-Saxon freedom in order to show how black and white Anglophone writers lay claim to an inheritance of English liberty that is racialized at its inception. For all these critics, questions of influence are not answered with simple claims of derivation or descent, but instead provide occasions for the kind of genealogical reflections that demonstrate, as Foucault writes, the “heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself” (82). More importantly, we begin to see that the project of transatlanticism is almost impossible to conceptualize, in literary terms at least, without a sense that its character as an intellectual practice is essentially genealogical: alternative lineages are claimed for figures rarely pictured in relation; multiple inheritances for texts are accumulated but left unresolved as if to confirm that genealogy “opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’ ” in favor of “the details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (Foucault 77, 80). Thus, even as Atlantic studies is increasingly confident about asserting where it is coming from – Boelhower identifies one strain of Atlanticism with Edward Said by way of Eric Auerbach by way of Vico – it is possible that the field’s own genealogical pursuits are a measure of the romance about beginnings that distinguish so many of its projects. Or, put differently, for all the ways that historians find predecessors for the transatlantic sensibility that is now prominent across the disciplines, literary studies might be the discipline best able to appreciate the romance at the origins of “transatlanticism” itself.

Periodization After Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Hutchinson recovers Grandfather’s chair from a garret and restores it to the fireside where it belongs, he sits down to write the colonial history of Massachusetts. “No doubt, the dim figures of the former possessors of the chair flitted around him as he wrote,” inspiring him with the knowledge of what they had “done and suffered” and then with a “reverie” that amounts to a counterfactual history of the revolutionary period to follow: looking ahead, he sees, not a progress into modernity, but “visions of hereditary rank for himself and other aristocratic colonists. . . . He [sees] stars, garters, coronets, and castles” (137, 139). Years later, when an angry mob approaches his house to retaliate for the Stamp Act, Hutchinson rests in Grandfather’s chair, “unsuspicious of the evil that was about to fall” on him; surrounded by his “beloved family” and the portraits of ancestors he “honorably remembered,” he takes some time to “[lay] aside the cares of state” (155). By the moment of the American Revolution, Grandfather’s chair is not so much the seat of power as the place to sit out history, which perhaps explains why, during the war itself, the chair goes missing: “the manner of its departure cannot be satisfactorily ascertained,” and meanwhile, “during the mysterious non-appearance of our chair,” Americans and British fight in the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (183). Like

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Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, who sleeps through the revolutionary break that separates the past from the present, the chair only reappears in the present as the untimely figure of a period that is lost. What persists with the chair, even to the present when it belongs to Grandfather, is an archive of relations and attachments within the colonial era that seems as archaic and strange as an old chair with a coat of arms, but that invests the contemporary moment with a sense of its difference. The tales Grandfather tells are always sympathetic to the shadow “forms of departed friends” and “vanished scenes” that, from the perspective of the chair, seem “almost as real as what was actually present” (121). The children who listen cry for the Acadian refugees whose “hearts had been torn asunder by separation” from their families and homes, and then they cry for Hutchinson and other Tories when they become “homeless” too (125, 159). (“ ‘Alas! for the poor Tories!’ said Grandfather.”) They also cry at the Boston Massacre, not so much because people die, but because they learn that the Revolution itself could have been avoided and that “the ancient bonds of brotherhood” between America and Britain “would again have been knit together, as firmly as in old times” if the first shot had never misfired (191, 169). The stories of colonial Atlantic separations stand in relation to the stories of American progress from which Grandfather says they are themselves “inseparable” (128); they offer alternative origins for a national moment that seems inevitably to have arrived by forgetting the sources that diverged from it. The point of the “whole history,” in fact, is to recover these lost connections within an enlarged human context, so when Grandfather’s silent chair is finally given a voice – in Grandfather’s dream at the end – it says that the “all-important secret” of history it hopes to teach is, along with truth and justice, “Love!” (209). In Hawthorne’s tale, the history of the chair is discontinuous, since the children keep moving on from it to other things for “two or three months” at a stretch, after which Grandfather can pick it up again. Playing in “the gladsome sunshine of the present,” they lose sight of “the shadowy region of the past, in the midst of which stood Grandfather’s chair”: “How strange that we should have forgotten it so long!” says Clara (74). A gold watch “pilfered” from the enemy during the French and Indian War and “still in existence” continues to mark “each moment of time, without complaining of weariness, although its hands have been in motion ever since” (131): it registers the linear, teleological time that cuts the “whole history” into a sequence of homogeneous moments as it advances to the present. The history of the chair, in fact, can never keep up since months pass while Grandfather is telling it, so he is urged to “make haste, or [the chair] will have a new history to be told before we finish the old one” (147). The tale, in other words, is always out of sync, registering a different phenomenology of time that slows down or accelerates according to the children’s increasing sympathies to the figures of history as Grandfather reflects on them. When little Alice is uninterested and falls asleep, she misses 18 years of history in the space of a nap, and so do we. Against the modern progress of the nation is the historical romance that “cuts anywhere with equal ease,” so that American history appears in strange, uneven, and overlapping shapes – even in the shape of a chair (Kubler 2).

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The history of Grandfather’s chair ends not in 1841, where it currently is, but in 1803, when Samuel Adams, its last owner, dies. Grandfather purchases the chair at the auction of the Adams estate to help pay for his funeral. Why 1803? Adams dies in early October of that year, just weeks before the United States ratified the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, acquiring from Napoleon the wide expanse of Western land that doubled the nation’s size and turned its attention to the future of the continent. France sells the Louisiana territory to focus its resources on the Haitian slave revolt against colonial rule, but by the end of 1803 Haiti had won its independence. We could say that the story of the chair ends at the moment when a whole interconnected colonial history that linked European empires with colonies in the Americas and the coast of Africa gives way to the primacy of national histories. After 1803, in other words, the paradigm of a “whole history” as a unified concept or space that suggests the contours of an integrated Atlantic experience, and for which an ocean (or a ship or chair) becomes a figure, loses its hold when the American colonies secede and when the modern course of nation building begins. As Bailyn writes, The birth of the American nation-states in the independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not the goal toward which Atlantic history had been inevitably tending, but the opposite: it marks not the fulfillment but the demise of the world that had gone before. (Soundings 2)

Well by the time Hawthorne writes his tale, the Atlantic had become an anachronistic model of relations, not because people, ideas, and things did not continue to traverse it (in fact, with the invention of the steamship and telegraph, they traversed it more), but because, with the wars of independence, the Atlantic basin and all it encompassed was no longer valid as “a single functional unit” of analysis and experience, if it ever was beforehand (O’Reilly 67). Either the nations surrounding it became independent of it or with the accelerating pace of modernity – and the new global frameworks necessary to think through its systems of capital, technology, and imperialism – the Atlantic seemed less a “world” unto itself, and more a part of the world as such. Historians suggest “that the expansion of European imperialism and the spread of commerce after 1800 make a global framework of more utility than an Atlantic one for those who are not content to operate within traditional national and imperial frameworks” (Morgan and Greene 21). Thus, it is not just the specific set of relations – to the British, for example – that Grandfather reassembles when he reflects on his chair, but also the virtual experience of completeness, including the feelings of belonging to people and homelands elsewhere, that is perhaps the last form in which the totality of an Atlantic world that is never coming back might still be known. It is worth remembering that, as Joyce Chaplin points out, before the mid- to late eighteenth century, the Atlantic was called by the names of its individual “seas” (e.g., the North Sea and the Ethiopian Sea) and that it took a while for the people around the Atlantic “to convince themselves that the ocean at the center of their attention deserved a distinctive name” (45). Transatlantic is similarly a late eighteenth-century

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word, and its popularity rises dramatically by the beginning of the nineteenth century: a keyword search in the American Periodical Series electronic database shows no instances of the word before 1780 and eight instances before 1800; but there are 242 uses of the word between 1800 and 1820, and 1,755 uses between 1820 and 1840, more than seven times as many as the previous two decades in less than twice the number of periodicals. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the origins of the word as encompassing an Atlantic oceanic region to Thomas Jefferson in 1782 when, during the Revolutionary War, he invokes the “trans-Atlantic ties” that he is trying to dissolve. Transatlanticism is always a belated category whose own dominant, relevant time was already behind us at the moment we become aware of it. In this respect, both new Atlantic history and the literary criticism it now informs are propelled ahead by the imaginative power of a concept that was invented to look back at the texture of a world that remains apart from the modernity it helps to make. Transatlanticism, to put this differently, is a variety of historicism as it was conceived in the nineteenth century: a way of understanding how the past is a space that is entirely its own and knowable when we feel how far we traveled from it even if, according to the clock or calendar, time may not have moved so much as we have.

References and Further Reading Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Bailyn, Bernard, and Patricia L. Denault. Eds. Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Barthes, Roland. Michelet. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987. Baucom, Ian. “Introduction: Atlantic Genealogies.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 1–13. Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Blum, Hester. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 670–7. Boelhower, William. “Atlantic Studies Complexities: Routes across Cultures.” In “The Sea Is History”: Exploring the Atlantic (pp. 11–23). Eds. Carmen Birkle and Nicole Walker. Heidelberg: Universitätssverlag, 2009. Boelhower, William. “The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix.” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 83–101. Braudel, Fernand. 1949. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol.

2. Trans. Sian Reynolds. Glasgow: William Collins, 1973. Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Brown, Vincent. “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery.” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1232–49. Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Chaplin, Joyce E. “The Atlantic Ocean and Its Contemporary Meanings, 1492–1808.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (pp. 3–34). Eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Coclanis, Peter. “Atlantic World or Atlantic/ World.” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 726–42. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

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Eltis, David, and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Esty, Jed. “Oceanic, Traumatic, Post-Paradigmatic: A Response to William Boelhower.” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 102–7. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader (pp. 76–100). Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Games, Alison. “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities.” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 741–57. Games, Alison. “Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections.” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 675–92. Giles, Paul. Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair. In True Stories from History and Biography. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972. Klein, Bernhard, and Gesa Mackenthun. Eds. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2004. Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor. Eds. The Transatlantic Literary Studies Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

McGill, Meredith L., ed. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. McGill, Meredith L. Ed. The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Morgan, Philip D., and Jack P. Greene. “Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic History.” In Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (pp. 3–34). Eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard William. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. O’Reilly, William. “Genealogies of Atlantic History.” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 66–84. Orr, Mary. Intertextuality. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Schlegel, Frederick. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. Trans. J. G. Lockhart. Philadelphia: Dobson, 1818. Slauter, Eric. “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World.” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2008): 135–61. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954. Wïgen, Karen. “Introduction.” American Historical Review 1113, no. 3 (2006): 717–21.

17

American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain Shelley Fisher Fishkin

During the last decade or so, a number of books have drawn our attention to American literature written in languages other than English, and to the transnational movements of people and culture that gave rise to this rich body of material. I have in mind books like Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors; and The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, edited by Marc Shell and Sollors. Also Xiao-huang Yin’s Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (with its attention to American literature written in Chinese); Hana Wirth-Nesher’s Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature; Merle Bachman’s Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature; and numerous publications coming out of Arte Público Press under the direction of Nicolás Kanellos. Work like this, along with a large body of work by historians, has been central to the “transnational turn” in American studies, marked by the creation of the American Studies Association’s International Initiative and the launch of the Journal of Transnational American Studies.1 These and other like-minded projects are rooted in the assumption that American scholars need to be more attentive to voices that were previously largely redlined from the cultural conversation about the United States. But there is a category of voices that has received almost no attention in this recent ferment of recovery and recognition: the voices of writers and scholars who were not American, who wrote about American literature over the last century and a half in languages other than English, and who published their work outside the United States. This chapter explores what we might gain by seeking out and attending to some of this writing. I take as my case study Mark Twain. The cultural conversation

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about Mark Twain that is most familiar to scholars in the United States transpires in English. But writers have been reading and responding to Mark Twain in languages other than English for at least 138 years. Indeed, the first book devoted to Mark Twain published anywhere, in any language, was a French book published in Paris in 1884 by the 24-year-old Henry Gauthier-Villars (best known today for having been the controversial first husband of the writer Colette, whom he met five years after publishing his Twain book). Writers from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, writing in Chinese, Danish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish, have all engaged Twain. Aside from a few excerpts, the pieces they wrote have been unavailable in English until 2010. Previously untranslated texts that I included in a new collection of writers responding to Twain include essays by Nobel laureates from Denmark and Japan, by two of Cuba’s most prominent public intellectuals, by Argentina’s most celebrated author, by a famous Chinese writer (who supplied a preface to the first book by Twain published in China), by a major Russian poet, and by respected writers from Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union. An article on Twain from a Yiddish newspaper in Vilna serves as a poignant reminder of the vibrant intellectual culture that once thrived in Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe. I included as well a piece originally published in Chinese that was translated fairly recently but is still relatively unknown, and a similarly obscure piece that was translated some decades ago from its initial publication in Russian. These previously little-known materials open up new venues of critical inquiry and prompt fresh questions about the place of Twain (and, by extension, US writing) in the world. It has generally been assumed – at least by US scholars – that anything genuinely interesting or worth taking into account about Mark Twain would be published in English. And it has generally been assumed that critical writing in languages other than English was just about the last place one would look to learn something about US authors or about US literary traditions. But this conventional wisdom is flawed on several fronts. Let me give some brief examples of what we can learn about an American writer in the world, from writers working in languages other than English, by drawing on writing on Twain originally published in Chinese, Danish, French, German, Spanish, and Russian. (I am indebted to the colleagues from Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and the United States who translated and in some cases helped identify these materials as well.) I begin with José Martí, the Cuban writer and national hero who died in 1895. Martí is celebrated as an innovative poet and gifted orator, as an idealistic political leader and the father of the Cuban revolution, and as a martyr who tragically lost his life in the struggle to make Cuba an independent, democratic nation. Martí was also the first writer to popularize Mark Twain’s work in the Spanish-speaking world. (As Ivan A. Schulman notes, although other nineteenth-century American writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Longfellow were recognized names among the cultivated reading public in Spanish America during the last quarter of that century, Mark Twain was not; only one brief mention of Twain in a Latin American periodical has come to light before Martí began writing about him [104–5, 111–12]).

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Martí referred to Twain a number of times during his exile in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, but I want to focus on just two such occasions. In November 1884, Martí attended a reading by Mark Twain and George Washington Cable and wrote about it in Spanish for the Buenos Aires paper La Nación, and in 1890 Martí wrote about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in that same publication. In the first of these articles, the main topic that Martí addresses is Twain’s style; in the second, it is his social criticism. And on both of these issues he has interesting things to say. In his 1884 letter to La Nación, which was published in early 1885, Martí praised the unaffected freshness of Twain’s prose and expressed admiration for the ways in which his satire “clarifies with a certain picaresque innocence, the contradictions, baseness and hypocrisy of ordinary people” in a manner that causes people to “laugh at themselves”; and he called Twain a child not “of books but of Nature” (“Escenas” 1:1576, Editorial Lex, in Fishkin, Mark Twain 48–9). Indeed, careful readers of his essay on Twain will find the seeds of some ideas that will blossom in Martí’s most famous essay, “Our America,” which he wrote six years later, in which he praises “the natural man” who “overthrows the authority that is accumulated from books” (291). In this 1884 essay, Martí frequently describes Twain as just such a “natural man.” He writes that [Twain’s] ideas come to him directly from life; and although you can see the literary skill very well in his books, he is not one to trim, snip, and fashion his ideas to appear cultivated, as if any woman in finery for a formal ball were more beautiful than Venus de Milo. Where else but from excessive affectation comes that evasion or distortion of what one sees for himself, out of an urge to demonstrate one’s knowledge of what others have said? (“Escenas” 1:1576, Editorial Lex, in Fishkin, Mark Twain 49)

Martí’s comment about Twain’s rejection of “excessive affectation” resonates with Jorge Luis Borges’s assertion almost a century later that in Huckleberry Finn, “for the first time an American writer used the language of America without affectation” (37). Martí goes on to say in this piece on Twain, “Literature is now an occupation for gilders; it urgently needs to be an occupation for miners. The hands hurt more, but you extract, with strong hands, pure metal” (“Escenas” 1:1577, Editorial Lex, in Fishkin, Mark Twain 49–50). Martí clearly admired Twain for being a miner, not a gilder. The occasion that prompted this letter to La Nación was a public reading. What had Twain read? Although Martí does not name the titles of the selections that Twain read, the record shows that at this reading in New York in the winter of November 1884, Martí would have heard Twain read parts of A Tramp Abroad, as well as some portions of a book that was currently in press, a book that would come out in England the following month, but that would not be published in the United States until early the next year: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.2 But all that Martí had written about Twain previously was pallid and tame compared to his response to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Martí wrote in

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La Nación in 1890, just a little over a month after Yankee was published, that the book was “fueled by indignation” at “the privileged classes who are beginning to rise on the backs of the poor,” that its author was “exasperated” by “injustice,” and that reading the book made Martí want to meet its author and congratulate him (“Escenas” 40:119, Editorial Trópico, in Fishkin Mark Twain 53–4). He recognized that Twain was committed as a writer and as a citizen of a democracy to values that Martí shared: both men rejected the claims of aristocracy to deference and legitimacy; both abhorred injustice; both sympathized with the downtrodden and disempowered; both disdained writing that was pretentious and affected. Martí clearly saw in Twain a kindred spirit. He read Connecticut Yankee as much more than a satire of medieval chivalry: he recognized it as compelling criticism of contemporary injustice. He wrote that Twain “makes evident – with an anger that sometimes borders on the sublime – the vileness of those who would climb atop their fellow man, feed upon his misery, and drink from his misfortune” (“Escenas” 40:119, Editorial Trópico, in Fishkin Mark Twain 53). Twain “handles his subject with such skill,” Martí writes, that we get much more than scenes that are faithful to that age of kings and bishops, villagers and serfs – that a picture emerges of that which is starting to be seen in the United States today: virtuous men who are scourged by whips, armed by nature, with only solitude and hunger, men who go forth with a pen for a lance and a book for a shield to topple the money castles of the new aristocracy. There are paragraphs in Twain’s book that make me want to set off for Hartford to shake his hand. (“Escenas” 40:119, Editorial Trópico, in Fishkin Mark Twain 53–4)

Martí doesn’t say anything quite like that about any other writer he admires – even writers about whom he wrote at much greater length. Martí clearly recognized Twain as a fellow traveler when it came to issues of social justice; he saw the author of Connecticut Yankee as one Yankee who dissented from some of the conventional pieties of the exploitative society in which he lived, as Martí himself did, and, in a larger sense, whose social critique of modern society paralleled Martí’s own in important ways. The cultural and political issues at the core of Connecticut Yankee were often sidestepped by reviewers who preferred to focus on the book’s less controversial mockery of a long-dead age of chivalry. There were exceptions to this trend, of course – most notably, William Dean Howells, who wrote a review the same month that Martí’s was published in which he asserted that the Twain we see in Yankee is to the full the humorist, as we know him; but he is very much more, and his strong, indignant, often infuriate hate of injustice, and his love of equality, burn hot through the manifold adventures and experiences of the tale. . . . There are passages in which we see that the noble of Arthur’s day, who battened on the blood and sweat of his bondmen, is one in essence with the capitalist of [our own] day who grows rich on the labor of his underpaid wagemen. (145)

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Still, Howells and Martí were in the minority in their focus on social justice issues in the novel. Mark Twain may have helped model for Martí, then, ways in which a writer could reject effete, mannered, excessively ornamental European models and create natural, bold, original art out of American materials – materials mined from American quarries; he also may have modeled a way to create art “fueled by indignation” and powered by a well-honed sense of social justice. Is it not intriguing that a Martí who would entitle his most widely reprinted essay “Nuestra América,” or “Our America,” referred to the author of Connecticut Yankee with affection, one year earlier, as “Nuestro Mark Twain,” or “Our Mark Twain” (“Escenas” 38:186, Editorial Trópico, in Fishkin, Mark Twain 48)? The leading Cuban public intellectual of the generation after Martí similarly would lay claim to Twain as a kinsman from a continental standpoint. Jesús Castellanos wrote in 1910 that there is only “one in all the continent who can call himself truly American,” and that one is Mark Twain. “No one else has presented such astonishing discoveries of expression, feeling, ideas, language,” Castellanos wrote (116). We can probably credit Twain with having helped hone Martí’s aesthetic sense of what kind of new-world language was needed to tell new-world stories – a vernacular modernism, if you will, that aspired in theory, if not always in practice, to eschew the belabored, ornamental “gilded” literary conventions with Old World pedigrees in favor of a more rough-hewn and natural prose style. Twain also seems to have modeled for Martí how a writer could prompt readers to think about social justice in fresh ways. Both of these areas would inform Martí‘s own writing in the years that followed. Both would also prove to be central for other non-U.S. writers who read Twain. Indeed, the two areas that were particularly salient for Martí were key to other writers around the world, as well – in some cases decades before they came to figure prominently in the thinking of writers and critics writing in English. In 1884, the same year that José Martí lauded Twain for being a miner and not a gilder, for rejecting the densely ornamental “gilded” writing models of Europe in favor of a more natural mode better suited to the United States, a young Parisian, Henry Gauthier-Villars, made virtually the identical point in his book entitled simply Mark Twain – the first book published on Mark Twain anywhere. Only GauthierVillars was writing not as a fellow “American” in the continental sense, as Martí was, but as a young Frenchman who saw Twain as modeling what I’ve called a “vernacular modernism” that Gauthier-Villars wanted to graft onto French literature. GauthierVillars had little use for what he called the “refined stylists” currently in fashion in France who “compose a sentence with the minute labor of a mosaicist,” with results that are “tangled-up” and “precious,” writers who feel obliged to disdain the “gaiety, spontaneity,” and “literary good health” so abundant in the work of Mark Twain (94; Fishkin, Mark Twain 56). With wonderful élan, Gauthier-Villars held up Twain as a standard to displace the dull “refined stylists” currently in vogue, urging his countrymen to look to “young America and its completely new literature [since] the authors

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of the Old World have nothing more to satisfy our jaded minds” (11; Fishkin, Mark Twain 57). He continued, [H]ere is a first-rate writer who has not taken from the Germans either their mysticism or their brutality, and who even leaves to the English their jolts of convulsive laughter and black depression; he will not ever lose himself in the foggy ruminations of JeanPaul; he will not tarry either in the lovingly stroked descriptions of tea prepared at just the right temperature, that try the patience of the French in insurmountable terror! No! He is lively, jovial, incisive, and his bold irony deserves to focus, at least for a moment, our easily distracted attention. Hello then, charming writer with no model or imitator! I bid you welcome among us, newcomer with endless verve; the sound of the hurrahs you have raised has already crossed the ocean. We have been waiting for you. (12; Fishkin, Mark Twain 57)

Gauthier-Villars cautioned that translations may not “capture the joyous temerity of the American prose, or the joyous eccentricity of the expressions Twain creates from whole cloth, nor the sharp edges of the humor to which the original use of slang adds irresistible comedy” (56; Fishkin, Mark Twain 60). But nonetheless Gauthier-Villars hazarded a number of translations of his own that in large measure manage to do justice to Twain’s originals. (Gauthier-Villars paid homage to Twain in later years, by the way, by occasionally publishing under the pen name “Jim Smiley,” which is the name of the gambling-obsessed figure central to Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”) The influence of those refined Gallic stylists who set the standards in literary art seems to have declined elsewhere in Europe, as well, in part as a result of the efforts of other European admirers of Mark Twain. One example is Johannes V. Jensen, who is often considered the first great modern Danish author. When Twain died in 1910, Jensen wrote an editorial in the leading Danish newspaper, Politiken. Here Jensen wrote that “vitality is the word that almost fully covers Mark Twain’s nature. There is something singularly rested and awake about him, he rears, challenges, he is new, and there is a new world around him. His essence is a new beginning” (5; Fishkin, Mark Twain 119). When Jensen received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1944, in his acceptance speech he credited himself with having imparted something akin to that vitality to his own country’s literature; he wrote, “I inspired a change in the Danish literature and press by introducing English and American vigour, which was to replace the then dominant trend of decadent Gallicism” (Nobel; Fishkin, Mark Twain 117). The vitality and “American vigour” of Mark Twain’s prose probably played a role in shaping the ways in which Jensen transformed Danish writing in the twentieth century, an aspect of his work that the Nobel Prize committee recognized when it applauded the “bold, freshly creative style” that Jensen had developed (NobelPrize.org). Twain may even have had a hand in prodding Germans to be more open to accepting a more streamlined, modern version of their language. At least that possibility

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arises when we read what Eduard Engel, an influential German novelist, critic, and philologist, wrote in 1880 about “The Awful German Language,” which Twain published as an appendix to A Tramp Abroad. Calling this “the best Mark Twain has ever accomplished,” Engel wrote, Here, ignorance, good humor, and wit form such a strange mixture that when reading it one really does not know if one should get angry or laugh. I preferred the latter and advise any reader of this appendix to do the same. (578; Fishkin, Mark Twain 37)

Engel, the great turn-of-the-twentieth-century authority on German, credits Twain with having somehow aptly hit upon many “a sad truth” about the language “worth taking to heart,” such as when he is deploring the “parenthesis disease” that allows a “sort of luminous intellectual fog” to substitute for “clearness” (578; Fishkin, Mark Twain 38). Engel claimed in 1880, concerning one point Twain raised, that it was “well-known” that “a reform, if you want to call it one, is on its way,” one that he wagered Mark Twain could witness if he “visits Germany again in another ten years” (578; Fishkin, Mark Twain 38). But in her translator’s note, Valerie Bopp observes that over a century later, that reform has still not come to pass (Fishkin, Mark Twain 39). I want to turn now to what we can learn from these commentaries in languages other than English about the second theme that José Martí put on the table in his discussion of Twain – Twain’s social criticism and concern with issues of social justice. Until relatively recently, readers in the United States were likely to be largely unfamiliar with the Mark Twain that writers in China and the Soviet Union had been praising for much of the twentieth century. As Maxwell Geismar put it in Scanlan’s in 1970, During the Cold War era of our culture, mainly in the 1950’s although extending back into the ’40s and forward far into the ’60s, Mark Twain was both revived and castrated. The entire arena of Twain’s radical social criticism of the United States – its racism, imperialism, and finance capitalism – has been repressed or conveniently avoided by the so-called Twain scholars precisely because it is so bold, so brilliant, so satirical. And so prophetic. (33)

But while most Americans in the twentieth century had been encountering a tame and “castrated” Twain, to borrow Geismar’s word, readers in China and the Soviet Union were encountering a Twain unafraid to launch salvos at the hypocrisy and failings of the country that he loved. It turns out that Mark Twain’s achievement as a writer and his role as a social and cultural critic may have been distorted by imperatives of the Cold War, in ways that Twain scholars (myself included) have heretofore largely ignored. While Chinese and Soviet writers and critics lauded the Twain who was a searing critic of his country, American writers and critics at midcentury largely dismissed that Twain as a figment of the Communist propaganda machine and

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valorized America’s Twain as a writer to be celebrated primarily as a humorist rather than as a satirist and social critic. The propaganda functions to which Twain’s writings were put are obvious; but Americans threw out the baby with the bathwater when they downplayed the validity of Twain’s criticisms of his country – which were also criticisms of their country – and, unfortunately, in some ways, of America today as well. Lao She (the pen name used by Shu She Yu, 1899–1966) was one of the leading Chinese authors of the twentieth century. In 1960, as president of the National Association of Writers, he delivered a speech in Beijing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death.3 Lao She was in the United States between 1946 and 1949, and returned home soon after Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. An influential novelist and dramatist, he was named “The People’s Artist” and played a prominent role in the Chinese literary establishment before he was purged from the Communist Party and became a victim of the Cultural Revolution (although it is undisputed that Lao She delivered this speech, and although the text is now widely credited to him in print in China, the prominent Chinese poet and scholar Yuan Kejia claimed in a Chinese journal in 1985 that he was paid to write this speech for Lao She to deliver, and that he is its actual author).4 As Xilao Li has noted, after the founding of the People’s Republic, Mark Twain was one of the very few foreign writers whose works were allowed to be translated and published. Particularly during the Korean War, the anti-imperialist, antiwar aspects of his work were emphasized. Although Lao’s speech fits this mold and served China’s ruling interests at the time, and contains some of the expected Cold War jargon, it also contains some insightful readings of pieces by Twain with which American readers were then largely unfamiliar. With a few exceptions – most notably work by Philip Foner and Maxwell Geismar – Twain’s trenchant critiques of the country he loved tended to be as ignored in the United States at midcentury as they were celebrated in China. The fact that the most important book on this topic, Philip Foner’s Mark Twain, Social Critic, was published by International Publishers, the publishing firm of the Communist Party U.S.A., may have helped to prevent it from having the impact that it deserved to have upon Twain scholars; it was not ignored – but neither did it set scholars’ agendas. Meanwhile, Geismar was marginalized and dismissed as a critic in part because of his progressive politics.5 Only in the 1990s would American scholars generally decide that this political aspect of Twain deserved their attention. Lao She notes in 1960 that Twain’s criticism of the “Dollar Empire” has retained profound and immediate significance throughout the past half century. . . . Mark Twain’s reprimand of the imperialist aggressive powers and sympathy for the anti-colonialist Asian and African people [are] especially significant. This is the part of his literary heritage we should value most. (11, emphasis added; Fishkin, Mark Twain 283–4)

But until the publication of Jim Zwick’s book Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: AntiImperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War in 1992, this was probably the part

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of Twain’s literary heritage that his countrymen valued least. Zwick’s book did much to help Americans rediscover this side of Twain and set in motion a process of reevaluation that continues into the twenty-first century, in work like the recent international forum on ‘The War-Prayer” that ran in the first issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Lao She had announced back in 1960, In the fall of 1900, Mark Twain returned to the United States after being absent nine years. He told the press, “And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any land.” He also gave strong support to the Chinese people’s fierce struggle against imperialist aggression. As early as 1868, in his essay entitled “Treaty with China,” he berated the shameless invaders for their forceful setting up of concessions. (12; Fishkin, Mark Twain 284)

To this day, relatively few Americans have even heard of “Treaty with China,” an article Twain published in the New York Tribune in 1868. Indeed, this article is so obscure that its first reprinting since its initial publication was in the spring of 2010, in the second issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies, which also features an analysis of it by Martin Zehr. The speech that Lao She delivered in 1960 reveals an astute and thoroughgoing familiarity with a tremendous number of Twain’s publications, many of which were relatively unknown to Americans. It particularly champions Twain’s “excellent political comments and essays,” noting, for example, In 1900, in his “Salutation Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth,” [Twain] remarked sarcastically, “I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-chew, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking glass.” He thought the American invasion of the Philippines had stained the American flag, on which the only thing fit to be drawn were “the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross bones. (12; Fishkin, Mark Twain 285)

Twain’s anti-imperialism was not the only aspect of his satirical social critique that Lao She/Yuan Kejia appreciated. Along with Soviet writers Yan Bereznitsky and Abel Startsev, Lao She also underscored the strength, depth, and aptness of Twain’s critiques of American racism, drawing readers’ attention to texts with which most Americans were unfamiliar (14; Fishkin, Mark Twain 286). In a similar vein, the Twain that the Soviet writer Abel Startsev valued in his 1963 book, Mark Twain in America, was a Twain whose love for his country forced him to blast the “racists and lynchers” who had inspired him to write the dystopian fantasy “The United States of Lyncherdom,” a piece that Americans did not read in unbowdlerized form until the 1990s (Fishkin, Mark Twain 295; Oggel).

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The Twain that Lao She celebrated was the antiracist Twain, the Twain who was “Peace loving, democracy loving, anti-imperialist and anticolonialist” (14; Fishkin, Mark Twain 287). This is the Twain who was also valued by Soviet critic Yan Bereznitsky. But both Bereznitsky and Lao She complained that this was the Twain that Americans preferred to bury or ignore. Writing in Liturnaya Gazeta in 1960, Bereznitsky faulted the selections that Charles Neider had made in his 1959 edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, charging that Neider had allowed previously unpublished “inoffensive trifles” such as “Twain’s meditations on baldness, on the value of hair-washing,” and so on to displace Twain’s “indignant notes about the predatory wars which the United States carried on half a century ago” or his critiques of the “knights and henchmen of American expansionism” – pieces that were omitted from Neider’s book (“Mark Twain” 14; Fishkin, Mark Twain 279). Lao She, too, had voiced the charge that American critics were reducing a bracing, satirical, social and political critic to a figure who told trivial humorous anecdotes. In his 1960 speech, Lao She had written, “Some critics, bribed by Wall Street, even labeled Twain as just a humorist, trying to wipe out the bitter sarcasm behind his humor. Twain by no means was a mere humorist. He was a profound and excellent satirist” (14; Fishkin, Mark Twain 287). The assumption that American critics were “bribed by Wall Street” is absurd, of course, a relic of the discourse of the Cold War. But the opinion that Lao She/Yuan Kejia attributes to these critics is accurate. While the “part of [Twain’s] literary heritage we should value most,” according to Lao She/Yuan Kejia, was his searing social critique, American critics by and large did maintain that what was most important about Twain was his humor. Indeed, this view of what mattered most about Twain dominated writing on Twain throughout the twentieth century, and continues into the twenty-first. When he wrote a new preface in 2001 to his book Mark Twain: Social Philosopher, which had first appeared in 1962, Louis J. Budd, the celebrated elder statesman of Twain scholars (and a man whom I admire), felt compelled to close his new preface with this assertion, “Though I consider sociopolitical ideas – or the art of how we do and must live together – supremely important, we care about [Twain’s] particular questions and answers primarily because of his gift for humor” (xvii). Lao She/Yuan Kejia begged to differ. Personally, I find Lao She/Yuan Kejia’s view of what matters most about Twain more compelling: there is humor, to be sure; but it is the social criticism that makes it lasting. As Twain himself once said, “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever” (Mark Twain 202). How would late twentieth-century and early twenty-firstcentury writing on Twain be different if the extended appraisals of Twain’s long arc of anti-imperialist writing by Lao She/Yuan Kejia, Startsev, and Bereznitsky had been more familiar to Americans? What might it look like, for example, if Americans had been more aware of his 1868 anti-imperialist work, “Treaty with China,” that Lao She lauded in 1960? Perhaps noted scholar of empire Amy Kaplan would have hesitated before making the argument that we should view Twain as aligned with pro-

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imperialist forces until the last decade or so of his life, a factor that she claims is key to the writer he became. As John Carlos Rowe observes in Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, The strict periodization of the “anti-imperialist” Mark Twain of the fin de siècle, as distinct from the apparently patriotic and nationalist Twain of the 1870s and 1880s, has prevented us from recognizing how anti-colonial and anti-imperialist attitude[s] inflect virtually all of Twain’s writings. (122)

I agree with Rowe that “Twain’s public statements about his ‘change of mind’ ” about imperialism belie “the continuity of his thinking about imperialism from Connecticut Yankee to his overtly anti-imperialist satires of the period 1898–1905” (125). (Indeed, “Treaty with China” suggests that we need to track his anti-imperialist views back to 1868.) Rowe warns us not to trivialize “the great achievement of [Twain’s] critique of European and emerging U.S. imperialisms.” Twain, along with Howells, he tells us, spoke out against U.S. imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines . . . at a time when few were able to understand and even fewer were willing to challenge the emerging imperium of the United States. . . . [L]ong study . . . enabled [Twain] to comprehend what few others did about the direction of United States foreign policy and national identity. (139)

Lao She/Yuan Kejia, Yan Bereznitsky, and Abel Startsev foregrounded precisely these issues decades before US critics began to pay them serious attention; José Martí was attending to them a century before most US critics recognized their importance. Our understanding of Twain’s impact on the development of vernacular modernism in a range of languages in the twentieth century, and our appreciation of his prescient role as a social critic, are enriched when we add the voices of Martí, Gauthier-Villars, Lao She/Yuan Kejia, Bereznitsky, Startsev, and others to the conversation. For a century and a half, Twain’s works have traveled across the globe, shaping world literature in ways we are just beginning to understand. And for nearly that long, writers and critics have been discussing Twain in languages other than English, honing often fresh and distinctive insights into how Twain’s writing works and why it matters. It may not be easy to welcome multilingual, transnational voices into the cultural conversation about Mark Twain. Such an enterprise requires that we work collaboratively across linguistic and national borders, that we get to know colleagues in foreign language and literature departments at our own universities and around the world, that we embrace new technologies that facilitate global communication, that we stalk serendipity with interlibrary loan, and that we urge our multilingual students to apply their language skills to broadening the study of American literature. While this chapter has focused on what we can learn about Mark Twain by paying attention to transnational perspectives on his work, extending this approach to other

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writers can yield comparable fresh insights. A case in point is Walt Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman, edited by Ed Folsom, which was published in 2002. This outstanding collection of essays, the result of an international conference held in Beijing, demonstrates the significance of Whitman’s impact on literature in China, and also deepens our understanding of the importance of Asia for Whitman himself.6 Exploring transnational perspectives on American literature poses many challenges. It requires scholars whose primary language is English to pay attention to the possibilities and pitfalls of translation. It insists that colleagues around the world help each other to grasp how American writers are understood in connection with a range of national literary traditions. It demands that Americanists move beyond their comfort zone – beyond familiar ways of talking about their field – to seek out ways of connecting, in person and virtually, with peers who live and work in vastly different linguistic and cultural environments. But with these challenges come extraordinary opportunities. Foremost among them is the chance to make American literary studies in the twenty-first century a truly global, genuinely collaborative enterprise infused with unprecedented energy and excitement.

Notes 1.

See Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 2004.” The ASA International Initiative, which helped make it possible for over a hundred scholars from outside the United States to attend the American Studies Association annual meetings for four years, from 2004 to 2007, was supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Asia Foundation, the National Science Foundation of Taiwan, the U.S.-China Education Trust, the Luce Foundation, and other foundations. See also Elliott, “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does it Mean When American Studies is Transnational? – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 2006.” The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) was launched in 2009. As the open-access journal notes on its home page, The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) is a peer-reviewed online journal that seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary study of American cultures

in a transnational context. JTAS is the first academic journal explicitly focused on what Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 American Studies Association presidential address called the “transnational turn” in American Studies. Sponsored by UC Santa Barbara’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and Stanford University’s Program in American Studies, JTAS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. (http://escholarship. org/uc/search?entity=acgcc_jtas;view= aboutus) To access volumes 1, 2, and 3 of the journal, go to http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity =acgcc_jtas;volume=1;issue=1, http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity = acgcc_jtas; volume=2;issue=1, and http://escholarship. org/uc/search?entity = acgcc_jtas;volume =3;issue=1. JTAS has an editorial board of scholars from Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

American Literature in Transnational Perspective 2.

The New York Sun reported, for example, on November 19, 1884, that at the Chickering Hall reading (the event that Martí attended) Twain announced that he would “give a short chapter from my new novel, ‘Huckleberry Finn.’” The New York Times reported (also on November 19, 1884) that in addition to reading from his new novel during the regular program, when he was summoned to do an encore, Twain “ladled out another section of the ‘Huckleberry Finn’ advance sheets.” 3. For decades, scholars had assumed it had been lost, but after determined searching over many years, J.R. LeMaster and Zhao Huazhi managed to locate a copy in 1995 and had it translated by Zhao Yuming and Sui Gang; the translation was published in 1996 in the USChina Review. 4. In the summer of 2010, while this chapter was being written, I learned from literature professor Gongzhao Li of Luoyang University of Foreign Studies in China that although it is established that Lao She definitely delivered this text as a speech in Beijing in 1960, the speech may actually have been written for him by another prominent Chinese writer, Yuan Kejia, a respected poet and expert on American literature. According to Gongzhao Li, In Feb. 1985, Foreign Literature Review, run by the Institute of Foreign Literature, China Academy of Social Sciences, published a note by Yuan Kejia, in which he pointed out the mistake in publishing, in the 4th issue of Foreign Literature Review in 1984 (p. 132)[,] the essay under the name of Lao She. He also described the circumstance under which Lao She read the essay. It was read at a national conference in memory of Mark Twain in

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1960. They made the agreement that Yuan was to write the essay, and Lao She was to read the essay under his name, but the payment for the writing was to go to Yuan. Yuan said in the note that it was not uncommon for one to write an essay and for another to read it under his name. But for publication, it was another matter. The essay should be given its right author’s name to avoid confusions in the future. (Gongzhao Li, personal email communication, July 6, 2010) The essay, however, continues to be attributed to Lao She in China despite Yuan Kejia’s claim that it was he, and not Lao She, who wrote it. 5. In the 1960s, however, in part in response to charges of American censorship of Twain made by Soviet critics, some of Twain’s social criticism began to appear in print in the United States. But, as Jim Zwick points out, the versions of these pieces that US editors often used had been bowdlerized by Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s first biographer. As Zwick notes, “these later editors,” who included some of Twain’s social criticism in editions in the 1960s and early 1970s, “were undoubtedly unaware that by relying on Paine’s texts they were perpetuating a literary fraud. [Janet] Smith and Geismar, in particular, were trying to present the critical Mark Twain, but they unintentionally (and carelessly) reproduced censored texts that diluted his views” (Confronting 171). 6. It built upon the pioneering earlier anthology, Walt Whitman and the World, edited by Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom, which included responses to Whitman by poets and writers from around the globe.

References and Further Reading Allen, Gay Wilson, and Ed Folsom. Eds. Walt Whitman and the World. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. Bachman, Merle. Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007.

Bereznitsky, Yan. “Mark Twain on the Bed of Procrustes.” Literaturnaya Gazeta (Moscow), August 18, 1959, 4. In Charles Neider. Ed. Mark Twain and the Russians: An Exchange of Views (pp. 13–15). Trans. Robert Belknap. New York: Hill & Wang, 1960.

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Bereznitsky, Yan. “The Question is Significantly More Profound: A Letter to Charles Neider.” Literaturnaya Gazeta (Moscow), December 12, 1959, 5. In Charles Neider. Ed. Mark Twain and the Russians: An Exchange of Views (pp. 19–24). Trans. Robert Belknap. New York: Hill & Wang, 1960. Borges, Jorge Luis, and Esther Zemborain De Torres Duggan. An Introduction to American Literature. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1971. Budd, Louis J. “Preface to the 2001 Edition.” In Louis J. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (pp. ix–xviii). 1962. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Castellanos, Jesús. “Mark Twain.” In Los Optimistas (pp. 115–20). Madrid: Editorial América, 1910. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 133–6). Trans. Edward M. Test. New York: Library of America, 2010. Elliot, Emory. “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational? – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 2006.” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2007): 1–22. Engel, Eduard. “Mark Twain: Ein Amerikanischer ‘Humorist’ ” (Mark Twain: An American Humorist). Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes 98 (1880): 575–9. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 30–9). Trans. Valerie Bopp. New York: Library of America, 2010. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 17–57. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works. New York: Library of America, 2010. Fishkin, Shelly Fisher, and Takayuki Tatsumi. Eds. “New Perspectives on ‘The War-Prayer’: An International Forum.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1, no. 1 (2009). http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=acgcc_jtas;volume= 1;issue=1 Folsom, Ed. Ed. Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.

Foner, Philip S. Mark Twain, Social Critic. New York: International Publishers, 1958. Gauthier-Villars, Henry. Mark Twain. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, Imprimeur-Libraire, 1884. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 56–60). Trans. Greg Robinson. New York: Library of America, 2010. Geismar, Maxwell. Mark Twain: An American Prophet. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Geismar, Maxwell. “Mark Twain and the Robber Barons.” Scanlan’s Monthly, March 1970, 33–39. Howells, William Dean. “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” 1890. In William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain (pp. 145–9). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910. Jensen, Johannes V. “Mark Twain.” Politiken (Copenhagen), April 23, 1910, 5. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 117–20). Trans. Jan Nordby Gretlund. New York: Library of America, 2010. Journal of Transnational American Studies. Center for American Cultures and Global Contexts, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Program in American Studies, Stanford University. eScholarship, University of California. http://escholarship.org/uc/acgcc_jtas Kanellos, Nicolás. Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kaplan, Amy. “The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain.” In Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Lao, She (Yuan Kejia). “Mark Twain: Exposer of the ‘Dollar Empire.’ A Speech by Lao She Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Death of Mark Twain.” US-China Review 19 (Summer 1995): 11–15. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 283–8). Trans. Zhao Yuming, Sui Gand, and J.R. LeMaster. New York: Library of America, 2010. Li, Xilao. “The Adventures of Mark Twain in China: Translation and Appreciation of More Than a Century.” The Mark Twain Annual 6, no. 1 (November 2008): 65–76. Martí, José. “Escenas Norteamericanas” (“North American scenes”). La Nación (Buenos Aires),

American Literature in Transnational Perspective sent November 27, 1884, published January 11, 1885. In José Martí: Obras Completas (pp. 1575– 9). Vol. 1. Havana: Editorial Lex, 1946. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 48–53). Trans. Edward M. Test. New York: Library of America, 2010. Martí, José. “Escenas Norteamericanas” (“North American scenes”). La Nación (Buenos Aires), sent January 9, 1890, published February 20, 1890. In Obras Completas de Martí (pp. 113–22). Vol. 38. Havana: Editorial Trópico, 1941. Martí, José. “Escenas Norteamericanas” (“North American scenes”). La Nación (Buenos Aires), sent January 13, 1890, published March 12, 1890. In Obras Completas de Martí (pp. 113–22). Vol. 40. Havana: Editorial Trópico, 1942. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 53–5). Trans. Rubén Builes and Cintia Santana. New York: Library of America, 2010. Martí, José. “Nuestra America” (“Our America”). El Partido Liberal (Mexico City), January 20, 1891. In José Martí: Selected Writings (pp. 288–96). Trans. Esther Allen. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002. NobelPrize.org. “Nobel Prize in Literature 1944: Johannes V. Jensen.” http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1944/jensenautobio.html Oggel, Terry L. “Speaking Out about Race: ‘The United States of Lyncherdom’ Clemens Really Wrote.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 25 (2000): 115–38. Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Schulman, Ivan A. “José Martí and Mark Twain: A Study of Literary Sponsorship.” Symposium 15, no. 2 (1961): 104–13.

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Shell, Marc, and Werner Sollors. Eds. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Sollors, Werner. Ed. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Startsev, Abel. Mapκ TBeH и AMepиκa (Mark Twain in America). 1963. Rev. ed. Moscow, 1985. In Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Ed. The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (pp. 293–5). Trans. Katya Vladimirov and Nina Yermakov Morgan. New York: Library of America, 2010. Twain, Mark. Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper, 1940. Twain, Mark. “Treaty with China.” New York Tribune, August 4, 1868. In Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1 (2010). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2r87m203 Wirth-Nesher, Hana. Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Yin, Xiao-huang. Chinese American Literature since the 1850s. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Zehr, Martin. “Mark Twain, ‘The Treaty with China,’ and the Chinese Connection.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1 (2010). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t02n321 Zwick, Jim. Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity, 2007. Zwick, Jim. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: AntiImperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

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Southern Literary Studies John T. Matthews

It may be surprising to learn how central new ways of thinking about the South are to the questions and research now transforming the whole field of American literary studies. That in the past this was rarely true of scholarship about the region’s literature almost goes without saying. The US South was long associated in the rest of the nation’s imagination with resistance to moral and material progress, cultural isolation, and even a kind of proud spirit of backwardness. Many Southerners celebrated their sectional culture for its veneration of “traditional” values allegedly lost in the national march toward modernity: a sense of community; a regard for place; the continuity of family across generations; a social order founded on “natural” hierarchies of race, gender, and class; and an appreciation for leisure and culture over industry and money making. Scholars of Southern literature tended to reproduce those features as categories of analysis, even when they noticed inadequacies and contradictions within them. Through the era of the region’s belated modernization (changes spurred between the late 1930s and late 1950s by the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights struggle), Southern literary criticism’s explanation of what made writing of “the” US South distinctive often served as implicit defense of a culture thought still to harbor worthwhile oppositional values. Belief in Southern distinctiveness hardly died out with the region’s acceptance of more modern views and values. In 1980, one prominent scholar of Southern letters wondered whether the country might not be entering a new era in which the region’s experiences in progressive reform – particularly the revolution in race relations achieved by the contemporary South – could inspire liberal advances nationally. The inauguration of a highly popular Southern president in 1992 invited reflections on

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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how Southern the nation as a whole was becoming, and then in 2008 the nation elected its first black president, a man whose personal history evokes a colonially inflected hybridity: Barack Obama’s father was a Kenyan, his mother was the descendant of a white slave-owning family from Kansas, and his childhood years were spent in Indonesia and Hawaii. Some commentators continue to tout the South’s persistent differences (its comparatively high level of religious practice, for example), but demographic changes in Southern states make any effort to imagine “an enduring South” increasingly difficult. Inspired in part by the exciting variety of contemporary creative work in the US South, much of it by recent immigrants from Southeast Asia and Latin America, as well as African Americans returning to the region, literary scholars of the South have been challenging the orthodoxies that governed earlier accounts of the section’s culture. The result has been not only to interrogate regional shibboleths of agrarian community, place, the past, and the “natural” orders of race, gender, sexuality, and family – exposing how such ideals functioned ideologically to preserve advantages for certain groups – but also to begin to rethink even more fundamental categories like “the South” and “America” – exploring how the US South functioned as a disavowed Other in fantasies of national unity and purity, and how the histories of colonial conquest, the extermination of indigenous peoples, and the republic’s involvement in transatlantic slaveholding plantation economies were localized in one part of the country, where you could “look away” from them.

The South: World and Nation As American studies has swung broadly toward transnational modes of analysis, the US South has emerged as a crucial site for reconceptualizing the material and cultural history of the hemisphere. Although it is still not always treated as a fundamental category, the South – especially as expanded to designate numerous other hemispheric and global places that share histories of European colonialism – figures in reconsiderations of transatlantic Euro-American society, slavery and abolitionism; histories of race, New World immigration, Caribbean colonial societies, and the aftermath of independence; comparisons of hemispheric plantation cultures; and the histories of European imperialism (including US border studies) as well as of postcolonial regimes of racial segregation. In some ways, that is, the US South has risen to a new level of general and scholarly attention in a straightforward way: as a region whose irrepressible contemporary creative vitality has attracted notice; whose material and cultural history prove, on closer inspection, to be more complex and more central to national bearings than previously appreciated; and whose similarities to other Southern places invite conceptualization of a global South. Our definition of American literature, once taken in the United States to mean its own national literature (and even that of a pretty provincial sort), has been stretched in numerous ways, with various senses of Southernness contributing to breaking the continental Northeastern frame that once shaped our view of American literary culture.

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In other ways, though, “the South” retains its power to conceal the world-system – to use Immanuel Wallerstein’s influential formulation – responsible for the emergence of modern industrial capitalism. Wallerstein proposes a model of core and periphery to explain the primary dyad of capitalist world systems: the speculative, productive, and commercial domination of metropolises over peripheries that supply raw materials via exploitable land and labor. Although core and periphery tended at one point to align with geographical spaces like north and south, Wallerstein’s economic model emphasizes that such “places” are essentially positions within a system that divides the labor of production. Some of the most exciting work on US Southern literature situates it in the context of transnational colonial Souths. Southern literary scholarship has been revolutionized by the emergence of hemispheric comparative studies. In Post-Slavery Literature of the Americas, George Handley contends that nothing short of a fully comparative approach to “New World” literatures can break the US-centrism of an “American” literary history that has typically been understood as a matter of British transatlantic culture, and of methods of analysis and aesthetic standards suited to it. In demonstrating how postplantation cultures in the United States, Cuba, Mexico, and other Latin American nations shared conceptual problems – in this study, how to avoid reproducing colonial models of family and blood ancestry as they sought to imagine postemancipation modes of affiliation and identity – Handley powerfully resituates prominent works of US Southern literature. For example, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! may be telling the story of the South not only as a distinct sectional destiny, from Tidewater Virginia to the Mississippi cotton frontier, but also as the manifestation of a hemispheric history of colonial slave economies, racial technologies, slave rebellion, and emancipation and modern statehood. Likewise, the US South’s notorious obsession with history – also susceptible to an excessively national-regional explanation, and exemplified in US criticism’s fetishization of Faulkner’s preoccupation with the Deep South’s past – is put into hemispheric perspective by Deborah Cohn’s History and Memory in the Two Souths, which focuses on the comparable efforts of the postemancipation US South and South America to imagine usable colonial pasts. The problem of Faulkner’s disproportionate representativeness of the South (a problem because of the many national and social positions his work cannot speak from or for) we might track here as a touchstone in the new Southern studies. On the one hand, the indisputable capaciousness of Faulkner’s historical and literary imagination has allowed subsequent writers around the world – including many in the global South – to draw decisively on his work: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, V.S. Naipaul, and Edwidge Danticat, to name a very few. Cohn and Jon Smith’s edited volume of essays, Look Away! which takes as its premise that the US South, owing to its formative “experience of New World plantation colonialism” (2), more resembles many Latin American countries than it does the rest of the United States, has an entire section on the exceptional significance of Faulkner to Latin American writers. Edouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi challenged establishment scholars of the South’s signature writer by suggesting that Yoknapatawpha was less the continent’s southernmost

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place than a Caribbean plantation society’s topmost rim. Following Glissant’s lead, Valerie Loichot brings together the writing of Faulkner, St. John Perse, Toni Morrison, and Glissant himself to show the common concerns of authors from various national locales across a “postplantation” South. On the other hand, one might see the kind of critical attention accorded Faulkner as reinscribing the authority of US social and political perspectives, expressive forms, and critical values. Hosam Aboul-Ela’s Other South examines the importance of Faulkner’s fiction to postcolonial authors in South America and the Middle East, but demonstrates that indigenous theories of economic production and class better illuminate how such writers could read Faulkner profitably in postcolonial contexts ostensibly so different from those of the United States. Let me suggest that the lingering reluctance of US scholars of American literature to incorporate the study of the Americas’ Souths fully into the study of US literature stems from the country’s longstanding refusal to acknowledge that the national project rested on the foundation of a slave-holding plantation economy. The US South was only the most proximate reminder that national prosperity descended from a history of hemispheric colonialism and trafficking in humans. A novel like Absalom, Absalom! obsessively unravels the mythmaking that defended elite interests in the South, even as it compulsively reproduces the will to disavowal conditioning the beneficiaries – national as well as regional – of such a past: “I dont hate it [the South]. . . . I dont hate it. . . . I dont. I dont!” It took 50 years for readers of Faulkner’s version of the South’s story to ask why its iconic planter, Thomas Sutpen, has to go to Haiti to begin his career, or how his tiny town in rural Mississippi was connected to a wider circumCaribbean plantation society, or whether it matters that Absalom was published just as the US occupation of Haiti and Santo Domingo was ending in the mid-1930s. Matthew Pratt Guterl’s American Mediterranean, which begins with an evocation of Sutpen in Haiti, recreates a nineteenth-century pan-Caribbean plantation society that formed an economic, social, and cultural web around New Orleans and Havana as the key metropolises of the Gulf basin. Other innovative approaches to transatlantic or hemispheric plantation culture similarly complicate the US South’s regional and national boundaries. The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination by Elizabeth Christine Russ examines the cultural legacy of the New World’s central economic organization on writers from throughout the hemispheric South. Kirsten Silva Gruesz reconstructs the discourses of Hispanic literary activity circulating within and through the porous borders of the United States. Her study, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2002), reimagines literary scenes in the Southwest and the Gulf South, for example, including creolized New Orleans, which invite Southern studies to reassess its fundamental categories; Gruesz’s primary concerns involve breaking down arbitrary and distortive notions of exclusively white Anglo national culture. From early in the republic’s history, the slave plantation South came to be identified with traumatic social divisions and antagonisms that constituted the contradictory reality behind fantasies of American nationhood. Jennifer Rae Greeson has shown how Northerners began distinguishing the former colonies’ national identity after the

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War of Independence by casting Southern plantation states as the new nation’s internal Other: a realm of unenlightened tyranny and bondage that sharpened the rest of the new republic’s revolutionary devotion to enlightenment ideals. Leigh Anne Duck similarly examines how the idea of a backward South later served the conceptual needs of a modernizing nation early in the twentieth century as it defined by contrast its commitment to market capitalism, racial integration, and other progressive reforms. The US South continued to function as an alternative “chronotope” – an imaginary time and space – in the national imagination, an Other to the National Self, even as modern Southern literature began to challenge and complicate such representations of the South. If the South traditionally functioned as the nation’s abject Other, one might appreciate a trope common in complaints about its mistreatment: the North, it was claimed, exploited the South as a colony. To be sure, there’s plenty of irony in thinking about the US South in terms of colonial oppression since the region’s entitled classes practiced lethal forms of internal colonization themselves: the extermination, “removal,” or disfranchisement of Native Americans; the commerce in African chattel; the expropriation of slave labor; and the later confinements of racial segregation. The effects of the Southern expansion of the nation on Native American peoples have been investigated by Gary Eric Anderson and Annette Trefzer. Robert Brinkmeyer’s Remapping Southern Literature demonstrates how contemporary writing by Southerners has reoriented itself toward the West in an effort to unmoor itself from longstanding preoccupations with place, community, the past, and racial division. In Turning South Again, Houston Baker extends the argument he has made across several important studies of African American culture: that Southern figures (in this case, Booker T. Washington) were crucial to the development of national modernism. He concludes with a forceful meditation on the continuities between the Atlantic Middle Passage, the carceral state of the US plantation South, and the modern national prison system so disproportionately populated by African Americans. In its double-edged history as both the abject Other of an exploitative power to the north as well as the perpetrator of internal racial colonization within its boundaries, the US South functioned as a crucial test case for national debates about foreign imperialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the major reorientations of American literary studies has involved the study of the relation between US imperialism and national literary culture, particularly the ways imperial America’s interests in establishing sites abroad for the production of raw materials, markets for US goods, and bases for military supervision preoccupied the nation’s imagination. Amy Kaplan’s and John Carlos Rowe’s accounts both involve Southern material – primarily strategies for “managing” peoples of color and rationalizing American (federal and Northern) hegemony. Other studies more explicitly take up the role of the US South as a distinct region, with its history of plantation agriculture, coerced labor, and administration of a periphery from a remote core, to illuminate how the South functioned as a template for certain US imperialist projects (see Renda; Stecopolous; Schmidt).

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The South Not Itself Unlike the work I have discussed so far, which revises what we mean by “the South” by putting it into international and national contexts that disrupt its image as a naturally distinct, self-contained, and homogeneous place, a number of groundbreaking studies of the US South in the last decade challenge the region’s self-conception of itself on its own terms. These studies focus on the region as traditionally defined: the 11 states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina). Many of these projects tend to take up one of the primary categories once held to distinguish “the mind of the South,” as W.J. Cash put it in his powerful critique of the region in his 1941 book of that title. One of the signal interventions in the launching of the “new Southern studies” (before it was called that) was Michael Kreyling’s Inventing Southern Literature. Kreyling argues that the canon of Southern literature was formed in large measure by the social and cultural tastes of the Southern Agrarians, a group of Southern intellectuals who attempted in the 1930s to promote the region’s purported values of community, personal cultivation, and pastoral tranquility as antidotes to the materialistic culture of Northern industrial capitalism. The Agrarians’ preference for formalist literature and criticism – that which eschewed political engagement – reinforced a conservative political agenda in a society confronting changes to its vicious racism and genteel sexism. Community was hardly the ideal it passed itself off to be for everyone. Kreyling charges that academics complied with cultural quiescence in making a writer like Faulkner the epitome of Southern writing, a phenomenon he attributes to a cohort of guilt-stricken Southern white male academics in the 1950s–1970s who identified with Faulkner’s sense of tragic despair in confronting the offenses of a beloved South. The South’s toxicity to people of color, many women, and social progressives has stimulated a number of cold-eyed reckonings with the region’s violent defense of its traditional ways. In Making Whiteness, Grace Elizabeth Hale chronicles what she calls “the culture of segregation” in the South during the Jim Crow decades between 1890 and 1940. Hale’s cultural history examines the gruesome methods that whites used to subjugate blacks (particularly spectacle lynchings), but she also reveals significant criticism in Southern letters to such practices, as well as the conceptual and practical contradictions that contributed to segregation’s collapse. Habits of violence, acquired through generations of slaveholding, attracted some modern Southerners to the coercive politics of totalitarianism. Robert Brinkmeyer’s Fourth Ghost charts the various involvements – from espousal to opposition – of a number of prominent Southern writers to fascism during the mid-twentieth century, including the Nashville Agrarians, W.J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. Melanie Benson’s Disturbing Calculations (2008) surveys a wide range of Southern writing (from white modernists struggling with the guilt of elites to African Americans, women, Native Americans, and the poor

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writing back against subordination) to assess the difficulty of thinking beyond the inhuman epistemology of slaveholding capitalism. After Reconstruction, women writing from the South began to insist more openly on the complicity between racism and sexism in a nation intent on sectional reunification across the lines of white male solidarity. Writers like Pauline Hopkins, Frances Harper Lee, and Anna Julia Cooper focused on the distinctive difficulties of black women to forge social forms that would free them from the burdens of both Victorian womanhood and bourgeois racial uplift. The continued misfit between women’s experience and the traditional social and expressive forms available to women in Southern society is responsible, in Patricia Yaeger’s view, for a modern permutation of the most infamous feature held to characterize Southern literature: “the grotesque.” If we allow that earlier authors like Edgar Allan Poe, the Southwest humorists, and Mark Twain were drawn to the grotesque as a way to encode the social disfigurement of slaves, the wilderness, Native Americans, and poor whites, Yaeger helps us see that a domestic variant of the grotesque in Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty serves as a resource for women writers who use perversity to exaggerate, parody, and redirect the anathema aimed at them by misogynistic social and critical judgments. The planter’s mastery of bodies, land, and generation is safeguarded by an ideology that warrants white male heterosexuality as the normative position of power. The mutual exercise of such “domestic” colonizations – of gender, sexuality, race, labor, and so forth – not only installs a disciplinary regime but also stimulates desires deviant from its purposes and authority. Why, for example, do Faulkner’s retellings of plantation romance so invariably identify plots of homoerotic longing: from Quentin Compson’s uxurious attachment to his roommate at Harvard, to their shared fascination with the androgynous Charles Bon, to John Sartoris’s attraction to the uniformed, soldierly Drusilla Hawk, who accompanies him to battle during the Civil War? Michael Bibler suggests that such spaces of alternative sexualities may be understood as forms of “homoness”: same-sex intimacies – some fulfilled, and others left imagined – that embed dissident social and personal liberties. The Southern habit of making a fetish out of place in literature – and any number of observers have noticed that the region’s reverence for geographical place reinforces an insistence on keeping some people (down) in their various social places – has also come in for intensive challenge. Martyn Bone studies the vestigial effects of Southern place in The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Bone credits the Agrarians with reviving the importance of actual “proprietary” place through their dream of subsistence farming as an antidote to advanced capitalism, and then shows how the idea of a place exempt from modernity continues to preoccupy writers like Faulkner and Welty. Eventually, in Bone’s account, contemporary writers begin to engage with the real economic and social transformations that produce a sense of Southern place that goes on functioning in the deterritorialized landscape of postmodernity. Contemporary Southern literature, so much of it arising from newcomers to the region, looks at the friction between imagined places in the US South and remembered

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places in the global South that so many immigrants carry with them. A novel like Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, for example, superimposes impressions of northern Virginia, where many Vietnamese émigrés have resettled, over the rural countryside they have left behind in Southeast Asia. The uncanny resemblances of family, history, and politics in these two places conjure the global South as a palimpsest of military aggression, domestic suffering, and subsequent negotiations between collided cultures. The notion that it is something other than an actual geographical place inspires Scott Romine to explore “the South” as a fantasy of social and cultural cohesion in times of acute material dislocations. Under a postmodern regime in which cultural goods are primary forms of production and consumption, the South functions primarily as a fungible commodity, a brand, a logo, a lifestyle, and a state of mind to be bought, rather than a place into which you are born.

The New Southern Studies Just as the tide had begun to change in Southern studies, Houston Baker and Dana Nelson marked the moment with a coedited special issue of the journal American Literature in 2001 devoted to “Violence, the Body and ‘The South.’ ” Baker and Nelson sought to remind the broader field of American literary studies how centrally the South had figured in the course of national development, and to suggest by the new scholarship they were representing how our understanding of American culture should no longer segregate Southern literature within American literary studies. The stakes of Baker and Nelson’s enterprise ran to their convictions that the establishment and flourishing of the republic depended upon the systematic defilement of black bodies under chattel slavery, that the long postemancipation persistence of racial violence testified to the durability of racist ideology forged under Southern slaveholding, and that the armature of national formation and progress depended on disavowing slavery and racial violence as regional aberrations. Pursuing these lines of inquiry would further the mission of what Baker and Nelson termed “a new Southern studies” (232), a movement they identified as already emerging in books like Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire, Jones and Donaldson’s Haunted Bodies, and Richard Gray’s Southern Aberrations. It seems plain that the urgency to look freshly at the US South at the end of the twentieth century had a great deal to do with globalization – from the circulation of jobs and workers through peripheral regions and economic sectors to the sharpening appreciation of what it means for neoliberalism to have reoriented global capital from an East-West axis to a North-South one. To what extent have multinational corporations reduced poor workers to a liquid colony? To what degree have growing discrepancies in income within the United States inducted the domestic poor into a global South? What do we learn about the origins of economic imperialism by examining the history of the US South – the United States’ “first colony,” as George Handley has put it? As in the past, the US South functions as the site of conflicting ideas about what the country is or should be: does its low income, immigrant diversity, racial

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hybridity, religiosity, political conservatism, skepticism toward government and science, and so on make it an ideal to be emulated or a problem to be fixed? The determination by scholars to characterize and present Southern literature to the rest of the nation – that is, to practice Southern literary studies – has invariably reflected ideological inclinations. Peter Schmidt demonstrates, for example, that a number of studies of Southern literature, along with anthologies meant to define a canon of Southern literature, appeared at the turn to the twentieth century, as Southern progressives sought to convince the rest of the country that the region should be thought of again as part of the nation. Such anthologies suggested the utility of Southern literature to the purposes of nascent US imperial ventures overseas, when the model of a society that knew how to subordinate darker peoples might prove apposite. That is, the South could become American to the extent that the nation saw itself as Southern. Beginning in the 1920s, H.L. Mencken’s ridicule of the South as hopelessly backward spurred Southern apologists to congratulate Southern culture on its refusal of national modernity’s decadent values, however grotesque that might make it: Faulkner’s history-haunted revenants, Welty’s place- and family-bound survivors, and O’Connor’s otherworldly souls bespoke an alternative to urban Northern materialism and standardization. Southern literature did not attain professional standing until 1953, when Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs published The Southern Renascence, a collection of essays on the burgeoning of modern Southern writing between the world wars. A Cold War agenda would make much of Southern culture’s ostensible veneration of “family, kinship, community, history, and memory” (Ladd 1628). The South also served as an example of democracy’s superiority: even secession and a violent civil war did not destroy the republic. The nation did reunite, and the thriving of culture in the once-backward South only further testified to the opportunities for personal freedom and creativity. Faulkner traveled on behalf of the U.S. State Department as an icon of such national unity in the 1950s, after he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Obviously, the matter of continued violence against blacks to enforce their political disfranchisement failed to make it into such narratives of American triumphalism, although the Cold War did in fact serve as one instigation to addressing the embarrassments of official US racism. During the 1960s, when the white South felt particularly embattled as a result of federal pressure to end segregation, a burst of books appeared offering to explain the South to outsiders. Works of literary criticism and intellectual history invited the rest of the country to understand what C. Vann Woodward called “the burden of Southern history.” Scholarship from this era of the “long” civil rights movement (through the early 1980s) – much of it by white Southern males – did not stint in criticizing the region, even when personal affection for the region was evident. The principal school of Southern literary studies ran from Lewis Simpson and Louis Rubin through Fred Hobson. Simpson and Rubin began producing studies of Southern literature, while Hobson’s landmark intervention identified an imperative in Southern writing to explain – given its purported peculiarities – what the South was like,

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how it was different, how it might be defended, and why it could be condemned. Rage to Explain (a phrase taken from Faulkner) concluded with the speculation that a tradition of morbid self-loathing might be taken as reaching its end in the figure of Quentin Compson, Faulkner’s despairing heir to the sins of Southern elites, who momentarily breaks free of Mississippi, only to commit suicide after his first year at Harvard. Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, both of whom had been affiliated with the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and both of whom had made their way to national prominence in the academy (both taught at Yale), together became perhaps the most influential exponents of “practical” criticism in post-World War II higher education. Warren was well known for his fiction, including the acclaimed All the King’s Men, and poetry (he later was named US poet laureate); Brooks was perhaps the most important popularizer of the New Criticism, and collaborated with Warren on a widely used series of textbooks for the study of literature in the college classroom. As their tastes in literature and literary method prevailed (the New Criticism was marked by a focus on formal features and a relative subordination of historical context), one could say that students of literature in the United States were trained by Southerners to ignore the relevance of history to the appreciation of culture.

An End to Southern Studies? My point here is simple, but I believe crucial: the idea of the South has always served ideological purposes in the nation’s imaginary. To the extent that US Southern studies, however freshly conceived and practiced, retains a dyadic model of regional and economic relations, it continues to harbor the foundational abjection of the South as the nation’s Other, and it continues to permit American literary studies to proceed as if plantation economics and slavery belonged to a national elsewhere. The idea of “the South” performed the essential cultural work of screening the entire nation’s reliance on a colonial plantation economy, subtended as it was by race-based chattel slavery, in order to disavow national complicity. “The South” emerged in the early national imaginary as a device to enable the denial of the nation’s violation of its own republican ideals. Sectional difference became a matter of even more intricate equivocation over the first half-century of the republic, since the circuitry of the plantation economy continued to unite the new nation’s Northern and Southern regions. Whether as business partners in the production and manufacture of cotton goods, or in the wide range of commercial gain generated by the Atlantic slave trade, New England and the plantation South (continental as well as Caribbean) together created national prosperity. Elites enriched by national plantation economies fashioned a set of cognitive mechanisms allowing them to manage such contradictions. Forms of fetishistic evasion appear in a number of national narratives that broach the reality that the republic’s origins and growth were embedded in the South’s ongoing plantation society. Such strategies of representation in antebellum literary

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texts work by hiding Southern plantation economy in plain sight. The cultural technology may be encountered in – to cite some foremost examples – Poe’s Pym (with its staging of the Haitian slave revolt as a barely disguised menace to Nantucket sea traders), Melville’s Benito Cereno (with its vertiginous meditation on American innocence as fetishistic disavowal), or Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (with its cryptic anxieties over bodily enslavement and Salem port commerce). Let me illustrate how attention to what goes on below New England might reorient our sense of what some works of imagination did to accommodate national involvement in hemispheric plantation society. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) pays no explicit attention to slavery or race – despite the numerous ways the issue would have enveloped Hawthorne as he wrote in Concord, Massachusetts, about nearby Salem in the 1840s. Hawthorne lived amid family and friends embroiled in New England abolitionism, at a moment fevered by questions of Northern complicity in sustaining slavery (and enflamed by the Fugitive Slave Act). The Salem that Hawthorne chose to write about was in tumult over race and slavery. An emerging modern middle class was ashamed of the seaport’s earlier involvement in the triangular Atlantic trade in Africans, and its civic life was convulsed with disputes over desegregation. A notorious crime of suspected racial revenge then punctuated the scene. A free black man was charged with murdering a former slave-trading sea captain, with the trial riveting public attention and the newspaper accounts of the grisly act probably serving as a model for Hawthorne’s macabre treatment of Jaffrey Pyncheon’s death. As in virtually all of Hawthorne’s work, the midnineteenth-century United States’ “great subject” goes unremarked (Hawthorne to Longfellow [16:431], qtd. in Bonnet 487). Scholars have drawn a dismal assessment of Hawthorne’s career-long indifference to the problem of slavery and the question of race (for a different view of Hawthorne, slavery, and race, see Levine 119–78). But Hawthorne’s private circumstances might have augured greater interest. Hawthorne’s eventual wife, Sophia Peabody, and her sister Mary spent over a year in Cuba in the early 1830s. Sophia’s letters from the Morrell coffee plantation record the natural beauties of the island, while also turning away from troubling displays of slavery’s cruelties. Sophia’s family circulated the letters among their acquaintances in Salem. Hawthorne himself reportedly read Sophia’s “Cuba Journal” on his first visit to the Peabody household in 1837, and although some passages reappear in his Notebooks, he never yielded to Mary’s urging that he write a novel on the subject. Mary Peabody did compose a fictional version of the sisters’ sojourn in Cuba. It was explicit in its condemnation of slavery, but appeared only after her death in 1887, as Juanita: A Romance of Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago. Given the numerous ways that plantation slavery might have urged itself on Hawthorne’s attention, Jean Fagan Yellin concludes that “the studied ambiguity of [Hawthorne’s major] works, generally understood as the result of deliberate artistic decisions, must also be considered as a strategy of avoidance and denial” (157). I contend that Hawthorne does not simply refuse to represent slavery, however, so much as he conceals it in plain view. That the nation’s

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origins, Salem’s prosperity, the Hathornes’ livelihood, and the author’s sense of shame all owed to the curse of New World colonial plantation economics may be found everywhere in the novel but where one thinks to look. Consider what the commodities stocked by Mistress Pyncheon may reveal about the nature of New England commerce. Hepzibah’s first transaction involves selling a gingerbread cookie in the shape of a Jim Crow dancer. Gingerbread is made from molasses, a byproduct of sugar refinement that was imported into Salem from the West Indies. Molasses was acquired in the islands with US goods and brought back to New England to be distilled into rum, which was then carried to Africa to procure slaves for Caribbean plantations. Ginger is found in abundance in the West Indies, and Jamaica is still its leading producer. Hawthorne’s father, Nathaniel Sr., was a commercial ship captain out of Salem from 1795 until his death from yellow fever in Surinam at the age of 34 in 1808. He sailed the globe, to India, South America, and the South Pacific, but after he married and began a family (Nathaniel Jr. was born in 1804), he restricted his seafaring to the West Indies. The orphaned son pored over his father’s ship logs, prized possessions he displayed in his room at Bowdoin. Salem’s unparalleled prosperity through the 1840s depended largely on the supply trade with the plantation Caribbean, where commodity agriculture in sugar and coffee meant that staples had to be imported. Yellin also notes that Salem recorded regular direct traffic from Guinea, presumably in slave trade, until 1795. All in all, “Hawthorne’s Salem . . . fed on slavery,” Yellin summarizes (136). Hepzibah’s Negro gingerbread cookies fetishize the sordid trade in black bodies upon which Salem, New England, and Northern wealth was in part founded. Hawthorne never specifies how the first Pyncheons made their money, although a plausible inference would be that, like most of Salem’s aristocracy, their wealth derived from sea commerce. The Pyncheon family has misplaced its legitimating documents by the 1840s, but Hepzibah’s goods, like all commodities, carry on their surface the knowledge of what they would forget. As fetish, the cookie substitutes a pleasure for an anxiety, innocent consumption for lethal production, a dark sweet for black sweat. New England’s mindfulness of its dependence slips in obliquely, as when Hepzibah fantasizes that some hypothetical Pyncheon gone to Virginia to make his fortune as a planter will learn of their distress and send an annual “remittance.” The logic of fetishized knowledge would prompt us to look for the representation of guilt hiding in the open, and Seven Gables does exactly that in its constitution of Maule’s curse. Colonel Pyncheon’s abuse of Matthew Maule ostensibly delineates a conflict of class. However, when a contemporary Maule descendant, the daguerreotypist Holgrave, offers a fictional account of his family’s insult, racial slavery unexpectedly surfaces. Holgrave relates a story in which an earlier Maule scowls blackly when he recognizes his own condition as laborer in that of the black servant Scipio: “ ‘No matter, darkey!’ said the carpenter. ‘Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?’ ” (188). Maule knows he will never be accepted by the refined Alice Pyncheon, since she regards him “as if I were a brute beast” (201).

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Alice later falls under the spell of Maule’s mesmerism, reduced to a zombie under the will of her new master. That Maule’s revenge on the “fair, and gentle” Alice should be to make her live as his “slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which binds its chain around the body” (208), suggests that it is the slave’s dream of revolt and revenge that is hiding in front of our eyes. To the extent that Maule identifies himself metonymically with Scipio’s African blackness, in other words, he casts himself a slave: coerced labor displaced from natal land and deprived of limbs (hands, feet, or heads – as occurs to the devoured gingerbread cookies). Among white Northern abolitionists, mesmeric spells were seen as analogous to the unseemly control exercised by masters over slaves. Hawthorne may be acknowledging a version of ancestral and national guilt that actually has as much to do with slavery as witchcraft, with chattel as land, with sea captains as judges. In an account of preparations for battle in Washington, DC, during the first days of the Civil War, Hawthorne draws a startling connection between the plantations of New England and those of Virginia: There is a circumstance, known to few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from the May Flower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned Slaves upon the southern soil, – a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistible impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one – and two such portents never sprang from an identical source before! (Hawthorne, Complete Works 12:319)

Seven Gables all but reaches the recognition that New England is the twin progeny of the plantation South, that American and African are delivered from the same womb, that the errand into the wilderness and the peculiar institution are a single monstrous New World prodigy. Hawthorne’s conceit of a monstrous prodigy anticipates Twain’s use of the trope in Pudd’nhead Wilson to mock the persistence of willful blindness in the nation’s accommodation of racial segregation in the South after Reconstruction. Twain shows how a social design of imaginary descent from plantation Virginia has been superimposed over the Missouri frontier as a post-Reconstruction romance, its violent absurdities hidden in plain sight. Twain suggests the force of ideological denial in the figure of the conjoined twins – a single entity taken as two separate ones – like the “legal fiction” of separate races, or like assumptions about separate regional histories and national futures. The prodigy’s indivisibility is never remarked. The townspeople know the brothers to be one, yet act as if they are two. In limning this cultural history of Southern disavowal, let me suggest further that a principal feature of US modernism involved challenging received fantasies of nation

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that had disguised the bedrock of plantation history. In the broadest context, such an account would align our national modernism with shifting accounts of other AngloEuropean modernisms that now recognize the political and economic problems of colonialism in the formation of modernism. More specifically, such an approach would make the Southernness of so many US modernists central, not incidental. An experimental work like Jean Toomer’s Cane, for example, suggests how modernist aesthetics negotiates territorial as well as temporal, racial, sexual, and aesthetic hybridities in a palimpsest of plantation and metropolis. As I Lay Dying registers the derangement of the South’s agricultural workers by late capital in what may be our national literature’s most modernist novel. At such moments, the work of defetishization opens out toward the writing of numerous other writers of the modern: toward Willa Cather, whose figure of Blind D’Arnault in My Ántonia points back to the origins of national prosperity in the Virginia plantation, and to the French planter colonialism behind it; or toward Ralph Ellison, who sees in Invisible Man the historical convergence of global colonialism in the postplantation South, New York world import houses, and West Indian slavery. A final provocation, then: one goal of the present new Southern studies might be to fulfill itself by vanishing as a separate enterprise, to integrate what we know about the US South into thoroughgoing accounts of its long-disavowed centrality to national, hemispheric, and global cultural histories.

References and Further Reading Aboul-Ela, Hosam. Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Anderson, Eric Gary. American Indian Literature and the Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Baker, Jr., Houston A. Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism / Re-Reading Booker T. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Baker, Jr., Houston A., and Dana D. Nelson. Eds. “Preface.” In “Violence, the Body, ‘The South’ ” (special issue). American Literature 73, no. 2 (2001): 231–44. Benson, Melanie. Disturbing Calculations the Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912–2002. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Bibler, Michael. Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

Bone, Martyn. The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Bonnet, Michele. “Consuming Tragedy and ‘the Little Cannibal’ in The House of the Seven Gables.” ATQ 20, no. 2 (2006): 481–97. Brinkmeyer, Robert. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930– 1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Brinkmeyer, Robert. Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South. New York: Knopf, 1941. Cohn, Deborah. History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Cohn, Deborah, and Jon Smith. Eds. Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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Duck, Leigh Anne. The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Glissant, Edouard. Faulkner, Mississippi. Trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Gray, Richard. Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problem of Regionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Greeson, Jennifer Rae. “The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature.” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (1999): 209–48. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Guterl, Matthew Pratt. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Vintage, 1999. Handley, George. Post-Slavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Chiefly about War Matters: By a Peaceable Man.” Atlantic Monthly 10, no. 57 (July 1862): 43–61. Reprinted in The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. 12. Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers (pp. 299–346). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, , 1891. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed.William Charvat et al. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–97. Henninger, Katherine. Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Hobson, Fred. Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Howard, John. Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Jones, Anne Goodwyn, and Susan Donaldson. Eds. Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Jones, Suzanne, and Sharon Monteith. Eds. South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. King, Richard. A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Kreyling, Michael. Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Ladd, Barbara. Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine. Eds. Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Levine, Robert S. Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Loichot, Valerie. Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Monteith, Sharon. Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Porter, Carolyn. “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies.” American Literary History 6, no. 3 (1994): 467–526. Renda, Mary. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Richardon, Richée. Black Masculinity and the US South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Southern Literary Studies Romine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rubin, Louis, and Robert Jacobs. Eds. The Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953. Russ, Elizabeth. The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Schmidt, Peter. Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865–1920. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008.

