Comparative American Studies

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An International Journal

Volume 1 2003

Editor Richard Ellis

Associate Editor Paul Giles

European Editor Hartwig Isernhagen

North American Editor Jane Desmond

SAGE Publications ISSN 1477-5700 74P 00prelim (ds) 30/1/03 12:55 pm Page 3

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

Volume 1 Number 1 March 2003

Contents

Editorial 5

Articles US Americans and ‘Us’ Americans: South American perspectives on Comparative American Studies Sonia Torres 9

Figuring the future in Los(t) Angeles Hazel V. Carby 19

Globalization, spectral aesthetics and the global soul: tracking some ‘uncanny’ paths to trans-Pacific globalization Rob Wilson 35

What is so bad about being rich? The representation of wealth in American culture Winfried Fluck 53

‘Who speaks for us?’: Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction and the politics of immigration Helena Grice 81

Locating an American romanticism: Emerson, Cavell, ‘Experience’ David Greenham 97

Reviews Andrew Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question Reviewed by Gert Buelens 111 74P 00prelim (ds) 30/1/03 12:55 pm Page 4

Eric L. Muller, Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II Reviewed by Terry Caesar 112

Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity Reviewed by Kate Fullbrook 113

Jane Davis, The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature Reviewed by Rachel van Duyvenbode 115

Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media Reviewed by Christine Bold 116

Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country Reviewed by Bryan F. Le Beau 118

Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life Reviewed by Olga Antsyferova 119

Larzer Ziff, Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780–1910 Reviewed by Pere Gifra-Adroher 120

William G. Robbins and James C. Foster (eds), Land in the American West: Private Claims and the Common Good Reviewed by Angela Schwarz 122

Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul Reviewed by Miglena Todorova 123

Rick Wallach (ed.), Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy Reviewed by Kate Fullbrook 125

Thomas E. Bonsall, More than They Promised: The Studebaker Story Reviewed by Jennifer Clark 126 74P 01edit (ds) 30/1/03 12:59 pm Page 5

Editorial

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

Comparative American Studies has evolved out of a widely perceived need within the academic community to reposition the study of America hemi- spherically and internationally, rather than according to the older agendas of area studies that held sway in the middle years of the 20th century. America is, of course, not a country but a continent, embracing different nation states to the north and south, and American Studies in this new century will need to focus more attention on the flows of peoples, media and culture (in the broadest sense of that term) across national boundaries, both inside and outside the Americas. These transnational flows are coming increasingly to define the ways in which the United States and other nations understand their relationship to the (often fraught) processes of globalization. Globalization at the beginning of the 21st century remains a contentious issue, as does the role played by the United States in its development. What is less in question, though, is that American Studies today needs increasingly to take account of relationships between ‘A merica’, however that term is defined, and the rest of the world. What is needed now is, in the words of Rowe (2000), an American Studies which is ‘more internationalist and comparative’ (p. 3). Perhaps this can be exemplified by considering how careful it is now necessary to be when deploying the pronoun ‘we’ within American Studies. Who are ‘we’? We are Americanists, studying America and its multi-valent relationships to ‘America’. We are Americanists working in that moment when post-national reconstructions of the idea of America are in full flood. An inundation of ideas is flooding through all the holes in the ‘commonsense’ dykes that try to help us retain an idea of what constitutes America. We are then the ones who all take pause when we encounter the word ‘America’. ‘Which “America” is it that is signified?’, we ask. ‘Who owns (up to) it? Who wins out and who loses?’ Consequently we have all rightly become somewhat nervous when embarking upon any deployment of the first person plural, with its coercive, in-built assumption that somehow a clear community of some sort exists, with distinct boundaries – distinct enough, that is, to countenance the unavoidable, shadowy presence of both a second person plural and a third person plural alongside it. If we are we, then who are you? And – even worse – who are they? They are

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(aren’t they?) the others, or the Other, or some frightening mix of the two: others Othered, helping us know who we are, or who we really ought to be. We are not we in a simple, innocent way – not any more. For example, who are ‘we’ in, say, the following quotation? (Please note the contrived ellipses, and the inevitable distortions that result.) Slowly the idea took hold that we needed to collaborate on a project . . . In literature, music, film, popular culture, religious records, and studies by social scientists, we find bodies in jeopardy . . . ‘We the people’ have of course never been whole. ... all who find the energies of this special issue compatible with a more comprehensive understanding of the Americas realize that as a nation, we are always already in ‘The South’, that it is unequivocally and intricately lodged in us, a first principle of our being. (Baker and Nelson, 2001: 231–43) Houston Baker, Jr and Dana D. Nelson wrote this in the preface to their recent special issue of American Literature on ‘Violence, the Body and “The South”’ (the ‘scare quotes’, as they call them, are theirs). The way they set about interrogating the term ‘the South’ is plainly in line with the way ‘Americanists’ have dished out an awesome drubbing to the gendered, racialized and imperial inflections nestling within the equation of ‘America’ with ‘the USA’. Indeed, as their preface considers the term ‘the South’, they take up this style of attack with interest. Inevitably, however, Baker and Nelson are also tempted off their immediate patch (‘the South’) to join in the critique of ‘America’ as a unifying signifier: ‘we talked about the struc- turalist principles that guided nation formation, wholeness, union, coher- ence. . . . To have a nation of “good,” liberal, and innocent white Americans, there must be an outland, where “we” know they live’ (p. 236). Baker and Nelson are plainly uneasy about the ‘us/them’ discourse they see as shadowing the term ‘we’. Indeed, they use ‘we’ in their preface with brilliant irony. ‘We’ fluidly refers to: we, the two co-authors of the American Literature preface; we scholars who constitute a community of multi- and inter-disciplinary Americanists; ‘we of the United States’ (or, at least, ‘we’ who consider ‘we’ belong to that nation); and, lastly, we who self-reflexively recognize the ironies implicit in the use of ‘we of the United States’. Plainly, the implication of these fluid, ironical interroga- tions is a sense of the need for some re-definition (involving, inter alia, more care about how ‘we’ use the term ‘we’). Over the past few years several new research initiatives have effectively been redefining how ‘we’ are to understand ‘ourselves’ within a reconsideration of how the United States should be studied, over the past few years – such as the birth of the International American Studies Associ- ation, the inauguration of the Center for Transatlantic Studies at Maas- tricht in the Netherlands and the Collegium for African American Research. Such initiatives as these have sought specifically to promote the possibilities of international perspectives on a field which historically has 74P 01edit (ds) 30/1/03 12:59 pm Page 7

Editorial 7

been framed by national, and sometimes nationalistic, agendas (as Baker and Nelson recognize). In addition, various research centers within the United States, such as the Forum for US Studies at the University of Iowa, the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the Longfellow Institute at Harvard University, the latter focusing on multi- lingual aspects of American culture, have deliberately sought to create space for exogenous conceptions of the subject to become more visible. The practical difficulties associated with all such enterprises should not be underestimated, however. Although US cultural imperialism is often cited at this point as a barrier, a rag-bag of more immediate issues – such as language difference, costs of overseas travel, the fiefdoms of local politics and unequal access to IT and library resources – have all militated against the kinds of open conversations across nations which have in the past few years been increasingly held up as a scholarly ideal. This may be one reason why the older national associations of American Studies have not exerted such a strong intellectual influence on the formation of the subject as one might have expected, even though, for example, the Indian Association for American Studies is numerically the largest in the world, with a membership exceeding even that of the ASA. Notwithstanding these potential obstacles, Comparative American Studies will seek to provide an academic forum within which such exchanges can be facilitated and international dialogues extended. It will not seek to impose a dogmatic theoretical framework about how the field should be constructed or where it should be going, but will endeavor to provide the opportunity for these debates to be carried on within a broadly-visible global arena. The expectation of the editorial board is that redefinitions of the subject will emerge gradually, over time, with the stronger and more cogent arguments surviving more robustly than the merely transitory or fashionable ones. Prophecy is a dangerous art, and it is impossible to know where American Studies might be in 10, 20 or 50 years’ time, but Comparative American Studies hopes to play a part in the evolution of area studies into something more appropriate to the cultural conditions of the 21st century.

References Baker, Houston Jr and Nelson, Dana D. (2001) ‘Preface’, American Literature 73(2), June: 231–44. Rowe, John Carlos (2000) ‘Introduction’, in John Carlos Rowe (ed.) Post- Nationalist American Studies, pp. 3–5. Berkeley: University of California Press. 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 9

Article

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

US Americans and ‘Us’ Americans: South American perspectives on Comparative American Studies

Sonia Torres Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract This article discusses topics in Comparative American Studies from a South American perspective. If, on the one hand, we no longer restrict a people’s history or literary and cultural production to spaces which were arbitrarily constructed for political and economically hegemonic purposes, but rather see these ‘national’ spaces as plural and movable loci, on the other hand, the very concept of ‘America’ will require an approach that seeks to deal with the geographic, linguistic, ethnographic, cultural, political and economic hemispheric differences – and the relations between space and power that necessarily come to mind when one thinks about America comparatively. The us/them paradigm, in an inter-American context, becomes highly problematized: in historical terms, America, the New World, is primarily a European construct; later the word America was appropriated to signify the US national space. Thus, America must be approached from a perspective that takes into consideration these very processes; which is to say that, whichever the adopted approach, it will necessarily be one that problematizes ‘American’ and that develops a form of US Studies that theorizes an interpretive framework for studying how the US exports its image to the rest of the world, the many ways in which the rest of the world has constructed the US and how US Americans have imagined ‘us’ Americans.

Keywords comparativism ● inter-American contexts ● North–South relations ● power-space

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It is a privilege to be living at this particular historical moment when paradigms are shifting once more. After the unsettling new events and theories that marked the beginning of the century that has just ended, we are now faced with an equally destabilizing moment. For those of us working in American Studies, it is stimulating to think of the limits and perspectives for rethinking and revisioning America at this particular moment in history – a moment that is highly characterized by the reorganization of national borders and by the impact of globalization. We now conceive history as the articulation of systems that are intertwined, superimposed and constantly changing. However, if, on the one hand, we no longer restrict a people’s history or literary and cultural production to spaces which were arbitrarily constructed for political and economically hegemonic purposes but rather regard these ‘national’ spaces as plural and movable loci, on the other hand, the very concept of ‘America’ will require an approach that seeks to deal with the geographic, linguistic, ethnographic, cultural, political and economic hemispheric differences and the relations between space and power that necessarily come to mind when one thinks about America comparatively. For, as Keith and Pile (1993: 38) have written, ‘all spatialities are political because they are the (covert) medium and the (disguised) expression of assymetrical relations of power’. Since the 1990s a growing number of scholars have been dedicating themselves to the study of transnational cultural inter-contaminations. In my own field, today, more than ever, due to the processes of reformulation which both Comparativism and Literary Historiography have undergone, the interference of each of these areas with the others has become more intense, giving way to a wide production of literary histories based on an innovative and eminently comparative perspective. As examples I would cite the series edited by Ana Pizarro on Latin American literature and culture (1993); the publication of a history of the Francophone production of the Caribbean, edited by James Arnold (1994); and, more recently, the transnational mega-project titled ‘Latin American Literatures: A Com- parative History of Cultural Formations’, coordinated by Mario Valdez and Djelal Kadir.1 The specific cultural paradigm these works are couched in frequently investigates the relation between geographical spaces and political power, addressing the national/cultural and its role in resisting imperialism. These studies reflect some of the central concerns of postcolonial theory based on the Other – Edward Said’s Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture come immediately to mind; but so do Silviano Santiago’s theorizations on inbetweenness or liminality,2 popular throughout all of Latin America since the 1970s, which have recently become available to the UK and US public in the forthcoming anthology of his essays published by Duke University Press. There is an important body of works being developed at the moment throughout Latin America, historicizing the presence of the US through cultural or political institutions, organizations and/or publications and the 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 11

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media: research on the experience of the Peace Corps in Brazil; travel literature; the discourse and ideology of Panamericanism in guides on ‘how to do business in Latin America’ or in advertising during the ‘good neighbor policy’; US images of Latin America in The Reader’s Digest; stereotypes of Brazil in Hollywood movies. We can also add to this list comparative and/or transcultural studies of graffiti, and the ‘funkification’ of Rio de Janeiro – studies on the phenomenon of the bailes funk, the funk dance halls, in the favelas (shantytowns) and periphery of Rio de Janeiro.3 What do these projects have in common? I would argue that they all revolve around a recurrent theme in Latin America, since the 19th century: our identity. During the 19th century, discussions about Latin American identity were marked by works that postulated the necessity of freeing ourselves from European parameters, as these ineluctably led to a reading of Latin American cultural manifestations as extensions or ‘copies’ of European models. In the 20th century, this theme was marked by our identity vis-à-vis the impact of US neocolonialism, and an awareness of transnational permeabilities, created, to a great extent, by histories of conquest, occupation and foreign policies, but also by economic fluxes and American (in its ample sense) migratory circuits. They also have in common the fact that they were not generated in American Studies departments. Perhaps at this point I should make a short detour to explain that the implementation of American Studies programs did not meet with success, and they were only very rarely implanted by the USIA or USIS in South America (exceptions that come to mind are Uruguay and Argentina). North American and European scholars have not been impervious to the relation between US political power and the expansion of American Studies as a discipline in the early 1970s (and, therefore, coinciding with the period of dictatorship in Brazil and other countries ‘south of the border’). US scholar Robert Spiller had already pointed out that the difficulty of developing American Studies programs in South American countries was due to the perception of a US agenda of ‘nationalist propaganda’ or ‘imposition’ (i.e. of the ‘American way of life’). From a European point of view, H.C. Allen linked the expansion of American Studies to ‘the fact of American power’.4 My academic generation was (in)formed by Marxist theory, and liberation theology (some by dependency theory) and, due to the association in Latin America of the CIA with regimes of oppression and to the long history of US political, military, and economic interventions, the acronyms USIA, USIS and CIA were synonymous to most of us. Conse- quently, studies focusing on the US in South America – especially during the Cold War period – were frequently accused of perpetuating the Yankee ideology of exceptionalism throughout the continent. I might add that this belief persists, and is represented, for example, by the divide between hard core Marxists and cultural studies researchers or oral historians. I might also add that, besides distrust on the part of national colleagues, non-US researchers dedicated to American Studies outside the US – 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 12

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especially those from peripheral countries with a long history of struggles for self-legitimization under the domination of the hegemon – sometimes find resistance from US scholars, who resent the fact that we – to use the (not very felicitous) words of one US colleague during a recent conference at which I spoke – ‘get jetted back and forth . . . to teach us how to do American Studies’. This policy of exclusion plays out what Larsen (1995) has termed the authoritative gaze of the North over the South. It also reinforces an important point made by Gilbert Joseph (Joseph et al., 1998), when he called attention to the almost total absence of cultural analysis, from a US perspective, on the overseas history of US expansionism and hegemony. Most importantly, in the context I pointed out earlier, it signals the issue of national belonging, which has been complicated by the paradigm shift I mention in the opening paragraph of this brief piece. The globalization of societies and the deterritorialization of cultures generates a rupture between an ideologically constructed ‘national memory’ and its objects, bringing about, as one of its main consequences, the destabilization of the concept of national identity. Accordingly, ‘Unitedstatesian’ identity has also been affected by this paradigm shift. This identitary crisis is to a large degree due to the process of globalization. Brazilian social scientist Renato Ortiz (1994) argues that being part of the world market implies breaking off with the previous, traditional identification between ‘US culture’ and consumer society. The everyday objects, once representative of ‘Ameri- canness’ have lost their territoriality. Japanese cars, European articles, clothes and toys manufactured in Taiwan have short-circuited the mechanisms so laboriously constructed by the national grand récit of Americanness. It is no surprise, then, that the circulation of foreign signs in the US ‘scapes’ contributes to the destabilization of this constructed identity, creating a desire to reinforce, or reiterate, what it means to be ‘American’. It is significant, then, that this form of critical analysis is generally produced outside the US. Little wonder that American Studies in (to use the words of José Martí) ‘Our America’ tends to be comparative, privi- leging issues such as dependency and neocolonialism: focusing on US hegemony is not only a means of reading the dominant nation but also a means of reading ourselves. This approach suggests that a view from the outside – Comparative American Studies – can make important contributions to this field of study. To conclude this quick inter-reference, I suppose I should also explain that what could be termed American Studies in Brazil tends to be associated with my own field of study, i.e. modern language and literature programs. In this way, potential US Studies scholars in Brazil – due to mastery of the English language – usually have as their main purpose becoming teachers of English as a Foreign Language, professional trans- lators, or researchers/professors of English or English language literatures. However, due to recent contributions from comparative literature, 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 13

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translation studies and cultural studies, an innovative interrogation of the intersections of space, culture and power has opened up; these fields more and more frequently dialogue with a diversity of other fields that now approach their topics through literary theory and discourse analysis, a perspective theoretically compatible with contemporary postcolonial or postmodern international relations studies. So this is not to say that other fields of study have not privileged the US as a locus of study. There are undergraduate and graduate courses – mainly in economics or history of economics, communications, political science, history, sociology, and international relations – whose syllabi include studies of the US. I have given very quick examples, earlier, of the work being done; it is really a matter of finding out who/what/where. However, it is important to always point out that these research projects are usually comparative hemispheric studies focusing on US–Latin America relations. I have argued elsewhere that I cannot really think of any non-US Americanist working in the humanities or social sciences whose gaze is not, at least implicitly, comparative, for the reasons I have already argued. Yet, the us/them paradigm, in an inter-American context, appears highly problematized. As we all know, in historical terms, America, the New World, is primarily a European construct; later the word America was appropriated to signify the US national space. Thus, America must be approached from a perspective that takes into consideration these very processes; this is to say that, whichever the adopted approach, it will necessarily be one that problematizes ‘American’, that develops a form of US Studies that theorizes an interpretive framework for studying: (1) how the US exports its image to the rest of the world; (2) the many ways in which the rest of the world has constructed the US; and (3) in the context below the equator, how US Americans have imagined ‘us’ Americans. So, returning to the question I asked earlier, it is important to point out that the works I have cited here share points in common: either questions of national representation through the ‘imperial gaze’ are discussed in them or ways in which globalized US popular culture is reworked to produce new, hybridized identitary inscriptions are considered. They all problematize the dependency theory – the classic example of this prob- lematization being the anthropophagous paradigm, first explicitly outlined in the famous Manifesto Antropofagico of Brazilian vanguard artist Oswald de Andrade, which advocates a practice of cultural canni- balism, whereby the metropolitan cultural import, rather than being simply assimilated into the same, one-way network of cultural distribution, is appropriated as simply one other element of a dynamic, postcolonial ‘assimilation’ that can consume without losing its national cultural identity. Indeed, artistic production inspired by movements such as the Tropicalist Movement in music (curiously, now ‘traveling’ to the US via Sean Lennon’s partnership with Arnaldo Antunes, the main song- writer of Tropicalist group ‘Os Mutantes’) has led many critics to argue 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 14

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that Latin America is postmodern avant la lettre. These works open up to discussions about the ways in which identitary discourses and spaces are mutually constructed, through the contact zones of US empire. They also show how forms of power have been varied and complex, both through nation-states and informal regional relationships: business, tourism, communications, migratory fluxes, the entertainment industry, travel literature, scientific manuals, etc. The phenomena of decentering, transculturation, hybrid spaces, etc., related to theories of US neocolonialism, have produced recent works that help cast light on the US sociopolitical role in the hemisphere and in the world, today. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences have become more and more attentive to the fact that cultures are produced and reproduced through social practices, and that these occur on a variety of spatial levels that have been historically constituted. The current interest in spatiality offers an opportunity to create international and interdisciplinary conversations and should inspire a desire to cross gazes and to map the political, cultural and aesthetic dimensions of capitalism, through cultural texts that recast the ways of seeing the US role in the hemisphere and in the postcolonial world, contributing to American Studies through a comparative and transnational gaze. An important way of interrogating and historicizing the hybrid or tran- sculturated spaces of the Americas is being developed in studies of identitary discourses inscribed in transnational migratory spaces, or circuits.5 For example, there has also been a growing body of studies on the Gover- nador Valadares–Boston migratory circuit which is leading to the formation of a Brazilian ethnic community in Massachusetts – but also to an alteration in the lifestyle of the community of origin in Brazil.6 On a transnational level that is not specifically inter-American. We can also consider, for example, that São Paulo is the largest Japanese city after Tokyo, in the same way that Los Angeles is the largest Mexican city after Mexico City. The former circuit has produced works, curiously enough, by US Japanese author Karen Tei Yamashita, who traveled to Brazil to do research on the Japanese–Brazilian migratory circuit. She ended up marrying a (non- Japanese) Brazilian, living in Brazil for many years, and publishing two novels – Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) and Brazil Maru (1992).7 And, since I mentioned the rainforest, about a year and a half ago, while reading the SBPC (Brazilian Journal for the Progress of Science) newsletter, I came across the disquieting information that, in a US public school, during geography classes, the map of Brazil was being divided into two parts, one of which – the Amazon – was being taught as an ‘international’ zone. Since then, the Brazilian Consulate in the US has investigated the source of this information, and it has been attributed to a rumor planted on the web. More recently, a colleague of mine who is also interested in this polemic, sent me the title of the book, supposedly used in junior high schools, that contained the map (Introduction to Geography, by David Norman), along with an image of the map (p. 76), also via the 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 15

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internet. She has attempted to order the book, and I don’t know whether she has met with success or not. Nonetheless, the very rumor in itself, and the whoopla it stirred up on the internet, provide food for thought on (re-)imaginings of local versus international spaces and powers. Given that this type of discourse is not permeating the US educational system, it has already found its way into the virtual space of the world wide web. The implications of this vis-à-vis American hemispheric relations in the future can be an important contribution to Comparative American Studies projects focusing on the equation Globalization = Americanization. This brings us, of course, to the implications of cyberspace – the new international space called the web, whose default language is English. As we all know, the US is the only country that doesn’t have to be speciﬁed after the URL or email addresses. This is a particularly interesting example because, as Brazilian cultural critic Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda has pointed out, it opens up the possibility of studies focusing both on the presence of new hegemonic forms and the reproduction of asymmetrical relations (in this case, on the web) and what we could call ‘counterdis- cursive’ and creative means of dealing with this – for example, the negoti- ation between national languages in Spanglish and Portenglish glossaries on the internet. This process forces the transnationalization or submission of words like mouse, click, delete, default, etc. to the logic of other languages – generating words like ‘mouses’, for example. In this way, users reterritorialize English words through these new geopolitical and linguistic inﬂections. These are the new paradigms we are witnessing, along with the mil- lennium. For those of us working in American Studies it is a moment which offers an opportunity for us to think of ways in which to develop new international networks, especially in terms of research projects that are intellectually and geographically inclusive.

Acknowledgements The considerations developed here are due, in great measure, to an invitation to participate in a panel discussion on Comparative American Studies at Pennsyl- vania State University in November 2000; and to the opportunity of participating in the ‘Crossing Borders: Spaces of Hope’ conference in March 2002, held at the University of Iowa during my period as visiting professor/IFUSS Fellow. I am grateful to my host/hostesses during these two occasions: Dr Djelal Kadir (Depart- ment of Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University) and Drs Jane Desmond and Virginia Dominguez, co-directors of IFUSS.

Notes 1To be published by Oxford University Press as The Oxford History of Latin American Literature. 2Cf. Silviana Santiago (2001). A classic essay in this collection is ‘O entre-lugar do discurso latino-americano’, ﬁrst presented at the Université de Montréal, 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 16

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18 March 1971. Later, this same piece was republished in English as Latin- American Literature: The Space In-Between, SUNY, 1973. 3For examples of these works I refer the reader of Portuguese to Sonia Torres (2001) and Tunico Amancio (2000). 4For these scholars’ considerations on American Studies programs and the expansion of American Studies, see Robert Spiller (1970) and H.C. Allen (1976). 5I am borrowing the term from Richard Rouse (1991). 6 See works by Ana Cristina Braga Martes (2000, 2001) and Glaucia de Oliveira Assis (2001: 199–211, 245–53, respectively), also Martes (2000). In English, see Margolis (1994). 7I am deeply indebted to Cristina Stevens, from the University of Brasilia (UnB), who ﬁrst introduced me to Yamashita’s work.

References Allen, H.C. (1976) American Studies International Newsletter, Winter. Amancio, Tunico (2000) O Brasil dos gringos: imagens no cinema. Rio de Janeiro: Intertexto. Arnold, James, ed. (1994) A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Vol. 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Assis, Glaucia de Oliviera (2001) ‘Emigrantes Brasileiros para os EUA e a (Re)Construcao da Identidade Etnica’, in S. Torres (ed.) Raizes e rumos: perspectivas interdisciplinares em estudos americanos, pp. 199–211. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras. Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Braudel, Fernand (1981) Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Vol. 1. The Structures of Everyday Life. The Limits of the Possible. trans. Sian Raynolds. London: Collins. Joseph, Gilbert M., LeGrand, Catherine C. and Salvatore, Ricardo D., eds (1998) Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve, eds (1993) Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge. Larsen, Neil (1995) Reading North by South. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Margolis, Maxine (1994) Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martes, Ana Cristina B. (2000) Brasileiros nos Estados Unidos: um estudo sobre imigrantes em Massachussetts. São Paulo: Paz e Terra. Martes, Ana Cristina B. (2001) ‘Emigracao Brasileira e Mercado de Trabalho’, in S. Torres (ed.) Raizes e rumos: perspectivas interdisciplinares em estudos americanos, pp. 245–53. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras. Ortiz, Renato (1994) Mundialização e cultura. Sao Paulo: Brasiliense. Pizarro, Ana, ed. (1993) America Latina – palavra, literatura e cultura. São Paulo: Memorial da America Latina/UNICAMP. Rouse, Richard (1991) ‘Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism’, Diaspora 1 (Spring): 8–23. Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage. 74P 02torres (ds) 30/1/03 12:57 pm Page 17

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Santiago, Silviano (2001) The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, ed. Ana Lucia Gazzola. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spiller, Robert (1970) American Studies International Newsletter, Autumn. Torres, Sonia, ed. (2001) Raizes e rumos: perspectivas interdisciplinares em estudos americanos. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras. Yamashita, Karen Tei (1990) Through the Arc of the Rainforest. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Yamashita, Karen Tei (1992) Brazil Maru. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.

Sonia Torres is Associate Professor at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil. She is former President of the Brazilian Association of American Studies (ABEA) and currently Vice President of the International American Studies Association (IASA). She is the author of Nosotros in USA, has edited the American Studies reader Raizes e rumos, and is on the editorial board of Transit Circle, the Brazilian journal of American Studies. Her current research interest is literature, culture and political conﬂict. Address: Rua Sa Ferreira, 232 apt. 902, Rio de Janeiro, 22071–100,RJ – Brazil. [email: [email protected]] 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 19

Article

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

Figuring the future in Los(t) Angeles

Hazel V. Carby Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Abstract This article examines Los Angeles’ symbolic relation to the rest of the US, deriving from its multi-layered political, social, economic, racialized and environmental complexity. Metropolitan Los Angeles has become ‘a dystopian symbol of Dickensian inequalities and intractible racial contradictions’, according to historian Mike Davis. Rather than representing America’s modernity, Los Angeles has come to symbolize ‘the collapse of the American Century’. Accordingly this article explores the motives of African American writers in representing Los Angeles as a politically and environmentally disastrous living space and a figure for the state of the nation. The value that black writers place upon and celebrate in the multiple range of urban ethnicities is at odds, not only with the class and racialized political and economic hierarchies of the city which oppresses its black residents but also contrary to contemporary dominant models of American citizenship. The article considers work by Chester Himes, Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley and argues that within and without the borders of the US, labels like ‘minority’ or ‘ethnic’ literature ghettoize, marginalize and minimize its significance. Yet the work of these authors currently carries the weight of the search for a more ethical and moral sense of responsibility for the state of a nation skidding down the path of increasing inhumanity, injustice and disregard, not only for the majority of its own population but for the majority of the residents of this planet. These works are significant acts of dissent from the perpetuation of injustice in contemporary politics, from the increasing extremes of wealth and poverty, and from the parasitic relation of the US to the environment.

Keywords African American ﬁction ● Chester Himes ● dystopia ● Los Angeles ● Octavia Butler ● Walter Moseley

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Los Angeles, California, is a city that has a very complex symbolic relation to the rest of the US. For me, the story of the Belmont Learning Center vividly dramatizes the betrayal of minority dreams by the boosterism, corruption, ineptitude, and potential for environmental disaster that characterizes the political culture of the city. Planned more than a decade ago at a projected cost of $200 million, it will be, if completed, the most expensive public high school ever built in the US (Purdum, 1999). Construction of the Belmont Learning Center proceeded despite warnings issued by the State Division of Oil and Gas about the dangers of the site, an abandoned oil field. The black officials of the school board were desperate to solve the overcrowding and generally dire conditions in which so many young black, Latino, and poor students do not get educated in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But potentially explosive methane gas and toxic hydrogen sulfide gas, known to cause neurological damage, seeped into the school structure for which there appeared to be no remediation. Finally, after spending $170 million, the School Board voted in January 2000 to abandon the project.1 However, Superintendent Roy Romer revived the project, and, with $175 million spent so far, completion could add yet another $100 million to the costs. Oil-well logs have revealed an earthquake fault underneath already existing buildings on the campus; any seismic activity would cause a rush of the gases with devas- tating consequences (Gao, 2002). More than a metaphor for the city, this unfolding tragic narrative actually embodies the multi-layered political, social, economic, racialized and environmental complexity of Los Angeles from its fissures and abandoned oil fields below ground to the concrete highways soaring through, around and above its neighborhoods. In Ecology of Fear, the historian Mike Davis reminds us that the city used to be regarded as the ‘Land of Endless Summer’, a national symbol for a ‘lifestyle against which other Americans measured the modernity of their towns and regions’. Today’s metropolitan Los Angeles, however, has become ‘a dystopian symbol of Dickensian inequalities and intractible racial contradictions . . . with its estimated 500 gated subdivisions, 2,000 street gangs, 4,000 minimalls, 20,000 sweat shops, and 100,000 homeless residents’. Rather than representing America’s modernity, Los Angeles has come to symbolize ‘the collapse of the American Century’ (Davis, 1998: 354). Davis provides us with an intriguing account of the city’s fictional and filmic annihilation and claims, ‘no city, in fiction or film has been more likely to figure as the icon of a really bad future’ (Davis, 1998: 278). He asks us to consider why Los Angeles is the city we love to see destroyed. Acknowledging that the city has, to a certain extent, become ‘the scape- goat for the collapse of the American Century’, Davis emphasizes the power and popularity of pulp fiction and film that incessantly recycles the ‘ritual sacrifice of Los Angeles’, and cites these texts as part of a ‘malign syndrome, whose celebrants include the darkest forces in American history’ (Davis, 1998: 355). While it is Robert Heinlein’s novella of 1952, 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 21

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‘The Year of the Jackpot’, that in ‘crowning Los Angeles the disaster capital of the universe . . . anticipated the cornucopia of imaginary disaster to come’, it is the issue of race, Davis concludes, ‘which unlocks the secret meaning of Los Angeles disaster fiction’ (Davis, 1998: 276). I share Davis’s distaste for much of this disaster fiction, particularly the neo-nazi survivalist narratives with their predictions of imminent race war. But his observations prompt me to consider what motives African American writers may have for representing Los Angeles as a politically and environmentally disastrous living space for many of its residents and even, perhaps, for contemplating its destruction. Literary representations of the city in the work of black writers span many periods, take many forms and range across a variety of genres, but even when African American writers imagine its destruction, I would argue that far from being part of a ‘malign syndrome’, their work should be seen as an attempt to interrogate the limits and the possibilities the city offers for imagining self, community and citizenship. If Los Angeles is ‘the most culturally heterogeneous city in the history of the United States’ (Soja, 1999), it is also true that many of the white and wealthy are running away as fast as they can from that very heterogeneity. They flee toward homogeneous gated enclaves and the suburbs in an attempt to escape a declining economy, abandoning the multi-colored, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic residents of the metropolitan region who remain in poor neighborhoods with declining schools. Of course, the desire of many white US citizens to live and go to school separate from citizens of color is a wish not confined to those who live in Los Angeles. For large sectors of the white middle class, residential segregation is their American dream. Since 11 September 2001 the racial politics of the 20th-century US has remained securely in place: the language of democracy and justice continues to paper over a deeply segregated, poverty-ridden and unjust society, a glaring contradiction that seems to bore politicians and the media alike. At the same time, politicians and the media have fostered a blitz of public discourse about the relation of the self to the other, of friend to foe, of home to foreigner, since the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. Bodies seem to be in suspended relation to one another while concepts of citizen and subject are being re-negotiated. The US, as a national body politic, is publicly figured as ‘home’. However, in the face of the increasing surveillance and confinement of citizens suspected of being members of terror cells or possibly planning to make ‘dirty bombs’, who is to be included and nourished within its walls remains ultimately unclear. For the last quarter of a century the ‘have a nice day’ home has been the public face which rendered invisible the home that houses the poor and the black in disproportionate numbers in the largest prison population the world has ever seen. The poor and black not within the penitentiary system are condemned to a life of segregation in devastated inner-city projects and schools that do not school. 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 22

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The invention of an Office of Homeland Defense, the pronouncements of the Bush administration and the language of the media, particularly the New York Times, CNN, and Time magazine, all spoke to the need to defend ‘home’ from both external and internal threats. At ‘home’, residents have been subject to increasing questions about their legitimacy, a process over-determined by the language and practices of racialization. After the first six months of apparent intensive labor, the Office of Homeland Defense unveiled a color-coded alert system in which levels of threat were represented as red through orange, even though everyone ‘knew’ that it was brown bodies at home and abroad that represent potential danger. Since the early days of President George W. Bush’s ‘Crusade’, which bodies constitute the national body has been marked by contradictions. ‘Home’ is multiple bodies seemingly endlessly divided, a home in which neighbor has become potential enemy. Despite the absolutist implications of ‘crusading’ language, exactly who is to be blessed by God, as opposed to subjected to his wrath (courtesy of the US military), exactly who is to be embraced and comforted while others are to be shunned, spat upon, assaulted, arrested, and even murdered, remains ambiguous and elusive. The endless sea of Stars and Stripes that proclaims the freedom to rule the universe and glories in the ‘American Way’ of domination and consumption of the majority of the earth’s resources waves alongside a constant stream of arrests of US citizens, people’s neighbors, accused of complicity with terrorists. People disappear though the evocation of military rule of law. My small town American flag waving neighbors in New England (predominantly white) are very satisfied that they live in almost total segregation from the residents of New Haven (predominantly black and Latino), let alone New York City, which many regard as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah and very few ever visit. Although the public expression of grief from small towns and suburban America for New York City was obviously genuine, ‘One Nation Under God’ has clearly demarcated urban/suburban borders. I doubt that most white Americans imagine their ideal homeland as international, cosmopolitan, multi-cultural and multi- ethnic communities of the type that was destroyed in the World Trade Center Towers or that can be found in metropolitan Los Angeles. There is clearly much more at stake for the politics of citizenship in the racialized formation of metropolis versus ‘the American way’ than a discussion of the literary representation of any one city can encompass. But, for a number of African American writers of the 20th century, Los Angeles became a figure for the state of the nation. The value that black writers place upon and celebrate in the multiple and complex range of urban ethnicities is at odds not only with the class and racialized political and economic hierarchies of the city which oppresses its black residents but contrary to contemporary dominant models of American citizenship. Some brilliant young scholars of the black diaspora are carrying out the excavation of the earliest history of black writers from California by 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 23

