European journal of American studies

9-2 | 2014 Summer 2014

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10334 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.10334 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014, “Summer 2014” [Online], Online since 26 September 2014, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10334; DOI: https:// doi.org/10.4000/ejas.10334

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Old Nick Crossed the Mississippi: The Figure of the Devil in Late Cold War Era Novels of the American West Michael Walonen

“To Sacrifice One’s Intellect Is More Demonic than Divine”: American Literature and Politics in Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days Peter Swirski

Urban Spaces and Architecturally Defined Identity in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts Wayne E. Arnold

Americans and Climate Change: Transnationalism and Reflection in Environmental Writing Brian Glaser

Commerce and Sentiment in Tales of Barbary Encounter: Cathcart, Barlow, Markoe, Tyler, and Rowson Andrew S. Gross

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Old Nick Crossed the Mississippi: The Figure of the Devil in Late Cold War Era Novels of the American West

Michael Walonen

1 The literature and folklore of the American West abound with appearances by the figure of the devil that well up from the deep substrata of U.S. cultures. During the late Cold War period (1968-1991) literary deployments of the devil within Western settings take on particularly pointed thematic contours that variously challenge and/or reinforce mainstream conceptions of evil and in doing so seek to come to terms with the meaning and direction of change in this period of vast social and cultural permutation. These long two decades saw, among other things, the emergences of the cultural realities critics have come to label postmodern, the social-structural realities dubbed postindustrial, and the various technologies of the Information Age. At the same time, they marked the birth and growth of neoliberalism as an ideology and political- economic system: the shift away from the early postwar form of social state that sought to guarantee full employment and provide a basic set of New Deal-spirited protections to its citizens, to a sort of governance driven by free market logic, privatization, and corporate power, in which citizens are atomized and valued almost exclusively in their functioning as consumers. These disorienting nature of these changes can in part explain the need of

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 3 cultural producers to look for conceptual anchors in such absolutist, foundational cultural figures as the devil, particularly given how in the face of these changes and the increasingly voluble calls of different social groups for recognition of their practices, value systems, and needs, Americans found themselves challenged to adopt more relativistic, multiculturalist outlooks. In addition, various historical events, examined below, provoked a particular cultural fixation on the nature of evil and the dark side of the American experience during this period, which helped give birth to the narrative uses of the devil figure in the three novels to be analyzed in this essay: Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), and Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). Focusing on novels—the most heteroglossic of literary genres, Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us—published by these three writers over a span of sixteen years will facilitate a consideration of the range of conceptualizations of the role and nature of evil during this era of tumult and transformation.

2 An exhaustive treatment of the figure of the devil in the narrative fiction of the American West would need to consider a broader array of genres and stretch farther back in time to consider such works as Robert Bloch’s “That Hellbound Train” (1958) and even representations of such early frontier moments as Robert M. Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), as well as other rich and deserving texts like Robert Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984). However, taken collectively the works of King, McCarthy, and Reed offer especially penetrating, even portentous, insight into the evolving social character of late Cold War/ early postmodern America and the ways in which American cultural producers have conceived of the (internal or external) moral Other. My analysis will address some of the ethical, socio-historical, and political conflicts represented through the figure of the devil in the literature of the American West during this late-Cold War period of cultural change.

3 But before considering the thematic uses of the devil figure in the three novels in question, it bears asking why the geography of the West, and particularly the Southwest, has so frequently been conceptualized in terms of the diabolic. One aspect of this cultural equation is evident in descriptions of the region’s once-sparsely settled reaches, which often take on satanic overtones due to its apparent

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 4 maleficence, its strangeness and seeming hostility.i For example, as Craig Miller observes in his “Nature and Cowboy Poetry,” pre-twentieth-century cowboy ballads from West Texas and the surrounding area recurrently equate the region with the devil and hell (227). In anonymous works like “The Llano Estacado” and “Wrangler Kid” the harshness of the land is described as a form of hell come to earth, while in Homer W. Bryant’s “He Rang the Devil’s Knell” the vocations of the cowboy and the devil, with their common hardships and hell raising, are conflated, with the latter being presented in the role of the former (Miller 229-230). The ballad “Hell in Texas,” on the other hand, presents the desiccated land “on the Rio Grande” as a home relegated to the devil by God because it is so harsh, rugged, and infertile. The devil has proceeded, so the song goes, to further accentuate these attributes so that the land conforms to his image: “he put thorns on the cacti and horns on the toads ... and poisoned the feet of the centipede.” “Hell in Texas” presents even the comforts the state has to offer as taking on a diabolical character, with its water “a regular cathartic that smelt like bad eggs” and its cuisine dominated by red pepper that makes its eater “shout / ‘I’ve a hell on the inside as well as without.’” Other cowboy ballads, such as Gail Gardner’s “Sierry Petes” (also known as “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail”), present the West as the devil’s dwelling place, but in a less formidable manner, with the devil functioning as just one more hostile element of the land for the intrepid cowboy to tame and dispense with. This work narrates the encounter in the mountains near Prescott, Arizona between two tough cowboys and the Prince of Darkness, during the course of which the former lasso, tie up, brand, and knot the tail of the latter. At the song’s conclusion the two leave the devil in the mountains, bound and howling in rage and discomfort, thus symbolically embodying the view that while the devilish aspects of the West have been tamed by rugged American individualists, they have not been altogether expunged.

4 But the West has been envisioned as not just a place rugged to the point of maleficence, but also in terms of a broader set of ideological constructs informing a sense of Western American place and the identity of its inhabitants. It is in this regard that the preponderance of the devil in the literature of the West can perhaps best be understood. In his essay “The Sense of Place” Wallace Stegner sees the West as lacking a firmly established cultural definition,

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“that human attention” born of an admixture of memorialization and memory “that at its highest reach we will call poetry” (3). That is, just as the West has been seen historically as a site of spatial openness where new identities and forms of society could be forged, it has also been a place of relative semantic openness lacking a discernible social spatial character of the sort that is produced and codified by a large body of indigenous expressive culture.ii Because of this, the region has tended to be described in terms that reflect the essential mythic substratum of American national culture, as Richard Slotkin argues in Gunfighter Nation. Consequently, the most centrally archetypal American character types—figures including, for instance, the frontiersman, the good clergyman, the bad clergyman, and the rebel—have been especially preponderant in Western narratives. One of these figures, who has occupied a particularly obsessional role in both the American national mythic system and the expressive culture of the American West, is the devil. Cultural Historian W. Scott Poole vividly traces America’s historical obsession with the devil in his Satan in America: The Devil We Know, detailing why America, of all Western nations, has had such a distinctively pronounced relationship to this figure in its imaginary. He argues that America’s particular forms of religiousness have time again caused the country to look at social problems in theological terms, with the result that Americans of each successive era have seen themselves as innocent, externalizing the notion of evil by envisioning the enemy Other (Catholics, alcoholic beverages, first World War Germany, communists...) in diabolical terms (xi, xiv).

5 This tendency has been particularly pronounced in the American West, given that the region has held and continues to hold a special, psychically charged place in American history and the national imaginary—a synecdochic one, as the western frontier, starting with the Atlantic Seaboard and moving westward over time, has represented core American notions of promise, autonomy, and new beginning for generations of European-descended settlers and inhabitants. That is, the West as a site of cultural projection (rather than an actual lived environment) has been conceptualized as a place with a special paradigmatic relationship to American national identity. In light of this, it makes perfect sense that the figure of the devil, so psychically charged and fixating within American culture in general, would appear so

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 6 prominently within the literature of the American West. And so a broad cross-section of the chroniclers of the region, sparsely populated historically and at times seemingly hostile, have used it to serve as a site of confrontation with the devil. They envision it in terms akin to those Rudi Blesh uses to characterize the spaces of the Mississippi Delta where Robert Johnson legendarily bartered his soul: as “full of evil, surcharged with the terror of one alone among the moving, unseen shapes of the night. Wildly and terribly, the notes paint a dark wasteland” (qtd in Poole 129). In this manner the West has been culturally construed as a fraught, teleologically privileged setting for different versions of a struggle of moral forces imagined in distinctly American terms, one which had previously been imaginatively situated amidst the milieus of earlier frontiers, for instance, by Washington Irving in “The Devil and Tom Walker” and Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Young Goodman Brown.” Amongst the mountains, plains and deserts of the West, descendants of Tom Walker and Young Goodman Brown, latter-day representatives of America’s proverbial “city on a hill” have, in varying imaginative terms, been pitted by their creators against the ultimate imaginative embodiment of the malign and the destructive.iii

6 This vision of the West as battleground for the clash between evil and distinctively American good is central to a work that lies close to the pulse of the contemporary United States in its apocalyptic purview and its absolutist forms of moral reckoning: Stephen King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel The Stand. King’s text narrates the story of a world in which over ninety-nine percent of America’s population has been killed off by a leaked government-engineered plague, the survivors of which end up grouping themselves into two camps, one located in Boulder, Colorado and led by the aged and saintly Mother Abigail, the other located in Las Vegas and led by the antichrist figure Randall Flagg. The Stand was an attempt by King to represent the “contradictions” he saw evident in the America of the Patty Hearst case, the Arab Oil Crisis, and the increasing despoilment of the environment as well as “write a fantasy epic [of good versus evil] on the scale of The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting” (King Danse Macabre 370; King, “Inspiration”). 7 The novel’s personification of malignity and darkness, Flagg, is not the devil per se; in the words of Mother Abigail, “He ain’t Satan...but he and Satan know each other

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and have kept their councils together of old” (504). In a hypnosis-induced trance Tom Cullen, one of Mother Abigail’s compatriots, reveals that Flagg is an incarnation of Legion, the possessing demon(s) Christ drove into a herd of pigs in the bible (Mark 5:9, Luke 8:30, Matthew 8:28-34). But this demon has a distinctively American character—the paragraph that first introduces Flagg notes that “From New Orleans to Nogales, from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, it was his country, and none knew or loved it better” (171). Flagg personifies the dark side of the American character, the forces of disorder, hatred, and violence that have run through the nation’s history. As Jenifer Michelle D’Elia observes, “By the time Randall Flagg is introduced, readers are ready to accept that Flagg knows America—his kind of evil resonates in the landscape of a country that has long been home to dastardly deeds”(118). Flagg has instigated anti-establishmentarian violence, furthered and participated in both white-on-black and black-on-white racial violence, and helped to inspire serial killer Charles Starkweather and presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (174-175).iv King uses him to come to terms with the violent turn taken by the counter culture in the 1970s, noting that “[h]e sometimes thought he might have been born in [the] strife” of the Civil Rights Movement and placing him in conspiratorial contact with the Symbionese Liberation Army and associates of the Weathermen.v While postwar evangelical Christianity envisioned an imminent coming of the Antichrist and end of time as an attack by an inimical, external force, King imagined the rise of the demonic as a rallying of a will towards destruction that has long been a part of the American equation, just as the disease that wipes out American society in the novel has been domestically engineered.

8 Out of the ashes of America’s plague-ravaged society Flagg sets up a new capital in Las Vegas, drawing to him through their dreams the plague survivors whose character flaws are stronger than their innate goodness: “Shoplifters and sex fiends and people who like to use their fists...Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones...the lonely ones...the ones that have left God out of their hearts” (503). Together, they plan to take over and enslave the community set up by Mother Abigail and her followers in Boulder, Colorado, setting up a conflict with Manichean and Christian, as well as American nationalist, overtones. On the one hand, it is a relatively unambiguous struggle between good and evil, light and dark, but at the same time

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 8 it is a struggle of competing visions of America. The plague abates on the Fourth of July, a date that symbolically figures the survivors as creators of a new America. Flagg’s people quickly reestablish the America of material comfort, Henry Miller’s “air-conditioned nightmare” complete with the very un-utilitarian running fountains of Las Vegas. Theirs is also the control-society America of the prison and military industrial complexes, of repressive executions designed to scare potential criminals and preemptive military strikes against their perceived enemies. In contrast, the Boulder group clearly sees itself as the standard bearers of the U.S.A. and accordingly seeks to re-inaugurate the old socio- political order— as Leonard Cassuto notes, while Las Vegas lies in a symbolically resonant valley, the more highly elevated Boulder functions in the text as a modern version of the Puritan’s American exceptionalist “city on a hill” (83).vi At their first town hall meeting they sing the “Star- Spangled Banner” and one of their first items of business is to readopt the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But this drive by the novel’s “good guys” to recreate their bygone society places in evidence two of its foundational tensions: that between the individual and the group and that between the natural world and technologically infused industrial / postindustrial society analyzed at length by Leo Marx in his The Machine in the Garden.vii Throughout America’s history its cultural valuation of individualistic self-determination— manifested in such various forms as its relentless drive towards economic advancement and its collective distaste for public transportation—has stood at odds with attachment to the larger community, society, and social good. In The Stand the Other is a source of danger—first of contagion, then, after the collapse of society, of violence— but the survivors of the plague quickly seek out other individuals to ward off loneliness, for mutual protection, and for self-affirmation. As Glen Bateman, the novel’s resident sociologist affirms, “man is a gregarious, social animal, and eventually we’ll get back together, if only so we can tell each other stories about how we survived the great plague of 1990” (332). However, for Stu and Frannie, two of the novel’s main characters who survive up through its end, this need is outweighed by the bureaucratization, politicking, and insecurity that arise as the Boulder society evolves. Consequently, they leave the settlement, opting for that perpetual American gesture, dating back to the Puritan settlement of New England and the Westward expansion of the country, of lighting out for unoccupied territories in

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search of space and autonomy to set up purer and less repressive social order.viii 9 The text’s conflation of Christianity and American nationalism within the apocalyptic narrative mode functions on other registers as well. The Stand presents right and wrong almost exclusively in absolute, metaphysical terms. Mother Abigail, represented throughout the text as a saintly and oracular authoritative voice within a world of destruction and uncertainty, shakes her head in tolerant disdain at the mainline Protestant and post-Vatican II Catholic tendency to view the devil in metaphorical terms. She muses that according to “the new preachers who had got on the land the last twenty years or so,” There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle—and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. (503-504) 10 Instead, the novel offers the unambiguously demonic Flagg, user of black magic and fomenter of destruction. Seeing the enemy in the unwavering moral terms that Mother Abigail does and the novel’s characters and readers are encouraged to do, is the first step towards representing the destruction of Flagg and his followers as rational, necessary, and redemptive, in the sense that Richard Slotkin explores the archetypal narrative pattern of redemptive savage warfare against the alien Other in his trilogy of studies of the mythologies of the American West. If Flagg embodies absolute evil, then all means of combatting him become legitimate, including the Boulder settlement’s sending three particularly vulnerable members of its community into harm’s way as spies: a retarded man, an elderly former judge, and a woman who has been viciously and repeatedly sexually abused in the wake of the plague. Here the logic of the Boulder survivors is redolent of the worst of the long cultural pedigree of American exceptionalism coupling with the demonization of the enemy Other to justify all manner of transgressions of its ostensible ideals—a trend whose genealogy W. Scott Poole chronicles at length in his Satan in America.

11 This struggle of American good versus American evil in The Stand is charted in terms of a highly significant mythopoetic cartography. Most of the Boulder settlers who

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figure at all significantly in the plot, including the novel’s three most central characters—Frannie, Stu, and Larry Underwood—journey to Colorado from the New England states, reenacting the historical westward migration of the Euro-American people (at least according to the popular, Anglo-centric version of U.S. history, with its privileging of the Puritans as founding fathers at the expense of the Spanish, French, and Virginia colonies). Just as the West has represented promise and potential rebirth in the American geo-cultural imaginary, the northeast, which continues to hold by far the largest concentration of the nation’s population, has been equated with the old America of privilege, establishment, and tradition.ix Western movement has, accordingly, been imagined in temporal as well as spatial terms, as a movement into a future which, given America’s prevalent millenarian outlook, teems with the prospect of Armageddon.x So King’s choice of the West as the battleground for his good and evil survivors has a naturalized, intuitive aspect to it, which is highlighted by the fact that after the plague has run its course Larry first travels east to the Atlantic Ocean during a period of mental/ emotional breakdown, only to find “land’s end” and join up with two other survivors, with whom he turns around and heads west. Just12 as significant as the historical and symbolic resonances of the Western region in the text, though, are the archetypal locations within it that The Stand employs as settings.xi Las Vegas, the proverbial den of iniquity of American popular imagination, makes for a logical base of operations for Flagg’s camp, particularly given that the novel’s first and revised editions were published before Sin City began efforts to tweak its public image in a more family-friendly way during the 1990s. Boulder as the “good guys’” city is less clear of a choice, though part of the reason may lie in the city’s history of progressive governance and local culture. More significant, though, is the fact that Boulder lies just to the east of the Great Divide, while Las Vegas stands to its west. Thus in the novel good and evil, even if they are grounded in a common American historical experience, do not bleed into each other ambiguously or relativistically—they are close but profoundly separated by a formidable boundary which the novel’s heroes must traverse in their climactic quest to do battle with evil in the form of the satanic Flagg.

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Cormac13 McCarthy’s Blood Meridian offers a very different moral vision than The Stand, employing the devil figure to dramatize the intertwined nature of civilization and barbarity rather than the Christian tradition of Manichean morality; it also sets its sights on the foundational past rather than an alternative present in attempting to come to terms with America’s defining relationship to evil. Set amidst the badlands of West Texas, Arizona, California, and Northern Mexico, the novel recounts the experiences of a protagonist known only as “the kid” (and briefly, during the text’s dénouement, as “the man”) as he participates in an ill-conceived invasion of the state of Sonora with a company of filibusters, is imprisoned in a Mexican jail, released, and then engages in a genocidal hunt for Native American scalps with the historically inspired Glanton gang, whose members are gradually winnowed away by misadventure and the predations of one of their leaders, Judge Holden. Philosophical and brutally violent, the judge functions in Blood Meridian as a kind of Mephistopheles figure, as John Sepich observes (121-126).xii When the gang first encounters the judge they are out of gunpowder and being pursued by a band of Apaches; he makes them a batch of gunpowder out of saltpeter, sulfur, guano, and urine, and, after the Apaches have been massacred, he joins the gang in a leadership capacity and helps to lead them down the road to greater and greater violence and eventual destruction. On first introducing Judge Holden, the narrator of this episode cryptically remarks, “Give the devil his due” (131). Indeed, as Sepich notes, in this section of the text the judge is described as a “sootysouled rascal” whose handiwork is liberally seasoned with references to “the devil,” and “brimstone” (121). Further, throughout the novel Holden and the rest of the gang are associated with fire and whiskey (liquid fire), thus accentuating the hellish aspect of their situation (Sepich 150-151). What Sepich overlooks, however, is the fact that the imputations of devilishness and the entire narrative that casts his joining forces with the gang in a Faustian light come from the ex-priest Tobin, and they say just as much about Tobin’s Manichean Christian outlook as they do about the character of the judge. The same goes for tent revivalist preacher Reverend Green’s cry “This is him. The devil” (7), which Sepich also cites as evidence of Holden’s devilishness. In other words, Sepich fails to adequately account for perspective—there are demonic aspects to Judge Holden (Sepich notes, for instance, two interesting

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textual parallels between descriptions of the judge and Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” [119, 122]), but he represents a broader set of forces than this. On an archetypal level, he is just as much the Magus or the Alchemist. Philosophically, and most pertinently for this study of the diabolical aspects of Western place, the judge is an embodiment of George Bataille’s dictum “I MYSELF AM WAR” (239). The judge represents everything that is brutal and carnal in human beings; he embraces existence as violence, flux, and the competing exertion of wills. He kills passionlessly and haphazardly; he knows jurisprudence, natural science, and modern and ancient languages—not out of any humanistic impulse or sense of calling, but for the sake of mastery. When called on to explain his meticulous cataloging of fauna and artifacts, he explains, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent ...Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth ....In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation” (207). Here the judge’s will to power manifests itself in the logical extreme of Western society’s positivism and reduction of the external world to its immediate use values. For him this is one of the forms of violent struggle endemic to existence; in a kindred vein he conceives of the risk and carnage embodied in war as lying at the heart of the human condition: It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be...Men are born for games. Nothing else...But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all...war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. (259-261) 14 Ultimately, it is in this, in his consummate embrace of the forces of destruction, upheaval, and non-productive expenditure that marks the malign and imposing Judge Holden as, in a sense, satanic.

15 The central narrative conflict in Blood Meridian is that of the judge, the personification of these principles, seeking to have the orphan, the kid, embrace him and his terms of existence in a father/son relationship. The kid kills and

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 13 scalps with the rest of the Glanton gang and is tempted to embrace their life of aimless bestiality and the judge’s joyfully Hobbesian philosophy of life as “war of all against all” (96). However, on multiple occasions he shows mercy and/or compassion, both of which are anathema to the judge: for example, when he refuses to shoot the wounded Shelby, when he helps Brown remove an arrow from his leg at the risk of his own life, and when he refuses Tobin’s urgings to shoot Holden. Because of this, when he visits him in a San Diego jail after their predatory waltz in the desert, Holden judges the kid a failure for not having turned away from his innate compassion to take up Holden’s path, for thus betraying the gang in his heart. He condemns the kid: “Don’t you know I’d have loved you like a son? ... [but] You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay” (319). In the end, the kid’s triumph, his preservation of his humanity in the face of the judge’s satanic temptations, is only temporary; perhaps the novel suggests that such a victory can only be contingent and transitory. Twenty-eight years after his exploits with the Glanton gang, the kid, now referred to as the man, reencounters the judge in a frontier bar, where he is overwhelmed and destroyed by him in an act of carnage that, for once in the novel, takes place off stage, and has consequently haunted the most prurient corners of its readers’ imaginations.

16 As Stephen Shaviro compellingly argues, the textuality of Blood Meridian, wavering between history and archetype, realism and symbolism, fosters a particular relationship between the reader and its many scenes of violence, one of complicity with the brutal acts of Judge Holden and the rest of the gang (155-156). As such, Blood Meridian gorily reenacts America’s westward-pushing Manifest Destiny in a way that renders the reader a culpable participant rather than a passive, abstracted observer free to take a sanctimonious position of moral condemnation (187). So the crucible of the soul the kid faces is the reader’s and the American nation’s as well: how to preserve the best of one’s human capacities in the face of the equally human “satanic” drive to eradicate the Other and possess all that can be forcibly taken.

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17 While McCarthy uses the diabolic to lay bare the barbarity that exists as the shadow side of civilization, Ishmael Reed seeks to reclaim and reconfigure the devil figure as a means of contesting the dominant values of his era. His pataphysicist Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a counter-cultural work written at the crest of the late-sixties period of social protest, a time whose desperate seeking after alternative forms of spirituality and fervent exploration of sensual gratification led to various forms of fascination with and reappraisals of Satanism and the figure of the devil, as Gavin Baddeley notes in his Lucifer Rising (43). Reed’s devil figure, protagonist Loop Garoo Kid, bears the stamp of this Age of Aquarius cultural moment: he is a Dionysian figure employed narratively to subvert the early Christian equation of the pagan underworld and fertility gods with the diabolic (Russell 11), thereby challenging the puritanism of American culture and its persecution of dissenting groups in the name of Christianity.

