Miranda, 5 | 2011, « South and Race / Staging Mobility in the United States » [En Ligne], Mis En Ligne Le 01 Décembre 2011, Consulté Le 16 Février 2021

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Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world

5 | 2011 South and Race / Staging Mobility in the United States Sud et race / Mise en scène et mobilité aux États-Unis

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/83 DOI : 10.4000/miranda.83 ISSN : 2108-6559

Éditeur Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

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SOMMAIRE

South and Race

Introduction Anne Stefani

Forgetting the South and the Southern Strategy Michelle Brattain

Image, Discourse, Facts: Southern White Women in the Fight for Desegregation, 1954-1965 Anne Stefani

Re-Writing Race in Early American New Orleans Nathalie Dessens

Integrating the Narrative: Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You Baby and the Sub-Genre of the Kitchen Drama Jacques Pothier

Representing the Dark Other: Walker Percy's Shadowy Figure in Lancelot Gérald Preher

Burning Mississippi: Race, Fatherhood and the South in A Time to Kill (1996) Hélène Charlery

Laughing at the United States Eve Bantman-Masum

Staging American Mobility

Introduction Emeline Jouve

Acte I. La Route de l'ouest : Politique(s) des représentations / Act I. The Way West: Representations and Politics

The Road West, Revised Editions Audrey Goodman

Le héros de la Frontière, un mythe de la fondation en mouvement Daniel Agacinski

Acte II. Errances : Regards sur l'Amérique / Act II. Wanderings: Visions of America

The Constant Traveller: Staging Mobility in the Poetry of Robert Frost Candice Lemaire

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Mobilité et immobilité dans les romans américains de Georges Simenon Christine Calvet

“You Need to Come Here… to See What Living Is Really About”. Staging North American Expatriation in Merida (Mexico) Eve Bantman-Masum

Acte III. Le capital en marche : mise en scène et mise en espace / Act III. Capital on the Move: Stage Space

Facteurs de mobilité ou mobilité des facteurs (de production) ? La mise en scène urbaine du capitalisme américain Frédéric Leriche

Occasional papers

Metamorphoses of the Uncanny in the Short-Story “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl Jacques Sohier

Symbiose et circulation dans Of Mice and Men de John Steinbeck Damien Alcade

Reviews

Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Joan Thomas, Curiosity Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Marilyn Pemberton (ed.), Enchanted Ideologies: A Collection of Rediscovered Nineteenth-Century Moral Tales Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Carmen Flys Junquera, Irene Sanz Alonso, Montserrat Lopez Mujica, Esther Lao y Leone (eds), Paisajes Culturales : Herencia Y Conservacion / Cultural Landscapes : Heritage and Conservation Françoise Besson

Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker and Leigh Wetherall- Dickson, Melancholy Experience in the Long Eighteenth Century Hélène Dachez

Tom Dunne and William L. Pressly, James Barry, 1741-1806: History Painter Muriel Adrien

Simon Shaw-Miller and Sam Smiles, Samuel Palmer Revisited Muriel Adrien

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Anne Stefani (dir.) South and Race Sud et race

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Introduction

Anne Stefani

1 This collection of articles provides a multi-faceted reflection on the importance of race in southern culture, past and present. It examines the topic from a great variety of perspectives, from history to anthropology through literary and film analysis. Six articles deal with the southern United States from the early nineteenth century to the present, exploring the influence of the white supremacist doctrine on southern culture through history. The seventh stands apart in dealing with the relationship between Mexico and the United States. From its radically different perspective—the North- American continent—this last article challenges the readers to broaden their view and to redefine the South as Mexico, and race as a concept based on national character rather than on skin color.

2 In 1928, historian Ulrich Phillips defined race as “the central theme of southern history”.1 In 2001, another historian of the American South, Sheldon Hackney, observed: To believe that there is a South and that it is based in some way on the formative power of biracialism is not to argue that all white southerners believe in white supremacy or that every African American in the South is an incipient Nat Turner. It is to maintain, however, that every white or black southerner must decide where he or she stands with regard to the tradition of black subordination. One can be a white liberal, a racial equalitarian, an unreconstructed segregationist, a leave-me- alone moderate, a black accommodationist, a black militant, or many other shades of racial consciousness. What one cannot be is nonracial. (Hackney 68)

3 The fact that two prominent scholars writing during two eras separated by the Civil Rights Movement and the abolition of legal segregation should point out the centrality of race in southern culture testifies to the profound influence of race on southern identity irrespective of all other factors that might have played a part in its shaping and evolution. Indeed, anyone considering the contemporary South from any perspective will soon find out that race pervades its cultural and social fabric, as scholar Joel Williamson, commenting in 1984 on the specific condition of southern women, noted: “In the South, the absoluteness of the race role plays directly into the absoluteness of the sex role and roles of good and bad” (Williamson 497). Obviously, to single out race as the major distinctive feature of southern identity is not to deny its

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influence in the national experience. In the South, however, the legacy of institutionalized racism, first in the form of slavery, then in that of segregation, confers to race a specific dimension that cannot be ignored.

4 Until the 1960s, the vocal defense of white supremacy by southern politicians left no doubt as to the centrality of race in southern identity, in its cultural, political and social dimensions. After the abolition of the Jim Crow laws, however, this concept seemed to lose its strength in the definition of regional distinctiveness, and the very existence of a southern identity came into question as a result. Nevertheless, the connection between the South and race is still a matter of debate today. Indeed, if the South’s “racial problem” was allegedly settled with the abolition of legal segregation, the concept of race remains crucial to any real understanding of the contemporary South, even if it is apprehended in new and probably more complex ways than in the past.

5 For a long time in American history, the reflection on race understandably focused on the South and on the effects of institutionalized racism on African Americans as embodied by the Jim Crow laws. Scholarship relied on clear North/South and black/ white dichotomies which led most commentators to overlook the complexities of the issue. This tendency to oversimplification was of course favored by the white supremacist discourse which had erected a wall between the black and white worlds, not only in the concrete reality of southern society, but also in the collective imagination. Racial discourse and thought tended to pit white against black indiscriminately, opposing white racism to black victimization without probing further into the variety of experiences that individuals actually went through. Since the late twentieth century, this binary frame of thought has given way to a much more complex one, in which the definitions of blackness and whiteness have become more nuanced, recognizing the existence of many shades within each category, and shedding new light on the interaction between the two. Whereas, in the past, the reflection on race had mainly hinged on blackness, it turned in the last two decades to a more nuanced exploration of whiteness and to the subtle ways in which blackness and whiteness influence each other. This evolution is to be placed within the broader epistemological framework of the current humanities and social sciences, whose evolution has been marked by a growing emphasis on the interaction of multiple factors in social and cultural phenomena. Hence historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's observation: Like gender and class, then, race must be seen as a social construction predicated upon the recognition of difference and signifying the simultaneous distinguishing and positioning of groups vis-à-vis one another. More than this, race is a highly contested representation of relations of power between social categories by which individuals are identified and identify themselves. (Higginbotham 253)

6 This new approach to race actually enables scholars to revisit American and southern racial history, as one of them, Elizabeth Hale, aptly points out in a study devoted to whiteness: To be American is to be both black and white. Yet to be a modern American has also meant to deny this mixing, our deep biracial genesis. Racial segregation colors even our language, and thinking beyond its construction is not easy. To trace the creation of whiteness as a modern racial identity, we must leave assumed, habitual ways of racial knowing behind. (Hale 3)

7 In her exploration of whiteness, Hale does not conceive of separating the experiences of blacks and whites, adding: “If we cannot imagine less racially binary pasts or raceless

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futures, who will (Hale 11)”? The concept of race as it is currently understood thus allows the overdue integration of racial language and thought.

8 Interestingly, Hale not only rejects the black/white dichotomy, but she also places her reflection in a national perspective by referring to American, rather than southern, identity, whereas her research is centered on the South—as conveyed by the title of her book, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. She thus clearly dismisses the traditional North/South dichotomy. This tends to demonstrate that the shift in racial thought which has occurred in the last decades has been accompanied by a shift in the ways in which scholars approach the South and its relationship to the nation. Although southern identity is still unique owing to its racial history, American identity is also presented as deeply marked by racism, so much so that the South, instead of serving as a convenient scapegoat for the conscience of the nation owing to its blatantly racist past, is now viewed as a revelator of a national disease to be eradicated by new ways of apprehending the past and the present.

9 The first three articles of this collection deal with the connection between South and race from a historical perspective. They demonstrate that, although race has always been an essential influence in southern society and politics, this influence has not been the same everywhere and people's ways of dealing with it have been significantly different depending on places and eras.

10 Michelle Brattain invites her readers to ponder over the significance of race in contemporary southern politics by discussing historians' recent reassessment of the “southern strategy” and “southern exceptionalism.” Whereas traditional scholarship accounted for the late twentieth century partisan realignment by stressing the Republicans' deliberate appeal to white southern racism in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, recent scholarship has argued that race had been overestimated in the interpretation of the Republican ascendency in the South. While acknowledging the strength of the latest literature on the issue, Brattain nevertheless provides convincing evidence that race was indeed a major factor in the partisan realignment that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century, and that it continues to be a distinctive feature of southern politics which serves the interests of the national Republicans despite their claims to the contrary. She argues that even if race has disappeared from contemporary political discourse, the idea of race still pervades the language through coded words and images invariably referring to the segregationist era.

11 The segregated South constitutes the framework of the second article, which deals with an ill-known aspect of the school desegregation crisis triggered by the Supreme Court's Brown decision of 1954. By examining the collective action of white women's groups in favor of desegregation, I analyze the destructive power of racial symbols in the confrontation between segregationists and integrationists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This article shows that racial taboos were so strong at that time that the women who worked for desegregation had to resort to a subtle strategy based on coded behavior and discourse that enabled them to undermine white supremacy without seeming to do so.

12 In the third article, Nathalie Dessens takes us back to early nineteenth-century New Orleans. This article confirms the recent epistemological trend toward multi-folded interpretation and the crossing of perspectives, building on the recent historiography which has questioned dichotomous readings of racial patterns and race relations in New Orleans. The author shows that the Crescent City stands both as a typical southern

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city and as an exception, in the sense that race was undeniably a factor of social stratification in early American New Orleans, but that the racial pattern of the city was not based on the traditional opposition of blacks and whites but on a three-tiered division into whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color. Moreover, due to the constant influx of Europeans and the massive arrival of Caribbean refugees at the turn of the nineteenth century, ethnic factors became as important as racial factors in the shaping of social relations, so that race relations appear to have been much more complex there than in the rest of the South. Nevertheless, race remained a major reference point in the social fabric of the city.

13 The next two articles explore the significance of race in southern literature in the post- Civil Rights Movement era. Like the previous pieces, they invite the readers to search for meaning beyond the simplistic patterns of black and white opposites and their moral corollaries, good and evil. In his study of Ellen Douglas's novel Can't Quit You Baby (1988), Jacques Pothier examines Douglas's treatment of the relationship between white housewives and their black housekeepers in the South. He analyzes more particularly how the interaction of race, gender, and class—inherited from the combined influences of white supremacy and patriarchy on which southern society was built under slavery and segregation—makes the relationship between white and black women in the South much more complex than it seems to be. The article demonstrates how Douglas reshapes the sub-genre of the kitchen drama by depicting her white narrator's gradual discovery of the peculiar bond that unites her to her housekeeper—a bond of which she had been unconscious because of racial conventions. Douglas thus revisits class, gender, and race by transcending literary conventions. As for Gérald Préher, he offers an innovative reading of Walker Percy's Lancelot (1977) by arguing that the novel does not deal primarily with the protagonist's immorality and search for sin—as most critics have claimed—, but proposes a reflection on race relations in which the black character provides the white character with an opportunity for moral redemption. The article analyzes the relationship between Lancelot and his black help, Elgin, showing how Lancelot's attitude towards Elgin becomes a way for him to expiate his racial sins as a white southerner. Thus the two literary articles of this collection stress in their own ways the enduring burden of race on the southern imagination in the late twentieth century, suggesting that the abolition of segregation and the relegation of white supremacy to history did not erase the issue from the regional culture.

14 The persistence of race as a central feature of southern identity in the contemporary era also comes to light in Hélène Charlery's comparative analysis of two movies, Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill (1996). The article argues that, in many respects, the later movie proves more conservative than the earlier one, which can be accounted for by the political and ideological contexts in which they were produced. While both broach the issue of racism in southern society through the depiction of a white lawyer as a liberal hero in the midst of a benighted South, A Time to Kill extols conservative values such as masculinity and fatherhood rather than denouncing southern racism—whereas To Kill a Mockingbird and other 1960s and 1970s movies condemn racism unambiguously. The depiction of black characters in the later movie also conveys a conservative message about race insofar as those characters only serve to support the construction of heroic white fatherhood. Thus, unlike the two novels analyzed in the previous articles, the 1996 movie does not

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emphasize white guilt but white righteousness, relegating the race issue to the background.

15 Finally, the last article takes us south of the border to Mexico, where “race” does not apply to skin color but to national character. In an original and engaging essay about anti-American humor in Mexico, Eve Bantman analyzes the essentialist discourse characteristic of jokes targeting the United States and its population. She shows how, by depicting Anglo-Americans as a race—designated by the term Gringo—such humor contributes to redefining the relationship between Mexico and the United States to the advantage of Mexicans. Although the Mexican experience bears no comparison to the racial history of the southern United States, it is interesting to note that Mexicans use the concept of race as a weapon—the “weapon of the weak”—to reverse the relationship of domination between North and South. The author argues that Mexican stereotypical representations of the Gringo as the Other enable Mexicans to “assert their right to exist independently” and to “reclaim their national heritage”. In that respect, the concept of race serves a function that is not fundamentally different from that defined above by Evelyn Higginbotham as “a social construction predicated upon the recognition of difference and signifying the simultaneous distinguishing and positioning of groups vis-à-vis one another”.

16 As this introduction indicates, our purpose here is not to offer an exhaustive study of the connection between South and race, but it is rather to invite readers to ponder over the great variety of ways in which those two themes interact. The present collection of articles attests to this variety while shedding light on striking similarities and/or elements of continuity between periods, places, and approaches.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hackney, Sheldon. “The Contradictory South.” Southern Cultures 7:4 (Winter, 2001): 65-80.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. 1998. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs 17:2 (Winter, 1992): 251-274.

Phillips, Ulrich B. “The Central Theme of Southern History.” American Historical Review 34 (1928): 30-43.

Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

NOTES

1. See Phillips in the bibliography.

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AUTHOR

ANNE STEFANI Maître de Conférences HDR Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Forgetting the South and the Southern Strategy

Michelle Brattain

1 Let's begin with a true story about the modern South.

2 In 2002 the Dodge County (GA) commission voted to fly the Confederate Battle flag outside their courthouse one day a year in honor of Confederate Memorial Day (Bennet). Given the simultaneous uproar over the placement of the stars and bars on Georgia's state flag—the official state banner changed three times in the space of just twenty-seven months prior to May 2003—Dodge County's policy seemed a moderate, even temperate, compromise between those who wished to honor “Southern” history and those who argued that the stars and bars should not have any official sanction by the state. Until 2001, Georgia had flown the 1956 state flag, adopted by segregationist legislators in the heat of massive resistance, which defiantly devoted two-thirds of the flag's real estate to the Confederate stars and bars. At the time, the Democratic Governor's floor leader had declared that the flag would “show that we in Georgia intend to uphold what we stood for, will stand for and will fight for”—in other words, segregation (Martinez 224). But times had changed in the twenty-first century, and led by Democratic Governor Roy Barnes, the legislature adopted a new, somewhat awkward, compromise design giving equal space to all five flags that had historically flown over the state, including the Confederate battle flag but also two American flags. However, this aesthetically-challenged flag, like Barnes, would not be long for Georgia.1

3 As Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the Heritage Preservation Association demanded a return of the Stars and Bars, Republican gubernatorial candidate Sonny Perdue announced his support for a referendum on the flag. In 2002, this position won Perdue, formerly a state senator and a Democrat, enough white rural votes to defeat Barnes and make him the first Republican Governor of Georgia since Reconstruction. Two-thirds of Georgians, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, wanted a flag referendum, and more than half considered the stars and bars a symbol of Southern heritage (Wilson and Silk 183). But the referendum on the 1956 flag never came to pass. After the election Perdue began distancing himself from Confederate symbols, even banning the flag's display at his inauguration. Angry “flaggers” protested with three

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small planes flying over the inauguration with thirty-three-foot banners displaying the 1956 flag and demanding: “Let us vote. You Promised” (Galloway, 2003, 1A). In 2004 the referendum took place, but the choices were limited to the Barnes flag and yet another new stars-and-bars-free design, outraging the “flaggers” and eliciting a sigh of relief from Republicans worried about tainting the party's image in an election year and pro- business Georgians worried about what kind of message that might send about the state (“Phew” Economist). Flaggers now threatened to throw their support to a Democrat in the next gubernatorial election, “just to send a message”, according to a member of the Heritage Preservation Association (Galloway 2004, 1D). As “Sonny Lied” signs began popping up on highways throughout rural Georgia and flaggers vowed to seek revenge at the ballot box, Dodge County's 2002 decision must have appeared quite extraordinary—a model of a New South committed to remembering history, not reliving it.

4 The only thing was that Dodge County's Commissioners didn't remove the flag after Confederate Memorial Day. They never took it down. It has been flying continuously outside the courthouse in Eastman, Georgia for nearly a decade (Bennet). In 2011 when the President of the Dodge County NAACP asked the county to comply with the original law, the majority-white county commission, anticipating a law suit from either the NAACP or the SCV no matter what they did, passed a new law permitting year-round display of the battle flag—which is now padlocked to the pole (Bennet, Richards).

5 Perhaps the never-ending saga over the Confederate flag is low-hanging fruit in the quest to make a point about Southern exceptionalism. White racial insensitivity is undoubtedly not unique to the South (Sugrue 209-258, McGirr 185, 305). As a Southern transplant attending graduate school in New Jersey, I still remember the shock of discovering that 1. Whites outside the South were not universally racial liberals and 2. “Northerners” nevertheless made many assumptions about all white Southerners, including me. Seven years at Rutgers University cured me of a telltale Charlotte, NC accent but it also motivated me to do Southern history, because I was certain that “myth” and the desire to exoticize the South had prevented historians from seeing its complexity. I remember feeling compelled to challenge scholarly assumptions about a universal white Southern identification with the Confederacy and to inform fellow students in a Southern history seminar that in fact my family never sat around the supper table romanticizing the Lost Cause or rehashing Civil War battles. It was wrong, and perversely ahistorical, to assume a direct line of continuity between the 19th and the 20th century South. Other aspects of “Southern” distinctiveness, however, rang uncomfortably true for me, especially in recent history. There were no Klan members hidden in my family closets, but it was true that my parents were Nixon-era converts to the Republican Party, motivated in no small part by school busing and their sense that Nixon represented the “high-class” alternative to men like George Wallace and (then- Democrat) Jesse Helms. My folks never advocated integration and they hated busing, but they were good Southern folk with the “right” raising, who had enough sense to be moderate and polite about their demands.

6 So my own response to the recent scholarly trend of declaring the “end of Southern history” and the “myth” of Southern exceptionalism has been ambivalence. On the one hand, I understand the impulse to expose the myth of American racism as an exclusively Southern phenomenon and to do justice to the genuine complexity of Southern history. My own dissertation research was motivated by my desire to show

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that white Southern workers were more than the hapless counterparts of the other “American” workers or victims of false consciousness disciplined by the threat of a phantom black industrial army waiting to steal their jobs. There was then, and probably still is, a hardy tradition of thinking of the South as the anomaly in a norm of “American” history (Lassiter and Crespino 7-11). That faith has long justified Southern history's existence as a traditional subfield that, in spite of many scholarly challenges, predictably rises from the ashes like a phoenix every time a new cohort of historians offers a dedicated graduate seminar, presents their work at regional conferences, or publishes in specialized journals. The indisputable truth that all Southern historians have to face is that the South has at times been quite different—obviously because of the extent and duration of slavery, secession and the Civil War, Reconstruction, the segregation and disfranchisement of black voters, and more recently the very visible, public civil rights movement and an equally visible opposition. The South has historically been more rural, agrarian, and poor, with distinctively low rates of unionization and an economy dominated in the first half of the twentieth century by low-wage industries. Its politics have also been historically peculiar, functioning as a de facto one-party state dominated for nearly a century by the Democratic Party and profoundly shaped by near universal black disfranchisement. And even within the Democratic Party, Southerners were frequently distinctive: consistently anti-union, anti-civil rights, pro-military, anti-communist to the extreme, and more conservative generally, voting more frequently with conservative Republicans than Democrats in Congress.

7 Even as the South was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century, presumably becoming more urban, suburban, industrial, and diverse—e.g. “American”—it still seemed to change and act as a region, especially in politics. First in 1964, the once reliably Democratic South began to withdraw its loyalty to the national party that had begun to champion black civil rights. In the 1964 Presidential election, five deep-South states threw their support to the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, one of a handful of Senators that had voted against the Civil Rights Act. In 1968, Southern states divided between Republican Richard Nixon and former Alabama Governor and Independent George Wallace, but roundly rejected the Democrats, seemingly forever. Almost overnight, the single-party, solid South was no more. White Southern voters, and white Southern politicians, shifted in droves to the Republican Party in national elections, making the South a new Republican and conservative stronghold. (Lesher, 311-313, 436; Rieder 243-69; Black and Black 1-39).

8 Wrapped up in this narrative of party realignment is the most “modern” article of faith behind Southern exceptionalism: the Republican “Southern strategy.” Richard Nixon and his advisors, the story goes, stole a page from the Goldwater and Wallace playbooks and wooed white Southern voters into the Republican party with appeals to festering racial resentments. But they didn't act like Southern segregationists or openly champion white supremacy. Rather, the Republicans employed a coded language of “state's rights,” “law and order,” and “forced busing.” (Carter 1996 xi-xiv, Rieder 243-69) As Nixon aide John Erlichman later described it in Witness to Power, Nixon took strong positions on busing, quotas, and crime, but “always couched his views in such a way that a citizen could avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.” There were, for example, “plausible reasons to be against open housing that had nothing to do with the fact that most public-housing-project dwellers” were minorities, so that's what they offered. (Erlichman 223, Carter 1996, 30). Such

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disingenuous campaigning, invented by Wallace and perfected by Nixon, some scholars have argued, has kept the white South unapologetically coming back for more “colorblind” Republicanism every four years.

9 It's this last chapter in Southern exceptionalism that has recently come under fire. As one historian put it bluntly: “The 'Southern strategy' explanation of the political transformation of the modern South is wrong” (Lassiter 2006, 5). Moreover, as co- editors and contributing authors to the 2009 anthology The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino argue that the “notion of the exceptional South has served as a myth, one that has persistently distorted our understanding of American history.” Their goal is not to “absolve the South but to implicate the nation” (Lassiter and Crespino 7). Neither denies the history of racism in the South or its role in Southern-style massive resistance. Rather both argue that the tendency to associate white racism exclusively with the South—a practice perpetuated by South-centered accounts of the Civil Rights movement and the “Southern strategy” account of partisan political realignment—has obscured the presence of white racism and racially inflected politics elsewhere in the United States. As they point out, two weeks before President Eisenhower sent the National Guard to protect black students from segregationist mobs in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Governor of Pennsylvania was forced to dispatch state troopers to the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown. There, a white mob of 400 people turned out to protest a black family that had just moved in, tormenting them with loud music and car horns, vandalizing their home, and displaying a Confederate battle flag. Clashes between the Pennsylvania troopers and residents lasted for a week. Americans remember Little Rock, but not Levittown. The reason, Lassiter and Crespino suggest, is because history and popular memory have “reinforce[d] a selective historical consciousness about the civil rights era, which is typically portrayed as an epic showdown between the retrograde South and a progressive nation.” (4-7). In reality, they argue, “most regional characteristics cited as evidence of difference of kind are really differences of degree.” (12). Thus contributors to The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism frequently turn their gaze elsewhere—reminding us not only that whites rioted against housing integration in Pennsylvania, but that segregation (of the Chinese) existed out west, and that NY prisons could be as brutal as Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm.

10 But the most vociferous challenges to Southern exceptionalism have come primarily through scholarship of the South itself. Unlike the old “top-down” arguments suggesting that Nixon orchestrated the late 1960s “backlash” against Civil Rights, these authors all describe a quiet revolution from below. Republicans did not “Southernize” the nation; rather the dramatic economic and social changes that swept through the South after the 1950s dramatically transformed the region, making it more like the rest of the nation (even if contemporaries tended not to notice). In the process, political power shifted from the rural Black Belt to the metropolitan frontiers of the sunbelt. Although the emphasis varies across this new scholarship, two factors are thought key: the urbanization and more importantly suburbanization of the South, and as a result, the mobilization of Southern whites around new “colorblind” conservative political issues such as private schools, busing, or social values (Lassiter 2006, 225-250, Kruse 259-266, Crespino 205-206, 271). In a move that has been long overdue, these new works simultaneously reveal the existence of a wide variety of opinion and conviction about race from the 1950s through the 1980s. The white South had its William Simmonses and Bull Connors and its Anne Bradens and Connie Currys, but there were a lot, a majority

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in fact, of people in between who varied in their commitment to segregation, who were willing to follow the law—even if they did not like it, and who actually adjusted themselves and their politics to the new racial order (Lassiter 251-275, Kruse 138-139). Judge Tom P. Brady, Mississippi author of the notorious Black Monday is a case in point. Though as a leader of the Citizens' Council he authored some of the most vicious racial propaganda produced during the massive resistance era, on the bench he did his duty to uphold the law, “irrespective of how erroneous it may appear, or how odious it is,” because “a decision of the United States Supreme Court is still the ultimate in judicial determination and is binding on the tribunals and citizens of the respective states.” (Crespino 175).

11 All the new Southern revisionists emphasize how demographic changes transformed the politics of both the South and the nation. Lassiter, for example, suggests that the key to understanding partisan political realignment after 1964 is not the exploitation of Southern politics, but suburban politics, which were a national phenomenon with profoundly racial implications (Lassiter 2006, 3-5, Lassiter 2004). In the South, as elsewhere, the suburbs were produced by entrenched racial structures, from restrictive covenants to the FHA's racially skewed method of awarding mortgage subsidies, which, by the 1960s, had helped generations of whites accumulate substantial economic and cultural capital. The suburbs also provided a haven for whites fleeing municipal integration. In Atlanta, when segregationist efforts were foiled by white city elites content to desegregate public facilities that elites didn't use anyway, blue-collar and middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, where, in Kevin Kruse's words, they “made their dreams manifest in the spatially and socially removed lands of suburbia” far from the “pollution, bad schools and crime” they associated with the integrated city (Kruse 247). Outside the perimeter in places like Cobb and Gwinnett County, secessionists were joined by new suburbanites, who had not necessarily participated in the original migration from Atlanta, but readily adopted the same political mantras of low taxes and individualism, which, in practice, were racial politics nonetheless (Kruse 243-266). Political Scientists Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston argue that these economically based preferences, rather than race, were the primary force transforming the South into a new Republican stronghold. However, as Lassiter and Kruse point out, this new politics was different from and more than simple racism, since middle class status insulated middle class and affluent whites from racial others nearly as effectively as whiteness. Suburbia was also one of those racial advantages that many white Americans forgot about very quickly, embracing instead what Lassiter calls a myth of “racial innocence” (Lassiter 2004, 558). But, significantly, it was a myth they shared with suburban whites all over the country. Ironically no one understood this better than Mississippi Senator John Stennis, who protested in 1970 that federal policy unfairly targeted the de jure segregation of the South while leaving the de facto segregation of Northern, Western and Midwestern suburbs intact (Crespino 175).

12 To those who are tempted to draw a straight line from Goldwater, through Wallace, to Nixon and beyond as evidence of Republicans manipulating white Southerners through carefully coded appeals to their racism, the new critics of Southern exceptionalism point to other, less-well-known forces working at the grassroots of Southern politics and culture—namely, moderation. This was true, as historian Joseph Crespino shows, even in the “most Southern place on earth”: Mississippi.2 Though Crespino unflinchingly recounts the familiar and undeniable violence of Mississippi's white supremacists and the below-the-belt tactics of its Citizens' Council, he also documents

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the early emergence of a new, business-oriented, urban and suburban political elite who were committed to projecting an image of moderation while preserving the racial status quo. This Mississippi would be unrecognizable to a casual acquaintance familiar only with the Mississippi of “Eyes on the Prize.” Even the Sovereignty Commission, the notorious state surveillance agency formed to monitor and discourage civil rights activity in Mississippi, had by the early 1960s added white extremist organizations to its list of charges, attempting to channel white resistance into “more subtle and effective strategies.” In line with the political wisdom of Commission director Erle Johnston, for example, the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, had, by 1965, stopped using words “nigger” or “Negro,” replacing them with “'communists' or subversive individuals” (Crespino 108). As Crespino documents so well, Mississippi didn't need Republican presidential political strategists or white suburbanites to invent “conservative color blindness and racist code words” (Crespino 8) because they had them all along: “states' rights,” after all, had never required anyone to use the N-word. Thus the Civil Rights Act was a “dangerous and unconstitutional expansion of federal powers” and school busing violated “freedom of choice.” Mississippi Republicans likewise attempted to work defenses of racial tradition into a broader platform of conservative ideology.

13 By 1970, Lassiter argues, white Southerners preferred moderate policies and candidates who employed a language of abstract principles over open defiance and political extremists—a lesson that Nixon learned the hard way. One of the few “genuine” incarnations of the Southern strategy, Lassiter argues, was Nixon's decision in the 1970 midterm elections to lend his support to the Southern Republican candidates who represented the most extreme racial backlash to court-ordered school desegregation and busing. In theory (Kevin Phillip's theory to be precise) such a strategy would have hastened Southern partisan realignment. However, centrist Democrats triumphed over race-baiting Republicans in several key gubernatorial and Congressional elections. By 1970, Southern suburbanites, like their American counterparts, seem to have rejected massive resistance in favor of moderates who, in the very least, paid lip service to integration and “equal rights” while opposing busing and “special treatment” (Lassiter 2006, 251-275). In Charlotte, NC, for example, subject of the infamous Swann v. Charlotte- Mecklenberg Board of Education (1971) Supreme Court case, the white suburbanites who formed the Concerned Parents Association to oppose “two-way” school busing were not racists in the conventional sense. Unlike the old adherents to massive resistance, they did not categorically reject integration in principle. Rather they considered themselves “good citizens,” who had had the foresight and affluence to purchase homes in neighborhoods with good schools whose rights as taxpayers and consumers were now being violated (Lassiter 2006, 121-147, Lassiter 2004). It was in this capacity, not as white Southern racists, Lassiter argues, that white Southern suburbanites actually identified with Nixon and the “Silent Majority.”

14 Such reexaminations of Southern political, social, and cultural history have been long overdue, and they have made enormous contributions to late twentieth century US history. The national success of Nixon's appeal to middle-class whites who disdained social engineering in the name of racial equality is an extraordinarily important historical insight that challenges myths about American racial innocence. The similarity of white responses to busing across regions, for example, and the hypocrisy of Hubert Humphrey and other non-Southern Democratic liberals who resisted the application of integrationist remedies in their own backyards has newly exposed the emptiness of

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distinctions between de jure and de facto segregation (Crespino 178-180). The triumph of “moderate” politics in the South of the 1970s over the diehard segregationists still beating the same drum likewise challenges any scholar who would draw a straight historical line of continuity between the Dixiecrats and the Southern Republican party. But is it time to forget the Southern strategy and declare the “end of Southern history”?

15 One remaining—and substantial—hurdle is that the “Southern strategy” still explains a lot about national politics, even if the details need modification. Perhaps the “Southern strategy” was not as successful as Kevin Phillips, author of the New Republican Majority, assumed it would be, but it is nevertheless very difficult to deny that the National Democratic Party's open embrace of federal civil rights legislation contributed to a fundamental political realignment in the United States beginning in 1964. Even Lyndon Johnson expected to lose white voters in Southern states after passage of the Civil Rights Act. On the other side of the coin, Phillips predicted that the Republicans would never again get more than “10 to 20 per cent of the Negro vote” after determining to go “where the [potential new Republican] votes are” (Boyd 106). And both were correct. The regional and racial repositioning that occurred after 1964 can be described and circumscribed in many ways: as the dissolution of the New Deal coalition, as a shift limited to Presidential politics that proceeded in fits and starts until the 1980s, or the Republicans' successful seduction of disaffected white Southern voters. But it's undeniable that most Southern states gave up their knee-jerk support for the national Democratic Party, and this was an extraordinary development. Let's recall that we're talking about states that were so firmly Democratic at the national level that they even supported Adlai Stevenson in 1956. We can never be entirely sure what precise slogan or policy attracted each individual white Southerner who cast a vote for Goldwater, Wallace, Nixon, or later, Reagan, but there were quite a few who openly declared that it was the Democrat's support for national civil rights legislation. In any case, a great number of them obligingly trooped the polls and acted according to contemporary predictions.

16 There's also the problem of all those smoking guns that the Republicans left behind. “Coded language” was not the modern invention of historians, it was an open secret in the Nixon political camp. Although Nixon and many other Republican operatives were often guarded or defensive about the Republicans' relationship to the white South in the 1960s and 1970s, their memoirs, recordings, and internal documents unapologetically rehash their efforts to court white Southern voters with appeals to race. Special Nixon commercials were created for Southern audiences, many featuring Strom Thurmond “talking about crime, busing, and the Supreme Court”—all issues that had been inseparable from race for the past 15 years, and were firmly racialized in the context of the federal government's 1968 hardline position on Southern desegregation plans (McGinnis 122). Or take Nixon's position on “law and order.” In 1968, after four summers of urban populations across the United States exploding into open racial rebellion, Nixon recorded a television ad bemoaning the “decline of ‘law and order' in American cities.” The ad itself did not mention race, but viewing it, Nixon declared that this campaign spot “hits it right on the nose…It's all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there” (Carter 1996, 30). Nixon's campaign advisors even edited out an image of a little boy “staring in the smoldering ruins of what had

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been his home” because it might suggest “sympathy for Negroes who riot” (McGinnis 116).

17 Some Republicans have been forthcoming about how this tradition was carried over into later decades. While many denied that Ronald Reagan's decision to kick off his 1980 Presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi with a speech declaring his belief in “states' rights” was intended to appeal to white racism, others admitted that “abstract” or coded language was deliberately employed to do exactly that. As Lee Atwater, a Reagan advisor explained it to a political scientist in the early 1980s, Republicans would win white Southern votes by continuing in the same tradition established in the 1960s. “You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,'” Atwater explained, “By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.” In the process the racial issues become “abstract,” even if a “byproduct of them” is clearly a differential effect on racially identified groups and “blacks get hurt worse than whites.” By 1980, the Republicans were “doing away with the racial problem one way or the other…. because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'” (Lamis 26).

18 That these confessions are rare and severely outnumbered by examples of moderate speech by Nixon et al. is no accident. Political strategists understood that the successful deployment of a Southern strategy in a national election depended on moderate language, the appearance of sincerity (as opposed to cynical pandering), and the articulation of a national interest. “We should disavow Phillips' book [The New Republican Majority] as party policy,” Nixon political strategist Harry Dent advised, but “stick with the silent majority theme.” (Lassiter 2006, 241). Phillips, after all, had been fairly blunt in public about the “Southern strategy” and how this approach used knowledge about “who hates whom” to win elections (Carter 1996, 43). Although in private Nixon and his advisors were at times equally coarse about their political machinations, they carefully tuned their public speech. In South Carolina “Dirty Tricks” Dent once attempted to discredit a political opponent by publicizing a picture of him shaking hands with a black man. But as an advisor to the President, he declared in Time Magazine, “this country is bigger than the South… the President has to have a stance that's national.” If Dent had “[taken] up the South's cause, waved the Confederate flag, and [run] all through the White House yelling and being parochial,” he explained in 1969, it would have done more harm than good (“Nation: Up at Harry's Place” 1969). Even Southerners in the South weren't doing that any more. The President could win the votes of the extremists anyway, Dent advised privately, by “retreating from aggressive civil rights enforcement and making sure that voters blamed the Democrats for 'massive integration'” (Lassiter 2006, 241). Besides, moderate opposition worked as strategy. Protecting “neighborhood schools” prevented genuine and meaningful school desegregation from ever becoming a reality. That it permitted its adherents to express their support for Brown V. Board of Education at the same time was an added political bonus.

19 The basic premise of the “Southern strategy” also fits too neatly with some of what we know about the development of Southern politics. One of the most extraordinary contributions of recent works in Southern history has been the careful documentation of that surprisingly gradual, bottom-up transformation of the politics of race from simple, overt racism to one that preserves and defends racial privilege in more subtle

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ways, encapsulated in many cases within a single generation or the political careers of single individuals. It was accompanied by a gradual transformation of state and local politics in the South from support for conservative Democrats, who had rarely followed the lead of the national party anyway, to Republicans. As Dan Carter reminds us, George Bush Sr., embarked on his political career in Texas by running as a Republican challenger to an incumbent Democratic Senator who had voted in favor of what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bush did not defend segregation per se, but he expressed opposition to an “unconstitutional” abuse of federal power. “The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14 per cent of the people,” he explained in a campaign speech; he was “worried about the other 86 per cent” who would be affected by it (Carter 1996, xi, xii). In Mississippi, white Republicans who took over the state's party apparatus likewise sold themselves not as a local opposition party but as an alternative more effective than the Democrats' defense of segregation. There is also an essential continuity across many individual cases of partisan shifts. Many Southern Democrats, like Senator Strom Thurmond of SC or Jesse Helms of NC retained essentially the same political positions for most of their careers and simply switched parties. While challengers to the “Southern strategy” interpretation have complicated this narrative by revealing its bottom-up qualities, the development of moderate language and strategy, the failures of extremism, or the slow evolution of partisan change at the state and local level, the basic shift in the second half of the twentieth century is hard to dismiss.

20 This is even more compelling if you consider who else in the United States would like for us to forget about the Republican party's links to the Southern strategy. Remember what happened in 2002 when Republican Senate Minority leader Trent Lott dredged up unwelcome memories of the roots of the Southern G.O.P. with a remark at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party? Mississippi had voted for Thurmond when he was the States' Rights Party presidential candidate of 1948, Lott reminded the audience, and, he declared: “We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.” According to the Washington Post, the comment drew “an audible gasp and general silence” even in that presumably sympathetic crowd. Newspaper stories registered the predictable liberal outcry and, in what was perhaps a revelation more caustic than their inevitable history primer on just what Thurmond and States' Rights stood for in 1948, the papers reminded readers that Lott had made essentially the same remark at a 1980 Jackson, Mississippi campaign event for the saintliest of all recent Republicans, Ronald Reagan. Some conservative pundits, like Pat Buchanan, defended Lott (and by extension Reagan) against what they saw as an unfair attack by a biased media. But mainstream Republicans, including the Bush White House, and many conservative intellectuals dropped Lott like a hot potato. “Oh God,” William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, reportedly said, “It's ludicrous. He should remember it's the party of Lincoln.” Lott's spokesmen attempted to deflect the criticism with a two-sentence statement that “Senator Lott's remarks were intended to pay tribute to a remarkable man who led a remarkable life. To read anything more into these comments is wrong.” (Edsall 2002, 6) But it was nearly impossible not to, and Lott was ultimately forced to resign from his post as a Party leader.