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recovering what they wrote in British Columbia, Canada, after they left the US. As Karina Vernon states, ‘more than half the black population of San Francisco migrated to British Columbia en masse’ in 1858 when the ‘California legislature passed a series of racially repressive laws, culmi- nating in the proposal of a bill that would ban outright any further immigration of blacks’ into the state. Their writing, in the form of letters, diaries, poems and autobiographies has been recently published (Compton, 2001) and is, Vernon attests, a ‘textual legacy . . . [of] the desires and disappointments of black subjects’ (Vernon, 2002: 3). In addition to regarding Los Angeles as a significant measure of the systems of racial injustice that permeate the entire country, the work of Chester Himes, Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley offers powerful accounts of the limitations of the 20th-century American dream and acute intellectual analyses of the future of its rampant and unrestrained capitalism. These African American writers explore the complex questions of the relation between transnational, national, regional, and local geographies of self, other, community, and citizenship in Los Angeles. An unconventional history of the literary relation of African American writers to the city could begin with Chester Himes and his novel, if he hollers let him go, written and set during World War Two and published in 1945. if he hollers presents us with a stark but convincing portrait of the particular racial formation that emerged in Los Angeles during the war and was to shape the city’s future. For Himes, the war years marked a turning point in the development of white supremacy in the country and he imagined a Los Angeles in which the geography of its human relations pre-figured and epitomized the future of the urban racial formation of the US. Himes created a particular social, political and philosophical landscape of Los Angeles that set an agenda of questions to which contemporary writers, like Butler and Mosley, continue to respond. The forces of destruction permeate every page of if he hollers, but it is not the city’s infrastructure that is under siege. Rather, it is the physical, political, and psychological well-being of Los Angeles’ minority residents that is being attacked at each and every turn. This Los Angeles, imagined as a literal and metaphorical landscape in which the forces of oppression roam unchecked through its streets, workplaces and neighborhoods, reappears in our contemporary moment in the work of Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley. Each interrogates Los Angeles as a site in which the struggle for economic, political and social justice is a matter of life or death. James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, emphasize the importance of per- ceiving cities as ‘challenging, diverging from, and even replacing nations as the important space of citizenship – as the lived space not only of its uncertainties but also of its emergent forms’ (Holston and Appadurai, 1999: 3). I would argue that the fiction of Himes, Butler and Mosley explore these ‘uncertainties’ and ‘emergent forms’ of the relation between transnational, national, regional, and local geographies of self, other, community, and citizenship. 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 24

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Chester Himes arrived in Los Angeles in 1940 on a Greyhound bus from Cleveland. What he found there, he declares in his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, was a city that ‘hurt [him] racially as much as any city [he] had ever known – much more than any city [he] remembered from the South’ (Himes, 1971b: 73). For him, the war years mark a new moment in the racial formation of the US and he constructs a Los Angeles that both pre-figures and epitomizes the new directions of American racism. if he hollers recreates a specific historical moment in the history of Los Angeles, the 1940s, when migrants streamed into it from all over the country to work in ‘the huge industrial plants . . . shipyards, refineries, oil wells, steel mills, [and] construction companies’ (Himes, 1971a [1945]: 23–4). The shipyard where the protagonist, Robert Jones, works is a microcosm of the racial formation of the US and a symbol of the shifting demographics of the state; Jones’s co-workers seem to come from every state in the Union except California. The spatial organization of their work sites, categorized by racial and ethnic division, intensifies and concentrates racist hatred. Jones lives in constant fear in both his sleeping and waking hours. He traces the source of this fear to that of the internment of Japanese Ameri- cans rather than to the Jim Crow conditions of life and work in Los Angeles, an experience with which he was all too familiar long before he moved to the city. Jones describes the nature of the racism he had to confront:

When I got here practically the only job a Negro could get was serving in the white folk’s kitchens. But it wasn’t that so much. It was the look on the people’s faces when you asked them about a job. Most of ’em didn’t say right out they wouldn’t hire me. They just looked so goddam startled that I’d even asked. As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, ‘I can talk.’ It shook me. Maybe it had started then, I’m not sure, or maybe it wasn’t until I’d seen them send the Japanese away that I’d noticed it. Little Rike Oyana singing ‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day. It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance. Without a trial. Without a charge. Without even giving him a chance to say one word. It was thinking about if they ever did that to me . . . that started me to getting scared. After that it was everything. It was the look in the white people’s faces when I walked down the streets. It was that crazy, wild-eyed unleashed hatred that the ﬁrst Jap bomb on Pearl Harbor let loose in a ﬂood. All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or ignore. Everyday I had to make one decision a thousand times: Is it now? Is now the time? I was the same color as the Japanese and I couldn’t tell the difference. ‘A yeller-bellied Jap’ coulda meant me too. I could always feel race trouble, serious trouble, never more than two feet off. (Himes, 1971a [1945]: 7–8) 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 25

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I quote this passage at length to highlight the sophistication of Himes’s insights into the politics and processes of racializing citizenship. He stages Jones’s monologue as a gradual process of recognition. Although Jones’s meditation begins with his Jim Crow experiences, he moves quickly to reflect upon the hegemonic ideological strategies of racism intended to categorize, divide and isolate groups of racial ‘others’, strategies which produce his experiences as a ‘nigger’ as distinct from those of a ‘yeller- bellied Jap’. He then acknowledges the relation between these experiences and, finally, he recognizes the common threat to the rights of citizenship for all racialized peoples. The juxtaposition within the monologue of the young Japanese American boy being taken to an internment camp with his singing of ‘God Bless America’ is not just a poignant evocation of an image but also a political realization, in literary form, of the contradictions between racialization, nationality, and citizenship as they are articulated at this particular historical moment. Himes renders these contradictions visible, ambiguous and fragile. Anxiety ricochets through Jones’s vision of a possible common fate for African Americans and Japanese Americans alike, but at the exact moment of realization, Himes also undermines the hegemonic spatial equation of discrete racist ideologies and distinct categories of peoples. He raises to visibility, I would argue, the possibility of renegotiating the ‘geography of difference’ (Harvey, 1996). In an argument based upon the premise that the ‘transnational flow of ideas, goods, images, and persons . . . tends to drive a deeper wedge between national space and its urban centers’, Holston and Appadurai identify Los Angeles as a city which ‘may sustain many aspects of a multicultural society and economy at odds with the mainstream ideologies of American identity’ (Holston and Appaduri, 1999: 3). Though I would not disagree with this conclusion, I would question the relation of cause and effect in their premise. Rather than trying to trace a causal relation of effect from the global to the local, I would prefer to develop a way of mapping the dialectical relations between a variety of spatial scales that coalesce in one place at a specific moment.2 if he hollers let him go consistently moves across and through a variety of spatial scales – the local, the national, and the global – each over- determined by ideologies of masculinity, which act simultaneously to reassert and reframe relations between processes of racialization and definitions of citizenship. Los Angeles enables Himes to represent how racialization and citizenship coalesce, accumulate, concentrate, intensify and, ultimately, penetrate through the skin to the body of Robert Jones, arguably the most localized site of all. The racial hurts and slurs, the slights and threats, fall like blows battering Jones, circulate throughout his system, pound in his chest and his head and, finally, seep out through his pores, drenching his body in fear. Jones wants nothing more than to kill to bring an end to this constant fear. In the end his wish is fulfilled, though not in a form he either anticipates or desires. At the end of the novel Jones 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 26

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is drafted into the army. His rage, arising from his recognition of the true nature of the threats to his sense of self, manhood and rights as citizen, is confined, controlled and directed by the state toward a new target. In the future Jones will kill in the interest of the nation that denies his humanity. As a writer, Chester Himes turns his back on Los Angeles and limps away. It was Los Angeles, he declares in his autobiography, which almost destroyed him: I had survived the humiliating last five years of the Depression in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional; my mind was sharp, my reflexes were good, and I was not bitter. But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I had become bitter and saturated with hate. . . . I was thirty-one and whole when I went to Los Angeles and thirty-five and shattered when I left to go to New York. (Himes, 1971b: 76) Octavia Butler was raised in Los Angeles. All of her novels are concerned with the multiple forms of struggles of its population for and against domination and oppression. Unlike the uncritical masculinity of Chester Himes, Butler is particularly concerned with forms of patriarchal domination, oppression, and exploitation. Patriarchal power and abuse is produced within, reproduces and maintains the destructive capitalist and repressive relations of Los Angeles and its suburbs, but patriarchs in Butler’s novels are ultimately either destroyed or superceded by their female offspring and the parasitical nature of patriarchal relations transformed. Butler’s work displays a ‘thoroughly grounded understanding of place, space and social theory’ and, alongside that of Samuel R. Delany, is among the most interesting, innovative, and politically challenging contemporary science fiction being published in North America.3 Butler’s fiction offers her readers the possibility of seeing the world from multiple perspectives, while rejecting both totalization and rela- tivism. Because they all are set within the landscape of a decaying or destroyed Los Angeles, I will begin my discussion with the novels in her ‘Patternmaster’ series and then turn to Parable of the Sower. The ‘pattern’ of the ‘Patternmaster’ series allows Butler to imagine a cartography of subjectivities, a cartography that in her hands becomes a tool in the fictional exploration of partial and imperfect ways of knowing, sensing, and making claims upon others.4 In two of these novels, The Pattern- master (1976) and Mind of My Mind (1977), telepathy forms a primary mode of connection between and among her characters. Butler forges these connections into a web of possibilities, a web which guides the reader through an exploration of a variety of forms of knowledge. The novels are literary explorations of the use and abuse of ways of knowing structured into relations of power and subjection, control of the self and of others. The ‘pattern’ allows for the representation of both spatial and temporal relations between and among her characters and its manipulation produces very specific consequences for Butler’s fictional geography of individual and communal politics. 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 27

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Butler creates her telepathic pattern as a web of arteries, an alternative geography and mode of communication to the conventional arteries of the city and its suburbs. Literally, the pattern acts as a set of alternate lifelines to the disintegrating social and political formation of her fictional Los Angeles. In particular, her arteries form a multi-racial, inter-racial, and multi-ethnic web of imaginary relations that replace the segregated spatial pattern of the actual city. At times, the pattern provides alternative avenues of movement to the freeways: Butler’s characters are constantly physically and mentally moving between metropolis, suburb, and edge city. This movement, while being multi-layered and multi-dimensional, is also structured in relations of power and control. Those who learn to control it can manipulate the web, and those who travel its threads are often drawn into movement through the will of another. However, the multi-racial, inter-racial, and multi-ethnic mind-body relationships in the conduits of the pattern are also creative and offer the characters an opportunity to leave behind the destructive mind-body relations that characterize the city’s segregation and communication systems for which Butler appears to have utter contempt. In Clay’s Ark, Butler describes the spatial relations of Los Angeles as follows: ‘Enclaves were islands surrounded by vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness connecting cesspools – economic ghettos that regularly chewed their inhabitants up and spat the pieces into surrounding communities’ (1984: 34).5 Though the relations between and among members of the pattern are fraught with struggles over power and control, like that of the city and its sewers in which they are embedded, the pattern is a fictional device for theorizing the construction of social relations, communal solidarities, and loyalties. It is only within the parameters of the pattern, for example, that a multi-racial, inter-racial, and multi-ethnic community is represented. As I have said, all of Butler’s novels are primarily concerned with multiple forms of struggles for and against domination and oppression. In the ‘Patternmaster’ series and in her most recent two novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), she is particularly concerned with forms of patriarchal domination, oppression, and exploitation – those produced within, reproducing, and maintaining the destructive spatial-temporal relations of Los Angeles and its suburbs. Butler expresses her most elaborate, detailed and powerful condemna- tion of Los Angeles in The Parable of the Sower, a deeply philosophical meditation upon the nature of our society, published in 1993. Set in the near future, the novel begins within the confines of a walled community in 2024 and closes in Humboldt County, California in 2027. Its protagonist, a young black woman only 15 years old in the opening pages of the novel, is a most unlikely heroine for American fiction. In the racialized and gendered political discourse of the US, black female teenagers are characterized as pathological, dismissed as unworthy citizens and represented 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 28

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in the media predominantly as unwed mothers. In stark contrast and in direct challenge to these ideas, Octavia Butler makes her protagonist, Lauren Olamina, a symbol for the future and the force behind the building of a new society. Parable of the Sower opens with Lauren trying to be her father’s daughter but feeling as if she is living a lie trying to please him, a Baptist minister, her middle-class community, and their God. As readers, we follow her developing analysis of the patriarchal nature of all three. In a reaction against the narrow vision of her community, Lauren embarks on a deep interrogation of the terms and conditions of her citizenship and all aspects of her belonging. In what appears to be a revision of the opening trope of Alice Walker’s (1982) novel, The Color Purple, Lauren, instead of writing to the God of her father and her community, records in her diary the invention of her own spiritual entity which she calls God and deﬁnes as Change. Lauren dreams of escape but, in Parable there is no telepathic web, or pattern, to act as an alternative set of arteries through which to communicate and build alternative communities. Instead Lauren, at 18, responds to the destruction of her walled community by setting out on the second stage of her journeying, a search for a new way to live. She quickly gathers around her a group of refugees from Southern California and leads them north on foot along the freeways to found a community called Earthseed. In addition to surmounting her youth and her uncertainty about what she will ﬁnd outside the walls of her gated community, Lauren must also learn how to transcend her own ability to enter into the minds of others. This ability, called ‘hyperempathy syndrome’, was caused, Lauren explains, by a drug her mother took: ‘Paraceto, the smart pill, the Einstein powder’ (Butler, 1993: 11), which was invented to halt the deterioration of the mind associated with Alzheimer’s disease but which also boosted the intellectual performance of the young and the healthy. It ‘became as popular as coffee among students, and, if they meant to compete in any of the highly paid professions, it was as necessary as a knowledge of com- puters’ (Butler, 1993: 18). As a consequence, Lauren is a ‘sharer’, one who can feel both the pain and the pleasure of others. However, because in her society there is little pleasure and much pain, the ability becomes a dis- ability, a terrifying and frequently paralyzing response to the agony of others. Yet that which disables her also brings an acute awareness and understanding of social and political conditions. While the members of her family and community put their faith in the walls of their enclaves behind which they hide from the violence of city and suburb alike, Lauren under- stands that those walls will not protect them from the forces of change that will inevitably engulf them. Rather, she attempts to embrace change by adopting it as her own form of religious belief, or set of doctrines. As one character tries to describe the principles of Lauren’s philosophy: ‘Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle and . . . the second law of 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 29

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thermodynamics’ (Butler, 1993: 47–8). It is from this rather eclectic combination of theories that Lauren shapes Earthseed, an alternative ecological, political, and social philosophy and practice out of which she intends to found and build an alternative community. Whereas the pattern of telepathy in Butler’s earlier novels acts as a postmodern compression of space and time analogous to cyberspace (Harvey, 1996: 245), in Parable of the Sower Lauren is grounded by the pain of others, though she constantly fights against paralysis, seeking always to act upon what she learns from such pain in order to allow herself and others to transcend it. Her hyperempathy is at one and the same time a bizarre combination of a disabling weight and a source of vision and insight. Structuring the novel by the progress of this struggle allows Butler to create a constant fictional theoretical conversation about the processes that connect the complex relations of self, other, and community, processes that are accessed through the representation of what David Harvey calls ‘the militant particularism of lived lives’ (Harvey, 1996: 44). Parable of the Sower, situated only 24 years into the future, is Butler’s imaginative response to, and extension of, the political and social conditions which already exist in Los Angeles and its environs, conditions with which we are already too familiar but ignore: our most public secrets. The novel explicitly challenges the consequences of the conservative political agenda which has come to dominate the national body politic since the Reagan/Bush (the elder) administrations. Maqiladoras, renamed ‘borderworks’ in the novel, which currently exist along the Mexican border, have in Parable proliferated, flourishing along the Canadian border. The rein- troduction of slavery by corporations is represented as a logical extension of current exploitative labor practices: the form of peonage under which agricultural workers labor in California at present becomes debt slavery in the novel; and industrial workers in the borderworks are similarly enslaved. In this manner, Butler deliberately crafts an interventionist role for science fiction as she disturbs and challenges the expectations of her readers, demanding that they recognize their responsibility for the shape of the future. The premise of Parable of the Sower rests upon a vision of an active citizenship; accepting the exploitative and oppressive economic systems of the present is an act of complicity with the state and determines the systems of re-enslavement of tomorrow. When Lauren ventures outside of her privileged, middle-class, walled community she sees the broken people that have been excluded from it and who form the residue of their exclusive existence: children with running sores, adults with missing limbs, women recently raped with blood still running down the inside of their thighs, and the dead – merely food for feral dogs. Feeling and sharing their pain is what the walls have prevented Lauren from experiencing or from knowing. In one of Butler’s earlier novels, Mind of My Mind, there is a particularly vivid and horrific scene in a Los Angeles apartment which epitomizes 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 30

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the poverty and desperation hidden behind walls which Butler seeks to bring into view. Children lie in their own filth and a newborn baby, battered to death by its parents, lies covered in maggots. In an intertexual reference, Parable of the Sower extends this image to encompass the entire city and its destructive effect on processes of community formation: Los Angeles is abruptly dismissed by Lauren’s father as ‘a big carcass covered with too many maggots’ (Butler, 1993: 9). Lauren invents an alternative community in her imagination and records her imaginings in a diary in poetic form. Earthseed is her response to the pervasive environmental and human disaster that surrounds her and it articulates ‘the need to plant ourselves far from this dying place’ (Butler, 1993: 72). Earthseed is also Lauren’s response to the need to escape from ‘politicians and business people, failing economies and tortured ecologies’ (Butler, 1993: 77). Her reflections and deliberations gradually evolve into a spur to political action. Parable of the Sower draws upon the form of 19th-century slave narratives while also telling a particularly Californian story and conjuring up a vision of those 19th-century black migrants from San Francisco moving north to Canada in the hope of finding liberty and justice. As an author, Butler abandons Los Angeles as her preferred fictional landscape. Lauren Olamina finally flees north, gathering a multi-racial, inter-racial, and multi-ethnic band of runaways and ex-slaves around her as she goes. It is interesting to note that Butler has also abandoned Los Angeles as a resident. Having spent her entire life in the metropolis, she has recently moved to Seattle. Los Angeles has become the most exportable model of future metropolises, a model that has already been copied from Phoenix, Arizona and Mexico City to São Paolo, Brazil. But, within the terms of Butler’s critique, the model of this metropolis cannot sustain a politically viable future for an inclusive vision of community, self and citizenship. In Parable of the Sower, Los Angeles is disintegrating and returning to the desert it once was while the wealthy cling tenaciously to their privileged existence in their fortified outposts. Only the rich can survive intact because only they can afford that luxury. Having abandoned the poor to their fate outside the walls of their gated communities except, of course, for those needed as domestic servants, the wealthy concentrate on pro- tecting themselves and their property in enclaves secured primarily through extensive use of advanced technology and, in case that fails, armed guards. The rich also have exclusive use of the educational system for, while still mandatory, education is no longer free. Only those with plenty of money and resources can obtain police protection because the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) demands high fees for any sort of investigation. Water, being more expensive than gasoline, is sold in small amounts to the poor, those who are homeless and those who are squat- ters. Consequently, trading in such a valuable commodity makes peddling water an extremely hazardous occupation. Using gasoline to actually fuel a car is strictly a privilege of the wealthy, but in the hands of the poor 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 31

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petrol becomes a weapon. Arsonists burn anything and anyone under the influence of an easily available drug which transforms watching a fire into a source of intense sexual pleasure. This is the future in Butler’s Los Angeles. On the night the last big ‘Window Wall’ television in her neighborhood went dark for good, Lauren records that on its screen: ‘We saw a dust-dry reservoir and three dead water peddlers with their dirty blue armbands and their heads cut halfway off. And we saw whole blocks of boarded up buildings burning in Los Angeles. Of course, no one would waste water trying to put such fires out’ (Butler, 1993: 18). We are already too familiar with the stark inequalities that exist in Los Angeles with regard to protection from fire. Mike Davis has documented how the entire city’s fire-fighting infrastructure, with federal support, has become focused on the protection of the wealthy in their precarious perches in canyons down which the hot, dry Santa Ana winds blow from the desert. In the center of the city, apartment blocks that warehouse the poor are neglected by fire services already stretched to capacity: for them, inadequate or no fire inspections or protection is the norm (Davis, 1998: 93–148). The wealthy, as they always have in Los Angeles, simultaneously defy its multi-racial, inter-racial, and multi-ethnic realities and its environmental limitations with an arrogance that is truly breathtaking to behold. Butler deftly exposes the way in which these social contradictions and environmental disasters are inextricably interdependent, making Parable of the Sower a powerful political indictment of contemporary American society. It stands, I would argue, as both a stern reminder of James Baldwin’s warnings in The Fire Next Time and as a fictional re-enactment of the street cry from Watts in 1965, and South Central Los Angeles in 1992: ‘let it burn, baby, burn.’ Walter Mosley, I would argue, sets up a dialogue with the fiction of Chester Himes and Octavia Butler. But while Butler’s protagonist turns her back on Los Angeles and lets it burn so that we can build a more just and equable future, Mosley, in his novel, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, deliberately refuses Butler’s resolution and persuades us that the ashes will produce only madness. An insane arsonist writes in his diary: ... if I could just get them to see that we got to burn down all this mess we done stacked up and hacked up and shacked up all around us. If they could see the torch of change, the burning of flames all around their eyes. We could come together in fire and steel and blood and love and make ourselves a home. Not this shit, not this TV and church world. (Mosley, 1998: 181) But the response to the devastation of the world of South Central Los Angeles, Mosley suggests, is more complicated and difficult than the metaphorical and literal baptism of fire that has touched and irrevocably damaged so many lives. Mosley creates an urban hero, Socrates Fortlow, 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 32

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who emerges from the rejected and criminalized waste of American society and subsequently becomes a figure of compassion who offers hope for finding a way to survive in the streets of Los Angeles (Mosley, 1998). The character of Socrates, like so many of Mosley’s protagonists, seems to arise from the questions that Chester Himes left unresolved in if he hollers let him go. In particular, Easy Rawlins, Paris Minton, and Socrates all struggle with the fears to which Chester Himes gave voice through Robert Jones.6 But, in addition to the constant fear that haunts black manhood, Socrates is a fulfillment of Robert Jones’s desire to murder and rape. When Always Outnumbered opens, Socrates has recently been released from jail where he served 27 years for committing both of these crimes. The reader must come to terms immediately with what on the surface appears to be the most unsympathetic of protagonists. It is a testimony to Mosley’s extraordinarily creative imagination that the character of Socrates Fortlow forces readers not only to live with his crimes, as Fortlow himself does on a daily level, but to transcend, while not ignoring, the fear, horror and hatred within him. As Socrates emerges as a philosopher worthy of his name, out of the mouth of the murderer and the rapist come the most profound questions of justice and equality, of rights, responsibility and obligations. As Socrates stumbles, falls, picks himself and others out of the gutter and carries them with him into an uncertain future we, the readers, cannot fail to recognize the limitless depths of his humanity in his fragile but persistent attempts to build a future for himself and others. Twenty-seven years in jail did not teach Socrates Fortlow how to survive outside of it. What we learn from Always Outnumbered is that Socrates’ constant struggle to find ways to live is irrevocably bound to his attempts to teach others how to survive, to value living in a way that improves all our chances at life. Socrates finds depths of humanity in himself by discovering the humanity in others, despite the fact that he is a product of a society that denies all of their humanity on a daily level. If we are to find a new way of being in the world it is important that the work of African American writers, and other so-called ‘minorities’, break the chains with which institutions of education and publishing bind them. Within and without the borders of the US, labels like ‘minority’ or ‘ethnic’ literature ghettoize, marginalize and minimize its significance. Yet, so much of this work is currently carrying the weight of the search for a more ethical and moral sense of responsibility for the state of the nation. It is carrying the weight of hope in the heart of an American empire that is skidding down the path of increasing inhumanity, injustice and disregard, not only for the majority of its own population but for the majority of the residents of this planet. These fictions are significant acts of dissent: dissent from the perpetuation of injustice in contemporary politics; dissent from the increasing extremes of wealth and poverty; and dissent from the parasitic relation of the US to the earth and its environment. These writers should be 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 33

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regarded as a barometer of the American dream. Re-visioning the ‘sunshine state’ of California as the epitome of the 20th-century version of that dream allows these writers to document how the condition of black existence is an important measure of who paid for and suffered in its shadows.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Rachel Rodewald for her astute reading and careful editing of this article.

Notes 1 It was announced that the project had been abandoned on Morning Edition, National Public Radio, 26 January 2000. 2I would agree with David Harvey that a socialist politics needs to come to terms with issues of geographic scale – as he puts it: ‘to negotiate between and link across different spatial scales of social theorizing and political action’ (1996: 41–2). 3 See David Harvey (1996), who has argued that ‘theory is never a matter of pure abstraction. Theoretical practice must be constructed as a continuous dialectic between the militant particularism of lived lives and a struggle to achieve sufficient critical distance and detachment to formulate global ambitions.’ Harvey demonstrates how we can utilize fiction in the crucial task of ‘building a critical, materialist, and thoroughly grounded . . . understanding of places, space and social theory’ (p. 44). Novels, he feels, are ‘not subject to closure in the same way that more analytic forms of thinking are. There are always differences, subtle shifts in structures of feeling,’ he concludes, ‘ all of which stand to alter the terms of debate and political action even under the most difficult and dire of conditions’ (p. 28). 4 Donna Haraway argues that:

... the topography of subjectivity is multi-dimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never ﬁnished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. Here is the promise of objectivity; a scientiﬁc knower seeks the subject position not of identity but of objectivity; that is of partial connection. (quoted in Harvey, 1996: 284) 5 Clay’s Ark concerns the transmission of disease organisms brought back to earth by a lone survivor of a space mission. The processes of transmission and spread of these organisms provide Butler with literary opportunities to discuss the complex relations of self and other and the struggles for power and control that are similar to her use of the pattern. 6 The Easy Rawlins series includes Devil in a Blue Dress, A Red Death, Black Betty, and most recently Bad Boy Brawley Brown. Paris Minton is the protagonist in Fearless Jones. 74P 03carby (ds) 30/1/03 1:00 pm Page 34

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References Butler, Octavia (1984) Clay’s Ark. New York: Warner Books. Butler, Octavia (1993) Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Butler, Octavia (1998) Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories Press. Compton, Wayde (2001) Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp. Davis, Mike (1998) Ecology of Fear. New York: Metropolitan Books. Gao, Helen (2002) ‘Belmont’s New Woes: Earthquake Fault Found under Trouble- Plagued School’, Daily News of Los Angeles, 14 September: N1 Haraway, Donna (1991) Simeons, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David (1996) Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Himes, Chester (1971a[1945]) if he hollers let him go. New York: Signet. Himes, Chester (1971b) The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years. New York: Paragon House. Holston, James and Appaduri, Arjun (1999) ‘Introduction: Cities and Citizenship’, in James Holston (ed.) Cities and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mosley, Walter (1998) Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. New York: Simon & Schuster. Purdum, Todd S. (1999) ‘A 200 Million School that May Never Open’, New York Times, 28 July: A12. Soja, Edward (1999) ‘Transnational Geographies: The Restructuring of Territorial Identities’, paper presented at Dartmouth College, Los Angeles, La Frontera, Mexico City, 30 July–1 August. Vernon, Karina (2002) ‘The Black Arctic: Literature and Subjectivity in Black British Columbia’, paper presented at The Black Atlantic Graduate Symposium, Purdue University, 21–23 March. Walker, Alice (1982) The Color Purple. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hazel V. Carby is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies at Yale University where she has taught since 1989. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (Oxford University Press, 1987), Race Men (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). Recent essays include ‘What Is This Black in Irish Popular Culture?’ in the European Journal of Cultural Studies 4(3), 2001. Her current research projects are: Britain in Black and White: A History of Racial and Sexual Politics in the UK since WWII; A Cultural History of Radical Black Women, 1925–75; and A Critical Analysis of the Writing of Octavia Butler. 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 53

Article

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

What is so bad about being rich? The representation of wealth in American culture

Winfried Fluck John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University, Berlin, Germany

Abstract Today, the USA is the Western nation with the greatest percentage of the world’s rich and with the greatest gap between rich and poor. However, there is hardly any national debate or outcry about this growth of wealth polarization. From a Cultural Studies perspective, this puzzling absence of protest raises the question whether and in what way culture plays a role in shaping US attitudes toward economic and social inequality. This article traces these changing attitudes by focusing on cultural representations of wealth in four different stages of US cultural history: the ‘Protestant ethic’, ‘robber barons’, ‘conspicuous consumption’ and the recent ‘greed’ periods. The article concludes by discussing the conﬂicting attitudes currently at work in the perception and representation of wealth in US culture.

Keywords conspicuous consumption ● greed ● inequality ● Protes- tant ethic ● robber barons ● wealth distribution

‘No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions’, writes Alexis de Tocqueville (1969: 9) in the famous opening line to his Democracy in America. One should add that the equality the European aristocrat Tocqueville had in mind was above all one of social rank and not economic conditions. Nevertheless, he also believed that social equality would lead to greater economic

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equality. Tocqueville, writes David Cohen in his recent book, Chasing the Red, White, and Blue (2001), in which he reports on . . . a journey in Tocqueville’s footsteps in contemporary America . . . painted a picture of America as a nation with greater equality of material wealth, and of opportunity, than any country in Europe, with a gap between rich and poor becoming ever narrower. (p. xii) Cohen’s journey in Tocqueville’s footsteps, however, leads to exactly the opposite conclusion: ‘So there you have it, Alex: rising inequality – not equality – has become a fact of life here’ (p. 253). The recent trend in US life ‘to increased inequality and social exclusion’ (Cohen, 2001: 267) is beginning to become a major topic in public debates in the US but, surprisingly, not in American Studies, which continues to be entirely absorbed by issues of identity and difference. This new cultural politics of difference seems completely oblivious to the possibility that another form of inequality may be even more important in shaping the future not only of US society but modern societies in general.1 While the new transnational American Studies is happily celebrating the trans- gressive potential of border zones and the intoxicating promise of multiple identities, economic and social inequality are steadily growing in US society. The reason lies in the US’s deepening wealth and income concen- trations and, linked with these factors, the growing size of the rich–poor gap.2 In his book Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips therefore calls US society ‘the most polarized and inequality-ridden of the major Western nations’ (2002: xi).3 However, one may very well argue that the lack of interest that current American Studies shows in this development only reflects the lack of concern in US society at large.4 Why is there no public outcry about the growth in wealth polarization? From a Cultural Studies perspective this puzzling absence of protest raises the interesting question whether and in what way culture plays a role in shaping, or perhaps even constituting, US attitudes toward economic and social inequality. In this article I want to approach this issue by focusing on changing attitudes toward wealth in US culture. The purpose of such an inquiry is not moral accusation but an interest in how the cultural imaginary of modern democracies works. In order to grasp the imaginary function and symbolic significance of wealth, one has to discard a view of cultural representations as ‘reflections’ of economic developments and focus on the process of transfer through which audiences give meaning to cultural representations by investing wishes and emotions of their own.5 Cultural representations of wealth in US culture are of interest not because they can serve as documentation of inequality but because they reveal how Americans struggle with questions of equality and inequality. As the article will show, the traditional reference to a belief in a Calvin- ist God who rewards the righteous is not sufficient to explain the changing symbolic roles of the rich in US culture. As we have already seen, economic and social inequality poses a 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 55

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challenge to the analysis of US society because it complicates one of its founding myths, that of equality. Whereas equality promises to level hierarchies between human beings, inequality establishes new hierarchies of worthiness or worthlessness, of superiority or inferiority. This in turn raises the issue of justice. Inequality actually is an integral part of democracy which is, after all, a system designed to give individuals leeway in their own pursuit of happiness.6 A problem arises when inequality begins to violate certain public standards of what is considered fair. The question, therefore, is how much inequality a democracy can accept before it enters a crisis of legitimization.7 Hence, the crucial criterion in discussing the issue of wealth is that of merit.8 To be rich means to have considerably more money and property than one’s average fellow citizen. It is a surplus that far exceeds what one could possibly need for a good life. The interesting question then is on what grounds this uncalled-for abundance can be justiﬁed, or, from an ethical perspective, on what grounds wealth can be considered as deserved or not. The answer to this question changes over the course of US cultural history. In this article, I trace this development by focusing on four major stages in the representation of wealth in US culture – stages in which the perception of wealth and its discussion in terms of merit underwent crucial changes. The article concludes by trying to sort out the complex set of conﬂicting attitudes currently at work in the perception and representation of wealth in US culture.