18 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down narrates the adventures of a rodeo rider and hoodoo shaman named the Loop Garoo Kid in and around the Western settlement of Yellow Back Radio during a time that is part 1960s, part Old West, and part Lewis and Clark expedition.xiii The book begins with Loop Garoo Kid and a small group of fellow performers in a traveling circus arriving in the town of Yellow Back Radio, where, in a fairly straightforward nod to the youth unrest of the 1960s, they find that the fun-seeking children of the town have driven off the adults and taken over. Shortly thereafter, many of the children and most of Loop’s companions are slaughtered by gunmen working for arch- capitalist land baron and cattle rancher Drag Gibson. Loop then goes into hiding, from which he casts hoodoo curses on Drag and his cattle until the former is forced to call in the pope.xiv The book ends with Drag and the white, Christian, capitalist establishment he represents defeated by a coalition of the subaltern, while Loop, having fulfilled his role, rides off on the pope’s ship. 19 At its outset the text subtly places in evidence the fact that Loop is Lucifer, the fallen angel, noting that he has a cleft foot and was “booted out of his father’s house after a quarrel,” but this identification isn’t noted again or reinforced until Loop’s meeting with the pope towards the end of the narrative (9). This matter-of-fact diabolicalness helps Reed demystify the evil of the devil, reconfiguring him to suit his own thematic purposes Robert Elliot Fox notes

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 15 that the text particularly keys in on the Promethean aspects of the devil, those beloved by the Romantics, in the Loop Garoo Kid (45). Just as prominent, if not more so, are the chthonian elements. Loop hides out in a cave like pagan male fertility gods and carries a large snake around with him. Along these same lines, the text playfully mocks Christianity’s conflation of virginity and idealized maternity by posing the Virgin Mary as a hyper-sexual mother goddess lusting after Loop, who proceeds to pimp her out (163). 20 In addition to casting Loop’s diabolicalness in a way that draws on the subversive cultural resonances of an underworld male fertility god, Reed’s text poses him as a sort of trickster figure as well, thereby using this Africana cultural trope to undermine the traditional Western good/ evil binary opposition. Loop, who like many other tricksters and shamanic figures in the Africana tradition was born with a caul, repeatedly uses spells and other forms of trickery to subvert the efforts of Drag and other characters to achieve domination over their human fellows by undermining such rudiments of social power as property and public image (9). Through the use of his hoodoo spells, he publically humiliates the town preacher, brings down a variety of illnesses upon Drag, and kills off the latter’s livestock. Loop tells the Pope that his power does not have evil sources, but is more of a cosmic joke: “I’ve always been harmless—St. Nick coming down the chimney, children leaving soup for me—always made to appear foolish, the scapegoat of all history” (165). The same sense is conveyed when he preens in the mirror the preacher uses to ward him off and lashes the crucifix from the preacher’s hand before comically reducing him to a “quivering mumbling heap” with a series of taunting insults and whip cracks (103).

21 This tricksterish undermining of the preacher is part of the overarching animosity the text poses as existing between the Christian church and the “impious” sexuality and sense of play of older faiths. As Reginald Martin observes, the text conceives of Christianity and its figurehead the pope as establishmentarian powers which constrain the possibilities of leading a “full” life and seek to eradicate groups offering alternatives (75). Loop castigates the pope for having “cooked up” the witch-hunting manual “the Witches’ Hammer [sic] ... to crush my followers way back when” and for the Catholic Church’s “massacre” of “the Gnostics, not to mention the Bogomils, Abigenses, and Waldenses” (162, 165). At issue here is the church’s and

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Western society’s violent intolerance of differing worldviews and ways of living, made possible by the process of canonization, of “ascrib[ing] to hearsay [sic], apocrypha or superstition” forms of narrative, being, and belief outside of the keen of the narrow institutionalized Christian purview (164). These have included the “satanic” varieties of spiritual practice represented by Loop, particularly African forms of knowledge and religion, which have been delegitimized, “discredited only because Black people were discredited therefore what they knew was ‘discredited,’” to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison (61). As the pope in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down admits: We’ve tried to hide the facts by ridiculing the history of Sub-Saharan Africa and claiming that of North Africa as our own. Notice how the term “blackamoor” was dropped from St. Augustine’s name, and how our friends the German Aryan scholars faked the history of the Egyptians by claiming them to be white....when African slaves were sent to Haiti, Santo Domingo and other Latin American countries, we Catholics attempted to change their pantheon, but the natives merely placed our art alongside theirs. Our insipid and uninspiring saints were no match for theirs....When Vodun arrived in America, the authorities became so paranoid they banned it for a dozen or so years....Loop Garoo seems to be practicing a syncretistic American version....It’s important that we wipe it out because it can always become a revolutionary force. Many of the Haitian revolutionaries were practicing priests. (153-154)

22 In Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, as in other works from the same period like his celebrated Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed imagines a more inclusive, multicultural social order that forgoes this sort of repressiveness. The spirit he imagines undergirding such a society is what he terms “neo-hoodoo,” a force of primal spontaneity, vitality, and sexuality opposed to the rigid pieties of Christianity (“Neo- Hoodoo Manifesto” 2064). For Reed, as postulated through his neo-hoodoo priest, the Loop Garoo Kid, and in somewhat more expository discursive terms in his “Neo- Hoodoo Manifesto,” Neo-Hoodoo is the Dionysian force of flux and creation that runs through traditional African religion and rock and roll. It is the carnivalesque spirit that can potentially disorder the foundations of American society, clearing the way for a promiscuous mixing of different cultures and their attendant spaces that poses such a threat to the established order (Fox 49; Swope 613-4, 620). The resolution to this conflict in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is not one of happy adaptation of the spirit of Neo-Hoodoo, however. Rather, the citizens of the West (Americans), child and adult (hippies and bourgeoisie), turn away from the large scale cultural conflict Loop is

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 17 engaged in and head towards a gaudy city of mass produced material comfort rising in the West: “in the distance could be seen rising a really garish smaltzy [sic] super technological anarcho-paradise. The people began to trot in slow motion towards the blue kidney shaped swimming pools, the White Castle restaurants, the drive-in bonanza markets, the computerized buses and free airplanes, the free anything one desired” (170). This fictional movement West towards this Las Vegas-esque materialist “Ciabola”xv in abandonment of the revolutions of the 1960s strikes a prescient chord, given the number of theorists such as Robert Venturi who have seen a distillation of postmodern America as a whole in Las Vegas’s superficial affluence, free play of glitzy signs, and unfettered celebration of the pop cultural.

23 So for Reed, the devil who defines the struggle over the tack of progress and the definition of Western space is left by society’s wayside in the endgame, as the forward march of consumer capitalism demonstrates a remarkable capacity to sidestep otherwise intractable forms of conflict. King’s more conventional devil survives the nuclear blast that levels Las Vegas at the end of The Stand, being reborn in a far-off locale, and so he will continue to serve as an obstacle as Americans continue in their spatio-temporal movement westwards.xvi So, it seems, will Cormac McCarthy’s dark force of life as war embodied in the judge: “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” (348). In this regard all three speak to the unresolved conflict and sense of moral flaw at the heart of American society: the enduring quality of the nation’s “dark side” for King, its unabating penchant for violence and imperialism for McCarthy, and the unconsummated promise of its countercultural revolution for Reed.

* * *

24 There are certain conjunctures of space and time that are particularly conducive to diabolic imaginings. This was the case for the Hebrews of Roman-occupied Judea, who first conceived of the idea of Satan as a separate and distinct entity as they sought to comprehend their oppressed social condition, and, in a very different way, for late-nineteenth-century Parisians, whose fascination with Satanism reflected an attempt to confront the incipient modern era while processing a deeply ingrained Catholic cultural pedigree (Russell 32-33). For America of the late-

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014 18 twentieth century, confronted with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, rapid technological change, a rising tide of cultural and moral relativism, and a longstanding tradition of millenarian outlook, the devil has similarly served as a useful vehicle for dealing with cultural anxieties. Though, with the exception of King, these authors invert or reconfigure most of the conventional cultural associations attached to this figure, they nevertheless draw on the unparalleled symbolic power of the devil in the Western tradition, as they do upon the mythic conceptualization of the American West as a privileged site of encounter, showdown, and individualism. As writers who have deeply tapped into the cultural tensions of their era and the broader historio-cultural trajectories of the United States, King, McCarthy, and Reed give a sense of the range of thematic roles in which the devil has been employed in American writings of the late Cold War Era that take up the variegated issue of moral struggle in the continually charged, even if increasingly less culturally inchoate, spaces west of the Mississippi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship & Rock and Roll. London: Plexus, 2006. Print. Bataille, George. “The Practice of Joy Before Death.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939. Trans. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985: 235-239. Print. Bataille, Gretchen. Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, andLiterary Appropriations. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001. Print. Casebeer, Ed. “Dialogue Within the Archetypal Community of The Stand.” A Casebook on The Stand. Ed. Anthony Magistrale. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1992: 173-188. Print. Cassuto, Leonard. “The Power of Blackness in The Stand.” A Casebook on The Stand. Ed. Anthony Magistrale. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1992: 69-88. Print Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage, 1999. Print

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Davis, Jonathan P. Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1994. Print. D’Elia, Jenifer Michelle. Standing Up With the King: A Critical Look at Stephen King’s Epic. Diss. U of South Florida, 2007. Print. Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Print. Gardner, Gail. “The Sierry Petes.” Features: Gail I. Gardner. CowboyPoetry.com, 2011. http://www.cowboypoetry.com/gardner.htm. 22 December 2011. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Print. Hundorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Print. “Hell in Texas.” Poems by Anonymous Americas. Poemhunter.com, 2011. Web. 22 December 2011. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkley Books, 1987. Print ---. “Inspiration.” The Stand: Complete and Uncut Edition. StephenKing.com, 2000-2011. Web. 22 December 2011. ---. The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. New York: Signet, 1991. Print. ---. 11/22/63. New York: Gallery Books, 2012. Print. Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed, Hoodoo, and the New Black Aesthetics Critics. Diss. University of Tulsa, 1985. Ann Arbor: UMI. Web. 17 July 2014. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. New York: Vintage, 1985. Print. Miller, Craig. “Nature and Cowboy Poetry.” Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry. Ed. David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher. Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P., 2000: 226-238. Print. Morrison, Toni. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. Oxford: U P of Mississippi, 2008: 56-64. Print. Poole, W. Scott. Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Print. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Ne York: Vintage, 1998. Print. Reed, Ishmael. “Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003: 2062-2066. Print.

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---. Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000. Print. Rudwin, Maximillan. The Devil in Legend and Literature. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1959. Print.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print. Sepich, John. Notes on Blood Meridian. Austin: U of Texas P., 2008. Print. Shaviro, Stephen. “A Reading of Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Hattiesberg: U of Southern Mississippi P, 1999: 145-158. Print.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Print. Stegner, Wallace. “The Sense of Place.” The Sense of Place. New York: Random House, 1992: 1-4. Print. Swope, Richard. “Crossing Western Space, or the Hoodoo Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.” African American Review 36.4 (winter 2002): 611-628. Print.

NOTES i. In this regard, narratives of the American West often resemble those of Puritan New England, in their imagining the “wilderness” surrounding them and its Native American inhabitants in devilish terms. This widespread trope of the Native American as savage devil, found for instance in the Lonesome Dove series of texts, is explored at length in such works as Shari M. Hundorf’s Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination and Gretchen M. Bataille’s collection Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. ii. In both these regards, of course, this apprehension of the West has been predicated on an elision--an antipathy to and willful ignorance of the modes of relating to the land of the Native American tribes who had inhabited these territories long before the time of Euro-American encroachments. iii. The aridness of much of the West, particularly those locales in the Southwest that the devil has been preponderantly imagined within, has no doubt reinforced this connection. As Maximillan Rudwin notes in his TheDevil in Legend and Literature, the devil and demons have been particularly associated with desert spaces due to such biblical passages that situate them in “dry places,” such as Matthew 12:43 and Luke 11:24 (62-63). iv. In his recent novel 11/22/63 (2011), King attributes America’s souring, its fall from what he presents as the grace of the Kennedy years, to Oswald. v. Thus, while Philip Roth attributes this birth of violent revolutionary domestic dissent to the fecklessness and myopicness of the generation of early Cold War America in his American Pastoral (1997), King sees it as a manifestation of the

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ingrown dark side of America’s character. That is, while Roth envisions this epochal conflict in socio-political terms, King does so in metaphysical ones. vi. Cassuto further notes that the novel’s almost wholesale indifference to events occurring outside of the United States, within which it situates its grand conflict between good and evil, marks it as a bearer of American exceptionalist ideology (83). vii. Jonathan P. Davis notes that this struggle “between pursuing the American dreams of life, liberty, and individual happiness and surrendering those values for the sake of keeping the societal machine rolling” is one of the most prominent thematic focuses in King’s oeuvre (90). viii. As numerous critics have pointed out, throughout his oeuvre King idealizes and sentimentalizes purity and innocence. ix. Along these lines, the Trashcan Man, one of Flagg’s associates, refers to Las Vegas in the novel as Ciabola, the legendary city of gold lying to the west. x. For an incisive consideration of this cultural dynamic as it pertains to Southern California, see Mike Davis’s “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” in his Ecology of Fear. xi. Ed Casebeer observes in his “Dialogue Within the Archetypal Community of The Stand” that this same archetypal character extends to most of the personae of The Stand and many of King’s other works, which accounts for much of their popularity. xii. This is not to argue reductively the judge is simply Mephistopheles or the devil--he is a complex character bearing prominent aspects of this figure (making him relevant to this study), but also shades of Captain Ahab, Iago, and the archetypal figures noted below, among others. xiii. “Loup garou” is French for werewolf, and so the protagonist’s name lends him a dark protean quality. Additionally, as Robert Elliot Fox notes, “loop” plays off significations of continuity, circuitry, and being thrown for a loop (45). xiv. Who functions in the text as an archetypal “any-pope,” but who textual clues also encourage the reader to see as the inquisitorial Pope Innocent VII. xv. Here Reed, like the Trashcan Man in The Stand, uses the name of the mythic seven cities of gold sought out by the conquistadors to evoke the West as a goal/ideal. xvi. The original sense of the Hebrew word “satan” is “one who obstructs” (Russell 28).

ABSTRACTS

The figure of the devil – employed time and again by Americans as a means of culturally construing the perceived enemy Other, as W. Scott Poole illustrates in his study Satan in America – appears with great frequency within the corpus of the literature of the American West. This essay focuses on Western regional novels of the late Cold War period (1968-1991), analyzing their manner of using the devil figure to variously challenge and/or reinforce mainstream conceptions

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of evil and come to terms with the meaning and direction of America at a time of crossroads and vast social transfiguration. It argues that Stephen King’s The Stand (1978) employs the satanic Randall Flagg to interrogate what is taken as an intrinsic strain of evil running through America’s history and emerging in especially pointed form in the social unrest and malaise of the late 1960s and 1970s. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), on the other hand, attributes Mephistophelean attributes (among others) to its antagonist Judge Holden as a means of dramatizing how barbarity, destruction, and expenditure are inexorably intertwined with the values and goals of civilization, while Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) reconfigures and repurposes the devil figure, drawing on the cultural valences of pagan male fertility figures and the Africana traditions he elsewhere conceptualizes as “neo-hoodoo” to wage a counter-cultural attack upon the pillars of American and Western Christian society.

INDEX

Keywords: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Stephen King’s The Stand, the devil in American literature, Western American regional literature

AUTHOR

MICHAEL WALONEN Bethune-Cookman University

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“To Sacrifice One’s Intellect Is More Demonic than Divine”: American Literature and Politics in Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days

Peter Swirski

Introduction

1 In 1995 two born-again evangelists sat down to pen what would turn out to be a phenomenally lucrative franchise. On paper, they were an odd couple behind a multi- platinum bestseller that from 1999 on would top The New York Times charts with each new instalment. One of them would never write a word of it. The other would ultimately dash off more than six thousand pages of earnest prose. Together they would become avatars of not trying to be taken seriously by literary critics, but being taken very seriously by the bankers.

2 Jerry B. Jenkins, the actual writer but only the second name on the cover, is the author of more than a hundred and fifty books, including several bestselling sports biographies and the nationally syndicated comic strip Gil Thorp. He is also a former president for publishing at the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago which runs the Moody Press, the port of call for biblical prophecy writers. Of late he has also cofounded the Christian Writers Guild which helps born-again novelists with marketing and writing in the same meat-and-potatoes style that drives Left Behind and the entire Left Behind Series (LBS).

3 Tim LaHaye, the prime mover behind the series, is himself the author of a long line of publications on Bible prophecy. Characteristically, in parallel to the LBS he launched the PreTrib Research Center dedicated to promoting the dispensationalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Back in 1979 he helped persuade Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority and joined its board of directors. In the 1980s, forsaking the pulpit to make room for writing and politics, he locked arms not only with Reagan-

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era Republicans but also with the ultra-conservative John Birch Society whose agenda, from vilifying the UN to promoting an evangelical interpretation of the Constitution, gets a sympathetic airing throughout the LBS.i

4 LaHaye also got involved in presidential politics as a co-chairman of Jack Kemp’s 1988 campaign, only to be kicked off in the first week when his inflammatory anti- Catholicism became a public liability. In 2000 he played a major role in rallying the religious right to vote for George W. Bush, and in 2007 publicly threw his weight behind Mike Huckabee in the Republican primaries. The would-be president returned the favor by endorsing Left Behind and its sequels as a “compelling story written for nontheologians.”ii

5 By then the entire series was winding down after fifteen years of success, with Left Behind nominated for Novel of the Year by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, LaHaye and Jenkins making the cover of Time (July 2002) and then Newsweek (May 2004), and sales receipts proving Matthew’s error when he preached that ye cannot both serve God and mammon. In short, a mammoth triumph for a story that refurbishes the Old and the New Testaments by cutting and pasting contemporary events into the dispensationalist catechism—“Nostradamus rewritten by Jeffrey Archer” in the wry summary of the London Times (Morrison 2-3).

6 Dispensationalism itself, an evangelical denomination with roots in the late 1820s Plymouth Brethren Movement, emigrated from the British Isles to America in the 1860s via the agency of an Anglican dissenter and itinerant preacher, John Nelson Darby. The centerpiece of his theology was the division of religious history into seven periods, or dispensations. In the beginning, preached Darby, was the Dispensation of Innocence (Adam and Eve in the garden east of Eden) succeeded by the Dispensation of Conscience (after the forbidden fruit). It was followed, in turn, by the Dispensation of Human Government (after God gave Noah the basic laws), of Promise (after the covenant with Abraham), of Law (after Mosaic laws on Mount Sinai), and of Grace or Church (after Jesus’ resurrection).iii

7 The millennium-long kingdom to be established by Christ after the Second Coming is called the Dispensation of the Millennium. It will be inaugurated by the Rapture, during which all born-again Christians will be beamed up to heaven, and followed by the Tribulation during which Earth will be scourged by plagues and calamities of apocalyptic proportions. The holy war between God and Satan will wipe out most of humankind before the glorious return of Jesus, who will smite the Antichrist on the plain of Armageddon. He will then establish a thousand-year kingdom, albeit not on Earth, which will itself be annihilated, but on a planet identical to ours miraculously created in its place.

8 All that, including the pogrom of several billion souls: atheists, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others who do not subscribe to the dispensationalist creed, is part of God’s master plan to bring all to the true faith. For Darby, this theodicy was not a problem: his divine omelet clearly called for the breaking of a few billion eggs. The fact that God’s retribution might rain indiscriminately on all people on Earth, born-again or not, was more disconcerting. In the end, Darby decided that, rather than suffer the equivalent of Amalric’s ‘Kill them all, for the Lord knows them that are His’, true Christians would be spirited up to heaven just before the reign of terror began. Bailed out by the Rapture, they could then safely look down on God’s carnage of those left behind. As to who qualifies as a true Christian, Darby’s teachings were no different

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from that of the Calvinists, the Puritans, and the Separatists: nobody knows except the Lord.

9 Darby’s uncompromising stance programmatically distanced him from institutionalized churches like the Roman Catholic which guarantee salvation to all who embrace it, and which historically allowed the wealthy to buy indulgences, pardons, benefices, dispensations, and other forms of simony. In contrast, in the born- again order there would be no cutting corners. No church membership or pious works could put you among the regenerate. Only unquestioning obeisance to the doctrine as elucidated by the doctrinal elders would do. Darby’s doctrinal platform was rooted in his interpretation of I Thessalonians 4:16-17: 16 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: 17 Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.iv

10 Although his reified evangelicalism was ignored by other Christian denominations, his disciples spared no efforts to popularize its bright side, insofar as the Rapture exempted prospective converts from the hell on earth that was to befall unregenerate humankind. In 1909 their efforts received a major boost with the Oxford University Press publication of the Scofield Reference Bible by an apostle of Darby’s, Cyrus I. Scofield.

11 Forging the illusion that these wildly eclectic texts all point to the dispensationalist creed, Scofield cross-referenced the entire Old and New Testament, printing his glosses directly under the scriptures and in exactly the same font.v Despite his exegeses being superimposed on the biblical verses—or perhaps because of it—the book became a big hit with fundamentalists (the revised 1966 edition is still in use). Institutionalized in the born-again Bible schools founded across America in the early twentieth century, it sold in excess of twenty million copies, paving the way for Left Behind and its version of Apocalypse Now.

1. Deus ex Machina

12 Left Behind , the first and most important novel in the series, opens onboard a transatlantic flight during which some passengers suddenly disappear from their seats, leaving nothing but bundles of clothing behind. Routed back to Chicago, the jetliner lands on the last open runway in the midst of pandemonium. Air-traffic controllers, dispatchers, motormen, drivers, surgeons were raptured while on duty, leaving a blaze of collateral death and chaos in their wake.

13 Against the terrors of the ensuing Tribulation, the book and the series follow a core group of characters: Rayford Steele, senior airline pilot from the opening pages, his spirited daughter Chloe, and her eventual husband, ace journalist “Buck” Williams. By the end of the first book all three become steadfast converts to dispensationalism. Tsion Ben-Judah, a Jewish rabbi who converts later in the series, becomes the theological spokesman for the group and for their real-life creators. Together with Pastor Barnes they form the so-called Tribulation Force which, over eleven sequels and four prequels, will evangelize the infidels and combat the Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, as he rises from obscurity to become the President of Romania, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and finally world dictator. Seven years and several billion corpses later, the Left Behind Series culminates in the glorious appearing of Christ at

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Armageddon where Carpathia and the forces of evil get slain exactly as prophesied by Scofield. The end.

14 If all this Bible-meets-Tom-Clancy soap opera sounds vaguely familiar, it is because once you have read one dispensationalist tract disguised as a novel, you have read them all. Even the locations (the United Nations, Petra, Babylon, Armageddon) are recycled from the stock of previous paper apocalypses, as are the Antichrist’s campaigns for One-World Government, One-World Currency, and One-World Religion, together with their political insinuations: the EU, the World Bank, and the ecumenical movement are minions of Satan. Still, returns to familiar faces and places can be a source of aesthetic pleasure and emotional gratification, as corroborated by die-hard fans of genre cycles like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct or television soaps like The West Wing. And genre and soap formulas come thick and fast right from page one of Left Behind.

15 The scenes of panic aboard the airliner hail straight from Alex Hailey’s Flight into Danger and the bedlam on the ground from his other disaster thriller Airport.vi Brushes with death, including a car bombing which rains a leg and part of a torso on the sidewalk, are all in a day’s work for the born-again action hero Buck. Like all handsome, loaded, lone-wolf investigative reporters he packs his MacGyver ingenuity next to his false passport. Like them, he also operates in a comic-book fairyland. Tossing the passport and ID at the site of the bombing, Buck feels confident that the police would now conclude that he was one of the casualties (Left Behind 185). Evidently Jerry B. Jenkins has never heard of forensic odontology or DNA.vii

16 On another level, the series also styles itself as an extended self-help book and a vade mecum for the millennial Everyman. Rayford Steele may be yet another generic action hero—his name clearly rings up 1980s TV and Remington Steele—but his quest for salvation becomes a handbook of instructions for every would-be spiritual pilgrim. “So how do we become true Christians?” demands Steele. “I’m going to walk you through that,” replies Pastor Barnes, “and I’m going to send you home with the tape” (200).viii

17 The sequels to Left Behind pump up the bloodshed over global theatres of war, deploying the obligatory military hardware, battle tactics, weapons specs, and aide-de- camp mindset of a techno-thriller. The LBS also attempts to fashion itself into a geopolitical exposé. Buck penetrates the periphery of a Bilderberg-like cabal of politicians and high financiers who use their global leverage to elevate Carpathia to the status of world dictator. The Antichrist’s acclamation as President of Romania is but the first in the succession of bloodless coups d’état, politically as surreal as “a freshman congressman becoming president of the United States in an off-election year, no vote, president steps down, and everybody’s happy” (138).

18 Generic plotline, stock characters, potboiler formulas, and fairy tale miracles—at every turn Left Behind demands a suspension of disbelief. So does, of course, the credo quia absurdum est of the premillennialist belief system. Ironically, this literal and figurative affirmation of the power of fiction to imagine an alternative world and to affect the affairs of this one could lie behind some of the appeal of the LBS. So could Jenkins’s utilitarian style which depicts the apocalypse in the narrative analogue to plain brown paper, with occasional hints of the confessional prosody of Edward Taylor and the confrontational one of Jonathan Edwards. At the end of the day, it may have been a selling point with the consumers: a book that tells it plainly like it is.