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Stecopoulos, Harilaos. Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperalisms, 1898– 1976. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Trefzer, Annette. Disturbing the Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Hawthorne and the Slavery Question.” In A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne (pp. 135–64). Ed. Larry J. Reynolds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

19

New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations Sean X. Goudie

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Caribbean has witnessed the mass migration – from countryside to city, and from island to continent – of West Indian laborers in the service of sprawling US multinational corporations like United Fruit Company (UFC) and the Panama Railroad Company (PRC). Scholars such as Anthony Payne and Anthony Maingot have examined how shifting power dynamics marked by transformations in hegemony and sovereignty affect the mobility or stasis of bodies, labor, goods, services, and criminal activity across North America and the “Caribbean.” The latter term denotes the island archipelago, the Caribbean Sea, and the coastal nations of Central and South America that comprise the Caribbean basin, while the whole – including North America and the Atlantic – constitutes what Payne provocatively terms “Caribbean America.” Writes Payne of US-Caribbean relations at the end of the twentieth century, “the many linkages between the US and the Caribbean have reached a sufficient depth and intensity across such a range of issues that they must be seen to have created a novel structural context . . . an emergent ‘Caribbean America’” (Payne and Sutton 241). This chapter begins the work of assessing the ways in which cultural imaginaries reinforce and/or resist the emergence of US dominance in the Caribbean American “region,” a term deployed in shifting conceptual registers according to distinct ideological commitments.1 It aims to suggest and demonstrate the value of plotting a field of writing that might be termed Caribbean American regionalism. Crucially, such a field is not bound exclusively either to the objects of study for Caribbean studies scholars or to the geographic or generic characteristics of US “regionalist” traditions, even as it acknowledges and extends from innovative scholarship in these areas (e.g.,

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Greeson; Hsu; Kaplan). By posing a simple question – Is there a Caribbean perspective that might be aligned with and contribute to furthering multidisciplinary conversations on regionalism? – this chapter argues for the mutually formative influences of the global and local to allow for a Caribbean American regionalist line of inquiry responsive to several concerns identified by scholars of the New International Political Economy (IPE) such as Payne and Maingot. Specifically, I stress the need for scholars to assess how authors from North America and the Caribbean engage in imaginative terms the question of whether Caribbean-based political and business leaders and laboring populations are compliant with and/or resistant to US empire building in the Caribbean from the last half of the nineteenth century to the present time. Further, critics of Caribbean American regionalism might attend more systematically to how traveling to and from or residing in the Caribbean and North America inflects writers’ imaginative decisions to endorse or challenge US empire building. Such work would unsettle notions about what constitutes center and periphery, or the local and the global, in a Caribbean American region where the paradoxical forces of migration and occupation render such binaries radically unstable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, hospitality emerges as an especially prominent figure informing literary cultures’ entanglement with such developments. What Jacques Derrida describes as “conditional laws of hospitality” are shaped by racial, ethnic, gender, class, religious, or other codes that define the borders between host and guest, family and stranger, native and foreigner, resident and alien. Such conditional terms of hospitality are inherently unstable and not infrequently arrived at according to the contingency whereby “welcoming” masks an a priori appropriation of land or territory (Derrida 15–16). Mireille Rosello usefully extends Derrida’s insights by suggesting that distinct notions of hospitality held by immigrant and “native” communities alike could provide an opportunity for parties to renegotiate the boundaries of their identities in the presence of one another according to mutually sustaining social and cultural exchanges, “the by-product and the visible evidence of hospitable gestures” (175–6). To defy such a precondition would be, in advance, to mark one’s self as inherently inhospitable, destructively fearful of what Rosello acknowledges is a painful but ethically necessary responsibility to reconsider the conditional laws of hospitality either party holds dear. While many authors could be treated according to a “hospitality” matrix in the context of a Caribbean American regionalist imaginary, this chapter treats two figures who have figured prominently in recent critical reassessments of “New England” and “Western” US regionalist writing traditions respectively, Sarah Orne Jewett and Sui Sin Far (penname of Edith Eaton), alongside two foundational, if understudied, figures in the Caribbean diaspora literary tradition, Mary Seacole and Eric Walrond. Jewett and Sui Sin Far were witnesses to the proliferation of the United Fruit Company’s growing influence in Jamaica in the late nineteenth century as well as a burgeoning international tourism industry that was coextensive with a retooled plantation economy seeking to recover from recurring periods of postemancipation labor unrest. As part of a massive migrant West Indian labor force, Seacole ran a Creole boarding house

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near the construction of the Panama Railroad during the 1850s, whereas Walrond worked as a journalist while witnessing thousands of migrant West Indian laborers build the Panama Canal a half century later on behalf of the US nation and its corporate partners. Collectively these four authors and their texts reveal the ways in which US claims to hemispheric exceptionalism during this time frame pivot on a disturbing irony: at exactly the moment when the United States relied on immigrant and ex-slave labor at home and West Indian colonial labor abroad for capitalist and territorial expansionism, white US Americans turned ever more resolutely to supremacist attitudes to justify such a trend. Jewett, Sui Sin Far, Seacole, and Walrond gauge the nation’s investment in supremacist attitudes as the chief governing principle informing US efforts to conquer (or not conquer) the tropics. As they do so, they provide sustained, if varied, critiques of uneven development in US-Caribbean relations from the midnineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as they coalesce in commercial sites of (in) hospitality wherein US “guests” frequently seek to impose hierarchical racial, ethnic, class, and gender notions on their Caribbean “hosts.” Together they demonstrate how writers across the Caribbean American region are affected by and responsive to such developments, rhetorical and actual, and that this is particularly so given how heavily US transnational corporations like the Panama Railroad Company and United Fruit Company depended on commodities produced by the labors of West Indians, both migrant and resident. By marking (in)hospitable relations in the Caribbean American region in sites of hospitality – the Creole boarding house and tourist hotel, respectively – such writers, albeit from diverse locations and with varying effects, expose the (in)hospitality of industry and the industry of (in)hospitality sponsoring US expansionism from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. As they do so, they direct us to the urgent need to define a not-so-new field of regionalist literary studies, one that traces itself backward to the late eighteenth century and forward to the present time, a field that I term “Caribbean American regionalism.” In January 1896, publisher, poet, and hostess Annie Fields and close friends, including Maine local color writer Sarah Orne Jewett, set out from their native New England for a cruise to the West Indies. Along the way they stopped in Jamaica, where they were looked after by Lorenzo Dow Baker, founder of Boston Fruit Company, which would be renamed United Fruit Company in 1898. Fields kept a Diary of [a] West Indian Island Tour in which she remarks how “[t]he British government and the American Trade together seem to produce an effect for the good when we contrast this place with any other [island] we have yet seen” (26). Thus Fields suggests that only through the administrative guidance of American corporate elites who have inherited the “white man’s burden” from Europe might the West Indies be saved. Sarah Orne Jewett wrote only a few brief letters describing her experiences during the cruise – a vacation she took just after completing The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a collection of local color sketches about life in a Maine seaside village. Yet upon returning from the West Indies she penned a haunting and haunted tale, “The

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Foreigner” (1900), which critics have remarked rewrites and refocuses the material imagery of the earlier work. In it, we learn for the first time that one of Country’s central figures, the healer and herbalist Almira Todd, has acquired her “gifts” from a mysterious, racially ambiguous, dislocated widow from Jamaica via Guadeloupe or Martinique. In “The Foreigner,” Mrs. Todd relates her concerns about her mother living on Green Island during a violent storm in the context of the tale’s title figure, the foreigner Mrs. Tolland, who was carried to Dunnet Landing by a Maine merchant ship returning from a trading voyage to Jamaica. We learn that when Mrs. Todd was still a young woman, Mrs. Tolland died in her arms, though not before the two women witnessed the ghost of Mrs. Tolland’s dead mother welcoming her “home.” Readers have been drawn to the ambivalent characterization of Mrs. Tolland’s mother’s ghostly “dark” face, suggesting that it indicates the mixed-race status of her and her dying daughter, who is described as being a “good-looking woman . . . [of] a sort of foreign cast” (Jewett 168). The text’s reticulated array of surrogate mother figures and facial substitutions, the blending and blurring of the material and immaterial, the embodied and disembodied, the domestic and the foreign, and the Creole West Indies and Creole North America, pivot, I believe, on Jewett’s profound sense of ambivalence over New England’s extensive role in providing for an expanding US commercial empire in the Caribbean-American region – both in the 1850s moment during which Mrs. Todd’s recursively told ghost story occurs, when “brown” Jamaican Creole boarding house operators like Mary Seacole welcomed enterprising “Yankees” to Kingston, as well as the late nineteenth-century moment from which Jewett writes and the story itself is told and then retold by the narrator – the moment when Lorenzo Dow Baker’s Boston Fruit Company expanded and proliferated across Jamaica. Ultimately, Jewett’s profoundly ambivalent story tends toward the reification of, rather than a truly revolutionary sensibility regarding, the potentially anarchic possibilities of dangerously fluid and racially, ethnically, and exotically charged North American and West Indian Creole-crossed bodies and borders. Like a Northern travel writer to the Caribbean, Mrs. Todd dilates on Mrs. Tolland’s exotic physical traits and her enchanting bodily performances. In this regard, Mrs. Tolland can be understood as enacting a form of Creole minstrelsy bespeaking the asymmetric power relations that led to her ostracism from the Dunnet Landing community. Mrs. Tolland thereby conveys her understanding that an upbringing “among the [West Indian] heathen” (175) made her an unacceptable guest threatening to transgress the community’s privileged relation to her as host. Yet Mrs. Todd’s confessions of intimacy between her and her special friend also confound would-be distinctions between them. She admits that Mrs. Tolland’s “child’s mind” caused her to “imagine new things” (172), like how to West-Indianize her repertoire of gardening, healing, spiritual, and cooking practices in a newly tropicalized Maine that in Country of the Pointed Firs had been traceable to Native American herb-gathering and root traditions. In the end, Jewett substitutes Mrs. Todd’s – and her own – confessions of West Indian intimacy for a direct reckoning of the New

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England domestic sphere’s complicity in commodifying brown and black Creole West Indian women’s bodies, labors, and cultural products that comprise the ghostly violent underside to the US “civilizing” mission to “conquer the tropics” in the last half of the nineteenth century. “The Foreigner” thus functions as an especially ambivalent fictional engagement with the historical fact of too-intimate associations between the ostensibly Creole regenerate United States and the Creole degenerate West Indies. In such a way, Jewett’s Creole-crossed text suggests the efficacy of reexamining would-be bounded local and national US regionalist traditions and texts to discern whether or not they are shaped by US expansionism and imperialism – less in general terms and more in relation to discrete regions or zones such as the Caribbean American Region in which political, economic, and cultural relations among and between states or colonies and their various stakeholders unfold across space and time. Of mixed Asian and European ancestry, Sui Sin Far arrived in Jamaica in 1896 (Jewett and Fields departed the island earlier in the year) aboard a Boston Fruit Company steamer. Thus, at the outset of her trip from Canada via Boston on the Barnstable, Sui Sin Far had intimate familiarity with the phenomenon of US corporate expansionism in the Caribbean. Her very conveyance to Jamaica was provided by it. Yet unlike Fields and Jewett, Sui Sin Far did not travel to Jamaica as a tourist but to begin work as a cheaply paid reporter for Gall’s Daily News Letter, a position she held from 1896 to 1897. Less well known and remarked upon by scholars than Sui Sin Far’s portrayals of Chinese North American life are writings she produced for Gall’s. In her examination of Sui Sin Far’s reportage for Gall’s, Dominika Ferens sees in Sui Sin Far an exilic consciousness that evolves during the course of her stay in Jamaica from a sense of estrangement from an undifferentiated otherness (white and black) to a constant shifting between a tentative alignment with the dominant group as she “studied down” and an equally tentative identification with the disempowered blacks, women, and children as she “studied up.” (78)

Ferens thus suggests how Sui Sin Far’s Jamaican experiences were crucial to her maturation as an artist and the development of her progressive attitudes toward race and social justice, coming as they did before Sui Sin Far published the bulk of her North American Chinatown fiction. The shifting ethnographic gaze Ferens keenly identifies in Sui Sin Far’s journalistic writings manifests itself as well in a story recently recovered by Martha Cutter that Sui Sin Far published shortly after her return to North America from Jamaica. A Caribbean American regionalist “allegory,” “Away Down in Jamaica” (1898) produces meaning in highly allusive (and, for present-day readers, elusive) ways, belying what seems on a surface level to be the work’s gratuitously exotic Jamaican “local color”

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setting. More precisely, the story suggests the potentially fatal consequences for duplicitous foreign and local elites who look away from oppressive conditions facing peasant and laboring Jamaican populations as a result of self-serving reforms authored by Jamaican colonial elites and exploited by US capitalists. These interrelated developments conspire to sell a burgeoning tourism industry and proliferating banana trade as the best “white” hopes for “civilizing” Jamaica, thereby forestalling meaningful political representation and social and economic justice for the majority population of poor brown and black Jamaicans in the wake of the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865 (Moore and Johnson 1–13). In that regard, it is difficult to overestimate the extent of UFC’s influence under Lorenzo Dow Baker’s leadership on establishing a political economy capable of extending and fully exploiting the project of social and cultural imperialism masquerading as Victorian uplift promulgated by white – and some brown – elites in Jamaica in the late nineteenth century. By creating a global banana trade, including revolutionizing technologically its operations in all phases – production, transport, delivery, and consumption – Dow Baker utterly transformed what had been a subsistence peasant economy in eastern Jamaica restricted largely to remote mountainous areas in the interior controlled predominantly by ex-slaves and their descendants. The construction of several resort-style hotels was part of a major government initiative in the early 1890s to attract foreign investment to the island via a North American tourist industry that was the brainchild of, once more, Lorenzo Dow Baker. In the 1880s, Dow Baker began transporting tourists to Jamaica on his banana boats and housing them in hotels he built and operated with all-white American management and waiting staffs, with Afro-Creole Jamaicans filling out the menial positions. In turn, local and foreign investors sought to cash in on the banana and tourist boom, with Kingston and Port Antonio becoming the southeastern and northeastern terminal points of a plantation and business corridor marking the new international political economy in Jamaica in the 1890s – a distinctly Caribbean American regional system responsive to all manner of “cultural policies, imperial ideologies and Victorian moral codes” (Moore and Johnson 13; see also Taylor). In “Away Down in Jamaica,” Sui Sin Far anatomizes the debilitating effects of Anglo-American imperialism on its beneficiaries and victims alike according to the destructive romantic relations between a cast of characters evocative of the simmering tensions between white elites and the island’s brown and black populations. The story’s characters include Kathleen Harold, a white American woman of means intimately connected to the white elite planter and business class in Jamaica via her engagement to one of its representatives, Wycliff Walker; Clarissa, a Jamaican “brown girl” seeking revenge for her seduction and betrayal by Kathleen Harold’s fiancé; and the story’s archvillain, Walker, a businessman conducting his affairs between Kingston and Port Antonio, the two cities most associated with the North American banana and tourism industries at the turn of the century. Whether Walker is a white Jamaican Creole, an Englishman from the metropolitan center transplanted to Jamaica, or an entrepreneurial North American businessman living and working in Jamaica is left

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tantalizingly unspecified, suggesting that he might come from any one or be intended to represent all of these groups. Sui Sin Far’s decision to write a ghost story that amounts to an obeah narrative in “Away Down in Jamaica” is neither topically nor generically incidental to the material moment that her story addresses. Coupled with the proliferation of anti-obeah statutes, the widespread popularity of obeah narratives in the 1890s – published in the language and printing houses of civil society, thereby belying government claims that their appeal was restricted to the “ignorant black population” – suggested that obeah’s influence in all sectors of society could not be easily eradicated (Moore and Johnson 23, 28). By importing obeah and the tradition of obeah narratives into her text and exporting the disruptive potential of the obeah narrative to civilized societies beyond the West Indies, Sui Sin Far thus repeats the devilment that obeah literature produced in relation to efforts by colonial authorities to prevent obeah from possessing the minds of the civilized reading public and gives voice to territorial struggles and shadow political economies and spiritual communities as uninvited guests haunting the colonial “host.” In the climax of “Away Down in Jamaica,” Clarissa enlists the services of an obeah man and punctures, from the adopted location of the “uncivilized” maroon community, the illusion of intimacy between devoted, mysterious brown mistress and white US gentlewoman, the former gladly offering her labor, natural resources, and romantic personal history to the latter – the precise terms according to which Clarissa’s floral gifts are naïvely accepted and (mis)understood by the American Kathleen Harold at her Kingston hotel. By poisoning Kathleen with her flowers, Clarissa thus avenges her seduction and abuse by Wycliff Walker, Kathleen’s fiancé. In the story’s concluding chapter, the omniscient narrator hands over the narration to Kathleen Harold’s Afro-Caribbean hotel maid Rachel, who reveals that when authorities label Clarissa “mad” and try to lock her up, she escapes “to where no one can find her,” an obvious reference to the maroon communities in the Blue Mountains (Sui Sin Far 95). As Kathleen’s “body [is] fixed up and sent to her people in the States,” Rachel sings, “Oh, there’ll be mourning, mourning . . . At the Judgment seat of Christ” (95). “Away Down in Jamaica” thus ends by evoking not only the haunting power of Jamaica’s white elite but also Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Just as in Stowe’s novel when Cassy uses vodoun to haunt the man who has compelled her to be his mistress, the evil overseer Simon Legree who had “learned his trade well, among the pirates in the West Indies” (371–3), so Clarissa exploits the powers of Afro-Caribbean “black magic” to thwart her oppressor, Wycliff Walker, who has learned his “trade well,” too, among the “pirates” in the West Indies – the unscrupulous planters and businessmen he represents. The hymn that Cassy chants from the attic of Legree’s haunted house serves as epitaph and judgment in Sui Sin Far’s text. Like Stowe and Cassy, Sui Sin Far and Clarissa enter into Frantz Fanon’s “zone of occult instability . . . where the people dwell” (Fanon 227), summoning ghosts and other bewitching creolizing forces in the service of a revolutionary Caribbean American poetics. Jarring the “original” out of its “nation-based model” of “American litera-

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ture . . . as a world apart, sufficient unto itself, not burdened by the chronology and geography outside the nation” (Dimock 2–3), Sui Sin Far thereby ingeniously insinuates Stowe’s novel, too, into the tradition of Caribbean American regionalism. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) was published several decades prior to Jewett’s and Sui Sin Far’s texts but begins in a location central to them: Kingston. Raised there by a mulatto mother, a healer and boarding house operator for foreigners, Seacole details her own adventures as a healer and boarding house operator during the building of the Panama Railroad in the 1850s and, later, operating a “British Hotel” on the battlefront in the Mediterranean during the Crimean War. As she does so, Seacole defends her text’s unconventional point of view: I am fully aware that I have jumbled up events strangely, talking in the same page, and even sentence, of events which occurred at different times . . . [but] unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all. (147)

As critics have recognized, Seacole claims here a different kind of authority as she acknowledges her Creole-derived tendency to “jumble events up strangely” (see Fish; Frederick; Gunning). Likewise, the brand of hospitality, healing, and mannerly reform that Seacole practices troubles the inherent truth value of official histories that produce coherent, triumphal narratives of the construction of the Panama Railroad as a symbol of US exceptionalism. In providing a personal account of the building of the Panama Railroad, Seacole gives voice to the silences of these more expensively produced and widely circulated accounts of a foundational project of US commercial empire in the Caribbean American region, pondering its efficacy as well as her ambivalent relation to it. Scholars estimate that between 40 to 60 percent of the labor force on the Railroad project, construction on which began in 1849 and was completed in 1855, were Black Jamaican men (Newton 39). Alongside this massive labor contingent was a smaller but vital labor brigade of migrant “brown” – quadroon and mulatto – Jamaican women operating boarding houses and shops. Such an occupation afforded them considerable mobility in post-emancipation Jamaica in relation to the white ruling and economic elite they hosted as contrasted with the laboring and peasant populations (Gunning 955–64). Accordingly, in the radically liminal state of Panama, a loosely administered protectorate of the newly independent (from Spain) New Granada republic, related but distinct economies of scale inflected the terms of hospitable relations between various communities present there. White US investors and managers of the PRC, according to a macroeconomic understanding of the region, no doubt viewed themselves as welcoming hosts to migrant Jamaican guest workers as well as New Granadans residing in Panama. Yet Seacole was not a direct employee of the Railroad Company but a constituent part of a provisional micro-economy spawned by the project that would largely vanish upon the railroad’s completion, when boarding houses became unnecessary save in the railroad’s terminal cities of Aspinwall and Panama City.

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These competing sets of hospitable relations, tied to the shifting economies of scale necessary to support a project of such a magnitude, inflect in palpable ways the strain of Creole ambivalence with which Seacole recounts her encounters at her boarding house in the remote town of Cruces on the Isthmus with Americans she identifies as “Yankees” and “foreigners.” She describes how Americans as “hosts” (to those who serve the railroad project) or “guests” (of the citizens of New Granada in the Isthmus not beholden to either the Americans or the distant New Granada central government, and of migrant boarding house operators like herself) fail to reconsider the “conditional laws” governing US Americans’ rules of (in)hospitable engagement with other Americans in the ethically responsible ways suggested by Rosello. That Seacole as host is willing to negotiate with her American guests the terms of hospitable relations between them is readily apparent. Yet a statement that she makes early in the narrative proleptically warns the reader that her hospitality will not be reciprocated let alone lead to a “metamorphosis” in the superior attitudes and assumptions of her American guests: [M]y experience of travel had not failed to teach me that Americans (even from the Northern States) are always uncomfortable in the company of coloured people, and very often show this feeling in stronger ways than by sour looks and rude words. . . . I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related – and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is . . . is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me? (14)

Such confessions and questions challenge the reader’s orientation toward the violent prejudices upholding the dominant structures of slavery at home and empire building abroad. Accordingly, Seacole chafes at the inability of her hospitality to effect any productive discomfort in her white American guests such that they (like the implied “good” reader) might acknowledge the untenable conditional laws of hospitality that cause them pathologically to “always [be] uncomfortable in the company of coloured people.” As such, Seacole shows the reader how she, rather than the Americans she hosts, imparts a civilizing difference on the chaotic, degenerative conditions in Cruces and across Panama, conditions that inhospitable American guests aid and beget. Americans’ discomfort in the presence of colored people is thus ironic given the substantive role Seacole and other men and women of color play in sustaining US empire building across the Isthmus. Indeed, as the text progresses, Seacole becomes increasingly anxious about her ironic complicity with US corporate expansionism in Panama on behalf of which, however indirectly, her surrogate domestic sphere provides healing treatments. She implicitly recognizes that her efforts will never be acknowledged in official records, just as the thousands of black Jamaican men laying the railroad’s tracks are passed over as incidental to the railroad as sign and symbol of US

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technological superiority and emergent commercial dominance in the CaribbeanAmerican theater. Thus, Seacole’s narrative writes an oppositional story into the fissures of the shaky rhetorical foundations of grand narratives that tout the railroad project as evidence of America’s exceptional capacity to conquer and civilize the tropics. For example, in his influential Illustrated History of the Panama Railroad (1861), American F.N. Otis remarks that “despite all obstacles . . . our bold operators at once, and earnestly, pushed forward this stupendous enterprise” (22). Yet Seacole provides glimpses like the one above of how American racism and xenophobia provide simultaneously for Otis’s jingoism and the “stupendous enterprise.” Seacole is sustained while in Panama, she reveals at various moments in the narrative, by Americans whose “respect” she truly “values” – specifically “negroes, fugitives from the Southern States” (50), who have risen to positions of considerable importance in Panama in government, the law, business, and religion. Indeed, Seacole’s resistance to inhospitable Americans is indebted arguably not to the founders of the railroad whom Otis lionizes but to black masculine maroon figures found across Panama whose acts of defiance she strategically recounts in the context of her own resistance. Moreover, Seacole’s accounts of former slaves escaped to New Granada remind the reader that pathways to freedom for slaves in North America flowed not only South and North but also South and deeper South, leading to circum-Caribbean collectives of brown and black Creoles unwilling to sacrifice hard-won freedoms. In such a way, Seacole’s narrative, a poetics of creolization as “seen from below” over and against a poetics of creoleness as “seen from above” by Otis and others draws us toward what Guyanese writer Wilson Harris terms a “third perhaps nameless revolutionary dimension of sensibility” inhospitable to cunning dichotomies – white/ black, master/slave, and American/Creole (Harris 81). Likewise, by considering Seacole in the context of a Caribbean American regionalist writing tradition, we defamiliarize in ethical ways a now familiar model of transnational US regionalist study whereby scholars focus on how regional authors promote and/or contest US imperialism and expansionism without ever actually treating literature and other cultural forms produced on the other end – or at points in between and aside – of the imperial route. Such a method of inquiry has the ironic effect of reinforcing the center-periphery model of colonialism and expansionism according to which the economic, political, and cultural interests of the (would-be) center alone are privileged. A more multivalent cultural critique that treats authors writing from a plurality of locations across epochs in US-Caribbean literary relations, identifying points of contact and divergence between them while resisting the temptation to privilege any one of them, might allow for a more ethical poetics of Caribbean American regional relation. West Indian author Eric Walrond is a key figure in such a reassessment for the ways in which he extends Seacole’s mid-nineteenth-century critique of US expansionism and imperialism in Panama into the early twentieth-century moment when Jewett and Sui Sin Far were writing in response to United Fruit Company’s mounting

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presence in Jamaica. Thus, Walrond’s writings lay bare the full extent of US state and corporate influence across the Caribbean American region by the turn of the twentieth century. US expansionism in the Caribbean American region depended on a massive migrant West Indian labor force, not only in the mid-nineteenth century with the building of the Panama Railroad but also later in the early twentieth century when US recruiters shipped thousands of displaced plantation workers from Jamaica, Barbados, Haiti, and elsewhere to the Panama Canal Zone to assist with the building of the canal, which the US state had undertaken following its orchestration of a coup d’état in New Granada that led to the independence of Panama. Once more, central to that laboring force were brown and black West Indian women, who served as domestic servants and boarding house operators (Watkins-Owens 11–17). Walrond’s singular cultural imaginary is a direct by-product of the mass migration of West Indian labor across space and time. Born in British Guiana, Walrond relocated with his mother to Barbados and then to Panama, where he finished his schooling before working as a journalist on an important Panamanian newspaper. He later migrated from the Canal Zone to New York City, where he was unique among the many West Indian-born writers and intellectuals who inspired the Harlem Renaissance for having witnessed firsthand the building of the Panama Canal by fellow West Indians (Parascandola 11–14). Once in New York, Walrond authored a number of essays and stories critiquing US expansionism and imperialism in the Caribbean American Region that revisit and revise the hospitality genre, including “On Being Black” (1922) and “The Palm Porch,” which was included in the important story collection Tropic Death (1926). The thinly veiled autobiographical story “On Being Black” is a set of three interrelated fragments wherein the first-person narrator, a migrant West Indian living in New York City, encounters manifestations of what Walrond describes elsewhere as the trauma awaiting educated and skilled West Indian workers like himself in the distinctly inhospitable United States: “He is angry and amazed at the futility of seeking out certain types of employment for which he may be specially adapted” (Walrond, Winds can Wake up the Dead 146). Accordingly, throughout the story the narrator is rendered “limp, static, emotionless” while trying to avoid appearing “truculent . . . in the midst of a color-ordeal” (80), troubled by recurring confrontations between his “foreign” ideas about race and those wielded by agents enforcing the discriminatory policies and practices of corporate America across the Caribbean American region. As Michelle Stephens argues, in “On Being Black” Walrond “attempted to denaturalize American forms of ‘color consciousness,’ where black skin becomes the only and absolute signifier for what it means to be black and . . . raced” (315). In the story’s final vignette, during an encounter with officials representing the tourism industry, the narrator is confronted with the hemispheric reach of the hierarchical relations of power sponsoring US expansionism across the Caribbean American region. Indeed, the series of sketches are arranged in such a way that they open the narrator’s eyes to an ever-widening corporate complex serving US empire building in the hemisphere, outward from an optometrist’s shop to a recruiting agency for “one

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of the biggest banks” (Walrond 78) in New York City to a “steamship company” selling “three months’ cruise[s]” to the Caribbean. The narrator recounts how the stylized tourist brochures for the cruise advertise the “blueness of the Caribbean” – a phrase that registers ironically in “On Being Black” – and tout the “beauty” of Jamaica and the “fine a la carte service at Myrtle Bank Hotel.” One of the main American tourist hotels in Kingston, it almost certainly is the hotel that Sui Sin Far reimagines so compellingly in “Away Down in Jamaica” and in which she resided – albeit in the servant’s quarters – while working for Gall’s. Ultimately the narrator recounts how because of his “Colored” status he is treated as “a nigger” by white and “SpanishAmerican” staffers alike when he unsuccessfully seeks the advertised $150 rate for passage “to the tropics” – his birthplace – on behalf of his ailing wife, also a migrant West Indian. He thus utters a final ironic note, “It pays to be black” (80), realizing how distressingly interwoven the “culture of consumption” and the “culture of segregation” are in the modern era. This is true not only in the United States, as James C. Davis has shown, but also across the Caribbean American region, where enterprising American capitalists seek to “consume” the natural resources, labors, and cultures of the West Indies and its peoples while paradoxically exporting their segregationist practices – a phenomenon that Seacole experienced firsthand, we have seen, while working alongside the building of the Panama Railroad. The 10 loosely related experimental stories of Tropic Death (1926) are perhaps Walrond’s greatest fictional contribution to forging a collective awareness in his readers about the extreme servitude and suffering endured by the laboring classes across the Caribbean American region. “The Palm Porch” relies for its indicting effect on juxtaposing the “omnivorous monster” (Walrond 85) – the massive powers of an expansionist US capitalist state brought to bear on building the canal – with the “deep tragedy” (92) of Miss Buckner, a Jamaican mulatto proprietor of a boarding house that is, in truth, a bordello staffed with Miss Buckner’s own daughters and protected by a senior officer in the Panamanian military and the implied consent of the occupying US government and its corporate partners. Critics have often characterized Walrond’s modernist fiction as “fatalist,” and certainly Miss Buckner’s repetition of the racialist agenda of the US occupiers while denigrating her fellow brown and black West Indians of the laboring classes and selling her own daughters in the sex trade supports such a reading. Yet her complicity in perpetuating oppressive race, gender, and class conditions, however tragic, is fueled less by notions of inherent inferiority – at various moments she speaks or meditates in derogatory terms on “khaki-clad, redfaced and scrawny-necked whites” (86) as well – and more by her self-reflexive recognition of racialized programs of Victorian uplift that she had been exposed to in Jamaica before relocating to the Canal Zone. An enterprising capitalist, Miss Buckner thus believes the only way to truly get ahead as a single mother of five light-skinned daughters is to insure that they marry olivecomplexioned Panamanians of the governing elite or whites of the managerial classes. Thus, at story’s end, when a drunken, enraged British “Vice-Consul” (94), a client of her beautiful daughter Anesta, gets into a verbal shouting match with the brothel’s

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US clients and then lunges at the Panamanian captain who provides protection for the bordello – and to whom Miss Buckner hopes to marry Anesta – she orders the British Vice-Consul into a back room and stabs him dead with her prized dagger. For all her remarkable fortitude and shrewdness, Miss Buckner’s triumph represents only a provisional form of independence that is inseparable from the oppressive sociopolitical conditions of late British colonialism in Jamaica and the new US imperialism in the Caribbean American region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ultimately Walrond’s metatextual message is one he states in explicit terms in an essay entitled “The Negro before the World” (1932), for the reader to rid himself [sic] of whatever illusions he may still have about the social and economic system that has grown under capitalism and imperialism. A system that fattens off the labouring masses – black, yellow, and white – and that enriches the privileged few is one which he can never be reconciled to. (Winds Can Wake up the Dead 288)

If Walrond himself can be said to be “tragic,” he is in the sense that David Scott has recently suggested about Walrond’s contemporary, C.L.R. James. Walrond identifies with, and is inspired by, the “black, yellow and white” laboring classes who are more than simple “pawns of imperial tyranny” (Scott 221), and whose examples speak powerfully to us in our own moment as well about a more usable, and interdynamic, poetics, politics, and economics in order to envision a way beyond an ongoing crisis in uneven development. Such a crisis has proven formative in works by successive generations of Caribbean American regional writers, many of whom, including Jamaican American novelist Michelle Cliff in Free Enterprise (1993), draw on and extend in historically knowing ways the “hospitality” genre in order to critique race, class, and gender hierarchies that perpetuate uneven development in the region across space and time. What, finally, might more ethical Caribbean American regional relations – political, economic, and cultural – look like? In “Ishmael at Home,” Barbadian author George Lamming suggests one possible paradigm for reversing the devastating trend in Caribbean-US relations. He does so by remarking on, as I have urged in this chapter, the long history of (in)hospitable treatment of laboring brown and black West Indians in the Caribbean American region across the centuries. Furthermore, he provides stirring witness to their contributions and sacrifices that proved so influential on, we have seen, the cultural imaginaries of Jewett, Sui Sin Far, Seacole, and Walrond, albeit in remarkably distinct ways. “We have always been mixed up in America’s business,” Lamming writes of West Indian peoples, and thus he suggests counterintuitively that West Indians “owe it to America” to help cure what ails it (154). Notwithstanding the ongoing exploitation of the West Indies by “the America of the Mason Dixon line [and] the colonising policies in the guise of freedom and strength” (152), Lamming remarks how West Indian underdevelopment might, ironically enough, be the islands’ greatest asset to

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“America” as it seeks to reassess the terms of its relation with the hemisphere’s poor and peoples of color: It’s a different America that the West Indies can explore. . . . We have not solved any racial questions; for prejudice is with us in one form or another; but we have been for a very long time a good example of the evolution of human relations in the future. . . . America is very much with us now: from Puerto Rico right down to Trinidad. But America is one island only; and we are used to many islands . . . the less money and the more islands, the better it may be for America herself. (152–4)

If Lamming adopts the standard practice of gendering America feminine, this chapter has urged that we resist mere metaphor and attend to the conditions of rooted and migrant women of color laboring for US transnational industries of a most (in)hospitable kind by redrawing the boundaries of regionalism to allow for a Caribbean American regionalist perspective. Such a perspective might provide linkages between whole archipelagoes of writers who otherwise might remain islands unto themselves – Jewett, Sui Sin Far, Seacole, and Walrond – so as to attempt the kind of liberatory poetics and radical recalibration of power and place that Lamming envisions.

Note 1.

Parts of this chapter are adapted from my essay “Toward a Definition of Caribbean American Regionalism: Contesting Anglo-

America’s Caribbean Designs in Mary Seacole and Sui Sin Far,” American Literature 80 (June 2008): 293–322. Copyright 2008.

References and Further Reading Davis, James C. Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893–1933. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1957. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967. Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2002. Fields, Annie Adams. Diary of [a] West Indian Tour. 1896. Unpublished manuscript. Referenced as

Diary of a Caribbean Trip, 1896 in the microfilm edition of the Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852– 1812, roll 2. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1981. Fish, Cheryl. Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004. Frederick, Rhonda. “Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Gender & History 15, no. 3 (2002): 487–506. Goudie, Sean X. “Toward a Definition of Caribbean American Regionalism: Contesting AngloAmerica’s Caribbean Designs in Mary Seacole and Sui Sin Far.” American Literature 80, no. 2 (2008): 293–322.

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Greeson, Jennifer Rae. “Expropriating The Great South and Exporting ‘Local Color’: Global and Hemispheric Imaginaries of the First Reconstruction.” American Literary History 18, no. 3 (2006): 496–520. Gunning, Sandra. “Traveling with Her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 949–81. Harris, Wilson. Explorations: A Selections of Talks and Articles, 1966–1981. Mandelstrup, Denmark: Dangaroo Press, 1981. Hsu, Hsuan. Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Jewett, Sarah Orne. “The Foreigner.” 1900. In The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (pp. 157–88). Ed. Mary Ellen Chase. New York: Norton, 1981. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Lamming, George. “Ishmael at Home.” 1960. In The Pleasures of Exile (pp. 151–60). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Maingot, Anthony P., and Wilfredo Lozano. The United States and the Caribbean: Transforming Hegemony and Sovereignty. New York: Routledge, 2005. Moore, Brian L., and Michele A. Johnson. Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920. Mona and Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004. Newton, Velma. The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850–1914. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. 2004. Otis, F.N. Illustrated History of the Panama Railroad. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1861.

Parascandola, Louis J. “Introduction.” In “Winds Can Wake up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader (pp. 11–42). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 1998. Payne, Anthony. “The New Politics of ‘Caribbean America.’ ” Third World Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1998): 205–18. Payne, Anthony, and Paul Sutton. Charting Caribbean Development. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2004. Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 1857. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Stephens, Michelle. “African-American Modernisms.” In A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950 (pp. 306–23). Ed. John T. Matthews. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. New York: Bantam, 1981. Sui Sin Far. “Away Down in Jamaica.” 1898. Legacy 21, no. 1 (2004): 90–5. Taylor, Frank Fonda. To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993. Walrond, Eric. Tropic Death. 1926. New York: Collier, 1954. Walrond, Eric. “Winds Can Wake up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader. Ed. Louis J. Parascandola. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Watkins-Owens, Irma. Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900– 1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

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American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy George B. Handley

This chapter explores the ecological foundations of the literary imaginations of two writers of the Americas – the early twentieth-century Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha and contemporary US novelist Cormac McCarthy – in order to underscore how ecology puts national boundaries into comparative relief and renders even the very ideas of history, human memory, and the specialness of human experience and expression perpetually contingent and renegotiable. I also aim to demonstrate that no serious consideration of the literatures of the Americas can avoid addressing the ways in which national literatures emerged from and were influenced by the region’s environmental history and by changing scientific conceptions of natural systems in modern experience. Ecocriticism has asked us to reread literature in the interest of cultivating an imagination more attuned to ecological realities, but ecology also asks us to cultivate a more relational, comparative, and interdependent awareness of nationalism and national literatures. In other words, ecosystems are not merely thematically important but also provide a theoretical imperative. As such, they help us to see, as Euclides and McCarthy thematize with regard to borders in the Americas, that literature functions like an ecosystem; it imagines a series of interdependent and complex relations that destabilize our understanding of geopolitical boundaries in the Americas as well as the boundaries between nature and culture. Euclides, considered to be “the first ecological engineer of Brazil,” and McCarthy, a devotee to science and complexity theory at the Santa Fe Institute, propose that the literary imagination is a contingent response to and an extension of the open and complex ecosystems that sustain humanity. Purposefully, then, this chapter offers a comparison between two seemingly disparate examples in the Americas in order to model the kind of contingent and open systems we find in ecology. A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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The Natural Sciences and Ecosystems Because the natural sciences are so important to the cultural history of the Americas and to both authors, I first provide a brief gloss of how the natural sciences initially developed in the Americas and how they have enabled our contemporary understanding of natural systems. Although the term “natural science” today refers to earth sciences such as geology, geography, oceanography, and hydrology, and various biological sciences, including botany, zoology, ecology, and atmospheric sciences, at least until the nineteenth century in the Americas, the natural sciences were not yet specialized. Instead, “natural science” was a broad holistic response to the crisis of epistemology that the empirical realities of the New World posed to the Old. In their nascent state, the natural sciences attempted to identify the spiritual and/or natural laws that structured the universe and upheld a Western cosmos in the context of an earth rendered more complex and interdependent than had been previously imagined (Cañizares-Esguerra, 3; see also Barrera-Osorio 8). The new epistemology of empirical observation that emerged to manage rapid environmental change in the early modern period represented a fundamental shift away from dependence on classical tradition and the academic wisdom of Europe and placed new emphasis on the observable differences of the New World. Colonial empiricism also exposed a new interdependence among American and European cultures and between humanity and the natural world, revealing a sometimes chaotic and unknowable “circle of interdependence and mutuality” at the root of our biological existence (Worster, Rivers 22). As colonial powers gathered and rationalized data from the Americas in imperial botanical gardens in Europe, for example, the Americas were undergoing an unprecedented and widespread ecological transformation of flora and fauna – particularly wherever plantation economies emerged – resulting in unanticipated loss of soil fertility and biodiversity. Attempts to understand and use the resources of the Americas resulted directly in indelible change among the very systems scientists sought to understand. This was a mutual transformation and blurring of the boundaries between culture and nature that the natural sciences relied on. As Schiebinger and Swan put it, “[T]he story of colonial botany is as much a story of transplanting nature as it is one of transforming knowledge” (16). In other words, despite their beginnings in the colonial context, the natural sciences began to tell a story of empirical realities that traversed and even belied fixed national boundaries and undermined the exceptionalism of human history itself. Richard Grove reminds us, moreover, that we owe contemporary environmental ethics paradoxically to the development of the natural sciences in the colonial context of the Pacific and Caribbean islands. For this reason, it is significant that even though the natural sciences depended on and nurtured colonial expansion and then national consolidation in turn, writers such as Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy demonstrate how the knowledge these sciences produced also serves to undermine imperial and neocolonial enterprises and render porous, if not increasingly irrelevant, the discrete national boundaries that continue to inform the hemisphere’s politics and literary cultures. We might say that

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the natural sciences, on the one hand, have been used to manage and control nature much like literary criticism has served to manage and narrate the varieties of literary expression within discrete national boundaries. On the other hand, in the search for a totalizing system under which to subsume an increasing variety of observable phenomena, the natural sciences have exposed the mutually transformative interactions between species and environments and their unpredictable and often unmanageable complexity. This has created a heightened sense of the contingent and sometimes rhetorical frames that are used to produce scientific knowledge, just as literary criticism has discovered the complex interactions between readers and texts, and the contingent and rhetorical boundaries used to denote the literary object of study – be it an author’s oeuvre, a regional or national literary history, or even comparative studies of discrete boundaries. In short, we have entered a phase of understanding in both fields that must recognize the limits of systems and that accommodates unpredictability, contingency, and chaos. For much of Western history, scientific discoveries have seemed to justify confidence that we will inevitably understand the workings of the world with always increasing reliability. This positivism remains the predominant ethos of scientific research and discovery, and is one reason why Eugene Odum’s mid-twentieth-century popularization of the concept of an ecosystem posited a relatively closed system – a balanced, stable, and manageable whole. An ecosystem, in the words of Daniel Botkin, is “a network of living and nonliving parts that can maintain the flow of energy and the cycling of chemical elements that, in turn, support life” (7). Daniel Worster notes, however, that whereas ecology was “basically a study of equilibrium, harmony, and order” in its mid-twentieth-century beginnings, “it has become a study of disturbance, disharmony, and chaos” (“Nature” 3). In the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed that an ecosystem was a kind of “superorganism” and its laws of operation were only a matter of discovery in order to find the path to sustainability. But the deeper we have ventured into the operations of complexly interconnected and open systems, we are learning that “change is without any determinable direction and goes on forever, never reaching a point of stability” (8). For Worster, this means that an ecological ethic doesn’t dictate belief in nature’s independent order or balance, but rather requires humanity to understand itself as part of a whole that includes chance and chaos. As a consequence of positivism and the considerable advances of technology and capitalism over the past century, however, nature came to be seen as an interconnected, knowable, and manageable machine. This persistent view has had two important implications. First, it suggests that ecosystems move directionally and predictably, as Odum suggested in 1969 (Botkin 54). It has also implied that nature has “the capacity to keep operating, [with] replaceable parts, and the ability to maintain a steadystate and thus to be in balance” (105). As quantum and chaos theory developed, it became apparent, however, that nature was subject to chance and that it was not discernable as discrete systems but as a set of overlapping systems whose predictability resembled not a machine but a “set of probabilities” (124). As Botkin explains, “[A]t

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the level at which organisms respond to and affect their environment, the world is one of risk, predictable only to probabilities. Nature as perceived by living things is a nature of chance” (124). Of course, any observation of the politics of culture tends to reveal a persistent impatience with complexity and interdependence. The unpredictability and complexity of such problems as climate change have often produced an ethics of retrenchment and fear and a violent simplification of science for the sake of political convenience. In other words, culture and politics have not always kept pace with the more nuanced understandings of science, thus explaining why positivism continues to pervade scientific discourse. Positivistic simplifications fly in the face of science’s more radical political and cultural implications (see Sarewitz; Serres). The most ambitious globalizing claims evident in climatology, for example, might seem to suggest that we can manage the planet with perfect reliability even though climatology points to the need for a contingent sense of community and a poetics of relation that would help inspire a collective ethics. According to Michel Serres, science is an indicative rather than an imperative epistemology. This means that science cannot adequately speak to the ethical and moral principles that are relevant to the conditions it describes. Science has, in other words, encountered its own limits because it has been unable to deny the increasing evidence of complexity that blurs the Enlightenment and positivist distinctions between subject and object and between subjective and objective knowledge on which scientific knowledge has historically relied. Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy offer two examples that science’s newfound need for a kind of contingent cosmology and collective ethics is something that literature can provide. If the categories of subject and object are no longer reliable, distinctions between culture and nature, between nations, and between science and literature are fruitfully confused. In the readings that follow, I mean to push the theoretical implications of ecological complexity and use this confusion to challenge how we understand American literature. Aaron Sachs has already provided an important example of the direct relevance of natural science to the literary imagination by tracing the influence of the important naturalist, Alexander Von Humboldt, and his successors on the literary imagination of such figures as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe. But because Euclides and McCarthy pay particular attention to the important question of ecological complexity, their writings help us to imagine a more contingent and broad inter-American community than ecocritics have treated.

Euclides da Cunha and the Law of Extraterritoriality Euclides da Cunha published only one poem and never ventured into fiction, but he is nevertheless a monumental figure in Brazilian letters because of his compelling account of the rebellion of a religious community against the Brazilian military in 1902, entitled Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands). Employed as a journalist and trained in engineering and in the military, he was widely read in science and literature.

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According to Leandro Tocantins, Euclides’s understanding of science was strongly influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Ernst Haeckel, as well as by the Americans Frederick Hartt and Henry Walter Bates (28). But the prose of Os Sertões and of his essays on the Amazon, Á marjem da historia (Land without History), which will be my focus here, is never merely scientific; it blends anthropology, sociology, and natural science with high literary expression, the literary qualities emerging precisely at those moments when the complexity of the empirical world begins to break down the objectivity and control he strives to maintain over his subject. In 1905, at the age of 38 and just three years after publishing Os Sertões, Euclides da Cunha traveled to the Amazon as the head of a national delegation to participate in a joint effort to delineate the Amazonian borders between Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. His essays about the region, most specifically about the Purus River, were gathered and published posthumously in 1909, in the collection Á marjem da historia, after his tragic death in a duel. As a journalist and scientist, he writes about the venture with a fascinating, and sometimes contradictory, dual commitment to empirical observation and positivistic management of nature and to figural language and the need for environmental restraint. The essays cover the ecology of the river, observations about the indigenous and creole cultures of the region, and the challenges the region poses to settlement. What is important for my purposes is that his ambition to understand the ecology of rivers produces hybrid essays that, precisely in their fidelity to the complexity he observes, end up compromising his nationalist objective to map rivers as geopolitical borders. On ecological grounds, then, his posthumous Amazonian essays provoke doubts about the utility of national frames and motivate a dialectical and comparative understanding of literature itself as a kind of complex ecosystem that integrates and confuses epistemologies. Rivers, of course, are central to just about every major national and imperial project in history, which is perhaps why rivers are today some of the most endangered ecologies in the world (over 70 dams are currently planned for the Amazon; Worster, Rivers 5). Despite the more narrow political purposes they have been asked to serve, rivers nourish broad systems of life that transcend national and geopolitical interests and are hardly discrete objects or even ecosystems with definable boundaries. As Euclides discovers, it is virtually impossible to know where a river ends and some other nonriver entity begins. Rivers depend on topography, climate, soil, and the endless transformations of the water cycle; they nurture life beneath the ground, on banks, on floodplains, in the air, and, of course, in the water itself. For Euclides, a river is entirely at odds with the kind of mission he engages in 1904, counter not only to the very project of drawing national borders but also to the positivist impulse to bring under control the wild and defiant shape, form, and dynamism of watersheds. Euclides’s dependence on scientific positivism is hard to miss, but what has fascinated critics and what has contributed to his importance to Brazilian literature and national culture is his perplexing willingness to deconstruct the structures of knowledge he uses to build his accounts of Brazilian reality. The scientific and philosophical

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culture of positivism came from late nineteenth-century France and dominated thought in the Americas at the time. Its influence on Brazil was particularly strong, as evident in its national motto of “Ordem e progresso” (Order and progress), adopted after independence in 1889. Euclides’s influence, then, has cut both ways: on one hand, it has inspired literature that explores the complex relationships between the metropole and the Brazilian interior in a style that is often self-reflexive and even ironic about the objectivity of science; but, on the other, it has led to a tendency within Brazilian letters for a kind of scientific description of Brazilian reality that borders on self-exoticism. One critic, Luiz Costa Lima, for example, argues that Euclides and Brazilian culture of the time could not achieve desired autonomy from Europe because of a mistaken assumption that mimesis of local landscapes would suffice to achieve independence. The result was a perpetually unimaginative thrust to literature, always bowing to the positivist and scientistic impulse to name, mimetically represent, and control the diversity within its national boundaries (Costa Lima 163). I wish to highlight, however, the ways in which Euclides’s mimesis produces difference and marks his own subjectivity, despite his intentions or pretensions to objectivity. This is a vital strategy of reading because it helps to blur the often stereotypical differences between the objectivity of science and the imaginative force of literature. Empirical study of ecological process might not begin with literary intentions, but in Euclides (and in many other writers from the Americas), the openness to experience and to the dynamism of change establishes the grounds for cultural and political independence. More importantly, this emergent sense of independence gives way to a growing awareness of ecological complexity and interdependence. Thus, instead of drily naming and mapping the land, Euclides’s prose indulges in the excesses of metaphor so as to insist finally on the limits of representation. This ecological transformation of the literary imagination is not a new phenomenon. The mimetic impulse – stimulated by the achievements of scientific explorations of New World lands – informs Euclides’s literary precursors throughout the nineteenth century, including Andrés Bello, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, José de Alencar, João Manoel Pereira da Silva, and José Martí, all of whom sought cultural independence through mimetic representation of local conditions. It is important, however, to note how such efforts to delineate and map new spaces of originality were also, inadvertently or not, compromised by a growing awareness of the complexity and interdependencies that ecology exposes (see Handley, New World Poetics). Euclides is anxious to provide a guide for the nationalization of an unruly and outlying territory and yet willing to allow ecology to transform his neocolonial mimetic ambition into something more literary and poetic. In other words, because he ultimately acknowledges that the ecology of the river stands in direct tension with Brazilian national ambition, his positivist enterprise to map objectively moves from being a mere empirical reckoning with the Purus River to an imaginative expression of profound wonder and contingency. Euclides writes that the river “contains everything and at the same time lacks everything, because it lacks the linking-together of phenomena developed within a

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rigorous process that produces the well-defined truths of art and science – and which bespeaks the grand unconscious logic of things” (5). In its artless state, outside the bounds of a rationalizing epistemology, the river functions as a kind of ecological unconscious current beneath the surface of modernity. To the extent that he yearns to bring this chaotic substrate of the Amazon into the order of Brazilian modernity, his is a modest desire for ecological management, replete with caveats and warnings. He strives to be an instrument of modernization, to be sure, but not unlike the way in which John Wesley Powell similarly urged a modest, ecologically sensitive development of the US West on a scale that would respect the West’s aridity. For this reason, perhaps, Tocantins calls Euclides the “first ecological engineer of Brazil” (85). To correct the haphazard and violent methods of settlement in the interior, he writes, What comes definitively to the fore is the urgent need for measures to rescue this hidden, abandoned culture: a work law that ennobles human effort; an austere justice that curbs excesses, and some form of homestead provision that definitively links man and land. (27)

He sees a need to “preserve the Purus” because of the likelihood of human abuse and excess and, more importantly, because he has come to understand how the ecology of the river already supplies its own mechanisms for mitigation and storage. He suggests a “modest but consistent program of improvements, to be passed down from federal government to federal government in a continuous, unbreakable commitment of honor with the future . . . in order to save the majestic river” (30). Euclides here cannot escape his positivism, but to see this as merely “straightforward imperialism,” as Lucia Sá puts it, seems to miss this vital call for restraint and balance, flawed and insufficient though it may be, and its provocative cross-cultural implications (Sá xiv). The cross-cultural poetics of these essays emerges most clearly in this attempt to respect the river’s tropical ecology. The sheer size and power of the Purus and the complexity of the tributaries suggest that rivers and land stand in a dynamic and dialectical relationship: the river combines “constructive and destructive processes in such a manner that landscapes, in their slow, constant transfiguration, manifest the effects of a prodigious sculpting process” (7). Such riverine forces render the very meaning and identity of land ironic: “dissolved continents are contained in their silty waters. Countries are transformed. Lands are remade” (7). His description of the river’s ecology models contemporary understandings of river ecology, noting the “vital” and “dramatic” struggle and exchange “among plant species” along the banks of the river and the edges of these islands (9). Riparian zones, where we see the interface between land and river water relegate land to constant movement and make the very notion of solidity uncertain. The upshot of this ecological violence is a perpetual ambiguity of form, which as a result of his mimetic intention to describe it accurately becomes an ambiguity of literary form. At once science, poetry, and anthropology, the essays are both nationalistic and defiantly cross-cultural. The wish to simplify their complexity is symptomatic of an impatience with ecology itself.

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Whether intentionally or not, Euclides’s ecology performs a challenge to the social knowledge he hopes to produce for Brazilian nationality: “this river that more than any other defies our lyrical patriotism is in fact the least Brazilian of our watercourses. It is a strange adversary, given over day and night to the task of wearing away its own land” (8). The river is an emigrant, carrying away the land in the natural course of erosion and the fluctuations of climate and flow and dumping it into the currents of the Atlantic Ocean. This means that the soil may arrive at the coastal regions of Georgia and the Carolinas in North America. . . . In such places, the Brazilian, albeit a foreigner, would be treading Brazilian land. Which leads to an astounding perplexity: to the fiction of extraterritorial law [extraterritorialidade] – country without land [a patria sem a terra] – is counterposed another basic physical concept – land without country [a terra sem a patria]. Such is the marvelous effect of this other kind of telluric migration. Land abandons man. (9)

The lyrical chiasmus in these passages is the result of a mimetic response to the biological intertwining he observes: liquid as solid, solid as liquid; land without country, country without land; the Brazilian citizen who stands in the “least Brazilian” territory in his own land, only to tread Brazilian land elsewhere. Ostensibly an expression of unique Brazilian character, this encounter with the Amazon basin is also a description that undermines the very idea of Brazilianness. Euclides’s ecological law of extraterritoriality requires a tolerance for the contingency of nationality within the relational context of complex transnational ecosystems in deep time. In the Amazonian interior, Euclides insists that the river’s “monstrous” and “scandalously profligate” tropicality threatens to defy rationalization (10, 28). For this reason, Tocantins argues that Euclides came to understand that his positivism would not be enough to gain control; the climate was “not as sovereign as the determinists had thought,” and “the social environment” also “imposed itself on the cosmic environment” (91). What emerges is an understanding of the complexity of a system of “interrelationality in which the environment acts on man and man on the environment” (91–2). The perpetually mutual transformations of cultural and natural forms in the tropics mean that mimetic language will always miss its mark, and his language marks this miss deferentially in its self-reflexive lyrical excess. Precisely when the scientist is supposed to be the most restrained in empirical observation, “the great river . . . evokes the marvelous so powerfully that it catches up the unpresuming chronicler, the romantic adventurer, and the careful scholar alike” (5–6). The ecological reality of the tropics makes all alike guilty of a “flight of fancy” or of a “daring ‘rush’ of imagination and fantasy,” and is therefore the reason for blurring the distinctions between historical, literary, and scientific prose (5, 19). It is for this reason that Euclides’s prose can be described as simultaneously “expressionistic” and “impressionistic,” both poetic and mimetic (Tocantins 92). The point here is that to the extent that ecology brings political and genre boundaries into question, it makes a compara-

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tive frame necessary – between genres, epistemologies, and geopolitical borders – in order to approach its extensity and complexity. Of course, broad comparative frames run their risks, just as narrow nationalist ones do. To argue that the Amazon is not an entity that fits within any one nation’s borders, of course, is meant to highlight the dangers of monolithic and static definitions of nature and the contingency of nationalism itself. But it is not enough in turn to insist rigidly on the oppositional idea that the Amazon belongs to all of the Americas or to the entire world. Candace Slater’s work on representations of the Amazon has exposed the attendant problems of contemporary environmentalism in its desire to globalize and thus save the rainforest from the locals. The mono-mythic and cosmopolitan view of the Amazon as the endangered Eden, as the lung of the world, has been a vital catalyst for environmental thought and action. Indeed, ecologically speaking it is one of the more cross-cultural and vital ecologies in the world. If climate change persists unabated, however, we can expect to see signs of the collapse of the Amazon basin and its rainforest by 2040, resulting in a release of carbon stored in its vegetation and soils that equals 8% of the world’s stored carbon (Flannery 198). However, the idea of the rainforest as an ecosystem tends to elide the rich overlay of stories, myths, and histories that emerge from local and transnational experience within the watershed. Slater’s exposé of that overlay makes a strong case for what she calls a “meeting of the waters,” or a comparative and dialectic criticism that moves from within and from without a given geographical space. I endorse this dialectical and comparative approach, but I wish to suggest further that it is made necessary by the very ecology of this watershed. Ecological understanding may serve not only to balance the social and cultural concerns she raises but also to aid us in the formation of a dialectic between the global and the local that is adequate to contemporary environmental problems. The implication here is that criticism that seeks to organize the chaos of literature into meaningful and discrete systems of knowledge must, like the prose that attends to the intertwining ambiguities of form in the tropics, remain decentered, interdisciplinary, and, we might even say, baroque in its methodology. The baroque form has been widely recognized as a vital strategy for American and Latin American writers such as Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Carlos Fuentes, José Lezama Lima, and others who have sought to represent the complex overlay of histories in the Americas. As I have argued elsewhere, the aesthetics of the New World Baroque is a productive response to ecology; it stipulates the priority of the land, the almost moral obligation of mimesis, and the inevitability of self-reflexive excess in which ecology decenters the human self (Handley “New World Baroque”). Euclides places front and center the complexity, interdependency, and unpredictability of the river as ecosystem; as a result, his literature is similarly resistant to reductive or isolated readings. It demands a recognition of the mutually constitutive forces of nature and culture and the need for shifting and comparative geographical and literary contexts in order to tease out its fullest range of meanings. Criticism, in other words, should not seek to reduce

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literature, like a dam to a river, to an ideologically fixed point. In his description of Thoreau’s attempt at biocentric prose, Aaron Sachs pinpoints the reasons why such a decentered response is necessary to respond to the empirical realities of ecology. He describes how Thoreau allows ecology to deconstruct his human-centered view only to “then buil[d] the whole back up into something even more complex, rich, overwhelming. To be slightly off balance oneself was the only way to make a cosmos of the chaos” (97). Euclides’s inability to rationalize the river’s ecology and to even control the rationality of his own prose is symptomatic of the ecological grounding of the literary imagination and an argument for literature itself as an ecosystem.

McCarthy, Biocentrism, and Literature as Ecosystem Cormac McCarthy is a contemporary writer with a similarly keen interest in the scientific understanding of his time and with an oeuvre that also imagines the interplay of ecosystems. Author of several plays and 10 novels, his fiction explores the cultures of the South and of Mexico and the existential dimensions of our human relationship to the physical world. I wish to focus on his 1994 novel, The Crossing, which is the second of a border trilogy of three novels that all take place across the geopolitical borders and cultures of the United States and Mexico and across the borders between the human and natural realms. The Crossing’s teenage protagonist from southern Texas, Billy Parham, engages in three crossings over into Mexico – once to protect the life of a wolf who has ventured into his father’s cattle ranch; the second time with his brother Boyd, after they have been orphaned, to rescue stolen horses; and the final time in a failed attempt to bring back his brother’s remains after he is killed in Mexico. The boy’s sufferings provide McCarthy an opportunity to reflect philosophically on the human place within the broad systems of life and to thereby understand the meaning of suffering. It is most significant that the novel does so by representing ecology as a complex system that blurs and destabilizes the boundaries between nations, between human individuals, and between humans and animals. For the past two decades, McCarthy has been affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, an unusual scientific think tank that is devoted to tackling questions that pertain to complex systems and that houses some of the brightest minds in science, social science, and mathematics. McCarthy himself views physics as one of the twentieth century’s most important “universal human flowerings” (Lincoln 9; see also Kushner; Woodward). In mimicry of the kind of ecosystems discussed earlier, McCarthy’s treatment of the interconnections of human and animal life deconstructs fixed borders even while it generates an imagined and contingent system. His literary representation of a lifecentered, or biocentric, cosmos contains the probabilities of complexity, loss, and risk while suggesting the reasons for continued hope and ethics in the face of the fragility of the earth’s and our own ecology. As such, the novel renders even more complex Euclides’s inter-American ecological imaginary as it seeks to be adequate to what

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contemporary empirical observation tells us about the biological basis of all cultures. Some ecocritics have suggested that biocentrism, as opposed to the arrogant and ecologically indifferent position of anthropocentrism or a human-centered cosmos, provides the cosmological view required to redeem us from the problem of our own environmental sins. However, if foregrounding more-than-human life in this way merely implies finding a more sensitive form of ecological management, as it sometimes did for Euclides, McCarthy’s novel suggests that for biocentrism to be ethically valuable, we must confront its troubling implication of senseless suffering (see Arnold 221). If we don’t insist on our human difference, why should suffering and death, whether human or not, bother us at all? In other words, for McCarthy, a biocentric universe is not a harmonious and manageable whole but is subject to chaos and unpredictability, and the only ethics it allows is one that accounts for unforeseeable probabilities. The discovery of these profound implications of biocentrism is facilitated by Billy Parham’s ventures across the boundaries of family, community, language, and nation. Billy is not alone in his crossings, as he encounters various communities that also remain outside of the claims of national histories and the demarcations of territories: Mexican vagrants, Native American peoples wandering between nations and languages, Mennonites, Mormons. While in Mexico, he meets a series of mentors who tutor him in the meaning of human existence in a biologically contingent world. One mentor is a man blinded in the Mexican Revolution who describes for Billy a cosmos in which blindness is paradigmatic: To move is to abut against the world. Sit quietly and it vanishes. En mis primeros años de la obscuridad pensé que la ceguera fue una forma de la muerte. Estuve equivocado. Al perder la vista es como un sueño de caída. Se piensa que no hay ningun fondo en este abismo. Se cae y cae. La luz retrocede. La memoria de la luz. La memoria del mundo. De su propia cara. De la carantoña. He said that if this falling were a falling to death then it was death itself that was different than men supposed. Where is the world in this falling? It is also receding away with the light and the memory of the light? Or does it not fall also? He said that in his blindness he had indeed lost himself and all memory of himself yet he had found the deepest dark of that loss that there also was a ground and there one must begin. (McCarthy 291–2)

The text’s frequent dialectical movement between Spanish and English creates an ambiguity of “doubleness” (Soto 58), of course, but what is most telling here is the Whitman echo in the phrase “different than men supposed.” Whitman wrote of what he called the “strange chemistry” of natural regeneration – that is, nature’s capacity to renew itself from the vestiges of dead bodies – because he felt that it implied something democratic and cross-cultural. Because of the radical equality and perpetuity of all life, he famously wrote that “to die is different than anyone supposed, and luckier.” This last phrase, “and luckier,” was central to the optimistic tone of his

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romantic theodicy. Despite his rather advanced understanding of ecological process in his time, however, he was never able to reconcile himself to the more existentially frightening and ethically complicated implications of nature’s indifference toward human suffering. If natural law makes no distinctions between life forms and their various stages of decay and regeneration, he struggled to explain why we should continue to insist on or believe in the value of human difference (see Handley, New World Poetics). In other words, romanticism and even positivism recoiled from the possibility that the radical equality of ecological process implies that democracy might be messier than imagined, that nations are in dialectical relationships to each other, and moreover that ecology threatens us with unpredictability, unknowability, and nihilism. What initiates Billy’s geopolitical crossing is an attempt to kill a wolf that has attacked his father’s cattle. After following the wolf along the meandering trajectory of its ecosystem, Billy captures but can’t bring himself to kill it. One famous articulation of a biocentric ethic was Aldo Leopold’s charge to consider the value of a wolf to a mountain’s ecosystem and thus to learn to “think like a mountain.” To think ecologically, in other words, requires a renunciation of the specialness of human life and a reconsideration of human life in biological context, not unlike the ways in which Euclides is learning to think, as it were, like a river. Indeed, Billy becomes compelled to follow the ecosystem further, which necessitates crossing the Mexican border so as to return the wolf to his Mexican mountain home. In his fidelity to the logic of an ecosystem, he strives to see the world through the eyes of the wolf. However, what he learns is not so reassuring. He begins to understand that the wolf “knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there” (McCarthy 45). To imagine otherwise is to imagine “the unspeakable” (148). To retain faith in the probability that “something knows of [Billy’s] existence[,] [s]omething knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from” (148), however, McCarthy insists that we must be willing to imagine “terrible things of Him.” McCarthy’s biocentric cosmos offers a theodicy that reconciles trust in order and meaning with the terrible facts of biology. Faith in the face of chaos, in other words, requires that “the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments” (202). While McCarthy’s border trilogy offers a potent inter-American imaginary, the connections that link these different geopolitical spaces are represented both metaphorically and ecologically. Moreover, these open spaces between boundaries threaten to obliterate human meaning altogether. McCarthy’s blind man suggests, however, that this confrontation with the nihilism at the heart of biology can become the starting point for rebuilding faith in order and in community. Although he acknowledges that a biocentric view makes death different than we might have supposed, he does not declare it “luckier.” Whitman’s optimism took him so far as to suggest that perhaps evil doesn’t exist, but we can hear McCarthy walking a finer line. The man tells Billy, with regard to the world, that “nothing had changed and all was different. The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less” (277–8). McCarthy’s ecosystem, then, is not a

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facile reassuring promise of regeneration and balance but is instead a process of exchange and transformation that perpetually renders us answerable for our own acts of evil. Another mentor teaches Billy that key to understanding this metaphysical meaning of biological regeneration is recognizing that life stands in a dialectical relation to death. As he explains, “[D]eath was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof” (379). As if to reject the facile notion of an ecosystem as a balanced, closed, and manageable system of life, Billy carries the wolf across national, linguistic, and ethnic borders and thereby sees in the wolf ’s eyes a “reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart” (105). The wolf, in other words, presents that “always problematic and tenuous relationship between the text and the world, as well as between human and non-human animals” (Powici 1). McCarthy repeatedly insists that this relationship is problematic because it is “reckonless” and, in Spanish, “inconoscible,” implying that the animate world of our biology is both necessary to our self-understanding and a secret that remains beyond our grasp. This mentor tells Billy that “the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought” (McCarthy 235). In a sacramental act to get himself closer to this deeper thought, Billy tastes the wolf ’s blood. Instead of bringing redemption or knowledge, however, this act of communion with the biological cosmos brings Billy to a state of unknowing. The dead wolf becomes now “what blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war” (127). With these persistent metaphysical musings in the novel, McCarthy suggests that biology signifies the world’s indifference to human significance. Only after Billy is willing to face this abyss does he become aware of a “perfect cohesion” that underlies this space of unknowing, a cohesion that bespeaks a world “sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men’s imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen” (283). Throughout the novel, there are those who, unlike the various migrants he encounters, try to police the various boundaries of this multicultural and transnational south, as if to wrest the threatening chaos of these unknowable and open systems into a stable and ordered whole. These are judges, property owners, and the military, all representatives of civic and political power. But the various errant wanderers whom Billy befriends instead emerge as alternative voices for a more contingent kind of order. McCarthy implies that in the same way that geopolitical boundaries, religious creeds, ethnic certainties, and linguistic differences are used to fix and stabilize the dynamic self (as well as national literatures), so too do conceptions of fixed borders between the human and the more-than-human world prove inadequate to account for the perpetually contingent and unknowable nature of existence. McCarthy does not disavow Whitman’s widely shared nineteenth-century notion that literature shapes imagined communities and that, if literature is responsive to the local qualities of the natural world, it can inspire a particularly democratic and independent community. However, he suggests that the order that must emerge from

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empirical observation and mimesis of the natural world should be informed by biology’s brute terrors and unpredictable complexity. Billy’s perceptions of stars, his ruminations on the contours of rivers, or his questions about the subjectivity of the wolf are all cause for him to reflect on the facts of his common biological substance as dust. McCarthy’s positing of this radical equality of all material and biological existence is not cause for a romantic celebration of transcendent meaning, as it was for Whitman, nor reason for positivistic hope in manageability, as it was for Euclides, but it at least is cause for wonder and compassion. As the blind man explains to Billy, the fact that all we can touch and see will ultimately become dust is paradoxically “la evidencia mas profunda de la justicia, de la misericordia. En esto vemos la bendición mas grande de Dios” (293). McCarthy’s is Janus-faced theology because for every trace of meaning Billy builds from the ashes and dust of his physical existence, he still must face the abyss again. When Billy’s father appears to him in a dream, his father “seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him” (112; see Canfield). McCarthy here represents death, like the spaces between nations and peoples, not as a space of knowledge but of being. Arrival at this state of being appears to require the renunciation of knowledge and of naming. But, as indicated earlier, the blind man tells Billy that if death is a space of uncertainty, it remains a probability that it can become a space of hope because, as he further notes, “Si el mundo es ilusión la pérdida del mundo es ilusión también” (283). McCarthy’s novel portrays an ecological imbalance in human civilization that emerges from a fear of the probability of the meaninglessness of human suffering. This fear manifests itself by turning ecosystems into so many territories, parts of a geopolitical machine that vigorously polices borders and exchanges identities as so many of its constituent parts. He implies that nature as a stable and alternative category to human history, then, is not the antidote to civilization gone awry. The antidote is a human consciousness of the biosphere, a gift that comes from listening to and gathering stories of errant crossings, as the novel itself does. Even though literature begins with the aim of apprehending the secrets of biology, in the end it is a form of hyperreality, as Kenneth Lincoln argues, a linguistic flourish over and above an empirical reality that defies facile summary or denotation (19). Literature is always in this sense metaphysical even when it is modeled after the world, since it is in baroque excess of an empirical reality. As one mentor to Billy puts it, “[T]here is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale” (143). Unlike direct experience with the world, stories require a suspension of disbelief and a contingent imagination of wholeness that sees all parts linked by necessity. In other words, although it derives its energy from places, literature here makes words more vital than flesh, culture more vital than nature, and imagination more vital than the determinisms of geography. McCarthy’s insistence that in the end we are left with words recalls the literary and baroque style that we saw emerging in Euclides’s prose, and it emphasizes our responsibility for our own

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ethical orientation to the world. Environmental ethics are not determined by what science tells us but by our capacity to imagine the reasons for our belonging in a lifecentered universe. As McCarthy makes clear, stories are contingent methods for rendering “everything necessary” and for providing the “joinery’ that makes wholeness possible to imagine (143). As such, they remind us that ecosystems are our stories, our constructions; they express our hope that despite the risks of loss and of disorder, we can accept the constraints that our interdependency requires and live sustainably within them. The novel ends with Billy sitting in silence, and “after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction” (426). The day is evidence of natural regeneration, the perpetual newness of the world, and hence perhaps a sign of hope and redemption. But although “godmade,” the sun rises for all, including the many evildoers whom Billy has encountered, thus confirming the blind man’s theodicy that the world is new and yet old, made of the same evil and good as always. The sun, then, is both providential and biological, evidence of love and possibility as well as of dissolution and nothingness. Biology alone does not provide the reasons for hope; our hope lies in our capacity to take up the materials of chaos, the detritus of time, and to organize systems and worlds, to make stories out of blood and bones. As the gypsy tells Billy, this is “the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?” (411). In their own ways, Euclides and McCarthy encounter and represent a fact that should be obvious by now: a biocentric cosmos renders national borders and national literatures endlessly porous and contingent. Nevertheless, this analysis suggests that the fact that literary criticism remains relatively wedded to nationalist paradigms, even when it attempts to interrogate such frames, is perhaps a symptom of an impoverished ecological imagination. American literatures circulate within complex and open systems of mutual exchange and transformation, both among books and between the word and the world. But the links that bring these literatures together, like the untraceable links of biology’s secret matrix, cannot be understood or described without some investment of our own hopeful imagination to make meaning of relation. Euclides and McCarthy remind us that we can choose contingent frames to be able to speak of an “American literature,” but we cannot fix its meaning or close its histories. As Euclides and McCarthy’s imaginations make evident, the best we can do is to tell the story of literature as a set of probabilities, of overlapping and complex systems that remain open to other systems and to the world itself. Literary criticism, like the primary literature it attends to, becomes a rhetorical and imagined attempt to organize the chaotic material of life, an attempt best facilitated by crossing geopolitical borders. The result is not an imagined community that requires the wall building of geopolitical power or the hedge trimming of cultural criticism. Rather, reading dialectically and cross-culturally provides a method for imagining human belonging in the physical world. The sense of belonging that emerges, unlike identities fostered by nationalist contexts that want to marry identity to land or fix literature by region,

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reveals subjects as much shaped by the environment as by their own poetic desire. Ecology perpetually creates this ambiguity between nature and culture, which is a paradox since it means we can no longer be sure what the distinction is between the world of things and the world of words, between object and subject. We can imagine that literature is an ecosystem because it asks us to construct the reasons to hope that our words will finally reach their target of making sense of our physical life, that they will finally be made flesh, of literal bones and dust.

References and Further Reading Arnold, Edwin T. “McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing.” In Edwin T. Arnold, Cormac McCarthy: New Directions (pp. 215–38). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Barrera-Osorio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Botkin, Daniel. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Canfield, J. Douglas. “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” In Edwin T. Arnold, A McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (pp. 256–69). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Costa Lima, Luiz. Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times. Trans. Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Cunha, Euclides da. Á marjem da historia. Porto, Brazil: Livraria Chardron, 1926. Flannery, Timothy. The History and Future Impact of Climate Change. London: Allen Lane, 2006. Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Handley, George B. “New World Baroque as Postcolonial Ecology.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (pp. 117–135). Ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Handley, George B. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Kushner, David. “Cormac McCarthy’s Apocalypse.” Rolling Stone, December 27, 2007, 1–8. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Lincoln, Kenneth. Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Vintage, 1994. Powici, Chris. “Witnessing the Wolf: The Human and the Lupine in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.” Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English 1 (2000): 1–8. Sá, Lucia. “Introduction: Voicing Brazilian Imperialism: Euclides da Cunha and the Amazon.” In Euclides da Cunha, The Amazon: Land without History (pp. xi–xxiii). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Sachs, Aaron. The Humboldt Current: NineteenthCentury Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism. New York: Penguin, 2007. Sarewitz, Daniel. “Science and Environmental Policy: An Excess of Objectivity.” In Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community (pp. 79–98). Ed. Robert Frodeman. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan. Eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

American Literature as Ecosystem Slater, Candace. Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Soto, Isabel. “The Border Paradigm in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.” In Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (pp. 51–61). Eds. Jesus Benito and Ana Maria Manzanas. New York: Rodopi, 2002. Tocantins, Leonardo. Euclides da Cunha e o paraíso perdido. Manaus, Brazil: Edições Governo de Estado do Amazonas, 1966.

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Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac Country.” Vanity Fair, August 2005, 98. Worster, Daniel. “Nature and the Disorder of History.” Environmental History Review 18 (Summer 1994): 1–15. Worster, Daniel. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence Mark Rifkin

This chapter will examine examples of recent work on affect in American literary studies, asking what they can contribute to analysis of what I describe as “settler structures of feeling.” Processes and institutionalized frameworks of settlement – the exertion of control by non-Natives over Native peoples and lands – give rise to certain modes of feeling, and, reciprocally, particular affective formations among non-Natives normalize settler presence, privilege, and power.1 Understanding settlement as a structure of feeling entails asking how emotions, sensations, and psychic life take part in the (ongoing) process of exerting non-Native authority over Indigenous peoples, governance, and territoriality. How are the politics of settler rule lived in everyday ways? How do quotidian modes of feeling help naturalize non-Natives’ sense of entitlement to (once) Indigenous lands and sense of ease in the territory claimed by the settler state? How does that feeling of connection to this place as citizens of the state actively efface ongoing histories of imperial expropriation and contribute to the continuing justification of the settler state’s authority to superintend Native peoples? What makes non-Native feeling significant, then, is that it both indexes how processes of settlement come to appear self-evident and how such dynamics are realized – given structure and made concrete – through everyday experiences of embodiment, location, and belonging. What distinguishes Native peoples from other ethnic or minority groups in the United States is their indigeneity – their occupancy as polities on the land currently claimed by the United States prior to the extension of Euro-authority over it. The primary issue that frames US-Indian relations, then, is not racist exclusion from citizenship but forced incorporation into the state (for differently configured overviews of the history of US Indian policy, see Bruyneel; Cheyfitz; Deloria and Lytle; Wilkins). A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Although US Indian policy has taken multiple and shifting forms, the central problematic remains: the territoriality of the United States is composed out of lands to which Indigenous nations did and do assert claims. That fact has generated and continues to generate a fundamental tension within the jurisdictional imaginary of the United States, troubling the effort to posit an obvious relation between the rightful authority of the state and the territory over which it seeks to extend that authority. The attempt to manage this endemic crisis in legitimizing settler sovereignty propels the naturalization of particular forms of land tenure and governance. The assertion of state control over Native populations and places is validated by appeal to the supposedly obvious superiority of private property holding. Although cast as prepolitical, non-Native modes of liberal landholding depend on the ongoing superimposition of US jurisdiction and property law on Native polities and their territory, while the appeal to the normative ideal of individual(ist) ownership helps validate state displacement and regulation of Indigenous peoples (on the relation between individual identity and property holding in Euro-American history, see Cohen; Elmer; Macpherson). The exertion of authority over Indigenous peoples and territories literally produces the foundation for the US state, and the interwoven forms of national belonging, property, and personhood that arise within the United States are marked by the ongoing inscription of settler sovereignty over Native polities and modes of placemaking. To live under US jurisdiction, then, is to have one’s sense of personhood, property, and place shaped in fundamental ways by processes of settlement, even when Native peoples, histories, and lands do not seem at issue. Critics within Native studies have begun to explore the effects of non-Native institutions and legacies of dispossession, exploitation, and erasure on Native structures of feeling (for examples, see Carpenter; Driskill; Justice; Million; Miranda). However, if one seeks to understand how settler power works, a focus on Native experience can flip over rather easily into what Andrea Smith has described as “ethnographic entrapment,” producing a vision of Indigenous identity for the consumption of non-Natives. Instead, as Smith suggests, attention needs to be directed toward the logics of settler colonialism – the social, ideological, and institutional processes through which the authority of the settler state implicitly and explicitly is enacted. In this vein, for non-Natives to express sympathy, and even to decry violence against Indigenous peoples, is not the same as examining how they intimately are enmeshed in the imperial legacies and trajectories that (re)produce the US nation-state. This chapter, then, is an effort to draw attention to otherwise unmarked forms of settler subjectivity, focusing on how American literary studies might better attend to the ways settlement works through ordinary sensations of space and selfhood. Over the past decade, American literary studies has developed a critical language for talking about everyday emotional life. It addresses how texts reflect, critique, and engage emotional dynamics, including the political implications of such expressions and experiences of feeling even in the absence of a clearly articulated political position or discussion of existing institutional formations. However, while such interpretive strategies can help in conceptualizing and tracing how texts register and participate

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in settler structures of feeling, available approaches to affect tend to treat the existence of the state and citizenship within it as a neutral framework, thereby displacing analysis of the ongoing regulation and elision of indigeneity. Therefore, opening up the potential of this body of scholarship for analyzing the role that settlement plays in ordinary forms of non-Native feeling requires marking the unstated role of US jurisdiction and citizenship in scholarly methodologies. In doing so, I will focus on two critics – Christopher Castiglia and Anne Cheng – whose work illustrates well current ways of analyzing affect,2 and in discussing the possibilities and limits of their approaches, I will address Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836) as critical allegories.3 These texts provide particularly vivid examples of how non-Native feeling takes shape within and helps naturalize the exertion of US imperial authority over Native peoples. They address how the dynamics of that sociopolitical system appear as forms of everyday sensation that do not necessarily reference Indigenous claims. These texts indicate connections between the displacement of indigeneity and the everyday life of non-Natives, and by attending to that relationship, I want to explore how non-Native feelings can be read as imbricated in settlement even in the absence of reference to things Native. Thus, I am less concerned with these texts’ historical context than their capacity to indicate relations between normative modes of personhood and placemaking in the United States and its status as a settler state, relations largely bracketed in recent studies on affect. Such work tends to treat the jurisdictional field of the state as given, displacing discussion of how the legal geography of the United States gives rise to quotidian modes of selfunderstanding that help normalize the ongoing process of settlement.

The Affective Life of Jurisdiction In his most recent book, Christopher Castiglia seeks to trace the emergence of a certain way of conceptualizing personhood in the United States and its displacement of democratic deliberation and engagement. More specifically, he suggests that social life has come to be understood in terms of forces played out within individuals. This “interior state” helps explain how people participate in political, economic, and cultural formations. He argues that we have been encouraged to misrecognize the location of the social, finding it, not in association with others, but in the turbulent and conflicted interiors of our own bodies. The bodily interior has become misunderstood as a social space, as the social space of modernity, and it is exclusively within that interior state that citizens are encouraged to develop democratic innovation and the skills of negotiation across differences. (2)

More than simply an act of disengagement, the turn inward constructs a sense of psychological and affective interiority out of existing social processes and tensions. From this perspective, “nervousness, desire, appetite, [and] fantasy” are seen as

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marking idiosyncratic sensations rather than registering the social conditions within which the individual is living (12). The very idea of individual interiority, then, is a misrecognition, a topological misassignment of social struggle and negotiation. Envisioning personhood in this way not only isolates citizens from each other but treats the experience of affect and sensation as confirming that fundamental, ontological separateness, rather than pointing toward mutual enmeshment with others in social structures and processes. To have feelings illustrates one’s distinctness from other people, and to take part in practices deemed wasteful, excessive, perverse, or destructive – that violate dominant ideologies of proper labor, family, and home life – means that one has wrong feelings. Nonnormative kinds of association and activity are understood as due to individual failings (mental, emotional, or physical) that express faulty forms of interiority rather than alternative modes of sociality. Such interioriziation, Castiglia suggests, is accompanied by a growing “institutionalism,” an investment in and identification with bureaucratic structures. They promise to provide stability and order by maintaining a regularity that can overlay the idiosyncratic, and potentially erratic, internal lives of the national populace (64–5). As against this immobilizing dialectic of interiority and institutionality, Castiglia insists, “Sociality is not a projection of the ‘self.’ . . . The ‘self ’ is an introjection of the social” (261). Affect, then, registers how individuals participate in broader social processes, even as that experience is lived and narrated as if it were merely a sensation emanating from inside. Such analysis draws attention to structures of feeling that connect individual emotion to sociopolitical formations while highlighting the ways that understanding feeling as expressive of individual identity stymies the capacity to envision large-scale social change. However, what kind of change would a “post-interior” sensibility make possible, and does it rely on reaffirming the organizing structures of the (settler) state? Castiglia suggests that the kinds of interiority he traces, and their portrayal in imaginative writing, provide “an archive of democratic aspirations that have been discredited or foreclosed” (11), but the “we” whose aspirations are disavowed is composed of US “citizens.” If the members of this “we” are the subjects of the US state, isn’t “the social” implicitly a function of the US jurisdictional imaginary? How is the “we” constituted as such, and to what extent does that process depend on the administrative and property logics of US legal geography? If “post-interior democracy” potentially reconnects feeling to community and broader modes of social engagement (204), it retains an investment in the geopolitical coherence of the United States, from which the “we” of citizenship comes. The absence of an acknowledgment of the constitutive role of this institutionality in Castiglia’s formulation of democracy raises the question of what kind of participation is possible for Indigenous peoples if it depends on accepting the legitimacy of US jurisdiction and authority over them. More than that, retaining the nation-state as the paradigmatic frame of analysis displaces discussion of the relation between the production of an interior for or as the nation (“domestic” space) and the production of forms of affective interiority – normalizing certain modes of selfhood and experiences of space that reiterate the obviousness of

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settler jurisdiction. How do the forms of institutionality involved in sustaining the existence of the settler state generate practices of inhabitance and social interaction (such as those around property holding) that come to serve as conditions of possibility for individual subjectivity? How does affect emerge from and circulate within the material structures and dynamics of everyday life, including those that maintain the geopolitical and jurisdictional integrity of the state? To the extent that the “we” of national membership functions as an unreflexive yet central frame for tracking feeling and the ways it structures experiences of personhood and place, the project of settlement serves as a fundamental premise of scholarly critique. That implicit framework overlooks how structures of feeling ordered around the principles and practices of settlement can remain active despite an expressed hostility to the state apparatus or to specific policy programs. One can see that problematic played out rather precisely in Walden. At first, such a claim appears rather odd given Thoreau’s declared opposition to the owning of property and to obedience to state mandates, as well as his repeated critique of US expansionism. In perhaps his baldest statement on this point, he insists, “Enjoy the land, but own it not” (139), suggesting a kind of pleasure, a way of relating to oneself, that can only emerge in the absence of ownership. However, his account of embodiment depends on the notion of self-possession at play in the liberal ideas he rejects. Describing the kinds of labor entailed in maintaining “inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools,” he wryly observes, “The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh” (3). Here he makes the body into the object of one’s focus, prioritizing self-care over accumulation while offering an impression of corporeality as the thing that one owns or cultivates like property. Thoreau further asserts that the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these [unnecessary commodities], and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which . . . result from the use of such things. (138)

Highlighting ownership of oneself over that in land or things, he argues, frees you from the political and economic network of “the state,” the jurisdictional matrix that commits you – whatever your conscious principles – to “slavery and war” as a function of your participation in it. Yet, earlier, the text models selfhood on the territoriality of the state: “Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them” (95). How can we understand this apparent contradiction? Refusing allegiance to the state does not mean that one’s experience of selfhood follows different principles than those through which the nation is sustained as such. Moreover, this spatial imaginary turns out to describe a specifically settler sort of selfhood. Thoreau incorporates Native peoples as a feature of psychic or emotional interiority. In doing so, he registers the potential jurisdictional crisis created by indi-

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geneity while at the same time neutralizing it by situating it as an internal feature of normative personhood, which itself is structured around the sensation of self-possessed containment. Walden’s invocation of Native peoples suggests less a retreat into the self than an implicit fashioning of selfhood out of the dynamics of settler sociality and sovereignty. In “Higher Laws,” he presents hunting as a necessary part of (boys’) maturation while also critiquing it as a kind of “savage” remainder: “There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the ‘best men,’ as the Algonquins called them” (142). The “wildness” that leads one to desire to hunt marks a vestigial impulse (140), and each person has such a “period” in his “history.” While the killing of animals indicates “the larva state” in “a man,” “whole nations” can remain in this condition (144). If some men are “like nations” in their bounded individuation, others are part of “nations” that have failed to develop, that remain trapped in an earlier stage of human history marked by an absence of proper cultivation. To have grown up as a proper individual is to have a state-like sense of physical containment, as opposed to the excessive spatiality of hunting, and to belong to a “savage” nation is to have undisciplined physical yearnings and tendencies, rather than understanding the practices grouped under hunting as indicating an alternative collective mode of occupancy, land tenure, and placemaking. Such savagery is linked to “the Algonquins” (the name of a language family that includes numerous peoples on the east coast extending toward the Great Lakes), suggesting it serves as a metonymic stand-in for Native peoples on whose homelands New England was built. A shared desire to hunt among (male) US subjects, then, marks a process of maturation, of coming to consciousness in which Native proclivities emerge within individual non-Native selfhood but do not ultimately challenge the frame of self-possessed individuality. While Algonquins may be invoked to name forms of settler feeling, they cannot themselves make claims to the space occupied by national subjects. Algonquins, instead, represent a kind of sensation that needs to be regulated in order to achieve proper personhood, which itself resembles the “natural boundaries” of the nation. At points, Thoreau notes that Native people(s) preceded him on the territory he inhabits (105–6, 128–9), and he tells an anecdote about “a strolling Indian [who] went to sell baskets” to people in the neighborhood, the moral of which is to learn “how to avoid the necessity of selling them” so as not to be dependent on others’ willingness to buy (12). Thus, when actual Indians enter the text, they either lack any determinate sense of place (“strolling”) or are gone – having all died or moved elsewhere. Native hunting, however, had been and continued to be a topic of great concern in US Indian policy. In addition to the amount of land that hunting required, it also functioned as a symbol of the significant distinctions between Indigenous modes of placemaking and collective decision making and those at play in US liberal governance and the treaty system (see Rifkin). At stake in the definition and disposition of Native “hunting grounds” was the jurisdictional authority of the United States to manage lands within its boundaries and to define what would constitute a viable assertion of Native sovereignty and territoriality. Here, that geopolitical struggle appears

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as a negotiation within settler selfhood, as the need to better channel individual desire. The institutional imperatives of US legal geography provide the frame for conceptualizing feelings of “wildness,” and, reciprocally, such narration normalizes the terms of settler governance as the prism through which to view and understand everyday experience. However, that connection between personal feeling and the policies of the settler state is disavowed. Thoreau assures readers that “the hunting and fishing grounds [in New England] were not limited like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage” (141). The shared feeling of savagery that provides the basis for identification among self-possessed individuals emerges in a space always already cleared of actual savages, yet one that also ostensibly exceeds or transcends state mandates and the constrictions of private property. Settlement continues to shape the experience and representation of selfhood even in the absence of declared commitment to its terms. This implicit linkage is made visible when Thoreau plays Indian (see Deloria). At one point, Thoreau describes himself as coming into town “like a friendly Indian” (178), and he earlier suggests that “all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with – ‘Welcome Englishmen!’ ” (104), thereby presenting himself as Samoset – an Abenaki man who spoke to the Pilgrims in their own language upon meeting them. These moments seek to mark his distance from the village, his isolation from the networks of exchange he decries, and the difference of his life in the woods. To do so, he draws on qualities (stereotypically) associated with Native peoples. Indianness indexes individual settler desire for distance from the space of owned things and toward “wildness.” Such tendencies, though, are safely contained within the individuated, self-owned body of the non-Indian whose personal propensities never become a principle of collectivity – of national adhesion. Thoreau’s imagination of himself as an Indian recapitulates the terms of settler jurisdiction – his nation-like, self-possessed separateness from others – while remaining unconnected to anything that might resemble the collectivity and/or territoriality of a “savage” nation, and thus might challenge the geopolitics of US nationality. He is outside, but that outside ultimately is inside. The invocation of indigeneity as if it were a kind of individual sensation detached from the politics of sovereignty helps foreground what usually remains tacit. The feeling of democratic “boundless”-ness in the United States – the affective extension of personhood into space – depends on both the erasure of Native polities’ claims to that territory and the narration of the experience of self-enclosed individuality as prior to and beyond the legal structures that make that space available for non-Native occupancy. When Thoreau plays Indian, representing his desires and relations to others through invocations of Native people, one might interpret this pattern as a form of racial subordination. With respect to white abolitionists’ relation to African Americans, Castiglia suggests that the former, in some sense, play black, engaging in a kind of internal minstrelsy. Addressing William Lloyd Garrison in particular, he suggests that “identification with black Americans . . . gave rise to a complex pedagogical” project in which black citizens serve “as abstract markers of civic virtues,” and “[t]hrough

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sympathy with blacks, then, white abolitionists absorbed the virtues born of private purity and public pain” (130). That sympathetic identification “imagine[s] ‘blackness’ as white interiority” (130). In the place of engaging with black people, Garrison and others envision them in terms of their role in white emotional life. Put another way, from this perspective, whiteness can be thought of, at least in part, as an affective formation in which (stereotyped images of) black people serve as material for forms of personal experience and self-definition that deny African Americans an existence separate from white structures of feeling. Considering Thoreau’s text in these terms would highlight how actual relations between Natives and non-Natives are effaced in favor of treating Indians as a set of affective dispositions (such as “wildness”) operative within settler emotional life. However, what potentially falls away in such a reading is the fact that the kinds of social engagement overlooked by white abolitionists are not the same as those effaced by Thoreau. The former are relations among subjects of the state within a field defined by the possibility of full national belonging and citizenship, whereas the relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers are irreducible to the terms of a national “we.” As I have been suggesting, the modes of feeling and experience Thoreau addresses through explicit or implicit citations of indigeneity have to do with access to and occupancy of space, forms of placemaking and associated notions of personhood that cannot be separated from the settler jurisdictional frame that makes them possible and that they naturalize. The elision of settler-Indigenous relations in Walden, then, marks less racial subordination within the state than the management and erasure of indigeneity on which the existence of the state, and the “we” of national identification, depends. In this way, the “nation”-like self-possession at play in Walden serves as the mark of such identification even in the apparent negation of property holding and statehood, and the imperial dimensions of this supposedly unfettered sensation of selfhood are revealed by the traces of indigeneity that litter the text, indicating a relation to ongoing processes of settlement despite their seeming absence or disavowal.