21 Significantly, the Lott episode reveals some important things about American political memory: It is short and selective. Born in 1941, Trent Lott was an undergraduate student at Ole Miss in 1962 when students rioted to block the admission of James

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Meredith. He himself played a key role in blocking the integration of his national fraternity (Tumulty). After law school, Lott served as an aide to Democratic Congressman and signer of the notorious “Southern Manifesto,” William Colmer. In 1967 Lott campaigned for the arch-segregationist gubernatorial candidate John Bell Williams. When Lott was elected to the House of Representatives in 1972, he entered as a Republican, but acted the Southern part, leading the fight against IRS regulations threatening the tax-exempt status of lily-white private schools in Mississippi and persuading Congress to restore citizenship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis (Crespino 211, 257-61). All the while he collected votes and warm support from the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose literature and rhetoric were littered with unapologetic paeans to white supremacy (Edsall, 1999, A2). None of this prevented Lott from becoming a Republican Party leader. No one really seemed to care much, and besides, Lott's positions and his ultra-conservative supporters could be easily attributed to his hardfast support for small government, fairness, heritage, states' rights, etc.

22 And yet, his praise of Thurmond—an offensive remark to be sure but one that really harmed no one except the Republican party—proved to be the one historical genie that could not be put back into the bottle of states' rights. When Lott stepped down, removing another smoking gun from prominent view, party leaders and conservative pundits emitted a nearly audible collective sigh of relief. Lott, Kristol optimistically asserted, was “really virtually the last of the products of Richard Nixon's 'Southern strategy' to be in major positions of power in the Congress, and with his leaving, you will have cleared out people who, fairly or unfairly, have a somewhat compromised image to the country as a whole'' (Perdum A18). The funny ending to this story—or sad ending, depending on your politics—is that Lott rose again anyway. In 2007, the Republican party, praising his effectiveness and his legislative expertise, elevated him once again, this time to the position of minority whip. Lott supporter and future Republican Presidential candidate John McCain remarked that ”We all believe in redemption… Thank God.“ (Leibovich 1). What redeemed Lott with the Republicans, however, was not his remorse (which did appear genuine) or reparations, but his political effectiveness in holding his Senate seat in 2006 and the work he did for the Party. ”Lott could still get elected“ plus ”Lott helped the Republicans“ equals ”end of story.“

23 Other twenty-first century Republican encounters with the Southern strategy betray a similarly cynical concern with the bottom line: election numbers. In 2005 the chairman of the Republican National Committee Kenneth Mehlman admitted to an NAACP audience that in the 1960s the Republicans ”gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit from racial polarization.“ And ”we were wrong.“ Mehlman did not own up to just what ”racial polarization“ had meant in the trenches: the offensive advertisements, the preservation of racial stereotypes (black criminals and welfare queens), or the policies that perpetuated segregation. Instead he focused on selling a ”new opportunity for the party of Lincoln and for the African American community to restore our historic bonds.“ CNN anchor John King asked Mehlman pointblank ”If a Republican candidate in the next election cycle uses the confederate flag [as Republican Governor Sonny Perdue had in 2002]… will [you] and the president of the United States, George W. Bush, stand up and say 'stop' and cut off their money?“ Mehlman waffled. The Governor of Georgia, he said, was a ”good man“ who was doing a ”fantastic job of reaching out,“ and had won ”a significant percentage

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of the African American vote“ (CNN late edition)—even though Perdue actually carried a lower percentage of black votes (6%) than his Republican counterparts in 1994 (10%) or 1998 (8%) (Hayes and McKee 8). Fortunately Perdue never forced anyone to ”stand up“—at least not in 2005. On the other hand, Republican remorse over the Southern strategy had not stopped Perdue from courting the Flaggers' votes in the tight election of 2002. The portion of the electorate that reliably responds to such new-fangled but old-style ”Southern“ appeals may have diminished, but it is clearly still an important, and perhaps a critical margin in some elections.

24 In this country of fresh starts and second chances, Americans like to leave what are often ugly historical truths behind. Even George Wallace earned redemption for renouncing his segregationist past—enough to win a substantial number of black votes in his fourth successful campaign to become governor of Alabama in 1982. Of course it helps that Americans have short memories. In Georgia, defenders of the old Stars-and- Bars state flag, nearly five decades removed from its original installation, willfully ignored the fact that it was a symbol of the 1950s rather than the 1860s and demanded its reinstallation in the name of yet another newly sanitized history of states' rights, the Confederacy. But the problem is greater than forgetting. Many candidates who have, and would continue to, exploit racial polarization to win votes want to rewrite history to suit their needs. In the 1980s Strom Thurmond defended his run as the Dixecrat's Presidential candidate as merely an effort ”to protect the rights of the states and the rights of the people,“ and not the ”race fight“ it was subsequently labeled by ”some in the news media.“ (Noah 2011). When presented with a transcript and film footage of his 1948 speech where he declared, ”There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,“ the Senator's aides responded with shock and Thurmond himself with ”incredulity,“ according to biographer Nadine Cohodas. Once he was convinced that the excerpt was indeed a genuine record of his speech, Thurmond remarked, ”If I had to run that race again…I would word it differently“ (Cohodas, 177).3 The words mattered, because once ”segregation“ and ”Negro“ were part of the record, it was much harder to defend as an abstract position on ”states' rights.“

25 In 2010 Haley Barbour, a veteran of Nixon's 1968 campaign, attempted a similar whitewashing of Mississippi and his own history in The Weekly Standard. Barbour ”just [didn't] remember [the civil rights era] as being that bad.“ Contrary to what people might have thought ”up north,“ Barbour claimed, the Yazoo County Citizens' Council was ”an organization of town leaders“ that actually kept the peace and the Klan out (Ferguson). Barbour's reconstruction was, in some very technical but ultimately meaningless sense, at least partly correct since that's how it may have appeared to white people. As Joe Crespino recounts, Yazoo City avoided headline-grabbing violence, while the Citizens' Council fought desegregation with intimidation and the discipline of white pocketbooks. In 1955, the Citizens' Council published the name and address of every parent who had petitioned the local school board to desegregate city schools in the local paper and displayed the same list of names in every store window in town. All but two of the petitioning parents ”suffered some form of economic reprisal, most of them losing their jobs or businesses“ (Crespino 29). Yazoo County whites may not have permitted interference by the Klan, but they didn't need it anyway.

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26 In response to criticism of his selective memory, Barbour issued a statement re- describing the Citizens' Council as ”totally indefensible, as is segregation.“ But Barbour curiously misremembered other aspects of his own past, disingenuously claiming that ”his generation“ went to integrated schools (though he did not) and recalling a chummy relationship with Verna Bailey, the first black woman to attend Ole Miss (who had no memory of him). When Barbour's name popped up as a potential Presidential candidate in 2012, all his trials with racial insensitivity, including his association with the Council of Conservative Citizens, became fair game once again. Newsweek columnist Ben Adler commented that even if Barbour's racial indiscretions disqualified him from candidacy, it made little difference in terms of Republican racial policy—except for his tendency toward incriminating gaffes, Barbour was ”substantively no different on racial issues from his primary opponents“ (Adler). But politically, Republicans and conservative pundits know, Barbour's link to Southern racism was a deal breaker for those who like to think of themselves as racially enlightened conservatives. If only because Barbour is a white Southerner from Mississippi of a certain age, making him a national figurehead in the Republican party would inevitably invite suspicion of the motives behind the usual G.O.P. cry of fiscal and social conservatism. Should the Republicans ever finally be successful at disowning the ”Southern strategy,“ however, it would certainly make their positions easier to defend as colorblind.

27 As a scholar, based on my own research and that of others, I do believe that there was a Southern strategy, even if the project of correctly characterizing it is ongoing. I am convinced, also, by the new literature that it is a very complicated phenomenon, influenced by multiple factors. I'm painfully aware that maintaining the idea of the Southern strategy as the source of modern conservatism entails other kinds of oversimplifications and compromises by those of us who care about setting the racial record straight, and that if we want to get it exactly right we have to be more sophisticated. I also agree that one of the problems with talking about the Southern strategy in particular, and Southern Exceptionalism in general, is that it has prevented Americans from having a deeper understanding of the history and context in which recent political conservatism developed. While no one denies that racial elements were central to the history, a Southern focus lets all the other white Americans who remain convinced of their own racial innocence off the hook, while strengthening the myth that the white South was the odd outlier in an otherwise racially liberal, fair-minded political culture. This myth, deeply etched in Americans' collective popular memory, has undoubtedly misrepresented and obscured the nature of American racism.

28 However, as with all myths, there is an essential kernel of ”truth“ at the heart of the ”Southern strategy“ that scholars must address. Southern white voters were distinctive and remain distinctive in their overwhelming support of modern conservative politics in the twenty-first century. Some contemporary white Southern voters are recent migrants to the region, but many are the very same people who cast votes in 1968—I know some of them in fact. To a large extent, white racial ”innocence“ is undoubtedly a persistent theme, as middle and upper class whites can afford to be cavalier about government programs and social welfare policies that do not benefit them. It's also undoubtedly true, as Joe Crespino and Lisa McGirr have shown, that the rejection of liberalism increasingly had as much to do with conservatives' concern about social values as it did civil rights. The conservatives' agenda has broadened considerably beyond the economic and civil rights issues at the forefront in the 1960s. But the South

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still stands out with respect to race and region. As Dan Carter has pointed out for the 2004 election returns, white Southerners are almost twice as likely as white Americans elsewhere to vote for Republicans. In 2004, 52% of white Americans in households earning from $ 30,000 to $ 100,000 and 58% of those earning more than $ 100,000 per year voted for President George Bush, while 74% of white Southerners earning $ 30-100,000 voted for Bush and the percentage of wealthy white Southerners was even higher (Carter 2007).

29 The 2008 Presidential election likewise revealed an even more distinctive pattern among Southern whites. Although Barack Obama failed to win the majority of white votes nationwide, his support from whites in the deep South was markedly lower—just 10% in Alabama, 11% in Mississippi, 14% in Louisiana, 23% in Georgia and 26% in South Carolina. In Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, the Southern states carried by Obama, he won just 42%, 35%, and 39% of white votes. Even in Arizona and Alaska, the home states of John McCain and Sarah Palin, Obama won 32% and 40% of the white vote respectively. Only in five other states – Idaho, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming —did the white vote for Obama dip under 35% (Noah 2008). Racism probably prevented some whites from voting for Obama, but it would be foolish and somewhat simplistic to assume this of the majority—that isn't the point. Many Southern whites would be unlikely to vote for a Democrat, no matter their racial identity or beliefs about race, for many reasons. But even if this is a new incarnation of Southern white identity different from the racist reactionaries that conventional wisdom has associated with the late 1960s and early 1970s or even the 1980s, it does appear to be a racial, regional identity, just one generation removed from segregation.

30 It would be a shame if arguments over the success or failure of the Southern strategy as an explanatory mechanism or over the ”myth“ of Southern history prevented us from examining such regional and racial continuity as we struggle to put the last fifty years of American political history in perspective. There are, as so many recent books have persuasively argued, many reasons to doubt that Southern whites were the tail that wagged the dog of Republican ascendancy. There are also many reasons to think, as Lassiter and Crespino argue so persuasively, that much of what were once believed to be differences of kind are really differences of degree. But the white South of the Southern strategy is not simply a historian's creation. Rightly or wrongly contemporaries also believed in it and many white Southerners acted in ways that appeared to affirm it. Although many Republicans would like to forget, many have not. In 1981, a repentant Harry Dent, who had given up his legal and political work to “follow the Lord, full time,” admitted that his “biggest regret” about his political career was “anything I had done to stand in the way of the rights of black people.” (Sawyer).

31 Recent works in Southern history have been sensitive to the conceptual confusion between the South in American memory and the South of American history. We historians struggle to get the history right, but surely one of our goals in doing so is to improve the memory of the public in these matters we consider so important. We must seek to modify the public's distorted memory of the South, but we also have to preserve those elements whose place in memory serve as reminders of some of the more repulsive historical truths about the United States. For better or worse, the partially false memory of the “Southern strategy” is one of the few, if not the only, modern instances where Americans actually do remember that “states' rights,” “freedom of association,” or the Confederate battle flag have loaded meanings—racist meanings—

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beyond what is immediately apparent in the words or the image. Even if, as many historians now argue, the link between the Southern segregationist past and America's conservative present is not the whole story, it's a large part of the story and provides the most damning reconstruction of colorblind politics there is. For while the present- day opponents of “special treatment” or “judicial remedies” may deny that America has a problem with racism, no one with a prayer of getting elected or influencing opinion would defend the Jim Crow South or the tactics used to perpetuate segregation. “States' rights” has only worked as an amoral mantra of national conservatism when stripped of its ties to white Southern heritage.

32 Regardless of whether we as historians think there “really” is a South or not anymore, there is in the public mind an idea of the South and a Southern identity. The idea is in many ways pernicious and ought to be revised to more accurately reflect our American truth. But ideas, like memory, have their own reality nonetheless, and in matters of identity ideas can be incredibly powerful. Those in Georgia who sought to return Confederate stars and bars to the state flag did so for some reason. Perhaps those white Georgians do not remember how the stars and bars got there. Perhaps they genuinely believed, as a Dodge County member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans opined, that the flag is “for all people that fought in the civil war whether they were white, black, red, yellow, the Hispanic, the Jews” (“Dodge County NAACP”). And one response to flaggers would be to argue that they really are no longer that different from other Americans and have no distinctiveness worthy of recognition. But another would be to point out that their symbols have a history that almost no one would defend.

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Edsall, Thomas B. “Lott Decried For Part Of Salute to Thurmond; GOP Senate Leader Hails Colleague's Run As Segregationist.” Washington Post 7 Dec. 2002: A6.

---. “Controversial Group Has Ties to Both Parties in South.” Washington Post 13 Jan. 1999: A2.

Erlichman, John. Witness to Power: The Nixon Years. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Ferguson, Andrew. “The Boy from Yazoo City: Haley Barbour, Mississippi's favorite son.” The Weekly Standard 16.15 (27 Dec. 2010). Web. 11 May. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/boy-yazoo-city_523551.html.

Galloway, Jim. “Perdue to seek 2004 referendum on flag.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 12 Feb. 2003: 1A.

---.“For '56 flaggers, it's not over yet.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 4 Jan. 2004: 1D.

---. “Airborne 'flaggers': Who's paying?” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 28 May: 1A.

Hayes, Danny and Seth C. McKee. “Booting Barnes: Explaining the Historic Upset in the 2002 Georgia Gubernatorial Election.” Politics and Policy 32 (Dec. 2004): 1-31.

Jackson, Edwin L. “State Flags of Georgia,” in The New Georgia Encyclopedia Updated 3 Mar. 2009. Web. 16 May .

Kruse, Kevin Michael. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Lamis, Alexander P. Southern Politics in the 1990s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

Lassiter, Matthew D. “The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind” Conservatism

Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis”

Journal of Urban History 30 (May 2004): 549-582.

---. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Lassiter, Matthew D., and Joseph Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Leibovich, Mark. “In Senate Shift, Big Comeback for Trent Lott.” New York Times 16 Nov. 2006: A1.

Lesher, Stephen. George Wallace: American Populist. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

Martinez, Michael. “The Georgia Confederate Flag Dispute.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 92 (summer 2008): 200-228.

McGinnis, Joe. Selling of the President, 1968. New York: Pocket Books, 1970.

McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

“Nation: Up at Harry's Place.” Time 11 July. Web. 21 May. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,900972,00.html.

Noah, Timothy.“ The Legend of Strom's Remorse: A Washington lie is laid to rest, ” Slate Mag., 16 Dec. 2002. Web. 16 May. < http://www.slate.com/id/2075453/>.

---. “What we didn't overcome, part 2,” Slate Mag. 12 Nov 2008. Web. 23 May. < http://www.slate.com/id/2204464/#sb2204528>.

“Phew: Another new flag—and a rough baptism for the new governor.” The Economist 1 May. Web. 16 May. .

Perdum, Todd S. “ Divisive Words; A Nixon-Era Distraction Steps Out of Limelight.” New York Times 21 Dec. 2002: A18.

Poundstone, William. Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It). New York: Macmillan, 2009.

Richards, Doug. “Confederate flag padlocked to flagpole at Dodge County Courthouse.” 11Alive News. 4 May. Web. 11 May. .

Rieder, Jonathan.“ Rise of the Silent Majority. ” In Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Ed. Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 243-69.

Riley, Michael, Don Winbush and Richard Woodbury.“ Louisiana: The No-win Election. ” Time 25 Nov. 1991. Web. 25 May.

Sawyer, Kathy.“A Repentant harry Dent Will Follow the Lord” Washington Post 22 Aug 1981: A3.

Shaefer, Byron E. and Richard Johnson. The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Torpy, Bill. “Confederate Flag Controversy; Heritage vs. hate at heart of dispute.” Atlanta Journal- Constitution 15 May: 1B.

Tumulty, Karen. “Trent Lott's Segregationist College Days.” Time 12 Dec. 2002. Web. 25 May. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,399310,00.html.

Wilson, Charles Reagan and Mark Silk. Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode. Walnut Creek, [Calif.] : AltaMira Press, 2005.

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NOTES

1. The new Georgia flag was deemed the “worst-designed state or provincial flag in North America” by the North American Vexillogical Association. Jackson, “State Flags of Georgia.” 2. “Most Southern” from the title of James C. Cobb's The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (1994). 3. I found this quotation through Timothy Noah's article in Slate Magazine.

ABSTRACTS

This paper examines recent historical arguments against relying upon “Southern exceptionalism” and the “Southern strategy” to explain late twentieth-century partisan realignment. While acknowledging the seminal contributions of this new literature, the article examines some of the historical evidence supporting the traditional interpretations of the Southern strategy and some of the ways that the “Southern strategy” has figured into recent American politics. Though the emphasis on the South has distorted the memory of overall American resistance to civil rights and social change, the article suggests that Southern history nevertheless plays a unique and important role as a reminder of American resistance and the race-based origin of many colorblind social policies.

Cet article étudie les arguments récemment avancés par les historiens pour remettre en question l'explication du réalignement partisan de la fin du 20e siècle, fondée sur l'“exceptionnalisme sudiste” et la “stratégie sudiste”. Tout en reconnaissant les apports majeurs de ces nouveaux travaux, l'article souligne certains éléments historiques tendant à prouver la validité des interprétations traditionnelles de la stratégie sudiste et de la manière dont cette dernière a influencé la politique américaine récente. Si le fait de porter l'accent sur le Sud a déformé la façon dont on se souvient de la résistance américaine à la reconnaissance des droits civiques et au changement social, cet article suggère cependant que l'histoire du Sud joue un rôle unique et important de révélateur de la résistance nationale et des fondements raciaux de nombreuses politiques sociales censées être racialement neutres.

INDEX

Mots-clés: stratégie sudiste, exception sudiste, drapeau confédéré, majorité silencieuse Keywords: Southern strategy, Southern exceptionalism, Confederate flag, silent majority

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AUTHORS

MICHELLE BRATTAIN Associate Professor of History Georgia State University [email protected]

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Image, Discourse, Facts: Southern White Women in the Fight for Desegregation, 1954-1965

Anne Stefani

1 The power of images and myth-making is well known for being especially strong in the South and in southern history, and it is all the more so as one becomes interested in white women during the first half of the twentieth century.1 One of the major and most obvious characteristics of the South between the late nineteenth century and the 1960s was its conservatism and its wish to preserve its distinctive culture and institutions, including white supremacy and segregation, and it is no surprise that the definition of southern white womanhood should be first identified with this conservative outlook. Indeed, whenever one refers to southern women during the segregation era, the image that comes up at once is that of a sweet, fragile, old-fashioned creature mainly devoted to her home, her church, and possibly the glorification of Confederate heroes (Coryell et al., eds., 1). In other words, white southern womanhood in the first half of the twentieth century is usually associated with the figure of the so-called “southern lady”, i.e. a Victorian lady, southern style. The image of the lady, which dates back to the antebellum era, was actually re-used and re-shaped in the late nineteenth century by the white supremacists who institutionalized segregation in part as a means for white men to justify the oppression of black men in the name of the protection of white womanhood.2

2 The present article aims at demonstrating that although the ideal of the southern lady pervaded the regional culture throughout the segregation era, a significant number of white women who apparently conformed to it, actually challenged the racial and gender assumptions on which it had been constructed. Few scholars have studied the ideal of the southern lady beyond its obvious connection with the conservatism characterizing southern society and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Two studies paved the way for research on this subject: Anne Firor Scott's The Southern Lady (1970), and Jacquelyn Hall's Revolt Against Chivalry, first published in 1979. They dealt, however, with specific groups of women, and did not extend beyond World War II. A number of

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monographs have been published recently, focusing on specific organizations or places, but no comprehensive study has yet been devoted to southern white women in the segregation and desegregation eras.3 An important book, Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege (2004), edited by Gail Murray, revolves around the topic, but it is a collection of articles and the vision it provides is a mosaic of individual experiences rather than a comprehensive perspective. This article studies the specific identity of white southern female reformers during the segregation era by analyzing the nature and the evolution of their racial activism. It shows that, far from being the guardians of segregationist culture, thousands of white women undermined segregation throughout that era without seeming to do so, most of the time through church-related activities, and in a quiet, non-confrontational way.4

3 If this is true of the whole segregation era—from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s—it is all the more so of the decade running from the Supreme Court's Brown decision of 1954 to the Voting Rights Act passed by Congress in 1965, a decade historians sometimes call the “Second Reconstruction”, in reference to the school desegregation crisis that opposed integrationists and federal authorities to southern segregationists. As southern leaders openly defied the Supreme Court and called the white population to resist school desegregation by all means, some white women worked quietly for the implementation of the Brown decision against the will of their communities.

4 If a majority of these women were not ready to go as far as rejecting segregation altogether, the leaders of the main women's groups active at mid-century were deeply committed to racial integration, but resorted to other means than direct action to achieve this goal. In a majority of cases, they based their actions on the use of image and discourse—in particular the image of the southern lady—to persuade their fellow Southerners that segregation had to be abandoned. This conciliatory approach has led historians to view them as conservative or moderate at best, as compared to the outspoken civil rights activists of the same period. In fact, it can be argued that far from being conservative, or even moderate, these women leaders were activists of a different kind, liberal on the surface, but radical in depth.5

5 The decade spanning the years between the Brown decision and the Voting Rights Act is a particularly interesting one because it was a period of crisis—in the sense that it was marked by the direct confrontation of arch-segregationists and integrationists—but it was also a period of transition from one generation of female racial dissenters to another—the term “generation” being used in a broad sense for the sake of analysis. 6 Most within the first generation were born at the turn of the twentieth century whereas the members of the second generation were born in the 1930s and early 1940s. Consequently, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two groups overlapped and participated in the same events, which makes the period unique in that it offers a rare richness of nuances and depth of perspective. While the older generation belonged to the middle and upper classes, the younger activists were of more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. This difference in class accounts in great part for the paternalism that characterized the older generation whose members were drawn to racial activism through reform activities led by the middle class since the Progressive Era. There were many differences of opinion among the women involved in the desegregation crisis, from the most conservative to the most radical, and there were also various degrees of defense of integration, but the common characteristic to all of

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them, leaders and followers, was the direct connection between their religious faith and their commitment to racial justice.

6 It will be shown that the image of the southern lady was a double-edged sword in the hands of white women and of their opponents. On the one hand, it could be used as a weapon in the fight against segregation, but, on the other, it could also become an obstacle for those who wanted to be more outspoken or more direct in their actions. After a presentation of the figure of the southern lady in segregationist culture and of the context of the period under study, the reflection will focus on the use of image and discourse as a form of activism. I will then examine the limitations of such tactics and the necessity for some women to reject the image in order to act in conformity with their ideals.

1. Southern ladies and race

7 The southern belle and the southern lady were the two models for white women in southern society and culture from the antebellum era to the 1960s. Historian Anne Goodwyn Jones provides a very complete definition of these ideal figures revealing their far-reaching implications in the lives of white women in the South: Southern lore has it that the belle is a privileged white girl who is at the glamorous and exciting period between being a daughter and becoming a wife. She is the fragile, dewy, just-opened bloom of the southern female: flirtatious but sexually innocent, bright but not deep, beautiful as a statue or painting or porcelain but risky to touch. A form of popular art, she entertains but does not challenge her audience. Instead, she attracts them—the more gentlemen callers the better—and finally allows herself to be chosen by one. Then she becomes a lady, and a lady she will remain until she dies—unless, of course, she does something beyond the pale. As a lady she drops the flirtatiousness of the belle and stops chattering; she has won her man. Now she has a different job: satisfying her husband, raising his children, meeting the demands of the family's social position, and sustaining the ideals of the South. Her strength in manners and morals is contingent, however, upon her submission to their sources—God, the patriarchal church, her husband—and upon her staying out of public life, where she might interfere in their formulation. But in her domestic realm she can achieve great if sometimes grotesque power. (Jones 42)

8 The figure of the southern lady can be traced back to the antebellum South, at the time when women North and South still had to conform to strict gender norms and were confined to the domestic sphere where their role involved the running of the house and educating the children. At the turn of the twentieth century, the status of women changed as a result of several developments such as industrialization, urbanization, the growth of the consumer society, the expansion of female education, the spread of social reform movements, and, of course, the first feminist movement which led to the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920 (Evans 145-173). However, change did not come as fast in the South as in the rest of the nation because of the conservatism that characterized the region and which had been reinforced by the restoration of white supremacy after Reconstruction. Indeed, the establishment of segregation at the turn of the twentieth century and the defense of the system throughout the following decades slowed down social progress in the South so that class and gender norms evolved less rapidly there than elsewhere during the segregation era.7

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9 Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, since the white leaders of the ex-Confederate States pledged themselves to white supremacy in the region, southern culture and society were reshaped in conformity with the resurgent racist ideology of the time. The image of the southern lady was then revived and adjusted to the new segregationist doctrine. White women actually played a fundamental role in the restoration, and then in the preservation of white supremacy in the South, because it was in their name that white men justified the oppression of black men. The white supremacist leaders rewrote history by declaring that the Civil War had been waged to defend a superior civilization whose main incarnation was the southern lady. The dominant discourse defined white womanhood as sacred, because women were seen primarily as the guardians of the white race. The preservation of their purity was presented as the main protection against the mixing of the black and white races, and it was in the name of the protection of white southern womanhood that lynching was justified. In exchange for protection, of course, the women were supposed to behave in conformity with the men's expectations, i.e. they were to remain submissive, they were not supposed to indulge in any intellectual or political activities, and they were officially in charge of the home, of the children and of church-related activities.8 If the ideal of the southern lady conditioned first and foremost the lives of white middle and upper-class women, it was so intricately linked to the maintenance of white supremacy that its influence extended to all white women in the South (Wolfe 7-9).

2. The 1950s as a pivotal decade

10 When the desegregation crisis heightened in the mid-1950s, this view of white womanhood still prevailed in southern culture and society. Thousands of women were indeed involved in reform-oriented work and church activities in the fields of health care, relief and education for the poor, among other things. Churchwomen and religious associations such as the YWCA and Methodist women's groups were very influential in their field, but some non-religious organizations such as the League of Women Voters were also active in political and social reform. All of them had started questioning the legitimacy of segregation in the previous decade.9 New groups reflecting women's growing concern for racial justice in the South had been formed starting during World War II. For instance, United Church Women (UCW)—originally United Council of Church Women—was an interdenominational organization created in 1941 to the specific purpose of extending democratic principles to all spheres of society.10 In the same spirit, Dorothy Tilly, a prominent Methodist leader who had been a member of President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights, founded the Fellowship of the Concerned (FOC), “a fellowship of Church women leaders of both races and the three faiths, concerned about their South”, in 1949. With a membership of 4,000 members one year after its creation, the FOC focused its efforts on the racial issue after 1954 through local workshops and regional conferences designed to persuade southern whites to accept desegregation (“Fellowship of the Concerned”; Riehm 24).

11 Several factors contributed to leading white southern women reformers to refocus their energy on racial integration in the 1950s. First, in the aftermath of World War II, black protest against segregation kept rising and the southern black community became more and more militant. Some federal initiatives also slowly contributed to undermining segregation. For example, in December 1946, President Truman appointed

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a Committee on Civil Rights, which declared in the following year that segregation was wrong and which proposed federal measures to eliminate it.11 The next landmark in the struggle against segregation was the Brown decision, which, in 1954, declared school segregation unconstitutional. In 1955 the Supreme Court asked the states to desegregate their school systems “with all deliberate speed”. The stage was set for the worst national crisis since the Civil War and Reconstruction.12

12 Southern politicians did not recognize the legitimacy of the Brown decision and called for massive resistance to its implementation. Southern legislatures passed resistance laws. White Citizens Councils were set up to exert pressure on school boards, teachers, and all supporters of the Brown decision. The Ku Klux Klan was revived. Moreover, as the crisis coincided with McCarthyism, the white supremacists used anti-communism to repress all racial dissenters by accusing them of being affiliated with communism. In such a context, anyone who disapproved of segregation and was ready or willing to implement the Brown decision was labeled “radical” and persecuted as such by local authorities and their communities.13

13 With the spread of massive resistance across the South, local groups were formed in response to the states' threat to close the schools rather than desegregate them. Although some of these were composed of both men and women, all were actually led and managed only by women. They included Little Rock's Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC) and Atlanta's Help Our Public Education (HOPE), both formed in 1958, New Orleans's Save Our Schools (SOS), formed in 1960, and Mississippians for Public Education (MPE), formed in 1964.14 Most of the women who joined the new groups had been members of the older reform organizations. While all save-the-schools groups acted on the same principles and were strikingly similar in membership as well as in the tactics they adopted, the present article, when dealing with them, will focus more particularly on HOPE as an emblematic example of “lady activism”.15

3. Image as a weapon

14 Given the climate of intolerance and the risks that reformers ran by advocating desegregation at the time, the women who wanted the Brown decision to be implemented as a step forward toward racial equality relied on the power of image and discourse rather than on open confrontation with segregationist authorities. They deliberately downplayed the issue of race and presented themselves as southern ladies working for the preservation of education in their region.

15 The image of the lady was a good protection for white women. It actually gave them a certain freedom to act because they did not seem to transgress gender/social norms when they presented themselves as the moral guardians of their communities. Their close association with churches kept them in their traditional role, outside of politics and social agitation. This aspect was reinforced by the school crisis, during which they presented themselves as mothers who were mostly concerned about the future of southern children. Motherhood was the centerpiece of all save-the-school movements' discourse. HOPE leaders publicized their fight in the papers by declaring: HOPE, Inc. does not propose to argue the pros and cons of segregation vs. desegregation, or states rights vs. federal rights. It has one aim—to champion children's right to an education within the state of Georgia. (Dartt 45)16

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16 A typical example of lady/mother activist was Nan Pendergrast, head of HOPE's Speakers' Bureau, who belonged to an old prominent Atlanta family. She gave birth to seven children while devoting her life to a great variety of causes, including racial integration. She was particularly popular with the city's newspapers who portrayed her as a model mother and wife who played a nurturing role in society without threatening the social order.17

17 Another advantage of being identified as southern ladies was that many women felt they were actually freer than their husbands to act in favor of racial reform, because they did not risk losing their business as a result of their dissenting positions. Some men even encouraged their wives to act in their place. Such was the case, for instance, with Milton Tilly who reportedly drove his wife, Dorothy, around Atlanta's poor neighborhoods in the early 1930s in order to convince her to dedicate her time to reform. He told her: I thought if you saw the people hurting long enough, that you would hurt, too—and if you hurt bad enough, you'd do something about it! I can't do it myself, but I'll make it possible if money is needed for you to get involved. I'll back you! (Riehm 29)

18 This was how Dorothy Tilly became one of the most prominent southern female reformers at mid-twentieth century.18

19 Finally, white women often used lady-like manners to exert pressure on politicians. Indeed, some of them had lobbied state congressmen, senators, and governors, as well as judges and law officers, since the 1930s (notably in their fight against lynching and against voting rights restrictions in the South).19 Lady manners and dress became part and parcel of the women's tactical apparatus during the school desegregation crisis. In their lobbying campaigns, they purposely wore white gloves, nice dresses and hats so that the men who received them could not dismiss them as “radical agitators” or as threats to the peace. The technique was often successful as some male politicians were just incapable of coping with this type of action that was completely unexpected. This aspect of white women's activism bore a striking resemblance to the attitude and manner of dressing of African American activists during the same period, of which the Montgomery Bus Boycott provides an illuminating example.20 Of course, unlike African Americans, who had to face the prejudices of whites, white women who conformed to the social and gender norms of their society did not have to struggle to impose an image of respectability, but they deliberately used this image to transgress norms in a subtle way. Thus, Tilly told Guion Johnson, one of her co-workers: “When you go out to battle, you must dress for the occasion.” And Johnson commented: “So, she wore frilly hats with flowers and lace on them and frilly dresses and always with white gloves, and she was accepted by the sheriffs and the commissioners and the city councilors [sic]… (Johnson 4-5).” Frances Pauley, a key member of HOPE, recalls how she carefully selected the members of the organization who went to the Georgia state legislature to campaign for open public schools in 1960, and the directions she and other leaders gave them: “We told everybody to dress very nicely and wear white gloves and told them not to say anything—not to boo, not to clap, not to do a thing.” Once they were in the gallery and segregationist politicians began to speak, they all took out signs reading “We Want Public Schools” (Nasstrom, ed., 57-58). Pauley explained later: “HOPE was very genteel. We operated in a very nice manner; it was a little bit hard for people to get at us” (Pauley 1983, 6).21

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20 The figure of the lady was also linked to a key notion in the fight for desegregation, the notion of respectability. Because at the time all critics of the racial status quo were accused by the segregationists of being “outside agitators” or communists, the women leaders and the organizations in which they played a major role used respectability as a tactic.22 This was essential firstly to attract the highest number of followers who did not dare speak in favor of desegregation for fear of retaliation, and secondly to avoid repression by the segregationist forces. This is the reason why, for instance, the founders of HOPE chose as their official chairperson a woman who would attract the highest number of people thanks to her profile. The organization's historian, Rebecca Dartt, notes: Fran Breeden seemed the logical choice. She had perfect credentials for the job: she was southern, having been born and raised on Florida's Gulf coast; Protestant; charming; articulate; and unknown in Atlanta. (Dartt 40)

21 All save-the-schools groups actually put on the same southern, white, middle-class, Protestant, and conservative profile. Besides, the women clearly placed their action within the boundaries of domesticity as the first meetings set up to launch the movement took the form of tea parties at the organizers' homes (Dartt 60-61).

22 Save-the-school groups were very diverse in their positions on integration, but it is undeniable that their leaders were deeply committed to integration, even though they never put this to the fore. They deliberately opted for an all-white policy, not necessarily because of any hostility to blacks, but because they thought it necessary to gain acceptance within their communities. Frances Pauley recalled that she had first objected to limiting the scope of the organization to whites, but that “this was a political issue, and at that point it looked like maybe this would be the best way to go, tactically”. She added that her black friends agreed that such an option seemed to be the best in the circumstances (Nasstrom, ed., 55).23

23 It was actually deemed safer and more efficient to tone down race as an issue and to emphasize education or human relations instead. As an illustration, the many Councils on Human Relations which were created across the South after 1954 to ease the desegregation process actually dealt with race relations but would not use the term to define their work. According to Eliza Paschall, a white liberal woman who served as executive director of one of those councils, “human relations” was the southern phrase for “race relations” (Paschall 1975, 7). Some words such as “integration” or “desegregation” remained taboo. Significantly, the founders of WEC “had first envisioned starting a committee for racial harmony, but because of the crisis they had decided that this in itself would create opposition, so the focus for the new group was to be 'strictly aimed at saving the public schools'”. This tactical stance was conveyed in subsequent campaigns by flyers hammering out the same message: “NOT For Integration, NOT For Segregation, FOR Public Education” (Murphy 75, 80). As for SOS, one of its leaders said: “They wanted it to look like we were just keeping the schools open, although in the back of our hearts a lot of us were assaulting the bastions of segregation” (Frystak 88).

24 Such a tactic proved quite successful in a certain number of cases, as in Georgia for instance, where HOPE could be credited for leading the state's authorities to admit that a significant section of the population preferred integrated schools to no schools at all (Dartt 92). As an illustration, Governor Vandiver appointed a Committee on Schools which came to be known as the Sibley Commission after its chair's name. The

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Commission was charged with examining the situation of public schools in the state and giving recommendations as to the implementation of the Brown decision, which the state legislature officially resisted. The Commission organized ten hearings in March 1960 (Dartt 90), and public opinion gradually changed between the first and the last one, thus indicating that HOPE's campaign had had a significant impact. In the end, the majority of the population was still opposed to integration, but the report and recommendations of the commission reflected a widespread reluctance to maintaining segregation at all costs.24 After a two-year battle, the politicians finally did not move to close the schools when the local courts mandated the implementation of the Brown decision, thus indicating that HOPE's campaign had been effective.

25 As for churchwomen across the South, they often managed to persuade their communities to accept desegregation without violence, even if their success was not spectacular because acceptance, being less sensational than resistance, was mostly not publicized. However, the hundreds of letters and reports about the progress being made, sent by local members of the various Councils on Human Relations scattered across the states, are undeniable evidence about this invisible contribution. School desegregation took a long time because of white resistance, but it can be argued that the crisis would have been much worse had not the women created bridges between communities. What is especially striking when reading the correspondence women leaders received as the civil rights movement unfolded is the omnipresence of the words “fear” and “courage.” Indeed, as the segregationists spread terror across local communities, hundreds of churchwomen who participated in interracial regional conferences organized by groups such as Dorothy Tilly's Fellowship of the Concerned returned to their communities totally transformed.25 They then wrote Tilly to thank her for inspiring them and giving them the courage to act at the local level.26

26 Yet the tactic of respectability also had its limitations since it neither openly called for a comprehensive repudiation of white supremacist culture, nor explicitly advocated the repeal of segregationist laws. Besides, the white women who exclusively played the card of southern ladyhood, could only go as far as persuading their leaders to accept change, but could not force them to alter the system. This weakness became all the more obvious when integrationist forces radicalized in the early 1960s. White resistance continued, school desegregation remained mostly symbolical, and the black civil rights movement adopted a much more vocal and radical stance than the one that civil rights activists had expressed in the previous decades.

4. Image as a liability

27 One of the weaknesses of “lady” activism was the persistence of ingrained white prejudice among some of the white women who worked toward interracial cooperation, which limited their relations with blacks. This was especially true of the older generation. The paternalism inherited from earlier reform movements tended to disappear with the development of the Civil Rights Movement, but it could not be totally eliminated in a matter of a few years. Racial prejudice was the result of long- lasting oppression of African Americans, of racial separation, and the ensuing total incomprehension between the two racial groups in the South. Thus, as long as they remained outside of the African American community—which was the case of most racial reformers until the 1950s—white women could not know black people, and, not

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knowing them, they could not feel equal to them. The members of the older generation had indeed inherited the racial prejudices of their class, which undeniably limited the strength of their activism. Black women sometimes resented this paternalism, and many white women deliberately struggled to overcome it. Frances Pauley, for instance, decided at one point that she had to learn about blacks in order to relate to them. She started going to Atlanta University, which was all black, and became friends with Sadie Mays, the wife of Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College. The black woman helped her correct her errors and fight her personal prejudices. Pauley recalls in her autobiography: “I remember that she was the one who first corrected me when I said, 'Nigra.' She said, 'Now listen—Negro.' That's when 'Negro' was the word to use” (Nasstrom, ed., 51).27 However many women did not manage to learn. In this case, their education as southern ladies had created a superiority complex which prevented them from sympathizing with blacks, from working with them rather than for them. The only way out of it was to become close friends with black people, which happened quite often.