19 True enough, ignoring most cardinal rules of narration, LaHaye and Jenkins tell it all. They tell us that Buck is a writer’s writer, although they never furnish a word of his

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scintillating prose. They tell us that Carpathia’s oration to the UN General Assembly brims with incredible knowledge, but the two paragraphs of it we get to see are banality itself (243). Nonstop editorializing, such as when they tell us that the Antichrist rose from his chair with “pseudodignity” (447) is on a par with third-grade theology, such as when Steele undergoes an epiphany: “if genesis meant ‘beginning’, maybe revelation had something to do with the end” (121).

20 Isaac Asimov’s often quoted (and not unsympathetic) quip that the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve also holds for premillennialist fiction. It is more than the matter of the faithful walking unscathed through A-bomb blasts or of lions becoming petting-zoo leaf-eaters. In what passes for the debate on abortion in Left Behind, the only pro-choice argument comes from Hattie, the whore of Babylon: abortions are good or abortion clinics could not make a living (267). “Heckuva” is the limit of adult language in the White House, perhaps in deliberate contrast to the Nixon tapes which shocked Americans as much with their dirty tricks as with four-letter expletives. But not to worry. In the tradition of Christian romances or holy rock music, Satan’s henchmen will condemn billions to nuclear hell but will not say “hell” in the middle of the most heinous acts.

21 Torn between evangelizing and selling copy, LaHaye and Jenkins settle for an uneasy truce, with dispensationalist exhortations scrambled palimpsest-like into an action thriller. This helps explain why, when they profess that during the Rapture “everything was left behind” (16), they do not stop to sort out the theological import of grafted skin, artificial limbs, transfusion plasma, and other miracles of modern medicine that should have also been left behind. The apocalyptic plotline has no room for such trifles, so long as Left Behind XVI is gorier than Left Behind XV. On cue, battle forces in Kingdom Come (2007) are a millennial thousand times larger than in Glorious Appearing (2004).

22 In narrative terms, the LBS is a franchise made in heaven, with sequels built-in by the premise of prefiguration. After all, the last sentence of Left Behind could well be the first sentence of the sequel, Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind: “The task of the Tribulation Force was clear and their goals nothing less than to stand and fight the enemies of God during the seven most chaotic years the planet would ever see” (468). To be continued. By their own admission, LaHaye and Jenkins were taken aback by the popularity of what was first a trilogy, written in the hope of reaching half a million readers, which morphed into a bestselling dodecalogue and finally a sixteen- novel franchise with a long line of merchandise. Upsizing the narrative canvas, and consequently recycling subplots and second-string characters, has unintended comic effects, such as when one infiltrator of the Antichrist’s computer banks falls by the wayside, only to be replaced by his narrative clone, different in name but little else.

23 The Tribulation Force is LaHaye and Jenkins’s evangetainment hybrid of born-again Green Berets and “Doomsday Preppers” from the National Geographic channel reality- TV series. As befits an evangelical comic book, albeit one without frames, Christ’s commandos are top-gun graduates of the lantern-jawed school of Dick Tracy vintage. Jesus Christ himself is little more than the quintessential deus ex machina. Alighting over the fields of Armageddon, he smites his enemies and blesses the dispensationalist creed in pages upon pages of rambling monologue excerpted verbatim from the Scriptures. What should have been the series’ most exalted sequence, evincing the true measure of its epic design, is nothing short of an epic anticlimax.

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24 No less questionably, LaHaye and Jenkin replace the charitable turn-the-other-cheek Essene from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke with a death-sowing theocrat. The premillennial Savior in all but name mimics the Antichrist. Carrying himself with vanity, stamping out all theological opposition, the dispensationalist Messiah tolerates only faith that is not even blind so much as servile. In the dispensationalist disjunction tertium non datur: either you’re with us or you’re against us. Even more incongruously, in The Rising (2005) young Carpathia encounters an unidentified character who leads him to a desolate wasteland, forsakes him for forty days, bids him turn stones into bread and to throw himself off a temple roof and be saved, and pledges to him all the kingdoms of the world “if you but kneel down and worship me” (379)—all in an outré recreation of the temptations of Christ. This incongruity carries even into the spinoffs, such as the violent Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game, in which players can hack away at Christians as troopers of the Horned One.

25 Even as the LBS pays homage to the wisdom of every man and woman reading the Bible for him- or herself, the only interpretation that looms self-evident to everyone is LaHaye’s.ix Not one word about those who read the Bible differently, as all unbelievers and most believers do. Not one word about its prophecies being as lucid as those of Nostradamus. Not one word about the standard problems of textual scholarship rooted in the fact that the Scriptures collate fragmentary and often contradictory accounts written by chroniclers with vested religious and sociopolitical agendas.

26 All of which highlights the fundamental quandary of appealing to the Bible as the ultimate religious or political authority: Which is the biblical text? Is it the synoptic gospels? And if so, in which transcription: Aramaic, Coptic, Koine Greek, or Latin—and why? Or is it some synthetic reconstruction thereof? If so, does it include the apocrypha (and whose apocrypha)? The Dead Sea scrolls? The Nag Hammadi codices? The Codex Tchacos, including the recently discovered Gospel of Judas? If LaHaye is even aware of these and other hermeneutical conundrums, he dismisses them out of hand.x

27 Were the LBS Paradise Lost, its most interesting creation would be the ur-rebel with a cause: the Romanian-born Antichrist. And so he is, in the first half of Left Behind, before he plays his hand and becomes a cipher onto which LaHaye and Jenkins write all their religious and political evils. The name of the Beast is a portmanteau of Nicolae Ceausescu, the communist-era despot of Romania notorious for his personality cult, and the Carpathian range of Transylvania, home to the infamous Vlad Dracula.

28 In political terms, the Antichrist heads the organization that, in the eyes of LaHaye and his fellow dispensationalists, aims to emasculate the United States. Symbolically, the great deceiver, who is fluent in all six of the official UN languages, removes its headquarters from New York to Babylon. Just like his social platform which brims with the global-village rhetoric straight from the mouths of American liberals, his campaigns to end Third World hunger, unify global currencies, and foster ecumenical coexistence of the world’s religions prove to be satanic ruses. But it is Carpathia’s call for global disarmament that marks him for what he is. Given that the Tribulation is said to be unavoidable, anyone who brings peace must be a false pretender, if not the devil incarnate.

29 In a grand slam at the American political mainstream, Carpathia is thoroughly at home with “millenarianism, eschatology, the Last Judgment, and the second coming of Christ” (255), a rather different agenda from that of most members of Congress. Still, when the Tribulation Force is pressed to keep an eye on him, LaHaye’s message could

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not be more plain: born-again Christians should keep an eye on American politics and politicians. His fiction reincarnates his nonfiction: throughout his career LaHaye has made it no secret that “leadership in America should be filled by Christian men and women” (Bible’s Influence 83).

2. De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

30 Historically, even as the obsession with the end of the world peaks with every fin de siècle, it reaches maximum intensity at the end of every millennium, much as it did during the Dark Ages when the entire Christendom quailed in terror on the eve of 1 January, 1000 A.D. Never mind that the medieval theophanists failed to get their Judgment Day right, what with calendar reforms from Numa Pompilius onward or the absence of zero in the Roman numerical system.

31 Proving that modern minds are no less susceptible to eschatological superstition, in 1809 the Reverend George Stanley Faber published A General and Connected View of the Prophecies Relative to the Conversion, Restoration, Union, and Future Glory of the Houses of Judah and Israel; the Progress, and Final Overthrow, of the AntiChristian Confederacy in the Land of Palestine; and the Ultimate General Diffusion of Christianity. With the help of numerology and other techniques, he divined that the Antichrist was Napoleon Bonaparte and that the world would end with the end of the latter’s imperial rule.

32 Over the next two centuries, undeterred by the predictive successes of Faber and his league of successors, countdowns to Armageddon began to multiply at an accelerating rate, once more rising to a crescendo as the second millennium drew to a close. Increasingly, however, cognizant that they were swimming against the tide of modern science, apocalyptic prophets would preemptively voice their disdain for critical reasoning. Like LaHaye and Jenkins, time and time again they would exhort readers “to move beyond being a critic, an analyst” (214). Without batting an eyelid, on the other hand, they would appeal to reason in their divinations, as Edgar C. Whisenant did in 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Is in 1988 (1988).

33 Reason dictates, of course, that, quite apart from their continuously revised timetables, the very proliferation of apocalyptic prophecies reduces their credibility to zero. But even as it pays lip service to reason, dogma is immune to it. It is for no other reason that, armed with convoluted charts, Marylin J. Agee could announce in The End of the Age (1994) that the End Times were due on 31 May, 1998, and when things did not quite work out that way, calmly sit down to write Revelations 2000 (1998).

34 In Planet Earth—2000 A.D. (1994), Hal Lindsey counselled all Christians not to plan to be on planet Earth by the year 2000. This was the same Lindsey who back in 1970 predicted Armageddon for the 1980s in the bestselling nonfiction of the decade, The Late Great Planet Earth (ghost-written by Carole C. Carlson). In between, Lester Sumrall waved goodbye to Earth in I Predict 2000 A.D. (1987), Charles Berlitz and J. Manson Valentine obliterated it in Doomsday 1999 A.D. (1981), Kirk Nelson prophesied the Second Coming in The Second Coming 1998 (1998), Harold Camping foretold the end of the world for 1994 in 1994? (1992), then for 2011 in Time Has an End: A Biblical History of the World 11,013 BC— 2011 AD (2005), and so on.

35 Pinpointing the end of the world is even more popular in fiction which allows authors to reach a wider audience without losing credibility over falsifiable prophecies.

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Dispensationalist fiction, it must be said, is distinguishable from nonfiction primarily because in the latter, the authors incestuously cite one another as evidence of scholastic respectability. Paradoxically, the same evangelists who profess their disdain for critical thinking never fail to shore up their eschatology with exegetical “proofs” cited thereafter in the stream of “scholarly” publications as evidence of their accuracy. In recent years, the line between premillennialist fiction and nonfiction has blurred even further owing to the burgeoning practice of releasing novels in parallel with ancillary pseudo-scholarly apparatus. In study guides, digests, and workbooks such as The Authorized Left Behind Handbook (2005), dispensationalists neglect no opportunity to spell out their nonfictional exegeses of their fictional exegeses of the Bible.

36 But it was The Late Great Planet Earth and its triumph at the box-office that spawned a whole school of “have Scofield Bible, will novelize.” Lindsey himself was nearly beaten to the punch by Joe Musser —later a co-author of a long line of thrillers with Irangate Oliver North—and the apocalyptic Behold a Pale Horse (1970). Also in 1970 appeared 666 by the founder of the Second Coming Ministries, Salem Kirban. Three years later it was followed by his premillennial sequel, titled simply 1000. Kirban’s associate, Gary Cohen, rolled out his version of the Armageddon in Civilization’s Last Hurrah (1974). He was followed by Frank Allnutt of New Heart Ministries whose The Peacemaker (1978) featured a Henry Kissinger look-alike as the Antichrist.

37 In 1979 Carol Balizet of Home in Zion Ministries released The Seven Last Years. Pastor Dan Betzer of First Assembly of God finished the Earth off in The Beast: A Novel of the Coming World Dictator (1985). Frank Peretti, assistant pastor with the Assemblies of God, followed suit with This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989), in which, among other evils, demon-seized professors corrupt university curricula and students. Erstwhile professor of politics and NSA analyst, James BeauSeigneur, contributed Christ Clone Trilogy, to this day the most literary specimen of the dispensationalist genre (republished by Warner in 2003-2004).

38 He was followed by evangelist and part-time exorcist Bob Larson with Abaddon (1993), himself followed by evangelist and candidate for President of the United States Pat Robertson with The End of an Age (1995), himself followed by a former Moody radio affiliate David Dolan with The End of Days (1997), followed by Peter and Paul Lalonde’s Apocalypse (1998), followed by Mel Odom’s Apocalypse Dawn (2003), and so on in a long and growing line of paper apocalypses.xi

39 Subject to the same commodifying pressures as other pulp genres, dispensationalist fiction recycles similar plotlines, basing them on the premise that the history and the calamitous future of our civilization are described in the scriptures. At the same time, through the process known in ecology as adaptive radiation, it produces an endless number of variations on this basic template. With the lion’s share of every novel devoted to the terrors visited upon the Earth first by God and then by Satan, the seven- year Tribulation looks every inch like the seven-year itch that has to be scratched over and over again—albeit to no avail, since the compulsion to foretell the day when the Antichrist rides into Babylon on a pale mount shows no signs of tapering off.

40 Facing these anachronistic prophecies, a skeptical inquirer may be excused for asking where fiction ends and reality begins. The standard concept of “reality” does not, of course, allow for much in-betweenness. Its semantic bivalence is simple: something is either real like a pen, or unreal like a unicorn. But what about the reality of centers of gravity? You can never hold the latter in your hand like you hold a pen, yet civil

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engineers and acrobats stake their lives on them. Interestingly, psychoanalytic talk- cures or psychosomatic placebos work to the extent people believe them to be real.

41 On 1 July, 2002 a Time/CNN poll reported that nearly sixty percent of Americans believe that the apocalyptic prophecies intimated in the Book of Revelation will come to pass.xii No matter that this belief flies in the face of scientific knowledge, not to mention the Bible itself which appears to put the End Times at the end of the first century A.D. (Matthew 24:34). No matter that we have by now survived hundreds of these premillennial and postmillennial apocalypses, always to wake up the morning after and go to work.

42 Any rational enterprise that got all of its deductions and predictions wrong might be tempted to take a step back and re-assess the theory on which they are based—in this case the theory of Rapture, Tribulation, and Apocalypse. But not premillennialism. The rapture, insist LaHaye and Jenkins, “could not be dissected and evaluated scientifically from a detached Ivy League perspective” (394), demanding a suspension of disbelief instead. At the end of the day, much like in art, in religion de gustibus non disputandum. All the same, as a literary critic with a mandate to think critically, I prefer to throw my lot in with Paul Tillich who, in his existential sermons collected in The Shaking of the Foundations, warned that the command “to sacrifice one’s intellect is more demonic than divine. For a man ceases to be man if he ceases to be an intellect” (62).

3. Apocalypse Now

43 For American Christianity these may be the worst of times and the best of times. Many congregations are in decline, sex and child-abuse scandals are driving even lifelong pew sitters away, and in some areas of life, from gene therapy and contraception to abortion and gay marriage, the church looks look antiquated, perhaps even reactionary. Not much seems to have changed, in short, from 1966 when Time magazine baited Americans from its first-ever pictureless cover with: “Is God Dead?”

44 Naturally, rumors of God’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In April 2005, for example, Marie Claire ran a feature on Christian iconography which left little doubt that the divine brand identification could be the envy of every marketing whiz. Crosses are ubiquitous, it reported, splashed on billboards, dangling from necks and ears, tattooed on raw skin. God speaks from t-shirts, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs. Jesus sells a diversified portfolio of products, from diets (kosher) to hobbies (carpentry) to footwear (sandals). This is not to even mention a backlist of bestsellers such as What Would Jesus Eat? or, for those who do their penance in the gym, Body By God.

45 In 2007 USA Today published a Gallup poll according to which two out of three American adults believe that the Almighty created human beings in their present form during the last ten thousand years. This dramatic evidence of born-again fervor is even more impressive in light of the fact that, over the last half a century, membership in mainstream denominations has nosedived. Presbyterian and Methodist congregations, for example, are only half of what they were when Time needled believers from newsstands. The registered numbers of Episcopalians are down by almost sixty percent. Ditto for the United Church of Christ.xiii

46 One can spin these numbers in a number of ways, but there is no denying that born- again Christianity is no longer playing catch-up to the American religious and cultural

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mainstream. These days it is part of the mainstream, lending some credence to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell’s claims of commanding a television audience of one hundred million (Sizer 23, see also Luhrmann). Its religious and political clout, in turn, accounts at least in part for the spike in the numbers and commercial returns of story cycles like Left Behind.

47 Yet, instead of celebrating their social and cultural penetration, many evangelical leaders bemoan society’s decline among accusations of moral turpitude and political decay. Neither is this spirit of doomsday anything new. Back during America’s bicentennial, Tim LaHaye himself made no bones about the evil rampant in the fifty states. In parallel with his efforts to counter the work of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, and the National Association for Education, he thundered under the imprint of Christian Heritage College: “Today we face our greatest enemy, atheistic humanism, which seeks to destroy our moral character and divert us from the principles that have produced the greatest nation in the history of the world” (LaHaye, Bible’s Influence 33).

48 Forget global warming, with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance. Forget the menace of militant fundamentalism at home and abroad. Forget street violence, drug culture, systemic poverty, political disfranchisement, and education limping on a wing and a prayer. None of them pose as much threat as America’s Enemy Number One: humanists who have wrested the helm of the ship of state from the hands of born-again Christians. And the results of their machinations? Nothing short of Apocalypse now: Government induced socialism in the guise of liberalism is raping the American free enterprise system, human initiative is being sapped by welfarism, the morals of our nation have dropped to an all time low, crime threatens our personal safety, and the liberal media is seeking to control the thinking of our people. (LaHaye, Bible’s Influence 73)xiv

49 Oddly, not once does LaHaye and other doomsayers pause to reflect on the fundamental, not to say fundamentalist, self-contradiction in their theologic. On the one hand, they squander no opportunity to affirm that the Almighty is in absolute control of everything there is. In Left Behind LaHaye and Jenkins could not be more categorical that all that happens happens as decreed by a celestial master plan: “Bible prophecy is history written in advance” (214). They reprise their message in The Remnant: “God has given us in the Bible an accurate history of the world… It is the only truly accurate history ever written” (228). The belief in predestination goes so far that Tsion Ben Judah, the authors’ ill-concealed mouthpiece, enunciates in Soul Harvest: “the outcome has already been determined. We win!” (247)xv

50 This is why, taken at face value, evangelical fulminations against atheism, humanism, liberalism, socialism, or other “isms” could be considered inherently blasphemous. If history unfolds in accordance with what is in the Bible, twentieth-century liberalism and humanism are also agents of the divine will. Opposing them amounts to opposing God’s decree which is not only sacrilegious but, in fundamentalist terms, impossible. In sum, LaHaye advocates rebellion against divine providence while maintaining that it cannot be done—a logical and theological suicide.

51 Undoubtedly, a devil’s advocate might object at this point that this entire reductioad absurdum is predicated on taking Left Behind and its exegetical maneuvers at face value. Is it not, however, a category error to read fiction as if it wasn’t? Is it not wrongheaded to emulate Madame Bovary and take LaHaye’s novels to be the gospel truth? Has not Sir

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Philip Sidney already apologized on behalf of every writer that he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth? He has, while holding his fingers crossed behind his back. As Sidney knew too well, literary fiction can have profound consequences in the real world. Even those novels that do not make national history like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Jungle did, remake readers in their image by affirming or challenging their ideas about the world. But it is when they expressly call on readers to stand up for these ideas that they expressly cross from fiction into political activism and mass propaganda.

52 Such is the case when LaHaye and Jenkins demonize their partisan adversary, Molly Ivins, known for her libertarian broadsides at born-again Republicans from Pat Buchanan to George W. Bush. In the Left Behind series she is incarnated as Viv Ivins, a woman who raises the Antichrist and whose very name in Roman numerals spells VI VI VI—the number of the Beast. Importing their fundamentalist and Republican commitments so expressly into their fiction, LaHaye and Jenkins deliberately renounce Sir Philip Sidney’s defense. In the end, the Left Behind novels more than license being read in the light of their authors’ real-life religious and partisan convictions. They demand it, precisely because they represent a mass-market popularization of their apocalyptic eschatology and their arch-conservative politics.

4. Dehistoricizing History

53 One should not judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Left Behind the original hardcover from Tyndale House corroborates The New York Times’ dismissal of the LBS as a literary “exercise in brand management” (Kristof A23). Bible-black monochrome with a stenciled title serves as an emblem of the Good Book—and, as such, a good book. Between the covers, unjustified margins reinforce the symbolism. No justification is needed in a book premised on transcribing God’s moves for the Endgame. No matter that Matthew 24:34 identifies End Times with the end of the first century A.D., leaving its modern exponents behind by nearly two thousand years.

54 In a tacit admission of this flagrant anachronism, in the preface to the final book in the series LaHaye forswears his core premise of reading the Bible literally. In a dramatic u- turn, God is now to be taken at His word only “wherever possible” (Kingdom Come xiv). In one fell swoop, the purportedly true history of humankind is reduced to a hermeneutist’s paradise. The problem is, of course, that there is little in the Old Testament to justify LaHaye’s hermeneutics in the name of the New. The alleged prophecies of the Second Coming of Christ in our time are taken out of context and hammered onto gospels that by and large have little to say about them.

55 The real guiding light in all such free-for-all exegeses, documents James Barr in Fundamentalism, is not the gospel truth but the impulse to show the Bible to be inerrant. Cherry-picking the scriptures for “evidence,” often by means of free association and wordplay, premillennialists forsake “the literal sense as soon as it would be an embarrassment” (46).xvi Worse, LaHaye’s gospel à la carte is grounded in conspicuous misinterpretations. It is more than the awkward fact that there is not one word in the Scriptures about dispensations, and even less about the Rapture or the Tribulation. In Tribulation Force and then in Soul Harvest LaHaye and Jenkins claim that the Tribulation Force is named after “what the Bible calls ‘tribulation saints’” (236). Except the phrase “tribulation saints” is absent from the Scriptures.

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56 At the end of the day, all this narrative and theological skullduggery makes it difficult to see the LBS as anything else but a species of juvenile adventure. Whatever its artistic and aesthetic demerits, on the other hand, it has more than proven its staying power with American readers (tellingly, translations were almost uniformly flops). So what that, as weapons in the fight for the minds of the American public, the Left Behind novels are artless and crude? Much as in politics, in religion a bludgeon is sometimes more effective than a lancet.

57 Moreover, even if forgettable as an aesthetic experience, the LBS is invaluable as a social seismograph for getting a reading of the influence of Christian fundamentalism in American public life. This is largely because apocalyptic fiction never strays far from politics tout court. As a matter of fact, many tenets of evangelical Christianity, such as the absolutist view of the scriptures, the belief in divine agency, or the desegregation of state and religion are mirrored in its political platform—such as an apocalyptic view of history, the displacement of democracy by charismatic leadership, and the advocacy of behavioral control.xvii

58 The end results of the apocalyptic notion of history are particularly insidious. The Judgment Day perspective on the course of human affairs in effect dehistoricizes world history, replacing self-realization and material causation with the divine finger in the name of a teleological fulfillment of wildly anachronistic divinations. More perniciously still, it transmutes the workaday political process—premised as it is on vigorous debate, hardnosed negotiations, and bipartisan horse-trading—into an apocalyptic standoff between the forces of good and evil.

59 Apocalyptic politics in the United States goes beyond evocations of doomsday, branding of sundry axes of evil, appeals to “What Would Jesus Do?” or agitprop about America’s divine election. Crucially, it eliminates the political middle ground and the presumption of vectoring a collective impulse, and with them the culture of collaboration and compromise. In their place it cultivates a politics of hardline disjunctions, block refusals, and wedge issues contrived to polarize the electorate and turn partisan politics into a zero-sum showdown of Manichean proportions. In short, to borrow a word from Jon Stewart, it turns American politics into a daily cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust.

60 Seen in this light, apocalyptic fiction and apocalyptic evangelism are clearly not just about religion. Krishna Kumar’s analysis of modern-era fundamentalism in India is particularly useful in this context. His insights into communalism—whereby a community of adherents shares not only religious affiliation but also social, economic, and not least political objectives—open a window onto the engagé variety of fundamentalism ascendant nowadays in the United States. Personified by the authors of Left Behind, it stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Christian suspicion of striving for reward in this world as opposed to the next.

61 Like all other fundamentalist denominations, dispensationalism has traditionally viewed human history as inherently corrupt, with the contemporary times as the best case in point. Such a perspective is not conducive to active engagement in society’s affairs, seen as they are as a source of degeneracy and vice. Indeed, the dimensions of the political revolution in evangelical circles is apparent when one considers that in the first half of the twentieth century several denominations questioned whether it was even moral to vote.xviii

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62 The apparent clash with science, reason, and liberal social values has led many to see in fundamentalism a rejection of modernity and even an epitome of antimodernity.xix It is at least as plausible, however, to see it as a quintessential expression of modernity and its fragmented, unstable nature that produces a cultural antithesis for every thesis. Ironically, with dispensationalism ambivalent about so much of the contemporary world, dispensationalist fiction exploits this anxiety even as it recruits rank and file for its political goals.