In his book on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber (1992) has postulated a far-reaching connection between radical (‘ascetic’) Protestantism and the drive for success and prosperity:

In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we shall call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as deﬁnitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all people not under capitalistic inﬂuence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas. If we thus ask, why should ‘money be made out of men,’ Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 56

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the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: ‘Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings’ (Prov. xxii. 29). The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic, as expressed in the passages we have quoted, as well as in all his works without exception. (pp. 53–4) Weber’s link between the Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism is speculative and, in its monocausality, no longer accepted by most historians today. But it is still a helpful argument for explaining the gradual cultural legitimation of wealth, and, more specifically, how wealth could become an expression of virtue in US culture.9 With its break from the Catholic Church, Protestantism had created the problem of how the individual could be certain whether he or she was in a state of salvation. Calvinism exacerbated the problem by the doctrine of predestination. As Weber argues, the doctrine of predestination had the effect of increasing the Protestant anxiety about salvation even further, although, at first sight, it seems to do the opposite, by claiming that the question of whether one was among the elect lies exclusively in the hands of a stern, inscrutable God. David Landes (2000) has provided a helpful clarification of Weber’s argument: Calvinistic Protestantism, said Weber, did this [sanctioning of economic success] initially by affirming the doctrine of predestination: One could not gain salvation by faith or deeds; that question had been decided for everyone from the beginning of time, and nothing could alter one’s fate. Such a belief could easily have encouraged a fatalistic attitude. If behavior and faith make no difference, why not live it up? Why be good? Because, according to Calvinism, goodness was a plausible sign of election. Anyone could be chosen, but it was only reasonable to suppose that most of the chosen would show by their character and ways the quality of their souls and the nature of their destiny. This implicit reassurance was a powerful incentive to proper thoughts and behavior. And while hard belief in predestination did not last more than a generation or two (it is not the kind of dogma that has lasting appeal), it was eventually converted into a secular code of behavior: hard work, honesty, seriousness, the thrifty use of money and time. (p. 11) This linkage between virtue and wealth works in two directions. On the one hand, ‘a psychological need for assurance of salvation’ (Henretta, 1993: 328), seeks refuge in an ascetic Protestantism that stresses inces- sant self-observation and relentless self-regulation. Industry and self- control become virtues in themselves. Franklin (1961) can self-confidently confirm that such virtuous behavior will lead to riches as a just reward: In short, the Way to Wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the Way to Market. It depends chiefly on two words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY: i.e. Waste 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 57

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neither Time nor Money, but make the best USE of both. He that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he gets (necessary Expences excepted) will certainly become RICH. (p. 187)

If virtuous behavior leads to riches as just reward, however, this connection can also work the other way round, so that wealth can actually be regarded as a sign of virtue. Although it should be displayed only modestly and without false pride, it is nevertheless not something one needs to hide or be ashamed of.10 Moreover, if success can be considered a sign of virtue (and not selfishness), then the temptation may grow to take an active part in the production of signs that may be able to signal a state of virtue and salvation.11 The way in which the Protestant ethic changed cultural perceptions of wealth presents a cultural revolution not only because it redefines the cultural meaning of wealth from selfish to virtuous, but also because, unwillingly to be sure, it paves the way for a link between wealth and impression management, that is, the creation of impressions that can redefine wealth as virtuous. Even in this secularized version, however, a positive view of wealth is still inextricably linked to the idea of virtue: only if wealth is perceived as a result of moral self-discipline can it be accepted as being deserved. The cultural perception of wealth remains governed by a moral context.12

III

A morally sanctioned view of wealth can best be maintained in a trade- and crafts-based society in which there is not yet a polarization in wealth distribution. Prosperity, in effect, may be a more ﬁtting term here. The word ‘prosperity’ implies virtuous moderation; the word ‘wealth’ can still imply decadent, aristocratic excess. However, wealth of an unheard-of dimension soon arrived in American society as a result of industrializa- tion, which created the great American fortunes in the second half of the 19th century that are today associated with names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Carnegie. Their rise challenged the equation of prosperity and virtue on two counts. For once, a dramatic gap between rich and poor, formerly associated with European feudal and aristocratic societies, now becomes part of US society. At the same time, the great new fortunes undermine the merit argument because charges multiply that they are not the result of hard work but of monopolistic practices, cut- throat behavior, and political corruption.13 This means that wealth can no longer be justiﬁed on moral grounds, as just reward for virtuous behavior. Quite the contrary, the great American fortunes of the so-called ‘robber barons’ become symptoms of the displacement of US ideals by materialist values.14 In view of the charges of a complete indifference to ethical standards, wealth can no longer be regarded as deserved. The great fortunes become a worrisome sign that a new plutocracy may be in the 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 58

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making in the US that eludes political and cultural control.15 The rich are betraying the American promise of creating a new and better world. A civilization governed by materialist values is a society without moral compass and spiritual meaning. In an almost Faustian deal, the businessman, as a representative of modernity, has sold his soul for individual ambitions, and critics must make sure that the same will not happen to US society as a whole. In view of this perception of the great American fortunes as a ‘betrayal’ of the promise of America, it is understandable that their rise after the Civil War caused a moral panic in the cultural elite of the east coast. Critical comments on the development of US society after the War take up the issue again and again, until a narrative genre is created for dealing with it, first as part of the political novel in which the corruption of the post-war period is addressed, and then as one of the central narratives of American realism. This narrative pattern draws on the major popular genre created for the justification of wealth – the success story – in order to invert it in a culturally instructive way. Although adjusted to modern times, Franklin’s success story had flourished in two immensely popular versions in the Gilded Age: the dime novel of the Horatio Alger-type and, somewhat unexpectedly, in a religious literature that offered increasingly explicit and unashamed affirmations of the gospel of success.16 Both versions already present telling variations of the success formula, for while Franklin’s recipe for success is still based on the idea of hard work and self-discipline, the new popular versions rely chiefly on the power of belief. Franklin still wants to give advice for self-improvement; Alger’s dime novels and the religious gospel of success have to overcome the growing discrepancy between promise and reality by insisting on the need for a strong, single-minded vision of success as a precondition for the climb from rags to riches. In effect, more so than anything else, these genres are powerful cultural socializations into this single-mindedness. The so-called inverted success stories of US realism, on the other hand, criticize the single-minded drive for riches as immature, adolescent fantasy.17 In this critique, moral integrity and riches come to stand in inverted relation to one another. The two values, which for Franklin reinforce each other, now get in each other’s way and begin to exclude one another. One can either be virtuous or gain riches, but not both. In his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), William Dean Howells has created a classic version of this argument.18 The novel is exemplary in that Howells presents a case in which the common man and his ambitions for riches are not to be criticized but to be steered in the right direction.19 Like Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James and other intellectuals of the period, Howells does not dismiss the US businessman in principle but sees him as a raw diamond who is still in need of culture in order to realize his full potential (and, by implication, that of US society). Culture in this context does not mean European high culture but a system of civilizatory values that will tame and channel the selfish ambitions of the individual. 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 59

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The Rise of Silas Lapham is thus not a critique of economic ambition but of the loss of a moral context for keeping it in check. Significantly, it is not his regular business activities which lead to Lapham’s fall but the fact that he goes into speculation. Production is a legitimate activity and money gained through it can be considered deserved. Speculation, on the other hand, is not honest labor, but a shady shortcut to wealth. It does not represent ‘real value’ and thus cannot be part of the system of just rewards. When the businessman shifts from production to financial speculation as his major source of wealth, he compromises his integrity (and loses Howells’ sympathies).20 In The Rise of Silas Lapham, this excess of ambition finds expression, as it often does in realist fiction, in the building of a new house which goes far beyond the needs of the family in order to display Lapham’s net worth. It is this moment of public self- advertisement which ushers in Lapham’s financial problems, because he begins to disregard his own sound business sense. Yet, although his overreaching ambition may lead to his financial ruin, it also leads to his insight that he has pursued the wrong values. In response to his own fall, the immature, adolescent American finally grows up.21 The underlying narrative pattern for the representation of wealth here is that of the story of self-development in the style of the Bildungsroman, in which the supreme value is that of human growth. Wealth, the novel shows, impedes self- development, although – and this makes it such a complicated cultural issue even for Victorian realists – it can create an imposing outer impression of growth, even to the businessman himself and certainly to the public. Wealth thus no longer is an expression of virtue but signals a deficiency in individual development. Lapham is by no means a villain; his problems arise from the fact that there is no social or cultural authority that could have provided him with another orientation. This, in fact, is the goal of the realist novel. The issue is further complicated by Mark Twain, because Twain had a much clearer sense than Howells of the temptation posed by wealth. He has a clearer sense because he takes into account the role that the imagination plays in the cultural perception of wealth. For Twain, the wish for recognition and self-importance linked with wealth is an almost anthropological disposition that we all share. Twain’s novel The Gilded Age (1969[1873]), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, provides a case in point. The novel is usually read as a scathing satire of the new materialism of the Gilded Age, but it is also a remarkable reflection on the surprising links between the success drive and the literary imagination. Both, the businessman and the writer/reader are speculators who are driven by a desire to become somebody else. However, there are, in Twain’s world, two kinds of speculators and this distinction makes all the difference. There are the clever and cunning manipulators who take advantage of other people’s dreams, and there are the sympathetic dreamers who have become the victims of their own overheated fantasies. In this, financial speculation bears striking parallels to literature. Both are 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 60

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generated by an active imagination capable of imagining other worlds and both are fantasies of an easy and complete transformation of the self. Speculation, one may say, is the equivalent of the romance in literature. However, although the realist Twain has a clear grasp of the fascination of this romance not only for the juvenile mind but for all of us, he also believes that we must learn to overcome our own desire for romantic self- aggrandizement. In a brilliant interpretation, Philip Fisher has recently offered a quasi- economic reading of Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Fisher focuses on the so-called ‘whitewashing-scene’ in which the clever speculator and gifted salesman Tom Sawyer manages to make others invest their time and money into something that was actually created as punish- ment for him. As Fisher reads it, Tom, reﬂecting Twain’s instinctive grasp of the working principle of capitalism, thereby demonstrates a very modern attitude towards the phenomenon of speculation. Not only does he get others to do the work, but they even invest their own capital for the privilege of being allowed to do so and thus make Tom a ‘rich’ man within one afternoon.22 There is no doubt that Twain considers Tom’s clever speculation which transforms a juvenile anti-work ethic almost effortlessly into proﬁt as a stroke of genius and the wealth Tom acquires as just reward. However, it seems equally obvious to me that this is only possible in the context of children’s books’ nostalgic portraits of small- town society, which can be amusing to us, because children play grown- ups. While Lapham’s problem consists in the fact that his ambitions are still adolescent, these same wishes are quite in place in the adolescent world of Hannibal, Missouri, and can become a source of amusement because Tom’s manipulation cannot cause any real harm. Similarly likeable speculators who will not really harm others because they are children at heart can also be found in The Gilded Age. As in the case of Tom Sawyer, speculation is a form of daydreaming for these characters. In both cases, the imagination plays a crucial role; both daydreaming and speculation derive their fascination from the fact that they create tempting scenarios of self-aggrandizement. This is illustrated by Squire Hawkins when, after a successful act of speculation, he imagines the future of his children: ‘They’ll live like princes of the earth; they’ll be courted and worshipped; their names will be known from ocean to ocean!’ (Twain and Warner, 1969[1873]: 8). The actual hero of the novel, however, is Colonel Sellers, who is a master in kindling and fuelling not only the fantasies of others but also his own. His tongue is ‘a magician’s wand’ which can miraculously transform poverty into riches (p. 55). After he has managed to become acquainted with the American president, his imaginary self-aggrandizement begins to take on grandiose proportions: ‘If he respected himself before, he almost worshiped Beriah Sellers now, as a superior being’ (p. 271). But, although Sellers’ case presents an extreme, he only does openly what most people want to do. Twain leaves no doubt that he considers the hunger for wealth not as morally reprehensible but 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 61

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as very human.23 If this dream is adolescent, then there is an adolescent in all of us. But the realist Twain also accepts the fact that we cannot remain forever in this state of prolonged adolescence. We can nostalgi- cally look back at it and enjoy it in the form of literature but there is no doubt that we will have to grow up, just as Tom Sawyer will have to grow up eventually.

In the realist critique proposing that the US is in danger of becoming a materialist society, the hunger for riches is explained as an adolescent wish for self-aggrandizement. It signals a lack of growth and maturity. The rich do not know or do not want to accept any limitation, just like adolescents do not yet want to acknowledge that wishes must have limits. This narrative critique gradually loses its influence at the end of the 19th century. One reason is the displacement of Victorian philosophical idealism, which lies at the bottom of a critique of US society in terms of materialism, by an evolutionary perspective. As a consequence, the representation and cultural critique of wealth is put on a new basis at the turn of the century. For this, a distinction between success and wealth becomes necessary. A successful businessman illustrates the Social Dar- winist theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Success, and the wealth that comes along with it, are earned no longer through virtue and moral self- discipline but through aggression and strength of self-assertion. But in keeping with the same biological paradigm, as soon as the successful businessman settles down to enjoy the lifestyle of the rich, he becomes a parasite, especially so when he tries to bequeath his wealth onto following generations as permanent privilege. The problem with wealth is not that it is generated by a reckless will to succeed (because this is biologi- cally inevitable) but that the rich try to preserve it in quasi-aristocratic fashion. In a world governed by biological laws of evolution, these rich people present a dead-end of evolution.24 Historically, this change in cultural attitude toward wealth can be linked to the fact that the rich are no longer the founding generation of industrial entrepreneurs, but a generation of heirs who are not productive themselves but indulging in the conspicuous consumption of wealth.25 In his famous study The Theory of the Leisure Class (1953[1899]), Thorstein Veblen therefore puts the concept of conspicuous consumption at the center of his analysis of the rich.26 For Veblen, the purpose of conspicuous consumption is social prestige: ‘In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence’ (p. 42).27 Perversely enough, in the world of the rich, prestige is created by wasteful expenditure.28 Spending money on seemingly super- fluous, even frivolous matters becomes the only reliable sign of real 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 62

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wealth.29 Consequently, for cultural critics the problem with the rich is no longer that they are still adolescent, but that they are superficial, empty-headed grown-ups without inner substance, and hence entirely absorbed by ostentatious self-display. Howells read Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class as a social satire of upper-class life. The idle rich can cause moral outrage, but, as a dead- end of evolution, they can also become objects of amusement – especially where they seem to be unaware of their own obsolescence. This, in effect, is what happens in the screwball comedy of the 1930s, where the rich become a joke. Living an entirely parasitical life, their only purpose is to preserve their privileges of class and to cultivate their lifestyle. However, as these movies make abundantly clear, this cultivated outer appearance is only the facade for a life of sterility and boredom. It is the founding premise of the screwball comedy, exemplified by Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, that real life takes place somewhere else. Hence, the rich in the screwball comedy are no longer immature adolescents. They have grown up and are, as grown-ups, hopeless cases. Making the con- ventions of their class their ruling principle, they suffocate all spontane- ity. Screwball comedies aim at revitalization, but the revitalization can only come from outside. The best way is to be rescued by a member of another class. A basic narrative pattern for the representation of wealth in the screwball comedy – for example in movies like Holiday, My Man Godfrey and all Capra movies – is that of a (successful or failed) escape from the sterile world of the rich. This provides another turn in the changing attitudes toward wealth: while the conflict in the second phase is still that between wealth and virtue, this opposition is now replaced by that between wealth and ‘real life’.30 The life of the rich is psychologically deformed and leads to neurotic self-suffocation. The problem no longer is whether one can become rich by morally acceptable means but how one can escape from the suffocating impact of wealth! F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) has been called a novel of manners and at first sight the satiric mode in the representation of wealth seems to dominate. In his ostentatious style of living, Gatsby appears as the embodiment of the superficiality of the newly rich. However, the point of the novel is, of course, to show that in the world of the rich, it is Gatsby alone who still possesses some ideals, even though they exist only in the residual form of an adolescent reading of Franklin. The Great Gatsby thus points to a differentiation in the representation of wealth in the third, ‘conspicuous consumption’ phase: within the sterile and parasitic world of the rich there are some exceptional individuals, who merit interest because they strive – although ultimately in vain – for self-awareness and self-development, a search which takes on a larger-than-life dimension because of the financial means that are at their disposal. This shift from a satirical to a tragic mode signals an interesting change in attitudes. Satire still implies the possibility of change. Increasingly, however, we encounter a psychological interpretation which attributes the need for a 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 63

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conspicuous display of one’s own worth to an obsessive desire for recognition which has deep psychological roots. The satiric mode implies distance and superiority on the side of the audience, the tragic mode triggers empathy and potential catharsis. In the story of rise and fall, the tragic hero enacts, in a larger-than-life dimension, inner conflicts in which we are all entangled. The almost royal pretensions of the idle rich at the end of the 19th century which openly defy US ideals of equality manifest themselves in the grand estates of the period, such as the Biltmore of the Vanderbilts in Ashville, North Carolina, which is an imitation of a French chateau from the period of absolutism.31 In his movie Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles also uses a grand estate, the Hearst Castle in California (called Xanadu in the movie), to characterize the life of the rich as empty, although this emptiness is hidden behind a facade of grandeur. There are several scenes at the end of the movie where Welles’ analysis of the rich is staged in visually effective ways. After the collapse of all of their journalistic, political and artistic ambitions, the newspaper tycoon Kane and his second wife have retreated to Xanadu, a simulation of feudal European castles. However, this symbol of Kane’s extraordinary wealth has become a prison. Because it is all display, it cannot serve as a home. The point is made effectively when we witness a typical evening in the life of the couple. In order to fight her boredom, she does a puzzle in front of a gigantic fireplace. In feudal times, this kind of central hall was the meeting point of family, friends and followers, but the monomaniacal Kane has alienated his last friends. Dwarfed by the huge hall, Kane and his wife reveal how isolated they are. The rich who appear to have everything lack the most important thing. This representation of the rich, frequently to be found in the first half of the 20th century, presents the wealthy businessman as almost a tragic hero. Intimacy and close relations have no chance in the wide empty spaces of Xanadu. The couple is estranged. Their wealth should provide for an especially pleasant life; instead, it is one of the reasons for their problems. The vision of self-importance generated by wealth cannot be realized in daily life. Behind the grandiose facade of the castle prevails the plain banality of everyday life.32 In yet another failed attempt to put his enormous wealth on display, Kane arranges a splendid excursion, but the result is only another demonstration of his failure to relate to others. His wealth destroys the possibility of meaningful human relations. In the end, his wife leaves him. The scattered statues in storage we see at the end, which Kane has bought wholesale in Europe, demonstrate how material success has been transformed into abstract cultural values that have no meaningful function and serve as a symbol of the meaninglessness of wealth.33 Citizen Kane brings together all the important features of the third phase in our history of changing cultural attitudes towards wealth. As in the second phase, the drive for wealth is attributed to an immature 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 64

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fantasy of self-aggrandizement, but in contrast to the second phase, this drive is now described as rooted in a psychological problem that cannot be healed. In the satiric mode, the idle rich are spiritually empty and therefore of no interest as human beings. At the core of Kane’s inner self, it turns out, there also is a void, but one that poses an intriguing enigma which makes Kane extremely interesting, much more interesting, in fact, than the common man. The hunger for self-aggrandizement (indicated in the parallels between Kane and Khan) is no longer an adolescent condition that can be overcome. It is attributed to a psychic wound which is so ‘deep’ that it remains a dark secret throughout the ﬁlm. At the beginning, when a newsreel about Kane’s life is criticized because it does not really help us to understand Kane’s personality, the ﬁlm sets itself the task of solving the secret of Kane’s subjectivity. But, in consequence of its modernist pluralization of perspectives, it fails to do so. At the end, the possibility of insight, which in the movie is linked to the search for the meaning of the word ‘Rosebud’, seems to be regained. But although we now realize what Rosebud refers to, we still do not understand the meaning it had for Kane. He remains an enigma until the very end. The secret of Kane’s subjectivity cannot be solved because, in Con- radian fashion, it is constituted by a level below consciousness. What remains is the act of overreaching itself which provides Kane with an out- of-the-ordinary, almost Shakespearian dimension. In the tragic mode of the third phase, the rich are incapable of either self-awareness or redemp- tion by others. They are stuck with their own obsessive drive that must eventually result in failure. Kane fails miserably in trying to prove that wealth equals greatness. However, because he fails in the grand manner of challenging the whole world, he is not an object of amusement or ridicule, but of pity – a pity we reserve for the fate of the tragic hero.34

Changes in the attitude toward wealth in the fourth phase can be illustrated by reference to two films which can be seen as responses to the greedy 1980s and yuppie culture.35 In both movies, the heroes are no longer just rich, but super-rich (defined by the possession of one’s own private plane). Both heroes present a new generation of reckless speculators who make their money with stocks, buy-outs and the chopping up of profitable enterprises. Businessmen who want to become rich by producing something are despised, because this is not where the quick profits are. At first sight, Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987) seems to follow the by now familiar pattern of the inverted success story by telling the story of the rise and fall of the speculator Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Gekko’s fall does not lead to any self-awareness or change of attitude, however. And although his young apprentice, played by Martin Sheen, who has gained success by copying Gekko’s tricks, finally learns a 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 65

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lesson, it is only the lesson that this kind of crime does not pay, because your competitors will inform on you. In Howells’ novel becoming rich by means of speculation is immoral, because it is not ‘real labor’; in Wall Street it is not to be recommended because, ultimately, it is bad business. But, as Stone’s surprisingly ambivalent version also implies, it was worth the risk and the exciting ride. Conspicuous consumption or the lifestyle of the rich is no longer the topic, just the context for conflicting economic and social ambitions. Although Gekko is one of the super-rich, his wealth is not displayed in quasi-aristocratic fashion. The contrast is striking in comparison with the movie version of The Great Gatsby, in which Gatsby’s wealth is staged in glamorous, wild parties that dwarf anything encountered before. Gekko’s parties in his modern, but by no means grandiose or palace-like house are almost intimate in comparison – above all, because they are used by him to pursue his business interests in an informal setting. Conspicuous display of wealth or quasi-aristocratic self-indulgence can only result in competitive disadvantage: while Gekko would party in Great-Gatsby- style, his competitors would surely continue to pursue their professional goals and thereby gain an edge. Hedonism is simply unprofessional. A glimpse of conspicuous consumption is occasionally evoked in Wall Street, for example by Gekko’s private jet, a monster limousine with in-built bar, or the easy availability of women, but it is never something Gekko indulges in and certainly is not the main goal of his ambitions. His outer appearance is usually casual; often we see him in sports outfits or other examples of the informal American lifestyle. In the context of American mass culture in which even billionaires dress casually and have no problem in wearing jeans or jogging shoes, the purpose of wealth can no longer consist in conspicuous consumption. There is no lifestyle, then, in Wall Street, which could have the function of distinguishing the rich businessman from others. There are simply single elements that can be used for the demonstration of importance and power. Wealth for Gekko is not primarily a means to gain recognition but power over others. We are interested in him, in effect, may even sympathize with him, because he is basically a professional at the peak of his game. If wealth is the prize in a professional power game, however, then its status is precarious and failure always a possibility, because in the never-ending power struggles in business winners and losers change positions all the time. While wealth in the first phase held the promise of an expression of virtue, in the second of a promise of self-development and in the third of a conspicuous display of the importance of the self, now a new definition, derived from mass culture, begins to dominate, that of the redefinition of the super-rich as superman. The life of the rich is of interest because it presents a struggle for power in which the successful gain a sense of omnipotence by which even the critical Oliver Stone seems to be fasci- nated. This experience of omnipotence is precarious and temporary, however. Thus, although the life of the rich is without any substance and 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 66

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genuine culture, it cannot be sterile. Gekko’s life resembles that of the adventurer: one can gain everything on one day but also lose everything on the day after. This, in turn, provides an easy answer to the question of merit: wealth is deserved, if one wins, and undeserved, if one loses.36 While Wall Street takes a critical, although, as we have seen, highly ambivalent look at wealth, Pretty Woman (1990) approaches it with admiration. While in the third phase the problem with wealth is still how one can prevent psychological damage, Pretty Woman shifts from ‘wound’ (the super-rich hero, it is suggested, is damaged by a former affair) to access: within the fairy-tale structure of the film, ‘real life’ in the shape of a streetwalker enters the world of the rich and rescues the emotionally frozen hero from himself. The film is of interest for our topic, not only because it was so popular but also because it reflects changing attitudes in the public perception of wealth typical of the 1990s. One of the reasons for the popularity of Pretty Woman is its basic narrative pattern. The film provides a modern version of the Cinderella motif and is thus also a film about cultural sources of recognition. Cinderella stories are stories about a girl whose true worth has not been recognized yet and who therefore faces the problem of demonstrating that worth to the outside world. In traditional versions the way to do this is by self- sacrifice and renunciation, which have the function of illustrating her virtue; however, since renunciation will not automatically lead to recognition, the heroine at one point gets support from a magic helper. There are three aspects that provide the Cinderella motif with cultural significance in the context of our discussion: (a) the heroine is somebody who actually belongs to another world, but is still in need of being discovered by a prince in order to gain access; (b) a way to do this is not by appren- ticeship but by a dramatic rescue operation; (c) there is a magical dimension in transporting the heroine from state A to state B. At the beginning of Pretty Woman, ‘worthlessness’ is redefined for modern times: the heroine is a prostitute whom the prince does not have to discover because she is already standing and waiting on the sidewalk. At first sight, this constellation seems to undermine traditional criteria of success in terms of merit completely. Her ‘rise’ is staged as pick-up, her only merit is her suggestive appearance, the magical helper through whom she finally finds recognition is the credit card of her rich companion. The credit card has the power to transform the heroine from Cinderella streetwalker to elegant young lady within three minutes in a rhythmically cut montage, reminiscent of filmed advertisements. Wealth here is a source of the possibility of re-fashioning, the re-invention of a person who finally gets the recognition she deserves. Self-presentation and impression management are no longer signs of hypocrisy, superficiality, or compensation for a deep psychic wound; they are creative acts of regeneration. Whereas Wall Street redefines wealth by its association with professionalism, thereby providing it with a dimension of adventure, risk and excitement, Pretty Woman links wealth with 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 67

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consumption and presents it as really nothing else but a magically enhanced possibility for consumption. In the movie, the act of re-fashioning has two stages: one is the act of consumption itself, which is staged in video-clip manner as a revitalizing, almost intoxicating experience. The second stage – the flight to San Francisco in his private jet in order to go to the opera – elevates the re- fashioned heroine to the level of a deserving person. This cannot be achieved by going shopping; even in Pretty Woman shopping is not yet a cultural achievement per se. For making the heroine worthy of her rise to the world of the rich, the movie draws on symbols of high culture. The heroine proves that she is worthy of her rise by feeling at home in the quasi-aristocratic setting of the opera. Consumption, it turns out, is only complete and ‘worthy’ when it finally includes the consumption of art. In opening up these possibilities, it is the best weapon against feelings of worthlessness, and hence a powerful basis for individual regeneration. This, I think, is the symbolic function wealth has gained in contemporary American culture. Regeneration through violence still plays an important part in American culture, but regeneration through consumption is the much more frequent way taken. Does this transformation of wealth to ‘magical helper’ mean that wealth is justified unconditionally now? Even Pretty Woman is not going that far, because both of the major characters – the super-rich entrepreneur and the Cinderella streetwalker – can only transform wealth into personal happiness because they prove themselves worthy of personal happiness. The heroine may be a prostitute, but she is one with unwavering moral integrity. In accordance with the Cinderella story she is not what she appears to be. Her integrity transforms him from an unscrupulous entrepreneur into a socially minded businessman when he uses a buy-out to consolidate a company that actually produces something. The encounter with the heroine has transformed him into a human being and thereby confirms that the cultural conflict between wealth and social justification is not entirely dissolved in favor of wealth. There is one cultural goal that is even more important than wealth and that is recognition as a worthy human being. This is one of the reasons why the opera is introduced into the narrative. In the context of her elevation to the status of a worthy heroine, it functions as a test of the depth of her feelings and, thus, of her integrity as a human being. Wealth is a consumer’s dream because it can provide everything: lifestyle, high art, and even the regeneration of the self as genuine human being. Wealth is the ultimate form of self-empowerment and self-empowerment is a culturally shared goal.

The question that many observers of US society ask today, I said at the outset, is why there is no moral outcry in US society about the 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 68

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dramatically increasing gap in income and wealth. The goal of this article has been to find out whether a look at the changing cultural attitudes towards wealth in US culture can contribute an answer. The first conclusion is of a general kind: the history we have traced adds up to a story of an accelerating process of individualization which can be observed in many areas of US culture and society.37 Initially, wealth is justified by reference to a generally accepted moral value. In the second phase, it is no longer virtue but individual growth and maturity which provide the perspective from which the rich are criticized. These are still values that carry general claims but they are no longer religiously or morally grounded and hence subject to debate; the realist novel, in effect, uses the issue of the US businessman who is still in need of culture as a strategy to bolster its own version of what constitutes exemplary self-development. This idea of self-development is then undermined in the evolutionary perspective of the third phase. The explanation for the relentless drive for wealth is now found in psychological models of arrested development: in the satiric mode, the rich are permanently arrested in barbarian or parasitic stages of development; in the tragic mode, they are driven by a deep, irrecoverable wound that blocks self-awareness and resists all therapeutic attempts. The pursuit of wealth is one of these therapeutic attempts but the greatest failure of all. The hunger for success and wealth now finds an explanation that helps us to understand (and perhaps even pity) the rich, but this explanation still carries the negative connotation of obsessive behavior. Only in the fourth phase has the pursuit of wealth become not only ‘perfectly normal’ but, even more so, the source of a revitalizing experience of refashioning. Movies like Wall Street and Pretty Woman can explain why it has become so difficult in American culture to criticize even excessive forms of wealth as undeserved. In contemporary American culture wealth is no longer a mani- festation of selfishness, superficiality or an inner void but a magical source of regeneration. The rich do not always make good use of that source but that does not diminish its potential. Words like lottery or casino capitalism, often used in current descriptions of the American stock market, all evoke this fairy tale structure of a magic transformation which is now a major component in the cultural perception of wealth. This process can be called a process of individualization because the grounds on which wealth and wealth concentration are culturally justified have become ever more individualized. In the ‘Protestant Ethic’ phase, justification is linked to a religiously based sense of virtue, in the ‘Robber Barons’ phase to a socially acceptable idea of ‘civilized’ self- development. In the ‘conspicuous consumption’ phase, this criterion can no longer be maintained, because there is no self that can be developed. But although this phase denies the possibility of self-development, it indi- vidualizes our perception of the rich further: in the failed effort to recover the subjectivity of Gatsby or Kane, individual self-realization and self- fulfillment appear as more important than wealth itself. In the fourth 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 69

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phase, this striving for self-fulfillment is finally liberated from the tragic mode. The criterion for justifying wealth is now whether and how wealth can make the individual happy. Self-development is radically ‘democra- tized’. It sheds its association of inner growth and becomes a way of self- fashioning by means of consumption, including the consumption of art. Films like Pretty Woman illustrate to what extent conspicuous consumption has become a commonly shared cultural ideal in contemporary society. For if wealth is defined primarily by lifestyle and consumption, then this provides the basis for successful mimicry. The more successful this self-fashioning becomes, however, the greater the problem of determining on what grounds the rich can be criticized, because either as pro- fessionals or as conspicuous consumers, they are merely more successful in doing what everybody wants to do. As far as I can see, even critics of current developments in the US have not found an answer to this problem of ambivalent cultural attitudes.