28 Prejudice also worked against white women insofar as they were systematically identified with the image of the southern lady, whatever their actual behavior, which could hinder their activism. White women had been put on a pedestal in the nineteenth century, and the pedestal sometimes turned into a trap from which they could not escape. For instance, black women tended to resent white women as a group because they were part of the oppressive system that had discriminated against them for centuries (Olson 367-68). Besides, with the radicalization of the freedom movement and the rise of black power starting in 1965, white women were deemed hopelessly paternalistic just because they had been born white women. For instance, in a letter to her children, Frances Pauley remarked: [T]he Negroes have shown me how awful paternalism is—so I hesitate to say—or think—that I want to be of service… But anyway I still do. [. . .] I know I am in a superior position because I am white. But that makes me feel inferior. I know I have hated my white skin many times, I could go—and maybe help work—if only I weren't white.

29 A few lines further she added: Of course I must admit—at the moment I play my old lady with white hair to the hilt. It is my greatest protection. But also is my age and my position—Southern white gives me the worst possible position… (Pauley [n. d.])

30 So it seemed that the image of the southern lady, for all its usefulness, did not offer any acceptable solution in the struggle against southern racism: white guilt seemed inescapable.

31 Finally, the ideal of the southern lady was also a powerful instrument of control within the white community. It could be used by the segregationists as a means to maintain women in their subordinate role and to prevent them from challenging the existing order. Many women actually remained within the boundaries of respectable reform work. But many others did not and sometimes they paid a heavy price for it. In fact, in a significant number of cases, the involvement in the fight against segregation led to personal emancipation from gender norms as the women realized that they could not commit themselves fully to racial integration without violating the prescriptions of white southern womanhood.

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32 For the older generation, the process was gradual and went along with the evolution of society and civil rights. Such was the case of Virginia Durr or Sara Parsons, for instance. Those women progressively came to reject the stereotype of the lady as their commitment to black equality deepened, but they only did so when the image clearly became an obstacle to their action. For instance, Sara Parsons, who, in her own words, had married as “a sweet southern girl,” gradually embraced the cause of school desegregation against her husband's will, which finally led her to repudiate her original status, and ultimately to get divorced (Parsons 1999, 18). In March 1964, she wrote in her diary: It isn't that Ray objects to my being away from home so often. He objects to the fact that what I do is not on the “socially approved” list of what company executives' wives are supposed to do. Many of the approved activities are nothing more than time killers and status symbols. I need my energy and my time for the important things in life like brotherhood, peace, and justice for all, now especially. Besides, there is no way I can go back to the socially accepted proper “Southern Way of Life.” It is much too late. (Parsons 2000, 103-104)

33 One month earlier, she had related in another entry how she had resisted her mother's pressure to conform to social norms, and had commented: “I knew then that the way she wanted me to be—a properly dressed, socially prominent matron—wasn't me at all” (Parsons 2000, 102). Thus Parsons could only assert her integrationist principles by rejecting the norms of southern womanhood she was supposed to respect.

34 As for Virginia Durr, she was a typical member of the older generation of white women racial dissenters. Born in 1903 to a white middle-class family, raised as a perfect southern lady, she became involved in politics in the 1930s and devoted the rest of her life to social and racial equality. In her autobiography, published in 1985, she explains how the desegregation crisis led her to reject the social and gender norms she was expected to uphold. In 1954, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, chair of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, held a hearing in New Orleans for the purpose of proving that Durr and several other integrationists had close ties to the Communist Party.28 The hearing was a turning point in Durr's life as she refused to answer Eastland's questions and openly voiced her contempt for his committee. Such an act of public defiance against a prominent politician was obviously not appropriate for a lady, and she partially lost the respectability she had so far benefited from in her community. Yet, she commented: “In a way, I was grateful that my cover as a nice, proper Southern lady was blown by the hearing, because then I could begin to say what I really thought” (Barnard, ed., 271). The experience of such women is a perfect illustration of the complex intertwining of gender and race in a segregationist culture.

35 For the younger generation, the rejection was more sudden as they joined the Freedom movement on reaching adulthood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However the effect was by no means less painful. Dorothy Burlage's case is quite exemplary. Like her elders she was raised in Texas as a “southern lady”, but she joined the Civil Rights Movement against her family's will, and, in the process, became a feminist in spite of herself. Her marriage in late 1963 plunged her into an identity crisis, for she became torn between her wish to respect the norms she had been taught, which dictated her to become a perfect housewife, and her desire to carry on her militant activities as she had done so far. She finally freed herself from her native culture and got divorced in the process (Burlage 118). Another member of the younger generation, Casey Hayden, was led to realizing the limitations of “lady” activism when she openly challenged segregationist

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rules by sitting in the “colored” section of the Albany courtroom during the trial of Freedom Riders in 1962. Unlike Burlage, Hayden was of a working-class background, but she was not immune to the influence of the ideal of white womanhood. She reports the scene in Albany when the police asked her and her husband to move back to the “white” section of the courtroom: “I hooked my legs under the bench so that they had to pry me out sideways.” But she adds: “Ever the young lady, I wore white gloves” (Hayden 347). However, the policemen's indifference to her appearance and manners obviously proves that the image of the lady had lost its effectiveness by 1962. So whatever their personal experiences, it can be said that by the 1960s, most of the “ladies” had turned into “women”, and many had come to realize what one of them, Eliza Paschall, finally put into words when she wrote around 1970: “the main problem of the Southern White Woman, quite seriously and with no malice, is the Southern White Man” (Paschall n. d., n. p.).

36 As a conclusion, it is clear that the stereotypical image of the southern lady as the guardian of segregationist culture was seriously undermined, if not shattered, by the white women who embraced the fight for racial equality. However, these women did not completely resolve a fundamental paradox that characterized them, which is that they liberated themselves from their native culture without ever rejecting this culture altogether. This is directly linked to the fact that they used the stereotype rather than repudiate it. It seems, actually, that they hardly had a choice, given the overwhelming power of the white supremacist and patriarchal doctrine that permeated their society. One consequence among others was that, although they emancipated themselves in the process of helping black people gain their freedom, southern white women remained distinctive from American women in the sense that most of them did not identify with the women's liberation movement. They continued to think that racial and social justice were more crucial than gender equality, which was obviously linked to the historic interconnection of race, gender, and class in southern society and culture. Manuscript sources:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barnard, Hollinger (ed.). Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, by Virginia F. Durr. 1985. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1990.

Bartley, Numan. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s. 1969. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

Boyle, Sarah Patton. The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition. New York: Morrow, 1962.

Burlage, Dorothy. “Truths of the Heart.” In Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Ed. Constance Curry. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. 85-130.

Chappell Marisa, Jenny Hutchinson and Brian Ward. “'Dress modestly, neatly … as if you were going to church': Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early

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Civil Rights Movement.” In Gender in the Civil Rights Movement. Ed. Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith. New York and London: Garland, 1999. 69-100.

Coryell, Janet L. et al. (eds.) Beyond Image and Convention: Explorations in Southern Women's History. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998.

Dartt, Rebecca. Women Activists in the Fight for Georgia School Desegregation, 1958-1961. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. 1989. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Fosl, Catherine. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. 2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Frystak, Shannon. Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Goldfield, David. Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Hayden, Casey. “Fields of Blue.” In Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Ed. Constance Curry. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. 333-375.

Jones, Anne Goodwyn. “Belles and Ladies”. In Gender, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (general editor Charles Reagan Wilson), vol. 13. Eds. Nancy Bercaw and Ted Ownby. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 42-49.

Knotts, Alice G. Fellowship of Love: Methodist Women Changing American Racial Attitudes, 1920-1968. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996.

---. “Methodist Women Integrate Schools and Housing, 1952-1959.” In Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965. Eds. Vicki L. Crawford et al. 1990. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. 251-258.

Lynn, Susan. Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Murphy, Sara Alderman (Patrick Murphy II, ed.). Breaking the Silence: Little Rock's Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958-1963. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Murray, Gail S. (ed.) Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

Nasstrom, Kathryn (ed.) Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Olson, Lynne. Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

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Parsons, Sara Mitchell. From Southern Wrongs to Civil Rights: The Memoir of a White Civil Rights Activist. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2000.

Paschall, Eliza. It Must Have Rained. Atlanta: Center for Research in Social Change, Emory University, 1975.

Riehm, Edith. “Dorothy Tilly and the Fellowship of the Concerned”. In Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era. Ed. Gail S. Murray. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004. 23-48.

Scott, Anne Firor. “After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties.” Journal of Southern History 30: 3 (Aug., 1964): 298-318.

---. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. 1970. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

Shannon, Margaret. Just Because. Corte Madera, CA: Omega Books, 1977.

Sosna, Morton. In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Sullivan, Patricia (ed.) Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Movement. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Taylor, Elizabeth A. “Suffrage and Anti-Suffrage.” In Gender, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (general editor Charles Reagan Wilson), vol. 13. Eds. Nancy Bercaw and Ted Ownby. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 276-279.

United States. President's Committee on Civil Rights. To Secure These Rights, the Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1947.

Whitney, Susan E. The League of Women Voters: Seventy-Five Years Rich: A Perspective on the Woman's Suffrage Movement and the League of Women Voters in Georgia. Atlanta, GA: League of Women Voters of Georgia, 1995.

Wolfe, Margaret Ripley. Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Woods, Jeff. Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

Archives and Special Collections Division, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center. Atlanta, GA.:

Southern Regional Council Papers.

Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia:

“Babies Are Fun,” Atlanta Journal Magazine 1 September 1956, clipping, folder 6, box 1, Nan Pendergrast Papers.

“Fellowship of the Concerned”, folder 4, box 2, Dorothy Tilly Papers.

Mississippians for Public Education. “A Time to Speak”, folder 5, box 1, Constance Curry Papers.

Paschall, Eliza. “Great Speckled Bird: Eliza Paschall Writings for (b),” n. d., box 19, Eliza Paschall Papers.

Pauley, Frances. Letter to children, [n. d.], folder 6, box 1, Frances Pauley Papers.

---. Interview with Paul Mertz, 1 August 1983. Box 95. Frances Pauley Papers.

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“We Are a Family of Sailors,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine 28 July 1957: 10, 11, 30, 32, clipping, folder 9, box 1, Nan Pendergrast Papers

Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): Electronic edition. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South http://docsouth.unc.edu/:

Interview with Guion Johnson, 1 July 1974. Interview G-0029-4.

Interview with Louise Young, 14 February 1972. Interview G-0066.

Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia. Georgia Women's Movement Oral History Project.

Parsons, Sarah, interviewed by Janet Paulk, 5 May 1999.

NOTES

1. This characteristic of southern culture grew out of the trauma caused by the Civil War. After Reconstruction, the white southern elite redefined southern identity by glorifying its past, by depicting the Civil War as the chivalric defense of a great civilization, and by presenting white southern womanhood as the incarnation of this civilization. The myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause thus pervaded southern culture for decades following the restoration of white supremacy in the region (Goldfield 4, Foster 172). 2. The most extreme manifestation of oppression of black men in the name of the protection of white womanhood was the spread of lynching in the region after the end of Reconstruction. See for instance Hall 129-57. 3. The author is currently writing such a study under the tentative title of Unwilling Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice in the South, 1920-1970, to be published by the University Press of Florida. 4. It is difficult to assess the number of these women as they belonged to a great variety of reform organizations which were active in the South throughout the period studied. A major force in the struggle for racial equality between the 1920s and the 1960s was composed of Methodist churchwomen. According to historian Alice Knotts, their number amounted to more than 1,250,000 in the early 1950s (Knotts 1990, 251). These and churchwomen from other denominations were also very active in the YWCA which started to undermine segregation after World War II. Prior to the war, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), an all-white organization, had challenged white supremacy by denouncing the rationale which justified lynching as an act of chivalry meant to protect white southern womanhood from the alleged assaults of black men. By 1942, over 43,000 women had endorsed the ASWPL's anti- lynching pledge (Hall 179). As for the women who supported desegregation after the Brown decision of 1954, they were represented by associations such as Little Rock's Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, Atlanta's Help Our Public Education, and New Orleans's Save Our Schools, which respectively claimed more than 2,000, 30,000, and close to 1,200 members at their height (Murphy 211, Frystak 86, Bartley 333).

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5. The terms “radical” and “liberal” have to be understood in the context of the segregationist South. Throughout the segregation era, such terms could not be dissociated from the racial issue. Whereas “liberal” and “liberalism” referred to a reformist position which condemned racial discrimination without calling for the immediate abolition of segregation, “radical” and “radicalism” applied to all individuals and groups who condemned segregation outspokenly and advocated direct confrontation with segregationist authorities to achieve total equality. Although other factors, such as one's position on communism and socialism, shaped the definitions of liberalism and radicalism in the region, race remained the major one until the 1960s. See Sosna ,viii. 6. The women I identify as the “older generation” of white female racial dissenters were born between the late 19th century and World War I and became involved in social and racial reform through church-related activities and women's organizations. Those of the “younger generation” were born in the 1930s and 1940s and joined the civil rights movement in their college years. While the older generation worked to reform the system without openly rejecting segregation, the younger one repudiated white supremacy on coming of age and directly confronted the system. 7. Such conservatism is well illustrated by the strong opposition to woman suffrage which could be observed in the southern states in the early 20th century and by the persistance of the image of the southern lady long after the ratification of the 19th Amendment (Taylor 279; Scott 1964, 298). 8. On white women and white supremacy at the turn of the 20th century, see for instance Foster or Gilmore. 9. For more information on the YWCA and racial reform during the desegregation era, see Lynn. On the involvement of Methodist women in racial reform between the 1920s and the 1970s, see Knotts 1996. For an account of the evolution of a southern League of Women of Voters, see Whitney. 10. The delegates who attended the organization's Constituting convention in Atlantic City adopted a statement in which they vowed to promote peace but also “to consecrate [themselves] to the task of building a democracy at home which recognizes individual worth and strives for justice to all the people” (Shannon 21). 11. See the committee's report, To Secure These Rights, for details. Another decisive move on the part of federal authorities was the 1944 Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision which declared unconstitutional the white primary elections barring blacks from participation in local and state elections in the southern states (Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649, 1944). 12. Brown v. Board of Education: Brown I, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), Brown II 349 U.S. 294 (1955). 13. For a detailed analysis of white resistance to desegregation, see Bartley. 14. For more information on HOPE, see Dartt; on WEC, see Murphy; on SOS, see Frystak. 15. In 1954, after the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional, the Georgia General Assembly proposed a referendum to amend the state constitution. The new text stipulated that state schools were to be segregated, and allowed state and local governments to fund private schools with tax money. In 1956 the Assembly passed laws allowing the governor to close all public schools if one school was desegregated as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision (Dartt 9, 14). Then came the events of Little Rock (1957), and the closing of schools in Arkansas and Virginia (1958). Consequently,

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in 1958, after a period of uncertainty in Georgia, a small group of whites (mostly women) met to find a way to prevent the destruction of the public school system. They called themselves HOPE for “Help Our Public Education". 16. See also Mississippians for Public Education, “A Time to Speak”. 17. See for instance “Babies Are Fun,” or “We Are a Family of Sailors”. 18. The idea that women were freer to act than men because they were immune to economic retaliation is confirmed by several testimonies. See for instance Young 35, or Hall 76. 19. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching and the League of Women Voters provide illuminating examples of such action. See Hall and Whitney. 20. Indeed, several incidents had already occurred in connection with bus segregation in Montgomery and the idea of a boycott had been considered by the leaders of the black community before 1955, but they had waited for an exemplary case to launch their protest. Such a case came up when Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1 of that year. Rosa Parks was an activist, but her impeccable manners commanded respect so that she could not be accused of being a dangerous agitator. Thus, the leaders of the boycott used "her apparent conformity to pervasive middle-class ideals of chastity, Godliness, family responsibility, and proper womanly conduct and demeanor as codified in America's black and white media" to launch their protest movement (Chappell et al., 87). 21. Numerous other examples corroborate the use of lady manners as a tactical device. See, for instance, Murphy 115, 117, on WEC. 22. On the use of anti-communism as an instrument of repression against southern integrationists in the 1950s and 1960s, see for instance Woods. 23. See also Frystak 86 on SOS, and Murphy 73-74 on WEC. 24. For a detailed account of the hearings, see Dartt 93-115. 25. Many women who worked for the implementation of the Brown decision in the mid- and late 1950s became the direct targets of white supremacists. Some, like Dorothy Tilly, received hate mail and anonymous phone calls at night (Riehm 39). Others, like Sarah Patton Boyle, woke up at night to find crosses burning in their yards (Boyle 253-54). Extremist segregationist groups also publicized the names and addresses of the people—mostly women—who organized interracial activities such as prayer meetings, thus encouraging local segregationists to harass them (Sullivan, ed., 168-71). 26. See Tilly's correspondence, reel 196, Southern Regional Council Papers. 27. Several other white women recall living exactly the same experience with black people who became their friends. See Boyle 107, Parsons 2000, 41, or Anne Braden in Fosl 87. 28. On Eastland and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, see Woods 5, 42-47, 107-111.

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ABSTRACTS

The present article examines the paradoxical racial activism of the white women who supported school desegregation in the southern United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As southern segregationists organized massive resistance to the implementation of the 1954 Supreme Court's Brown decision, and violently repressed the supporters of desegregation, a number of white women who refused to sacrifice their moral ideals to the defense of white supremacy, used the image of respectability from which they benefited as “southern ladies” to undermine the segregationist system without seeming to do so. Thus, it can be argued that, on the surface, these women were moderate, even conservative, but that they were radical in depth. This strategy enabled them to ease the desegregation process by exerting their influence on their local white communities while the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. Yet this “lady” activism also had obvious limitations as the ideal of the southern lady imposed constraints likely to confine these female dissenters within their traditional roles as the guardians of white supremacy. Ultimately, the road to racial integration inevitably entailed a repudiation of the ideal of white southern womanhood.

Le présent article étudie le militantisme paradoxal des femmes blanches qui apportèrent leur soutien à la déségrégation des écoles dans le Sud des États-Unis à la fin des années 1950 et au début des années 1960. A la suite de l'arrêt Brown de 1954, dans lequel la Cour Suprême déclara la ségrégation scolaire inconstitutionnelle, alors que les ségrégationnistes organisaient un mouvement de résistance massive et réprimaient violemment les partisans de la déségrégation, un certain nombre de femmes blanches, refusant de sacrifier leurs principes moraux à la défense de la suprématie blanche, utilisèrent l'image de respectabilité dont elles bénéficiaient en tant que “dames du Sud” pour saper les fondations du système ségrégationniste sans en avoir l'air. Ainsi peut-on qualifier ces femmes, en apparence, de modérées, voire de conservatrices, alors qu'elles étaient en réalité radicales. Cette tactique leur a permis de faciliter le processus de déségrégation en exerçant leur influence sur les communautés blanches locales tandis que le Mouvement pour les Droits Civiques s'amplifiait. Néanmoins, ce militantisme particulier souffrait de limites évidentes car l'idéal de la “dame du Sud” imposait des contraintes susceptibles de confiner ces femmes dans leur rôle traditionnel de gardiennes de la suprématie blanche. Ainsi l'engagement pour l'intégration raciale a-t-il entraîné une répudiation inévitable de l'idéal féminin sudiste.

INDEX

Keywords: United States, south, segregation / desegregation, white women, womanhood, Southern Lady, massive resistance, Brown decision Mots-clés: sud, ségrégation / déségrégation, femmes blanches, États-Unis, résistance massive, arrêt Brown

AUTHORS

ANNE STEFANI Maître de Conférences HDR Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Re-Writing Race in Early American New Orleans

Nathalie Dessens

1 Louisiana's first century of history accounts both for its inclusion in the antebellum American South and for the specificities it displayed in the young American republic. After six decades of French rule, it became a Spanish colony at the end of the Seven Years' War, before briefly—and secretly—returning to French rule, in 1800, and being eventually sold, in 1803, to the United States by France. Its colonial past made it a slave colony, like the rest of the Anglo-American South, but it also made its social order slightly different from the rest of the South. Its three-tiered order, although it was by no means an exception in the plantation societies of the North-American continent, contradicted the biracial order that prevailed in most of the South and in the psyche of the new American rulers of Louisiana in the early nineteenth century.

2 When Louisiana was turned over to the United States, many historians contend, the old Creole population1 and the new rulers of Louisiana started conflicting over how to legislate on the racial order and how to deal with race relations in this new territory (then state) of the Union. Until relatively recently, the Creole/American opposition has been set forth by historians of Louisiana as the backbone of racial representations in early American Louisiana.2

3 Recent historiography, however, has tended to show that, if this binary opposition is often a correct representation of the debates over racial questions in early American Louisiana, it is most certainly an oversimplification and cannot account for all the representations of race relations in Louisiana in the first four decades of American rule. This article is a contribution to these new historiographical trends.

4 Relying on a specific testimony, that of Jean Boze, a Frenchman arrived in New Orleans with the large wave of refugees from the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue at the time of the Haitian Revolution, this article contends that the pattern of race interactions and race relations was much more complex than that defined by the Creole/American opposition. It will first examine the history and historiography of race relations in colonial and early American Louisiana, before examining the way in

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which testimonies of residents of Louisiana in the early national period may help revisiting the writing of race in the early postcolonial Crescent City.

1. Races in context in colonial New Orleans

5 The first period of French rule over Louisiana (1699-1763) clearly placed Lower Louisiana among the slave societies of the North-American continent.3 When Spain took over, in 1763, Louisiana already had a slave population of 4,598 that slightly outnumbered its free population (only 3,654).4 Although the late French colonial period was marked by a slowing down of slave importations,5 the almost forty years of Spanish rule clearly confirmed Louisiana's place among the main slave societies of North- America.6 By 1800, when Louisiana was retroceded to France by Spain through the Treaty of San Ildefonso, the slave population of Lower Louisiana amounted to 24,264, again outnumbering the free population (19,852).7 Lower Louisiana was thus ready to integrate the Anglo-American slave South, which it did as territory in 1803, and as state in 1812. Before the debate over the integration of Missouri into the Union started, Louisiana had quietly become one of its main slave states.

6 Throughout its colonial period, and in parallel with the progressive expansion of the institution of slavery, Louisiana witnessed the development of a perfectly codified three-tier order. As was the rule in the French and Spanish colonies of the Caribbean, a free population of color developed and expanded alongside free whites and enslaved blacks, especially under Spanish domination. Because Spanish codification gave the slaves the possibility to purchase their own freedom (coartación), and because it was current practice for white fathers in French and Spanish colonies to free their racially- mixed children, the free population of color increased steadily, albeit slowly, in the four decades of Spanish rule.8 In New Orleans alone, their number grew from 97 in 1771 (3.1% of the total population, 5.1% of the free population, 7.3% of the nonwhite population) to 1,566 in 1805 (19% of the total population, 30.6% of the free population, 33.5% of the nonwhite population).9

7 The free population of color, mainly—but not solely—present in New Orleans, had acquired, by the late Spanish colonial period, a number of privileges and had made its place in the socioeconomic order.10 In the past three decades, many historians of Louisiana have commented on this characteristic of colonial Louisiana. Although several Anglo-American Upper-South states or urban areas (like Charleston) also had free populations of color, historians have systematically proclaimed their socioeconomic and cultural role a specific feature of Louisiana. Speaking of New Orleans, Kimberly Hanger, for instance, writes that “over time there emerged in New Orleans what might be considered a free black ˈelite,ˈ although not on the scale of the gens de couleur of Saint-Domingue in the same period or of the large free property holders that made Louisiana distinctive in the antebellum United States” (Hanger 55). They owned, bought, and sold property according to a geographical pattern that denoted no residential segregation (Hanger 138).11 Beyond freedom and property rights, the free people of color had privileges unheard of in other urban societies of the American South. Belonging to the militia was one of them, in keeping with the French and Spanish Caribbean traditions, and it gave a sense of “corporate identity” to the free people of color of the Louisiana capital and granted them several distinctive privileges not found in the rest of the South (Hanger 109).12 In the late colonial period, Louisiana

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was a slave society, based on a three-tiered order, not unlike the other Spanish or French colonies of the Americas.

8 When the Americans took over, in 1803, after three brief years of secret French rule, the territory they incorporated was clearly singular. Although other slave regions of the United States had free populations of color endowed with certain privileges, Louisiana was where the free people of color enjoyed the most rights, including that of serving in the militia and all the privileges attached to the function. They sometimes held much property and had a certain power of negotiation with the white authorities (Hanger 136-162).

2. Races in context in early American Louisiana

9 Although Anglo-Americans had started migrating to Louisiana a decade before the young American republic purchased the territory, the influx became an uninterrupted flow after the Purchase. The new status of Louisiana triggered several changes in the racial distribution of the inhabitants of Lower Louisiana. The first obvious demographical consequence of the Louisiana Purchase was the relative proportional decrease of the free population of color, the in-migration from the eastern United States including mostly white people and slaves. The second was an immediate attempt by the Americans at reorganizing the territory according to their standards, in terms of government but also of social and racial organization. This resulted in a reconfiguration of the role of the free blacks in New Orleans society. They “encountered increasing discrimination and legal restrictions that would draw them together and more clearly define their position in New Orleans society” (Hanger 163). They remained, however, a substantially powerful group in the Louisiana society. Their property holding went on increasing,13 they went on interacting with the white population, and retained their distinct status in New Orleans until the Civil War. Their presence in the militia was not even threatened, despite a relative loss of prestige of the function (Hanger 134).

10 For a very long time, historians avoided addressing this specificity and assumed that there was no need to singularize early American Louisiana from the rest of the slave South in terms of races and race relations.14 For decades after the Civil War, American historians discussed race in the South in general, without focusing on regional differences. New Orleans historians were scarce and had difficulty gaining national recognition. Most of the historians were strangers to the Crescent City and a Louisiana exception was no part of the canonical American narrative15 which was more intent on pitting against each other the main sections interacting in the antebellum era than on showing the complexity and heterogeneousness of the individual sections. In the second half of the twentieth century, dissenting voices arose, mostly in New Orleans but also in the rest of the country, and the historiography of Louisiana started revising this depiction of a uniform, homogeneous antebellum South.16 Since then, historians have taken pains to show that New Orleans had a racial organization and a pattern of race relations that greatly differed from the rest of the South.17 They have highlighted the existence of the three-tiered order, common with the Latin colonies of the Caribbean, and inherited from the French and Spanish colonial era. Although many have focused on how the system became increasingly fixed when the Americans took over Louisiana and how the Creoles attempted to counter this American influence, most historians

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have also concluded that “the long contest between the creoles and the Americans proved a major force in shaping the unusual character of New Orleans” (Hirsh and Logsdon 91).

11 What mostly comes out of these reinterpretations of Louisiana's early postcolonial history is the opposition between Creoles and Americans in the management of racial statuses and race relations.18 Through the prism of the struggle for power between the Creole population and the new American rulers, they show the complexity of race relations in rapidly changing Louisiana. The vision that has emerged from these reinterpretations of Louisiana's early postcolonial history is one of a slightly isolated Louisiana, still extremely Latin in its management of race relations, despite the attempts of the new American rulers to impose their more binary conception. In the early national period, New Orleans remained, as historians have shown, a three-tiered order, with a relatively more relaxed management of interracial relations, where free people of color often thrived and managed to keep an intermediate position which deprived them of any political power but gave them space for economic and cultural influence. Although this representation of race relations in New Orleans is much closer to historical reality than the earlier ones, history never stops reinterpreting the past and recent historiographical trends have started elaborating more dialectic depictions of the racial order and giving a much more complex vision of race relations in early postcolonial New Orleans.19 This more dialectic conception is doubtlessly still a better representation of race relations in early postcolonial New Orleans.

12 The management of races and race relations, in particular, is indeed much more complex than what was hitherto believed, first of all, because historians have started reassessing the complexity of the Louisiana fabric in the early postcolonial period. If the confrontation between Creoles and Americans was one of Louisiana's main constitutive elements in the first decades of the nineteenth century, there were several in-migrations that made the confrontation anything but binary. Those years were an era of tremendous growth for the city, which went from a population of about 8,000 inhabitants in 1803 to being the third largest city in the United States in 1840, with a population of 102,193 inhabitants (Dessens 2011, 108). This tremendous increase had several origins: the constant influx of foreigners, from Europe for the most part (from France, Germany, Ireland, principally), but also from Mexico at the time of the independence from Spain in 1821; and the tremendous influx of Saint-Domingue refugees.

13 In several waves, between 1791 and 1810, about 15,000 Saint-Domingue refugees came to Louisiana (mostly New Orleans), more or less equally distributed into whites, blacks, and free people of color. This influx was essential in inflecting the racial policies in early American Louisiana. The arrival of the refugees, first of all, numerically reinforced the free population of color whose proportion to the total population had started diminishing owing to the influx of the Anglo-Americans who had brought numerical additions to the white and slave groups almost exclusively. When the last wave of refugees came to New Orleans from Cuba, in 1809-1810, this influx more than doubled the free population of color, which immediately went up by 134% (Dessens 2007, 27). Mentioning this influx, Hanger concludes on “the dramatic increase in their numbers and cultural influence” it brought to the free people of color (Hanger 163).

14 New Orleans thus had, in the early nineteenth century, a very diverse population, ethnically heterogeneous. It is clear that the perception of race relations could not be

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the same for all the ethnic groups.20 Much has been written in recent decades about the Anglo-Americans and their biracial pattern. There was, however, more diversity than heretofore believed since, among the new inhabitants of Louisiana, were also people who came from countries that had never relied on slavery (like Germany) or from countries that had institutionalized slavery in their colonies (like Spain). Much is also known about the Creole vision based on the three-tiered order of society, inherited from the French and Spanish colonial era. The French-speaking group was much more heterogeneous than what was long thought, since new migrants ceaselessly arrived, either from French American slave colonies (like Saint-Domingue) or from metropolitan France. It may be inferred that there was thus no single perception of races and race relations in this very composite population.

15 It is thus important, in the early twenty-first century, to try to reassess the relationships between the various racial groups—enslaved blacks, free people of color, and whites—in the context of this important ethnic diversity. Primary sources indicate that Louisiana's racial and ethnic pattern was so rich that each group had its own discourse on race and race relations and that there could even be diversity within each ethnic group. There was not one single way of writing race in the Crescent City in Louisiana's early national era and it is important to try to reconstruct this complex pattern by using new, relatively unexplored testimonies written by Louisianans at the time. An insight into the Saint-Domingue refugee group, for instance, attests to this rich diversity.

3. A Saint-Domingue refugee's testimony

16 Among the many rich sources that give insights into the complexity of the system, is a long correspondence written by Jean Boze to Henri de Ste-Gême, archived at The Historic New Orleans Collection.21 The Ste-Gême Family Papers (MSS 100) contain, among many other items, 158 letters written by Jean Boze between 1818 and 1839, covering 1150 pages, which give precious insight into the pattern of race relations in early postcolonial New Orleans.

17 Jean Boze was a Frenchman born in 1753 near Marseilles.22 Originally a captain in the French merchant marine, he had settled in Saint-Domingue, the French colony that is today Haiti, in the early 1780s. Married to a white Creole whose family had settled in the colony three generations before and possessed several coffee plantations, he was successively the captain of the harbor of Jacmel, a royal notary in Ste. Lucie (now St. Lucia), a Corsair for the Dutch in Curacao, a merchant in Saint-Domingue, and the captain of the harbor of Port Républicain (the name of Port-au-Prince at the time). Evacuated from Saint-Domingue in the last days of the Haitian Revolution, in late 1803, he lost his wife in their last moments on the island, and found refuge in Santiago de Cuba, in the Cuban Oriente, with his two children. In 1809, he had to flee with some 10,000 other Saint-Domingue refugees, when the Cuban colonial authorities expelled the French citizens, in response to Napoleon's European policies (Dessens 2010, “Napoleon,” 69). He then found his second asylum, New Orleans.

18 He fled with Henri de Ste-Gême, a nobleman from southwestern France, a high-ranking officer in the French army, who had fought the Haitian Revolution under various flags, had been discharged for health reasons, and had also settled in Santiago de Cuba in August 1803. On their way to New Orleans, if not before, they became close. Since Boze

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was carried to New Orleans on one of Ste-Gême's ships, and with him, they probably already knew each other. In New Orleans, Ste-Gême married a Louisiana Creole who had inherited a plantation in Gentilly, a few leagues from the city center, from her deceased husband. He then returned to his French country castle, the cradle of his family, near Toulouse, in 1818. He trusted Jean Boze so much that he left all his financial assets and his illegitimate family of color in his care. He had indeed come to New Orleans with his companion of color from Saint-Domingue, with whom he had had three children, all born in New Orleans, and thus Creoles of color of New Orleans. After Ste-Gême's departure, and apparently at his request, Boze wrote him letters that he often calls “newsletters”, and that mostly resemble a log book, in keeping with their author's original training as a ship captain.

19 In his letters, for twenty years, Boze recounted life in New Orleans for Ste-Gême. His thorough reports, aimed at keeping Ste-Gême informed about all the evolutions of the city in the eventuality of his return to New Orleans (which never occurred), described the social, economic, political, and cultural changes that the city was undergoing in those extremely lively twenty years of the early postcolonial era.23

20 All of the letters contain insightful information on race relations in New Orleans at that time. Boze's position is an original one. As part of the Saint-Domingue refugee group, he writes both as an insider and an outsider to the system. He is, to some degree, an insider, in that he had been living in American colonies for almost four decades when the correspondence started. Having lived in French and Spanish Caribbean colonies, he intimately knew the slave colonies of the Latin European countries. Although he had not been a slave owner personally, his wife's family had had large coffee plantations in Saint-Domingue. As a harbor captain and as a ship captain involved in corsair activities, he had, at least indirectly, condoned the institution of slavery. He was, however, also an outsider to Louisiana, having settled there six years after its purchase by the United States, and only three years before statehood. He was no part of the Louisiana Creole society, although he obviously had connections with it. As part of the Saint-Domingue refugee group, he observed from a distance the struggle for power between the Americans and the Creoles. As an already old man who had no direct involvement in the economic and political life of his new home, he had a relatively detached and impassionate perspective. This makes for the richness and interest of his testimony.

4. Ethnicity, origins, and the writing of race

21 Boze had a complex relationship to race. Although he had never owned slaves himself, he had lived in close contact with slavery and had married the daughter of a slaveholding family. He had had to flee Saint-Domingue just before it became the Republic of Haiti and had lost his wife, killed by the black insurgents. All in all, he spent 60 of his 90 years in slave societies. But he also took good care of Ste-Gême's family of color. And what his letters show is a strange mixture of racial prejudice, general agreement with the New Orleans fixed racial order, and a clear tendency to often let other considerations supersede his perception of races. His letters show a permanent wavering between his belief in the whites' superiority, his defense of the three-tiered order and opposition to any attempt at reducing this order to any binary perception of races, and the strong sense of belonging he had developed in the St. Domingue refugee group.

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22 Boze never questions the legitimacy of slavery. For him, it was a normal feature of society, in keeping with his past and present life. Whenever he mentions slaves, he does it as someone who has integrated the institution in his mental representation of society. When he reports the condemnation of a mulatto slave for killing a white, he says it is “a loss for the owner” and adds that “this master still has the weakness of saying he was a good subject” and of wanting to save him.24 Informing Ste-Gême of the death of one of his slaves, who had been weak and sick for some time, he adds “it is a new loss for you, which will prove the qualities of your heart since you could have sold him” (F 23, 10/08/18). He—often implicitly, but also sometimes explicitly—condones slavery, including the enslavement of racially mixed persons. Whenever he seems to criticize the system, he is, in fact, only condemning unusual cruelty. He denounces the “cruel nature” of Widow Lanusse towards her slaves and Widow Blanque's “barbarous treatment” of hers (F 134, 01/12/28). Beside cruel treatment, the only thing that apparently made him cringe was the constant importation of slaves from the Anglo- American states, and he recurrently expresses the opinion that these bad subjects jeopardize public peace and may trigger revolts. In 1831, he expatiates on the two great slave rebellions of Jamaica (the Christmas rebellion) and South Carolina (Nat Turner's rebellion) and keeps commenting that this is what will happen in Louisiana if the constant influx of Anglo-American slaves does not stop: I will not tell you about those who have already arrived, but will only mention that, for the past two years, over 20,000 slave nègres25 of both sexes and of all ages have been introduced, vomited here by the northern places, as much for the lure of profit as to get rid of that caste.

23 He concludes that motions have been introduced in the legislature to end “this dangerous practice” (F 175, 22/11/30-23/01/31). In short, slavery is normal, whether the slaves are nègres or mulâtres, which corresponds to the vision shared by the population of New Orleans in general. If anything needs to be criticized, it is the increasing proportion of slaves from the Anglo-American South in the Louisiana slave population.

24 Boze also seems to readily side with the existence of a relatively stratified three-tiered order. He regularly mentions the free people of color, informs Ste-Gême on the group without ever being judgmental about their economic weight, shows that they were involved in the social order, and even that, in New Orleans, they shared practices normally reserved for whites in the rest of the South. New Orleans Creoles of color, including those with Saint-Domingue origins, were, for instance, regularly involved in dueling, a practice normally reserved for gentlemen in the rest of the South.26 Naturally, Boze's mission to take care of Ste-Gême's illegitimate children was fulfilled scrupulously and he expresses both admiration and affection for the three children. They were the owners of their house and six slaves, were given a good education, including the teaching of English to the young son, Gême, to prepare his future in an increasingly Anglophone Louisiana; the girls learned sewing, the boy was being trained as a joiner and cabinetmaker; they also benefited from the renting of part of their house and slaves. He adds, several times, that “they mingle with the best society of their color” (F 231, 11/08-26/09/33), which suggests, beyond the close proximity he has with them, his general acceptance of a separate racial order. But he is never judgmental about interracial relations, informing Ste-Gême about them as part of the social order. To give a single instance, he tells him, without passing the least judgment, about Mr. Delegue, the former business partner of Prudent Casamajor, who had married his

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“housekeeper”, the sister of Casamajor's “housekeeper”,27 in Santiago de Cuba “to make his natural children inherit” (F 189, 20/08-20/11/31). This is in keeping with what historians have recently written about the attitude of New Orleans Creoles towards the three-tiered order and interracial relationships that prevailed in the city and clearly indicates a certain homogeneousness among the French speakers, whatever their origins.

25 What is more unusual and less in keeping with the traditional depictions of the pattern of race relations is that Boze is also ready to let group solidarity supersede the strict racial order of Louisiana's society. Indeed, very often, from what he writes and from the wording he uses, the cultural and ethnic origins of the people he mentions seem more important than their color. What he despises most is not slaves, but slaves from the English-speaking United States. Already more acceptable are the black Creoles, be they slaves or free people of color. But the group he is most defensive of is obviously that with Saint-Domingue origins. And his solidarity goes to the refugee group, whatever the color of the people he mentions. He always speaks nicely of slaves brought over from Saint-Domingue by their refugee masters and he never suggests that they may jeopardize the Louisiana peace and order. He is always ready to support the free people of color in their response to any attempt at limiting their rights. Most of the news he gives concern Saint-Domingue refugees, whatever their color and, whereas he rarely mentions Anglo-Americans in the information he gives to Ste-Gême, he writes at length about the refugees, mostly whites and free people of color, which shows that people tended to get acquainted with members of their ethnic group in this early postcolonial era. The various groups apparently mingled as little as they could across the language barriers, while Louisiana Creoles and Saint-Domingue refugees seem to have interacted more easily and while there seems to have been much interaction between whites and free people of color within the Saint-Domingue refugee group.28

26 Boze also constantly criticizes any attempt on the part of the state or city authorities to legislate against the free people of color, as when Francophone Senator Antoine Ducros, in May 1834, introduced a bill setting a fine for any teacher teaching free people of color, children or adults, to read and write. He concludes that the bill has fortunately been rejected and that this group will continue to have “the liberty to get for themselves and their family the education they want” (F 239, 04/05-06/06/34). This example shows not only that Boze was protective of the free people of color but also that, contrary to what is often believed about early American Louisiana, the Anglophones were not the only ones trying to pass legislation limiting the rights and prerogatives of the free people of color. Boze sometimes even mentions specifically the Saint-Domingue Creoles of color in his criticism against the restrictive legislative attempts, as when, in January 1830, the legislature tried to pass a law preventing free people of color from settling in Louisiana, section 12 of the act requiring all free people of color who had entered the state between the adoption of the 1812 Constitution and 1 January 1825, to register with the judge of their parish or with the Mayor's Office if they lived in New Orleans. Although most of the free refugees of color had been in New Orleans before 1812, he feared for them and concludes: we hope there will be a change, to avoid pushing to despair unfortunate families who have been refugees for 23 years, on the belief that this was a free country which had welcomed them with open arms, and to whose laws they have submitted and which they have religiously abided by until now. (F 157, 25/01-19/02/30)

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27 He clearly sides with the free refugees of color against the white legislators of Louisiana. In another letter, he praises the bravery of a free refugee of color, Major Savary, who was the first black officer in the US army during the Battle of New Orleans, 29 and shows how it favorably compares to that of a white combatant, General Lacoste. Commenting on the honors given, upon his death, to Lacoste, who had commanded the Company of the Louisiana free people of color, he minimizes Lacoste's courage and puts forward the superiority of Savary, concluding: I must not forget, on this occasion, to say a few words on the bravery of the late Savary Jr., who commanded the company of the free people of color from Saint- Domingue, and who, with this company, fought the enemy with an astonishing dauntlessness, deserving, upon his death, a truthful necrology on his behavior and his courage in war (F 242, 15-18/07/34).