63 Today millennialism and meliorism go hand in hand with an active, even proactive, attitude to social engineering and political engagement. Historian Michael Standaert makes this point in the context of LaHaye and the LBS by showing how the grafting of dispensationalist theology on the American myths of exceptionalism and rightwing conspiracy fantasies made for resurgent political activism (27). Johann Pautz describes how Left Behind belongs to a far-right social landscape that runs from the Militia Movement to the John Birch Society, exerting “considerable influence in American politics” (283). And Melani McAlister completes the picture of evangelism engagé by detailing how evangelical fiction and nonfiction articulate a clear and present “political agenda” (775).

5. Coda: Judgment Day

64 Historically, the granddaddy of apocalyptic bestsellers was not Left Behind or The Late Great Planet Earth but Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 narrative poem The Day of Doom. His literary terrors of Judgment Day, especially the part in which God damns unbaptized children to hell, proved so scandalizing to its contemporaries that today not one copy of the first two editions survives. They were all thumbed to shreds.

65 Viewed in one light, the LBS is no more than a commercial spinoff from the bestselling and arguably most important book in the history of the Western civilization. Viewed in another, however, it is an embodiment of a time-honored tradition of modernizing the Christian gospel for its contemporaries. Going back to the ancient corpus of Vetus Latina, via the now canonical Vulgate, it extends right up to the beehive of twenty-first century Bibles tailored to the eclectic tastes of American consumers.

66 For the tree-huggers there is the Green Bible printed on recycled paper with soy ink, with all references to the environment highlighted in green. For the yuppies there is the Bible Illuminated in a GQ-style glossy oversized format and adorned by photos of celebrities from Che Guevara to Angelina Jolie. There is the Power of a Praying Woman’s Bible, Spiritual Warfare Bible, Spirit-filled Life Bible, Livin’ Out Your Faith Bible, Duct Tape Bible, Backpack Bible, Extreme Teen Bible, American Patriot Bible, and —rounding up a catalogue of hundreds of other niche offerings—the Veggie Tales Bible.

67 The evangelical United States may not be ready, however, for the findings documented in 2009 in Evolutionary Psychology. Countries with low levels of social dysfunction—as measured by the rates of homelessness, unemployment, teen pregnancies, abortion, divorce, imprisonment, homicide, STDs, and others—are invariably the most secular. In contrast, countries afflicted by social problems, such as the United States, are the most religious (as reflected by belief in God, religious service attendance, frequency of prayer, and so on). Behind the correlation lies causality. The easing of social and economic problems dims religiosity, while social ills turn it back on.xx

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68 The apparent ease with which populations shrug off God when conditions improve bucks the view popular in American evangelical and political circles that religious observance is the bedrock of existence. Instead, it appears to be an adaptable coping mechanism. When socioeconomic dysfunction reaches critical levels, people deal with the trauma by turning their eyes toward heavens. This is an awkward truth in a country in which, if Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are anything to go by, “atheist” and “humanist” are four-letter words. A country in which coordinated political action from groups such as the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition of America aims to keep godless liberals from forging a nation in their own image. A country whose elected representatives apparently aim to convert it into a theocracy, with the Bible in the place of the Constitution.

69 The rallying cry of the religious right is, after all, that the Constitution was written to promote a Christian order. So what that this contradicts the historical record? “If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you’re going to legislate sin,” holds Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris, co-chair of Bush II’s 2000 election campaign and a would-be Senator.xxi Some Senators even vow not to confirm atheists to the Supreme Court, thus violating the very Constitution—which mandates that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust—on which they took an oath.xxii

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LaHaye, Tim, and Jerry B. Jenkins. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1995. Print.

---. Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1996. Print.

---. Are We Living in the End Times? Current Events Foretold in Scripture and What They Mean. Nashville, Tenn.: Tyndale House, 1999. Print.

---. Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1999. Print.

---. The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2002. Print.

---. Glorious Appearing: The End of Days. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2004. Print.

---. Kingdom Come: The Final Victory. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2007. Print.

Luhrmann, T.M. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf, 2012. Print.

Lindsey, Hal, with Carole C. Carlson. The Late Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970. Print.

Mathewson, Dan. “End Times Entertainment: The Left Behind Series, Evangelicals, and Death Pornography.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 24:3 (2009): 319-337. Print.

McAlister, Melani. “Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Fundamentalism’s New World Order.” South Atlantic Quarterly 102:4 (2003): 773-797. Print.

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Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.

Morrison, Richard. “Armageddon Ahead: Please Fasten Your Bible Belt.” The Times 20 September (2002): T2, 2-3. Print.

Paul, Gregory. “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Social Conditions.” Evolutionary Psychology 7:3 (2009): 398-441. Print.

Pautz, Johann. “The End Times Narratives of the American Far-Right.” In Kinane, Karolyn and Michael A. Ryan, eds. End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2009. 265-286. Print.

Price, Robert M. The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007. Print.

Scofield, Cyrus Ingerson. The Old Scofield Study Bible: King James Version, Standard Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print.

Shuck, Glenn W. Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.

Sizer, Stephen R. Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? Leicester, UK: IVP, 2004. Print.

Standaert, Michael. Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire. Brooklyn, New York: Soft Skull, 2006. Print.

Sutherland, John. “Apocalypse Now.” Rev. of Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The Guardian 12 June 2003. Web. Accessed 15 June, 2014.

Swirski, Peter. American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York, London: Routledge, 2011. Print.

Tillich, Paul. The Shaking of the Foundations. New York: Scribner’s, 1948. Print.

Demographia. “Trends in Large U.S. Church Membership from 1960.” Web. Accessed June 15, 2014.

Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Print.

Weremchuk, Max S. John Nelson Darby: a Biography. Neptune, NJ: Loizeaux Brothers, 1993. Print.

Whisenant, Edgar C. 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. Nashville, TN: Whisenant/World Bible Society, 1988. Print.

Wigglesworth, Michael. The Day of Doom, or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment: With Other Poems. London: Forgotten Books, 2012. (Orig. 1662.)

Wilkinson, Paul. For Zion’s Sake: Christian Zionism and the Role of John Nelson Darby. Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2007. Print.

NOTES i. For the dimensions of LaHaye’s educational and political empire, see Standaert. ii. On Kemp campaign, see Dreyfuss; Huckabee quote in Chafets. iii. On Darby, see Sizer; Wilkinson; Weremchuk. iv. On Darby’s textual exegeses, see Frey; Shuck. v. Shuck, 37.

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vi. Co-written with John Castle. vii. Buck Williams may be based on Tom Hammond, bachelor journalist hero of the early- twentieth-century premillennialist novels of Sydney Watson. viii. All subsequent references are to Left Behind unless indicated otherwise. ix. This point is elaborated by just about every ecclesiastical commentator on the series, including Price; Bergen; Mathewson; Chapman. x. On biblical transmissions, corruptions, and restorations, see Metzger; the Gospel of Judas in Kasser, Meyer, and Wurst. xi. For plot précis, see Price; Shuck; Gribben (2009, Chapter 7) tracks other prophecy fictions after the LBS. xii. See Sutherland. xiii. See Demographia. xiv. For background see Guyatt, esp. 245-277. xv. For background see Bernstein. xvi. See also Gold, 40; below, Price, 294. xvii. Frey, especially Introduction; in Marks of the Beast, Shuck deliberately separates the two terms (and favours the first); for behavioural engineering and charismatic leadership, see Swirski (2011). xviii. Wacker, Chapter 13. xix. Gribben (2009). xx. Paul; Luhrmann re-articulates the coping mechanism thesis on page 320. xxi. Kramnick and Moore, 22; Harris in Dershowitz, 117. xxii. For the US Senators James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and Don Nickles (R-Oklahoma), see Freddoso.

ABSTRACTS

The article focuses on the cultural and political implication of the recent publishing sensation from two fundamentalist Christian ministers-turned-writers: Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Their sixteen-book Left Behind Series (1995-2007) has by now sold close to eighty million copies, crossing over from the evangelical margins to the bookseller’s mainstream. Focusing by and large on the first novel in the series, the article analyzes its narrative and political logic in the context of the rise of apocalyptic imagery in American culture and public life.

INDEX

Keywords: Left Behind; Tim LaHaye; Jerry B. Jenkins; apocalypse; American literature; American politics.

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AUTHOR

PETER SWIRSKI Sun Yat-sen University

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Urban Spaces and Architecturally Defined Identity in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts

Wayne E. Arnold

Introduction

1 On August 1st, 1933, The Greenwich Villager, a New York neighborhood newspaper, featured a front-page article entitled, “Greenwich Village Bows to Modernity.” The author lamented the geographical and architectural developments unfolding throughout the previous decade within the dwindling bohemian environments of Greenwich Village, with outdated structures to be sacrificed on the “Altar of Progress” (Watts 1). Outdoor recreational spaces, such as Washington Square, were becoming walled-in by the newly erected structures; apartment buildings infringed upon existing residential zones—one particularly threatened house boasted possession of the last front yard. Such developments were considered challenges to which the city’s residents must adjust. A frequent visitor of Greenwich Village, Nathanael West (1903-1940) witnessed the surfacing architectural transformations causing the subsequent emigration of numerous Village artists. West possessed a literary talent that has been noted for being infused with critical and satirical astuteness concerning the core social issues of his generation. Unsurprisingly, West infused his 1933 novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, with images of urban spaces that ultimately define his lead protagonist through the architectural structures of the city. Throughout the novella’s rapid-paced narration various locales become keys for interpreting the structural world defining urban life. Places within West’s city—an urban park, an underground speakeasy, an office, or even the apartment of the protagonist, Miss Lonelyhearts—function as mirrors that reflect the physically and psychologically oppressed city dweller. Such locations represent what Henri Lefebvre describes as abstract space, various spaces that are multifaceted in their functions due to their shifting—and abstract—relation with a larger environment. I argue that an examination of the physical setting of the

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narrative will illuminate a new understanding of the repressed, agoraphobic identity of Miss Lonelyhearts, and bring a fresh phenomenological interpretation to the demise of one of West’s most complicated characters.

2 I have chosen West’s second novella due to its sparse prosaic construction and direct references to the surroundings of New York City. Miss Lonelyhearts is a study of actions and emotional responses to an environment of rigid architectonics, depicting a society collapsing inwards. My main argument evolves from the viewpoint that in Miss Lonelyhearts, the personal tribulations the protagonist undergoes are intimately connected with environment-induced confusion. Through an episodic examination of the novella, I demonstrate how the mental collapse of the protagonist is related directly to his surroundings; the individual, West suggests, becomes intertwined with his environment and may fail to rationally overcome agoraphobic tendencies, thereby becoming an abortive incarnation of Georg Simmel’s concept of a new public self surmounting the mentally inundating metropolis (338). The culmination of this analysis, I trust, will bring a fresh interpretation to West’s work—including a new perspective on the finale—by examining the spaciality within Miss Lonelyhearts.

1. Literary Architectonics

3 Literature has long been a source for the cultural examination of urban environments; indeed, examining the Euro-American modern novel “shows that as a culture, we are coming to represent the unrepresentable complexity of this urban world through a thematics of empty space” (Milun 11). Miss Lonelyhearts, as a work structured around environment, encourages the exploration of the 1920s and 30s megalopolis. West’s prose is of particular value for period analysis due to his meticulous attention to detail and to his fine-tuning of every produced sentence that leaves the reader with a sense of receiving “striking pictorial effects” (Zlotnick 177).

4 Often praised for his “idiomatic leanness of prose” (Keyes 79), West is less frequently noted for his inclusion of what might be labeled as descriptive asides, seemingly subtle references to windows, walls, doors, rooms, stairwells and high-rises.i Jay Martin, West’s official biographer, has observed that in his final novel, The Day of The Locus (1938), West was “fascinated by the architectural” atmosphere of Hollywood. Indeed, West briefly considered incorporating the following epigraph by Lewis Mumford, author of The Culture of Cities (1938): “‘From the form of a city, the style of architecture, and the economic functions and social grouping it shelters and encourages, one can derive most of the essential elements of a civilization’” (qtd. in Martin 309).ii After returning from Paris in 1929, having been introduced to the surrealistic movement—known “to encompass architecture” (Bohn 72) in their methodology—West had become enamored with the work of Max Ernst, often looking through “Ernst’s books of scrambled illustrations” (Wilson). In paying attention to both the personal, domestic quarters and outer, public spaces comprising the urban environment, West parallels the reflections of his contemporary, Le Corbusier, who published The Radiant City in 1933; for Le Corbusier, future architectural design must transform “the frightening chaos and the saddening monotony of today’s cities” (Radiant 301).

5 Recent decades have seen a rise in scholarly examination of place, space and time. Conceivably, we have been “experiencing a resurgence of a model of European

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intellectual history focused on cities” (Spector 259), exploring the space-theories of European and, in particular, French intellectuals. Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, in their introduction to NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity, contend “that thinking with space and time results both in deeper theoretical insight in and broader practical application of the contemporary critique of modernity” (1; original italics); such practical application applies to understanding how the individual and the environment are decidedly inseparable since our very existence is defined in time and space. Space, as Foucault argues, may not be extracted from time, instead there exists a “fatal intersection” (46) of the two, by which spaces are traceable through an indelible historicized period. Contemporary work on theorizing urbanity, by anthropological and sociological critics such as Marc Augé, Bruce Janz, Adian Southall, and Verena Andermatt Conley, for instance, endeavor to delineate the metropolitan environment, opening it up for analytical dissection. Places, postulates Augé, share the combined attributes “of identity, of relations and of history,” and are “both spatial and social” (43). From the moment of birth we are associated with a place, thereby generating a traceable and historical narrative. For each of us, our human body participates in the intersection of space and time through our individual associations with place: “the extent of place is less broad than we presume when place is taken to be merely a portion of space. Place has an intensity and intimacy familiar to the lived bodies that inhabit it” (Casey 242). The crucial aspect of the relationship between the “lived bodies” and spaces is the crisis of overpopulation of regions. Threatening the modern city are extreme levels of congestion; likewise, “[c]onflicts for space often [translate] into conflicts for identity” (Ward and Zunz 11), in terms of social association and individual uniqueness. Furthermore, a megalopolis, such as New York, is “more likely to become the locus of identity conflicts than to transcend such conflicts” (Davis and Duren 1). An understanding of individuality and identity within the modern city translates into a better understanding of how environment imposes itself on both our bodies and our interactions with place, space and time.

6 In The Production of Space, Lefebvre contends that conceptualized domains between mental and physical space are often obscurely defined realms. Instead, overlapping occurs across a variety of representational spaces; he cites specific examples of imbricated spaces for “leisure, work, play, transportation, public facilities” (Production 8), all incorporated within architecture, urbanism or social planning. These multifold realms converge, creating “an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next.” Conscious of its apparent obviousness, Lefebvre posits that “(Social) space is a (social) product,” arguing that “[s]ocial space… ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space” (Production 26–27; original italics); Lefebvre makes the interconnection between space—or spaces—and the self, and such interaction between the variety of spheres creates a joint relationship between the self and the man-made, produced environment. Our experiences, therefore, are both mental and physical, and the physical element is composed of multiple spaces, interacting through our daily life. Personalizing such experiences,iii prominent Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, in The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (2005), accentuates the inability of the city inhabitant to repel an interchange between self and space: “I experience myself in the city, and the city exists though my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me” (43).

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2. Miss Lonelyhearts’s City

7 Thus far, I have established the inextricable relation with which we, as individuals, become enveloped within the environment. The fusion of space and the individual serves as a springboard for our analysis of place and space within West’s novella. Locales within the narrative illustrate how personal and public spaces detrimentally precipitate the psychological downward spiral of the protagonist. The narrative generates a “kind of fragmentary, machine-like experience associated with the loss of aura” (Barnard 205), as it represents late 1920s New York City, replete with urban advancements (high-rises) and urban decay (a desiccated park), and founders in rejuvenating the distressed protagonist. Locational significance present in our daily life did not escape West’s artistic eye; place and space are clearly established in Miss Lonelyhearts, as all but one chapter begins with a place-referent.iv Miss Lonelyhearts’s identity is at risk of fracturing owing to the forceful impact of the urban environment. The narrative evinces the ingurgitating locales, “[revealing] an unsuspected depth to urban alienation” (Wisker 61), in which Miss Lonelyhearts can hardly surmise that he is mentally slipping into a deranged and radical identity. In “Some Notes on Miss L.,” West reveals the he intentionally composed the narrative so that “[e]ach chapter instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture” (401). Accomplishing this agenda requires a keen ability for constructing a strategically depicted spacial environment, resulting in an aerial view of the story’s scenes.

8 To briefly outline the narrative, Miss Lonelyhearts is employed as a newspaper columnist in charge of writing advice for the troubled readers of a New York City newspaper; however, his mental state is already faltering, and he seldom meets the submission deadlines for the column. Ironically, he himself is in need of the most counseling as he suffers throughout the course of the story from an encompassing Christ Complex, an impression that Christ has ordained him to succor the troubles of his readers. Crossing the boundary between author and readership, Miss Lonelyhearts has a rendezvous in a city park with a loyal reader, Mrs. Doyle; a brief sexual encounter occurs in his apartment, leaving Miss Lonelyhearts even more distraught due to failed interpersonal communication. Shortly thereafter, in a basement speakeasy, Miss Lonelyhearts is introduced to Mr. Doyle, and the two men struggle to communicate in the murky environment. Putting writing aside, Miss Lonelyhearts attempts to mend the Doyle’s broken marriage. Yet, the columnist only exacerbates the situation, as events turn violent. The novel culminates when a vengeful Mr. Doyle visits the columnist’s apartment. At this point, suffering from a complete mental breakdown, Miss Lonelyhearts believes that Doyle’s presence signifies a sign from God; a scuffle ensues on the stairwell—a crucial locational space for the climax—as the columnist runs to embrace Mr. Doyle, and Miss Lonelyhearts is presumably shot and killed by his loyal reader.v

9 The prosodic sparseness of Miss Lonelyhearts is epitomized in West’s control of location in the novel. Of paramount importance is the city park, functioning as the “central node” (Rozelle 102) of the novel, where the distressed protagonist, at one point, nearly comprehends his girlfriend’s admonishment that “all his troubles were city troubles” (West 95). Structurally separated from the high-rises by which it is surrounded, the park illuminates Miss Lonelyhearts’s vulnerability to the influences of

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environment, as his “melodramatic and often fraudulent broodings in the park are laughable, [yet] his visions are those of his place” (Rozelle 104). An element of trickery underlies the events as they develop in relation to place. Part of the comical nature of the rapid narrative, Miss Lonelyhearts’s attempts to reinvigorate himself emphasize the misdirected purposes of modern urban public and private realms. The adjectives, verbs and nouns depict a warped, antipastoral environment filled with degenerate flowers, blotched lawns, soiled fields, tortured plants, and spike-like herbage.

10 As a form of urbanized nature, the park represses its visitors, being surrounded by mechanical structures and subjugated through the force of a produced rather than a natural, pastoral space. Miss Lonelyhearts’s chosen route to a local speakeasy causes him to pass through the park; he entered “at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch” (West 63), reminiscent of the urban city depicted in The Waste Land (1922), with an “Unreal City / Under the brown fog of a winter noon” (Eliot 136).vi A byproduct of the encroaching mechanical environment, his senses are blunted with a miasma of “artificially heated” (63) air and a “gray sky [that] looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser” (64). He walks through a shadow of a lamppost and envisions its spear-like resemblance piercing his body. The shadow generates both a physical image of violence as well as a symbolic threat to the vulnerable nature of Miss Lonelyhearts’s personal self. Being symbolically pierced by a spear-shaped shadow, outside of its Christological connotation, intimates the depth of Miss Lonelyhearts conscious—or sub-conscious—awareness concerning the oppressiveness of his urban surroundings. Tired, and resting on a bench, he becomes aware that he is “heavy with shadow.” The arch under which he passes severs the urban street from the produced (un)natural space. The interurban backdrop that incorporates the park is what Lewis Mumford, in The Culture of Cities (1938), categorizes as an outer physical realm; to absorb such spaces, the observer must successfully interface the outer with the inner: “for the outer environment to function effectively, man must face it, seize it, assimilate it: and when that is done, it is no longer an outer environment” (303–304); yet, crucial for understanding our protagonist, what develops if the environment itself is devalued to a point of ineffectiveness?

11 Elaborating on Jean Baudrillard’s assessment of the scarcity of space, Verena Conley explains that “[w]hen social relations were based on transcendent or fixed values, there existed a clear demarcation between inside and outside, private and public.… With no moral value, functional places are simply integrated in a structural system of value” (51). The linking of morality and architecture has found voice in the work of Le Corbusier and Giedion, specifically. In the controversial Morality and Architecture (1977), David Watkin posits that Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (1923) “[preached] of a chosen type of architecture as an inescapable natural and moral commitment” (44). The extent to which moral design can be implemented into architectural design has been hotly contested over the past century. In West’s fictional world of the late 1920s New York City, Miss Lonelyhearts struggles with providing a moral compass for his disturbed following of readers, as he slowly begins to surmise that the very environment of the city is inextricably entwined within the faltering value system of the culture. Even so, Miss Lonelyhearts designs to resuscitate the irreparable park, to revive it for his purpose of providing a sanctuary from the menacing megalopolis.

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12 The park, a polarized source of nature, signals the developing mental fatigue of Miss Lonelyhearts, precipitating his eventual complete psychological breakdown. Within the small park, Miss Lonelyhearts delves into his most “spacial” thinking by examining the encroaching urban landscape. His passing thoughts, provided by the omniscient narrator, integrate a conscious awareness of the creation and destruction of space, generated through architectural design. Pondering his location, Miss Lonelyhearts converts to what Lefevbre would label an urbanist; defined in The Urban Revolution, Lefevbre styles an urbanist as one who “imagines himself caring for and healing a sick society…. He perceives spatial diseases, which are initially conceived abstractly as an available void…. Eventually, space itself becomes a subject. It suffers, grows ill, must be taken care of so it can be returned to (moral) health” (157). Stopping for a moment in the park, Miss Lonelyhearts concentrates attention on the park’s diseased, barren condition: As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt. What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. To-morrow, in his column, he would ask… his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up [.] (63)

13 Believing the park to be repairable, Miss Lonelyhearts idealizes his therapeutic ability. What occurs is the delusional desire to have the power to aid; or, as Lefebvre further describes, “[t]he urban illusion culminates in delirium. Space, and the contemplation of space, leads the thinker down a hazardous avenue. He becomes schizophrenic and imagines a mental illness—the schizophrenia of society—onto which he projects his own illness, space sickness, mental vertigo” (Urban 157). The sickness in Miss Lonelyhearts is intensified by the sickness he sees in the park, onto which he imagines placing a healing hand.

14 Stepping away briefly from the narrative, the richness of West’s prose and his literary depiction of mental space and physical world are further conjoined through his specialty of manipulating and repeating words. The word “stone” appears fourteen times throughout the narrative. Its initial function is metaphorical, employed by Shrike, the newspaper director, who apathetically counsels Miss Lonelyhearts on how to influence his readership: “Explain that man cannot live by bread alone and give them stones,” further recommending that they start each day with the prayer, “Give us this day our daily stone.” Sitting in the park, Miss Lonelyhearts comprehends that such advice is worthless, as “[h]e had given his readers many stones; so many, in fact, that he had only one left—the stone that had formed in his gut” (63). In Miss Lonelyhearts’s opinion, his counseling, as “stones”, miscarries on a catastrophic level, neither being digested by his readers nor advancing their quest for solutions. Later uses of the word represent it in physical form; in these cases, “stone” remains connected with what Miss Lonelyhearts views as mankind’s destructive nature and incapacity for creative construction. Returning to the park later in the narrative, Miss Lonelyhearts inspects his surroundings from a park bench. From his position he turned his trained eye on the skyscrapers that menaced the little park from all sides. In their tons of forced rock and tortured steel, he discovered what he thought was a clue. Americans have dissipated their radical energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians. And

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they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them. (89)

15 West believed that “America was suffering a collective failure of feeling” (Klug 29), and despite the fact that the novella is rife with emotional turmoil, it also illuminates the sociological forces brought on by the physical surroundings, as “[s]tructures are both the medium and the outcome of social practices” (Pearson and Richards 2). By considering the manipulation of stone, West is in many respects giving voice to a protest against what Le Corbusier defines as a revolution in architecture. Le Corbusier hypothesizes: The history of Architecture unfolds itself slowly across the centuries as a modification of structure and ornament, but in the last fifty years steel and concrete have brought new conquests, which are the index of a greater capacity for construction, and of an architecture in which the old codes have been overturned. If we challenge the past, we shall learn that ‘styles’ no longer exist for us, that a style belonging to our own period has come about; and there has been a Revolution. (Towards 7)

16 The adjectival differences between Le Corbusier and West’s depiction of “forced rock” and “tortured steel” emphasize their critical differences of a psychological dismemberment evolving from the architectural advances of the previous half-century. In the narrative, Miss Lonelyhearts’s inefficacious efforts to uncover any logic within his physical, stone-breaking environment merely demonstrate how little meaning is derived from the “greater capacity for construction” of the Modern age. Instead, the revolution in style conceivably produces an erasure of human interconnections.