Notes 1At present, economic inequality increases between the West and the so-called Third World. Within European societies it also increases but more moderately than in the US. In all of these cases, it is the market system which, in the ﬁnal analysis, causes the new type of economic inequality, so that one might argue that the problem is not so much one of American society but of market economies in general. But, depending on a set of political, economic, and legal factors, the impact of markets can be quite different quantitatively and qualitatively. Present-day American society poses an especially interesting and challenging case in this respect. 2 In his 1995 study, Top Heavy, Wolff summarizes tendencies that have continued and deepened since then:

The rise in wealth inequality from 1983 to 1989 (a period for which there is comparable detailed household survey information) is particularly striking. The share of the top 1 percent of wealth holders rose by 5 percentage points. The wealth of the bottom 40 percent showed an absolute decline. Almost all the absolute gains in real wealth accrued to the top 20 percent of wealth holders. (p. 7) The top 1 percent of Americans own close to 40 percent of the country’s personal wealth. One-ﬁfth of the population accounts for 83 percent, leaving four-ﬁfths with 17 percent 3 As Phillips (2002: xi) points out, the ratio of largest fortunes to median has jumped from 4,000:1 in 1790 and 370,000:1 in 1890 to 1,416,000:1 today (p. 38). A particularly striking example is provided by Bill Gates:

Bill Gates has an estimated net worth of $52.8 billion, roughly the same as the gross domestic product of Slovakia ($55.3 billion). His wealth exceeds the economies of numerous countries around the world, including Cuba ($19.2 billion), Ethiopia ($39.2 billion), Costa Rica ($25 billion), Ghana ($37.4 billion), Syria ($50.9 billion) and Uruguay ($31 billion). (Kiger, 2002: 12) 4 In his recent book D’Souza (2000) wonders that ‘there is no real national 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 70

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debate about inequality’ (p. 66). For support, he quotes Michael Walzer: ‘It’s mystifying. The inequalities in our society continue to get worse, and the public shows no real interest in the subject.’ (p. 66). Recently, there has been something like a public outcry about corporate greed. But, following a long- standing tradition in American culture, this debate is not one about economic inequality but about the violation of rules of fairness on the playing ﬁeld. As James Jasper puts it:

Vastly unequal outcomes are accepted, since there must be lots of losers in order to have a big pot for the winner. This, we’ll see, is pretty much how Americans view the economy, as a fair competition with unequal results. We trust markets to allocate rewards fairly, not equally. (Jasper, 2000: 132) 5For a more detailed presentation of this argument see my essay (Fluck, 2002). 6 One may even argue that such inequality is one of the logical consequences of Tocqueville’s understanding of equality as basically a matter of rank. Since individuals are no longer defined, once and for all, by their social rank, they are set free to pursue their own ambitions and careers without being hampered by class barriers. Equality will thus open the door for inequality. There is a strong incentive for individuals to distinguish themselves from others, because only in this way will they be able to attract recognition from all the other ‘equals’, as C. Vann Woodward points out in summarizing European views of the privileged role of money in American society: ‘The pursuit of wealth had a peculiar attraction in a democracy. Since democracy ruled out distinction by title, rank, or heredity, wealth was likely to be the chief or only means of gaining status and distinction in society’ (Vann Woodward, 1991: 44). This symbolic dimension explains why the pursuit of wealth can go far beyond actual needs and will, in effect, hardly ever stop. 7 The challenge which the growing economic and social inequality poses to the American system is reflected in three recent publications: Cox and Alm (1999), D’Souza (2000) and Phillips (2002). 8 Critics of the staggering new wealth concentration in the US argue therefore that financial gains seem completely detached from any acceptable standard of merit. Fittingly, D’Souza speaks of a ‘Himalayan reward structure’ (2000: 71). To give but one example: Former Enron Chairman Kenneth L. Lay collected $103.6 million in total payment from his company in 2001, including a salary of $1.07 million, a bonus of $7 million, long-term incentives of $3.6 million and $81.5 million in loan advances. Lay also was awarded stock options and restricted stock worth $49.1 million (Los Angeles Times, 18 June 2002: A 15). 9 In his ‘interpretive guide’ Anker (1999) provides a survey of criticism of Weber’s thesis from the side of social history but fails to address the issue of cultural legitimation. For a more comprehensive assessment of the debate, see Lehmann and Roth (1993). The volume contains an essay by James A. Henretta (1993) which argues that the Weber thesis can be applied to American conditions also at the economic level. 10 Cf. Anker: ‘Franklin’s caution against wealth warns not against wealth itself but only against its distorting blandishments, which often lead to its loss’ (1999: 111). 11 In ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’, Franklin writes: 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 71

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The most trifling Actions that affect a Man’s Credit, are to be regarded. The Sound of your Hammer at Five in the Morning or Nine at Night, heard by a Creditor, makes him easy Six Months longer. But if he sees you at a Billiard Table, or hears your Voice in a Tavern, when you should be at Work, he sends for his Money the next Day. (Franklin, 1961: 186) 12 Certainly, this does not necessarily mean that the actual practice was also governed by a moral context. We are talking about the conditions under which wealth could be culturally legitimized. 13 Two classic, still readable histories of the rise of the great fortunes in the Gilded Age which have shaped the view of a newly-rich plutocracy decisively are the studies by Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (1909–10) and Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons, published in 1934. In his preface to the 1936 [1909–10] edition, Myers spells out the revisionist intent of his book: ‘In the course of research upon my The History of Tammany Hall I had come across some documentary facts which severely shattered the inculcated conception that, with an exception here and there, the great private fortunes were unquestionably the result of thrift and sagacious ability’ (p. 19). Myers’ book, which found a cool, if not hostile reception upon its publication in the Progressive Era, was rediscovered in the 1930s and was republished in 1936. The usefulness of Myers’ study for radical agitation was hampered by the fact, however, that in 1939, he published a book with the title The Ending of Hereditary Fortunes, in which he argued that political and legal responses in the Progressive Era and by the New Deal had put an end to the conditions described in History of the Great American Fortunes. 14 An interesting figure of transition is Emerson, who had an ambivalent attitude towards the American businessman and his drive for wealth. In principle, the businessman was a figure which exemplified the great potential of American life. In this sense, he can even be seen as ‘idealist’. Unfortunately, however, real American businessmen are not yet the ideal type but still a somewhat ‘raw’, unfinished version. As Dieter Schultz summarizes Emerson’s position, this businessman is still in need of culture in order to fulfill the potential of American life: ‘Unfortunately, the true businessman, like the true American, does not exist. This is where culture enters as a means of refining materialism and releasing its creative potential’ (Schultz, 2000: 422). 15 For the cultural elite, the period after the end of the Civil War was a period of high hopes that American civilization would finally start to fulfill its own potential as an advanced civilization. Slavery, its worst violation of the idea of human progress, was finally abolished. In John William DeForest’s historical novel about the Civil War (1869), often considered the first realist novel in American literary history, the figure of the enlightened Southerner, Dr Ravenel, is used to expound this gentry version of civilizatory progress:

As long as we were bedraggled in slavery there was not much room for honest, intelligent pride of country. It is different now. These Europeans judge us aright; we have done a stupendous thing. They are outside of the struggle, and can survey its proportions with the eyes with which our descendants will see it. I think I can discover a little of its grandeur. It is the ﬁfth act in the grand drama of human liberty. First, the Christian revelation. Second, the Protestant reformation. Third, 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 72

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the war of American Independence. Fourth, the French revolution. Fifth, the struggle for the freedom of all men, without distinction of race or color; this Democratic struggle which conﬁrms the masses in an equality with the few. We have taught a greater lesson than all of us think or understand. Once again we have reminded the world of Democracy, the futility of oligarchies, the outlawry of Caesarism. (DeForest, 1969[1869]: 494–5) 16 A striking example is provided by the following excerpts from the enormously popular sermon, Acres of Diamond, by the Baptist minister Russell H. Conwell, which was published in 1888 and became an instant bestseller, still in print today. Conwell’s connection between religion and a gospel of success is so amazing that a long excerpt seems justiﬁed:

Now then, I say again that the opportunity to get rich, to attain unto great wealth, is here in Philadelphia now, within the reach of almost every man and woman who hears me speak tonight, and I mean just what I say. I have not come to this platform even under these circumstances to recite something to you. I have come to tell you what in God’s sight I believe to be the truth, and if the years of life have been of any value to me in the attainment of common sense, I know I am right; that the men and women sitting here, who found it difficult perhaps to buy a ticket to this lecture or gathering tonight, have within their reach ‘acres of diamonds,’ opportunities to get largely wealthy. There never was a place on earth more adapted than the city of Philadelphia today, and never in the history of the world did a poor man without capital have such an opportunity to get rich quickly and honestly as he has now in our city. . . . I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich. How many of my pious brethren say to me. ‘Do you, a Christian minister, spend your time going up and down the country advising young people to get rich, to get money?’ ‘Yes, of course I do.’ They say, ‘Isn’t that awful! Why don’t you preach the gospel instead of preaching about man’s making money?’ ‘Because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel.’ That is the reason. The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. . . . ‘Oh,’ but says some young man here tonight, ‘I have been told all my life that if a person has money he is very dishonest and dishonorable and mean and contemptible.’ My friend, that is the reason why you have none, because you have that idea of people. The foundation of your faith is altogether false. Let me say here clearly, and say it briefly, though subject to discussion which I have not time for here, ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. (1975[1888]: 19–21) 17 Criticism of the increasing materialism in American life is a major topic of American realism after the Civil War. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that in the general culture, the businessman and successful entrepreneur were still considered supreme models of the ‘self-made man’. Josephson gives an apt description of their status as culture heroes:

The newly rich who had so quickly won to supreme power in the economic order enjoyed an almost universal esteem for at least twenty years after the Civil War. Their glory was at its zenith; during this whole period they literally sunned themselves in the affection of popular opinion. The degree in which they had won a general public consent is reﬂected in many a candid and even naively ecstatic chronicle in the press, a press with which they of course maintained the warmest and most inspiring relations. (1962[1934]: 315) 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 73

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In contrast to these enthusiastic versions, the literature of American realism is of special interest for our discussion, because it addresses the question on what grounds a critical perspective could be developed within this cultural context. 18 Other remarkable examples of the same narrative pattern in the ‘age of realism’ are provided by Henry B. Fuller’s novel With the Procession (1895), Frank Norris’ The Pit (1903) and Robert Herrick’s The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905). In the ethnic literature of the period, an example is provided by Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). In the social criticism of the so-called ‘muckrakers’, on the other hand, the perception and representation of the rich begins to change: the issue is no longer one of individual self-control but of systemic features such as taxation, etc. 19 A similar view of the businessman can be found in Henry James’ novel The American (1995[1877]). James’ successful businessman Christopher Newman goes to Europe in order to acquire culture and thus to ‘civilize’ his own person (as a model for American society). In his study of European perceptions of America, C. Vann Woodward describes an analogous European attitude: ‘For all that, European critics through the early years of the twentieth century were inclined to view American money-making as a youthful exuberance in response to unprecedented opportunity, a temporary obsession they would outgrow’ (1991: 46). 20 On the central role of speculation in the novel, see Walter Benn Michaels’ (1980) essay ‘Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy’, in which he contrasts Howells’ critical view of speculation with the much more positive one of Dreiser. 21 This process, it is metonymically implied, also has to be undergone by American society, if it ever wants to realize its civilizatory promise. 22 See the introductory chapter to Fisher’s study (1999: 7–12). 23 As I have put it in a different context:

Twain’s understanding of the source and cultural consequences of ‘materialism’ is remarkable and far exceeds that of the gentry-authors of the period. For them, democracy has gone off the track because of a shameful loss of principle and moral discipline, for Twain, it has taken a new and dangerous course because it has created entirely new possibilities for the imagination . . . and [because of] its constant search for self-fashioning and self-aggrandizement. As Twain realized, ‘speculation’ and ‘credit’ as the new cultural forms of determining and establishing value, do offer entirely new chances for the individual to enhance his or her sense of self-importance and self-worth. ‘ “Money Is God” ’: Materialism, Economic Individualism, and Expressive Individualism’. (Fluck, 2000: 1.438)

24 This view was nourished by reports about the growing decadence of the rich around the turn of the century, such as, for example, a book written by the conservative banker Frederick Townsend Martin, Passing of the Idle Rich, published in 1911:

Martin reported extensively on the excesses of the rich, citing anecdotes about elaborate banquets and balls and extravagant behavior. Martin’s lurid anecdotes included one about an owner of a little mutt dog who gave a banquet in the animal’s honor. Men in evening clothes and women in gowns attended to watch the dog be rewarded with a diamond collar worth $15,000. Another man gave a 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 74

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‘poverty social’, where his guests arrived in rags, ate food scraps on wooden plates, and drank beer from tin cans while they sat on broken soapboxes and used newspapers for napkins. Another anecdote describes a millionaire who turned an imported motor car into what may have been the ﬁrst recreational vehicle – he reﬁtted it with two small rooms, hot and cold traveling water, a small bathtub, and a kitchen. Further, Martin wrote, ‘At the conclusion of an elaborate affair in New York City, the guests leaned back in their chairs to listen to the singers. The cigarettes were passed around. . . . Each was rolled, not in white paper, but in a one hundred dollar bill and initials of the host were engraved in gold letters.’ With images of excess constantly circulating – Martin said, ‘Our papers are full of them’ – it was to be expected that Americans would learn ‘to hate great wealth’. (quoted in Barton, 1989: 59–60) 25 In his book The Tastemakers, a study of cultural self-representation in the Gilded Age, Russell Lynes characterizes the clients of the fashionable architect Richard Morris Hunt in the following way: ‘For the most part his clients were the scions of the men who established the great fortunes; it was the second, third, and even fourth generations of wealth who represented a new leisure class such as America had never known before’ (1954: 132). 26 Veblen, too, had an evolutionary perspective but he put emphasis not so much on the ‘parasitic’ but the ‘barbaric’ aspect of the leisure class. The rich are a barbaric remnant. Thus, Veblen’s book The Theory of the Leisure Class begins with the sentence: ‘The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture . . .’ (1953[1899]: 21). In his introduction to the Viking Press edition, Robert Lekachman provides a good summary of Veblen’s argument:

The drama of modern society is in the conﬂict between the instincts which promote evolutionary adjustment and those which retard such adjustment. Within this context the role of the leisure class is both plain and crucial. The class is the embodiment of all the anti-evolutionary impulses which have survived from the past into the present. (1967: viii) See also Jackson Lears’ characterization: ‘The orgies of display at Newport and the parading of ornamental wives on Fifth Avenue corresponded to similar ceremonies among “primitive” tribes: the captain of industry, like the Kwakiutl chieftain, was eager to demonstrate his prowess by showing off his trophies’ (1990: 74). Lears’ essay provides an excellent critique of the problems of Veblen’s argument. 27 Conspicuous consumption thus is a form of consumption whose purpose does not consist in satisfying wishes and needs but in the public demonstration of how much one is worth. As any observer of American society knows (or can easily ﬁnd out), the practice of publicly announcing one’s ‘worth’ in terms of money is all-pervasive in American culture. Josephson provides a typical example from a newspaper article in 1885:

We are told now that Mr. Gould’s ‘$500,000 yacht’ has entered a certain harbor, or that Mr. Morgan has set off upon a journey in his ‘$100,000 palace car,’ or that Mr. Vanderbilt’s ‘$2,000,000 home’ is nearing completion, with its ‘$50,000 paintings’ and its ‘$20,000 bronze doors’. (1962[1934]: 330) In former, pre-modern times conspicuous leisure was the dominant sign of 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 75

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wealth. However, as society becomes socially differentiated, so that ﬂeeting encounters with strangers increase, a sign system is needed that is suited to demonstrate one’s worth to others in an easily readable way: ‘In order to impress these transient observers, and to retain one’s self-complacency under their observation, the signature of one’s pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read’ (Veblen, 1953[1899]: 72). 28 In chapter 14 of his book The Robber Barons (1962[1934]), Josephson provides a detailed history of the emergence of a new upper-class culture with aristocratic pretensions:

The fancy-dress ball of 1883 signalizes a historic peace and ‘combination’ between the Astors and Vanderbilts. For this memorable evening, fulsomely described in the press of two continents, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt was costumed as a Venetian princess, Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt as Louis XVI, and his spouse as the Electric Light, in white satin trimmed with diamonds, and with a superb diamond headdress. . . . For the six quadrilles which represented the high moments of the ball, the dancers formed in the gymnasium on the third floor, moved down the grand staircase Caen Stone (fifty feet high) and swept through the great hall (sixty- five by twenty feet) into a drawing-room (forty by twenty feet whose whole wainscoting of carved French walnut had been torn from a French chateau and hauled across the ocean). A memorable evening which, as it broke the last barriers between the Astors and the Vanderbilts, also broke all bounds for conspicuous consumption. (pp. 331–2)

Finally a costume ball given by Bradley Martin, a New York aristocrat, in 1897, reached the very climax of lavish expenditure and ‘dazed the entire Western world’. ‘The interior of the Waldorf-Astoria was transformed into a replica of Versailles, and rare tapestries, beautiful flowers and countless lights made an effective background for the wonderful gowns and their wearers. . . .’ One lady, impersonating Mary Stuart, wore a gold-embroidered gown, trimmed with pearls and precious stones. ‘The suit of gold inlaid armor worn by Mr. Belmont was valued at ten thousand dollars.’ (p. 339) 29 This also redefines what constitutes wealth. Josephson quotes Ward McAllister, who, together with Mrs William B. Astor, acted as a (self- appointed) authority on matters of the ‘upper 400’ in New York society, an idea with which he came up in preparation for a ball in 1876: ‘A fortune of a million was now nothing. One needed a fortune of ten, fifty, one hundred millions to be counted rich’ (Josephson, 1962[1934]: 330). 30 A typical example is the movie Holiday, in which Katherine Hepburn chooses bohemian insecurity over suffocating riches. An even starker, politically charged, example is My Man Godfrey, in which the rich are helplessly neurotic, whereas the redeeming ‘real life’ is that of the homeless who live on the city dump. 31 In The Tastemakers, Lynes stresses this aspect of the Biltmore: ‘He built the most palatial mansion that America has ever seen, and he built it at a time when palaces of surpassing splendor were the order of the day for such families as the Astors, the Goelets, and the Belmonts’ (1954: 121). 32 As Josephson points out, criticism of the emptiness and meaninglessness of the life of the rich was a standard motif in comments on the new leisure class: 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 76

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The lives of the colossally rich were generally ‘no more worth living than those of their cooks,’ said Henry Adams, who respected both money and social position. His friend Cabot Lodge, the scion of New England ‘Brahmins’, professed himself shocked by the emptiness and the vulgarity of the talk he heard everywhere. (1962[1934]: 337) In his autobiography Charles Francis Adams writes:

I have known and known tolerably well, a great many ‘successful’ men – ‘big’ ﬁnancially – men famous during the last half century, and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. (quoted in Josephson, 1962[1934]: 338) 33 Josephson makes the point that the (undiscerning) import of European culture was one of the major means by which the new plutocracy class sought to establish prestige:

And nearly all ransacked the art treasures of Europe, stripped medieval castles of their carvings and tapestries, ripped whole staircases and ceilings from their place of repose through the centuries to lay them anew amid settings of a synthetic age and a simulated feudal grandeur. Such demands made the fortune of decorators, furniture-dealers and art-dealers, who sold trainloads of second-hand furniture and shiploads of ‘old’ paintings. (1962[1934]: 332)

Like the successful military chieftains of old times . . . the captains of industry began to ﬁll their own castles with the loot and plunder of the ages; the paintings, the tapestry, the china, the ancient illuminated manuscripts began to ﬂow as in a torrent to the western shores of the Atlantic as William Vanderbilt, Pierpont Morgan, Henry Frick, Whitney, Stillman, Havemeyer, Widener and many others began to bid against each other. The physical seizure of the ‘spoils’ of civilization, as Henry James called them – trophies, as Veblen, his contemporary, said – assumed proportions both huge and grotesque. (p. 341)

In the history of human civilization there had been no such sweeping displacement of works of art, at any rate since the days when the successful military captain, Napoleon, had plundered the Italian cities. (p. 345) 34 Shakespeare’s tragedies were Welles’ major inspiration in this as in most of his other movies. 35 Between the 1930s and the 1980s, the turbulent 1960s developed a radical critique of the American economic system in books like G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America (1967), Gabriel Kolko’s Wealth and Power in America (1962) or Ferdinand Lundberg’s bestseller The Rich and the Super- Rich (1968). These books focus on the political inﬂuence of the rich and the super-rich who, for the authors, have gained the status of a secret oligarchy and betray the ideals of American democracy. Thus, Lundberg’s (1968) book begins with the words:

Most Americans – citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most ideal- swathed country in the world – by a very wide margin own nothing more than their household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as automobiles and television sets (usually purchased on the installment plan, many at second hand) and the clothes on their backs. A horde if not a majority of Americans live in shacks, cabins, novels, shanties, hand-me-down Victorian eyesores, rickety tenements and ﬂaky apartment buildings – as the newspapers from time to time chortle that new 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 77

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Russian apartment-house construction is falling apart. (Conditions abroad, in the standard American view, are everywhere far worse than anywhere in the United States. The French, for example, could learn much about cooking from the Automate and Howard Johnson.) At the same time, a relative handful of Americans are extravagantly endowed, like princes in the Arabian Nights. (p. 1)

Those few newspapers that make a practice of printing foreign news occasionally survey Latin American countries. The writers are invariably grieved to ﬁnd a small oligarchy of big landowners in control, with the remainder of the population consisting of sycophantic hangers-on and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. But I have never seen it remarked that the basic description, with the alteration of a few nouns, applies just as well to the United States, where the position of the landowners is occupied by the ﬁnanciers, industrialists and big rentiers and that of the peasants by the low-paid employees (all subject to dismissal for one reason or other just like the peasants). (p. 3) This political criticism was not particularly interested in cultural representations, however. 36 An illustration of the same attitude is provided by Robert Ringer’s highly successful self-help book Looking Out for No. 1 (1977), which, under the title ‘Fasten Your Seat Belt’, begins with the following programmatic statements:

Clear your mind, then. Forget foundationless traditions, forget the ‘moral’ standards others may have tried to cram down your throat, forget the beliefs people may have tried to intimidate you into accepting as ‘right.’ Allow your intellect to take control as you read, and, most important, think of yourself – Number One – as a unique individual. (p. 8) Since we are all selﬁsh – the only difference lies in those who admit it and those who don’t – ‘looking out for No. 1’ is a perfectly reasonable and rational form of behavior:

Looking out for Number One is the conscious, rational effort to spend as much time as possible doing those things which bring you the greatest amount of pleasure and less time on those which cause pain. Everyone automatically makes the effort to be happy, so the key word is ‘rational’. (p. 10) From this perspective, the question whether wealth is deserved or undeserved becomes moot. To strive for ever more money is an eminently rational way to secure pleasure and thus justiﬁed on utilitarian grounds. On such grounds, the rich are ‘winners’. Morality can only be a private morality:

Morality – the quality of character – is a very personal and private matter. No other living person has the right to decide what is moral (right or wrong) for you. (p. 20) Still, there is no need to worry that immoral behavior could result from this privatization of morality, because immoral behavior is ‘irrational’ for Ringer and therefore something the individual will avoid in his own interest:

It’s simply not in your best interest. In the long run it will bring you more pain than pleasure – the exact opposite of what you wish to accomplish. (p. 21) 37 By individualization I do not mean a movement towards individualism but a growing tendency toward self-legitimization. 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 78

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References Anker, Roy M. (1999) Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Barton, Michael (1989) ‘The Victorian Jeremiad. Criticism of Accumulation and Display’, in Simon J. Boner (ed.) Consuming Visions. Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880–1920, pp. 55–71. New York: Norton. Bonner, Simon J., ed. (1989) Consuming Visions. Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880–1920. New York: Norton. Cahan, Abraham (1917) The Rise of David Levinsky. New York: Harper. Cohen, David (2001) Chasing the Red, White, and Blue. A Journey in Tocqueville’s Footsteps Through Contemporary American Life. New York: Picador. Conwell, Russell H. (1975[1888]) Acres of Diamonds. New York: Pyramid Books. Cox, Michael W. and Alm, Richard (1999) Myths of Rich and Poor. New York: Basic Books. DeForest, John William (1969[1869]) Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. Columbus, OH: Charles Merrill. Domhoff, Walter (1967) Who Rules America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. D’Souza, Dinesh (2000) The Virtue of Prosperity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Fisher, Philip (1999) Still the New World. American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1925) The Great Gatsby. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fluck, Winfried (2000) ‘“Money Is God”: Materialism, Economic Individualism, and Expressive Individualism’, in Roland Hagenbüchle and Josef Raab (eds) Negotiations of America’s National Identity, pp. 431–46. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Fluck, Winfried (2002) ‘The Role of the Reader and the Changing Functions of Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte’, European Journal of English Studies 6 (forthcoming). Franklin, Benjamin (1961) The Way to Wealth, the Autobiography and Other Writings. New York: New American Library. Fuller, Henry B. (1965[1895]) With the Procession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henretta, James A. (1993) ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Reality of Capitalism in Colonial America’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds) Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, pp. 327–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herrick, Robert (1905) The Memoirs of an American Citizen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howells, William Dean (1885) The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Signet. James, Henry (1995[1877]) The American. New York: W.W. Norton. Jasper, James (2000) Restless Nation. Starting Over in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Josephson, Matthew (1962[1934]) The Robber Barons. The Great American Capitalists 1861–1901. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Kiger, Patrick J. (2002) ‘Living Ever Larger’, Los Angeles Times Magazine (9 June 2002): 12. Kolko, Gabriel (1962) Wealth and Power in America: An Analysis of Social Class and Income Distribution. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Landes, David (2000) ‘Culture Makes Almost All the Difference’, in Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds) Culture Matters. How Values Shape Human Progress, pp. 2–13. New York: Basic Books. Lears, Jackson (1990) ‘Beyond Veblen. Rethinking Consumer Culture in America’, 74P 05fluck (jk/d) 30/1/03 1:02 pm Page 79

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in Simon Bronner (ed.) Consuming Visions. Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880–1920, pp. 73–97. New York: Norton. Lehmann, Hartmut and Roth, Guenther, eds (1993) Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’: Origins, Evidence, Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lekachman, Robert (1967) ‘Introduction’ to Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, pp. v–xi. New York: Viking Press. Lundberg, Ferdinand (1968) The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today. New York: Bantam. Lynes, Russell (1954) The Tastemakers. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Michaels, Walter Benn (1980) ‘Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy’, Critical Inquiry 7: 373–90. Mills, C. Wright (1953[1899]) ‘Introduction’ to Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, vi–xix. New York: New American Library. Myers, Gustavus (1909–10) History of the Great American Fortunes. New York: Modern Library. Norris, Frank (1903) The Pit. New York: Penguin. Phillips, Kevin (2002) Wealth and Democracy. A Political History of the American Rich. New York: Broadway Books. Ringer, Robert J. (1977) Looking Out for No. 1. New York: Fawcett Crest. Schultz, Dieter (2000) ‘Emerson’s Thrifty Soul and the Business of America’, in Roland Hagenbüchle and Josef Raab (eds) Negotiations of America’s National Identity, pp. 420–30. Tübingen: Stauffenberg. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1969) Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Townsend Martin, Frederick (1911) Passing of the Idle Rich. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Twain, Mark and Warner, Charles Dudley (1969[1873]) The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. New York: New American Library. Vann Woodward, C. (1991) The Old World’s New World. New York: Oxford University Press. Veblen, Thorstein (1953[1899]) The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: New American Library. Weber, Max (1992[1904–5]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge. Wolff, Edward N. (1995) Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America. New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press.

Winfried Fluck is Professor and Chair of American Culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Free Uni- versity, Berlin. He has published widely on American literature and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries and on questions of literary and cultural theory. His books include Theorien amerikanischer Literatur (Konstanzer Universitätsverlag, 1987), Inszenierte Wirklichkeit (Fink, 1992) and Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1770–1900 (Suhrkamp, 1997). He is currently writing a history of American culture. Address: John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr. 5–9, 14195 Berlin, Germany. [email: ﬂ[email protected]] 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 81

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Comparative American Studies An International Journal

‘Who speaks for us?’ Bharati Mukherjee’s ﬁction and the politics of immigration

Helena Grice University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

Abstract In the years since the 1970s, something of a revolution has occurred in the area of South Asian American fiction, as writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Ginu Kamani, Anita Rau Badami and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni have begun publishing their work. Bharati Mukherjee’s predominant focus is the politics of immigration, not only as a prevalent preoccupation in her fictional writing, but as the focus of a series of newspaper and journal articles as well. This article seeks to contextualize the development of Mukherjee’s writing in relation to wider current debates about the nature of the American canon, the question of ‘Americanness’, and the continually vexed issue of multicultural politics in the US. In reading four of Mukherjee’s novels both through and against her polemical writing, I will argue that Mukherjee’s fictions should be read together as an ongoing counter-nativist project and, as such, constitute an important intervention in US race relations.

Keywords America ● Bharati Mukherjee ● citizenship ● ethnicity ● expatriation ● immigration ● India ● multicultural race relations

Who . . . speaks for us, the new Americans from nontraditional immigrant countries? Which is another way of saying, in this altered America, who speaks for you? (Mukherjee, 1988a: 28–9) In the years since the 1970s, something of a revolution has occurred in the area of South Asian American ﬁction, as writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Ginu Kamani, Anita Rau Badami and Chitra Banerjee

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Divakaruni have begun publishing their work. Bharati Mukherjee’s novels, in particular, are becoming an increasing focus of critical attention, especially her four most accomplished books: Wife (1975), Jasmine (1989), The Holder of the World (1993b) and Leave It to Me (1997b). Mukherjee’s novels often depict the struggles faced by new immigrant women, are characterized by constant movement and flight, and can almost be read as postmodern versions of the immigrant narrative. These novels all identify oppression predicated upon both gender and ethnicity. A further connection between these texts is the recurrence of particular thematic concerns, many of which overlap with more general themes of contemporary women’s writing, such as: a preoccupation with issues of identity; an objection to limitations placed upon women by patriarchal forces; a questioning of white male values and definitions of beauty and attractiveness; a sensitivity to the effects of violence against women and other trauma, such as sexual abuse; a recognition of the phallocentricity of history and other mainstream versions of the past; a suspicion of the state as a regulatory force in women’s lives; and an unease with the silencing of women’s voices. Mukherjee’s predominant focus is the politics of immigration, not only as a prevalent preoccupation in her fictional writing, but as the focus of a series of newspaper and journal articles as well, and many of the thematic concerns outlined above are filtered through this primary preoccupation. Mukherjee’s second novel, Wife, was typical of a phase in her long writing career when she felt herself to be something of an ‘immigrant schizophrenic’, or exile in North America, her adopted home (Ma, 1998). Five years after Mukherjee published Wife, however, she moved to the United States from Canada, and has since felt far more comfortable with her immigrant status, as she has documented at length in a well-known and controversial article in the New York Times Book Review entitled ‘Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists!’, published in 1988a, and this is also reflected in her later novels. In reviewing this shift in Mukher- jee’s own experience and writing, critic Polly Shulman (1998) has remarked that whereas Wife deals with ‘the aloofness of expatriation’, subsequent novels exhibit ‘the exuberance of immigration’ (p. 19). This article seeks to contextualize the development of Mukherjee’s writing in relation to wider current debates about the nature of the American canon, the question of ‘Americanness’, and the continually vexed issue of multicultural politics in the US. In reading these four novels both through and against Mukherjee’s polemical writing, I will argue that Mukherjee’s fictions should be read together as an ongoing counter- nativist project, and as such, constitute an important intervention in US race relations.

‘Give Us Your Maximalists!’

Although Asian Indians currently comprise some one million people in the US, their experiences of immigration have received considerably less 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 83

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attention from academics and other interested parties than other, more numerous Asian American immigrant groups, notably Chinese and Japanese Americans. Partly this is due to the disjunctive immigration history of Asian Indians to America. A very short burst of immigration occurred from 1907 to 1917, after which immigration was halted by the US Congress. This immigration was almost exclusively male: although these young men were mainly married, their wives stayed at home. When the 1917 Immigration Law was enacted, it actually prohibited men from bringing their wives to America, emphasizing this imbalance. Initial South Asian immigration was largely a reaction to British colonial activities in India, but due to immigration restrictions this early wave of immigration was not sustained. For instance, Ronald Takaki notes that by 1940, the Asian Indian population in the United States numbered only 2,405, of whom 60 percent resided in California (Takaki, 1990: 314). These early immigrants were also mainly from rural Punjabi farming families. Since the 1965 abolition of immigration quotas, however, Asian Indian immigrants have tended to be educated and fluent in English, from professional classes, high castes, and from a wider range of geographical areas, such as Bengal and Rajasthan, as well as other South Asian countries, notably Pakistan and Sri Lanka. This uneven immigration pattern helps to explain the paucity of South Asian American writing until the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the relative absence of non-fictional accounts of Asian Indian experiences of immigration. This absence changed in 1988 when Bharati Mukherjee, the author of two novels and a collection of short stories, wrote a controversial – even perhaps provocative – article on American fiction and the politics of immigration for the New York Times Book Review. Entitled ‘Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists!’. This piece established Mukherjee as a decisive voice in the US multiculturalist debate, as well as consoli- dating her position as one of the best-known South Asian American writers.1 The essence of Mukherjee’s argument was that although the United States has long – in fact always – been a multicultural nation, this is not reflected adequately in its literary canon: ‘But where’, she asks, ‘in fiction, do you read of it? Who, in other words, speaks for us, the new Americans from nontraditional immigrant countries? Which is another way of saying, in this altered America, who speaks for you?’ (Mukherjee, 1988a: 1). Mukherjee makes a distinction between two types of American literary production, which she terms ‘minimalism’ and ‘maximalism’. Minimal- ism, in Mukherjee’s formulation, is the fictional preoccupation with the subjects of divorce, aging, midlife crisis, childlessness, AIDS and drug addiction – ‘life, barely’ (Mukherjee, 1988a: 28) as she brands them – and is viewed by her as constituting a ‘nativist’ bias (Mukherjee, 1988a: 28). In contradistinction, ‘maximalism’ exhibits all of the complexities of immigrant experience, a rich and vibrant experience, characterized by change. Of these immigrants, Mukherjee observes: ‘they have all shed past lives and languages . . . lived through centuries of history in a single 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 84

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lifetime – village-born, colonized, traditionally raised, educated’ (Mukher- jee, 1988a: 28). Rather than viewing the difficult transitions that a new immigrant to America is forced to make as a burden, Mukherjee regards this as the very source of interest and engagement as a fictional theme: ‘I would rather we all cashed in on the other legacy of the colonial writer, and that is his or her duality’ (Mukherjee, 1988a: 28). After all, as Mukher- jee notes, ‘The New America I know and have been living in for the last seven years is a world, by definition, of doubles’ (p. 28). Thus, Mukherjee would like to see ‘the very American novels of a Toni Morrison or a Lore Segal’ (p. 28) – or a Mukherjee we might add – read not as ‘ethnic’ fiction, ‘minority’ writing, or any other ‘sub’ label, but as American writers who reflect the socio-historical reality of US demography and experience. Mukherjee insists that she herself was transformed into an American, by virtue of her sensibility, which celebrates an ‘American’ way of life (Silvera, 1995: 17). Mukherjee has continued to publish polemical pieces on immigration and citizenship in a series of internet and newspaper articles written in the 1990s, although they are less well known than ‘Give Us Your Maximalists!’. Two pieces in particular, ‘American Dreamer’ (http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/JF97/mukherjee.html), and ‘Two Ways to Belong in America’ (New York Times, 22 September 1996), have together furthered her self-appointed mission to define ‘new immigrant’ literature. ‘Two Ways to Belong in America’ is quite a whimsical article that compares Bharati Mukherjee’s life in America with her sister Mira’s, who, unlike Bharati, has chosen not to become an American citizen, and has the intention of eventually returning to India. Like her other non- fictional writings, this piece also rehearses the arguments for becoming an American citizen as a means to claim that most elusive of identities. Mukherjee sees a very clear distinction between the status of an expatriate – like her sister – and an immigrant, whose identity has been transformed by citizenship. Of her sister, for instance, she notes: ‘my sister is an expatriate, professionally generous and creative, socially courteous and gracious, and that’s as far as her Americanization can go’ (Mukher- jee, 1996: 2). ‘American Dreamer’ is a more developed personal meditation upon Mukherjee’s life, and tracks her move from India to Iowa City to study writing in 1961, through her marriage to Clark Blaise, her move to Canada and the unhappy years she spent there, and finally her return to the US, where she gained citizenship and established an illustrious career as a writer and academic. The pivotal moment in Mukherjee’s life was the moment she made ‘the transition from expatriate to immigrant’ (Mukher- jee, 1997a: 1), a distinction that recurs in her writing. This transition occurred through Mukherjee’s decision to gain citizenship, which was the subject of ‘Give Us Your Maximalists!’. Mukherjee’s insistence here that she is something of a ‘super-American’, by virtue of her decision to become an American by choice, is striking: 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 85

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I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship. . . . I take my American citizenship very seriously. I am not an economic refugee, nor am I a seeker of political asylum. I am a voluntary immigrant. I became a citizen by choice, not by simple accident of birth. (Mukherjee, 1997a: 1–2)

Like her adamant assertions regarding her own status, Mukherjee (1997a) is equally assured in her view of what America faces in its multicultural agenda:

... questions such as who is an American and what is American culture are being posed with belligerence and answered with violence. . . . But in this decade of continual, large-scale diasporas, it is imperative that we come to some agreement about who ‘we’ are, and what our goals are for the nation, now that our community includes people of many races, ethnicities, languages, and religions. The debate about American culture and American identity has to date been monopolized largely by Eurocentrists and ethnocentrists whose rhetoric has been ﬂamboyantly divisive, pitting a phantom ‘us’ against a demonized ‘them’. (p. 2)

Like many other writers on ethnicity, Mukherjee rejects the analogies of both ‘melting pot’ and ‘cultural mosaic’, as well as the oft-cited theoretical notion of an ethnic centre-versus-periphery model. Instead, Mukher- jee (1997a) favours a model that discards the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality, one that will ‘think of American culture and nationhood as a constantly re-forming, transmogrifying “we”’ (pp. 1–5), that is, a labile and plural communal identity. Similarly, though perhaps more controversially, Mukherjee also rejects the label ‘Asian American’ as applying to her own sense of identity, precisely because, as she sees it, such a label simply replicates a hierarchical model of ethnic relations. ‘Why is it’, she asks, ‘that hyphenation is imposed only on nonwhite Americans? Rejecting hyphenation is my refusal to categorize the cultural landscape into a center and its peripheries; it is to demand that the American nation deliver the promises if its dream and its Constitution to all its citizens equally’ (p. 4). She does note, though, that this view has been widely interpreted as ‘race treachery’, by fellow India-born writers and academics. The doubleness of immigrant subjectivity as Mukherjee describes it is not simply fruitful ground for fictional subject matter. In Mukherjee’s view, it provides the very means by which she is able to roam imagina- tively across myriad subject positions and circumstances in her writing. If ‘history forced us to see ourselves as both the “we” and the “other”’, she notes, then ‘that training . . . now heaps on me a fluid set of identities denied to most of my mainstream American counterparts . . . allows me without difficulty to “enter” lives, fictionally, that are manifestly not my own’ (Mukherjee, 1988a: 28–9). In fact, this aspect of Mukherjee’s writing is the most commonly commented upon feature in reviews, since many 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 86

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remark upon Mukherjee’s preoccupation with ‘seeing ourselves as others see us’, as a review in the Detroit Free Press described it. Incidentally, Mukherjee is concerned with doubleness in other respects as well, and often uses the double meanings of words and phrases as guiding epigraphs to her writing. Leave It to Me, for instance, can be read as ‘leave it to me’, and as ‘leave it to me’, thereby drawing attention to the novel’s twin themes of legacy and agency. In another instance, Mukherjee puns upon the meaning of ‘Dimple’, her central female protagonist in Wife, in which she describes the word as ‘a slight surface depression’, with clearly ironic resonances as Dimple herself eventually sinks into virtual insanity. Together with ‘American Dreamer’ and ‘Two Ways to Belong in America’, ‘Give Us Your Maximalists!’ constitutes both a personal and literary manifesto, but it can be read in another way too. As many com- mentators have observed, a significant number of theoretical contributions to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies have been made by both British and American critics of South Asian ancestry, and most notably include Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak, Avtar Brah, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Benita Parry. Furthermore, there are many prominent South Asian ‘postcolonial’ writers who live in Britain, including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Amitav Ghosh and V.S. Naipaul (many of whom – and especially Naipaul – Mukherjee has acknowledged as role models). Yet, writers of South Asian ancestry who have made their home in North America such as Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri and the Malaysian-born Shirley Geok-lin Lim, to name but a few, tend more often to be classed as ‘diaspora’ or ‘immigrant’ writers, or have been discussed in the context of Asian American studies rather than postcolonial theory. Furthermore, this is a distinction Mukherjee herself tends to make in interviews, as she frequently rejects the label ‘postcolonial’ as an inappropriate way to describe both herself and her work.2 Despite this, ‘Give Us Your Maximalists!’, and Mukherjee’s other polemical writing on multi- culturalism, can be usefully read as an interjection in postcolonial debates about migrancy, diaspora and ‘belonging’. John McLeod has identified a ‘roots to routes’ preoccupation as significant in writing by postcolonial novelists and critics (McLeod, 2000: 215). An example of this is the writing of Salman Rushdie, and especially his influential essay ‘Imaginary Home- lands’ (1991). Rushdie’s description of the displaced sense or loss of home, and the doubleness of his sense of self, is very reminiscent of Mukherjee’s own words in ‘Give Us Your Maximalists!’:

... the writer who is out of country and even out of language may experience this loss in an intensiﬁed form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his being present in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere’. . . . Our physical displacement from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will in short, create ﬁctions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (pp. 10, 12) 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 87

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Like Mukherjee’s reference to the ‘we’ and the ‘other’ of her vision, and its plenitudinous possibilities for artistic creation, Rushdie also finds the fruitfulness of his ‘double’ position, seeing in ‘broken mirrors’ (Rushdie, 1991: 11) the myriad possibilities for representation and a sense of self. As John McLeod notes, ‘the space of the “in-between” becomes re-thought as a place of immense creativity and possibility’ (McLeod, 2000: 215). This view offers an interesting base from which to explore the developments in Mukherjee’s fictional writing. As the discussion above attests, Mukherjee’s view of her own position as an immigrant writer, like Rushdie’s, stresses the positive and offers an at times almost exuberant vision of the possibilities of multiethnic harmony. Mukherjee also commonly engages in what might be termed a ‘performative patriotism’ (about which I shall say more later). An analysis of Mukherjee’s novels – especially her earlier fictions – confirms this view, although in so doing she also sometimes reveals (as in Wife) a far more ambivalent, and at times even negative, portrait of immigrant life, one which is sometimes strik- ingly at odds with her multicultural vision. Mukherjee has said that ‘Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss, the loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as gain’ (Mukherjee, 1997a: 5). In fact, her fictions figure loss → gain as the very process by which her immigrant characters come to transform themselves into ‘Americans’. A notable recurrent feature of Mukherjee’s novels is that they tend to depict new immigrant women who are forced to undergo a series of transformations before they can become fully-fledged, self-confident and self- aware members of American society. In these four novels, each woman is metamorphosed from one ethnic identity into another. In the earlier two novels, Wife and Jasmine, this metamorphosis occurs alongside and in the wake of a physical move from India to America. In The Holder of the World, this physical move occurs in reverse, as the novel’s heroine, Hannah Easton, travels to south India, where she becomes an Indian concubine. In the most recent novel, Leave It to Me, the central female character undergoes a voluntary transformation that tracks a physical and psychological search for her Indian roots. In each case, this transformation is captured by a name change, as the female protagonist adopts multiple identities, each representative of a different stage in the process of adopting a new identity. Each woman – ‘Wife’/’Sita’/Dimple; Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane; Hannah Easton Fitch Legge/’Salem Bibi’/’Precious as Pearl’; and Debby/Devi – undergoes radical changes that are sometimes voluntary, but more often are the unjust requirements of a society intol- erant of ‘difference’. As I will argue, Mukherjee’s characters do not simply claim America, they transform it, but in a different way in each novel. Uma Parameswaran has noted that a characteristic feature of much Indian expatriate writing is the inability to either ‘wholly repatriate’ or ‘wholly impatriate’ (Para- meswaran, 1976: 46). Wife, my first example, demonstrates this inability, 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 88

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since Mukherjee leaves her central character stranded in limbo at the end of the novel. In contrast, in Jasmine, if Gurleen Grewal is correct in her assertion that the eponymous character Jasmine is a ‘born again American’, then this novel, like The Holder of the World, celebrates the acquisition of identity rather than (or perhaps as well as) mourning its loss (Grewal, 1996: 181). My ﬁnal example, Leave It to Me, I will suggest, does both.