28 Many of his remarks, just like this one, seem to be color-blind, as long as the person he mentions is a Saint-Domingue peer. This solidarity is not reserved to Boze and was clearly the practice of the refugee community. When Ste-Gême's older illegitimate daughter married, for instance, she had a marriage contract drawn, and a white notary from Saint-Domingue, Marc Lafitte, had “the good heart of serving as counsel to that orphaned family”30 (F 216, 12/01-08/02/33), proving that most white refugees were often ready to protect and assist the free refugees of color.

29 In short, the most important element in Boze's identity is the sense of community he shares with the people who have experienced exile (sometimes double exile) from Saint-Domingue to New Orleans.31 And he shows that this solidarity is strong among the Saint-Domingue refugees, with a high degree of color blindness that has not yet been highlighted by historians. This sense of community blurs racial boundaries, makes color lines more flexible, and suggests that there were many different ways of perceiving and writing race in early postcolonial New Orleans.

30 Recent historical literature has tended to restore, step by step, the complexity of race relations in early postcolonial New Orleans. Historians have shown that race relations were probably more complex in New Orleans than anywhere else in the United States due to the specific colonial history of the city and to its highly cosmopolitan character in the early colonial period.

31 Creoles and Americans differed in their conceptions of race relations and this difference is attested by legislation and legislative attempts, although Jennifer Spear has recently shown that, if changes in the ownership of Louisiana were followed by legislative modifications, the practice of race relations between the French, Spanish, and American periods displayed more continuity than what is commonly believed.

32 Boze's testimony may be considered as anecdotal in the larger Louisiana picture, and to a large extent, it is. Its interest is to show, from inside, that it is impossible to generalize when trying to write the history of races and race relations in Louisiana in the early national era. All French speakers did not think alike and all Anglo-Saxons did not necessarily think alike either. Boze's example also shows that historians still have much to discover in the many testimonies left behind by the inhabitants of the Crescent City. The ethnic and racial fabric of New Orleans was so heterogeneous in terms of national and cultural origins that a better focus on the interplay between race and ethnicity is necessary before historians manage to honor the richness of the Crescent City's society at that time.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone. The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

---. Generations of Captivity. A History of African American Slaves. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Cossé-Bell, Caryn. Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Dessens, Nathalie. From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.

---. “Louisiane, terre d'aventure”. Sources 20-21 (automne 2008): 138-149.

---. “Napoleon and Louisiana: New Atlantic Perspectives.” Napoleon's Atlantic: The Impact of Napoleonic Empire in the Atlantic World. Eds. Christophe Belaubre, Jordana Dym and John Savage. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. 63-77.

---. “La Nouvelle-Orléans au XIXe siècle : femmes de couleur libres, femmes de pouvoir ?”. Anglophonia 27 (2010): 107-118.

---. “New Orleans” in “Cities in the Early Republic, 1790-1828.” In Cities in American Political History. Ed. Richardson Dilworth. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: Sage, CQ Press, 2011. 103-108.

Domínguez, Virginia. White by Definition. Social Stratification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Fossier, Albert E. New Orleans. The Glamour Period, 1800-1840. 1957. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998.

Hall, Gwendolyn Middlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana. The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the eighteenth century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places. Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997.

Hirsh, Arnold and Joseph Logsdon. Creole New Orleans. Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1992.

Ingersoll, Thomas. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans. The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

Kastor, Peter J. and François Weil, eds. Empires of the Imagination. Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

Lachance, Paul. “The Formation of a Three-Caste Society: Evidence from Will in Antebellum New Orleans.” Social Science History 18:2 (Summer 1994): 211-242.

Phillips, Ulrich. American Negro Slavery. New York: D. Appelton and Company, 1918.

Remini, Robert V. The Battle of New Orleans. Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Sainte-Gême's Family Papers, MSS 100, The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Scott, Rebecca. “Public Rights and Private Commerce. A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary.” Current Anthropology 48:2 (April 2007): 237-256.

Spear, Jennifer M. Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Stampp, Kenneth. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.

Sublette, Ned. The World That Made New Orleans. From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009.

Tregle, Joseph G., Jr. “Early New Orleans Society: A Reappraisal.” Journal of Southern History 18 (February 1952): 21-36.

---. Louisiana in the Age of Jackson. A Clash of Cultures and Personalities. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

Williams, Jack K. Dueling in the Old South. Vignettes of Social History. College Station and London: Texas A&M University, 1980.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. 1960. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.

NOTES

1. Although the definition varied through time and place, in early American Louisiana, Creole meant born in Louisiana of French (or Spanish) ancestry. Reserved for white Louisianans, it was occasionally used to designate other categories but was then generally combined with further information on the origins of the people (Havana Creole, Saint-Domingue Creole, etc.). In later periods it was used to also designate free blacks of French ancestry (generally under the expression Creoles of color). 2. The territory purchased by the United States was large and presented various perspectives in terms of races and race relations. For the sake of consistency, this article will focus on Lower Louisiana, and more precisely on what became the state of Louisiana in 1812. 3. For a very comprehensive study of the development of slavery in French Louisiana, see Hall, chapters 1 to 8, more specifically 56-155. 4. See Hall 10. 5. Only one slave ship reached Louisiana in the last ten years of French rule. See Hall 11. 6. See Hall's chapter 9 entitled “Re-Africanization Under Spanish Rule”, 275-315. 7. Hall 279. 8. See chapter entitled “Avenues of Freedom” in Hanger 17-54. 9. See tables I.I and 1.3 in Hanger, 18 and 22, respectively. 10. See the very comprehensive study by Hanger and more particularly chapter 2 on the economic position of the free people of color (“Work and Property Accumulation”, 55-88), chapter 4 on their position within the militia (“A Privilege and Honor to Serve”,

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109-135) and chapter 5 on their political and cultural role in late colonial New Orleans (“Cultural and Political Activities”, 136-162). 11. Hanger conducted her study from censuses and notarial archives. 12. See the whole chapter on the privileges granted by militia membership. 13. See, for instance, the example of Mme Couvent in Dessens 2010, “Nouvelle-Orléans”, 110. 14. See, for instance works by Phillips, Stampp or even C. Van Woodward in the bibliography. Including Louisiana within the South as an entity, without distinguishing it, led to an oversimplification of racial representations. Early 20th-century historians never seemed to question the image of a biracial South, where blacks were almost all slaves, discriminated against and oppressed by their white masters. 15. Or what historians also sometimes call the "master narrative." See, for instance, Kastor and Weil 5. 16. Joseph G. Tregle pioneered this historiographical revision with his 1952 article “Early New Orleans Society: A Reappraisal” published in the Journal of Southern History. 17. See, for instance, Gwendolyn Middlo Hall, Kimberly Hanger, Thomas Ingersoll, or Ned Sublette, to cite only a few of the historians of Louisiana who have highlighted Louisiana's distinctiveness. 18. See, for instance, Albert Fossier, Arnold Hirsh and Joseph Logsdon, Caryn Cossé Bell, Virginia Dominguez , Joseph Tregle, Rebecca Scott, or Paul Lachance. 19. In Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, for instance, Jennifer Spear develops the idea that, if racial codification was indeed altered whenever Louisiana changed hands, from French to Spanish to American, there was much more continuity in the practice of race relations than heretofore thought between the French, Spanish and American eras. A quote by Dan Usner, professor at Vanderbilt University, on the back cover of her book comments that there is still much to do although Spear manages to take “full advantage of tangible special circumstances […] to replace stale assumptions about the Crescent City's peculiar society with fresh insights into its comparative importance in early American history”. 20. What is here meant by “ethnicity ”is what Kastor and Weil define, in their introduction, as "a more elusive term in the Americas [than race] that usually suggests a combination of culture, physical appearance, and distinct pasts. Following this definition, the Saint-Domingue refugees could thus be considered as an ethnic group different from the Louisiana Creoles but also from the migrants who came to Louisiana directly from metropolitan France (Kastor and Weil 5). 21. The Historic New Orleans Collection is a private New Orleans archive founded in 1966. 22. For more details about the itineraries of Boze and Ste-Gême and for details on sources, see Dessens 2008, 140. 23. The present article is part of a larger project that relies on Boze's correspondence to write a detailed chronicle of New Orleans in the decades that followed the Louisiana Purchase. The manuscript is currently being reviewed by the University of Florida Press. 24. This quote is excerpted from the letter written by Boze on 10 August 1818, contained in Folder 23 of MSS 100. From now on, the Folder number will be indicated in

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the body of the article with indication between brackets of the folder number followed by the date of the letter. Most letters were written over a long period of time, to avoid excessive mailing costs, Boze writing in the same letter, often called “Bulletin”(Newsletter), over a period that could go from a few weeks to a few months. This accounts for the presence of two dates, most of the time, indicating the beginning and end of the writing of the letter contained in the folder. For this specific reference, it would read as (F 23, 10/08/18). The letters were originally written in French, all translations are mine. 25. This word cannot be translated in politically correct English. Translating it as "slave" or “black” would, however, lose the racial prejudice included in the word “nègre”, which is the reason why I decided to leave it in its original version, as agreed with the editor of my forthcoming book. 26. See, for instance, Williams 4-5. 27. The word used in French was “ménagère” and is generally translated as housekeeper. It referred to the women of color (often racially mixed) who were the lifelong mistresses or companions of white men, generally the mothers of their illegitimate children. Although mixed marriages were forbidden in 19th-century New Orleans, there are several examples of such mentions in Boze's letters. Most of the time, these marriages were contracted in foreign countries, including in France. 28. See, for instance, Hirsh and Logsdon 92; also see Lachance, in Hirsh and Logsdon 101-130. 29. This battle, that occurred in January 1815, after the signing of peace with England, unbeknownst to the Louisianans, was a landmark in New Orleans's early American history. For more details see, for instance, Remini 136-168. 30. The children had, by then, lost their mother and their father was obviously too far to serve as counsel. 31. On the concept of identity in early American Louisiana, see Kastor and Weil 8-11.

ABSTRACTS

This article examines the representation of the racial pattern and pattern of race relations in early American New Orleans. Starting with a historical and historiographical contextualization, the article shows that race relations were more complex than is usually depicted, partly because considerations based on other criteria than race were superimposed on the traditional categories. It concludes that there was not one way of representing races and race relations in the first decades of the postcolonial era, and suggests that these representations greatly varied from one group to another and did not necessarily correspond to the current representation based on the American/Creole dichotomy.

Cet article s'intéresse à la représentation du système de classification raciale et des relations interraciales à la Nouvelle-Orléans au début de la période américaine. Après un rappel historique et historiographique sur cette question, l'article s'attache à démontrer que ces questions sont

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beaucoup plus complexes qu'il n'y paraît, entre autres du fait que des considérations autres que raciales sont souvent venues se superposer aux catégorisations traditionnelles. Il suggère qu'il n'y avait pas, dans les premières décennies de la période postcoloniale, une seule façon de considérer les races et les relations interraciales et que ces représentations ne correspondaient pas nécessairement à la représentation courante fondée sur une dichotomie Américains/Créoles.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Nouvelle-Orléans, relations interraciales, historiographie, créoles, américains, réfugiés de Saint-Domingue Keywords: Antebellum New Orleans, races, race relations, historiography, creoles, americans, Saint-Domingue refugees

AUTHORS

NATHALIE DESSENS Professor of American History and Civilization Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Integrating the Narrative: Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You Baby and the Sub-Genre of the Kitchen Drama

Jacques Pothier

1 Ellen Douglas's 1988 novel Can't Quit You, Baby could be seen as part of a series of classic narratives of the South foregrounding the most common form of employment for black women in the South after emancipation and through the 1960s: housekeeping.1 Before Douglas, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1926), Go Down, Moses (1941), Carson McCuller's The Member of the Wedding (1946), Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960) and of course most recently fellow Mississippian Kathryn Stockett's record-breaking best-seller The Help (2009)—to take only the most famous examples—have staged the figure of the selfless black housekeeper. While she ignores the demands of her own family, the black servant is faultlessly patient, enduring, devoted to a white family riddled with tensions, grief and misery, to the point of invisibility. As Sharon Monteith has pointed out Ironically, segregation in Southern society had prevented blacks from being able to share the space allotted to whites under Jim Crow, yet all the time black women continued to share that most intimate of white spaces, the home. The domestic was deemed to safely occupy this space, since she was objectified as having no context outside of the family's requirements. (Monteith 107)

2 In these novels, the kitchen is seemingly a sanctuary of human warmth and good sense, but the housekeeper is definitely the “supporting cast”, the other scene to the main scene of life. This “kitchen-plot” is less secondary in Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life, a novel (1933) and film (1934) that focuses on Bea Pullman, a white widow, and her black housekeeper, Delilah Johnson. Bea's financial situation brings her very close to Delilah and her daughter Peola, who become like family to her. Bea comes up with the idea of using Delilah's delicious pancake recipe to open a restaurant, in which she makes the black woman a (very) minor partner. The business is so profitable that she sets up a

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successful pancake formula corporation, using the image of Delilah as an Aunt-Jemima- like figure. Today the figure of meek Delilah devoting herself completely to Bea Pullman who basically stole her patent is difficult to bear, but in the 1930s just picturing the closeness between black and white women could be considered by many as boldly progressive.

3 In the first page of her 1988 novel Can't Quit You Baby, Ellen Douglas offers the image of two women, Cornelia and Julia, nicknamed Tweet, a Southern lady and her black housekeeper, busy at work in the kitchen of a house. They are making preserves: departing from the image of Jim Crowism and deep racism which is attached to the South in the 1960s the reader is presented with an image of friendship and equality at work— admittedly, it is not the public sphere, but the private sphere of the kitchen to which women have been affected, pointing to a more globally widespread segregation. The separation of genders is so general that it is in most cases taken for granted: in most of the world, the kitchen is the women's realm. Don't these kitchen plots suggest that the segregation of gender roles has replaced the segregation of races? Incidentally, where are the men?

4 Douglas's novel is not played entirely among women, as is, for instance, Kathryn Stockett's The Help. Jan Shoemaker has noted that “Tweet's whole life is a series of threats to her selfhood by patriarchs, both black and white” (Shoemaker 92). The novel presents women of all races as insecure, barred from agency, under the constant threat of male predators. With the exception of Julia / Tweet's grandfather, all males turn out weak, absent, treacherous, unaccountable, shiftless. Both Cornelia's and Tweet's fathers left their wives and children to fend for themselves—not a rare pattern in Southern fiction.2 The innocuous female complicity might be viewed as an index to an at last peaceful and decent relationship, breaking the legacy of silence that has prevailed across color lines.

5 Could it be so, though, in the 1960s, in which the conspicuous persona of the author insists that we should never ignore that the story is set? And, as this story mostly set in the age of the Civil Rights movement, like The Help, is supposed to be relevant generations later, can we see in a novel with a title so suggestive of reconciliation the promise of an end to racial segregation as due to precede the end of gender segregation? The kitchen has a special history in the South, and Douglas reminds us right away that this anthropological and political significance lives on: There is no getting around in these stories of two lives that the black woman is the white woman's servant. There would have been no way in that time and place—the nineteen-sixties and seventies in Mississippi—for them to get acquainted, except across the kitchen table from each other, shelling peas, peeling apples, polishing silver. (Douglas, 1989, 3-4)3

6 This is possible because the South's class system, i.e. segregation, has maintained a huge gap between white incomes and black incomes. The kitchen in the house is an avatar of the plantation kitchen, formerly separate from the big house and therefore segregated from it, where the black cook held her authority, and close to where Uncle Remus could run his house of fiction, holding authority over the little boy in the surrogate realm of the imagination.

7 In his “memoir”, Henry Louis Gates devotes a chapter to the kitchen (chapter 4: “In the Kitchen”), emphasizing that this room is the black women's privileged area, the sanctuary of their identity as women. But, Douglas shows, even this is no longer true.

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Integrating—if one may use the term lightly in the context of the 1960s' South—the kitchen in the house does not mean that the black maid becomes “part of the family”, but that now even the black woman's authority over the marginal space of the kitchen was challenged. Douglas signals this invasion in ironic exaggeration, emphasizing that Cornelia has taken over like a usurping queen: “Every weekday morning at nine-thirty Julia appears at the door of the room where Cornelia prefers to hold court. Cornelia is an accomplished cook and the kitchen is her throne room.” Cornelia wears her cloak of indifference like a queen, with a constant “distant, faintly embarrassed smile.” (70) Cooking has always been for her a strategy of limited agency to pretend control and to ignore the serious issues with her family and the world: a son's affair with a married woman; his kids, wild as stray cats; Vietnam and its atrocities, reaching into the Southern backwaters. Mastery is denied to the black woman whenever her boss decides to treat her as a friend and not an employer. By joining her housekeeper in the kitchen and taking over, Cornelia, the Southern lady, has incidentally invaded the Mammy's place (or Aunt Jemima's?) to meet her in her area of excellence, but in doing so she is also depriving her of the limited sanctuary of agency that Southern tradition secured— or, to echo the first scene, “preserved” for her.

8 In an essay based on Ellen Douglas's novel as well as on Alice Childress's Like One in the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life, Sonya Lancaster argues that [t]hese two literary representations of cross-racial relationships show white women profiting from the oppressive circumstances of the black women they employ— often forcing a one-sided intimacy on them—and black women expressing their discomfort at the indignity of their positions. (Lancaster 113)

9 This is translated by Cornelia's tactical deafness—being deaf, she hears through a hearing-aid that she can turn up or down, and even off, and she secretly prides herself on being a good listener even when she chooses not to hear, as she masters all the techniques to pretend that she is interested and involved in the conversation. In Imitation of Life Delilah Johnson delighted Bea Pullman with her gifts of pancakes; in Can't Quit You Baby Tweet usually arrives “bearing a gift” (6)—flowers, fruit, tomatoes, stories in the winter, which Cornelia accepts as decorations, not testimonies—aesthetic supplements that do not displace her self-delusion about the way the world works, not evidence likely to deepen social awareness. Among the stories that Tweet brings, on the day when the story begins, she brings one on Wayne Jones, a white man who has just died.

10 Wayne Jones looks like a stereotypical Southern white male—putting up his wife on a sexless pedestal of purity, while he is openly promiscuous with his female black helps. Tweet used to work as a cook in Wayne Jones's restaurant, and she tells Cornelia how he used to chase her around the kitchen, so much so that she at last complained to Mrs. Jones, who had always been friendly to her. But Mrs Jones was no help: she told her to “make allowances for him”. Cornelia cannot believe it, but right in this first conversation in the novel, Tweet has obliquely made her point to her: in the kitchen world, in her parallel condition as a white woman married to a man with easy access to black helps, Cornelia's reaction would probably not have been very different from powerless Mrs Wayne's, and so clearly the gendered solidarity between women, black and white, cannot trump race. The “peculiar sisterhood” of Minrose Gwin's book on Black and White Women in the Old South (1985) lives on as an invisible but efficient dividing screen: “for the most part… color lines blinded white women to the humanity

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of their black sisters and built in black women massive layers of hatred for those fair ladies who would not, or could not, see their suffering” (109; quoted by Jacobsen 28).

11 As Sharon Monteith has noted, Douglas's narrator is intensely aware that she may fall victim to “clichéd characterizations” (Monteith 114). Blurring the distinction between narrator and author, Douglas inserts frequent metafictional notes in which she confronts the tensions between narrative conventions and historical accuracy, echoing in the reader's response the kind of exposure to uncertainty that is the white woman's experience in the diegesis. Whereas, as we have seen, the first paragraphs of the novel could work as the “establishing shot” for a familiar kitchen-drama movie, the narrator's comments and, more interestingly, her style simultaneously diffract the reader's response: A safe, secure fictional world is never created in Can't Quit You Baby. The opening paragraphs, written in the continuous present tense, immediately crack the reader's frame of reference that expects a storytelling past. The two women are staged dramatically, posited as an idea, as subjects for fictional exploration: “The two women are sitting at right angles to each other at the kitchen table on a sunny July morning in the nineteen-sixties” (3). The narrator goes on to examine her subjects, both politically and linguistically: “Servant? Mistress? They would be uneasy with these words, and so am I.” (Monteith 118)

12 Douglas thus suggests that the issues of class, gender and race in the South are not contained within a framework of social and legal injustice in a given place and time— the segregated South—but also dwell in the language in which the people involved figured out their relationships, or we look back on them nowadays.

13 The whole novel is full of moments of fake stillness, which the author symbolizes by the allegory of the young white water-skier suddenly caught in the grip of a tangle of water moccasins: There is an apocryphal tale of a water-skier that rolled like ball lightning through the Mississippi Delta during the late sixties. It is a summer day. A beautiful young girl is flying along the surface of one of the innumerable oxbow lakes that marks changes in the course of the Mississippi River. […] Then something happens—the rope breaks or she loses her balance and falls. No big deal. It's happened hundreds of time before. But this time is different: screams of agony—a thrashing and churning in the water. The lover spins the wheel, brings back the boat in less time than it takes to write this sentence. The young girl's lovely face is contorted with pain. Barbed wire, she gasps. I'm caught in barbed wire. But there isn't any barbed wire. No. It's a writhing, tangled mass of water moccasins. (130-131)

14 For the Southern lady, shielded from unpleasant realities by a deafness which is not just physical, life is fair. Before her husband died, she lived in his shadow, here “to love, honor, obey and occasionally amuse her husband, to bring up his children and manage his household.” She thinks of herself as beyond common bigotry, and she cannot even see the unpleasant secrets of her own family. All is quiet on the surface, but the old monsters still lurk below, and they are hungry.4 Patricia Yaeger has noticed how southern women writers tend to picture white anxieties about the changing South as catastrophic. The title of her book, Dirt and Desire, suggests that they seem to think of them in terms which are also related to gender roles: change is something which is untidy, not neat. In Can't Quit You, Baby, Ellen Douglas revisits the relationship between races, but only thanks to a change in their situation which forces them to interact in a way for which life has not provided them with a template. In the course of the novel,

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Douglas first shows how Cornelia, the white woman, perfected the art of turning up or down her hearing aid to monitor her awareness of the world, a strategy to ignore the tangled moccasins of contemporary chaos, and then how this strategy stopped working to be replaced by another sound-pattern. A process begins which results in a new form of interaction, if not necessarily one of cooperation.

15 Tweet tells various stories to illustrate what segregation means—how she was deprived of a plot of land she had inherited from her grandfather and that was crucially situated as an enclave in a white man's estate.5 Naturally the white landlord, whose name was ironically Mr Lord, was a friend of an attorney, also the vice president of the bank he did his business with. The attorney supported the sensible decision: “the land would be more economical to work and the Negroes could move to Chicago” (112),—and so the will was broken. “Nigras,” Douglas ironically explains, “like children and women, simply have to be managed for their own good.” The courthouse is where white male adult power is enforced—where property taxes are paid for careless landowners who do not realize that they owe taxes, and so ownership of land is transferred to those who pay the taxes... Tweet learnt resilience and has a shrewd sense of how the white world works, and the book confirms that black servants know in more detail the world of their employers than the white women they work for do theirs, or for that matter their own.

16 One day in spring 1968, Cornelia takes her car and drives to the black neighborhood: it is the day after Martin Luther King's assassination. “She is paying a bereavement call. She knows that King's portrait hangs in the place of honor over the mantelpiece in Tweet's living room” (98). Note the arrangement of these two sentences: the performance of a show of sympathy as a transaction (paying); next the assertion of knowledge about the arrangement of the living room. The advantage of knowing warrants the white woman's dominant status. This could be seen as another predatory invasion of the black woman's private space, and Tweet's immediate coldness in response suggests that at first it is just that—once more, empowerment comes with knowledge, even if it is the knowledge of someone else's grief. The narrative makes it obvious that the white woman is performing her number with more narcissism than genuine sympathy, going through the motions and the text of the bereavement call as a kind of genre scene, showing off her expertise. She speaks: “I am sorry”, but the black woman does not nod, declines to meet her gaze (99).6 The white woman's eyes roam over the black family's lounge, all the objects that cram the room so full that in a moment she will have to stumble out in order not to be sick: once more, the discomfort is channeled through gendered obsessions. Cornelia's world is quiet, ordered, muffled by her controlled deafness, the “myopia with each member of her family” (Monteith 117): she “is adept at creating imaginary people and imaginary lives. Her children, her husband, her closest friends, are all imaginary people. With her expectations she tempts them to be perfect” (Douglas 129). Unlike hers Tweet's world, in which she constantly has to struggle with the various agents of her oppression, is a shock: the clutter, the untidiness are unbearable, like a jumble of words failing to make sense as a coherent narrative, a sentence in which subordinate clauses do not find their place in reference to the main clause. Cornelia looks distractedly around her at overstuffed chairs, a sofa piled with not- yet-folded wash, a glass-topped coffee table littered with ashtrays, old bills, magazines, a Bible, discarded jewelry. There is a barrette, a twisted ropelike circlet

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in a pin tray, a pair of earrings and matching necklace on top of a stack of magazines. (99)

17 In these first sentences of the description, the objects appear juxtaposed, piled up, bulky, unnecessarily multiplied. But the gaze learns to digest, to organize, to familiarize, while the sentences become better organized: “In the chimney opening that once housed a coal grate a gas space heater glows and pulses as if even on this April day there must be a fire against the encroaching chill.” As the description unfolds, the gas heater is thus reframed within a metaphoric plot, where the rubble in the house becomes the pathetically fallacious projection of its inhabitants' surmised emotions— actually the emotions of the visitor. The emotions are mediated by the visitor's memories—hence the use of the present perfect: Cornelia has been in Tweet's house many times, has sat and visited in this living room, but now she gasps at the stifling air, feels the wall closing in on her like the walls in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” (99)

18 The metaphoric room finishes its mutation to make sense as a post-modern intertextual plot, drawn from one of the classics of Southern literature. The white Southern discourse (and its clichés) has momentarily overcome the unpleasant rubble of clueless poverty.

19 But there was a castaway gem of meaning in this rubble, which Cornelia and the reader will ignore for the moment. The barrette—the first object catching Cornelia's eye— should indeed have been arresting to a more attentive eye: at the end of the novel, when Tweet's illness has humbled Cornelia to the point where she can show real compassion, Tweet explains to her that she had stolen the barrette out of hatred for her employer: the barrette, formerly a dangling participle wanting its function in a sentence—“There is a barrette, a twisted rope like circlet in a pin tray, a pair of earrings”—suddenly recovers its meaning in the grammar of feelings. So Cornelia's cognitive victory on her visit after King's assassination was a Pyrrhic one.

20 In order to place this process firmly in the realm of inter-racial relations rather than gender relations, a look at Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust may be rewarding. This novel provides another example of the trope of the white person's visit to the black person's place, except that in this case the white boy has been invited to do so by the black man who rescued him from a frozen river. In the first chapter of Faulkner's 1948 novel, the white boy Chick Mallison is equally confronted to the mind-numbing disorder he found about Lucas Beauchamp's house, and the narrative follows him as he attempts to create the epistemic connections which allow him to escape destabilization—the attempts to connect are italicized by me in this passage, and it could be worth noting that the process of healing of the white boy's narcissistic wound is still going on many years later: the paintless picket fence whose paintless, latchless gate the man kneed open still without stopping or once looking back and [...] strode on into the yard. It would have been grassless even in summer; he could imagine it, completely bare, no weed no spring or anything, the dust each morning swept by some of Lucas' womenfolks with a broom made of willow switches bound together, into an intricate series of whorls and overlapping loops which as the day advanced would be gradually and slowly defaced by the droppings and the cryptic three-toed prints of chicken like (remembering it now at sixteen) a terrain in miniature out of the age of the great lizards ...

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21 The description runs for more than a full page, but concludes with a quaint temporary conclusion which neatly situates the black man's shabby quarters in the comfortable certainty of architectural consistency—it is back to the classics, quite literally: [...] beyond this the house itself, gray and weathered and not so much paintless as independent of and intractable to paint so that the house was not only the one possible continuation of the stern untended road but was its crown too as the carven ailanthus leaves are the Greek column's capital [emphasis mine].(Faulkner 1948, 289)

22 Chick Mallison first thought he could get away with the puny gesture of charity that whites had always used to dispose of their guilt towards blacks—offering some small change as a propitiatory gift. But his host refuses, leaving him symbolically indebted. Years later, in the main plot of the novel to which this first chapter served as a thematic prologue, he will be drawn into a quest for truth and justice that will eventually prove the black man suspected of murder to be innocent. In this quest, an alliance is concluded between the black man (innocent of murder), a white child and his black playmate, and an old lady—representing three categories of victims of the Southern patriarchal order.

23 Can't Quit You, Baby attempts to show how a full relationship with the past will have to outgrow the compassion for misery. It involves a revisionist process.7 The comparatively straightforward, consistent primary narrative breaks, like the smooth surface of the lake in the book's recurrent metaphor: Do you remember when I wrote, early on, that Cornelia was like a dancer, a skier- skimming over the surface of her life as if it were a polished floor or a calm surface lake? For twenty-five years now she's managed to fly across the steely water under the bright sky—although sometimes, fleetingly, rising early from forgotten nightmare, she may have thought (but only for a moment) that the flight was an escape. (Douglas 127)

24 At the end of the novel, Cornelia goes through the process of discovery which brings her close to Tweet, who had a cerebral stroke and lost the use of her voice. Eventually Cornelia will have to accept to be destabilized. Cornelia's awakening comes as she has decided to take a trip to New York in winter after the trauma of her husband's dramatic death.8 For the first time in her life, she is taking a risk, exposing herself to chance. In this city she finds herself thrillingly exposed. In an explicit reference to James Joyce's “The Dead”, it is beginning to snow, and this snow, possibly also reminiscent of the white snow-tide hemming in Bigger Thomas's space in Richard Wright's Native Son, prompts the recollection of the stories that Julia/Tweet told her, the stories that she was paying merely superficial attention to—she realizes that she needed her: now she is listening. As Gretta remembered her dead young lover Michael Furey in Joyce's story, she also remembers now her first lover Lewis Robinson, that had been erased behind the memory of her husband. She is reviving the narrative, finding a place in it, and so she ceases to be an invisible woman.

25 She now connects the visit to Tweet after King's death, that the reader will have read about in the first half of the novel, to another scene, another occasion when she had visited Tweet's home in 1967 (the year before) to help her take care of her mother's dying husband, and in the confrontation of the two scenes she now sees the “clutter, disorder, pierced through with sorrow and mystery” of Tweet's life that she had for so long been putting away as she did her preserves (202). So it is only in the working of her memory, when Tweet's cerebral stroke has confined her to silence, that she can

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revisit their relationship to discover a bond of friendship that race had kept unconscious. She turns up her hearing aid, notices that Tweet is humming to herself. Singing. Blues or gospel. Now Cornelia is the one who can talk.

26 At this point, the narrator confesses: “I am the one who is skiing, who cannot express the complexity of all those layers of circumstance and imagining—in all our lives, but particularly in Tweet's” (239). She never gets under the black woman's skin—hasn't she been struggling in vain with the issue of race? It is now Cornelia's turn to take care of the black woman, massaging her as black Delilah did to white Bea in Imitation of Life. Nice? Or too sweet? The narrator of the novel repeatedly insists on her difficulty to tell the story of Tweet from her own point of view as a white woman-writer. Isn't she led, for instance, to idealize Tweet as an icon of endurance (as Faulkner had done), in compensation for a patriarchal society's double oppression of Tweet's kind, both as woman and as black?—to exaggerate the efficiency of her conversion to a healing form of sympathy to bring the story to a harmonious ending? After all, as a white woman, the narrator says: The tensions born of race, class and gender do not surface in words easily, as if weighed down by untold reverence for the actors of the past, the forefathers, that Tweet says are still with her beyond their deaths. Only by killing the ghosts of the past is some sense of precarious redemption obtained, so that a more balanced friendship becomes negotiable, in the musical language of the blues song that gives the novel its title: “I love you, baby, but I sure do hate your ways”. An outcome to the tangle of race, class and gender which only comes about through the decisive introduction of a fourth paradigm: age—that Douglas foregrounds in other works as an important agent to reach Truth. Could this happy ending of sorts be just another traditional white woman's classic behavioral pattern, integrating the narrative after all?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bauer, Margaret D. “I Love You, Baby, but I Sure Do Hate Your Ways': Reluctant Friendships in Dessa Rose and Can't Quit You, Baby”. Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 9:4 (1998): 69-86.

Bomberger, Ann M. “The Servant and the Served: Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby”. Southern Literary Journal 31:1 (Fall 1998): 17-34.

Dalessio, William, Jr. “A Lifetime Burning and Can't Quit You, Baby: Acknowledging, Challenging, and Replacing 'Comfortable Lies'”. Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 36:1 (1997): 99-106.

Douglas, Ellen. Can't Quit You, Baby, 1988. New York: Penguin, 1989.

----. Truth: Four Stories I am Finally Old Enough to Tell. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1998.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury, 1929. Novels 1942-1954. New York: Library of America, 2006.

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----. Go Down, Moses, 1942; Intruder in the Dust, 1948. Novels 1942-1954. New York: Library of America, 1994.

Gates, Henry Louis. Colored People: a Memoir. New York: Vintage books 1995.

George, Courtney. “Ellen Douglas Sings the Blues for Cultural Appropriation in Can't Quit You, Baby”. Studies in American Culture 30:1 (2007): 65-89. MLA International Bibliography.

Gwin, Minrose C. Black and White Women in the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

----. “Sweeping the Kitchen: Revelation and Revolution in Contemporary Southern Women's Fiction”. Southern Quarterly 30:2-3 (1992): 54-62.

Hurst, Fanny. Imitation of Life, 1933. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Movie adaptations: Imitation of life (1934, b&w, 111 min.), Universal; screenplay, William Hurlbut, dir. by John M. Stahl. Imitation of life (1959, col., 125 min.), Universal-International; screenplay by Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott; dir. by Douglas Sirk.

Jacobsen, Karen J. “Disrupting the Legacy of Silence: Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You Baby”. Southern Literary Journal 32:2 (Spring 2000): 27-41.

James, Theresa. “Race in the Kitchen: Domesticity and Growth of Racial Harmony in Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You, Baby and Christine Wiltz's Glass House”. South Atlantic Review 65.1 (2000): 78-97.

Jones, Suzanne W. Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Joyce, James.“The Dead”, in Dubliners, 1914. London: Penguin, 1956.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mocking Bird. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960.

Lancaster, Sonya J. “Too Many Cooks: Contested Authority in the Kitchen”. Southern Literary Journal 32:2 (Spring 2006): 113-130.

McCullers, Carson. The Member of the Wedding, 1946. London: Penguin, 1962.

Monteith, Sharon. Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendhips in Contemporary Southern Fiction. Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Pifer, Lynn. “A Tangle of Snakes: Confronting White Racism in Douglas's Can't Quit You. Baby”. EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work 1 (2004): 172-185.

Sharpless, Rebecca. “Servants and Housekeepers”. In Gender, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (general editor Charles Reagan Wilson), vol. 13. Eds. Nancy Bercaw and Ted Ownby. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 246-251.

Shoemaker, Jan. “Ellen Douglas: Reconstructing the Subject in 'Hold On' and Can't Quit You, Baby. ”Southern Quarterly 33 (1995): 83-98.

Stockett, Kathryn. The Help, 2009. New York: Berkley, 2010.

Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

NOTES

1. For a more detailed overview of these narratives, see Sharon Monteith's chapter “Across the Kitchen Table: Establishing the Dynamics of Interracial Friendship” in her

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Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendhips in Contemporary Southern Fiction; and Rebecca Sharpless, “Servants and Housekeepers”. 2. One can be reminded of Scarlett O'Hara's destiny, a care-free Southern belle swiftly widowed, who at the end of the war has to take over the running of the dilapidated estate from her prematurely incapacitated father. 3. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent plain parenthetical page references will be to this book. 4. Patricia Yaeger thinks this scene is emblematic of southern women's writing in the first chapter of her book Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (University of Chicago Press, 2000). 5. Sharon Monteith notes that even though Can't Quit You Baby is not “Black literature”, the story of the grandfather appropriates features from this tradition that Toni Morrison has identified in her essay “Rootedness: the Ancestor as Foundation”. (Monteith 121) 6. Theresa James estimates that “a connection is still made” on this occasion (James 82) — but this connection is not documented in the passage; the progress is limited to the shock for Cornelia. 7. Ellen Douglas foregrounded this process in Truth: Four Stories I Am Now Old Enough to Tell, a book in which she revisited stories told in previous fiction (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books. 1998). 8. Her husband died of a stroke on a flight; in shock Cornelia could think of no one else to call but Tweet.

ABSTRACTS

This article examines Ellen Douglas's novel Can't Quit You, Baby, which can be situated in the subgenre of the kitchen drama, focusing on the relationships between housewives and their black housekeepers in the South, at the crossroads of the issues of race, class and gender, as they come out in the privileged locus of the meeting between black and white women, the kitchen. Douglas's novel transcends the convention of the genre through an innovating narrative perspective and through her style.

Cet article porte sur le roman Can't Quit You, Baby de Ellen Douglas (1988), situé dans un sous- genre américain qu'on pourrait appeler le kitchen drama, qui s'intéresse aux relations entre maîtresses de maison et leurs domestiques noires dans le Sud, au carrefour des questions de race, classe et genre, à travers le lieu privilégié où se manifestent ces interactions. Il examine comment le roman de Douglas joue avec les conventions du genre pour les remettre en cause, en particulier à travers le style et une perspective narrative innovante.