17 As the fast-paced plot of Miss Lonelyhearts develops, the symptomatic consequences of modernity surfacing in West’s protagonist become both more complicated and more dangerous as Miss Lonelyhearts moves from public to private realms of the urban landscape in an attempt to restore his inner self. In Space, Time and Architecture (1941), Sigfried Giedion explains a theoretical conjunction of early modernist thought (specifically forming in cubism and futurism)vii by overlapping a space-time continuum of “contemporaneous feelings.” Such “unconscious parallelisms” arose from efforts to revive the fragmented inner life of modern man, as, Giedion claims, the language of design between artists and scientists no longer permitted meaningful communication. The individual man, then, is tossed through the sea of a disjointed civilization: “This orientation of the vital energies… is reflected in the make-up of the man of today. Scarcely anyone can escape the unbalanced development which it encourages. The split personality, the unevenly adjusted man, is symptomatic of our period” (14). Le Corbusier and Giedion propose advancements in architectural design to readjust, so to speak, contemporary man to his environment. Nevertheless, West’s depiction of his protagonist and surrounding environment does not reflect an architectural development that encourages the realignment of an “unevenly adjusted man.”

3. Spirits from the Underground

18 Although secluded beneath the city street, the local speakeasy serves as a predominantly public gathering place in Miss Lonelyhearts and is the narrative’s best example of the overlapping of physical and social environment. The recurring locales in the novella illustrate the “time, space and repetition in social life” (Giddens 205), and, accordingly, several crucial events for the storyline transpire in the murky bar

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atmosphere. The speakeasy’s inner space provides an isolated stage in which West can micro-analyze the urban environment. Patronized principally by male customers who spend their time disparaging women and lamenting their own social status, the speakeasy is a space dominated by macho prowess, ironically located not below a place of commerce, but “in the cellar of a brownstone house that differed from its more respectable neighbors by having an armored door” (West 64). Placing the speakeasy in the basement of a house displaces this hyper-masculine domain, generating a disparity between the physical environment of the house and the social backdrop. In 1929, German architect Bruno Taut intimated that architectural design could advance intellectual capacity: “the people who use the building for any purpose, will, through the structure of the house, be brought to a better behavior in their mutual dealings and relationship with each other. Thus architecture becomes the creator of new social observances” (qtd. in Watkin 47). Taut suggests that architecture itself may generate, from a tabula rasa, meaningful social value for the occupants of various architectural spaces. In West’s text, the characteristics of the patrons behind the armored speakeasy door are degenerative, destroying, not creating, any new social observances. The house, in a sense, has been misappropriated for ulterior motives.

19 Considering the idealized function of a house or home, Gaston Bachelard suggests that its essential elements comprise “a body of images that give mankind proofs or allusions of stability” (17). The necessity of stability surfaces when examining the brownstone house with the armored door—as well as the seclusion from the street— create the allusion of constancy as demonstrated through the patrons of the speakeasy. West’s description of the speakeasy conveys how each individual experience “is governed by and utilizes the architectural structures we perceive, as we perceive them” (Frank 4–5). In partial harmony with Taut’s theories, space impacts the individual—but not necessarily in a positive manner. The social space of the barroom operates more as a failed murky sanctuary where the male patrons endeavor to separate overlapping social spaces from their idealized masculine domain. Here, they attempt to arrest the reality that, in their opinion, the external world is becoming increasingly less male- dominated and homogenous—daring to suggest the gang rape of transgressing females. More specifically, if we focus on the cellar as a specific place, Bachelard theorizes that it “is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths” (18; original italics). Bachelard alludes to the Freudian postulation that the cellar is where our painful experiences are repressed and stored by the unconscious; in the cellar, the unspeakable may be enacted. As the narrator explains, the speakeasy allows Miss Lonelyhearts a place to “settl[e] into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom” (West 64). It creates a supposed space of stability that is architecturally secluded from the street by its very construction, secluded from the “[c]rowds of people [moving] through the street with a dream-like violence” (West 104). The cellar atmosphere assumes negative characteristics through retaining the dysfunctionality inherent in a masculine-dominated society. These traits are emphasized through the presence of the refuge-seeking drinkers, who, in their alcohol-induced lucidity, realize that “the trouble with all of us… is that we have no outer life, only an inner one, and that by necessity” (75). The underground space delivers to the men the needed allusion of stability from which they can grasp onto their meager inner life.

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20 As the violence in the narrative unfolds, the speakeasy setting produces aggressive images and actions. West believed that violence was at the very heart of American culture, as his oft-cited short theses “Some Notes on Violence” and, in particular, “Some Notes on Miss. L.,” demonstrate. “Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events” (401), West informs, and such depictions contort the speakeasy milieu into a military battleground with smoke, explosions, and artillery—perhaps representing the battlefield of the repressed subconscious: “Through the light-blue tobacco smoke, the mahogany bar shone like wet gold. The glasses and bottles, their high lights exploding, rang like a battery of little bells when the bartender touched them together” (75). Drinking and watching the routines of the barman, Miss Lonelyhearts drifts into a reverie of his sister dancing in their childhood home; he begins imagining all children dancing in geometrical form, as “[s]quare replacing oblong and being replaced by circle” (76). The geometrical shapes replace the dancers, eradicating their individuality by confining them to transmuting rigid forms. Inextricably linked with identity, memory can be located in its own space, as a “focus on memory,” argues Andreas Huyssen, in Present Pasts, files into “categories of space… and cultural studies” (11). Recalling Bachelard, the dream within the “cellar” of the mind, brings the dreamer into “harmony with the irrationality of the depths.” The distant memory momentarily removes Miss Lonelyhearts from his surroundings, providing him a glimpse back to an era of childhood innocence; however, snapping back to his reality and moving from his spot at the bar, he collides with a man holding a beer. Before he can apologize, the man punches Miss Lonelyhearts, sending him the floor and leaving him to nurse a bruised head. Memory entails inner space, and Miss Lonelyhearts’s regression from outer towards inner space suggests that the more personal the space, the more physically violent and unfeeling the outer world is in comparison.

4. Unhomely Space

21 Unlike the city park and the speakeasy, the home of the protagonist would ideally function as a personal environment; yet, in this defined space, he achieves no reprieve from the outside world. The apartment space appears early in the novella and eventually serves as the backdrop for the climatic action. Far from a sparing safe- haven, it resembles an oppressive chancel-like residence: “He lived by himself in a room that was as full of shadows as an old steel engraving. It held a bed, a table and two chairs” (67),viii barren of decoration except for a cross nailed to the wall. ix It is a simulacra of a pious yet defiled church, with the ivory Christ detached from the cross and “hung opposite the foot of the bed” (67). Both Heidegger and Bachelard consider the house, or dwelling, existing in a relatively secluded place, so as to be fortified against other urban spaces. For Heidegger, in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” various places may be construed for a person to repose (but not necessarily call ‘home’); these he defines as dwellings, where to dwell is “to be set at peace, [it] means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving” (148; original italics). Additionally, Bachelard explains that “house”, is an object which has “the chief benefit” of “shelter[ing] daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (6). In West’s depiction, instead of correlating the apartment with an image of peaceful privacy, we find the modern image of “dwelling”

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being distorted. Rented apartment spaces are commodities; as Neil Leach explains, such commodification of place generates a “fundamental shift in the ways in which we relate to the world. Not only must we question the primacy of the concept such as ‘dwelling’ as a source of identification, but we must also ask whether a concept which is so place- specific can any longer retain much authority” (155). Miss Lonelyhearts’s apartment serves as a place in which the columnist sleeps off his alcoholic binges; yet, the room fails to ease his own doubts of identity. At one point, following a tiff with his girlfriend, Betty, Miss Lonelyhearts deliberates on where to go next, revealing his consciousness concerning his ineffective living environment, as he was “afraid to go home” (74). Home for Miss Lonelyhearts fails to achieve a stabilizing peace of the mind.

22 Early descriptions of Miss Lonelyhearts reveal his struggles to create a structured environment, manipulating the artificially controllable space of his apartment to serve as a miniature counterpart for the larger, outer world. In his room, “Miss Lonelyhearts found himself developing an almost insane sensitiveness to order. Everything had to form a pattern: the shoes under the bed, the ties in the holder, the pencils on the table” (70). Miss Lonelyhearts’s actions are his attempts to organize both his inner and outer life. The mental impact of the urban environment, Simmel argued in 1903, requires an ability to manage the subjectivity of the modern environment: “the technique of metropolitan life in general is not conceivable without all of its activities and reciprocal relationships being organized and coordinated in the most punctual way into a firmly fixed framework of time” (328). Comprehending his outer environment has noticeably failed, developing in Miss Lonelyhearts a neurotic fetish for controlling his inner, personal spaces. The daily struggle for control ascends from the abstraction of the physical, external world—plausibly, the removal of distinct symbols causes the individual to attempt to assemble their own reality—arising from what Baudrillard, in The System of Objects, deems is “the notion of a world no longer given but instead produced—mastered, manipulated, inventoried, controlled: a world, in short, that has to be constructed” (28; original italics). Yet, unable to organize the external realm, Miss Lonelyhearts recedes into his inner world in an attempt to organize and control the placement of his belongings; additionally, the barrenness of the columnist’s apartment suggests a larger, social disconnection. The narrator informs us that Miss Lonelyhearts has maintained an austere protestant resemblance in his décor and possessions. Examining the columnist’s apartment, we should consider that “[n]o dwelling is static and fixed in time,” unless the occupant is resistant to change; additionally, we would expect that “each dwelling mutates as fortune and human circumstances change” (Knapp 8). The location of Miss Lonelyhearts’s apartment is unclear, but he apparently lives in a building with remote access to the street. His simplistic compartment encapsulates him and contrasts the exuberance of the New York City environment. Between historical past and the static condition of the present, a correlation surfaces involving the identity of Miss Lonelyhearts within the austere and nonregenerative design of his apartment.

23 The private residence is also a constructed realm and, as such, is an environment historically connected with the identity of the inhabitant. Therefore, let us consider for a moment that the unease experienced by Miss Lonelyhearts may indeed be attributable to his past. Writing in 1914, Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr. published what they believed to be the first “study of house-decoration as a branch of architecture” (xx; original italics) in nearly fifty years. The authors conjecture that,

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“every one is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others,—the wants of dead and gone predecessors…. The unsatisfactory relations of some people with their rooms are often to be explained in this way” (Wharton and Codman 19). Wharton and Codman provoke a correlation, though merely hypothetical, which is ascribable to the protagonist and his past. The “son of a Baptist minister,” with the appearance of “the New England puritan” (West 61), Miss Lonelyhearts has, perhaps subconsciously, arrayed his apartment symbolizing a continuance of his heritage. But, the narrative demonstrates that it is not merely personal possessions that unhinge the protagonist; it is also the shadows in the room, the view from his window, and the objects within this physical space, all of which are taunting him in his own unrealized identity. Architecture, John Ruskin believed, is directly tied to memory: “We may live without her [memory], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her” (169). The past may well be part of Miss Lonelyhearts’s identity, but the architectonic environment surrounding his daily life aggressively infringes on his mental space causing a disjuncture between his past and his present, as demonstrated by the violent awakening from his childhood recollection of his sister while in the speakeasy.

24 As Miss Lonelyhearts struggles to control his living environment, he is incapable of assimilating its space as it too closely overlaps with the imposing architecture of the city. A constant observer of environment, he visually attempts to manipulate the external surroundings of his apartment: “When he looked out of a window, he composed the skyline by balancing one building against another. If a bird flew across this arrangement, he closed his eyes angrily until it was gone” (70). To generate a skyline is his intent, not to redefine specific buildings; however, he does use the buildings to create “regulating lines,” deemed necessary by Le Corbusier for “harmony” in an architectural system (Towards 72). Nevertheless, the columnist is exposed to the spacial disarray within his architectural horizon, a “splintered utopia” (Augé xvii), predominating the urban world, in his fidgety struggle to restructure his environment. Near the window, he stands at the “transparent cut between inside and out” (Vidler 13), being present in the inner space of his apartment while observing the outer space of the larger metropolis. He becomes desperate to keep various spaces linear and defined—yet, when distorted through the presence of a bird, he is incapable of maintaining control. Miss Lonelyhearts’s “agony is the acute perception of the anti- order of [his] times, the incompatibility of his city experiences to any ordering and coherence” (Widmer 101-102). The bird’s trajectory disorders the protagonist’s field of vision, demonstrating an overreliance on the physiognomy of his surroundings: “[w]hen a person’s visual relation to his environment is so crucial to his sense of self, and that environment’s visual aspect is increasingly dominated by monumental, abstract, empty space, the conditions are set for an eruption of anxiety over the vision- dominated self’s loss of control” (Milun 117). Beginning to realize that his reality lacks satisfactory patterns, he seeks to organize the personal, physical objects of his modest apartment; then, moving to the window, he set his sights on restructuring the urban sprawl to remove the abstract and empty space below the skyline—in this undertaking, he ultimately fails.

25 Regarding Miss Lonelyhearts’s tactics for coping with his environment, the narrator informs us that, “[f]or a little while, he seemed to hold his own but one day he found himself with his back to the wall. On that day all the inanimate things over which he had tried to obtain control took the field against him” (70). Again, West’s choice of wording suggests a battle ground between the individual and his environment, as the

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columnist tries to “hold his own,” but figuratively finds his “back to the wall,” with inanimate objects in his apartment “[taking] the field against him.” Believing that the apartment has spiraled out of his control, Miss Lonelyhearts flees to the street, only to discover “there chaos was multiple;” to deflect the cacophony of the street, Miss Lonelyhearts “stood quietly against a wall, trying not to see or hear” (70). In this continued instance of fear, the inner and outer environments converge on the protagonist and trigger an agoraphobic anxiety attack. In these two brief scenes, the metaphorical and corporeal walls of his environment merge—exemplifying Lefebvre’s argument that mental and physical spaces overlap. Panic disorders materialize in Miss Lonelyhearts in his apartment, the street, and in the city park as he sits staring at a Mexican War obelisk. Walter Benjamin thought that such occurrences are symptomatic of urban space. In “One-Way Street,” Benjamin explains that “[t]he insecurity of even the busy areas puts the city dweller in the opaque and truly dreadful situation in which he must assimilate… the abortions of urban architectonics” (454). After multiple efforts by Miss Lonelyhearts to vainly assimilate to his urban situation, the environment- promoted downward spiral into his deranged state of Christ-ordained-columnist culminates in violence on his apartment stairwell.

26 As the novella closes, Miss Lonelyhearts has succumbed to another mental breakdown, as lack of cohesion in his life, amidst the abstract city spaces, has predestined his collapse. From his bed, he realizes that, except for the image of Christ hanging on the wall, “[e]verything else in the room was dead—chairs, table, pencils, clothes, books” (West 125). At this point, he has exceeded the mindset of the urbanist, and is no longer intent on healing. The apartment environment has proven to be devoid of the qualities of peace, preserving, and protection—crucial requisites that Heidegger and Bachelard outline for dwelling space. Twice during the novella the word “dead” is linked to the apartment, thereby equating death and physical space. In the initial apartment scene, Miss Lonelyhearts contemplates, “how dead the world is...a world of doorknobs” (67–68). Doorknobs, of course, are structural devices engaged in opening and closing doors, and by extension, the opening and closing of spaces— Pallasmaa describes them as “the handshake of the building” (62)—in this case, however, they are linked with a dead material world. Miss Lonelyhearts’s contemplations reveal his cognition of the unfulfilled and lifeless spaces, or even immaterialized spaces. The connection between the death that he senses within his apartment (personal space) and the almost humorous comparison to a dead world of doorknobs (architectural) inescapably brings architecture and inner spaces into an amalgamated joint relationship with each other.

5. Stairwell to Nowhere

27 As with each previous event in the narrative, the location of the climatic action is distinctly established. In this final section, I illuminate the reason why West’s novella fittingly closes with the protagonist on a stairwell.x In order to do so, I borrow a term defined by Marc Augé: the Non-Place.xi For Augé, a non-place represents architecturally delineated space that does not signify or carry sufficient qualities defining it as a place, and he associates such non-places within the time-space constructs of supermodernity. Augé terms a place as “at once spatial (relational), temporal (historical) and linked to identity (individual)” (Conley 71); places that do not achieve these qualities are labeled

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as non-places. Therefore, by this definition, we could label the park, the speakeasy, and the apartment as distinct places. “Non-places are there to be passed through” (Augé 83) in an isolated manner, and such passing is exactly the function of the stairwell to Miss Lonelyhearts’s apartment. Being summoned from his sickbed by the doorbell, Miss Lonelyhearts is greeted with the sight of Mr. Doyle ascending the stairs. We will remember that Mr. Doyle is a “cripple” and a cuckolded husband who is now bent on revenging himself and his wife. In his delirium, Miss Lonelyhearts presumes that Doyle’s presence is a sign from God, and the columnist rushes down the steps to embrace his loyal reader. Doyle perceives the columnist’s descent as a confrontation, and he shouts out an unheeded warning. As the columnist and Doyle collide on the steps, the gun which Doyle has been concealing “exploded and Miss Lonelyhearts fell, dragging the cripple with him. They both rolled part of the way down the stairs” (126). Thus ends the novel; we receive no clarification as to who was shot or if anyone was killed; neither is there any tone of sadness from the narrator. The final act, like many scenes in the novel, uses the terminology of the battlefield, with Miss Lonelyhearts charging towards Mr. Doyle’s exploding gun. Numerous critics have commented on the sparseness of the conclusion, and some have even noted that both men fail to roll completely down the stairwell and into the street. In the non-place of the stairwell, identity is defunct as the individual belongs in place and space, which are “major categories for people wherever identity and reciprocal relations are countenanced…. [P]lace is where people live and dwell” (Conley 68). Therefore, it is fitting that West concludes his novella in such a fashion: Miss Lonelyhearts’s removal from his apartment, which has continually retarded the development of his identity and individuality, almost requires his moving into a non-place, for it presages the final effacement of identity brought on by a structurally defined space. Once the individual has been destroyed, the incidents surrounding the body are ultimately inconsequential.

28 West’s depictions of the New York City environs illuminate an unwelcoming landscape of space, place, and time all of which become menacing factors in the life of the protagonist. The inconclusive final events, with Miss Lonelyhearts presumably being shot and left in the “non-place” of the stairwell, reveals how West’s modern urban spaces decisively destroy identity and annihilate the individual. The city park, the underground speakeasy, and the apartment filled with “dead” objects prevent Miss Lonelyhearts from realizing the figure of the modern metropolitan man; rather, the city bombards him, exacerbating his agoraphobic nature and drives him into seclusion and delirium. By approaching Miss Lonelyhearts with this sociological perspective toward the narrative, and a sharp examination of the city structures, the outcome clearly demands that the failed formation of Miss Lonelyhearts’s individuality and identity require his body to be left in a place that is devoid of spatial consequence.

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NOTES i. Of biographical interest is the family business from which much of West’s personal, but limited, funds originated, until the onset of the Depression. In the early 1920s, West was unenthusiastically involved in his father’s construction business, where “he had been obliged to work on apartment houses being built by his father in the Bronx, occasionally as a bricklayer” and “as construction superintendent” (Martin 75). By 1925, West was advancing his literary interests, and after a short stint in Paris, he returned stateside, involving himself with “a seriously intellectual, masculine group, interested in the most recent developments in the world” (Martin 114); the group’s European concenter would have exposed West to the burgeoning interest in Urban renewal, spearheaded by Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and other European intellectuals. ii. Mumford’s employment of the word “style” is in sharp contrast to the rejection of the word by Le Corbusier and Giedion, who, as David Watkin explains, considered that the use of the word “style” would “open the door to a formalistic approach” (18). iii. We must bear in mind that the noun “experience” is subjective, as German philosopher Hans- Georg Gadamer observes: “‘However paradoxical it may seem, the concept of experience seems to me one of the most obscure that we have’” (qtd. in Jay 47). Controversial in its paradoxical nature, it is even more difficult to analyze the experiences of a literary character as the authorial intent skews the intended perspective for narrative purposes. iv. The place-referent at the beginning of each chapter is likely due to West’s initial efforts to create the story in the form of a comic strip. Miss Lonelyhearts must, therefore, be placed in a particular space—often including a time-referent—as Thomas Strychacz alludes to in “Nathanael West’s Comic-Strip Novel” (176). More pointedly, Justin Nieland views West’s humor as a type of vaudevillian “New Humor,” that permitted an avenue of expression demonstrating “the discontent of the immigrant urban masses with the ability of American institutions to fulfill their promises, and its economy and pace mirrored the hurried tempo of urban life, the ‘hasty people’ of West’s imagined readership” (63). v. Darryl Hattenhauer emphasizes that critics too easily surmise that Miss Lonelyhearts dies at the climax of the novel; it is also presumptuous, Hattenhauer argues, to assume Miss Lonelyhearts is the victim, perhaps it is Doyle who is shot, or maybe no one has been shot. Falling down the stairs together does not warrant a death certificate; all told, the ending of the novel remains “extremely ambiguous” (120–121). vi. A few articles have examined the overlapping of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Miss Lonelyhearts, as West himself made clear the connections. In “Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts: The Waste Land Rescripted,” Miriam Fuchs argues that “West parodies crucial elements of the poem in order to dramatize the dangers of authority outside the self” (44), and West enhances Eliot’s use of the city as a signifier of a contorted, man-made landscape. vii. West was known to have “avariciously gulped down the most fashionable aesthetics— dadaism, expressionism and futurism” (Crosby) in his personal artistic exploration.

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viii. West may have lost track of the furniture ascribed to his protagonist’s apartment; in a later scene, after his sexual encounter with Mrs. Doyle, Miss Lonelyhearts “dropped down into a large armchair near the window” (West 90). Mentioned solely in this instance, the armchair seems distinctly remote from the austere living environment West was painting in the initial description of the apartment. ix. In the early drafts of Miss Lonelyhearts, published in Contact, the description of the room is altered to accommodate a mirror: “His room was furnished with a bed, a table, and two chairs. The walls were bare except for a mirror and an ivory Christ. He had removed the cross to which the figure had been delicately fastened with tiny silver nails and had spiked it to the wall. But the desired effect had not been obtained. It did not writhe; it remained calmly decorative.” x. Early drafts of Miss Lonelyhearts have the protagonist speaking in the first person; at one point he describes his residence, “I lived on a deserted stairway, among steel engravings of ornate machinery” (Contact 18). West removed this line; however, it’s presence is significant, as the narrator figuratively depicts the transformation of the stairwell into a lifeless landscape as he attempts to compose responses to his readers while sitting in his apartment: “The joke of suffering and the joke of comforting killed this world. The stairway flattened into a desert […]” (Contact 18). xi. I am cognizant that Augé’s definitions are relative to supermodernity; nevertheless, the essential definitions for the non-place strike me as being enlightening to the purpose and function of the stairwell in Miss Lonelyhearts. Stairwells, like escalators, serve as a mode of transition from one locale to another, one in which we may pass strangers without engagement or interaction.