Citizenship and Its Discontents Appeals to citizenship potentially enable forms of antiracist sentiment and mobilization, but such challenges to official state ideologies, and the popular discourses and practices they engender, do not necessarily undo the continued efficacy and obviousness of settler sovereignty. In fact, invoking national belonging as a means of contesting white privilege can further entrench settler privilege. To the extent that scholarly accounts of racial(izing) structures of feeling do not engage with the jurisdictional and property logics of the state, their portrait of the political dynamics and implications of selfhood in the United States can end up normalizing the terms of settler governance. This effect occurs even as these accounts mark the violence of racism, in particular charting how people of color in the United States are called on to inhabit

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a damaging psychological and emotional matrix. On this score, Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race offers an instructive example. She argues that nonwhites’ experience of selfhood remains inscribed within competing identifications. All subjects in the United States are called on to live an ideal of personhood aligned with whiteness. While whites themselves only ever approximate this ideal, people of color are both called on to conform to that ideal (assimilation) while simultaneously judged in relation to an idealized racial type (authenticity). These competing ideals are not simply imposed from the outside but shape the workings of consciousness, desire, and fantasy, such that there is not a self that one could appeal to that is outside of or beyond these antagonistic processes of interpellation. That construction of selfhood around an ideal that is lost or impossible can be characterized, as Cheng suggests, as melancholia, a dynamic that is not pathological but actually normative: “In melancholia, assimilation (acting like an internalized other) is a fait accompli, integral to ego formation for the dominant and the minority, except that with the latter such doubling is seen as something false (acting like someone you’re not)” (125). Those persons typed as nonwhite occupy a more vexed relation to the dominant model of personhood, suspended as they are between the call to be generic citizens and the demand that they embody the nation’s own melancholic investments. “Racialization in America may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others” (10). The development of ideal types for each racial category allows them to serve as sites to which qualities and practices at odds with the “white national ideal” can be displaced while still retained as nodes of potential imaginative and affective investment by whites (such as Thoreau’s identification with a “wildness” typed as Native). People of color, though, are called on to be that type, to occupy it as their authentic self – generating forms of what Cheng describes as “racial grief.” Such feelings highlight the costs of having to embody a (stereo)type while still always failing to do so properly. Individual affect exceeds the parameters of this racializing narrative of nonwhite selfhood without taking form as a coherent, true identity that could be contrasted to the false type. In this way, Cheng’s account foregrounds how people of color are denied full inclusion within the nation. That discrimination gives rise to forms of “racial grief”: “the economic, material, and philosophical advances of the nation [specifically the United States] are built on a series of legalized exclusions” (10). She situates the possibility for acknowledging such grief within “the hypothetical space of citizenship” (192), which provides the potential for identification and interdependencies not founded on the (re)production of racial types. In some sense, the ultimate wounding here is the inability to participate in US nationhood as a full subject; the imperative to perform or approximate nonwhite racial identity generates the fundamental insecurity of being caught between performing racial authenticity and assimilating to the dominant (white) ideal. However, what makes US citizenship the horizon of possibility? How does taking citizenship as that horizon present the affect of belonging to the nation as itself neutral? In exploring how people of color are called on to be representative

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of the racial group to which they ostensibly belong, Cheng posits an “inherent gap between individual and collectivity” (155): “The individual fantasmatically invests in a representation of him/herself through communal relations, and it is that fantasy that confirms, retroactively, those relations” (157). Separate from questions of racialization, “the individual” appears here as (onto)logically prior to “communal relations.” This analytical distinction “between the individual and the collectivity,” though, seems to replicate the terms of liberal citizenship, in which belonging to the nation trumps any other kind of “communal” enfolding while simultaneously being characterized as a status occupied by persons rather than groups. In other words, recognition as a subject of the state provides the context in which “individual”-ity can signify as such, as against other kinds of social “relations,” including invidious modes of minoritization. To what extent, though, is the individuality of citizenship, which here serves as a bulwark against the insistence that one melancholically approximate either a dominant or racialized ideal, necessarily constituted through the jurisdictional and property matrix of the state? How does identifying with and through US citizenship – regardless of one’s racial status – implicitly commit one to subjectification as a settler? William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip” explores how forms of citizen feeling emerge in the context of institutionalized structures and imperatives that are themselves predicated on the disavowal of Native sovereignty. The project of settlement appears as crucial in the construction and persistence of US modes of governance: [A] foundation was laid in the first Legislature to enslave our people by taking from them all rights, which has been strictly adhered to ever since. Look at the disgraceful laws, disfranchising us as citizens. Look at the treaties made by Congress, all broken. Look at the deep-rooted plans laid, when a territory becomes a state, that after so many years the laws shall be extended over the Indians that live within their boundaries. (134)

The dynamics of US state formation (the “first Legislature,” treaties, and the transformation of territories into states of the union) axiomatically constrain and displace Native peoples, extending “laws” over them and their lands which deny their “rights” as autonomous polities. While further denied full citizenship in the nation carved out of Indigenous space, the principal violence, consolidated and rendered obvious through law and policy, lies in the denial of Native self-determination and coerced incorporation into the jurisdictional framework of the settler state. This political infrastructure provides the context in which settler sentiments take shape. Apess offers an imaginary conversation between the president of the United States and Native peoples that lays out the implicit terms of Indian relations and national belonging: “We want your land for our use to speculate upon”; “it aids us in paying off our national debt”; “our fathers carried on this scheme of getting your lands for our use”; “this has been the way our fathers first brought us up, and it is hard to depart from it” (135). The continual reproduction of the national “we” and “our” as such depends on the extension of a geopolitical claim to Indigenous “lands,” and the topos of familial inheritance here connects quotidian feelings of citizenship to property holding, indicating that

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the experience of national belonging is shaped by ongoing processes of settlement through which the national “we” (literally) is given form. The “I” of inheritance and landholding gains intelligibility within the institutionalized “we” of settler nationalism; reciprocally, the generational transfer of property materializes the broader imperial imposition of settler jurisdiction in an everyday way, helping make it seem self-evident. Apess’s text traces how US citizenship functions, in Raymond Williams’s terms, as an “experience of the present” in which the feeling of belonging helps realize an ongoing history of settlement (128). Through the figure of inheritance, Apess suggests that the legacy of displacing Natives and effacing their survival remains ongoing, connected as it is to the sensation of intimate filiation to the nation. Enumerating the violent acts and retrospective justifications by English settlers in New England throughout the seventeenth century, Apess exhorts, “Let the children of the Pilgrims blush while the son of the forest drops a tear and groans under the fate of his murdered and departed fathers” (114). The shame borne by these “children” lies in their relation to the Indigenous peoples whose decimation and dispossession cleared the space for the occupancy of the former. The rhetoric of fathers and children implies both a kind of familial resemblance and the transfer of property, indicating how the current generation benefits from while perpetuating the modes of imperial aggression pioneered by “the Pilgrims.” Apess extends the language of patrimony to include the emergence of the nation-state. Taking up the discourse of the Pilgrims/Puritans as national origin that became popular in the 1820s, he casts the United States as the inheritor of prior iniquities: “the 22nd of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy” (114). Linking the (supposed) date of the Pilgrim landing in 1620 to the Declaration of Independence presents them as of a piece, positioning the latter as the genealogical unfolding of the lineage of destruction and appropriation begun a century and a half earlier. Moreover, this fusion opens up the signification of “children” to include all subjects of the state, who all inhabit the history of settler occupation bequeathed to the United States by English colonial forebears. However, rather than turning generational succession and the attendant inheritance of ownership of particular plots of territory into a metaphor distinguished from the literal bequeathing of an estate, Apess’s repeated invocation of the trope of parenthood emphasizes that the broader dynamics of expropriation and erasure he addresses are realized as quotidian forms of private landholding passed through legally recognized family lines. He observes that “it does appear that the Indians had rights, and those rights were near and dear to them, as your stores and farms and firesides are to the whites, and their wives and children also” (116). The everydayness of settler domestic life occurs in places whose availability for such inhabitance depends on the suspension of Native “rights.” The topos of inheritance, though, also extends beyond such acts to include the creation of the nation, implicating all those who enjoy status as citizens in the systemic, normalized structures of assault that continue to produce Native tears and groans. The text insists, “These things I mention to show that the doctrines of the

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Pilgrims has [sic] grown up with the people” (133). “The people,” whose will ostensibly founds and legitimizes the state, remain committed to “doctrines” that arise out of the denial of Indigenous sovereignty, further suggesting that to belong to the body politic of the United States entails adopting such modes of being. The practice of citizenship both reveals and engenders an orientation toward settlement regardless of one’s apparent sympathies: “Although in words they deny it, yet in the works they approve of the iniquities of their fathers” (115). As opposed to something like a conscious repudiation of indigeneity, subjects in the contemporary moment live their citizenship as a structure of feeling in ways that arise from and propel the extension of claims to Native lands and dismissal of Native polities. In light of Apess’s account of US citizenship, the generic “individual” citizensubject posited by Cheng can be seen as animated by and recirculating the principles of settlement, inasmuch as such identification and sensation emerge from and gain intelligibility within state networks of jurisdiction and ownership. As suggested by my earlier reading of Thoreau, resistance to politics and/or property per se does not mean that they cease to function as an organizing frame through which one conceptualizes and experiences selfhood. In fact, the dominant modes of personhood and placemaking persist within self-conscious projects of resistance and change, the one shaping the horizon of possibility for the other. Thus, the structuring principles of the (settler) state remain in play even when unrecognized as such. Attending to such dynamics allows for analysis of how settlement actively is enacted in the present moment even in the absence of any explicit commitment to dispossess or manage Native peoples. Citizen selfhood both emerges out of and actively contributes to a sensation of belonging to a national “we.” The inheritance of that experience of belonging to national peoplehood, which itself is produced and reproduced through settlement, generates structures of feeling that treat the institutionalized mappings of the state – and the attendant management and displacement of Native peoples – as the self-evident framework for everyday experience. I have sought to highlight how available ways of thinking about affect within American literary studies tend to treat membership in the political collectivity of the nation as a precondition for analysis, a move that can prompt challenges to racializing and privatizing ideologies enacted by the state. I want to insist, though, that ongoing processes of settlement are more pervasive, entrenched, and constitutive of experiences of being and belonging on land claimed by the United States and for US national subjects than such critical accounts suggest. While not claiming that non-Natives definitionally are incapable of identifying against the logics of settler colonialism, such reflexive recognition requires acknowledging that the continuing existence of the United States depends on the enactment of a jurisdictional imaginary. The imposition and reproduction of that legal geography is less a background feature of private feeling and public sentiments than a central enframing condition for both (and the relations among them) at all scales. Such sensations of individual selfhood and collective belonging are predicated on shifting forms of incorporation, superintendence, regulation, and erasure of Native polities and their homelands. In this way, the effort

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to address settler structures of feeling as a crucial feature of life in the United States calls on American literary studies to see how quotidian experiences of place, personhood, and community – and the modes of representing them – remain bound up in settler privilege and historical and ongoing systemic violence against Native peoples, bodies, and lands.

Notes 1.

In Raymond Williams’s terms, “structure of feeling” refers to the ways in which social structures are registered as forms of individual and collective affect that do work in continually reconstituting social life, as a key part of “the undeniable experience of the present” (128). Moreover, feeling has a structure “with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension,” while indicating “a social experience which is still in process” (132). 2. These two well-respected scholars offer some of the most compelling work in this area, so attending carefully to their arguments is a way of developing a sense of the methodological

3.

and theoretical stakes of considering the largely unrecognized effect of settlement on settlers. Other examples I might have used include Berlant; Coviello; Eng; and Luciano. For important work on affect outside of American literary studies, see Ahmed; Brennan; Massumi. By “critical allegory,” I mean that I am drawing on these texts to stage particular issues in existing scholarship rather than offering a fuller interpretation of them on their own. For this reason, I will not actively situate my readings in existing scholarship on these texts.

References and Further Reading Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Apess, William. “Eulogy on King Philip.” 1836. In A Son of the Forest and Other Writings (pp. 103–38). Ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Bruyneel, Kevin. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Carpenter, Cari M. Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. Castiglia, Christopher. Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the

Antebellum United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cheyfitz, Eric. “The (Post)Colonial Construction of Indian Country: U.S. American Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law.” In The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945 (pp. 1–124). Ed. Eric Cheyfitz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Cohen, Ed. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Coviello, Peter. Intimacy America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Settler States of Feeling Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984. Driskill, Qwo-Li. “Stolen from Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic.” SAIL 16, no. 2 (2004): 50–64. Elmer, Jonathan. On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Justice, Daniel Heath. “ ‘Go Away, Water!’: Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative.” In Reasoning Together (pp. 147–68). Native Critics Collective. Eds. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Luciano, Dana. Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Million, Dian. “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 53–76. Miranda, Deborah. “Dildos, Hummingbirds, and Driving Her Crazy.” Frontiers 23, no. 2 (2002): 135–49. Rifkin, Mark. Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Smith, Andrea. “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism.” GLQ 16, nos. 1–2 (2010): 41–68. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. In Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government (pp. 1–225). 2nd ed. Ed. William Rossi. New York: Norton, 1992. Warrior, Robert. “Your Skin Is the Map: The Theoretical Challenge of Joy Harjo’s Erotic Poetics.” In Reasoning Together (pp. 340–52). Native Critics Collective. Eds. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Wilkins, David E. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History James H. Cox

American Indian individuals, communities, and tribal nations have always lived within and generated Native contexts: intellectual, political, historical, national, territorial, and cultural. When Europeans, Africans, and others arrived, their presence changed these contexts, often quickly and dramatically, but did not eliminate or otherwise prevent the continued production of tribal nation-specific contexts. Whether they were shooting at squatters or signing treaties, sitting for a portrait by George Catlin or posing for a photograph by Edward Curtis, arguing before a tribal council or lobbying Congress, telling a story to an ethnographer or writing their own, American Indians continued to view the world on their own terms. The US contexts of American Indian literatures are more familiar and recognizable to most scholars of US literatures, but the indigenous contexts are operative as well. As Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks demonstrates so vividly in her work on Mary Rowlandson, these indigenous contexts also shape European immigrant writing in the Americas but remain underexamined. Attention to such contexts enriches our understanding of the strategies that American Indians developed to resist and accommodate colonial and settlercolonial incursions, as well as our understanding of the trajectories of American Indian and US literary histories. Attention to tribal nation-specific rather than pan-indigenous contexts recognizes the many distinct histories in Indian country and foregrounds the enduring daily struggle within those nations to limit US intrusions into their affairs and fortify their sovereignty. This chapter urges a more substantial regard for specific tribal nation contexts by establishing their importance for reading three major American Indian writers of the mid-twentieth century.

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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The three authors under primary consideration in this chapter were born citizens of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory prior to Oklahoma statehood in 1907. They traveled throughout the United States, western hemisphere, and globe and wrote about these places from within their own tribal nation perspectives. Short story writer and novelist John Milton Oskison, who also served in editorial roles at the New York Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly, earns mention in some studies of American Indian literature, but he remains a peripheral figure in the field. Some scholars express particular concern about his apparently assimilationist politics. A tribal nation reading of his Indian Territory novel Black Jack Davy (1926) reveals a celebration of the Cherokee outlaw-hero Ned Christie as well as what Cherokee scholar Kirby Brown identifies as a defense of Cherokee Nation property laws. Lynn Riggs is the prolific playwright and author of Green Grow the Lilacs (1930), the source play for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943). Scholars tend to lament the despair for a Cherokee future expressed in The Cherokee Night (1936) or the silence on Cherokeespecific issues in his other plays. Riggs has experienced a mini-renaissance in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Though critics increasingly recognize the Cherokee contexts of his Indian Territory plays, we have not turned to his Mexico plays, including The Year of Pilár (c. 1935–8). When read within the context of the place that Mexico holds in Cherokee history, the Mayan revolution that Riggs stages in the play speaks more clearly than any of his other plays to a hopeful Cherokee future. The Cherokee contexts that inform the writing of Will Rogers, one of the most famous celebrities in the world in the 1920s and 1930s, have only recently drawn the attention of scholars such as Amy Ware and Tol Foster (Muscogee Creek). Rogers consistently asserts throughout his writings a subjectivity embedded in a Cherokee national context. In the correspondence gathered in Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President (1926), these assertions demonstrate the committed effort he makes to validate Cherokee national history on a global stage. The final section retains this focus on the international movement of indigenous Americans by considering a novel, Confederated Salish and Kootenai author D’Arcy McNickle’s Runner in the Sun (1954), that emerges from intertribal, hemispheric contexts. The novel and the contexts that inform its production challenge the political and geographic orientations of tribal nation as well as hemispheric and transnational critical practices. A shift in American Indian literary studies in the second half of the 1990s from a critical focus on identity, culture, and representation to tribal nation-specific histories, writing traditions, and politics dramatically reoriented the field and expanded its focus. Prior to the era initiated by Osage scholar Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets (1995), concerns about identity, culture, and representation dominated discussions of American Indian literatures as well as Indians in literature. Scholars asked, what do representations of Indians – noble, savage, vanished – tell us about the formation of US national identities and cultural imaginaries? How did early immigrant English writers represent Indians to enable and justify colonial violence? How did American Indian writers subvert or reify these representations? Representations of Indians permeate US culture, and powerful discourses that define Indian authenticity circulate throughout popular

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and mass culture as well as the fields of literature, law, and politics. The critical assessment of the correlation between literary representations of Indians and colonial or federal Indian policies, therefore, as in Lucy Maddox’s groundbreaking Removals (1991), is crucial to identifying the direct role that US literatures play in settlercolonial expansion and the attendant, enduring violation of the human and civil rights of American Indians. The dominant focus on these issues, however, foregrounds Europe and the United States at the expense of indigenous contexts and draws scholars into distracting debates about who is and who is not an Indian, about what is and what is not American Indian literature. Warrior observes, Both American Indian and Native Americanist discourses continue to be preoccupied with parochial questions of identity and authenticity. Essentialist categories still reign insofar as more of the focus of scholarship has been to reduce, constrain, and contain American Indian literature and thought and to establish why something or someone is ‘Indian’ than engage the myriad critical issues crucial to an Indian future. (Tribal Secrets xix)

Instead, Tribal Secrets and scholarship by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux), Jace Weaver (Cherokee), and Craig Womack (Muskogee Creek) situate literary theory in not only American Indian cultural but also intellectual, political, historical, and tribal national contexts. This chapter owes an abiding debt to tribal nation-specific inquiry as practiced by Brooks and Womack and an even greater debt to Daniel Justice (Cherokee) and his Cherokee-specific study, Our Fire Survives the Storm (2006). The work of these scholars and many others encourages both the reassessment of texts familiar to us through primarily cultural interpretations and the recovery of texts that failed the authentic culture test. The sites of inquiry in the field, therefore, have multiplied exponentially. The mid-twentieth century, for example, has long appeared as a lacuna between the Progressive and Civil Rights eras on the timeline of American Indian literary history. However, there is an astonishing amount of writing, much of it extraordinarily popular, by American Indians between 1920 and 1960. From the perspective of scholarship focused on identity and culture, most of these writers do not register as Indians. Even if a scholar identifies them as Indians or as people with Indian heritage, these writers are neither racially authentic nor culturally traditional, and, therefore, not real enough to earn serious critical consideration. The historical and political orientation of tribal nation-specific critical practices, however, places the identification of American Indians in the hands of families, histories, and tribal national governments, which have the sovereign right to define tribal national citizenship. The authors under consideration in this chapter were born citizens of their tribal nations; they are Cherokee nationals contributing to a Cherokee national literature. The shift in focus from identity and culture to history and politics, and a particular recognition of the sovereign if also domestic dependent status of tribal nations, helps to reveal

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the mid-twentieth century as a major rather than nearly dormant period in American Indian literary history. Oskison, Riggs, and Rogers are only three of the many writers from this period awaiting reintroduction to American Indian and US literary history.

The Territories of Tribal Nation Writing John Milton Oskison, William Penn Adair Rogers, and Rollie Lynn Riggs were born in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in 1874, 1879, and 1899, respectively. All three experienced in their early lives the disruption of a national Cherokee history by the allotment of tribally owned lands and Oklahoma statehood. Oskison explores this history in three novels in which he punctuates narratives of national continuity with moments of outrage at the losses sustained. Riggs characterizes the legacy of this history in his Indian Territory plays as primarily traumatic, though he finds a revolutionary Indian territory in Mexico that promises a more optimistic future for Cherokees. Rogers consistently grounds his observations about corrupt, incompetent, and meddling governments across the globe in his own history in the Cherokee Nation. The work of these writers shows Cherokee contexts mapped onto tribal nation, Indian Territory, settler-colonial, and international contexts. The transformation of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory by non-Native immigration in the 1890s is the core concern of Oskison’s second novel, Black Jack Davy, and a conflict over ownership of the land dominates the plot. Though Oskison identifies the setting as Indian Territory, he characterizes this entire region as legally and historically Cherokee. This Cherokee Nation fills Indian Territory; Cherokeespecific contexts overflow tribal national borders. On a local, northeastern Oklahoma level, this strategy is an act of appropriation. On a US national scale, it is an assertion of land rights for all tribal nations in the territory. The border crossing on the novel’s opening page moves US readers into a foreign territory. When he crosses the Six Bulls River, which runs through Cherokee land, the protagonist, “Black Jack” Davy Dawes, “felt quite cut off from the old life” (1). Davy, who takes his nickname from the famous ballad, is traveling with his foster parents, Jim and Mirabelle Dawes. They have leased land from Ned Warrior, a “fullblood” who lives with his younger companion, Rose Lamedeer, and their infant (19). During a quick visit to their neighbors, Davy’s Uncle Josephus, Aunt Elizabeth, and Cousin Mary, we learn from the family friend Judge Pease that “bad men from the whole United States are flocking into Indian country” (17). The main villains are Jerry Boyd, who calls himself an Indian Territory “old-timer”; his son Cale; and the bandit Jack Kitchin (3). Boyd arrived in Indian Territory 20 years previously running a medicine show, then stayed after he married Jennie Roberts, “daughter of old ‘Soggy’ Roberts, second chief of the tribe” (24). The marriage to a tribal nation citizen allows Boyd to start ranching. By the time the novel begins, he has expanded onto farms to either side of his own land. Mary explains to her cousin Davy, “Folks say . . . Mr. Boyd wants to get hold of all this land between the river and Horsepen creek – more

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than three thousand acres. He got mad when Ned came in and he and papa made their bargain” (19). Like the Six Bulls River, Horsepen Creek is in Cherokee territory; it runs north and west of Claremore. Throughout the course of the novel, Ned Warrior and the Dawes family defeat all of Boyd’s schemes. The catalog of Boyd’s criminal activities includes many of the strategies for dispossession long used against American Indians by non-Natives and the US government. As Boyd begins to plot against Warrior, he thinks, “First, he must get rid of Ned Warrior; and he believed that he could accomplish the Indian’s removal soon and with no peril to himself” (61). Oskison’s use of “removal” situates Boyd’s criminal enterprise in a long Cherokee and American Indian history of dispossession. Boyd tries to convince Warrior to sell his land, and, when Warrior refuses, he sends the sheriff to arrest Warrior for shooting a deputy marshall named Burke. Once the sheriff reluctantly arrests Warrior, Boyd sends an ally, Ben Stannard, to remove Rose and occupy Warrior’s house and land. Then, in an attempt to run Uncle Josephus’s family from the plot of land that they lease from Warrior, he plans to set fire to their home and barn. With the help of Kitchin, Boyd eventually succeeds in setting Uncle Josephus’s barn on fire and laying siege to the Dawes home. Yet Oskison interrupts this familiar history and plot of Cherokee dispossession: Ned Warrior gains his release from jail just in time to stop Boyd. “Ned had his own private war to wage,” writes Oskison before providing a glimpse into Warrior’s mind: Shaken by a silent, passionate rage, not merely against Cale, but all such scum from the white man’s world as were riding this night against his friends, Ned understood better than ever before why old Running Rabbit and his fellow full-bloods of the hill country met in secret councils and planned to drive out the aliens and close the borders to them. If only they could! (271–2)

Ned Warrior decides against running to the hills to fight a guerilla war. Though the odds appear unfavorable, Ned Warrior chooses direct confrontation or what Daniel Justice calls the Chickamauga path of defiance: Of course, there were many honest whites, good friends of the Indians and good neighbors. . . . But they appeared, sometimes, to be a helpless minority. They seemed to count for so little compared with the horde of lawless invaders, the whiskey peddlers, cattle thieves, store thieves, train robbers, greed-crazed land grabbers like Jerry Boyd. (272)

In his first novel, Wild Harvest (1925), Oskison focuses primarily on the “honest whites,” but his readers will not have a full picture of his conception of Indian Territory without reading Black Jack Davy. They are companion novels in which the honest white characters of the first, such as the cowboys Gabe Horner and Tom Winger, appear in the second novel but with much less social and political influence. Oskison situates his revision of popular plots about doomed Cherokees in a local history familiar to many readers in and around the Cherokee Nation. Ned Warrior is

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a reimagined Ned Christie, the famous Cherokee leader who in 1887 was accused of a murder that he did not commit. The full-bloods in the hills to whom Warrior’s thoughts turn are the Keetowahs, the community of Cherokees that Robert Conley describes as traditionals devoted to preserving Cherokee culture, opposing slavery, and resisting allotment. According to Conley, Ned Christie was a Keetowah born in 1852 in the Rabbit Trap community of the Cherokee Nation (Encyclopedia 65). As an elected member of the Cherokee National Council, Christie “was an outspoken proponent of Cherokee sovereignty” (Encyclopedia 65). Authorities tried to arrest him after he was accused of killing Deputy US Marshall Dan Maples. The first attempt ended with Christie’s house on fire, and he caught a bullet in his right eye. As subsequent attempts also failed, Conley relates, Christie was accused of many other crimes. In defense, he turned his house into what locals began to call Ned Christie’s fort. Conley describes the final assault on the fort: They fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the house all day long and into the night. They also shot flaming dowel rods at the house in an attempt to set it on fire and fired a cannon until they split the barrel. . . . In the morning, they managed to plant some dynamite under a wall and blow it apart, setting the house on fire. When Ned came running out, he was killed by members of the posse. (Encyclopedia 66)

Many Cherokees regard Christie as a national hero: the official webpage of the Cherokee Nation calls him a “martyr and patriot” (“Ned Christie”). When the stage adaptation of the novel by Richard Mansfield Dickinson was performed in the late 1920s in Tulsa, Norman, and Vinita, Oklahoma, many members of the audience would have made the connection between Warrior and Christie. The criminal charge against Warrior and the details of his battle to avoid arrest earlier in the novel correspond to the initial allegation that authorities made against Christie and his subsequent fight against them. The battle pits Warrior against Captain Black, a deputy marshall, and a posse. Black uses “an ancient three-pounder cannon” in the assault against Warrior’s cabin, which “resembled a fort” (112). When the use of the cannon does not lead to Warrior’s surrender, Black turns to dynamite: Waiting until the first peep of dawn, he posted his men at the edge of the clearing with instructions to pour upon the door and window openings such a fire as the man in the cabin could not face; and with the opening bars of that mad movement, he ran to lay the sticks of explosive under the cabin wall and light the fuses. (115)

Warrior sustains multiple wounds, but Oskison revises Ned Christie’s history: Warrior survives the attack, helps the Dawes family break Boyd and Kitchin’s siege of their home, and then marries Rose. “On a clean slate,” Oskison explains, “Ned proposed to write a story of quiet happiness” (305). Oskison connects the Indian Territory of Black Jack Davy to Wild Harvest when many of the characters from the first novel

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appear at the end to assure Warrior’s self-authored quiet happiness by killing or arresting the surviving members of Kitchin’s gang. Oskison pairs the revision of Ned Christie’s history with Cherokee-specific commentary on the largest land run in US history. The Cherokees owned millions of acres of land west of the Nation. The land, guaranteed by the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, was called the Cherokee Outlet. Following the Civil War, the Nation was forced to cede part of the Outlet and to accept the settlement of other tribal nations in the eastern part of it. What remained of the Outlet was ceded to the United States in 1893. In a scene in which Oskison depicts the federal government distributing funds for the purchase of the Outlet, the “half-blood tribal chief” Ross Murray gives a speech condemning the history of treachery that led to this latest land cession (169). Oskison intrudes to connect this cession to another national loss, “the wholesale removal of the tribe from lands in Georgia and Tennessee coveted by the whites,” then describes the massive land run that followed the loss of the Outlet. Boyd’s attack on Warrior localizes the land run and establishes an analogy: Boyd is to Warrior as the Sooners are to Indian Territory. Careful attention to the tribal nation-specific details of this novel unmasks a narrative of Cherokee resistance. Oskison transforms Ned Christie, however, from a Cherokee hero to an Indian Territory hero. Warrior’s/Christie’s triumph over Boyd belongs to all tribal nations in the region. Lynn Riggs also masks a Cherokee Nation geography in an Indian Territory setting. Riggs only identifies characters as Cherokees in The Cherokee Night and The Cream in the Well (1940), but other Indian Territory plays, including Big Lake (1927), Roadside (1930), and Green Grow the Lilacs, are Cherokee specific. The setting of Big Lake falls within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation immediately prior to its dissolution by Oklahoma statehood and, similarly to Claremore Mound in The Cherokee Night, evokes a land dispute between Cherokees and Osages that was settled in this case in favor of neither tribal nation. The play is set on the shores of Big Lake in the Coowee-scoo-wee district of the Cherokee Nation, now Rogers County, Oklahoma, and is, therefore, a description of life in the Cherokee Nation. Riggs also situates the action in Big Lake, as in the other Indian Territory plays, in a constellation of Cherokee Nation towns: Claremont (Claremore), Verdigree (Verdigris), Foyil, Sageeyah, Pryor Crick (Pryor Creek or Pryor), and Grand River. Riggs embeds the play’s plot in this Cherokee Nation landscape, in the histories of violence that shaped it, and in the disruption of Cherokee national life imminent in the play but already experienced by Riggs and the nation’s other citizens. Indeed, Riggs consistently dramatizes throughout his career the legacy of the European invasion of indigenous territories in plays such as Russet Mantle (1936), set in Santa Fe; Dark Encounter (1947), set on Cape Cod; and The Year of Pilár, set in a Mayan region of Yucatán, Mexico. While a Cherokee-specific reading of Russet and Dark would be challenging, The Year of Pilár draws upon the powerful place that Mexico occupies in Cherokee history. In addition to their first contact with Spanish rather than English colonizers and the archaeological evidence of Mesoamerican influence on the US Southeast, Cherokees have accounts that they migrated from or

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through Mexico. In a history of his people published in 1921, Cherokee historian Emmet Starr explains, The Cherokees most probably preceded by several hundred years the Muskogees in their exodus from Mexico and swung in a wider circle, crossing the Mississippi River many miles north of the mouth of the Missouri River as indicated by the mounds. . . . The Muskogees were probably driven out of Mexico by the Aztecs, Toltecs or some other of the northwestern tribal invasions of the ninth or preceding centuries. This is evidenced by the customs and devices that were long retained by the Creeks. (22)

Though Starr leaves room for doubt, he treats this account confidently as empirical history rather than legend or folklore. In his Cherokee national history, Robert Conley is less confident but still relates the story as significant to Cherokees. These histories likely shaped Cherokee views of Mexico as a safe haven from English and US colonial violence. The story of the “Lost Cherokees,” as recorded by James Mooney, tells of a group of Cherokees that protested land cessions by leaving the Southeast for northern New Spain in 1721. Other Cherokees found them later living in a precolonial Cherokee world. Historian Dianna Everett cites a report of Cherokees visiting one of New Spain’s northern provinces, Texas, in 1807 and establishing a settlement there in independent Mexico in 1813. Other Cherokees followed in an attempt to move beyond the reach of the United States. Richard Fields, who Everett argues was a “red” or war chief, even led a delegation to Mexico City in December 1822. Fields hoped to establish an alliance with Mexico, but he returned to Texas in June 1823 without an agreement. While the Texas Cherokees negotiated with Mexico and eventually the Republic of Texas, Cherokee scholar Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., explains, John Ross in the Cherokee Nation in Georgia also attempted to make arrangements with Mexico to reserve land for the Cherokees. The famous inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, Sequoyah, also made a journey to Mexico at the end of his life in an attempt to find Cherokee relations living there. Littlefield describes a Cherokee delegation sent to Mexico in the early 1840s by the Old Settlers, under John Brown, and another larger delegation of Old Settler and Treaty Party Cherokees in 1845. Several generations after Sequoyah and Brown, Mexico maintained its presence in the Cherokee political imaginary. When Cherokee citizens faced the allotment of their nation’s land base in the late nineteenth century, some of them looked to Mexico as a possible sanctuary. From 1895 to 1908, Indian Territory and Oklahoma newspapers reported on various plans by Cherokees led first by Bird Harris and then Redbird Smith to immigrate to Mexico. In 1910, Smith, the chief of the Nighthawk Keetowahs, “went to Mexico with a document dating from 1820 hoping to prove a claim to land under that government” (Conley, Cherokee Nation 203). The journey, an attempt to realize what Littlefield calls “the utopian dream of the Cherokee fullbloods,” was unsuccessful (404). Yet the journey made clear again that for some Cherokees, Mexico was a place associated not only with the histories of a precolonial and Spanish colonial

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era but also more specifically with resistance to colonialism. Riggs’s own frequent visits to Mexico in the 1930s, and perhaps his long relationship with the Mexican dramatist Enrique Gasque-Molina (Ramon Naya), confirmed for him this view of Mexico. The Year of Pilár is a dramatization of an enervated colonial world collapsing under the weight of its inflexible, oppressive traditions. It tells the story of the Crespos, a wealthy criollo family that owns a hemp plantation in Yucatán but flees in 1917 during the Revolution. After living in New York for 20 years, Pilár, the Crespos’ oldest child, insists that the family now flee the corrupting influences of New York and return to its hacienda. She is surprised to learn too late that their return coincides with the institution of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas’s agrarian reform measures. The Mayans in Pilár, though not as fully developed as the members of the Crespo family and as enigmatic as most of Riggs’s Cherokee characters, gain control of their present and future. Riggs stages the actual process of land redistribution in Yucatán and justifies the wrath of local Mayans who at the end of the play punish the hacendados for centuries of enslavement and torture. The play is a devastating critique of colonialism and an unequivocal assertion of the feasibility of decolonization: retribution against the settler-colonial land owners, the return of land to Indigenous people, and the first steps toward a return to self-government. Pilár is the most explicit colonizer in the catalog of Riggs’s characters. Riggs describes her in the stage directions: “She is a vibrant girl, with the cool aristocratic authority and pride of years of privilege. Her mind has the keenness and the violence of her Conqueror forefathers; her emotions the fierce range that will devastate others – or herself ” (8). Riggs emphasizes the Crespo family’s conquistador ethic, as captured in the image of Pilár’s keen and violent mind, by aligning the family with Porfirio Diaz, who visits the Crespo family and then requests that they allow Pilár to spend a week with him. Don Severo Crespo, the hacendado and family patriarch, agrees to send Pilár with Diaz. Diaz was the dictator of Mixtec and Spanish ancestry who ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and from 1884 to 1911, and he gave his support to the hacendados, as well as to wealthy foreign investors and corporations, throughout his career. One of his more vicious acts was to quell a Yaqui rebellion in the late 1880s in Sonora by removing Yaquis to Yucatán and enslaving them on the haciendas. Like Indian Territory, Yucatán also has a history shaped by the arrival of indigenous people violently removed from their distant homelands. Pilár, the family’s “stone post,” relentlessly enforces her conception of the dominant social, political, and racial status that the family’s history confers upon them. She stands for Spain, the mother country, as well as for the conquistador and his descendants. Pilár’s zealous, dictatorial Catholicism produces a toxic family dynamic that drives her younger sister, Graziela, into prostitution in Cuba. Her brother Fernando flees into the chicle forests to be a chiclero after he marries a woman from a family that does not satisfy Pilár’s moral and social standards. Her brother Trino also leaves the home to work in the fields with his Mayan half-brother, Beto, and live with him, perhaps incestuously, in his jacal. Her parents, Don Severo and Doña Candita, watch

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helplessly as Pilár destroys the family by trying to maintain the moral and social contours of the world that they inherited and perpetuated. Intrafamily resistance to her comes primarily from Trino, short for Trinidad (Trinity), the most rebellious of the Crespo sons. When the family first arrives at the hacienda, Trino shakes hands with Beto. Pilár reacts violently: “You don’t give your hand to an Indian!” (17). Trino’s threatening gesture of friendship and brotherhood with an indigenous Mexican, his assault on colonial decorum, has its origins in a view of history that conflicts with Pilár’s. Trino provides the most explicit denunciation of this history: My grandfather was a tyrant, an oppressor. It’s no wonder he was at home here. Slaves to command – to torture if it please him – forcing them to work like beasts to fill his own money-bags. Women slaves to enjoy at night. The rich gluttonous old Spanish bastard! It’s no wonder he was just like that with that old despot, Porfirio Diaz. (31–2)

The outrage that Trino has at the abuses of his ancestors and his immediate family, including the father that he shares with Beto, leads him to establish an alliance with his half-brother. Beto is the dominant Mayan character in the play, and Riggs presents him as oppressed but dignified. When the scene shifts from New York to Yucatán, “a little band of Indians,” including Beto, awaits the arrival of the Crespos (12). Beto’s refusal to dance a jarana, to perform in red face, is an act of civil disobedience that foreshadows his role in the imminent social unrest. Riggs also depicts Beto as hardworking, philosophical, and immune, almost stoically so, to Trino’s outbursts of self-righteous anger. This representation of Mayans corresponds to Cárdenas’s own view. He shared with other Mexicans “the widespread belief in the legendary peaceful and hardworking qualities of the Maya” (Fallaw 13). Though the honorable Beto is Riggs’s representative Mayan, one of the omnipresent homicides of Riggs’s Indian Territory plays suggests that Mayans are prone to outbursts of violence: one Mayan character kills another with a machete for obediently playing a song demanded by Fernando. Riggs establishes this violence, though, as part of the colonial context: as with the Cherokees and Osages in his Indian Territory plays, the oppressive interference of outsiders forces indigenous people into violent conflict with each other. Riggs suggests the possibility of an incestuous relationship between Beto and Trino that represents not the nadir of a corrupt colonial history but a promise of healing. In the two scenes that Riggs sets at Beto’s jacal, a stoic Beto and an outraged Trino discuss the region’s colonial history. When Trino’s mother and sister arrive to reclaim Trino as a part of the family, Pilár intuits what she thinks is an incestuous relationship. Though Trino explicitly denies it, the specter of incest allows Riggs to heighten Pilár’s sense of horror that she first expressed when Trino shook Beto’s hand. Beto and Trino’s father then arrives to relinquish his position as patriarch and claim Trino and Beto as his sons. Craig Womack observes, “One of Riggs’s themes is innocent youths

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in conflict with oppressive adults and restrictive social institutions that hold back natural and free impulses. Idealism, especially in youth, succumbs to convention” (299). The theme that Womack identifies in Riggs’s Indian Territory and US plays does not translate to the Mexican context, where social and political processes at work affirm Trino’s idealism. While the aforementioned Mayan-against-Mayan violence mimics the Cherokeeagainst-Cherokee violence of The Cherokee Night, the Mayans in Pilár begin to direct their anger at the criollos. As the government begins the process of land redistribution, some Yucatecan Mayans begin to kill hacendados and their families. The radio announcer delivers the news to the Crespos: On the hacienda of Don Ernesto Solis, the Indians, inflamed to passion against Senor Solis for his cruelties and abuses over the many years of their servitude, seized tonight the moment of their coming to power to raid the Solis house and to massacre all people within. (60)

As Doña Candita fears the worst, Pilár says, “No, no, mamacita! For cruelties and abuses, the radio says. We’ve not been cruel” (60). Here, Pilár does not condemn the violence; she implies that those who commit cruelty and abuse deserve punishment for their crimes. At the same time, her denial of her own family’s participation in the cruelty is absurd. These comments, therefore, sanction the violence – killing one’s oppressors is acceptable within the historical and moral universe Riggs creates – and seal Pilár’s fate. The Spanish colonial world in the play, at least as represented in the contest over land, is approaching its end. Early upon their return to Yucatán, a neighbor compares the Crespo hacienda to the ruins at nearby Uxmal, and Trino repeats the comparison later in the play. The image of a colonial hacienda as similar to Mayan ruins foreshadows the end of colonial dominance, an end achieved by both friendship – between Trino and Beto – and violence. Trino tells Beto early in the play, “A little hate would have saved you” (31). Beto rejects hatred; instead, Trino and Beto work the fields and together help the government redistribute the land. As an employee of the government, Beto begins to take a role in a Mayan future that at this moment promises some self-government. Mayans on other plantations, however, express their outrage by killing the hacendados and their families. In the critical paradigm Justice presents in his literary history of the Cherokees, the different responses to colonial oppression taken by Beto and the neighboring Mayans are, respectively, the Beloved Path of accommodation and Chickamauga resistance. Indeed, the hope in the Beloved Path so conspicuously absent from The Cherokee Night appears as a powerful political principal in Pilár. A Chickamauga consciousness is also necessary, though, to bring this colonial world to its end. The revolution promises a good night for the Mayans and for the invaders another noche triste, the Spanish designation for the summer night in 1520 when the Mexicas drove them from Tenochtitlán. This vision of a liberated

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indigenous future resonates within a Cherokee national history in which Mexico is always a territory of hope. Like Riggs, Will Rogers traveled frequently to Mexico in the 1930s, though Rogers’s travels also took him around the globe to Argentina, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and many European countries. In the correspondence from Europe, as in all his writings, Rogers identified himself as a Cherokee and his home as the Cherokee Nation and/or Indian Territory. He did so with enough frequency that his regular readers would have recognized these details as a significant part of his subject position and voice. Rogers moved to Hollywood in 1918 following a successful career in Wild West shows, vaudeville theater, and the Ziegfield Follies. James Smallwood and Steven Gragert, the editors of the collected writings of Will Rogers, explain that Rogers began his weekly feature in December 1922, and within a week the column went into syndication. Eventually, 600 newspapers published it until Rogers’s death in a plane crash on August 15, 1935. Approximately the same number of newspapers published his “Daily Telegrams” from 1926 to 1935. These shorter features were actually telegrams from Rogers to the Western Union office in the building that housed the New York Times. Through the newspapers, which dominated the era’s media, but also as a movie star and radio personality, Rogers became a daily presence in the lives of millions. His assertions of a Cherokee identity and memories of his Cherokee national homeland are almost entirely celebratory and often nostalgic. In a weekly article from February 18, 1923, his observations on water management eventually turn to Oklahoma: Now I am off my Senators from Oklahoma, especially Robert Owen who is part Cherokee like myself (and as proud of it as I am). Now I got names right there on my farm where I was born that are funny, too, and Owen don’t do a thing to get me a Harbor on the VERDIGRIS river at OOLAGAH in what used to be the District of COOWEESCOOWEE, (before we spoiled the best Territory in the World to make a State). (Smallwood and Gragert 1:27)

A discussion of the increasing popularity of football in a weekly article from September 29, 1929, entitled “Story of a Misspent Boyhood,” leads to a reflection on his childhood education at an all-Indian, one-room school. Rogers laments the school’s demise, which he argues was a consequence of its excessive focus on academics and failure to field a good football team. He takes the opportunity to remind readers that the school was in “the Cherokee Nation, (we had our own Government, and the name Oklahoma was as foreign to us as a Tooth Paste)” (Smallwood and Gragert 4:68). Other references in the weekly articles to his Cherokee identity and the Nation also include the addendum that he is proud of both. This assertion of a Cherokee perspective continues throughout his writing, including the international correspondence he wrote for US periodicals, and demands that

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readers account for it. Rogers wrote Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President from Europe in 1926 to the Saturday Evening Post. Historian Andrew Denson establishes the Cherokee historical context for Rogers’s diplomacy. “The Cherokee National Council,” explains Denson, began to appoint official emissaries to the United States in the 1820s, as pressure mounted for the tribe to move west. . . . [B]y the post-Civil War era, appointing delegates had become a standard part of each year’s business in the tribal government. (11)

Denson summarizes, “In essence, their job was to monitor the activities of the United States government” (11). Will Rogers fulfills this job description of a Cherokee diplomat in his daily and weekly newspaper columns, in which he constantly monitors the federal government for his audience. Rogers, like his official diplomatic forbears, was also a member of the Cherokee elite. He was not appointed by the Cherokee national government, though his unofficial status within this historical context makes him a self-made Cherokee diplomat as much as he is a self-made representative of the United States. Rogers adopted the guise of a diplomat representing President Calvin Coolidge and the United States when he visited Europe from April to September 1926. In his letters, Rogers uses the code name WILLROG and reports on his diplomatic activities. His primary goal, he explains, is to help the United States recoup some of the loans it made to European nations during the Great War. As in his weekly articles and Daily Telegrams, Rogers identifies himself as a Cherokee from Indian Territory, and this identification shapes his diplomatic mission. As a first step in an ultimately successful attempt to get into the House of Commons, Rogers goes to the foreign press office in London and shows his press credentials for the Claremore Progress of Claremore, Oklahoma. Claremore then remains a key point of reference in his travels, including in his next book, There’s Not a Bathing Suit in Russia (1927). Rogers catalogs in Letters the relative merits of Claremore and Paris, for example, by comparing the Tiber unfavorably to the Grand or Verdigris Rivers, suggesting Claremore as a summer vacation spot, or preparing to meet Mussolini by giving himself the following pep talk: “Come on, Claremore, les see what Rome has got. I am going to treat this fellow like he was nobody but Hiram Johnson. Get your Lions ready for a foot race, in case I displease” (Rogers 129). The use of metonymy – the substitution of Claremore for Will Rogers – demonstrates the powerful association that Rogers experiences between himself and his hometown. In his role as a diplomat in Europe, he also continues to monitor the US federal government, and he repeatedly advises President Coolidge to tend only to the business of the United States. The Rogers doctrine of noninterference becomes a staple of his later journalism. His readers might not have viewed him as a self-made Cherokee diplomat, but Rogers positions himself in this role. The difficulty he has in getting a passport without a birth certificate is a familiar satire of incompetent government bureaucracy,

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but his struggle is also embedded in a long history of American Indians trying to gain the recognition of US federal authorities. Rogers explains in the second letter, You see, in the early days of the Indian Territory where I was born there was no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough. We generally took it for granted if you were there you must have at some time been born. (26)

This common sense that characterizes Indian Territory is nearly absent in the United States from which he departs and in the Europe where he arrives. Rogers was grateful, however, in this era of Prohibition, to have the Spanish Premier Miguel Primo de Rivera summon a servant to bring him a glass of sherry. Rogers describes the moment: He explained to us that it was some stuff that Queen Isabella, I believe it was, had put these few bottles away for Columbus when he come in from a hard trip exploring. It was supposed to have some kind of spices in it, they said. I slipped my glass over to be reloaded. I says if I can just inveigle this old General out of a couple of more jolts of this Discovery medicine I will go out and hide America where no one can find it. (209)

Rogers’s wishful thinking for a reversal of European colonial history anticipates the nostalgia for the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory that becomes part of his regular newspaper columns. As he returns to the United States, Rogers comments that as a result of its unpopular status in the world, many of the other passengers are traveling incognito – and hiding liquor in their luggage. From the evidence of his later weekly articles and Daily Telegrams, Rogers likely wished that he was returning to the Cherokee Nation instead. Further study of the writings of Oskison, Riggs, Rogers, and their contemporaries in tribal nation contexts will reveal a more vibrant era of politically engaged American Indian writing, particularly if we heed Robert Warrior’s call in The People and the Word to include nonfiction in our scholarship. Oskison positions the subjects of A Texas Titan: The Story of Sam Houston (1929) and Tecumseh and His Times (1938), for example, in Cherokee contexts. Choctaw author Todd Downing wrote a history of Mexico, The Mexican Earth (1940), and 10 detective novels set primarily in Mexico and the MexicoTexas borderlands. Like Rogers, Downing publicly and continuously identified himself by tribal nation, Choctaw, rather than ethnically as Indian. Downing’s sense of his place in Choctaw history and his admiration for his father, a Choctaw political leader, inform the political commentary in his books on colonialism, settler-colonialism, US neocolonial intrusion in Mexico, and contemporary indigenous Mexican life. John Joseph Mathews’s self-identification as Chesho, of the Sky People and peace division of the Osage Nation, rather than as Hunkah, of the Earth People and war division, might fruitfully shape a reading of his memoir, Talking to the Moon (1945). Though tribal nation-specific literary criticism is not the only way to open these texts and this period to more rigorous study, it has moved the field beyond the often debilitating

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debates about identity and culture that until recently obscured rather than illuminated the era.

International Indigeneity Many indigenous nations in the United States appear distinctly local from the perspective of the surrounding settler colonial nation. While local-tribal national histories and politics figure prominently in contemporary American Indian literary criticism, these critical practices do not foreclose US regional and national, transnational, hemispheric, and global modes of inquiry. During their travels, Oskison, Riggs, and Rogers were attentive to the histories and politics of the many places they visited, and they developed international, transnational, and global perspectives that as yet remain unexamined. These perspectives are rooted, though, in the Cherokee Nation contexts that shaped these authors. Attending to the interplay of tribal national, international, transnational, and global contexts will be a rewarding task for scholars of American Indian and American literatures. These contexts contributed directly to D’Arcy McNickle’s 1954 novel Runner in the Sun. The novel tells the story of a young boy named Salt from a fictionalized southwestern cliff-dwelling community of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Salt returns to the community’s legendary homeland in the central valley of Mexico with the goal of finding a strain of corn that will revitalize his people and save them from a destructive political division. Runner does not appear to lend itself to a tribal nation-specific reading, though scholars have read it as a response to the post-World War II termination crisis in Indian country. As a founding member and leader of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), McNickle was a fierce opponent of the termination of the federal government’s responsibilities to tribal nations. Indeed, the United States planned to terminate his own tribal nation. The threat to Salt’s community, however, is internal. Equally if not more important than this US federal Indian policy context was McNickle’s journey in 1940 to the First Inter-American Congress on Indian Life in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. The Congress witnessed the meeting of prominent figures in federal Indian policy in Mexico and the United States, including Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier, as well as from the rest of the hemisphere. Lázaro Cárdenas, in the final months of his presidency, spoke there. John Joseph Mathews also attended, as did representatives from nine other tribal nations. Historian Paul Rosier observes, The presence of representatives of nine Native American communities – including the Papago, the Jicarilla and San Carlos Apache, the Hopi, and three Pueblo groups – reinforced Collier’s message of promoting Indian sovereignty. Seventeen years after they had sent delegates east to Washington to protest the Bursum Bill, the Pueblo communities sent ambassadors from New Mexico south to Mexico to strengthen pan-Indianism across international borders. (82)

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In addition to promoting Collier’s program and pan-Indianism, the Papago, Apache, Hopi, and Pueblo representatives likely had their own tribal nation-specific messages to promote. Identifying these messages would affirm their roles as tribal national diplomats as well as illuminate what use they, rather than Collier, hoped to make of the conference. One task for literary critics is to identify what use American Indian writers might have made of this conference and other similar events. McNickle maintained his interest in indigenous peoples in Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere following the Congress. He served as the director of the National Indian Institute (NII), the US branch of the hemispheric organization formed at the Congress, and he published at least three articles in América Indígena, the organization’s journal, that focus primarily on termination. He also attended the second and fourth Inter-American Indian Institute Conferences in Cuzco, Peru, in 1949 and Guatemala City in 1959. They Came Here First (1949), his sweeping history of indigenous America, focuses primarily north of Mexico, but he emphasizes the trade routes that connected Mexico to the north and the origins of indigenous agriculture, especially maize, in Mexico. McNickle’s consistent look to the indigenous south in this period suggests that we can read Salt’s journey to Mexico as a reimagined Inter-American Congress on Indian Life with indigenous people exclusively as actors. The US and Mexican bureaucrats and indigenistas that dominated the 1940 conference disappear in the novel in favor of a diverse, exclusively indigenous world connected through time and across space but also divided by language and custom. Salt diplomatically negotiates this world until he discovers in Mexico’s central valley a custom he cannot support: sacrifice. He helps a young woman escape sacrifice, and she returns with him to his home. Once there, his community politically and ceremonially incorporates Salt, the young woman, and the corn that she brought with her. Thus, while the geographic scope of the narrative is what contemporarily we would call international, intertribal national, or indigenous transnational, McNickle’s main concern is what that international experience contributes to the home community. In Runner, Salt’s journey demonstrates the urgent necessity of indigenous self-government. Indeed, self-government is the unremitting goal of every American Indian tribal nation. References and Further Reading Brooks, Lisa. “Turning the Looking Glass on King Philip’s War: Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative in the Network of Relations.” Unpublished manuscript. Brown, Kirby. “Nationhood, Sovereignty & Citizenship in John Milton Oskison’s Black Jack Davy.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, forthcoming. Conley, Robert. A Cherokee Encyclopedia. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Conley, Robert. The Cherokee Nation: A History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Denson, Andrew. Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830– 1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

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Everett, Dianna. The Texas Cherokees: A People between Two Fires, 1819–1840. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Fallaw, Ben. Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Foster, Tol. “Of One Blood: An Argument for Relations and Regionality in Native American Literary Studies.” In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (pp. 265–302). Eds. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Justice, Daniel Heath. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Littlefield, Daniel F., Jr. “Utopian Dreams of the Cherokee Fullbloods: 1890–1934.” Journal of the West 10, no. 3 (July 1971): 404–27. Maddox, Lucy. Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. McNickle, D’Arcy. Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize. 1954. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. “Ned Christie.” http://crt.cherokee.org/Culture/59/ Page/default.aspx Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokees. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. Oskison, John M. Black Jack Davy. New York: D. Appleton, 1926. Riggs, Lynn. The Year of Pilár. In Lynn Riggs, 4 Plays (pp. 1–72). New York: Samuel French, 1947.

Rogers, Will. Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President. Vol. 1. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926. Rosier, Paul C. Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Smallwood, James M., and Steven K. Gragert. Eds. Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams: Volume 1. The Coolidge Years: 1926–1929. Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1978. Smallwood, James M., and Steven K. Gragert. Eds. Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams: Volume 4. The Roosevelt Years: 1933–1935. Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1979. Starr, Emmet. History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore. Oklahoma City, OK: Warden Company, 1921. Ware, Amy M. “Unexpected Cowboy, Unexpected Indian: The Case of Will Rogers.” Ethnohistory 56, no. 1 (2009): 1–34. Warrior, Robert Allen. The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Weaver, Jace. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Communities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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Globalization Paul Giles

Literary history is always presentist in its orientation, reinventing narratives of the past in accordance with contemporary concerns, and considerations of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have served to frame the entire trajectory of American literary history in a new perspective. Although the discourse around contemporary forms of globalization has been quite distinctive, the notion of ideas that are in scope universal rather than particularistic, global rather than national, has an extensive provenance. Just as the emphasis on multiculturalism in American literary study of the 1990s led to revisionist accounts of Hispanic encounters in the sixteenth century, so this chapter will start from the contemporary moment and will then trace the idea of globalization back through American cultural history, to suggest what traditional narratives centered upon the emergence of national identity tended to leave out. Whereas national narratives have often attempted to present themselves as the purveyor of universal values, notably in Cold War myths about the benefits of American “freedom,” a more self-conscious focus upon the methodological framework of globalization would concern itself explicitly with ways in which local or national designs interface with a world wide web. Globalization since 1980 has been impelled by various factors, the most conspicuous of which is a revolution in communications technology that has made the transfer of ideas and commodities across national frontiers much easier, and which in turn has left the economies of nation-states more exposed to rapid transfers of global capital by transnational corporations and others. It was in the 1980s, according to Roger Burbach, that “finance capital began to exert a more decisive influence over state policies” (7), with cuts in public funding running alongside a shift from labor-intensive

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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to capital-intensive industry, as a process of economic globalization was driven by the “transnationalization” of production and of capital ownership (25). All this happened quite suddenly: as Thomas L. Friedman remarked, when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 virtually no one outside exclusive government circles had access to email (10), and it did not become widespread in universities until a year or two later; but by the end of the 1990s, email forms of communication, to which national frontiers were no impediment, had become equally ubiquitous as, and distinctly cheaper than, conversations on the telephone. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was thus a convergence of different types of social formation, with the widespread availability of information technology (in international forms such as satellite television and mobile phones as well as the Internet) running alongside, and indeed arguably helping to bring about, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This meant that the “three worlds” theory, the established basis for familiar assumptions about the geopolitical and geocultural order since World War II, gave way to a new perception that the world was, in fact, interconnected in a single system or network. As Michael Denning observes, the term “globalization,” with its implication of amorphous boundaries, effectively superseded “international,” the “keyword of an earlier moment,” which tended by contrast to indicate a process of interaction across still stable national domains (Culture 17). The classic statement of globalization by Arjun Appadurai in 1996 posits five dimensions of global cultural flow – ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes – all of which testify to ways in which various forms of social, economic and ideological capital circulate transnationally. Noting the absence of “isomorphism” in new conceptions of locality, Appadurai proposed instead “the configuration of cultural forms in today’s world as fundamentally fractal” (Modernity 46). In recent American literature, the hard edges of globalization have been represented most obviously by writers such as William Gibson, a native of South Carolina whose science fiction narratives now project versions of technological displacement from his base in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Don DeLillo, whose later novels such as Cosmopolis (2003) and Falling Man (2007) have focused on the more dehumanized qualities of financial markets and global terrorism. The multibillionaire hero of Cosmopolis regards “data itself” as “soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process,” as expressed in “the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions” (24). The globalization of American literature during this period was also underwritten by the increasing prominence of English as an international language – not, usually, as a replacement for local languages, but as something to run alongside them, a lingua franca – and this was also interwoven with the exponential growth of information technology at the end of the twentieth century. As David Crystal has explained, the “world status” of the English language was primarily the result of two factors: “the expansion of British colonial power, which peaked towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of the United States as the leading economic power of the twentieth

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century” (59). This increasing viability of English as a world language thus helped to create a new, international version of it as an agent of communication, most obvious perhaps in the truncated codes used by air traffic control systems and the like, and this again helped to disseminate the idea of American culture as a global rather than a narrowly nationalist phenomenon. Much of Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) is set in Japan, with Gibson (who did not himself visit Japan until 1988) claiming that he prepared for the novel by observing “Japanese tourists” in Vancouver and by taking the street scenes for his fictional Chiba City “from a Japan Air Lines calendar” (McCaffery 285). Even if this is not literally true, it exemplifies ways in which local and global jostle together linguistically and culturally in his work. Rather than romanticizing the idea of exile, as did Ernest Hemingway and the members of his “Lost Generation,” Gibson’s narratives prefer creatively to dissolve categorical divisions between home and abroad. When the idea of “a global society” began to be widely discussed at the beginning of the 1990s, its emergence was frequently understood in progressive terms as what American scholar Betty Jean Craige in 1991 described as a “clash between traditionalism, manifesting itself in nationalism, and cultural holism, manifesting itself in globalism” (396). Cultural holism, as defined by Craige, involved “a widespread appreciation of diversity, which multicultural education fosters” (400), and a capacity for “appreciating . . . the world’s variety of human expression” (397). This emollient liberal thesis was taken up and adjusted by Francis Fukuyama, whose 1992 book The End of History identified not environmentalism or multiculturalism but the “spread of a universal consumer culture” (xv) – along with the natural ally of a free market, “prosperous and stable liberal democracies” (12) – as the benevolent forces whose global dissemination would eventually put paid to the jealously guarded interests of local tyrants. Political theorist Anthony King concurred with this conception of globalization as universalism, arguing in 1991 how the basic paradox of globalization was the way its exposure of seemingly new horizons led to a sense of societal and ethnic difference grounded upon identity politics, a reaction that effectively served to obscure the common social and economic sources that in fact produced such diversity: “the degree to which cultures are self-consciously ‘different,’ ” wrote King, “is an indication of how much they are the same” (153). Slavoj Žižek, in a 1997 essay, similarly linked the newfound popularity of multiculturalism in institutional terms to the rise of multinational capitalism, arguing that both involved trading in commodified versions of diversity, where sentimentalized versions of cultural pluralism and difference could exist alongside a political investment in the new liberal world order. This kind of latent complicity between national tradition and a rhetoric of multiculturalism has been internalized by much of the most popular ethnic writing in the United States over the past two decades, where there has often been an effort to domesticate globalization, to represent it not as something disturbing or disorienting but as a prospect fundamentally consonant with larger American narratives. The 1996 novel by Chinese American author Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, draws upon the iconography of a “promised land” to evoke a world where the fluidity of social

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and ethnic transformation (in this case, a metamorphosis of Chinese into Jewish) can be valorized: “Tell them this is America,” says the heroine’s best friend, “anything is possible” (84). This notion of infinite possibility is associated here with old American pioneers such as Lewis and Clark (148), and ultimately with Ovid’s testimony to the powers of change, flux, and motion, as cited in the novel’s epigraph (viii). It is also noticeable how much of Jen’s narrative takes place in educational settings, both Mona’s high school and her elder sister’s Harvard, thus creating for this rite-of-passage novel something like a pedagogic imaginary, where coming of age involves being initiated into the moral circumference of American civic life. Even Ovid is being read in Mona’s high school English class, and indeed at one point the novel draws this analogy between education and civic life directly, saying how Mona understands that this is how life operates in America, that it’s just like the classroom. You have to raise your own hand – no one is going to raise it for you – and then you have to get ready to stand up and give the right answer so that you may gulp down your whole half-cup of approval. (67)

It is true that there are in Jen’s novel elements of pastiche and irony hedging in all these invocations of a promised land, an iconography that is both evoked and revoked simultaneously. What this book does suggest, however, are the powerful institutional and pedagogic reasons for wanting to cling to an idea of national promise, even at a time when the theoretical premises of US exceptionalism have been all but exhausted. Various other well-received American novels during the first decade of the twentyfirst century represented national and religious difference in terms that Crèvecoeur in the 1780s would have endorsed, seeing them as a crucible within which a new definition of the United States as a global society could be forged. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) is centered on a native of Calcutta, Ashoke Ganguli, who does his doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT and then gets a job at a university in Massachusetts, where he teaches for the rest of his life. Despite his arranged marriage to an Indian woman and the family’s frequent trips back to India to visit relatives, this is basically a novel of immigration and assimilation, where the protagonists learn ultimately how to participate in the American way of life. It is true that there is a continuous emphasis throughout the book on displacement and doubling, with Ashoke taking his son’s name from the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, a historical figure who also spent most of his adult life outside his native country. “Being a foreigner” is described here as “a sort of lifelong pregnancy, a perpetual wait, a continuous feeling out of sorts” (49); and that sense of estrangement extends to the next generation, as Gogol’s marriage to his fellow Bengali immigrant Moushumi fails, with their shared ethnic heritage being unable finally to overcome their everyday cultural differences, and Gogol himself coming to feel that a sense of things being “out of place and wrong” (287) is part of his lifelong destiny. Nevertheless, the lucid realism of Lahiri’s novel ultimately aligns itself in many ways with the promise of America. Symptomatically, during a high school expedition where he is taken to visit a seven-

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teenth-century New England graveyard, Gogol feels himself linked to “these ancient Puritan spirits, these very first immigrants to America” (71); and the refrain of his mother, who is appalled by this educational expedition and says it could happen “only in America” (70), reinforces the sense of American exceptionalism that pervades this narrative. As if to emphasize again the philosophical continuities between “classic” American literature and these new ethnic formations, Lahiri’s more recent collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), takes its title from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), with the epigraph to Lahiri’s book quoting directly from “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne’s prefatory essay to his novel: “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth” (xi). In this way, Lahiri aligns herself with Hawthorne to imply clearly how a process of multicultural transformation is in accord with an American spirit of assimilation and with the practice of putting new wine in old bottles. Similarly Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) is set in the posttraumatic landscape of New York after 9/11, where the hero, a native of Holland who has married an English woman and who now works on the American stock market, has all kinds of bureaucratic tussles with the federal Department of Homeland Security. Nevertheless, what really takes the interest of Hans van den Broek here is the evolution of cricket in America, inspired by a chance meeting with a native of Trinidad, Chuck Ramkisson, who has drawn up all kinds of business plans to build a sports stadium and market cricket in the United States. As the novel goes on, it becomes clear that this is not purely a pipe dream: according to the latest census, so we are told, there are nearly a million English-speaking West Indians in the New York metropolitan area, and at one point Hans joins Chuck and his friends in a sports bar to watch a cricket match between Pakistan and New Zealand being “broadcast live from Lahore” (51). Chuck also persuades Hans that cricket actually has a long buried history in America, that “Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man” (14), and that the “first international team sports fixtures anywhere were cricket matches between the USA and Canada in the 1840s and 1850s” (98). These are established facts, and they lend the novel’s transnational dimension an air of historical authenticity. At the same time, cricket clearly represents an alien culture in terms of mainstream modern America. Chuck says at one point, “You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black” (13). And later on, after Chuck’s shady connections with the gangster world have caused him to be murdered, his former business associate Farek Patel says, “There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket” (243). The idea here, as Chuck himself puts it, is that for all of their global ambitions, “Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can’t” (204). There is, in other words, a tension in this novel between a theoretical receptiveness in the United States to the impulse of globalization and the kind of entrenched, defensive mentality that actually characterizes the country in its fearful post-9/11 state.

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The way that Hans attempts to reconcile these two contradictory forces is by remapping the history and terrain of the United States to encompass its Dutch origins. This provides the source of the novel’s title, Netherland, which speaks not only to the country of the Netherlands but also to the idea of a land beneath the country’s topography, a “nether-land” in that double sense. Describing himself at one point as a Rip Van Winkle figure, Hans also imagines the American countryside outside New York morphing into the landscape of Netherlanders and Indians that comprised Dutch national territory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All this is highly reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, at the end of which the narrator Nick Carraway links Gatsby’s home landscape of Long Island with “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes” (140). What O’Neill’s novel does, in effect, is intertextually rewrite The Great Gatsby for the twenty-first century, redescribing the history of America as properly a multiethnic phenomenon, and correlating the promise that Carraway finds in Gatsby with the willingness to make “a go of things” that Hans admires in Chuck (158). For all of its multiethnic inventiveness, then, Netherland, like The Namesake, ultimately acquiesces in a traditional myth of American exceptionalism, of America as a “providential country” (86), where the new conditions of multiculturalism have been harnessed in the name of a refurbished and updated national narrative. What such textual superimposition tends to ignore, however, is the way The Great Gatsby itself was written and published at a specific historical moment, 1925, that was quite different in terms of its institutional politics from the contemporary culture of globalization. It was this period between the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century that saw the emergence of American literature as a discrete nationalist phenomenon. The consolidation and standardization of the United States after the Civil War had led to the legal suppression of French in Louisiana in 1868, after which time the language could no longer be taught in the state’s secondary schools, while the establishment of monolingualism as US national policy was strengthened around the time of the First World War, with former President Theodore Roosevelt declaring in 1917, “We must . . . have but one language. That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence” (Shell 8). The controversial nature of Roosevelt’s agenda at this time was highlighted by the intense debates in the 1910s about how immigration and multilingualism could or should contribute to US national life. In a 1914 book entitled The Old World and the New, Edward Alsworth Ross, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a particular favorite of Roosevelt’s, argued that an influx of new immigrants who did not share fundamental American values was damaging to the US body politic. Despite being much more receptive to the immigrant condition, Randolph Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America,” which appeared in Atlantic Monthly in July 1916, similarly took for granted “the failure of the ‘melting-pot’ ” (107) and the need for “the great American democratic experiment” to find other ways of defining “American nationalism” (117), perhaps through some form of “dual citizenship” (120). For Bourne, global America was essentially a federal rather than a nationalist entity. “[T]here is no distinctively

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American culture,” he wrote (115): “What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature” (117). H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, which first appeared in 1919, also made a point of emphasizing how the American vernacular was a polyglot phenomenon made up of words from many tongues other than English, while the first Cambridge History of American Literature, which was issued in four volumes between 1917 and 1921, included in its final volume two chapters on “Non-English Writings” (Pearce 280), noticeably more than subsequent versions of the Cambridge History have done. In the 1910s, in other words, the extent to which American literature and culture should (or should not) be seen as exclusively English was a widely debated topic, with the conservative position of Roosevelt and Ross being fiercely contested by the more inclusive politics of Mencken, Bourne, and others. As Neil Smith has written, however, this “first formative moment” of globalization, between 1898 and 1919, was checked in the United States by a series of factors that induced America to retreat further from international engagement: the Russian Revolution, labor disquiet and perceived socialist threats at home, and later the rise of fascism in Europe. In 1919 the US Senate rejected participation in the League of Nations, thereby heralding what Smith calls “a deglobalization of sorts” (454) and helping to ensure that paradigms of multilingualism and dual citizenship were taken off the public agenda. The passage of the 1924 Immigration Act radically reduced entry to the United States by some 85% of what it had been on the eve of World War I (Kerber 737), and by the 1920s there was a more pronounced emphasis on American literature as a nationalistic endeavor. This was shown by the establishment in 1921 of an “American Literature” section at the Modern Language Association, a group that published its collective manifesto The Reinterpretation of American Literature under the editorship of Norman Foerster in 1928, and by the inaugural issue of the journal American Literature in 1929. The burgeoning of mass communications in the 1920s thus overlapped with a new culture of academic professionalization that was easily translated into popular pedagogical terms, with the nationalist focus of American literature ensuring its place even in secondary school curricula (Renker 30). Just as The Great Gatsby prides itself on patriotically extolling the “fresh, green breast of the new world” (140), so John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) advances its nationalist credentials by altogether ignoring the Mexican workers who actually formed a large proportion of the agricultural labor market in California during the 1930s, so as to present instead a narrative of decent white Americans being victimized by the economic system. This version of “racial populism,” as Michael Denning has described it (Cultural 267), depends upon the kind of systematic repression of global narratives that was endemic to American literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This did not, of course, mean that such discursive models of globalization did not exist, sometimes in embryonic forms, but the institutional pressures of the time were generally pulling in quite another direction. The culminating critical work of this

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period, F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), is characteristic of the late 1930s in its nationalistic emphasis and its insistence on appropriating historical figures as resources for a progressive political agenda. The “rebirth” of Matthiessen’s title consequently carries a triple connotation: not only aligning the English Renaissance with its American nineteenth-century equivalent, so as to boost the cultural status of the latter, but also revivifying the utopian dimensions of Transcendentalism as a counterpart and correlative to the communitarian ethos of Popular Front and New Deal politics in the 1930s. In the way he seeks to collapse chronology and make all time analogous to itself, Matthiessen thus imitates discursively the Emersonian strain that he writes about. Matthiessen was, of course, also party during the interwar years to Foerster’s project of academic professionalization, particularly in the way he sought to establish writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville as totemic figures in the pantheon of American literature. Indeed, Matthiessen’s project helped to validate approaches to these canonical figures after World War II that regarded them as exemplars of US democratic freedom, rather than as writers engaged at many different levels with the shifting epistemological and geographic frontiers of the American scene. It is true, of course, that nearly every American writer from the first half of the twentieth century can usefully be reinterpreted from a global perspective. This has obvious relevance to the more ostentatiously cosmopolitan modernists – Ezra Pound in 1917 specifically designated “provincialism” as “the enemy,” writing that “isolation” (171) was a form of “ignorance” (160) – while Anita Patterson has also argued recently for the repositioning of Langston Hughes within “an extensive transnational literary network” encompassing André Malraux, Bertholt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, and others (94). None of this, however, changes the political pressures toward cultural homogeneity or the academic pressures toward the standardization of national types that framed the conditions within which writers of every era were read and understood in the United States at this time. Robert Frost’s comment in a copy of North of Boston inscribed to Régis Michaud in 1918 about how he was “as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art” (693) did not, of course, mean that he sought to disregard the influence upon his work of non-Americans such as Edward Thomas; rather, Frost saw his task as to translate global and classical cultural forms into a specifically American idiom. The idiosyncrasy of this nationalistic approach lies in the way it incorporates geography itself as a mode of allegory, promoting the American environment as the source of its own intrinsic meaning and value. What this suggests also is that globalization should be understood not simply as a historical phenomenon, but also as a critical perspective through which American literature of earlier periods can be reframed. One of the most significant aspects of globalization is the way it potentially recuperates latent or implicit counternarratives that were systematically passed over when the institutional matrix of American literature as an academic subject was being consolidated in the middle years of the twentieth century. The recent efforts by Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz to highlight the pervasiveness of Hispanic cultural influences

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within canonical nineteenth-century American literature – in the writing of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Stowe, and others – are only the most visible manifestations of a process of critical reorientation in the twenty-first century that has taken many different forms and shapes, all of which have served to reconfigure US writing in relation to a much wider global sphere. This process of globalization, then, has the potential to open up the American literary canon in significant new ways. Rather than applauding authors for their inclination to focus primarily on domestic scenes, a global rereading of the American literary tradition would focus more on ways in which the local and the universal coalesce and collide. For instance, the old quest for signs of literary nationalism served to marginalize entirely Richard Alsop’s epic poem of the late eighteenth century, The Charms of Fancy. Alsop’s major poem was written mostly in the mid-1780s, though it was not first published until 1856, long after the author’s death in 1815. Alsop had affiliations with the Connecticut Wits, a group of poets normally written off as conservative pedants who remained altogether blind to the emerging American Romantic spirit; but in The Charms of Fancy Alsop brought together the two sides to his interests, the comparative mythologist and the American patriot, and the result is a remarkable long poem in four cantos that self-consciously situates the formation of the new republic within a global context. Like the poets of sensibility and the early Romantics – such as William Collins and Philip Freneau – Alsop is attached to images of ruin and desolation, and in the final canto he evokes the “mouldering relics of magnificence” at Thebes (183), going on to prophesy a similar fate of obsolescence for the United States even before the life of the new nation has properly begun: And shine, Columbia! mid thy favor’d skies, Some future day may see in dust o’erthrown, With brambles shadow’d, and with brake o’ergrown. (197)

This ubi sunt theme is unexceptional, of course, but what makes The Charms of Fancy unusual is the way it associates this poetic convention of melancholy with the more specific global remappings of time and space that were taking place in the late eighteenth century. In the first canto, Alsop discusses how Indian civilizations in America have been “Lost in the ocean of revolving years” (35), how remains of “ancient fortifications” have been found in Ohio (40), and how there have been various theories, some of “wild Invention” (36), to explain this mysterious disappearance of a civilization that a thousand years earlier appeared to be flourishing. In the second canto, this comparative mythology is theorized in spatial terms, as Alsop surveys the old civilizations of Egypt, India, Africa, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Borneo, China, and other places. Europe, he says, merits only a “slight mention” (44) on the grounds that it is too familiar already, since Alsop’s primary concern here is to bring to light regions of the world whose cultural achievements have been unjustly neglected:

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For Alsop, the political establishment of the United States in the 1780s as a new world involved just that: a new world, a reconfiguration of conventional geopolitical maps, since the advent of US political independence served effectively to rebalance the entire globe. Alsop effectively conflates geography and history, spatial enlargement and temporal promise, by describing the first survey of “Japon’s extensive isle” as a “distant region of the new-born day” (66); and he writes in this second canto of how it was a “thirst of knowledge” that led “Adventurous Cook” (57) to discover new lands on his voyages to the Pacific in the 1770s: Wide o’er the immense of seas, in southern skies, Within itself a world, New Holland lies . . . (51) ......................... Where e’er he [Cook] roves, see gladdening islands heave, And worlds unknown their shrouds of darkness leave. . . . (57)

The notes to this canto comment extensively on the kangaroo first described by Captain Cook, on the scientific observations of Joseph Banks (who accompanied Cook on his first Pacific voyage), and of how “The island of New Holland [Australia], by far the largest hitherto discovered, is two thousand miles in length, and surpasses Europe in the number of its square miles” (79). Alsop’s annotations here reveal a marked curiosity about geographic and scientific facts – the Chinese, he notes, “have possessed a standard Dictionary of their language, from nearly two hundred years before our era” (102) – and his metacritical framework suggests ways in which the romantic melancholy that pervades The Charms of Fancy is buttressed by a more hardedged sense of temporal and spatial relativity. Cultural reactions to globalization in the United States, then, have been intertwined with the larger question of the nation’s relation to questions of universalism, and to the often tense interaction between universal and particular. The exceptionalist thesis, which provided an epistemological ground for the study of American literature and culture for many years, held that the country was a protected space, immune from global currents and uniquely favored by providence: Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1796 of his wish to see an “ocean of fire” between the United States and Europe (1044). Such isolationism has, of course, been challenged over the last 50 years by critical perspectives that have sought to highlight categories – including race, ethnicity, and gender – that could never be circumscribed so comfortably by nationalist concerns. Yet tension between local and global remains a constant theme throughout US literary culture. Thomas Paine in 1776 designated America as an “asylum for all mankind,” rather than just for Americans, and indeed in Common Sense he specifi-

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cally related this notion of emancipation to a universalist model, writing of how “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe” (100). The question of how America’s heritage relates to the Enlightenment is a crucial one, and the relative marginalization of eighteenth-century writers within the traditional American literary canon testifies to an academic framework where nineteenth-century Romanticism rather than eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism has long been the preferred point of institutional origin. In Rethinking American History in a Global Age, however, Thomas Bender argues against the “near assimilation of history to national history over the course of the two centuries following the invention of the modern nation-state” (2), and he calls instead for a “thickening” of American history in order to “deprovincialize” it (9–10). Just as Langston Hughes in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) posits an alternative source for American culture in the Congo and the Euphrates, so Walt Whitman in “A Backward Glance O’er Travelled Roads” (1888) acknowledges continuities between his American poems and prior Old World models of “great poems receiv’d from abroad and down the ages.” While continuing to insist that “really great poetry is always . . . the result of a national spirit” (584), Whitman at the end of his career admits he would never have been able poetically to affirm his New World ideals of “democratic average and basic equality” if he had not stood “with uncover’d head” before the “colossal grandeur” (576) of “Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them” (577–8). For all of his emphasis on “autochthonous song” (584), then, Whitman’s poetry encompasses a comparative spirit where global narratives are translated into national forms. Again, the focus is not so much upon local mimesis in itself, but on the ways in which the local and global are symbiotically intertwined with each other, and within this equation Whitman’s poems describe a kind of circle whose radius expands and contracts in accordance with shifts in nationalist emphasis and perspective. There has been some interesting work recently from Wai Chee Dimock and others on ways in which Transcendentalism related to Islam, Hinduism and other world religions outside an accustomed American orbit, and all this suggests ways in which forms of globalization impacted dominant national narratives of US literature in the nineteenth century (on Emerson and Asian religions, see Buell 169–98). Similarly, the frequent attempts in our day to revise anthologies of American literature so as to balance the time-honored “Puritan origins” story by including Hispanic encounters, from the sixteenth-century writings of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and others, speak to a kind of globalization process in reverse.1 In this sense, the alternative version of the New York past inscribed in O’Neill’s Netherland epitomizes the kind of revisionist impetus that has become characteristic of the globalization thesis in general. Influenced in part by poststructuralist conceptions of the malleable nature of historical narratives, exponents of globalization in various different fields have sought to redescribe American cultural history as a transnational phenomenon comprising multiple border zones and intersections, rather than one determined merely by unilinear teleologies of immigration and assimilation. Empire, published in 2000

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by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, argued against older notions of spatial sanctity by suggesting that twenty-first-century conceptions of imperialism would involve not the establishment of a “territorial center of power” but “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii; emphasis in original). In January 2001, similarly, PMLA published a special issue on “Globalizing Literary Studies,” whose general hypothesis was that nation-based approaches to literary study had simply become superannuated: such ideological “coherence,” suggested Paul Jay, “was rooted in a cultural moment that has passed” (43). In all of these cases, a discourse of globalization was mobilized in order to dismantle what were thought to be the increasingly archaic structures of national narratives. It is, however, abundantly clear from events of the first decade of the twenty-first century – notably 9/11, but also the global financial crisis of 2008 – that there are what Appadurai in 2006 called many “darker sides to globalization” (Fear 3). Appadurai contrasted the “high globalization” theory prevalent in the 1990s (Fear 2), when an ebullient rhetoric of open markets and free trade predominated, to “the phenomenon of grassroots globalization, globalization from below” (Fear x–xi), that has become more visible since the turn of the millennium. This new dynamic of transnational activism first came to general prominence in the riots at the World Trade Organization ministerial conference held in Seattle in 1999, when there was widespread protest against the negative effects of transnational corporations on domestic environments, but the subsequent widespread misery brought about through cumulative domino effects after the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market in 2008 was ample testimony to how closely the world’s national economies are now interlinked. In addition, as Appadurai notes, terrorism might aptly be described as “a kind of metastasis of war, war without spatial or temporal bounds” (Fear 92), a phenomenon that updates the idea of war for the global age. “Terror divorces war from the idea of the nation,” writes Appadurai (Fear 92), and he consequently calls terror “the nightmarish side of globalization,” one that “cannot be divorced from certain deeper crises and contradictions that surround the nation-state” (Fear 33). In truth, though, such “contradictions” have always been endemic to globalization processes of many different kinds. Expansive global horizons have long carried as their shadow the prospect of a systematic destabilization of local identity, something that has often carried as its corollary a threat of violence, either literal or metaphoric. The disruptions wrought in the heart of the American republic by the twenty-first-century War on Terror or the First World War of 1917–18 are not altogether different in kind from the threats to the US body politic about which Adams and Jefferson were concerned in the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution. Globalization in the United States has a long history, but it is a checkered history, and to trace the fluctuations in its fortunes over the course of two centuries is to bear witness also to how the concomitant narrative of cultural nationalism has similarly ebbed and flowed. Exceptionalism and globalization might thus be regarded within the American domain as different sides of the same coin, symbiotically attached to each other, but

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destined always to present alternative faces to the world. While globalization should not, of course, be regarded as a universal panacea for American (or any other) culture, it is equally a force whose long-term significance cannot be disregarded. While the larger fate of globalization in the twenty-first century remains uncertain, it seems unlikely that US literary studies will ever be able again simply to locate itself “in the American grain,” in the way William Carlos Williams recommended at the historical moment of the subject’s nationalist emergence in 1925. For better or worse, such nativist impulses and exceptionalist assumptions have in the twenty-first century been forced to enter into negotiation with more extensive transnational currents, and the historical map of American literature has necessarily been redrawn to reflect this wider global provenance.

Note 1.

See, for example, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, whose multicultural emphasis deliberately

takes issue with Bercovitch’s Puritan Origins thesis.

References and Further Reading Alsop, Richard. The Charms of Fancy: A Poem in Four Cantos, with Notes. Ed. Theodore Dwight. New York, 1856. Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bender, Thomas. “Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives.” In Rethinking American History in a Global Age (pp. 1–21). Ed. Thomas Bender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. Bourne, Randolph. “Trans-National America.” 1916. In War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919 (pp. 107–23). Ed. Carl Resek. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Burbach, Roger. Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons. London: Pluto, 2001. Craige, Betty Jean. “Literature in a Global Society.” PMLA 106, no. 3 (1991): 395–401. Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2007. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. Denning, Michael. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London: Verso, 2004. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Foerster, Norman, ed. The Reinterpretation of American Literature: Some Contributions toward the Understanding of Its Historical Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928. Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century. London: Allen Lane-Penguin, 2005. Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York: Library of America, 1995. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. In Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, I: The Poems: 1921–1940 (p. 36). Ed. Arnold Rampersad. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Jay, Paul. “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 32–47. Jefferson, Thomas. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984. Jen, Gish. Mona in the Promised Land. New York: Knopf, 1996. Kerber, Linda K. “Toward a History of Statelessness in America.” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 727–49. King, Anthony D. “The Global, the Urban, and the World.” In Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (pp. 149–54). Ed. Anthony D. King. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. London: Flamingo, 2003. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Lauter, Paul. Ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Mencken, H.L. The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. New York: Knopf, 1919. O’Neill, Joseph. Netherland. London: Fourth Estate, 2008. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. 1776. Ed. Isaac Kramnick. London: Penguin, 1976. Patterson, Anita. Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pearce, Thomas M. “American Traditions and Our Histories of Literature.” American Literature 14, no. 3 (1942): 277–84. Pound, Ezra. “Provincialism the Enemy.” 1917. In Selected Prose 1909–1965 (pp. 159–73). Ed. William Cookson. London: Faber, 1973. Renker, Elizabeth. The Origins of American Literature Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ross, Edward Alsworth. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: Century, 1914. Shell, Marc. “Babel in America.” In American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni (pp. 3–33). Ed. Marc Shell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Smith, Neil. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press, 1939. Trent, William Peterfield, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren. Eds. The Cambridge History of American Literature. 4 vols. New York: Putnam, 1917–21. Whitman, Walt. “A Backward Glance o’er Travelled Roads.” 1888. In The Complete Poems (pp. 569–84). Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 1975. Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: Boni, 1925. Žižek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review, 225 (September–October 1997): 28–51.

Part III

Practices

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Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature Dana D. Nelson

One of the cornerstones of the United States’ self-image is a triumphalist story of how its orderly political freedom matured over time into “the world’s leading democracy.” Most US citizens proudly (if incorrectly) define the nation’s political system as a “democracy” and consider our governmental model as well as our culture of individual freedoms worthy of the world’s emulation. Of course, careful students remember that the US governmental system is a representative republic and not, properly speaking, a democracy. But those who err can hardly be blamed, because the growth of democracy is one of the United States’ most central and carefully rehearsed stories about itself. In the consensus story, democracy begins as a rhetorical glimmer in the nation’s Declaration of Independence, an inchoate if energizing ideal that fuels the new nation’s revolutionary bid for independence from England. This idealism is wisely seat-belted by the Framers, whose Constitution engineered a representative system to help citizens avoid the “democratic excess” of direct participation. Their model eschewed what they viewed as the impracticability, unpredictability, and even lawlessness of popular democracy. Democracy, properly delimited by official structures of political representation, was then launched by the election of President Thomas Jefferson, who released the “voice of the people” in his electoral triumph over the elitist Federalists. The political sway of the “common man” subsequently burgeoned under Andrew Jackson with the advent of the party system and with “universal suffrage,” when all white men, regardless of their access to wealth or property, won the vote. Of course, the phrase “universal” now ironically highlights the lingering injustices of citizenship: women of every race along with African-descended, Native

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American, and foreign-born men were excluded. And thus began a longer struggle for civil rights and access to the ballot box. This narrative, a touchstone of civics education, depicts democracy as a boon from the Founders who created prudent constraints allowing ordinary people to take up democratic freedoms responsibly, ensuring that the nation’s common citizens and its political system would mature in tandem. Democracy, we learn, is about getting the vote, which marks political (i.e., law-abiding and self-disciplined) adulthood. This story narrates democracy from a bird’s-eye view that reveals to its grateful recipients a relatively orderly progress. Interestingly, though, the first century of US literature does not corroborate this consensus narrative. Rather it offers a different, richer, more deeply democratic picture – if by “democracy” we refer to the contributions of the demos, the common or poorer classes of citizens. It explores the democratic ideas and traditions of these ordinary citizens, framing the conflicts that emerged as a result of competing ideas about democracy and different democratic cultures in the late colonies and early nation. It offers insights into how some ideas, cultures, and practices won out, becoming officially enshrined in the nation’s memory, and how others were squeezed into political irrelevance. It gives us tantalizing hints about diverging democratic histories, and different modes of democratic possibility that might be worth remembering, exploring, and even trying to deploy today. It shows how “representation” extends beyond politics to social interactions and aesthetic practices. The literature of the early nation confirms that democracy was not an adult-sized suit that childlike citizens grew into, but rather something messier and more contentious, where ordinary citizens had adult ideas from the start – not always in accord with the Constitution’s vision for political order. “Democracy” in this literature was not official government, but competing ideas, ideals, and practices that were fought over, gained, and also lost in the first century of “independence.” The democratic conflicts that are explored, historicized, theorized, celebrated, and vilified in this literature offer a provocative, politically revisionist framework for understanding how democratic cultures were streamlined into a more officially singular democratic Culture in the early United States and also reveal that many early citizens did not see their fractious and vibrant local democratic practices as being in opposition to constitutional democracy or federal order but rather as a vital (if contestational) partner with it. The literature of the young nation corroborates and fleshes out the investigations of a new generation of historians into alternative democratic political cultures in the late colonies and early nation. Revolution had emboldened common folk all over the new United States to involve themselves in the work of self-governance rather than leaving things to their representative “betters.” This growing understanding of what came to be enshrined in the Constitution as the sovereignty of the people started not as a theory, but in local, face-to-face practices. Common folk in the backcountry, towns, and cities believed they had a right to “regulate” existing government to ensure fairness. And they agitated for economic policies that, as historians Woody Holton and Terry Bouton each

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detail, would create a more enduring foundation for political democracy. As Bouton notes, historians have paid ample attention to the Revolution’s impetus toward political equality. But the push for economic equality has received much less attention. Bouton argues that in this pivotal moment, people – wealthy, middling, and poor – came to believe that “economic equality was what made political equality possible. . . . To them, concentrations of wealth led to corruption and tyrannical rulers, while widely dispersed political and economic power promoted good government” (32). For many, the flowering of democracy would depend on supportive economic policies, for instance, treating the land as a commonwealth, to be fairly distributed so as to assure the livelihood of the citizenry. These people were calling for a more muscular sovereignty than that bequeathed by the Constitution with its emphasis on the delegation of participation, and for access to a secure livelihood. In other words, they were demanding conditions that would maximize public happiness (an idea much discussed in the revolutionary era of the eighteenth century) – the ability to participate publicly in the project of self-government on equal standing – rather than a private happiness or individual good. In their demands, democracy was about communal wealth parity as the basis for political equality rather than the unimpeded right of individuals to wealth accumulation. The ratification of the Constitution and its order-producing structures for delegated representation did not make these expectations disappear. Instead, demands for fairness and access grew across the United States in its first century, manifested in a variety of communities, informal practices, organized protests, and formal political organizations. Even though their detractors increasingly represented them as a disorderly threat to the nation, these actors, agitating for better political and economic access, did not see themselves as opponents to the Constitution: they aimed not at overthrow, but at reform, as historians like Ronald Formisano have detailed. US literature, read with a critical eye toward democratic cultures, reflects these alternative understandings and practices of what “self-government” might be. From the start, an energetic, developing tradition of political novels and poems challenged (and continues challenging) readers to consider how important reading literature – and the critical capacities that such reading develops – can be to the practice of democratic self-government, representative and otherwise, in the early nation. And, intriguingly, some of this literature emphasizes that the very contention and disagreement disdained by the consensus narrative is itself the heart of democratic vitality in the United States – that contention, in fact, is absolutely fundamental to the vitality of community and the democratic commonweal, not its downfall.