Fledgling feminisms: ‘Wife’ (1975)

Many contemporary Asian American novels deal with the desire for the home to provide a haven from a hostile racial environment. Wife relates the story of Dimple Dasgupta, the adolescent daughter of middle-class Indian parents, who, during the early part of the novel, marries Amit Basu, an engineer, and emigrates with him to the United States. Dimple has high expectations of her life in America but her experiences are very different. She encounters a world of racism and prejudice, where Amit cannot obtain trained work and she herself is increasingly isolated, huddled inside her claustrophobic flat. Dimple sees her flat as her only refuge from New York: ‘The air was never free of the sounds of sirens growing louder, or gradually fading. They were reminders of a dangerous world (even the hall was dangerous, she thought, let alone the playground and streets)’ (Mukherjee, 1975: 120). The sense of both Dimple’s social and cultural isolation and gradual psychological deterioration as the novel progresses is acute, and, as Ketu Katrak observes, ‘America hardly exists except as a backdrop, a physical location where she finds herself geographically’ (Katrak, 1997: 212). Dimple eventually goes insane and kills her husband. This may be symptomatic of her inability to resolve the conflicting sense of identity she feels, as Sheng-Mei Ma asserts: ‘Dimple’s unresolved dilemma between her wish to remain a traditional Indian wife and the irresistible influences of the New York world . . . lead to her insanity’ (Ma, 1998: 56). Ma has read Wife as representing an ‘immigrant schizophrenic’, or the inability to reconcile two worlds, that are both cultural and physical. The importance of this theme in the novel is underscored by Mukherjee’s epigraph, where ‘Dimple’ is described as a ‘slight surface depression’. The novel is separated into three parts, correlating with the three stages of Dimple’s transformation. Part One represents Dimple’s era as a young teenager in India and then traditional Hindu wife, and her immersion in traditional Indian values, when she spends her days looking forward to her marriage and daydreaming of becoming Sita, the ‘ideal’ Hindu wife of Rama or Vishnu. The evocation of Sita at this point in the novel is important, as it indicates the ideological framework and cultural references against which Dimple judges herself. Part Two sees her emigrating to the US, and her seduction by American consumerism, as she spends her days alone watching television shows and advertisements which trade upon 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 89

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ideologies of the perfect all-American wife baking packet-cakes and cleaning with ever more sophisticated products. She is influenced during this period by the all-Indian wife, Meena Sen, whose days are spent ironing, cleaning and caring for her young daughter. The final section tracks Dimple’s gradual feminist awakening, tutored by the very un-Indian wife, Ina Mullick, who wears short tops and smokes, and whose social circle moves beyond the insularity of all-Indian social gatherings. During this later section of the novel, much narrative space is devoted to Dimple’s struggle to reconcile the demands placed upon her to be a passive, Bengali wife, and to develop her fledgling transformation into a self-confident and assertive American woman. Mukherjee has said that this is one way in which she provides ‘the larger context of politics, class and race’ in her writing, as Dimple ‘experiences racist discrimination in a Queens shop, gendrist discrimination at home, and classist discrimination at meetings with white feminists’ (Chen and Goudie, 1997: 14, 15). Wife has often been regarded as one of the weakest of Mukherjee’s fictions, precisely because of Dimple’s ultimate inability to transform herself and adapt successfully to life in America. In a sense, in Wife we see Mukherjee explore the ‘loss’ of identity that a new immigrant – and especially a woman – has undergone, without the ensuing move towards the ‘gain’ of a new perspective and sense of self. Dimple remains stranded between two worlds, two identities, her subjectivity effectively obliter- ated by the process of hyphenation. In interviews, Mukherjee has discussed her decision to depict a character who is unable to make the transition from immigrant to ‘American’. She has said: I see ‘diasporality’ as a kind of continuum with immigrants and immigrationists at one end of the scale and expatriate or exilic figures and postcolonialists at the other. . . . Several of my characters fail to move from expatriate to immigrant in the ‘diasporality’ sense. (Chen and Goudie, 1997: 13, 14) Wife is ultimately an unsatisfying novel. Despite its narrative trajectory, which seems to offer the promise of the reconciliation of identity, both in terms of the adoption of a secure hyphenated Americanness (at least in so far as this can ever be secure) and in the attainment of some version of a feminist credo by which Dimple could live, the novel’s conclusion does not fulfil these aspirations. Instead, the novel finally offers a contradic- tory vision of a woman unable to either successfully repatriate into America or to shed her previous life and its accompanying ideological encumbrances.

‘Vietnamizing’ America: ‘Jasmine’ (1989)

Jasmine is arguably the most formally and thematically complex of Mukherjee’s novels, and in contrast to Wife is also one of the most 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 90

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accomplished.3 Often described as an impressionistic prose poem about being an exile, it was published nine years after Mukherjee’s move to America in 1980, in the wake of her literary success as the winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for The Middleman and Other Stories (1988b), and one year after ‘Give Us Your Maximal- ists!’. It bears the hallmark of a change in emphasis in Mukherjee’s writing, not least in the considerably more complex treatment of the themes of immigration, assimilation and femininity, than in earlier works like Wife and the even earlier The Tiger’s Daughter (1971). It is also the novel which has generated the most critical analysis, as well as critical and commercial success. Whereas Wife’s narrative is straight- forwardly chronological, the narrative structure of Jasmine is cyclical, and tracks the central character’s cycles of memory from the narrative present of her life in Baden, Iowa, as the wife of an agricultural banker, back through her former existences as an Indian peasant girl, her arrival as a young and vulnerable immigrant in America, and her transitional period as an au pair for a New York couple. Each of these stages is represented by a name change. She starts out as ‘Jyoti’ of Hasnapur, is re- christened ‘Jasmine’ upon her arrival in America, is nicknamed ‘Jase’ by her employers in New York, and finally becomes the all-American ‘Jane’ in Iowa. The considerable attention paid to these name changes in the text underscores its symbolic and structural importance. For example, at pivotal moments in the character’s life, Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane reflects upon this aspect of her identity: ‘In Baden, I am Jane. Almost’ (Mukher- jee, 1989: 20), she says at one point; and later: ‘Jyoti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities’ (p. 177). Unlike Dimple, Jasmine emerges as a survivor from her violent past, and this also indicates a clear shift in emphasis in Mukherjee’s writing. Unlike Wife, too, in Jasmine the loss of identity that accompanies Jasmine’s many moves, from India through America, is figured as a liberation rather than a restriction. When Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane sheds previous lives, she sheds with them the oppressions and heartaches of those earlier incarnations, always moving one step closer to embracing America as her desh (home). The first instance of this is upon Jyoti’s arrival in the US, when Mukherjee uses the image of sati (voluntary immolation by a Hindu wife upon her husband’s funeral pyre). Prior to this, Jyoti’s husband Prakash has been murdered by Sikh extremists in India, and Jyoti has vowed to fulfil their joint dream of emigrating to America together, on her own. At this point, Jyoti – soon to become Jasmine – literally burns all of her baggage:

My body was merely the shell, soon to be discarded. Then I could be reborn, debts and sins all paid for. . . . I buttoned up the jacket and sat by the fire. With the first streaks of dawn, my first full American day, I walked out the front drive of the motel to the highway and began my journey, traveling light. (Mukherjee, 1989: 121) 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 91

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Mukherjee thereby uses the image of sati to symbolically represent Jyoti’s consignment to the ﬂames of both her former life and her name, along with her physical baggage. But, we might ask, what of the woman goes too? If Mukherjee continually suggests that ‘Americans’ are not born, but made, what she seems to say here is that they can be born and made, and that both immigrant and country are transformed by the process. We can explore this further through a parallel example in the text. Jane’s adopted son in Iowa is the 14-year old Vietnamese boy, Du Thien, an ex-refugee. Du functions textually as Jane’s doppelgänger: he, like Jyoti, moved to America after suffering from physical and psychological violence. For Jyoti this was getting caught up in the Sikh separatist con- ﬂicts in Punjab; while in Du’s case, it was the experience of life in the refugee camp in Vietnam:

He’d had two lives, one in Saigon and another in the refugee camp. In Saigon he’d lived in a house with a large family, and he’d been happy. He doesn’t talk much about the refugee camp, other than that his mother cut hair, his older brother raised fighting fish, his married sister brought back live crabs and worms for him to eat whenever she could sneak a visit from her own camp. From a chatty agency worker we know that Du’s mother and brother were hacked to death in the fields by a jealous madman, after they’d gotten their visas. (Mukherjee, 1989: 18)

Like Jyoti/Jasmine/Jane, too, he seemed to shed his former life upon his arrival, and threw himself wholeheartedly into his new life, watching sitcoms, eating at McDonalds, and acquiring English:

Du is a Ripplemeyer. He was Du Thien . . . he does well, though he’s sometimes contemptuous. He barely spoke English when he arrived; now he’s ﬂuent, but with a permanent accent. ‘Like Kissinger’, he says. (Mukherjee, 1989: 13)

Because of their past lives, both Du and Jane seem to share some sort of bond; as she says, ‘once upon a time, like me, he was someone else. We’ve been many selves’ (Mukherjee, 1989: 214). This bond is ﬁgured almost as a conspiracy in the text – at one point Jane observes ‘secrets roll like barbed wire between us’ (Mukherjee, 1989: 30). And it is Du’s ultimate fate in the text that also, somewhat paradoxically, provides the denouement of Jane’s own story. Near the end of the narrative, Du announces his intention to move to Los Angeles to live with his Viet- namese sister, whom he has tracked down through Vietnamese acquain- tances, and who runs a taco stall, and will, he says, care for him. Jane’s reaction to this is signiﬁcant. Her shock at the prospect of losing her adopted son is overshadowed by her realization of Du’s successful amal- gamation of his Vietnamese and American selves. She says: ‘I am amazed ... My transformation has been genetic; Du’s was hyphenated. We were 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 92

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so full of wonder at how fast he became American, but he’s a hybrid’ (Mukherjee, 1989: 222). Not only does Du transform himself, but he also transforms his environment. As Mukherjee notes, ‘I’m writing about the way that America has been Vietnamized, and the way my characters are being Americanized’ (Vitale, 1992, audio interview). A few pages later, Jane too announces: ‘I’m going somewhere’ (Mukherjee, 1989: 240), and also leaves. Jane’s insistence that she was re-born American and through this discarded her Indian identity – that her transformation was ‘genetic’ as she puts it – contrasts with Du’s added-on Americanness, and serves to underscore Mukherjee’s belief in ethnic identity as a choice. This in many ways preﬁgures the identity-performance we witness in her later novel, Leave It to Me.

‘North America turned inside out’: ‘The Holder of the World’ (1993)

The historical subject of Mukherjee’s fourth novel blends the history of colonial New England with the story of increasing cultural and trade contact between South Asia and America via the East India Company in the 17th century. The Holder of the World tracks the historical contact between South Asia and America through the simultaneous perspective of a 20th-century American asset hunter, and a 17th-century woman- turned-concubine. Beigh Masters is the 32-year-old asset hunter whose task it is to track down the spectacular diamond called the ‘Emperor’s Tear’ for a client, and in so doing, becomes absorbed in the life and times of Hannah Easton, aka the ‘Salem Bibi’. She is a woman who travels to the Coromandel coast in South East India with the East India company, where she takes a Hindu raja lover, Jadav Singh, before returning to Salem pregnant with his child, in her later years. At first glance it appears that this subject matter is a major departure for Mukherjee, and that The Holder of the World does little to further the multicultural project undertaken by Mukherjee in her other work, and which is the subject of this article. Yet closer exploration in fact reveals this historical novel to be equally engaged in Mukherjee’s stated project, as she herself observed in a 1993 article. In ‘A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman’, Mukherjee said of The Holder of the World that it would be ‘a major work, historical in nature, that nevertheless incorporates a much earlier version . . . [of] the making of new Americans’ (Mukherjee, 1993a: 26). Although in this assertion Mukherjee seems to locate her work within her ongoing multicultural project despite its status as a historical novel, in fact we should regard The Holder of the World as an important component in her oeuvre, precisely because of its historical sweep, which offers an alternative history of colonial New England, one inflected and influenced by contact with Asia (described in the novel as ‘North America turned inside out’; Mukherjee, 1993b: 160), and which comes to disrupt and 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 93

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question the very categories of ‘immigrant’, ‘native’ and ‘expatriate’, long before America became the multicultural nation it is today. There are also thematic similarities with both Wife and Jasmine. Like both of these novels, The Holder of the World foregrounds the experiences of marriage, expatriation and both coerced and voluntary sex. As in these novels, too, the many transformations effected by and upon Hannah/’Salem Bibi’/’Precious as Pearl’ are marked by a name change, which echoes shifts in fortune as well as identity. The restrictions experi- enced by Hannah as an East India wife on the Coromandel coast reﬂect those felt by Dimple Dasgupta upon her arrival in America. Like Wife and Jasmine, The Holder of the World also makes use of the Rama/Sita Hindu myth of ideal wife-hood; as in these novels, Hannah/Salem Bibi is forced to contend with Sita as a role model as suggested by her friend and servant Bhagmati. According to Fakrul Alam, the merit of The Holder of the World is that it ‘shows Mukherjee reafﬁrming her Indianness while asserting her Americanization’ (Alam, 1996: 137). Indeed, Mukherjee’s stated endeav- our in this work, to ‘make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar’ (Mukherjee, 1993a: 25), is successful precisely because by juxtaposing the histories of New England and South India, Mukherjee reorders and revises those pasts.

‘Indias of the Mind’: ‘Leave It to Me’ (1997)

Mukherjee’s ﬁfth, and most recent, book, Leave It to Me, marks a clear departure from the subject matter of her previous novels. Although they exhibit different degrees of complexity, Wife, Jasmine and The Holder of the World take as their subject the process of cross-cultural metamorphosis, and, to a lesser degree, both chronicle the manner in which this is complicated by gender issues. In contrast, Leave It to Me approaches the immigration story askew, by depicting a young adopted Asian American girl’s search for her Asian roots from the perspective of America. The narrative thrust is thus retrospective rather than progressive and this produces a more elegiac feel to the narrative than in previous works. It also means the central character’s Americanness is taken for granted from the outset, and it is instead her ‘Asiancy’ which is the focus of attention. Similarly, in this story, the central female character, Debby DiMartino/ Devi Dee, is mourning a lost identity rather than searching for a new one, as in the previous texts (and her physical move is not from village to city, as in the other novels, but rather in reverse).4 Like Wife and Jasmine, though, Mukherjee makes use of a split narrative persona in which to thematize the issue of ethnic identity. Here, ‘Debby’ is the adopted daughter of Italian Americans, who embarks upon an odyssey in search of her birth parents, an Indian father and American mother, who abandoned her on the Asian hippie trail sometime in the 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 94

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1970s. Along the way she re-creates herself as ‘Devi’, a slinky hip Indian woman. ‘Devi’ refers to ‘Devigaon’, the village of her birth, but is also the female goddess version of ‘Deva’, the Sanskrit word for ‘shine’. To many readers this novel seems more playful, and less burdened by the weight of identity questions than the earlier examples. Debby’s transformation is less a matter of necessary cultural impatriation and more a voluntary transformation. At one point Debby/Devi says, ‘Debby DiMartino has no weight, no substance. I had to toss her out’ (Mukherjee, 1997b: 10). Debby’s Asiancy (agency) is also figured in the text as self- fashioned exotica; she wraps it around herself as one might a shawl, in an all-out demonstration of the very performativity of identity.5 Tellingly, the 1997 Ballantine edition of the novel was illustrated by a pair of hands adorned with henna engravings, folded casually in a woman’s lap. Tracing a development through Mukherjee’s work in the period 1975 to 1997, we can see that she has latterly reached the point whereby identity can be figured as a performance, and a choice. If, as I suggested earlier, Mukher- jee herself exhibits a performative patriotism at times in her non-fictional writing, in this fictional work her character engages in a performative ethnicity, in a whirlwind tour of her past against the backdrop of post- 1960s California. Ultimately, for Debby/Devi, ‘Asia’ exists only as a backdrop, a space of the imagination and of possibility, an ‘India of the Mind’, to use Salman Rushdie’s phrase. In a discussion of Jasmine, Mukherjee paradigmatically described her writing project thus:

... [my books] are meditations on change, on transformations that you, I, the world, and especially north America are going through right now – they reﬂect a larger social vision, a larger social, political statement, about the nature of all of our lives . . . about a new kind of American life. (Vitale, 1992: audio interview)

I have sought to argue that Mukherjee’s ﬁctional and non-ﬁctional writing demonstrate a development from an abiding preoccupation with the problems of immigration and the accompanying loss of identity in her earlier work, to an exuberant vision of the possibilities of ethnic transformation and re-incarnation. Bharati Mukherjee is a revolutionary writer who warrants – indeed demands – serious attention within the US multicultural debate, through her project of re-thinking the identity of all Americans, not just ethnic Americans; in her sense of writing communal memory as gain; and in her emphasis upon the very performativity of ethnicity and identity.

Notes 1 Mukherjee is no stranger to controversy, and had already established a reputation for producing subversive work in Canada, before emigrating to the 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 95

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US. For instance, in 1987, she co-wrote a controversial documentary, The Sorrow and the Terror, with her husband, Clark Blaise, the subject of which was the 1985 Air India crash which killed 329 people, the majority of whom were Asian Canadian. Mukherjee concluded that this terrorist act was the work of Khalistani extremists and claimed that, despite warnings, the Canadian government failed to take pre-emptive action. 2 Mukherjee has said: ‘Postcolonial studies seems an inappropriate category in which to place my works. I don’t think of myself as a postcolonial person stranded on the outer shores of the collapsed British Empire . . . the writer/political activist in me is more obsessed with addressing the issues of minority discourse in the U.S. and Canada’ (Chen and Goudie, 1997: 2). 3 There are many similarities between the two works though, not least in terms of ﬁctional themes: suicide, murder, marriage and female subjectivity, to name but a few. 4 Mukherjee has also made the point in an interview that Debby / Devi is deliberately the opposite of Jasmine in many ways: ‘Devi came to me as the opposite of a character I’d written earlier, Jasmine’ (Hogan, 1997: 1). 5 There is a clear parallel here with Mukherjee’s own identity-performance when she published ‘American Dreamer’: this article appeared alongside a photo of a triumphant-looking Mukherjee wearing an American ﬂag.

References Alam, F. (1996) Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne. Chen, T. and Goudie, S.X. (1997) ‘Holders of the Word: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee’, Jouvert: a journal of postcolonial studies, 1–19. http://152.1.96.5/jouvert/v1i1/con11/htm volume 1, issue 1. Grewal, G. (1996) ‘Born Again American: Immigrant Consciousness in Jasmine’, Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives, ed. E.S. Nelson, pp. 181–96. New York: Garland. Hogan, Ron (1997) ‘Outsider Looking In, Insider Looking Beyond’, Beatrice Interview, 1–4. http://www.beatrice.com/interviews/mukherjee.html Katrak, K. (1997) ‘South Asian American Literature’, in K. Cheung (ed.) An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, pp. 192–218. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ma, S. (1998) Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. New York: SUNY. McLeod, John (2000) Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mukherjee, B. (1971) The Tiger’s Daughter. New York: Fawcett Crest. Mukherjee, B. (1975) Wife. New York: Fawcett Crest. Mukherjee, B. (1988a) ‘Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists!’, New York Times Book Review 1 (28 August): 28–9. Mukherjee, B. (1988b) The Middleman and Other Stories. London: Virago. Mukherjee, B. (1989) Jasmine. London: Virago. Mukherjee, B. (1993a) ‘A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman’, American Studies Newsletter 29: 24–6. Mukherjee, B. (1993b) The Holder of the World. London: Virago. Mukherjee, B. (1996) ‘Two Ways to Belong in America’, New York Times (22 September): 1–2. 74P 06grice (ds) 30/1/03 1:03 pm Page 96

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Mukherjee, B. (1997a) American Dreamer, http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/JF97/mukherjee.html. 1–2. Mukherjee, B. (1997b) Leave It to Me. London: Vintage. Mukherjee, B. and C. Blaise (1987) The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy. Ontario: Penguin. Parameswaran, U. (1976) ‘What Price Expatriation?’, in A. Niven (ed.) The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and Expatriation, p. 41–52. Brussels: M. Didier. Parameswaran, U. (1995) ‘Names Resonant and Sweet: An Overview of South Asian Canadian Women’s Writing’, in M. Silvera (ed.) The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature, pp. 3–17. Toronto: Sister Vision. Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. London: Granta. Shulman, P. (1998) ‘Review of The Middleman and Other Stories’, Voice Literary Supplement (June): 19. Silvera, Makeda, ed. (1995) The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature. Toronto: Sister Vision Press. Takaki, R. (1990) Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin. Vitale, T. (1992) Audio Interview with Bharati Mukherjee, A Moveable Feast.

Helena Grice is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her research interests are ethnic American literature and theory, and feminist theory. She has published in Melus, Amerasia and Hitting Critical Mass, is co-author of Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (Manchester University Press, 2000) and, most recently, has published a monograph on Asian American women’s writing, entitled Negotiating Identities (Man- chester University Press, 2002). Address: Department of English, Hugh Owen Building, University of Wales Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3DY, UK. [email: [email protected]] 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 111

Book reviews

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

Andrew Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question. New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2002. x + 234 pp. ISBN 0–521–80722–0 (hbk) £40

Towards the end of his interesting introduction, Andrew Taylor sums up: ‘This book argues for a reassessment of Henry James Senior and his relationship with the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century America. ... [H]e is considered here both in his own right . . . and as a complex influence on his novelist son’ (p. 23). This is an accurate summary of the emphasis placed by Henry James and the Father Question, which does not so much discuss the novelist’s work in the light of James’s relationship with his father as it looks at the latter’s thought with a bias towards what may also be recognized in the son’s writings. Wary of the type of ‘psy- chologised, Freudian’ account that Leon Edel traced, Taylor does not seek the ‘complex influence’ in any family narrative of adoption and rejection, but instead holds that James Senior’s ideas ‘became distilled, often merely in the form of ancestral echoes, into the writing of his novelist son’ (pp. 14–15). His key point of difference with earlier critics Quentin Anderson and Alfred Habegger is to insist on the ‘oblique’ manner in which James echoes his father (p. 15), and, as a consequence of this, to disagree when they argue that a novel like The Bostonians is severely limited by the per- nicious influence of ‘The Father’. Though Taylor often takes Habegger to task (Anderson much less), he tends to fight out his disagreement with the same obliquity that he claims for James Senior’s impact on his son. What the title indicates as the heart of the book – a discussion of Henry James – actually remains as much an empty centre as is Milly in The Wings of the Dove. Light is shed on four important texts of James’s – successively, the Autobiography, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians and The Ambassadors – but the light is usually filtered and dispersed through a preface to another novel, or a tale that James was writing while composing the novel, or a review or essay of his. The more general context is also given prominence, not with the sustained attention of a New Historicist account, nor always very persuasively: we could have dispensed with the thumbnail sketch of The Spirit-Rapper, which does not demonstrate as effectively how The Bostonians ‘evolves out of a tradition of twin-pronged satire already well established’, as do

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Lucy Boston and Hannah Thurston (p. 154). Two long chapters are devoted to the important relationship between James the Father, James the Son, and, as it were, Emerson the Holy Spirit. The reader can learn a lot here, especially about the dynamic between the elder two. But the principal case Taylor claims to make – that the ‘widely held assumption of Emerson’s moral innocence’ which both Jameses shared is mistaken (p. 95) – is somewhat weakened by his failure to distinguish clearly between what is already known (e.g. his quote from Joel Porte on the ‘emptiness . . . at the bottom of Emerson’s consciousness’ [p. 109], which pre-empts the kernel of his case) and what he is genuinely contributing (e.g. that James Senior responded to Emerson in theologico-philosophical terms; Henry in socio- cultural, psychological and moral ones; pp. 88 and 125). On Henry James’s works Taylor is always worth reading, but also frustrating, since he indulges in interpretation very rarely, and then takes for granted rather than carefully arguing. While I found myself without exception agreeing with his (implied) readings, I have more than a hunch that several other critics, including Habegger, would less easily adopt the view that James, to give just one example, ‘ultimately could not share his father’s radical embrace of inertia and non-participation’ (p. 48). If the ‘Father Question’ is to be answered by arguing that there is no more than an indirect resonance of James Senior’s ideas in his son’s ﬁction, the proof had better come quite as much from compelling interpretation of James’s ﬁction (and systematic tackling of criticism on it) as from sustained scrutiny of his father. Gert Buelens Ghent University

Eric L. Muller, Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xv + 198 pp. ISBN 0–226–54822–8 (hbk) $27.50

Part of the story of any war includes the story of the resistance to it by those enlisted to fight. But what sort of story is this resistance, precisely? Is it the same as the story of those who fought in the war? Most particularly, do those who resist make the same contribution to the national narrative as those who fight? What makes the case of Japanese Americans at the time of the Second World War so compelling is that the ones who eventually chose to resist being drafted, because they were Americans, did so in large part because they were at the outset of the war denied the opportunity to fight because they were judged to be Japanese. Eric Muller’s lucid account of the Japanese American draft resisters emerges as a very American story, although for two rather incommensurable reasons: it enhances our understanding of the national narrative, while it troubles our sense of what a national narrative might actually be in the first place. 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 113

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That there were draft resisters at all among any of the thousands of Japanese Americans incarcerated from 1942 to 1944 in 10 ‘concentration camps’ (Muller’s preferred term) will come as a surprise to many readers. His is the first full-length book on the subject. Not only were the research demands – court records, newspapers editorials – daunting, but the very fact of these resisters (there were more than 300) unsettles both the official story of nearly 800 Nisei soldiers killed during World War II (heroes all) and even the story of the 120,000 forced into the camps (victims all). Both these groups of people are inscribed on the National Japanese Memorial to Patriotism, dedicated in Washington, DC in 2000. The resisters are not mentioned. Muller is at pains to show that they belong there with no less justice. He repeatedly exclaims that the Nisei the government began prosecuting for their disloyalty in refusing to obey draft notices sent out in 1944 (after first denying their loyalty to serve and then incarcerating them in 1942) were Americans. At times his advocacy almost amounts to special pleading, and this is particularly unfortunate since the status of the Japanese American men who resisted calls the very term ‘American’ into question. In a sense, Muller provides an extended argument with the Japanese Americans Citizen League, in particular, whose official positions about what it means to be ‘American’ must not be permitted to be decisive – today, no less than in 1947, when President Truman pardoned the resisters, to the discomfort and dissatisfaction of just about everyone. A national narrative is at least two things. First, a collection of mini- or micro-narratives, and Free to Die is full of them, ranging from various Japanese Americans to the lives of judges who were so important in deciding their fates. Second, a national narrative emerges as a larger construction in which some group must be necessarily left out, although not in the interests of justice. If this were so, there would be no doubt of what Muller speaks of as the idea of ‘the fully assimilated Americanism of Japanese America’. Instead, that there was, and perhaps still is, some doubt regarding the presence of these resisters in the national idea testi- fies instead to the abiding existence of another narrative of America, whereby those who resist what they deem to be injustice, even in time of war, become truer and more courageous Americans than those who are comprehended by national memorials. Terry Caesar Mukogawa Women’s University, Japan

Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. London: Duke University Press, 2001. 320 pp. ISBN 0–8223–2609–4 (hbk) £35.50; 0–8223–2617–5 (pbk) £12.95

Despite its ghastly, faux-sensational title, its dreadful, repellently dull cover, and its tendency to make serious overstatements when advancing 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 114

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its argument, this is a serious and valuable investigation into an episode in American history that would prove crucial for the representation of the lesbian to the American public. The episode in question is the murder of 17-year-old Freda Ward by her estranged 19-year-old friend, Alice Mitchell, on 15 January 1892 in Memphis, Tennessee. Alice, who had planned to elope with Freda, marry her, and support them both disguised as a man, slit her beloved’s throat in broad daylight, in the public street, after Freda’s family had forbidden their continued association. Rather than let anyone else have Freda, said Alice, she would rather see her dead. It was a classic crime passionel, complete and familiar in its mad, pos- sessive logic, and in its sad conclusion of wasted lives and love gone wrong. The significant difference, however, in the Mitchell–Ward case, was its lesbian cast. The fact that both the murderer and her victim were women caught the appalled imagination of the American sensationalist press, both locally and nationally. Drawing on material from contemporary Memphis papers like the Memphis Appeal Avalanche, the Memphis Commercial, and the Memphis Public Ledger, as well as national newspapers like the New York World and the San Francisco Examiner, Duggan follows the coverage of the murder from its first, sensational reportage, through the court proceedings which ended with Mitchell being declared unfit to stand trial and committed to a local mental asylum where she died in 1898. All this is extremely interesting, and Duggan does a good job of teasing out the elements of the journalistic representation of the Mitchell–Ward lesbian love murder, which provided significant elements of the trope of same-sex love for women in America until the 1920s. Further, in an even more intriguing move, Duggan winds the story of Freda Ward’s murder around another major criminal offence in Memphis in 1892: the lynching of three African-American men in March, which was investigated by Ida B. Wells, with the result that her local newspaper offices were destroyed, an event which provided the furious impetus to her influential, international anti-lynching campaign. By looking closely at these two events interlocked in place and time, Duggan attempts to pull together a commentary on the development of modernity in America that is based, pre-eminently on the notion of race. This idea of race is specifically that of a ‘whiteness’ depend- ent on the assumption of the sexual passivity of the respectable white woman, an assumption that is crucially undermined, from one perspective, by the very existence of lesbian love among the daughters of middle-class men, and from another, by the innocence of the black male victims of lynching, executed for sexual crimes they had not committed. While scarcely new in many of its features, Duggan’s argument has many attractive points, but it also harbours too many weaknesses. Class is seriously underplayed in it, as is any suggestion of economic power except in the vaguest possible way. Various aspects of cultural behaviour and outlook are declared to be specifically American, when they are not. The account of the Memphis lynching, and its significant aftershock, gets 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 115