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INDEX

Keywords: race, class, gender, South, integration, segregation, narrative, kitchen, memory Mots-clés: race, classe, genre, sud, intégration, ségrégation, récit, cuisine, mémoire

AUTHORS

JACQUES POTHIER Professor Université Versailles St Quentin [email protected]

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Representing the Dark Other: Walker Percy's Shadowy Figure in Lancelot

Gérald Preher

1 Most southern writers have rooted their fiction in the region they come from, but not all of them adopt the same stand. Some ignore the presence of the dark other, others describe white people's hatred for whom they perceive as inferior beings, while the greater number makes use of the specific bond uniting whites and blacks, picturing the ambivalent relationship between children and their mammies in white households, interracial friendships or intimate relationships. For instance, Shirley Ann Grau, in The Keepers of the House, has exposed white people's reluctance to acknowledge the importance of African-Americans in their background. In the course of the narrative, her main character is forced to face the truth and accept the role that her grandfather's maid and mistress played in her life. In keeping with the idea that a change of stance on the part of white southerners is urgent, Grau penned, for Cosmopolitan, a lengthy article entitled “The Southern Mind” in which she explores various issues related to race and uses interviews with people throughout the South. Published in 1964, just like her novel, the essay makes it apparent that most Southerners are not ready to accept change: “The South enjoys its separateness and wants to keep it, while having the benefits of the economy of the rest of the country” (Grau 1964, 38). Although she clearly condemns her region for its stagnation, Grau emphasizes the changes that she has witnessed so far “in every field: education, civil rights, jobs” (Grau 1964, 40); she means to call the American reader's attention to the foundations of the South: It isn't all hate and struggle. There are memories of pleasant associations, memories buried indelibly in the mind of every middle-class child. Memories of a classless, colorless world. Memories of innocence before the fall. (Grau 1964, 48)

2 Like Virginia Durr, with whom Fred Hobson deals in his book But Now I See, Grau's goal is to trace back “the origin of a doubt” (qtd. in Hobson 123) to make people understand that class and race cannot be used to evaluate an individual's position in a given society. It might be utopian to think that the gap between people of different colors can

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fully be bridged, but as Hobson suggests, it is only at the “intersection [between paradoxes and contradictions] that any honest discussion of contemporary southern life increasingly must lie” (Hobson 147). Walker Percy's comments on the race issue go in the same direction: I don't mind saying or writing what I think on the social issues or the race issue in the South. […] And when any writer in the South pretends he can write a novel and ignore the social issue of the Negro, something is wrong. (Cremeens 17)

3 My aim here is to study how in his 1977 novel Lancelot1 Percy tries to make sense of the paradox inherent in the South and succeeds in toning down the eponymous character's oft-commented upon violence by picturing his relationship to Elgin, his African- American house help. The phrase “shadowy figure” used in the title of this article can thus apply to both characters: Lancelot is a man isolated in the “shadowy world” of his pigeonhole, trying to pull the strings as if he were the behind-the-scenes operator, and Elgin ends up being an intermediary between Lancelot's ordinary life and his wife's secret adventures. As a consequence, Lancelot and Elgin can be perceived as mirrors or doubles of each other (the white knight/the black knight). In the novel, Percy provides a thought-provoking treatment of the racial issue at the core of the southern experience and illustrates C. Hugh Holman's concept of the South as “a riddle union of opposites” when he emphasizes the complexity of the region's main features: “calm grace and raw hatred,” alongside “polished manners and violence” (Holman 180). As Holman explains, “The southern writer has been uniquely equipped by his history to draw the symbol of guilt and to serve, himself, as an example” (Holman 196). Percy started reevaluating his social ethics when he joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1947 (O'Gorman 1999/2000, 70)2, as his depiction of African-Americans testifies. After focusing on the way race relations are presented in Lancelot's confessional narrative, I will analyze the portrait that emerges of a character that might eventually be referred to as Percy's “Artifical Nigger,” for, like Flannery O'Connor's, he has “redemptive qualities” (O'Connor 78).

1. Lancelot: Percy's “Southern Moderate”

4 Farrell O'Gorman believes that Percy showed a true interest in the racial issue in his first two novels only, and that his novels after The Last Gentleman “show (…) little concern with race” (O'Gorman 1999/2000, 87). Adrienne V. Akins would certainly not concur with this critic since she recently devoted an essay to Love in the Ruins in which she concludes that “Percy depicts racism as not only a social problem but, even more significantly, as a sinful failure of love” (Akins 72). It seems to me that Percy's views also filter through Lancelot and that Elgin's presence and the importance allotted to him testify to the writer's concern for racial equality. Studies of this novel generally center on the eponymous character and his search for sin, forgetting that he is helped along the way by an African-American character whose friendship and faithfulness he values. 3 So far, all the essays on Lancelot have dealt solely with Lancelot's immorality. In her study of the “search for moral standards,” Bernadette Prochaska merely mentions Elgin as the person who tapes the adultery at the core of the book. In fact, even though Lancelot proves to be “immoral” as far as his reaction to his wife's betrayal is concerned, he shows a lot of concern for Elgin and thus somehow echoes Percy's moral standards on the racial issue.4 Lancelot can therefore be read as an example of Suzanne

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W. Jones' theory that “contemporary fiction set in the South can (…) help imagine new ways of racial knowing” (Jones 3).

5 Upon discovering his wife's adultery, Lancelot reflects on his life and makes the following assessment: There I sat in my pigeonnier, happy as could be, master of Belle Isle, the loveliest house on the River Road, gentleman and even a bit of a scholar (Civil War, of course), married to a beautiful rich loving (I thought) wife, and father (I thought) to a lovely little girl; a moderate reader, moderate liberal, moderate drinker (I thought), moderate music lover, moderate hunter and fisherman, and past president of the United Way. I moderately opposed segregation. I was moderately happy. (L 24)

6 Everything in this description suggests that Lancelot feels incomplete. The inclusion of commentaries ('I thought') calls attention not only to the frailty of the facts he is exposing, but also to the gap between what he thought and what is. On the surface, he is a perfect Southerner but deep down he knows that there is an evil current underneath the smooth surface. What is interesting for my purpose is the reference to segregation for it places the novel in a specific context and suggests that, just like Lancelot's life, the South is in a precarious situation.

7 Percy's character is also reminiscent of comments made by the writer in an essay entitled “The Southern Moderate” (1957): The Southern moderate (…) is a man of good will who is aware of the seriousness of the problem, is searching for a solution, but disagrees that the solution is simple and can be effected overnight. (Percy 1991, 95)

8 Indeed, Lancelot knows that the racial problem is one that cannot be set aside and he is happy to say that “The blacks after all were right, the whites were wrong, and it was a pleasure to tell them so” (L 59). When Lancelot explains that he “cannot tolerate this age” (L 154, L 156, L 157, L 159), he not only associates it with his wife's betrayal of the marriage pact but also with a duel fought by one of his ancestors resulting from someone's exposing his origins—the fact that his father was a “Negro” (L 154). His conclusion, “I do not think men should butcher each other like animals” (L 155), proves his awareness that what he has done is not moral either. Indeed, as Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. reminds us, Lancelot “confidently asserts to Percival at one point that his actions were not evil but insignificant because they revealed nothing to him” (Brinkmeyer 38).

9 Recalling his scholarly work on the Civil War and the tourists from the Midwest he showed around Belle Isle, his family plantation, Lancelot mentions his desire to explain the racial issue to those foreign to the South: Things are not so simple as they seem, I told them. There is something to be said for the master-slave relation: the strong, self-reliant, even piratical master who carves a regular barony in the wilderness and lives like Louis XIV, yet who treats his slaves well, and so help me they weren't so bad off on Belle Isle. (L 59)

10 Lancelot specifies that he did this “somewhat tongue-in-cheek,” which implies that he sees the past with the necessary distance (he both mocks his ancestors and suggests that they were not too harsh on their slaves). As Susan V. Donaldson has put it, “Belle Isle and all that it represents no longer exist as a viable and organic part of everyday life but as objects rendered alien and autonomous by the pressures of a market economy” (Donaldson 68). Lancelot's making fun of his visitors' expectations and his

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comment that such people “hate the niggers worse than we ever did” (L 59) reinforces the point Percy makes in “Red, White, and Blue-Gray” when he writes that The South has gotten rich and the North has gotten Negroes, and the Negro is treated badly in both places. The Northerners won and freed the slaves and now are fleeing to the suburbs to get away from them. (Percy 1991, 81)

11 By pitting the two points of view against each other, Percy means to prove that “Racial injustice is bad business” (Percy 1991, 97). In Lancelot, he addresses this issue by means of a satirical text so as to “[a]ttack the fake in the name of the real” (Percy 1991, 161) since northern hypocrisy is, in his mind, as detrimental to the black population as southern racism.

12 Comparing himself to his cousin Royal on what he calls “the 'nigger' business” (L 29, L 30), Lancelot ends up thinking that he actually does not do much himself: [Royal] operated on blacks and whites alike and didn't call them niggers or even by their first names and sat them down together in his waiting room and did more for them than I did. He outdid me in the race thing. He did more and talked less. (L 30)

13 The absence of punctuation in the first sentence and the use of polysyndeton emphasize the fact that Royal's positive attitude towards African-Americans has no limit, while the length of the sentence contrasts with the short sentences following it. The paratactic introduction of his feeling of inferiority makes the gap separating Lancelot from Royal even wider. This episode marks a turning-point in his apprehension of “race” as a concept, since later on he seems more aware of the dark other's presence, both in his family background and in his present surroundings. He mentions dealing with “N.A.A.C.P cases” (L 71) and “helping Negroes” (L 87), thus making his involvement quite obvious.

14 Not only through his attitude as a budding activist, but also through his attacks on the twentieth century—that age he considers intolerable—Lancelot can be seen as a rebel. As for the issue of “race,” he explains that during the 1960s he made a point to disagree with some of his fellow Americans: “it was a pleasure to take the blacks' side: one had the best of two worlds: the blacks were right and I wanted to be unpopular with the whites. It was a question of boredom” (L 58). Lancelot's final comment sheds light on his subversive posture and raises suspicions about the sincerity of his commitment. Stylistically, the use of aposiopesis to separate the motives from the actual behavior makes it clear that cause and consequence are at odds. Lancelot may be defending this “UN-lost Cause” but at bottom he is trying to give meaning to his life by choosing an unlikely path. In addition, the unpopularity that Lancelot is talking about here is not foreign to his past lethal actions: he killed several people also because he wanted to fight against the sins of his contemporaries and, as a consequence, was sent to an asylum. When he notes that “the other day I ran into a black man with whom I had stood shoulder to shoulder defying angry whites” and that together “[they] won the fight” ( L 59), he makes his position clear: he is looking for social equality and truthfulness and wants to do right, no matter how much he might be hated for his political positions.5 Nevertheless, the encounter appears to be quite awkward and again, aposiopesis is brought into play: “We eyed each other uneasily. There was nothing to say. He told me he had had a slight stroke, nothing serious. We had won. So he bought a color TV, took up golf […]” (L 59). The communication gap is made obvious through the use of indirect speech and reads as proof of Lancelot's uneasiness concerning his involvement. Still, the use of “we” to refer to both himself and the

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African-American shows that color no longer matters; a fact that is comically reinforced with the final comments on the television and on golf.

2. A friend in need is a friend indeed: Elgin's changing status

15 When Elgin makes his first appearance, he is shown “[sitting] in the slave chair, made by slaves for slaves” (L 43) and is therefore identified as a servant. However, Lancelot is quick to express his true feelings for him: “Elgin is, was, the only man, woman, or child I would trust completely outside of you, the more credit to him because it's required of you, isn't it?” (L 44). Lancelot breaks the temporality of his narration by juxtaposing the present situation with his memories: the novel consists in his confession to his priest-friend Percival and, even if he often asks questions to his confessor, the reader only gets Percival's answers in the last pages of the novel and they are limited to “yes” or “no” (L 256-257). Elgin is more important than Percival because he played a part in the events Lancelot is now recounting6 and is part of Lancelot's daily activities: “I went to my office as usual, came home for lunch as usual, returned to the pigeonnier as usual, but instead of having three drinks and a nap, I sent for Elgin” (L 89). Elgin's importance increases to the point that he becomes Lancelot's eyes.

16 Indeed, Elgin first appears to be a kind of informer for Lancelot who wonders about his wife and the film crew that is shooting at Belle Isle: “Elgin,” I said. I had been thinking. “Did you happen to hear what time they got in last night? The reason I ask is I heard somebody, maybe a prowler, around two.” Elgin looked at me. “They didn't come in till after three.” He knew who “they” were. (L 43)

17 This dialogue suggests that Elgin functions as the kind of “invisible man”7 Lancelot wants him to be (L 99) so he can report everything he sees (L 98). When Lancelot needs to ask him for “a favor” (L 91), he puts himself on an equal footing with Elgin and they sit “in two slave chairs” (L 90). Before he explains what kind of favor he wants, Lancelot provides a very detailed description of Elgin (L 91-93) and, even though he does seem supercilious when he displays Elgin's feelings towards him and mocks the truth of the facts that have brought them together, there is little doubt that he values Elgin as an individual: “Elgin was smart, Elgin was well educated. Elgin could read and write better than most whites” (L 92). In addition, no matter how he puts it, Lancelot did save Elgin's family from the KKK. (L 92) and helped him get a scholarship (L 91)—ample proof of his concern for the man. In fact, this sounds like misplaced modesty and confirms that Lancelot wants to be perceived as a “tough guy” devoid of feelings. Like some of the writers Suzanne Jones studies in Race Mixing, Percy seems to “have found a way to model better interracial relationships or promote racial reconciliation without succumbing to 'friendship orthodoxy' or 'the integration illusion'” (Jones 15). Lancelot's telling Elgin “'I want you to do [me a favor] without further explanation on my part'” (L 91) and Elgin's accepting to play the game makes their relationship one of complete intersubjectivity8 and trust. Lancelot observes: “Elgin, I do believe, would do what I asked, not out of gratitude (a very bad emotion as both he and I knew), but because he liked me and felt sorry for me” (L 94)—a revealing comment implying that in Percy's aesthetics, interracial friendship is possible. Lancelot admires Elgin for his scientific look on everything (L 100) and his fondness for the man is clear in many

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instances when he mentions his smile (L 99, L 100) —in a way that goes against the common racial cliché—or his general attitude towards life: “Find happiness in problems and puzzles and mathematical gold bugs” (L 101).9 In some of their exchanges the idea that they belong to different races even disappears: “In his triumph [Elgin] permitted himself to be what he was: a twenty-two-year-old Southern youth who smiled and laughed a great deal” (L 100). At this specific moment, the color of Elgin's skin is not important for what Lancelot sees is only a comforting presence.

18 The favor Lancelot is asking for is that Elgin keep track of everyone's “comings and goings” so that he can get “the whole picture” (L 97). Although there is no further explanation as to what Lancelot is precisely looking for, the intimacy that the two characters share tells volumes: “[Elgin's] single swift opaque look told me he did understand. Understood and agreed. Understood even that there was something I needed to know but didn't want to tell him, nor did he want me to” (L 97). Their pact is sealed in secrecy, which explains why Elgin finds it difficult to read his report out loud after a night of spying (L 124-125). He actually “puts distance between himself and this business” (L 124) and starts calling everyone Mister and Miss, which, according to Lancelot's analysis, suggests that “he had retreated to being an old-time servant” (L 124). Such a regression into a subaltern role suggests that African-Americans deride the system that has long kept them in submission. When Lancelot asks for another favor, Elgin immediately agrees: “Elgin, there are some things you and only you can do for me.” “I'll do them.” (L 129)

19 In fact, Lancelot's plan is twofold: he has to phone his cousin who—thanks to the money Lancelot lent him (L 125)—owns the Holiday Inn where the film crew is staying, and arrange it so with him that the crew will eventually be housed at Belle Isle; that way, he will be able to set up his “cinéma-vérité” (L 128). Elgin is to be his cinematographer: “I'm asking a favor of you. I need someone to help me and only you can do it. There are two reasons for this. One is that you have technical ability to help me. The other is that you are one of the two or three people in the world I trust. The others are probably your mother and father. I must tell you that it is a large favor because you will be doing it without knowing why.” (L 140-141)

20 The shift in subject in this chain of sentences exposes Lancelot's vulnerability: the first two and the last one use the first person singular and therefore place Lancelot in the position of the beggar, while in the two middle ones the subject is the second person, which conveys Lancelot's empowerment of Elgin. Elgin's role then is instrumental in the unfolding action—without him, Lancelot would never get proof of his wife's adultery on tape. Like Ellison's character, Elgin ends up playing with colors: he indirectly fills the white pages of Lancelot's story with black words. Thus, this empowering process shows that, if originally Lancelot's rebellion is against contemporary sinfulness, it eventually becomes one against racial or social injustice.

3. Elgin's redemptive qualities

21 Critics have generally condemned Lancelot for being too much of a Southerner. Gary M. Ciuba writes that he “commits that unpardonable sin of turning people into objects. Elgin, Lancelot's personal cinematographer and sound man, is reduced to his ancestral status as a slave…” (Ciuba 108). In fact, a close reading reveals something totally

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different: Lancelot does say that “[Elgin was] in a sense 'my nigger'; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to 'them,' if they were 'ours'” (L 142); but he introduces this comment as an “odd thought,” which testifies to his awareness that it might be misunderstood. The many references to “sin” throughout Lancelot's confession and his desire to map out his own anatomy of that notion suggest he is involved in a project that is not foreign to the “conversion narratives” Fred Hobson studies in But Now I See.10 The above example indicates that Lancelot is “able to distinguish racial right from wrong at the point [he tells his] story” (Hobson 6). As he recounts the events at Belle Isle, Lancelot proves his acute knowledge of the race problem—though, as a southern moderate, he is very careful what he says. There is little doubt that in the perfect world he foresees at the end of his confession, he will definitely give African-Americans a space of their own.

22 Telling the story allows Lancelot to step back and see things differently. Knowing Percy's interest in cinematic techniques, it seems that the interplay of light and darkness is a means of inscribing the race issue in the novel. The tables are somehow turned on racial discrimination since the African-American character is in charge of revealing the truth, of bringing the light.11 Oddly enough, when Elgin brings Lancelot the incriminating tape, the latter is filled with anger for he believes Elgin has played it beforehand: Again a confession which does me little credit but it is important I tell you the truth. I had to admit I was angry because he had looked. Looked at the videotape. Then it was I discovered in myself what I had so often despised in others. For I had expected Elgin to do what I told him, be a technological eavesdropper and spy for me but not listen or look. More than that: I had expected that somehow he could not look—just as the hicks I despised believed that through some magical or at least providential dispensation the Negro bellboy cannot see the naked white woman in the same hotel room. Cannot even if he wanted to: she is somehow invisible. (L 180-181, Percy's emphasis)

23 Such a comment reinforces the idea that Lancelot's narrative also includes what Hobson would call “racial enlightenment” (Hobson 2): even though he finds it trying, the character is confessing that like any other Southerner he was hurt in his pride because a black man had “looked” at his Belle and seen her naked—on top of it all with another man. In this instance, Lancelot is protective of his wife's image and of his own. When Elgin explains that he just checked the beginning of the tape for quality, Lancelot is relieved; at the same time, his referring to Elgin as “the perfect nigger” (L 181) brings him back to the old southern way of treating people of color.12 The ambivalence of Lancelot's feelings vanishes when he reflects that Elgin “still had the power to set things straight” (L 181); Lancelot thus has him reintegrate the realm of friendship he should not have removed him from. Even though Lancelot closes this episode with scornful comments on Elgin's behavior (L 182), he later behaves very considerately and saves him from the final cataclysm he has carefully orchestrated.

24 Lancelot's plan to avenge his honor is to blow up Belle Isle; but before he sets his plan in motion, he arranges to save those he feels have “good sense.” Unsurprisingly, Elgin is among them and the dialogue that is reported shows how much Lancelot cares for his young friend. He gives him $ 75,000 to secure his future, provided he uses the money for two things: “One is to finish your education at M.I.T. despite the fact that your scholarship has run out. […] The other is you want to marry your classmate Ethel Shapiro and buy a house in Woodale” (L 198).

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25 Lancelot is aware that it is hard for black people to buy a house there and he admires Elgin's determination to do so against all odds. Lancelot's condition is simple: he wants Elgin to leave right away and take the “only people around here who have any sense with him” (L 199). Lancelot's gesture proves that he is not the “immoral” monster a lot of critics have described. On the contrary, his attitude towards Elgin shows that there is one sin he has come to terms with and overcome. Lancelot thus belongs to the texts Suzanne Jones believes can help “imagine our way out of the social structures and mind-sets that mythologize the past, fragment individuals, prejudge people, and divide communities” (L 17).

26 Lancelot's life started to crumble when he found out about his wife's betrayal and suddenly realized his existence had been wasted: “The moment I knew for a fact that Margot had been fucked by another man, it was as if I had been waked from a twenty- year dream” (L 107). His situation can be compared to that of the man in the first movie Binx mentions in The Moviegoer: although this man “found himself a stranger in a strange city,” Binx thinks “things were not so bad after all” (Percy 1961, 4) since it gave the man a chance to start his life over. In much the same way, Lancelot notes: “There was a sense of astonishment, of discovery, of a new world opening up, but the new world was totally unknown” (L 42). Lancelot also becomes 'a stranger in a strange place' and believes this new world to be a world of freedom, a world with no boundaries, a world in which he will be able to act (L 107).

4. Conclusion

27 During his confession, Lancelot expresses his hopes for the future: “There will be leaders and there will be followers. […] There will be men who are strong and pure of heart, not for Christ's sake but for their own sake” (L 178). Lancelot's dream is a dream of independence. In his society, one which will undoubtedly integrate ethnic minorities, “One will work and take care of one's own, live and let live, and behave with a decent respect toward others” (L 158). The idea of respect is central to understanding Lancelot's story, all the more as it is epitomized in his relationship with Elgin which is based on mutual commitment.

28 As Lancelot leaves the madhouse, he also puts an end to his confession and he feels cold: You know the feeling of numbness and coldness, no, not a feeling, but a lack of feeling, that I spoke of during the events at Belle Isle? […] The truth is that during all the terrible events that night at Belle Isle, I felt nothing at all. Nothing good, nothing bad, not even a sense of discovery. I feel nothing now except a certain coldness. (L 253)

29 The coldness he feels is a clue concerning his psychological development. He does not want to admit it but he has understood what went wrong, he can see his actions in a different light and can now describe them as “terrible.” The use of the present and past forms of the verb 'to feel' also proves that he has learned something from the telling of his story. He may have failed in his search for evil, but he has succeeded in showing that he is human—with flaws, but also with qualities: bringing Elgin out of the shadowy world he was confined to does make Lancelot less objectionable.

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---. Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

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Vauthier, Simone. “Mimesis and Violence in Lancelot.” In Delta N° 13: Walker Percy. Eds. Ben Forkner and G. Kennedy. Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 1981. 83-102.

NOTES

1. All references to the novel are to Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, which will be abbreviated to L throughout the article. 2. For a detailed analysis of the religious symbolism in the novel, see O'Gorman's essay and his book. 3. Lewis A. Lawson refers to Elgin as Lancelot's “faithful retainer” (Lawson 78) while Simone Vauthier mentions the character's mimetic behavior (Vauthier 84). 4. In a 1977 interview, Percy explained that, among other things, he intended the novel to remind the reader about “the [revolution] in the South, which was lost because of the wrongs of slavery” (Mitgang 147). 5. Incidentally, Lancelot claims that “[t]here are worse things than being disliked: it keeps one alive and alert” (L 59). What he suggests is that difference is not a flaw but a quality, an element he uses to demonstrate that he can see clearly through his age and that, unlike many of his fellow Americans, he will not be fooled by appearances. 6. Lancelot's words make him sound like someone who does not want to hurt Percival's feelings or imply that what he is doing for him by listening is pointless compared to what Elgin did. 7. Elgin is also very much like the character Shirley Ann Grau derives from Ralph Ellison's famous narrator in The Condor Passes (see the opening words of her novel). 8. This term is borrowed from Gabriel Marcel's philosophy, which Percy had read closely. For Gabriel Marcel, “intersubjectivity” is the intimate, subjective relation between two persons. He explains: “Ce qui est en cause, c'est l'acte par lequel, au lieu de me défendre de l'autre, je m'ouvre à lui et me le rend en quelque façon pénétrable dans la mesure même où je deviens moi-même pénétrable pour lui. Au lieu que toute objectivité, et notamment celle du lui, se réfère à un certain dialogue entre moi et moi- même, ce qui implique une relation triadique, - lorsque je suis en présence du toi, une unification intérieure s'opère en moi, à la faveur de laquelle une dyade devient possible” (Marcel 58). In an essay on The Moviegoer, Janet Hobbs clarifies what Marcel means: “Intersubjectivity is a unification which allows each person to transcend his own separateness through sharing with and caring for the other. Bringing joy and

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meaning and completeness to two lives, such a relationship combines aesthetic enjoyment with ethical responsibility” (Hobbs 47). 9. The allusion to Poe's story, “The Gold Bug” makes it possible to establish a parallel between Elgin and Jupiter, the caricatured African-American, for both men are totally devoted to a white person (either his employer for the former or his master for the latter). Poe's narrator describes Jupiter as a man “who had been manumitted before the reverses of the family, but who could be induced, neither by threats nor by promises, to abandon what he considered his right of attendance upon the footsteps of his young 'Massa Will' (Poe 561). Ultimately, in both Lancelot and “The Gold Bug”, it is noticeable that the African-American character transcends racial boundaries by becoming a point of reference in the interpretation of the story, as one of Poe's characters has it: “Perhaps, after all, it was rather a desire than an actual belief;—but do you know that Jupiter's silly words, about the bug being of solid gold, had a remarkable effect upon my fancy?” (Poe 584). 10. Hobson uses this expression to refer to “a form of southern self-expression not seen until the 1940s”, that is “works […] which qualify as racial conversion narratives [and] in which the authors, all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society, confess racial wrongdoings and are 'converted,' in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment” (Hobson 1-2). 11. For an analysis of light and darkness symbolism see Préher. 12. Race relations are closely linked with the gender issue, especially in the South, where the preservation of the purity of white women was at the core of the racial divide. The fact that a white man asks an African-American to spy on his wife, thus tempting him, proves that Percy enjoys using clichés and questioning racial boundaries.

ABSTRACTS

Starting from Fred Hobson's reading of southern memoirs as “conversion narratives” in But Now I See (1999), this article aims at showing that Walker Percy's novel, Lancelot (1977), can be read as an attempt at depicting interracial relations in the South. Numerous critics have focused on the narrative voice and on Lancelot's unreliability as a narrator; yet Lancelot's various reflections on his bond with Elgin, his African-American help, show another facet of his character and make it possible to read his search for sin in a whole new way. True, he breaks several biblical commandments, but he also behaves like a good Christian with Elgin by treating him as a confident and privileged friend and not as an inferior being. By analyzing how the relationship between master and servant evolves and how Elgin gradually becomes an involuntary accomplice in the massacre that takes up much of the narrative space, the reader understands the true meaning of Lancelot's confession.

Partant du concept de conversion narrative qu'analyse Fred Hobson dans son ouvrage But Now I See (1999), cet article a pour objet de montrer que le roman de Walker Percy, Lancelot (1977), peut être lu comme une tentative de description des relations interraciales dans le Sud. Bien des critiques se sont intéressés à la voix narrative et au fait que Lancelot se révèle être UN narrateur

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peu fiable ; pourtant, les diverses réflexions que propose le personnage sur ses liens avec Elgin, son domestique noir, montrent une autre facette de sa personnalité et permettent de relire sa quête du péché d'une toute autre façon. Certes, il enfreint nombre de commandements bibliques, mais il se conduit en bon chrétien en traitant Elgin comme UN confident et UN ami privilégié et non comme UN individu inférieur. En analysant comment les relations entre maître et subalterne évoluent et comment, de domestique, Elgin devient le complice involontaire d'une tuerie qui occupe une grande partie du récit, le lecteur comprend véritablement le sens de la confession que lui livre Lancelot.

INDEX

Keywords: race relations in the South, violence Mots-clés: relations raciales dans le Sud, violence

AUTHORS

GÉRALD PREHER Maître de Conférences Institut Catholique de Lille [email protected]

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Burning Mississippi: Race, Fatherhood and the South in A Time to Kill (1996)

Hélène Charlery

Introduction

1 In 1989, in Clanton, Mississippi, Jake Brigance, a young white local lawyer, is hired to defend Carl Lee Hailey, a black father charged with the murder of the two white men who savagely raped his ten-year-old daughter. This is the plot of Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill, a Hollywood-made courtroom drama on race relations in Mississippi, adapted from John Grisham's first best-seller and autobiographical novel.

2 Not randomly, when A Time to Kill was released in American theaters, several movie critics disparagingly compared Joel Schumacher's film to the 1962 movie adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's novel directed by Robert Mulligan. Hal Hinson from The Washington Post, called it a “stick, fast-paced and glamorously sexy […] To Kill a Mockingbird with a blockbuster make-over” (Hinson). In Variety, Todd MacCarthy gave more credit to the film's cast than to “this sweaty Southern courtroom drama [with] its To Kill a Mockingbird setup” (MacCarthy). Rob Dreher, from the Sun Sentinel, laughed at this “visceral tale of a brave white lawyer trying to defend a black man in a racially charged Southern climate—A Time to Kill a Mockingbird” (Dreher). As Roger Ebert from Chicago Sun-Times rightfully argued in his review of the film, A Time to Kill raises interesting questions, “but they don't occur while you're watching the film” (Ebert).

3 Like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill mixes three movie genres: the courtroom drama, the race movie and the southern film. Yet, while clinging to the filmic codes of the courtroom drama (Papke), both films play different cultural works regarding both race and the South. When To Kill a Mockingbird was released, Hollywood had ceased to portray Louisiana and Mississippi as the “romantic backdrops for films about the Old South, the planter elite, riverboat gamblers, and showboats” (Cox 86). In films of the 1930s, the comforting images of the southern upper class in a colorful landscape

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undeniably brought relief during the Depression years (Liénard-Yeterian 38). But by the mid-1940s, and most importantly in the 1950s and 1960s, the South had become the location where central characters defeated the region's institutional and collective racism in movies such as To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heart of the Night (1967). Hollywood then provided a different stance both on racism and the region. A “backward South”, correlated to “racism and tradition”, was then adroitly distanced from “a modern or 'enlightened nation'” associated with democracy and change (Duck 3).

4 In her article, “Angel or Demon: Peforming the South in Cinema”, Marie Liénard- Yeterian commented these binary visions of the South as an idyllic setting or as a land of evil and horror. As she put it [t]he South has always provided a reservoir of images and narrative resources used by Hollywood to respond to certain national needs. […] It projects idealized and comforting images by offering alternatives to distressing and current events, or it processes fears and anxieties generated by the news […]. Filmic representations of the South provide emotional paradigms and elaborate psychological scripts that bring comfort either because they offer an outlet for certain fears or because they offer a comfortable distancing (“they” are not “us”). (Liénard-Yeterian 39-40)

5 The emergence of integration and message films coincided with what Francis M. Nevins called the “Golden Age of the law film” and the defense lawyer (Papke 474-475). Out of the three genres, Atticus Finch, because he defended a black man falsely accused of the rape of a white woman, facing an all-white jury in the Deep South, came out as a southern icon, a highly popular redemptive figure and “the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism” (Crespino 9).

6 The three movie genres were revived in the late 1980s and the 1990s, meanwhile trying to reenact Atticus Finch's racial heroism (Graham 17). In A Time to Kill, Carl Lee Hailey, played by Samuel L. Jackson, does not of course stand in the dusty blue overalls that Tom, the black defendant of To Kill a Mockingbird, wore facing the judge next to Atticus Finch. Yet, though wearing a red tie on a white shirt, he similarly stands next to Jake Brigance, his white defense lawyer, whose costume strangely resembles Gregory Peck's in the 1962 movie adaptation.

7 Yet, as Donald Bogle put it in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films, while the 1960s and 1970s movies denounce southern racism, “the subconscious goal of the 1980s may often have been to rid American films of the late 1960s/early 1970s [black] rebellious figures” (Bogle 269). Therefore, when Hollywood addressed the race theme by the late 1980s and 1990s, it actually “flirted [with it] but avoided a full examination of the subject” mainly because its history of the black population was centered on how it was experienced and explored by the white central characters (Bogle 301-316).

8 Indeed, Mississippi Burning (1989) and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) illustrate Hollywood's 1980s and 1990s efforts at “whiten[ing] the southern past”, which implied cinematically rereading of the civil rights movement and era “from the perspective of white [male] officers and lawyers” (Barker and McKee 10-11). It allowed Hollywood producers and filmmakers to redefine “white masculine heroism” in the post-Reagan era, by showing how the moral and human values behind the hero's individual actions illustrated the best of American contemporary values (Jeffords 118). In addition, Atticus Finch's liberal heroism was built by the combined efforts he put to defeat southern racism in court and to bring a moral message to his son and his daughter at home. Therefore, the 1990s

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reenactment of the Atticus Finch-heroism reinforced the conservative values of the father-figure as a central element of the family structure.

9 This article seeks to examine this cinematic conservative rereading of white masculinity and fatherhood in A Time to Kill's South. The examination of how the film depicts the two southern white men who rape the black little girl will lead to discuss the portrayal of the region. This first negative characterization is concomitant to the construction of the white liberal lawyer figure. However, despite the dichotomous categorizations of these figures, the acquittal of the black man in A Time to Kill leaves critical viewers with an ambiguous racial message that must be addressed eventually to understand how white male heroism is built through the film's positive images of manhood and fatherhood.

The rednecks and the South

10 In an article analyzing the evolving representations of the South from the first movie adaptation of John MacDonald's The Executioners in 1962 to the second adaptation released in 1991, Claire Dutrieux concludes that, since To Kill a Mockingbird and then Mississippi Burning, moviegoers have been accustomed to watching films in which the South “evolves in [racialist] fear” of others and reacts violently to it. Yet, movies after movies, it has been shifting from an Old South to a New one (Dutrieux 207). In A Time to Kill, the shift occurs with the assured death of the South's villains—representing the Old South—and the moral transformation of the local community under the benevolent impact of the “redeemed” southern white lawyer, turning the region into a “New” South.

11 A Time to Kill brings out the issues of racial violence and racism in the South from the very beginning of the movie. But it distinguishes the two issues, by associating racial violence with the two white rapists on the one hand, and racism with the rest of the county's white community, on the other. The film depicts the two men as rednecks whose violence, spurred by drug and alcohol abuse, is racist, ignorant and gratuitous (Laurent 88). As Allison Graham put it in Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (2001) the irrationally violent redneck is the indispensable convention of Hollywood's white redemption tales, the character whose essential, class-bound criminality is offered up, movie after movie, as proof of the inherent goodness of all other whites. (Graham 17)

12 The movie's introduction is purposely staged so as to bind the two rednecks' irrational racial violence and their criminality to “an inherent characteristic of class rather than race” (Graham 13). Several filmic devices used to insist on the two white men's negative cinematic presentation go further than John Grisham's description of the two rapists in the novel's first pages (Grisham 1-5).

13 The novel starts with the rape scene, but the latter only intervenes in the conclusion of the film's introduction scene. After a long still shot on the County's quiet country landscape, the pick-up truck of two men visually disturbs this quiet visual moment: the pick-up truck covers the entire landscape with the road dust it lifts on its full-blast ride. The quick pace of the editing and the close-ups on the drug they use while driving madly throughout the country, contrast sharply with the soundless images of the little girl in the black grocery store. The close-ups on the grocery list that she attentively

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follows insist on the idea that she is not just a child, but somebody's daughter. This cross-cutting effect is meant to bring a vivid contrast between the slow, quiet routine of the black characters and, on the other hand, the careless lifestyle and racist violence of the two rednecks, as they throw bottles of beer on the roof of a black inhabitant's house or on a basketball hoop while two black youngsters are casually playing ball.

14 The two men's despicable racist actions are filmed to distinguish them from the rest of Clanton's white community. The surprising look of the black inhabitants confronted with their gratuitous violence, their clothes or the close-ups on the four packs of beer that they buy at the same black grocery store are opposed to the wide long shot on Jake Brigance's house, at the precise moment when the latter walks out to go to work, followed on the house's porch by his lovely wife and daughter, and his dog. Thus, the film's two rednecks are cast in some form of racial marginality, because they disrupt the peaceful atmosphere in the black part of the County.

15 This racist violence visually prepares the audience to the rape scene that is preceded by the racist and sexual comments of the two rednecks as they stop by the young black girl who walks by herself on the country road. By the moment one of them throws a can of beer on her head, the viewers can only see the girl through shots on her body parts. They are visually encouraged to understand that after the passage of the two rednecks, Tonya has gone from an innocent black daughter grocery shopping to a dehumanized body.

16 The rape scene is depicted both through straight cuts and through a subjective camera showing the events as they are lived by the black girl: the cutting thus crosses shots on the sweating faces of the aggressors as they are seen by Tonya lying on the floor, and shots on parts of her body being touched by the two adults or tightened by the rope. The latter are meant to suggest the progression and the inevitability of the rape. While the audience can hear her constantly calling both her father and her mother during the rape, they can also hear the insults and death threats of the two rapists. The scene concludes on the rednecks' failed attempt at hanging the girl to a tree, whose branch breaks under the small body's weight. Thus, the rape scene is graphically staged so that the audience is visually disgusted by the physical presence of the rednecks on the screen after the rape.

17 Because the “spectacle of racial redemption” implies the “expulsion of the lawless redneck from southern society [so that] the moral purity of whiteness […] is affirmed” (Graham 13), the violent death of the film's two rednecks is as much cinematically conventional as their irrational violence. Therefore, when Carl Lee Hailey storms out his M16 on his daughter's aggressors in the city's court hall, a slow-motion shot of the shooting scene seals the cinematic punishment of the two rednecks.

18 Yet, in the movie's introduction, the two men's own violence and racism, the violence of their arrest or of their death, are grounded in the South and the state of Mississippi. A sticker of the Confederate flag on the pick-up truck's rear window stands behind most shots on the two men's faces in the introduction scene; the flag is as well in the background of the out-of-town bar where Clanton's black sheriff arrests the two men. The dialogue between one of the white rapists and the black sheriff alters racial insults (“Blue gums, get out of here and grab a branch”) and references insisting on the uniqueness of these two rednecks in the county (“unless there's another redneck asshole with a yellow truck...... with a Confederate flag”). The flag hung on the wall appears in the background on the shot when the white rapist utters “You go to hell

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nigger”. Eventually, the vertical tracking shot after the shooting displays the two rapists' bloodstained bodies lying under the seal and motto of the state of Mississippi, Virtute et Armis (“By valor and arms”) that covers the entire hall's floor.

19 Such graphic presentation of the state or these specific characters is not random: “The idea of Mississippi has functioned in the American imagination as a kind of holding bin for negative things about the nation” (Kathryn McKee quoted by Frazier). Likewise, in Hollywood race/South dramas, the state has become the location which epitomizes the South's “tradition and racism” (Duck 3). If there have indeed been changes in how race issues or the South had been depicted in Hollywood movies from Gone With the Wind (1939) to To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), this has also implied changes in the depictions of Hollywood's favorite locales, especially Mississippi.

20 Both limiting and inscribing the two rednecks' racial violence and their deaths to the state of Mississippi's Virtute et Armis localize or seclude these rednecks within the limits of the state. In A Time to Kill, the vertical tracking shot provides the viewers with Marie Liénard-Yeterian's idea of the “comforting distancing” role and function of the South as filmic object. This secures the cinematic idea that such racist violence can only erupt and be solved in the South, meanwhile providing the context in which white male heroism can be built to the audience.

21 Indeed the characterization of the two rednecks is accompanied with a graphic acceptance of racism or class distinction between the white and black inhabitants of the County. Before the trial's final summation, Carl Lee Hailey both defines and explains that racial line to Jake Brigance, meanwhile normalizing it: We ain't no friends. We're on different sides of the line. I ain't never seen you in my part of town. You don't know where I live. Our daughters...... won't play together. […] You think just like them. […] You're one of them, don't you see? You think you ain't because you eat in Claude's…and you're on TV talking about black and white. But the fact is...you're just like them. When you look at me, you don't see a man. You see a black man […] You don't mean to be, but you are. It's how you's raised.