Democratic Conflict and Early US Literature In its earliest iterations, we can see diverging tendencies between what we might call “consensus” and “conflict” models for framing these democratic struggles. And we can see how literature participated in these conflicts, developing as an aesthetic

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corollary to official practices of political representation. An early political poem, The Anarchiad, framed fractious democratic debates in terms that were friendly to the nascent consensus narrative. As disagreement and protests over debt and paper money played out across the nation in the 1780s, a group of Yale-educated New Englanders known as the “Hartford Wits” or “Connecticut Wits” – David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins – weighed in. In the form of a fragmentary mock-epic, the authors published 12 installments of The Anarchiad between October 1786 and September 1787 (the Constitutional Convention sat from May to September 1787). Attempting to influence public opinion toward a stronger, federalized government, the authors proffered their work as a “rediscovered” epic poem, supposedly excavated from an ancient American fortress, which uncannily prophesies the current democratic battles. Warning of a “darkness” that threatens to overwhelm “the new-born state,” the poem describes the dangers posed by “mobs in myriads” who “blacken all the way . . . shade with rags the plain” and “discord spread” (6). The Wits summarize the actions of fellow citizens who lobby their states’ representatives, protest, and fight for fairer laws as “Chaos, Anarch old” (6). The poem names Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck, two of the leaders of the Massachusetts Regulation (or “Shay’s Rebellion”), without identifying their concerns. Rather, it dismisses their actions – legal and extralegal alike – as a fundamental threat to the nation’s existence. The poem personifies this political struggle in mythical terms by depicting a battle between Anarch, the force of lawlessness and darkness, and Hesper, a mythological figure that manifests Venus, the “bringer of light,” who convenes and counsels “sages” to assemble in Philadelphia to rescue the country. A few years later, a participant in a different post-Constitution Regulation, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, would depict these ongoing struggles, humorously celebrating democratic conflict while theorizing it as a problem of both aesthetic and political representation. The multivolume novel, Modern Chivalry, thoughtfully explored battles over democratic access and form with a sense of humor that matches the Wits’. Hugh Henry Brackenridge pokes fun at and takes seriously the questions about democratic self-governance raised in the political actions, protests, and rebellions of its time. Because of its length (over 800 pages) and episodic nature, Brackenridge’s novel (published 1792–1815) is not high on the list of must-reads for those who study the political and literary legacy of the early nation. It is worth reading, though, because its arguments are substantially different and less dystopic than those of more familiar novels from this period – for instance, Charles Brockden Brown’s dark ruminations on the politics of representation in Wieland (1798) and Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800). Modern Chivalry makes a significant contribution to the early Republic’s debates over what the people’s sovereignty might entail, over the tensions between direct democratic local traditions and the federal representative order, and over ambiguities that existed in developing practices of political representation. Brackenridge’s theory of democratic representation expands its scope beyond its formal governing function, proposing that literature itself is part of a continuum of

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representative practices that are necessary to the fundamental work of common citizens in a healthy democracy. Modern Chivalry’s episodic structure is built around farcical political situations. For instance, in an early scene Captain John Farrago (the putative hero of the novel, whose patronym means “a confused mixture” or “hodgepodge”) is about to lose the services of his personal servant, Teague Oregan. They have ventured into a town election between an educated man and a weaver. Farrago, with a smug aristocratic “disinterest,” tries to persuade the “multitude” to reject the weaver as unqualified and, failing that, to dissuade the weaver from running. Meanwhile, the crowd tries persuading Teague to stand for office. Mortified at his failure to educate the crowd in the selection of suitable candidates, Farrago instead convinces Teague to refuse this new opportunity by offering a terrifying vision of its consequence: It is the devil in hell to be exposed to the squibs and crackers of the gazette wits and publications. You know no more about these matters than a goose; and yet you would undertake rashly, without advice, to enter on the office; nay, contrary to advice. For I would not for a thousand guineas . . . that the breed of the Oregans should come to this; bringing on them a worse stain that stealing sheep; to which they are much addicted. You have nothing but your character, Teague, in a new country to depend upon. Let it never be said, that you quitted an honest livelihood, the taking care of my horse, to follow the new fangled whims of the times, and to be a statesman. (17)

Farrago’s method for “representation,” as the narrator will later note of a similar episode, “had the desired effect upon Teague and he thought no more of the matter” (40). Within pages, the narrator recaps the same episode a little differently, qualifying Farrago’s supposedly beneficent disinterest: “the selfishness of the captain prevailed, and obstructed [Teague’s] advancement” (42). Much later in the novel, Captain – now Governor – Farrago is threatened with impeachment, because of rumors that he has been unfairly lenient with Teague, recently named an Indian war hero, but who is currently (and rightfully) suspected of misrepresenting his role in the taking of scalps. Farrago manages to persuade his constituents that he is no longer responsible for Teague’s actions, and the infuriated crowd begins calling for Teague’s blood. Happily, though, a cagey gardener presents a piece of panther hide, claiming it to be Teague’s scalp, which calms the crowd and brings it back to its (collective) senses. The narrator summarizes, Hence the fury abated in a moment, and when it occurred to them that their remonstrance to the governor had been the occasion of the tragedy, they began to relent, and to blame themselves as having been too precipitate in their representations. (736)

In this long burlesque on the fledgling representative democracy, political “representation” becomes a more expansive practice than what the Constitution structures. In Brackenridge’s novel, representation is a collective practice of public happiness that

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can be informed by a variety of motives not always conducive to the commonweal. It can be selfish, too hasty, and poorly informed. It can be deliberated and reconsidered. And, the novel insists, representation is not just the result of democratic decision making (in the form of elections, political proxies, or legal decisions). It is also the basis for democratic decision making, the material from which people form the opinions that shape their decisions about their political will. As the narrator notes, “[H]ow can it be otherwise when the people cannot themselves be all present to see” the affairs under consideration? (597). Modern Chivalry, like the democratic cultures it pokes fun at, insists that democracy – usually beneficially and sometimes dangerously – exceeds the formal boundaries of representative government. It examines a range of locations and modes for political representation that cultivates the balanced and thoughtful democracy that this novel treasures, including individual self-discipline, dinner table conversation and random roadside encounters, coffeehouse discussion in the midst of mob actions, newspaper reports and editorials, popular elections, legislative deliberation, and, indeed, novels. Read as part of the nation’s democratic archive, it offers not only an alternative historical account of the development of democracy in the new nation but also a political tool kit for our own interest in democracy today.

Frontier Democracy Brackenridge’s optimism about the ability of ordinary citizens to engage in the democratic process was not always shared. The frontier literature that became so popular after the 1820s often supported the developing consensus narrative, consigning the equalitarian demands, practices, and beliefs of common citizens to the outlands or the nation’s prehistory. Frontier novelists represented muscular notions of equality not as a real political possibility, but rather (at best) as a naïve ideal that should be abandoned, or (more typically) as a form of savagery or organized crime that needed to repudiated in order for settlers to “mature” and earn their admission to the civilized nation. Such plots repudiate the equalitarian goals of political solidarity forwarded by rural farmers and urban workers in the early nation, as they track the enduring challenge that such ideals and practices posed during the tumultuous political and economic changes of the Jacksonian era. In the 1830s, white men across the nation, regardless of property status, got the vote; at the same time, the political power of the common folk – whom Jackson invited into the White House at his first inaugural – was vilified and feared by elites across the political spectrum. As lands opened up in the South and West, thanks to Jackson’s creation of Indian territory in what is now Oklahoma, and his policy of Indian removal, land speculation became rampant and banks proliferated, launching a cycle of economic boom and bust that didn’t abate until well into the twentieth century, and igniting a range of populist movements as well as belligerent political majoritarianism. Citizenship, increasingly dissevered from notions of equalitarian fraternalism (and decisively excluding women en route, as historian Rosemary Zagarri details in Revolutionary Backlash), became more and more

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attached to ideals of competitive, independent manhood. And during this time, populist actions became more destructive against property (mainly in the North) and violent against lives (largely in the South), as David Grimsted details in American Mobbing, 1828–1861. Two famous frontier novelists, William Gilmore Simms and Robert Montgomery Bird, developed stories that bolster the consensus narrative’s suspicion of local democracy and its more insistent equalitarianism by emphasizing the unreliability of fraternity for the construction of familial or political bonds. Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1838) sets its action in 1782, when the nation was still a political confederacy and Kentucky was still a district. Its plot repudiates the brotherhood that undergirded the Articles of Confederation, advocating for a hierarchical political order, more like that imagined by the federal Constitution that would be ratified in 1789, governing the entry of Kentucky into statehood. Its young, orphaned Virginian hero, Roland, is descended from “one of the most ancient and affluent families on the James River,” but his uncle Roland, the eldest, inherits all the family wealth, while the younger two brothers, including Roland’s father, “were left . . . to shift for themselves” (59). During the Revolution, Uncle Roland remains loyal to the Crown, as the younger two brothers cast their lot for Independence. Uncle Roland never forgives his younger brothers, who soon die in battle, though he seemingly forgives their offspring, Roland and his cousin Edith. But when the uncle dies shortly after the British defeat at Yorktown, he apparently leaves them penniless and unprotected. Roland and Edith must light out for the frontier to make their living. The novel idealizes fraternity in the twins’ patriotism, and plots its “real-world” fate. Uneven distribution of property – whether enforced by law or produced by what Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10 calls that “diversity in the faculties of men” – combines with the vicissitudes of war to transform revolutionary brotherhood into a postrevolutionary fall. The message is clear, if regrettable: brotherhood can’t be trusted. The perspective of the novel, and the symbolic citizenship it conveys, shifts decisively from brothers to an anxious, isolated, orphaned son, emphasizing that men struggle alone in a competitive and brutish world. The novel’s Indians, for their part, confirm their political backwardness in their very extension of fraternal welcome. “Boozhoo, brudder,” may be the most clearly intelligible thing Indian characters get to say in the course of the novel. Their brotherly greetings underscore their savagery. Not only do the Shawnees play at politics in war camp speeches that seem like childish imitations of adult speeches, but also they make a habit of eating their so-called brothers. Early on, the frontier leader, Colonel Bruce, describes a Delaware defeat of a Pennsylvania military expedition: “Beaten! . . . say that the savages made dinner of ’em and you’ll be nearer the true history of the matter” (56). Thus the novel not only negates the political possibility of equalitarian democracy but also rules out the possibility of effective Native and Anglo-American alliances by revealing Indians as cannibals. The novel is nevertheless haunted by the possibility of such alliances. Deriding potential equality as nothing more than grotesque polyglot gibberish (“Boozhoo,

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brudder”), it gestures toward the real-world option that emerged on the frontier for people to form cross-cultural political alliances by invoking then-famous Indian captive and “renegade” Simon Girty as background for the character Abel Doe, who, like Girty, “turns Injun.” With the specific invocation of the cross-racial and cross cultural fraternity that the Girty “threat” represents, Nick of the Woods invokes the peril of an equalitarian ethos spreading like infection from the Indians to even apparently good frontiersmen by again evoking the horror of cannibalism. For instance, Colonel Bruce exhorts his men into battle with a sinister hint: “If thar’s a thousand Injuns, or the half of ‘em, thar’s meat for all of you” (92). The novel shows frontier equality as developmental regression; in its plot, the nation must aim to end the fraternal idealism that trains frontiersmen as renegades and not citizens. The project of citizenship is to bring men away from “savagery” into representative order, to tame self-determining political desire with a representative order that demands citizen submission. Simms’s Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama (1838) is even more direct than Nick of the Woods in repudiating brotherhood. Set in the early 1830s of Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, the novel is loosely based on a legend then circulating about a reallife outlaw, John Murrell, whose alleged activities (including slave running and/or stealing) inspired fears of an interracially orchestrated slave rebellion and actual recriminatory lynching sprees in Mississippi in 1835 (a summer when the entire nation, as Grimsted summarizes, witnessed “maximum mob mayhem, in numbers and variety of riots never before or since surpassed in the United States” [ix]). Richard Hurdis mostly ignores the racial aspects of the Murrell legend, and instead plays up the threat of an underclass counternation being consolidated on the frontiers among poor whites. This “nation,” a “mystic brotherhood” composed of squatters (people too poor to purchase land outright), rejects US laws privileging the wealthy elite. It has its own laws and rules for citizenship, and members are committed – among other things – to an absolutely fair division of all spoils. Its threat (members brag repeatedly that its membership has topped 1,500) forms the dramatic backdrop to the story’s central tale of a fratricidal struggle between Richard Hurdis and his oldest brother, John. Richard Hurdis, the narrator, characterizes himself as “stout of limb, bold of heart, prompt in the use of my weapon, a fearless rider and a fatal shot” (2). The most “decisive” (4) of his brothers, Richard is not the most favored by his father; rather, that preference falls to John, whom Richard characterizes as fat, conniving, and lazy. When Richard realizes he is in love with the proverbial girl next door, Mary Easterby, and begins to suspect that she might prefer to give the favor of her hand in marriage to John, he becomes enraged. Proudly refusing to ask either Mary or John, and relying rather on rumors of his Alabama neighbors, Richard provokes a fight with John by insulting him, and then leaves home with his dear friend William Carrington to strike out into the territory of the Creek nation – William to purchase some land to live on when he is able to marry his fiancé, and Richard ostensibly to make a life independent from his despised father and brother.

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Not an entirely reliable narrator, Richard admits that he is easy to anger, impatient, and deeply suspicious, traits for which he is chided by both Mary and William, the latter advising him, “To look for rascals is to find rascals; and to believe in wrong, is not only to suffer, but to do wrong” (33). But Richard defensively castigates William for his trustfulness and optimism, countering that William’s faith in mankind “will be rewarded by faithlessness.” The novel confirms Richard’s gloomy view. As soon as he lights out for the territories, John hires a poor squatter, Pickett, to track and kill Richard. But Pickett mistakenly kills William instead as he flees from a gang of bandits that have entrapped the two young men. The bandits, members of the “mystic brotherhood,” quickly recruit Pickett and John Hurdis to their cause. Meanwhile, without knowing his brother has been inducted into the “brotherhood,” Richard disguises himself in order to infiltrate the outlaw gang and extract revenge for the death of William. As luck would have it, when the showdown comes, John is among the bandits. Richard, who by now has untangled the chain of events that led to William’s murder and understands that John had meant for Richard to die, aims explicitly to kill his brother: “I could no longer resist the conviction that the fates had brought me to my victim” (351). As he takes aim, though, he is obstructed by Pickett’s daughter, and while he struggles with her, one of his compatriots kills John. Happy that his brother is finally dead, Richard nevertheless pauses to “thank God, and the stout fellow who rode beside me, that my hand had not stricken the cruel blow that was yet demanded by justice” (353). He rides on to finish the work of defeating the gang, and the novel apparently concludes with the felicitous defeat of both familial and political brotherhood, a victory rewarded by Richard’s happy marriage to Mary. Not all frontier novelists, though, rejected the practices and principles of equalitarianism that still circulated on the frontiers. Another narrative published in 1839 offers a more favorable view of these ongoing ideals and practices. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? loosely fictionalizes her family’s experiences on the 1830s Michigan frontier. More than just the document of women’s drudgery in the West, Kirkland’s narrative details its fictional heroine Mary Clavers’s pleasure in her frontier learning curve. One aspect of that learning comes in the social economy of the frontier town Montacute. The Clavers arrive with trunks loaded with fineries, only to discover their uselessness in the rough conditions they encounter. Aided – and also irritated – by neighbors who spurn her idea of civilized comforts and who borrow butter only to return margarine, Mary’s sketches often build humor at the expense of her “less refined” neighbors (earning Kirkland serious contempt from her real-world Michigan neighbors). But throughout her sketches and most explicitly in her closing words, Mary Clavers embraces what she has learned, claiming a common cause: This simplification of life, this bringing down the transactions of daily intercourse to the original principles of society, is neither very eagerly adopted, nor very keenly relished, by those who have been accustomed to the politer atmospheres. They rebel most

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determinedly, at first . . . yet . . . after the barriers of pride and prejudice are once broken, we discover a certain satisfaction in this homely fellowship with our kind, which goes far toward repaying whatever sacrifices or concessions we may have been induced to make. (184–5)

Kirkland’s depiction of the homely (but not savage) social and political equality that develops on the frontier between more and less “civilized” denizens embraces, with admitted ambivalence, the rough equalitarianism she discovers there. A New Home insists on the productive exchange of federal, or “civilized,” democracy with the “primitive” equalitarianism still practiced in frontier territories. Here Kirkland’s argument differs notably from Bird’s and Simms’s. In Nick of the Woods, the citified adventurers learn that they can’t hack it on the frontier, and must wait for the transition to be completed before they reenter Kentucky; in Richard Hurdis, the narrative teaches that the savagery of the frontier must be eliminated by the hardiest of adventurers among the elite classes. Quite differently, Clavers imagines a political reciprocity between the more democratic frontier and the more civilized nation. In the story of her own transformation, Clavers proposes an infusion model, suggesting that frontier equalitarianism can redirect the more jaded and class-divided practice of representative democracy in the East. She closes her narrative not by returning to “civilization” as both Roland and Richard do, but by placing herself “beyond the pale” of the “sublime clique” and affirming instead her citizenship in the “wild woods” of Michigan (186).

Self Culture versus Interpersonal Democracy The property and political disputes and rebellions that had peppered the early nation began cropping up again in the 1840s – for instance, the Anti-Rent Wars of New York State and the Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island, where political activism intensified around the conflict between liberal democracy and the demands of workers who wanted access to land and livelihood and not just capitalism’s fabled “opportunity.” Historian Mark Lause has detailed how the National Reformers of the 1840s reignited revolutionary era demands, agitating for equalitarian social reconstruction by calling for an end to seizure of homesteads for debt, a federal homestead act, and a limitation on land ownership. These political ideals, reflecting the interests of agrarian and urban working classes alike, would be echoed by the “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” slogan of the Republican Party when it formed in the mid-1850s. But the nation’s formal commitment to developing capitalism at the direct expense of democracy hardened in this era, as private law increasingly shielded the economy from political intervention (see Horwitz). Meanwhile, more canonical writers from the nineteenth century – those who have been steadily admired and studied throughout our nation’s history – were developing literary styles and philosophies that both elaborated and tested the consensus narrative

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that celebrates representative government while separating the economy from democratic influence. Emerson’s Transcendentalism made a virtue out of political individualism even as it attached it spiritually to a larger corporate good, reflecting even as it refined to a narrower ambit the utopian and socialist perfectionism of a variety of middle-class movements in the mid-nineteenth century, from Fourierism and Mormonism to the Oneidas and Brook Farm. Emerson counters what he sees as the mobbish tendencies – the banal, untidy, and conformist orientation – of association with the higher, symbolically directed exercise of self-culture. This is an argument that culminates in “New England Reformers” (1844), when Emerson outlines his distrust of party politics and reformist leagues: [C]oncert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then there is concert for the first time possible, because the force which moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever qualities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert of the false and disunited? There can be no concert in two where there is no concert in one. . . . The union is only perfect, when all of the uniters are isolated. (598–9)

For Emerson, political interaction – the Revolutionary era’s vaunted public happiness – compromises communal good more often than not: it warps, distracts, and diverts civic actors. Taking aim at the growing party power and democratizing aspirations of the “common man,” Emerson argues that political and spiritual goods alike lie not in association, but that the “union must be ideal in actual individualism” (599). In Emerson’s account, even political representation would ideally act as a function of self-culture. The concept of representation makes unity symbolically present where it did not before exist, and he suggests that it is indeed by serving the ideal Representative that we best advance our self: “Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and nobler?” (629). Others influenced by Emerson’s Transcendentalism, like Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass, would leverage Emerson’s isolationist representative philosophy toward a broader sociality and a more expansively face-to-face practice. In contrast to Emerson’s self-disciplining service to the Representative, Whitman’s poet imagines a sprawling and undisciplined reciprocity. His bardic persona proffers self-culture as an athletic sympathy that will extend democratic openness and public happiness both within individuals and between diverse people, turning the Constitution’s representative distance into revitalizing, local, and global democratic contact. Douglass, for his part, deployed the achievements of his self-culture in ways that challenged the representative order of the white republic, first to free himself from slavery, then on behalf of abolition, in his autobiographies and his activist work within black print culture

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and community. From his earliest endeavors to teach himself to read with a copy of the Columbian Orator, the arts of citizenship were of central concern to Douglass, and he theorizes citizenship throughout his career, while parrying its real-life exclusions even after the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. By the 1840s, as historian Ronald Formisano shows, democratic activists began more and more to look for ways to work within and alongside constitutional political process rather than externally to it (as “Regulators”). We see this accommodation, for instance, in Douglass’s move from Garrisonian opposition, deciding instead to hold the nation’s political system to its own highest ideals by insisting that the Constitution was antislavery (despite the 3/5ths and fugitive slave clauses). The emphasis on internal democratic reform correlates with a societal shift from an emphasis on public happiness – the activism of regular citizens in their communities and in dialogue with their federally representative government – to private happiness and individual heroism. Or, to frame this in historian Jeffrey Sklansky’s terms, American understandings of selfhood and society swapped political economy for social psychology. Citizenship’s purview shifted away from the self-authorizing, communal, sovereign right to watch over and participate in government to a narrower focus on individual heroism and self-reform. Thus, public happiness, which philosopher Hannah Arendt summarizes as “the citizen’s right of access to the public realm, in his share of public power – to be a ‘participator in the government of affairs’ in Jefferson’s telling phrase,” was replaced with private happiness, the definition we still definitively associated with Jefferson’s “self-evident” list of truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (see Arendt 127). The pursuit of this private happiness is, however, a mixed treasure, what cultural theorist Christopher Castiglia has termed “democracy’s door prize”: “No longer entitled to exert agency over [democratic] institutions, citizens were given the responsibility of regulating and managing the turbulent interiors that supposedly made them unfit for civic participation” (6). As Douglass frequently emphasized, private happiness was not equally protected: individual achievement often didn’t count within a society that called itself “democratic” and organized itself through race, class, gender, and regional hierarchies. Political, social, and economic exclusions continued challenging and limiting the nation’s officially stated equalitarian aims. Indeed, the question of race carried the nation into Civil War. Two novels published in that war’s immediate aftermath take up the struggle of democratic cultures and the problem of the United States’ ascriptive exclusions. These stories counter the insistence on individual representativeness and heroism in Emerson and even Douglass to suggest instead – only somewhat less narrowly – that the nation’s most important political struggles for equality take place on a local and even intimate scale: in workplaces, on neighborhood streets, and within the family. Like Douglass, Anna Dickinson explored how racism warped and perversely misrepresented black citizens and slaves, probing how whites’ attitudes change when they

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discover someone they admire is black (if white enough to pass). Her historical romance, What Answer? (1868), set amidst the Civil War, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, and the storming of Fort Wagner by a Black Infantry regiment in 1864, centers on the burgeoning love between Willie Surrey, the only child of wellto-do parents, and Francesca Ercildoune, a universally admired young woman who is, unknown to most in her social circle, the daughter of a quadroon father and white mother. Dickinson’s plot explores how a range of whites, from poor immigrant Irish workers to some of New York’s and Philadelphia’s most privileged elite, respond to situations that test their moral mettle, and she delineates the struggles and race pride that inform the actions of the novel’s black characters. Dickinson foregrounds how class anxieties play into the social reproduction of racism when she has the Irish laborer, Jim Given, bring a petition on behalf of his nearly 300 coworkers to Willie, his boss’s son. The petition threatens a strike to protest the promotion of Abram Franklin, a young African American bookkeeper. Jim, who is resolute in his commitment to maintaining white supremacy in this episode, will later change his mind as he interacts with slaves as a result of his Union service during the Civil War. Dickinson counterpoints Jim’s change of heart, though, with a collage of scenes that feature a drunken Irish coal heaver, who endeavors to have a Black Union soldier dumped off the trolley they’re riding; Surrey’s wealthy parents disinheriting him when they discover that he wants to marry a black woman; and, perhaps most poignantly, the lynching of Franklin during the Draft Riots. Dickinson doesn’t try to pretend that an individual’s change of heart will change the world, any more than she sees abolition or even war as producing the necessary changes. But her novel, featuring the developing interracial friendships and alliances of an array of characters, insists that even the most banal interpersonal exchanges might produce crucial transformations that lead governmentally empowered whites to help fight for social justice for all. In another, perhaps more ambitious postwar historical romance, Rebecca Harding Davis poses a similar analysis. Waiting for the Verdict (1867) more self-consciously forwards an argument about democratic change on the home front. Its backdrop is the threatened breakdown of national community in the Civil War. Her plot relies on the model of historical romance, interweaving and intermarrying characters from Alabama, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. Conflicts and desire emerge around social difference: characters create and destroy relationships, seek each other out, and disagree in ways that challenge them to become more aware of how exclusions of class, race, citizenship, and gender affect those they love. Davis simultaneously uses and critiques the romance form, infusing it with a realist countersensibility. This novel’s “social realism” attempts to imagine democracy socially as disagreement, and not its resolution in “consensus.” In other words, it explores conflicts and their limited resolutions between ordinary, limited, and frequently unsympathetic citizens. In this world, there is no possible unity because no one can “stand for” the good of the whole. Instead, Davis offers us at least a gesture toward a different kind of democratic literature and political understanding, one that in substance and style repudiates any possible

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“consensus” narrative, all the while insisting on the democratic good of a functionally discordant but still substantive community. The central plot turns around two sets of “mismatched” couples whose stories occupy the bulk of the novel, and one well-matched couple (the married and enslaved Annie and Nathan) whose efforts to reunite form much of its backdrop. The first mismatched couple is Ross Burley, a girl who grows up in abject poverty in Philadelphia, who develops class solidarity and a (not always antiracist) commitment to abolition, and Garrick Randolph, a weak-willed and selfishly romantic Kentucky native who impulsively casts his lot with the Union cause, and who sells a family slave “down the river” to protect his inheritance. In the second mismatched couple, we find the mysterious Dr. Broderip – a renowned surgeon, educated in France, who was well admired among the social elite of Philadelphia, but whose moodiness makes him socially remote – who falls in love with Margaret Conrad, the daughter of a blind minister, who is characterized by her absolute inflexibility of opinion. One of these opinions has to do with her belief – even in the context of her abolitionism – in an unbridgeable difference between blacks and whites, expressed as her absolute repulsion from blacks. The conflict between these two lovers emerges when Broderip painfully decides, late in the war, publicly to acknowledge the secret of his past: aided by white benefactors, he has been passing and is “in reality” Nathan’s brother and James Strebling’s escaped slave “Sip.” Margaret renounces him immediately; he enlists to lead a black regiment; and he dies at the end of the war from injuries sustained leading troops into Richmond, having just been released from a prisoner camp. In its multiple plots, Waiting for the Verdict rebuts the representative idealism of Emerson’s transcendentalist self-culture. Indeed, the novel refuses to offer even a marginal but wise character: all are flawed and limited by their own experiences and habits of perception. Davis extends this strategy to her characters’ appearance, all depicted as average and even ugly – except in the eyes of those who love them best. Every character operates fully as a multivalent, rich, and limited subject. Davis’s dogged insistence on the productive value of their differences and limitations denies power to the ideal of the singular Representative who can stand for the good of the whole. Rather, she insists that the most important forces for democratic political change come not from the halls of Congress or the office of the President, but in daily interactions at work, on the streets, and at home. Dickinson’s and Davis’s novels push back against the “individual” democracy forwarded by Emerson, and adapted by Whitman and Douglass, to insist on interpersonal democracy. Quite differently from the self-sufficiency embraced by these betterknown (and more carefully studied) male writers, Davis and Dickinson contend that every character is a limited actor, and that it takes many different people working together to produce an equalitarian society. In their vision, the nation’s commonwealth depends both on an independence and interdependence that are produced more meaningfully in close spaces of domestic, labor, and social exchange than by government action.

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Conclusion: Democracy In the aftermath of Civil War, newly freed African-descended Americans took up the “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” motto of the young Republican Party with their own demand for “forty acres and a mule” – but their appeal past the end of Reconstruction fell on deaf white ears. The launch of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan coordinated with expanding Indian Wars in the West and the resettlement of defeated nations onto reservations. The Homestead Act (1862) encouraged white settlement of lands seized from resettled Indians and ignited a new round of economic expansion both at home and, soon, overseas. The completion of transcontinental railroads and communication networks accelerated the extraction of natural resources through mining and timbering, a second industrial revolution, and the expansion of population, markets, and corporate power that ushered the United States into the Gilded Age. At the end of the nineteenth century, new conflicts between common laborers, farmers, and robber baron corporate heads and bankers yielded new political forces like Populism and Progressivism as the United States entered its second century. Just at that moment, one of the United States’ most esteemed figures, Henry Adams, published a withering assessment of the nation’s experiment with the people’s sovereignty and representative government. In Democracy: An American Novel (1880), set in the aftermath of the Civil War, the failure of radical reconstruction, and a time of widening wealth gaps between the many and the few that were already producing bitter protests and strikes, Adams probed the nation’s representative system for answers. Turning away from the play of local traditions and clash of regional cultures that animate writers from Brackenridge to Kirkland; from the nobility of civic self-culture probed so carefully by Emerson, Whitman, and Douglass; or local aspects of daily life in which Dickenson and Davis locate democratic work, Adams focused rather on the grand machinery of federal democratic government – and finds it definitively lacking. The novel centers on Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, a wealthy young widow, who takes her sister Sibyl to spend a season in Washington, DC, searching for a meaning she has been unable to find in her extensive reading, in her travels, in her philanthropic work, or even in the New York society in which she circulates. In the capital, she hopes to understand her Americanness, to see the clash of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces of government and the machinery of society at work. (18)

Madeleine starts in the Senate Gallery, where she is inspired by the power of democratic oratory of senator Silas P. Ratcliffe, “the Prairie Giant of Peonia, the Favorite Son of Illinois.” Her acquaintances describe him as a “great statesman,” notable, the narrator slyly observes, for the “smoothness of his manipulation” (90). Silas, for his part, is mesmerized by Madeleine, and she – no longer interested in love past the

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death of both husband and child, but tugged by appeals to woman’s “goodness” and philanthropic obligation – is soon captivated by Ratcliffe, who calculatingly offers her the mission of being his political guiding moral force as he maneuvers her toward accepting his marriage proposal. As Madeleine is drawn deeper into the “eddying dance of democracy” (55), she becomes more and more disillusioned by Washington society and government alike. The cabinet members, congressmen, and ambassadors she circulates among are not motivated by selflessness and a commitment to the common good, but rather by egotism, mindless party loyalty, and gross ambition. Washington, as it develops under her observation, is crowded with “swarms” of “simple-minded exhibitions of human nature; men and women curiously out of place, whom it would be cruel to ridicule and ridiculous to weep over,” with politicians who can hardly pay intelligible lip service to democracy, with presidents who are only a “horrid warning to ambition” (54–5). For Madeleine, the representatives are as crass and debased as those they represent. She generalizes from Ratcliffe to the representative system, concluding that those in power talk about “virtue and vice as a man who is colorblind talks about red and green,” speculating that “politics” causes “this atrophy of moral sense by disuse” (182). Ultimately, Madeleine resolves to leave the “business of democratic government,” which she has discovered to be “noting more than government of any other kind,” for the “true democracy of her life, her paupers and her prisons, her schools and her hospitals” (176). But the novel does not unequivocally endorse Madeleine’s view; rather, the narrator observes that “the bystander who looked on this scene with a wider knowledge of facts might have found entertainment in another view of the subject, that is to say, the guilelessness of Madeleine Lee” (182). Democracy thus deprives the reader of even Madeleine’s noble conclusions, offering rather a splintered raft of realpolitik without an oar of idealism. Exhausted by the conflicts and compromises that wracked the nation from the mid-nineteenth century, Adams, like many other writers of his generation, looked away from the resilient cultures of democracy that still lived in local cultures, if not perhaps in the nation’s Capitol and its formal representative government. Brotherhood and community have entirely vanished in this story; even domestic relationships (excepting perhaps sisterhood) are portrayed as manipulative and competitive. Adams’s novel presages a significant narrowing in the nation’s democratic imaginary. If the common people of the early nation envisioned government as something the people come together to do, Adams offers government as an institutionalized (and corruptive) force decisively beyond the influence of ordinary people. Washington, DC – its federal institutions and its governing culture – is “popular sovereignty.” In “democracy,” now a geographical-institutional site that guards the barrier between those (representatives) with power and those (citizens) who are simply acted upon or left alone by government, there is no basis for public service other than an unquenchable rage for (or against) power. Anyone who dreams otherwise, like Madeleine, is a credible fool. Adams’s novel does not, however, end the proverbial story. Corporate power coordinated with industrialized government in the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age,

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and their grabs for power at the expense of ordinary workers, would eventually galvanize new local democratic movements – the Populists, whose cooperatives burgeoned across the South and Midwest in the 1890s, and the urban Progressive movement of the new century. Writers would again be inspired by these competing cultures, the necessity of which has never been eliminated by the federal government that the Framers promised would represent them. Rather, democratic cultures would continue to compete and clash, at their worst producing conflict, intolerance, and even violence, and at their best inspiring new democratic visions, activism, and demands in the new century.

References and Further Reading Adams, Henry. Democracy: An American Novel. 1880. New York: Meridian, 1994. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. 1963. New York: Penguin, 1965. Bird, Robert Montgomery. Nick of the Woods. 1838. Ed. Curtis Dahl. New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1967. Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Brackenridge, Hugh Henry. Modern Chivalry. Ed. Claude M. Newlin. New York: American Book Company, 1937. Castiglia, Christopher. Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Waiting for the Verdict. 1867. Ed. Donald Dingledine. Albany, NY: College and University Press, 1995. Dickinson, Anna E. What Answer? 1868. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003. Douglass, Frederick. Selected Speeches and Writings. Ed. Philip S. Foner. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. Formisano, Ronald P. For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Fritz, Christian G. American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition before the

Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Grimsted, David. American Mobbing, 1828–1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Holton, Woody. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Horwitz, Morton J. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Humphries, David, et al. The Anarchiad: A New England Poem. 1786–7. Ed. Luther Riggs (1861) and William Bottorff. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967. Kirkland, Caroline. A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Ed. Sandra A. Zagarell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Lause, Mark A. Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Simms, William Gilmore. Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama. Ed. John Caldwell Guilds. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995. Sklansky, Jeffrey. The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Whitman, Walt. Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1996. Zagarri, Rosemary. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

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American Literature and Law Brook Thomas

The United States is famously a country ruled by laws, not by men, a place where, supposedly, no individual is above the law. In the year of the country’s founding, Thomas Paine distinguished the United States from Britain and its monarchy by declaring, “In America the law is king” (I:29). It is, therefore, not surprising that many works of American literature deal with the legal system in one way or another. We have courtroom scenes or trials from Wieland (1798) to “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (1831) to “A Man Without a Country” (1863) to The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) to Native Son (1940) to The Crucible (1953) to The Book of Daniel (1971). Our fictional lawyers include the narrator in “Bartleby” (1853), Basil Ransom in The Bostonians (1886), William Faulkner’s Gavin Stevens, Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera (1956), and Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). We have judges of varying virtue from James Fenimore Cooper’s Judge Temple to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Judge Pyncheon to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Judge Clayton to Charles W. Chesnutt’s Judge Straight to Robert Penn Warren’s Judge Irwin. But even though the relationship between law and American literature is longstanding, the nature of that relation has changed over time. Various legal documents and works by lawyers were once considered part of American literature. In Rufus Griswold’s 1847 The Prose Writers of America, there are six selections from US Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story and only four from Hawthorne. The 1918 Cambridge History of American Literature devotes an entire chapter to Daniel Webster and another to “Publicists and Orators, 1800–1850.” The second chapter discusses John Marshall’s great opinions and Story’s and James Kent’s legal treatises. If in the course of the twentieth century a romantic and postromantic view of literature led to the exclusion

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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in American literature of what Donald Davie calls a “distinct and ancient literary genre, political speculation and commentary and political oratory” (190), one of the groundbreaking studies of American literature and the law, Robert Ferguson’s Law and Letters in American Culture (1984), restored to our attention a “now-forgotten configuration of law and letters that dominated American literary aspirations from the Revolution until the fourth decade of the nineteenth century” (5). Ferguson looks at both lawyers such as Thomas Jefferson, Kent, Story, and Webster and writers of fiction trained in the law, such as Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. This powerful tradition of legal men of letters depended on a Ciceronian view of legal education. As Story put it in his inaugural address when appointed to the Harvard Law School, every student needed to “addict himself to the study of philosophy, of rhetoric, of history, and of human nature” and to be in “full possession of the general literature of ancient and modern times” (527, 529). If this configuration survived in the South with prominent writers trained in the law, such as John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, Sidney Lanier, and A.B. Longstreet, it became victim to increased disciplinary specialization in the North. Late in his life Herman Melville remembers Rufus Choate, whose eloquence grew out of careful study of Cicero and other classical orators. “Rufus Choate, the Boston advocate, when inspired to his best before an audience, how he exhilarated and elevated and transported his hearers. But he is gone; and all of those fireworks of elfish passion and wit, where are they?” (“The Marquis” 400). Nonetheless, figures of the American Renaissance still had important connections with the law. Melville’s father-in-law was for 30 years the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. One of Hawthorne’s closest friends was the noted lawyer George Hillard, the law partner of Charles Sumner, who forged an intimate alliance with Frederick Douglass. Likewise, Stowe relied heavily on the counsel of lawyers, while even Emily Dickinson knew the law from her father and brother. In the postbellum period, the separation of the two disciplines widened with the heightened professionalization of both. Even so, some important writers trained in the law continued to make their mark such as Albion W. Tourgée, Thomas Dixon, Thomas Nelson Page, and Chesnutt. The twentieth century saw even more of a professional separation of the two fields, although once again some figures were trained in both, such as Wallace Stevens. Despite the increased separation of the two disciplines, there were various efforts to maintain connections between them. John Wigmore published a list of legal novels in the 1908 Illinois Law Review, revising it in 1922. In 1925, Justice Benjamin Cardozo published an essay on “Law and Literature” in the Yale Review. In 1960, Ephraim London published anthologies of both “Law as Literature” and “Law in Literature.” In 1962, Perry Miller edited a collection entitled The Legal Mind in America from Independence to the Civil War. Even so, the interdisciplinary study of the two took off in earnest only in the last three decades. There were three different but at times overlapping developments. First, in law schools a number of professors worked to counter the professional specialization of

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legal education by emphasizing a twentieth-century version of the Ciceronian tradition. Literature was an obvious place to turn. One of the inaugural moves was James Boyd White’s textbook for legal writing, The Legal Imagination (1973), which included works of literature. A professor of classics, English, and law, White was joined by Richard Weisberg, a law professor with a PhD in comparative literature, who called attention to the importance of Wigmore’s list of legal novels and in 1982 worked with Jean-Pierre Barricelli to write an article on “Literature and the Law” for an MLA volume on Interrelations of Literature. The scholarship of pioneers like White and Weisberg and the law and literature courses they designed for law students were by no means confined to American literature and the law. On the contrary, few works of American literature appeared. Instead, the emphasis was frequently on world classics, like Antigone, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and The Trial. Second, in both law schools and literature departments, there was a heightened interest in theory, for the most part continental theory. In law schools, some of those most interested were members of the critical legal studies movement concerned that legal education not be simply a legitimation of the political status quo. Since at the time literature departments were frequently the clearinghouses for poststructuralist thought, many of these legal scholars read literary theorists. At the same time, some literary scholars calling for a political turn in criticism saw the law as a discipline with much more direct influence on politics than literature. For them, the work of critical legal studies was a fruitful place to explore the political implications of various new theories. These theories, it was found, could be profitably applied to interpretations of legal documents as well as to works of literature. Deconstruction attracted special interest. One of the most influential essays for legal scholars was Jack Balkin’s “Deconstructive Practice and Legal Theory” in Yale Law Journal (1987). Also of interest was Derrida’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s 1921 “Critique of Violence” in “The Mystical Foundations of Authority” (1989), which has spawned a series of commentaries that continue to today. But deconstruction was not the only topic of interest. In Baltimore, Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels, who were at The Johns Hopkins University, played pickup basketball games with Kenneth Abraham of the University of Maryland Law School. The result was Abraham’s 1980 “Statutory Interpretation and Literary Theory: Some Common Concerns of an Unlikely Pair,” as well as Fish’s and Michaels’s forays into debates about the interpretation of legal as well as literary texts. Equally important was the application of narrative theory to the law. When legal scholar Robert Cover insisted on the importance of narrative in shaping legal norms in “Nomos and Narrative” (1983), he participated in and helped to launch analysis of the narrative component of the law. These two developments led to the characterization of law and literature as the study of either law in literature or law as literature, the titles of London’s two 1960 collections. The third development was within literature departments. Many literary scholars sensed the need to move beyond formalism and what was perceived to be a formalist tendency in theoretical analysis. The general turn to history in literary studies attracted

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historicists old and new within American literary studies, and some, if by no means all, saw engagement with legal history as a way to give us a new sense of American literature’s relation to American culture in general. For them, the work of legal historians was as important as the work by other legal scholars in law and literature. In 1983, literary critics Carl Smith and John McWilliams combined with legal historian Maxwell Bloomfield to produce separate essays in a collection called Law and American Literature. The next year, Ferguson’s groundbreaking book came out. The same year, Critical Inquiry published my essay on “Melville’s Legal Fictions.” Indeed, the mid-1980s saw a flurry of activity in all three areas. 1984 also saw the publication of Weisberg’s The Failure of the Word and White’s When Words Lose Their Meaning. 1985 brought us Milner Ball’s Lying Down Together and Robin West’s law review essay that used Kafka to challenge Richard Posner’s method of law and economics. Posner responded in 1986, reviewed Weisberg’s book in 1987, and published his own Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation the next year. Also, in 1988 literary critic Steven Mailloux and law professor Sanford Levinson edited Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutical Reader. The two had met at the School of Literary Criticism and Theory in 1982 and decided to bring together a number of theoretical pieces dealing with shared interpretive controversies in both disciplines. The productive interaction these three developments could produce was on display at a 1987 conference on Billy Budd at Washington and Lee University Law School. It brought together, among others, Weisberg, Posner, West, Michaels, Mailloux, myself, and Melville scholar Harrison Hayford. Papers from that conference appeared in the first edition of Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (1989), which is now called simply Law & Literature. About the same time, the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities began, and a number of years later came Law, Culture, and the Humanities, whose title signals the emphasis on cultural studies in the humanities and the turn to culture by some former members of the law and society movement. With professional journals and professional organizations, a law and literature movement was well underway. Nonetheless, differences between the three developments remained. Studies of law and American literature are primarily historical studies. Yet in an essay on “Law as Literature,” Levinson had asked, “Are cases simply historical fragments which should be studied for insight into the ideology of the time[?]” (386). Although sounding ahistorical, this question actually poses an important challenge to historically based literary studies. After all, if a law has not been repealed or a decision overruled, it still has effect. Similarly, we read works of literature from the past in the present. Do we do so only to learn about the past, or do those works still speak to us today? That question suggests that historical studies of law and American literature should perhaps consider not only the time when a work was produced (in Billy Budd’s case, the late nineteenth century) or the time its action represents (in Billy Budd’s case, the late eighteenth century) but also the time of its reception, including moments from when it was published up to the present day. Perhaps it was no accident that Levinson teamed with Mailloux to coedit a volume, since Mailloux

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is an advocate of reception studies, a development in literary studies that has not been fully exploited by work on American literature and law. Likewise, those working in the general field of law and literature are frequently more concerned with philosophical questions about the nature of justice than with historical analysis. Thus they are more prone to pay careful attention to philosophers’ uses of literature. To be sure, the law and literature work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum is known by most Americanists working in the field, and Wai Chee Dimock’s Residues of Justice (1996) draws on philosophers such as Kant to analyze nineteenth-century American fiction. Nonetheless, not many Americanists seem aware that “Bartleby” has become the literary work of choice for continental political philosophers. Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben, Zizek, and Negri have all provided provocative readings of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.” At the same time, it is fair to say that none of these eminent figures cite the excellent law and literature work on “Bartleby” by Americanists. In fact, even those who see themselves as general specialists in law and literature frequently ignore some of the most interesting work done on literature and the law by Americanists. That exclusion is not confined to those teaching at law schools. In her 2005 PMLA essay on the state of the law and literature studies, “Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real,” Julie Stone Peters does not cite one work devoted to the study of law and American literature. Whereas such exclusions are by no means inevitable, what enabled the cooperative exchange at the 1987 Washington and Lee conference was the focus on Billy Budd, which is a canonical work both in American literary studies and in general studies of law and literature. One of the most important developments in the study of American literature and the law has been the expanded range of literary works open to this interdisciplinary analysis. Especially noteworthy are works having to do with race and racial relations. Jon Christian Suggs has convincingly argued that the African American literary tradition cannot be understood without knowledge of the legal issues facing black Americans, whether the laws of slavery, the Civil Rights Amendments, Jim Crow laws, or rulings in the era after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). From the poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the tradition of slave autobiographies to the antilynching campaign to the Harlem Renaissance to the black protest novel to the works of Toni Morrison, African American writers have written about conditions in large part determined by the law at the same time that their works can give us a better sense of the experiential effects of the legal system on black lives. If Douglass’s various autobiographies help make the abstractions of legal codes of slavery come alive, we also get a fuller appreciation of Douglass the writer if we not only focus on his responses to slavery but also pay attention to his comments on the legal issues of the eras of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction. Ralph Ellison is not as obvious a figure as Douglass for law and literature analysis, but an entire issue of the Oklahoma City University Law Review (2001) was devoted to a symposium on “Ralph Ellison and the Law,” including analysis of his response to the Tulsa race riot, his understanding of the laws of segregation, and his engagement with the Civil Rights Movement. Underlying Invisible Man (1952) is what Gregg Crane

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calls a “constitutional faith,” a “hybrid transcendental and pragmatist tradition in American aesthetic and jurisprudential thought” (“Ralph Ellison’s” 104) that is flexible enough to adapt the Constitution to varying circumstances while idealistic enough to insist on basic principles of justice. Crane’s own work in Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (2002) shows that the legal issues of concern for African American writers are also a fruitful resource for other writers as well. In that book, Crane identifies a tradition of lawyers and writers, black and white, who employed a higher law approach to the law to work for emancipation and civil rights. It includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sumner, Stowe, Douglass, Mark Twain, Chesnutt, and Moorfield Storey. But writers and lawyers supporting African American rights are not the only ones who lend themselves to a law and literature approach. In Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (2007), Jeannine DeLombard traces how developments in print culture allowed both proponents of abolition and defenders of slavery to take their case to the “court of public opinion.” Likewise, literary apologists for segregation such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon cannot be fully understood without attention to their understanding of the law. Law is as formative in the development of the Asian American literary tradition as it is in the African American tradition. The middle chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980) is “The Laws,” a reminder of the central role laws played in the lives of Chinese in this country. Most obvious are the various Chinese Exclusion Acts that, with a very few exceptions, prohibited those of Chinese ancestry from entering the country. These acts needed to be enforced, leading to the entire administrative structure controlling immigration that persists today. Lisa Lowe in Immigrant Acts (1996) uses works of literature to document the repressive effects of the state’s regulation of immigration. But if the lives of Chinese were determined by repressive laws and administrative structures of this sort, the Chinese were also determined not to be simply victims of the law. Thus, as Kingston documents, they did not accept the system as they found it, but learned to use positive provisions in the Constitution to alter laws and put the force of the law on their side. In doing so, they changed the law not only for themselves but also for all Americans. For instance, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1887), they convinced the US Supreme Court to rule that, according to the Fourteenth Amendment, if discriminatory intent can be inferred from unfair administration, a law that seems fair can be unconstitutional. As a result, the NAACP appealed to Yick Wo in its efforts to have separate but equal laws declared unconstitutional. Similarly, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) ruled that, even though Chinese were not allowed to be naturalized citizens, the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed birthright citizenship to a man of Chinese ancestry born within the territorial limits of the country. As a result, today anyone born in the United States, no matter who his or her parents are, is an American citizen. As important as such cases are, they point to complications that arise in any attempt to give a thorough account of the relation between American literature and law. Frequently attorneys for the Chinese were highly paid corporate lawyers, whose

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employers benefited from cheap Chinese labor. Indeed, one of the attorneys for Wong Kim Ark worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the same company vilified in one of the first major Latino works of literature, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885). Dealing with the failure of the United States to honor the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as well as legislative and judicial corruption, this novel invites exploration into the legal status of the former residents of Alto California. At the same time, Ruiz de Burton’s depiction of Native Americans in this novel and her earlier Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) is far from flattering. Indeed, Native Americans have their own complicated legal history, from Justice Marshall’s declaration in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) that tribes are “domestic dependent nations” (20) to ongoing questions about native sovereignty, a history influencing and at times influenced by Native American writers. In general, then, the expansion of the literary canon to include literature by people of color led to analysis of issues of race by those within the field of American literature and the law at the same time that their scholarship introduced new works and issues to be studied. The concern with race in studies of American literature has had its counterpart in law schools with the rise of Critical Race Studies. Extending analysis of narrative and the law, members of Critical Race Studies argue that the American legal system is structured in such a way that it does not allow the stories of people of color to be heard. As a result, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Patricia Williams have produced personal narratives to tell stories about race and the law that expose the legal system’s exclusions. The idea that there are untold stories of the law did not originate with Critical Race Studies. Feminist scholars of law and literature have long argued that the legal system does not adequately listen to concerns of women. As with those addressing issues of race, the work of these scholars was enabled by the expansion of the canon at the same time that they helped to introduce new works to study. There is, for instance, perhaps no better example of the untold story of the law than Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) in which two women, who are neighbors of a lonely prairie housewife accused of killing her husband, survey the couple’s kitchen and detect evidence explaining the motive for the crime that the experiential worldview of both the sheriff and the district attorney keeps them from recognizing. The story ends with the woman being acquitted by the “jury of her peers,” as her neighbors decide to suppress this crucial evidence that could lead to her conviction. Feminist scholars also focus on how works of literature dramatize the legal status of women and how an understanding of their legal status gives us insight into various works of literature. For example, the legal inequalities built into the marriage contract opens up analysis of works as different as Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Revolt of ‘Mother’ ” (1890), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). For gays, the issue is not so much historical inequalities within the marriage contract as the right to marry at all. Queer theorists have a special interest in the legal

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right to privacy because of its importance in cases like Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which refused to apply a constitutional right to privacy for homosexual acts, and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which within limits did. In Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (2001) Deborah Nelson provides a provocative reading of Paul Monette’s Love Alone (1990) and Bowers. Queer theorists are, however, not the only ones interested in the right to privacy. Nelson also compares changes in the legal concept of privacy with the construction of the private in post-World War II confessional poets such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman. Literary scholars intent on drawing on the right to privacy need to distinguish between two different, if interrelated, rights. First, there is a constitutional right to privacy that protects private persons from intrusions by the government. This right was first created in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), when the Supreme Court ruled that a state law banning the use of contraceptives violated the privacy of married couples. It gets extended to protect a woman’s right to choose in Roe v. Wade (1972) and is evoked in Bowers and Lawrence. These decisions are indebted to Justice Louis Brandeis’s articulation of the right in his dissent in the wiretapping case of Olmstead v. United States (1928), a dissent James Boyd White so admires that he includes it in The Legal Imagination. Justice Brandeis is the link between the constitutional right to privacy and the other version of the right. In 1890, he and Samuel Warren wrote a Harvard Law Review essay that articulated a tort right to privacy, which protects individuals from intrusions from other private entities, not from the government. They were especially concerned with the rise of a culture of publicity in which the press and others threatened the sanctity of what they called an “inviolate personality” (211). This creation of a tort right to privacy lends itself to productive analysis of The Bostonians, The Aspern Papers (1888), and The Reverberators (1888) by Henry James, who shared the two lawyers’ concern about the new regime of publicity. In The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2005), Stacey Margolis explores the concerns of privacy in other writers of the time. Warren and Brandeis’s argument has an additional relevance to studies of law and literature. Even though there was no explicit mention of a right to privacy in the common law – or in the Constitution – the two claimed that it had a common law origin in various copyright cases. If people have a right to publish, they argued, they also have the right to withhold information from the public. Copyright is, of course, one way in which the law can have a direct effect on the production of literature. For instance, any study of the reception and marketing of nineteenth-century works needs to take into consideration the lack of an international copyright treaty for most of the period, just as authors, like Twain and James, lobbied to alter existing law. Copyright also allows the exploration of legal and aesthetic notions of authorship, and some of the essays in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi’s The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (1998) have American topics. Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003) explores the period’s resistance to tightening control over intellectual property.

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Another area of the law that can have a direct effect on the production of literature is censorship. Because of some highly publicized trials, such as that of Ulysses (1922), much focus has been on charges of obscenity, the topic of Frances Dore’s The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (2005). But censorship of political speech is also addressed in works like The Crucible (1953) and Harold Frederic’s neglected The Copperhead (1893), both of which defend freedom of speech; and Thomas Dixon’s play about Lincoln, A Man of the People (1920), and George Ford Milton’s bestselling Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column (1942), which evoke the example of Lincoln to justify crackdowns on civil liberties in World War I and World War II, respectively. Because of the notorious gag act in Congress and efforts to limit the distribution of abolitionist literature, the history of freedom of speech is closely connected to debates over slavery. Indeed, a major change in public opinion about abolitionism came in 1837, when an angry mob in Alton, Illinois, attacked abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy’s press, killing the newspaper editor and minister in the process. Many people who did not support abolitionism were appalled by the violent measures to deprive him of the right to publish his opinions. Public opinion was in part swayed by an outpouring of poetry written about the incident. There are numerous other areas of the law worthy of study. Laura Korobkin looks at the role of storytelling, legal and otherwise, in famous cases of adultery, including the Beecher affair, in Criminal Conversations: Stories of Adultery and Love in Late NineteenthCentury America (1998). Nan Goodman turns to torts for Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America (1998). In Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, The Civil War, and American Literature, 1852–1867 (2006), Deak Nabers offers what he calls a literary history of the Fourteenth Amendment. Property, labor, and inheritance law are other productive areas to explore. For instance, the plots of Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851), Melville’s Pierre (1851), Rebecca Harding Davis’s Waiting for the Verdict (1868), Tourgée’s Bricks without Straw (1880), Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) all hinge on complications of inheritance, which often call attention to the disinheritance of Native Americans, African Americans, and others. In contrast, Page’s Red Rock (1898) draws on considerable legal detail to have a land dispute resolved in favor of genteel Southern families whose estates were fraudulently taken away by carpetbaggers and scalawags. In recent years, legal scholars and lawyers have joined literary scholars in expanding the range of works and topics open to legal analysis. To cite a few examples, in Law and the Company We Keep (1995), Aviam Soifer uses the works of William Faulkner to explore the law’s relation to racial violence; Allen Boyer details connections between The Great Gatsby (1925), the Black Sox scandal, and the law of high finance; and Alfred L. Brophy provides perhaps the best accounts we have of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of the law in both Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). Likewise, work on American literature and the law is not confined to the geographic boundaries of the United States. Outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship has been produced by European American studies scholars, such as Peter

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Schneck, who analyses the use of evidence with special attention to Wieland (1798), and Helle Porsdam, whose Legally Speaking (1999) includes chapters on Tom Wolfe, Scott Turow, and William Gaddis. If these are some of the topics, books, and authors drawing the attention of scholars, the question remains: what is the relation between works of literature and the law? The safest answer to that question is that there are many different relations. There is, however, one that people frequently evoke that I find unproductive. Works of literature are often said to reflect the workings of the legal system or the legal ideology of a certain period. The reflection model is limited for work in law and literature for the same reason it is limited for historical criticism in general. If all a work of literature does is reflect some aspect of history, legal or otherwise, we may as well go directly to history or the law. Literary works are never simply a reflection of history; they are always a mediated account. Indeed, we would be wise to keep in mind the words of Tourgée describing the difficulties of a lawyer writing fiction. His With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys (1890) is set in a large law firm, allowing him to tell a variety of stories dramatizing the life of lawyers and the law united by the personalities and activities of the firm. It is, in other words, a precursor to the numerous television series set in law firms. In his preface, Tourgée notes that the danger of writing about the law is, in the case of the layman, lack of knowledge; on the part of the practitioner, too great technicality. The layman’s ideas of the lawyer’s life are usually absurdly incorrect, and his notions of legal procedure ludicrously inexact. On the other hand, the lawyer who enters the field of fiction is in constant danger of giving too much attention to the niceties of practice or demonstration of theory, which, though they may be enjoyable to his brethren of the bar, are to a degree incomprehensible and wearisome to the general reader. (6)

Too often, therefore, legal fiction turns upon “miracles performed by the phenomenal practitioner who manipulates courts, juries, and witnesses” even though “legal miracles are not abundant” (6). If we want to know about the actual practices of the law, lawyers, and judges, we should go to the law. Rather than arguing that works of literature reflect the law, it makes more sense to claim that a number of them respond to specific legal issues. For instance, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) clearly responded to the legal institution of slavery. Many works that respond to the law protest its injustices. But not all. If the works of Langston Hughes and Lillian Smith in different ways protested the regime of Jim Crow, works by many others – even, arguably, a novel like the Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) – helped legitimate a world of separate but equal. Our analysis of such works is not complete until we explore not only what they say about issues like slavery and segregation, but also how they say what they say. Even if works respond to legal issues rather than reflect a preexisting legal order or ideology, we need to acknowledge their mediated status, which means paying careful attention to

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their form. One example is Edgar Dryden’s demonstration of how the narrator’s comment in Billy Budd that “truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges” (128) is formally embodied by the last three sections of the book, which offer three different accounts of the book’s action. In my own work, I have tried to show how, by presenting the interaction among characters according to a horizontal, not a vertical, ordering principle, works of literary realism evoke the “promise of contract,” which, rejecting a world of status relations, imagines free and equal individuals taking responsibility for the uncoerced promises and agreements they make with one another without transcendental sanction (10–13). In responding to legal issues or controversies, some rhetorically effective works can have a significant influence on legal debates, as Crane has shown Emerson had on racial issues through figures such as Sumner and Storey. Authors of other works often hope to have an influence, although they are not always as successful as they would like. Melville, for instance, hoped that White-Jacket (1850) would influence debates about corporal punishment in the US Navy, but the effect was minimal. Even lack of desired influence can be a fruitful object of analysis, however, helping us to understand something about both the work of literature and the legal climate in which it was produced. At the same time, some effects are not immediate. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) seemed to have no influence on debates about the race question when it was published, but was frequently evoked during the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. If some works of literature can influence politicians, politicians can also influence the production of works of literature. Sumner, for instance, worked closely with his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when he was composing “The Building of the Ship” during the free soil controversy. When the author is a lawyer himself, the alliance works even more closely. In 1890, Tourgée included arguments in his novel Pactolus Prime that six years later he would use before the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which gave constitutional sanction to racial segregation within individual states. For Tourgée, in other words, the imaginative freedom of literature created a space for him to rehearse arguments that might or might not work in court. The possibility that works of literature can serve as rehearsals for legal arguments is one that needs more attention in studies of law and literature. And the rehearsal need not be confined to lawyer-authors like Tourgée. The “as if” nature of literary fictions allows readers to try out various positions on controversial issues about the law, to conduct internal debates, and, possibly, to adopt novel positions. Influence need not be direct. In an 1834 speech called “The Importance of Illustrating New England History by a Series of Romances Like the Waverley Novels,” the lawyer Rufus Choate evoked a famous quotation by the Scottish nationalist Andrew Fletcher, “I know a very wise man . . . [who] believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of the nation” (344). Shaping public opinion, including that of lawmakers and judges, works of literature can influence the cultural context in which laws are made and interpreted. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that generally works of literature do not

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have the same degree of influence on the general public today as they did in the days of Choate. Recognizing the beginnings of that change, Chesnutt has a character in The Marrow of Tradition proclaim, “The man who would govern a nation by writing its songs was a blethering [sic] idiot beside the fellow who can edit its newspaper dispatches” (83). My own work in relating law and literature follows from Cover’s claim, “No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning” (4–5). One way to understand the cultural narratives that give laws and legal institutions their meaning is to view them in conjunction with works of literature that more obviously than the law reveal the stories a culture tells about itself. Thus, I developed the method of “cross-examining” law and literature. Those cross-examinations make no claim that the law will unlock all the mysteries of works of literature or that literature will miraculously reveal the hidden workings of the law. But they can give us a perspective on aspects of American culture not available when the two disciplines are studied separately. When we cross-examine the American literary tradition with its legal tradition, a paradox presents itself: why, in a country in which law is supposedly king, do so many of its major works of literature raise questions about the justice of the law? Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) makes a case for principled resistance to unfair laws. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), not only does Hester Prynne seek fulfillment in violating the laws of adultery but also her antinomian streak challenges the legal foundations of Puritan society. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, in different ways, attack laws upholding slavery. In The Sport of the Gods (1902), Paul Laurence Dunbar tells the story of an African American falsely convicted of a crime to save the reputation of a white Southern family. An American Tragedy (1925) questions the ability of the judicial system to provide a fair outcome. The answer to this paradox is not, I think, that the authors of these works have lost complete faith in rule by law. What they do instead is dramatize the complexities that life in a society honoring rule by law entails. For instance, in Iola Leroy (1892) Frances Harper can endorse the belief that “[t]he great distinction between savagery and civilization is the creation and maintenance of law” (218), even though a character notes that the high percentage of African Americans in prison is due to “a partial administration of the law in meting out punishment to colored offenders” (255). Such complexities are most on display at the very limits of a legal system. I want to focus on two limiting situations. The first results from the fact that, as even the staunchest supporters of rule by law acknowledge, it cannot guarantee justice in all cases. A human-made institution, it is fallible. Nonetheless, if no one is supposed to be above the law, it seems to follow that no exceptions should be made for individual cases. But sometimes the particular circumstances of a case call out for an exception. In the Western world, the need to correct individual cases has been associated with the concept of equity. Aristotle defines equity as the “sort of justice that goes beyond written law” (81). Writing in the American context, Joseph Story claims that Aristotle’s notion of equity “must have a place in every rational system of justice”

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(8). But the status of equity in the United States is complicated. Colonies inherited courts of equity from Britain. In Britain, however, courts of equity, as an alternative system to common law, were associated with the Crown, as only the king was felt to have the authority to make exceptions to the law. That association caused skepticism in the new Republic, which had broken with the monarchy. Thus, in many states separate courts of equity were abolished or, as in New York with the Field Code of 1848, were merged with the legal system. Melville alludes to the 1848 Code in “Bartleby” when he has the narrator complain that he can no longer make the lucrative profit that he once could as a master of chancery. If the narrator’s self-interested comments show why there was good reason to do away with courts of equity, it can be argued that, in the absence of a formal institution of equity, one function of selective works of American literature is to point to the need for equitable remedies to the law, just as George Washington Cable argued that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1883 decision, declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional and denying African Americans needed legal protections, the nation needed to make a case for the freedman through an appeal to equity. But the problem with appeals to equity is that human beings do not have secure access to the higher law standard on which equitable appeals are supposedly based. Thus, in his response to Cable, the Southern segregationist Henry Grady argued that the truly equitable solution to the race problem was a system of separate but equal. One person’s appeal to equity can seem to another a case of special pleading. This dilemma is poignantly dramatized in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, written in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Chesnutt clearly felt the injustice of the legal system of separate but equal. He even provides a scene in a Jim Crow railroad car in which a black doctor is forced to sit in a car reserved for blacks that by no means has the same accommodations as the white car. Shortly thereafter, a specialist brought in from the North to help in an operation to save the life of a white supremacist’s son requests that the black doctor help with the procedure. But the boy’s father refuses to let Dr. Miller participate. When the specialist protests, saying that, as a matter of principle, professional considerations should trump prejudice, the family doctor responds, That states the case for Major Carteret. . . . He has certain principles, – call them prejudices, if you like, certain inflexible rules of conduct by which he regulates his life. One of these, which he shares with us all in some degree, forbids the recognition of the negro as a social equal. (71)

How do we tell the difference between prejudices and principles? If many works of literature point to the need, in specific cases, to provide an equitable remedy to verdicts rendered by the legal system, some adopt a transcendental point of view that assumes access to a higher law standard that can expose prejudice, while others adopt a point of view that forces readers to wrestle with the dilemma that Chesnutt’s Southern doctor poses to his Northern counterpart. Analysis of law and literature

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needs to be able to make such distinctions, and it can do so only by formal analysis of the literary works at hand. Which is not to say that content is unimportant. For instance, it is one thing to blame the legal system for an injustice; it is another to identify which aspect of the system is responsible. Is it the legislative branch for passing unfair laws, the executive branch for administering potentially fair laws unfairly, or the judicial branch for its interpretation of the laws? In The Squatter and the Don, a corrupt lawyer tells the story of two litigants in a lawsuit. One claims to have “on my side the law, the equity, the money, and the talent.” The other responds, “You have the law, the equity, the money, and the talent, but I have the Judge” (Ruiz de Burton 269). One reason that Billy Budd has canonical status in law and literature circles is because, even though it deals with a military trial, it invites such questions about all three branches. In combining the function of both administering and interpreting the law, Captain Vere shows the potential danger of not keeping executive and judicial roles separate. He also raises questions debated by countless critics as to whether he acts fairly in either capacity. Lying behind his actions, there is a larger question as to whether the mutiny act under which Billy is tried is itself fair. But Billy Budd is important for another reason. If, as much as any work, it forces readers to ask whether Billy’s special case calls for an equitable correction to the general application of the law, Billy’s execution points to the law’s complicated relation to violence. That relation brings us to another limiting situation. Captain Vere passionately believes in the forms, measured forms, of institutions that allow human beings to overcome their bestial nature and resolve conflicts through rule of law rather than through violence. Yet in order to protect those institutions, he has to wage a war, in the midst of which he evokes strict adherence to the rule by law to put Billy violently to death. Indeed, law’s capacity for violence is most obvious with the death penalty, and it is no accident that H. Bruce Franklin has productively linked Billy Budd with late nineteenth-century debates about capital punishment, and John Barton has done excellent work on nineteenth-century literature and debates about the death penalty, helping us to understand how the United States, which was once at the forefront of the movement to abolish capital punishment, is now so far behind other countries. In fact, in another novella Melville questions the law’s vaunted claim to be superior to violence in resolving conflicts. In Benito Cereno (1855), most readers are horrified by the violence committed by the rebellious slaves, who go so far as to hang the decaying body of the Spaniard Aranda from the ship as a mock figurehead, warning the other whites that if they resist they will “follow their leader.” Mixed with suggestions of possible cannibalism, this act seems to prove the barbarity of the Africans. Yet when the African leader Babo is legally executed, he is “dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule. . . . The body burned to ashes” and his head “fixed on a pole in the Plaza,” its bleached bones, like those of Aranda, put on display to command obedience (315). Violence is justified when backed by the authority of the law, but condemned as brutal and satanic when not. Benito Cereno would, therefore, seem to confirm Michel Foucault’s assertion,

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Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence. (150–1)

But if Benito Cereno seems to collapse the distinction between violence committed in the name of the law and violence committed outside its boundaries, the horrors of lynching that captured the attention of Ida B. Wells, Douglass, Chesnutt, and others suggest that the distinction might be worth maintaining after all. The horrors of lynching come not only from its violence but also from the fact that it takes place outside of legal channels. It is by no means a defense of the death penalty to acknowledge that an execution resulting from proper legal procedures is less horrifying than one conducted with no legal safeguards. Part of the doctrine that no one is above the law is the understanding that people do not have the right to take the law into their own hands. Indeed, compelling as Foucault’s criticism of the law’s use of violence may sound, there is a logical rationale for the state’s assumed monopoly on violence. To put the punishment of wrongdoers in the hands of the state while holding it accountable to a clearly prescribed set of legal procedures was, nineteenth-century anthropologists of the law argued, designed to stop endless cycles of vendetta and revenge when – as in lynchings – people take the law into their own hands. For instance, even though there is no physical violence in The Scarlet Letter, the heartless revenge that Chillingworth enacts on Dimmesdale affirms the importance of working within the law, even in a story fully recognizing how flawed the legal system at times can be. Giving the state a monopoly on violence may help to prevent lynchings and acts of revenge between private parties, but to what extent is violence justified as a response to unfair laws themselves? This question has been part of the nation’s heritage from its founding, which necessitated a violent rebellion in order to make law king. It has been treated in works as different as Douglass’s antislavery “The Heroic Slave” (1853), about a violent uprising on a slave ship; E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), which evokes Kleist’s famous Michael Kolhaus to explore the extent to which someone wronged by legal authorities has a right to respond violently; and Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1972), dealing with the Chicano Moratorium of August 29, 1970. Cases involving possible equitable corrections to the law and law’s relation to violence are frequently the topic of works labeled realistic. Such cases are not, however, representative of everyday practices of the law. They instead, as I have suggested, dramatize limiting situations in a system of rule by law. Because they could be decided many different ways and are not ideal for setting precedent, lawyers call them hard cases. If, as a legal proverb tells us, hard cases make bad law, they often make excellent works of literature. Transporting us to a world of “as if,” those works force readers to confront the complicated legal dilemmas they raise. If Abraham Lincoln wanted “reverence for the laws” to become the “political religion of the nation”

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(I:112), selected works of American literature can help us better understand what that religion entails.

References and Further Reading Aristotle. The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle. New York: Modern Library, 1954. Barton, John. “The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America.” REAL 22 (2004): 145–79. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia 30 US 1 (1831). Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901. Choate, Rufus. “The Importance of Illustrating New England History by a Series of Romances Like the Waverley Novels.” In The Works of Rufus Choate with a Memoir of His Life (I:319– 46). 2. vols. Ed. Samuel Gilman Brown. Boston: Little, Brown, 1862. Cover, Robert. “Nomos and Narrative.” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 4: 4–68. Crane, Gregg. Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Crane, Gregg. “Ralph Ellison’s Constitutional Faith.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (pp. 104–20). Ed. Ross Posnock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Davie, Donald. “American Literature: The Canon.” In Trying to Explain (pp. 187–98). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979. Dryden, Edgar. Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968. Ferguson, Robert A. Law and Letters in American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (pp. 144–66). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Franklin, H. Bruce. “Billy Budd and Capital Punishment: A Tale of Three Centuries.” American Literature 69 (1997): 337–59. Harper, Frances E.W. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1892. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Levinson, Sanford. “Law as Literature.” Texas Law Review 60, no. 3 (1982): 373–91. Lincoln, Abraham. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 8 vols. Ed. Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. In Great Short Works of Herman Melville (pp. 238–313). Ed. Werner Bertoff. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Melville, Herman. “The Marquis de Grandvin.” In Great Short Works of Herman Melville (pp. 396– 401). Ed. Werner Bertoff. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. In The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. 2 vols. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Citadel Press, 1945. Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. The Squatter and the Don. 1885. Eds. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1992. Story, Joseph. Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence as Administered in England and America. 2 vols. Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1835. Story, Joseph. “Value and Importance of Legal Studies.” In The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story (pp. 524–42). Ed. William W. Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1852. Suggs, Jon Christian. Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Thomas, Brook. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Tourgée, Albion W. With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1890. Warren, Samuel, and Louis Brandeis. “The Right to Privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4 (1890): 193–220.

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Sexuality and American Literary Studies Christopher Looby

It would be hard to imagine a national literature queerer than that of the United States. The writings of most of the traditional canonical authors are replete with same-sex and otherwise queer affiliations and affects. Many of the writers who have been counted as major authors, or who have constituted major literary schools or movements (including the writers of the American Renaissance, as well as those of the Harlem Renaissance and such groups as the Beats), were in some sense personally queer. It is, of course, an old-fashioned and “essentialist” critical move to measure the queerness of a literary field by citing the sexual identities of the writers who belonged to it. But the critical gesture has an unmistakably blunt power as well, which led Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet to execute just such a strategy, in the interest of demonstrating the structuring centrality of the “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” to “thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole” (1). “Socrates, Shakespeare, Proust; and, beyond that, legion – dozens or hundreds of the most centrally canonic figures” (52) of Western literary culture might be counted as queer, Sedgwick maintained, which was not meant at all, she averred, to foreclose on “some real questions of sexual definition and historicity” (53) that would always render such list-making projects fundamentally problematic and incomplete. Sedgwick’s list included, from the American canon, “Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson (Dickinson?),” Cather, James, and Eliot (53), and her chapter on Melville’s “Billy Budd” by implication added him to the list, too. But it might be argued that for American literature what Sedgwick characterized as the “infinite elasticity” (53) of such a list is, for certain reasons, well, even more infinitely elastic. Below, I will discuss in detail a short story, “Martha’s Lady,” by an author (Sarah Orne Jewett) who by any

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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measure belongs on a list of queer American writers, but whose presence on it also raises in vexing ways all the most profound questions of “sexual definition and historicity” that beset such critical projects. This particular short story, as I will show, raises searching questions about social and sexual definition, about the legibility of sexual identity categories, and about the fundamental historicity of sexual experience – questions, indeed, about the cogency of the concept of “sexuality” itself. At the same time, “Martha’s Lady” offers an opportunity to see how literary form – and such traditional methods of literary study as archival research and textual studies – can help us refine our account of the history of sexuality. As an academic field, the discipline of American literary studies was marked in its very formation by scholars’ and critics’ interests in nonnormative identities and unaccountable erotic phenomena. Walt Whitman’s poetry has had its vehement detractors from the start, but his canonical eminence was in large part established and preserved by coteries of queer readers. Herman Melville’s reputation was rescued from obscurity largely by gay readers, too. It might have seemed, at one time, that the traditional American canon, consisting of such writers as F.O. Matthiessen included in his great field-defining work American Renaissance (1941) – Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Hawthorne – was as queer as it was only because the critics who designed it were bent that way. It might have been expected, therefore, that once the old canon’s narrow limitations and constitutive deformations were questioned and many new writers and literary forms were rediscovered and studied (women, people of color, etc.; sentimental, domestic, sensation, and reform fiction, etc.; popular poetry, poetry circulated privately, etc.), the queerness of the expanded field would be markedly diluted. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Sentimental and domestic fiction, devoted ostensibly to normative social values, natural kinship bonds, and heterosexual ideals, turn out, on closer critical inspection, to be attuned not-so-secretly to broken families, odd voluntary relationships (e.g., passionate romantic friendships and Boston marriages), and perverse attachments of all kinds (see Weinstein for an account of nineteenthcentury American literature’s valuation of chosen bonds of love over biological kinship). Mass-circulation sensation fiction is crazy with erotic mischief. Popular poetry and poetry circulated in manuscript are alike replete with bodies and pleasures that defy normative discipline.1 The queerness of American literature is extraordinarily deep, pervasive, and persistent. Whether we construe queerness in a relatively narrow sense (as pertaining to same-gender and otherwise nonnormative sexual relationships) or in a broader sense (encompassing derogated affects, unconventional identities and relationships of all kinds, gender nonconformity, and so forth), the roster of American writers for whom such things mattered centrally is long and impressive: Edward Albee, Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Horatio Alger, James Baldwin, Djuna Barnes, Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane and Paul Bowles, Charles Brockden Brown, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Willa Cather, John Cheever, Alfred Chester, Kate Chopin, Alfred Corn, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, Countee Cullen, Michael Cunningham, H.D., Richard Henry Dana, Samuel R. Delany, Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson!), Robert Duncan, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Field,

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Henri Ford, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Henry Blake Fuller, Margaret Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Angelina Weld Grimké, Allan Gurganus, FitzGreene Halleck, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Patricia Highsmith, Pauline Hopkins, Richard Howard, Julia Ward Howe, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arturo Islas, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Weldon Johnson, Chester Kallman, Tony Kushner, Alain Locke, Jack London, Audre Lord, James McCourt, Carson McCullers, Claude McKay, Herman Melville, James Merrill, Marianne Moore, Richard Nugent, Frank O’Hara, Dawn Powell, James Purdy, John Rechy, Adrienne Rich, James Whitcomb Riley, Richard Rodriguez, George Santayana, James Schuyler, Hubert Selby, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Stoddard, Charles Warren Stoddard, Bayard Taylor, Rose Terry, Henry David Thoreau, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, Mark Twain, Parker Tyler, Carl Van Vechten, Gore Vidal, Glenway Wescott, Edmund White, Walt Whitman, Michael Wigglesworth, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and Constance Fenimore Woolson – and the list could go on a great deal longer, its membership revised and contested ad infinitum. No doubt any reader will notice omissions from this list. One scholar has even nominated William Faulkner as a lesbian writer! (See Michel.) Why not count W.H. Auden, Thom Gunn, Christopher Isherwood, and Thomas Mann? How about Frederick Douglass? (See Van Leer.) While most of the critical energy and scholarly effort in the past were devoted to recognizing frankly the widespread presence of queer content in American literature, as well as rediscovering and appreciating queer authors, the agenda for the future will naturally be different. While new writers and texts will doubtless continue to be found in the archive, or recategorized based on shifting definitions, it remains to be discovered why American literature is so thoroughly queer. Is there something more than a contingent relationship between American experience and adventurous sexualities? Is American literature’s queerness just a particular local case of Western culture’s constitutive formation by the “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition”? Or is it something more than that? Has the relative openness of American society during much of its earlier history (its relatively weak institutional matrix, its thin social organization, and its heterogeneity and geographical dispersal), for example, granted a degree of freedom to wayward erotic energies that would be more tightly bound in other, older, more homogeneous, and more compactly settled and disciplined societies? Do literary social circles provide a bohemian environment in which sexual freedom is expressly valued and cultivated? Is there something about literariness itself – its bending of communicative norms, its cultivation of innovative and extravagant stylistic effects – that is fundamentally queer? Is “the place of style in American literature,” as Richard Poirier called it in his classic study A World Elsewhere, actually a very queer place? These broad questions, of course, imply a set of hypotheses. Since the United States was founded as a nation in a massive act of political disobedience and cultural disaffiliation, has a certain antinormative propensity been encoded, as it were, in the American social DNA? Or, to encompass a longer history of prenational creole settlement, has the history of America’s population by means of successive waves of immigration entailed a variety of queer displacement effects, with gender and family

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norms fundamentally weakened and/or reformatted by such disruptions and relocations? Most of us no longer think of American literature (now that the field has been expanded and redefined in various ways) as having a singular origin in a text like John Winthrop’s famous “Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), the sermon he preached to his fellow religious exiles aboard the ship Arbella as they crossed the Atlantic, a utopian preachment in which Winthrop expressed the hope that “they might be all knitt more nearly together in the Bonds of brotherly affection” (34). But it is a striking fact about the exacting social vision propounded by Winthrop, with “the exercise of mutuall loue” (44) forming the “ligaments” (40) uniting the social body, that he attributes to this “publique” (45) social affection a “sweetness” (44) in excess of any that might be found in “the State of wedlock” (44) or in any other “private” (45) bonds. Winthrop exemplifies this especially sweet “mutuall loue,” grounding the new social order by invoking two same-sex pairs from the Bible: Wee may see this acted to life in Jonathan and David. Jonathan a valiant man endued with the spirit of love, soe soone as he discovered the same spirit in David had presently his hearte knitt to him by this ligament of loue; soe that it is said he loued him as his owne soule, he takes soe great pleasure in him, that he stripps himselfe to adorne his beloved. His father’s kingdome was not soe precious to him as his beloved David, David shall haue it with all his hearte. Himself desires noe more but that hee may be neare to him to rejoyce in his good. Hee chooseth to converse with him in the wildernesse even to the hazzard of his oune life, rather than with the greate Courtiers in his father’s Pallace. When hee sees danger towards him, hee spares neither rare paines nor perill to direct it. When injury was offered his beloued David, hee would not beare it, though from his oune father. And when they must parte for a season onely, they thought theire heartes would have broake for sorrowe, had not theire affections found vent by abundance of teares. Other instances might be brought to showe the nature of this affection; as of Ruthe and Naomi, and many others. (43)

It is sometimes difficult to remember, much less fully appreciate, that the American twentieth century’s strict and often punitive enforcement of what has been called “heteronormativity” (Warner xvi, xxi ff.) was historically anomalous; that a variety of other forms of affection, attachment, and erotic practice were once relatively uncontroversial, even exalted; and that American literature’s unembarrassed depiction of such forms bears eloquent witness to kinds and degrees of erotic liberty that may, for all we know, be reemerging in our own time. Now let me turn to Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Martha’s Lady,” a story she first published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1897 and then reprinted in a book collection, The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories, a few years afterward (1899). Scrutiny of this particular story may help to concretize the claims I have been making about sexual definition, historicity, and the value of literary evidence for studying these together. There are three main characters present: Miss Harriet Pyne, a 35-year-old spinster living in her stately ancestral home in the coastal Maine village of Ashford, a dignified woman whose days are occupied with “the companionship of duty and serious books” (871–2);

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Helena Vernon (later Mrs. Dysart), Harriet’s beautiful and kindly young Boston cousin, who has come to Ashford for an extended summer visit; and Martha, the new servant girl who has just joined the household. Martha is the replacement for “her aunt, a most skillful person, who had but lately married a thriving farm and its prosperous owner” (875). Jewett pointedly accomplishes much with such a seemingly incidental comment about the recently departed servant: this is a household from which, for one thing, marriage necessarily takes one away. But, more importantly, marriage itself is characterized as principally a question of property (the aunt “married a thriving farm”) and only secondarily a matter of a personal relationship (“and its prosperous owner”) with an unnamed incidental man. This wry comment situates the institution of marriage, for the purposes of this story, squarely within the broad historical phase of the “deployment of alliance,” as Michel Foucault called it, a traditional social system in which marriages were contracted primarily on the basis of family alliances and property interests (106). When Helena later becomes engaged to a young Englishman she calls Jack, she evidently chooses him for love, not property; she belongs, at least incipiently, to what Foucault calls “the deployment of sexuality,” a social system in which marriages were grounded in personal desire (106). As Foucault took pains to point out, the deployment of sexuality did not neatly replace the deployment of alliance, but was superimposed upon it, and coexisted with it while gradually displacing it (106–7). This ongoing, gradual displacement describes the vast social metamorphoses that frame the intimate local tale told in “Martha’s Lady.” Harriet cannot but feel regret that her attractive and resourceful young cousin will henceforth “sink her personality in the affairs of another” (881), regretting it all the more because Helena seemed to be (as the unmarried Harriet must think of herself) “so equal to a happy independence” (881). Here we have Harriet exhibiting an affirmative and perhaps forward-looking sense of the positive value of female independence, but at the same time she is “an old-fashioned gentlewoman” (882) who is not insensible to the social value of “a brilliant English match” (881) with a handsome and presumably wealthy young man from the mother country. Harriet’s divided feelings about this marriage, which we might even characterize as asynchronous feelings (forward looking and modern on the one side, but old-fashioned on the other), are just one example of the many forms of “queer temporality” that fill this story. Studies of what has been called “queer temporality” constitute one of the most promising and exciting areas in literary studies of sexuality today. The special issue of GLQ edited by Elizabeth Freeman is the obvious place to start. Scholars should also consult Valerie Rohy’s Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality, as well as Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (along with her essay “Geological Fantasies, Haunting Anachronisms”). The general claim of this work on queer temporality is that sexually deviant lives often take a skewed position with respect to normative life narratives: they mature early or late, they don’t follow the usual trajectories, they exhibit strange effects of precocious-

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ness or belatedness or abnormal pacing, and so forth. “Martha’s Lady” exhibits such temporal distortions or slippages in abundance. It transpires, as the plot of “Martha’s Lady” progresses, that Martha develops a devastating crush on the beautiful and gracious Helena, who is obligingly patient and affectionate with this untaught servant girl and gently helps her make the difficult transition from her former hardscrabble country life to the relatively elegant existence of this prosperous household – and (we should add) also a transition from an environment of natural kinship relations to one that is very different and, at first, quite alienating. After Helena leaves at the close of her summer visit, Martha spends the major portion of her life adoring the image and the memory of her beloved, whom she does not meet again for 40 years. The pathos of the story depends fundamentally upon the premise that erotic desire is chiefly a matter of imagination: it is independent of its object, and can survive intact without any contact. Jewett’s story was included in Susan Koppelman’s valuable 1994 anthology, Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers. And it’s fair enough to construe it as such, that is, as a “lesbian” story, for the good reasons that Koppelman gives in her introduction: we have no trouble counting nineteenth-century stories of male-female love as “heterosexual,” as essentially portraying the same kinds of normative relationships familiar to us today, so why should we hesitate to count stories that feature passionate female same-sex attachments as lesbian? But it’s also important to recognize the profound anachronism of that ascription – important to observe, for instance, that Sarah Orne Jewett might not have recognized her story in such a description, and that in some crucial ways female same-sex attachments were different then from what they are today. (This implies, too, that it is a mistake to think that nineteenth-century stories of male-female love are, in fact, “heterosexual” at all.) But it is better still, I would argue, to recognize that this particular story knows something about anachronism, and dramatically stages certain anachronistic effects belonging to the uneven historical development of sexuality as such; the story knows that to ascribe a lesbian identity to Martha is to redescribe in late nineteenth-century (or even twentieth-century) terms a person who still lives, effectively, within the very different terms of antebellum categories of affection and attachment. And Jewett’s story knows as well that to understand Martha as a lesbian is to import identity categories from elsewhere that have no meaning in the backward precincts of provincial Ashford, Maine. My wish in the remainder of this chapter is to convey how “Martha’s Lady” invokes and concatenates various questions having to do with sexual subjectivity and its temporalities (personal and historical); I wish also to show how these questions have a great deal to do with literariness and with unevenly distributed access to various emerging late nineteenth-century discourses about sexual subjectivity; and I wish finally to demonstrate that “Martha’s Lady” embodies these questions in its own form, and especially in certain small but telling revisions to the story that Jewett made when she republished it two years after its first appearance. In these ways, I would like to make the case by practical demonstration that the formal features of a