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rather lost as the Mitchell–Ward trial material takes over the book. Indeed, the documentary and scholarly apparatus almost consumes the book at times, leaving Duggan with too little space to make her very complex case. The second section of the book, which focuses largely on eugenics and theories of degeneration and their links to race, sex, and criminality at the turn of the century, simply repeats familiar material which has been treated better elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, this is a good project and one that is worthy of attention. And the ﬁrst section of the book, in particular, raises questions of deep signiﬁcance regarding women, their representation, and the legal and medical restraints on their freedom as agents. Kate Fullbrook University of the West of England

Jane Davis, The White Image in the Black Mind: A Study of African American Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. 161 pp. ISBN 0–313–30464–5 (hbk) £48.95

This study seeks to unveil and interpret the ways in which ‘black writers have very pointedly created a typology of white images’ (p. 17). Drawing on George Frederickson’s landmark study The Black Image in the White Mind, Davis’s work mirrors developments within ‘whiteness studies’ to ‘devote significant analysis to blacks’ perspectives on whiteness’. This study combines a discussion of archetypal images of whites based on the ‘literary data’ of African American fiction, journalism and speculative psychology. Specifically, her analysis seeks to expose the neurotic aspects of white identity extant within the four central images of whites in the minds of black writers: The Overt White Supremacist, The Hypocrite, The Good-Hearted Weakling and The Liberal. The first chapter provides brief textual illustrations of these central images, drawn from diverse (loosely) literary sources. The second chapter provides a more compelling case study of the ‘personal incoherence’ of white characterization through close readings of James Baldwin’s Blues For Mister Charlie, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks. The third chapter is devoted to the representation of white women in Richard Wright’s novels, juxta- posed with Ralph Ginzburg’s One Hundred Years of Lynching. In this chapter Davis excavates a ‘liberating counter-mythology’ for black (men) concerning violent black male and white female relations. Moving from ethnographic iconoclasm, the fourth and fifth chapters attend to the experience of white ‘neo-racism’ in the academy and corporation (Ellis Cose, Lawrence Otis Graham and Derrick Bell) and the thorny issue of black self-alienation in the works of Richard Wright. The study concludes with a catalogue (or rather coda) of ‘What Is a White Person?’, authenti- cated by disparate textual testimonies. 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 116

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Davis’s study is ambitious in its undertakings, venturing across disciplinary lines to enlarge the scope and appeal of her project. Her thesis is most persuasive when she grounds her argument in social and historical context and to this end chapters three and four are by far the most sophisticated and challenging. Equally, Davis’s efforts to include a variety of sources are confounded by her reliance upon the works of James Baldwin and Richard Wright to the detriment of other critical voices. In particular there is a glaring absence of African American women writers examined. In addition, just as the author’s taxonomic approach threatens to obscure nuances and contradictions within white representation, this study would have been enhanced by the author’s questioning of stable, binaristic conceptions of racial identity. In short, Davis’s book will be of appeal to scholars working within the field of African American studies as well as those with an interest in the ways in which race matters. Overlooking the decontextualized and hence impaling effect of Davis’s inventory, this study makes a timely intervention in the study of fictionally e-razed subjects. Rachel van Duyvenbode University of Sheffield

Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xii + 252 pp. ISBN 0–8078–4978–2 (pbk) $18.95

At one point, Carolyn Kitch refers to her study as a ‘survey’, and this is part of its considerable value, reproducing and analysing a wide range of cover illustrations in magazines – ‘the first truly mass medium in the United States’ (p. 4) – from 1895 to 1930. This was the heyday of the illus- trator: Kitch’s subjects include names whose fame has survived (Charles Dana Gibson, Norman Rockwell) and those which have faded (Jessie Willcox Smith, Neysa McMein). The selection spans the best-selling Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, the first magazines to pass the million readership mark, in 1905; the socialist magazine The Masses, killed by America’s entry into the First World War; and the African-American Crisis, founded in 1910. The study is also driven by a strong analytical focus and cultural emphases. Kitch explores how magazine images shaped women’s emergence into the public sphere during the period when the term ‘feminism’ first came into use. The overall trajectory, as she traces it, diverts the early feminist potential of the ‘New Woman’ into consumerist models of choice while collapsing class and race difference into ‘the white, suburban, nuclear family’ (p. 184). Era by era, she explores representational strategies which negotiate shifting political contexts: Alice Barber Stephens’s late-19th-century illustrations initiate the movement of the 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 117

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‘true woman’ out of the home and into the public domain of the ‘new woman’. The Gibson Girl of the new century – ‘the first visual stereotype of women’ (p. 37) – was an aristocratic, strong-willed type towering over ineffectual men, an image softened into a more athletic mode by Harrison Fisher and Howard Chandler Christy. Next emerged the sexually threatening types – James Montgomery Flagg’s ‘vamp’, Coles Phillips’s gold- digging beauty – whose sting was drawn by John Held Jr’s boyish ‘flapper’. This widely circulated pencil-thin, adolescent figure contributed to a political backlash against women newly empowered by the Nine- teenth Amendment, trivializing their freedom as self-indulgently sexual (p. 122). In the postwar period, Neysa McMein and Norman Rockwell took women back into the bosom of the family. Kitch’s historical narrative is neither inert nor simplistically neat. Extrapolating from feminist film theory, she argues that magazine images were activated by a ‘female gaze’ shared among women figures and with the woman reader (pp. 32, 54). She also addresses illustrations which do not fit the dominant trajectory: the adaptation of The Gibson Girl by C.D. Batchelor in a suffragette press walking a fine line between the familiar and the challenging and the complex representation of working-class women and desire on The Masses covers. Perhaps most fascinatingly, she considers how African-American magazines converted the white press’s idealized sketches into photographs documenting black women’s achievement of the same educational, social and aesthetic goals as their white counterparts. How these developments seep into the culture at large is traced partly through the reciprocal relations between magazine illustrations and patriotic war-time posters and between editorial and commercial images. Kitch’s announced motive is to uncover the constructedness of a ‘cycle of gender imagery that has played out at least three times in twentieth- century mass media’ (p. 189) and that has fed a backlash against feminism from the 1920s onwards. An eerie echo is one she never mentions: the late Diana, Princess of Wales. In the turn of a Gibson Girl head, in the sideways glance of a Fisher girl, in the body language of a Phillips Fadeaway Girl, there are intimations of Diana. And in the marketing of these images – the Gibson girl’s ‘chiseled face and aristocratic bearing were reproduced on china . . . as well as silverware, pillowcovers, chairs, tabletops, match- boxes, ashtrays, scarves, and wallpaper’ (p. 41); Phillips’s Fadeaway Girl ‘used the female figure as a design element’ (p. 163) – we hear echoes of the uses to which Diana was put. It is disturbing proof that these early images did indeed ‘set into place a visual vocabulary of womanhood that now seems natural’ (p. 3). Christine Bold University of Guelph, Canada 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 118

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Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. xxvii + pp. 207. ISBN 0–8173–1040–1 (pbk) $19.95

First published in 1979, Wrestlin’ Jacob investigates the efforts of whites to evangelize African Americans in the antebellum South and the response of African Americans to those efforts. Clark studies two areas of the South – one rural, Liberty County, Georgia, and one urban, Charleston, South Carolina – and the ‘negotiated relationship’ that resulted in each community. The goal of white preachers in evangelizing the slaves was to harvest not only good Christians but also obedient and hard-working slaves. In responding to ministerial efforts, the slaves sought hope for a better world in the future and to forge resources for resistance in the present. Blacks outnumbered whites in Liberty County by almost three to one. Without the more intimate relationship between the races elsewhere in the South, blacks were able to maintain important links with their African heritage, including their religion. Clarke uses Charles Colcock Jones’s ‘Apostle to the Negro Slaves’, as a case study of white efforts to evangelize that population. Jones strove to make Liberty County a model for the South of what could be done for the religious instruction of black slaves. He sought to convince the white South of its religious responsibilities to its slaves – responsibilities that included not only the conversion of lost sinners to good and faithful servants, but also the provision for the physical needs of black brothers and sisters who were children of God. From the white perspective, Jones’s work was a success. He preached the gospel, taught submission, and improved the moral character of the black community. Blacks realized that much of what Jones did and taught was part of the whites’ attempt to keep them in submission. Neverthe- less, although Jones had moved into the pulpit that had once been filled by publicly acknowledged black preachers, he had the advantage of strong white support that felt little need for interference, and therefore was able to give blacks an important opportunity to strengthen their community with a minimum of white supervision. The urban context meant significant differences in the approach of white preachers and in the manner in which black slaves resisted the oppression of slavery. For one thing, in contrast to Liberty County, whites in Charleston were as numerous as black slaves. And there was also a sizable free black population – 3,400 free blacks with a slave population of 19,000. Free blacks, especially those with considerable wealth, served as a reminder that slavery and black skin were not inevitably linked and as a source of leadership for blacks in the city. Charleston was also a city of significant contrasts. No other city in the South at the time could match its cultural distinctions or cosmopolitan perspectives. But it was also a centre of the North American slave trade. Free blacks lived in an environment of relative stability and freedom. But, 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 119

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due to the Denmark Vesey plot and its association with an African Church, no independent black church was allowed in Charleston after 1822. Charleston authorities insisted that blacks worship under the supervision of whites. At the same time, however, Clarke shows, white preachers in Charleston devoted themselves to the religious instruction of blacks to a degree unequalled in any other southern city and whites accepted blacks in ways that would be unheard of in a later segregated South. As in Liberty County, Charleston ministers provided blacks with religious instruction that they believed had a salutary effect on their labour and discipline. For blacks, the churches provided them with opportunities for freedoms not known in other areas of their lives. Leaders of the black community were nurtured therein, and blacks organized so that even in the midst of their bondage they could support one another’s spiritual and physical needs. As Clarke concludes: ‘Here, in the churches of the city, black slaves had laid the foundation for the black church which in the years ahead would seek to lead their people out of Egypt into the Promised Land’ (p. 99). Bryan F. Le Beau University of Missouri, Kansas City

Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2000. xi + 193 pp. ISBN 0–521–65547–1 (pbk) £35.00

During the past dozen years, ethics has gained new resonance in literary studies. Robert B. Pippin’s book is a ﬁne illustration of this. Henry James and Modern Moral Life is written by one of the pre-eminent interpreters of the modern European philosophical tradition (Pippin is Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago), but someone who also views works of creative writing as model embodiments of social values (just as Richard Rorty does) and takes up Martha Nussbaum’s treatment of Henry James’s novels as a necessary supplement to the study of moral philosophy. Probably what is most original about Pippin’s reading of James is the scholar’s attempt to combine an ethically valenced approach to literature with historicity. According to Pippin, James took his moral bearings from the complex and unprecedented historical situation of modernity, managing to do full justice to the ambiguities and con- fusions unavoidable in such a social world, while avoiding skepticism or a narrow aestheticism. Interpreting The American Scene, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and several of James’s short stories, Pippin shows that James treats morality as a matter of social and historically speciﬁc practices. The social change of modernity bears on the problem of meaning (which is analyzed more in ontological and ethical than in linguistic terms) and therewith moral assessment. Modernity involved a 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 120

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change in basic mores and sensibilities, which greatly complicated moral assessments and was especially visible in the privileged (reflective, intensely self-conscious, freed-from-the necessity-of-labor) classes James described. Modern social existence had become so complex that James tried to do justice to what he saw by inventing a completely new sort of language for it. This complexity has to do with the increasing unavail- ability of what people used to rely upon in interpreting and assessing each other, on the new role of money and the social mobility it made possible, on new, much more extensive and deeper forms of social dependencies, and on the very new ways of understanding quite variously interpretable dimensions of psychological life. Thus, the primary Jamesian modern experience may be qualified as dependence. A profoundly new sort of society created new forms of dependencies so intimate, pervasive and unavoidable as to make daily life a constant experience of some lack, a lack of subjectivity itself or an anxiety that one’s own desires were mere reflections of what others desire. This also presupposes new understanding of freedom that cannot be achieved alone; the achievement of free subjectivity requires a certain sort of social relation among subjects. This suggestion about what is required for a life to have a certain kind of sense, and so be one’s own, is often what is at issue in James’s basic plot. Deep and penetrating, Pippin’s book is not easy reading, competing with James’s in its convoluted style, in its numerous amplifications and provisos. While stating his ideas and elaborating them, Pippin character- istically refers to some ‘other long stories’, occasionally hints at ‘another subject fit for another book or two’. This approach is partly intriguing, partly promising the never-ending path of knowledge, but sometimes leaving the reader’s hermeneutic desire unsatisfied. Overall, this interdisciplinary project, with its instances of fine literary analysis, is a valuable contribution to modern Jamesiana. Olga Antsyferova Ivanovo State University, Russia

Larzer Ziff, Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780–1910. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. xiv + 304 pp. ISBN 0–300–08236–3 (hbk) £20

Influenced by tourism as well as other critical approaches, studies of the various connections between travel and writing in American culture have proliferated in recent years. Return Passages, one of the latest examples, focuses on five key figures to survey the development of American travel writing from the Revolution to the First World War and contends that the literature of travel produced during this period stemmed from ‘the authorial search for a completeness that the young nation alone could not furnish’ (p. 15). Ziff begins his study focusing on John Ledyard’s writings, particularly on his famous account of Cook’s 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 121

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third voyage, and portraying him as an idealist who asserted both his Americanness and the early democratic impulses of the republic through the understanding of difference. He then comments on John Lloyd Stephens, popularly acclaimed thanks to the resilience evinced in his trek to Arabia Petrea and his travels in Mayan territory. His patriotic zeal, notes Ziff, compelled him to search for a monumental past in his own continent, and as a result of his exhausting jungle explorations he produced Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, & Yucatan and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, two masterpieces where his occasionally embittered views on contemporary Indian life were tempered by his faith in the future dissemination of American values through commerce and technology. The turning point in Ziff’s survey, however, is Bayard Taylor, who after the early unexpected success of his Views-Afoot literally ‘invented’ travel writing as a truly lucrative craft, publishing a widely read corpus of travel books characterized by their embedded imperialism and racial superiority. Mark Twain, Ziff observes, also connected with the ideology of mainstream white America thanks to the touristic ‘innocence’ displayed in texts like The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, but the exploitation of other peoples he witnessed across the world – recorded in Following the Equator – eventually made him more critical of racial injustice in the antebellum South and prepared him for his bitter anti-imperialist writings of the early 1900s. In the last chapter, Ziff traces Henry James’s progression from the early sketches he wrote in the 1870s to his full-fledged travelogues, and argues that his writings – more concerned with issues of class than race or imperialism – express a gradual loss of interest in the genre. Paradoxically, this growing dissatisfaction with travel writing produced two classics, the impressionistic A Little Tour in France and the incisive The American Scene, where he harshly criticized his own country for its incompleteness in permitting ‘the systematic elimination of whatever is not new’ (p. 268). In analyzing the specific cultural work of these travelers’ writings, Return Passages includes relevant comments on the number of editions, profits, or even publication details of some of these texts. Moreover, in each chapter Ziff cogently tackles rhetorical matters that illustrate the heterogeneity of American travel writing. He attributes the freshness of Ledyard’s narrative, for instance, to his reliance on sources like Shake- speare, Milton and the Bible rather than on the scientific discourse of the age. Likewise, he locates Stephens’s appeal in his manner of proceeding by means of ‘incidents’, and James’s quality in his emotive style based on impressions. Still, despite his recovery of once-renowned travelers like Ledyard and Taylor (undoubtedly one of the great merits of this book), there is a complete absence of women and minority authors from the ‘great’ tradition Ziff so vividly surveys. This book would also have bene- fited from Ziff’s engagement in a productive critical discussion with such critics as William Stowe, Mary Suzanne Schriber or Terry Caesar who, like 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 122

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himself, have fairly recently struggled to bring under academic scrutiny a hitherto neglected literary genre. Such reservations aside, let me hasten to say that Return Passages is a very entertaining and informative book that deserves serious consideration among all Americanists. Pere Gifra-Adroher Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

William G. Robbins and James C. Foster (eds), Land in the American West: Private Claims and the Common Good. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. xi + 222 pp. ISBN 0–295–98020–6 (pbk) £12.50

Writing in the 1830s after his nine-months visit to the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville described a keen and ubiquitous commitment to property as a characteristic element of the American polity, thus pointing to one of the essential elements of the American political tradition up until today. Through American history – even before the arrival of Europeans in the ‘New’ World – runs the thread not of a single static idea of property, but of multiple and multiplying conceptions of this phenomenon in a continuous process of transformation. To a considerable extent, it was the rivalry of diverging property conceptions at specific places or in a specific political debate at a given time that directed the course of events. With the emergence of the American nation being interwoven with territorial expansion and the claim to ‘new’ lands, no single type of property better serves to illustrate this than land. And with the image of the American West as the epitome of vast, boundless lands, of opportunity, there is no better area to focus on than the West. Since colonial days, land has been a terrain contested by indigenous peoples and European immigrants, by citizens of the United States and citizens of the Spanish Empire and of its successor states in Latin America, mostly Mexico, and by different groups of Americans, for instance between miners, loggers, developers on the one hand and environmental- ists on the other. Underlying most of these disputes over land and its use is the tension between private claims and the common good. In January 1997, historians and political scientists came together for a symposium at Oregon State University to discuss past and present forms of land use in the western United States. This collection of essays, which offers an insightful approach to the conceptions and conflicts of private and public property from three different angles, assembles the conference papers revised for publication. Following an introductory essay emphasizing the historic dimension of land disputes, three essays analyse the ideological background of property rights and the way it has influenced disputes. If readers were to have thought of the land question simply as one of legal squabbles with, perhaps, some effect on political debates and the relation of state and federal administration, this important part of the book quickly proves 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 123

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them wrong. Whether in the exposition of the American idea of land, the interconnectedness of property rights and the evolution of the social order, or the characteristics of the more recent property discourse, readers are sensitized to the broad ramifications of property notions that impinge on legal issues as well as on ideals of individual liberty, social values, repub- lican virtues, beneficent government, and the structure of the American polity. The subsequent section draws attention to the relevance of urban versus rural perspectives on property, concentrating on the demands of cities on their sites, and the contest over public lands as commons for agricultural use. Three case studies on more recent disputes, one in the San Luis Valley in Colorado and New Mexico, another over the Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, and a third on the conflict of local economic interests in Alaska and federal policy, attest not only to the way arguments and conceptions of past debates persist – if in a modified version – until today, but to the dynamic nature of the ideas involved, i.e. property and land as well as nature. The land in the American West has been a contested terrain, and so have the notions underlying this struggle. As this collection of essays convincingly argues, a closer look into this matter leads to both the roots of an ongoing discussion and a indis- pensable thread in the elaborate fabric of American history. Angela Schwarz University of Duisburg, Germany

Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul. London: Duke University Press, 2000. 249 pp. ISBN 0–8223–2526–8 (hbk) £39; ISBN 0–8223–2560–8 (pbk) £14.50

This study compares ‘national theorizing’ in 19th- and 20th-century Russian and African American literature. It seeks to understand the reasons for the ‘strong afﬁnity’ between Russian and African American modern expressions of ‘ethnic soul’ (p. 3). This question of ‘afﬁnity’ forces into the light the intersections of cultural nationalisms that are otherwise perceived as culturally distinct and geographically remote. Russian and African American nationalist philosophies intersect at their ‘similar striving . . . to give visibility and voice to a native culture that has been hidden and held bondage to narrow Western standards of civility and literacy’ (p. 6). Russian and African American nationalist thought thus emerges and takes shape against Western racialization of Russians and African Americans as ‘barbaric’ and unhistorical peoples. These literary articulations of ‘nationality’ are expressed in two distinct modes. One mode of literary discourse asserts the presence of authentic ‘ethnic soul’ rooted in the ‘folk’ culture of Russian serfs and American slaves. The other articulates the inherent ‘double-mindness’ of the ‘ethnic soul’ of Russian and African American elites, educated in the Western literary traditions within which these intellectuals write, yet seek to subvert. 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 124

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The argument is organized around the ‘distinct phases’ of Russian and African American cultural self-consciousness. Bakhtinian ‘dialogics’ and W. E.B. DuBois’ ‘double-voicedness’ constitute the praxis along which these nationalist philosophies call and respond to each other and enter into a dialog with Western discourses. The ‘missionary nationalism’ of ‘Christian Westernizers’ Peter Chaadaev (1794–1856) and Alexander Crummell (1819–98) sought to uplift native cultures by aligning them with universal Western Christian civilization. These theorists relied on the ‘essential capacity’ of Russians and African Americans to reinvent themselves in the name of such universal civilization (ch. 1). In contrast, Ivan Kireevsky (1806–56) and W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963) asserted a non- Western national culture, yet one with a special place in history, for it was evolving toward a higher stage of the universalism achieved by Western civilization (ch. 2). Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1862) and W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) constitute the foundation of modern Russian and African American cultural nationalism. Both intellectuals were concerned with the emancipation of Russian serfs and African slaves in whose ‘folk’ music and dance they saw the true essence of ‘ethnic soul’ (ch. 3). The literary ethnographies of Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) and Zora Neale Hurston (1901–60) articulated the cultural gap between the literate nar- rators and the descendants of slaves and serfs, whose ‘veiled’ vernacular the educated were uncovering and recording (ch. 4). These are striking early examples of a deconstructionist mode that would become characteristic of postcolonial theory and practice. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) brought forth the ‘double-voicedness’ of the ‘ethnic soul’ of Westernized Russians and urbanized African Americans (ch. 5). ‘Alienated insiders’ Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) and Richard Wright (1908–60) rejected nationalist ideas of ‘ethnic soul’ and expressed the limits of given cultural identity (ch. 6). Russian ‘Eurasians’ (1921) and The New Negro Renaissance (1925) embodied simultaneously a claim to cultural particularism and multi- culturalism (ch. 7). Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora (1976) and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) were ‘fresh currents’ of Russophillian- ism and Afrocentrism constructing ‘ethnic soul’ which had to be pre- served in a dangerous world. This argument powerfully links two racially distinct, nationalist ‘speech communities’ across East and West, and across capitalism and communism. The signiﬁcance of ‘race’ and racial self-perceptions in the Russian case, however, is implied but not explicitly addressed. Dale Peterson’s engaging prose is not saturated with heavy literary jargon. It is thus accessible to scholars across ﬁelds, who are interested in racial, ethnic and national discursive formations beyond borders. Miglena Todorova University of Minnesota 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 125

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Rick Wallach (ed.), Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 399 pp. ISBN 0–7190–5947–X (hbk) £45; 0–7190–5948–8 (pbk) £15.99

The question of Cormac McCarthy’s literary status is currently an interesting one. A cult writer until All the Pretty Horses, his National Book Prize winning bestseller of 1992 brought him much wider fame. McCarthy and his violent, Gothic, misanthropic fiction may or may not come to be seen as essential to an understanding of American fiction in the later 20th century, but the contributors to this wide-ranging collection of essays are all convinced of the importance of his work. Understandably, though, they are less certain that others outside the fold share their view. This makes for a certain uneasiness that marks many of the essays in predictable ways: overstatement of the virtues and understatement of the problems which arise in the fiction. It also leads to a tendency to boosterism, which works directly against the essayists’ intentions. For example, at every opportunity McCarthy is compared not only to other major modern Southern Gothicists like Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, but to Twain, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Joyce, Mann, Rilke, Hemingway and Melville, among others. This is most unfortunate. There is too much in the volume of this kind of straining to secure the credentials of the author. However, given the origin of many of the essays as conference papers from various meetings of the Cormac McCarthy Society, which was established in 1993, one might both expect and forgive their overly partisan orientation. Setting aside that major concern, the volume is useful for including 26 essays on a wide range of topics, along with a decent bibli- ography, and appendices listing the names of the characters in each of McCarthy’s novels (which is the sort of fanzine undertaking which should appeal greatly to McCarthy aficionados). The collection is also valuable for mixing straightforward academic readings of the fiction with those written by novelists, and artists. As might be expected, the quality of the essays is varied, but none is without merit. And a number of essays will, without doubt, be central to whatever development takes place in the study of McCarthy’s work. William Prather’s analysis of McCarthy’s novel The Orchard Keeper, in terms of the traditions of the absurd and the grotesque, is both well argued and alert to the major intellectual tendencies on which McCarthy draws. Nell Sullivan’s essay regarding the preva- lence of the rotting female corpse as an object of desire in McCarthy’s fiction is promising, if rather too timid. Taken together, Peter Josyph’s and Edwin T. Arnold’s essays on McCarthy’s play The Stonemason provide a fascinating case history on the sheer weirdness attendant on the world of the arts in the contemporary United States (though the loss of discipline in the final part of the otherwise superb Josyph essay is inexplicable and embarrassing). David Holloway, John Beck and Neil Campbell all provide interesting readings of key questions raised by the novels in The Border Trilogy, while Mark Busby more than deserves the space allotted to his 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 126

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essay, one of the longest in the collection, for his accomplished analysis of the importance of borders, as image, topic and practice, in McCarthy’s late ﬁction. Finally, Rick Wallach has done a ﬁne job as editor of this collection, providing an intelligent ordering of highly disparate material as well as a useful introduction. For all the enthusiasm displayed here, however, the jury is still out on McCarthy and is likely to remain so. Kate Fullbrook University of the West of England

Thomas E. Bonsall, More than They Promised: The Studebaker Story. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 488 pp. ISBN 0–8047–3586–7 (hbk) $49.50

It is surely true that the automobile has dominated American society since the early 20th century. I cannot easily think of one aspect of everyday life that has not, in some way, been influenced by our collective love affair with motor transport. Yet I would also argue that historians have been slow to incorporate an understanding and an appreciation of automobile culture into their interpretation of the recent past. It is as if something so important to us, something so pervasive in our lives, something so ordinary, is neglected because of its very closeness, or else tucked away under the separate title of automotive history. Thomas E. Bonsall’s More than They Promised: The Studebaker Story is, in my view, a very fine contribution to our understanding of the history of the motor vehicle. In this book Bonsall traces the history of the Stude- baker company beginning in 1736 when the first Studebakers immigrated from Germany and settled in Pennsylvania where they established a blacksmithing and wagon-making business by 1788. From there the business grew and diversified, becoming renowned for quality production of wagons and carriages. When the automobile first appeared in the last years of the 19th century, Studebaker was well positioned to move into automobile manufacture – commencing in 1897. Studebaker enjoyed the distinction of being the only top carriage builder also to become a top ranked automobile manufacturer. The company remained involved with the automobile market until 1966, when Studebaker reached the end of the line. Bonsall’s book is intended to be a history of the Studebaker company, emphasizing those decisions and characteristics which contributed to its demise. Indeed, the last chapter is headed ‘Why Studebaker Failed’ and is dedicated to an analysis of the downfall of Studebaker. Bonsall has con- centrated heavily on the management of Studebaker, the men in charge, the decisions they took and the efforts they made to design profitable cars. As a consequence, the story is punctuated by models and management changes. The evolution of the company is represented in the design changes to the Studebaker vehicle, including the 1953 product line, which 74P 08 bkrevs (ds) 30/1/03 1:05 pm Page 127

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Bonsall describes as ‘one of the worst conceived and executed in the history of the industry’. The book focuses much attention on the main models, particularly the chequered history of the ‘Avanti’, one of the most revolutionary designs in the Studebaker catalogue. Bonsall admits in his introduction that the approach he took in this book required decisions about where to concentrate his attention and what to omit. ‘There is no such thing as a “complete” history of a great industrial enterprise in the sense that every possible avenue is exhaus- tively explored’, he explains. He is right of course, but I can’t help thinking that this book contains many tantalizing forays into areas that could have and perhaps should have been developed, even given the chosen angle. For example, Bonsall often draws attention to labor relations in the South Bend, Indiana, plant and refers to the implications of a labor policy intended to pacify workers. This is one aspect that must have had enormous ramifications for the Studebaker Company, and yet it could not be fully developed because the book’s structure follows management changes and the rise and fall of new models in the market. Bonsall knows the importance of automobile manufacturing in American history because he identifies the Studebaker Company very early on in the book as ‘in microcosm the story of the industrial development of America, a story which is both interesting and important, indeed’. Bonsall is correct, however, that the links between the Studebaker Company and the rest of industrializing America were not strongly made. Instead, this book concentrates on the struggles of one company to stay afloat. It is, therefore, a mixed story of missed opportunities, high idealism, poor decisions, struggles, growth and decline. Bonsall’s book is a good read and a real contribution to an important field. It is necessary for all kinds of historians to be aware of automotive history simply because of the enormous impact the automobile has had and continues to have on American history and culture. The more diverse automotive history becomes the better for us all. Jennifer Clark University of New England, Australia 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 35

Article

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

Globalization, spectral aesthetics and the global soul Tracking some ‘uncanny’ paths to trans-Paciﬁc globalization

Rob Wilson University of California at Santa Cruz, USA

Abstract The intensification of neo-liberal globalization under US hegemony has all the more activated uncanny forces and spectral forms in various trans-Pacific sites. This article contrasts Korean and US films and travelogues to elaborate uncanny paths to globalization and articu- late modes of spectral critique. The seamlessness of globalization across the Pacific is thus threatened by uncanny anxieties, disrupted space–time coordinates, and everyday fears that challenge the end-of-history triumph in marketization.

Keywords global/local ● globalization ● postcolonial ● uncanny

The experience of Latin America [photographing migration sites and displaced peoples] made the sprawling cities of Asia seem strangely familiar. . . . Yet at times I would forget where I was. Cairo? Jakarta? Mexico City? (Salgado, 2000: 11) Under the space–time compressions of globalization, time seems harried, frantic, ‘out of joint’ (see Robbins, 2001); place all but lost into a deformed hologram of ﬂux, speed, and mixture; the self coded into a trans-local semblance of inter-connection, multiplicity, and pseudo-power. ‘Thank you for activating your Bank of Trans-America credit card. You may now use it at any one of 19 million locations worldwide’, a voice-message from God-knows-where comforted me, as I used my not-so-bottomless credit

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card to purchase an electronic ticket to jet across 16 time zones from San Francisco to Hong Kong. Globalization becomes installed via a triumphal- ist discourse of achieved ‘globality’ (see Radhakrishnan, 2001), but it brings no relief: crossing Pacific vastness, we feel like Whitman (1989[1860]) haunted by lack at the end of Facing West from California’s Shores – ‘the circle almost circled [on the Passage to India] . . . (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)’. These ‘global souls’ as Pico Iyer has called the more fortunate citizens of the ‘post-imperial’ and/or ‘post-global order’ like himself (2000: 91, 284) – in passages echoing Emerson, abolishing selfhood in a 747 cabin over the Pacific, as the Postcolonial Oversoul enters some ‘duty-free zone’ of transnational ‘deracination’ on route (for Time Inc.) to write-up Asia/Pacific (2000: 19) – such souls are not fully at home in the jetlagged speed and rhizomatic newness of global modernity. They are (like Whitman’s trans- imperial Oversoul) in and out of those globalization processes, watching and wondering at them. From Taipei and Paris to Los Angeles and Seoul, citizens of such agglom- erating global-cities (becoming ‘fellow in-betweeners’ [Iyer, 2000: 19] of rootless places), become disoriented, restless, haunted by the uncanniness (‘un-homeliness’) of a world driven by the dynamism of neo-liberal values, uprooting local identity and ties of location, yet riven by irruptions of spirit presences and place-hauntings that techno-science cannot abolish nor calibrate. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin was fond of quoting a passage from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to the effect that the ‘fever- ishly youthful pace of material production’ in the mid-19th-century US was being driven by the creative-destructive dynamics of capitalist technologies like the railroad, steam engine, phototype, hydraulic mining, and telegraph (embraced as quasi-poetic achievements of US Manifest Destiny by that same past-liquidating Emerson et al.; see Stephanson, 1995: 53–65). Such forces of relentless production and waste ‘had neither time nor opportunity . . . to abolish the old spirit world’ (Benjamin, 1989: 52). So the poets under high capitalism have anxiously wandered the malls, crowded sidewalks, dried-up rivers, and back alleys of the modernizing city in search of some lost aura or spirit-shining, as alienated into the commodity form, cultural sign, or material technology, and looking back to the diminished maker of global production as ‘profane illumination’. This lyric ‘shock’ is all too fleeting (‘unreal city’ lamented Eliot of London) to disrupt the feeling of not-being-at-home. For Baudelaire, in a famous prose-poem on the cusp of global modernity in Paris Spleen, the poet had lost his vaunted aura of lyric productivity in the urban mud; for Poe, in the hurrying city crowd which treats its dwellers like fellow-ghosts; for Whitman, the poet had squandered the afflatus of high-seeing and sublime selfhood in the sea-drift and dirty muck of the Long Island Sound or displaced such personal attributes into the euphoria of Brooklyn Bridge. But we are on the other side of Hiroshima as instance of the US sublime. Post- modern thinkers of ‘dissensus’ like Lyotard have challenged the reign of 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 37

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neo-liberalism’s master-narrative, claiming to produce ‘the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of capitalist technoscience’ (1992: 17) by mocking the deformed spaces and mediatized genres the subject inhabits as life-world. ‘We are like Gullivers in the world of technoscience: sometimes too big, sometimes too small, but never the right size’, Lyotard warns in his trope of uncanny dispossession (1992: 79). Global cities all the more register the circulation and mix of locals and non-locals; they are becoming ‘translocalities’ of semiotic interface more unbounded and open than the nation and its border-stalking citizenship criteria. As Ien Ang writes in On Not Speaking Chinese, describing discrepant versions of this rooted/routed mix of fluid ‘Chineseness’ via her own unsettling diaspora from Indonesia to Amsterdam to an anxiously ‘Asianizing’ Australia, the global city ‘is one large and condensed contact zone in which borders and ethnic boundaries are blurred and where processes of hybridization are rife’, and diasporas are undone (2001: 89). The very intensification of globalization flows in such spaces has often led to the felt necessity and desire to elaborate ‘an intensified version of the local situation’ (Wilson and Dissanayake, 1996: 5) at the global/local interface expressing ‘both/and’ linkage. ‘Best thing about Brooklyn? All the countries of the world are here. Worst thing about Brooklyn? None of us get along’, concludes an elderly black man in the Wayne Wang/Paul Auster movie Blue in the Face (used as an epigraph to Atlanta by Iyer, 2000: 174). At some Pacific Rim extremity of race war, uneven development and lurid catastrophe, Los Angeles nestles within such an ‘ecology of fear’ (see Mike Davis, 1998) a la Blade Runner cum Mulholland Drive. The banal anguish of not fully belonging to this modern life-world, that uneasy state of being outside its space–time coordinates, takes away self- attunement to urban discipline and globalizing locality but gives the possibility of an uncanny rupture of the spirit world and its alien utter- ances. ‘In Angst one has an “uncanny” feeling’, is how Heidegger describes this famously in the modernist ontology of Being and Time. The fretful feeling of being thrown into forms of modernity is disrupted even more so by the ‘nothing and nowhere’ feeling of ‘not-being-at-home’ in the presence of dislocated, subliminal, or traumatized being. Such dis-attuned anxiety, in its full range of terror, trauma, and wonder, ‘fetches Da-sein [Being] out of its entangled absorption in the “world”’; here, the uncanny approaches, irrupts, and dismantles the taken-for-granted security of the everyday space–time horizon’ (1996: 176) and the threat of placelessness of life in the city.1 Mike Davis has pointed out, in his New Left Review analysis of New York City going up in smoke and flames after 9/11, that the imaginary of global terrorism and war-from-above hitting the EuroAmerican city was long dreamt of, imagined, and luridly posited, in recent Hollywood action films and science fiction, as well as darker modes of German expression- ism and Spanish surrealism from World War I. The event thus had that ‘uncanny effect’ of disrupted modernity (he quotes Freud, and echoes 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 38