22 The movie indeed encourages viewers to perceive this racial separation, but it binds it to a class division. During the first scenes, the still shot on Jake Brigance's house in a middle class neighborhood invites the viewers to notice the contrast with the distanced houses of the black inhabitants, or to ponder at the fact that Tonya had to walk miles throughout the country to go to the nearest local grocery store. Similarly, the track-out at the end of the religious service Jake Brigance attends with his wife and family-in-law shows an exclusively white upper-middle class population in a plush church, which contrasts with the service in the following scene that only black inhabitants attend in a more modest church in another part of town. There are no white inhabitants witnessing Carl Lee Hailey walking out of his house bringing the shattered body of his daughter to the ambulance. Likewise, there are no black characters in the bar where the sheriff arrests the two white rapists.

23 A wide long shot on the customers at the Coffee Shop restaurant of the city center, before Jake Brigance is informed of Tonya's rape, depicts a significant racial organization of the extras. A black customer is indeed sitting at the counter of the restaurant in between white characters, and two black middle-class men sit in the middle of the shot, surrounded by other white customers sitting at their own tables. In the very background, an elderly black woman seems to be having breakfast with white women her age. Yet, the shot is too quick for the viewers to see without a pause.

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This very structured and conventional organization of the placing of the extras in the shot contrasts with the same quick wide long shot of the scene at Claude's, a more modest restaurant in the black part of the city, where only black customers are seen. In other words, in the city center, near the courthouse, characters of both races and of the same class do share the same place or space, because laws have changed and are now enforced, but there remain black and white parts of the southern town.

24 Most black characters of the film are poor, while most white characters are wealthy. The only poor whites are the two rednecks and those that are connected to them. Because none of the black characters commit gratuitous violent crimes, this dichotomous portrayal of race and class in the film's introduction leads to conclude that the two rednecks' social class indeed justifies both their racist violence and criminal behavior.

25 Because the redneck figure encapsulates all the racial bigotry of the Deep South, he is to be either redeemed by acknowledging such racist views or be killed as a punishment. On the other hand, the southern white lawyer will become the hero of this redemptive tale because he will have the capacity to “[transcend] the limits of [the southern] tradition and [attain] a liberal, morally rational racial viewpoint […], seen as quintessentially American” (Crespino 9). It is through this character that the County's white community will eventually “[accept] responsibility for racism” (Graham 13). Thus, both figures serve the same purpose of satisfying and reassuring a national movie audience on the film's race message.

The film's ambiguous racial message

26 In “Like writing history with lighting': film historique/vérité historique”, Robert A. Rosenstone claims that historic drama generally put individuals at the forefront of historical episodes, because the individualization of societal issues allows filmmakers to avoid addressing historical trauma on a collective basis, but rather to focus the viewers' attention on the personal solution or redemption of the central characters (Rosenstone 165). Like Rosenstone, Joseph Crespino brings a similar reading regarding race or southern movies: [H]aving a white racial hero at the center of the story allows the public to conceptualize race issues within an individual, moralistic framework. If racism exists only on an individual basis, then racial reform can occur only through individual moral reform—not through social or structural change that might challenge the legal, economic, or political status quo. (Crespino 26)

27 Contrary to To Kill a Mockingbird, which insists on the influence of the spontaneous mob in the perpetration of racist violence and lynching in the 1960s Mississippi, the racial violence that erupts after the double manslaughter in the movie A Time to Kill is individualized. Jake Brigance's summation in the film differs from Atticus Finch's. Rather than promoting the impartiality of the American justice system as in To Kill a Mockingbird, Jake Brigance relies on the individual living experience of the members of the jury (“I want you to listen to yourselves.”), not a collective thinking on race relations. A Time to Kill willfully leaves aside the pessimistic end of Harper Lee's novel or movie adaptation, concluding on Tom's death, only to focus the story on the white hero's individual construction:

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This is the strangeness of Atticus Finch's career: once a tool of liberal racial politics, Atticus has now become the pawn of racial conservatism. […] As conservatives beatify the racial heroism of Atticus Finch, they fight the symptoms of the disease and fail to look for a cure that might get at the issue of white privilege […]. (Crespino 26)

28 Through close-ups on the faces of Klan members, Klan membership is then estranged from a white supremacist ideology that could be shared by the white inhabitants of the County. Instead, it is associated to characters that are either mere idiotic followers or motivated by criminal revenge. Although the viewers can watch Klan members foment different violent plans, they quickly learn that the Klan's influence has weakened and that most members are scattered in different counties throughout the state. In addition, the perpetration of this violence on screen is depicted as a single man's act, rather than by an organized group of men. The Klan is definitely eliminated from the city when the black sheriff handcuffs the three inhabitants who had joined the organization. But, the most surprising element of A Time to Kill's Klan members is that they only unleash their violence against the film's white characters.

29 Likewise, Joel Schumacher decided to give far less attention to the actions of the NAACP in the story than John Grisham did in his novel. The members of the organization are quickly estranged from the plot's ending as they are portrayed as being more interested in the black cause in the South than in Carl Lee Hailey or his family's sake. In A Time to Kill, the individualization of the white hero in the unfolding of the plot inevitably implies the filmic instrumentalization both of black characters and of racial tensions in the state as Roger Ebert's review of the film rightfully sums up: “the movie is interested in the white characters as people and the black characters (apart from Carl Lee Hailey) as atmosphere” (Ebert).

30 Criticisms had been voiced against Alan Parker's decision to center Mississippi Burning on the two white federal agents, Anderson and Ward, rather than depicting the efforts of the black local activists or the Justice Department1: In order to manufacture Anderson and Ward as independent heroes realizing the potential of a system of law, they need to be portrayed as taking the initiative in solving the murders and defying the white society that condoned them. The individual quality of their initiative would be lessened if the actual, documented work of the Justice Department on this case had been shown. (Jeffords 126)

31 Justifying his choice, Alan Parker claimed that he was trying to reach a wider audience, an “entire generation who knows nothing of that historical event […] to cause them to react to it viscerally, emotionally, because of the racism that's around them now” (King). In 2000, historian Daniel Blake Smith remembered how he was asked to rewrite his script of a film project on the Greensboro Four. Rather than focusing on the “generational tension” or the “impatience of youth” that started the 1960s mass protest movement, the historian/screenwriter had to rewrite the script to center the story on an individual character-driven heroism, attract “a bankable adult star […] cast in a prominent role“, and appeal to ”the likely demographic audience for the film” (Smith, 44), for his original script showcased only the four young men. And there were no. 18–20 year old black actors who had the 'marquee value' to carry the film and attract an audience. Thus, the script needed a much stronger adult role which could be cast by a well-known black actor. (Smith 39)

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32 This explains why, despite the ambiguous treatment of the American criminal justice system that the movie ends on, it is of course not possible for Joel Schumacher's summer 1996 blockbuster to conclude on the conviction of a black father who killed the two white southern racist men who raped his ten-year-old daughter, or on the conviction of a part played by such a renowned black actor as Samuel L. Jackson. The “wider audience” argument would thus encourage filmmakers to believe that the viewers could only emotionally react to the films' historical and social themes if they are lived by a well-known actor (whether black or white) and told through the eyes of a white man.

33 Mississippi Burning (1988), A Time to Kill and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) depict racial violence in a Mississippian context, in which white southern central characters are to solve crimes, and meanwhile enforce and protect American laws in the region. Their moral mission is endowed with a social duty, for they all embody official law abiding figures, whether it is a former local county sheriff turned FBI agent in Mississippi Burning, a lawyer in A Time to Kill, or a local prosecutor in Ghosts of Mississippi.

34 What indeed makes these race/South films so appealing and entertaining is that they show how their central white characters who originally share their local community's traditional Mississippian race-related values (as they are depicted in the films), “rebel” against these values and confront their traditional values to the American justice system. These southern white legal figures' “rebellion” originates in their desire to respect the rule of law after the acts of racial violence perpetuated in the story. They go through a revelation that they afterwards bring their entire community to, as illustrated by Jake Brigance's summation: “I tried to prove blacks could get a fair trial in the South... that we are all equal in the eyes of the law.”2 Thus, both in Ghosts of Mississippi and in A Time to Kill, the viewer gets to exclusively witness the transformation of the traditional Mississippian into a liberal white southern lawyer.

35 In race/South/court drama movies, the final summation is generally handled by a middle-aged man, wise and experienced enough to invite the jury to “[transcend] the limits of that [southern] tradition”, as Joseph Crespino put it (26). At the beginning of the film To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch already had what movie reviewers back in 1962 called a liberal charm (Crespino 9). Although the wise middle-aged and experienced white lawyer is also present in A Time to Kill, the redemptive mission is left to Jake Brigance. Being younger and played by Hollywood newcomer Matthew McConaughey, Jake Brigance's southern charm, his duty as a white liberal lawyer and role as a father must all be built. The film's viewers can easily appreciate Jake Brigance as a likeable naive and arrogant apprentice because they are convinced that by the end of the film, he will go through a moment of personal consciousness and become truly aware of the real meaning of the mission he has to carry on.

36 Despite poor reviews from the critics, A Time to Kill was a commercial success with nearly more than $110 million at the box-office. The movie's plot may have been appealing to a national audience both influenced and divided along racial and class lines by the media spectacles of recent trials and their verdicts. A Time to Kill was indeed released four years after an all-white jury acquitted the four LAPD police officers who assaulted the black driver Rodney King in 1992, and two years after a mostly black jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of the charges pressed against him during his criminal trial in 1994, while a mostly white jury found him guilty during the civil trial.

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37 In A Time to Kill, the black character to defend is undeniably guilty of the crimes he is accused of. The premeditated double murder is given much visual importance. After Carl Lee Hailey implicitly reveals his intention to murder the two men to Jake Brigance during the night that precedes the gun shooting, he is seen breaking into the courthouse, crossing the hall, and hiding in a small room on the ground floor waiting for the right moment to act. The scene is shot as a rehearsal, since, the day after, the camera repeats the same shot angles as viewed during the night scene, this time filled with the city's inhabitants. Therefore, the gun shooting occurs in the crowded court hall, under the baffled eyes of all the characters that had come to attend the trial of the two rapists. The slow motions and the close-ups on Carl Lee Hailey's face as he shoots the two rapists, or the vertical tracking shot displaying the two bloodstained bodies lying on the floor cannot escape the film viewers' attention. The multiple intra- and extra-diegetic witnesses of this public execution make it obvious that the black character is guilty, thereby focusing the viewers' interest on how the white lawyer will reach the final acquittal of the black man by an all white-jury in Mississippi.

38 David Ray Papke argues that the “cavalcade of courtroom trials in American literature, film, and television”, tends to encourage American viewers and readers to “naturaliz[e] the text”: [M]ost American readers and viewers take the renderings of courtroom trials for granted. They read about and watch courtroom trials without critically reflecting on them. The courtroom trial is a motif that delivers “meaning”, and “meaning” is received without critical reflection. Americans are at ease with literary and cinematic courtroom trials, and they can use them to clarify their values, reinforce their moral standards, and even shape their identities (Papke 478).

39 The movie A Time to Kill does not invite viewers to critically read Jake Brigance's closing argument because the film's focalization on individual male heroism forces its end to diverge considerably from the novel's racial conclusion.

40 In John Grisham's novel, Jake Brigance learns that the jury decided to acquit Carl Lee Hailey because Wanda Womack, a white woman of the jury, asked them to imagine that the victim was a blue-eyed, fair-haired white little girl, and most importantly, that the rapists were two drunken black men (Grisham 513). In the film, the rape is narrated by Jake Brigance himself during his closing argument, not by a southern white woman trying to address the black male brute stereotype. What matters in A Time to Kill is not whether Carl Lee Hailey will be acquitted, but how Jake Brigance will win this acquittal. Thus, the latter is at the center of the plot's development and conclusion. The camera progressively zooms on his face, as he tries to hold up his tears when narrating the rape. The climax is when he tells the jury that, willing to get rid of the sole witness and victim of their crime, the two rapists threw her body over a bridge in a canyon, a last action which the viewers cannot see at the beginning of the film, during the rape scene. He concludes by inviting the jury to imagine that the little girl is white.

41 Yet, the reference to the potential drunken black rapists is taken out, and the jury is only invited to consider the atrocities lived by a white little girl, not the race of her aggressors, as is the case in the book. Thus, the novel's strategy goes further, because it also forces the white members of the jury to address collectively the signifying construction of black men as black male brutes.

42 Because he believes that this strategy invites the all-white jury to consider the defendant as a white father, Leonard Baynes concludes that:

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the main message in A Time to Kill is perhaps that only White men have legitimate reasons for taking the life of another White man […], and [that] the only way that an all-White jury can justify the African American man's actions is by imagining that he is White. (Baynes 558)

43 When the strategy is considered from an adaptation process, another reading can be brought out. The movie concludes on an unquestioned color-conscious jury and justice system, as the only strategy that prevails is the fact that the jury can only individually feel sorry for the victim because they're imagining her being white.

44 While the novel concludes on Jake Brigance's decision to leave the state of Mississippi and join his wife and daughter in Memphis, the movie's conclusion resonates with a widely different message, with the hopeful and politically correct image of the black and the white mothers introducing their daughters to each other, in the black part of town, meanwhile asserting that the racial divide in the South can be bridged. While white heroism is revived, the viewers are invited to question neither the filmic treatment of racial injustice in the South, nor the movie's representation of black characters, nor the “storytelling strategy” (Papke) with which the black defendant is acquitted. Combining the analysis of the summation's strategy to the film's treatment of gender can as well provide another reading on manhood and fatherhood.

The construction of white heroism: cinematic images of manhood and fatherhood

45 While the film's black characters only help shape the story's atmosphere and start the narrative, Carl Lee Hailey's character is treated differently, because his characterization creates a link between his act of murder, Jake Brigance's defense and the movie's construction of fatherhood. The gunfire occurs after the conversation Carl Lee Hailey has in Jake Brigance's office in which he tells him about the physical trauma Tonya will have to live with for the rest of her life. Immediately afterwards, he questions Jake Brigance's capacity to win his acquittal should he be in trouble, implicitly suggesting his intention to murder the two men. When Jake Brigance asks him what he intends to do, Carl Lee Hailey answers: “You got a daughter, Jake. What would you do?” By this moment of the film, although the two men are different on the racial and social levels, they are bound by their fatherhood.

46 The movie may leave critical viewers with such debatable racial message precisely because it uses race as a pretext to focus on the construction of fatherhood, as is illustrated by the image of Carl Lee Hailey after the acquittal, holding his daughter, in a low angle shot with the American and the Mississippian flags floating in the background. For that matter, Sarah Projansky provides another reading to Jake Brigance's strategy in his closing argument: By asking the jurors to imagine a white girl being raped, […] he simultaneously racializes and deracializes Tonya: he reminds the jury (and the audience) that she is African American and that the rape was racist, but he also insists that the violation of a man's child goes beyond race and racism, is a moral crime (against the father as much as against the daughter) that calls for the rapist's death (at the hands of the father). (Projansky 166)

47 She adds that the film's presentation of race, the staging of the rape and the characterization of the two rapists builds the story of a film

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in which an African American teaches a white man about his right, or rather his moral duty, to protect his daughter and to defend any other man who does so, regardless of race. Thus, while the film seems to “scream” “this story is about race!” throughout and while it depends on a gendered and racialized rape as narrative catalyst, in the end the film is most concerned with Jake's imagined role as avenger of the imagined rape of his (white) daughter. (Projansky 166)

48 The first conversation between Carl Lee Hailey and Jake Brigance ends with a cut that displays a shot on Jake Brigance's house. In the following scene which first depicts the lawyer as a father, he is seen putting his daughter to sleep, Carl Lee Hailey's line (“You got a daughter, Jake. What would you do?”) lingers in the viewer's mind. The reverse angle shot shifts from the white father's serious face looking at his daughter to the close-ups on the sleepy fair-haired blue-eyed daughter. The filmic device and the ensuing conversation he has with his wife about the fact that looking at his daughter, he “cannot help but thinking about Tonya” prefigure his summation's conclusion, and continue building the relationship between Carl Lee Hailey and Jake Brigance as fathers.

49 The still shot on Carl Lee Hailey's entire family watching their father walk, without handcuffs, to the sheriff's car when he is put under arrest, insists on the fact that the black man's murder was tied to his fatherhood. Indeed, the scene repeats the same camera angle shots as when Carl Lee Hailey, earlier in the film, brought his daughter's body to the ambulance after the rape. The repetition of the camera angles is meant to associate his act to his moral duty as a father.

50 Other cleverly chosen and well-portrayed characters of the film support Carl Lee Hailey's duty as a father. When Deputy Dwayne Looney, the police officer accidentally shot during the gunfire, testifies during the trial, Jake Brigance, fearing that the now legless police officer publicly blame his client for his new condition, first refuses to cross-examine him. Carl Lee Hailey then forces his lawyer to do so, insisting he asked the deputy if he would send Carl Lee Hailey to jail. The Deputy does not answer as a police officer, but as a father (“I got a little girl. Somebody rapes her, he's a dead dog. I'll blow him away like Carl Lee did”.), and concludes his testimony by shouting that Carl Lee Hailey is a hero.

51 The use of the film's female characters also supports that growing male bonding and fatherhood. Gwen Hailey and Carla Brigance, the black and white wives, reinforce both father-figures. Gwen Hailey is constantly depicted as a mother. When she intervenes in the film, her children, and more specifically Tonya and reminders of her physical trauma, are seen on the images: Even when Tonya has been found and is with her mother, it is not until her father, Carl Lee Hailey, arrives that Tonya speaks and that the full horror of the event is articulated. When Carl Lee arrives, a close-up reveals his pained face as Tonya's mother cries offscreen and Tonya apologizes for dropping the groceries. (Projansky 165)

52 Therefore, although Tonya occupies most of the early images of the film, she is used afterwards as a pretext to systematically remind the audience of the reason why Carl Lee Hailey murdered the two white men. The aim is as well to set up Carl Lee Hailey's fatherhood and binds it to Jake Brigance's: “The emphasis [is put] on men's experience of the rape of” their “women, or more accurately” their “daughters” (Projansky 165).

53 In John Grisham's novel, Jake Brigance's daughter is taken away from the violent attacks directed against her father. Contrarily, in the film, the white daughter can hear

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the threatening phone calls paid to her father, the viewer is told that she comes home crying because she's been called a “nigger lover” by the other children at school and is the one who discovers the burning cross in front of their house. The white little girl is seen on screen whenever Jake Brigance's decision to defend a man who committed two cold-blooded murders is questioned by his wife and his family-in-law. The filmic victimization of the white daughter then accompanies Jake Brigance's belief that what happened to Tonya could have happened to Hannah. This is made more explicit when his wife returns: I thought you took this case because you wanted to prove what a big time lawyer you were. But I was wrong. You took this case because if those boys had hurt Hannah the way they hurt Tonya you would've killed them too.

54 As Gwen Lee Hailey tells her husband in jail, “How you think you going to get money when you stuck in jail?” Jake Brigance is not only defending a black man facing an all- white jury in the South. He needs to win Carl Lee Hailey's acquittal so that he can restore the latter in his fatherly position and himself in his own.

55 As all the female characters of the film are being victimized by physical violence or threats, the movie celebrates a powerful patriarchy and the rhetorical values of the family as they were portrayed in films of the Reagan and the Bush presidencies (Smith 77-80). The movie constantly builds images of masculinity and male heroism around the strong moral values of the father figure. At the end of the film, to Carl Lee's astonishment, Jake Brigance says the film's final line: “Just thought our kids could play together, Carl Lee.” Though this line can be read as a message of hope in racial integration in the South, it is illustrating the cinematic victory of the movie's two father figures, for it is the values of fatherhood that victoriously restore peace and guarantee racial integration in the region.

Conclusion

56 A Time to Kill is a courtroom drama, a southern film, a race movie and a movie adaptation whose analyses bring out complementary readings of the film's conventional approaches to these genres' cinematic codes: the race question is seen through the white character; the final summation marks the narrative victory of the white law-figure; the South's rednecks are eliminated from the story's conclusion which allows this redemptive tale to protect the rest of the southern white community; the characterization of the central black character supports the narrative construction of the white hero. All these support the film's conservative central purpose: constructing white male heroism by binding it to the conservative values of a family structure grounded on victorious and strong images of fatherhood.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Deborah E. and Kathryn McKee. American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Baynes, Leonard M. “A Time to Kill, the O.J. Simpson Trials, and Storytelling to Juries.” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review. 17:3 (1997) 549-569.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. An interpretative History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum, 1999.

Cox, Karen L. Dreaming of Dixie. How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Crespino, Joseph. “The Strange Career of Atticus Finch.” Southern Cultures 6:2 (2000) 9-29.

Dreher, Rob, “Time to Star: a Moral Tale, Memorable Performances” The Sun Sentinel 24 July 1996.

Duck, Leigh Anne. The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation and U.S. Nationalism. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Dutrieux, Claire. “Deux Visions, Deux Sud ? Évolution de la représentation du Sud d'un Cape Fear à l'autre, 1962-1991”. In Le Sud au cinéma: De The Birth of a Nation à Cold Mountain. Dir. Marie Liénard-Yeterian et Taïna Tuhkunen. Palaiseau: Editions de l'Ecole Polytechnique, 2009. 197-208.

Ebert, Robert. “A Time to Kill”. RobertEbert.com/Movie Reviews. Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved in June 2011.

Fleming, Victor. Gone With the Wind. MGM. 1939.

Frazier, James. “Hollywood's Mississippi Remains a Brutal Backwater”. Daily Caller 18 September 2011.

Graham, Allison. Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Grisham, John. A Time to Kill. New York: Bantam Dell, 1989.

George, Nelson. “Black-And-White Struggle with a Rosy Glow”. New Tork Times 9 August 2011. Retrieved in August 2011. < http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/movies/black-and-white-struggle-through-hollywoods- rosy-glow.html?pagewanted=all>

Higashi, Sumiko. “Walker and Mississippi Burning: Postmodernism Versus Illusionist Narrative”. In Why Docudrama? Fact-Fiction on Film and TV. Ed. Allan Rosenthal. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 340-356.

Hinson, Hal. “A Time to Kill: Justice Gets a Make-Over”. Washington Post 24 July 1996.

Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Jewison, Norman. In the Heart of the Night. United Artists. 1967.

King, Wayne. “Mississippi Burning: Facts vs. Fiction in Mississippi”. New York Times 4 December 1988.

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Laurent, Sylvie. “Le Poor White Trash ou la pauvreté odieuse du blanc américain”. In “Sud(s), reconstructions” RFEA 120 (2009) : 79-95.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. 1960. London: Arrow Books, 2006.

Liénard-Yeterian, Marie. ”Angel or Demon: Performing the South in Cinema.“ In Le Sud au cinéma: De The Birth of a Nation à Cold Mountain. Dir. Marie Liénard-Yeterian et Taïna Tuhkunen. Palaiseau: Editions de l'Ecole Polytechnique, 2009. 38-52.

MacCarthy, Todd. “A Time to Kill”. Variety 10 July 1996.

Mulligan, Robert. To Kill a Mockingbird. Universal Studios. 1962.

Nicholson, Colin. ”Hollywood and Race: To Kill a Mockingbird.“ In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2006. 65-74, 72-73.

Papke, David Ray. “Conventional Wisdom: The Courtroom Trial in American Popular Culture”. Marquette Law Review 82:3 (1999): 471-490.

Parker, Alan. Mississippi Burning. Orion Pictures. 1988.

Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Reiner, Rob. Ghosts of Mississippi. Sony Entertainment. 1996.

Rosenstone, Robert A. “Like writing history with lighting': film historique/vérité historique”. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire 46 (1995) : 162-175.

Schumacher, Joel. A Time to Kill. Warner Bros. 1996.

Smith, Carol R. “Gender and Family Values in the Clinton Presidency and 1990s Hollywood Film”. In American Film and Politics from Reagan to Bush Jr. Eds. Philip John Davies and Paul Wells. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. 77-88.

Smith, Daniel Blake. “The (Un)Making of a Historical Drama: A Historian/Screenwriter Confronts Hollywood”. The Public Historian 25:3 (Summer 2003): 27-44.

NOTES

1. As Sumiko Higashi put it, “claims to historical truth are vigorously debated because competing visions of the past are invoked to influence social attitudes and to shape public policy” (Higashi 350). 2. The entire summation may be watched on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=C7f-BgDgpmE

ABSTRACTS

Inspired by the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and its movie adaptation (1962), A Time to Kill (1996) reenacts Atticus Finch's white liberal heroism, but provides a more conservative standpoint on

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masculinity and fatherhood. This article seeks to examine this cinematic conservative rereading by considering the film's different movie genres: the courtroom drama, the race movie, the southern film and the movie adaptation

Très largement inspiré du roman To Kill a Mockingbird et de son adaptation cinématographique mise en scène en 1962 par Robert Mulligan, A Time to Kill (1996) réactive la figure héroïque d’Atticus Finch, l’avocat blanc libéral du roman d’Harper Lee. Mais il en propose une lecture plus conservatrice, axée sur la construction du père comme ardent défenseur des valeurs de la famille et de la région. Cet article propose d’étudier cette relecture en tenant compte des différents genres cinématographiques auxquels le film appartient: le film de prétoire, l’adaptation cinématographique et les longs-métrages faisant du Sud un objet filmique ou mettant en scène des thématiques interraciales.

INDEX

Keywords: race, South, Mississippi, A Time to kill, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch, white liberal lawyer, racial integration, racial violence, fatherhood Mots-clés: appartenances raciales, représentations filmiques Sud / Mississippi, Redneck, avocat libéral blanc sudiste, paternité

AUTHOR

HÉLÈNE CHARLERY Maître de Conférences Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Laughing at the United States

Eve Bantman-Masum

1. Introduction

1 Karl Marx once wrote that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. This is a lesson that Mexicans seem to have learnt well insofar as their relationship to the United States is concerned. In the decades that followed its Independence from Spain, Mexico suffered so many forms of U.S. encroachment that resisting Northern influence became a central element in Mexican nationalism. As a consequence, Mexicans also developed a peculiar sense of political humor and irony regarding U.S.-Mexico relations. But this ubiquitous aspect of Mexican political culture has received very little academic attention. The aim of this article is to explore Mexican humor—particularly popular jokes and comical representations—on the United States and the American people1 and to make sense of the abundance of light-hearted, witty, popular comments on Mexicans and Americans. This supplement to the existing works on North American relations examines the connection between representations of race and politics, documenting the impact of essentialist descriptions of U.S. citizens on political beliefs and practices in Mexico.

2 The kind of humor we shall explore undoubtedly verges on racism: it can be both crude and offensive. Humorists make fun of how Americans behave and often target American leaders; worse, they even trivialize 9/11. We do not endorse the views reported here, and neither do most Mexicans. Much of the material under study comes from empirical data collected in Mexico between 2002 and 2006 and illustrates the views of left-wing activists who strongly resent U.S. leadership and influence. More importantly, Mexican humor is also notoriously graphic and vulgar, hinging on macabre when it comes to politics. This love of macabre is rooted in cultural habits in Mexico. Owing to centuries of political instability and human tragedy, Mexicans have been practicing immoral humor for decades. Considered from this angle, joking about 9/11 is the same as laughing at death, revolutions, epidemics, etc (Giasson). This kind of humor is clearly immoral, but should not be understood as an expression of deep-felt hatred for the United States. It serves other functions that will be analyzed here.

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3 Obviously, humor is a benign form of criticism compared to terrorism, even if jokes on America and Americans are depressingly negative, even racist. While U.S. jokes on Mexicans are under constant academic scrutiny, humor is conspicuously absent from the literature on anti-Americanism, in spite of the fact that Mexicans routinely crack up over all aspects of U.S. society, culture, and politics. Experts trying to assess potential threats to national security generally conclude that Mexican anti- Americanism is relatively benign (MacPherson), with post-9/11 contributions often ignoring Mexico altogether (Judt and Lacorne; O'Connor and Griffiths; Schlapentokh et al.). Studies on perceptions of the United States and U.S. citizens in Mexico—a better source of information on our topic—have produced a body of evidence on the existence of essentialist clichés and patterns of representation of the Other in Mexico (Merrill; Meyer; Morris, 2000 and 2005). General studies have also noted that Mexicans simultaneously love and hate the United States (Ganster and Pacheco; Raat; Ricard), highlighting the ambivalent co-existence of Americanization and Anti-Americanism in Mexico.

4 The few existing studies on Mexican humor view it as a social ritual. Schmidt, writing before the fall of the PRI—the post-revolutionary authoritarian party that ruled Mexico for 70 years—maintained that jokes helped Mexicans survive political oppression. Before him, Limon had shown that vulgar forms of macho banter were practiced in a context of deep political and economic alienation. More recently, Torres presented humor as the weapon of the weak, a form of subaltern discourse. The last two writers view humor (irony for Torres and banter for Limon) as a social ritual performed by poor, exploited workers. Humor is therefore very political in Mexico, and even more so when one considers jokes on the United States. Indeed, ever since 1847, Mexican leaders have systematically claimed to be defending Mexican integrity against U.S. encroachments. However, they practiced a highly ambivalent form of nationalism, preaching Mexican resistance to the United States and simultaneously encouraging U.S. influence in Mexico. Discourse and policies were harmonized after the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 (Nafta), leading to closer relations between the two powers. But although Mexican nationalism is no longer officially anti-American, Mexican nationalists still privately believe in and practice resistance to the United States. As we shall see, jokes on the United States tend to be very critical of official proclamations, and encourage nationalism as well as individual opposition to closer U.S.-Mexico relations.

5 Expounding on previous studies, we shall first discuss stereotypes on Americans and the binary opposition between Mexicans and Gringos to show how humorists subvert all clichés. Jokes take up the official discourse on “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so Close to the United States” and then playfully reinterpret tales of Good and Evil to condemn corruption and weakness among Mexicans in their dealings with powerful, profit-oriented Americans. A powerful tool in the hands of opposition leaders and dissenters, humor on U.S.-Mexico interactions is part of what we shall call “everyday anti-Americanism”, popular practices of resistance to U.S. influence. Anti-American humor can therefore be considered as a form of social rite. Examples of political debates will introduce readers to anti-American humor in use. Our findings confirm what many before us have described—the existence of clichés on North American culture and civilization, resentment against U.S. interventionism, economic might, and

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push for free trade—but also illustrate how popular interpretations have moved beyond the love-hate paradigm.

2. Essentializing difference, challenging the balance of power

6 To begin with, most jokes on the United States do not solely criticize the United States. Instead, they equally dwell on the shortcomings of Mexicans. In doing so, humorists are elaborating on preconceived notions of the differences between the two countries that have been hotly debated by Mexican intellectuals ever since Independence in 1820. There is indeed a protracted history of comparison between the two peoples, the Mexican and the North American. For example, one of the early critics of national characters, Lorenzo de Zavala, who later abandoned Mexico to become the vice- president of Texas, elaborated on these clichés on the two nations. To some extent, his views have shaped many prevailing ideas about North-Americanness: An industrious people, active, reflexive, circumspect, religious amidst many sects, tolerant, miser, free, proud and persevering. Mexicans are light-hearted, lazy, intolerant, generous, even bountiful, belligerent, superstitious, ignorant and hostile to dominions of all kinds. (Carballo 51)2

7 In the 1820s, Zavala portrayed Mexican boisterous irrationality and then the frugalness of Americans, and its corollary, affluence. Since then, most Mexican intellectuals have, at some point, compared in similar terms the national characters of the two people, thereby transforming highly subjective observations into classic, influential essentialist clichés. Early descriptions and comparisons of national characters tell us that Mexicans form a mediocre people and praise the industriousness and genius of North America. After the traumatic defeat of 1847, the description of U.S. character was transformed to include new elements: greed, materialism, imperialist tendencies, lack of morals and culture. Repetition led Mexicans to believe that this comparison was self-explanatory when in fact it was premised on prejudice. In addition, essentialist clichés are highly ambivalent, at once praising and criticizing North Americans. They are even less consistent when it comes to Mexicans who are systematically described as deeply mediocre people. Notorious samples of such propaganda can be found in Mexican textbooks that have, ever since the second half of the nineteenth century, encouraged patriots to remember North American encroachments (Vazquez et al.; Covo; Gilbert; Roldan) and act accordingly.

8 Mexican humorists typically elaborate on contradictions to highlight the inconsistencies contained in a political discourse that simultaneously glorifies Mexican resistance to the United States and encourages closer relations to the United States. Instead of lamenting Mexican inferiority and extolling North American superiority, the following joke typically celebrates Mexican shortcomings and ridicules North American greatness. In the Mexican version, the American tourist speaks broken Spanish: A group of gringo tourists is touring the Mexican countryside. In one village, they notice a Mexican small farmer resting in the shade under a tree, enjoying his nap. One of the gringos joins him there to start a conversation: Hello amigo, howaryou? Great, thank you. Just relaxing. You tell me: why you not working on your lands? What for?

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For get more output and sell more. What for? Like this for make more money and buy animals. What for? For animals get reproduction and sell and make more money. What for? For have nice house and live at ease and relax. What for amigo? Ain't I relaxing just now?

9 The lazy Mexican in the joke embodies all the defects listed by Zavala and others in their depictions of Mexican inferiority. But here, the clever Mexican beats the hard- working Gringo. This suggests that Mexican underdevelopment is proof of the nation's superior nature: why work when you can have it all without working? The fact that the visiting Gringo displays such a poor command of Spanish certainly bespeaks, in the eyes of a Mexican nationalist, his limited genius. Like others, this joke tends to subvert existing hierarchies. Asymmetry of power between the two countries has resulted in what many view as poor treatment of Mexican immigrants in the United States, and an open-door policy for Gringo tourists in Mexico. A century of mass migration to the United States has convinced a great number of Mexicans that they would never receive fair treatment in the United States. At the same time, tourism to Mexico has developed, with millions of North Americans now vacationing in the country. Mocking Gringos in Mexico who ridicule undocumented Mexicans in the United States is one way of showing defiance and resistance.

10 Similarly, the following joke turns official Mexican rhetoric about the two countries on its head: “If Mexico hadn't been there, Walt Disney would surely have invented it” (author's translation). The joke lampoons an idea that is immensely popular in Mexico —the classic opposition between Mexico's cultural heritage and North American cultural barrenness. Mexicans use the expression Gringolandia to refer to the United States (and to Americanized spaces in Mexico, like Cancun): the name is derived from two words, Gringo (now an almost neutral synonym for Americans) and the name of U.S. leisure park Disneyland, suggesting that the U.S. is superficial, big business but no real culture. Mexico is the butt of the joke here, a place so ridiculous that the Gringos could actually showcase it. More subtly, the joke suggests that Mexicans are not culturally authentic. Instead, they are under the influence of North American mass culture: they are agringados. The word does not translate as “Americanized”: Mexican nationalism ruled that to ape the Gringo was to cease to be a Mexican; to be agringado is therefore to have debased yourself to embrace the American Way of Life, to have renounced civilization and become a traitor. Even as it teases Mexican nationalists, this joke is also directed at North Americans. It suggests they need Mexico, a point that is rarely admitted in the North American public sphere but which underpins the popular analysis of U.S.-Mexico relations in Mexico.

11 Interestingly, many jokes on the United States tend to be about Mexican politicians too. As the saying goes, “You're Mexican if you blame the PRI for practically everything, and the United States for everything else” (author's translation). Schmidt mentions one joke that circulated during George Bush Senior's Gulf War, and which might seem opaque to outsiders: “Salinas sent two destroyers to the Middle East : Echeverria and López Portillo” (Schmidt, author's translation). Echeverria and Lopez Portillo are two PRI politicians: the first is commonly held responsible for the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco while Lopez Portillo is blamed for starting the debt crisis which plagued the

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Mexican economy in the 1980s. Salinas—widely believed to have won the 1988 presidential election by fraud—ruled the country between 1988 and 1994. He was decidedly pro-American and signed NAFTA into law. Having destroyed Mexican hopes for autonomy and trampled upon the nationalist ambition to resist U.S. hegemony, these leaders could therefore be assimilated by many to “destroyers”. At a more subtle level, the joke offers one last twist: receiving help from such inept leaders may deliver unexpected results, such as an American defeat in what was viewed by many as yet another imperialist scramble for oil. Generally speaking, the idea that Mexican politicians are dangerously incompetent is the starting point of many jokes similar to this one: Mexico's President made an announcement yesterday: “I have got good news and bad news for the country. The good news is that we've repaid all the money we owed the United States. The bad news is that we must leave the country in 15 days.”

12 While many Mexicans are convinced that U.S. leaders are still hoping to lay their hands on more Mexican land (and natural resources), they also believe that Mexico is governed by a corrupt clique ready to sell Mexico away: entregar el pais a los gringos. There is even a name for this state of mind (entreguismo) and for those who practice it (los entreguistas). Mexican politicians are portrayed as betraying the country by serving U.S. national interest, and leaving Mexicans with nothing at all. The idea that Mexican politicians are incapable of sustaining the population is so popular that you will find it reprinted in many books. A leading Mexican sociologist remarked in an article published shortly after Nafta came into effect that: If the Mexican state had been in charge of the development of the United States during the nineteenth century, it would probably have persecuted the grain farmers until it had taken everything away from them, scattered them and converted them into beggars. (Zermeño, 205)

13 Jokes that seem very critical of the United States often target, as we have just seen, local elites rather than the U.S.

14 Mexican jokes on the U.S. and Americans can nevertheless be very offensive. Even if it was immoral to do so, Mexicans used to joke a lot about 9/11 in the years that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center. There are many reasons why Mexicans reacted in such an unpredictable way. Since anti-Americanism is no longer the official ideology of the Mexico State in Mexico, it is now growing out of control. Mexican authorities no longer monitor anti-Americanism, and remarks about the United States have become less tame, less politically correct, and therefore more impertinent. What was a clearly articulated set of preconceived clichés on American-ness to be printed in magazines and textbooks has now retreated to the private realm. In addition, laughing at tragedies is culturally accepted, even encouraged to a certain extent, in Mexico. So the graver the situation is, the funnier the jokes will be: the fact that it might be immoral to laugh about something only makes it more pleasurable.

15 Considering all this, 9/11 was a natural target for Mexican humorists, especially because of the War on Terror. Sadly, the response to 9/11—War—led many Mexicans to believe that the U.S. had returned to imperialism. Mexicans clearly opposed the War on Terror, with government declining to participate and refusing to send troops to Iraq or elsewhere. With the War on Terror, the idea that Americans are prepotente became very popular. Officially, the word is used to describe someone who is at once arrogant, domineering, and overbearing. But Prepotencia is also a political concept whereby

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Americans are made responsible for Imperialism. Gringos prepotentes tend to think very highly of themselves, believe they are always right, and impose their views and lines of conduct on others. With 9/11 and the War on Terror, Prepotencia became a hot issue, with humorists highlighting U.S. weakness in every sense of the word.

16 Living in Mexico in the months that followed 9/11, you would constantly be told jokes similar to this one: “Mexico and the United States are playing chess. Who's the winner? Mexico, because the United States are missing two towers”. Jokes like this one do not satirize American character, nor celebrate the deaths of Americans. They overstate what the terrorist attacks seemed to prove at the time: that the United States was no longer invincible, that it could be defeated, that it was vulnerable. The fact that it was cruel to laugh about the loss of innocent lives was ignored, except by those who feared for their loved ones living in the United States, or those who sympathized with the victims for personal reasons (including one informant who mentioned that those who had died in the towers were not decision-makers but workers, including many immigrants). Still, similar jokes were silently conquering the Mexican public sphere, to the point where 9/11 could be casually mentioned.