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literary text can serve as exceptionally acute registers of incremental historical changes (and subtle geographical variations) in the social organization and subjective experience of sexuality. “Martha’s Lady” does a magnificent job of giving us, in a short compass, a theoretical history of sexual subjectivity in nineteenth-century America. When Helena returns to Ashford after 40 years’ absence, on the last page of the story, she immediately sees that Martha has maintained her loving devotion unaltered during the interim; a great deal has happened to Helena over these 40 years, but virtually nothing has happened to Martha. Helena has made a “brilliant match” to an Englishman and become Mrs. Dysart, has borne children and seen them variously die, leave home for school, and marry in turn (884); she has lived in several European capitals, met “lords and ladies,” and undertaken “great journeys” (884); but has now been widowed and has come back home to Boston at last, a woman of 60-some years. The story proper begins in the antebellum years, quite exactly specified as in the immediate wake of the Second Great Awakening, or even just in its aftermath, at a time of reaction against evangelical excesses (“The outbreak of a desire for larger religious freedom caused at first a most determined reaction toward formalism, especially in small and quiet villages like Ashford, intently busy with their own concerns” [872]). So let us say the story begins sometime around or after the mid-1840s, although with some effort we could probably date it even more exactly given other hints Jewett drops, like Helena’s use of what sounds like a fashionable colloquialism when addressing her gratitude and admiration to Martha, who has gamely climbed a cherry tree to pick fruit: “ ‘oh, you’re a duck, Martha!’ ” (876). Jewett’s narrator also invokes the fading memory of the American Revolution (“in this moment when the great impulse of the war for liberty had died away” [872]) and projects forward to “the coming war for patriotism and a new freedom,” that is, the Civil War (872). During this long interval between two wars, the town has seen something like a retrograde motion in the moral sphere: Miss Pyne’s own grandmother had “preserved some cheerful inheritance of gayety and worldliness from colonial times” (872), but in present-day Ashford, as in many of Jewett’s coastal village settings, life has become more isolated and provincial over time, and people are now less worldly and gay and informed than they once were. During these, “the very dullest days of New England,” life in Ashford is characterized by “much dignity and discretion of behavior” and “the pettiest indifference to large things” (872). Along with these carefully specified historical parameters, Jewett also provides some spatial and geographical coordinates. Helena brings her small margin of Boston sophistication to dull and ossified Ashford at the beginning of the story, and by the end (after the lapse of 40 years) she brings back the much greater “European” worldliness she has acquired as the wife of an English diplomat. Meanwhile, Martha’s fervent, grateful devotion to Helena has not only persisted but also strengthened. To leap ahead quite a bit, I contend that when they confront one another again after 40 years – presumably not too much earlier than the date at which the story was published, 1897 – they meet across what we might describe as the gap

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between one sexual world and another, one deployment (“alliance”) and its emergent successor (“sexuality”). Martha, we might say, has faithfully preserved her attachment to Helena under the rubric of a certain kind of “romantic friendship,” one characterized and structured by social asymmetry (mistress/servant, city/country, etc.), while it is implied (I believe) that Helena, during her worldly peregrinations, has entered the era of what Foucault calls the “deployment of sexuality,” with its specification of persons according to patterns of sexual object choice. Helena might now be inclined to think, might even be able to say (to herself), that Martha is a lesbian; but Martha, for sure, has not yet heard tell of this new specification of persons. From even this barebones account of “Martha’s Lady,” you can see how Jewett locates the action of the tale on a narrow local scale, within one underpopulated allfemale household. But the scale expands significantly, by implication, to include relatively urbane Boston, thus invoking a regional economy of scale. And impinging on this quiet drama most consequentially is the moral history of the United States since the Revolution and well past the Civil War, up to the late-nineteenth-century time of “Martha’s” publication. It would not do, either, to ignore the fact that the story has a transnational framing: Helena is a changed person when she returns from Europe, with the comparative ideas and wide variety of experiences that a transatlantic adulthood have bestowed upon her, and the difference that the historical emergence of “sexuality” as such may be inferred to have made in her conceptual apparatus. Jewett demonstrably has a subtly developed sense of both the historicity of sexuality and its regional and transnational variability. Between the time that Jewett first published the story in the Atlantic Monthly (October 1897) and the time when it was republished in her collection The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories (1899), she made several quite consequential revisions to the story at its very end, during the poignant reunion scene between Martha and Helena. These textual changes bear upon the vexing question of how we might understand the nature of the intense but asymmetrical relationship between the two of them, and how we might interpret the changes that had come to pass in the 40 years of their separation. Jewett’s interest in such temporal dislocations seems to have derived from her own life’s experience. In an undated letter to her friend Sarah Wyman Whitman (probably from mid- to late 1897, because it alludes to Jewett’s attendance at the May 31, 1897, dedication of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s relief sculpture in honor of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment), Jewett wrote that she felt that she “was brought up with grand-fathers and grand-uncles and aunts for [her] best playmates,” and that she therefore “look[ed] upon that generation as the one to which I really belong” (Fields 111). This may well remind us of what she says in “Martha’s Lady” about Harriet Pyne, who, because she stayed at home to take care of her aging parents and consequently never married, prematurely “developed all the habits of a serious elderly person” (871). F.O. Matthiessen, in his book on Jewett, notes her acute feeling for temporal aberration too, quoting from a letter she wrote to another friend around the turn of the twentieth century,

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I have had to go to Exeter several times lately, where I always find my childhood going on as if I had never grown up at all, with my grand-aunts and their old houses and their elm trees and their unbroken china plates and big jars by the fireplaces. (30)

In a slightly later letter to Sarah Wyman Whitman (again, undated, but because it alludes to Whitman’s response – in a letter dated September 26, 1897 – to reading “Martha’s Lady,” we can infer that it was written shortly thereafter), Jewett thanked her friend profusely for her acute and affirmative reading of the story, which Jewett apparently feared other readers might find “plain” or “dull” (Fields 112). “It is impossible to say how your letter has heartened me,” Jewett wrote to Whitman. You bring something to the reading of a story that the story would go very lame without, but it is those unwriteable things that the story holds in its heart, if it has any! that make the true soul of it, and these must be understood and yet how many a story goes lame for lack of that understanding! In France there is such a “code” such recognitions, such richness of allusions, but here we confuse our scaffoldings with our buildings, and – and so! This I feel like talking all day about, if you were only here – but I come down to my poor Martha; I thought that most of us had begun to grow in just such a way as she did and so could read joyfully between the lines of her plain story – but I wonder if most people will not call her a dull story? That would be all my fault and sets me the harder at work. The stone ought to be made a lovely statue. Nobody must say that Martha was dull, it is only me. (Fields 112).2

What I wish to stress here is Jewett’s sensitivity to the passage of time (“I thought that most of us had begun to grow . . . ”) and the difference that time makes in people’s ability to “read . . . between the lines” of a story like Martha’s. Jewett laments the fact that her calculated inexplicitness about the nature of the relationship between Martha and Helena, her necessary vagueness about certain “unwriteable things,” may disappoint or baffle some readers, even cripple the story (“goes lame”). Jewett had fairly recently visited Paris, in 1892, and there met Thérèse BlancBentzon, a longtime correspondent who translated her writings into French; and in June 1897 Blanc-Bentzon paid a return visit to her in South Berwick, Maine, around the time that Jewett was writing “Martha’s Lady.” We can surmise that this French connection had something to do with the readiness to mind of Jewett’s belief that in France her “between the lines” meaning in “Martha’s Lady” would have been more readily understood, because there was “a ‘code’ such recognitions, such richness of allusions” for a writer to draw upon, and with which to establish readerly rapport. But for lack of such a code at her disposal, she fears, American readers might find themselves at a loss. Jewett seems to suggest, even in the days immediately following its Atlantic Monthly publication, that she is already thinking of revision, putting herself “harder [to] work” on the story, so as to make the “stone” into a “lovely statue.” In any event she did revise it, within a couple of years, in the direction of somewhat greater explicitness; but at the same time in her revisions she highlighted the very

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idea of “recognition,” heightening the drama of Helena’s belated appreciation of the passionate and enduring intensity of Martha’s attachment to her. Here are the final two paragraphs of the story, as they appeared first in the Atlantic Monthly and then in The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories (I have indicated the most substantive additions and changes by placing them in boldface): That night Martha waited in her lady’s room just as she used, humble and silent, and went through with the old unforgotten loving services. The long years seemed like days. At last she lingered a moment trying to think of something else that might be done, then she was going silently away, but Helena called her back. “You have always remembered, have n’t you, Martha dear?” she said. “Won’t you please kiss me good-night?” (Atlantic Monthly 1897, 533) That night Martha waited in her lady’s room just as she used, humble and silent, and went through with the old unforgotten loving services. The long years seemed like days. At last she lingered a moment trying to think of something else that might be done, then she was going silently away, but Helena called her back. She suddenly knew the whole story and could hardly speak. “Oh, my dear Martha!” she cried, “won’t you kiss me good-night? Oh, Martha, have you remembered like this, all these long years!” (The Queen’s Twin 1899, 169)

Jewett seems, in the later revision, to want to assist the reader in “[knowing] the whole story”; she wants to enable the reader to participate vicariously in Helena’s suddenly dawning awareness, and although she doesn’t say explicitly what Helena “knew” in that moment, she certainly cues the reader more directly to ask what there was for Helena (and for us) to know about Martha’s 40-year devotion. Of course, there is a good deal in this recognition that has to do with the sheer moral weight of the revelation: Helena went away promising to return soon, but never did, and perhaps since then has only occasionally thought of Martha. To learn all of a sudden that Martha has thought of little else in the meanwhile would be breathtaking and perhaps guilt inducing; to think of this devotion as the governing purpose of Martha’s constricted life would be at once marvelous and horrifying. But plainly, this is not all of what Jewett feared readers would miss, and what her textual revisions sought to render less obscure. Susan Koppelman first pointed out the importance of these textual revisions (Koppelman 219, 242), and she would doubtless count them as further evidence of the story’s qualification for a lesbian identity. This seems again to be perfectly fair, but I would add to it a reservation that I think Jewett herself was insisting upon, and that her correspondence with Sarah Whitman around this time would appear to justify. Helena here “knew the whole story,” and perhaps that is because she has had 40 years of worldly experience during her “much-varied foreign life” (883), having spent nearly all of it in Europe as the wife of a diplomat who has at various times been posted from London to Paris, Madrid, and St. Petersburg (886). Helena returns to Ashford in her sixties, then, with this lifetime of experience behind her – perhaps,

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indeed, with knowledge of the very “code” and the “recognitions” that Jewett ruefully believed (as she wrote to Whitman) would have been common currency in France but were frustratingly unavailable in America. And those 40 years of Helena’s absence from America had been, it is accurate to say, exactly the 40 years during which (as Foucault and many other historians of sexuality have established) the homosexual as a distinct type of person was invented, or recognized (Foucault 43), and articulated in a wide variety of discourses including sexology, criminology, psychiatry, and so forth, not to mention in the domain of literary art. It was during those 40 years as well that persons whose same-sex attractions were powerful and potentially self-defining could also find themselves adopting homosexual identities for themselves, through the recursive process that Ian Hacking has described, in his essay “Making Up People,” as “dynamic nominalism”: The claim of dynamic nominalism is not that there was a kind of person who came increasingly to be recognized by bureaucrats or by students of human nature but rather that a kind of person came into being at the same time as the kind itself was being invented. In some cases, that is, our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on. (228)

Helena may very well in the 40-year interim have become acquainted with these sexual classifications; she must have been aware, for instance – as Jewett must have been aware too – of the epoch-making trial of Oscar Wilde (1895) that brought homosexual identity into greater public prominence and disrepute. Helena’s greater worldliness is observed by Harriet when she notes dryly that the telegraph announcing her imminent return (the availability and common use of commercial telegraphy being another of the story’s careful markers of history’s passing) specifies Sunday as the day of arrival – properly reverent New Englanders would never choose to travel on the Sabbath. “I daresay, having been a foreigner so long, she does not mind traveling on Sunday,” Harriet primly observes (886). But Martha herself has almost certainly had no access to such information as Helena may have had. Jewett tells us that Martha, by contrast, lived in an extremely information-poor environment, one that had in fact grown more isolated and provincial over time. “As far as was possible the rare news that reached Ashford through an occasional letter or the talk of guests was made part of Martha’s own life,” but she had a “limited acquaintance with newspapers,” and she apparently confined her newspaper reading to the housekeeping hints that she took great pains to bring into practice in the Pyne household (885). What, then, is the speech defying “recognition” that Helena experiences when she finds herself with Martha again, and sees and feels how devoutly Martha has cherished her affection for Helena? What would Jewett like us to “read between the lines of her plain story”? What was the “unwriteable” that she nevertheless urgently felt “must be understood,” and that led her to revise the story in an effort to render it marginally less inscrutable than she had left it in the Atlantic Monthly version? In between the

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1897 publication of the story and its republication in 1899, Jewett again visited Europe, traveling through England and France with her longtime intimate friend and companion Annie Fields, the woman with whom she had formed a “Boston marriage” following Fields’s husband’s death in 1881; they visited with other writers, including queer old Henry James and the lesbian writer Vernon Lee. During this European trip, it is easy to imagine that Jewett’s relationship with Fields met with different kinds of recognition, and was classified differently than it customarily had been in America. To put it somewhat too baldly: in America they formed an old-fashioned Boston marriage, but in Europe they were lesbians. All of this, we can speculate, led Jewett to revise “Martha’s Lady” for its 1899 republication in the small but telling ways evidenced above: now (to put it perhaps too tendentiously) attributing to Helena a knowing recognition of Martha’s lesbianism, a recognition Martha could not have shared herself because such ascriptive categories were unknown to her. Martha still merely loved Helena, neither having, wanting, or needing any new description or label for her affection; 40 years later, witnessing the passionate intensity and the durability of that love, Helena “knew the whole story,” knew that in a drastically changed world passionate same-sex love now had a name that would mean nothing to Martha, a name she could not utter. My goal in the brief compass of this chapter has been to propose that the literary archive can tell us a great deal – somewhat confoundingly – about the history of sexuality in America. Past forms of intimacy and affiliation do not always (or perhaps often) answer to our present categories of sexual understanding, and the diligent effort to gain some tangible sense of how people in the past understood their bodily, desiring lives – although it can never absolutely escape from presentist categories – nevertheless ought to be pursued with the literary forming an especially telling body of evidence. Numerous scholars might be mentioned who are practicing some form of what Max Cavitch has pointedly called “disinhibited reading,” reading that licenses conceptual departure from received notions. Although there are a great many scholars pursuing such goals today, and their important work cannot be surveyed comprehensively or in any detail here, a few examples – in no particular order – may be pertinent. Michael Trask, for one, in Cruising Modernism, “has aimed to look past the species model of sexuality by dealing with the more elastic notion of ‘desire’ ” (194), and has put desire into an intimate relationship to questions of social class. Scott Herring, dealing with the modern period as well, has written in Queering the Underworld that criticism might take a cue from the “sexual mystifications” of past actors and forswear the project of sexual knowledge altogether, adverting instead to “sexual unknowing” (209). Dorri Beam, in Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, has unearthed an entire archive of “highly wrought” fiction by women writers, fiction that uses elaborate ornament and other stylistic effects to explore and promulgate “new forms of sensual presence” (55) that do not correspond neatly to the kinds of categories and practices we are used to. Michael Moon, in his invaluable study Disseminating Whitman, provides what is still perhaps the signal account of the way an erotically adventurous writer used the opportunities of textual revision to enact a

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project of disturbing and displacing the normative frameworks of bodiliness of his time. Americanists might find useful examples of how to do the history of sexuality via literary studies in other national and historical domains as well. I am thinking of the way Paul Kelleher is attempting to recover “the messier, more unsystematized world of bodily and affective practice that obtained in a culture of sensibility,” such as that of eighteenth-century England. “The advent of sexuality’s regime . . . replaces the homosocial and heterosocial culture of sensibility with its ‘simple abstractions’: ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality,’ ” Kelleher writes, quoting Foucault (154). Along similar lines, Bruce Burgett has argued for the excavation not of sexuality but of “sensual practice,” and Stephen Shapiro has described an historical phase in which “sensual tendencies” were coalescing, that is, formations of the self that were more than a mere collection or pattern of acts but were not yet the defined sexualities that would later emerge. The American inheritance of – and, arguably, its expansion and elaboration of – the culture of sensibility and sentiment should suggest that Kelleher’s “messier, more unsystematized world” had a long afterlife on the American side of the Atlantic, retarding the emergence of the simple abstractions of sexual specification, and giving an extended life to the “sensual practices” and “sensual tendencies” of which Burgett and Shapiro speak. It may be (as I argue elsewhere) that such formations of bodiliness or sensuality are best understood as aspects of aesthetic history, not in fact categorically distinct from all the other dimensions of aesthetic experience in which human beings delight. Yet farther afield, the work of James A. Schultz on medieval German forms of courtly love has described a regime that did not distinguish between hetero and homo but valued “courtliness” as a complex amalgam of personal qualities and bodily bearing, and practiced the “love of courtliness” rather than anything like our current sexualities. Jewett’s “poor Martha” may not have had a sexuality in our modern sense of the word; but she practiced something uncannily like the love of courtliness, romanticizing her beloved Helena for a charismatic embodiment of a complex mixture of personal beauty, moral kindness, and sensual allure that might reductively have been labeled “lesbian” but was not yet answering to that name.

Notes 1.

“Bodies and pleasures” is, of course, a formula borrowed from Foucault, who frankly urged us to stop talking about “sexuality” and revert to the looser category of “bodies and pleasures.” This is his political prescription for the future, but it is also good advice for those investigating the past. 2. For convenience, I have supplied a citation to the published edition of Jewett’s letters edited

by Annie Fields, but I have corrected the transcription silently to reflect my own reading of the manuscript, which in its punctuation and other features has a more headlong and enthusiastic quality than Fields’s normalizing transcription allows. See Sarah Orne Jewett to Sarah Whitman, MS Am 1743.1 (126), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

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References and Further Reading Beam, Dorri. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Burgett, Bruce. “In the Name of Sex.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 60, 1 (January 2003): 185–8. Castiglia, Christopher. “The Genealogy of a Democratic Crush.” In Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics (pp. 195– 217). Eds. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Castiglia, Christopher, and Christopher Looby. Eds. “Come Again? New Approaches to Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature” (special issue). ESQ 55, nos. 3–4 (2009). Cavitch, Max. “Audience Terminable and Interminable: Anne Gilchrist, Walt Whitman, and the Achievement of Disinhibited Reading.” Victorian Poetry 43, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 249–61. Coviello, Peter. Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Fields, Annie. Ed. Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Freeman, Elizabeth. Ed. “Queer Temporalities” (special issue). GLQ 13, nos. 2–3 (2007). Hacking, Ian. “Making Up People.” In. Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (pp. 222– 36). Eds. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellberry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986. Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hobbs, Glenda. “Pure and Passionate: Female Friendship in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘Martha’s Lady.’ ” In Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett (pp. 99–107). Ed. Gwen L. Nagel. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. “Martha’s Lady.” Atlantic Monthly 80, no. 480 (October 1897): 523–33. Jewett, Sarah Orne. “Martha’s Lady.” In Sarah Orne Jewett, Novels and Stories (pp. 871–88). New York: Library of America, 1994. Jewett, Sarah Orne. Letter to Sarah Whitman (undated). MS Am 1743.1 (126). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899. Kelleher, Paul. “If Love Were All: Reading Sedgwick Sentimentally.” In Regarding Sedgwick: Essays in Queer Culture and Critical Theory (pp. 143–62). Eds. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark. New York: Routledge, 2002. Koppelman, Susan. Ed. Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers. New York: Meridian, 1994. Looby, Christopher. “ ‘Innocent Homosexuality’: The Fiedler Thesis in Retrospect.” In Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (pp. 535–50). Eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s, 1995. Looby, Christopher. “Sexuality’s Aesthetic Dimension: Kant and The Autobiography of an Androgyne.” In American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions. Eds. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby. New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming. Looby, Christopher. “Strange Sensations: Sex and Aesthetics in ‘The Counterpane.’ ” In Melville and Aesthetics (pp. 65–84). Eds. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Love, Heather. “Gyn/Apology: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Spinster Aesthetics.” ESQ 55, nos. 3–4 (2009): 305–34. Luciano, Dana. Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Luciano, Dana. “Geological Fantasies, Haunting Anachronism: Eros, Time, and History in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods.’ ” ESQ 55, nos. 3–4 (2009): 269–303. Matthiessen, Francis Otto. Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929.

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Michel, Frann. “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author.” The Faulkner Journal 4, nos. 1–2 (1988): 5–20. Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Rohy, Valerie. Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009. Schultz, James A. Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Shapiro, Stephen. “Sexuality: An Early American Mystery.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 60, no. 1 (January 2003): 189–92. Trask, Michael. Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Van Leer, David. “A View from the Closet: Reconcilable Differences in Douglass and Melville.” In Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (pp. 279–99). Eds. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Warner, Michael. “Introduction.” In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (pp. vii– xxxi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Weinstein, Cindy. Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Whitman, Sarah. Letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, September 26, 1897. MS Am 1743.1 (107), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Winthrop, John. “Modell of Christian Charity.” In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (pp. 33–48). 3rd series, vol. 1. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1838.

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Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War Priscilla Wald

At a key moment in John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church tries to rescue a group of people who are too weak to lift themselves out of the way of a rising tide. As he reaches down to take one woman’s hands, her skin slips “off in huge, glovelike pieces.” Although sickened by the sight, he forges on. Witnessing the effects of what he did not yet know was radiation sickness, he has “to keep consciously repeating to himself, ‘These are human beings’ ” (60–1). Hersey’s account, which first appeared as a special issue of The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, chronicled the impact of the first nuclear weapon used in an act of war and documented the remarkable transformation crystallized by the bombing. The pastor’s efforts to remind himself that the slimy creatures shedding their skin were human beings can serve as an analogue for a radical conceptual change: the contemporary understanding of “human being” and “humanity” had shifted with the devastated landscape. While these changes had their roots in the prewar world, the bombing of Hiroshima – and, within three days, of Nagasaki – marked a dramatic origin point for what the media quickly dubbed “the Atomic Age,” and Hiroshima represents the attempt of an astute journalist and his editors to make sense of what they recognized was a new understanding of the human experience. As psychologists would later note, everyone who lived through the war was in some sense a survivor of the bombings, as of the other atrocities of the war, and the “victors,” too, would have to come to terms with their implications. These atrocities manifested the possibilities and consequences of mass dehumanization and therefore of the fundamental instability of the terms “human being” and “humanity” – which is to say of the exquisite fragility of being. While political theorists studied the

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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significance of that instability for foundational institutions, scientific research challenged basic assumptions about the nature of “human being” that further destabilized the term. Research in areas including cell biology, ecology, genetics, cybernetics, and psychology illustrate how the idea of the human was being reconceptualized at the level of cells, atoms, and genes, and through the idiom of information systems and the unconscious. The rapid development of new technologies during and after the First World War offered insights into the role of genes in human development and evolution, the workings of the human mind, and the cause of disease. In the decade following the Second World War, the new theories generated by those insights circulated in the mainstream media. People learned that genes and viruses were “information” and that one small miscommunication could have a profound impact on an individual and even in some cases on the species; they read about viruses taking control of a cell’s nucleus and of Communists taking control of human minds. In both science and politics, it was increasingly clear that everything was interdependent. The circulation of “information” was as crucial to human survival as the circulation of blood, and the state no less than the individual thrived only when that circulation was unimpeded. Information became commodified – “classified” for the first time – and its theft became a crime punishable by death. In the vast cauldron of literary production that followed the war, novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers fashioned stories that imaginatively engaged with the multiple challenges – biological, social, and geopolitical – to the ideas of “human being” and “humanity” that characterized this moment. Their work refracted those concepts, registering the expectations and anxieties that accompanied the changing sense of what it meant – or could mean – to be human in the aftermath of war. The preoccupation with the changing contours of “human being” and “humanity” was nowhere more evident than in the proliferation of works of science fiction, which emerged as a literary genre in this moment, known as its “Golden Age.” Isaac Asimov published the first novel of his epic Foundation series, in which he explored the mutual impact of the politics of (galactic) imperialism and human development, in 1951 and the first novel in his equally influential robot series, which considered the idea of artificial intelligence and helped to popularize cybernetics, in 1954. Beginning in the late 1940s, the British writer Arthur C. Clarke used alien encounters to meditate on human evolution, and Alfred Bester’s popular The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956) centered on the radical social changes that would emerge following the discovery of heretofore unimagined human traits and capacities. Science fiction writers explored human potential and limitations, the optimism and concerns of the Atomic Age, through such scenarios as the discovery of alternate universes and mental dimensions, the implications of human evolution and the creation of artificial intelligence, contact with alien beings and worlds, and the ultimate unthinkable that was never really far from the human imagination: the consequences of full-scale nuclear war.

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Science fiction dramatized the possibilities debated at the highest levels of policy making and in the most advanced laboratories in the world, but it proliferated in the United States most likely because of the thriving publishing industry (in a boom economy generally) and the general optimism about the possibilities promised by scientific research (notwithstanding the anxieties concerning its dangers). The nascent genre picked up on what appeared to be the one certainty emerging from scientific research, which was the inevitability of change. Darwin had written the Great Origin Story of the human species in the mid-nineteenth century, but he could offer no causal mechanism for his most famous and widely debated concept: natural selection. The combined work of geneticists and natural historians in the 1930s and 1940s yielded the “evolutionary synthesis,” which showed how the means by which random microscopic changes at the level of the gene could ultimately produce macrochanges at the level of the population. While genetics had characteristically focused on the individual organism, the synthesis shifted the focus to collective changes evident in a population over time and, in so doing, implicitly told a story about inevitable human metamorphosis – and finitude. That story was inflected by the contemporary emergence of the concept of an “ecosystem,” a term introduced in 1935 to name the interactions of living organisms and their environments in a vastly interconnected web of existence that was constantly changing as the result of adaptations to random events. Significantly, funding in the fields of both ecology and genetics came largely, in the postwar period, from the Atomic Energy Commission, fueled by the growing interest in studying the effects of radiation on individual organisms and on the environment. Inevitably, the source of the research would color the emerging accounts. Not surprisingly, research in both ecology and genetics yielded a story in which the continuation of any part and ultimately of the whole of the environment was uncertain for the short term as well as the long term: the survival of the human species, like their surroundings, was contingent on the vagaries of mutations no less than human aggression. The human contingency that was surfacing in biological theories had a social analogue in the “displaced persons” to whom Hannah Arendt called attention in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), in which she showed how the category of “displaced persons” manifested the dependence of the rights and dignity of human beings on the nation-state. The fate of these people, she explained, put on display how the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. (299)

The enslaved and colonized had similarly belied any claim of fundamental or natural rights, showing how the state enforced and could revoke them. All of these figures thereby haunted the very concept of the nation-state, which was predicated, as Arendt notes, on the notion of equality before the law.

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If displaced persons embodied how ostensibly intrinsic human rights were contingent on social and political structures in Arendt’s work, the psychiatrist and theorist of colonization Frantz Fanon demonstrated how individuals internalized those structures in his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks, in which he explored the psychology of dehumanization and the psychopathology of colonialism. He sought in this work to liberate black consciousness from the racism that had normalized whiteness, to free black men and women from “the dilemma, turn white or disappear” (100), dramatized the same year by Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man. Defining “the collective unconscious” as “the unreflected imposition of a culture” (191), Fanon elucidated the dynamics through which a dominant culture imposes exclusionary conceptions of human being through cultural forms and creates crises for those who do not see themselves reflected in them. “Man is human[,]” he argued, “only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him” (216). Science fiction in the decade following the war registered the implications of challenges to the human in anxieties that found expression in end-of-the-world scenarios ranging from aliens and atomic weapons to viruses, overpopulation and the exhaustion of natural resources, and the natural course of evolution. An especially prominent theme in science fiction, however, captures a more abstract form of nonbeing. Beginning in 1938 with John Campbell’s novella Who Goes There?, the theme of alien possession proliferated in fiction and film of the 1950s, including such works as Robert Heinlein’s 1951 The Puppet Masters, the 1953 film Invasion from Mars, Philip K. Dick’s 1954 “The Father Thing,” and, most famously, Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, serialized in Collier’s Magazine in 1954 and appearing in book form in 1955 and its first of many film versions in 1956. The popularity of The Body Snatchers in its numerous incarnations suggests a ubiquitous cultural fear of an impending threat to humanness as well as to humanity. In this story, alien pods reproduce themselves virally by appropriating the bodies and memories of human beings from whom they are nearly indistinguishable except for the absence of emotions, which is the intangible that makes us human, Finney suggests, and that we are in danger of losing. Finney describes the horror and disgust that human beings experience as they realize that their former friends and family have lost their humanity, which is chillingly conveyed cinematographically in the vacuous gaze and uninflected tone of the automatons that represent the possessed in Don Siegel’s direction of the 1956 film based on the original Collier’s serial. Human beings did not need to turn into pod people to turn suddenly unfamiliar. Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious showed that everybody harbored unacknowledged impulses that effectively possessed them. His challenge to conventional conceptions of human being gained widespread acceptance in Europe in the wake of World War I, facilitated particularly in Europe by the wartime phenomenon of shell shock. In the United States, the literature following World War II manifests a fascination with the implication of those challenges.

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Among the most controversial of Freud’s theories were the dangerous desires that were distorted into pathologies by the very relationships that ostensibly offered stability against the uncertainties of the moment: the nuclear family. The anthropologist George Murdock coined the term, which he derived from cell biology (the nucleus of a cell), in his 1949 Social Structure, where he explained that “nuclear families are combined, like atoms in a molecule, into larger aggregates” (2). The 1950s witnessed the lowest rate of divorce during the twentieth century and a “baby boom,” with birth rates beginning to rise in 1942 and peaking in 1957. The nurturing nuclear family was a staple of domestic comedies in the new medium of television, as well as a feature of much fiction and film; ideologically, it was at once the nucleus and the microcosm of the nation. Yet, following Freud, many of the nation’s storytellers found in its pathologies one of the great dramas of the moment. The unconscious assumed literally monstrous proportions in Fred M. Wilcox’s 1956 film, Forbidden Planet, in which strange planetary forces turn an overprotective father’s desire to keep himself and his daughter sequestered on an isolated planet into a murderous force unwittingly directed against anyone countering his wishes. For a range of more earthbound writers and directors, the unconscious forces unleashed by the nuclear family were no less destructive for their lack of literal animation. Jo Sinclair’s 1946 Wasteland features a successful psychoanalysis, through which her protagonist, Jacob Braunowitz, learns that he must confront his shame about his Jewish background and accept his dysfunctional family in order to live a full and integrated life. The damage that families could perpetrate was a common theme in fiction, such as J.D. Salinger’s 1951 Catcher in the Rye and Philip Roth’s 1959 Goodbye, Columbus, and films, including the 1955 East of Eden (Elia Kazan) and Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray), both starring bad boy film idol James Dean, who embodied the rebellious side of the boomer generation. Sloan Wilson’s 1955 bestselling novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, illustrated Fanon’s claims about the susceptibility of the unconscious to cultural influences. His eponymous protagonist quickly became iconic as he epitomized the worship of organizations, self-subordinating belonging, and “sanctimonious materialism” that William Whyte criticized in his 1956 sociological study, Organization Man (251). Yet, the iconicity of the man in the gray flannel suit – the epitome of conformity – has obscured the nuances of the novel’s reflection of the broad concerns of the Atomic Age: the changing contours of the human. While the novel chronicles the protagonist Tom Rath’s dissatisfaction with corporate American culture, marked by his job in the public relations department of a major broadcasting company, the moving force of the novel is Tom’s unconscious. War trauma, crystallized in his accidental killing of his best friend, had led him to try to “cauterize . . . his mind” (86), but that leaves him feeling numb, thwarted, and cynical, and it nearly destroys his marriage and family. Tom believes that he can compartmentalize his life into “four completely unrelated worlds”: his childhood in a dysfunctional family, his war experiences, his job, and his own family. If Wilson were writing science fiction, Tom may have found himself literally inhabiting four

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alternative universes, but Wilson’s realist novel casts the problem in psychoanalytic terms. Tom learns an ecological as well as psychological lesson about the nuclear family: that it is the center of an interconnected web of experiences and memories from which it cannot be cut off. The crisis of the novel seems to revolve around Tom’s discovery that he has an illegitimate Italian son. It ostensibly resolves in his and his wife’s acceptance of financial responsibility for the child and his mother and in a further affirmation of the nuclear family, as Tom decides to step off the fast track of his PR job to take a job that will allow him to balance his life and to become a suburban developer. Yet, at the end of the novel, Tom again refuses to talk with his wife about the war, not because he “want[s] to and can’t,” but because he would “rather think about the future” (272). That future, like the “nuclear family,” is built on the social as well as psychological exclusions that have haunted the Raths’ marriage throughout the novel. At the center of Tom’s “cauterized” memory is a psychotic break that reveals what he – and perhaps the novel itself – refuses to face. Unable to accept his friend’s death, Tom guards the body at knifepoint until he wanders into an African American unit where a compassionate sergeant gently punctures his delusion. Tom vomits, and the “big sergeant . . . put[s] cool hands on his forehead, the way a mother holds the head of a sick child” (94). His tender encounter with the black sergeant is at once at the heart of the refused memory that motivates the plot and almost incidental in the context of the rest of the novel, and this moment of profound humanity is revealingly racialized and gendered. The novel appeared in the immediate wake of such events as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the gruesome murder of Emmett Till, and the Montgomery bus boycott – events, that is, that publicized the racism of US culture – and at what W.T. Lhamon, referring to the explosion of black cultural forms in mainstream US culture, calls “the precise moment when black culture [became] an apt symbol for the way millions of nonblacks wanted to be in the world” (39). This moment of human connection is foreclosed by the white nuclear family, which supplies the only terms Tom has to imagine it, as he turns the black sergeant, despite his “gigantic stature,” into a (feminized) maternal figure. Tom’s affirmation of the nuclear family is itself built on segregation, since suburban development notoriously entailed the exclusion of African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups from “white” neighborhoods. Family secrets and the racial mass hysteria that Arthur Miller explores in The Crucible, his 1953 play, gave the notorious hearings of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations their most salient metaphor: the Salem witchcraft trials. The philosopher Walter Benjamin observed that to “articulate the past historically . . . means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). The Crucible represented such a memory at a moment of collective delusion prompted by a belief in impending threats of literal and cultural annihilation. Miller’s play “remembers” a moment of contagious madness resulting in a loss of humanity on a collective scale and explores the dynamic of dehumanization that so deeply engaged the social and political thinkers of this moment.

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Two liberties that Miller took with the Salem transcripts underscore his diagnosis of the dangerous pathologies of his moment. He imagines the afflicted girls’ turning to the Barbadian slave Tituba and her magic rituals when they had no other outlet through which to express their emotions and curiosity in their austere surroundings. Similarly, Miller altered the ages and relationship of two principals, the accuser Abigail Williams and the accused John Proctor, in order to imagine a thwarted love affair as a key motivation for the accusations. The changes allowed him to explore the secrets that predispose individuals to group psychosis. Early in the play, Abigail tearfully explains to John, I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not, I cannot! (22)

While John believes his “sin” to be adultery, Abigail’s outburst shows the deeper problem to be that he showed her the hypocrisy of her social order but gave her nothing in which to believe in its place. Salem, for Miller, dramatized how the theocracy that had held the community together in the face of adversity eventually turned against fabricated internal threats when external dangers became less threatening; the glue of the community became the source of its destruction, and its rituals became the means to confess unwitting desires and express unconscious jealousies and resentments. The Crucible anatomizes the unraveling of a community when social and political transformations are increasingly at odds with prevailing ideologies, but the play also dramatizes the flip side of that crisis: the individual susceptibilities to those ideologies. The emerging public relations industry that Tom Rath found so disillusioning explicitly capitalized on those susceptibilities. One of the chief architects of the industry, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, used his uncle’s ideas in his development of the public relations industry in the United States. In his widely influential 1928 public relations bible, Propaganda, Bernays offered an analysis of democratic culture that explained the positive dimensions of the social processes that, in Miller’s analysis, could take such a disastrous turn. Human susceptibility was a fact of life, Bernays explained: [I]n almost every act of our daily lives . . . we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. (1)

Noting that propaganda had assumed a “sinister context” during the First World War, Bernays argues that it is nothing more than an effort to become more scientifically conscious of the nature of social and political influence. His ideas about “the new propaganda” grew out of the conception of society as a biological organism that was

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central to the emerging “science of society” (sociology) at this time: the “new propaganda . . . sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organization but as a cell organized into a social unit. Touch a nerve at a certain spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism” (28). Acknowledging that the Nazis’ conspicuous use of propaganda during the Second World War reinforced its sinister associations, Bernays argued in “The Engineering of Consent” (1947) that “propaganda,” which referred only to the influence on how information and influence traveled, was therefore central to an ethics of social responsibility. It makes sense, given the rapid growth of the public relations industry in the postwar period, that Sloan Wilson would set his study of human susceptibility in the contexts not only of war trauma but also of that burgeoning field. The anxiety about this susceptibility that Bernays accepted as a given found its most profound expression in the widespread horror at allegations of a new form of torture: brainwashing. Coined in 1950 by the anti-Communist journalist and OSS/ CIA agent Edward Hunter, “brainwashing” referred to the alleged tactics used by the Chinese and North Koreans against American prisoners of war as well as against their own citizens. Reports of these subtle-to-extreme forms of mental manipulation intrigued psychologists and other social scientists seeking to understand the nature of psychological influence and communication. In The Rape of the Mind (1956), the psychologist Joost Meerloo explained the implications of the phenomenon for what he considered the greatest danger for any society: totalitarianism. Like Bernays, Meerloo believed mental conditioning to be inevitable for social existence, but he worried that contemporary trends were producing populations with increased susceptibility to totalitarianism even in the most democratic societies. He cautioned against common practices that he believed promoted that susceptibility, threatening to turn the population into “opinionated robots,” including mass communication (especially television), aggressive advertising and public relations work, and the “examination mania” that characterized contemporary education and inhibited critical thinking. Meerloo coined the term “menticide,” invoking the newly coined “genocide,” to describe the scale and scope of the destructive potential of collective mental manipulation. Mind control is a kind of annihilation, as Jack Finney’s body-snatched automatons dramatized. Meerloo’s provocative title, The Rape of the Mind, moreover, implicitly feminized its victims, registering the gender anxieties that accompanied threats to the notion of the human. The commingling of the themes of incest and brainwashing in Richard Condon’s 1959 The Manchurian Candidate attest to the disgust evoked by the idea of brainwashing, which is viscerally captured in the lurid description of bodily possession in such science fiction works as The Puppetmasters and The Body Snatchers. In Condon’s novel, a father’s perverse sexual relationship with an adoring daughter produces the warped character of Ellie Iselin, motivated by her one conviction “that the Republic was a humbug, the electorate rabble, and anyone strong who knew how to maneuver could have all the power and glory that the richest and most naïve democracy in the world could bestow” (69). Without being brainwashed, she has been divested of her human-

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ity. Epitomizing science fiction writer and essayist Philip Wylie’s well-known concept of “momism,” a term that summons a disturbing figure who performs the maternal role to monstrosity, Ellie raises a son, Raymond Shaw, whose passivity and resentments equip him for nothing in life so well as being brainwashed. Condon’s sardonic novel reads almost as a checklist of the paranoid fantasies of the moment, with Communists (Russian and Chinese) in league with a power-mad mother and an emasculated son further deprived of his humanity through brainwashing. In accordance with racial stereotypes of the moment, the brilliant Chinese scientists savor their mental manipulation of Raymond’s unit, as they program Raymond to become a remorseless walking weapon and design a plot to have him assassinate a presidential candidate who will be replaced by his running mate, Ellie’s buffoon husband, a savagely comic parody of Joseph McCarthy (who had died in 1957). The horror that Raymond evokes in this darkly humorous, cynical novel is less the result of his uniqueness than his representativeness: he embodies the extreme of “the need for automatic motions that were called living” that keep most of the members of his unit – like the majority of their world – from suspecting the Communist-maternal conspiracy. At base, the problem stems from the corruption of the nuclear family represented by the act of incest, which is also central to Grace Metalious’s 1956 Peyton Place. Although Metalious’s editor turned a father into a stepfather to temper the shock, incest is still the open secret of small-town life in Peyton Place (as in Invisible Man). The familial pathology in The Manchurian Candidate, however, like the adultery in The Crucible, is a moving force of history. The world Condon conjures is fundamentally decadent, decaying, and evidently as damnably drained of its humanity as the society Wylie derided in his widely selling 1942 Generation of Vipers. The west side of New York “was rich in facades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis . . . and the tall buildings, end upon end, were so many fingers beckoning the Bomb” (171–2). The 1962 film version somewhat mediates the bleakness of Condon’s novel in having Raymond, with the help of his unit commander, Ben Marco, overcome his conditioning and assassinate his mother and stepfather before turning the gun on himself, but in the novel the act is the result of Ben’s reprogramming. Condon underscores the danger of conditioning and of the social and psychological conditions that underpin the susceptibility of most individuals. The novel ends with an image of the ultimate loss of humanity, as Ben listens “intently for a memory of Raymond, for the faintest rustle of his ever having lived, but there was none” (311). Laments about invisibility and exclusion from history and a full sense of personhood were not unique to the Atomic Age, but the widespread geopolitical transformations intensified the exploration of social exclusions and the changing social terrain. Sociologists and novelists investigated the performativity of social roles and their relation to the “propaganda” of culture. In 1950, the sociologist Robert Park observed that the fact “that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask . . . is a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a rôle” (249). Ralph Ellison’s 1952 award-winning Invisible Man chronicles the African

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American narrator’s discovery of the fluidity not only of his own identity but also of identity – and the history that contextualizes it – generally. Ellison described his story as depicting a series of “rites of passage . . . through which important social values were projected and reinforced” (“On Initiation Rites” 175) and thereby tracking the circulation of ideas among social strata. Unlike Raymond, the anonymous narrator protagonist of the novel is acutely aware of his invisibility as well as of what it prevents and what it enables. When asked by a reader whether he had intended Invisible Man to address specifically “the Negro relationship with the white man, or, . . . perhaps to everyone,” he replied that he had hoped . . . to write so well that anyone who shared everything except his racial identity could identify with it, because there was never any question in [his] mind that Negroes were human, and thus being human, their experience became metaphors for the experiences of other people. (181)

Writing about stigma in 1963, the sociologist Erving Goffman described identity as relational and explained that “the general identity-values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet they can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living” (128–9). Challenges to the concept of human being showed how anyone could be alienated from the terms of humanity. The protests against segregation in schools and transportation and the angry counterprotests bore witness to the contests concerning the sanctity of the definition of humanity. The narrator of Invisible Man comes to a gradual understanding of the performative self during the course of the novel. Speaking for the first time on behalf of the Brotherhood, a fictional depiction of the Communist Party, he exuberantly tells his Harlem audience that they have made him feel “ ‘suddenly more human. . . . With your eyes upon me I feel I’ve found my true family! My true people! My true country! I am a new citizen of the country of your vision, a native of your fraternal land’ ” (346). With family and nation (citizenship) as the defining vocabulary of humanity, the narrator unwittingly intones the very terms of belonging that have marked what he eventually comes to realize has been black Americans’ systematic exclusion from (white) history and thereby full personhood in the United States. “Humanity” is a function of white terms of recognition. Only later, when fully disenfranchised and friendless, can he understand the implications of his words. In a carnivalesque scene, while disguised, he is mistaken in multiple contexts for a man named Rinehart, whose range of identities shows the narrator that [y]ou could actually make yourself anew. The notion was frightening, for now the world seemed to flow before [his] eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling, [he] caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities and turned away. (499)

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The discovery is disturbing because it forces him to confront the baselessness of all identity. The realization makes him feel “more dead than alive.” It is “more shattering” than if he “had learned that the man whom [he’d] always called father was actually of no relation to [him]” (510). The realization is more disturbing than his understanding of his individual exclusion from white history because it displays the instability of the very terms of human being, which means that even the revision of history (such as that for which he had believed the Brotherhood to be working) could never rest on stable ground. The language of paternity suggests that the instability is even more disturbing than a challenge to the conventional bases of identity: family and kinship. The narrator learns that power governs reality, but is perpetuated only through belief in power, and he comes to understand that, ironically, his uncertainty about his humanity is a function of his (alleged) equality under the law – or his entrance into the terms of the law. His formerly enslaved grandfather, by contrast, “never had any doubts about his humanity – that was left to his ‘free’ offspring. He accepted his humanity just as he accepted the principle. It was his, and the principle lives on in all its human and absurd diversity” (580). No one more obviously embodied the vagaries of the law in the United States than the Japanese and Japanese Americans who had been dispossessed and incarcerated under the terms of Executive Order 9066 during the war. In fiction and memoirs, writers such as Toshio Mori, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Hisaye Yamamoto, Monica Sone, and John Okada described life in the American camps in ways that challenged the sanguinity of an America that sought moral rectitude for its own participation in war atrocities in its ostensibly unqualified distinction from the Nazis. In the preface to his 1957 novel No-No Boy, Okada explains that “when the Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor . . . the Japanese in the U.S. became, by virtue of their ineradicable brownness and the slant eyes which, upon close inspection, will seldom appear slanty, animals of a different breed” (iii). He ends his preface with a conversation in a B-24 in which a Japanese American soldier, whose parents are interred in a camp in the Wyoming desert, tells his lieutenant, “a blond giant from Nebraska[,] about the removal of the Japanese from the Coast, which was called the evacuation, and about the concentration camps, which were called relocation centers” (xi). With his rhetorical corrections, Okada implicitly challenges the historical narrative that contributes to the oppression and dehumanization (“animals of a different breed”) that are the subjects of the novel. Through the postwar experiences of Ichiro Yamada, a “no-no boy” who had refused to serve in the US military and was thereby removed from the camp to a prison, Okada explores the internalization of the terms of that dehumanization. He describes the awakening of a “stranger” in a hotel room from the “period between each night and day when one dies for a few hours, neither dreaming nor thinking nor tossing nor hating nor loving, but dying for a little while because life progresses in just such a way” to “a fleeting sound of lonely panic,” the “momentary terror” of the unfamiliar space until “he remembers that he is away from home and smiles smugly as he tells himself that home is there waiting for him forever” (39). The stranger’s smugness

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springs from a certainty from which Ichiro is excluded: for him, “there was no intervening span of death to still his great unrest through the darkness of night” (39). But like Raymond and the “Invisible Man,” Ichiro is threatening less in his uniqueness than in his representativeness. At the heart of the intergroup racisms that permeate the novel is a fundamental terror of estrangement; the fear of the sense of nonbeing that Ichiro experiences – and embodies – continually confounds precisely the “recognition as a complete human being” (134) for which, ironically, everyone is striving. Estrangement can also be liberating, as it is for one character who, typically overlooked in critical discussions of the novel, gives voice to a potential paradigm for living in the postwar world. Ichiro’s friend and fellow “no-no boy” Gary, a painter, considers his prison sentence to have been his rebirth as a real artist. His explanation makes him sound as isolated as everyone else in the novel: “ ‘Old friends are now strangers[,]’ ” he explains to Ichiro. “ ‘I’ve no one to talk to and no desire to talk, for I have nothing to say except what comes out of my paint tubes and brushes[,]’ ” but he claims it gives him “ ‘peace and satisfaction’ ” and that his “ ‘cup is overflowing’ ” (224), and his whole demeanor confirms his claims. When Ichiro looks “deep into his friend’s eyes to detect the fear and loneliness and bitterness that ought to have been there[,]” he “saw only the placidness reflected in the soft, gentle smile” (224). Gary’s claim echoes the professed motivation of a range of avant-garde artists of the postwar moment who turned the terror of nonbeing into an occasion for artistic – particularly, formal and stylistic – experimentation. From the turn of the twentieth century, visual artists had pioneered techniques that enabled them to explore the nature of visual perception and to display (hence defamiliarize) the conventions that shaped what the eye saw. The rise of cinema contributed significantly to this fascination with perception, which by the mid-twentieth century was also inflected by psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. Artists affiliated with the Beat Movement, for example, experimented with new forms and styles that would expose the means by which a culture they viewed as dangerous and corrupt reproduced itself, in just the ways Bernays had outlined in Propaganda, through what William Burroughs called “the virus power.” The term conveyed his sense of the dangerous processes that disseminated a corrupting culture – the same mechanisms that concerned Meerloo, but on an even grander scale. “The virus power manifests itself in many ways,” Burroughs explained in 1964. “In the construction of nuclear weapons, in practically all the existing political systems which are aimed at curtailing inner freedom, that is, at control. It manifests itself in the ugliness and vulgarity we see on every hand, and of course, it manifests itself in the actual viral illnesses” (Burroughs and Hibbard 12). In Naked Lunch (1959), which earned William Burroughs a cult following for its darkly humorous exploration of his own drug addiction and its hallucinatory stylistic innovation, drugs are at once a figure for and literally, as he explains in his introduction to the novel, “big business” (205). The novel explores the destructive power not only of addiction, but also of bureaucracy and corporate culture through the instrument of language. In the introduction to his novel Queer, written in the early 1950s

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but not published until 1985, he confessed to an anxiety that could be read as an epithet of the postwar moment; he lived, he wrote, “with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control” (xxii). Burroughs, like Gertrude Stein, whom he acknowledged as a literary predecessor, and like the visual artists of his moment who similarly explored sense making in their media, understood his medium as an antidote, maintaining in his 1962 novel, The Ticket That Exploded, that the virus of “Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it” (51). No works more famously captured and celebrated Beat culture than Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (written in 1951 and published in 1957) and Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956), which offered the biography of a subculture. Beat author John Clellon Holmes had introduced the term and the movement in a November 1952 New York Times magazine article in which he characterized a Beat generation, with its “perfect craving to believe . . . a craving for convictions” (20, 22). It is a generation that has come of age with a sense of deep uncertainty: “ever since they were old enough to imagine [a future], that has been in jeopardy anyway” (19). For both Kerouac and Ginsberg, jazz offered an aesthetic paradigm for such times. With its famously fast tempos and interest in improvisation and syncopation, this avant-garde African American art form seemed to offer a rhythm through which to celebrate the cultural taboos of their moment: sex (including homosexuality), drugs, rootlessness, and freedom from the constraints of social status and the nuclear family. For both, however, their celebration was also a lament. Ginsberg anatomizes the destructiveness of contemporary culture, opening Howl with an image of “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets of dawn looking for an angry fix[.]” The poem anticipates others, including Ken Kesey and R.D. Laing, in positing madness as a – maybe the only – reasonable response to a mad world. Divided into three sections, the poem is a journey to an underworld that takes the reader into the heart of the fully destructive forces of contemporary culture, which Ginsberg calls “Moloch,” after the child-eating god of the Bible: “Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!” The last section finds the poet in Rockland, a psychiatric hospital, where Ginsberg met his friend and fellow writer Carl Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated. Like Burroughs, Ginsberg offers his art as a means of making visible the dangerous forms of communication that are driving “the best minds of his generation” mad. In Howl, he transforms Cold War paranoia into a parodic aesthetic. Modeling his long lines on the length of a breath, he encourages his readers to breathe together – literally, conspire – with him. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered brinksmanship – taking the country to the brink of nuclear war – as a diplomatic strategy. Ginsberg teased out the implications of that strategy by demonstrating what it meant to live always on the brink in a parodic literalization that embodied and recontextualized the terms of paranoia. The hallucinatory images of the poem, in the process,

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reconfigure the relationship between internal (perceptions) and external (events), through which Ginsberg demonstrates how a culture shapes a consciousness. It is no wonder that “the best minds,” who listen “to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,” end up in Rockland, “where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ / airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs / the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny / legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal / war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free[.]” Where else can the internalized destructive forces of this culture lead but madness? The times called for new reading practices, and the poem offers art – in effect, itself – as a means of reflecting on, and exorcizing, this destructive process of internalization. Art registers those processes (“the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox”), but art can refract them as well. The poem teaches the reader how to read (it); the best minds . . . obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalogue the meter & the vibrating plane, . . . made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose . . .

The artist-alchemist transforms the “sudden flash” of nuclear explosion into artistic revelation: coal into gold. The juxtaposition of two visual images (“hydrogen jukebox,” for example) works as poetic alchemy; the energy of the poem (the trapped archangel) inheres in the juxtaposition, as the oddity of the image thus created prompts speculation. “Hydrogen jukebox,” for example, suggests how the destructiveness of contemporary culture seeps into and shapes collective consciousness through popular art and other quotidian forms of communication. “Most people don’t see what’s going on around them,” Burroughs would tell an interviewer in 1962. “That’s my principal message to writers: for God’s sake, keep your eyes open” (68). In Howl, Ginsberg fashioned – and described – an aesthetic designed to inspire reflection. After all, as Jack Finney had shown, bodies could only be snatched while asleep. Central to the Beat aesthetic was the absurdity as well as the tragedy of contemporary society. While Finney’s science fiction may seem a far cry from Beat experimentation, Burroughs used the frame of science fiction – a space invasion – as the premise of his Nova trilogy of the 1960s, beginning with The Ticket That Exploded. By the second postwar decade, in fact, humor became a prominent response to the madness that Ginsberg parodied in Howl. Beat associate Terry Southern transformed British writer Peter George’s 1958 Red Alert from a somber cautionary tale about the potential for nuclear destruction into the wickedly funny screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, which depicts nuclear holocaust as the conse-

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quence of male sexual anxieties and competition. The film was characteristic of the increasing literary and cinematic embrace of the absurdity not only of nuclear destruction but also of the world and its politics generally that marked the legacy of the Beat Generation and of such publications as MAD magazine (founded in 1952), in what has come loosely to be called postmodernism. Thomas Pynchon brilliantly lampooned the postwar anxieties through the aptly named figure of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a work that exemplifies this tradition. Oedipa finds herself ensnared in the nightmare scenario of the postwar period when she comes home from a Tupperware party to find herself executor of the will of a former boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. The bored suburban housewife is the Everywoman of the Atomic Age, and her confusion over her possible discovery of a secret alternative communication system gets at the heart of the Cold War anxieties. Oedipa is the cultural unconscious, enthralled by what Betty Friedan, two years earlier, had dubbed “the feminine mystique.” Friedan used “brainwashed” (182) to describe both male and female acceptance of the image of woman that Sloan Wilson’s Betsy Rath so completely embodied: suited to and wanting nothing more than her role as wife and mother. She drew on Bruno Bettelheim’s study of the psychology of dehumanization in the Nazi death camps to describe what was happening to women and their children in the suburbs, which she famously – and controversially – dubbed a “comfortable concentration camp” (282). Ironically, her concern about the passive children whom thwarted women were producing through overmothering strikingly resembled Wylie’s critique of momism in A Generation of Vipers. It is difficult not to see Oedipa – whose unconventional psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarious, turns out to have practiced his craft in a Nazi camp – as stepping parodically out of the pages of The Feminine Mystique. Friedan noted that rites of passage frequently provoked a woman’s sense of confusion about her role and her desires, and Oedipa certainly has what Friedan calls, following the sociologist Eric Erickson, an “identity crisis.” Early in the novel, Oedipa tries unsuccessfully to find her image in a bathroom mirror and experiences “a moment of nearly pure terror” before realizing that the mirror was broken. While Friedan cautions that “ ‘self-realization’ or ‘self-fulfillment’ or ‘identity’ does not come from looking into a mirror in rapt contemplation of one’s own image” but from a woman’s discovery of her “human purpose” (333), The Crying of Lot 49 manifests a deep suspicion of the very terms of “identity,” individual or collective. If, as Friedan suggests, gender roles register large-scale brainwashing, then all desires – and all sense of human purpose – should be suspect. It is unclear in the novel, which one reviewer called “a metaphysical thriller in the form of a pornographic comic strip” (“Nosepicking Contents”, 131), whether it is the absence of identity or its too complete acceptance that leads to dehumanization. Friedan was critical of the artistic move toward abstraction that she saw in the Beats and in such visual arts movements as abstract expressionism, which she condemned as a “retreat” into psychology from politics and an “evasion of meaning” (187). Yet, the trajectory of interest in the susceptibility of the unconscious to (often

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dehumanizing) cultural influences manifested in postwar literature and arts shows how the psychological was, as Fanon so forcefully demonstrated, distinctly political. Oedipa the English major is no less representative than Oedipa the housewife, and, as a figure for the reader, she, like the poet of Howl, inspires contemplation of the nature of artistic and cultural production and its relationship to the circulation of information and the production of meaning. Oedipa is on the cusp of a new generation that, as Eldridge Cleaver would observe in 1968, was in the throes of the “psychic pain of waking into consciousness to find their heroes turned by events into villains” (69). In 1952, Fanon had called for a new approach to psychoanalysis that would recognize the susceptibility of the unconscious to demeaning cultural images. That work inspired his revolutionary call, in 1961, for a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes . . . above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men. (315)

In 1966, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael would summon one of his “patron saints: Frantz Fanon” (151) to denounce institutionalized racism, including the Nazi strategy (that he sees reproduced in the United States) of torturing a victim “to the point where he ceases to affirm his identity” (168) as well as “the physical and psychological murder of our peoples” (169). The declaration of revolution that Carmichael issues in this speech grows out of the observations that preoccupied the writers and cultural analysts of the postwar period. From propaganda and brainwashing to the invisible man and the man in the gray flannel suit, the issues explored in their work presaged his assertion that “[t]hose who can define are the masters” (153) and his call for a new history, written from the perspective of the margins. As Cleaver would soon note, the “howl of the beatnicks and their scathing, outraged denunciation of the system – characterized by Ginsberg as Moloch, a bloodthirsty Semitic deity to which the ancient tribes sacrificed their first born children – was a serious, irreverent declaration of war” (71). With his emphasis on the centrality of definitions, Carmichael explained what much of the postwar literature dramatized: the political implications of the instability of such terms as “human being” and the cultural dimension of power. Friedan concluded The Feminine Mystique with the thought that “the energy locked up in those obsolete masculine and feminine roles is the social equivalent of the physical energy locked up in the realm of E=MC2 – the force that unleashed the holocaust of Hiroshima” (395). Such references, along with a condemnation of the genocides of white civilization, suffuse the writing of Carmichael and Cleaver as well. The literature following the war showed how and why these terms had become the reference points of the Atomic Age – and with what consequences. In so doing, they help to explain as well how and why the call for revolution found expression in the profound educational and cultural as well as political transformations that have come to be known as “the sixties.”

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References and Further Reading Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: H. Liveright, 1928. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (pp. 253–64). Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Burroughs, William. Queer. New York: Viking Press, 1985. Burroughs, William. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Burroughs, William. “White Junk.” In Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960–1997 (pp. 60–81). Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Double Agents Series, 2001. Burroughs, William S., and Allen Hibbard. Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” In To Free a Generation: The Dialectics of Liberation (pp. 150– 74). Ed. David Cooper. New York: Collier Books, 1968. Cleaver, Eldridge. “The White Race and Its Heroes.” In Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (pp. 65–83). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Condon, Richard. The Manchurian Candidate. 1959. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Ellison, Ralph. “On Initiation Rites and Power: Ralph Ellison Speaks at West Point” (transcript of address from March 1969). Comparative Literature 15, no. 2 (Spring 1974): 165–86. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963. Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. In Allen Ginsburg, Collected Poems 1947–1997 (pp. 134–41). New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. Hersey, John. Hiroshima. 1946. New York: Random House, 1985. Holmes, John Clellon. “This Is a Beat Generation,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 16, 1952, 10, 19–22. Lhamon, W.T. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Meerloo, Joost A.M. The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1956. Miller, Arthur. The Crucible. 1953. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Murdock, George Peter. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan, 1949. “Nosepicking Contests” (review of The Crying of Lot 49). Time, May 6, 1966, 131. Okada, John. No-No Boy. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Park, Robert Ezra. “Behind Our Masks.” In Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture (pp. 244–58). Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999. Whyte, William Hollingsworth. The Organization Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Arbor House, 1955.

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The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature Ursula K. Heise

In the futuristic San Francisco described in Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), organic and robotic animals are kept together on the rooftops of apartment buildings, backdrops for a story of conflict and convergence between biological and mechanical life forms as well as between humans and animals. These scenes of domestic techno-biology foreshadow the recurring concern of recent American literature with the status of humans as a species and with species boundaries in general. Two central questions surface in the texts that follow Dick’s urban technopastoral: is technology changing humans’ minds and bodies so profoundly that they must be considered a new species? And does our increased knowledge about animals and humans any longer justify the absolute ontological distinction between them that Western humanism has drawn in the past? Although different in their points of departure, these two questions converge in their uncertainty about humans’ status as a biological species, and thereby circumscribe a “posthuman turn” in recent philosophy, art, and literature. This posthuman turn is by no means limited to the USAmerican texts and artifacts on which this chapter focuses within the framework of the present volume, but has found equally compelling articulations in works from other cultures, to which I will occasionally refer by way of context and comparison. The concept of “posthumanism” gained currency in the 1970s as part of postmodernist critiques of Enlightenment thought, particularly the assumption that all human beings can be described in terms of a cross-cultural and transhistorical essence on which humanist perspectives might rely. Anthropologists, historians, linguists, philosophers, as well as literary and cultural critics, questioned this assumption from the various angles of feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism so as to highlight

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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in what ways the “essentially human” tended to articulate and justify the perspective of politically and socioeconomically dominant groups rather than the neutral viewpoint they claimed (Badmington 4–10). In speculative fiction, the genre that this chapter will primarily focus on, such questions about universality and its reliance on definitions of the politically and culturally “other” were often articulated through the figure of the alien, whose biological difference and real or supposed technological superiority served as convenient allegories for biological and social differences among humans. In the 1980s, “posthumanism” came to describe a rather different and more specific philosophical project, the questioning of the boundaries between human and machine. In and of itself, this project was not new: It runs back at least to Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s 1748 treatise L’homme machine and runs through works such as Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” (1810), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1817), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831), Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1921), and much twentieth-century speculative fiction. But in the 1980s, this tradition crystallized in the concepts of “cyberspace” and the “cyborg,” new machine-generated forms of spatiality that in turn enabled new forms of human and nonhuman consciousness and being. The figure of the cyborg in particular, invented in the early 1960s but popularized by Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1984), came to signal the emancipatory and utopian hopes connected with the transcendence of merely “natural” human form at that moment, and was expressed above all in the new science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk. Digital technologies have continued to fuel posthumanism to this day. Yet in the 1990s, rapid advances in genetics and biotechnology came to superimpose themselves on earlier visions of media technologies as engines of human evolution. The cloning of Dolly in 1996 and the mapping of the human genome in 2003 marked important steps on the way to a different posthuman imaginary whose central problematic lies less in the boundary between human and machine than in that between human and animal. Haraway’s shift from cyborgs to “companion species” as markers of shifting species concepts is symptomatic of a much broader surge of interest in questions surrounding animal life in its relation to humans. Not only has the emergent area of “animality studies” produced a new wave of theorizations of the animal, but fiction, film, and videogames have also taken up the question of whether and how humans should be considered a species apart, and what the implications might be of posthuman perspectives that approach them as one animal species among many. The three sections of this chapter will trace the three stages I have just outlined in American literature and film of the last 50 years. “The Alien Moment” focuses mainly on the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and the different functions of the alien in that period, occasionally looking forward to more recent appearances of extraterrestrials as a way of thinking about the limits of the human. “The Cyborg Moment” shifts to the 1980s and early 1990s with their particular fusions of the organic and the mechanic and the challenges they articulate for conventional notions of the human. “The Animal Moment,” finally, deals mainly with the later 1990s and early 2000s

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and the figure of the animal as a reconceptualization of the species question. This roughly chronological progression is not meant to suggest that aliens no longer feature in current speculative fiction, or that animals did not play a role before the 1990s. But it does point to shifting emphases that are themselves indicative of broader, changing cultural concerns about the nature of the human. So broad, indeed, are these concerns that themes and devices formerly specific to science fiction have now migrated to authors and texts not usually associated with the genre, in a shift that highlights how much the questions of biology and technology that have shaped this genre since its beginnings in the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have now become part of mainstream culture in the United States and elsewhere. Novels such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985); Richard Powers’s Gain (1993), Plowing the Dark (1998), and Generosity (2009); Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997); David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1998); Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003); William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003); and Laurence Gonzales’s Lucy (2010), to name a few, address media technologies, agricultural technologies, chemistry, medicine, and genetics in sociocultural contexts of the present rather than the future. Human minds and bodies, in all of these texts, are irreversibly altered by science and technology, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The cyborg and the animal mixing with the human are no longer figures of the future, but dimensions of human identity as it exists now, in these authors’ visions.

The Alien Moment The encounter between humans and beings from other planets is undoubtedly the theme that most clearly characterizes the science fiction genre in the popular imagination. Yet aliens are more common in some national traditions and some historical moments of science fiction than others. In American science fiction of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, aliens fulfill three rather different narrative and ideological functions. In a classic such as the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), as well as many other works of the period, the arrival of aliens constitutes a real or perceived threat for all inhabitants of Earth that forces people to put aside their differences and recognize their common humanity in the face of the extraplanetary other. For a planet riven by the conflicts of the Cold War and decolonization, divided over issues of gender and race, and always facing the risk of nuclear annihilation, the alien presence offers an opportunity for the emergence of a global consciousness and in some cases even of international governance. In such scenarios, the alien presence serves to highlight what humans share and encourages the unification of a species whose internal differences turn out to be not only relatively superficial but also in fact obsolete, manifestations of an older age of communicative and political isolation that is now coming to an end. Aliens thereby initiate benign forms of globalization, universalism, and cosmopolitanism in which the affirmation of differences is itself relegated to an older, pretechnological age.

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But obviously, in this basic scenario, difference as such does not so much disappear as shift from confrontations among humans to confrontations of humans with another group construed as even more implacably Other. Hence, even as aliens can appear as a planetary unifying force, they also quite often take on the opposite role of allegorizing already existing differences between humans. Television and film series such as Star Trek (1966–9) and Star Wars (whose initial trilogy was released between 1977 and 1983, with additional films following from 1999 to 2008) illustrate this tendency in rather painfully obvious ways. Not only does the starship Enterprise, with a crew whose international origins are highlighted by somewhat embarrassingly crude imitations of foreign accents, gesture toward a utopian post-Cold War human community, but also many of its voyages confront the Earthlings with alien allegories of their own condition. For example, in the episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (1969), the crew becomes entangled in the conflict between two aliens whose bipartite black and white faces at first sight make them appear to be members of the same community. Yet, as it turns out, Bele and Lokai hunt each other to kill, as the location of the white half of the face on the right side in one case and on the left in the other marks them in each other’s eyes as members of biologically different and hostile groups. The patent absurdity of this distinction in the eyes of the terrestrials, who have trouble even perceiving it at first, serves as an all too obvious allegory of American racial conflict in the age of the Civil Rights movement. With similar obviousness if less critical distance, the body snatchers, alien microbes, and dark forces of much science fiction and film of the period allegorize geopolitical and racial conflicts. Far from serving as unifying forces, aliens in these contexts appear as hyperbolized versions of intrahuman differences, differences that are perceived as so fundamental and irremediable that they can only be expressed in the vocabulary of species distinctions. When allegorical aliens of this kind reappear in more recent science fictions, they tend to do so in the context of more complex and ambiguous plots. In Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn [1987], Adulthood Rites [1988], and Imago [1989]), the Oankali save a few human survivors of a global atomic war – but only because their own biology forces them to seek gene exchanges with alien species for a reproductive process that involves three rather than just two genders. Butler’s extraterrestrials thereby function as both saviors of the human species and as a brutal colonial power that leaves the survivors little choice but to link their own future with that of the alien invaders. The trilogy’s complex and sometimes self-contradictory engagement with questions of gender, race and species difference, imperialism, assimilation and resistance, and essentialism and constructivism in the conceptualization of identity has been discussed at great length by literary critics (see Boulter; Grewe-Volpp; Luckhurst; Zaki). Yet the allegory of the alien as a figure for the human Other continues to structure the trilogy, a procedure that has been harshly criticized by Walter Benn Michaels for its assumption that differences of race and culture can be compared to differences of species; any hope for reconciliation among humans, in Michaels’s view, must rest on the opposite premise that humans share a great deal with each

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other, and indeed that their differences only assume their political and cultural meanings when considered against this background. Butler’s trilogy also illustrates the third important function that aliens already assumed in science fiction of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as catalysts of an evolutionary leap that ultimately propels humans into a different species identity. The aliens of Arthur Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End (1953) unify humankind and initiate a golden age of global prosperity, but only until a generation of children with unusual capabilities is born who ultimately merge in a collectivity that is neither accessible nor understandable to the last generation of old-style humans, whose species goes extinct. Themselves incapable of achieving such an evolutionary transformation, Clarke’s aliens serve as nursemaids to species who can. A similar assumption underlies Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (2001), in which an unknown alien species not only prepares the evolutionary path from primates to hominids but also transforms one of the space-traveling humans in Earth’s future into the first Star-Child, a creature that retains some of the appearances of a human baby but, floating above Earth in outer space, clearly heralds the beginning of a new stage in human evolution. As a figure of biological as well as technological Otherness, the alien therefore traces the limits of the human in different and sometimes contradictory ways between the 1950s and the 1970s: by forcing humans to acknowledge their shared species identity, by highlighting differences between humans but also pointing to ways of overcoming disparities, and by imagining evolutionary leaps that transform humans into posthumans merged into new social and political structures.

The Cyborg Moment From the 1980s onward, the cultural reflection on humans as a species takes a somewhat different shape, as Fredric Jameson has argued in one of his many essays on science fiction. Starting with Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), according to Jameson, the genre shifts from the classic or exotic alien to the representation of the alien other as the same, namely the android, whose differentiation from the earlier robot secures a necessarily humanoid form. This may be said to be the moment of a kind of Hegelian selfconsciousness or reflexivity in the genre, in which our attention and preoccupation as readers turn inward, and we meditate on the “android cogito”, which is to say on the gap or flaw in the self as such. (141)

In fact, the “android cogito” presents itself in two shapes in the 1980s, as androids so apparently similar to humans that their difference can only be detected with sophisticated testing equipment, as is the case in Scott’s film, and as cyborgs consisting of fusions of the organic and the mechanic, such as they appear in James Cameron’s

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Terminator (1984) or Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987). Both androids and cyborgs consist of pseudohuman bodies and minds generated by advanced technology, and thereby ask anew the old question of whether a sufficiently sophisticated machine is ontologically different from a human. But the inextricable mixtures of biology and technology in the android and the cyborg also raise the question of whether human identity was not in fact circumscribed by technology from its beginnings at the dawn of prehistory – the possibility that Kubrick’s 2001 had already explored – so that the notion of any “authentic” humanness outside of technology turns into a philosophical mirage. This idea lies at the core of Donna Haraway’s well-known “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1984), which seeks to free the figure of the cyborg from the militarist and masculinist context in which it appears in the Terminator and Robocop fantasies, and to reinterpret it as a utopian figure of possibility for feminist and socialist thought: The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense. . . . The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family. . . . The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. (150–1)

For Haraway, then, the cyborg offers the possibility of rethinking the human beyond conventional categories of gender, race, class, and geopolitics, and of reinventing psychic as well as social and political structures outside of the limits imposed by older political utopias that sought the return to a point before technology and modernity. But at the same time that she turns the cyborg into an alternative myth, a tool to reimagine the future, Haraway also emphasizes its present reality: By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machines and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. (150)

Jameson and Haraway, therefore, both identify a turning point in the imagination of human identity in the 1980s that revolves around the figure of the android or cyborg. Their theoretical analysis is borne out by the emergence of a new subgenre of science fiction at that moment, cyberpunk, which revolved around innovative information, communication, transportation, and medical technologies that were transforming the human body in unprecedentedly intimate ways. As the novelist Bruce Sterling points out in his preface to the Mirrorshades anthology of short stories, an introduction that comes as close as any cyberpunk text to functioning as the movement’s manifesto,

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For the cyberpunks, . . . technology is visceral. It is not the bottle genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds. . . . Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens. Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry – techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self. (xiii)

Most central among these new technological interfaces was what the novelist William Gibson, the most prominent writer in the group, famously called “cyberspace” in a 1982 short story: the global network of data structures and flows envisioned as a new kind of space, more than a decade ahead of the introduction of the first browser that made the Internet accessible to the general public. Whereas the entire tradition of literature on the human-machine boundary focused on either mechanized humans or anthropomorphized machines (animated dolls, robots, and intelligent or emotive supercomputers), cyberpunk focuses on a new kind of spatiality in which very different forms of identity – from “normal” (if technologically enhanced) humans and software personality constructs all the way to avatars and artificial intelligences – can unfold and interact. The leap ahead in technology, in other words, no longer consists in a closer approximation of the machine to the human body or mind, but in its ability to create new types of spatial logic and movement in relation to which the human body and mind are reconfigured. It is against the cultural invention of cyberspace, which replaces outer space in the speculative fiction of the 1980s, that the figure of the android or cyborg acquires its true importance – not so much in the organicmechanic hybrids that for all their futuristic appearance preserve the integrity of the human body in its essential outlines, but in the organic-virtual hybrids that populate cyberpunk novels and redefine body and mind in their relation to data flows.1 Cyberpunk in film and fiction, from Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982) and the novels and short stories of Sterling, Gibson, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Rudy Rucker to Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace, and the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy, explores the modalities of this new form of being. The Matrix films from the turn of the millennium mark one kind of culmination of the cyberspace imaginary, especially in comparison to the most famous cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). At the beginning of Gibson’s novel, the hacker, Case, has been neurologically mutilated by his former employer so that he is no longer able to access the virtual matrix. This handicap condemns him to a life of crime and despair until he is hired for a computer break-in by a shady group of individuals working on behalf of an artificial intelligence. They restore his capability for neural interface with the data matrix, and his first reentry into the virtual realm is

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nothing short of a pseudo-religious reincarnation. Gibson’s description of the virtual matrix clearly marks it as the successor to the science fiction galaxies of old and sets it apart as the realm of a higher, extraordinary, almost transcendent experience. The software engineer Thomas A. Anderson (aka Neo), played by Keanu Reeves in the first Matrix movie, has a similar experience of reincarnation and recognition when a band of rebels decouples him from the machine that keeps all humans connected to the matrix in this vision of the future, and decants him, in a process that visually resembles a literal birth, from the organic fluids in which his body has been preserved. Yet all of Gibson’s assumptions are reversed in the Matrix scenario: the realm of the virtual is indistinguishable from ordinary experience and accessible to all humans – indeed, inescapable for most. Reincarnation here means becoming conscious again of the organic realities of a body that for all practical purposes had been relegated to the side in Gibson’s universe; it implies turning away from the lures of the virtual and encountering the “desert of the real.” Some critics have argued that precisely for this reason, the core philosophy of the first Matrix film is better described as a return to old-fashioned humanism than any kind of posthumanism (Bartlett and Byers). Maybe so – but the fascination of viewing the movie lies not in the real world the film ideologically endorses but in the virtual realm it ideologically rejects, with the fantastic possibilities for perception, movement, and action that its purely simulated nature enables. By presenting this virtual realm as more adventurous and visually attractive than the devastated physical world, the Matrix movies do line up with the posthuman imaginary of the cyberpunk universe. The cyborg moment, then, marks out a rather different set of posthuman possibilities than the alien moment did. The encounter with the alien in speculative fiction usually functions as a first impulse or as the decisive step in humankind’s movement toward some kind of greater unity – minimally, global governance, but, in the more radical versions, the emergence of some kind of overmind, collective consciousness, or biologically and psychologically distinct form of species community. The cyborg moment, by contrast, emphasizes the potential for posthuman transformation that arises at the moment of fission, either of community or of self. What the various modes of technological self-enhancement as well as the realm of virtuality offer is the possibility, even for a single individual, to live more than one life, assume more than one identity, and belong to various and contradictory communities. In typical postmodernist manner, this fracturing of community and self is not usually rejected as a “flaw” in the self (as Jameson interprets it, wrongly in my view) but celebrated as a transformation into a new mode of human existence. This is particularly clear in Sterling’s novel Schismatrix (1985), which brings together in its very title the ideas of fracture and new patterns. In Sterling’s future, humankind has spread across the solar system, but does not live on other planets so much as in artificial habitats that are frequently prone to breakdown. Humans are divided between the Mechanists, who seek life extension by means of mechanical body prostheses and medico-physical technologies, and the Shapers, who procreate by carefully selected gene lines and psychologically condition their offspring. Under

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the strain of internal strife, the malfunctioning of habitats, and the pressure of encounters with a whole series of alien species, humankind begins to fracture into a multitude of factions, sects, parties, and other groups. Biotechnology has reached such a level of development that humans can reengineer their own bodies to adapt to completely alien environments: one group, at the end of the novel, reengineers itself as a community of “aquatic posthumans” to live in the oceans of the Jovian moon Europa. As one character remarks, humankind has reached the stage where even a simple disagreement between two individuals or small groups can lead to the emergence of a new species if one of the contending parties wishes to dissociate itself completely from the other. Sterling’s vision of a humanity in no way united but, on the contrary, dividing endlessly into a multitude of divergent future species stands out by its tone of celebration and utopianism: “The new multiple humanities hurtled blindly toward their unknown destinations, and the vertigo of acceleration struck deep. Old preconceptions were in tatters, old loyalties were obsolete. Whole societies were paralyzed by mind-blasting vistas of absolute possibility” (195), an absolute possibility that, as the novel’s final words assert, will lead “ ‘Somewhere wonderful’ ” (236).

The Animal Moment Sterling’s vision of genetic engineering as an engine of human evolution prefigures the increased interest in biotechnologies a decade later. Indeed, from the mid-1990s onward, the discussion over posthumanism in general gradually shifts from its earlier focus on the boundary between human and machine to the one between human and animal. New developments in biotechnology such as the creation of insect-resistant plant varieties in agriculture and controversies over their use, the cloning of the sheep Dolly in 1996, and the mapping of the human genome completed in 2003 mark some of the milestones that have kept biotechnologies in the public debate. Environmental crises, including the current rapid loss of animal and plant species around the world, have attracted increased attention to questions of species extinction and survival. In the university, a new transdisciplinary area of animal studies has emerged that draws on the philosophical traditions of the animal rights movement, recent poststructuralist work by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben on “the question of the animal,” and a steady flow of new scientific insights into the cognitive, communicative, emotive, and cultural capabilities of animals. A great deal of work in this area has pointed not only to shortcomings and paradoxes in the ways in which Western cultures have drawn the distinction between human and animal, but also to the problematic political implications of this distinction. As Cary Wolfe in particular has argued, the difference between human and animal can be considered foundational for many other inequalities among humans themselves, in that, historically, innumerable forms of social discrimination and political oppression have based themselves on the explicit or implicit assumption that those outside one’s own social groups were somehow not human at

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all, subhuman, or at any rate not fully human in the sense of one’s own group (Animal Rites 7–9; see also What Is Posthumanism ch. 3). Donna Haraway’s recent work has, at least symbolically, marked this transition from the cyborg to the animal as the crucial figure of posthumanism with the publication of her Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2008). Focusing exclusively on pet animals and among them specifically on dogs, rather than on the lab and factory-farming animals at the center of many debates over animal rights, Haraway argues that she has “come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species, in which reproductive biotechnologies are generally a surprise” (11) and that [c]yborgs and companion species each bring together the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in unexpected ways. (4)

Too vague to establish any genuine conceptual bridge, statements such as these nevertheless highlight the shift in the exploration of the limits of the human from the cyborg to the animal. Approaching this shift from the perspective of literature, one could say that the figure of the alien in earlier speculative fiction has effectively split into two components, that of technological superiority and that of biological otherness, which are displaced on to the cyborg and on to the animal, respectively. This split does not imply, however, that the animal is invoked to reestablish the authenticity that the cyborg so obviously defied. Many of the animals that appear in recent literature and film, on the contrary, are themselves part of the all-pervasive influence of technology that the figure of the cyborg helped to foreground. In recent animated films such as Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) or Pixar’s Wall-E (2008), cyborgs or robots are accompanied by animals to whom they are deeply attached (see Heise). Other works prominently feature animals who have been technologically modified to the point where they have acquired human characteristics, or humans into whose bodies animal genes have been incorporated. Jonathan Lethem’s novel Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), for example, develops the typical mix of noir detective plot and futuristic settings from cyberpunk fiction and film further by positioning both humans and animals in the crucial mystery novel slots of private investigator, murder victim, and murderer. In Lethem’s future San Francisco, humans have developed an “evolution therapy” designed to accelerate children’s development,2 producing a strange category of children called “babyheads” who are far more advanced in their capabilities than their physical age would allow, but also suffer from serious side effects of the therapy. Animals, too, have been evolved (the verb has turned transitive) by the same means. The human protagonist, P.I. Conrad Metcalf, investigates the murder of an evolved ewe named Dulcie; is assaulted by the kangaroo Joey Castle, who works as hired muscle for an underworld boss; and encounters another P.I. who worked on his case earlier, the ape Walter Surface, whose “face was human enough to

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look weary with trouble, creased with the contemplation of things most humans, let alone most apes, never see” (158). Technology seems to have benefited the animals, who seem on the whole vital and reasonably well adjusted socially, whereas many of the humans have been stripped of any personality by constant, legalized drug use and the reliance on so-called memory boxes to compensate for the severe amnesia the drugs provoke. Evolved animals play an even more central role in Sheri Tepper’s The Family Tree (1997), a novel whose plot unfolds in two alternately presented time periods. In the ecologically devastated and overpopulated late twentieth century, a small group of humans exterminates most of humankind through a virus so as to rescue nonhuman species and the planet as a whole from destruction. Several thousand years into the future, a population of intelligent beings keeps so-called ummini as their work and pet species, investigates the past, and devises a way to travel back in time to the twentieth century. It is only when the reader comes to see these beings through the eyes of twentieth-century people – several hundred pages into the novel! – that it becomes clear they are not themselves humans at all, but the evolved descendants of late twentieth-century biotech lab animals. The “ummini” the animals keep are descended from the humans who committed the genocide, a consequence of the humans’ decision to forgo language and become subject to animal rule as a way of atoning for their crime. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) revolves around a similar genocide, this time perpetrated by a single bioengineer, but apparently with the same intention of averting terminal destruction of the environment and human life. Crake, a biotech genius, kills off most of humankind by means of a virus hidden in an aphrodisiac pill, and replaces them with a newly designed group of humans, the Crakers, biologically engineered so as to sidestep all the troubles of culture, religion, violence, and warfare that brought down the old humanity. The novel tells the beginnings of this new species from the perspective of Crake’s friend Jimmy, whom he has left alive as a caretaker for the new humans, and alternates between accounts of Jimmy’s past and his bleak present. The Crakers themselves are genuine posthumans in Sterling’s sense, with plenty of animal material blended into their genome, and both they and Jimmy are surrounded by innumerable species of genetically engineered plants and animals – including the dangerous pigoons, a species of pigs with partly human genes. All three novels, therefore, centrally feature the blurring of genetic and cognitive boundaries between humans and animals, as do other works ranging from Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985) to the television series Dark Angel (2000–3). Yet the import of this convergence is rather different in The Family Tree than in Gun or Oryx and Crake. Both Lethem and Atwood retreat from the species-blurred world they create to more or less conventional forms of humanism. In Atwood’s novel, the Crakers create an effigy of Jimmy while he is away from their camp for several days, thereby manifesting the beginning of a culture that promises to bring all the delights and complications that Crake had intended to engineer away; for all their physical and social difference, therefore, the Crakers are on their way to becoming a new version

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of the old humans, defined both positively and negatively by their culture. Lethem reinvokes humanism more obliquely. Conrad Metcalf, tired of a society whose technologies seem to deliver no genuine life improvements but merely gadgets that greet their users with gratuitous flourishes of music, willingly accepts another long term in the cryogenic suspension that replaces jail time in this vision of the future, hoping that by the time he is brought back, a better society will have emerged. A purely negative reassertion of Metcalf ’s human authenticity, then – but a reassertion of the authentically human nonetheless. Tepper, by contrast, fully accepts and indeed targets as her final vision a world in which intelligent animals and humans, reconciled over past atrocities, share culture, resources, and power. Using terms developed by the literary critic Cary Wolfe (Animal Rites 5–6), one could say that Atwood and Lethem present “posthuman” scenarios in their novels, in the sense that they sketch worlds with a vast range of different forms of biological and technological consciousness, but in the end return to attributing a special status to authentic humanness. Tepper’s novel, by contrast, is fully “posthumanist” since it endorses a view that rejects human superiority over other animal species in any form. The most radical posthumanist vision of this kind in recent literature, however, has emerged not from US-American but from German speculative fiction, though it deserves mention here because it is directly inspired by Tepper’s Family Tree. Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten (The Decommissioning of Species, 2008), begins its plot in the year 476 after the Liberation of animals from human rule. In what used to be Europe and Africa, an animal-dominated civilization centered around three cities has evolved, and a culture of intelligent automata – punningly called “Ceramicans” – has sprung up in the former South America. The animal society is governed by a lion with the euphonious name of Cyrus Iemelian Adrian Vinicius Golden, who is assisted by badgers and wolves and, somewhat more originally, bats and dragonflies as his advisors. This scenario of an animal kingdom ruled by a lion sounds at first like a throwback to the world of animal fable and Disneyesque stereotype. But when it turns out that the lion’s mate, the lioness, used to be a swarm of insects, it becomes clear that the concept of “species” no longer works in the accustomed ways in Dath’s vision of the future. “The designation ‘horse,’ for example, did of course not refer to the same sort of being as before the Liberation. Rather, the new horse’s head, just like the heads of any other creature that possessed language, displayed hominid features,” the narrator explains (34). And, even more to the point, “Since each creature resembled only its very own species and almost everyone could produce offspring with everyone else, distinctions between genuine species had become as pointless as distinctions between human races” (34). This postspecies rather than posthuman civilization is overrun and destroyed by the Ceramicans – clearly the descendants of the cyborgs of old – but not before they have expedited “seedlings” of their own genetic material into space in order to enable the creation of colonies on Venus and Mars and, much later, the return of two descendants of these colonies to Earth. In his ambitious stacking of futures upon futures, Dath goes Tepper one better and envisions civilizations whose ability to conceptualize and use different biological forms as transferrable data

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has moved them beyond the species concept altogether. Not only is the human not set apart anymore in this world, but it has also become part of biological data flows that enable individual beings to add or subtract biological forms and functions to their own bodies at will, creating for each “its very own species.” The lion’s five names, in this context, turn out not to be a sign of royal megalomania but of the five successive, biologically very different identities this creature has assumed, starting with a human genetic engineer who helped develop the techniques that triggered the Liberation. Few contemporary novels that are concerned with posthumanism can compare to Dath’s in their conceptual scope and linguistic inventiveness. But even in less experimental works, the question of the human in its relation to the animal persistently resurfaces in contemporary literature. Bernard Werber’s trilogy The Ants (1991), The Day of the Ants (1992), and The Revolution of the Ants (1996), spectacularly successful in France in the 1990s, features both ant and human protagonists in an attempt to render nonhuman cognition and perception realistically. British novelist Will Self ’s Great Apes (1997) imagines a world in which chimps have taken the evolutionary leap forward and created something very like twentieth-century human society, with humans themselves as an endangered species to be kept in zoos and protected in the wild. But this world unravels when the simian protagonist, the artist Simon Dykes, starts imagining he is actually human and comes from a human-dominated society – though his delusion is upended by the novelistic preface in which the author (chimp, obviously) explains that this narrative device is his way of attempting to imagine the world from a human point of view. Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (2008), a lyrical novel with no pretense to science fiction, features a protagonist whose experiences of human loss drive him to seek the company of “terminal animals,” members of highly endangered species in zoos and in the wild, in search of empathic bonds that cross species boundaries. James Cameron’s immensely successful film Avatar (2009) uses the setting of another planet to explore questions about the relationship between human, humanoid, and nonhuman species both there and back on planet Earth. And Laurence Gonzales’s novel Lucy (2010) features a protagonist who turns out to be the bonobo-human offspring of a primate researcher stationed in the Congo and one of his subjects. In enormously varied ways and by means of quite different narrative and visual techniques, all of these works nevertheless keep returning to the question of how we might envision a world in which being human no longer means being categorically set apart from other biological species – in which being human entails some mode of being posthuman. With the exception of Cameron’s Avatar, none of these works fits comfortably under the “science fiction” label, or even into the broader genre of speculative fiction. Indeed, one of the most remarkable developments of the last few decades has been the spread of science fiction modes of storytelling, often involving one form or the other of the posthuman imagination, into works and authors not normally associated with the genre. The critic Brian McHale had already pointed to mixtures of science fiction with mainstream fiction as one of the hallmarks of the postmodern with reference to such authors as Thomas Pynchon and Kathy Acker (“POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM”).