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Zˇizˇek, 2002, on the Hollywood uncanny), ‘as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality’ (2001: 38). Reaching some nodal point of global/local materialization in the World Trade Center’s twin towers vanishing into the smoke and debris of instant ruins, the resulting ‘globalization of terror’ and specter of security threats has become an everyday affect of the global city, from Taipei and Paris to New York and Seoul. In more structural terms of North/South dialectics, as more people are born into poverty and made vulnerable to the effects of an interdependent economy of weaponry, spectacle, state security, identity theft and terror, ‘global violence [becomes] the hard core of our existence’ as Sven Lindquist outlines in the cautionary fragments and long-duree of global violence-from-above in A History of Bombing (2001: 186). The Bush II administration of global empire seems to take a special paranoid pleasure in the return of the security-state apparatus from cold war storage and the binary discourses of civilizational antagonism between us/them. The uncanny all the more circulates in the global technologies of post- modernity (like cinema of the fantastic or the magical-realist novel), haunts them, gives them a new or exploratory efficacy in the aesthetic mapping of the real, however broken or incomplete the languages or frames. In Mod- ernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai is pointing to such a shift in this global ‘technoscape’ of interactive narratives and clashing ‘ideoscapes’ as the imagination takes on the force of a social practice and becomes a site for figuring collective agency crucial to ‘the new global order’ (1996: 31) of mix and flow. Unsettling this neo-liberal regime of foreign globalization, Derrida has called this bursting-out of spectral media-effects a global hauntology, ‘the ghost that goes on speaking’ (1994: 32, 51) in our technologies and languages from the future and across borders of our nation- states. Such modes of alien ‘hauntology’ and threatening otherness might have a peculiar pungency and attraction in a divided country like South Korea, for example, haunted by a Marxist alter-reality and Confucian simulacrum to the North, the cold war remainder of what President Bush has recently re-demonized (like some lost Nazi kernel) as our new and abiding ‘axis of evil’.2 The media of representation, like photography or film, can barely keep up with or register the new global conditions of migration, urban saturation and transnational flight (see Salgado, 2000). The ‘euphoria of liberal democracy and of the market economy’ (Derrida, 1994: 56) is haunted in South Korean films throughout the 1990s by ‘spectral effects’, as I will discuss, and images forth an alternative geopolitics of blasted trees, haunted temples, restless tombs, blind sooth- sayers, possessed beds, the returning horror of the ruined and dispos- sessed. Such a triumph of capitalist modernity is challenged, bereaved, threatened with catastrophe amid all the manic watching of the dot-com- dot-gone-dot con calculus of the globalizing market. As Derrida puts the claim for the politically uncanny effect and the ‘strange familiarity’ of unhomely spectral forces of globalization like mounting homelessness or 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 39

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migrant workers (‘the visibility of the invisible’ [1994: 100] at home in the 1990s), ‘Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony’ (1994: 37). Belongs, I would say, even more so to a neo-liberal state like South Korea, which assumed and pushed towards some kind of enlightenment-based abolishment of the pre-modern and, as it were, oriental allure of such Buddhistic ghosts and rural paths. The Buddhist alternative path to national enlightenment via an ascetic renunciation of urban wealth and the worldly world haunts the geopoli- cal cosmology of an art film like Bae Yong-Kyun’s Why Has the Boddhi- Dharma Left for the East? (1989), for example, which uses the city to represent the allure of market accumulation, disorientation and fury, if not the blindness of the poor to such a fate (as captured by the blind mother the priestly son has abandoned). But, beautifully filmed to the point of Asiatic sublimity, the film shows only a tattered temple and a broken male-centered genealogy of succession, ash, and ascetic anguish as some kind of dead-end. An alternative path to globalization, an alternative Buddhistic cosmology for Korea, but wandering as in some anti- modern void (see Willemen [2002] on alternative regimes of Korean space-making and subject-position in cinema).3 In a 1996 Korean horror film directed by Jacky Kang (Kang Chegye), Gingko Bed, the scientific and artistic orders of contemporary Seoul are disrupted by the uncanny entry of a spirit-laden wooden bed returning from the pre-modern order of feudal relationships which threatens the cigarette-and-laughter modern relationship of the woman doctor and her art-lecturer lover. The jealous class rivalry between a general and a court musician over the preternaturally beautiful Mi-Dan acts as an uncanny catalyst and works its way, from a ‘love felt over a thousand years’ in the spirit world by General Kang, into the relationship of the present-day couple, ruining their careers, their homes and offices, burning up their horizon of banal everydayness. The cash-nexus of the ordinary city is put out of joint, defamiliarized: some stunning visual effects add symbolic credibility to the cinematic spirit-conjuring, as needy ghosts flit in and out of contemporary bodies and disrupt the medical and artistic technologies for measuring the line between life and death, self and other, body and soul, reality and spirit. The uncanny seems at times luridly theatrical (hoaky sprectrality of the special effects, as it were), but in its reach aims to hook into the political unconsciousness of abolished spiritual beliefs and debts adhering to the past. Released from the market of commodity exchange and returned to the fetish world of Korean spiritual-political- romantic force, the gingko bed becomes a kind of commodity in reverse, ‘a “thing” without phenomenon, a thing in flight that surpasses the senses’ in its uncanny spectrality, disturbing the homey bedroom (see Derrida [1994: 150] on the fetishized invisible exchange-value of the commodity form under capital). The out-of-the-body experience of Gingko Bed is rendered everyday and normal via the quasi-Buddhist horizon of metempsychosis, souls of a 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 40

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romantic triangle reincarnated into two gingko trees and a hawk. The Korean middle-class couple are finally restored to everyday modernity, but not before the comforting boundaries of modern reality and the space–time coordinates of techno-capital (which seemingly have abolished the spirit- world in its rationalized calculus of instrumentalized profit) have been luridly challenged with the blood and terror of vengeful ghosts, vampiric murders, heart captures, resurrections, spirit unions, and a large-scale exorcism symbolized in the end by the burning up of the gingko bed. We have to wonder, with the innovative Korean scholar and film- maker Kim So-Young, if these ‘uncanny’ effects circulating in such films of the 1990s have not surfaced to re-visit present-day Korea to remind the county of what has been lost in the furious making of the postwar modern city and capitalist nation. In an interview with Kim So-Young in Postcolonial Studies, Chris Berry has called attention to the recent ‘resurgence of the fantastic mode in various [Korean] box office hits’ such as the horror films The Quiet Family and Whispering Corridors in the anti-globalization climate of 1998, becoming popular ‘just when entry to the OECD and democratic politics seemed to have secured middle class prosperity’ (Kim and Berry, 2000: 54). Pushing this return of the repressed back before the Asian currency crisis of 1997 called into question Korea’s bond to the neo-liberal discourse of globalization. Kim So-Young links the ‘brutal sweep of the modernization project’ under the regime of Pak Chun-hee to the ongoing ruse and rise of Korean cinema as ‘liminal space’ and uncanny irruption. The Korean uncanny indeed has a long trajectory in postwar Korean cinema and surfaces, again and again in differing contexts, as a ghostly imagery of what we could call fantastic critique. Kim calls attention to the ‘re-emergence of the fantastic mode’ (2001: 27) in such new wave late 1990s films as Gingko Bed, Nine Tales Fox, Soul Guardian and Yongari. Beyond this, she has deftly exposed the cold war traumas and all-too- reactionary geopolitics returning to haunt the Korean blockbuster mode of pseudo-Hollywood production in films like Phantom Submarine (1999), JSA (Joint Security Agreement) (2000), Soul Guardians (1999), and Shiri (1999). We might also recall Pak Chol-su’s alluring film 301/302 (1995), where two apartment dwellers act out their symptoms of over-eating and under-eating in cleanly modern spaces haunted by traumas of childhood abuse and a claustrophobic marriage evacuating the seeming prosperity and stylized success of a well-ordered life. As Kim So-Young summarizes this generic promiscuity and trans/national imaginary of such films, ‘Ghosts seem to exist not only in the horror film but in the propaganda film, historical epic, and action and espionage genre. Korean cinema is becoming the liminal space of apparitions’ (2001: 304). These films pursue a ‘discrepant hyridity’, as Esther C.M. Yau and Kyung Hyun Kim note more broadly, and in so doing ‘pursue the politics of the possible by articulat- ing the discrepant, the non-normative, the traumatic, and the scandalous in the films’ rendition of the Asia/Pacific’ as an uncanny region haunted 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 41

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by ghosts, ghouls, and various motley dead or ex-colonial figures who ‘have yet to die’ (2001: 282–4). Chunhyang and her undying love for Mongryong is by no means a ghost story, but her force as intertextual construct and interpellative legacy in Korean patriarchal culture gives her much-filmed narrative a haunting quality as blasted allegory coming down from the premodern past of the Chosun Dynasty to call upon and constrain the globalizing nation-state present and its concert-going (or Hollywood-enchanted?) audience. From Yu Chin Hahn’s Chinese-character version in 1754 to the popular tradition- trenched novel of 1955, Chunhyangjun, not to mention more recent joint performances of the pansori folk tale by South Korean and North Korean artistic groups performing in Pyongyang, the Chunhyang narrative stands at the core of Korean folk culture, conveying an inter-textual archive of attitudes, beliefs, pieties, mores, and modes (see H. Lee, 2000: 64–90). As Kim So-Young notes of myriad Korean melodramas fetishizing suffering women as a way of narrating ‘the inscription of the new patriarchal order in a rapidly shifting society’, one of the earliest Korean films, Chunhyang- chon [The Story of Chunhyang] (1923) enlisted a renowned contemporary courtesan to play the lead role of virtuous wife and thus gave the film- commodity an early courtly aura and cross-over of traditional prestige for modern culture (2001: 304–5). Haunted by class tensions and the gender codes and sexual morality structuring a Confucian-based social order, ‘Chunhyangjon is a text apt for an ideological interpretation’ by Korean film makers both in the North and the South, as Hyangjin Lee has argued, whereby globalizing Koreans can work through a heritage of colonized subjectivity and seemingly preserve residual feudal values of face-saving, ethical idealism, and the patriarchal gaze (see H. Lee, 2000: 72 and chapter two, ‘Gender and Cinematic Adaptation of the Folk Tale, Ch-unhyangjon’; for a strong critique undermining such ‘nativist’ claims within the ‘everyday’ capitalist modernity of hyper-globalizing East Asian sites like Korea and Japan, see Harootunian, 2000: 37–42). A vast intertext of cultural uses and implications surely haunts any contemporary retelling of the Chunhyang story, creating (I would hazard to guess) vast disjunctures of meaning between local, national, and international audiences. As film director Im Kwon-Taek has noted of this story, this beloved Korean folktale of a forbidden passion and sublimating romance crossing class lines had been filmed 14 times before his own version became the first Korean film to compete at the Cannes Film Festival and the first of his own to go global beyond an art-festival film venue. By way of pushing this reflection on a distinctively Korean path to trans-Pacific globalization towards a contemporary end, I want further to interrogate the global/local dynamics of this figure in Im Kwon-Taek’s recent mini-blockbuster film, Chunhyang (2000), to call attention to the uncanny localism of this period-piece film which actually once again tracked a distinctive Korean path to globalization. Here I am drawing upon and applying an argument I made recently in 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 42

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the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal (2001a), outlining a more sweeping analysis of films by Im from Mandala (1981) to Sopyonje (1993). There I called attention to and defended Im’s use of ‘strategic localism’, so long as Korean film increasingly confronts, as a structural condition, ‘the larger global/local plight of entrenched locality and nationality as such under global endangerment’ (2001a: 308). Employing over 8,000 extras and 12,000 costumes and carefully researched and filmed with impeccable cinematic detail, Chunhyang emerges as ‘Korea’s largest cinematic production ever’, the Dream-Suite Productions website boasts in De Mille- like terms of the spectacle-sublime. But, more on the deformative or localist mark, Ryan Motteshead in an indieWire interview (4 January 2001) with Chunhyang’s director has called attention to ‘Im’s stubborn Korean-ness’ in his use of the pansori voice-over narrative, not just as context but as perspectival device and mise en scene. Indeed, it is fair to say that the ‘caterwauling . . . barking and yowling and shouting’ pansori singer, here played by Cho Sang Hyun, is what gives the movie its uncanny Korean power and defamiliarizing frame: its turn to represent (in aural and visual disjunctive modes coming in and out of narrative synch) an alternative mode of narration, linking the audience of the performative context (shrouded at first in black, and later brought into the diegesis via call-and-response towards the film’s ending). ‘Who knows what will happen after the story’s end?’, the pansori narrator taunts the aroused audience with the seemingly happy ending, suggesting that the portrayal of exploitative rulers ‘fattening their pockets’ and ‘impoverishing the poor’ may continue into the patterns of crony-capitalism and trickle-up economics haunting modern-day Seoul and its rural peripheries like the Cholla province itself where the film is set and where Im comes from. The ideology of class status uttered by the corrupt Governor Byun – ‘class has a natural order and cannot be violated’ – gives way to a discourse of human rights and a sacrificial vision of gender equity. Less comfortingly, the fidelity to principles of a Confucian state and the scholar-centered patriarchy (‘serving two husbands is like serving two kings’, Chunhyang laments to the point of self-sacrifice) are given postcolonial ratification via cinematic spectacle that borders on epic in its vistas and Citizen-Kane like perspectives upon power seen from afar and from below. Pondering the uneven situation of globalization in which (to quote Im Kwan-Taek in the indieWire interview) ‘Korean films have yet to establish their own identity for international audiences’ and furthermore having faced the relative inattention of international film criticism due to what Tony Rayns (1994) sees as ‘extreme specificity in references and commitment to a kind of activism deemed passe in the west’ (p. 22), Korean films are beginning to forge their way into the international circuit in a distinctive and scrappy, if belated, way. As I have argued, ‘Korean film at times seems torn between the quite culture-based extremities of these two transnational film genres: (a) the diasporic one [followed by Ang Lee and many 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 43

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Hong Kong film makers] portraying international hybridity, global flux, and cultural impurity, versus (b) the other deftly self-orientalizing one using an ethnographic gaze backward, imagining some damaged trait as a national essence or enduring cultural trait’ (2001a: 315). Chunhyang, in my opinion, again heads down this latter path toward globalization, portraying with ethnographic and visual mastery and sumptuous detail certain enduring Korean stories, genres, if not cultural traits. When asked by Ryan Motteshead what he thought American audiences could take away from watching this Korean film version of Chunhyang, director Im replied, warily but with grim humor: ‘American audiences may very well not be interested, because I am not well known in the United States. So it may be very natural for audiences not to come to see my films [laughs]. However, I am not too worried about it’ (2001). Such is the power of the Korean uncanny to make its way through the circuits of globalization, laughing, seemingly oblivious to a superpower whose genres, outlets, forms and codes often define the very global in terms of its own neo-liberal particulars, though American film thankfully is by no means the only worlding-world of globalization. Global productions increasingly send the trans-Pacific local culture offshore and world-wide, resolving the tensions of imperial history and global imbalance into mongrel fantasy, soft spectacle, and present-serving myth. Given the reach and impact of an ‘increasingly globalized popular culture’, we have to wonder (with Paul Gilroy) if such works are not engaged in creating ‘racialized signs’ of cultural difference and, with all the liberal good-will of a corporate muticulturalism gone cosmopolitical and sublime, spreading ‘commodified exotica’ under the myth of authenticity (Gilroy, 2000: 13–21).4 Solidarities evoked around blood or land, crucial to the sovereignty claims and precolonial ontology of native peoples in the Pacific, are superceded by the pop-culture community of Elvis Presley music, beach-going, and the pleasures of multicultural mixture as in Disney’s pro-tourist fantasy, Lilo and Stitch (2002).5 Full of a residual animism and uncanny forces that settler colonialism has not fully displaced or marketed, the Hawaiian islands (for example) may be ‘the most super- stitious place in the world’ (or at least the United States), as ex-local Annie Nakao has written,6 tracing the impact of Japanese obake, or ghost stories, and the uncanny hold of native Hawaiian lore (like the volcano goddess Pele) upon its residents (or driving the contradictions of a mixed-heritage novelist like John Dominis Holt in Waimea Summer [1975]). While economically remote or irrelevant to global production, the offshore Pacific (however alternative its vision of Oceania or place) has long served as such a testing space for global fantasy and the transnational reach of ‘Ameri- canization’ stories, where nuclear weapons, imperial wars, contact phobias, cultural mutations, and (nowadays) the multicultural hyperbole of transnational community can work themselves out with romantic dreami- ness, narrative immunity, and the (ridiculous) postcolonial sublimity of historical oblivion.7 The full force of these trans-Pacific displacements – 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 44

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ecological, financial, semiotic and cultural – demand the scrutiny and resistance of de-orientalizing tactics, for the ‘uncanny’ Pacific of transnational globalization remains haunted by historical injustice, social unevenness, and racial phobias coming back from the postcolonial future. Looking back to John Houston’s close-to-war-propaganda film, Across the Pacific (1942), the Pacific was portrayed as a deceptively romantic, uncanny, and ultimately phobic space full of inscrutable oriental forces (and their subversive white allies) harboring imperial designs and an array of anti-US forces as they gather around to undermine the US hegemony over the Panama Canal just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. A huge strategizing white man is a Japanese spy and double agent (played by Sydney Greenstreet, a karate expert, reciting haiku breathlessly) who is sickened by the weak-willed and drunken white rancher in Panama, where the Japanese hide the attack planes. Even a second-generation Asian American ‘nisei’ character from California is shown to be part of the international takeover move by the Japanese axis – this all had to be decoded and stopped by the counter-espionage Humphrey Bogart character (and his hotel-owning Chinese ally), who thwarts the Japanese air attack just in time in a kind of lone-gun, stealthy, and pragmatic bit-by- bit way. Such works of cinema helped to provide the perceptual apparatus to reclaim, fantasize over, and integrate the Pacific as an American-dominated space, as Paul Virilio has written: ‘For the Ameri- cans, the abstractness of their recapture of the Pacific islands made “cinema direction” a necessity – hence the importance of the camera crews committed to the [Pacific] campaign.’8 ‘The Pacific is the white man’s ocean’, as William Randolph Hearst pro- claimed in response to the Pearl Harbor air attack (quoted in Brechin, 1999: 230), and Houston’s movie works to provide a geopolitical rationale and, even more so, ‘perceptual arsenal’ (Virilio, 1989: 9) to keep it this way. This phobic Pacific as space of peril and threat is recognizable in an array of war-era poems by Robinson Jeffers, as in ‘The Eye’, which shows an ocean full of blood, scum, and filth, and the ‘world-quarrel of wester- ing/ and eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of faiths’. Or in Robert Frost’s west-coast poem ‘Once By the Pacific’, where the ocean grows apocalyptic with yellow peril forces and God’s Jehovah- like wrath, inscribed in the trans-Pacific sky and water: ‘The clouds were low and hairy in the skies/Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.’ In his white-republic diatribe, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (1855), Hinton Rowan Helper portrayed this phobic version of the trans- Pacific in 1855 as a mongrelizing site of swarming immigrants like ‘the solemn Chinamen, tattooed [Pacific] islander, and slovenly Chilean’ coming in across the ocean from alien sites of bad blood and cheap labor, thus creating a ‘copper Pacific’ as threatening politically as the chattel slavery and miscegenation of the Black Atlantic. ‘Our population was already too heterogeneous’, Helper writes of everyday life in the free-soil American state of California, ‘before the Chinese came; but now another 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 45

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adventitious ingredient has been added; and I should not wonder at all, if the copper of the Pacific yet becomes as great a subject of discord and dis- sension as the ebony of the Atlantic’ (quoted in Robert G. Lee 2000: 49, 26). Exclusion acts would soon be activated to try to keep this ever-cop- pering Pacific white, and Pacific coastal states like California the exclusive domain of so-called ‘native’ white labor. Globalization discourse nowadays inscribes a very different trans- Pacific, one full of motion and mixture and interconnection to Asia and the Pacific. This globalization ‘discourse implies concurrence’ (Glissant, 1989: 3), and would push the globe towards some utopic transnational fusion: recuperating an Asian origin of trans-Pacific synthesis dreamed of by Whitman’s Facing West from California’s Shores (1989[1860]), when ‘the house of maternity’ in Asia civilizations and wisdom-traditions would meet hard-headed European technologies, ‘the circle almost circled’, Columbus or Emerson settling down to meditate in Bombay. Globality achieved, image of wholeness and completion and fusion-culture. But we can recall how Whitman-the-post-imperial-American is haunted by lack, incompletion, something missing in the grand global journey of translated- empire from Atlantic origins to Pacific telos – ‘But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?’ – as the poem ends on a note of anti-Hegelian failure and the breakdown of the globalization telos. The seamlessnesss of US-dominated globalization across the Pacific is all the more these days threatened by a new-world order of anxieties, disrupted space–time coordinates, and everyday fears, and perhaps it is best to keep this war-era and Cold War Pacific of clashing imperalisms, civilizational divides, and racial antagonisms lurking in mind as we push to map a contemporary array of uncanny forces and emergent forms that give the lie to the end-of-history triumph in marketization. Less critique than symptom of those neurotic globalization patterns we are living through as temporal dislocation and spatial disorientation, Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (2000) is a highly privileged postcolonial travelogue written around a set of haunted global/local paradoxes: the more market unity we have, the less the ‘global soul’ feels it belongs, the more it longs for a sense of home, a psycho-geography of postmodern belonging, and bond to place (which Iyer feels, finally, at a Buddhist spirit-lantern site in Nara, Japan, his own home in Santa Barbara, California, having gone up in flames). The more unity we have on certain levels of commodity-exchange and media flow, the more tribal, fragmented, and divided we remain as civilizations and cultures. Iyer searches through the East/West and North/South hybridity- effects of various paradigmatic sites of globalization: Los Angeles Airport (LAX) as Disney-like site of multicultural mixture and border-crossing flux and fear; Toronto as global city of managed cosmopolitan interface; London as site of periphery-to-center reversals and ex-imperial transformation into Cool Britannia; Atlanta as site of Olympics brotherhood and terrorist threat. The threat of ‘residual tribalism’ gives way to the 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 46

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mongrel mix of global commensurability.9 But above all for Iyer, the site of maximal globalization where the global soul feels most (temporally and spatially) disoriented, lost from place, lost into ‘the global marketplace’ of commodified identity and the self becoming a PIN number, credit card, and phone card, is Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, Iyer portrays his ‘global twin’, a British friend (fellow student of Oxford and Eton) named Richard (now working as management consultant for an American firm ‘in a global market that asks him to move as fast as it does’ [2000: 84], although his ancestors had served as governor-generals in India) who lives in an expensive flat furnished with suitcases, laptops, modems, cell phones, and Delta business class toilet kits for ‘people passing through’ (p. 82). Life at One Pacific Place has become a space of flows and transient comforts, a ‘permanent hotel’ that flows into a shopping mall and an airport for leaving and returning, a place to use 12 phone cards and to live as if ‘in midair’, like some ex- imperial airplant. Richard’s life as ‘flexexecutive’ lackey to high-capitalist exchange is so accelerated, so tied into the nexus of global markets, flows, and 24-hour exchanges, that at times he gets so jet-lagged he does not know who he is nor where he is. In Hong Kong, Iyer paradoxically realizes the digitalized comfort of belonging in some de-materialized way: ‘You could live on the plane, I realized, or on the phone – or, best of all, on the phone on the plane’ (p. 85). Pico Iyer’s postcolonial life of luxurious displacement on the Pacific Rim, like Richard’s, nonetheless becomes a compound of time lag, culture mix, zone shift, ‘living out of displacement’ (p. 86). On the cusp of the Chinese turnover in 1997, Iyer finds not a ‘uniculture’ but remnants of ‘generic’ British colonial style that make him feel (in Hong Kong’s Central District, spotting an Anglican church) not just like being in Singapore or Bombay (where his father is from), but as if ‘I was in England, on a gray November morning’ (p. 90). Amid the transience and mongrel flux of globalizing and postcolonializing Hong Kong with its share of boat people and migrant domestics, Iyer barely engages with via his ever-present hybridity tropes of surface mix, the space will also ‘accommodate a thousand kinds of homesickness’ (p. 93) and lead to gazing at those diasporic paradoxes of ‘white coolie waiters from Britain and Australia who’d taken over the menial jobs in Hong Kong now that the lines of power were being redrawn’ (p. 105). That Hong Kong is now filled with ‘abode seekers’ from mainland China only adds to the pathos of this uneasy mix of privileged nomads with less fortunate refugees and labor diasporas of the global flow (see Salgado [2000: 333–431] on labor flows into global cities of Asia). Losing his soul into a more privileged version of the ‘sweatshop sublime’ (see Robbins, 2002), Iyer’s self-doubling Richard ends up lost in the more digitalized or cyborg sublimity of global capitalism: he leaves Iyer with phone numbers for an office in Tokyo, home and fax numbers in Hong Kong, an 800 number for voice mail, mobile number, fax numbers and his mother’s number in London, a toll-free number for calling voice 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 47

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mail from Japan. ‘Somehow, that left no room in my address book for his name,’ Iyer ruefully concludes (p. 112). Only displaced back into a trans- Pacific Japan glutted with global products, and yet still staunchly itself as locality and culture, can Iyer claim to feel at home, as if enacting here some uncanny repetition of Thoreau at Walden Pond; but this time the transcendental market release into the illusion of autonomy takes place in Nara, Japan, with a woman who speaks little English and Iyer himself speaking less Japanese, as if in entering into semiotic immunity and de- racinated into the global oversoul: ‘I read Thoreau on sunny Sunday mornings, as Baptist hymns float from across the way, and think that in our mongrel, mixed-up planet, this may be as close to the calm and clarity of Walden as one can find’ (p. 296). Pico Iyer, rather obsessively, now stages the cultural fantasies and psychic needs of a latter-day American transcendentalism, but finds a home for them not at Walden Pond but in Nara and Kyoto, fronting the Pacific Rim interface of transnational encounter.10 The American transcendental imaginary of Iyer’s global oversoul has been brought as spiritual cargo along with Starbucks, Costcos, American Online, and Mister Donut across the Pacific and transplanted into a Japan full of ‘Western things (played out, as it were, in katakana script)’ (p. 283). Iyer realizes (in this last chapter, called ‘The Alien Home’) that ‘a sense of home or neighborhood can emerge only from within’ (p. 282). Ever mobile yet longing to belong to the brave new world of techno-driven globalization, Iyer roots down in Japan amid uncanny disruptions where ‘ming- lings are more and more the fabric of our mongrel worlds’ (p. 292), writing transcendence amid the anxiety-laden space–time co-ordinates of globalization for the offshore global soul. Iyer’s uncanny path to East/West or trans-Pacific globalization is a recognizably American one, however, linking up and down to local differences while at the same time diasavowing traces of imperialism or transnational expansionism in the drive to install (translate different cultures into) a neo-liberal American version of universal liberation at LAX: ‘And so half-inadvertently, not knowing whether I was facing east or west, not knowing whether it was day or night, I slipped into that peculiar state of mind – or no-mind – that belongs to the no time, no place of the airport. . . . I had entered the stateless state of jet lag’ (p. 59). Or, better said, Iyer has re-entered the uncanny myth-engine of a US-centered global capitalism on its latest Passage to Cathay, where Pacific Rim expansion is recoded as self-loss and the globalization dynamic is read (translated downward) as a victory of the local culture over the regime of global time- space.11

Notes 1Heidegger’s disturbing closeness to ‘mystical raciological ideas’ and quasi- fascist resolutions to the ﬂux of global modernity are critiqued by Paul 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 48

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Gilroy (2000: 63–5). The romantic notion of organic Lebensraum (living space) was appropriated by German fascism into a place purified of mongrel bloods and mixed cultures (p. 39). 2 By Confucian simulacrum to the North, I am alluding to the hyper- culturalist argument recently put forth by Hyangjin Lee in Contemporary Korean Cinema (2000) that the films of North and South Korea, especially those from the 1980s, share a core of residual Confucian values that endure despite the ideological divisions of capitalism in the South and socialism to the North: ‘Confucian tenets on social hierarchy and family life are widely incorporated into the films from both areas. The five adaptations of Ch’unhyangjon, for example, invariably stress the time-honored Confucian family ethic based on harmony, unity, and loyalty among its members’ (p. 191). I will return to the Chunhyang film genre shortly. 3 By contrast, two recent Korean films by Kim Ki-duk, The Isle (1997) and Real Fiction (2000), depict a brutalized everyday world shorn of culturally uncanny forces or redemptive alternatives and thus reduced to the raw master-slave dialectics of exploitation and kill-or-be-killed commodified need, from city to countryside. (I thank my colleague Earl Jackson for calling these brilliant and contrarian films to my attention.) 4 Gilroy is addressing the ‘planetary traffic in the imagery of blackness’ (p. 21), which in a Pacific context often shifts into a fantasy of evoking indigenous and Asian otherness in American contact-zones of proximity, admiration, and mixture. 5 On tactics of native ontology and sovereignty emerging across the contemporary Pacific, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999). 6 See Annie Nakao (2002), who draws an ecological imperative from uncanny Hawaiian beliefs: ‘But much of the island lore emanates [not just from immigrant Japanese but] from a native Hawaiian culture that respects its spiritual environment – not a bad way to live on the earth.’ 7For a ‘Polyn-Asian’-based updating of ‘how island paradises are produced for global consumption’, see Harris and Neill (2001): ‘Consequently, the South Pacific has been colonized by Hollywood as a site of cultural rather than capital production, within which US commercial ambitions can be phantasmatically reimagined and replayed’ (p. 76). From another angle of production, see also Najita (2001) on the fantasmatic colonial-settler history of Jane Campion’s (1992) globally popular film, The Piano. 8 See Paul Virilio (1989: 95n). On the US war movies of John Houston, Anatole Litvak, and Frank Capra made in an era when Nazi-based German cinema (via Joseph Goebbels) sought to overcome ‘American super-productions’ and undermine ‘the American perceptual arsenal’ of world cinema, see Virilio (1989: 9–10). 9 Here I draw upon Lindsay Waters’ critique of ‘incommensurability’ and the essentializing retreat towards ‘residual tribalism’ that marks our age of globalization and results, at times, in a neo-orientalist standoff of civilizational divides, as in the work of Alan Bloom or Samuel Huntington or even more left-leaning cultural studies work: see ‘Opening the American Mind . . . Towards China’ (essay forthcoming in Dushu, cited with permission, based on lectures at universities in China, May 2002). 10 In a related cross-cultural travelogue set on the Pacific Rim, Iyer (1992) takes his essential copies of Thoreau and Emerson to Kyoto, where he searches for moments of zen intensity and romantic self-abolishment in temples and 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 49

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inns. Finding a secret Japan within its globalizing corporate culture, one closer to the libidinal desires and blasted lives of Tsushima Yuko’s feminist fiction (pp. 332–3), Iyer self-ironically situates himself in the lineage of writers like Pierre Loti, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kenneth Rexroth, for whom the zen mystery of Japanese otherness and aesthetic epiphany is embodied in quest of Japanese women (p. 79). Again, the book is a brilliant acting out and critique of this post-orientalist symptom and transnational romance: Iyer becomes the monk haunted and consumed by romance, here staged as ontological obsession with cultural difference. 11 Against Iyer’s globalized vision of a Hong Kong given over to ‘The Global Marketplace’ (this is what he calls his chapter on Hong Kong in Global Soul), we would have to track Chinese national tensions, British legacies, and global/local dynamics in a more nuanced way where localism recodes, translates and deforms the global, as in the poetry of Leung Ping-Kwan in Travelling with a Bitter Melon (2002) and Foodscape (1997). As Rey Chow summarizes Leung’s uncanny poetics of the Hong Kong local around the tensions of global capitalism and 1997, ‘Against the oft-repeated moralistic indictment that Hong Kong is a place driven exclusively by materialism and consumerism, Leung’s work, through cohesively nuanced self-reflections, forges an alternative path to the materialist and consumerist world [of globalization] that the poet, like any other person, inhabits’ (foreword to Bitter Melon, 14]. Foodscape poems like ‘Salted Shrimp Paste’ or ‘Eggplants’ help to provide alternative mappings of global-local dialectics, where local culture abides within and against looming forces of globalization and appropriation without being reified into timeless essence or some unchanging ‘Chinese’ trait. On discrepant global/local conjunctions in Taiwan, see also Hsia Yu (2001), for example, ‘Salsa’ (p. 39) and Wilson (2001b).