17 One of the most popular jokes about 9/11 tells the story of how Bin Laden had originally chosen to blow up the Torre Latinoamericana, a Mexico City skyscraper built in 1956. But no sooner had his hitmen set foot in Mexico that a customs officer had stolen their bags. When the Arabs hired a cab to the airport, they were hijacked by the driver. After paying a heavy ransom, they were released only to catch Moctezuma's revenge (food poisoning). Convinced that no terrorist attack could ever be launched in this desmadre [mess], they finally decided to cross over to the other side, which took them weeks because of bad traffic and difficulties with the border patrol. Many versions of the joke circulated in 2002: one said that the terrorists were never able to launch the attack because they had been robbed and were too poor to buy a plane ticket; another explained that they had given up trying upon realizing that Mexicans kept erratic business hours, and that it would be impossible to commit mass murder in Mexico by hitting a deserted office building with a plane. Each time, 9/11 is only a pretext to laugh about corruption and crime in Mexico. These jokes also ridicule the ambitions of Mexico's modernizing elite who built the Torre Latinoamericana,—a miniature version of America's breathtaking skyscrapers, a lone monument towering over the low-rising colonial center of town and the sprawling, underdeveloped metropolis. At a deeper level, the joke says that Mexico is led by a bunch of terrorists anyway, competing to ruin the lives of ordinary Mexicans who heroically manage to conduct their daily lives in spite of crime and extreme conditions of living. Simultaneously, it lists all the reasons why millions of Mexicans have decided to leave their homeland and migrate to the United States. The joke is another example of the humorous quality inherent to popular nationalism: it praises the heroism of Mexicans who are too strong to be threatened by Arab terrorists; inversely, more perversely, the joke implies that Americans are less heroic, less resilient too.

3. Anti-American rites: redefining the relationship between South and North

18 But humor is not static. And beyond what it means, it is equally important to understand how it is practiced. Joking serves first and foremost a social purpose: to

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show friends a good time and reinforce group cohesion. Political jokes serve a dual purpose: they strengthen ties among a political community and guarantee speech effectiveness. Because it is spontaneous, humor is a mood, as well as a statement. The jokes reported here first circulated by word of mouth. During our fieldwork, informants used to spontaneously offer witty comments on the U.S.-Mexico relationship. Something about my research interest (studying the relationship between Mexicans and the United States) prompted them to make a statement, to show the rest of the world that they were not fools. This humor illustrates the popular, as opposed to the official view on geopolitics. Part of the fieldwork was conducted in Chiapas, among a left-wing community that had set out to defend Mexico against both U.S. ambitions and Mexican corruption. These activists had settled in Chiapas (southern Mexico) to support the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, or EZ). The Zapatistas, as they are now called, stole the show away from Nafta when they emerged in Chiapas on January 1st 1994. They were soon joined by Leftists from across the globe, among whom many Americans, who set out to challenge U.S.-led globalization.

19 The Zapatistas put the idea of Mexican resistance to the North back on the political agenda. Speaking from the Southern state of Chiapas, they revitalized anti-American nationalism from a racialist perspective: indigenous Mexicans have since been presented as the natural alternative to U.S. capitalism, spearheading popular efforts to rescue Mexico from neo-liberalism. Although this is never the most central element in their discourse, Zapatistas clearly oppose the pure, indigenous South to the racist, decadent North. They have revived essentialist clichés on national character to garner support for their cause: defending the rights of Indigenous Mexicans from both government and U.S. intervention. Here, Mexicans are defined as racial opposites of Anglo-Americans, an idea that had haunted intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, from José Vasconcelos to Samuel Ramos. However, in spite of this discouraging focus on race, post-1994 discussions of North-South relations have also asserted the need for new interpretations and new policies.

20 The EZLN has made ample use of humor to ridicule Mexican leaders and globalization, Mexican politicians have established such a poor record that alternative politicians do not want to sound like them. As a consequence, humor has gradually and undoubtedly become an essential feature of alternative political discourses. Political humor was brought to a new level with Marcos, one of the Zapatistas' most popular speakers, who has the ability to turn political speech—usually couched in stern, technical terms—into something pleasurable to the ear. This gift was crucial in garnering support for the EZLN in Mexico and beyond. Reflecting upon their communication and use of the Internet, Oliver Froehling noted how Marcos' fantastic sense of humor, particularly his conversations with a beetle called Durito, “have helped to coalesce a diverse network of followers and have guaranteed ongoing international visibility” (Froehling 297). What made Marcos' style particularly appealing was “his knowledge of global culture, … his diverse styles, humor, self-criticisms, references to literature and indigenous culture, and access to other social movements” (ibid, 290). In her analysis of the writings of the Subcommandante Marcos, Nathalie Blasco concurs that humor played a central part in securing widespread adherence to the Zapatista analysis of Mexican politics (Blasco 79). Both Froelhing and Blasco cite texts where Marcos quips about Americans, the United States, and entreguismo.

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21 From an empirical point of view, laughing at the United States is crucial in garnering support for the cause. Humorous speeches are far more efficient than rational explanations of politics, especially when one is dealing with activists. The day George W. Bush was reelected, an alternative technological institute based in San Cristobal de las Casas (Chiapas) held a research seminar on Immanuel Wallerstein in order to “study his work and see how it could help us in solving our contemporary political problems”. The research seminar was designed to help community organizers in Chiapas deepen their understanding of the global political situation: all the people who attended the seminar belonged to a leftist organization and were decidedly pro-Zapatista. A Mexico City professor had been invited to discuss the balance of power between Mexico and the United States. He supported John Kerry, but his words fell upon dead ears. People were talking loudly instead of listening, even when he mentioned American greed, superpower, and Mexican corruption. Nothing worked.

22 At another conference organized by Zapatista supporters and left-wing activists at the national university (UNAM) in Mexico City in 2003, the same topics had elicited a radically different response from the audience. The speaker had started by cracking a few jokes about 9/11 and Zedillo—Salinas' successor, who presided over the 1995 peso crisis: “9/11 has created a New World Order. Even Zedillo is talking geopolitics now! [Laughter] If his politics are as good as his economics… [Laughter].”3 Like all good jokes about the United States, this one is about Mexico, its corrupt elite, and U.S. prepotencia. The jokes that followed ran along the same line as the ones we have discussed— American greed, elite incompetence, and their unexpected consequences. The speaker's humor celebrated the genius of humble Mexicans, playing upon the discrepancies between official and alternative conceptions of nationalism in Mexico and the United States: I'm still hoping that one day we will get our best president in a long time, not here, but in the United States [Laughter]. Because if things remain the way they are now, all of us millions of Mexicans are going to cross over to the other side! [Laughter]. Not to mention other Latin American peoples! If the United States wish to go hara- kiri, then they should just push on with neoliberalism! We are going to help them fill the demographic gap left by 9/11! (op.cit, author's translation)

23 People were laughing so loud the speaker had to pause and wait for them to catch their breath. But when calm returned, he had their full attention and they proved wholeheartedly receptive to his central idea, which was very similar to that of the Chiapas speaker: Mexicans need to adopt a more global perspective and nuance their understanding of the United States. He discussed Tobin and the Tobin tax for ten minutes, actually praising him for his work but declaring at the end that his theory catered to the needs of developed states, not those of developing countries.4 And because the speaker was funny, even hilarious sometimes, he managed to capture everybody's attention for over forty minutes, and to raise serious issues in the process. When he explained how the United States was verging on bankruptcy, the listeners clung to every word he said and nodded at the idea that America needed Mexico, and Mexican oil, to get back on its feet: Oil—and we all know that in Mexico, oil is a national security priority [Laughter]— costs 3 dollars. They say that it is no business. They say that it is a curse to have oil! But if it is a curse, then what do the Gringos want it for?! [Laughter]. Isn't it strange how the Gringos always seem to want the things we don't want?! I for one don't know of any Gringo buying worthless things! [Laughter] (op.cit, author's translation)

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24 These sentences were uttered with a different accent, reminiscent of the kind of Spanish spoken in small-town Mexico. This is the voice of common sense, that of ordinary Mexicans questioning top-down decision made by Mexican Presidents: the Mexican nation knows that the people in power are giving the oil away and betraying the nation. One might view these jokes as interludes to maintain the listeners' attention. But they also speak of a different way of doing politics; the speaker does not pretend he is the only knowledgeable person in the room. On the contrary, he extends his authority to all those who share his beliefs. He reminds those present of what they know and confirms their superior understanding of the treacherousness of all elites. The opening statement on oil being a national security priority is more daring because it also encourages the listeners to reconsider classic nationalist formulations. Instead of focusing on nationalist preconception about oil—the symbol of Mexican resistance to the United States ever since it was nationalized in 1938—, the speaker wanted to look at the wider picture; contrary to many who simply lampoon all politicians, he hoped to create a shift in paradigms. This is exactly what the Chiapas speaker had hoped to do at the Immanuel Wallerstein seminar; but he had failed at it because he was taking things too seriously. The attitude of the UNAM speaker is also emblematic of a certain democratic mindset: rulers get chided for their incompetence and the opinions of rank- and-file citizens are taken into consideration. In the following extract, the oppressed become the witty heroes of a political tale in which Mexican and American leaders feature only as idiots: It's easy [for the United States] to attack Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Fox! [Laughter] But France! They're boycotting French Fries! [Laughter] I don't even worry about the United States anymore: I worry about their gastronomy. They are going to end up without Mexican enchiladas, no French wines, no Chinese food, no—with the Vatican's blessing—Arab food! [Laughter]. They're just going to end up with bretzels [laughter]. But then you need to know how to eat those! [Everyone cracks up] (op.cit. author's translation)

25 Instead of condemning America's wars, the speaker chose to ridicule them, and by adding Vicente Fox's name to the list (Mexico's president at the time) he simultaneously reminded his Mexican audience of the political weakness of recent rulers who have supported the United States unconditionally. The joke plays upon two ideas, one old and one new. Traditionally, Mexicans consider Mexican food unpalatable, yet another proof of America's lack of cultural greatness. The three types of food mentioned here (French, Chinese and Arabic food) are among the most popular foreign cuisines in Mexico (which was briefly ruled by France in the 1860s, received a lot of Chinese workers before the Revolution; Arab tacos are a standard feature of the Mexican shopping street). The idea discussed here is that the United States is so weak— and unpopular—that no one wants to fight its War on Terror. In fact it is so weak that it cannot even banish those who resist it. Mexicans should no longer focus on the United States because they are about to collapse (an idea that the speaker had developed at length earlier on, arguing that the country was laboring under debt and that power was being transferred elsewhere). The finale is an allusion to the incident where George W. Bush almost choked on a bretzel. All in all, the joke draws a very bleak picture of the United States, ruled by someone who cannot eat properly, who bullies weaker nations into turning over their natural resources, and yet proves unable to rally allies after 9/11.

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26 This particular sequence signals that some changes are taking place in the way Mexicans consider the United States. Surreptitiously, Mexicans have adopted a new way of looking at their relationship to the United States. For a long time, opposition leaders were content with just denouncing the unhealthy relationship between the U.S. and Mexican governments and clamoring for a return to nationalism and resistance to dependence. But the jokes we have just reviewed do not just elaborate on classic views of the U.S. in Mexico. They are also introducing new elements into the equation: elite- bashing, praise for ordinary Mexicans, irony toward ideology, to name just a few. These jokes reflect an intimate relationship to the United States and great disillusionment with nationalism among the masses. The solution, it seems, is no longer to either resist or give in. The balance of power between North and South needs to be reassessed, now that the United States is no longer all-powerful: Mexicans are ready for innovative policies. While they remain fond of essentialist clichés, they have considerably distanced themselves from the view that Mexicans can only be either superior or inferior to the American people.

27 Before concluding, one word about the deeper significance of anti-American humor in Mexico. Our analysis is premised on the idea that joking is a rite that strengthens ties among a political community of dissenters in Mexico. But laughing at Americans—and Mexican relations with the United States—is related to other forms of everyday resistance that seek to challenge the existing balance of power, such as ripping off tourists or complaining about gringos. Assessing the relevance of such practices at a national level is almost impossible because studies of anti-Americanism in Mexico have hardly investigated them at all. Clearly, most Mexicans are friends of the United States, even if many have at some point abused tourists, criticized North Americans or joked about them. Explaining why Mexicans—like many others—indulge in anti-Americanism can be traced down to specific U.S. policies and their disastrous consequences. But anti- Americanism also exists beyond politics and interactions, because it serves a crucial social function. Criticizing the United States and Americans partakes of a wider process of identity formation in Mexico. In a world where the United States has driven global standardization of business and culture, anti-Americanism is a very common form of nationalism. By resisting and challenging the U.S. model, Mexicans assert their right to exist independently, reclaim their national heritage, and defy leaders who failed to defend the national interest.

28 In Mexico, anti-American humor is the language of those who yearn for more political participation, people who feel trampled upon, with not even a government to stand up for them and uphold their ideals. While resistance to the United States used to be the official doctrine of the government, it is now the language of those who oppose those in power, particularly politicians in favor of economic liberalization and North American integration. Joking allows powerless patriots to ridicule Mexican corruption, and its corollary, dependence on the United States. One among many practices of everyday resistance, humor is redefining Mexican ideology, and particularly, popular attitudes toward the United States. Laughing at the United States is a demonstration of political seriousness, a proof that the people cannot be fooled.

29 Even if it has received very little academic attention, humor is therefore an important aspect of political culture in Mexico. It is a crucial component of the Mexican relationship to the United States. After all, one of the most popular descriptions of this relationship is an ironic saying attributed to nineteenth century dictator Porfirio Diaz

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who famously quipped, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States”. Most Mexicans adhere to this interpretation of history (Mexico has suffered from geographic proximity to the United States), and also to the irony behind it: Diaz was a dictator who promoted U.S. economic interests in Mexico at the expense of true development for Mexicans. But Poor Mexico must not be taken at face value: it is not simply an ironic assessment of the situation—defenseless Mexico falling prey to Yankee imperialism—but also, more importantly, a national symbol of ideological hypocrisy in a country where political leaders have encouraged anti-Americanism just as they created a pro-American environment.

30 Mexicans are now calling for alternatives: after all, they have come a long way since the nineteenth century but they are still yearning for access to the world beyond the United States. The current wave of drug-related violence might reinforce the trend, with millions of citizens marching against policies inspired by the United States that have cracked hard on crime and made Mexico increasingly unsafe. In this context, humor on the United States is as vital as ever, maintaining tradition and yet voicing popular yearning for change. It soothes and supports rebellion against all dogmas. In the words of a Mexican author: The involuntary humor of politicians is an endless source of material for newsmen and cartoonists around the world. Historians are irremediably leaving aside these fundamental moments of life. (Alatriste, author's translation)

31 For all these reasons, jokes on America and Americans should not be ignored by specialists of U.S.-Mexico relations because they provide a crucial insight into popular political culture. Similarly, material that documents popular beliefs and practices regarding the United States should be given center stage in the literature on anti- Americanism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alatriste, Sealtiel. “Por qué no hay humor en la historia”. Revista de la Universidad de México 4 (June 2004).

Bantman-Masum, Eve. Unis contre les États-Unis ? EHESS, 2007.

Blasco, Nathalie. “L'humour dans les communiqués du sous-commandant Marcos : le contre-pied des pratiques ascétiques des révolutions marxistes (1994-2005)”. In Humour et politique en Amérique latine/humor y política en América latina. Ed. Yves Aguila. Bordeaux : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006. 43-80.

Carballo, Emmanuel. Que Pais Es Este ? Los Estados Unidos y los gringos vistos por escritores mexicanos de los siglos XIX y XX. Conaculta: Sello Bermejo, 1996.

O'Connor, Brendon and Martin Griffiths (eds). The Rise of Anti-Americanism. London and NY : Routledge, 2006.

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Covo, Jacqueline. “L'Enjeu du manuel scolaire au Mexique : l'image des États-Unis”. In États-Unis Mexique Fascinations et Répulsions Réciproques. Ed. Serge Ricard. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996.

Froehling, Oliver. “The Cyberspace” War of Ink and Internet in Chiapas in Mexico.“ Geographical Review 87.2 (April 1997): 291-307.

Ganster P. and M Mirando Pacheco (eds). Imagenes Recíprocas. La educación en las relaciones México- Estados Unidos de América Quinta Reunion de universidades de México y Estados Unidos. Mexico : Amacalli Editores, 1991.

Giasson, Patrice. “Le Mexique populaire et les images tragiques. Sur les traces de l'artiste Nicolás De Jesús”. Images re-vues 5 (2008) 1 September 2008.

Gilbert, Dennis. “Rewriting History. Salinas, Zedillo and the 1992 Textbook Controversy.” Mexican Study-Estudios Mexicano 13:2 (Summer 1997): 271-298.

Judt, Tony and Denis Lacorne (eds). With Us or Against US. Studies in Global Anti-Americanism. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

Limon, José. “Carne, carnales, and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian Batos, Disorder, and Narrative Discourses”. American Anthropologist 16:3 (Aug. 1989): 471-486.

McPherson, Alan. Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American relations. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Merrill, John C. “The United States As Seen From Mexico.” Journal of Inter-American Studies 5:1 (Jan. 1963): 53-66.

Meyer, Michael C. “Mexican Views on the United States”. In twentieth century Mexico. Eds. Raat and Beezley. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 286-300.

Morris, Stephen D. Gringolandia. Mexican Identiy and Perceptions of the United States. New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2005.

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Ramos, Samuel. El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México. México DF: UNAM, 1934.

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Torres, Gabriel. The Force of Irony. Power and the Everyday Life of Mexican Tomato Workers. New York: Berg, 1997.

Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

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NOTES

1. For lack of adequate terms, we shall be referring to U.S. citizens as Americans, North Americans, or gringos—now a neutral expression. There is no English equivalent for the more specific Mexican term estadounidense. 2. My rendition of the original text: “Un pueblo laborioso, activo, reflexivo, circunspecto, religioso en medio la multiplicidad de sectas, tolerante, avaro, libre, orgulloso y perseverante. El mexicano es ligero, perezoso, intolerante, generoso y casi prodigo, vano, guerrero, supersticioso, ignorante y enemigo de todo yugo” (Carballo 1996). The book provides many examples of the comparison between Mexicans and Americans. 3. Author's translation of a recording of the conference, UNAM, 2003. All following quotes come from the same source. 4. The exact quote is, “We want our own economists who think in Latin American terms, not caricatures of economists who, like Stieglitz or Tobin, only make the system more acceptable. That's not what we want”.

ABSTRACTS

Jokes on the United States and Americans are very popular in Mexico. Based on stereotypical representations of the Other, this brand of humor now supports a radical critique of North American relations. To Mexican humorists, the World Trade Center attacks and the War on Terror served as evidence of U.S. decline. This interpretation of events ridicules the unduly alliance between Mexican governments and U.S. leaders. But beyond politics, laughing at the United States also serves a social purpose, that of strengthening ties among Mexicans for whom resisting the United States is synonymous with gaining the right to exist independently.

Les blagues sur les États-Unis et les Américains sont très populaires au Mexique. Elles s'appuient sur des représentations essentialisées de l'Autre qui servent de support à une critique radicale de la politique interaméricaine. Les attentats du 11 septembre et la Guerre contre le Terrorisme ont notamment fourni aux humoristes mexicains une preuve du déclin de l'empire américain. Mais indépendamment des relations internationales, l'humour est également une pratique sociale, qui

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cimente les communautés politiques et renforce leur légitimité. Dans le contexte mexicain, l'humour anti-américain permet de mettre l'idéologie à distance, tout en affirmant son patriotisme, puisqu'en ironisant au sujet de la gouvernance nord-américaine, on affirme son autonomie et sa capacité de résistance.

INDEX

Keywords: anti-americanism, 9/11, humor, Mexico, United States, north-south relations, images, visions, ideology, zapatismo Mots-clés: humour, Mexique, États-Unis, politique, représentations, idéologie, zapatisme, relations nord-sud, 11 septembre 2001

AUTHORS

EVE BANTMAN-MASUM Maître de Conférences Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Emeline Jouve (dir.) Staging American Mobility Mise en scène et mobilité aux Etats-Unis

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Introduction

Emeline Jouve

1 Pays d’immigration et d’expansion géographique, « fantasme » de prospérité sociale, les États-Unis apparaissent comme une nation en mouvement (Baudrillard 75). La notion de mobilité sociale et géographique, centrale à l’identité étasunienne, est ici abordée sous l’angle de la mise en scène. Les auteurs des six articles de ce numéro consacré aux « jeux » et « enjeux » de la représentation des phénomènes de déplacement et d’évolution explorent la façon dont artistes et acteurs sociaux se sont appropriés ces différents concepts. La référence théâtrale se veut ici métaphorique. Il ne s’agira pas, en effet, d’étudier comment le théâtre en tant que genre littéraire réfléchit les manifestations de la mobilité aux États-Unis mais plutôt d’envisager comment les autres modes de représentations, artistiques ou symboliques, utilisent les ressorts de la dramatisation dans son acception la plus large pour rendre à la fois compte des mécanismes et des implications des divers phénomènes de mobilité.

2 En guise d’allusion à la métaphore structurante de notre sujet d’investigation, « Mise en scène et mobilité aux États-Unis » se décline en trois « actes » regroupant des articles apportant chacun divers éclairages sur trois principaux thèmes ayant inspiré nos six auteurs : l’ouest américain, le voyage, le capital. La variété des éclairages proposés est liée à la dimension pluridisciplinaire de ce numéro qui envisage les questions de représentation et de circulation du point de vue littéraire, philosophique, anthropologique et géographique. La partie intitulée « La route de l’ouest : politique(s) de représentation » est une immersion dans l’ouest américain à travers les articles d’Audrey Goodman et Daniel Agacinski. « Errances : regards sur l’Amérique », notre second acte, se lit comme une invitation au voyage par Candice Lemaire, Christine Calvet et Eve Bantman-Masum. Nous conclurons notre étude en abordant la thématique de la mobilité du capital aux États-Unis. L’article de Frédéric Leriche, « Le capital en marche : mise en scène et mise en espace », constituera alors la trame de notre Acte III.

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Acte I. La route de l’ouest : politique(s) des représentations / Act I. The way West : representations and politics

3 « À la fin du siècle dernier », écrivait Alexis de Tocqueville dans les années 1830, « de hardis aventuriers commencèrent à pénétrer dans les vallées du Mississippi ». « Ce fut, » conclut-il dans De la démocratie en Amérique, « comme une nouvelle découverte de l'Amérique : bientôt le gros de l'émigration s'y porta ; on vit alors des sociétés inconnues sortir tout à coup du désert » (61). Cette vision de l’ouest américain par Tocqueville semble résumer les valeurs que cette région, aux frontières fluctuantes, a progressivement incarné : espace sauvage, terre de conquête, l’ouest est le symbole d’une Amérique « nouvelle », d’une Amérique toujours renouvelée. Pour Frederick Jackson Turner, l’histoire de l’ouest se confondait jusqu’à la seconde moitié du 19ène siècle avec l’histoire des États-Unis même.1 Erigée comme récit fondateur de l’identité américaine, l’Histoire de la conquête de l’ouest éveilla l’imaginaire et fut alors l’objet de réécritures mettant en scène une nation éprise de liberté et de justice. Définissant en préambule de leur étude les reconfigurations nationalistes de l’ouest comme mythes, Audrey Goodman et Daniel Agacinski revisitent ces mécanismes de représentations identitaires en isolant chacun un principe structurel emblématique du concept de mobilité. Synecdoques de l’ouest, la route puis la frontière sont alors envisagées par Goodman et Agacinski en tant que paradigmes. Adoptant une approche littéraire dans son article « The Road West, Revised Editions », Audrey Goodman s’intéresse aux représentations de la route de l’ouest dans l’œuvre de Walt Whitman (1812-1892) et ses réinterprétations par les auteurs William Kittredge (1932-.) et Ellen Meloy (1946-2004), ainsi que par le photographe Edward Weston (1886-1958) et la poétesse Ofelia Zepeda (1952-). Cette étude diachronique de la mise en scène de la route de Whitman à Zepeda montre que l’ouest, qui n’a de cesse d’inspirer les artistes, est alors un sujet d’inspiration en constante évolution, ce qui permet à Goodman de théoriser l’imagination comme concept essentiellement mobile. La dramatisation du mouvement par la littéralisation ou l’évocation de l’image de la route participe, selon l’auteur, de la mise en scène des politiques anti-impérialistes mais aussi anti-régionalistes. L’intérêt de Goodman pour les enjeux politiques des représentations de l’ouest américain est partagé par Daniel Agacinski qui, dans son article « Le héros de la Frontière, un mythe de la fondation en mouvement », étudie les mécanismes de « mise en légende » de la frontière à travers le prisme philosophique. Espace imaginaire ou fantasmé, la frontière apparaît comme le terrain de jeu de personnages itinérants venus de l’est pour conquérir un nouveau territoire sauvage qu’ils cherchent à apprivoiser, civiliser. Du pionnier défricheur de terre ou cowboy redresseur de torts, le héros de la frontière, héros américain par excellence, est donc celui qui repousse toujours plus loin les limites du sauvage afin de fonder une cité, symbole du monde civilisé. Empruntant ses exemples aux westerns américains, Agacinski montre en quoi les représentations de la fondation à l’œuvre dans ces mises en scène de l’ouest jouent un rôle déterminant dans la construction d’une identité américaine, de la « ‘conscience de soi’ politique de la nation américaine ».

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Acte II. Errances : regards sur l’Amérique / Act II. Wanderings : visions of America

4 Suite à notre exploration de l’ouest américain aux côtés d’Audrey Goodman et Daniel Agacinski, c’est en direction de l’est puis du sud que Candice Lemaire, Christine Calvet et Eve Bantman-Masum proposent aux lecteurs-voyageurs de ce numéro de mettre le cap. Dans son article « The constant traveller : staging mobility in the poetry of Robert Frost », Candice Lemaire renverse l’image traditionnelle de la conquête de l’ouest et présente le poète Robert Frost comme un conquérant de la côte est, objet de rêveries pour ce promeneur solitaire. Dans son analyse littéraire de l’œuvre de Frost, Lemaire isole l’image de la chaussure reprise dans plusieurs poèmes afin de démontrer que, à l’image de son auteur, l’écriture frostienne est une écriture nomade, une écriture du déplacement à la fois géographique et symbolique. Au grès de ses déambulations lyriques, Frost revisite la Nouvelle Angleterre qui, sous la plume du metteur en scène- poète, prend alors des allures de Paradis Perdu. C’est aussi une Amérique d’après la Chute que Georges Simenon dépeint dans les ouvrages de sa période dite « américaine », comme le démontre Christine Calvet dans son article « Mobilité et Immobilité dans les romans américains de Georges Simenon ». A travers son étude de Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946), Maigret à New York (1946) et Feux Rouges (1953), Calvet montre que la mobilité, symbole traditionnel du Rêve Américain, ne résiste pas chez Simenon « à une sorte de cristallisation des mouvements humains et des déplacements identitaires ». Comme Daniel Agacinski, Calvet s’intéresse aux rapports entre identités et espaces. Si Agacinski démontre que l’identité américaine, ou du moins la vision que les Américains eux-mêmes s’en font, est intrinsèquement liée à la notion de territoire, Calvet conclut que pour le romancier belge l’identité est avant tout universelle. Si le drame, c'est-à-dire l’action, naît du décor, le décor n’a pourtant aucune influence sur la vie des personnages mis en scène puisque, pour Simenon, Calvet écrit, « seul compte ‘l’homme’, dans son immobilité profonde, pris aux pièges de ses incessants déplacements et condamné à vivre et mourir en scène, dans la tragédie de sa destinée ». Alors que Lemaire présente le point de vue d’un Américain sur les États-Unis et Calvet, celui d’un étranger sur cette même nation, Eve Bantman-Masum déplace l’angle de vue et s’intéresse au regard que des expatriés américains posent sur leur terre d’adoption. Ce nouveau cadrage proposé dans « ‘You Need to Come Here… to See What Living Is Really About’. Staging North American Expatriation in Merida (Mexico) » est non seulement géographique mais également méthodologique puisque, contrairement à Candice Lemaire et Christine Calvet qui utilisent une grille d’analyse littéraire, Bantman-Masum adopte une approche anthropologique. Si Simenon semble remettre en question le Rêve Américain, Bantman-Masum suggère que les étatsuniens ont trouvé leur nouvel Eldorado dans la ville de Merida, capitale de l’état du Yucatan, au Mexique, alors que de nombreux Mexicains continuent à traverser la frontière à la Recherche du Bonheur. Analysant le discours de la « communauté nord-américaine … tel qu’il est développé dans les récits autobiographiques, guides pour expatriés, visites guidées, sites internet, vidéo, et livres de décoration », l’auteur considère les procédés de mises en scène de la vie à Mérida. Bantman-Masum s’intéresse particulièrement aux symboliques liées à l’acquisition et la rénovation de maisons par des expatriés afin de définir l’impact de ce phénomène d’immigration en termes, notamment, d’identités culturelles.

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Acte III. Le capital en marche : mise en scène et mise en espace / Act III. Capital on the move : stage space

5 « Le spectacle » écrit Guy Debord, « est le capital à un tel degré d'accumulation qu'il devient image » (32). Dans La Société du Spectacle publié en 1967, Debord considère le spectacle comme forme ultime du capitalisme. Alors que Debord file la métaphore théâtrale pour dénoncer les abus de l’idéologie marchande, Frédéric Leriche, dans son article « Facteurs de mobilité ou mobilité des facteurs (de production) ? La mise en scène urbaine du capitalisme américain », utilise la trope du théâtre comme instrument d’analyse afin de mettre à jour les mécanismes propres à la mobilité du capital. Géographe, Leriche s’intéresse à la façon dont le capital se met en scène dans les espaces urbains qu’il définit comme « lieux par excellence de la concentration et de l’amalgamation » des pôles de production et par conséquence du travail. Epousant une approche diachronique, rappelant celle adoptée par Audrey Goodman, l’auteur retrace l’évolution de l’inscription des facteurs de production dans l’espace étasunien de la première révolution industrielle à l’ « après-fordisme ». A travers l’étude des cinq longs cycles d’expansion économique comparable aux cinq actes du « drame de la mobilité spatiale du capital », Leriche montre comment cette mise en scène des succès du « capital constant », à travers « des projets urbanistiques et architecturaux d’envergure » a des répercussions sur le « capital variable », sur le travail.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Agacinski, Daniel. « Le héros de la Frontière, un mythe de la fondation en mouvement ». Miranda, n° 5 (2012). Numéro identique à celui de cette introduction.

Bantman-Masum, Eve. « You Need to Come Here… to See What Living Is Really About’. Staging North American Expatriation in Merida (Mexico) ». Miranda, n° 5 (2012). Numéro identique à celui de cette introduction.

Baudrillard, Jean. Amérique. Paris : B. Grasset, 1986.

Calvet, Christine. « Mobilité et Immobilité dans les romans américains de Georges Simenon ». Miranda, n° 5 (2012). Numéro identique à celui de cette introduction.

Debord, Guy. La Société Du Spectacle. Paris : Gallimard, 1996.

Goodman, Audrey. « The Road West, Revised Editions ». Miranda, n° 5 (2012). Numéro identique à celui de cette introduction.

Lemaire, Candice. « The constant traveller: staging mobility in the poetry of Robert Frost ». Miranda, n° 5 (2012). Numéro identique à celui de cette introduction.

Leriche, Frédéric. « Facteurs de mobilité ou mobilité des facteurs (de production) ? La mise en scène urbaine du capitalisme américain ». Miranda, n° 5 (2012). Numéro identique à celui de cette introduction.

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Tocqueville, Alexis de. De la démocratie en Amérique. vol. 1. 3ème ed. Paris : Pagnerre, 1850.

Turner, Frederick J. The Frontier in American History. New York: Dover Publication Inc., 1996.

NOTES

1. « Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development » (Turner 1).

AUTEUR

EMELINE JOUVE Docteur Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Staging American Mobility

Acte I. La Route de l'ouest : Politique(s) des représentations / Act I. The Way West: Representations and Politics

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The Road West, Revised Editions

Audrey Goodman

1 In “Song of the Open Road” (1867), Walt Whitman, the great poet of American mobility, stepped out “afoot and light-hearted,” feeling “healthy, free, the world before me.” Proclaiming his own good fortune, he sought contact with the earth, the air, and the light—those elements he shared with his fellow Americans and which he claimed to possess through keeping his feet moving and his breathing deep. In the process, he projected unlimited freedom: From this hour I ordain myself loose’d of limits and imaginary lines Going where I list, my own master total and absolute Listening to others, considering well what they say Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. I inhale great draughts of space The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. I am larger, better than I thought I did not know I held so much goodness. (lines 53-61)

2 Here Whitman’s conception of a road spans all directions. It entices the reader beyond any mapped route, into “pathless and wild seas” (line 125) and out into the universe, which can be known, the poet proposes, “as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls” (line 180). His mobility was imaginary and local: Whitman walked down Broadway, through lower Manhattan and Brooklyn; rode the omnibus; traveled by ferry and train. Perhaps because of his intimate knowledge of the city, he could travel freely through territories that were not yet unified into a nation—and in fact would soon be divided by war and unevenly reconstructed into regions. His mobility was also formal, constitutive of his poetry in terms of flexible lines and wide-ranging catalogues.1 For Whitman, the figure of the road integrated material and imaginary ways of being, provided a means to organize space and movement, connected the disparate parts of his vision, and enabled him to imagine spanning a globe he could never fully traverse.

3 The possibilities the westward road presented for individual freedom and reconfigured social formations shaped the mythology of European-American and Anglo-American culture. The road suggests a geographical imagination that leads as far west as the

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Pacific and is democratically available, one in which places and cultures encountered along a particular route are equally accessible and comparable. If we consider the relation between the road and representations of place in American literature, we might see the road as strategy for staging and sustaining mobility and for resisting provincialism, those limitations in cultural perspective associated with staying still. Even in the twenty-first century the road remains a figure for modernization’s spread, however antiquated it may be as a technology for transport and exchange. It also cannot be separated from the imperial history of nation-building that extended European domination across the territory that is now the United States. The road, in its representations and revisions, thus provides an opportunity to think critically about how places work on several levels: how they take shape in written and visual languages; how they contribute to the project of modernity; and how they provide a means to compare collective formations across space and time.

4 My models for rethinking the idea of the road come from Gayatri Spivak’s defense of the intellectual process of wandering and her efforts to critique comparative literary study, as well as from Walter Mignolo’s assessment of the field of Latin American studies. In a recent interview with Cathy Carruth, Spivak explained that wandering allows for the possibility of accidental discovery and resists the programmatic production of meaning. Her comments in this interview suggest a new approach to thinking about the ways that physical and intellectual mobility might be connected. Her essay “Rethinking Comparativism” (2009) and Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America (2005), meanwhile, urge re-consideration of the ways that constructions of identity through encounters with new places might distort or exclude indigenous languages and histories. Speaking of her early work as a comparativist, Spivak explains her earlier method of working with units of meaning which could be isolated and measured against one another: “What was especially useful for us in those early days was the study of topoi, sets of imageme-narrateme-philosophemes that seemed to travel without either historical or psychic ballast across the history of literatures and cultures that make us code geography, write our world” (Spivak 2009, 611). While such topoi allowed her to “think affinity in place of mere comparison,” she now recognizes that “those great networks of affiliations work by way of exclusions” and warns that “to discover varieties of sameness is to give in too easily to the false promises of a level playing field” (611).

5 The physical process of wandering on and off the road has led to a great deal of our knowledge about the terrain and cultures of the United States, as well as to a rich literary record about how we imagine places and homelands. But in our current postcolonial moment, this history also poses troubling questions. Has the writing produced out of such wandering caused us to replace real differences with a fantasy of equivalence? To exclude or ignore elements of our history because they were less accessible or too difficult to translate? Or to pay too little attention to the idioms and languages that shape not only what we know but the way that we know? Mignolo seeks “to unravel the geo-politics of knowledge from the perspective of colonization, the untold and historically unrecognized counterpart of modernity” (xi). According to Spivak, one essential step in the decolonizing process of rethinking comparativism is to return to the study of language and the active process of translation—to the deep learning of a first language, whichever it may be, and to what she calls “the very moves of languaging.”2

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6 While the process of translating the experience of place into language and literary form often emerged out of encounters on the road, even in the early twentieth century the road as a literary structure—a trope or chronotope—could not fully contain the meaning of these encounters. My research into the formation of Anglo-American culture in the American Southwest has focused on the ways that writers have tried to understand and translate experiences of western places into different literary and visual forms, from tour books and photographs to popular western novels, poetry, memoirs, and modernist fiction. I concluded in Translating Southwestern Landscapes that at least through the 1920s Anglo-Americans both recorded their first-hand observations of southwestern places and projected their desires onto these places. While recognizing that “[s]uch dreams of translation and such fascination with the dead and the inaccessible can unwittingly do violence to the living” (164), I also posed the question of whether outsiders could ever really imagine a native point of view. My recent reading of the literature of mobility produced in the western U.S. has led me to see that this opposition between outsider and native (one commonly discussed in scholarship on literary regionalism) oversimplifies differences in perspective that are shaped by culture, class, gender, and language as well as by location. Contemporary western writing and New Western history have proceeded to break down such binary oppositions by wandering off the beaten track or returning to sites left for ruin. In the process, they excavate previously untold histories of native landscapes, unsettle the dominant accounts of Anglo-European conquest, and restore rituals and narratives of everyday life told in native tongues.

7 In this essay I look at selected examples of such texts which continue to refigure the notion of mobility in order to question how modes of moving through space might shape both the form of writing and the way a writer imagines gaining access to language. I am especially interested in the ways that different kinds of mixed-genre texts—contemporary memoirs which are also natural and cultural histories, illustrated books, and bilingual poetry by indigenous writers—might reveal this process of entering into multiple languages and histories. I focus here on essays by William Kittredge and Ellen Meloy, photo-books by modernist photographer Edward Weston, and poems by Native American linguist Ofelia Zepeda to show how routes of exploration have yielded to sites of deliberate passivity, practices of wandering, and paths of return. My investigation thus seeks to combine ongoing challenges to the American West’s history of imperialism with a new effort to animate “the very moves of languaging.”

1. Discovery and dispossession

8 The routes to the western territories of North America produced singular, unrepeatable accounts of discovery and led to the violent conquest of lands and people. By returning to these original accounts and revising them, writers like William Kittredge and Ellen Meloy have produced powerful post-western narratives of displacement and new forms of landscape history.3 One example can be found in Kittredge’s memoir Owning it All. “Home,” the book’s opening essay, describes the legendary winter walk on snowshoes taken by John Colter, a companion of Lewis and Clark, through what is now Yellowstone National Park. “Imagine those shining snowy mountains burning against the sheltering endless bowl of clear sky, and Colter alone there in Jackson Hole,”

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Kittredge writes. “We will not see such things again, not any of us, ever. It’s gone. We know it is. Only one man ever got to be Colter […] Except for some natives, who maybe never thought they were alone” (6). Much has been made of how explorers engaged in real and visual colonization of western territories and imposed European conventions of scenery on the lands they discovered. Too little attention, perhaps, has been given to the freshness of the language and the newness of perception that came out of such wandering. Even in retelling this expedition, Kittredge acknowledges the power of the early Anglo explorer’s mother tongue, the pain of his own loss of any original relation to the Western landscape, and the recognition that his own family history is complicit in Anglo-European imperialism.