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This tendency is becoming more accentuated as authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro in England, Michel Houellebecq in France, and Karen Tei Yamashita and Junot Diaz in the United States now deploy science fiction techniques and devices in innovative ways to reflect on the technologically saturated present. No longer confined to the imagination of utopian or dystopian futures, the transformation of humans into a new species – conceptually as well as technologically – has become the concern of literature and culture at large at the beginning of the third millennium.

Notes 1.

Some critics such as Katherine Hayles have argued that this cyberspatial imagination, for all its high-tech trappings, reiterates the old Western longing to have the mind transcend the body; against such tendencies, she insists on the importance of embodiment in any vision of posthumanism (Hayles ch. 1).

2. The basic idea is lifted straight out of Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik, in which adults undergo a similar kind of therapy to enhance their own cognitive abilities.

References and Further Reading Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Badmington, Neil. “Introduction: Approaching Posthumanism.” In Posthumanism (pp. 1–10). Ed. Neil Badmington. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2000. Bartlett, Laura, and Thomas B. Byers. “Back to the Future: The Humanist Matrix.” Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 28–46. Boulter, Amanda. “Polymorphous Futures: Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy.” In American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique (pp. 170–85). Ed. Tim Armstrong. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Butler, Octavia. Adulthood Rites. New York, Warner, 1988. Butler, Octavia. Dawn. New York: Aspect, 1987. Butler, Octavia. Imago. New York, Warner, 1989. Dath, Dietmar. Die Abschaffung der Arten. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. New York: Ballantine-Del Rey, 1996. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. New York: Penguin, 2000. Grewe-Volpp, Christa. “Natural Spaces Mapped by Human Minds”: Ökokritische und ökofeministische

Analysen zeitgenössischer amerikanischer Romane. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr, 2004. Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” 1984. In Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149–81). New York: Routledge, 1991. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heise, Ursula K. “The Android and the Animal.” PMLA (March 2009): 504–10. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Lethem, Jonathan. Gun, with Occasional Music. New York: Tom Doherty, 1994. Luckhurst, Roger. “ ‘Horror and Beauty in Rare Combination’: The Miscegenate Fictions of

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Octavia Butler.” Women: A Cultural Review 7 (1996): 28–38. McHale, Brian. “POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM.” In Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction (pp. 308–23). Ed. Larry McCaffery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Reprinted in Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (pp. 225– 42). London: Routledge, 1992. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Political Science Fictions.” New Literary History 31 (2000): 649–64. Millet, Lydia. How the Dead Dream. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008. Self, Will. Great Apes. New York: Grove, 1997. Sterling, Bruce. “Preface.” In Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (pp. ix– xvi). New York: Ace, 1986.

Sterling, Bruce. Schismatrix. 1985. New York: Ace, 1996. Tepper, Sheri S. The Family Tree. New York: Avon, 1997. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Wolfe, Cary. Ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Zaki, Hoda M. “Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler.” Science Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 239–51.

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Narrative and Intellectual Disability Michael Bérubé

The first section of The Sound and the Fury is not hard to read. No, really. Go ahead and take a crack at it: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. (Faulkner 3)

There isn’t a single complex sentence in that famous opening paragraph – or in the section as a whole; there are no punctuation marks other than commas and periods (certainly no semicolons or dashes). Neither the syntax nor the vocabulary would strain any reader proficient at the third-grade reading level. So what, precisely, is all the fuss about? Why do college students howl with dismay (as mine have, every time I have dared to assign the novel in an American literature survey) when they are asked to read the section without the help of textual aids? Compare that simple paragraph to this one, which is written in precisely the same mode: Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack: the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. (Joyce 37)

There is no question as to why this is hard to read. The word “diaphane,” the allusion to Dante in the original, and the (unexplained) reference to Aristotle as “he” in the fifth sentence: a reader has to know a great deal in order to make her way through the thicket of Stephen Dedalus’s narrative – and has to learn how to navigate its idiosyncratic syntax, incomplete sentences, and cognitive leaps. It would appear that I’ve stacked the deck at the outset, by contrasting the stream of consciousness of an adult with a significant intellectual disability with that of one of the most aggressively hyperintellectual characters in the history of literature. Clearly, the transcription of Benjy Compson’s mental events, as he watches the golfers play in what used to be “his” pasture, is easier to read than Stephen Dedalus’s ruminations on sight because Benjy’s mental capacity is so much more limited than Stephen’s. And yet Benjy’s narrative is not easy to read, even though, sentence by sentence, it’s a breeze. Why? Is it because Benjy does not know enough to use the words most people familiar with golf would have used, such as green, tee (for “table”), or putting (for “hitting”)? Benjy’s lack of familiarity with golf doesn’t help matters, but the task of figuring out what’s going on in that paragraph isn’t a significant burden. The real problem, of course, is that Benjy Compson has come unstuck in time. His narrative, in other words, lacks some of the necessary connective tissue that makes narrative intelligible as narrative. It is not incoherent, it is not unintelligible; after only a few pages, even the most befuddled reader can get the sense that Benjy is relaying a sequence of episodes from his life, though that sequence is far from clear. But his narrative is disabled, in the sense I have employed in calling the narrative of Chris Nolan’s 2000 film Memento “disabled” (Bérubé 2005): some of the ordinary functions of narrative are here inoperative. (In the case of Memento, I argue that there is no way to reconcile fabula and sujet, no way to reconstruct the former even after one “compensates” for the fact that the latter is relayed backward in time by a person with no short-term memory.) I could say the same, a fortiori, about the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses: it is a tour de force, one of the most extraordinary things written in English, but it is not a narrative. It is what happens, according to Joyce, when narrative falls asleep and some other logic takes over. It does not contain any characters with intellectual disabilities, so the issues are not quite what they are in Benjy’s chapter; but it does suggest the possibility that some forms of experimental narrative, leaving aside for now the more straightforward stream of consciousness of “Proteus,” attempt to mimic or enact some of the self-reflexive features of the human mind. When the narrative in question is conveyed by a character with an intellectual disability, then two questions become paramount: one, what does his or her disability tell us about the functions of narrative in general? That is, what do we learn about

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the ways narrative works by reading narratives in which some of the functions of narrative do not appear to work as we expect? Two, and more locally, to what extent does the character with an intellectual disability have the capacity to understand the narrative he or she inhabits? We know, for example, that Benjy does not understand why he has been “gelded,” and that he knows nothing about the era he lives in, the era of institutionalization and involuntary sterilization. But the question of what a character knows about the narrative she or he inhabits is by no means limited to characters with intellectual disabilities: it is the foundation of narrative irony, as central to Oedipus Rex as to Elizabeth Moon’s 2003 near-future science fiction novel The Speed of Dark. In the former, the question of whether Oedipus understands the narrative he inhabits is nothing less than the central question of the play; in the latter, the question of whether Lou Arrendale, an adult with autism, understands what is happening at his workplace (and to his life) proves so difficult to handle, narratively, that Elizabeth Moon has to resort to episodic “breaks” narrated by a traditionally omniscient narrator, focalized through a neurotypical character who has none of Lou’s limitations. Lou works at a bioinformatics firm that employs people with autism for their pattern recognition abilities; they are known as Section A, and the firm offers extensive facilities (including a gym with trampolines) to accommodate their special needs. Gene Crenshaw is a manager who wants to get rid of all these allegedly expensive accommodations and subject the members of Section A to experimental treatments that will cure their autism. But since Lou doesn’t know about any of that, another more expository level of narrative is provided from the perspective of coworker Pete Aldrin, who does.1 Contrast this strategy with that of Mark Haddon, whose Christopher Boone learns, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, that his parents have divorced and that his mother is not dead by discovering her letters to him, hidden in his father’s bedroom closet. Curious Incident manages to address and “solve” the question of Christopher’s inability to understand the narrative he inhabits by introducing another level of textuality into the texture of the narrative – a tactic Haddon employs to great (and Quixote-like) effect when Christopher’s father angrily informs him that he has read the narrative Christopher has written thus far and therefore knows full well that Christopher did not keep his promise to refrain from trying to discover who killed Wellington the dog. The Speed of Dark explicitly opens and closes with the question of who knows what about whom, and who is thereby authorized to ask questions and validate answers. The narrator here is Lou, and he is registering his (fruitless) objections to the endless barrage of psychiatric evaluations to which he is subjected: Questions, always questions. They didn’t wait for the answers, either. They rushed on, piling questions on questions, covering every moment with questions, blocking off every sensation but the thorn stab of questions. . . . Dr. Fornum, crisp and professional, raises an eyebrow and shakes her head not quite imperceptibly. Autistic persons do not understand these signals; the book says so. I have read the book, so I know what it is I do not understand.

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What I haven’t figured out is the range of things they don’t understand. The normals. The reals. The ones who have the degrees and sit behind the desks in comfortable chairs. . . . She doesn’t want to know what I mean. She wants me to say what other people say. “Good morning, Dr. Fornum.” “Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” “Yes, I can wait. I don’t mind.” (1–2)

Lou eventually decides to volunteer for the experimental cure; the epilogue, written seven years afterward, suggests that the treatment has been “successful,” even though it has stripped Lou of his feelings for Marjory, a neurotypical woman with whom he had been in love. The last line of the novel, fittingly, is “now I get to ask the questions” (340); now, too, Lou needs no secondary diegetic device to explain his life. Whether or not one is happy with Lou’s decision – and some readers have objected to it – the point remains that the novel opens with a Lou who does not understand the larger narrative structuring his life, and ends with a Lou who does. For Christopher, Lou, Benjy, and Oedipus, in other words, narrative irony – the distance between what we know as spectators or readers and what they know as characters – constitutes the very fabric of the narrative. But this phenomenon is heightened when the character in question has an intellectual disability, not only because of the possibility that other characters might be exploiting this to their own advantage (this provides the structure of Memento) but also because the inability of characters with intellectual disabilities to understand the narratives they inhabit appears, in contrast to Oedipus’s hubris, as radical innocence. We feel pity and terror, as Aristotle suggested, at watching our fellow humans flail about in a world they do not fully understand, subject as they are to their passions, their blood feuds, and their capricious and vengeful gods. But our fellow humans with intellectual disabilities are more vulnerable, more precarious than Oedipus; and if theorists from Aristotle to Freud to Ricoeur to di Lauretis are right in seeing fundamental narrative principles at stake in the unfolding of Oedipus’s story, then perhaps the narrative irony at work in stories involving characters with intellectual disabilities can tell us something important about narrative and irony as well as about intellectual disability. In saying this, I am deliberately trying to “textualize” intellectual disability, to make it available for discussion not as a matter of diagnosis but as a subject fit for the tools of literary criticism; at the same time, I want to demonstrate that the tools of literary criticism can enable us to ask questions about intellectual disability that go to the heart of how it is that we know what we know – or don’t know. To put this in terms of what I don’t want to do: I have no interest in determining whether Benjy has Down syndrome or whether Christopher Boone has Asperger’s. Especially with regard to Curious Incident and The Speed of Dark, commentary has focused largely on whether the narrators in question are accurate representations of persons with autism; and that commentary, interestingly, has been explicitly licensed by the novels themselves. Curious Incident notes, in its front matter, that “Mark Haddon is a writer and illustrator of numerous award-winning children’s books and television screen-

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plays. As a young man, Haddon worked with autistic individuals” (n.p.). The Speed of Dark is predicated on Moon’s status as the mother of a young man with autism: the lead blurb on the back cover of the Ballantine paperback (provided courtesy of the Denver Post) states that “Moon is the mother of an autistic teenager and her love is apparent in the story of Lou.” The novel also features a “reader’s guide,” an appendix consisting of an interview between Moon and Paul Witcover, that is devoted chiefly to questions about autism, and does not fail to include the perfunctory “I know you have an autistic son; how much of Lou is based on your son and your experiences in raising him?” (np).2 Why shy away from literalism? For many reasons, not least of which is that literalism is so (literally) literalist. In these cases, it reduces reading to diagnosis: ah, the character says X because he is on the autism spectrum (and then the temptation is all but inevitable: all autistic people are like that). This then leads us away from the grainy details of utterance X, distracting us from what we should be asking about narrative as such. Mark Osteen offers a useful corrective in his introduction to the edited volume Autism and Representation. Even as he plaintively calls for more literal representations of people with autism in novels and film (“Is it too much to expect simple accuracy?” [30], he asks, in response to Tom Shakespeare’s rather reasonable reminder that “it is dangerous to develop hard and fast rules of representation”), he attends to how Mark Haddon’s ironic humor works in Curious Incident: Christopher’s inability to comprehend others’ emotions also enables Haddon to filter the bathos from potentially overwrought scenes. For example, when Christopher finally arrives at his estranged mother Judy’s apartment following a harrowing train journey to London, he informs her that his father, Ed, had told him she was dead. Christopher – a big fan of TV nature shows – blandly tells us, “And then she made a loud wailing noise like an animal on a nature program on television.” Christopher’s neutral narration makes the scene more powerful. (39)

That it does, clearly enough. And though I will spend the remainder of this chapter discussing examples from American literature (which, I will argue in closing, has featured characters with intellectual disabilities for historically and culturally specific reasons, even though intellectual disability is universal throughout the species), I want to append to this observation the even more obvious point that Christopher’s “harrowing train journey to London” takes up half the book. That in itself is remarkable, at least for the argument I’m trying to develop here: where a neurotypical narrator might say, “And then I went by train to my mother’s house in London,” Christopher recounts the entire journey in minute detail for over 60 pages.3 The narrative is thrilling, as we learn from Christopher’s perspective just how harrowing his journey is; but at the same time, it forces us to reconsider our ordinary distinction between significant and insignificant detail. If I were to tell you about my most recent travels in New York City subways, you would consider it odd if I included in my narrative a detail about a station in which

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there were signs saying Great Western and cold beers and lagers and CAUTION WET FLOOR and Your 50p will keep a premature baby alive for 1.8 seconds and transforming travel and Refreshingly Different and IT’S DELICIOUS IT’S CREAMY AND IT’S ONLY £1.30 HOT CHOC DELUXE and 0870 777 7676 and The Lemon Tree and No Smoking and FINE TEAS. (145–6; boldface in original)

But in Christopher’s narrative, these details make perfect sense, not only because he habitually notices things that neurotypical people miss but also because the constant threat of sensory overload is part of what makes Christopher’s journey so harrowing. Intellectually disabled characters can do that: they can bend the narrative around themselves, so to speak, so as to warp our expectations for degrees of detail or continuity (see Belmonte). Of course, the extent to which they do so depends on the extent to which a writer is deploying a character’s intellectual disability as a means of exploring alternate senses of time, space, and narrative technique. Steinbeck’s depiction of Lenny in Of Mice and Men has no implications for the texture of the narrative itself, which is not shaped in any significant way by Lenny’s consciousness. In such narratives, the second question (of the extent to which a character with an intellectual disability has the capacity to understand the narrative he or she inhabits) is paramount, and my first question (what does their disability tell us about the functions of narrative in general?) is relatively unimportant, because their disability does not affect the sujet or any aspect of narrative technique, and is simply reported on from elsewhere, so to speak. The fabric and functions of documentary realism are not altered by the presence of Lenny in the narrative – and the same could be said of any number of mainstream Hollywood films about intellectual disability, such as Rain Man, Forrest Gump, I Am Sam, and Radio, none of which take their central characters’ intellectual disability as an opportunity to expand the possibilities of narrative. The most efficient and/or dramatic way to bend a narrative around a character with an intellectual disability, no doubt, is to tell the story directly from that character’s perspective, in the first person; though Faulkner, Moon, Haddon, and Nolan (in Memento) employ different strategies for revealing how their characters know what they know, and (more subtly) how we can know what they don’t know, they all attempt to address the problem of intellectual disability and narrative from the inside out. By contrast, in his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick makes an exceptionally ambitious attempt to portray intellectual disability in such a way as to present a radically different sense of time and narrative – without resorting to the first-person gambit. The premise of Martian Time-Slip sounds like one of Dick’s standard – that is, “standard” in the sense of “inconceivably odd” – variations on postwar American science fiction. It is 1994, and the inhabitants of a slowly dying Earth have colonized Mars under the auspices of the United Nations. The colonization project is complicated by (1) the fact that Mars has humanoid inhabitants who are closely related to early human hominids and constitute a dying race of African-Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherers (they are called Bleekmen, and are despised, reviled, and employed as domestic servants); and (2) the expense of shipping heavy machinery to Mars, which

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means that a great deal of the colonists’ infrastructure is already beginning to decay. Accordingly, repairmen are so high in demand as to have become a class of professionals, and one of the most important power brokers on the planet is one Arnie Kott, Supreme Goodmember of the Water Workers’ Local, Fourth Planet Branch. Almost all of the narrative is third-person nonparticipant omniscient, focalized through Kott or through repairman Jack Bohlen; the novel’s early chapters include narratives focalized through herbal foods and black market salesman Norbert Steiner, but after he commits suicide, the novel drops him from the narrative trajectory. Steiner’s son, Manfred, is on the autism spectrum. He is housed in the only Martian facility open to him and other “anomalous” children, a school known as Camp BenGurion, run by the Israeli settlement on Mars. Early in the novel, we learn that the United Nations is considering a bill that would close Camp B-G, as it is known, because (in the words of Anne Esterhazy, the mother of an “anomalous” child and the ex-wife of Arnie Kott) they don’t want to see what they call “defective stock” appearing on the colonial planets. . . . Back Home they see the existence of anomalous children on Mars as a sign that one of Earth’s major problems has been transplanted into the future, because we are the future, to them. (40)

Clearly, Dick’s novel foregrounds questions of race and eugenics, colonization, and disability: “Earth’s major problems,” indeed. If that were all there is to say about Martian Time-Slip, then one could plausibly file it under the (capacious) heading of speculative fiction novels that address Real Social Problems in especially fanciful ways, and one could praise it for being on the side of the angels, who know a genocidal, eugenic program when they see one. But the novel is – happily, and vexatiously – far more complex than that. For it appears that Manfred Steiner inhabits a realm of narrative time that not only exceeds that of any character in the novel, but also warps and distorts the narrative fabric of Martian Time-Slip itself. One of Manfred’s supervisors, a Dr. Glaub, tells Manfred’s father Norbert of a “new theory about autism” (44) that has recently been developed by Swiss researchers. The theory, in fine, is that people with autism experience a different sense of time than neurotypicals, such that they perceive the world around them moving at a rate too fast for them to process. This accounts for their “withdrawal,” their inability to socialize or read affective cues. It turns out that the Swiss theory is partly right: Manfred Steiner does indeed live in a different sense of time than the novel’s other characters. But his withdrawal from the world is occasioned only partly by that fact; more immediately, he is haunted by visions of the inevitable decay of everything around him. He can see the far future in which even Martian structures yet unbuilt have fallen into disrepair and desuetude. He is particularly horrified by a recurring vision of himself at the age of 200, having been immobilized for decades and kept alive in the medical facility of a huge housing complex – even after his limbs have been amputated and most of his internal organs have been removed. Arnie Kott, upon hearing that people

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with autism might be “precogs” who have access to the future, hires Jack Bohlen to build a device that can bridge different senses of narrative time and translate Manfred’s visions into the present. Kott’s motivation is almost comically petty: he wants access to information about a blockbuster real estate deal involving a nearby Martian mountain range. The denouement of that plot occurs when Bohlen has to break the news to Kott that (a) Manfred has drawn a detailed sketch of the decay of the massive AM-WEB housing project housed in the mountains (centuries from now) and (b) his own father has already bought the land in question. Kott is an imperious man, and Bohlen is consumed with anxiety at the prospect of telling him that his experiment with time translation does not work (since Manfred is no use for giving insider-trading tips) and that the point of the enterprise is moot anyway. On the way to that denouement, however, the novel becomes seriously weird. The scene in which Bohlen breaks the news to Kott is narrated four times; the first three are out of sequence (that is, they are effectively a series of flash-forwards), and though each seems to be focalized through Manfred, and are announced by a paragraph that begins, “Inside Mr. Kott’s skin were dead bones, shiny and wet” (144, 157, 167), they are nevertheless narrated from different spatial perspectives (we follow a character out of the living room in one, but stay in the living room in another) and are marked by subtle differences from episode to episode. Two examples follow, one comparing passages from the second and third flash-forward episodes, and the second comparing passages from all three: Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in an awful fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self to her and the dead bug words popped from its mouth. “I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott was saying. “I’ll put this tape on.” (157) Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in a filthy fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self nearer and nearer to her and the dead bug words popped from its mouth and fell on her. The dead bug words scampered off into the folds of her clothing, and some squeezed into her skin and entered her body. “I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott said. “I’ll put this tape on.” (167)

Both seem to be narrated from Manfred’s perspective, mixing his idiosyncratic vision of his fellow creatures with ordinary dialogue. The second series of examples, however, introduces another level of complexity and perplexity. When Kott puts on the tape, it turns out not to be Mozart but one of his electronically coded messages to his confederates: A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. Mr. Kott shut off the tape transport. (148)

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A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. He shut off the tape transport. (157) A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from somewhere in the room, and after a time she realized that it was her; she was convulsed from within, all the corpse-things in her were heaving and crawling, struggling out into the light of the room. God, how could she stop them? They emerged from her pores and scuttled off, dropping from strands of gummy web onto the floor, to disappear into the cracks between the boards. (168)

The sequence as a whole is richer and stranger than I can suggest here, but perhaps these examples give some idea of what is at stake in these repetitions. Again, the first two accounts of the “Mozart” tape seem to be focalized by way of Manfred; but the third is quite clearly focalized through the character of Doreen Anderton, who now seems to be overwhelmed by something very much like the “dead bug words” that had poured on her from Bohlen’s mouth. Time is not the only thing being warped here; the entire narrative fabric is twisting. Just as, in a later chapter, we are told that “Manfred Steiner’s presence had invaded the structure of the Public School, penetrated its deepest being” (182), here Steiner’s presence and perspective “leak” into other characters. The result is that it is finally impossible to attribute these passages solely to Steiner. When, for instance, the confrontation with Kott is finally narrated in “real” time (that is, as an event following the other events of the day in proper temporal sequence) and Kott puts on the Mozart tape, we find that the character who likens the screeches to the convulsions of corpses is Kott himself: A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers. Noises like the convulsions of the dead, Arnie thought in horror. He ran to shut off the tape transport. (195)

As for Bohlen, himself a recovered schizophrenic, he finds himself increasingly incapacitated in the course of the evening; on one page he “felt the coming apart of every piece of his body” (198), and on the next the confrontation and the crisis have passed and he has no recollection of them: “the next thing he knew he was standing on a black, empty sidewalk” (199). In the following chapter, on the following day, Bohlen stops to reflect on what has happened to him and to the novel: He had sat, he realized, in Arnie Kott’s living room again and again, experiencing that evening before it arrived; and then, when at last it had taken place in actuality, he had bypassed it. The fundamental disturbance in time-sense, which Dr. Glaub believed was the basis for schizophrenia, was now harassing him. That evening at Arnie’s had taken place, and had existed for him . . . but out of sequence. (206)

This is a fair enough summary of what we, as readers, have just experienced. But it doesn’t solve everything, because the perspective from which Jack Bohlen was a

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dead sack, teeming with “gubbish” (decay) and leering at Doreen Anderton, was clearly not Jack Bohlen’s. Manfred’s “autistic” rendering of events becomes the “schizophrenic” break in the text of the novel itself. What Dick has crafted in Martian Time-Slip – and it is no mean feat – is not merely the depiction of a character whose intellectual disability, like Benjy Compson’s, entails a radically different sense of time and narrative; it is instead a textualization of that character’s intellectual disability such that the character’s sense of time and narrative so pervades and structures the novel that it can no longer be attributed to that character’s private stream of consciousness. I submit that Martian Time-Slip represents one of American literature’s most fascinating attempts to textualize intellectual disability; I might add, following a lead from Ato Quayson, that it is also one of the most vivid examples of aesthetic nervousness in postwar American fiction. Quayson has recently elaborated a theory of “aesthetic nervousness,” a textual phenomenon that arises “when the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability” (15). But perhaps the radical experimentalism of Martian Time-Slip can be explained away, for some, by the very fact that it belongs to the genre of speculative fiction, where writers are permitted to concoct outlandish things like time travel and extraterrestrial civilizations, and the dominant protocols of representation tend to defy the dominant protocols of representation in mainstream fiction on a pageby-page basis. I propose that Dick is worthy of study precisely because he takes the raw matter of speculative fiction as a means for devising experiments with the fabric of narrative; but for those who would set that raw matter at a discount insofar as it is “speculative,” I will conclude with some remarks on how narrative and intellectual disability are mutually implicating in works by Maxine Hong Kingston and Richard Powers. Elsewhere (Bérubé 2005) I have remarked that, in The Woman Warrior, the encounter with the mentally disabled man in the laundry spurs Kingston’s narrator into speech and impels her to begin narrating the story of her life (“I studied hard, got straight A’s, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect” [195]). Here, I want to foreground the character of Moon Orchid, whose descent into madness and incoherence is marked at first by her growing inability to understand what constitutes an appropriate narrative. Under ordinary circumstances, there is no need to follow one’s family members around the house, narrating their every movement and conversation. But Moon Orchid does exactly that, and at one point the text doubles her annoying running commentary: The child married to a husband who did not speak Chinese translated for him, “Now she’s saying that I’m taking a machine off the shelf and that I’m attaching two metal spiders to it. And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically. Now she says I’m hunting for something in the refrigerator and – ha! – I’ve found it. I’m taking out butter – ‘cow oil.’ ‘They eat a lot of cow oil,’ she saying.” (141)

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Here, Moon Orchid’s niece is repeating Moon Orchid’s obsessive narrative about how the niece is beating eggs; she even repeats Moon Orchid’s “ha!” upon her own discovery of the butter. But the sentence I want to focus on is “And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically.” Surely this is excessive, is it not? It might even offer us a form of defamiliarization, of “makingstrange,” which for Viktor Shklovsky was the very definition of the literary. If Moon Orchid’s description of spiders spinning with legs intertwined renews our perception and leads us to see an eggbeater with fresh eyes, to make the stone stony (or the eggbeater eggbeater-y), then one may say that Kingston is deploying intellectual disability as the very vehicle of the literary. Such a deployment of intellectual disability can be a source of humor or a source of pathos; both options will depend, once again, on the distance provided by narrative irony, the distance between the peculiarities of a disabled narrative and our “normate” sense of what constitutes an “ordinary” handling of detail, description, motive, or temporal sequence. In Powers’s The Echo Maker, that distance is marked at the outset of the novel by the difference between the frame narrative, which adheres to the dominant protocols of realistic representation, and passages such as the following, which appear without warning or explanation: A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body. Lasts forever: no change to measure. Flock of fiery cinders. When grey pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can’t feel it. (10)

The passage might – one cannot say for certain – be focalized through a young man named Mark Schluter, who has sustained a devastating brain injury as the result of a mysterious accident in which his truck careened off an empty road at 80 mph at 2 a.m. As Mark gradually regains consciousness, and as he slowly reacquires the ability to speak, we learn that he has suffered a rare neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. People with Capgras syndrome are unable to recognize their loved ones as their loved ones; they recognize the faces of their family members, but they do not recognize them as their family members. (In neurological terms, the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex have somehow become disconnected: the facial recognition systems of the brain are working, but have lost their connection to the emotionalprocessing centers that would make sense of those recognitions.) In their attempt to make sense of the fact that they recognize deeply familiar faces but have no emotional attachment to them, they come to believe that their family members have been replaced by doubles, androids, or impersonators. It is a devastating disorder, and some people with Capgras have snapped completely: as Powers writes, “a young Capgras sufferer from the British Midlands, to prove that his father was a robot, had cut the man open to expose the wires” (89–90).

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It sounds like material for Oliver Sacks, and, indeed, half of the novel is devoted to an Oliver Sacks-like character named Gerald Weber, to whom Mark Schluter’s sister Karin writes in despair. Weber’s growing self-doubt and eventual breakdown make up one strand of the plot; another involves water use, ecotourism, real estate development, and the migration patterns of sandhill cranes, who stop every year in the Schluters’ hometown of Kearney, Nebraska. Most important for our purposes, the novel speculates repeatedly about the mental capacities of birds: “Birds will surprise you,” says Karin’s boyfriend, the conservationist Daniel Riegel. “Blue jays can lie. Ravens punish social cheaters. Crows fashion hooks out of straight wire and use them to lift cups out of holes. Not even chimps can do that” (388). “What does it feel like, to be a bird?” the novel asks (424), renewing Nagel’s famous question about bats. Karin Schluter is led to an epiphany about her own species: the whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors. At most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind. (348)

It is possible, then, that the “flock of birds, each one burning” passage is narrated from the perspective of the sandhill cranes themselves, and is not Mark Schluter’s postinjury interior monologue. Perhaps “nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing” is what cranes “think” as they soar over the prairie. Yet we are tempted to “humanize” those narrative interludes not only because we continue to believe that humans are the only creatures capable of narrative but also because they seem to “progress” into increasing intelligibility. The second such interlude begins, Rises up in flooded fields. There is a wave, a rocking in the reeds. Pain again, then nothing. When sense returns, he is drowning. Father teaching him to swim. Current in his limbs. Four years old, and his father floating him. Flying, then flailing, then falling. His father grabbing his leg, pulling him under. (18–19)

These seem, surely, to be the sense impressions of a human being. But it is many pages before Mark’s narrative interludes can rejoin the fabric of the main narrative. Until then, the plot of The Echo Maker, like that of The Speed of Dark, turns on the question of whether Mark Schluter himself will come to understand the plot – not the plot he thinks has been hatched against him, which (he believes) eventually includes his sister, his dog, his house, and the town of Kearney (all of which have been overtaken by impostors), but the plot of the novel we are reading. Narratively, Powers is working with a variation of what I might call the Flowers for Algernon phenomenon, whereby shades and degrees of mental impairment are registered on the page by a character’s capacity for narrative. Elizabeth Moon offers a version of this gambit after Lou submits to treatment for autism, as his posttreatment narrative

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begins with sentences like “Movement, shapes against the light, sting, warm back to dark” (322) and concludes with sentences like “I can hardly believe it, even though everything I’ve done for the past seven years has been aimed at exactly this” (337). Much more remains to be said about how narrative technique can be, and has been, used as an index and/or refractor of degrees of intellectual disability. For now, however, I will close this chapter by suggesting that the rendering of characters with intellectual disabilities has significant implications for American literature even though no intellectual disability is specifically American. For the United States has the dubious distinction of being the nation that took the premises of late nineteenthcentury eugenics, developed in England by Francis Galton, and turned them into an industry whose purpose it was to identify the (often textual) markers of intellectual disability. Likewise, it was a series of American researchers – H.H. Goddard, Lewis Terman, and R.M. Yerkes – who took Alfred Binet’s intelligence test and converted it from a device meant to identify children who might need extra assistance in learning to a device for ranking humans and reifying a narrow and scientifically unsound idea of heritable intelligence (see Gould 176–234). That project was fueled by Americans’ anxieties about race and immigration, and provided pseudoscientific justification for the inequities of industrial capitalism; it led not only to the displays of “good” and “bad” families in textbooks and state fairs but also to the practices of institutionalization and involuntary sterilization, which affected people with a wide variety of conditions from Down syndrome to epilepsy. A specter haunted the American century, one might say – the specter of intellectual disability. The Sound and the Fury is an obvious register of the fate of the “feebleminded” in the 1920s and 1930s, and Martian Time-Slip is (among other things) a response to the discourse of eliminationism, in which the United Nations turns out to be the exterminator-in-general and only the Israeli encampment on Mars has learned the lessons of recent history well enough to provide shelter and care for children like Manfred Steiner. Kingston offers a poignant revision of the trope of the immigrant with intellectual disabilities: whereas confused and racist notions of disability were used in the early decades of the twentieth century to exclude thousands of arrivals at Ellis Island, Moon Orchid has no problem entering the country but is driven to mental illness by her failure to adapt to American life. Moon and Powers, finally, tease out two of the new century’s signal anxieties about cognition and disability – the hopes and fears clustered around the idea of a “cure” for certain conditions, in The Speed of Dark, and the hopes and fears generated by the relentless reduction of psychology to neurology, in The Echo Maker. No doubt, it would be a bizarre form of American exceptionalism to claim that any of these concerns is specific to the history and culture of the United States; but that history and culture, over the past century and a half, have been defined in part by the attempt to reify intelligence and derive social policy from that reification. Depictions of and meditations on intellectual disability in American literature, accordingly, should be seen not only as a means for exploring the capacities of narrative in general but also as contributions to the texts and textures of cultural history and social policy.

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1.

See, e.g., Osteen: [I]t is difficult to accept when, given the chance to undergo an operation that will cure him of autism, Lou agrees to be normalized. . . . Is Lou behaving as his character would, or following a prescripted authorial program designed to provoke an argument or provide another recovery narrative? Because Moon is a neurotypical writer (and the mother of an autistic son), readers may suspect that her protagonist’s decision in more a neurotypical wish-fulfillment than a free choice. (38)

2.

I note that my discussion of narrative technique in The Speed of Dark is anticipated by the reader’s guide itself. Specifically, I find to my surprise that I am answering prompt number three of the “Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion”: Lou Arrendale is the novel’s main character, and most of its events are related

in his voice, through his eyes. Yet sometimes Moon depicts events through the eyes of other characters, such as Tom and Pete Aldrin. Discuss why the author might have decided to write this story from more than one point of view. Do you think it was the right decision? Allow me to pass on the final question, and say simply that it was a decision that has implications for the handling of disability and narrative irony. 3. Exceptions to this rule should be made for neurotypical narrators who are (1) induced to reverie by the taste of a madeleine, (2) obsessed with their sister’s “honor” (i.e., virginity), (3) Beckettian, or (4) belonging to the emperor. One of the reasons I begin with Faulkner and Joyce, in other words, is to suggest that modernism often challenges the idea of “neurotypical” narrative regardless of whether any specific character has an identifiable intellectual disability.

References and Further Reading Belmonte, Matthew K. “Human, But More So: What the Autistic Brain Tells Us About the Process of Narrative.” In Autism and Representation (pp. 166–80). Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 2008. Bérubé, Michael. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 578–86. Dick, Philip K. Martian Time-Slip. New York: Vintage, 1964. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1929. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1996. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Vintage, 2003. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1922. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Knopf, 1976.

Moon, Elizabeth. The Speed of Dark. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Nolan, Christopher. Dir. Memento. Santa Monica, CA: I Remember Productions, 2000. Osteen, Mark. “Autism and Representation: A Comprehensive Introduction” (pp. 1–48). In Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 2008. Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Picador, 2006. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Shakespeare, Tom. “Art and Lies? Representations of Disability on Film.” In Disability Discourse (pp. 164–72). Eds. Mairian Corker and Sally French. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1999.

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Reading for Asian American Literature Colleen Lye

What is Asian American literature? The past 20 years have witnessed a publishing boom in literature by US authors of Asian descent, but a scarcity of paradigms for its reading. On the face of it, this fact may seem surprising. In the 1990s, a critical mass of Asian American students in higher education fueled a second wave of Asian American studies program building at colleges and universities across the nation, aided by a new ascendancy of cultural studies that helped erode the intellectual hierarchy between English departments and ethnic studies. This cultural studies took its energy from a critique of Asian American identity as formulated during the first wave of 1970s program building, pointing to an increased ethnic multiplicity in US Asian populations and the various kinds of diversity this made visible. Asian American program building, however, bore a rather more paradoxical relation to Asian American cultural studies, whose intellectual energy stimulated institutional initiatives but whose identity critiques partially undercut their raison d’être. By the late 2000s, talk of an “Asian American studies in crisis” had become endemic at conferences of the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS). The transnationalization of frameworks for the study of race and ethnicity has no doubt contributed to the fragmentation of Asian American identity along ethnic lines, and it is common to narrate the intellectual history of Asian American studies in terms of a movement from cultural nationalism to transnationalism and diaspora. However, it is also true that, if Asian American identity was a period product of the cultural nationalism of the late 1960s, it inevitably partook of the internationalism of the Third Worldist movements of 1968 and was already in some measure a response to the arrival of new immigrants under the aegis of 1965 immigration reform.1 To

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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this extent, it is useful to think of Asian American identity as an identity that has from the beginning been in crisis. Like all identities, Asian American identity is imaginary, except only more so. It makes a fanfare of its catachrestic nature, which has to do with the fiction of pan-ethnicity.2 A historicization of the imaginariness of Asian American identity – rather than the strategic suspension of the recognition of its characteristic imaginariness – may be our best hope for intellectually conserving the category. This chapter is motivated by the challenge of how to read for “Asian American literature,” once we accept that neither ethnically aggregative nor synecdochic modes of representing it will do. The problem is that “Asian American literature” exists largely at the level of the course syllabus, scholarly research monograph, or publishers’ catalogues, rather than at the level of an individual text. It is the title given to an assemblage of texts chosen by an instructor, scholar, or publisher to teach, interpret, or purvey. Because there are over 30 named Asian and Pacific Islander (API) ethnicities as of the 1990 US Census, the most quantitatively comprehensive course or catalogue instantiations of “Asian American literature” are easily accused of being incomplete. Because of the uneven and unequal nature of the claim to Asian American identity exercised by various API ethnicities – which is the product of the historical contingencies of Asian American racial formation – a reliance on representative ethnic examples, no matter how robust, involves a synecdochic fallacy (Lye 46). The first scholarly survey of Asian American literary history, Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature (1982), soon became an easy target for the social experience it claimed the literature to represent and for the new or minor ethnicities it neglected. In the 1990s, Asian American cultural studies by and large turned toward thematic and topical ways of reading literature, discovering new political purposes for it that centered on reversing evidence of American belonging into evidence of anti-imperialist, antinationalist critique. In the 2000s, a “formal turn” in Asian American criticism sought to do aesthetic justice to Asian American literature by seeking to sever the ethnic once and for all from the ethnographic. Regardless, both kinds of approaches have eschewed essentialist definitions of Asian American identity but generally avoided the question of defining the criteria for the literary archive. If Asian American is a sociohistorical construction rather than an identity defined by biological descent, how does this affect the definition of Asian American literature? What is the relationship between Asian American as a racial formation and Asian American as a literary formation? First-wave Asian American literary history – for example, Kim’s – delighted in the interchangeability of literary and historical evidence. In theorizing the interaction between literature and history, second-wave Asian American literary history would be more interested in the material specificity of literary as compared to other kinds of textual sources, and cognizant of the historicity of the Asian American concept. A notable example in this vein, Jinqi Ling’s Narrating Nationalisms’s anticipatory rereading of Asian American literature, provided something other than a reflectionist account of its historical relevance, but demonstrated that such theoretical rigor required temporal and ethnic delimitation. The fact is, in

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seeking an account of the longer story of Asian American literary evolution, we still have no effective replacement for Kim’s work. Yet if in the 1980s Asian American literary history took its license from a paucity of research into Asian American social history, despite the new robustness of Asian American social history, the need for Asian American literary history might be seen to be all the more urgent now because, in the context of what social scientists note to be a continuingly weak racial formation, Asian American literature is arguably a primary force in the institutionalizing of Asian American social reality. From its beginnings in Third Worldist and antiwar movements in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City in the 1968 epoch, Asian American identity has been political. Asian American electoral behavior became a topic of political science study in the 1990s, a decade when the numerical growth of the Asian American population and the turn toward interest group lobbying among pan-ethnic organizations combined to promise a newly influential Asian American voice in statewide and national politics. As it turned out, Asian Americans continued to exhibit patterns of severe underrepresentation among registered voters and elected officeholders (Brackman and Erie 231). In the instances of the few career Asian American politicians that existed, these tended to be crossover leaders who identified least with the Asian American community (Brackman and Erie 237). The fact of political underrepresentation is usually attributed to the internal diversity preventing Asian Americans from being perceived as unified actors in public policy (Nakanishi 93). Beyond the problems of perception, others have questioned the real social hold of the pan-ethnic identity upon US Asians, especially new arrivals from Asia, who as of 1990 constituted the majority of the Asian American population (Lien 52–3). A 2004 survey of individuals of Asian descent disclosed that only 15% identified first as an Asian American, while two thirds chose to identify themselves by ethnicity (Lien, Conway, and Wong 17). The primacy of ethnic self-identification is shown to be capable of coexisting with identification with the Asian American label, but the salient point is that “Asian American” tends to surface as a secondary, situational identity. While Harold Brackman and Steven Erie interpret Asian American electoral invisibility to signify a disposition toward “politics by other means” (i.e., based on indirect influence), Pei-te Lien argues instead that Asian Americans have tended to pursue power less through mass means (whether voting or demonstrations) than through elite-based tactics, such as litigation, campaign donations, and lobbying to influence politics and policy (Brackman and Erie 231–3; Lien 81). If it is the case that, in the realm of politics, Asian American identity describes an elite modality – comprised of elite varieties of political practice undertaken by political elites – what might this imply about Asian American literature? As I have earlier stated, Asian American literature is not a natural artifact; it is a category disseminated primarily through the collating activities of teachers, researchers, and publishers. To some extent, writers (such as Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong in their 1974 anthology Aiiieeeee!) have also been active agents in the construction of the pan-ethnic literary category, particularly

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before the institutionalization of Asian American studies as an academic field. But the growth of academic criticism and of commercial literary publishing since the 1970s has tended to witness a tension between academics and writers and an active resistance on the part of many of the latter to the pigeonholing pressures of the label. In a magisterial theorization of the institution of Asian American studies, Mark Chiang describes Asian American literary and cultural studies as sites in the academy for “the conversion of political and cultural capital” (Chiang 9). Not unlike the leader of an Asian American community organization or lobby group, the scholar who claims “belonging to the Asian American field” is staking a claim “to the capital of the field as one who has the ability to represent or speak for Asian Americans as a group” (Chiang 13–14). Whatever the failures and impasses of the original Asian American Movement, pan-ethnic coalitions have historically articulated the identity to a left or liberal politics (Fujino 128). Lien’s research shows that, though in the 1990s the Asian American electorate may have evinced a three-way split between Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, where pan-ethnic community organizational elites managed to exercise influence they have tilted Asian American voting support toward liberal agendas and Democratic Party candidates (Lien 196). If so, and if educational institutions are one of the primary sites for the construction of Asian American identity, where students often learn for the first time to think of themselves as Asian American subjects, then we might begin to develop an answer for what might be politically at stake in choosing to disseminate “Asian American literature.” Asian American studies is an ideological apparatus through which college students of various ethnicities are interpellated as Asian American racial subjects, many of whom go on to become involved in panethnic professional organizations or pan-ethnic community organizations that are themselves engaged in the work of racial formation. As the scene of student activist demand for the creation of Asian American studies courses, from the beginning of the Asian American Movement college campuses were a main arena of pan-ethnic identity construction. What has been Asian American literature’s contribution to the social construction of the pan-ethnic identity and how has this varied, depending on the character of Asian American racial formation at the time? This, then, is what second-wave Asian American literary history might be tasked with investigating, since an Asian American literary history should perforce have a historicized account of Asian American literature. An incorporation of the historicity of Asian American racial formation into our understanding of Asian American literary periodization may well necessitate a nonlinear narrative, one that no longer conforms to the serial, cumulative structure of Asian American history narration to which we have become accustomed. In a critique directed at the homogenizations of Asian American history narration, Sylvia Yanagisako has observed the predilection of 1980s courses to present Asian American history as a succession of immigrant groups struggling against racism and nativism (281). Cultural criticism of the 1990s alerted us to the potential for Americanist teleology perpetuated by this historical narrative. Yet this teleology has proven difficult to

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transcend given that the racializing effect of Asian Exclusion upon disparate groups remains Asian American studies’ best explanation for the unity of Asian American identity, which orients the latter toward a politics of recognition. It is only more recently, in the work of the most recent generation of literary critics, that we are offered glimpses as to how to practice an alternative literary history that could be postnational and still, in some form, pan-ethnic.

New Directions for Literary History Three recently published works of Asian American criticism open up new possibilities for conceptualizing Asian American identity beyond ethnic aggregation or synecdoche: Lisa Yun’s The Coolie Speaks (2008), Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire (2010), and Mark Chiang’s The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies (2009). That they convey the historicity of the racial form through an appreciation of the textuality of its sources makes a strong case for literature’s centrality to Asian American history. To be sure, these works do not present themselves as literary history in any formal sense, but their historicist insights do suggest exciting possibilities for its renewal. At minimum, they help to fill in some of the gaps reflected by contemporary literary history’s symptomatic absence ever since the displacement of the “claiming America” paradigm by transnationalist trends shifted attention toward ethnic diasporas and eroded the political grounds for the pan-ethnic identity.3 Lisa Yun’s The Coolie Speaks discovers and analyzes a new archive of coolie oral and written testimonies collected by a Chinese commission to investigate conditions of indentured labor in Cuba in 1874. The report of this commission resulted in the banning of coolie traffic to Cuba, where Chinese coolies had been introduced in 1847 and slavery was not abolished till 1886. The temporal coexistence of Asian indentured labor and African slavery under similar conditions of abuse led Yun to reconsider the typical notion of the coolie as a figure of transition between slavery and free wage labor regimes in the Americas. The coolie makes visible the modernity of labor coercion and the fictitiousness of the freedom of contract. The introduction of the coolie as a significant topic of nineteenth-century labor history also disturbs a binary (black and white) model of race. But the coolie is not only a figure useful to the deconstruction of dominant racial paradigms and Enlightenment truths. The coolie is also a subject of whom Yun believes it is possible to ask, “what did [he] have to say?” (xv). Though solicited by a commission that served British competitive interests and that was built on international consensus, coolie petitions and testimonies can nevertheless be read as “acts of resistance,” polyvocal accounts of daily struggle, and a mass indictment of a brand of slavery cloaked in official representations of “agreement” (47, 59, 143, 175). Yun’s is equally a literary intervention as it is a historical reinterpretation. In demonstrating the intimacy between Chinese and Afro-Caribbean histories of coercion and insurgency, Yun posits the coolie narrative as a generic analogue to the slave narrative. Insistently transnational, Yun is explicit that she is not about “recuperating” the

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Cuban coolie as a “minority American” subject (xxi), and finds even “transPacific” to be too restrictive a label for an Asian migration to the Americas that often followed transatlantic routes (xxiii). Nevertheless, just as the slave narrative has long represented an ancestral beginning for African American letters, the coolie narrative might be seen as an origin point for Asian American literature, with “American” here functioning as a hemispheric rather than national designation. The final chapter of her study skips forward in time to discuss a 1927 communal biography of Cuban Chinese merchant society by a Chinese mestizo writer, one that did not manifestly feature the coolie but that is officially dedicated to – and, in Yun’s reading, textually “haunted” by – the coolie of the nineteenth century. Thus, Yun’s disclosure of a genealogical relationship between literature of the supposed middleman minority and subaltern speech of the anticolonial coolie can be seen to model a method of Asian American literary history. Yun’s materialist treatment of the coolie as a racialized labor form also models a potential for a trans-ethnic approach to the Asian American subject. “I use the term as one that calls upon a racialized history, as ‘coolies’ especially referred to Asian bonded labor and no other” (xx). Though her Cuban case study entailed a focus on coolies of Chinese origin, the fact that both Chinese and Indian indentured labor was trafficked by European colonial powers means that the coolie as a figure is not associated with a singular ethnicity, which is why “coolie” so often signifies a sensationalist stereotype of “Asiatic labor.” As such, the coolie can be understood as designating a sociohistorical racial formation rather than a species of ethnic descent. More expansively, the coolie might be taken to figure contract labor as a generalized mode of production, and thereby include the social histories of Japanese and Filipino migrants as well. The latter’s modes of arrival in the Americas certainly reflected very different structures of international and colonial relations, but it would be possible to theorize their comparable conditions of constrained mobility and racial segmentation. In the era of Asian indenture and exclusion, the notion of the coolie (or contract labor) narrative presents a promising way of reading for Asian American literature non-anachronistically. Occasions of interethnic collaboration and conflict between Japanese, Indian, and Filipino migrant workers have long been an area of research in Asian American working-class history. But until Yun’s coining of the “coolie narrative,” early Asian American literary history has lacked for theories of textual forms that could be understood as constitutively trans-ethnic (rather than aggregatively or synecdochically pan-ethnic). Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire also provides us with a historicized frame for reading texts as Asian American literature. Here the material determinant is the US Cold War in Asia, which involved an “unruly set of engagements . . . in . . . most of Asia” and not just one nation (31). Kim conceptualizes Asian American literature and culture as a critical “afterlife” or “translation” of the Cold War, which she interprets as both a historical period and an epistemology that exceeds its historical “eventness” (3). Ends of Empire is a historicizing extension of Lisa Lowe’s thesis that Asian American culture is a critical response to a US national culture that constitutively excludes it. By pro-

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viding a putatively materialist explanation for Asian exclusion, Lowe’s work reinforced a structural view of anti-Asian racism as an essential attribute of the US nation-form, with the effect that the variability of its forms and roles – despite the significant differences in Asian American social status after the 1960s – became less of a research question. Indeed, Asian American racial formation itself became something of a neglected topic in Asian American cultural studies, which saw advances in the psychoanalytic theorization of the Asian American subject but materialist conclusions as to its impossibility (Chuh). Kim’s grounding of Asian American literature within the context of the Cold War’s production of Asian Americans reunites Asian American political critique with a historical account of the Asian American subject. In the postWorld War II era, Asian Americans are subjects located within a US imperium that extends across the Asian continent. While US colonization of the Philippines since the turn of the twentieth century has long established a framework for reading Filipino American writing as an exilic rather than immigrant literature, Kim’s emphasis on the Cold War’s mass displacement of Asian populations now also allows for the reading of other post-World War II ethnic literatures according to a paradigm of “refuge migration,” a term borrowed from Ji-Yeon Yuh (237). To be sure, this model of “Asian American literature” as Cold War literary formation cannot be perfectly all-inclusive. As Kim explains, her textual selection had to be based on where the Cold War happened to be publicly waged and guided by which literary works happened to thematize it (31–2) – as it happens, works by Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese American authors. Kim’s notion of Cold War refuge migration literature provides us with a nonessentialist way of reading for Asian American literature after 1945. Kim is ambiguous as to the date of the Cold War’s expiration, echoing Tobin Siebers that “[t]he history of the Cold war is in part a history of false endings” (Kim 4). Her deliberate ambiguity on this point licenses a selection of texts that, in ranging from 1982 to 2002, can be understood to be of contemporary relevance; however, in her readings the particular events of interest tend to be past cataclysms, such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japanese American internment, or the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In this sense, “history” in Kim’s handling of twentieth-century letters, like Yun’s, is of a spectral sort, one whose violence against Asians is located in an unacknowledged past. Though Ends of Empire does not itself read texts in terms of their socially contemporary meanings, a project that would require more specification of the Cold War dimensions of US-Asian relations after 1989, the work it undertakes invites others to pick up this challenge. For the exploration of the historical agency of Asian American literature, Mark Chiang’s The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies provides a promising lead. Where Yun’s work encourages us to locate the materiality of the Asian American in labor history, and Kim’s in the geopolitics of its Cold War formation, Chiang’s locates the materiality of the Asian American in its post-1960s academic institutionalization. Chiang demystifies “Asian American” as a community or a people and, following Pierre Bourdieu, asks that we consider its operation as a “category” and a “field”

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(Chiang 10). Since Chiang’s focus is the pursuit of cultural capital within the university, he leaves open to others the task of examining the interaction between academic versus other kinds of organizational claims to Asian American representation. The value of Chiang’s analysis is that it scrupulously distinguishes between political and academic spheres of representation, and allows us to understand Asian American representation as a means of self-representation for an intellectual class (of writers, artists, scholars, and critics). While no doubt politically deromanticizing, his focus on cultural capital – which re-raises the question of why someone might choose to become Asian American – is what enables a renewal of the category in a “nonrestrictive and nonessentialist” vein (10). Following from Chiang, Asian American literature would be defined as literature that makes claims (or can be read as making claims) to Asian American political representation, in which what is at stake is intellectual legitimacy (Chiang calls it cultural capital accumulation). The nonrestrictive, nonessentialist textual archive implied by such a conceptualization points in at least two provocative directions for how we might conceive “Asian American literature.” To some extent, these are already present in the way in which Asian American studies is being practiced, researched, and taught. One direction involves recognizing that Asian American writing may in large part be composed of nonliterary texts, that is, if we adhere to a restrictive definition of literature to mean fictional or imaginative works. There are more nonfictional than fictional authors who directly ponder the meaning of Asian Americanness, evoke its existence, theorize its politics, seek its history, and give it discursive life. This likely explains why Asian American literature courses offered in English departments, even when not deliberately conceived as cultural studies courses, are as likely to populate their syllabi with writings by Gary Okihiro, David Palumbo-Liu, and other professional Asian Americanist scholars as with novels, poetry, and drama. In some ways, the relative extensiveness of Asian American representation in scholarly writing compared to imaginative writing may help explain the predominance of Asian American cultural studies and the perpetual underdevelopment of Asian American literary studies in the academy. If we are to take seriously that Asian American literature is where Asian American representation is to be found, it may mean that the textual field is one that cannot be based on a restrictive definition of literature. Alternatively, it is possible to keep imaginative literature at the center of the field if we are willing to delink the criteria for textual inclusion from authorial descent. The second direction for Asian American studies implied by a representational notion of the Asian American is one that would define the Asian American text as an American text that engages in the imaginative construction of Asia and Asians. Given the centrality of Imagism to American modernism and other brands of Orientalism to American literature in general, an Asian American literary archive construed in this way would not lack for materials. Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacements (2002) pioneered literary criticism of this type by choosing to look at the ethnic object strictly “from the perspectives of language and literature” (2). In Huang’s words, “transpacific displacement” is a “historical process of textual migration of cultural meanings, mean-

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ings that include linguistic traits, poetics, philosophical ideas, myths, stories” (3). Huang’s reconceptualization of “ethnic literature” as “ethnographic literature” – replacing the notion of a literature that represents an ethnic subject with the notion of a literature that creates an ethnographic image – allows him to range across a textual set that includes Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell alongside Maxine Hong Kingston and John Yau. In recent years, the appearance of more and more scholars pursuing a dialogue between modernism and Asian American literature, particularly in poetry, suggests that one of the most vibrant sectors of Asian American literary criticism is promising to displace the ethnic canon altogether, or at least one founded on a divide between the aesthetic and the ethnic. Textualist ways of redefining the Asian American archive show themselves to be particularly friendly to translingual methods. The pursuit of research along these lines – particularly within comparative literature departments, whose late participation in Asian Americanist conversations is now proving influential – owes to the fact that their students tend to be the ones with sufficient linguistic competency to take “transnationalism” beyond the level of thematics to the level of the source materials themselves. For Huang, the transnational sources of American modernism imply the transnationalism of American literature in general, of which Asian American writing can now be seen as an exemplary rather than outlying part. With a focus on the image of China and the Chinese language in American poetry, Huang’s chosen archive does not model a solution to the problem of the Asian American as synecdochic fallacy. However, his recuperation of Pound for Asian Americanist concerns is in itself a powerful gesture. Imagism after all presents an image of the Orient, not of China, and not necessarily even of China in an imaginary sense. Since the ideograph in Pound’s poetry comes via Ernest Fenollosa, whose knowledge of the Chinese language was mediated by Japanese translation, the Orient of Pound’s imagination was in some sense constitutively trans-ethnic. Josephine Park’s Apparitions of Asia (2008) proceeds from the Sino-Japaneseness of Fenollosa’s linguistics, which forms a starting point of an American Orientalist tradition inclusive of Pound’s Cathay and Snyder’s Zen – and relevant to the poetic inventions of David Hsin-Fu Wand, Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. Huang’s and Park’s collations of Asian American poetry alongside American modernist poetry suggest a way forward for theorizing the literary significance of Asian American writing, its historical engagement with American literary tradition and aesthetic ideology. Park retains a distinction between what is Asian American literature and what is American Orientalism on the basis of authorial identity, whereas Huang quite radically dissolves this boundary altogether by combining all his texts under the sign of ethnographic writing. At the same time, insofar as the ethnographic seems to index a particular ethnicity, it is Park’s focus on Orientalism that logically compels a diverse (East Asian) ethnic selection of literary examples. In general, the relocation of Asian American literature within representational conceits such as Orientalism or ethnographic writing encourages the envisioning of Asian American courses and research agendas detached from authorial background and focused around the form and function of texts.

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A representational notion of the Asian American presents a way of conserving the category in the wake of anti-essentialist critiques of identity. This conceptualization of Asian American literature is one that would not elevate texts because they are assimilationist or nationalist, nor prioritize those that claim America or subvert it. In this account, the Asian American text is not one that represents Asian Americans, since there can be none such. Rather, the Asian American text is one that is – or can be shown to be – engaged with a problematic of Asian American representation. To this extent also, such a model of the Asian American literary archive can never consist of a given set of texts, but is constantly subject to redrawing as a result of the activities of textual and historical interpretation.

Asian American Historiographic Fictions Certain imaginative texts do recur as the most regularly taught and analyzed examples of Asian American literature. Among them, works by Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-Rae Lee head the list. This is not only because Kingston and Lee write novels, and novels are popular. Nor is it simply because, in the context of a field that consists of a large number of occasional writers and memoirists, they have each produced a sustained body of fiction. Kingston and Lee are treated so often as “representative” Asian American authors because their work is preoccupied with Asian American representation as a problem. While there are many authors who thematize particular ethnic histories, only some thematize how representation mediates literature and history, or explore the relationship between the project of writing and the historicity of Asian American identity. Moreover, it is because Kingston’s and Lee’s works operate at both levels, indexing an ethnically specific history and interrogating its means of historical representation, that the Asian American identities they entertain seem to be constitutively trans- or interethnic. Kingston and Lee are, of course, post-1968 authors, that is, authors who postdate the naming of Asian American identity by the Asian American Movement and the establishment of Asian American studies programs. However, their works show an express interest in the present’s reconstructions of the past, and are, even when set in contemporary times, readable as historical fictions of Asian American racial formation in earlier periods. In this final section of the chapter, I turn to the historiographic significance of Kingston’s and Lee’s imaginative works, legible according to each of the new, historicizing concepts of Asian American literature discussed above: Asian American literature as coolie narrative, Asian American literature as Cold War formation, and Asian American literature as cultural capital. First, Asian American literature as cultural capital. Both Kingston and Lee have produced Künstlerromans that stage the Asian American writer as confronted by a vexed yet inescapable relationship between aesthetic and political representation. In Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1989), Wittman Ah Sing is an aspiring writer in the late 1960s who is searching for an Asian American art form that can create commu-

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nity. Community must be created because community does not already exist: its origins are lost, uncertain, or constituted by performance, even in the case of his own family tree. Wittman’s quest for an avant-garde Asian American art arises out of a condition of ethnic tribelessness, in which there is no preexisting family that could be coded as a natural ethnicity. For example, Wittman’s father Zeppelin, whose occupation as gold miner references the most seemingly authentic Chinese American historical ancestry, is a “pure Chinese” and yet was “proud to be taken for whatever, especially by one of their own kind, Mexican, Filipino” (Kingston, Tripmaster 200). The ethnic syncretism of Wittman’s theatrical sources similarly results in something other than a restoration of old Chinatown culture. Of his art’s revolutionary effect, we are left far more unconvinced. Partly, this is because all along, Wittman’s rebellion against routinized work, mass consumerism, and state documentation occurs in social isolation as individualized, antic responses to one-dimensional society. Tripmaster presents the opportunity for us to inquire into the prospect of an Asian American art in the absence of a political purpose for Asian American representation. The novel seems to be asking: can the representation of Asian American culture itself supply the content for an Asian American politics? Beneath the narrator’s mock-celebratory tone, how does the play’s formlessness, its seeming recalcitrance to description, offer a judgment on this question? By contrast, Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) centrally thematizes the problem of Asian American political representation by telling the story of a Korean immigrant politician in Queens, New York, whose temporary success and ultimate downfall hinge on his mistake of treating democratic political association as if it were a “natural” ethnic family. The councilman’s failed quest for mayoral office implies the impossibility of Asian American attainment to political universality, or a structural contradiction between being Asian American and a universally representative subject. Perhaps because Lee is explicitly engaged with Asian American identity as a political form, the social formation imagined here is radically elastic. John Kwang’s “people” are Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians, these brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers, countless unheard nobodies, each offering to the marketplace their gross of kimchee, lichee, plantain, black bean, soy milk . . . selling anything to each other and to themselves. (Lee, Native Speaker 83)

Where economic globalization introduces cultural diversity, political representation seeks the forging of new collectivities out of market atomization. The problem of Asian American political representation is framed by the novel as one of aesthetic representation, in that the politician’s story is the subject of the protagonist’s secret reporting, whose writing style becomes more “fanciful” as he tries to break free of his assignment (Lee, Native Speaker 147). Lee casts the Asian American writer as corporate spy whose professional success, parallel to the predicament of the Asian American politician, is structurally tied to betrayal of community. Just as the politician seeks to transubstantiate a political formation from numbered lists (of

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financial contributors), the writer keeps discovering after all that he is generating lists not poetry, information not literature. If there will in the end be no aesthetic autonomy from the economic incentives that have commissioned Henry Park’s intellectual labor, Native Speaker is also insistent that the economic is inseparable from the political. Park’s truly dreaded reader is not his boss, but the firm’s anonymous clients who may be intelligence agencies of undemocratic regimes or the United States’ own Immigration and Naturalization Service, the enemies of all diasporic peoples. Of course we, the readers of Lee’s novel, are the final audience of Park’s craft, and as such we are forced to ponder the complicities between reading for Asian American literature and federal surveillance of undocumented immigrants as yet another level of the ambivalence of subaltern representation. With Paul Pyun in Aloft, Lee opts for a direct portrayal of the Asian American writer, whose relegation now to the role of minor character appears to be a condition of his professionalization as an author of unreliable inspiration married to a college professor. Thus, even in the novel that, with its white protagonist, is considered to have strayed from the terrain of “Asian American literature,” the question of the relationship between Asian American writing and US racial formation – in this case, how the Italians became white – remains Lee’s means of exploring the social institutionality of Asian American literature. The inter- or trans-ethnic dimensions of Asian American identity are even more visible if we attend to the Cold War themes in Kingston’s and Lee’s texts. In many ways, the sense of Lee’s waxing canonicity for Asian American studies might be understood to result from precisely Lee’s grounding of Asian American character in the more contemporary dynamics of US geopolitics in Asia. While Lee’s celebrity has partly to do with his representation of Asian American identity through the historical experience of a “new” Asian ethnicity (new only in the sense of the recentness of Korean American visibility), it is not reducible to it. Lee’s second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), became an instant classic of Asian American studies in its innovative approach to the model minority myth. Where other Asian Americanists had typically resorted to exposing the Asian exclusionist currents in US society that thwart immigrant assimilation, Lee here unveils the damaged refuge migrant behind the façade of the good immigrant. In Doc Hata, Lee creates a character paradoxically popular and isolated in a small, largely white, upper-middle-class suburban town. To his neighbors presumptively Japanese American, Hata is slowly revealed to have been a Korean adoptee who’d served as a medical officer in the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. Lee’s version of the Asian American is thus an ethnically nested subject, a product of Korea’s colonization by Japan, whose war crimes it has been the convenience of a Pax Americana to overlook. If A Gesture Life fully replaces the tragic immigrant tale with an uncanny narrative of exile, Lee’s geopolitical framing of the issues is already implied by the earlier novel, where Park finds himself employed in the defeat of Third World political aspirations by a Nixon-like employer who is always “lurking about, snooping somewhere,” trailed by a hapless dog named Spiro (Agnew) (Lee, Native Speaker 28).

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Kingston has been so foundational to first-wave Asian American history writing that it is easy to overlook the ways in which her writing exceeds its imagination. We tend to think of Kingston as the paradigmatic “1970s” author whose intent to claim America has been superseded and updated by Lee’s post-1990s transnationalist savvy. In fact, her work richly accommodates a symptomatic reading of the Cold War’s making of the Asian American. The Woman Warrior (1976), after all, was published after Nixon’s visit to China but before the normalization of relations under Carter, right as the Cultural Revolution was winding to a close with the trial of the Gang of Four. The text’s famous improvisation upon Chinese tradition can be read as indexing this odd interregnum, when American apprehension of contemporary Chinese reality was newly possible yet still greatly mediated by the myths of the “bamboo curtain.” The uncertain truth of Chinese reality in the text can be read to register the material power of such geopolitical determinants upon the historical consciousness of Chinese immigrants and their US descendants who were made exilic by the United States’ nonrecognition of the People’s Republic after 1949. The notion of the Asian American as the necessarily fictionalizing subject who arises in a geopolitical communications breach is carried forward from The Woman Warrior to Tripmaster Monkey, which also entangles the fate of Asian American art in the gears of a US war machine. Pondering his mother’s performing troupe and its basis in the US war effort of the 1940s, Wittman resolves, “At the war rallies, they performed their last, then the theater died. I have to make a theater for them without a war” (Kingston, Tripmaster 190). The ironic truculency of this Vietnam-era peacenik is not merely a satirization of Asian American nationalist machismo. Wittman’s aggressive outbursts are cousin to the martial mode of self-empowerment fantasized by the Asian American as inhibited woman warrior – both symptoms of a racial subject engendered by war. The sense of war’s permanence has to do with the shifting scene of the military theater of operations during the Cold War (so that there is always some Asian country with which the United States is at war), as well as with the Cold War’s confusing reversal of the World War II status of Japan and China. Kingston’s war theorization of Asian American racial formation helps explain why, though its cultural content conspicuously draws from Chinese sources, identity is continually staged through interethnic antagonism and ethnic blurring. In Tripmaster, for example, the “American of Japanese Ancestry” paradoxically assimilated by internment’s injury serves as a necessary foil to the alienated Wittman, and hence Lance Kamiyama is his natural partner in their shticky parodies of Orientalist stereotypes (87, 126). Why else, too, does Wittman have a grandmother who speaks a mysterious “language of her own” that sounds Japanese but maybe isn’t (191)? While Lee’s Asian American is agonistically Korean Japanese, Kingston’s is Japanese Chinese, and one that is similarly produced by war’s material conflicts. If Kingston and Lee share a view of history as violence, their approaches to it are, however, differently historical. This can be seen in Kingston’s willingness to inhabit the viewpoints of earlier generations and Lee’s circumspection about its advisability.

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Lee’s history is fundamentally a traumatic specter within the present. The magical capacity of Kingston’s characters to talk with the dead attests to a greater belief in the value of historical reconstruction. However, a danger of her resort to fiction’s séance-like power is a potential hypostatization of history, in which what is communicated is the essential homogeneity of immigrant experience. Generations of “China Men” blur into one character. In The Woman Warrior, war becomes an immanent metaphor for an identity defined by the gauntlet “Nobody in history has conquered and united both North America and Asia” (49). Lee’s punctual concentration on the injuries of the Second World War treats war as more of a historical explanation for racial formation even if it typifies a kind of history that eludes recovery. For their significance as historiographical interventions, the differences between Kingston and Lee might finally be clarified if we consider their work in light of a coolie paradigm of Asian American literature. Kingston’s China Men (1980) represents a pioneering effort to portray the lives of Chinese contract laborers in Hawaii and the US mainland. Its influence was such that it became a source text for the historian Ronald Takaki’s documentation of Hawaiian plantation life. For a long time, Asians in this country were not allowed to tell their stories, sometimes even to talk. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel China Men, Bak Goong goes to Hawaii, where he is told by a foreman that laborers were not permitted to talk while working. . . . After work, resting in the camp away from the ears of the foreman, Bak Goong tells his fellows workers: “I will talk again, Listen for me.” . . . Then, one day, the workers dig a wide hole, and they flop on the ground “with their faces over the edge of the hole and their legs like wheel spokes.” Suddenly their words come tumbling out. . . . Today we need to fill the shouting holes, to listen to the Bak Goongs of the past and learn their secrets. Their stories can enable us to understand Asians as actors in the making of history and can give us a view from below – the subjective world of the immigrant experience. (Takaki 120–1)

Kingston’s fictional representation of “talk story” helped Asian American history writing testify to the perspectives of contract laborers that had been suppressed by nineteenth-century employers and twentieth-century historians alike. In recovering the speech of the coolie, Yun’s work can be seen as following in the footsteps of a representational effort initiated by Kingston. At the same time, Yun’s stress on the profound involuntariness of coolie labor puts into bold relief the ideological consequences of Kingston’s Promethean topoi. Even accounting for the material differences between the use of contract labor in Cuba versus US territories, Kingston’s China Men are depicted as world adventurers in the tradition of Crusoe, leaving home at will, occasionally impressed by local tyrants, and essentially Wild Men by nature. Kingston’s portrait would have us humanize the Chinese contract laborer as a classically modern individual, while Yun’s coolie would have us question the latter as a falsely universal ideology. In the end, Kingston’s historiographical project is fundamentally comic, which is perhaps a concomitant of giving voice to the subaltern. By contrast, Lee’s commitment

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is to remark the subaltern’s tragic silencing. Faithful to the depiction of Korean Americans as a largely postwar formation, Lee does not provide literal portraits of coolies. His fictional imagination is, however, haunted by a veiled figure of slavery, in this case not male contract or indentured labor but female sexual exploitation. Whether in the instance of the comfort woman in A Gesture Life, the maid-like second wife of Park’s father in Native Speaker, or the wife who drowns herself in Aloft, Lee continually lodges within his Asian American genealogies an ancestral figure of unfreedom. This silent figure forms the contrasting backdrop to contemporary Asian American Bildung, even as resonances between past and present generations confirm a pattern of gendered racialization. The connections disturb certitudes of biological descent and myths of ethnic purity. Just as K’s compulsory sexual service to the Japanese military means that the paternity of her unborn child remains to the end in question, the progressive darkening of Hata’s line suggests that a raised consciousness involves awareness of shared histories of racial oppression. In fact, starting with Native Speaker’s portrait of black-Asian urban tensions, Lee’s work throughout is fascinated by the inevitabilities of Asian-black-white triangulation. So too is Kingston’s. In Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman’s avant-gardist aspirations are always framed as a potential copy of black radical chic. China Men and The Woman Warrior remember a “black grandmother” who had been brought back to China by a maternal grandfather on one of his trips to the “West, Bali or Hawai’i or South America or Africa” (China Men 86). Blackness in the family tree signifies the interracial contact involved in a Chinese transnational labor migration that was historically coeval with colonial slavery. Even beyond trans-ethnicity, Kingston’s and Lee’s ventures into the prehistory of the Asian American yield a knowledge of transracialism. This recovered knowledge does not mean, though, that either author would place a vital bet on the power of Afro-Asian solidarity, Third Worldism, or, for that matter, any collective form of resistance. Lee’s characters are fundamentally solitary creatures, narcissists, or orphans of their own making. Despite her more working-class settings, so are Kingston’s China Men, and Wittman after them. Perhaps Kingston’s and Lee’s literary genius is that they have tapped the truth of Asian American political expression, which social scientists through empirical means have found to be perennially nascent. Or, perhaps their successes show that what signifies as literary achievement is inextricable from a sense of political estrangement, which may have something specific to tell us about the historically available modes of narrating the subject of Asian American literature.

Notes 1.

For the embeddedness of Asian American identity in the Third Worldism of the 1968 student movements, see Karen Umemoto’s

account of the role of Asian American students in the San Francisco State strike on behalf of a Third World College.

498 2.

Colleen Lye

For Asian American as a “catachrestic” formation, which indicates that “there is no literal referent for the rubric ‘Asian American,’ and, as such, the name is marked by the limits of its signifying power,” see Koshy (342).

3.

For the canonical critique of intellectual transnationalism’s threat to Asian American studies’ political purchase, which perforce needs to be grounded in a US local, see SauLing Wong.

References and Further Reading Brackman, Harold, and Steven P. Erie. “Beyond ‘Politics by Other Means’? Empowerment Strategies for Los Angeles’ Asian Pacific Community.” In Asian American Politics: Law, Participation, and Policy (pp. 231–45). Eds. Don T. Nakanishi and James S. Lai. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Chan, Jeffrey Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong. Eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. New York: Mentor, 1974. Chiang, Mark. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Fujino, Diane C. “Who Studies the Asian American Movement?” Journal of Asian American Studies 11, no. 2 (2008): 127–70. Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in TwentiethCentury American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kim, Jodi. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. New York: Vintage, 1989. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey. New York: Vintage, 1990. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1989. Koshy, Susan. “The Fiction of Asian American Literature.” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 315–46.

Lee, Chang-Rae. Aloft. New York: Riverhead, 2005. Lee, Chang-Rae. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead, 2000. Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead, 1996. Lien, Pei-te. The Making of Asian America through Political Participation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Lien, Pei-te, M. Margaret Conway, and Janelle Wong. The Politics of Asian Americans: Diversity and Community. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: Asian American Cultural Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Lye, Colleen. “The Sino-Japanese Conflict of Asian American Literature.” In Asian American Subgenres 1853–1945, Part II (special issue). Ed. Hsuan L. Hsu. Genre 39, no. 4 (2006): 43–63. Nakanishi, Don. “Asian American Politics: A Research Agenda.” In Asian American Politics: Law, Participation, and Policy (pp. 93–112). Eds. Don T. Nakanishi and James S. Lai. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Okihiro, Gary. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Park, Josephine. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Takaki, Ronald. “From a Different Shore: Their History Bursts with Telling.” In Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader (pp. 117–31). Eds. Min Zhou and James V.

Reading for Asian American Literature Gatewood. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Umemoto, Karen. “ ‘On Strike!’ San Francisco State College Strike, 1968–69: The Role of Asian American Students.” Amerasia 15, no. 1 (1989): 3–42. Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads.” Amerasia 21, nos. 1–2 (1995): 1–27.

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Yaganisako, Sylvia. “Transforming Orientalism: Gender, Nationality, and Class in Asian American Studies.” In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Analysis (pp. 275–98). Eds. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney. New York: Routledge, 1996. Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.

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Untangling Genealogy’s Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions Carla L. Peterson On March 5, 1897, 18 black men met at Lincoln Memorial Congregational Church in Washington, DC, to finalize the organization of the American Negro Academy. The brainchild of eminent Episcopal clergyman Alexander Crummell, the Academy boasted a truly impressive list of founders that included ministers Francis J. Grimké, Benjamin Tanner, Levi Coppin, J.W.E. Bowen, and Theophilus Gould Steward; classics professors William Saunders Scarborough and William Henry Crogman; lawyer T. McCants Stewart; newspaper editor John W. Cromwell; mathematics professor Kelly Miller; and W.E.B. Du Bois, then instructor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. The purpose of the organization was, in Crummell’s words, to bring together “men of Science, Letters, and Arts, or those distinguished in other walks of life” in order first to “promote the publication of literary and scholarly works,” especially those that would help in the “vindication of the race from vicious assault,” and second to “aid youths of genius in the attainment of the higher culture, at home and abroad” (Moss 24). Crummell and his colleagues worked tirelessly throughout the day to write, revise, and ratify the Academy’s constitution, taking time out to listen to the venerable clergyman deliver a lecture titled “Civilization, the Primal Need of the Negro Race.” The evening session was devoted to a paper by the up-and-coming Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” which has since entered the canon as one of his most important early statements about race. Well before 1897, black Americans had come to acknowledge that national Reconstruction had failed and that they were entering a period that historians now

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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refer to as the “nadir.” White supremacist doctrine proclaiming Negro inferiority and demanding Negro subordination flourished. Jim Crow laws relegating blacks to second-class citizenship were passed in state after state. In 1883, a U.S. Supreme Court decision declared unconstitutional the Civil Rights bill of 1875 that had banned discrimination in public places. It was followed in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined into law the invidious concept of “separate but equal.” Throughout these dismal decades, black leaders – both those who were present at the Lincoln Memorial Church meeting and those who were not – committed themselves to gaining what Judith Shklar has called “social standing” for the American Negro. According to Shklar, one of the hallmarks of democracy is the ability of each individual to overcome his or her original status – whether race, class, ethnicity, or gender – to gain the full rights of citizenship. Among these rights, Shklar listed the right to vote, which leads to inclusion into the polity, and the opportunity to work and own one’s labor power, which enables independence in the form of property ownership, inheritance, and so forth. Taken together, these rights result in social standing, in the acquisition of “social dignity” and “public respect,” without which individuals feel “not just powerless and poor” but also “dishonored” (1–3). “The Conservation of Races” constitutes an early intervention on Du Bois’s part in the debate over how best to achieve social standing; his solution lay in his very title. Firmly opposed to those who sought to minimize “race distinctions” in favor of notions of racial sameness derived from the biblical injunction “out of one blood God created all nations,” Du Bois insisted that races do exist and proceeded to define their essential differences (38). He began by acknowledging physical variations of color, hair, and cranial measurements, but argued that these characteristics were so “intermingled” that they ended up confusing racial categories and rendering racial criteria virtually meaningless. Beyond these “grosser physical differences” lay, however, other “differences – subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may be – which have silently but definitely separated men into groups.” These Du Bois defined as “spiritual, psychical differences,” constituting what he called “the race ideal” (39–40). Much like other races, Du Bois insisted, the Negro possesses a race ideal that finds expression not just in single individuals but also in the race as a group. He wanted his message to reach not only members of the black race but white Americans as well. Paradoxically, it was the race ideal of black Americans that would ultimately gain them social standing. Hence, Du Bois argued, It is our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals; as a race we must strive by race organization, by race solidarity, by race unity to the realization of that broader humanity which freely recognizes differences in men, but sternly deprecates inequality in their opportunities of development. (44)

Du Bois then itemized the means by which race solidarity would eventuate: through the establishment of Negro colleges, newspapers, business organizations, and what he termed an intellectual clearinghouse, namely, the American Negro Academy (44).

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Published as the American Negro Academy’s Occasional Paper, No. 2, “The Conservation of Races” was an immediate response to the Academy’s call for the increased production of literary and scholarly works. It affirmed members’ conviction in the power of the word to help, as they put it, in “the vindication of the race from vicious assault.” A canonical text today, it serves – in both substance and form – as an exemplar of nineteenth-century commentary on race: a deep-seated belief in the spiritual gift of the Negro couched in the language of prophecy. Such canonization has obscured several facts. It suggests that “The Conservation of Races” was the original product of one single person, when it was in fact the result of a race group effort in which the thinking of other unnamed black intellectuals working across the nineteenth century infused Du Bois’s speech. Today, some of these voices still resonate loudly, while others have fallen silent. Most dominant is that of Booker T. Washington. Although invited to attend the March meeting, the Wizard of Tuskegee had declined, aware that the Academy’s call for investment in higher culture was an explicit rejection of his emphasis on the Negro’s material needs, promotion of industrial education, and willingness to defer full civil rights until a later date. In its emphasis on the spiritual gift of the Negro and the need for Negro colleges and institutions like the Academy, “The Conservation of Races” constituted a direct challenge to Washington’s leadership. Less evident to many scholars today is the imprint of Alexander Crummell. Although frail and elderly, Crummell was the driving force behind the founding of the Academy; he had delivered the first paper of the day, and, despite his protestations of declining energy, been elected president of the organization by acclamation. His intellectual influence over Du Bois was unparalleled, and Crummell’s ideas permeate “The Conservation of Races”; indeed, Du Bois acknowledged his paper as a study-inhonor of his mentor (Moses, Afrotopia 178). Unheard by all except maybe by Crummell himself was the voice of his childhood friend, James McCune Smith, who had pondered the meaning of race as early as 1840. On the eve of the Civil War, Smith had written an essay for the Anglo-African Magazine titled “On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia” in which he directly addressed the issue of social standing in his question “Can the black and the white live together in harmony under American institutions, each contributing to the space and prosperity of the country, and to the development of the problem of self-government involved in American institutions?” (225). Jefferson, Smith lamented, had answered in the negative, insisting that his objections were not merely political but lay as well in the “real distinctions which nature has made . . . which are physical and moral” (226–7). Invoking the very same physical characteristics that Du Bois later would, Smith before Du Bois argued that numerous similarities existed across races and that hence “there exists in reality a uniform resemblance” among races. He closed his essay with a promise. “Having briefly discussed the physical differences between the whites and blacks,” he wrote, “a future article will be devoted to the mental and moral differences in those classes.” The article was never published. Had Du Bois read Smith’s essay and appropriated his arguments about the meaninglessness of physical characteristics in racial definitions? If Smith had published his “future

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article,” what would it have said? Did Du Bois decide some 40 years later that he would be the author of this missing article? Attending to the voices of men like Alexander Crummell and James McCune Smith suggests that nineteenth-century literary genealogies are composed of many more skeins than the canon has thus far recognized, skeins that we need to identify, untangle, and analyze. To date, Du Bois’s quasi-mystical theory of race ideals and his increasing antagonism toward the more materialist Booker T. Washington have dominated and defined post-Reconstruction literary histories. As a result, our critical obeisance to these two men has obscured Crummell’s “wide influence,” as Du Bois put it, over black thinkers at the nineteenth century’s end, achieved through decades of intellectual struggle and evolution (Souls 218). Indeed, Crummell had already begun formulating notions about the special destiny of the Negro decades before Du Bois. Yet, in the earlier years of Reconstruction he had promoted ideas that we identify today as Washingtonian. Resituating Crummell within nineteenth-century literary genealogies invites us both to restore the older man to his proper place and to rethink the canonized Washington-Du Bois debate by triangulating it through Crummell’s thinking. Our canonization of Du Bois’s late nineteenth-century “The Conservation of Races” has further effaced the contributions made by James McCune Smith in the early 1840s to the prophetic tradition of the race’s special destiny. Even more importantly, however, it has effectively silenced a countertradition of race deconstruction initiated by Smith in the minor key of irony. We cannot assume that had it been published, Smith’s essay on the “mental and moral differences” among races would have foreshadowed Du Bois’s call for the conservation of races. Indeed, I would argue that in his writings of the 1850s Smith anticipated the thinking of the few unnamed and unrecognized men who, in the heated debate that followed Du Bois’s lecture, resisted his plea to conserve races, insisting instead that racial mixing was a past, present, and future fact of human existence and hence that “race distinctions are of no consequence whatsoever” (“Organization” 21).1

Special Destiny of the Negro Alexander Crummell Scholars today have abandoned the caricatured description of Washington and Du Bois as polar opposites, the former espousing only industrial training, the latter only education. Both men were in fact committed to the same goal of achieving social standing for the American Negro. But their individual life experiences – their place of origin, civil status at birth, education, and current residence – necessarily shaped their thinking. As a result, each man constructed different strategies and different timetables for solving “the Negro Problem.” The Washington-Du Bois controversy was not new to the African American intellectual community. Debates over the relative merits of manual labor training and higher education had flourished since before the Civil War. Quite simply, there were

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Washingtonians before Washington and Du Boisians before Du Bois. Crummell had been both. He had already articulated many of the ideas we attribute today to these two younger men in the years when they were just coming into intellectual maturity: in the 1870s, when Washington was still a student and teacher at Hampton; and in the 1880s, when DuBois was still attending Fisk. Crummell’s gradual evolution from a proto-Washingtonian orientation to positions more aligned with Du Boisian thinking helps clarify for us the process through which Washington and Du Bois each reached their respective positions on education and Du Bois developed his ideas about culture. Born in 1819 in New York City, Crummell was educated at the African Free School on Mulberry Street in the company of classmates whose thinking would have a profound influence on his intellectual development, among them James McCune Smith. After graduation, Crummell set his sights on becoming an Episcopal minister, and after considerable difficulties he was ordained in 1844. Soon thereafter, he sailed for England, where 40 years before Du Bois he was able to fulfill his dream of attending a European institution of higher learning. He matriculated at Queen’s College, Cambridge University, and received a doctorate of divinity in 1853. At Cambridge, Crummell became familiar with the work of men like William Whewell, Julian Hare, and John Grote, whose teachings would have a lasting impact on his thinking. These Cambridge academics rejected the materialism and moral relativism of Hobbes, the sensationalism and skepticism of Locke, and the utilitarianism of Bentham. Instead, they subscribed to a version of Platonic idealism that emphasized the absolute reality of the world of ideas, ruled by the one central concept of goodness embodied in man’s conscience. Working from these tenets, Crummell eventually formulated his own philosophical principles concerning the soul that would later influence the young Du Bois. “The body is but the machinery and instrument of the immaterial essence which inhabits it,” Crummell wrote, and while, indeed, desirous, both by skill and kindness, to adjust and restore this machinery, when fractured, or disarranged, or lacerated, or under decay, yet, by so much as the soul is superior to the body, so do we estimate its superior value, and aim, the more, directly and indirectly, to seek its good. (Moses, Alexander Crummell 72)

After graduating from Cambridge, Crummell moved to Liberia, where he labored as a missionary for the next 20 years. “I think I have a sign,” Crummell wrote to a friend in an appropriation of the language of Genesis 12. “I hear almost a voice – Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee” (Moses, Alexander Crummell 81). Even this early in life, Crummell showed proof of Du Bois’s later contention that he contained within him both “protest” and “prophecy,” qualities that Du Bois himself would inherit from his mentor (Du Bois 214). Indeed, Crummell fashioned himself as a latter-day Abraham whom God commanded to leave Ur so that He could “make of thee a great nation.” In Liberia, however, Crummell came into repeated conflict with indigenous Africans as well as white missionaries and educators, and never fulfilled any prophecy.2

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Crummell returned to a changed United States in the early 1870s. The Civil War had ended slavery, and brought citizenship to all black Americans and the right to vote to black men. Yet much work remained. The question, Crummell asked himself, was whether he could use the power of the word, first to protest the unraveling of Emancipation and the Reconstruction’s present conditions, and second to fulfill God’s prophecy of endowing the American Negro with a special destiny that would both grant him social standing and enable him to purify the nation. In “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois grounded his plea to conserve races in the concept of a “race ideal.” Since scientists had failed to define race according to physical characteristics, the task now fell to the historian and the sociologist. Race, he wrote, is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life. (40)

Taken together, Du Bois, continued, these commonalities create a specific set of racial characteristics that, “under God’s high heaven,” has endowed each race with a special destiny. As with other races, God has given the Negro a distinct mission as a race, but up until now this mission has only been hinted at through individual heroic figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture. Based in racial characteristics, the American Negro’s destiny cannot be “a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.” He can never fulfill it through “absorption by the white Americans.” Indeed, it is the Negro’s race ideal that will transform the nation’s culture: “We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today” (43–4). Neither the substance nor the language of special destiny originated with Du Bois, however, but were appropriations from Alexander Crummell, who had meditated deeply on the subject throughout the 1870s, most especially in “The Negro as a Conservative Source of Power” and “The Destined Superiority of the Negro” (1877), the very title of which underscored his preoccupation. In the language of prophecy, Crummell asserted that God had singled out African-descended people for greatness, “because He intends to make something of them, and to do something for them.” Although the Negro’s message had not yet been fully delivered to the world, it had been glimpsed in the actions of heroic individuals among whom he named Toussaint L’Ouverture. In the present day, black Americans were now being called to “march on in the path of progress to that superiority and eminence which is our rightful heritage, and which is evidently the promise of our God!” (“Superiority” 204–5). In these early years of his return, Crummell paradoxically defined his concept of special destiny in terms that anticipate not the later Du Bois but the later Washington. As he sought simultaneously to calm white fears of “Negro domination” and to placate

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black Americans’ growing anger at racial injustice, Crummell placed protoWashingtonian ideas within a religious, providential framework. In an unpublished and undated paper, “The Negro as a Source of Conservative Power,” he asserted that the American Negro was above all characterized by his willing submission to authority. But this trait, he insisted, was not a negative condition to be overcome. Rather, it was the result of a “disastrous Providence,” through which first the discipline of slavery and later religious training in freedom had endowed black Americans with the proper moral character – the qualities of “sobriety, order, and self-restraint” – to understand and enact the true principles of freedom and citizenship, and, as he put it, correct the nation (238). In his prophecy, Crummell made yet another proto-Washingtonian argument that contrasted the destiny of the Negro with that of newly arrived immigrant populations. In his Atlanta Compromise speech delivered some 20 years later, Washington himself would invoke nativist arguments to impugn the loyalty of foreign-born immigrants and assure his white audience of his people’s patience and continued fidelity as nativeborn Americans better suited for citizenship. In even more virulent language, Crummell asserted that postbellum America was rife with “political insanity” brought about by the “crazed Bohemian,” the “superstitious Italian,” the “angry Irishman,” and the German filled with “godless speculations and wild theories”: among the insanities he named were conflicts between labor and capital, increased antagonism of the poor against the rich, indifference to law and civil order, and the political excitements of socialism and anarchy. Because of their particular history of oppression, Crummell argued, black Americans lay outside these movements; suffering and exclusion had disciplined them and rendered them “an antidote to the wide-spread evil of misrule which threatens this nation” (242, 236–8). In the name of national loyalty and cohesion, the American Negro rejected agitation and insurrection in favor of moderation and accommodation. Like Du Bois, Crummell inserted the concept of “conservation” in his title, suggesting, however, that what was at stake was the conservation of the nation. Well before Washington, Crummell recognized that submission meant accepting a subordinate place in the nation’s socioeconomic order, a willingness to confine ambition to industrial education and manual labor. Two speeches, “Industrial Education” (1880) and “Dignity of Labor” (1881), anticipate many aspects of Up from Slavery in their attempts to find solutions to the problem of black labor that would meet both the demands of the nation and the needs of black people. To make his case, Crummell abandoned the voice of prophecy to adopt the more prosaic language of need. In appearing before the Congressional House Committee of Education and Labor to deliver his “Industrial Education” speech, Crummell strategically tailored his comments to what his audience would find acceptable. “The great, eminent, universal need of the black race in this country,” he informed them, “is training in skilled labor, in mechanical knowledge and handicraft. . . . What we ask the government is to found scholarships for this object” (209). Accomplishing this goal required the establishment of agricultural colleges and trade schools. The result, Crummell promised,

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would be a pool of black labor that would both meet the material needs of the race and contribute to the rebuilding of the nation without threatening the current social order. In promoting the virtues of industrial education, Crummell, much as Washington would later do, spoke out against the need for higher education for blacks. “We are utterly opposed,” he proclaimed, to the use of colleges and universities. When colored men throughout the nation by their industry and activity secure wealth, then let them indulge in the luxury of classical learning; but just now that is not the great, the absolute need of the black race in general in this land. (“Industrial Education” 208)

Crummell went so far as to create a mocking portrait of a black youth sitting in a white man’s kitchen reading Tacitus and Euripides while rejecting the practical training in the necessities of life. This image would later find resonance in Washington’s derisive portrait in Up from Slavery of a young man sitting in a filthy one-room cabin studying a grammar book. The mid-1880s brought about a radical reorientation in Crummell’s thinking away from his proto-Washingtonian positions and toward a prophetic vision of the special destiny of the Negro that Du Bois would later espouse. Even as early as 1886, Crummell was elucidating a more nuanced view of education. In “Common Sense in Common Schooling,” he refused to pronounce himself in favor of any one single form of training but, much as Du Bois later would, promoted the idea of education according to ability. By the time he began organizing the American Negro Academy, however, Crummell was deriding continued calls for industrial education as “cautious, restrictive, limiting in nature” (“Attitude” 295). History, he asserted, taught two facts: one, that blacks needed no training in manual labor since they have been engaged in just such work for the past 200 years; and, two, that the civilizing process in fact precedes the industrial for the very reason that industrialism grows out of intellectual knowledge and not the other way around (“Attitude” 297). Although Crummell never made explicit the reasons for his shift, it was all too evident that the promises of Reconstruction had not been met and that black Americans had indeed entered a nadir. Crummell laid the groundwork for his new thinking in two addresses, “The Need of New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era” (1885) and “Right-Mindedness: An Address before the Garnet Lyceum, of Lincoln University” (1886), each delivered to an audience of black students. As the title of his first speech indicates, Crummell returned to the prophetic mode as he searched for new ideas for a new future for black Americans. The three speeches he gave to the American Negro Academy a decade later fully define these proto-Du Boisian ideas: “The Prime Need of the Negro Race” (1897), “Civilization, the Primal Need of the Race” (1898), and “The Attitude of the American Mind toward the Negro Intellect” (1898). Recalling perhaps his earlier immersion in Platonic idealism at Cambridge University, Crummell now stressed the spiritual over the material. Emancipation, he

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maintained, “was a change of state or condition, valuable and important indeed, but affecting mainly the outer conditions of this people. . . . But outward condition does not necessarily touch the springs of life. That requires other nobler, more spiritual agencies” (“New Ideas” 131). In an argument that Du Bois would later adopt Crummell insisted, first, that only a classical education could help develop these spiritual agencies, and, second, that once developed, the American Negro would at long last be able to fulfill his special destiny. Although Crummell never used the Du Boisian term “Talented Tenth,” he similarly argued that higher culture would be achieved first by a “class of trained and superior men and women” whose duty it would be to uplift those lagging behind. These race leaders would be “the molders of its thought and determiners of its destiny” (“Prime Need” 202). That destiny was “greatness,” which white America had so far denied them. To achieve greatness, black Americans would first need to shake off the yoke of white philanthropy under which men like Booker T. Washington still labored, declare their independence, and nurture their own colleges and institutions like the American Negro Academy. The consequent development of an educated class would rebut racist claims of Negro intellectual inferiority and prove blacks’ equality to whites. It would enable them to participate in a universal order in which they too would share the common heritage of mind and spirit that God had decreed extended to all humanity. Finally, in proto-Du Boisian language, Crummell claimed that classical education would “transform and stimulate the souls of the race” and allow its members to attend at long last to their “soul-life” (“Civilization” 287; “Right-Mindedness” 147).