ABSTRACTS

Nathanael West’s 1933 novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, depicts a New York City that defines its inhabitants through the architectural structures enveloping them. Throughout West’s narration, spaces and places within the city become social critiques, as these locations represent what Henri Lefebvre describes as abstract spaces: various spaces that are multifaceted in their functions due to their shifting—and abstract—relation with a larger environment. Fusing an analysis of space and the individual serves as a springboard for reexamining West’s novella of place and space in the then modern metropolis of the 1920s. Locales within the narrative illustrate how modern public and private spaces detrimentally precipitate the psychological downward spiral of the protagonist. This article argues that by scrutinizing the physical setting in the narrative we will illuminate a new understanding of the repressed, agoraphobic identity of the protagonist, Miss Lonelyhearts, and bring a fresh phenomenological interpretation to the demise of one of West’s most complicated characters.

INDEX

Keywords: architecture, identity, individuality, metropolis, Nathanael West, space

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AUTHOR

WAYNE E. ARNOLD Kansai Gaidai University

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Americans and Climate Change: Transnationalism and Reflection in Environmental Writing

Brian Glaser

1. Confronting Global Climate Change as an American

1 In his updated, expanded manifesto, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman uses the term “American” as a measure for carbon emissions and resource use. The chapter “Our Carbon Copies (or, Too Many Americans)” begins with a description of the speedy growth of two urban centers—Doha, Qatar and Dalian, China —which gives way to a meditation on the environmental impact of this growth pattern, particularly with respect to global climate change. Woven into this reflection is his critical term: “Remember: the metric to watch is not the total number of people on the planet—it’s the total number of ‘Americans’ on the planet. That is the key number and it has been steadily rising” (87). The scare quotes rather clearly beg the questions— what is the difference between an American and an “American,” and when does a person become an “American” in this problematic sense? For Friedman the difference between an American and an “American” is not so much a matter of the scale of consumption as it is a matter of answerability: “I certainly don’t blame the citizens of Doha or Dalian for aspiring to an American lifestyle or for opting to build it on the same cheap-fossil-fuel foundation we did. We invented that system. We exported it” (87).

2 So what the phrase of the chapter’s title—carbon copies—suggests in apparent playfulness as the relation between Americans and residents in industrializing cities (“Americans”) turns out to be in a quite serious way the organizing logic behind the rhetoric of this section of the book. To be an American, with respect to the problem of carbon emissions and global climate change, is to own the problem and to have an original relation to it. One thing that follows from this for Friedman is that Americans have a unique responsibility to “use our resources and know-how to invent” solutions:

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We Americans are in no position to lecture anyone. But we are in a position to know better. We are in a position to set a different example of growth.... In a world that is both flat and crowded, if we, as Americans, do not redefine what an American middle-class lifestyle is... we will need to colonize three more [sic!] planets. Because we are going to make planet earth so hot, and strip it so bare of resources, that nobody, including us, will be able to live like Americans one day. (87)

3 Americans have a moral responsibility to innovate, but they have a practical charge to do this as well, because “Americans” will copy what they do.

4 There is a muted but recognizable bit of American triumphalism in Friedman’s way of framing this issue. It is of importance to pay critical attention to this dimension of global climate change rhetoric, particularly because it is a discursive field that is still taking initial shape in the United States. But in this essay I am interested to approach what seems to me the somewhat broader question of what happens in a culture when some of its creative members begin to look at themselves in the way that Friedman suggests, as units of environmental impact. In particular, I want to make some critical observations about the cultural dimensions of what Friedman calls the redefinition of “what an American middle-class lifestyle is” in response to the urgencies of global climate change, especially as this redefinition is being carried out in the domain of print culture. For a number of books published within the last few years—I will discuss Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man, Doug Fine’s Farewell, My Subaru, and Kurt Hoelting’s The Circumference of Home—narrate the efforts of their authors to live over a sustained period of time in a way that is designed to mitigate their impact on climate change. These books fit into the broader category of environmental life writing, which is itself a field in relative critical neglect, but my focus here on works by Americans who are explicitly concerned with global climate change can give us a sense both of how American culture is coming to terms with this issue in the years since the release of An Inconvenient Truth and of how the genre of life writing has evolved into a significant element of print culture’s engagement with environmental thought.

5 Each of the writers of these texts is set to his project in part because of his sense that he participates in an American culture that generates a disproportionate amount of carbon gas and that has yet to establish the terms of a promising political conversation about how to address this. Their turn to the work of action on a personal rather than collective scale can be read in a number of ways—as a sign of misgivings about the possibility of Friedman’s green revolution, or as a commitment to the ideal of writerly leadership that has animated the American environmental movement since Silent Spring, or as a creative response to the intensified sense of urgency surrounding climate change in popular culture since the release of Gore’s film. But by designing experiments in living that lead them to be responsible for smaller carbon emissions, these writers also deliberately marginalize themselves from the American mainstream and its default position with respect to greenhouse gasses—flagrantly culpable and unsure what to do.

6 Reading these three works of climate change life writing in the context of the transnational turn in American literary studies, I think they can be seen to provide us with a valuable form of knowledge for living in the era of sociogenic climate change.i Beavan, Hoelting and Fine look at themselves as Americans from a global perspective, and this provokes them to undertake creative projects that represent various ways that one can be an engaged American in the era of sociogenic climate change. In each of these three texts, the writers discover that their sense of purpose changes as they

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encounter different forms of rationality with which they share the experience of living purposefully in the world. Acting as an American world citizen involves a particular form of reflection—adapting to the perspectives one is brought to by encounters with others.ii

7 The significance of this reflection needs to be demonstrated. By inviting here a larger conversation about climate change life writing as a genre, I hope to contribute in some way to that project already. But I will give a polemical edge to this essay with a few remarks intended to do more in this regard, setting my claim for these works alongside the ideal of ecocosmopolitanism that has been articulated elegantly and forcefully by Ursula K. Heise. She writes that “environmental literature and ecocriticism need to engage more fully with the insights of recent theories of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism” (383). Specifically, she has argued in ALH and in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet that local forms of identity and knowledge should be seen to be in a kind of determining subordination to global forces and contexts. As a caution and an invitation, Heise’s argument seems to me important.

8 But there is a dimension of Heise’s rhetoric of ecocosmopolitanism that can be usefully interrogated by attention to the particular form of reflection that I see to be articulated in climate change life writing. In her critique of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, Heise points out a deficiency: By offering multicultural and sometimes transnational family romances as narrative resolutions of ecological conflicts, or by using biological and cultural diversity as direct metaphors for each other, such texts seek to appropriate the oppositionality of the transnational subject even as they remain resolutely local in their opposition to globalization. (387)

9 Her readings demonstrate how these substitutions do real affective work in the structuring of her two texts. But in her move from these particular books to a discussion of the holes in “environmental literature and ecocriticism” as fields, it seems to me that Heise puts an unwarranted degree of trust in the transparency—I would even say the coherence—of the term “the oppositionality of the transnational subject.”iii

10 The implicit normativity of the definite article gives one pause. Is this oppositionality a necessary condition for being a transnational subject? And whatever the answer to that question might be, can this oppositionality be in any sense uniform among various transnational subjects? Heise seems to accept a binary hierarchy which contrasts the cosmopolitan or transnational with its other—be that the local or the nationally identified—and assigns valuable oppositionality to the cosmopolitan. The more full engagement with cosmopolitanism that she recommends seems to involve acceding to a concept and an expectation of oppositionality that are perhaps unfortunately normative in a number of respects.

11I want to repeat that I take Heise’s cosmopolitan challenge to Americanist ecocriticism to be valuable. Works like Beavan’s, Hoelting’s and Fine’s, which do not develop themes of multicultural interaction with anywhere near the complexity that they afford composting and solar panel installation, should be provincialized. But the provincializing of these books should not prevent us from seeing the quite novel and also valuable ways in which they contribute to transnational American literature. These authors are taking up identity as Americans from a global perspective, and they attempt to model a kind of responsible world citizenship from inside of this frame. In

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their reflective quality, they carry environmental writing beyond the naivety of much nature writing.

12 A narrative that binds transnational consciousness and oppositionality will not dwell on the political value of these books for addressing the problems of global climate change. But I think their creativity makes the possibility of meaningful and demanding change in American patterns of fossil-fuel use enlivening and concretely foreseeable. There are of course questions about how these life experiments could be scaled in a significant way, and some of these authors address those questions with only equivocal answers. Still their works creatively realize visions of American identity in the era of sociogenic climate change from a global point of view. And this realization offers knowledge that is valuable for many forms of progressive politics, including any oppositional politics—the knowledge that subjects’ purposes can evolve as they encounter and reflect on diverse forms of rationality.

13 In the most direct sense, these works offer what Ottmar Ette calls Lebenswissen— knowledge for living—in the era of sociogenic climate change by showing what can be done practically by individuals to address the problem of global climate change. But Ette’s discussion of the concept of literature as knowledge for living in his 2004 ÜberLebenswissen can allow us to see another way in which these books offer exemplary figures who facilitate cultural change to combat global warming, a way which is also important and perhaps not as obvious as the practical dimension of the books. “Lebenswissen wird jedoch nicht nur durch konkrete Erfahrungen in unmittelbaren Lebenskontexten sondern auch durch die Produktion und Rezeption symbolischer Güter, durch die unterschiedlichsten Aneigungsformen von Kunst und Literatur gewonnen” (12).iv If we look at the texts in the genre of climate change life writing as participating in the production and reception of symbolic goods that generate knowledge for living, we can see them as the instigators of an economy in which narrated experiences are useful not only for their immediate practical suggestions but also for the forms of knowledge that can be brought about by the symbol-employing processes of identification and reflection. Gaining knowledge for living from a written narrative involves the experience of seeing another for a time as a symbol for oneself, imaginatively living as him or her in order to reflect on how the world looks from his or her subject position, how one would respond to circumstances differently than the other does, and how one can benefit from his or her perspective and values.

14 It is in this spirit that I want in the section that follows to offer some thoughts on the characteristic reflectiveness of American climate change life writing. But before I do that, I want to stay with Ette’s discussion of Lebenswissen just a bit longer, because it seems to me that his contextualization of literature as symbolic exchange describes well how knowledge for living of a more reflective kind is created by these texts. It is also at this point that it seems to me Ette’s arguments begin to become rather clearly distinctive among critics who have approached the question of literature’s forms of knowledge, a tradition that ranges across Kenneth Burke’s concept of symbolic action and Martha Nussbaum’s plea for love’s knowledge. Addressing the problematic breadth of the concept of Leben or life in its relation to his arguments, Ette says this Einen endgültigen Begriff von dem, was Leben ist, wird glücklicherweise auch das 21. Jahrhundert nicht entwickeln können. Die Einsicht, ‘daß Rationalität plural ist’, bietet eine gute Grundlage, um unterschiedliche Logiken, verschiedene Kulturen, Künste und Wissenschaften zu Wort und zu Gehör kommen zu lassen. (20)v

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15 The quote in this passage comes from Lorraine Daston’s Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen. But it is an important one for apprehending Ette’s own message. The search for knowledge for living begins with the acknowledgement that rationality is plural. Just as various discursive fields—logical, artistic, scholarly and cultural—intersect within the word “life,” so the forms of knowledge that literature offers about life by symbolic means will intersect, overlap and perhaps conflict.

16 To read American climate change life writing with this in mind is to be aware that the authors of these books are, for all of their disciplined focus on the exigencies of their experiments, often shaped by ways of living, ways of being and thinking, that contest with their own. An important dimension of the knowledge for living that these books offer is the experience of identification with someone whose actions to fight climate change develop and evolve in response to the influence of others with whom his experiment becomes somehow shared. In a national culture where meaningful collective action to address the problem of global warming seems to be blocked by large, even enormous, economic and political obstacles, an important part of the work these texts do is to show the climate change counterculture ways of being both oppositional and reflective. Helping concerned citizens to cope with being situated in a material context where everyday life is in some ways at odds with their political and environmental visions can involve not only inspiring those citizens to reach in more extreme ways towards carbon neutrality but also representing the process of negotiating among the demands of many forms of rationality—many worldviews and systems of values—while one lives the dictates of one’s own social and environmental conscience. Knowledge for living, at least for Americans in the era of sociogenic climate change, can—and, these authors seem to imply, should—involve reflecting on the diverse forms of rationality one encounters while pursuing a minimal carbon footprint in such a way that that diversity might lead one’s own sense of purpose to evolve, to be open to change. What I mean to say by calling the forms of life with which the authors share their projects forms of rationality is that while they sometimes initially present themselves as not entirely open to the message of global climate change, they are not understood as irrational opponents by the authors of these texts. They are life forms with their own purposes and ideals which have integrity in their coherence and sense of identity.

17 Each of the books I discuss in the following section narrates a version of this process. They begin with an awakening of a kind, in which the scale of the problem of global climate change makes it seem both urgent and threateningly large, and this leads to the crafting of a project for modeling ideal behavior for an individual. In the course of carrying out this project, the authors encounter other forms of rationality, and this leads to a reflection on their project—a moment of seeing it through the eyes of another—which instigates a changed sense of purpose. In contrast with the picture of these experiments that emerges from the blog posts of the various authors, which tend to focus on the details of practical steps towards carbon neutrality, the book- length narratives situate knowledge for living in a less carbon-intensive way as a project which is modified by relation and, consequently, reflection.

18 One might think of the genre of climate change life writing as responding to the cultural need for reflection in environmental writing demonstrated by the purported naivety of popular American nature writing. Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature (“The immediacy that nature writing values is itself as reified as a Coke can”; 125) and

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Dana Phillips in The Truth of Ecology (“this writing leans more toward the private, inner world of the self, a place where tremulous sentiment rules, than toward the public, outer world of nature and culture”; 210) offer critiques of the genre that suggest that it has failed to live up to the praise for it as a mode of thought which is articulated in Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination. This is perhaps overly polemical—there remains a great deal of diversity in this field of writing. But I think it can be argued that there is a valuing of the experiential and the concrete in the tradition of nature writing that is modified in a significant way in climate change life writing. The emphasis on the immediate and the particular continues in the works of climate change life writing that I discuss in this essay. Animals appear in each of the three texts, and they are particularly important to Fine and Hoelting. But the way that these writers relate to their environment is mediated by their knowledge of the problem of sociogenic climate change. Nature does not hold out for them the promise of a transformative moment of awareness, as it does in much of the nature writing tradition created before the acknowledgement of the era of sociogenic climate change. Nature is seen by these writers as, in the way that Bill McKibben has been arguing for decades, irrevocably changed by climate change. And it is this awareness of mediation or transformation that sets the writers of climate change life writing to their task. There is a sense for each of them that immediacy in relation to nature would be an escape.

2. Life Writing, Knowledge for Living

19 Like a number of other books in the genre, Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man has in its opening section an acknowledgement—in this case indirect—that Al Gore’s film was an inspiration for his project: A year or so later [after 2004], news about global warming started coming out. I mean, it’s been out for twenty years, but somehow it hadn’t entered my liberal consciousness. We can’t maintain this way of life, the scientists said, the world can’t sustain it. The ice caps will melt, the sea levels will rise, there will be droughts—or, in short, the planet will be done for and millions of people will suffer. (6)

20 It is the social urgency that the cause has in the moment as much as the environmental threats of which he has become aware that impels Beavan. But this U.S. cultural phenomenon leads him immediately to a reflection on the implications that a recognition of global climate change might have for his identity as an American citizen: The countries of the world had negotiated the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, assigning mandatory targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases to signatory nations. But the United States, a signatory to the protocol, as well as the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, refused to ratify it. What had I done in light of our country’s deaf ear to environmental concerns? (6)

21 Beavan begins by seeing himself as an American from a global perspective, and this leads him to a feeling of being representative in an uncomfortable way—powerless but culpable.

22 He questions whether indeed he is as powerless as he has told himself he is, and finds that individual action might be more meaningful than it had seemed. The project that he develops after this reassessment is extreme but simple: As an experiment, I’d simply dedicate a year of my life to researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my small family—one wife, one toddler, one

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dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing as little harm to the environment as possible. . . . My idea was to go as far as possible and try to maintain as close to no net environmental impact as I could. (14)

23 Sections of his project included minimizing his waste, eliminating carbon-based transportation, and eating only locally grown foods to reduce the food-miles in his diet. But one dimension of the experiment that he neglects to mention here is writing about and publicizing the project, which he did in a number of ways—by keeping a blog, appearing in dozens of prominent media stories, and co-producing a film about his efforts. To an extent unmatched by other authors in the genre, he created an aura of celebrity around himself and his family.

24 But the family participated in the experiment in ways that could not be orchestrated. Repeatedly in the early pages of the book he narrates his wife Michelle’s skepticism and resistance, which gradually shift to a spirit of enthusiastic participation. His family of origin is a different story—after causing conflict and anger on declaring that he won’t be bringing his family to visit his parents for Thanksgiving or to attend a baby shower for his sister, Beavan decides to break his self-imposed rules and make a train trip to New England to visit his parents and sister for Christmas. Negotiating between his identity as No Impact Man and his role as a son becomes a source of torment, though, on December 25, when the sight of wrapping paper being torn open in profusion drives him to distraction. His sister laughs at him. His wife calls him a freak. And he confesses to the reader, “I don’t like what the project is doing to me lately. I feel I have to control everything” (110).

25This sense of being estranged from his family and even from himself leads him to a moment of critical self-reflection: “It’s like pulling a ball of string that starts to unwind. Instead of just thinking, How do I live without harming the environment? I find myself asking: How shall I live?” (110). The question has consequences. Immediately following the Christmas episode he writes of a conversation with Michelle about having another baby—she has “wanted a second child forever,” and he is “worried about our ability to afford and care for another baby” (110-111). With no coaxing other than the invitation to “play Russian roulette,” Beavan agrees to the possibility of another child, which agreement he calls “in some unspoken way... a quid pro quo for her participation in the project” (111). Beavan does not directly acknowledge the awkward fit that this openness makes with his project—the environmental impact of fathering a child is probably impossible to measure, but of course by no means negligible—but this reflection is tacit in the words with which he closes this passage: “I’m faced with myself again. You see what I mean? How shall I live?” (111). In the context of his relationship with Michelle, and in its rhetorical turn to the presence of another—you see what I mean?—this passage suggests that Beavan has discovered the extent to which he depends on a sense of belonging to his family in order for his life-project to seem sustainable.

26 Shortly after this section, Beavan reflects on the “truth” about his “motivation” for the No Impact project, and he suggests that a sense of perplexity and confusion that can be traced to the death of his brother at eight months old might have more to do with it than “polar bears or corrupt politicians” (113). His explorations of this make it seem plausible, though this section of the book might strike some readers as underdeveloped. But apart from whether this interpretation of his project is persuasive there is the significant fact that he is brought to this reflection by a sense of just how

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much he needs to feel the companionship of family in order to make his project sustainable for himself. The conflict-induced contradiction of changing his approach towards birth control in the course of his no impact year is a louder signal, to me, than his own introspection of the extent to which he finds that over time he wants to incorporate the values of others into his own assessment of what kind of impact on the planet is desirable for him to pursue.

27 Kurt Hoelting’s The Circumference of Home is subtitled “One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life.” Like Beavan’s, Hoelting’s book departs from the premise that the experiment will be the project and test of one man. And like Beavan he acknowledges, while discussing his motivations for the project, the influence of Al Gore (in this case, by citing in a footnote “Al Gore’s organization We Can Solve the Climate Crisis”) (253). This organization is where he found the online carbon footprint calculator that he used to come to this radicalizing perspective on himself: To my amazement, I discovered that my carbon footprint was more than twice the national average, in spite of the fact that I drive a hybrid vehicle and work hard to limit my personal use of energy. Since the average North American carbon footprint is ten times the world average, this was an alarming discovery. For someone who prides himself on living low on the energy food chain, this was not something I could take sitting down. (xiii)

28 Hoelting sees himself as a North American from a global perspective, and this commits him to a “radically local life” for a time, in large part because the source of his oversized carbon footprint is the amount of airplane travel that he undertakes in a year (xiv). He chooses an alternative to “feeling powerless,” and determines to “spend an entire year within walking distance of home,” which is a significant turn away from flight in both a literal and metaphoric sense (xiv). He limits himself to the region within a sixty-two mile radius of his home (xv). The motif through which he imagines his experiment is “homecoming,” and its spirit is to eschew the act of escape in favor of the labor and pleasure of return. Instead of knowing the globe as a jet transports him through it, he designs a year in which his three modes of knowing his environment will be by walking, biking and paddling a kayak.

29 Especially in the first of these three projects, Hoelting discovers that he feels intensely alienated from the life of his locality. Living in the somewhat insular culture of Whidbey Island in Washington, he stresses towards the beginning of the book that he finds the islanders’ phrase for visiting the mainland particularly appropriate—“going to America” (6). He dreads it: “‘Going to America’ trades a semblance of rural cohesiveness for an empire of sprawl—shopping malls, commercial strips, instant subdivisions springing up like mushrooms, and ever-more-congested highways” (6). The initial stages of his trip only confirm for him that he is lucky to be estranged from America; he reflects on the influence that the car has had on the architecture, pace and social fabric of American life—“Americans own more cars per capita every year,” they are beset by the “American ideal of hyperindividualism,” and driving is a “uniquely American pastime” (9).

30 This alienation is only deepened as he continues his walking tour of his local environs, and stops at Don’s 24-Hour Café: “I attempt some friendly banter with the waitress, but she takes my order on the fly and is gone. She asks no questions and betrays no curiosity. Nor does anyone else. The conviviality of the place doesn’t extend to me” (25). Hoelting feels that this is because of his “backpack and REI clothing,” but he also speculates that “red state/blue state distinctions” are operative in his

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experience of ostracism (25). America itself is a divisive body, and its divisions distort perhaps even for Hoelting himself the values and hopes that guide his project.

31 Another encounter later in his walking tour gives texture to this sense of alienation. As Hoelting enters the town of Stanwood looking for lodging, he meets a woman at a bus stop. They strike up a conversation in which the woman tells him about her life since being released from prison, a good bit of which has been devoted to raising the child her daughter had at the age of fourteen. “Her story puts my own small dilemmas in sharp relief,” he says (47-8). But her story also puts him in mind of Vaclav Havel, the playwright and political prisoner who became the president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic—he thinks of Havel’s definition of hope as “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out” (49). It is an association that he keeps to himself, and perhaps appropriately—for though it gives the readers a sense of how he has been affected by this encounter, it is also a flight of a kind, from “America” to a distant place and culture.

32 His sense of alienation from America is changed decisively by another kind of flight, however. Walking through the Skagit delta, located in northwestern Washington, with his wife Sally, Hoelting encounters “flock after flock” of snow geese, which “pile like snowdrifts against the curving edge of the slough, then settle down for a long lunch” (62). As he and Sally themselves settle in for lunch, Hoelting watches the geese and marvels that the flock “seems to function like a single organism” (62). He considers this, and then reflects: Yet a small number of informed individuals can have a decisive impact on the flock as a whole, even if these individuals are not recognized as leaders and do not recognize each other. It is known, for example, that 5 percent of a honeybee swarm can guide the group to a new hive. And for migrating groups of animals, the larger the flock, the smaller the number of informed individuals needed to effect a change in direction. The result is that unanticipated shifts in the direction of travel that benefit the whole flock can happen with breathtaking quickness. (62)

33 This fact is immediately present to Hoelting as a metaphor that helps him to understand the relation of his own project to the masses in a different way: “Maybe we don’t have to all get it before the flock gets it” (63).

34 The chapter ends with Hoelting and his wife finding their way to the home of friends for dinner, and he reports that they “have a deeper sense of what it means to be inhabitants of this place” (65). But his sense of connection to America is modified, too. Instead of being a name for the culture of the automobile and hyperindividualism that he mentioned earlier, America is reframed in the terms that Gary Snyder offers in The Practice of the Wild, and becomes the name for a place that is inhabited in a caring and thoughtful way. Hoelting quotes Snyder: There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally. Native Americans to be sure have a prior claim to the term native. But as they love this land they will welcome the conversion of the millions of immigrant psyches into fellow ‘Native Americans.’ (70-71)

35 This is quoted in full in the book because it describes the shift that Hoelting himself has undergone in the course of his walk, as a sustained walking exploration of a place exposes him to an alternative paradigm of flight, one that allows him to feel a greater sense of belonging to his environs and to America. One important development in the course of Hoelting’s walking tour is that the binary opposition between home and

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America that had organized his spatial identity is destabilized. Yet more significantly, through his encounter with the snow geese flight itself has become transformed into a metaphor that invigorates his efforts to live sustainably rather than being only a practice that he chooses to excise from his life.