References Ang, Ien (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. London: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter (1989) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso. Brechin, Gray (1999) Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Mike (1998) Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage. Davis, Mike (2001) ‘The Flames of New York’, New Left Review 12: 34–50. Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul (2000) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Edouard (1989) Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Harootunian, Harry (2000) History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 50

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Harris, Jonathan Gill and Neill, Anna (2001) ‘Hollywood’s Pacific Junk: The Wreckage of Colonial History in Six Days and Seven Nights and Rapa Nui’, UTS Review 7: 68–85. Heidegger, Martin (1996) Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York. Helper, Hinton Rowan (1855) The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Henry Taylor. Holt, John Dominis (1975) Waimea Summer. Honolulu: Topgallant. Iyer, Pico (1992) The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto. New York: Vintage. Iyer, Pico (2000) The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York: Vintage. Kim, So-Young (1998) ‘ “Mania” Or, Cinephilia: Films Festivals and the Identity Question’, UTS Review 4: 174–87. Kim, So-Young (2000) ‘The Phantom States: Double Exposuring Unfinished Mourning in Korean Melodrama. Talk at Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference, ‘Transitional Era, Transformative Work’. Kyushu University, Fukuoka Japan, 1–3 Dec. Kim, So-Young (2001) ‘Modernity in Suspense: The Logic of Fetishism in Korean Cinema’, Traces 1: 301–17. Kim, So-Young (n.d.) ‘Questions of Woman’s Work: The Maid, Madame Freedom, and Women’. Unpublished essay, used with permission. Kim, So-Young (n.d.) ‘Specters of Modernity’. Unpublished essay, used with permission. Kim, So-Young (n.d.) ‘Ticket: Dislocations of Korean Cinema and Its Melodrama’. Unpublished essay, used with permission. Kim, So-Young and Berry, Chris (2000) ‘Suri Suri masuri: The Magic of Korean Horror Film: A Conversation’, Postcolonial Studies 3: 53–60. Lee, Hyangjin (2000) Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lee, Robert G. (2000) Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Leung, Ping-Kwan (2002) Travelling with a Bitter Melon, ed. P.Y. Martha, foreword by Rey Chow Cheung. Hong Kong: Asia 2000 Limited. Leung, Ping-Kwan and Lee Ka-sing [photographer] (1997) Foodscape. Hong Kong: Original Photograph Club. Lindquist, Sven (2001) A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg. New York: The New Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1992) The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. and eds Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Motteshead, Ryan. Interview with Im Kwan-Taek in IndieWire. http://indiewire.com/film/interviews/int Kwon-Taek. Najita, Susan Yukie (2001) ‘Family Resemblances: The Construction of Pakeha History in Jane Campion’s “The Piano”’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 32: 81–115. Nakao, Annie (2002) ‘Restless Spirits Lurk Everywhere in Hawaii’, San Francisco Chronicle, 1 August: D12. Radhakrishnan, R. (2001) ‘Globalization, Desire, and the Politics of Representation’, Comparative Literature 53: 315–32. Rayns, Tony (1944) ‘Korea’s New Wavers’, Sight and Sound 4(11): 22. 74P 04wilson (ds) 30/1/03 1:01 pm Page 51

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Robbins, Bruce (2001) ‘Very Busy Now: Globalization and Harriedness in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’, Comparative Literature 53: 426–41. Robbins, Bruce (2002) ‘The Sweatshop Sublime’, PMLA 117: 84–97. Salgado, Sebastieõ (2000) Migrations: Humanity in Transition. New York: Aperture Foundation. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed Books. Stephanson, Anders (1995) Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang. Virilio, Paul (1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso. Waters, Lindsay (forthcoming) ‘Opening the American Mind . . . Towards China’. Essay based on lectures at Nanjing Normal University and Southeast China University, May 2002. Whitman, Walt (1989[1860]) ‘Facing West from California’s Shores.’ West of the West: Imagining California, eds Leonard Michaels, David Reid and Raquel Scheer. Berkeley: North Point Press. Willemen, Paul (2002) ‘Detouring through Korean Cinema’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3: 167–86. Wilson, Rob (1991) ‘Falling into the Korean Uncanny: On Reading Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee’, Korean Culture (Fall): 33–37. Wilson, Rob (2001a) ‘Korean Cinema on the Road to Globalization: Tracking Global/Local Dynamics, or Why Im Kwon-Taek is not Ang Lee’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2: 307–18. Wilson, Rob (2001b) ‘Doing Cultural Studies inside APEC: Literature, Cultural Identity, and Global/Local Dynamics in the American Pacific’, Comparative Literature 53: 389–403. Wilson, Rob and Dissanayake, Wimal, eds (1996) Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yau, Esther C.M. and Kyung Hyun Kim (2001) ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction to “Asia/Pacific Cinemas: A Spectral Surface”’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9 (Fall): 279–86. Yu, Hsia (2001) Fusion Kitsch: Poems from the Chinese, trans. Steve Bradbury. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj (2002) ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101: 385–9.

Rob Wilson teaches in the Department of Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of Waking in Seoul (Uni- versity of Hawaii Press, 1988), American Sublime (University of Wis- consin Press, 1991) and Reimagining the American Paciﬁc (Duke University Press, 2000), and co-editor of critical collections called Asia/Paciﬁc as Space of Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 1995), Global/Local (Duke University Press, 1996) and Inside Out (1999). He is Professor and Graduate Chair of Literature at the Uni- versity of California at Santa Cruz. Address: Literature Department, Oakes College, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, USA. [email: [email protected]] 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 97

Article

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

Locating an American romanticism: Emerson, Cavell, ‘Experience’

David Greenham Nottingham Trent University, UK

Abstract This article reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay ‘Experi- ence’ as a work of mourning that gives rise to critical reaction in the romantic tradition to speciﬁc philosophical ideas New England had imported from Europe early in the 19th century. The author reads this transatlantic interaction in the wider context of journal entries, arguing that the death of Emerson’s son is a test to Emerson’s philosophy and his literary form, indeed, the highest challenge, against which the claims of philosophy and literature could only fail. Moreover, it is the failure of his philosophy to contain his son’s death, to express it, that makes Emerson’s essay romantic. Deﬁning romanticism as incompletion: the impossibility of a total system which would include, for example, the death of the other (Cavell, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Blanchot). This, the author argues, proposes a ‘location’ for American romanticism that constitutes an adequate response to Critchley’s contention, in his reading of Cavell, that Emerson is not, in fact, romantic.

Keywords Ralph Waldo Emerson ● intellectual history ● transatlantic American studies ● transcendentalism ● Stanley Cavell ● US philosophy ● US romanticism

That Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay ‘Experience’ is a work of mourning is generally, though often reluctantly, accepted. Emerson’s use of the death of his young son, not yet six years old, as a spur to philosophy, to a questioning of philosophy, has been widely interpreted as a callous gesture, exemplifying his distant attitude to people and failure to

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love, or attributed to the numbness caused by the prior loss of father, brother, wife.1 Yet, if it is read in the wider context of journal entries and as an acknowledgement of the path through philosophy I shall be taking here, then there really is nothing else that the death of his son could have been to Emerson except a test to his philosophy, indeed, the highest challenge, against which the claims of philosophy could only fail. The first aim of this essay is to read ‘Experience’ as a work of mourning that gives rise to a deliberate and critical reaction in the romantic tradition to specific philosophical ideas New England had imported from Europe early in the 19th century. But in addition I want this to suggest a ‘location’ for American romanticism that constitutes an adequate response to Critch- ley’s contention, in his reading of Cavell, that Emerson is not a romantic. Emerson (1982a) anticipated his failure to mourn in a journal entry written almost five years before the death of his son: The event of death is always astounding; our philosophy never reaches, never possesses it; we are always at the beginning of our catechism; always the definition is yet to be made, What is Death? I see nothing to help beyond observing what the mind’s habit is in regard to that crisis. Simply, I have nothing to do with it. It is nothing to me. After I have made my will and set my house in order, I shall do in the immediate expectation of death the same things I should do without. (p. 173) Here then is the oft cited coldness set next to the failure of his philosophy: a Humean admission that only habit will get us through metaphys- ical crises,2 and a Stoical acceptance that what will be will be. So why, two years after the death of his son in 1842, does he forgo ‘habit’ and write the consistently astonishing essay ‘Experience’? Why does he use this ‘essay’, if that is what it is, to open up his philosophy and philosophy in general to the death of his son? Why do I want to read ‘Experience’ – or why does it demand to be read – as a work of mourning which enacts a romantic working through of idealism? Why, in sum, is Emerson’s ‘Experience’ romantic? In answering this I shall respond to Critchley’s determination that it is not, in fact, romantic in his interpretation of Cavell’s reading of Emerson’s ‘Experience’ as a romantic text in his otherwise insightful book, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (Critchley, 1997). I begin by stating Cavell’s position, reviewing how he manoeuvres Emerson alongside the Jena romantics, a group of German philosophers and poets of the generation before Emerson, of whom the brothers Schlegel and Novalis are the most famous members. Like that of Critchley, Cavell’s reading of the Jena romantics derives from Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s influential book The Literary Absolute (1988), which in turn (as Critchley and Cavell both stress) is inspired by Blanchot’s short but important essay ‘The Athenaeum’ (1969: in Blanchot, 1993). Both these texts limit their definition of the romantic, initially at least, to the journal The Athenaeum, the brief run of which lasted from 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 99

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1798–1800, and more particularly again to the sets of ‘fragments’ that appeared between its covers. Cavell is dealing with a very narrow, but in its own way exhaustive, definition of romanticism that can be summed up, loosely, as a fragmentary response to Kant’s critical philosophy of the 1780s and 1790s. Now, by Kantian philosophy I mean the sacrificing of a whole realm of knowledge, of God, of the thing-in-itself, of the idea of freedom, to the epistemological limits of ‘mere’ subjective phenomena.3 Kant’s phrase, which sums this up, is ‘The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience’ (Kant, 1998: 283/A158/B197, emphases added). (It is this sense that I give to the word ‘Experience’ in the title of Emerson’s essay.) In other words, the same conditions that make experience possible also make possible the objects of experience. This, in a nutshell, constitutes Kant’s idealism, and results in what Cavell calls a dissatisfaction, to which he responds, with some irony, ‘Thanks for nothing’ (Cavell, 1994: 13). Con- sequently the romantics and the later idealists were caught in the ambivalent position of trying to refute something in Kant, usually his denial of access to the thing-in-itself, whilst remaining true to his insights, particularly the new subjectivity. This epistemological circumscription – a critique of pure reason – which seems to leave us in the lesser of two worlds, leads to an assault on philosophy by poetry, an attempt to describe that which is ‘beyond’ the phenomenal, that is the noumenal, with expressive poetic language. The legacy of this two-world problematic, as I shall show, is played out in the central drama of Emerson’s ‘Experience’. With this in mind, I would suggest that romanticism is not located in a ‘place’, say America, or in a time, say ‘the first half of the nineteenth century’, but rather in this state of unsettledness – ‘between worlds’ (Cavell, 1994: 32) as Cavell puts it – that emerges from Kant’s ‘two-world’ theory. Romanticism is, by these lights, a condition of unreconciled unhappiness, a restless awareness that things should be otherwise, but with a structural impossibility of bringing this otherness to the surface. Such dissatisfaction may not seem to resonate at first glance with Emerson’s renowned ‘optative’ mood, his geniality and general affirma- tive spirit. But hope can only exist where there is, on some level, discon- tent; hope is always the desire for something better, which must mean that what is extant is somehow worse. Cavell locates this initial sense of despair in the mid-world inhabited by Emerson as a more or less successful interpreter of Kant; at least as someone who is willing to take on the inheritance of the critical philosophy. This trope of location is taken up explicitly by Emerson in one of his most famous questions, from the opening line of what is generally recognized as his greatest essay, ‘Experience’: ‘Where do we find ourselves?’ (Emerson, 1971: 228) I would like to suggest, tentatively, that ‘we’ find ourselves between worlds, between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, able to acknowledge them both, but not to escape their difficulties. I also hope to 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 100

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show that this initiates an answer adequate to the complexities of ‘Experi- ence’; in particular, to ‘Experience’ as a text of mourning that works through the sense of disappointment with the epistemological limitations of Kant’s critical philosophy. Emerson’s answer to his own question follows immediately upon it: ‘In a series, of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none’ (Emerson, 1971: 228). The imagery of the answer, borrowed from Piranesi, suggests that he ‘finds’ himself attenuated, drawn out across a spectrum, which disappears into infinite regress in front and behind. A philosophical analogue, however, is provided by Schlegel (1991) in the Athenaeum Fragments: ‘Viewed subjectively, philosophy . . . always begins in medias res’ (p. 84). Wherever philosophical speculation begins, it has always already originated somewhere else, sometime earlier, and is always already being pursued, projected. Emerson phrases this compromised subjectivity in a poetic fragment that he adapts from Sophocles’ Antigone (1987), also inserted in ‘Experience’. ‘Since neither now nor yesterday began/ These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can/ A man be found who their first entrance knew’ (Emerson 1971, 302).4 In this sense, then, the philosopher is always trying to catch up with history. The point is that each thinker only provides an incomplete fragment – is a fragment, as we shall see. This, also, is disappointing, dissatisfying. It is why I agree with Critchley (1997) when he writes, ‘Where does philosophy begin? It begins, I believe, in an experience of disappointment’ (p. 2). In addition, equally important for a reading of ‘Experience’, is Cavell’s (1989) grim conclusion, inspired by ‘Experience’, that ‘philosophy begins in loss, in finding yourself at a loss’ (p. 114). It begins, then, with Emerson, in the middle of a series of essays, striving to locate meaning in and from the loss of his son. Cavell, typically, does not put any stress upon whether Emerson has read the Jena romantics, either in translation, or in his own limited German. Instead, he assumes, probably correctly, that the ideas contained in their works were part of the rich intellectual ambience of the era. And he goes on to bring out why he thinks ‘Experience’ should be related to the thinking through of Kant that is happening in The Athenaeum: Accepting the thesis [of The Literary Absolute] that the idea of literature becoming its own theory – literature in effect becoming philosophy while contrariwise philosophy becomes literature – is what constitutes romanticism (in its origin in the Athenaeum), and beginning to see Emerson’s responsiveness to that material (or to its sources or its aftermath), my wonder at Emerson’s achievement is given a new turn. . . . So I should like to record my impression that, measured against, say, Friedrich Schlegel’s aphoristic, or rather, fragmentary, call for or vision of the union of poetry and philosophy, Emerson’s work presents itself as the realization of that vision. (Cavell, 1989: 20–1) Thus Cavell says that Emerson and, in particular, ‘Experience’ is the ‘realization’ of the romantic project envisioned by the authors of The 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 101

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Athenaeum (much will come to hang on just what Cavell is taken to mean by ‘realization’). Let us take this one step at a time. What does it mean for literature to become its own theory, and for this to occur through the integration of philosophy and poetry, the form of romanticism that responded to Schlegel’s (1991) injunction that ‘poetry and philosophy should be made one’ (p. 24)? To put it somewhat crudely, the aim is to overcome the limits of systematic philosophy with the expressive excess of poetry, but to retain them both (the inauguration of a dialectical manoeuvre). Schlegel writes: ‘It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two’ (p. 24). In this there is a rejection of system for the sake of system, that is, a self-grounding system (which F.H. Jacobi called nihilism),5 such as was attempted, for example, by Spinoza and later by Hegel, but also a recognition that some kind of systematization is essential to existence. (Perhaps we should also recall Emerson’s: ‘We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the absence of it; but it must not be spoken’, Emerson, 1971: 182.) This remnant of a(n unspoken) system is the fragment. As a literary form, the fragment is said to constitute its own theory through this ambiguity surrounding its system, a process that comes to mean that its very form is its theory, or at least strives to be. The fragment, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1988) argue, is ‘the romantic genre par excellence’ (p. 40). It responds to the denial of system through the impossibility of completion – the demands of incompletion. Its icon is the ruin, the sign of instability, impermanence, transition. This formulation of the impossibility of the system is a ﬁrst, ‘historical’, step that the fragment takes to its own theorization. For Cavell this initiates an adequate deﬁnition of the Emersonian sentence. The second, and more important, step, is the restless momentum of the project: the ‘future’. Incompletion, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, entails completion – or at least suggests the relentless surge into the future where such a completion may take place. In this open-ended quest for a closed circle, the fragment locates itself as essentially progressive. This idea corresponds to the observable difference between idealism and romanticism, between, say, Kant and Emerson: the circularity of their pursuit of philosophy. As Bowie (1997) puts it, after Frank, ‘The difference of the Romantic view from the Idealist view . . . lies in the Romantics’ eventual conviction that a self-grounding system of philosophy is impossible: the aim of German Idealism is such a system’ (p. 312n). Why I believe this to be circular is simple enough: if the romantics can recognize that a closed system is impossible, then they must have been searching for it, must have tried to assert it, in order to fail to do so; if the idealists feel the need to search for such a system they must have found it lacking, or continue to be unable to assert it, to fail to provide the system. The one position is the crisis of the other. The fragment, in all its paradox, is content to take on both perspectives – but at the cost of 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 102

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never ‘realizing’ itself. This then, I think, is why I think the fragment, as literature and as the call for a literature, is said to provide its own theory: its very limitation – its finitude, we might say with Critchley – always points elsewhere, to the possibility and the impossibility of the system, to the possibility and the impossibility of its own conditions of existence as a fragment – a phrase which deliberately recalls Kant and the disappointment with his legacy. Cavell, in his reading of Emerson’s ‘Experience’, brings together Kant and the idea of the fragment and begins to understand how Emerson’s essay actually works. For Cavell (1989), an Emersonian essay partakes of the fragment’s (compromised) insularity and self-reflexive theorization in that it ‘announce[s] and provide[s] conditions of its own comprehension’ (p. 20) (in more Kantian terms we might repeat that it announces the conditions of its own possibility). This, he argues, is the ‘realization’ of Schlegel’s call ‘for a vision of the union of poetry and philosophy’. How this works out, or how I want to work it out, I will leave in abeyance for now, because it is this word, ‘realization’, that constitutes the whole mistaken contretemps between Critchley and Cavell. As may have already become apparent, romanticism, if we take the fragment as its form, cannot ‘realize’ itself. Indeed its very essence is this incompletion. Much hangs, then, on what one takes ‘realization’ to mean. Critchley clearly takes Cavell to mean ‘completion’, some kind of closure or arresting of movement. While he does not intend that Cavell’s Emerson is in any way systematic in the nihilistic sense described earlier, he does take it to mean that Cavell believes Emerson to have resolved – realized – the relationship between poetry and philosophy, to have fulfilled the romantic genre. For Critchley, this is a fatal mistake that oversteps the bounds of romanticism; indeed, it is fundamentally unromantic. He examines a claim made by Cavell (1994) in his In Quest of the Ordinary, gleaned from Thoreau, that philosophy, or a good philosophy book at least, ‘would be written with next to no forward motion, one that culminates in each sentence’ (p. 18).6 Critchley (1997) takes this to mean that Emerson realizes the fragment because his sentences enact this type of closure, this denial of forward momentum. He uses two expressions for this: one, borrowed from Mulhall, is ‘lack of momentum’, the second, his own, is ‘inertia’ (p. 123). It is not trivial to point out that these concepts are not the same, and thus he is mixing his metaphors and misreading Cavell’s own ‘next to no forward motion’. This is important because texts do not ‘move’ on their own, quickly or slowly, there is someone next to them – i.e. reading them, and their inertia, their constancy, does not do the work for the reader, it just keeps step (‘at a bent arm’s length’), as Cavell (1981: 61), says: an image both of strolling arm in arm, and of holding a book). It is the reader then, who overcomes the periodic inertia, not the diminishing momentum of the text. It is the reader who turns the text into a progression (Cavell’s ‘succession’), makes it progressive, and not the writer. 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 103

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Perhaps this becomes clearer if we read the appropriate pages of The Senses of Walden, where Cavell first talks about this. It suggests that, from the beginning, Emerson’s text as well as that of Thoreau, which he cites, is not an inadequate romanticism, but is a successful interpretation of it – which we might call a ‘realization’: Writing, at its best, will come to a finish in each mark of meaning, in each portion and sentence and word. That is why in reading it ‘we must laboriously seek the meaning of every word and line; conjecturing a larger sense’. (Cavell, 1981: 61)7 Where writing stops, reading begins – reading as writing again, as a response, indeed, a responsibility – to the written text. Realization does not mean completion, it means putting to work, the romantic fragment. And it establishes the fragment’s place in a dialogue – as one side of an ongoing dialogue. Blanchot (1993) observes that: the fragment, in monologue form, is a substitute for dialogical communication since [and he cites Schlegel] ‘a dialogue is a chain or garland or fragments’ and, more profoundly, an anticipation of what one could call plural writing; the possibility of a writing that is done in common. (p. 358) I want to suggest that this writing in common, rather than being the anonymous collective of the Jena romantics, can correspond to the practice of proper reading, of reading being part of a creative collective act which is responsible to and for the written text, in this case an Emerson essay, ‘laboriously seek[ing] the meaning of every word and line’. Cavell’s insight is that this ‘condition’ (etymologically, speaking together), this confluence of voices emerging from the written text, is a way of interpreting Kant’s use of the word condition, in ‘conditions of the possibility of experience’. Here, then, language as an ongoing dialogue between writing and reading, as a response that demands a responsibility, is interpreted as the a priori condition for experience. And the responsibility for one’s own discourse, one’s fragmentary part in the garland of dialogue, is always a response to and a call to an open-ended realization of experience. Thus, contrary to Critchley, Emerson’s ‘call’ for philosophy is the initiation of a dialogue, the announcement of a fragment, the ‘happening’ of philosophy as the question of – the questioning of – experience. In this case, the failure to experience the death of his son, Waldo. Cavell in fact is working through this in This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989). It seems frustrating that Critchley did not read him suf- ficiently, did not follow the Cavellian injunction of responsibility to the ‘conditions’ of the text. Cavell writes, quite categorically: ‘In claiming an Emersonian essay to announce and provide conditions of its own comprehension . . . I am not claiming that these conditions are presented as complete and as realized, but that their completion and realization are questions for each essay’ (p. 20, emphasis added). Cavell, writing as he does, could not have made it clearer that the Emersonian essay is a 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 104

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working through of the realization called for by Schlegel, not, in fact its ‘realization’. Moreover, it is the very question of what stops an essay from realizing itself – what surpasses its conditions of possibility, say the (missed) confrontation with Waldo’s death that is the occasion for ‘Experi- ence’, and that emerges paradoxically, as the conditions for its own possibility, which we might call language and in its final impossibility, which we might call death. Romanticism fails for Emerson (or fails Emerson) because it cannot answer the questions that practical experience puts to genius – this ‘romance’ still remains, unfulfilled, at the end of the essay. That romanticism is this need to think the everyday through the categories of philosophy and to call those categories into question in the question itself is announced in the self-reflexive open gesture of the fragment. That it fails to put together the pure and practical, to reclaim the everyday in the light of the transcendental – that is to locate the transcendent – is, tragically, exemplified in Emerson’s attempt to ‘romanticize’ the death of this son. Or, more precisely, in that his attempt to realize it ends up romanticizing it. What follows is the foremost of many crucial passages from ‘Experi- ence’ that describes this problematic. It is where Emerson (1971) in- famously announces the death of this son: People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene painting, and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovitch who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief, too, will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, – no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, – neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity: it does not touch me: something which I fancied was a part of me, – which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left to us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us. (pp. 230–1) If romanticism, as I have named it here, is the attempt to bridge the gap between the pure and the practical, to recognize in the transcendental 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 105

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conditions of the possibility of experience the transcendent ‘experience’ in itself, to make them answerable to each other, responsible for each other, then this passage is a dramatic recognition of this failure. Death here is quite literally transcendence, the movement from the realm of intuitable experience to its other side, the unknowable, the noumenal. The experience of death is ineluctably ideal; death itself is impossibly real. So let us take the fragment: ‘Grief, too, will make us idealists.’ This phrase, usually associated with a tragic – but homely – wisdom, can on this reading be elevated to its full philosophical height. Grief too will make us idealists – we always already were idealists; grief – or rather the impossibility of grief’s object – just brings a new clarity to human finitude, both in mortal and in transcendental terms. But the bitterly ironic comparison of his son with a beautiful estate just a few lines later – how are we to take that? It is usually what appals the critics, perhaps understandably so. I take it, again, as a fragment, as a concept that cannot grasp its object – as a romantic irony that holds apart its terms. An estate is an empty signifier, which corresponds to the essential absence of Waldo, the absence of his name, from ‘Experience’. He cannot be named, only the failure to name him, to understand him as an estate, is testament to this. We can compare this to the more positive idealist Emerson of the 1836 Nature: The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. (Emerson, 1982b: 38) In Nature, Emerson holds on to the integrative power of the ‘eye’. In ‘Experience’, the poet misses his object, which was a subject, Waldo: who, without even the properties of an estate to which he may have title, slips over the horizon. The irony, then, is that in the drawing together of the two ideas, the estate and Waldo, an innavigable abyss opens up, and he explains, ‘I cannot get it nearer to me.’ Grief, then, exposes Emerson to the truth of idealism: that it fails, and that its failure becomes romanticism, which in turn fails – which is precisely Critchley’s point, but from which he excludes Emerson. ‘I grieve’, he writes, ‘that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me a step into real nature.’ It teaches him nothing that he does not already know: the lesson learned from death, that despite – or maybe because of – the now notori- ous epiphany of the transparent eyeball, nature is elsewhere. We are left with the subjective illusion of ‘Temperament’. And the overblown image of the eyeball, transcending the body, illuminating and integrating the landscape, becomes tragic when its shaping power ossifies with grief. And so Emerson (1971) realizes that ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 106

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lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what is in its focus’ (p. 231). Grief colours the world, shows how the power invested in the transparent eyeball, the creative romantic image, has a hard edge that pushes nature away, and leaves the subject untouched by the object, insular. As Packer (1982) grimly observes, ‘the price you pay for invulnerability is invulnerability’ (p. 170). So, the lesson of ‘Experience’ is not a retreat from idealism into empiricism – the Whicher thesis of Emerson’s decline – but from idealism into romanticism. Into the failure of experience to grasp its object, the unhand- some ‘lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest’ (Emerson, 1971: 231). There is a series of familiar philosophical puns here. To clutch hard is to grasp, in German Griff (which gives ergreifen: to seize, and begreifen: to comprehend – as in ‘prehen- sile’), from which comes Begriff, which translates back into English as concept, in the Kantian sense of applying experiences to rules in the understanding – in the sense of having ‘a grasp’ on something, say an object.8 Our concepts fail us when we clutch hardest; objects really do slip away and philosophy as idealism and romanticism is the disclosure of this ‘evanescence’ (p. 231). The secret of this, as Cavell points out, is that we must learn not to clutch too hard. But, in acknowledging the absence, we emerge wiser from the disjunctions of irony. A position disclosed by the writing and a responsible reading of the essay. This, then, is another lesson of grief. Philosophy, which begins in loss, fails and ends, too, in the tragic acceptance of loss. In his journals, Emerson is even more explicit about the role of grief. As early as 1823, Emerson writes, in his youthful voice of his dramatized solitude, that ‘the yell of their grief – it touches no cord in me’ (1982a: 38). The death of his first wife Ellen Tucker in 1831, was indeed a cause of much ‘grief’, the bitterness of which is more typical, less philosophical. But the fact never was that Emerson does not grieve over the death of his son – it is that he can only grieve over the death of his son. Which is as much to say that he can only write and that we can only read his grief from which Waldo is absent.9 Grief, as a mood or temperament, shows through as illusion because of its inadequacy to its object. And the ‘moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth’ deliver only an increased awareness of a subjectivity that touches the edges of solipsism. In a conversation with Jones Very recorded in 1838, he writes, ‘I saw clearly that if my wife and child, my mother, should be taken from me, I should still remain whole with the same capacity for cheap enjoyment from all things. I should not grieve enough, although I love them’ (Emerson, 1982a: 204–5). And stronger still, eight months after Waldo’s death: ‘Intellect always puts an interval between the subject & the object. Affection would blend the two. For weal or for woe I clear myself from the thing I contemplate: I grieve but I am not grief: I love, but I am not 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 107

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love’ (p. 288). Which must be thought of next to the famous letter to Caroline Sturgis written just days after Waldo’s death: Alas! I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve; that this fact takes no more deep hold than other facts, is as dreamlike as they; a lambent flame that will not burn playing on the surface of my river. Must every experience – those promised to be dearest and most penetrative, – only kiss my cheek like the wind & pass away?10 The textual echo between ‘I grieve that I cannot grieve’ and ‘I grieve but I am not grief’ is I believe, important in figuring the lessons of grief, what grief is supposed to do, what it may actually do, and certainly what it fails to do. To give oneself over to grief, to public grief, is to lose, in a sense, the responsibility for grieving, to fail (in) it, to refuse its work and to miss its lesson. Which is not one of attachments lost, but of ineluctable distance. There are, Cavell (1989) observes, at least two ways to make this mistake, one is religion, another might be called philosophy (p. 107). Both of them, as ‘Experience’ makes all too clear, are illusions: grief as a temperament is not sustainable. The absence of Waldo is something that has challenged other critics, in particular Cavell, in his ‘Finding as Founding’ (1989: 77–118) and Sharon Cameron in her ‘Representing Grief: Emerson’s “Experience” ’ (1986: 15–41), but I shall draw substantially different conclusions here. For Cavell (and I barely understand what he means when he says this), Waldo’s absence is overcome in that a close reading of the imagery of ‘Experience’ reveals that Emerson is using the essay to give birth to his son (and through him to a new America), to found him and to find him. Cameron, on the other hand, uses a sophisticated psychoanalytic reading (following Abraham and Torok), to locate Waldo in the very text of the essay. For her, writing is mourning, writing is disavowal of loss and, finally, there is satisfaction derived from the interment of Waldo in the text. These readings, both profound and complex, miss for me the work that the essay is doing, in exploring the genre of the fragment and engaging with its failure to realize its impossible object: death. Death as the absence of that which keeps us from the world. Both birth and disavowal seem to repeat themselves in a secondary disavowal of the task of the essay, the impossibility of death’s experience as a working through of experience itself. The fragment, at least in its romantic form, however, provides an answer (which is, deliberately, no answer) by opening itself up to what refuses it: its own completion, a completion which could only take the form, or at least the name, of Waldo. And Emerson writes in fragments because he doesn’t try to claim his object – or, if he does, he becomes only too aware of the futility of such a gesture. What Waldo has become in his death is beyond the possibility of experience and of the possible objects of experience. It is the romantic quest, upon which Emerson finds himself, 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 108

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to locate these objects, but to always fall short of experiencing them. And this becomes a quest that appeals to the reader to pursue Emerson’s fragmentary response to the impossibility of Waldo, through philosophy – idealism, romanticism, empiricism – and thus, in the act of reading, engage with philosophy’s failure as a call to philosophy and as a work of mourning, which calls from somewhere ‘deeper’ than philosophy itself. In this way, romanticism is realized, philosophy domesticated, grounded in its continuing struggle to register the everyday (and what is more everyday than death?). A process that could be described as Emerson’s (un)working of Kant’s critical enterprise, ‘from how we are such that we can experience’, to ‘how we are because of what we cannot experience’; from idealism to romanticism. This emphasis on limitation, on failure, is in fact romanticism’s strength, not its weakness, because ‘romanticism has the keenest knowledge of the narrow margin in which it can affirm itself’ (Blanchot, 1993: 356) within an ongoing, open-ended, clearly naïve dialogue with what is not itself. Critchley (1997) sums this up when he writes: The fact that romanticism does not work, rather than being a proof of weakness, will be interpreted instead as a sign of its strength. Its very weakness is its strength . . . Such a romanticism will still be naïve, but it will be rooted in self-conscious naïveté. That is, an acute awareness of failure and the limitedness of thought. (p. 98) For Critchley, whose stress is also on ineluctable finitude, romanticism’s power is that because of its failure to ‘absolutize’ its object (its failure to work itself) it always leaves it open for reworking, for a novel interpretation – for it to be otherwise. So ‘where we find ourselves’, to answer Emerson’s question, is in the middle of a dialogue, of which we do not know the extremes, but can only bear the responsibility for our fragment. This returns me to the point I made earlier about the location of romanticism in the mid-world. Romanticism has no physical ‘space’ just as I cannot locate it in New England or America or Europe but only in a dialogue between them, of which they are fragments (monologues). This, then, is what Emerson (1971) might mean by ‘this new, yet unapproachable America’ (p. 244) that he has ‘found in the west’: the impossible receding object of philosophical hope and of romanticism’s deepest naïveté.

Notes 1 The classic expression of this is Whicher (1961: 46), for whom the denial of grief is the denial of the tragic in the face of Waldo’s death. For Whicher this leads Emerson from idealism to empiricism. More recent discussions by Packer (1982: 159–70) and Cameron (1986) are sympathetic to Emerson’s grief, but still see it as inaugurating an intellectual shift toward empiricism, 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 109

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rather than toward romanticism as I argue here. Packer perhaps best preserves the tension that the movement she describes necessarily exhibits. 2 Manning (2002) also notes that, as a consequence of mourning, Emerson ‘suffers a Humean disintegration’ which paradoxically becomes ‘the condition of self-realization’ (p. 280). This belongs to the dialectic of unity and fragment, which situates the deﬁnition of romanticism used in this essay. Manning’s argument, rooted in a stylistic analysis of his rhetoric, is sympathetic to Emerson. I would also say that Manning’s successful depiction of the fragment as a trope in American writing of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods is complementary to the philosophical direction of this essay. 3For an elegant alternative reading of the relationship between Kant and Emerson, see Van Leer (1986). 4 It comes from the famous passage where Antigone is accusing Creon of breaking the immutable and god-given laws regarding the death rights/rites of her brother Polynices. A modern translation by Brown (Sophocles, 1997) reads:

I did not suppose that your decrees had such power that you, a mortal, could out run the gods’ unwritten and unfailing rules. For their life is not of today or yesterday but forever, and no one knows when they ﬁrst appeared. (ll. 455–60) Antigone seems a most appropriate choice here as, like ‘Experience’, it dramatizes a troubled work of mourning. 5See Bowie, 1997: 31ff and passim; also Franks, 2000: 95–116. 6 The phrase ﬁrst occurs in Cavell, 1981: 27. 7 The quotation is from Thoreau, 1986: 145. 8Cf. Cavell, 1989: 86. Cavell sets this next to the type of thinking that allows objects to come to us, passively, as we receive and acknowledge them. See Heidegger, 1968: 16. 9Recalling that Emerson also preferred to be called Waldo. 10 Cited in Cameron, 1986: 20.

References Blanchot, Maurice (1993) The Inﬁnite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bowie, Andrew (1997) From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London: Routledge. Cameron, Sharon (1986) ‘Representing Grief: Emerson’s “Experience” ’ , Representations 15: 15–41. Cavell, Stanley (1981) The Senses of Walden, expanded edn. San Francisco: North Point. Cavell, Stanley (1989) This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press. Cavell, Stanley (1994) In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Critchley, Simon (1997) Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Literature, Philosophy. London: Routledge. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1971) Essays. London: Everyman. 74P 07 Greenham (to/d) 30/1/03 1:04 pm Page 110

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1982a) Emerson in his Journals, ed. Joel Porte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1982b) Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Franks, Paul (2000) ‘All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, pp. 95–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1968) What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York: HarperCollins. Kant, Immanuel (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and eds Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe and Nancy, Jean-Luc (1988) The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Phillip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: SUNY Press. Manning, Susan (2002) Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish American Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Packer, Barbara L. (1982) Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays. New York: Continuum. Schlegel, Friedrich (1991) Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Sophocles (1987) Sophocles: Antigone, trans. Andrew Brown. Warminster: Aris and Phillips. Thoreau, Henry David (1986) Walden and Civil Disobedience. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Van Leer, David (1986) Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whicher, Stephen (1961) Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Perpetua.

David Greenham teaches English and American Literature at The Nottingham Trent University and is researching Ralph Waldo Emerson and European Philosophy, concentrating on romantic continuities and disruptions in transatlantic intellectual history. His article, ‘The Poetry of Origins and the Origins of Poetry: Norman O. Brown’s Giambattista Vico and James Joyce’ is forthcoming in boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture. Address: Faculty of Humanities, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK. [email: [email protected]]