James McCune Smith If Du Bois borrowed his ideas about the Negro’s special destiny from Crummell, so Crummell borrowed his from his former classmate, James McCune Smith, specifically from the 1841 “Lectures on the Haytien Revolution,” as well as the 1843 essay “The Destiny of our People.” Born in New York City in 1813, Smith attended the Mulberry Street African Free School, where he stood out even then for his intellectual prowess. Before both Crummell and Du Bois, Smith sailed for Europe to acquire a higher education. He attended the University of Glasgow medical school, graduated at the top of his class, and then returned to New York in the late 1830s to set up practice as a doctor and pharmacist. A genuine Renaissance man, Smith was also a political activist and journalist. He died early in 1865 when Crummell was still in Liberia. While at the University of Glasgow, Smith studied more than the body. If Crummell was influenced by Platonic idealism at Cambridge, Smith immersed himself in ideas derived from Scottish Enlightenment philosophers who thronged the halls of academia throughout the eighteenth century. Their writings resonated with Smith. Framing their ideas within the context of natural law, these Scottish academics perceived God as the director and regulator of all human activity. Yet a man’s capacity for action remained primary to their thinking. Men like Adam Ferguson rejected Rousseau’s

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theories of man’s prior existence in a state of nature, suggesting instead that social life was his natural condition. Others worked to define those values necessary for man to live in a state of social harmony. George Campbell promoted the idea of common sense whereby people properly acquire knowledge through both intuition and the conscious operations of the mind. Gershom Carmichael insisted on the necessary coincidence of private interest and public good as the basis of social order. Adam Smith argued in favor of the concept of moral sentiment in which human interaction is based on sympathetic identification. These concepts provide the philosophical context of Smith’s “Lectures on the Haytien Revolution” and “The Destiny of Our People.” Working within what Du Bois later termed a tradition of protest and prophecy, Smith wrote these essays out of a double faith in the rightness of both divine providence and American institutions. Casting African-descended people as one of God’s chosen races, Smith interpreted the oppression and resistance endured by enslaved blacks in the United States in terms of a providential history in which, God assured them, they would be agents of their own self-emancipation and fulfill their destiny not so much through violence as through their moral and intellectual capacities. Before Crummell and Du Bois, Smith argued his case by turning to the historical example of Haiti. It might seem paradoxical that he chose the Haitian Revolution, whose bloodiness had been widely reported throughout the world, as an example of New World blacks’ use of reason to gain their rights. But by means of careful historical investigation, Smith led his readers through the different stages of the rebellion, countering conventional interpretations by arguing that on every occasion black violence had been a legitimate defensive response to assaults by whites. “Be it remembered,” Smith insisted, “that this insurrection was the legitimate fruit of slavery, against which it was a spontaneous rebellion. It was . . . the consequence of withholding from men their liberty.” In a final reversal of conventional thinking, Smith argued that Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership of the rebellion indisputably proved that he was the true democrat; it was this educated former slave who, through constitutional means, endeavored to grant the rights of liberty, equality, and fraternity to every Haitian (Smith, “Lectures” September 25, 1841). In “The Destiny of Our People,” Smith turned to consider the special mission of black Americans. Unlike the ancient Jews who never thought of Egypt as home, he argued, black Americans were attached through their blood and their tears to the soil of their birthplace; hence, they should not emigrate, but remain in the United States. Like Toussaint in Haiti, in this country it was black Americans, not whites, who could best uphold the democratic ideals upon which the Republic was founded. Well before Du Bois and Crummell, Smith prophesized that the destiny of his people was to convert the “form” of the current American government into “substance,” to “purify” it by replacing slavery and oppression with liberty. They would accomplish this goal by following the guidelines set by Christ, relying on “right” rather than “might,” and “good” rather than “evil.” And their weapon would be that of reason: “as physical force is out of the question, the effort must be purely intellectual, and in order to

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maintain the struggle we must qualify ourselves to reason down the prejudices which bar us from rights” (10, 7, 8, 15).

Deconstructing Race: Du Bois’s Challengers, Alexander Crummell, and James McCune Smith Few scholars have paid attention to the lively debate that broke out after Du Bois’s lecture, in which several Academy members took issue with Du Bois’s propositions on race.3 Two members focused their remarks on what was happening here at home, the first arguing that he could not see “how we can live in this country collected as we are, and maintain the identity of the race,” and the second similarly claiming that race distinctions were being erased “right here on the American continent, where we have a conglomeration of the races of the world” (20–1). A third member took a broader view, attacking the concept of race from an historical perspective: There is one mistake being discussed this evening in discussing this question of race identity. Some brethren have talked upon the theory of an unmixed race as if there were any such thing on earth as an unmixed race. If you will read your Bibles, you will find that in the case of the Jews there were certain inflowings of blood during their travellings. It is just the same with all other races. That there is to be amalgamation – why there has always been amalgamation. (“Organization” 23)

Yet these ideas did not originate that night with Du Bois’s challengers. Knowingly or not, they were tapping into an intellectual genealogy of the idea of race deconstruction that goes back through Alexander Crummell to James McCune Smith. In “The Destined Superiority of the Negro,” Crummell had prophesized that a “disastrous providence” had destined black Americans for future eminence. Because of the suffering they had endured in slavery, God had reserved for them a special destiny that would eventually lead to greatness and, beyond that, to superiority. After having made this point, however, Crummell veered off into a surprising new direction: a paean to cultural imitation culminating in an ironically tinged meditation on cosmopolitanism from the standpoint from which to dismantle white supremacist ideology. Forced to recognize that they could no longer deny or suppress black intellect, Crummell averred, white Americans had taken to claiming that blacks were mere imitators, and sneered at the Negro’s “flexibility” and “pliancy” as “simulations of a well-known and grotesque animal” (201–2). But, Crummell went on, The traducers of the Negro forget that the entire Grecian civilization is stratified with the elements of imitation; and that Roman culture is but a copy of a foreign and alien civilization. These great nations laid the whole world under contribution to gain superiority. They seized upon all the spoils of time. They became cosmopolitan thieves. They

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stole from every quarter. They pounced, with eagle eye, upon excellence wherever discovered, and seized upon it with rapacity. In the Negro character resides, though crudely, precisely the same eclectic quality which characterizes those two great, classic nations; and thus he is found in the very best company. The ridicule which visits him goes back directly to them. The advantage, however, is his own. Give him time and opportunity, and in all imitative art he will rival them both. (201–2)

Crummell never returned to this argument in any of his later writings. But, brief as it is, its implications are startling. In validating imitation as a universal and necessary tool in the progress of civilizations, Crummell had not yet cemented his commitment to race ideals. His notion of cultural borrowings reaching back beyond the Greeks, whose civilization was already “stratified with the elements of imitation,” suggests the impossibility of cultural purity, the intractable fact of always already mixed civilizations. It flatly contradicted the definitions of race articulated by Du Bois – “a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses” – unless common is taken to mean universal (“Conservation” 40). And it further dismantled Du Bois’s contention that the Negro’s “destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals” (43). Imitation, Crummell insisted, need not be servile but may serve as a source of emulation, rivalry, and superiority. Moreover, if imitation is indeed a universal, timeless fact of human existence resulting in cultural mixing, then originality itself makes little sense. Even AngloSaxon culture is rendered suspect; like all other cultures, it is simply one derivative culture among many. In a single paragraph, Crummell offered a sweeping alternative history of the progress of civilizations based on a genealogy of culturally impure, imitative societies into which the Negro may readily insert himself. The result is a cosmopolitan perspective in which race ideals play little part unless it is that the Negro is the best imitator of all. Crummell himself knew something about imitation. I want to suggest that he borrowed his ideas from a literary exchange carried out in Frederick Douglass’ Paper between 1852 and 1855 among several of his old friends writing under the pen names of Communipaw, Ethiop, and Cosmopolite. Their identities were not a mystery, but an open secret among the paper’s readership. Ethiop was Brooklyn school teacher William J. Wilson; Cosmopolite was newspaper editor Philip Bell, who had also been a classmate at the Mulberry Street School; and Communipaw was none other than James McCune Smith. Their names were not chosen at random. Despite the ironic and playful tone of their writings, these three men were engaged in a serious discussion about race. To that end, they chose their pen names with care, allowing each to suggest the author’s particular perspective on race that variously emphasized race ideals, common humanity, or racial hybridity. Wilson initiated the debate. Trumpeting proto-Du Boisian notions of race ideals, he named himself Ethiop in order to emphasize his racial identification with Africa,

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and listed specific racial traits – based, as in the later Crummell, on ideas of suffering and submission – that he believed endowed black Americans with a special destiny (January 4, 1855). In contrast, Philip Bell chose the pen name Cosmopolite. By drawing from the worldly sensibility of eighteenth-century British culture, Bell fashioned himself into a citizen of the world who, even as a black man in America, felt free to partake of cosmopolitan high culture. To Bell, his ability to enjoy these events was proof positive that culture transcended race and led to color blindness. But Bell refused to speculate on what he meant by race beyond his insistence that cosmopolitan experience united its participants into a single, universal “race” of common humanity (March 16 and April 20, 1855). James McCune Smith’s Communipaw columns challenged both Ethiop’s racial ideals and Cosmopolite’s racelesss universality. In them, Smith rejected both the form and substance – the major key of prophecy and racial ideals – that had characterized his earlier “The Destiny of Our People,” in order to embrace the minor key of irony and race deconstruction. Cosmopolitan theft lay at the heart of his method. Smith’s first appropriation was from Washington Irving, whose fictional historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, had asserted that the earliest Dutch to come to North America landed at a village named Communipaw, now Jersey City, where they lived and intermingled in perfect harmony with Native Americans, Africans, and “Dutch Negroes.” By naming himself Communipaw, Smith suggested that he was the living embodiment of this colonial settlement, and hence living proof of the always already of cultural and racial hybridity in the United States. In playful language that belied his seriousness of purpose, he pointed to his own mixed identity as “a plain Dutch Negro, with only one head, without horns or tails: and am a lineal descendant from one of the folly fellows whom Washington Irving alludes to in his sketch book, as shining and laughing on our side of Buttermilk Channel” (March 18, 1852). From this perspective, Smith argued, racial purity is nothing more than a myth. Racial identities like his are impossible to parse. And since “single races” don’t exist, all existing racial categories are false; Jews, Chinese, and blacks alike are all racial “admixtures.” Addressing Ethiop directly, in a cultural borrowing from Shakespeare, Communipaw asserted the historical inevitability of racial mixing: “Black spirits and white,/ Mingle, mingle mingle”; and however dear to you may be your ebon hue, your great-grandchildren will be “many a whitey brown.” It is quite too late in the day to get up an association for the propagation of the pure African, or Irish, or any other breed. (August 6, 1852)

Smith gave one last twist to his argument in an 1855 column organized around the Victorian poet Tennyson. It bears close scrutiny. In it, he created a scene in which he, as Communipaw, and Philip Bell, referred to as Fylbel, are deep in conversation. Abruptly, Smith starts quoting from Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” a commemoration of British soldiers massacred during the Crimean War. “Half a league, half a league,/ Half a league onward,” he intones (January 12, 1855). What

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follows is an elaborate argument about cultural imitation, borrowing, and hybridity. Tennyson employs the dactyl to imitate the sound of horses’ feet; in so doing, he improves on Virgil’s similar attempt in book VIII of the Aeneid. Yet the British poet, Communipaw insists, is not imitating the Roman. Rather, Tennyson has committed “flat burglary” by stealing from a Congo chant that Communipaw came across in an article written by a Frenchman in the Revue des deux mondes. “Canga bafio te,/ Canga moune de le,/ Canga do ki la,/ Canga li,” Communipaw insists, is the original version of Tennyson’s “Cannon to right of them,/ Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them/ Volleyed and thundered.” Tennyson has chosen to imitate African, not European, culture. Communipaw himself then proceeds to engage in theft, stealing Tennyson’s lines to record his recent disagreement with Ethiop, and two white abolitionists, Oliver Johnson and W.W. Chapman: “Wilson to right of them,/ Chapman to left of then, Johnson in front of them/ Volleyed and thundered.” What was Smith up to? His comments anticipate Crummell’s later argument about cultural imitation, suggesting that high culture is not pure but the result of borrowings from different cultures. But they also extend his old friend’s contention in their bold assertion that Europeans borrowed from Africans. Whoever the borrower or lender might be, the result is a form of mingling in which elements from different cultures became so intertwined they could hardly be separated out. What is utterly unique to these columns is Smith’s use of irony, which plays itself out on at least two levels. The first is the gap between the seriousness of subject matter and playfulness of tone that, depending on readers’ aesthetic sensibility, might or might not be deemed appropriate. The second is the slippage between idea and expression suggesting that, unlike prophecy’s conviction in the fullness of the word, language can only approximate. Thus, when Bell asks his friend to “translate the Congo,” Communipaw replies that he can’t because the words are “incomprehensible.” Imitation, he insists, never produces an accurate translation but only an approximation based on arbitrary choices. Take Bell’s name, which Communipaw renders orthographically here not as Phil Bell but as Fylbel. Consider the use of the dactyl, which can only sound like the horses’ hoofs, or the unverifiable transliteration of the Congolese into English. Ponder Tennyson’s poem, whose subject is a series of miscommunications – poor translations, if you will – on the battlefield that result in unresolved contradictory versions of what really happened. Reflect, finally, on Communipaw’s playful tone. Please don’t take my interpretation of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” too seriously, he seemed to be saying to his readers. Maybe it’s correct; maybe not. The one lesson they needed to take away with them was that they should never make assumptions about cultural and racial origins and purity.

Back to the Future How did Alexander Crummell and James McCune Smith get excluded from our nineteenth-century literary genealogy? I suspect it was a convergence of factors.

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Du Bois and Washington survived not merely because they were literary figures but also because they were prominent historical actors on the stage of post-Reconstruction national politics. In contrast, Crummell moved primarily in theological circles while Smith died well before his time in 1865. Furthermore, Du Bois and Washington wrote in the still highly valued genres of the essay and autobiography, published as book volumes easy to preserve and place on library shelves. In contrast, much of Crummell’s and Smith’s writings have come down to us in the form of newspaper articles or speeches and sermons, sometimes printed, sometimes still in manuscript form. Locating them often necessitates trips to the archives to print out microfilm or copy manuscript material by hand. To make some of these documents accessible, critics such as Wilson Moses, J.R. Oldfield, and John Stauffer have compiled anthologies of their findings. The problem of archival retrieval has resulted in the undervaluing of much nineteenth-century writing. Ross Posnock, for example, begins his much acclaimed book, Color & Culture, with the following assertion: “In this book I turn on its head this tidy scenario of the black intellectual as a late-twentieth-century invention or discovery. Rather than latecomers, black writers circa 1900 were arguably the first modern American intellectuals” (2). Although Posnock gives a passing nod to Crummell, he does so only in relation to the older man’s influence on Du Bois and not as an intellectual in his own right. Neither does he analyze Crummell’s earlier writings in any detail or mine the archives for the minutes of the American Negro Academy 1897 meeting. Posnock holds to his contention: that “circa 1900” is the moment of the invention of the first modern black intellectuals. But why insist on a singular origin? Why circa 1900? Why “the first”? What constitutes the “modern”? And to whom do we owe this invention? To answer these questions, we need to acknowledge the tangled nature of the skeins of African American literary genealogy. We might begin by rethinking the genealogy of the modern and try to conceptualize a nineteenth-century African American proto-modernism. To do so, we need to question our commonplace notion of nineteenth-century African American culture as premodern, dominated by discourses of sentimentality and providential design, and to challenge “circa 1900” as modernism’s originary moment. In her essay “The Satire of Race in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” Gayle Wald cites a long list of literary critics – Henry Louis Gates Jr., William L. Andrews, Robert Stepto, and Valerie Smith – to concur with their assessment that the Autobiography marks a first in African American literary modernism. Defining the modernist project as a kind of alienation, a crisis of unified identity, and a nostalgic longing for authenticity, she argues that, filtered through the lens of race, this is precisely the ex-colored man’s dilemma. The hopelessness and irresolution of his situation are further underscored by Johnson’s ironic stance throughout the text and refusal of narrative closure at the end. Yet such a modernist project did not begin with Johnson circa 1900. As far back as the 1850s, James McCune Smith had already begun the work of challenging ideas of unified identity and racial authenticity in his ironic Communipaw articles.

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Indeed, Smith had a prescient and profound appreciation of racial theories that scholars have made their central concern over the last 20 years. Well before Paul Gilroy, he understood the illusory nature of a cultural nationalism grounded in the absoluteness of national and ethnic difference. Well before critical race theorists, he grasped that race is not a fixed phenomenon but an evolving social and historical construct. He would have fully agreed with scholars like Howard Winant who prefer to speak of racial formations whose meanings are open to interpretation and processes of signification are “inherently discursive” (23–4). Well before our current moment of globalization, both Crummell and Smith had placed race in a broad historical and geographic context and conceptualized cosmopolitanism along the lines of today’s revisionary critics. Both men embodied versions of Anthony Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitan,” at home both in their “natal patria” and abroad (618). Smith in particular had already anticipated James Clifford’s notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanism” that challenges the binaries of local and global, essence and positionality, homogeneity and difference (36). As a result, he was well aware that cosmopolitanism was no longer the prerogative of the West; indeed, he intuited that, given the historical existence of global networks, the very concept of the West was untenable. It’s time to begin untangling the skeins of African American literary genealogy.

Notes 1. For a correction to these omissions, see Joan L. Bryant’s forthcoming book, Reluctant Race Men. 2. For a comprehensive discussion of Crummell’s Liberia years, see Moses, Alexander Crummell, chapters 8–10.

3.

The exceptions are Moss and Moses, “W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races.’ ”

References and Further Reading Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997): 617–39. Bryant, Joan L. Reluctant Race Men: Black Opposition to the Practice of Race, 1830–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Crummell, Alexander. “The Attitude of the American Mind toward the Negro Intellect.” In Destiny and Race: Selected Writings, 1840–1989 (pp. 289–301). Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

Crummell, Alexander. “Civilization, the Primal Need of the Race.” In Destiny and Race (pp. 284–8). Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Crummell, Alexander. “Common Sense in Common Schooling.” In Civilization and Black Progress: Selected Writings of Alexander Crummell on the South (pp. 134–42). Ed. J.R. Oldfield. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Crummell, Alexander. “The Destined Superiority of the Negro.” In Civilization and Black Progress (pp. 194–205). Ed. J.R. Oldfield. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

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Crummell, Alexander. “Dignity of Labor.” In Civilization and Black Progress (pp. 65–77). Ed. J.R. Oldfield. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Crummell, Alexander. “Industrial Education.” In Destiny and Race (pp. 206–10). Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Crummell, Alexander. “The Need of New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era.” In Civilization and Black Progress (pp. 120–33). Ed. J.R. Oldfield. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Crummell, Alexander. “The Negro as a Source of Conservative Power.” In Destiny and Race (pp. 235–55). Ed. Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Crummell, Alexander. “The Prime Need of the Negro Race.” In Civilization and Black Progress (pp. 200–3). Ed. J.R. Oldfield. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Crummell, Alexander. “Right-Mindedness: An Address before the Garnet Lyceum, of Lincoln University.” In Civilization and Black Progress (pp. 143–54). Ed. J.R. Oldfield. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Conservation of Races.” In The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (pp. 38–47). Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. In The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (pp. 99–240). Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. “W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races’ and Its Contexts: Idealism, Conservatism and Hero Worship.”

Massachusetts Review 34 (Summer 1993): 275–94. Moss, Alfred A. The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. “The Organization of the Academy for the Promotion of Intellectual Enterprises among American Negroes.” 1897. American Negro Academy Collection. RGA04, Box 1. African American History Archives. Virginia Theological Seminary Archives. Posnock, Ross. Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Smith, James McCune. “The Destiny of Our People.” 1843. In The Black Abolitionist Papers. Eds. George Carter and C. Peter Ripley. Microfilm ed., 17 reels, Reel 3: 0799. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1984. Smith, James McCune. “Lectures on the Haytien Revolutions.” Colored American, June 5, August 7, August 28, September 18, September 25, October 2, October 9, and October 16, 1841. Smith, James McCune. “On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia.” AngloAfrican Magazine, August 1859, 225–38. Stauffer, John. Ed. The Works of James McCune Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wald, Gayle. “The Satire of Race in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” In Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders (pp. 139–55). Ed. John C. Hawley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. New York: Norton, 1996. Winant, Howard. Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

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Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction Ramón Saldívar

In the past few years, my research has focused on a project that I have termed “Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic.” In this new work, I am concerned with what I see as a large-scale generic, formal, and aesthetic turn on the part of some contemporary American writers to a “post-postmodern” and “postrace” era in American literature. My suggestion is that ethnic minority writers are at the forefront of this shift but that it is not limited to writers of color alone. In this chapter, I would like to identify some features of the transformation in American fiction being wrought by this speculative realism and the postrace aesthetic in the wake of the era of postmodernism. I begin by noting that, in the last decade or so, a whole new generation of writers has come to artistic maturity whose work signals a radical turn to something we might call a “postrace” and “post-postmodern” era in American literature, film, and other arts. One of the most interesting of these writers, African American Colson Whitehead, for example, in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times in late 2009, marked the one-year anniversary of the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. In this piece, Whitehead proclaimed, “One year ago . . . we officially became a postracial society” (A31). What in the world did he mean by that? In what sense “postracial”? Why are people talking this way now? And what shape does this idea take in literature?

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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A New Postrace Generation Colson Whitehead is not alone in his regard of a new “postrace” America. In addition to Whitehead, novelists such as African Americans Touré, Percival Everett, and Dexter Palmer; Asian Americans Karen Tei Yamashita and Sesshu Foster; Native American Sherman Alexie; and Latinos Salvador Plascencia, Yxta Maya Murray, Marta Acosta, and Junot Díaz all express similar concerns about a postrace America.1 They are joined by an even larger group of contemporary authors (Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Soer, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Jonathan Franzen, for example) who have deliberately and self-consciously turned away from postmodern metafiction toward what I am here calling speculative realism or historical fantasy. What is it about this group of authors? What characterizes them as a cohort? And why now? First, and probably most obviously, this generation of writers is a new generation: they are young, relatively speaking, all having been born for the most part in the 1970s, that is, a decade or two after the heroic period of the Civil Rights struggle. The Civil Rights Movement is for them not a memory (as it is for persons born in the 1950s and earlier) but a matter of history and so therefore part of the now-distant past. So there is a generational distinction. A second important feature that distinguishes them from previous generations of great American writers is that this generation of writers is university trained. This distinguishes them from African Americans such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, or Ralph Ellison; Chicano novelists Américo Paredes or Tomás Rivera; Asian Americans John Okada or Maxine Hong Kingston; or Native American D’Arcy McNickles. Unlike these great early to mid-twentieth-century writers, who became authors as independent apprentices in a solitary craft, today creative writers are, almost without exception, products of what Mark McGurl has called the creative writing program era, the boom in university-based, workshop-style, creative writing programs in the postwar era.2 Many of these creative writing programs simply did not exist before the Civil Rights era, and where they did exist, were certainly not admitting writers of color in any significant numbers into their programs. This is something, by the way, that is unique to the United States. To the best of my knowledge, in no other country in the world today do you find this need to be credentialed in a university in order to become a successful writer. In any case, feature number two is that the writers of this late twentieth-century generation are products of university-based creative writing programs. With this recognition, we would want to ask what the consequences are of their shared programmed creativity. And, finally, they share a third feature: they are all what I will call, certainly inelegantly, post-postmodern. To describe them so is less a matter of historical nomenclature than it is an aesthetic matter. Postmodernism is a matter of style, peculiar to our time, and writers of the last quarter of the twentieth century educated in the creative writing programs of the United States could not become writers without having been exposed to, if not fully embracing, the rules and principles of

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artistic creation associated with the postmodern styles emerging from architecture, music, film, and the avant-garde literary production of the era. Even today, it is virtually impossible to be a writer of note without being aware of, if not deeply influenced by, the tremendous explosion of postmodernism since the early 1970s (a time contemporaneous, in other words, with the end of the heroic stage of the Civil Rights era). The salience of postmodernism as an aesthetic is its rejection of the modern – and modernist – way of judging the world. If the ideology of the modern world was predicated on a turn away from a premodern world – that is, a world of tradition and faith – in favor of reason and rationality, then the postmodern was a way of questioning the modern triumph of reason and rationalism (which is what we like to believe separates the modern from the premodern worlds). Yet, unlike earlier styles and modes of realism, modernism, or even magical realism, postmodernism has not usually been a mode that writers of color have opted to use. Why? No doubt there are numerous reasons for this, not least of which might be a general turn to what has also been termed “post-theory.”3 But certainly, one main reason is because, for the most part, postmodernism has tended to be unrelentingly sardonic, parodic, cynical, and ironic, not to say outright pessimistic to the point of extreme narcissism about the possibility of redemptive futures, progressive arcs of history, and utopian solutions to the disasters occasioned in the name of enlightenment. Thus, while postmodernism has been an effective way of providing salutary critique of the triumph of modernity and instrumental reason, pointing out the failure of faith, ethics, or morality by showing how even belief in postmodern times functions in the service of the globalized money economy, using the techniques of modern advertising and commodity markets, few minority writers have embraced it as a form. For postmodernists, for example, the triumph of modern instrumental reason has meant that even something as allegedly divorced from market considerations as religion can be seen to be ruled not by faith, ethics, or morality but by making belief itself a matter in the service of the money economy, something, in other words, that one can commodify, market, and sell successfully. For many writers of color, consequently, postmodernism has proven to be simply too distantly removed from the real world of justice and injustice and too pessimistic about the possibility of freedom and right to make it the basis for an attractive form of imaginative creativity. The group of writers I refer to here are different from their predecessors on this score as well: while not postmodernists, they nevertheless critically, selectively, provisionally, and strategically employ the postmodern as a style, form, and ethos to be parodied, satirized, exploited, and, ultimately, superseded. These, then, are the three features that a new “postrace” “post-postmodern” generation of writers shares: • •

Youth: constituting a generational difference University credentialed: providing a difference in craft

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Ramón Saldívar Post-postmodern: utilizing an aesthetic of critical modern and postmodern forms, modes, and styles of representation

The Meaning of “Postrace” Before I turn to my textual examples, I must first say something about my other term, namely, “postrace,” a term that has understandably riled many people. In thinking about the “postrace” era, I want to make one thing crystal clear about my use of the term: race, racism, and the patterns of inequality and discrimination that racism creates are nowhere near extinct in contemporary America. Race remains a central question, but one no longer defined exclusively in shades of black or white, nor in the exact manner we once imagined. That is, apart from the election of Barack Obama, one other matter marks the present differently from the racial history of the American past: today, race can no longer be considered exclusively in the binary form of black and white, which has traditionally structured racial discourse in the United States. If for no other reason than the profoundly shifting racial demographics of early twentyfirst-century America, a new racial imaginary is required to account for the persistence of race as a key element of contemporary American social and cultural politics. What this suggests is not that we are beyond race; the prefix “post” here does not necessarily mean a chronological “superseding,” a triumphant posteriority. Rather, the term entails a conceptual shift to the question of what meaning the idea of “race” carries in our own times. The post of postrace is not like the post of poststructualism; it is more like the post of postcolonial, that is, a term designating not a chronological but a conceptual matter, one that refers to the logic of something having been “shaped as a consequence of” imperialism and racism. The coloniality of power has not been superseded in the postcolonial. In the arts, the idea of “postblack” or “postrace” is not entirely a new one. It began in the art world with a class of black artists who were adamant about not being labeled black artists even as their work redefined notions of blackness. Now, however, the idea is gradually expanding into the wider consciousness. In thinking about changing contemporary notions of race, it is useful to concentrate on racial symbolism, that is, the ways that creative writers, filmmakers, musicians, and artists in general today represent life experiences, such as access to safe working and living conditions or good schools, and how life opportunities are limited by conditions of severe economic exploitation, from living under constant vigilance and surveillance, or by migration, diaspora, and the history of economic, social, and legal injustice in the Americas. How are these matters symbolized in literature? Especially now that we have a “post-black” president, that is, someone who came to political prominence not as a product of or under the guidance of the traditional leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, the question of how as a society we may today represent and reimagine ideas and symbols of blackness, color, and race generally is a central

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one for writers, poets, dramatists, novelists, and other producers of creative works. The new generation of writers sees race differently, as an open-source document, a trope with infinite uses.

Percival Everett’s Erasure This is the context within which I wish to read Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001), which predates Obama and the most recent controversies about the reality of a postrace era, but which asks all the questions that are implied in current discussions. Percival Everett completed his MFA degree in the creative writing program at Brown University in 1983. He has been a prolific writer of novels and short stories since then. In the main story of Erasure, the central protagonist is an English professor and creative writer at UCLA, an African American interestingly named Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed “Monk.” As we enter Monk’s story, the narrative we read is in the form of a journal, “a private affair” (Everett 1), told from a vantage point that is a retrospective of the events we are about to read. Raised in a well-to-do family, a son and grandson of doctors, “graduated summa cum laude from Harvard,” Monk is a published author and black, in fact, a member of the elite black bourgeoisie. But black though he may be, Monk is not “black enough” (2) according to his critics, reviewers, and book publishers: I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. (1)

But then he adds, The hard gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. (2)

Monk’s books have nothing to do with the color of his skin, or his “black experience.” Instead, Monk writes intellectual novels grounded in mythology, philosophy, theology, and art, “retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists” (2). Erasure opens with a wittily hilarious parody of Roland Barthes’s S/Z that Monk is presenting as a paper at the annual meeting of the Nouveau Roman Society in Washington, DC (14–17). Academic postmodern parodies may be fulfilling and fun to write, but they are difficult to sell, as Monk’s agent likes to point out.

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Yet Monk doesn’t care about selling books. For him, it’s about “art” and the integrity of art. As his story opens, Monk is adamant about his desire to be able to write whatever he wants, in whatever form he wants, and not be pigeonholed or marketniched as a “black writer.” Tellingly, he recalls early in the narrative that as a child, his father once told him in a museum, when he complained about an illegible signature on a painting: “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it” (32–3). Monk savors the nostalgic memory but now rejects its solemnity: He was all wrong, of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, . . . was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life. (33)

The remainder of Monk’s narrative will hinge profoundly on the finding of the proper form for art while rejecting the mere manifestation of life. At the beginning of the story, then, Monk is proud of his unpopular books, and equally proud to put his name on them. He appraises them not as “mere manifestations of life” but as sincere attempts to get at life’s complexities. All of this, and especially his outlook on life and art, is challenged when, one day, he finds himself in a Border’s bookstore and discovers his books “in a section called African American Studies” (28). About this, Monk says that “the only thing ostensibly African American [about the books] was my jacket photograph” (29). As if that were not bad enough, to his further dismay, he finds in the bookstore a runaway bestseller titled We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, about the “black experience,” written by someone by the name of Juanita Mae Jenkins, a first-time black author who once spent “a couple of days” in Harlem (53). We’s Lives In Da Ghetto purports to be a realistic slice-of-life novel about the gritty reality of the contemporary urban black experience. This is the moment of transformation for Monk: like St. Augustine compelled by a heavenly voice, “Tole lege,” he picks up and reads We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. And reading this book, he says, “was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars” (29). “I closed the book and thought I was going to throw up” (29).

The Appeal of Black Pathology Everett’s incipient parody of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto is clearly a sharp jab at books like Sapphire’s Push (1996), adapted into the popular movie Precious (2009). Enraged by the book, Monk wants to know why it is that popular black books must be about slaves, or girls getting raped, or living in the ghetto, and why they have to be written in Ebonics. He wonders why books about illiterate black people as overweight, strung out on drugs, abused as children, raped, and having babies by their father are so

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popular generally and so beloved by critics. Is it that readers are more comfortable with a depiction of black people as pathologic losers? He wonders too whether the explanation might be that black victims provide catharsis for white guilt. At almost the same time, Monk’s sister, a reform-minded, social activist gynecologist working in a clinic offering poor women affordable health care is shot to death by an anti-abortionist right-wing zealot. Simultaneously, his mother is succumbing to Alzheimer’s while Monk debates whether to institutionalize her, and his rich, and apparently superficial, plastic surgeon brother has just come out as gay and is leaving his wife and kids for another man. Driven by all of this surrounding social and personal craziness, Monk, in violation of his avowed aesthetic codes, decides to write “a book on which I knew I could never put my name” (62). In one anger-filled sitting, Monk writes his own “black experience” book, a parody – almost as a therapeutic cure to his anger and depression – and signs it under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. The novella he writes is My Pafology, an interpolated narrative within the novel, included verbatim and as a complete disruption of the narrative flow of Erasure. On page 62 of Erasure, using the classical rhetorical mode of parabasis, the narrative of Monk’s story breaks, and for the next 70 pages we get the interpolated novella, My Pafology, purportedly the work of “Stagg R. Leigh.”

My Pafology My Pafology is about Van Go Jenkins, a bad 19-year-old gangbanger and rapist with attitude and the father of four children by four different women. We don’t get the names of all of the four women, but we do get the names of the kids: “Aspireena, Tylenola, Dexatrina, Rexall” (66). A bit later, with at best a hazy idea about geography, Van Go is dreaming about escaping his depressing ghetto life and retreating to the Afro Caribbean and “an island somewhere in them islands down there.” In this reverie, he begins imagining names for the babies he’s going to have by different “island” women. In alphabetical order, he says, “Their names gone be Avaricia, Baniqua, Clitoria, Dashone, Equisha, Fantasy, Galinque, Hobitcha, I’youme, Jamika, Klauss, Latishanique, Mystery, Niggerina, Oprah, Pastischa, Quiquisha, R’nee’nee, Suckina, Titfunny, Uniqua, Vaselino, Wuzziness, Yolandinique and Zookie” (82). That, plus the chapter headings of My Pafology – Won, Too, Free, Fo, Fibe, Sex, Seben, Ate, Nine, and Tin – should give a clue as to what’s going on. (We should note that this is an example of what is called “eye dialect,” that is, written representations of dialect speech where words are spelled in a manner that indicates a nonstandard pronunciation. Some famous authors who have used eye dialect to great effect are Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy, something an alumnus of the creative writing workshops would certainly know.) Then there is the matter of Monk’s chosen pseudonym itself, Stagg R. Leigh. No one to whom Monk shows My Pafology notices that “Stagg R. Leigh” is a reference to the first black “gangsta” song ever written, a blues ballad titled “Stagger Lee,” from

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the 1890s about a cruel, murderous pimp and his crimes. On Christmas Eve, 1895, in St. Louis, Missouri, a man by the name of Lee Shelton (March 16, 1865–March 11, 1912), an African American taxi cab driver and pimp, was convicted of murdering William “Billy” Lyons. The crime was immortalized in a popular song that has been recorded by numerous artists. In song, Stagger Lee has become an archetype, the symbol and embodiment of the tough, outlaw, black man – one who is sly, streetwise, cool, lawless, amoral, and violent, and defies white authority. And then, finally, the hero of My Pafology, describing a violent dream he has just had about his mother, says, “I stab Mama cause I love her. I stab Mama cause I hate her. Cause I love her. Cause I hate her” (65). In case we don’t get the abject misogyny, this nightmare scene is repeated a little later, on page 83, almost verbatim, the phrase becoming a leitmotiv of Van Go’s tendency toward the berserk. Each of these features of language, style, theme, and narrative mode is pathologically over the top. Clearly, Monk is doing his best to show readers of My Pafology that we are not in the real world here; rather, we are in a world of parody and satire, pure and simple, a fantasy concocted to excess in order to make an aesthetic and political point about the nature of racially pathologic symbology. With My Pafology, we have left the world of Erasure and entered a world constructed by pure irony to disrupt the stolidity of the Real. So far so good, we think. But then the problems of controlling irony and satire really begin for Monk. In order to effect his joke on the racialized world, Monk has to impersonate Stagg R. Leigh to book publishers and film producers. In one such meeting with a Hollywood producer, and in response to the man’s question about the reason for Stagg’s purported imprisonment, Monk intones, “They say I killed a man with the leather awl of a Swiss army knife” (218). To his shock and horror, My Pafology is bought by Random House for $600,000, the film rights are taken for $3 million, and an Oprah-like TV talk show host picks Stagg R. Leigh’s book for her book club and invites him on her TV show. But it is not just the lowbrow naïfs who get taken in by the parody. When Monk is asked to be on a literary prize committee to select the National Book Award, he is furious at his fellow judges, sophisticated readers all, who want to give the prize to My Pafology – even though Monk insists that Stagg R. Leigh’s book is “offensive, poorly written, racist and mindless” (261), nothing more than a piece of “demeaning and souldestroying drivel” (137). This is the imperturbable and insanely ironic logic that seems to drive the contemporary discourses of race coupled with artistic freedom in Monk’s world. Which way will Monk chose? Integrity and authenticity as an artist? Or the money that comes with being a “black” writer? Integrity or selling out?

The Novel’s Postrace and Post-Postmodern Dilemma Percival Everett’s Erasure is a postmodern parody within a parody. It is about how contemporary society has become so obsessed with things that are shocking and awful that we don’t care whether they are real or not. Also, it scathingly satirizes the fact

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that we are much too ready to take the exaggerated, over-the-top representation of extreme violence and depravity as the norm of African American life. We are caught in the novel’s dilemma: the novel gives us something – a parody – and then parodies the parody. Which version of “black” life are we really supposed to believe? Monk’s or Stagg’s? In what ways is a story like My Pafology honest? In what ways is it dishonest? What is it about stories like We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, Push, or Precious that so capture people’s imaginations and sensibility? At the same time as it satirizes representations of race, Erasure also deflates the entire enterprise of “postmodern fiction” (37), especially in the send-up of one pathetically insignificant defender of postmodernism, the character named Davis Gimbel. In a “disturbed, certifiable, and agitated postmodern state,” Gimbel accuses Monk of being “a mimetic hack” (18) and of despising postmodernism even while he fails to understand it (36–7). Monk dismisses Gimbel and his accusations, as he takes gleeful pleasure in satirizing him, poststructuralism, and postmodernism too in the parody of Roland Barthes’s S/Z that I mentioned earlier. Significantly, Everett links his satiric representation of the contemporary world of racial discourse to uncritical assumptions about the nature of both the racial imagination and the postmodern one. In the end, the two are linked as providing equally deficient possibilities for understanding the profundity of the contemporary social world. But the fact is that, despite his parodies of it, Monk is a kind of postmodernist. Enough so that he is anxious about one of his earlier novels, written in the “realist” mode, a story of a black character whose “white-looking mother is ostracized by the black community” and who decides to “attack the culture and so becomes a terrorist, killing blacks and whites who behave as racists.” Of this earlier work written in a reductively realist mode, Monk now claims, “I hated writing the novel. I hated reading the novel. I hated thinking about the novel” (61). What Monk hates about that earlier narrative has to do with its subject matter – that is, race – but only to a degree. He is, I think, more concerned about its lapse from his usual postmodern sensibility, style, and understanding. As a poststructuralist and postmodern writer, he is wary about the illusiveness of the kind of certainty and conviction that it takes to become a terrorist against racists. He believes that when we accept certainties of this kind, we are only one false step away from holding distorted, stereotyped, hypothetical versions of certainty and conviction. And when we do so, and verge into convictions that more often than not diminish and flatten out the infinite complexity of truths, especially social truths, we feel that we are thereby absolved from having to deal with the more uncertain truths of who people are and how they become that way. All too often, stories like the ones from Monk’s past, represented by his earlier “realist” novel and more repugnantly by Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We Lives In Da Ghetto, come to represent all black people’s stories, which obviously they are not. At the same time, however, as is evident in the events of his own life – his sister’s murder, the chaos in his brother’s life, his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease, his father’s suicide, and the subsequent revelation of his Korean War-time affair with a white

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British woman by whom he has fathered a daughter now living in New York – unimaginable things do happen to people, particularly to poor people of color, but to bourgeois blacks as well. So, as readers, we are caught in the novel’s dilemma: the novel gives us something – a parody – and then parodies the parody. Which one are we ultimately supposed to believe? Monk’s or Stagg’s versions of the truth? Everett keeps the irony spinning, switching from humor to horror and back again, as Monk weaves his way through the uncontrollable pitfalls of life and the self-induced dilemma he has created with the huge success of My Pafology. Given, then, the deficiencies of both contemporary racial discourse and postmodern critical and imaginative forms, how may one write the reality of race and racial experience with integrity and without stereotyping? As Monk puts it late in the novel, Had I by annihilating my own presence actually asserted the individuality of Stagg Leigh? Or was it the book itself that had given him life? There he was for public scrutiny and the public was loving him. . . . Would I have to kill Stagg to silence him? And what did it mean that I could put those questions to myself? Of course, it meant nothing, and so, it meant everything. (248)

Thus the novel’s dilemma: does the mild-mannered black artist have to resort to killing his archetypal black alter ego in order to retain his artistic integrity? Everett’s answer for this set of questions is to create a multidimensional protagonist interacting on several different levels, each representing different symbologies of race. What do I mean by this?

The Multidimensional Protagonist Everett’s novel gives us a triple-layered protagonist: •

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a university professor, cultured writer, furniture maker and lover of finely crafted woodworking, fly-fishing enthusiast, and possessor of sensitive intellectual humor who finds himself “not black enough” to satisfy the stereotype of the black man and black artist • Stagg R. Leigh, an altar ego, the ex-con murderer-turned-novelist, an artist of the vernacular street culture, and a connoisseur of the desperation of the ghetto • Van Go Jenkins, another alter ego, the repulsive main character of My Pafology, counterpoint to both creative authors and an independent crafter of an aesthetics of mayhem and violence What do they add up to? Who is Thelonious “Monk” Ellison? In a way, all of these characters ARE part of who Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is. I place the “are” and the “is” under erasure, crossed out: because none is all of who Monk is. Each is a stereotype, and therefore a partial version of reality. But more than

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a stereotype, each is understandable not as either Monk or not. On the contrary, each is both Monk and not.

Sous Rature This is the very nature of the process called sous rature, “under erasure,” a strategic philosophical device originally defined and developed by Martin Heidegger and later elaborated by Jacques Derrida. Usually translated as “under erasure,” it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Particularly in De la grammatologie (1967), Jacques Derrida uses the process of placing a word sous rature in order to signify that the word is “inadequate yet necessary,” that is, a particular signifier that is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but nevertheless must be used to represent it, since the constraints of our language offer nothing better. “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since the word is necessary, it remains legible,” explains Gayatri Spivak in her monumental preface to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Derrida; in particular, see Spivak’s “Translator’s Preface,” xiv). Sous rature has been described as the “typographical expression of deconstruction” (Taylor and Winquist 113). Deconstruction is a mode of analysis in literary theory that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.4 More accurately, deconstruction and the practice of sous rature seek to demonstrate that meaning is derived from difference and dialogical relationality, not by simple reference to some preexisting notion or freestanding idea (Belsey 116). In his use of the strategy of placing key words sous rature, Heidegger was concerned with trying to return the absent meaning of a concept to its present meaning, and the placing of a word or term under erasure “simultaneously recognised and questioned the term’s meaning and accepted use” (Taylor and Winquist 113). Derrida adopted this technique and further extended the implications of Heidegger’s erasure and its application in the wider setting of deconstructive literary theory. In particular, Derrida extended the problem of presence and absence to include the notion that erasure does not mark a lost presence. Rather, it marks the potential impossibility of presence altogether. In other words, Derrida pushes Heidegger’s notion all the way to investigation of the potential impossibility of univocity of meaning ever having been attached to the word or term in the first place. Ultimately, Derrida argued, it was not just the particular signs that were placed under erasure, but also the whole system of signification (Taylor and Winquist 113). It is no accident, then, that Everett titles his novel Erasure. Or that erasures mark the title page of the novel, that the front matter title is under erasure, that the chapter numerals are under erasure, and that the running heads place the title Erasure under erasure. In these instances, the narrative writes a word, crosses it out, and thus represents in print both word and deletion, literally. The crossed-out word is a sign of the unrepresentable and the unknown, like the “X” in the name of Malcolm X. Yet,

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this procedure is also, allegorically, the mode that Everett uses to represent and simultaneously retract a variety of terms in the novel, most prominently RACE itself. This is clearly the way to read the passage cited earlier about “race.” I cite it again, this time under erasure, because it bears rereading sous rature: The hard gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is. (2)

Since in the novel, and in the world that Everett is attempting to represent, the word “race” is inaccurate as a sign of the multiply layered, doubly enfolding, intricately contradictory nature of identity (and of the contemporary racial discourse and the practice of doing or performing racial identity), the only way to use the word, or live the consequences of its use in all honesty and sincerity, is under erasure, crossed out: RACE . Yet, because RACE is a word that can carry life-and-death implications, since one may be assuredly shot or hanged under its sign, it must necessarily remain visible and legible under the cross. This is one explanation for the formal strategies of the novel, namely, the multidimensional protagonist and the interpolated narratives (the parodies of S/Z and the full novella of My Pafology). It also explains why Everett gives his protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a name that triumphantly recalls both the great jazz artist Thelonious Monk and the magisterial African American novelist of the mid-twentieth century, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952). And it is why Monk, late in the narrative, self-consciously cites Ellison, “Behold the invisible” (212), obviously aware that he is a postmodern rendition of Ellison’s invisible hero, who in the guise of his own alter ego, named Rinehart, strained to adapt to white society at the cost of his own identity. As Monk further realizes, in creating Van Go Jenkins and Stagg R. Leigh, he is producing “an overly ironic, cynical, self-conscious and yet faithful copy of Juanita Mae Jenkins, author of the runaway-bestseller-soon-to-be-a-majormotion-picture We’s Lives In Da Ghetto” (221). Erasure thus proposes that in examining race, love, art, integrity, and other such necessary terms, we come to such unfamiliar conclusions that our very language is twisted and contorted as it guides us. As Spivak notes, “Writing ‘under erasure’ is the mark of this contortion” (in Derrida xiv). This is the “erasure” of the novel: is Monk a sellout or not? Is he a black author or not? Is he a mimetic hack or not? Is he black or not? And the answer that the novel provides is that, of course, under erasure, he is and he is not.

The Postrace Aesthetic in a Post-Postmodern World Given the rigor of these erasures, Everett’s novel leaves us with yet another perplexing conundrum: is this a good book by a Black writer, or is it a Black book by a good

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writer? And what would either of these labels, or any other that we could come up with, for that matter, mean? Still, the fact that we can pose these questions is what makes this novel “postrace.” This does not mean that race is superseded by the prefix “post,” but that it parodies both the modern and postmodern ways of thinking about race. For the postrace authors, neither the traditional, nor the modern, nor the postmodern ways of thinking about race are sufficient for accounting for the complex, multiple, often contradictory ways that persons today account for who they are and why they are that way, or imagine how they can be in the future. The “post” in postrace may simply be an indication of an attempt to clear out epistemic space for a new way of conceiving what “race” is and has been all along, not a way of claiming that we have somehow “gone beyond” race or that it has been transcended as a reality in contemporary life.5 Percival Everett’s Erasure and the other authors who I named at the beginning of my chapter are all getting at a variety of speculative and fantastical modes and forms: a new generational way of thinking about race, trained in the creative writing workshop in the wry, self-conscious, postmodern way of parodying traditional and modern ways of thinking about race, all of this in order to imagine something that does not yet exist in the real world, a place where “race” might truly not matter at all. Thus, after he composes My Pafology, Monk decries having done it: I tried to distance myself from the position where the newly sold piece-of-shit novel had placed me vis-à-vis my art. It was not exactly that I had sold out, but I was not, apparently, going to turn away the check. I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form but I very much sought in defying form to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less to defend. (139)

But as if in answer to this early question about the defying of form and the irony of affirming it while in the very process of denying it (exactly the way that as a young man he had once described the formal qualities of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake to his father [185]), Monk returns to the issues of form and irony: The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of “black” writers, I ended up on the very distant and very “other” side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn’t write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. . . . But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be. (213)

Fantasy, delusion, imaginary: these are the forms of the new real, a speculative vision of a world that does not yet exist and may never. More poignantly still, after

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his appearance on the Oprah-like “Kenya Dunston” television show, Monk realizes that “I had managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work, no boundaries yet walls everywhere” (257). The conclusion? “I had to rescue myself and that meant, it was ever so clear for a very brief moment, losing myself” (258). “I had to defeat myself to save my self, my own identity” (259). Forced by these ironies to wear multiple layers of masks, Everett’s hero enters into a fantasy of near-undecipherable proportions. This situation figures exactly what Jacqueline Rose means when she maintains, “Fantasy is not therefore antagonistic to social reality; it is its precondition or psychic glue” (3).6 And it is why no realism, whether magical, modern, or postmodern, alone can accurately represent the resolution of its ironic desire for a postrace world and aesthetic. Nevertheless, in desiring it, the novel creates something new, something we might call historical fantasy. Its province is the aesthetic in the mode we might term speculative realism as a hybrid amalgam of realism, magical realism, metafiction, and genre fictions such as science fiction, graphic narrative, and fantasy proper. Historical fantasy is a way of describing the “something more” that the literary works I refer to as postrace fictions do in linking fantasy, history, and the imaginary in order to remain true to ethnic literature’s utopian allegiance to social justice. With the concluding words of the novel, “hypotheses non fingo” – I frame no hypothesis, or, better, I feign no hypothesis – from Newton’s Principia (1729), Everett marks Newton’s emphasis on the margin between certainty and speculation as one of the central concerns of his own work as well.7 In a culminating act of supreme irony, Thelonious Ellison, Percival Everett’s postracial invisible man, like Isaac Newton drawing the line between sham hypotheses and explanations deduced from phenomena, stands at the very limits of our contemporary understanding of race and the postmodern to test our unexamined convictions about both. Instead of feigned hypotheses, Erasure poses an undiminished complexity of baffling truths that in their very speculative refractoriness cannot absolve us from having to deal with the real uncertainties of who people are and how they become that way. In doing so, it underscores the centrality of the condition of speculative realism as the mark of the postrace aesthetic in the era of the post-postmodern.

Notes 1.

Of the writers I refer to as “postrace,” see, for example, these works: Touré, Soul City (2005); Everett, Erasure: A Novel (2001); Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010); Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (1997); Foster, Atomik Aztex (2005); Alexie, Flight (2007); Plascencia, The People of Paper (2005); Murray, The Conquest: A Novel (2002); Acosta, Happy Hour at Casa

2.

Dracula (2006); and Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). From McGurl’s observation in The Program Era about the institutionalization of creativity within the university, several crucial evaluative questions arise: how have creative writing programs reorganized postwar American writing, and how might this reorganization

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affect our understanding of the writing itself? McGurl’s answers to these questions move the field significantly toward a major new understanding of the nature of contemporary American fiction. In particular, his rewriting of the history of postwar American fiction allows for a new way of considering the relationship between postmodern experimental high literary fiction, on the one hand, and ethnic literatures, on the other. The Program Era offers an explanation for why these seemingly divergent strains of American literature emerged at essentially the same moment and how we might make sense of the relationships between American postmodern and ethnic literatures. Of numerous possibilities, see, for example, McQuillan and Zizek.

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On deconstruction as a literary critical practice, see Belsey (116). For an excellent account of contemporary theories of race, see Markus and Moya, especially their synoptic introduction, “Doing Race: An Introduction,” 1–102. On labeling black books by black authors, see McGoy. Rose’s States of Fantasy is a wonderfully illuminating discussion of the power of fantasy as a personal and social reality. See Cohen, who notes, “The sentence, ‘Hypotheses non fingo,’ which appears for the first time in the concluding “Scholium Generale” in the revised second edition (1713) of the Principia, is unquestionably the most famous of Newton’s dicta” (379).

References and Further Reading Acosta, Marta. Happy Hour at Casa Dracula. New York: Pocket Star Books, 2006. Alexie, Sherman. Flight: A Novel. New York: Black Cat, 2007. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Routledge, 2002. Cohen, I. Bernard. “The First English Version of Newton’s Hypotheses non fingo.” Isis 53, no. 3 (1962): 379–88. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Everett, Percival L. Erasure: A Novel. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001. Foster, Sesshu. Atomik Aztex. San Francisco: City Lights, 2005. Markus, Hazel, and Paula M. L. Moya. Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. New York: Norton, 2010. McGoy, David. Review of Erasure. http:www. bookreporter.com/reviews/1584650907.asp McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

McQuillan, Martin. Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Murray, Yxta Maya. The Conquest: A Novel. New York: Rayo, 2002. Palmer, Dexter Clarence. The Dream of Perpetual Motion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010. Plascencia, Salvador. The People of Paper. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2005. Rose, Jacqueline. States of Fantasy. 1996. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Taylor, Victor E., and Charles E. Winquist. Eds. Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 2001. Touré. Soul City. New York: Picador, 2005. Whitehead, Colson. “The Year of Living Postracially” (op-ed). New York Times, November 4, 2009. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange: A Novel. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1997. Zizek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory. London: BFI, 2001.

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The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities Matt Cohen

Passage to India! Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work, The people to become brothers and sisters, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together. – Walt Whitman, “Passage to India” (1871–2)

Talk of something called “digital humanities” seems to be everywhere, lately. What is the “digital humanities,” and what does it have to do with American literary studies? Some confusion about the relation is warranted. As recently as 2008, new media scholar Jay David Bolter claimed that literature departments seem “unreasonably resistant” to using digital technologies (qtd. in Hayles, How We Think), but Matthew Kirschenbaum tells us that “digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus which is probably more rooted in English than any other departmental home” (Kirschenbaum, “What Is”). Although most of us wouldn’t describe ourselves as working in the digital humanities, we’d probably all agree that the “digital” in digital humanities may soon seem redundant to our students. The objects we study in the academic humanities, after all, will be experienced in great part through digital mediation before long. Does digital humanities constitute a methodology or critical formation that speaks to ongoing and emerging scholarly conversations in the history and criticism of American literature? How does it relate to the way we’ve done things in the past?1

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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I begin with Walt Whitman’s evocation of the age-old dream of the “passage to India” – a mixture of orientalism, capitalism, and imperialism – because it might remind us of both the latest promises and potential perils of the digital and the “worlding” of American literary studies as an intellectual enterprise through the methodological and political commitments of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, the circum-Atlantic, and the hemispheric. If what Lisa Lowe calls the “intimacies of four continents” are to be uncovered by research that looks beyond national boundaries and links hitherto obscured archives together, computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web would seem to offer quick passage to the revelation of North America’s enmeshed histories (191). Whitman’s network fantasy in “Passage to India,” his language of utopia, freedom, and interconnection, often resonates in discussions of new media and digitization. Even critiques of corporatization and loss of net neutrality frequently take a form that envisions technology creating a unified, ethical society. There is something hauntingly familiar about this technological utopianism, and its narrative of progress has been critiqued – at times by senior scholars who perceive a generational rift that a focus on “digital humanities” might be opening (Darnton; Grafton; Poster). “Fluidity” and “democracy” are terms often associated with the Internet, but these characteristics are not intrinsic; an enormous computational and infrastructural effort is required to make Internet-based computer work appear fluid. And as Google’s move in and now out of China shows, the conjunctional politics of the Web, what kinds of affiliations it will allow us to find and to forge, fluctuate. This chapter argues that debates surrounding the rise of “digital humanities” have on the one hand involved a sense of a radically different future for American literary studies and on the other hand partaken of many of the major shifts in American literary methodology described elsewhere in this volume. It outlines some of the competing definitions and constituents of digital humanities, but it does not attempt to define “digital humanities” as anything other than a set of works, practices, and institutions concerned with emergent questions about technology and humanity. I focus on methods, sketching a topography of four digital humanities domains that impact literary studies: electronic imaginative compositions, analytical approaches to digital humanities, archives, and institutional politics. In doing so, I confess to take a certain part in Whitman’s paratactic urge, hoping for connectedness among literary humanists, in part by acknowledging that technology divides – sometimes excitingly – no less than it unifies.

Electronic Imaginative Compositions I begin with digital literary production, because it is in this avant-garde realm that the need for traditional humanities scholars to embrace methods emerging out of computational environments is most clear. Writers, artists, and designers have for the past few decades been experimenting with what Whitman would call “the new life

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of the new forms” in the electronic realm, vectoring and transforming traditional artistic practices through the use of computation and networked media. Electronic imaginative composition, including writing in digital formats, new media works, video games, and composition through social media, have all changed how writers imagine what is possible. To analyze such works, as media theorist Lev Manovich has claimed, we still need “old media” tools. Film, for example, has in Manovich’s view shaped the visual and haptic structures of computational interfaces and even to an extent hardware and software logics, serving as the “language” in which designers have long created software and operating systems. Many electronic compositions are process oriented, reflecting on the conditions of their creation and intelligibility, and thus calling attention, as Manovich does, to the process by which we adjust to the kinds of signification that new media make possible. That’s a method that digital compositions share with their antecedents in print and manuscript. But in two ways they demand of scholars an adaptation in reading methods: in the number of their articulated modalities, and at the level of code. If poetry has always called attention to its embodiment as a part of its meaning making, the formal properties of electronic compositions often combine text, still and moving images, sound, and, in the case of interactive installations, touch and movement. Certainly literary scholars are good at reading interfaces; the recent upsurge in textual and visual studies continues a long history of thinking about how writing is delivered, traceable through thinkers like Gertrude Stein, William Morris, John Milton, Socrates, theologians, and writers of sacred texts. New media compositions often rely upon motion, particularly in the context of video games and video “mashups” (remixings of visual content from multiple, usually popular, sources and unified by a theme or often a song); in the case of “machinima,” the two are combined, as gamers take screen sequences from video games and recombine them into new narratives, often with operatic flair. Traditional tools for analyzing rhetoric and more recent ones from film studies take us a long way in unpacking such works. But literary scholars will also need to understand something about code and its relation to the interface if we are to appreciate the way electronic imaginative compositions reflect upon process and, by extension, the ways they articulate the politics of the digital to the new forms emerging from its affordances. At root, electronic artists are doing the same old, excellent thing: theorizing and contesting culture through, and in relation to, a medium or media. But code introduces new twists: it isn’t quite language, it isn’t quite a genre, and it isn’t quite a medium. Code is the set of commands that programmers issue to a computer; those commands are converted into machine language in order to “execute” a program or command. Code is human readable and systematic, but so systematic as not to function with the flexibility of a human language; it would be hard to analyze it as literary in itself. Still, as with any technology, the use of code is a social act, no less than a formal practice; an inquiry into the structural relation of code to meaning making in “born-digital” formats is a key methodological contribution of the digital humanities.

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Some light is shed on that relation by the history of what is called variously “electronic literature” or “new media poetics” by some of its influential critics (Hayles; Morris and Swiss). Computation, of course, influenced imaginative writing long before computers were common. And poets, perhaps constitutionally unafraid of the difficulties of distribution, began to use computers before the World Wide Web made getting digital works to audiences easier. In the Web’s early years, writers like Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson used hyperlinks to reroute traditional narrative and, it would seem, to put narrative paths in the hands of users. “To its advocates,” Adalaide Morris observes, “hypertext appeared to materialize the still vibrant poststructuralist dream of processual, dynamic, multiple signifying structures activated by readers who were not consumers of fixed meanings but producers of their own compositions” (Morris and Swiss 12). But the paths in these early works are hard-wired: code like HTML (HyperText Markup Language) ensures that the links between different parts of a story are relatively stable. And certainly the different parts of the story are “authored” in a traditional sense, fixed in files called by the code whenever readers click on a link that references them.2 Here code functions more or less invisibly, and more or less rigidly, to structure the reading experience. Indeed, as Joyce was writing his famous afternoon, a story (1987), he was simultaneously involved in the very design of the compositional software used to create many such works, Storyspace. His afternoon, a story is made up of a group of small individual texts, or lexia, joined by hyperlinks. The lexia contain elements of a story, and the hyperlinks constitute a group of potential pathways through which the lexia can be read to develop a narrative. The hyperlinks are coded within the lexia; unlike a database, in which the relationships between different sets of information (or tables, as they are called) are determined at the level of the tables and particular kinds of data within them (i.e., in which the limitations imposed by code function at the level of structure), here code influences meaning at the level of transitions in the narrative. Though he had an important role in its architecture, Joyce didn’t actually write the code for afternoon, a story, or even for Storyspace – Storyspace is software that, something like a word processor, makes it easy to build hypertextual structure into a narrative. But more recent artists and writers have written their own code. As the Web became more dynamic in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and as users of it have become more comfortable with Internet-based communication, writers and artists have responded both by creating structures that allow for user input of content and by highlighting the mediation of their creations by code itself. Writers like Loss Pequeño Glazier and Mary-Anne Breeze articulate together a variety of kinds of code, including scripting languages (programming codes, such as Perl and Python, that give commands to a computer’s operating system), Java, databases, and software such as Flash or QuickTime, to animate words, draw on an ever-changing set of source texts, create random links, and denaturalize the way a user interacts with a computer screen. One of the best and longest running of such code-based literary performances is jodi.org, an ever-shifting interface poem that reflects our Internet habits and aesthetics back to us, sometimes by simulating a system crash or a viral invasion;

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sometimes by seeming to proliferate pop-ups that furtively chase around the screen; sometimes by offering downloads of now-“ancient” video games – all the while using “digital retro” fonts and colors reminiscent of 1980s computer interfaces. Literary critics are used to reading works for the ways in which they call attention to their own underpinnings; the increasing numbers of digital humanists who analyze new media compositions call not only for a recounting of the history of such new forms, but also for a method that adds the flexible structuring element of code to the linguistic, material, and political analysis of digital media (see Fuller; Mackenzie; Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin). This holds true even in the realms of games and social media. Video games are big business; if literature and film have a competitor, surely it’s games. Games too have followed an increasingly networked, user-participatory development path. There are many video games that call attention to their own conventions, such as Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001), which features both an ironic avatar (the character “played” by the user) who critiques the player’s performance and “cut scenes” (motion picture scenes interspersed within the game play) that parody well-known films such as A Clockwork Orange. At times, to win such games, the user must resist or invert the customary kinetics used to make things happen in game play. A notorious example is a combat scene in Metal Gear Solid (1998), in which the player must unplug her own controller in order to win an important fight. In other games, such as Mass Effect 2 (2010), the player-avatar relationship is even more unstable, and the game is not clearly “won” or “lost,” but rather ends – in a way with which the player may or may not be happy – in one of a large number of possible outcomes brought about by the player’s choices. Game studies, or ludology, is a rapidly expanding field, and recently has taken an important turn toward the political.3 The study of social media, too, is burgeoning. Though social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are rigidly structured by code (and controversially so, in the case of Facebook), they have become important to the imagination of the social, and have even been used as vehicles for creative work (“twitterature”). Novel and poetry writing via Twitter and blogs is a common practice; Jay Bushman, for example, refracts major American literary works in his Spoon River Metblog and The Good Captain (a Twitter novel based on Benito Cereno). Many social network-delivered texts have made it into print as well, though perhaps unsurprisingly the blog format seems to outpace Twitter as a starting point for traditional print remediation (Perez). Social networks are important to scholarly communication as well, focalizing the confrontation of traditional scholarly communications networks with the more open publication forms made possible by the Web. The 2009 Modern Language Association conference was a case in point. In addition to digital humanities panels that boasted heavy attendance (with frequent tweeting) during the conference, Brian Croxall of Emory University used social media to raise the question of academic politics. His scheduled paper was titled “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty.” Croxall, on the market for the third time, got no job interviews and so couldn’t come to the conference. He published the essay, a critique of the expense of attending MLA and its

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differential effects on contingent faculty, on his blog, where it was read by thousands and reviewed and discussed both online and in print. The convergence of social media and labor issues in the academy in the publication event that Croxall’s paper became, like the efflorescence of new media works, speaks to the way the digital enters the literary studies world from many angles, and to the many combinations of the digital and political.

Analysis If electronic imaginative compositions ask us to analyze culture and computation through the interpretive process, other work in the digital humanities does so in a literary-critical mode. Some of this work takes digital culture itself as its subject – as in the case of N. Katherine Hayles’s work on subjectivity and on electronic literature – and some of it uses information technology to study literature.4 Computers and literature have a long relationship. Indeed, the essay widely considered to be the imaginative origin of today’s personal computer, “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, was published in a literary venue, Atlantic Monthly, in 1945, alongside poems, short stories, and advertisements for such works as Upton Sinclair’s Dragon Harvest and the collected poetry of W.H. Auden. The Nobel Prize-winning South African writer J.M. Coetzee wrote a dissertation in computational linguistic stylistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1960s, part of an early wave of a methodology still prominent today. Scholars of rhetoric and composition were also early adopters of computer-based techniques for teaching writing, hosting peer review, and archiving revision histories (Hockey). Such endeavors anticipated the explosion of humanities tool building that is happening today and that is an important source of questions about what “new forms” literary scholarship might be taking. Most of us are familiar with keyword searching, which has accelerated work in the literary humanities even as it makes it possible to ask new questions. Text mining (or, more broadly, data mining) radically extends the field of semantic searching by automating the aggregation of raw linguistic (or, if you’re ambitious, formal) information about a text or sometimes an unprecedentedly large group of texts. Computational linguists are on the cutting edge of such work, having analyzed linguistic corpora for decades – and having long debated the scholarly standards for generating and studying them. In recent years, linguists and digital literary studies projects that use linguistics methods have turned to the vast data sources made available by Google’s book digitization project and by free access archival projects such as Project Gutenberg, or a host of more specialized sites. The MONK Project, for instance, describes itself as “a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study”; its data sources include major electronic literary collections. The analytical tools freely available from MONK enable studies of a corpus that at the moment totals around 150 million words. Topic modeling, an approach that uses linguistics algorithms to find

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sets of words that tend to occur in proximity to each other, can be used to discover categories and themes automatically in large bodies of electronic text, regardless of genre and even language. Equally thriving at the moment are “geochron” visualizations, which use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and cultural-historical data to create maps that show change over time and space. The availability of linguistics and visualization tools to literary scholars – or, more precisely, their increasing ease of use as well as the growing availability of digital versions of the texts that literary critics study – marks an important moment of intermethodological potential. One could imagine, for example, a GIS-based digital companion to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) that offered user-manipulable maps of New York City linked to demographic, photographic, and legal data, including the Ellis Island and Port of New York records. Still, the jury seems to be out on data mining and how it will inflect literary interpretation. Franco Moretti’s much-discussed concept of “distant reading” speaks to similar concerns. In effect, Moretti’s research group creates visualizations of the sort of data patterns that text mining can produce. Take, for example, all of the works of Henry James, and search through them for place names. After disambiguating the tricky ones (Florence, Kentucky, versus Florence, Italy, for instance), reference these names to a standard toponym locator list, and then map them on a Google Earth map. For Moretti, who often works with groups of novels much larger than this, such an exercise is capable of revealing surprising things about a set of texts, or even about what we have taken to be genres. But more importantly, he hopes, it will force us to ask new questions about literature and society – evoking the implicit excitement of Whitman’s “oceans to be crossed, the distant brought near” in a data-mining passage to India. Such work need not be done only on a large body of texts. Tanya Clement has analyzed Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans using computational linguistics tactics combined with readings of the novel’s form, which has enabled her to discern structures hitherto unnoticed by critics – and, by extension, to suggest a less postmodern interpretation of Stein’s literary goals. But here again, whether the data set is small or large, we encounter the problem of code: driving the mining of literary corpora are algorithms created by humans. Often the results we get are uninteresting, because when we give the computer restraints in order to clarify a query, we eliminate so much evidentiary “noise” that the answer seems predictable based on what we already knew. The challenge is, then, to create algorithms that facilitate surprise (Ramsay). Creating algorithms and building tools – thought of as, say, using a reading practice and creating scholarly editions – are traditional literary studies activities. Having machines do the work of searching for key groups of terms or formal patterns introduces new difficulties, but revisits some old ones as well. American literary studies has played an important role in a broader humanistic interrogation of the ways in which tools and algorithms, even constructed with the best of intentions, can reinforce or reinvent hierarchies of power and visibility, and even interactional protocols, that

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work to the disadvantage of many people. The question of differential access to computing and networked resources – a problem in the United States, to be sure, but perhaps more of a problem globally – has had a lot of press. But other overlaps between the concerns of American literary critics and those of digital humanists also offer food for thought. One scene of such overlaps might be found in the work of Kimberly Christen and of the online journal Vectors, in which Christen’s work has appeared. The shared ground here is the relationship between Native American studies and American literature as a field. These are concerns that inform my work in the colonial American context. I’ve been working for some time on understanding the history of the relations between colonialist and indigenous communications systems. Increasingly, my conversations with American Indian scholars and community leaders at conferences have turned to questions about tribal representation on the Web. For many indigenous people, the stakes of controlling access to cultural information are high, even as the need to present a public face for purposes of achieving or maintaining sovereignty calls for a certain amount of self-exposure. While the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act provides guidance for the physical realm, allowing for the return of bodies and objects to tribes from anthropological collections and other holdings, the question of its applicability to the digital realm is still open. Controlling access to information about indigenous cultural heritage is a problem that anthropologists of aboriginal Australia have been grappling with for years, using database technologies and interface design. Christen’s projects are designed to privilege the cultural restrictions of information sharing in indigenous contexts. Her Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive uses Warumungu cultural protocols to restrict access to the database based on users’ information: by family, gender, status in the community, and country of origin. Within the archive, content is also organized according to Warumungu cultural categories. Christen and lead developer Craig Dietrich created and maintain the archive in an ongoing collaboration with Warumungu community members. With Chris Cooney, Christen published a conceptual version of the archive’s interface in the online journal Vectors; the interface makes the argument that Western users’ notions of free and open access to information are not universal. Google’s simple search box, which seems a window onto the world, represents and spurs an attitude about the free availability of information that may not serve everyone’s interests equally. Christen’s work raises questions about what sort of archival representation indigenous North American materials will have in the literature databases of the future. Should scholarly standards require that the works of, say, Samson Occom and William Apess be edited and archived in collaboration with indigenous communities? If so, then what about a case like A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, in which an adopted Seneca tells a story through a translator to a white writer? What implications does the “cultural protocols” approach have more broadly for building cultural heritage archives (considering that, among other things, “protocols” have a specific legal definition in Australia but not in the United States)?

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Archives In all of the projects published by Vectors, interface and data structure are the argument. Such an emphasis reminds us that whenever we use a resource like the Walt Whitman Archive, we must ask hard questions about not only what it contains, but also how it organizes and encodes that content, who participates in the design, what interactivity it allows (such as user searching and manipulating), and what interoperability it encourages with other data sources or software. These concerns emerge also out of the critiques of traditional editing and bibliography by Jerome McGann, D.F. McKenzie, and others, the embrace of which helped to catalyze literary archive building in the early 1990s. Sandra Gustafson, in a 2005 address titled “The Emerging Media of Early America,” praised the potential of Internet-delivered research media for American literary and cultural studies. “The emerging media of today,” she wrote, “can help us to better understand and preserve the emerging media of early America, making visible the range of textual forms from wampum belts to staged readings” (249). In effect, we will be able to do history better, Gustafson argues, to see more. No doubt this is true: many of us have, in doing our own work, already experienced the impact of the databases that Gustafson praises, such as the Digital Evans and Early English Books Online. But for some digital humanists, the defining inquiry is not how new media and new delivery systems can answer old questions. Rather, does the digital platform promote more emergence? What are the new questions spurred by tracing the implications of multimedia history, or raised when literary scholars create new chapters in that history today by making digital tools, resources, or publications? For Cathy Davidson, such questions, together with the possibility of opening humanities work to large communities beyond the academy, represent what she terms “Humanities 2.0.” “Web 1.0” was the old static web – the hyperlink-based, comparatively static online experience described above as characterizing the first wave of electronic literature. “Web 2.0,” from which Davidson takes her inspiration, is the social media-driven, interactive, dynamic experience of the Internet of the moment: sites remember who you are, Gmail parses your emails to generate advertisements targeting your keywords’ interests, and customization and information exchangeability are widespread. For Davidson, Web 1.0 is old news, and the humanities must rethink itself along the same lines as Web 2.0 by making interactivity central and assuming that the world’s literature will soon be equally available to everyone online. But Meredith McGill and Andrew Parker have recently argued an opposing position: eschewing the notion that “every medium has its own epoch and every epoch its own medium,” they use digitized sources to emphasize that literature was always a multimedia phenomenon (960). “It makes less sense,” McGill and Parker conclude, “to ask whether new media demand new forms of literature and literary criticism than to ask how new media make possible apprehensions of a literary past that is different from what we had anticipated and that has yet to arrive” (966).

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For Hayles, the question isn’t whether to transform literary criticism entirely or to turn back to old objects with new eyes. If the digital humanities approach advocated by McGill and Parker addresses itself to traditional humanists by extending “existing scholarship into the digital realm,” as Hayles puts it, the one Davidson represents, “by contrast, emphasizes new methodologies, new kinds of research questions, and the emergence of entirely new fields” (How We Think 17). For Hayles, both approaches can be productive, depending on institutional context, and they both operate under the same coupled risk in the larger context of today’s academy: “If the Traditional Humanities are at risk of becoming marginal to the main business of the contemporary academy and society,” she warns, “the Digital Humanities are at risk of becoming a trade practice held captive by the interests of corporate capitalism” (22). The things “betwixt and between” emerge when one looks with such a perspective: does Google Books, for example – a massive data-generating project – really hold Web 2.0 promise? It could, but at least at the moment, it is still structured around producing advertising revenue and user metrics for Google, not an information exchange and manipulation realm for users. Google Books certainly didn’t finish Web 1.0 from a literary-archival standpoint. Most of the world’s manuscripts, much of its print and architecture, much of its sheet music and its ephemera remain undigitized. Much of what is in Google Books is still under copyright (for an extended critique of Google, see Vaidhyanathan). Davidson rightly surmises that “digitizing (with interoperability and universal access) the entire record of human expression and accomplishment would be as significant and as technologically challenging an accomplishment of the information age as sequencing the human genome or labeling every visible celestial object” (714). But those like Kim Christen who have digitized even small parts of that record would suggest that it’s not so simple. If cultural protocols offer one obstacle to the Western vision of a total record, technical ones lurk, too: substandard digitization, such as the often-unproofed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that makes Google Books searchable, or completely untranscribed images or sound files, which may afford opportunities for mass analysis but are problematic for many literary humanities uses. Need the theory of Web 2.0 really be shared by all projects? We get a lot of cachet in the scholarly world for declaring revolutions, but the humanities has thrived in the past through a conjunctive analytics of the retro and the prophetic. In thinking about the digital archives that are expanding American literary scholars’ reach and perhaps changing their methods, then, it’s important to consider the code – the architecture of such resources – alongside the longstanding questions about archival politics and the canon. American literature has been the site of some of the most important electronic archival developments, considered in terms of data generation or user interactivity. Ed Folsom’s and Kenneth Price’s Walt Whitman Archive has a weekly audience in the tens of thousands, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant to create an endowment to support its work, and not only is freely accessible but also makes its encoded texts available to users for manipulation or analysis. Digital archives that focus on Emily Dickinson, Herman

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Melville, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin have been influential in creating models for further archival development. They have also often emphasized making materials available for researchers and students that are less commonly available than the literary ones: correspondence, marginal annotations, images, maps, and sound. Digitization projects for North American newspapers are proceeding across the country, at state and national levels, and sites like the Making of America and HarpWeek have created access to a long history of periodical literature. Such sites are home to contest and experimentation, not just to a utopian dream of archival completeness. The Women Writers Project takes gender as its primary organizing rubric, in an environment in which the literary archives that tend to get the most press – Jerome McGann’s Rossetti Archive, the Whitman Archive, the Blake Archive, among them – are based on single, white, male authors.5 Edward Whitley’s The Vault at Pfaff ’s archive also challenges the single-author archival paradigm, taking as its axis the literary and artistic community that used Pfaff ’s Beer Cellar in nineteenth-century New York City. Radical Scatters, a digital archive of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts edited by Marta Werner, reflects the rise of methodological interest in the materiality of texts and how bibliography and textual studies might be challenged to think about categories, such as gender and sexuality, that it has traditionally downplayed. We might also keep asking why writers with fascinating multimedia careers such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Wells Brown haven’t been among the leading subjects of scholarly electronic archival construction.6 The Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP), based at Rice University, is worth a close look for the way it addresses two major methodological concerns in recent American literary studies at the level of content, organizational structure, and code. The first concern is hemispheric approaches to cultural studies, and the second, related one is the question of translation in American literary studies. In imagining a multilingual, multi-institutional archive, the creators of OAAP decided to hire a translator for the project, to collaborate with institutions in other countries where possible (beginning with Mexico’s Instituto Mora), and to federate already-existing archives instead of attempting to be a single data source.7 The software that runs the project periodically sends an electronic query to partner archives’ servers, based on the particular formats used at each archive, and then generates an updated searchable master list of citations with links. This coding architecture mirrors the federative logic of the OAAP’s scholarly scheme: create conversations among different fields, while observing the local conditions of intellectual production in each. When you find a resource through the OAAP’s search engine, it will take you out of the OAAP interface and into the original archive’s web space. Thus the archive can expand (or not) at each home institution – with the caveat that given the relationship to OAAP, each archive must maintain interoperability standards in order to participate in the larger, aggregated data source (OAAP). At the moment, at least, the OAAP’s website doesn’t foreground the way in which its technical infrastructure and its methodological goals are mutually constructed. But

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it should, because digital archives in this early moment of the development of such resources make interpretive claims that can be valuable not only in widening discussion of the resources we use to do literary studies but for serving as models (or countermodels) to future projects as well. Matthew Kirschenbaum, in his book Mechanisms, emphasizes the methodological challenges that face us when we study the history of born-digital works, including electronic archives built by scholars. When we study digital creations, we must take into consideration the relations among their parts, hardware and software environments, interface changes, and other material factors, even as we consider the intellectual, political, or spiritual goals that inspired their makers.

Politics and Institutions Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms won, among other awards, the 2008 Modern Language Association First Book Prize. That a work focused on problems in the literary history of digital objects won this prize marks an important moment in the profession, acknowledging as it does the broader importance of digital humanities to literary studies. In a new essay (2010), Kirschenbaum emphasizes the political dimensions of digital humanities, including the use of the term as “a free floating signifier, one which increasingly serves to focus the anxiety and even outrage of individual scholars over their own lack of agency amid the turmoil in their institutions and profession” (6). Such anxieties can make an easy target of digital humanities work, for reasons worth looking at closely, and on the other hand can lead to a personal investment in digital humanities driven as much by frustration at institutional resource contests as by an interest in research problems.8 Institutional questions are particularly important for Americanists to consider, in part because American literary studies has been axial in the first major wave of institution building in the digital humanities. The Whitman Archive, the Valley of the Shadow project (which focuses on the Civil War), and Stephen Railton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin site were fostered by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. Funding secured by those projects helped ground IATH’s reputation and influence. Martha Nell Smith, one of the editors of the Emily Dickinson Archive, was founding director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Kenneth Price, coeditor of the Whitman Archive, helped found the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. These two institutes are thriving sites of experimentation, tool building, and archive building, but they also host workshops and provide consultation, fostering dozens of new projects in just the past few years. Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg founded the Humanities Arts and Sciences Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), an important communications center for work in digital humanities. The presence of leading American literature scholars on editorial boards and the willingness of some of its senior scholars to take up the field’s

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challenges have been key to the viability of digital humanities in literature programs generally. As this roll call intimates, digital humanities garners a level of financial support unusual in the humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities formed a special Office of Digital Humanities in 2002, and has elaborated a range of new funding initiatives under its jurisdiction, offering millions of dollars in grants to a wide range of projects, workshops, and planning activities. Major private foundations like the Mellon Foundation are also deeply invested in digital humanities development; Project Bamboo, a humanities infrastructure development project, is a multiinstitutional Mellon initiative, for example. The question the project uses to describe its purpose – “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?” – has a corporate twang that may rankle, even as it seems deliberately broadly phrased. But Bamboo is driven by the insight that electronic research efforts in the humanities often reinvent the wheel when it comes to basic platforms, services, and software, in part because of insufficient communication and in part because proliferating digital initiatives local to particular universities and colleges encourage (often pedagogical) innovation but not integration with research projects worldwide. I think both the rigorous peer review and the creative categories of grants that have been created are advantageous to the humanities broadly. The Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, in particular, explicitly describe themselves as encouraging innovation even if it means failure. The program encourages reporting to a broad public and information sharing among projects, in part by hosting a meeting of all awardees at the beginning of the funding period that was eye-opening for many of us in attendance. But it’s certainly true that the rapid increase in funding available to humanities projects in one particular category raises questions. Whether private or public, money is not going to more traditional sources of literary studies support, or, say, to traditional print purchasing in libraries. Libraries have sometimes been eager partners in digital humanities projects because they are a way of addressing digitization demands while bringing in resources through the research areas of the university. For some libraries, the cheaper maintenance costs per page of digital collections may be an important source of opportunity; for others, there is a tension between the demands of maintaining renowned print collections and bringing those to a wider audience through digital preservation. But especially in the financial environment of the past few years, resources for physical purchasing in libraries have diminished, spending on digital resources has gone up, and cultural critics seem to insist on the importance of both. We also still lack a broad culture of evaluation of digital humanities work – in many places, more than a nominal valorization – which introduces questions about how we train our graduate students or mentor junior faculty with promising electronic projects. In the sciences, training grants for first-year students are common, which buys time for students to learn basic laboratory techniques and get a feel for the field before they enter full-time research in a particular lab. There is no such structure for

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graduate students in the humanities; the creation of one could do double duty in providing time for language training (a strong need in American literature) and, for students interested in digital humanities research, training in programming, scripting, database, or interface design. What’s more (or, for many cultural studies scholars, what’s worse), corporate interests have long fueled the rise of digital humanities in the United States. Though digital humanities is a born-global field, having featured for years the kinds of international collaborations sought by literary scholars, technology development and Internet-based resource delivery are still dominant in the United States – and that should give us pause as we consider from what standpoint digital humanities work is done, what objects it focalizes, and what rewards it garners. IATH got its start from an IBM donation in the early 1990s. Apple is a regular contributor to higher education. The most recent striking example is Google’s million-dollar digital humanities research grants program. The political orientation of American literary studies is a crucial aspect of digital humanities: it’s a question of ideology among researchers and funders, not just the availability of technology or widespread access. In the debate about the future of the humanities, then, digital scholarship is one of several flashpoints. Should literary scholars embrace the possibilities of collaborating with corporations on digital projects to increase the visibility and perceived “relevance” of the humanities? Or should we insist, even as we reconfigure the academy itself by providing electronic collaboration beyond the university’s boundaries, on the peculiarly eccentric and non-profit-oriented qualities of humanistic work?