36 This changed relationship to America as a native land has an important consequence for his project. In the course of his year, he chooses to travel outside of his self-prescribed “circle” in order to participate in a Native canoe rendezvous: The fact that this event is taking place outside my circle only increases its appeal as the object of my first kayaking pilgrimage. It is in the spirit of the occasion that I should be willing to leave my home waters, joining canoes that have in many cases journeyed much farther from home than I have, in an effort to stitch the ancient culture of this coast back together. (185)

37 The story of his trip to participate in this event ends with a return to the U.S. that confronts Hoelting with the geopolitical complexities which can be involved in this kind of effort to connect culture to place. And so he has been drawn clearly and consequentially away from his original purpose by reflection and the experience of becoming a Native American in Snyder’s sense, “living here intellectually.”

38 Doug Fine’s Farewell, My Subaru begins with a similar attempt to embrace a sense of home, as the author has chosen to settle in New Mexico after decades of itinerant journalistic work. There are other similarities with Hoelting—the book is presented as an “adventure in local living,” and, in an unmistakable marker of the genre, the book acknowledges the influence of Al Gore. In Fine’s book, characteristically, this debt is mentioned in a spirit of humor—after watching his Subaru roll away from him at his recently purchased ranch, he uses the occasion to imagine a new beginning: “I figured I would forge success from astonishing, seemingly irrevocable defeat, you know, like Al Gore” (4).

39 Fine’s project, presented as a response to the reality of both global climate change and peak oil, is “to see if a regular guy who enjoyed his comforts could maintain them with a reduced-oil footprint” (5). This is how he describes it in a direct address to the reader at the start of the work. In a narrated conversation with Lacy, “a lifelong New Mexican,” Fine puts the project somewhat differently, though representing himself with the same evidently cherished term: “’I’m trying to show that a regular American can still live like a regular American, only on far fewer fossil fuels’” (12).

40 The complexities that Fine subsumes into his identity as “regular American” become clear early in the book. In a section that begins with a realization that he is “hopelessly dependent” on Super Wal-Mart in his new locale, Fine narrates his various trips to the box store and works towards a “vow to avoid box-store shopping” that is an occasion to imagine his relationship to the commodity economy as one of weaning towards self-reliance: I was going to dive into this project with everything I had.... I would do it one project at a time. Maybe after a year, I’d see some real reduction in the oil in my life. But it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. At the moment, even with solar panels, I would survive as long as crunchy co-ops imported tomatoes and box stores provided preroasted protein. (27)

41 The irony with which he views himself stresses a sense of how exemplary this project might be. To be a “regular American” with a reduced carbon footprint will mean replacing commodities with “comforts” that he has produced himself.

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42 This attempt to withdraw from market exchange Fine treats with a sense of playfulness, which allows him to register its contradictions—as when he presents his project as entailing “in concrete terms... bank-account draining investments in solar power”—as well as the substantial challenges it presents to his habits of self- confirmation—as when he longs to celebrate his sense of being “responsible” for his own “future protein,” which will be produced by two goats, with a “mass-produced domestic beer” (5, 44). But despite this light touch, Fine clearly begins the project with the ideal of becoming “independent,” a term he uses repeatedly and which serves as an important shadow to his identity as a comfort-loving regular American (15, 29). Implicit in his jocular discussions of investing in solar power or celebrating his start as a farmer with a mass-produced beer is the expectation that he will negotiate the tension between being independent and being a regular American by purchasing his way to self-reliance.

43 Woven in a not very clearly conceptualized way into his pursuit of a smaller carbon footprint is the desire to buy his way out of the commodity economy. This turns out not to be possible for him, though, as he discovers that the sorts of goods he needs to purchase in his pursuit of independence often involve him in relationships with the vendors that continue or deepen beyond the exchange of cash for commodity. He buys two goats from Janice, a woman living in Arizona, who gives him advice on traveling in a flooded area, feeding the goats, and injecting them with medicine, and gives him her phone number along with the invitation to call her with “any problems” (40). Though tending the goats turns out to be fraught with a fair number of problems, Fine does not call. In his interactions with Kevin Forrest, an Albuquerque mechanic who converts his automobile to run on vegetable oil, he finds himself yet more implicated in a relationship of commodity exchange that does not end with the transfer of money and goods: After seventy-two hours and a dozen trips to NAPA auto supply, Kevin declared my truck ‘converted.’ As he was waving a monkey wrench the size of a golf club over the vehicle, his proclamation actually had a somewhat spiritual ring to it, though I’ve seen formal religious conversions that took less time. In fact, since I’d just gotten splattered head to toe in vegetable oil from assisting in a minor hose- tightening mishap that Kevin called my ‘anointing,’ I felt as though I had just been through what any theological scholar would call a religious conversion [.] (82)

44 Fine and Forrest collaborate, discover and work around their very different political orientations and attitudes towards George Bush, and share this playfully religious language to describe their interactions.

45 The installation of the much-anticipated solar panels at the ranch eventuates as another occasion where Fine is involved in a relationship through commodity exchange. In this case, his solar panel installer, Jimmy O, requires his help because high winds kick up on the day when he arrives to mount them thirty feet up on a windmill. Fine presents his response to this circumstance in his habitually antic mood: Jimmy had blessed me with his expensive presence after literally six months of lobbying. It had been like planning a bar mitzvah, right down to the catering. We couldn’t reschedule just because the spring winds had chosen to move in this exact day. It could be months, even years before he’d come back. So instead of pleading for my life, I had to force myself to assist in the project. This meant saying things like, ‘Would you pass the three-eighth adjustable wrench, pardner?’ (110)

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46 Fine’s pursuit of independence is thoroughly undermined here—not only does he need the solar panels for his project, but he becomes an unpaid assistant to the person he has paid to help make him self-reliant. Purchasing has taken him outside of the relationship of commodity exchange, but not in a way that can be characterized as independent.

47 Fine is not one to brood on such things. There are at least two signals that his strategy for becoming an independent regular American has changed in the course of the project, however. One that is perhaps overdetermined by narrative convention is his discovery of a satisfying romantic relationship by the end of the book: “My neighbor Sandy was right when she told me that mine was a two-person task, but not because it made the chores easier. Rather because it made life infinitely more joyful” (189). A perhaps more telling indicator of the shift in his sense of purpose comes when he rewards an assessor with a carton of eggs for approving his questionable application for status as a working ranch (149). In a sense, both the approval and the gift are signs of how he has become appreciably self-reliant. But if they represent his movement away from the cash-for-commodity paradigm of exchange he meant to flee, they do this not so much as a passage into independence as into a mindset in which the exchange of commodities implies collaboration and relationship.

3. Conclusion

48 The era of sociogenic climate change demands more from print culture than a nature writing which longs for immediacy. But Heise’s call for ecocosmopolitanism shouldn’t keep us from seeing how writers who can be provincialized are living with the diverse consequences of thinking in broader terms than nationality provides. These include not only oppositionality but also relation and reflection. Beavan, Hoelting and Fine offer knowledge for living as an American who eschews the immediacy of nature writing and who takes seriously the global environment.

49 Heise has done both American Studies and environmental criticism a great favor by introducing the concept of ecocosmopolitanism. Thinking in global terms is essential for articulating a politics of the era of sociogenic climate change. But her strategy of staging the ecocosmpolitan citizen as necessarily oppositional and of provincializing some forms of solution-oriented thinking is, I venture to suggest, a kind of essentializing binary thinking that can limit the resources with which we identify how American culture is coping with the knowledge and challenge of global climate change. Rather than construct a binary with the role of the ecocosmopolitan at one pole, I suggest that we might use the term as an ideal that creates a spectrum along which we can see various efforts at solving environmental problems to fall. The global awareness that each of the authors I discussed manifests is perhaps imperfectly cosmopolitan, but it represents a global consciousness nevertheless. I believe that it is a decided improvement over the immediacy of awareness that much of the nature writing tradition offers, and one that is fair to call innovative in the tradition of Walden.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beavan, Colin. No Impact Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Print.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge: Belknap, 1996. Print.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Print.

Ette, Ottmar. ÜberLebenswissen. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004. Print.

Fine, Doug. Farewell, My Subaru. New York: Villard, 2008. Print.

Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat, and Crowded. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.

Heise, Ursula K. “Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Literary History 20: 381-404. Print.

---. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Hoelting, Kurt. The Circumference of Home. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2010. Print.

Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1.1 (2014): 62-69. Print.

Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Ross, Andrew. “The Great White Dude.” Constructing Masculinity. Ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson. New York: Routledge, 1995. 167-175. Print.

NOTES i. I agree with the argument made by Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg that climate change is better described as “sociogenic” than “anthropogenic” (66) because “intra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis and cannot be ignored in attempts to understand it” (62). ii. Particularly since the three authors I study are white males, it’s important for me to stress that the salient characteristic I treat in each text is the way that these men are open to change because of an encounter with another living being. They are in a way the opposite of the kind of “ecological superman” that Andrew Ross discusses in “The Great White Dude” (167). They are not lone heroes perpetuating the myth or mentality of the rugged individualism of the white man in American culture—they are partners in dialogue with other human beings and other species as they seek to live in sustainable and non-damaging ways. iii. While it is not made entirely clear what Heise means by “oppositionality,” I take it to mean a resistance to hegemonic forces in American culture, refusing to assent to participation in what is normatively constructed as American. iv. Knowledge for living is not only gained through concrete experiences and immediate contexts of life, but also through the production and reception of symbolic commodities and through the most diverse forms of adoption of art and literature. v. The twenty-first century too will, fortunately, not be able to develop a definitive concept of what life is. The insight “that rationality is plural” offers a good foundation for allowing diverse logics, and different cultures, arts and scholarly disciplines to speak and be heard.

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ABSTRACTS

This article reads three American works of climate change life writing in order to examine how print culture in America is responding to growing awareness of the threat of global climate change. Engaging with Ursula Heise’s work on American environmental writing, I argue against a binary conception of cosmopolitan and provincial responses to this threat, seeking to show how ambitious individual reactions to climate change are complicated and enhanced by ways of relating and collaborating with other humans and other species.

INDEX

Keywords: climate change life writing, ecocosmopolitanism, knowledge for living, sociogenic climate change

AUTHOR

BRIAN GLASER Chapman University

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Commerce and Sentiment in Tales of Barbary Encounter: Cathcart, Barlow, Markoe, Tyler, and Rowson

Andrew S. Gross

James Leander Cathcart was one of six American sailors captured by an Algerian corsair off the coast of Portugal in 1785. He was held in servitude for 11 years, but through luck and cunning managed to rise from dangerous and demeaning labor—it was his job to feed the lions in the palace gardens—to the highest position available to a Christian slave: that of clerk to the Algerian regency or Dey (Cathcart 144). During his captivity Cathcart accumulated enough money to purchase the ship that would carry him back to the United States. The Dey allowed him to go—even lent him some of the money—but he had no intention of releasing the other American seamen held captive in Algiers; their number was about 100 at that time (Baepler 103-04, 144; Allison 20). Cathcart sailed home to plead for his fellow captives, which meant pressing the American government to capitulate to the Dey’s ransom demands. Whatever the episode reveals about the Dey’s cunning, it is emblematic of the complexity of the American encounter with Islam at the end of the eighteenth century. Cathcart was forced into what might be called a pact with the devil: motivated out of sympathy for his fellow captives he in effect does the Dey’s bidding. In his memoir, unpublished during his lifetime, Cathcart downplays the conflict by describing his decision in terms of sentimental rather than national or religious loyalty. He wants to help his fellow captives; he also believes that cooperation is possible across lines of national and religious difference (Cathcart 141,145; Field 39). The bonds of sentiment, like those of commerce, were supposed to traverse differences in creed. Indeed, the same feelings that led Cathcart to cooperate with the Dey moved him to propose a transatlantic naval alliance that would force the Barbary States to renounce piracy and accept the rules of commerce. He called this alliance the “union of sentiment” (Cathcart 141, 145, 129).i The union of sentiment, as Cathcart conceived it, crossed national and religious boundaries. Like many of his contemporaries, Cathcart believed that fellow feeling

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could go beyond the narrow limits of parochialism, opening corridors of cooperation as extensive as those of Atlantic trade. In this paper I will argue that the first American encounter with Islam, which culminated in a war waged to free the American hostages being held as slaves, was nevertheless widely seen as an opportunity to forge international bonds of commerce and common sympathy. American authors with no firsthand knowledge of the Barbary Coast represented North African pirates as possible converts: to Christianity, in some cases, but more importantly to democratic sentiments and free trade. After briefly sketching the history of the Barbary conflict at the close of the eighteenth century, I will read three fictionalized accounts of Barbary encounter as secular conversion narratives, two of the three demonstrating how even despotic slaveholders could learn to embrace commerce and sentiment. Peter Markoe’s novel The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787), Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Slave (1797), and Susanna Rowson’s drama Slaves in Algiers (1794) suggest a certain openness to religious and national difference; however they are clearly about American concerns and, in fact, more committed to secularized Christian norms than their praise of common sentiment would suggest. In all three texts, Jews are excluded from the vision of common sentiment and made to symbolize what was cruel about commerce; it is my argument that they served as scapegoats for the American discomfort with its own failures of sentiment, evidenced most obviously by chattel slavery and the slave trade. These fictionalized tales of encounter hold up sentiment as the solution to all sorts of conflict. However, they also deploy sentiment, paradoxically, as a pre-biological marker of race, designating those beyond the union of sentiment—Jews—as somehow detached from the quality that makes people human. Cathcart’sintimate knowledge of the Barbary Coast led to a diplomatic career that spanned the presidential administrations of Adams, Jefferson, and Madison (Waller 139). One of his first official tasks as U.S. consul general was to deliver yet another ransom for other American captives held in the neighboring Tripoli (1796-7). The payment was stipulated in The Treaty of Tripoli, which was drafted in part by the Connecticut wit Joel Barlow. Barlow’s early epic of America—The Vision of Columbus (1787)—is largely ridiculed today, but an article he included in the English version of the treaty, endorsed by John Adams and unanimously approved by the Senate, is still considered a milestone: As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. (“Barbary Treaties”) How the article separating church from state made it into the treaty is unclear—it is not in the Arabic version. Curiously, it echoes lines that had appeared a decade earlier in Barlow’s epic: The task, for angels great, in early youth To lead whole nations in the walks of truth, Shed the bright beams of knowledge on the mind, For social compact harmonize mankind. (qtd. in Field 8-9) The treaty was designed to protect American shipping in the Mediterranean and Atlantic; but its language links commerce to an epic vision of global cooperation.ii

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Whatever the poetic appeal of the word “harmony,” it was a choice bit of diplomatic hyperbole.Barbary piracy was arguably the most difficult foreign policy problem faced by the Early Republic (Kitzen). Corsairs had long preyed upon the Mediterranean and Atlantic shipping routes, as had European privateers. The major powers, as Cathcart complains in his memoirs, declined to mount a concerted effort against pirates because it was more convenient to use them in proxy fights against each other (Cathcart 129). New England merchants had benefited from British arrangements before the Revolutionary War and French protection during. With independence—and the growing conflict with France after the French Revolution—came vulnerability. Washington, Adams, and Jefferson were opposed to paying for protection—the saying “millions in defense but not a penny in tribute” stems from this time—but they disagreed about the desirability of maintaining a navy and lacked the revenue to build a strong one (Waller 137). Adams and Jefferson did end up paying tribute. However the Treaty of Tripoli failed because payments were slow in coming. Corsairs again started seizing American prizes. This time Jefferson declared war on Tripoli (Allison 22; Waller 138-39; Field 44). The war has been forgotten, but it was crucial for establishing American access to Atlantic shipping routes, and for testing American ideas about the relation of trade to democratic sentiment.The mission did not, however, begin well for the Americans. The U.S.S.Philadelphia and its 307 sailors were captured after the frigate ran aground on a sandbar off the Barbary Coast. To solve the crisis, Jefferson ordered the bombardment of the Port of Tripoli coupled with a land invasion led by the marines. The regency capitulated. Public celebrations of the American victory were patriotic, but they were also remarkably secular—as secular as the treaty that had failed (cf. Wilson). The most significant hymn commemorating the battle is the one still sung by the Marine Corps: “From the halls of Montezuma/ To the shores of Tripoli...” Several American cities are named after the hero of the naval battle, Stephen Decatur, who set fire to the captured Philadelphia in a daring commando raid, and then personally avenged the death of his younger brother, who had been killed in action. Decatur’s famous toast, “our country, right or wrong,” also survives. Frances Scott Key commemorated the bombardment of Tripoli in a song which, revised a decade later, would express American defiance in the face of the British bombardment of Fort McHenry (1814). The title of the better-known version is The Star Spangled Banner. The prototype praises “the light of the star- spangled flag of our nation” for eclipsing “the Crescent, its splendor obscured” (Allison 205). The Crescent was obscured, but American religiosity also seemed to be waning. Historians argue that the revolutionary period marked “a decline for American Christianity as a whole” and the rise of a “civil religion” (to use Robert Bellah’s famous phrase) based on “a shared dedication to republican government and equal liberty” (Ahlstrom 365; see also Beneke 159). The secularization thesis needs to be qualified (as Ahlstrom himself does). American religiosity would go through a number of waves and fluctuations that would continue up to the present, and at the time of the Barbary conflict Christianity was changing, but it had not disappeared. There were of course ministers who insisted on describing the conflict in religious terms (Baepler 65-9; Waller 85). An admittedly extreme example of evangelical orthodoxy was Timothy Dwight, a former classmate of Barlow’s who would become the eighth president of Yale

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and a leading figure in the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening (1790-1870).iii Dwightcharacterized the fight against Barbary piracy as a crusade against the infidels (a term he also used to decry domestic opponents). Ironically, it was the man Dwight considered the most dangerous infidel of all—Pope Pius VII—who also celebrated American gains as a victory for Christendom, and the man he castigated as an atheist—Jefferson—who declared war in the first place (Allison xvi).iv Dwight had an audience but little direct political influence. The American civil religion, if not completely secular, was certainly disestablishmentarian.v The key political actors in the Early Republic separated church and state—against Dwight’s will —in order to avoid sectarian conflicts. This harmonized with the turn towards personal belief advocated by the Evangelicals gaining prominence anyway.vi Properly considered, the separation of church and state did not lead to a diminishment but a shift in religious emphasis. Faith became a matter of personal feeling; piety became more important than creed (Beneke 13, 174-75; Abzug 37; Bell 17). There were limits to pluralism; in a moment I will explore how Jews were excluded from the community of sentiment. First I want to point out that the personalization of belief as feeling led to a re-sanctification of government in another form.The state that recognized a plurality of churches could command devotion to its own political ideals: democracy, based on self-evident truths and universal principles, became more than an institution; it was a conviction. This conviction was pursued with missionary zeal. Bring commerce to despotism, Cathcart and Barlow believed, and those who begin to acquire wealth will want to join the community of free nations.Americans, in other words, were content to let the Barbary States remain Islamic as long as they converted to commerce. Two complementary beliefs were at work in this seeming acceptance of religious difference: one is the belief that people want to be free in a particular way; the other is that commerce brings them into common accord.Terry Eagleton describes this eighteenth- century platitude as “the ideology of so-called commercial humanism, for which the proliferation of trade and the spawning of human sympathies are mutually enriching” (Eagleton 17-18, 56). The key figure often cited in commercial humanismis Adam Smith, author of both the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, first edition) and the more famous Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith is sometimes described as the prophet of self- interest, although his views were much more complicated than that.vii As Amartya Sen points out it, Smith also believed that people are motivated by custom, reputation, and sympathy (187). Commenting on the importance Smith attached to considering moral questions from an impartial perspective, he notes that “Smithian reasoning thus not only admits but requires consideration of the views of others who are far as well as near” (126). This is a heavily debated issue. Sam Fleischacker points out that while Adam Smith intended his moral philosophy to be universal, he was nevertheless hard pressed to explain how values could be grounded beyond parochial community standards; Eagleton goes so far as to describe such morality as resembling a higher form of manners(Fleischacker 273-4; Eagleton 17-18, 31; see also Mullan 9). I do not propose to take sides on the Smith debate, but I do want to point out that there is a large body of scholarship interested in tracing philosophical sentimentalism back to Smith as well as thinkers such as Hume, Shaftsbury, and Hutcheson; thinkers who countered Hobbes’ bleak view of humanity—and the political absolutism he saw as the only possible check —with an appeal to the benevolence they claimed to be instinctual.A number of

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contemporary scholars have contributed to the analysis of what is now variously being called “American sympathy” (Caleb Crain), “the culture of sentiment” (Shirley Samuels), “the culture of feeling” (Michael Bell), and “sentimental democracy” (Andrew Burstein).They have done a thorough job of showing how sentiment both reinforced hierarchies of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation and “undermined the hierarchical assumptions of republican ideology [,] extend[ing] the category of the fully human to persons consigned to the margins: the poor, nonwhites, women and children” (Gilmore 608).The consensus seems to be that sentiment played a patronizing but ameliorative role from before the Revolution to after the Civil War. The international perspective afforded by Barbary conflict complicates this picture by showing how sentimental democracy was married to sentimental notions of commerce. The picture needs to be complicated because this marriage was a difficult one. The actual practices of eighteenth-century trade, when placed under the microscope, are a far cry from the sentimental ideals used to justify them. The Early Republic wanted to bring free trade and democracy to a despotic region, but democracy was more despotic than it cared to admit. The president who waged war to free white slaves from North African masters was himself a slaveholder; and the same year that he ordered the bombardment of Tripoli (1804), he refused to recognize Haiti, a new republic established through slave rebellion. There is a rift between the language of sentimental commerce and the actual space of the transatlantic slave trade. The voices emerging from this rift—like that of the black slave Olaudah Equiano, whose servitude on English vessels carried him across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean—do not distinguish between slavery in European colonies and the Ottoman Empire, except to point out that in the latter freedom could be won through religious conversion (Equiano 124). This disanalogy posed a challenge to the universal principles that were supposed to provide the framework for, but also be the expression of, natural sentiment. The United States might be no better than the Barbary States; in some ways it might even be worse. The nation that was pluralist in terms of religious freedom— because faith was more important than doctrine—was absolutist when it came to slavery. Slaves in America might escape or pass, but they could not win their freedom by converting to the civil religion. They were beyond the “union of sentiment”— Jefferson for instance distinguished between black and white ways of feeling (Levecq 53)—which is why Stowe’s sentimental portrayal of a slave family in Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused such a furor in 1852. The American civil religion personalized dogma as religious sentiment, but it also personalized slavery as the lack of feeling or its inadequacy. Not everyone bought this argument. Some eighteenth-century writers invoked the obvious parallels between white slavery in Africa and black slavery in America to make abolitionist arguments.viii However, many writers were more concerned with defending the sanctity of American sentiment than with addressing the discrepancies between free trade and political freedom. Instead of arguing against the slave trade, they blamed the failure of the American vision on betrayers. The scapegoats were often renegades or converts to Islam, who in fact captained the corsairs in large numbers.ix Commercial humanism was charitable enough to bring the gospel of wealth to the unconverted; it held nothing but contempt for the deniers.