Conclusion: “The Lands to Be Welded Together” There’s something eerie about Whitman’s choice of metaphor in this line, evoking an industrial technology whose power seems to be irrefutable and irreversible. Yet in certain ways, the dream of interconnectivity does entail a mutual reconfiguration from which we cannot return, and with whose consequences we must grapple. “The computerization of culture,” Lev Manovitch writes, “not only leads to the emergence of new cultural forms such as computer games and virtual worlds; it redefines existing ones such as photography and cinema” (9). “Doing” digital humanities with American literary materials and contexts, then, is a reflexive exercise, one that thrives when it both engages the way in which it inherits older concerns and restages them, as Kirschenbaum’s work does, in electronic form (e.g., bibliography, problems of the archive, and close linguistic analysis of texts). Digital humanities as reflexive practice also offers the potential to revisit past stories about media in light of our experience of studying the new, as folks using social media or crowdsourcing or who are building free-access archives do, and to transform traditional literary concerns or help invent new modes of analysis, as Moretti claims he does. The colonial desires and the dreams of a unified, divine humanity that structured Whitman’s refraction of the passage to India are the contested subjects of a digital humanities no less than are the questions

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of the reshaping of the human as a reciprocal function of the computational, or the transformation of a textual into a multimedia aesthetic. Acknowledgments The author thanks Nicole Gray, Rob Nelson, Kate Hayles, Matt Kirschenbaum, Kenneth Price, Lars Hinrichs, Travis Brown, and Jason Baldridge for the assistance and advice they offered toward this chapter. Notes 1.

The term “digital humanities” was vectored into common usage by John Unsworth, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, in the title of his edited collection with Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, A Companion to Digital Humanities, and by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, founded in 2006. It replaced the term “humanities computing,” which seemed to limit the field unnecessarily to computational work (see Svensson; Hayles How We Think; Kirschenbaum, “What Is”; McCarty; Schriebman et al.). 2. Landow was an early hypertext theorist; his work is critiqued in Aarseth; see also Glazier, Digital Poetics, and Glazier’s poetry, which often thematizes digital processing and delivery modes. The Web has also affected the archiving and distribution of poetry and, in particular, of lesser-known and avant-garde works; see UbuWeb at http://ubu.com. 3. See, for example, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter. The author thanks Chris Ortiz y Prentice for conversations about ludology that informed this paragraph. 4. Other recent examples of the study of digital culture, or of the effects of the digital on the humanities, include Gitelman; Bolter and Grusin; Nakamura; and Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin.

5. See also the debate over the Whitman Archive in the October 2007 issue of PMLA. Here one of the key points of debate was whether or not databases can be understood as a genre (as Manovich has suggested). It seems to me that as with code, it is important to understand databases as social acts first, as constituting a form but not necessarily a genre. 6. Sources for these writers can be found in a variety of places, in varying states of annotation: at the Library of Congress, see, for example, “Sojourner Truth: Online Resources” ( http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/truth ) and “The Frederick Douglas Papers” (http:// rs5.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/doughome. html); and the University of Detroit Mercy Libraries’ “Black Abolitionist Archive” (http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/baa). 7. This architecture borrows from that of the Networked Infrastructure for NineteenthCentury Electronic Scholarship (NINES), http://www.nines.org. 8. See for example the conversation at Ian Bogost’s blog (http://www.bogost.com/blog/ the_turtlenecked_hairshirt.shtml), following from a post in response to Cathy Davidson’s musing on the humanities in the wake of the Brian Croxall paper controversy described above.

References and Further Reading Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities Breeze, Mary-Anne (Mez). “Solo Show at Java Museum.” 2002. http://www.javamuseum.org/ mez/solo/index.htm Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think: A Scientist Looks at Tomorrow.” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 10–18. Bushman, Jay. The Good Captain. The Loose-Fish Project. June 5, 2009. http://twitter.com/#!/ goodcaptain Bushman, Jay. Spoon River Metblog. The Loose-Fish Project. December 27. 2008. http://jaybushman.com/spoon-river-metblog/ Christen, Kimberly, and Chris Cooney. “Digital Dynamics across Cultures.” Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular 2, no. 1 (2006). http://vectorsjournal.org/archive/ Christen, Kimberly, and Craig Dietrich. “Mukurtu: Wampurranrni-kari.” N.d. http://www.mukurtuarchive.org Clement, Tanya. “ ‘A Thing Not Beginning and Not Ending’: Using Digital Tools to DistantRead Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23, no. 3 (2008): 361–81. Coetzee, J.M. “The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis.” PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1969. Croxall, Brian. “The Absent Presence: Today’s Faculty.” December 28, 2009. http://www. briancroxall.net/2009/12/28/the-absent-presencetodays-faculty/ Darnton, Robert. “The Library in the New Age.” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008, 72 –9. Davidson, Cathy N. 2008. “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.” PMLA 123, no. 3: 707–17. Drucker, Johanna. SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Folsom, Ed, and Kenneth Price. Eds. “The Walt Whitman Archive.” 2010. http://www.whitmanarchive.org Fuller, Matthew. Ed. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

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Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Grafton, Anthony. “Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents.” New Yorker, November 5, 2007, 4. Gustafson, Sandra. “The Emerging Media of Early America.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 115 (2005): 205–50. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities. Eds. Susan Schreibman et al. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl; or, a Modern Monster. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. Joyce, Michael. afternoon, a story. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1990. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Kirschenbaum, Matthew . “What Is Digital Humanities and What Is It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin, 2010. http:// mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ ade-final.pdf Landow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Lowe, Lisa. “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (pp. 191–212). Ed. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. McCarty, Willard. Humanities Computing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. McGill, Meredith, and Andrew Parker. “The Future of the Literary Past.” PMLA 125, no. 4 (October 2010): 959–67.

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McKenzie, D.F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. The MONK Project. New York: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. http://www.monkproject. org Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Eds. The NewMediaReader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New York: Verso, 2005. Morris, Adalaide, and Thomas Swiss. Eds. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Our Americas Archive Partnership. October 26, 2010. http://oaap.rice.edu Perez, Sarah. “Twitter Novels: Not Big Success Stories Yet.” ReadWriteWeb. September 2, 2008. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ twitter_novels_not_big_success_stories.php Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Ramsay, Stephen. “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18, no. 2 (2003): 167–74. Schreibman, Susan, Raymond Siemens, and John Unsworth. “The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities. Eds. Susan Schreibman et al. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Svensson, Patrik. “The Landscape of Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 4, no 1 (2010). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/ vol/4/1/000080/000080.html Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything: How One Company Is Transforming Culture, Commerce, and Community, and Why We Should Worry. London: Profile Books, 2011. Werner, Marta. Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Fragments and Related Texts, 18701886. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Whitman, Walt. “Preface.” In Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. 1855. The Walt Whitman Archive. Eds. Folsom and Kenneth M. Price. http://www.whitmanarchive.org

Index

Abraham, Kenneth: and legal/literary theory 408 Acosta, Oscar Zeta: The Revolt of the Cockroach People 420 Adams, Henry 183, 203–4; and cruelty 184; Democracy: An American Novel 403–4; The Education of Henry Adams 88–9, 203, 204 Adams, John (US President): on equality 38: and Quakers 66 Adorno, Theodor W. 15–16; and the “culture industry” 24 advertising and advertisements: condition of cultural institutions in age of incorporation 192; fluidity of meaning and 117; medical imaging and 119, 120 affect: jurisdiction and 345–9; and the racialized Other 350 African American literary studies: and nineteenth-century genealogies 500–16; and speculative realism 517–31 African Americans: and Asian Americans 497; Crummell and moral character 506; discipline through suffering (Crummell) 506; Du Bois on 71–4; and early cinema 198; exclusion from history and personhood 446, 506; legal issues

410–11; parallels with classical antiquity (Crummell) 510–11; penal system and partial administration of law 417; settler states of feeling and 342–54; social standing 501; white interiority and 348–9 African diaspora: and Atlantic studies 269–70; see also African Americans African Theatre 146 Agamben, Giorgio 410, 462 Age of Anxiety, The (Auden) 134–5 Agrarians see Southern Agrarians Aiiieeeee! (anthology: Chan et al.) 485 Aiken, George: version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin 151–2 Alcott, Louisa May 46, 47 Algonquins 347 algorithms: computational linguistics 537–8 “alien moment, the” (posthumanism) 455, 456–8 aliens 456–8; figure split between cyborgs and animals 463; and human evolution 438, 458; and human species identity 455, 458; and human unity 461; possession 440 Alpaugh, David 162–3

A Companion to American Literary Studies, First Edition. Edited by Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Alsop, Richard: The Charms of Fancy 381–2 Amazon (River): global environmentalism and 333 “American”: scope of term 6 American exceptionalism 173; see also Americas exceptionalism American Indians see Native Americans American Negro Academy 500, 501–2, 507 American poetry: alleged antipoetic culture and 160; and American literary studies 158–70; anthologies 160, 161; avantgarde 161; H. Bloom on 159; histories 164; “how it travels” 163, 164, 165, 169; linguistic recognition, mutual 166, 168; “New Math of poetry” (Alpaugh) 162–3; 1980s onward 160; nineteenthcentury 162; Pearce on 159, 160, 161, 163; publishing forecasts 162; reader motives 163; repressive hypothesis 162; runaway production 162–3; twentiethcentury 161, 162 “American Renaissance” 69 American Renaissance (Matthiessen) 380, 423 American Revolution: Freneau and 16, 20–2, 23; propaganda 23 American Scene, The (H. James) 205 American Studies Association: International Initiative 279 American Tragedy, An (Dreiser) 417 Americas exceptionalism 214; Cabeza de Vaca’s self-mythologizing and 224–5 Anarchiad, The 392 androids 458–60 “animal moment, the” (posthumanism) 455–6, 462–6 animal studies 462 animality studies 455 animals: biological otherness 463; boundaries/relations between humans and 454, 455, 456, 462–3, 463–4; see also posthumanism: “the animal moment” antimodernism: Lears on 182 Anti-Rent Wars (N.Y.) 398 anxiety 177; and performance 126, 129–30, 133, 134–8

Apess, William 539; “Eulogy on King Philip” 351–3 Appadurai, Arjun: on globalization 374, 384 Appiah, Anthony 515 Apple Computer, Inc. 545 Arendt, Hannah 400, 439–40 Aristotle: on equity 417 Article of Confederation (US) 395 artificial intelligence 438 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) 307 Asad, Talal 62 Asian American literary studies 483–99 Asian Americans: and African Americans 497; category 489–90; definition and terms of reference 484–5, 485–7, 490–2; electoral behavior 485, 486; exclusionist currents and 494; identity 483, 484, 485–7, 498n.; literature 411, 484, 485, 486–97; non-literary texts 490; representation 490, 492 Asimov, Isaac 438 Astor Place Riot (1849) 150–1 Atlantic (concept) 276–7; see also Atlantic studies, “the new” Atlantic Monthly 87 Atlantic separations, colonial: and American progress 275 Atlantic studies, “the new” 267–74; “fluidity” and multidisciplinarity 267–9 Atomic Age 437; The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) and 451; energy and genocides (Friedan) 452; science fiction and 438; social exclusions 445 Atomic Energy Commission 439 Attridge, Derek: on creativity 43n. Atwood, Margaret: Oryx and Crake 464–5 Auden, W.H.: The Age of Anxiety 134–5, 136; on ballet 136–7 aura, film and: Benjamin on 88 Austin, John Langshaw 126–7 Australia, aboriginal: and control of access to information 539 autism: literary treatment of 471–3

Index autobiographical theory: Charon and 111 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Johnson): 514 Avatar (motion picture: Cameron) 466 Awakening, The (Chopin) 41 “Away Down in Jamaica” (Sui Sin Far) 314–17 Bacon, Nathaniel: Bacon’s Rebellion (Va.) 143, 144 Baker, Houston: “new Southern studies” 301 Balkin, Jack: “Deconstructive Practice and Legal Theory” 408 Ball, Milner 409 ballet: Auden and 136–7 Banks, Joseph 382 Barker, James Nelson: The Indian Princess 142–3 Barlow, Joel 392 Barricelli, Jean-Pierre 408 Barthes, Roland: S/Z 521 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville) 410, 418 Barton, John 419 Baum, L. Frank: The Wizard of Oz 17 Beam, Dorri 433 Beat culture 449–51 Behn, Aphra: The Widow Ranter 143 Bell, Philip 511, 512; as Cosmopolite 511, 512, 513 Bellamy, Edward: Looking Backward 87 Beloved (Morrison) 50 Bender, Thomas: Rethinking American History in a Global Age 383 Benito Cereno (Melville) 230, 231–2, 233–4, 235–6, 237–8, 239–40, 241, 242, 244–5, 304; James (C.L.R.) and 243; Twitter adaptation 536; violence and the law in 419–20 Benjamin, Walter 442; on cinema 78, 88, 197, 201; “Critique of Violence” 408; and technology 88–9 Benson, Melanie: Disturbing Calculations 299–300 Bercovitch, Sacvan 31

551

Bereznitsky, Yan: and Twain 287–8, 289 Berkeley, William 144 Bernays, Edward 443 Bernstein, Leonard 135–6 Bester, Alfred 438 Bettelheim, Bruno 451 Biassou, Jorge/Georges 241–2 Bible, the: same-sex pairs in 423 Bigelow, Jacob 77–9, 86 Billy Budd (Melville) 178, 184–6, 188; and law 409, 410, 416, 419 Binet, Alfred: misuse of his intelligence test 481 biocentrism 335, 339; McCarthy and 334–5, 336 biocultural signification: in image-based narratives 115 biocultures 109–10, 112–14, 115 “Biocultures Manifesto” (L. Davis & D. Morris) 112 biological context of human life: ecology 336 biomedicine 113–14; global imperatives 114; related disciplines and 121; see also biocultures biosphere: McCarthy on 338 biotechnology 462 biotextuality 110 bipolarism in American literary history 158–9 Bird, Robert Montgomery 395–6; Nick of the Woods 395–6, 398 black Americans see African Americans “black Atlantic” history: counterculture of modernity 270 Black Jack Davy (Oskison) 357, 359–62 Black Jacobins (C.L.R. James) 233, 242–5; multiplicity and revisions 243–4 black laborers at white theatres 146–7 black magic: in “Away Down in Jamaica” (Sui Sin Far) 316 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 440 blackface characters 146–8 Blade Runner (motion picture: R. Scott) 458 Blanc-Bentzon, Thérèse 430

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Index

Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne) 94–7, 106 Block Island 34, 35 blogs 536–7, 546n. Bloom, Harold 159 body, human: Crummell on soul and 504; norms of understanding shaped by medical visual culture 117 Body Snatchers, The (Finney) 440, 444 Bogost, Ian 546n. Bolter, Jay David 532 Bone, Martin: on Southern Agrarians 300 Bongie, Chris 245n. Bonnin, Gertrude see Zitkala-Ša Book of Mormon, The 67–71, 73, 74 “border thinking” (Mignolo) 224 Borges, Jorge Luis: on Twain 281 Boston Fruit Company 312, 313; see also United Fruit Company boundaries, genetic and cognitive: animals and humans 463–4 Bourdieu, Pierre 489 Bourne, Randolph: “Trans-National America” 378–9 Boyer, Allen 414 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry: Modern Chivalry 392–4 Brackman, Harold 485 brainwashing 444–5; Friedan, gender roles and 451 Brandeis, Justice Louis 413 Braudel, Fernand: and spatialized histories 271 Breeze, Mary-Anne 535 Bricks Without Straw (Tourgée) 414 Brinkmeyer, Robert: on the US South 298, 299 Britain see United Kingdom Brook Farm commune (Mass.) 94 Brooks, Cleanth 303 Brooks, Shirley: The Creole 151 Brooks, Van Wyck 30 Brophy, Alfred L. 414 Brown, Bill: on Crane 202–3 Brown, Charles Brockden: Wieland, or, The Transformation 63, 64–6, 73–4, 392, 415 Brown, William Wells: Clotel 27

Bryant, William Cullen 21; “The Prairies” 167 Budd, Louis J.: on Twain 288 Bug-Jargal (Hugo) 230, 232, 233–43, 245 Burgett, Bruce 434 Burke, Kenneth 23, 31 Burroughs, William 448–9 Bush, Vannevar: “As We May Think” 537 Bushman, Jay 536 Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble 128–9 Butler, Octavia: Xenogenesis trilogy 457–8 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez 211, 213, 383; role as merchant 217; unacknowledged complicity with conquerors 222–3; see also Relación (Cabeza de Vaca) Cable, George Washington 418 Call, The (newspaper): offices attacked, 1919 101 Cambridge, University of: Crummell and 504 Cambridge History of American Literature, The 379, 406 Cameron, James: Avatar 466; Terminator 458–9 Campbell, Alexander: on The Book of Mormon 67 Campbell, George 509 Campbell, John: Who Goes There? 440 Cannibals All! (Fitzhugh) 36 canon, literary 160–1 Capgras syndrome 479 capitalism: as cannibalism 33–8; and economic privatization of culture 191–2; eugenics and 481; and fragmentation of knowledge and critique 39; multiculturalism and 375; and technology 81, 373–4 Cárdenas, Lazar 364, 365 Cardozo, Justice Benjamin: law and literature 407 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (journal) 409 Caribbean: and US literary relations 310–34 Carlyle, Thomas: Emerson and 79

Index Carmichael, Gershom 509 Carmichael, Stokely 452 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger) 441 Cather, Willa: My Antónia 307 Cavitch, Max 433 censorship 414 Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (University of Nebraska) 543 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 491; Dictée 130–1 chaos theory 327 Charlotte Temple (Rowson) 50, 55 Charms of Fancy, The (Alsop) 381–2 Charon, Rita 110–11 Chase, Richard 175, 177–8, 179; on Billy Budd (Melville) 184–5, 186 Cherokee Nation: history in literature 357–70 Cherokee Night, The (Riggs) 357, 362, 366 Cherokee Outlet: ceded to US, 1893 362 Chesnutt, Charles W.: The Marrow of Tradition 414, 417, 418 Chiang, Mark 486; The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies 487, 489–90 Chicago World Trade Fair, 1893 193 Chicano Moratorium, 1970 420 Chickamauga: in The Year of Pilár (Riggs) 366 Child, Francis James 125 Child, Lydia Maria 51–2 Childhood’s End (Clarke) 458 children: and conditions of slavery 50; trope for ongoing history of settler occupation 352; and women’s economic status 49 Chimera, The (Marriott) 144 China: in American poetry 491; US relations with 495 China Men (Kingston) 411, 496, 497 Chinese Americans 411; and AfroCaribbeans 487–8 Chinese Exclusion Acts (US) 411 Choate, Rufus 416; Melville on 407 Choctaw Nation 369 Chopin, Kate: The Awakening 41, 412; “Elizabeth Stock’s One Story” 101; women and the US legal system 412

553

Christ: Smith (J.McC.), African Americans and 509 Christen, Kimberly 539 Christie, Ned 361 Cicero: Choate and 407 cinema: early 197–9; immigrants and 197–8; and perception 196; Wharton and 194, 196–7 citizen feeling: and disavowal of Native sovereignty 351–3 citizenship: democracy and 501; and individualism 394–5, 400; and territorial limits (US) 411; see also democracy civil rights, struggle for (US) 389–90; as memory or history 518 Civil Rights Act, 1875 (US) 418 Civil War, American: Longfellow and 168; and the stage 152–4; Valley of the Shadow (digital) project 543 Clarke, Arthur C. 438; Childhood’s End 458 class: Blithedale (Hawthorne) and 96–7; conflict in The Rise of Silas Lapham (Howells) 98–9; democratic equalization ousted by 93; discourse 94; downward mobility 95, 101; and gender 41; instability in definitions of 94; middleclass anxiety 94, 106, 107; middle ground 93–107; narrative unsettled by 94, 98; Pynchon and changing conceptions of 104; social bankruptcy in May Day (Fitzgerald) 104; underclass 94, 104; US capitalism as class system 42; urban crowd as 102; vacuum at social centre 95; see also inequality, social; insecurity, social; middle ground, social; naturalism; systems Cleaver, Eldridge 452 Clemens, Samuel L. see Twain, Mark Clement, Tanya 538 Cliff, Michelle: Free Enterprise 322 Clifford, James: “discrepant cosmopolitanism” 515 climate change: reaction to 328 Clinton, Bill 294 cloning, animal 455, 462 close-up, cinematic 194, 196, 202

554

Index

Clotel (W.W. Brown) 27 code, electronic 534; and archives 541; individual codes 535–6; OAAP 542; and social media 536 Coetzee, J.M. 537 Cold War: and critical orientation 175; displacement of Asian populations 489; and historicizing concept of Asian American literature 488–9 colonialism: links of color to 252 coloniality, condition of: in Hawthorne 253–4 “color, worlds of” (Dubois) 251–3; and the body 252; and colonization 251–2, 261 Common Sense (Paine) 26–7, 382–3 communications industry (US): capitalist incorporation and 194 communications technology: revolution in 373–4 Communipaw (i.e. J.McC. Smith) 511, 512–13, 514 Communism: and brainwashing 445; in fiction 446; and information 438 community identities: colonial encounter and 249 Companion to Digital Humanities, A (Unsworth, Siemens & Schreibman) 546n. comparativity 228: ecology and 332–3; text-networks and 228–47 complicity, social 32–3; in CaribbeanAmerican fiction 318, 321; hospitality and 318 computational linguistics 537 computers: access to 539; imaginative (literary) origin of personal computer 537; “noise” 538; technologies 90; see also under headings beginning digital . . . ; electronic . . . ; see also Internet, the; medical imaging Condon, Richard: The Manchurian Candidate 444–5 Conker’s Bad Fur Day (video game) 536 “Connecticut Wits” 392 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain) 281–3

Connery, Christopher 230 constative utterances 126–8 Constituting Americans (Wald) 130 Constitution (US): “Regulators” of constitutional process 400; and unofficial democracy 390–1 Constitutional Convention, 1787 (US) 37 consumer culture 375 Continental Congress (US): Ad Hoc Committee on Spies 66 contingency 327, 330; literature and 328, 339 Cook, James 382 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth 358 coolies 487–8; historicizing concept of Asian American literature 496–7 Cooney, Chris 539 Cooper, James Fenimore 149; The Pioneers 414 copyright 413; in Google Books 541 corporate interests: and digital humanities 541, 545; and disintegration of public literary sphere 195 corporate power: and industrialized government (US Gilded Age) 404–5 cosmopolitanism: African Americans and 512, 515; “rooted” (Appiah) and “discrepant” (Clifford) 515 Cosmopolite (i.e. P. Bell) 511, 512, 513 Cott, Nancy: The Bonds of Womanhood 41 Cover, Robert: and legal/literary theory 408 Craige, Betty Jean 375 Crane, Gregg: and legal/literary studies 410–11, 416 Crane, Stephen 202–3; Maggie 155; Red Badge of Courage 153 creative writing programs 518, 530–1n. Creole nationality: interaction with difference and 258 Creole regeneration/degeneration: in “The Foreigner” (Jewett) 313–14 Critical Race Studies 412 Crossing, The (C. McCarthy) 334, 335–9; biocentrism 335; Spanish-English dialectic 335 Croxall, Brian 536–7, 546n.

Index Crucible, The (A. Miller) 414, 442–3 Crummell, Alexander 500, 502–3, 510–11, 513–14, 515; “The Attitude of the American Mind toward the Negro Intellect” 507; biography 504–5, 505–8; “The Destined Superiority of the Negro” 505, 510–11; and Du Bois 507–8; “The Negro as a Conservative Source of Power” 505; and Washington 504, 505–6, 507, 508 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon) 93, 105–7, 414, 451–2 Cuba: in revision of Black Jacobins (C.L.R. James) 244; slavery in, Sophia Peabody and 304 cultural exchanges, system of: in Atlantic studies 270–1 cultural nationalism: Smith (J.McC.) and 515 cultural studies 483; Asian American 484, 489 cummings, e.e. 27 Cummins, Maria: The Lamplighter 52, 54–5 Cunha, Euclides da 325, 328–32, 333–4; Á marjem da historia 329–34; Os Sertões 328–9 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The (Haddon) 471, 472–4 cybernetics 438 cyberpunk 455, 459–61 cyberspace 455, 460; imagination in 467n. “cyborg moment, the” (posthumanism) 455, 458–62 cyborgs 455, 456, 458–60; technological superiority 463 Daly, Augustin: Under the Gaslight 153 Daniels, Lee: Precious 522 Darwin, Charles 439 data mining 537–8; and new questions 538, 540 databases: genre or social acts 546n.; see also names of individual databases, e.g. Digital Evans; Women Writers Project Dath, Dietmar: Die Abschaffung der Arten (The Decommissioning of Species) 465–6 Davidson, Cathy 540–1, 543, 546n.

555

Davis, Lennard 112 Davis, Rebecca Harding: Life in the IronMills 37, 86–7, 88; Waiting for the Verdict 401–2, 414 De la grammatologie (Derrida) 527, 528 Dean, James 441 death: basis of authentic order 336, 337; uncertainty and hope 338 death penalty: law and violence 419 Declaration of Independence (US) 129 Decommissioning of Species, The (Dath) 465–6 deconstruction 127–8, 129, 329 defamiliarization 479 dehumanization: in The Crucible (A. Miller) 442; Friedan, Bettelheim and 451; identity issues and 451; in No-No Boy (Okada) 447; and the unconscious 451–2 delegated participation: US Constitution 391 Deleuze, Gilles 410 DeLillo, Don 374 DeLombard, Jeannine 411 democracy, American: capitalism developed at expense of 398; conflict in 391–4, 405; as disagreement (in R.H. Davis) 401; early US literature (to 1880) and 390–4, 395–402, 403–5; equalitarian phase 391; exclusions 389–90, 400; frontier democracy 394–8; interpersonal democracy (in A. Dickinson) 400–2; original ideal 389–90; reciprocity 399; and social standing 501; unofficial 390–1 Democracy: An American Novel (H. Adams) 403–4 Denning, Michael 374, 379 depression, economic: and American modernity 100 Derrida, Jacques: on the animal question 462; on “Bartleby” (Melville) 410; on Benjamin 408; on hospitality 311; performative-constative opposition and deconstruction 127–8; sous rature in De la grammatologie 527, 528 deterritorialization 192 Diaz, Porfirio 364

556

Index

Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 454; Martian Time-Slip 474–8, 481; Ubik 467n. Dickinson, Anna 400–1, 402 Dickinson, Emily 159; in digital archives 541–2; law and literature 407 Dietrich, Craig 539 difference, interaction with: in The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 249–50, 251–5, 256, 257–8, 259–60 difference from without: and intercultural unconscious in early American texts 249–50 Digital Evans (database) 540 digital humanities 532–46; and archives 540–3; first common usage of term 546n.; four domains 533; literary production 533–6; political dimension 543 (see also research funding); as reflexive practice 545 digital technologies/media 90; and American poetry 163; literature departments and 532; and posthumanism 455 Dimock, Wai Chee 383, 410 Disability studies: and American literature 469–82 disabled narrative 470–1 disciplinary imperialism 225 disorientation, aesthetic principle of 201; in Adams (H.) 203–4; in James (H.) 202; in Zitkala-Ša 204–5 “distant reading” (Moretti) 538 Dixon, Thomas: A Man of the People 414 Dr. Strangelove (motion picture: Kubrick) 450–1 Doctorow, E.L.: Ragtime 420 dog imagery: in Melville and Hugo 238 Dolly (sheep) 455, 462 Dore, Frances: The Novel and the Obscene 414 Dorr, Thomas Wilson: Dorr’s Rebellion (R.I.) 398 Dos Passos, John: U.S.A. trilogy 27 Douglass, Frederick 399–400, 410, 420 Dow Baker, Lorenzo 312, 315 Downes, Olin 135 Downing, Ted 369

drama: as teaching tool in early US 141; see also theatre Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Stowe): the law in 414 Dreiser, Theodore: An American Tragedy 417; Sister Carrie 101, 102, 155; Trilling on 176 Dryden, Edgar 416 Du Bois, W.E.B. 251, 500, 502–3, 504, 505, 510, 511, 514; antimodernism 183; “The Conservation of Races” 500–3, 505; “The Talented Tenth” 71–4 Duchamp, Marcel: Nude Descending a Staircase 116 Dulles, John Foster 449 Dunbar, Paul Laurence: Sport of the Gods 417 Early English Books Online (database) 540 Eaton, Edith see Sui Sin Far Ebonics 522; parodied in Erasure (Everett) 523–4 Echo Maker, The (Powers) 479–80, 481 ecology: tension with national ambition 330 ecosystem 439; literature analogous to 325, 334, 340; river as 331, 333; successive views of 327–8 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams) 88–9, 203, 204 electronic literary compositions 90, 533–7 Ellison, Ralph 30, 410; Invisible Man 307, 440, 445–7; postmodern reference in Erasure (Everett) 528 email 374 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 328; “Address Delivered before the Senior Class” (at Harvard Divinity School) 69–70; antislavery 81–2; genealogy of influence 272–3; Hafiz and 273; and political individualism 399; and poverty in practice 95; race and law 416; Rahv and 159; “Self-Reliance” 95; and social complicity 32, 33; and technology 79–82; Transcendentalism 399, 402 empire: and capital 251; interdependency with colonies 251

Index Empire (Hardt & Negri) 383–4 empiricism, colonial: and interdependence of humanity and natural world 326 End of History, The (Fukuyama) 375 end-of-world scenarios 440 Endicott, John 35 Engel, Eduard: on Twain 285 Engels, Friedrich: and technology 81 English: as international language 374–5 Enlightenment: Scottish 508–9; US heritage and 383 entropy: in The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) 106 equality: Adams on 38; and early US democracy 391 Equiano, Olaudah 84–5 equity 417–18, 419, 420 Erasure (Everett) 521–30; postmodernism parodied in 521–2, 523, 524–5, 528, 529–30; and “post-postmodernism” 525, 529–30; race and racism caricatured/ parodied in 521–6, 529 Erdrich, Louise: Love Medicine 35–6, 38 Erie, Steven 485 Ethiop (i.e. W.J. Wilson) 511–12, 513 ethnicity: transnationalization of 483, 487 eugenics 102–3, 481 “Eulogy on King Philip” (Apess) 351–3 Evangeline (Longfellow) 166–8 Evans, Augusta 53–4 Everett, Percival 521; Erasure 521–30 evolution, human: aliens and 438, 458; “evolutionary synthesis” 439; genetic engineering and 462; science fiction and 438; see also posthumanism, concept of exclusion, terms of, in Anglo-American narrative histories 261; see also inclusive exclusion expansionism, US: and Seacole 318, 319 experience, sensory 193, 197, 199–200, 205; combining of analytic thought and 196 Facebook 536; and public heath awareness 121

557

“Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe) 95 family, nuclear: incest and 445; the unconscious, desires and pathologies in 441–2 family arrangements, idealized European: and meaning of colonial family 256–7 Fanon, Frantz 440, 452 fascism: US Southern writers and 299 Faulkner, William 296–7; Absalom, Absalom! 296, 297; and alternative sexualities 300; As I Lay Dying 307; despair at Southern social conditions 299; the law and violence 414; and reintegration of South into US cultural mainstream 302; The Sound and the Fury 469–70, 471, 472, 474, 481 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 451, 452 Fenellosa, Ernest 491 Ferguson, Adam 508–9 Ferguson, Robert: Law and Letters in American Culture 407 Fern, Fanny 52, 53 fetal sonogram: wider cultural significance 118 Fichtelberg, Joseph 142 Field Code, 1848 (N.Y.) 418 Fields, Annie 312, 433, 434n. Fields, Richard 363 film see cinema finance capital: and communications technology 373–4 Finney, Jack: The Body Snatchers 440, 444, 450 Fish, Stanley: and legal/literary theory 408 Fitch, Clyde 154–5 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby 378, 379, 414; May Day 101–4 Fitzhugh, George: Cannibals All! 36 flash technology 90 Fletcher, Andrew: quoted by Choate 416 Fliegelman, Jay: revisionist interpretation of US Declaration of Independence 129 Foerster, Norman 379, 380 “Foreigner, The” (Jewett) 312–14 Foucault, Michel 79, 83, 432, 434n.; and “biopower” 109; and law 419–20; and alliance or sexuality 426, 429

558

Index

France: a “code” and sexual understanding in 430, 432 Franklin, Benjamin: and American capitalism 33–8; technology of the self 82–4 Franklin, H. Bruce 419 Franko, Mark: and performance studies 132–3 Frederic, Harold: The Copperhead 414 Frederick Douglass’ Paper 511; see also Communipaw (i.e. J.McC. Smith); Cosmopolite (i.e. P. Bell); Ethiop (i.e. W.J. Wilson) Freeman, Mary Wilkins 412 Freneau, Philip: and form 21–3, 24–7; and propaganda 21–3; subject-matter of poetry 16, 24; tensions between poetry and prose 16–17, 20–1 Freud, Sigmund 440–1 Friedan, Betty 451, 452 Frost, Robert 380 Fugitive Slave Law (US) 304; Emerson and 81–2 Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History 375 Gaddis, William: legal/literary treatment 415 Gall’s Daily News Letter: Sui Sin Far and 314 Galton, Francis 481 Garrett, Matthew 44n. Garrison, William Lloyd 348–9 Gates Ajar, The (Phelps) 53 Gauthier-Villars, Henry: and Twain 280, 283–4, 289 gays: and US legal system 412–13; see also sexuality Geismar, Maxwell: on Twain 285 gender: capitalism and class 41–2; and scope of present volume 3; see also women Gender Trouble (J. Butler) 127–9 Generation of Vipers, A (Wylie) 445, 451 George, Peter: Red Alert 450 German language: Twain on 285 gesture 135; in performance studies 133 Gesture Life, A (C.-R. Lee) 494

gene: as information 438; level of, and whole populations 439 genealogy: religious significance 73–4 genetic engineering: and human evolution 462 genome, human 455, 462 geochron visualizations 538 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 538 Gibson, William 374, 460; Neuromancer 375, 460–1 Gilded Age (US) 403, 404–5 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Herland 87; Women and Economics 50; “The Yellow Wallpaper” 412 Ginsberg, Allen: Howl 449–50, 452 Girty, Simon: invoked in Nick of the Woods (Bird) 396 GIS (Geographic Information Systems) 538 Glasgow, University of: J.McC. Smith and 508–9 Glaspell, Susan: “A Jury of Her Peers” 412; The Verge 41 Glazier, Loss Pequeño 535; poetry on themes of digital processes 546n. global consciousness: aliens and 456 globalization 373–85; contradictions 384; critical perspective on earlier literature 380; darker sides 384; and defensive mentality 377; exceptionalism and 384; from above and from below 384; interruption in early-mid-20th century US 379–80; and local 333; and need for reconsideration of US South 301; in recent American fiction 374–8; tension with local 382 Gmail 540 Goddard, H.H. 481 Goffman, Erving 446 Gogol, Nikolai 376 Goldberg, David Theo 543 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis: Sab 234, 239, 246n. Gonzales, Laurence: Lucy 466 Goodman, Nan 414 Google 533, 539; Google Books 537, 541; Google Earth 538; research grants program 545

Index Grady, Henry 418 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) 379 graphic novel 27 Great Apes (Self) 466 Great Britain see United Kingdom Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) 378, 379; and law of high finance 414 Grimké, Sarah: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women 42 Grimsted, David: American Mobbing, 1828–1861 395 Griswold, Rufus: The Prose Writers of America 406 grotesque, the: US Southern literature 300 Gun, with Occasional Music (Lethem) 463–4, 465 Gustafson, Sandra: “The Emerging Media of Early America” 540 Habermas, Jürgen: and public discourse 195 Hacking, Ian: “Making Up People” 432 Haddon, Mark 471, 472–3; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 471, 472–4 Haiti 276; in Benito Cereno (Melville) 231–2; in Bug-Jargal (Hugo) 233–4, 236–8; James (C.L.R.) and 243–5; Smith (J.McC.) on 509 Hall, Stuart 39 Hamilton, Alexander: Report on Manufactures 85 Hansen, Miriam: on early cinema 198–9 Haraway, Donna 463; “Manifesto for Cyborgs” 455, 459 Hardt, Michael 384 Hariot, Thomas 84 Harper, Frances: Iola Leroy 417 HarpWeek (website) 542 Harris, Bird 363 “Hartford Wits” 392 HASTAC (Humanities Arts and Sciences Advanced Collaboratory) 543 Hawaii: in literature 496 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Blithedale Romance 94–7, 106; “The CustomHouse” 377; The House of the Seven Gables

559

38, 304–6, 414; involvement of family economy with slave trade 305; “The Minister’s Black Veil” 148; The Scarlet Letter 61–2, 260–2, 377, 417, 420; and slavery 304–5; and totalizing systems 39–42; The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair 264–7, 274–6 Hayles, Katherine 467n., 537, 541 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells) 199–201 healthcare crisis: biomedicine and 113 Heidegger, Martin: sous rature defined by 527; Stoss (concept) 201; and technology 78, 80 hemispheric (term) 245n. hemispheric comparative studies: and colonial studies 211–27; and diversity 248–63; and southern studies 296; and text-networks 228–247, 296 hemispheric exceptionalism: in colonial studies 211–27; US claims to: Caribbean irony 312; and digital humanities 533 Herland (Gilman) 87 “Heroic Slave, The” (Douglass) 420 Herring, Scott: Queering the Underworld 433 Hersey, John: Hiroshima 437 “heteronormativity”: historical anomaly 425 Hewlett, James 147 Hiawatha (Longfellow) 165–6 Hidden Hand, The (Southworth) 56–8 Hillard, George 407 Hiroshima 437; Cold War and Asian American literature 489 Hiroshima (Hersey) 437 Hispanic encounters: alternative source for American culture 383 Hispanic influence on 19th-century American literature 380–1 historically constructed nature of American literary study 125–6 historicist turn in American literature 173, 174 History of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Jefferson (H. Adams) 203 Hobbes, Thomas 17 Hobson, Fred 302–3

560

Index

Hollander, John 161 Holmes, John Clellon 449 Homestead Act (1864) (US) 403 homo-/heterosexual definition: anachronism 427; crisis of 422–3; Jewett, Fields and 433; origins of homosexual as type 432 hope: death, uncertainty and 338 Hopkins, Lemuel 392 Hopkins, Pauline: Of One Blood 87, 183 Horkheimer, Max: and the “culture industry” 24 hospitality: American/Caribbean, described by Seacole 317, 318; in regional studies 311; and social critique 322; in Walrond 320 House Committee on Un-American Activities 442 House of Mirth, The (Wharton) 101 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne) 38, 304–6, 414; encapsulation of Southern slave economy in 305; versions of ancestral guilt in 305, 306 Howard, Bronson: Shenandoah 153–4 Howe, Julia Ward 50 Howells, William Dean: A Hazard of New Fortunes 199–201; and incorporation 195; and mass media 193; on mass taste 195; The Rise of Silas Lapham 98–100, 101, 104, 106; theories of realism 97–8; on Twain 282–3 Howl (Ginsberg) 449–50, 452 HTML (HyperText Markup Language) 535 Huang, Yunte: Transpacific Displacements 490–1 Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of (Twain) 281: race and civil rights 416 Hughes, Langston 30, 380; and alternative source for American culture 383 Hugo, Victor: Bug-Jargal 230, 232, 233–43, 245 human being 437–8, 440; displaced persons and 439; family, nation and color 446; Freud and 440; instability and political implications 452; loss imagined in The Manchurian Candidate (Condon) 445; reconceptualization 438; see also dehumanization; humans

human genome 455, 462 human rights, concept of 439–40 humanism: reinvoked in posthumanist novels 464–5 “humanities, crisis in the” 108 “Humanities 2.0” (Davidson) 540 Humanities Arts and Sciences Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) 543 humans: and “companion species” (Haraway) 455; divergent future species evolving from (Sterling) 462; relations with animals 454, 455, 456, 462–3; species identity 454–6, 458; see also human being Humboldt, Alexander von 328 Humphreys, David 392 Hunter, Edward 444 hunting: wildness, settler selfhood and 347–8 Hurston, Zora Neale 30; Their Eyes Were Watching God 415 Hutchinson, Thomas 274 hyperlinks: and traditional narrative 535 hypertext 535, 546n. IATH (Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) 543, 545 idealism, Platonic 504, 507 identity: community, and colonial encounter 249; Goffman on 446; historical fluidity 446–7 identity politics 375 ideology critique 176, 177, 178 imaging, medical see medical imaging Imagism 490, 491 imitation, cultural: Crummell, African Americans and 510–11; Smith (J.McC.), Tennyson and 512–13 immigration and immigrants: anxieties and racism 481; and cinema 197–8; Crummell, African American destiny and 506; damaged refugee migrants 494; Immigration Act, 1924 (US) 379; queer displacement effects 424–5; storytelling 496; and US body politic 378 imperialism: deterritorializing apparatus of rule 384; see also expansionism, US

Index In the Cage (H. James) 202 Inada, Lawson Fusao 491 incest 445 incorporation, age of: and literary culture 191–206 Incorporation of America, The (Trachtenberg) 191–3 Indian Princess, The (Barker) 142–3 Indians, American see Native Americans indigenous heritage: Australia 539; see also Native Americans individual: and mislocating the social 344–5; separation from communal by geopolitical affect 351, 353 industrial expansion: post-bellum US 403 inequality, social: in American literature 32, 94–9, 100, 102, 103–5, 106–7 influence: genealogy of 273, 274; nature of 273; and transatlantic literary studies 273–4 information systems: and reconceptualization of human being 438 inheritance: law and literature of 414 innocence: as disavowal 303–4 insecurity, social: effect on narrative and plot 97, 99–100; middle-class 94, 106, 107 Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) 543, 545 institutionality and democracy: and the settler state 345–6 Instituto Mora (Mexico) 542 intellectual disability: narrative and 469–81; textualization 472, 476–8 intellectual property 413 interactive forms (electronic literature) 90 interconnectivity: and mutual reconfiguration 545–6; see also Internet, the intercultural unconscious: and American historical diversity 249 interiority: and bureaucratic structures 345; and geopolitics of US nationality 348; Native Americans and (Thoreau) 346–7; relegation of the social 344 Internet, the 90, 374, 373, 533, 540; access to 539; basis for communication 535;

561

loss of net neutrality 533; medical imaging and 119, 121, 122n.; Web 2.0 and 540; see also Facebook; Google; hyperlinks; social media; World Wide Web; YouTube Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutical Reader (ed. Mailloux & Levinson) 409–10 intersubjective interactions: the self and, in American literary history 261 Invisible Man (Ellison) 307, 440, 445–7 Iola Leroy (Harper) 417 Irving, Washington: Rip Van Winkle 154; Smith (J.McC.) and 512 Jackson, Andrew 149, 389, 394 Jackson, Shelley 535 Jamaica: Sui Sin Far and 314–17; nineteenth-century economic mobility described by Seacole 317; United Fruit Company and 311, 312, 315; US tourist industry and 315 James, C.L.R.: Black Jacobins 233, 242–5; on Moby-Dick (Melville) 186; Pease on 179–80; and Walrond 322 James, Henry 183; The American Scene 205; and constitutional right to privacy 413; and forces of publicity 193–4, 413; In the Cage 202; Jewett and 433; and media society 205–6; Rahv on 158–9; sentences 202; Trilling and 175–6; women in 201–2 Jameson, Fredric: historicism 181; on literary form 18–19; on science fiction 458, 459, 461; “symptomal” reading 176–7; on systems 39 Japanese and Japanese Americans: US government in World War II 447 jazz 449 Jefferson, Joseph III 154 Jefferson, Thomas: classicism and liberty 66; and democracy 389; “ocean of fire” isolationism 382; and public happiness 400; and race 502 Jen, Gish: Mona in the Promised Land 375–6 Jensen, Johannes V. 284 Jewett, Sarah Orne 311–14, 423, 429–33

562

Index

Jews: theories of early peopling of the Americas 70 Jim Crow 403, 418, 501 John the Baptist: in Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” 73 Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man 514 Journal of Transnational American Studies 279 “Journey into the Mind of Watts, A” (Pynchon) 104–5, 106 Joyce, James: Ulysses 69–70 Joyce, Michael 535 jurisdiction: affect and official nationality 345–9 jurisdictional imaginary: existence of US and 353 “Jury of Her Peers, A” (Glaspell) 412 justice, nature of: in legal/literary studies 410 Kac, Eduardo 116 Kadir, Djelal 245n. Kafka, Franz 409 Kant, Immanuel 410 Kaplan, Amy: on Twain 288–9 Kaufmann, Michael: on secularization narrative 62 Kelleher, Paul 434 Kent, James 406 Kerouac, Jack: On the Road 449 keyword searching 537 Kim, Elaine: Asian American Literature 484, 485 Kim, Jodi: Ends of Empire 487, 488–9 Kim, Myung Mi 491 King, Anthony 375 King James Bible: The Book of Mormon and 70, 71 Kingston, Maxine Hong 492–3, 494–7; China Men 411; The Woman Warrior 478–9, 481 Kirkland, Caroline: A New Home. Who’ll Follow? 397–8 Kirschenbaum, Matthew: on digital humanities 532, 543, 545 Kittredge, George Lyman 125 Kleist, Heinrich von: Michael Kohlhaus 420

Koppelman, Susan 427, 431 Korean Americans 493, 494, 497; see also names of individuals, e.g. Kim, Jodi; Lee, Chang-Rae Korean War, 1950–1953: Cold War and Asian American literature 489 Korobkin, Laura 414 Kracauer, Siegfried: on cinema 198 Kreyling, Michael: Inventing Southern Literature 299 Ku Klux Klan 403 Kubrick, Stanley: 2001: A Space Odyssey 458, 459; Dr. Strangelove 450–1 Künstlerromans: Asian American writers 492 Lacroix, Joseph-François-Pamphile de: Mémoires pour Servir à l’Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue 241, 242 Lahiri, Jhumpa: The Namesake 376–7; Unaccustomed Earth 377 Lamming, George: “Ishmael at Home” 322 Lamplighter, The (Cummins) 52, 54–5 Landow, George P. 546n. Lao She: and Twain 286–8, 289, 291n. law: American literature and 406–21; cultural context of lawmaking 416; cultural narratives 417; hard cases 420; and justice 417; principled resistance to 417; see also headings beginning legal . . . Law & Literature (journal) 409 Law, Culture, and the Humanities (journal) 409 Lawrence, D.H.: Americanist criticism of 177–8; on Franklin 33, 82 Lears, T.J. Jackson: No Place of Grace 182 Lee, Chang-Rae 492, 493–7 Lee, Vernon 433 legal education (US) 407–8, 412; theory 408 legal history: literary studies and 408–9 legal ideology: literature and 415–16 “Leigh, Stagg R: My Pafology” (in Erasure: Everett) 523–4, 525, 526, 528, 529 Lethem, Jonathan: Gun, with Occasional Music 463–4, 465

Index Levinson, Sanford 409–10 Lewis, Bradley 113 Liberia: Crummell and 504 libraries: and digitization 544 Library of Congress (US): digital archives 546n. Lien, Pei-te 485 Life in the Iron-Mills (R.H. Davis) 86–7, 88 Lincoln, Abraham: “reverence for the laws” 420 literalization: as literary brinksmanship 449 literary imagination: response to sustaining ecosystems 325 literary mode: as queer 424; and sexual subjectivity 427–8 literature (category): non-standard spatiotemporal nature of 272; wider/ looser definition under corporate capitalism 192 Lofton, Ramona see Sapphire London, Ephraim: law and literature 407 London, Jack 37 Long Day’s Journey into Night (E. O’Neill) 154 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 162–3, 165–70, 416 longue durée (Braudel) 271, 272 Looking Backward (Bellamy) 87 Lowe, Lisa 488–9, 533; Immigrant Acts 411 Lowell Offering, The (periodical) 85–6 Löwy, Michael 180–1, 183 Lucy (Gonzales) 466 Lukács, Georg 181 lynching 420 Macaria (A. Evans) 53–4 McCarthy, Cormac 325, 328, 334, 338–9; The Crossing 334, 335–9 McCarthy, Joseph 442, 445 McGann, Jerome 542 McGill, Meredith 413, 540 McGurl, Mark 518, 530–1n. McHale, Brian 466 machines: and humans (posthumanism) 455 McNickle, D’Arcy: Runner in the Sun 357, 370–1; They Came Here First 371

563

Maddox, Lucy: Removals 358 Madison, James 37, 77 madness: and appropriateness of narrative 478; Howl (Ginsberg) and 449 Maggie (S. Crane) 155 Mailloux, Steven 409–10 Making of America (website) 542 Making of Americans, The (Stein): computational linguistics and 538 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (S. Wilson) 441–2, 444 Manchurian Candidate, The (Condon) 444–5 “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (Haraway) 455, 459 Manovitch, Lev: on cultural forms 545, 546n. Margolis, Stacey 413 marriage: as question of property 426; women in nineteenth-century US 49 Marriott, Sarah: The Chimera 144–5 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt) 414, 417, 418 Marshall, John 406 “Martha’s Lady” (Jewett) 423, 425–33; Koppelman on 427; moral history of US and 429; revisions 429, 430–1; transnational framing 429 Martí, José 232; and Twain 280–3, 289 Martian Time-Slip (Dick) 474–8, 481 Marx, Karl: and technology 81 Marxism: critical analysis and the novel 93 Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities 543 mass culture: cinema as key part of 196–9; communications industry 191, 194, 205; consumption privileged over labor 192–3; corporate interests and 195; in The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) 106; decentralising tendency 191; and disorientation 191–2, 203–5; erosion of lived experience 192; ethnic minorities in 194–5, 206; gender and class formation 41; genres, literary writers and 199; journalism in excluded communities 194–5; mass taste and 195; new media and alternative mass publics 192, 199; niche publics 194–5; “postliterary”

564

Index

mass culture (cont’d) experimentation 195; response of literary authorities to 193–4, 199, 203–4; sensory experience in 193, 196, 197, 199–200, 204, 205; unfixing of cultural meaning 191–2; women in 198, 201–2; “world of dialects” (Vattimo) 201, 206; see also incorporation, age of: and literary culture; mass media; media and mediation Mass Effect 2 (video game) 536 mass media 192; in Crane (S.) 203; see also mass culture Mather, Cotton 266 Matrix trilogy (motion pictures: Wachowski brothers) 460–1 Mathews, Charles 147 Mathews, John Joseph 369 Matthiessen, F.O. 31, 69, 175, 178, 184; American Renaissance 4, 69, 380, 423; on Jewett 429–30 Maxwell, James Clerk: in The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) 105–6 May Day (Fitzgerald) 101–4 May Day Manifesto (Williams, Thompson & Hall) 39 Mayans: in The Year of Pilár (Riggs) 364–6 media and mediation: experience of 191–2; media vertigo 195 medical humanities 108–9, 113, 122nn.; see also biocultures; biomedicine; narrative medicine medical imaging 114, 115–21, 122n.; and humanistic interpretation of image and narrative 118–19 medicine: visual culture 114, 115–21, 122nn.; see also biocultures; biomedicine; medical imaging; narrative medicine Meerloo, Joost: The Rape of the Mind 444 melancholia, racial 350 Mellon Foundation 544 melodrama 142 Melville, Herman 18, 328; “Bartleby the Scrivener” 410, 418; Benito Cereno 230, 231–2, 233–4, 235–6, 237–8, 239–40, 241, 242, 243, 244–5, 304, 419–20;

Billy Budd 178, 184–6, 188, 409, 410, 416, 419; and capitalism as cannibalism 36; and the “creative” 43; in digital archives 541–2; ideology in criticism of 175; James (C.L.R.) and 244; and law 407; madness and modernity in 186; Mardi 43; mid-twentieth-century critical controversy 178–9; minstrel shows in 148; Moby-Dick 17, 18, 186; Pierre 414; poverty in 95; queer content 423; Rahv and 159; and social complicity 32–3; and subject-matter 30, 31; and the theatrical 150; White-Jacket 416; on women and factory work 86 Memento (motion picture: Nolan) 470, 474 Mencken, H.L. 302; The American Language 379 Mercy Libraries (University of Detroit): digital archives 546n. Metal Gear Solid (video game) 536 Metalious, Grace: Peyton Place 445 Metamora, or Last of the Wampanoags (Stone) 149 Mexico: Cherokee Nation and 362–4, 370–1; in Cherokee literature 359, 362, 364–7, 369–71 Michaels, Walter Benn: on difference 457–8; and legal/literary theory 408 Middle of the Journey, The (Trilling) 178–9 Mignolo, Walter 224 Miller, Arthur: The Crucible 414, 442–3 Miller, Perry: The Legal Mind in America from Independence to the Civil War 407 Millet, Lydia: How the Dead Dream 466 Milton, George Ford: Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column 414 mimetic impulse: Cunha and the Purus River 330–2; literary to scientific 330 “Minister’s Black Veil, The” (Hawthorne) 148 minstrel shows; 146–8; slavery as popular entertainment 148 miscegenation: and Atlantic historical relations 260; Mukherjee’s revision of Hawthorne 262; New World

Index disavowal of 253; women, male desires and 257–8 Moby-Dick (Melville) 17, 18; James (C.L.R.) and 179, 243; theatrical values 150 Modern Chivalry (Brackenridge) 392–4 Modern Language Association of America: American Literature section 379; 2009 Conference 536–7 modernism 491; African American 514; Imagism and 490; and neurotypical narrative 482n.; postmodernist rejection 519; and received fantasies of nation in US South 306–7 Moloch (Semitic deity): Ginsberg and the system 452 “momism” (Wylie: A Generation of Vipers) 445, 451 Mona in the Promised Land (Jen) 375–6 Monette, Paul 413 MONK Project 537 monolingualism: US national policy 378 Moon, Elizabeth 471, 473; The Speed of Dark 471–2, 473, 474, 480–1, 482n. Moon, Michael: Disseminating Whitman 433–4 Moore, Marianne 158 Moorhead, Scipio 165 Moretti, Franco 19–20, 545 Morris, David 112 Morrison, Toni: Beloved 50; A Mercy 261–2 Moses, Wilson Julius 183 Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (E. Newton) 128–9 motion: new media composition and 534 motley (term) 250–1 Mukherjee, Bharati: The Holder of the World 261, 262 Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive 539 multiculturalism: and larger American narrative 375, 377 multidimensional protagonist: Erasure (Everett) 526–7 multimedia: phenomenon of literature 540; transformation of textual into 546 Mumford, Lewis 30 Murdock, George 441

565

Murrell, John 396 “My Pafology (Stagg R. Leigh)” (in Erasure: Everett) 523–4, 525, 526, 528, 529 MySpace 536 Nabers, Deak 414 nadir (African American civil rights) 500–1, 507 Nagasaki 437 Naked Lunch (Burroughs) 448 Namesake, The (Lahiri) 376–7 narrative: character knowledge of 471; and legal norms 408; levels of 471; madness and appropriateness of 478; neurotypical 473, 482n. narrative closure: medical imaging and 120 narrative irony 471, 472 narrative medicine 108–9, 110–12, 114–15, 120, 121, 122n. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Charon) 110–11 Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, A (Seaver) 539 Narváez, Pánfilo de 211, 215 nation, the: and citizenship, at Native expense 352–4; and scope of present volume 2–3; see also interiority; nationality, jurisdictional; New Americanism; tribal nations literature nation-state, concept of 439 national boundaries: natural sciences and 326–7; policing of 337, 339; political and cultural 326 National Endowment for the Humanities (US) 544 national narratives: and universal values 373 National Reformers 398 nationalism: objectives compromised by ecology of rivers 329; Smith (J.McC.) and cultural nationalism 515 nationality, jurisdictional 345–6, 349, 351–2, 353; and relegation of indigenity 345–9

566

Index

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990 (US) 539 Native Americans: American diversity located in 252–3; The Book of Mormon and 70–1; capitalism as cannibalism and 35; digital study of 539; education policies 204; eruption of violent past into Federal future 206; Hariot on 84; historical legacy 8; The Indian Princess (Barker) and 142; Jackson and 149; legal history 412; Mukherjee’s vision of accommodation with 262; as the Other 254–5; in Relación (Cabeza de Vaca) 219; in The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 252–3, 254–6, 257, 258–9; and settler colonialism 342–3, 344; Southern expansion and 298; Thoreau and interiority 346–9; see also tribal nations literature Native Speaker (C.-R. Lee) 493–4, 497 natural science: and crisis of epistemology 326; history of discipline 326; and national boundaries 326–7; positivism 327 natural selection 439 naturalism 202; and capitalism 193; in drama 155; plot of decline 101 Nazism: US racism and (Carmichael) 452 necrocitizenship 166–7 Negri, Antonio 384, 410 Nelson, Cary: Repression and Recovery 161 Nelson, Dana: “new Southern studies” 301 Nelson, Deborah 413 Netherland (Joseph O’Neill) 377–8, 383 Networked Infrastructure for NineteenthCentury Electronic Scholarship (NINES) 546n. networks of exchange, colonial 266 networks of texts see text-networks neural locations 118 neurasthenia 182 Neuromancer (Gibson) 375, 460–1 New Americanists 160, 173, 174–6, 182–3 New Criticism 159, 303 New England: Hawthorne’s recognition of, as twin progeny of plantation South 306;

role in US imperialism in Caribbean, Jewett and 313 New Formalists (Levinson) 133 New Granada (republic) 317; escaped slaves in positions of authority in 318, 319 New Historicism 4, 17, 19 New Home (A). Who’ll Follow? (Kirkland) 397–8 New Left (UK) 39 New World Baroque: Cunha 333, 338 Newton, Esther: Mother Camp 128–9 Newton, Isaac: Principia 530 niche publics: print publication in age of incorporation 194–5 Nick of the Woods (Bird) 395–6, 398 NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) 546n. Nolan, Chris: Memento 470, 474 No-No Boy (Okada) 447–8 Norton, Charles Eliot 195 nostalgia: “residual” or “archaic” (R. Williams) 184 nuclear family see family, nuclear nuclear war 438, 456 nuclear weapon, first belligerent use of 437 Nussbaum, Martha 410 O’Keeffe, John: The Highland Reel 146 O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey into Night 154 O’Neill, James 154 O’Neill, Joseph: Netherland 377–8, 383 OAAP (Our Americas Archive Partnership) (digital archive) 542–3 Obama, Barack 295; postrace aesthetic and 517, 520 obeah narrative 316 obscenity in literature, charges of 414 Occom, Samson 539 ocean-space: and early America 265 OCR (Optical Character Recognition) 541 Odum, Eugene 327 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 471 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 527, 528 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) 474 Of One Blood (P. Hopkins) 87

Index Office of Digital Humanities (National Endowment for the Humanities) 544, 546n. Offray de la Mettrie, Julien: L’homme machine 455 Okada, John: No-No Boy 447–8 On the Road (Kerouac) 449 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) 541 Organization Man (Whyte) 441 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt) 439–40 Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 464–5 Oskison, John Milton 357, 359–62, 369; Black Jack Davy 357, 359–62; Tecumseh and his Times 369; Titan 369; Wild Harvest 360, 361–2 Other, the: aliens as 457, 458; animals as 463; human species identity and 455; interaction with, as the American norm 257; Native American as 254–5; racialized for White national ideal 350; self and 249, 253; US South as 295, 298, 303 Otis, F.N. 319 Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP) (digital archive) 542–3 Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (H. Wilson) 58–9 Oviedo, Lope de 211–12; as epistemological threat to colonialism 224; as foil to Cabeza de Vaca in Relación 217, 220, 223; literary-historical exclusion and 214; perspective on hemispheric turn in American literary studies 212; and primitivism 214, 220; story never explicitly told 212, 214, 219 Pactolus Prime (Tourgée) 416 Page, Thomas Nelson: Red Rock 414 Paine, Tom 382, 406; Common Sense 26–7, 382–3 Panama Canal Zone 320 Panama Railroad, building of: Seacole and 317 paranoia: and literalization 449 Park, Josephine: Apparitions of Asia 491 Park, Robert 445

567

Parker, Andrew 540 parody: parody of 526; see also Erasure (Everett) Parrington, V.L. 175, 177, 183 “Passage to India” (W. Whitman) 533, 545–6; quoted 532 Patterson, Anita 380 Payne, Albert Bigelow: and Twain 291n. Payne, Anthony 310 Peabody, Sophia: Juanita 304 Pearce, Roy Harvey 159, 160, 161, 163 Pease, Donald E. 173; on James (C.L.R.) 179–80; on Melville 175, 178; on Trilling 176 Pequot (Native American people): Puritan war against 35 performance: and American history 142; meshing with literary studies 133; over play text 141; understandings of 126, 132–3 performance studies 131–4, 138, 142 performative-constative opposition (Austin): Derrida’s deconstruction of 127–8 performative utterances 126–8 performativity: linguistic 126–31; of social roles 445 person: meaning 445 Peyton Place (Metalious) 445 Phelan, Peggy: and performance studies 131–3 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart: “The Angel over the Right Shoulder” 41; The Gates Ajar 53 Pierre (Melville) 414 Pioneers, The (Cooper) 414 Pippin, Robert 182 plantation society: origins of US national project embedded in 297, 303 Platonic idealism 504, 507 Poe, Edgar Allen 328; “The Fall of the House of Usher” 95; Parrington on 177 poetry: and American literary studies 158–72; “poetry wars” 160–1; political comparison with prose 15–28; Sartre and 15–16

568

Index

poiésis 80; techné and 78, 80 political estrangement: and Asian American literature 497 “political innocence”: socialism and 176 politics: and critical theory 29–30 (see also systems: and critical theory); and literary form 15–28 Poor Richard’s Almanac 82, 83 Porsdam, Helle 415 Populists (US) 405 positivism 327; Cunha and 329–30, 332 Posner, Richard 409 Posnock, Ross: Color & Culture 514 possession: bodily 444; threat of 449 postcolonialism 520 posthumanism: “the alien moment” 455, 456–8; “the animal moment” 455–6, 462–6; concept 454–5; critique of humanist perspective 454; “the cyborg moment” 455, 458–62 postmodernism 518–19; deflation of 525; and the Enlightenment 454; new media and self 90; parodied/deflated in Erasure (Everett) 521–2, 523, 524–5, 528, 529–30; “post-postmodernism” and 519, 520; and writers of color 519; see also posthumanism “post-postmodernism” 517, 518–20; Erasure (Everett) and 525, 529–30; sous rature in 527, 528 postrace aesthetic 517–18, 519–21; Erasure (Everett) and 521, 524–5, 526, 528–30; postspecies civilization 465–6 poststructuralism: and legal education 408 Pound, Ezra 380; and Asian Americanist concerns 491 poverty: origins of class discourse 94 Powers, Richard 478; The Echo Maker 479–80, 481 Precious (motion picture: Daniels) 522 presentism 248; basis for realistic insight into American past 262–3; and bodily desire 433; orientation of literary history 373 Price, Kenneth 543 primitivism: in Americas studies 225; Oviedo and 214, 220

Principia (I. Newton): Everett and 530 print publication: in age of incorporation 192, 194 prison system (US): plantation South and 298 privacy, constitutional right to 413 private happiness: dubious criterion of democracy 400; see also public happiness private property holding: and state control over Native populations 343; Thoreau and 346 probabilities: quantum and chaos theory, nature and 327 Program in Medical Humanities and Arts, University of California, Irvine 111 Progressive movement (US) 405 Project Bamboo 544 Project Biocultures, University of Illinois, Chicago 112 Project Gutenberg 537 propaganda: Bernays on 443–4; and literary form 21–3 prophecy: The Book of Mormon and 68–9 prose: political comparison with poetry 15–18, 19–21, 25, 27–8 Prose Writers of America, The (Griswold) 406 Pryor, Richard 521 pseudonyms: nineteenth-century women writers 50–2 public happiness: Arendt’s summarizing of 400; and early American democracy 391, 400 public health communication: medical imaging and 119, 122n. public relations industry 443 publishing and printing: technology and 81, 83–4 Puritans: and capitalism as cannibalism 34, 35; intersubjective nature of identity 250–60; legal foundations of Puritan society challenged in Hawthorne 417; on writers of fiction (in Hawthorne) 61 Purus (River): Cunha and 329, 330–1, 332 Push (Sapphire) 522 Pynchon, Thomas 466; The Crying of Lot 49 93, 94, 105–7, 414, 451–2; “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” 104–5, 106

Index Quakers 66 quantum theory 327 Quayson, Ato 478 Queer (Burroughs) 448–9 queer content, in Western and American literature 422–5; the American canon 422, 423–4; critical perception 423 queer temporality: “Martha’s Lady” (Jewett) 426–7 queer theory 129, 133, 412–13 race and racism 9–10; African Americans on 500–15 (see also names of individual authors, e.g. Crummell, Alexander; Smith, James McCune); aliens in allegory of 457; caricatured/parodied in Erasure (Everett) 521–6, 529; Cold War, the US South and 302; in Dickinson (A.) 400–1; and early American diversity 251; epistemic space for concept 529; existence of concept, African American belief in 501; immigration, American anxieties and 481; and labor 251; legal studies and 410–12, 416; myth of racial purity 512; performing racial authenticity 350; and physical characteristics 501, 502; as popular entertainment 146–8; postrace aesthetic and 520–1; “racial populism” (Denning) 379; in reform-minded novels 48; “separate but equal” solution 418; shifting demographics 520; Smith (J. McC.) and 512; stereotypes 145–6; symbolism 520–1; “unimprovability” and 149; white national ideal and racialized others 350; Winant and racial formation 515; see also segregation radiation 437, 439 Radical Scatters (digital archive) 542 Ragtime (Doctorow) 420 Rahv, Philip: “Palefaces and Redskins” 158–9 railroads: Emerson on 79, 81 Railton, Stephen 543 Ray, Nicholas: Rebel Without a Cause (film) 441

569

reading: “disinhibited” (Cavitch) 433; “distant” (Moretti) 538 reading methods: digital composition and 534 as critical practice 29–45 realism: competing definitions of the real in 193; Howells’s theories of 97–8 reason: and capitalism as cannibalism 34–5, 36–7, 38; Smith (J.McC.), African Americans and 509–10 Rebel Without a Cause (motion picture: Ray) 441 Reconstruction, post-Civil War (US): Crummell, the word and 504; perceived failure 500, 504; see also nadir (African American civil rights) Red Badge of Courage (S. Crane) 153 Rediker, Marcus: on the slave ship 272 Regionalism: and Caribbean writing 310–25; and sexuality 425–34 Reinterpretation of American Literature, The (ed. Foerster) 379 Reiser, Stanley 114–15 Reising, Russell 175, 176 Relación (Cabeza de Vaca) 36; Americas exceptionalism 214; author as threatening figure in 219; author’s role as merchant 217; author’s self-justification in 216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223; changed identity in 213; and critical romanticizing 224; discourse of “imperial pacification” in 213–14; effects of primitivism and 223; establishment as hallmark text 212; failed translation in 221–2; indigenous acculturation as subject 211–12; “narrative curriculum vitae” for the author 214; performance of distraction 220; prototype of literature to come 213; requested captivity in 216; see also Oviedo, Lope de religion: and secularization 61–76 “reparative” criticism 177 representative republic: or democracy 389; self-culture and 399 Republican Party (US): origins in equalitarian democracy 398 research funding 543–4; ideology and 545

570

Index

research training: for sciences and humanities compared 544–5 Revolt of the Cockroach People, The (Acosta) 420 rhyme: ideology of 25 Rich, Adrienne 31; An Atlas of the Difficult World 169–70 Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama (Simms) 396–7, 398 Riggs, Lynn 357, 362, 364–7; Big Lake 362; The Cherokee Night 357, 362, 366; Green Grow the Lilacs 357, 362; The Year of Pilár 357, 362, 364–7 “Rip Van Winkle” (Irving) 154 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells) 98–100, 101, 104, 106 Ritchie, Leitch: The Slave-King 234, 239–41, 246n. rivers: Cunha and 329, 330, 331; dialectical relationship with land 331; riparian zones 331; see also names of individual rivers, e.g. Purus Roach, Joseph: and performance 132 Robbins, Jerome 136 Robocop (film: Verhoeven) 459 Rogers, Will 357, 367–9, 370; Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to his President 357, 368–9; There’s Not a Bathing Suit in Russia 368 romance: and American literary studies 173–190; critical progress 174, 175, 177; and oppressive reality 181–2; and shape of American history 275; and the “world elsewhere” 180 Romanticism 183; and literary form 21–2 Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Löwy & Sayre) 180–1, 183 Roosevelt, Theodore: and monolingualism 378 Rosello, Mireille: on hospitality 311, 318 Ross, Edward Alsworth: The Old World and the New 378 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 508–9 Rowe, John Carlos: on Twain 289 Rowlandson, Mary 213, 262

Rowson, Susannah 144–5; Charlotte Temple 50, 55; Slaves in Algiers 144–5 Rubin, Louis 302 Ruiz de Burton, Maria Amparo: The Squatter and the Don 48, 412, 419 rule of law: US 406 Runner in the Sun (McNickle) 357, 370–1 Rush, Benjamin 82 Ruth Hall (Fern) 53 S/Z (Barthes): parodied in Erasure (Everett) 521 Sab (Gómez de Avellaneda) 234, 239, 246n. Sachs, Aaron: on Thoreau 334 Sacks, Oliver 480 St. Elmo (A. Evans) 53–4 Salem witchcraft trials, 1692–3 442–3 Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye 441 Samoset 348 Sandburg, Carl 159 Santa Fé Institute 334 Sapphire: Push 522 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15–16 Savage, Sarah: The Factory Girl 85 Sayre, Robert 180–1, 183 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) 61–2, 249–60, 377; hemispheric context 258; modern readings 260–2; principled resistance to unfair laws 417; violence and the law 420 Schismatrix (Sterling) 461–2 Schneck, Peter 414–15 Schreibman, Susan 546n. Schultz, James A. 434 science fiction 438–9, 440, 450, 456–7; diffusion of genre in posthumanist age 456, 466–7; mixtures with mainstream fiction 466–7; see also posthumanism Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner 458 Scott, Walter: Lukács and 188 sea: metaphor for disciplinary fluidity 267–8, 271 Seacole, Mary 311–12, 317–19 seafarers: Puritan leaders and 259 Seaver, James E.: A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison 539 secular, the 62–3, 75

Index secularism: absence in The Book of Mormon 69; existential relationship to Christianity 63–4; term as signifier 74–5 secularization narrative 62; and nineteenthcentury American literature 63–75 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 131, 176, 177, 178; and Billy Budd (Melville) 186; and James (H.) 130; and sexual identities 422 segregation: constitutional sanction in individual states 416; literary apologists and the law 411; the nuclear family, the unconscious and 442 Seigel, Micol 228, 230 self: allegorization of 40; authorial, staging of 129; the citizen, settlement and displacement of Native peoples 353–4; competing identifications 350; introjection of the social (Castiglia) 345; as machine (H. Adams) 88; new media and 90; and the Other 249, 253; technologies of 79, 82–3, 90; Thoreau and 346 Self, Will: Great Apes 466 self-culture 399–400 self-image, critical 225–6 Seneca Nation 539 sensibility: replaced by sexuality in cultural perception 434 sensory experience and analytic thought 196 sensory overload: in narrative 474 “separate but equal,” doctrine of 501 Sertões, Os (Cunha) 328–9 sexual relations, unorthodox: de facto legitimization by conventions of self and the Other 253 “sexual unknowing”: Herring on critical priorities 433 sexualities, alternative: embedment for social personal dissidence (Faulkner) 300 sexuality: policing of in wilderness community (Hawthorne) 256; replacing sensuality 434 and American literary studies 422–36 Shapiro, Stephen 434 Shattuck, Job 392 Shays, Daniel 392

571

Shelton, Lee 524 Shenandoah (Howard) 153–4 Shklar, Judith: on democracy and social standing 501 Shklovsky, Viktor 479 shock: “perception in the form of” (Benjamin) 197, 201 Shu She Yu see Lao She Siegel, Don 440 Siemens, Ray 546n. signification: new media and 534 Simms, William Gilmore 395, 396–7; Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama 396–7, 398 Simpson, Lewis 302 Sinclair, Jo: Wasteland (motion picture) 441 Sister Carrie (Dreiser) 101, 102, 155 Slave-King, The (Ritchie) 234, 239–41, 246n. slave ship: materialization of African diaspora in Atlantic studies 272 slavery: and Atlantic studies 269–70; coolie and slave narratives 487–8; as dramatic topic 151–2; Haiti, Smith (J.McC.) on 509; legal studies and 410; origins of US national project embedded in plantation society 297, 303; as popular entertainment 148; and remaining reasons for separate critical treatment of US South 297; Smith (J.McC.) on 509 Smith, Adam 509 Smith, James McCune 503, 504, 508–10, 511, 513–14, 515; biography 508; as Communipaw 511, 512–13, 514 Smith, Captain John 142–3 Smith, Joseph, Jr. (compiler): The Book of Mormon 67–71, 73, 74 Smith, Martha Nell 543 Smith, Redbird 363 Snow, C.P.: “The Two Cultures” 112 Snyder, Gary 491 social media and networking 90, 536–7, 545 social roles: performativity of 445 social standing: definition and application of concept 501, 502 social totality, concept of 39

572

Index

socialism: Hawthorne and 94–5; moralism/ politics 176; utopian movements in nineteenth-century US 94 Soifer, Aviam 414 Solomon, Carl 449 Sophocles: Oedipus Rex 471 soul: Crummell and 504 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner) 469–70, 471, 472, 474, 481 sous rature (process) 527–8 South (US) 7–8, 294–5, 297–9, 303; cultural renaissance 295; culture of segregation 299; fantasy of social/cultural cohesion 302; and ideological purposes in nation’s imaginary 303; imperial interests and US literary culture 298; reassessment of fundamental categories 297; reintegration into US cultural mainstream 301–3 Southern Agrarians 299, 300; see also names of individual writers, e.g. Faulkner, William; Welty, Eudora Southern (US) literature 295–7, 299–307; and definition of American literature 295; fetish of place 300; reorientation toward US West 298; women writers 300 Southworth, E.D.E.N. 53, 55, 56, 57 Sovereignty and Goodness of God, The (Rowlandson) 213 Spanish language: power and agency in Hugo and Melville 236–8, 245n. spatial perspectives: intellectual disability in narrative 476–8 spatial preoccupation of American studies 229 species: rewriting of 454–67 Spectator, The 83 speculative fiction 478 speculative realism 518, 529–30 Speed of Dark, The (E. Moon) 471–2, 473, 474, 480–1; Reader’s Guide 473, 482n. Spivak, Gayatri 527, 528 Sport of the Gods, The (Dunbar) 417 Squatter and the Don, The (Ruiz de Burton) 48, 412, 419 “Stagger Lee” (blues ballad) 523–4

Star Trek (TV series) 457 Star Wars (motion picture series) 457 Starr, Emmet 363 Startsev, Abel: and Twain 287, 289 status anxiety: social middle ground 94 Stein, Gertrude 449, 538; The Making of Americans 538 Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath 379; Of Mice and Men 474 sterilization, involuntary 481 Sterling, Bruce: on cyberpunks 459–60; Schismatrix 461–2 Stevens, Wallace: law and literature 407 stomach: capitalist trope 37, 38 Stone, John Augustus: Metamora, or Last of the Wampanoags 149 Storey, Moorfield 416 Story, Justice Joseph 406–7, 417 Storyspace (software) 535 storytelling: and immigrant labor 496 Stoss (concept): Heidegger’s notion of 201 Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Dred 414; law and literature 407, 414; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 151, 316–17, 414, 415, 541–2, 543 Stuckey, Sterling: Africanist critical framework 245n. subjectivity, human: medical research into 113 subjectivity, sexual: the literary mode and 427–8 Sui Sin Far 311–12, 314–17 Sumner, Charles 416 supremacism see white supremacism Swisshelm, Jane 250 “symptomal” reading (Jameson) 176–7 systems: capitalism 34, 35, 38, 39, 41; and critical theory 31; limits 327; totalizing 39–42; and waste 106 Takaki, Ronald 496 “Talented Tenth, The” (Du Bois) 71–4 Tales of a Wayside Inn (Longfellow) 166, 168–9 Taussig, Michael: on color 252 Taylor, Diana 132 Technological Medicine: the Changing World of Doctors and Patients (Reiser) 114–15

Index technology: Benjamin on 88–9; essence (Heidegger) 80; and fluidity 81; and literature 77–91; (term) 77; see also communications technology; digital technologies; flash technology; Internet, the television: and public health communication 119–20 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord: Smith (J.McC.) on “The Charge of the Light Brigade” 512–13 Tepper, Sheri: The Family Tree 464 Terman, Lewis 481 Terminator (motion picture: Cameron) 458–9 terror of nonbeing: avant-garde artists and 448 terrorism: “metastasis of war” (Appadurai) 384; postmodern wariness of certainty involved in 525 text mining 537–8 text-networks (model of multiscalar critical analysis) 230, 245; hemispheric 232–3 textual revision: and normative frameworks of bodiliness 433–4 textuality: levels of 471 theatre: and American literary studies 141–57 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) 415 Third Worldism: Asian American identity and 483, 497 Thompson, E.P. 30–1, 39 Thoreau, Henry David: Sachs on 334; Walden 95 “three worlds” theory 374 time, phenomenology of 275 Tocantins, Leandro 331, 332 Toomer, Jean: Cane 307 topic modeling 537–8 totalitarianism 444; The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 439–40 Tourgée, Albion W.: Bricks Without Straw 414; Pactolus Prime 416; With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys 415 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François 241, 242, 505, 509

573

Trachtenberg, Alan: The Incorporation of America 191–3 training of researchers: for sciences and humanities compared 544–5 Tramp Abroad, A (Twain) 281, 285 transatlantic (concept) 276–7 transatlantic literary studies 264–78; and early American literature 248–63; and text networks 228–47 Transatlantic Slave Trade database 269 Transcendentalism 380, 383, 399 transculturation 232 transethnicity 488 translation 229–30; in Benito Cereno (Melville) 232; diluting effect 284; failed, in Relación (Cabeza de Vaca) 221–2; intertextual connections 239; in The Slave-King (Ritchie) 240–1 transnational corporations, US: West Indian labor and 312 transnational studies 228; inadequacy of term 229; perspective on American literature (per Twain) 279–90, 291nn. Transpacific Displacements (Huang) 490–1 Trask, Michael: Cruising Modernism 433 tribal nations literature 356–71; international treatment of indigenity 370–1 Trilling, Lionel 175–9; on influence 273; on literature and the idea 31 Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston) 492–3, 495, 497 Tropic Death (stories: Walrond) 320–1 Trumbull, John 392 truth, commonsense notions of: performative utterances and 127 Tryon, Thomas 34 Turow, Scott: legal/literary treatment 415 tutelage, stories of: by nineteenth-century women 52–6 Twain, Mark: anti-imperialist aspects 286–9; Communism and 285–9; criticism in Chinese 286–8, 289, 291n.; in Danish 284; in French 280, 283–4, 289; in German 285; in Russian 287–8, 289; in Spanish 280–3, 289; global resonances 7; Huckleberry Finn, Adventures

574

Index

Twain, Mark (cont’d) of 281; pseudonym 52; radical writings sidelined in US 285–8; social criticism 285–9; A Tramp Abroad 281, 285; transnational perspective 279–89; “Treaty with China” 287; “United States of Lyncherdom” 287; Zwick and 286–7, 291n. Twitter 536 2001: A Space Odyssey (motion picture: Kubrick) 458, 459 Ulysses (Joyce) 469–70 Unaccustomed Earth (Lahiri) 377 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 151, 316–17; in digital archives 541–2, 543; the law in 414, 415 unconscious, the: cultural dehumanization and 451–2; Freud and 440–1; and reconceptualization of human being 438 United Fruit Company 311, 312, 315; see also Boston Fruit Company United Kingdom: courts of equity in 418 “universal suffrage” 389; irony 389–90 university: credentials for creative writing 518 Unsworth, John 546n. Up from Slavery (Washington) 506, 507 “usable past” 30 utopia, Puritan: need to protect 258–9 Vaca, Cabeza de see Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez Valley of the Shadow (digital) project 543 Vattimo, Gianni 201 Vault at Pfaff’s, The (archive) 542 Vectors (online journal) 539; interface and data structure 540 Verge, The (Glaspell) 41 Verhoeven, Paul: Robocop 459 vernacular modernism 283, 289 Verne, Jules 456 video games 534, 536 Vietnam War, Cold War and Asian American literature 489

violence: exaggeration as norm 525; history as 495; law and (in Melville) 419–20; the state’s assumed monopoly on 420 viruses: as information 438; “the virus power” (Burroughs) 448–9 Visible Human Project (US National Library of Medicine) 116 Visualization: and narrative medicine 108–24 vitality/-ism, literary 284 vodoun 316 Waiting for the Verdict (R.H. Davis) 401–2, 414 Wald, Gayle 514 Walden (Thoreau) 95; jurisdiction and affect in 346–9 Walker, David: Du Bois on 73 Walrond, Eric 311–12, 319–22 Walt Whitman Archive 540, 541, 543; and nature of databases 546n. Wand, David Hsin-Fu 491 War of 1812: War of the Gulls (Bigelow) 77 Warner, Susan B.: The Wide, Wide World 52, 54–5 Warren, Kenneth 183 Warren, Robert Penn 303 Warren, Samuel 413 Warrior, Robert: The People and the Word 369; Tribal Secrets 357–8 Warumungu 539 Washington, Booker T. 298, 514; Crummell and 503, 504, 505–6, 507, 508; Dubois, and the American Negro Academy 502 Wasteland (motion picture: Sinclair) 441 Weaver, Jace 358 Web, the see World Wide Web Weber, Max: “Science as a Vocation” 186–8; and transnational modernity as rationalization 179–80 Webster, Daniel 406 Weinstein, Cindy 423 Weisberg, Richard 408, 409 Wells, H.G. 456

Index Welty, Eudora 300 Werber, Bernard: Ants trilogy 466 Werner, Marta 542 West, Robin 409 West Indies: and US, Lamming on 322–3; see also Caribbean Western Union 194 Wharton, Edith: and cinema 194, 196–7; The House of Mirth 101; Twilight Sleep 184 Wheatley, Phillis 71, 72, 164–5, 166 Whiskey Rebellion 392 White, James Boyd 409; The Legal Imagination 408, 413 White-Jacket (Melville) 416 white supremacism 312, 401, 501 Whitefield, George: in Wheatley 72 Whitehead, Colson 517–18 Whitley, Edward: The Vault at Pfaff’s archive 542 Whitman, Sarah Wyman: and Jewett 429, 430 Whitman, Walt: and alternative source for American culture 383; McCarthy and 336, 337–8; Moon on 433–4; in popular literary history 158–9; queer readers and 423; Rahv on 158–9; and self-culture 399; transnational perspective on 290; US colonial dream and digital humanities 532 (quoted), 533, 545; see also Walt Whitman Archive Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair, The (Hawthorne) 264–7, 274–6 Whyte, William: Organization Man 441 Wide, Wide World, The (Warner) 52, 54–5 Widow Ranter, The (Behn) 143 Wieland, or, The Transformation (C.B. Brown) 63, 64–6, 73–4, 392; use of evidence in 415 Wigmore, John: law and literature 407, 408 Wild Harvest (Oskison) 360, 361–2 Wilde, Oscar 432 wildness: containment, and erasure of Native collective presence 348 Williams, Raymond 30, 39, 184 Williams, William Carlos 89, 385

575

Willis, Sara Parton see Fern, Fanny Wilson, Harriet: Our Nig 58–9 Wilson, Rob 230 Wilson, Sloan: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit 441–2, 444, 451 Wilson, William J.: as Ethiop 511–12, 513 Winant, Howard 515 Winthrop, John: Hawthorne and 258; “Modell of Christian Charity” 425 Witcover, Paul 473 Wizard of Oz, The (Baum) 17 Wolfe, Cary 462, 465 Wolfe, Tom: legal/literary treatment 415 Womack, Craig 358 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston) 478–9, 481, 495, 496, 497 women: and American capitalism 40–2; and early cinema 198; and European male fear of self-corruption 257–8; historiographic exclusion 248; in James (H.) 201–2; legal status 48; and manufacturing technologies 85–6; nineteenth-century options for financial independence 47, 49; and the nineteenth-century US novel 46–59; seen as threat in The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 253; Southern US writers 300; US legal system and 412 Women Writers Project (website) 542 Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (Seacole) 317–19 Woodworth, Samuel: The Forest Rose 147 world literature (concept): implied equality among texts 230 World Wide Web 535, 536; and North American histories 533; tribal representation on 539; Web 1.0 540; Web 2.0 540, 541 “worlding” 230, 244, 245, 533 Wright, Richard: and social complicity 33 Wylie, Philip: A Generation of Vipers 445, 451 X-ray imaging: and avant-garde art 116 Xenogenesis trilogy (O. Butler) 457–8

576 Yanagisako, Sylvia 486 Year of Pilár, The (Riggs) 357, 362, 364–7 Yerkes, R.M. 481 YouTube: and public heath awareness 121 Yuan Kejia: and Twain 286, 288, 289, 291n. Yun, Lisa: The Coolie Speaks 487–8, 496

Index Zitkala-Ša 204–5 Žižek, Slavoj: on “Bartleby” (Melville) 410; on multiculturalism and capitalism 375; and presentism 262 Zola, Émile 181 Zong massacre 270 Zwick, Jim: and Twain 286–7, 291n.