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The other scapegoats were those traditionally libeled as the deniers of Christ, namely Jews. The United States had no credit in Europe because it wasn’t paying off its revolutionary debt to France. It lacked the tax structure to raise revenue for ransom. When Barlow negotiated for the release of Cathcart’s 100 American companions, the only way to pay the Dey was to borrow from what Barlow called the “Jew House” of Baccri (Todd 134; see also Baepler 100). Ironically, the money Barlow borrowed to pay the Dey had been loaned to Baccri by the Dey himself (Todd 134). Barlow celebrated this as a minor victory, but he wasn’t amused when the Dey used American tributes to outfit corsairs, or when he used American debt as a pretext to commandeer the frigate George Washington to carry his own tribute to Turkey (Field 41). Barlow’s subordinates blamed this debacle on a Jewish conspiracy (Allison172, 174-5, 177). The explanations were far-fetched, but given the repressed religious underpinnings of commercial humanism this was hardly a surprising surmise. Jews were somehow different even when they fit in; they engaged in commerce not to promote the general welfare but to satisfy nefarious designs.x At least this was commonly believed (cf. Harap). In 1785, Patrick Henry expelled a group of would-be Jewish immigrants from the state of Virginia on the grounds that they might be spies for the Dey (Allison 3-4, 6-7). The Jews were not deported because of their beliefs but on suspicion of espionage—by authority of a Virginia law passed the same year that the state officially recognized religious pluralism (ibid). In theory the union of sentiment was capacious enough to include Muslims, who could be converted to commerce and were not immigrating to North America anyway. Jews were seen as permanent renegades to sentiment and made to personify the problem that commerce is itself renegade. Free trade did not lead to political freedom but to inequality, and in fact depended on the repression of an underclass who labored without hope of emancipation. The Africans forced into slavery were beyond the pale off common feeling; in the fictional accounts studied below, Jews are made to personify this absence of feeling or its manipulation and abuse. In what follows I will analyze The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, The Algerine Captive, and more briefly Slaves in Algiers as penitential texts of the American civil religion. While they are optimistic about converting Muslims to commerce, they cannot ignore, although in two out of three cases they do not mention, the chasm between American ideals and practice. That chasm is the space of the Atlantic slave trade. Their response to this credibility chasm was to symbolically sacrifice Jews to atone for slavery. The sacrificial logic reveals the religious underpinnings of American sentimentalism. It also prophesied a global economic system that has diverged in significant ways from the visionary harmony between political freedom and free trade. The Atlantic revolutions that followed the American Revolution did not lead to a global union of sentiment, but to a center-periphery geography organized around the complementary discourses of nation and race (Dillon 426-28). Whatever the universal moral intent of philosophical sentimentalism, the language of sentiment prefigured and helped provide the coordinates for this modern geography. The Jews expelled as spies from Virginia were trying to make it to Pennsylvania, which had a reputation for being more welcoming to strangers (Allison 6). Two years after the incident Peter Markoe, a resident of that state, anonymously published his only work of prose fiction, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787).xi The slim epistolary novel claims to be a collection of secret letters written by the spy Mehemet.This is an obvious

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ploy; Mehemet’s letters are actually catalogues of republican virtues barely draped in the customary cloak and dagger (Markoe 58).There are comic-ethnographic moments in the tradition of Swift and Voltaire and pointing towards Irving and Twain, such as when the bemused Algerian tries to make sense of a tea party and a Quaker meeting (40-46). The closest the novel comes to actual espionage is a one-paragraph plan to conquer Rhode Island, place it in the hands of Daniel Shay—leader of Shay’s Rebellion (1786-87)—and use it as a base to cruise the New England coast for virgins to send back to the Sultan’s harem (100). The editor of the recent edition of Markoe’s novel suggests that the digressions are so amusing one hardly notices the absence of a plot. But what the novel lacks in narrative development is made up for in polemic; the letters are actually anti- Federalist broadsides aimed at the Constitutional Convention, which also took place in Philadelphia in 1787 (xviii). The main argument is an economic one: the spy advocates maintaining a proper balance between agrarian and mercantile economies. The emphasis on agrarianism resonates with his development as a character. The supposedly secret letters end up with an American publisher because Mehemet has converted to “FREEDOM AND CHRISTIANITY,” as the final words of the novel put it in capital letters (122, 125). He purchases two farms and invites his former concubine Fatimah—who has rechristened herself Maria and married a Christian—to move in next door. The final words of the novel establish the Christian coordinates for Mehemet’s conversion to the universal values of freedom and harmony.Mehemet’s conversion is not only religious and political but also sentimental, and it is precipitated by a betrayal and a friendship (3; 47).The spy doesn’t relay much useful information to Algiers, but his correspondence, his travels, and his finances have to be channeled through two intermediaries—a Jew in Lisbon and another in Gibraltar. The Jew in Lisbon lies to the Dey about Mehemet’s loyalties—his motives are unclear (53, 112). This makes it impossible for the spy to return—his property is handed over to a renegade—but the betrayal proves to be a blessing in disguise (116). In his heart, Mehemet always rejected tyranny, which is why he paid his debts and freed most of his slaves prior to departing Algiers (60-61, 69, 103-4). The man who counsels him to stay in Pennsylvania and aids him in recovering some of his wealth is the Jew from Gibraltar. Mehemet’s conversion to freedom and Christianity is really a homecoming, but it is only possible when he separates the good Jew from the bad Jew. They personify different economic principles typical of the lands in which they live: the one trading information and money in the same way that Lisbon depends on trading gold; the other putting down roots in the same way Britain gets rich—at least according to Markoe’s analysis—by exporting domestic resources like tin (54-56). Too exclusive a reliance on mercantilism leaves a nation open to outside influence and corruption (109).The novel hammers this point home in a longish essay on how Jews make excellent merchants and diplomats, and most of them are loyal anyway, but they would be even more loyal and productive were they allowed to purchase real estate (14, 17-19, 55). There is no evidence that Markoe knew about the Jews deported from Virginia, but his long digression on Jewish property suggests that their story would have paralleled Mehemet’s, had he been allowed to write it. The moral seems to be that most people just want to settle down on farms and cultivate good republican virtues. Christianity is the umbrella term for those virtues, although the novel also endorses

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religious tolerance (14). Certainly doctrine is less important than the religious sentiment that is roughly equivalent to loving one’s neighbors. We know little about Markoe’s own background. His family, probably French in origin, immigrated to Pennsylvania from the Caribbean. He clearly identifies with Jews as merchants and travelers but sees the potential for betrayal in a mobile, commercial life. Sentiment grows up inside an international economy, embracing the universal principles that allow it to operate, but it must be allowed to take root in a community.Markoe’s protagonist articulates a version of Hume’s argument that neighborliness is a much stronger sentiment than “global fellow feeling” (Eagleton 55). The novel takes up the international theme of the Barbary conflict to offer a parochial alternative. “A philosophical history of commerce,” says the protagonist, would be an invaluable present to mankind.” It is not as useful as cultivating your own garden, however, because “The ambition of princes and the avarice of merchants will never be restrained or regulated by systems” (55). Markoe’s parochialism makes it unnecessary for him to confront cultural difference or the problem of American slavery directly. This is a Pennsylvania novel written by an anti-Federalist; the wholly imaginary Algiers serves as a projection screen for problems—like slavery and despotism—that Markoe simply refuses to admit have anything to do with his state. Nevertheless the repentant spy articulates an argument often employed against Southern slaveholders. They don’t work the land themselves, and so reap none of its personal benefits, instead developing into a class of lazy aristocrats. This argument is a fair summary of the first half of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), which capitalized on the recent liberation of American hostages by purporting to be an actual account of captivity.xii The novel takes a clear stand on slavery by sending its northern protagonist south in search of work, first as a teacher and then as a doctor. Updike Underhill is an educated fool who can’t understand why a Southern belle might take offense at an ode comparing her to “the ox eyed Juno,” and the first half of the novel is a series of picaresque misadventures generally poking fun at northern pedantry and southern pretense (Tyler 46, 47-51). The tone only becomes serious when Underhill assists a doctor in performing a successful cornea surgery. The blind man restored to sight continues to believe in the superiority of the tactile senses, however, insisting that a sensitive touch proves there is more difference between any two men’s fingernails than between white and black men generally (39-42). The purpose of the medical interlude, like the parody framing it, is to ascribe any differences between the North and the South, or between whites and blacks, to misperception. Sentiment, like touch, is a common feeling that goes beyond mere appearances (cf. Pangborn). The conclusion of the first half of the book is put to the test when Underhill, incapable of holding down a job, signs on as a ship’s surgeon on the merchant vessel Freedom and then a slaver named Sympathy. It is on the second ship that he witnesses the horrors of the middle passage including torture, rape, and the sailors’ cynical manipulation of the power of sympathy to dominate the captives. When the men go on a hunger strike, the sailors force them to eat by beating their wives and children in their presence: “though the man dared to die, the father relented, and in a few hours they all eat their provisions, mingled with their tears” (99). Underhill does his best to ameliorate the suffering, but only succeeds in earning the scorn of his shipmates (99).

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They abandon him to a corsair, and he experiences slavery himself—as well as the sympathy of some of the black captives liberated in the raid, who care for him because he has a good black soul in a white body (101). This turnabout clearly informs an abolitionist project, although most scholars agree that the second half of the novel radically diverges from the first. I want to suggest, however, that the exploration of sentiment provides a common theme that goes beyond the critique of slavery. Tyler is most interested in describing what makes a community a home even when it does not live up to its sentimental ideals (because of the slave trade), and therefore can hardly hope to export them. He goes to great lengths to corroborate its descriptions of the Barbary Coast with the up-to-date information then available in English. However, the geographical exploration is really a pretext for Tyler’s philosophical exploration of the negative side of sentiment. The preface mocks the growing interest in gothic fiction by eroticizing its effects: “Dolly, the dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man…amused themselves into so agreeable a terror, with the haunted houses and hobgobblins [sic] of Mrs. Ratcliffe [sic], that they both were afraid to sleep alone” (6). Feelings, as the blind man affirms, are more powerful than appearances, but this is precisely what makes them so useful in manipulating captives and readers. There are two crises of feeling in the second half of the novel. The first occurs when Updike is almost converted by a kind Mollah, himself a convert to Islam, who “disdained the use of other powers than rational argument” to convince the protagonist to convert (130). Although Underhill “trembled for [his] faith, and burst into tears,” it is the tears that save him from “sophistry” (ibid., 136). Religious sentiment is a guide to belief where religious reason fails. Feeling preserves Underhill’s faith, but feeling alone cannot save his self-respect or his sense of community. As in the case with the African captives who are forced to eat on board the slave ship, it can be used to manipulate the powerless—even to sever them from social bonds. The second crisis of feeling occurs when Underhill is forced to witness the public impaling of a Christian caught trying to escape. The terror he experiences convinces him at last that he is a slave. The passage is often, but erroneously, cited because the definitive Modern Language edition inadvertently drops a line, which I here add in brackets: “I will not wound the sensibility of my [humane fellow citizens, by a minute de-] tail of this fiend like punishment” (143; for the dropped line cf. the edition edited by Don Lewis Cook, 75-76). Contemporary critics, influenced by the modern philosophy of sentiment called trauma theory, often dwell on how the pun on tale/tail shows that pain is contagious or transferable to the body of spectators/ the body of the text. Their ideal is the negative union of sentiment called “bearing witness” (Felman and Laub). The sense of the restored passage, however, runs in the opposite direction. Pain can be inflicted or displayed to cause fear but this does not necessarily lead to sympathy. Underhill refrains from detailing the torture for his readers because the torture isolated him; his body is penetrated not with fellow feeling but with fear that does indeed succeed in destroying his “innate” love of liberty and his sense of solidarity with the other captives. Slavery, in other words, manipulates feelings to isolate the slaves from common sentiment. I have suggested that Markoe sees sentiment, in the form of neighborliness, as a compensation for the tyranny of global commerce; the good Jew can be separated from the bad. Tyler, more skeptical, shows how sentiment can actually be the

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instrument of tyranny and sympathy can be withheld or manipulated for personal or economic advantage. His symbols, once again, are Jews, who are described in keeping with the tradition of gothic villains. A Jewish father and son are the most consistently evil characters in the novel. They are always in disguise; even their palace is hidden behind a beggar’s façade. They at first seem to evince sympathy for Underhill, but this too is a deception. They aim to use him in a scheme to immigrate to America, but once this proves futile, they use his services as a doctor, steal his money, and sell him into slavery—not once but twice. In the end he is saved only by accident (220-224). This is an unsatisfying resolution in a novel with many formal problems. The biggest problem is that the two halves—picaresque and gothic—threaten to come apart at the seams. The genre trouble mirrors the political trouble that Tyler cannot solve by putting his faith in sentiment. He believes in the importance of sentiment, but he also sees that it can be abused. His ambivalence makes him more attentive than many to the parallels between Barbary captivity and American slavery. He does not believe that American commerce will spread fellow feeling because he knows commerce depends on the brutal exploitation of feeling. Nevertheless, for want of a better alternative, he has his protagonist return home to his parents and his country. Underhill’s closing words are the Federalist motto—BY UNITING WE STAND, BY DIVIDING WE FALL (226). This is sentimental, but defensive rather than missionary.xiii Tyler seems to advocate pledging allegiance to a flawed system rather than working to spread sympathy throughout the world. He worked closely with other Federalists supporting the Alien and Sedition Act (1798), passed a year after the publication of his novel. He did not see any contradiction between isolationism, expressed in the novel as anti-Semitism, and abolitionism. A few years later he moved to Vermont, where he became a State Supreme Court Justice, and where, according to his biographer G. Thomas Tanselle, “His Federalism seems to have become so mild that he could take office amidst a general Republican victory, but for the same reason could not survive the Federalist victory of 1813” (Tanselle 34). He remains, like his protagonist, an ambiguous figure, pulled in contradictory directions by the ships named Freedom and Sympathy, and settling at home for lack of any better alternatives. I now turn briefly to Susanna Rowson’s drama Slaves in Algiers (1794), slightly breaking with chronology in order to draw attention to what might be described as the sliding scale of sentiment within the universal framework of commercial humanism. Markoe is parochial, equating sentiment with neighborliness; Tyler is an isolationist who sees sentiment as a necessary but inadequate line of defense against the depredations of a commercial system that sanctions slavery. Rowson is a missionary who believes that sentiment can democratize foreign despotisms (Dillon 409-10). Her universalism serves the drama’s overtly feminist purpose of representing women as agents—not merely symbols—of political freedom. To do so she adapts the then pervasive fantasy of white Christian women kidnapped into harems.xiv The premise of the play is farcical, perhaps even pornographic, but Rowson’s purpose is avowedly feminist. As Rowson’s biographer Patricia L. Parker puts it, Rowson set her scenes in palace gardens and hid her characters behind fig trees, but she…seemed only slightly acquainted or little concerned with specific facts about the nation. She did know that olives and figs grew there and that Jews lived among the Moors without discrimination. Rowson’s interest, however, lay not in Algeria itself but in the subject of tyranny in general and of tyranny of men over

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women in particular. She used this popular topic to make her first feminist statement on stage. (Parker 68) The heroine of Slaves in Algiers, Rebecca, is an American mother, who through a comic- opera plot involving cross-dressing, disguises, and chance encounters, is reunited with her long-lost husband and daughter. Her perseverance teaches Algerians the importance of liberty, and sets up dramatic moments and an epilogue where strong female characters are able to express their commitment to liberty and convincingly decry the tyranny of men over women (Rowson 18, 72, 78). A slave revolt that makes the happy ending possible is ultimately welcomed by the Dey because he has learned the importance of liberty from the woman he wanted to make his concubine (74). Algiers is liberated according to the American plan, but ultimately it must consolidate its victory without American help. As Elizabeth Dillon points out, all of the interracial and interfaith marriages are avoided at the end. America and Algiers are analogous, but they remain distinct in terms of race and religion (Dillon 415). The most threatening figure of all, an English Jew who pretended to convert to Islam in Algeria, is exiled from both lands. His daughter, whom he sold to the Sultan because he believed money to be more important than any sentimental bonds to family, nevertheless rejects marriage with a Christian to care for him (74). Sentiment wins out in the end, but it defines itself in terms of family and tribe. Rowson’s women, who feel the need for freedom as strongly as men do, are qualified to be active political agents; nevertheless, the differences between races and religions establish themselves as boundaries to the more personal forms of affection. Rowson’s powerful vindication of women’s rights is also a plea for strictly delineated geography of national and racial boundaries which leaves Jews nowhere to go. The boundaries that reveal themselves in Rowson’s comic resolution map on to the racial and national boundaries of a global system of trade, which spread across the Atlantic under the banner of universal liberty, but distributed wealth in terms of core nations and their colonies (cf. Wallerstein). Jews seemed to have no place of their own in this emerging economic and geographical system. This is part of the reason why in these two novels and a play, they serve as figures for that other diaspora of enslaved Africans who were treated, in the name of profit, as if they were beyond the boundaries of human feeling. Cathcart and Barlow dreamed of international harmony. However, they wound up martyrs to sentiment that also seemed to have no place of its own. Cathcart ended his career (1818-1820) by surveying the newly acquired Louisiana territory and complaining about slavery to his superiors. Nobody listened, and his letters were not published (Waller 177). Barlow, who had helped free him, already lay buried in Żarnowiec, Poland, where he died of the pneumonia he caught while chasing Napoleon during his disastrous Russian retreat in 1812. Barlow had been dispatched (by James Madison) to negotiate yet another treaty, but what he saw convinced him that the international “harmony” achieved by revolution didn’t rhyme commerce with sentiment, but slaughter with slaughter. Barlow’s last poem, “Advice to A Raven in Russia,” is a catastrophic description of the final equality of “every nation’s gore” (rpt. in Woodress 338-39). His vision of global harmony turned out not to have a jurisdiction; his grave is its cenotaph.

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NOTES i. In the penultimate paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address (1805), Jefferson employs the same phrase—“union of sentiment”—to argue that the nation had overcome bitter factionalism to unify itself through his election (Jefferson). He is referring to Federalists who, led by ministers including Timothy Dwight, referenced later in this essay, accused him of atheism. Jefferson does not claim that he has won the Federalists over—the Inaugural is surprisingly specific about the vitriol of the attacks—but he does think that the two parties can agree to disagree, this time within the framework of free speech. It is unclear who borrowed the phrase from whom— Cathcart wrote his memoirs years after his captivity, but he was sending official dispatches to Jefferson during his first term of office. Neither of them invented it, however. The first usage I have found is in Thomas Paine’s American Crisis, no. 3, which describes how British oppression forged a “sentimental union” in the colonies reaching its fruition in the Declaration of Independence (Paine 116-18). Paine saw himself as a rationalist who lived according to universal principles rather than a sentimentalist with attachments to the particular. In American Crisis, no. 7, he argued, “my principles are universal. My attachment is to all the world, and not any particular part” (197). Whigs, on the other hand, would argue that this kind of abstract universalism sacrificed the concrete bonds of local human affection. However, Paine was more than willing to admit the importance of particular communities of sentiment within a framework of universal principles, as in the following excerpt from American Crisis, no. 9: “America ever is what she thinks herself to be. Governed by sentiment, and acting her own mind, she becomes as she pleases the victor or the victim” (231). In Cathcart, Jefferson, and Paine the union of sentiment is a way of imagining community as common feeling within a framework of universal laws. ii. In the revised version of Barlow’s epic, The Columbiad (1809), Columbus is granted a vision of a future world encircled by a commercial armada: “by fraternal hands their sails unfurl’d/ Have waved at last in unison o’er the world” (Barlow 193). iii. Dwight preached a sermon in Connecticut on July 4, 1798, “The Duty of Americans at the Present Crisis,” where he talked about the Christian victory against Islam (“Duty of Americans”). iv. “Dwight, a stalward Federalist among the stalwarts, was inclined to place Jeffersonians in the same category as infidels” (Cuningham 220). v. “Eventually Dwight grew disillusioned about his country’s peculiar role in world redemption, as disestablishmentarians and democrats gained power, but he did not despair of his faith’s

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ultimate success. Always the evangelical activist, he merely reconceived his millennial army in less nationalistic formation. He and his associates looked to a worldwide union of evangelical Calvinists to propagate the Gospel and subdue Infidel conspirators in every locality” (Berk 116). vi. What I am offering here is a version of the familiar, and to some degree no longer fashionable, argument that Protestantism led to secularization. Here it is in Peter Berger’s version: “[Protestentism] only denuded the world of divinity in order to emphasize the terrible majesty of the transcendent God and it only threw man into total ‘fallenness’ in order to make him open to the intervention of God’s sovereign grace, the only true miracle in the Protestant universe. In doing this, however, it narrowed man’s relationship to the sacred to the one exceedingly narrow channel that it called God’s word (not to be identified with a fundamentalist conception of the Bible, but rather with the uniquely redemptive action of God’s grace—the sola gratia of the Lutheran confessions). As long as the plausibility of this conception was maintained, of course, secularization was effectively arrested, even though all its ingredients were already present in the Protestant universe. It needed only the cutting of this one narrow channel of mediation, though, to open the floodgates of secularization” (118). It is the argument of this essay that secularism was more religious than it admitted. vii. Christine Levecq in Slavery and Sentiment: “The fact that Smith…authored both a moral study of sentiment and a book of liberal, free-market economics…suggests that his theory of individually negotiated emotional exchange is ideally suited to naturalize the individualism at the heart of his political philosophy” (21). viii. What qualifies as the first American anti-slavery tract, The Selling of Josesph (1700) by Samuel Sewall, who was one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials, invokes the Barbary comparison: “I am sure, if some Gentlemen should go down to the Brewsters to take the Air,and Fish: And a stronger party from Hull should Surprise them, and Sell them for Slaves to a Ship outward bound: they would think themselves unjustly dealt with; both by Sellers and Buyers. And yet ‘tis to be feared, we have no other kind of Title to our Nigers (Sewall 15). Benjamin Franklin wrote an ironic letter to the editor from the perspective of a Barbary ruler to lampoon the position of Southern slaveholders (Baepler 8). ix. Barlow tried to blame delays in American payments on a renegade captain—Peter Lyle—who had originally shipped out with Cathcart; his letters of the period express remorse for spreading a rumor that could have cost the renegade his head (it did not) (Barlow 142). Lyle’s defection seemed to place him beyond the pale of sentiment. The new millennium would be characterized by free trade and political freedom, and those who “turned Turk”—as the saying had it—were worse than unenlightened. They were deniers. x. Curiously, Timothy Dwight played a role here as well. His Conquest of Canaan, which preceded Barlow’s attempt to write the epic of America by a decade, was a religious allegory of American independence, but it also served as a blueprint for American missionary projects in Jerusalem, some of which advocated both the conversion and the emigration of Jews (Field 274). xi. Markoe’s biographer (Sister Mary Chrysostom Diebels) claims that The Algerine Spy was the first American novel (William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple both appeared in 1791, the latter published in England). This may be true, although it should be pointed out that Markoe did not invent the premise of an “oriental” spy who decides to settle in the west. The Algerine Spy was clearly modeled on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), which describes a Persian spy who never makes it back to his homeland. xii. The Algerine Captive is dedicated to David Humphreys, who was the American envoy to the region, stationed in Lisbon, and like Barlow known as one of the Connecticut Wits. xiii. Gilmore: “The Algerine Captive, like Tyler’s comedy The Contrast, integrates sentiment into the world of men. The novel politicizes affectivity so that it becomes an instrument of public virtue rather than the invitation to feminine self-indulgence deplored by critics” (637).

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xiv. Historians agree that European women were rarely taken captive by Barbary pirates, and probably never an American, for the simple reason that women were seldom on ships. However, spurious captivity narratives such as those purporting to be by one Maria Martin and a Mary Velnet were extremely popular around 1800 (Baepler 147). The virtue that Velnet managed to preserve could be seen in all its naked glory on the frontispiece, which depicted her at the low point of her captivity, bare-breasted and chained in a dungeon (Baepler 148).

ABSTRACTS

A number of American sailors were taken hostage by Barbary Corsairs and held as slaves in North Africa in the years following the Revolutionary War. The crisis would ultimately lead to open warfare, but many Americans were optimistic that international commerce and common sympathy might overcome religious differences. This essay sketches the history of the Barbary conflict and considers three fictionalized accounts of Barbary encounter as secular conversion narratives, two of the three demonstrating how even despotic slaveholders could learn to embrace commerce and sentiment. Peter Markoe’s novel The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787), Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Slave (1797), and Susanna Rowson’s drama Slaves in Algiers (1794) suggest a certain openness to religious and national difference; however they are clearly about American concerns and, in fact, more committed to secularized Christian norms than their praise of common sentiment would suggest. In all three texts, Jews are excluded from the vision of common sentiment and made to symbolize what was cruel about commerce; it is my argument that they served as scapegoats for the American discomfort with its own failures of sentiment, evidenced most obviously by chattel slavery and the slave trade. These fictionalized tales of encounter hold up sentiment as the solution to all sorts of conflict. However, they also deploy sentiment, paradoxically, as a pre-biological marker of race, designating those beyond the union of sentiment—Jews—as somehow detached from the quality that makes people human.

INDEX

Keywords: Barbary captivity, James Cathcart, Joel Barlow, Peter Markoe, Royall Tyler, sentiment, Susanna Rowson, Tripolitan War

AUTHOR

ANDREW S. GROSS Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

European journal of American studies, 9-2 | 2014