9 Unlike Whitman, who imagined possession of the air, Kittredge begins with a refusal to claim possession of the land, for “the notion that my people live in a separate kingdom where they own it all, secure from the world, is still powerful and troublesome” (3). That notion itself was a myth, invented out of the failures of his ancestors to secure the homeland of their dreams. Kittredge’s great-grandfather had traveled down the Mississippi to Panama, tried his luck in the gold camps in California, gave up and turned to ranching, and died in 1897, “white-trash poor in the sagebrush backlands near Silver Lake, Oregon” (8). Kittredge’s response to this history of failed colonization is to compare his memory of the past with other versions of his region’s past, wandering through various stories and allowing the disparities to resonate through time and space. Kittredge recounts strange and still unsettling encounters with local people, including a sometimes-violent ranch hand named Jack Ray and a Paiute girl who died too young, and with native species of animals. He remembers a disturbing confrontation with “a great strutting bird” which rose from a row of dry corn while he was working in the fields. Because he hated the job of laying damp burlap sacks on cucumber and tomato plants to protect them from frost, he daydreamed while he did it, making the sudden appearance of “black tail feathers flaring and a monstrous yellow- orange air-sack pulsating from its white breast, its throat croaking with popping sounds like rust in a joint” all the more startling. As he recounts it, the bird seemed to come from another, less coherent and darker world and challenged the boy to stand up to its territorial claim: The bird looked to be stalking me with grave slow intensity, coming after me from a place I could not understand as real, and yet quite recognizable, the sort of terrifying creature that would sometimes spawn in the incoherent world of my night-dreams. In my story, now, I say it looked like death, come to say hello. Then, it was simply an apparition. (9)

10 Kittredge proceeds to describe the courage he needed as an eight-year-old to hold his ground and confront the bird; in this encounter the bird staked its claim and conquered him. Despite the fact that he soon recognized the bird must be what his father called a courting sage-grouse, the act of naming dispelled neither his memory of fear nor his uneasy sense that this native bird was simultaneously “phantom and real” (10). The bird continued to occupy both his imagination and his family’s territory.4 Toward the end of his essay, Kittredge asks, “Is it possible to claim that proceeding through some incidents in this free-associative manner is in fact a technique, a way of discovery?” (15). He ventures that the answer is, probably, yes, because only by giving voice to all memories, including those the colonizers might have chosen to repress, can the American West’s multiple languages of longing and loss be found.

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11 Ellen Meloy’s essays on the desert West collected in The Anthropology of Turquoise (2002) provide another example of the revisionary memoir. The very notion that a color, turquoise, is so connected with human society that it requires its own historical investigation already displaces the individual observer from the center of the inquiry. Meloy takes color as “her first principle of Place” (14) because “With every color lies a story, and stories are the binding agent of culture” (13). The many stories that turquoise specifically tells both connect disparate cultures and mark their differences: the Persians believe it makes eyes strong and protects against pain; the Zuni view turquoise as the embodiment of water; the Aztecs see it as nourishing the heart. For Meloy herself, turquoise comes to represent “all that a person can try to put into each of her days: attention to the radiance, a rise to the full chase of beauty” (322). Essential to her subject and method is the refusal of the color to be owned by the observer or fully contained by language, for “colors are not possessions; they are intimate revelations of an energy field” that convey sensation and make provisional connections between people and places.

12 Many of Meloy’s essays play stasis against mobility, noting the traditional movement of native people (like the Navajo and the Mohave who wandered far beyond their traditional homelands) while cultivating her own practices of stillness and observation. Often she begins an exploration by looking carefully from a stationary place, whether a ridge made of sandstone or an unmarked place in the desert, and then pursues “an instinct of motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways” (6). For example, in her opening essay she tests the feeling of stone and the meaning of colors, especially of blue (signifying concentric motion, according to Vassily Kandinsky), from the aquamarine of lichen to the indigo of the river to the turquoise of rock and sky. By focusing on varieties of turquoise here and throughout the book, she transforms the material world into waves, space into light, matter into energy, touch into language.

13 The essay “Azul Maya” describes her search for turquoise in the Yucatán Peninsula, which requires her to travel along a road cut violently through the jungle. She drives past “a fortress of slash–trees cut and piled as if there could never be a peaceful transition between closed and open space, between green wall and pale tarmac” (129)— until she arrives at her destination, a coastal nature preserve where she can gaze at water and its layers of blue. It takes this brutal encounter with the destruction wrought by the development of the Yucatán for luxury tourism to bring her to the threshold of another world: she then gazes at the sea, feeling “as if I have crawled through an aperture in one of my horizon bands and emerged on the other side into turquoise writ large. The world layers itself in chromatic resonance from the horizon to my toes: deep indigo, aquamarine, turquoise, then water as clear as glass” (130). This discovery of the water’s colors and the complex world of the coral reef that created it, of the distinctive pigment of Mayan azul and many untranslatable words for blue in the Mayan language, leads Meloy to feel lost and mute. Yet, by immersing herself in this other world and other culture, she deliberately resists the impulse to map and to name the place, and in the process she discovers, unexpectedly, that a decolonizing “happiness exists” (155).

14 Meloy’s investigations of the visible and hidden lives in the land around her home on the Colorado Plateau also recognize that a wanderer might never gain satisfactory access to native histories, languages, and knowledge. Speaking of the traditional Mohave practice of walking through the desert, Meloy states:

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I bear no delusions that I could survive a Mohave walk. I know how to move my limbs in a desert, but I do not know anything–where to find water, how to pace a journey, what kind of snare would trick a rabbit, how to cook a yucca, how to make use of hallucinations, where to cross the serrated mountain ranges that rise up from the low-lying basins like the backs of a fleet of stegosauruses. If, here on a patch of desert south of Needles, California, I had native guides, perhaps I might go along as a topophiliac and a heavy dreamer, endearing myself to people for whom geography and dreams were nearly an obsession. The most difficult premise of this fantasy: how to envision the terrain of the pre-Columbian river people, how to make any progress once we trekkers took our very first step. The challenges to a twenty-first-century Mohave walk are formidable. (86)

15 Local knowledge means familiarity with not only how the land looks in the present but also with how people in the past learned to use, name, map, traverse, and symbolize the terrain. In this essay, “AhaMahav Walkabout,” Meloy pursues each aspect of such knowledge in a circuitous fashion, working at times like Kittredge through free- association; at other points she moves between evidence gathered first hand through observation of the valley, through conversation, or from a variety of natural and cultural histories (including Pliny the Elder’s Natural History from the first century AD and Alfred Kroeber’s 1925 Handbook of the Indians of California). Having fallen “off the landmarks into the map’s blank spaces” (80), she takes on the task of integrating her sources and mapping her own indirect path.

16 On one occasion of wandering the Mohave, Meloy discovers a magnificent maze made of rocks tamped by hand. The maze covers ten acres and originally included an intaglio of a man and a snake 150 feet long and 60 feet wide. Investigating the site, Meloy struggles to determine its age. She discovers that it “likely predates European contact;” that the Fred Harvey Company promoted it on postcards as “the Mystic Maze of the Mojave Indians”; and that the Mohave claimed as work of the “old ones” done to capture evil spirits floating down the Colorado River (while the newly released soul would continue to the land of the dead, where it would die again and be cremated by other ghosts). Over time large parts of the maze have been destroyed by bridge, railroad, and highway construction through its heart; by vandalism; and by a motorcycle race course. However, Meloy proposes that “[i]f you peel off the highways, reservoirs, compression plant, railroad track, and a number of centuries, the paths seem to honor a different miracle” (93): that of a “route [that] might lead to nothing else but a necessary faith in time” (94).

17 Like many of Meloy’s essays, the “ahaMakav Walkabout” narrates and compares ways of moving through space and approaching an alternate world; it arrives at a destination by standing still and letting go of control over time, consciousness, and language. Thus Meloy follows the model not of the Anglo explorers who preceeded her but of the Mohave and other Colorado River people who organized their lives by rituals and responded to their physical environment and their dreams by shaping experience into “song-stories.” Meloy finally writes her own desert song-story by combining the traditional form with her own observations of the landscape. She starts with the model “fear slough/fat earth/duck water/no water” (100), a story of a journey whose meaning could only emerge through patterns familiar to the Mohave people. “Mohave men dreamed in familiar mythic patterns, and the stories, in turn, provided a framework for interpreting the content of dreams” (Furst 32). Meloy’s adaptation instead makes concrete the contemporary reality of her inhabited and far-from-pristine desert west: “electrified campground/pipeline hydrocarbons/the boulder where the raven poops

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and drops her french fry/starts visible, ghost gorge not/designer water/motorhead water/no water/and oh dear God my river” (101). In an effort to connect the indigenous practice of expressing dreams in poetic form with her own cultivation of the practice and poetics of sensation, Meloy sets “geography to voice” (101) and finds a new language for interpreting her relocated life.

2. Edward Weston’s road trips

18 By the late nineteenth century, the frontier had closed, and people who had already settled in the mid-West went farther, to the West coast. By the early twentieth century, wagon routes and train travel yielded to automobile trips, and in the process, the road became a new kind of social and private space, as landscape historian J. B. Jackson has eloquently explained. Because Americans believed in mobility, they built landscapes that facilitated speed, efficiency, and privacy—with roads at the center. What “started out as a wavering line between fields and houses and hills […] then took over more and more land, influenced and changed a wider and wider environment until the map of the United States seemed nothing but a web of roads and railroads and highways,” Jackson explained—a list we might extend to include grids, satellite lines, networks, and webs (Necessity for Ruins 122). Such webs might be considered physical preparation for the network of global capitalism, which Stephen Tatum describes in “Spectrality and the Postregional Interface” as a hypermobile process that imagines the regional or the local as “a postindustrial nodal point where the global flows of capital, commodities, peoples, and images intersect” (11). According to Spivak, such capital “moves always with the same kind of value, grinding everything into commeasurability” (Interview 1021). No wonder photographers who sought to document the American landscape in the mid-twentieth century, such as Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and Robert Frank, struggled to find their own languages outside of the newly standardized highway system, through wandering off official routes.

19 Both of Weston’s major book publications, California and the West (1940) and Leaves of Grass (1942), came out of road trips. The first resulted from the two years he spent traveling through the West with Charis Wilson on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1937-39; the second was commissioned by the directors of the Limited Editions Club to illustrate a re-issue of Walt Whitman’s poem. In his Guggenheim application for the project that would become California and the West, Weston wrote that he believed “whatever exists in the rest of the world—from glacier to active volcano—is somewhere represented here” (Weston125). The book encompasses not only natural sites but also the region’s wildly diverse landscapes of cultivation and desolation. Weston framed land settled through traditional methods of building and farming, as well as those places left behind during modernization. He was especially compelled by the movement of clouds and by the scale and changeability of Death Valley, which challenged his ability to find order in nature. Throughout this trip, he welcomed the “loss of control” that Spivak advocates as an essential condition for aesthetic discovery.

20 What happened, then, when Weston followed the road back east and searched for the visible outcome of American ambition across an even wider range of highways and back roads? On a practical level, there was the problem of clothing (as Wilson put it in her unpublished notes, they were “such utter Californians, and coastal Californians are the utterest”); weather (“For the first time I realized what impossible weather the rest of

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the country was exposed to”); and speed (there was no way to avoid highways and or to manage a “running account” along the way, as she had done with California and the West).5 On a conceptual level, though, there was the problem of approaching the differences presented by the landscape, because each place displayed such powerful evidence of uneven development. In Arizona, Weston and Wilson visited a Yaqui village and learned as they left Tucson that the Nazis had just declared war on Russia; in New Mexico they felt again the absence of development, compared with California; in Texas, they listened to storytellers, including Frank Dobie, whose storytelling would be eclipsed by radio, and soon by television; in New Orleans, they probed the city’s Creole culture through the fascinating life of the cemetery; in metropolitan Chicago, they found the view of the industrial landscape from the Pulaski Skyway to be “the most terrific thing we’ve seen.” There was perhaps “more openness to variety, contingency, the unexpected” in this project, as Alan Trachtenberg has observed (“The Final Years” 290). Still, neither the people nor the landscape could be fit into Whitman’s summation of America.

21 This revision of Leaves of Grass proves that by the mid-twentieth century the view from the road and the idea of America could no longer be dissociated from national and global flows. From this historical moment on, the electronic and transportation networks, the virtual technologies, and the flow of images from the entertainment industry sector” “could be described as composing a postregional grid” (Tatum 13), one that creates spaces of movement rather than sequences of local places seen from the road and framed by a camera’s lens. In his effort to re-make Whitman’s vision through a sequence of photographs of the contemporary landscape, Weston both revealed the difficulty of retracing the imaginative route of his nineteenth-century model and articulated his resistance to the dominant contemporary conception of the U. S. as a uniformly powerful and privileged nation. This photo-book registers a critical disjunction between earlier methods of integrating disparate cutures and landscapes (such as Whitman’s catalogs and his revisionary process) without arriving at a successful new formal combination for conveying the landscape’s diversity and contested histories. Whitman alone may have been able to transform individual feelings of isolation, difference, and mortality into a poetics of unity, although later works such as Democratic Vistas and “Passage to India” written after the Civil War reveal a marked “ambivalence evoked by the prospect of unmapped [global] spaces” (Hsu 142). For Weston, the only part of the American landscape that that remained whole—and perhaps impossible to frame—was the view from his house at Carmel, on the nation’s westernmost coast, of the ever-changing Pacific.

3. Ofelia Zepeda’s vagrant clouds

22 My final example of a comparative poetics of wandering comes from Ofelia Zepeda, a poet who lives in Tucson and on the Tohono O’odham reservation which extends across the U.S.-Mexico border.6 Zepeda writes from a clear sense of cultural location, which she often expresses in her mother tongue.7 As she notes in her second collection of poems, Ocean Power, her native language is related to Pima, Yaqui, Hopi, and others in Mexico and further south; it “is still spoken by many members of the tribe” and “is rich in many forms of oral texts” (Zepeda 87). However, “[w]ritten O’odham is a relatively new creation” (87). To write down a song or verbal utterance is already an act of

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translation that requires cultural and linguistic mobility. Many of Zepeda’s poem titles refer to songs, alluding to their traditional origins. Some mix stanzas or refrains or words in O’odham with those in English, or imitate the structure of repetition common to O’odham songs and prayers. In both Ocean Power (1995) and Where Clouds Are Formed (2008), Zepeda excavates the sensory language of individual and tribal memory, locating home in the scent of burning mesquite, cedar, piñon, or juniper wood, or in the texture of smooth mud walls. Each of these strategies maintains a connection to the spoken language Zepeda learned first (as well as to the cultural formation such language learning implies) while experimenting with alternative written versions through bilingual forms. If “translation is the most intimate act of reading”, as Spivak claims (”Rethinking“ 613), then Zepeda’s poetry provides us with maps for this intimate act—and the opportunity to rethink how memories of learning and using two different languages could point us towards ways of reading places and texts outside of regional, national, and other geo-political frameworks.

23 Consider Zepeda’s road poem, “Blacktop”, which signifies on and revises the trope of Whitman’s “Open Road” to engage in a deep comparison between the lure of possibility and the meaning of a tribal homeland. The blacktop carries the speaker beyond the built environment and into the desert’s shimmering, inarticulate territory, places where the voices of weavers “drift into/The tangle of desert where all language goes” (Where Clouds Are Formed 65). By yielding to the road as Meloy yielded to desert and sea, Zepeda opens herself to disorientation and the possible discovery of language’s future destination. “Leaving the debris of my life under a mesquite tree,/I rush towards an imaginary new life”, she writes. Zepeda then continues to specify the intimacy of her relation to the road: “The blacktop carries me in all directions./It knows my name./I never told it my name./It calls me” (65). Suddenly, the road becomes animate, a companion, an embodiment of equal, if contradictory desires. And when it speaks to her, it offers the promise that she will carry the places she values, such as the mountain sacred to her people, and her mother tongue with her: It wants to carry me in all directions. It whispers, “You will always see Waw Giwalik In your rearview mirror.” (66)

24 In O’odham, “Waw Giwalik” means indented rock or peak (Saxton 437); it refers to Baboquivari Peak, believed by the O’odham to be the place of first emergence after the world flood. Many O’odham visit the mountain as a shrine and leave offerings for good luck. Here Zepeda confirms the grounding power of this place of origin while pursuing the open routes of discovery made possible by the blacktop, combining traditional knowledge and modern mobility. Such juxtapositions of first and second languages, and of ritual and contingency, lie at the heart of Zepeda’s poetics.

25 In other poems, instead of traveling or wandering herself, Zepeda observes the vagrant movement of the natural world. In “Cloud Song”, she translates natural motion into color and selects a single location from which she can observe the moving sky. She notices, “Greenly they emerge./In colors of blue they emerge./Whitely they emerge./ In colors of black they are coming./Reddening, they are right here” (Zepeda 1995, 15). The speaker of Zepeda’s poem stays still, leaving all the mobility to the clouds above; in this way she re-asserts her identity as an O’odham person. It is tempting to read this poem in terms of affinities: to William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, for instance; to Alfred Stieglitz’s series of cloud photographs he called Equivalents or Songs

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of the Sky; or to Weston’s extensive studies of clouds above Mexico and the Western U. S. As Spivak suggests, however, such comparison of tropes of mobility runs the risk of a false “discovery” of sameness that too easily dismisses differences in power, culture, and language. Instead, new practices such as Zepeda’s are needed. Rather than declare such continuities across cultures, such critical comparativism delves more deeply into the particular languages and forms of both native and decolonizing aesthetics. While it may be difficult for a writer or reader to become fluent in many languages, she can pursue a comparative aesthetics and thus develop the ability to register the affective differences between first and other languages.

26 Aware of her people’s histories of forced migration, Zepeda responds with alternate ways of locating identity in and moving through the landscape, often returning to traditional, even outdated modes of travel (walking, wandering), in order to find deeper maps and render cultural comparison in new forms.8 She repeatedly asserts her identity as one of the ”real desert people“ who try to “pull down the clouds”and “ift their faces/upward with the first signs of moisture”. Unlike newer transplants who pride themselves on merely surviving a June day in Tucson, Arizona or those who move from one air-conditioned environment to another, her people “know how to inhale properly” (“Proclamation”, in Zepeda 2008, 44). The speakers with whom she identifies might have left their native lands, but they also struggle to articulate the rhythms and rituals of home. For example, she explains about her poem “Ocean Power” that she chose to write “about two O’odham men who came too close to the ocean as they were being deported back to Mexico from Arizona” (Zepeda 1995, 86). They knew about “That land of hot dry air/where the sky ends at the mountains”, but their sudden view of the ocean produced “dry fear in their throats”. “We do not belong here,/this place with the sky too endless” she explains through their collective voice. Not only is the “air too thick and heavy to breathe”: We are not ready to be here. We are not prepared in the old way. We have no medicine. We have not sat and had our minds walk through the image of coming to this ocean. We are not ready. We have not put our minds to what it is we want to give to the ocean. (Zepeda 1995, 84)

27 Following the syntactical structure of a traditional song, the poem continues to contemplate the questions the men might have chosen to ask of the sea, the blessings they might have sought—if they had taken the proper road west.

28 A traditional O’odham journey to the ocean would probably have been a pilgrimage for salt, an expedition undertaken with great deliberation by each village and guided by a recognized leader. Along the way, the leader would have initiated recitations and songs and made sure that everyone stayed on the trail, spoke slowly, carried an offering of corn meal, and planted prayer sticks appropriately at each water hole. A speech called The Preparation would have put the traveler in the right frame of mind to receive visions at the ocean. Finally, upon arrival, the travelers would have thrown cornmeal in the waves, delivered an invocation, and completed their pilgrimage with purification rituals. Each stage of the journey would have required specific speeches or songs adapted for the group or occasion, and the pilgrimage as a whole would have aimed to transfer some elemental force to the traveler.9 In “Ocean Power” Zepeda seems to allude to this ritual and thus implicitly records its loss. But she also writes the story of

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this singular return into a new ritual, using poetic language that combines traditional forms of recitation with contemporary speech. Thus she presents even a forced repatriation as a journey worthy of respect and celebration. The bus driver in the poem, like a reader lacking knowledge of O’odham ritual, cannot fathom these negotiations—and his dismissal of the ocean’s significance marks the new territory the translator or poet must traverse. In her revised editions of the road west, Zepeda crosses this territory and moves between languages to speak the power of tradition, memory, sensation, and imagination; in the process, she leads us back again towards the “pathless and wild seas.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Furst, Jill Leslie. Mojave Pottery, Mojave People: The Dillingham Collection of Mojave Ceramics. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001.

Goodman, Audrey. Lost Homelands: Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010.

--- . Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region 1880-1930. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.

Hsu, Hsuan L. Geography and the Production of Space in nineteenth century American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Jackson, J. B. Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. Ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

King, Thomas. Truth and Bright Water. New York: Grove Press, 1999.

Kittredge, William. Owning It All. Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1987.

Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise. 2002. Repr. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: 2005.

Miller, Matt. Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.

Saxton, Dean and Lucille. Legends and Lore of the Papago and Pima Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. The Turquoise Ledge. New York: Viking Press, 2010.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Rethinking Comparativism.” New Literary History 40 (2009). 609-626.

--- and Cathy Carruth. “Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” PMLA 125: 4 (October 2010). 1020-25.

Tatum, Stephen. “Spectrality and the Postregional Interface.” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. Ed. Susan Kollin. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 3-29.

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Teuton, Sean Kikummah. Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008.

Trachtenberg, Alan. “The Final Years.” Edward Weston: Forms of Passion. Ed. Gilles Mora. New York: Harry Abrams, 1995. 288-94.

Underhill, Ruth M. Papago Indian Religion. New York: AMS Press, 1969.

Weston, Edward. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. New York: Paddington Press Ltd, 1976.

--- and Charis Wilson. California and the West. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1940.

Wilson, Charis. Unpublished manuscript. Pasadena, CA. Huntington Library.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.

Wordsworth, William. The Poems: Volume One. Ed. John O. Hayden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Zepeda, Ofelia. Ocean Power. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995.

---. Where Clouds Are Formed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008.

---, ed. When It Rains: Papago and Pima Poetry. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982.

NOTES

1. For a fascinating discussion of Whitman’s compositional method, see Miller, Collage of Myself. 2. In terms of methodology, such comparative work requires an aesthetic education, one that according to Spivak puts primacy on reading and language immersion; allows for the accidental; contemplates meaning in singular or unverifiable occurances; and lacks any guarantees about the future or the result. 3. Other examples of this contemporary post-western writing range in genre from personal essays (by writers like Kittredge, Rebecca Solnit, Scott Momaday, and Leslie Silko) to practices of New Western History (by Patricia Limerick and Jake Kosek), ethnopoetics and ethnobotany (by Dennis Tedlock, Gary Paul Nabhan, Cheryl Glotfelty and Tom Lynch), landscape photography (Peter Goin, Joan Myers), and poetry (by Luci Tapahanso, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Ofelia Zepeda). For a consideration of how some of these literary and visual forms re-imagine the native histories of the southwestern U.S., see my Lost Homelands: Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest (2010). 4. In a similar strategy of juxtaposition, Kittredge layers the histories of Paiute involvement in the Ghost Dance at Surprise Valley, on the Oregon border, with accounts of traditional Paiute healing practices and belated expressions of grief at the Paiute girl’s death, leaving each version of disappointment and failure raw and exposed. 5. See Charis Wilson’s unpublished notes at the Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA. 6. Currently a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, Zepeda was born and raised in Stanfield, Arizona, a rural cotton-farming community. She wrote the first grammar of the Tohono O’odham language, A Papago Grammar, published three collections of poetry, and edits a series of Native American books called Sun Tracks. She

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was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education, maintenance, and recovery. 7. Like many indigenous people, instead of seeking cultural knowledge through the mobility, the O’odham “understand themselves and their attachment to land through tribal stories about the history of that land, contained in the oral tradition” (Teuton 44). The primary relation that Indigenous people have with the land leads to “everything else—identity, history, culture” (45). 8. Zepeda’s most recent poems articulate the pain and frustration many O’odham encounter when trying to recover their mother tongue. For example, a speaker might be confused by a joke told in O’odham or unable to gain access to the “million pieces of information” in her grandmother’s mind. See “Walking with Language” and “Pain of Speaking” (Zepeda 2008, 63-64). 9. Ruth Underhill’s Papago Indian Religion provides an account of this ritual pilgrimage and includes examples of songs and speeches. One leader’s speech describes the acquisition and transmission of the power he obtained during his pilgrimage: “The powers I had won beneath my bed I place./I lay upon them and lay down to sleep./ Then, in a little time mysteriously there came to me/Beautiful drunken songs;/ Beautiful songs for the circling dance;/Beautiful songs for the maiden’s dance, / Wherewith the maiden I might cozen /My songs the stay-at-home youths did learn and sing, /Scarce permitting me to be heard./ With my songs the evening spread echoing, / And the early dawn emerged with a good sound, /The firm mountains stood echoing therewith, /And the trees stood deep rooted.” (229)

ABSTRACTS

This essay explores the relation between the trope of the road and comparative representations of place in North American literature through the lens of recent critiques of comparative literature and area studies. Beginning with the assertion of Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” as a key figuration of the mobile imagination essential to the modernizing processes of migration and imperialism in the U.S., the essay analyzes significant revisions of Whitman’s vision by essayists William Kittredge and Ellen Meloy, photographer Edward Weston, and poet Ofelia Zepeda. It argues that these mixed-genre and multilingual revisions of the idea of the road west provide new models for writing about local places in a time of globalization.

Cet essai étudie la représentation du trope de la route dans la littérature Nord-Américaine à travers le prisme de recherches récentes en littérature comparée et area studies. S’ouvrant sur la déclaration de Walt Whitman dans “Song of the Open Road” et sa représentation de l’imagination comme mobile, une représentation emblématique des processus modernes de migration et d’impérialisme aux USA, cet article analyse les relectures significatives de la vision de Whitman par les essayistes William Kittredge et Ellen Meloy, le photographe Edward Weston, et la poètesse Ofelia Zepeda. Nous démontrerons que ces relectures hybrides et multilingues de l’idée de la route vers l’ouest proposent de nouveaux modèles pour écrire le local à l’heure de la mondialisation.

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INDEX

Keywords: American West, Comparativism, genre, landscape, mobility, road, Tohono O’odham Mots-clés: études comparatives, genre, Ouest américain, paysage, mobilité, route, Tohono O’odham

AUTHORS

AUDREY GOODMAN Associate Professor of English Georgia State University [email protected]

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Le héros de la Frontière, un mythe de la fondation en mouvement

Daniel Agacinski

1 L’Ouest des États-Unis et la « Frontière » peuvent être vus à la fois comme des réalités historiques, géographiques et économiques déterminées et comme des interprétations de ces réalités, c’est-à-dire comme des concepts forgés pour leur donner une unité et une signification. Ces concepts interprétatifs n’ont pas d’abord été élaborés en tant qu’outils théoriques ; ils semblent émaner de l’environnement même qu’ils désignent, et ont été repris, aussi bien par les hommes de l’Ouest que par ceux de l’Est, pour définir un espace et un mode de vie spécifiques. On peut alors les appeler des mythes, au sens où le concept de mythe, en général, désigne une représentation imaginaire et populaire qui se rapporte à un élément important de notre existence, comme notre origine, notre mode de vie, notre rapport à la nature, notre place dans le monde et dans l’histoire. L’Ouest et la Frontière auraient ainsi une existence double : d’une part une existence spatiale et historique, car la frontière entre les territoires colonisés et les terres en friche a bel et bien existé quelque part dans l’espace concret et dans l’histoire du continent nord-américain ; et de l’autre une existence psychique, en tant qu’espace mythique, c’est-à-dire en tant que représentation imaginaire d’un espace qui est davantage déterminé par le sens qu’on lui prête que par son emplacement géographique précis.

1. Une mythologie narrative et située

2 Prise en elle-même, cette idée n’est guère originale : l’Ouest américain est en effet de nos jours perçu d’abord comme un espace imaginaire ou fantasmé, et les processus de sa mythification ont déjà été étudiés. Il convient cependant de se demander, plus particulièrement, à quelle espèce de mythe on a affaire lorsqu’on parle de la Frontière. Les mythes de la Frontière ont été transmis par des supports qui, s’ils sont très variés, sont tous caractérisés par la très large diffusion qu’ils assurent : la presse de brochure et les dime novels, les chansons, les illustrations consacrées à l’Ouest et les films hollywoodiens du genre « western » ont partagé le même succès populaire. Sur chacun

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de ces supports, la Frontière a été le point de départ de récits — de récits présentant des personnages singuliers, ayant existé et agi d’une manière décisive pour la communauté qui les entourait. En tant qu’ils sont faits de récits d’action généralement associés à des noms propres, de lieux et de personnages, en tant qu’ils circulent et forment une série de traditions à la fois orales, écrites et picturales, on peut dire que les mythes de l’Ouest prennent la forme spécifique de la légende. La légende est précisément ce type de mythe qui donne une signification générale à un épisode historique réel particulier, et qui donne à ses personnages le statut de héros, c’est-à-dire à la fois d’hommes représentatifs d’un lieu et d’un temps, et d’acteurs décisifs dans une histoire qui les dépasse. Ceci est manifeste dans le cas des légendes de l’Ouest, qui prennent systématiquement appui sur tel ou tel événement, daté et situé, tiré de la vie de la Frontière, et le transforment en une véritable geste que l’on s’empresse de chanter et de diffuser au gré des itinérances des musiciens, des journalistes, des romanciers, ou simplement des hommes qui aiment raconter des histoires.

3 L’intérêt, en l’occurrence, de ce concept de légende par rapport à celui, plus générique, de mythe, réside dans sa dimension plus explicitement narrative que symbolique. L’anthropologie nous a donné l’habitude de lire les mythes comme des structures reposant principalement sur l’usage de la métaphore, et ce type d’analyse a constitué un moment nécessaire de l’étude des mythologies, permettant notamment d’en dégager les parentés fondamentales, quelles que soient les aires culturelles dans lesquelles elles apparaissent ou les arts qui les transmettent. Cependant, il nous semble que la mythologie de l’Ouest américain doit être située pour être comprise, c’est-à-dire qu’il faut la regarder comme étant à la fois produite dans un contexte historique et politique donné, au terme de procédures matérielles particulières, et comme étant dans son contenu même relative à une situation déterminée dans le temps et dans l’espace : la conquête puis la colonisation des terres vierges de l’Ouest de l’Amérique du Nord. Le sens des légendes de l’Ouest étant lui-même un sens spatial (l’investissement imaginaire d’un espace concret et réel), il serait sans doute insuffisant de les lire du seul point de vue de leur structure, en y recherchant uniquement l’universel humain dont elles seraient la traduction métaphorique : l’inscription du mythe dans une conjoncture historique semble prendre ici une tout autre importance que dans le cas de mythes comme celui de Sisyphe, par exemple.

4 Certes, l’interprétation des mythes en termes de symboles ou de signes n’est pas nécessairement incompatible avec un effort consistant à en situer historiquement la genèse : Barthes, par exemple, lit les mythes de son temps avec les catégories de la sémiologie et avec celles de l’idéologie. Cependant, l’idée de signe conduit à regarder le mythe comme un système, comme une totalité dont le sens est donné en bloc ; et c’est une telle approche qui fait dire à Barthes du mythe qu’il est « une image naturelle » du réel historique, « une parole dépolitisée », constituée « par la déperdition de la qualité historique des choses » (216-217).

5 Le concept de légende, tel que nous voudrions l’utiliser, en tant qu’il implique directement l’idée de narrativité, permet quant à lui de lire autrement certains dispositifs mythologiques, de voir qu’ils ne constituent pas nécessairement une dépolitisation anhistorique des représentations, et qu’ils peuvent au contraire donner les clés d’une lecture politique et historique des réalités qu’ils évoquent. Le paradigme du mythe comme signe global ne pouvait pas faire droit à la pluralité, à l’équivocité qui est à l’œuvre dans le récit légendaire, comme dans tout récit, dès lors qu’il met en jeu

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plusieurs acteurs, plusieurs perspectives ; or l’identification d’une pluralité d’instances constitue le premier moment de la lecture politique d’une situation donnée. Ainsi, parler de légende nous semble nécessaire pour comprendre le type de rapport au temps, à l’espace et à la politique qui est instauré par les récits populaires des actions des hommes de la Frontière.

6 Qu’est-ce qui permet pour autant de faire de cette tradition légendaire un élément décisif de la représentation que l’Amérique se fait d’elle-même, une clé de la mise en scène de son identité ? Non seulement les récits des hauts faits de la Frontière ont circulé massivement sous toutes leurs formes pendant plus d’un siècle, mais ils jouent surtout un rôle dans la façon dont les États-Unis se racontent leur propre histoire politique ; plus qu’un simple épisode de la vie du pays, la conquête de l’Ouest représente une scène fondatrice, maintes fois répétée le long de la Frontière. Dompter les contraintes naturelles, vaincre les Indiens, discipliner les cowboys et les hors-la-loi : tels sont les trois actes par lesquels la société américaine s’établit sur l’ensemble de son territoire, et telle est la matière inépuisable des chansons, des romans et des films. Dès lors, il semble possible de considérer ces légendes de la Frontière comme l’épopée nationale propre des Etats-Unis, dans la mesure où l’œuvre épique est précisément celle qui repose sur un récit relatant les actions qui ont contribué à la fondation de la communauté. Et ce qui caractérise l’épopée, si l’on suit l’analyse qu’en fait Hegel dans l’Esthétique, c’est son caractère doublement politique : d’une part elle se joue dans un monde où le droit est encore imparfaitement établi, dans lequel il revient à des individus d’instaurer, héroïquement, un véritable ordre civil ; d’autre part, elle est faite de « l’ensemble de la conception du monde et de la vie d’une nation, présentée sous la forme objective d’événements réels » (Hegel 1979, 101). Elle est donc poésie politique en tant que poésie nationale, c’est-à-dire qu’elle traduit dans un récit la façon dont un peuple déterminé se représente la signification de son existence politique et se raconte sa venue à l’être en tant que peuple.

7 Dans la mesure où les légendes de l’Ouest correspondent à ces critères, on peut reprendre la formule de Robert Pippin, qui, lui-même, à la suite de Kurt Bayertz, trouve chez Hegel les concepts qui lui permettent de penser la dimension proprement épique de ces histoires : « Les Grecs ont l’Iliade ; les Juifs, la Bible hébraïque ; les Romains, l’Énéide ; les Allemands, le Niebelungenlied ; les Scandinaves, la saga de Njáll ; les Espagnols, le Cid ; les Anglais ont les légendes arthuriennes. Les Américains ont John Ford »1. En deçà même du cinéma de Ford, c’est à partir de l’expérience de la Frontière, qui est l’expérience la plus proprement américaine, la plus étrangère aux nations européennes, que se construit la légende singulière du peuple américain.2

2. Paradoxes de la mobilité des héros et de la Frontière

8 Une fois la tradition des légendes de l’Ouest comprise comme la matrice d’un épos national américain, il faut encore analyser le contenu de ces histoires pour en comprendre les effets sur la représentation que l’Amérique se fait d’elle-même à travers elles. L’un des caractères essentiels de cette tradition est, par sa définition même, son articulation à l’espace : non seulement ces légendes sont situées dans un espace déterminé, mais surtout elles instaurent, par le type d’action qu’elles représentent, un certain rapport à l’espace, marqué par le motif de l’itinérance, de la

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mobilité. Des premiers aux derniers héros de l’Ouest — des pionniers aux hommes de loi —, tous sont des personnages en mouvement, de friche en friche, de ville en ville, de territoire en territoire. La mobilité n’est pas pour eux une propriété accidentelle : leur œuvre ne peut s’accomplir que s’ils sont mobiles, et leurs attributs les plus visibles (le plus souvent, un cheval) les identifient comme itinérants. S’ils vivent sur la Frontière, ce n’est pas sur le mode d’une station fixe, mais ils la parcourent et la modifient ; ce sont des agents itinérants qui contribuent de manière décisive, selon le mythe, à la transformation du monde de la Frontière. Les défricheurs comme Daniel Boone ou Davy Crockett transforment une forêt en terre cultivable ; les héros du Railroad métamorphosent les conditions de la mobilité sur la Frontière ; et les fines gâchettes au service de la loi, comme Pat Garett ou Wyatt Earp, pacifient les villes de l’Ouest. Si bien que, chacun dans son genre, ces héros itinérants déplacent eux-mêmes la Frontière par leur action. Plus précisément, ils changent le statut du territoire qu’ils ont parcouru : la terre conquise par un groupe pionnier n’est plus une friche ; la ville pacifiée par un marshal exceptionnel n’est plus une zone de non-droit. Autrement dit, c’est le régime spatial propre à la Frontière qui, en tant qu’il produit une instabilité et une violence permanentes, rend nécessaire l’intervention de tels personnages héroïques, dont l’action, ponctuelle, va consister à résoudre une crise typique de la vie de l’Ouest. Ils ne peuvent agir qu’une seule fois en chaque lieu, et tel est d’ailleurs le motif même de leur itinérance : une fois un terrain défriché, il faut aller en découvrir un autre ; une fois une ville pacifiée, Wyatt Earp est appelé dans le comté voisin. Ce qui donne une telle importance à la mobilité du héros de l’Ouest, c’est qu’elle contribue à la puissance du mythe : comme ses hauts faits sont chantés dès qu’ils sont accomplis, et comme leur récit parcourt la Frontière, le héros itinérant est toujours précédé, où qu’il aille, par sa propre légende, diffusée d’abord par la presse populaire et les chansons, ce qui renforce son prestige et son efficacité3.

9 D’autre part, l’errance du héros rend compte du tragique de sa condition car, par son action même, il abolit ses propres conditions de vie : par exemple, sitôt les bandits cowboys chassés ou punis, sitôt la loi et l’ordre instaurés dans une ville, le héros qui a permis cette instauration devient superflu et même dangereux. Ainsi, le double mouvement (du héros et de la Frontière) est paradoxal dans la mesure où sa signification réside dans sa fin, dans son terme, qui est, sinon l’immobilité, du moins l’installation sédentaire, la colonisation de l’espace et son occupation par des habitants fixes : c’est manifeste dans le cas des pionniers, qui défrichent pour que des colons puissent s’installer et cultiver la terre, comme dans le cas des hommes de loi itinérants, qui assurent la sécurité de la vie bourgeoise naissante dans des villes encore marquées par les convois de bétail et le cortège de violences qui les accompagnait — c’est-à-dire traumatisées par une forme sauvage de mobilité. Les héros de l’Ouest se meuvent dans un espace aux limites mobiles, mais par leur mouvement même ils permettent l’émergence d’un espace stable de sédentarité — si bien qu’ils instituent tragiquement un monde dans lequel il n’ont plus de place, car une fois toutes les terres défrichées et toutes les villes pacifiées, l’existence même de ces héros perd son sens : ils deviennent inutiles et sont généralement bannis ou exécutés ; de ce point de vue, les héros de l’Ouest américain partagent le destin de ceux que Hegel appelle les « individus historiques », qui est de tomber « comme des douilles vides », une fois leur action accomplie (Hegel 1965, 124). Ici comme ailleurs, le propre des héros est d’agir de telle sorte qu’on n’ait plus besoin de héros.

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10 Leur mobilité, qui leur fait perdre, au terme de leur parcours, toute place dans le monde sédentaire, vient en définitive de ce qu’ils sont radicalement situés entre deux mondes (c’est-à-dire dans aucun des deux), en un sens à la fois temporel et spatial : entre le monde sauvage et le monde civil, entre le monde d’avant et le monde d’après — en cela ils sont précisément des hommes de la Frontière. Les héros des guerres indiennes sont souvent décrits par les récits mythiques comme entretenant une relation ambiguë avec leurs adversaires, marquée à la fois par l’hostilité résolue et par une compréhension intime4 : c’est ainsi que sont dépeints Kit Carson ou le Général Custer, par exemple, et c’est aussi ce qui caractérise le personnage d’Ethan, joué par John Wayne, dans La Prisonnière du désert de John Ford5. De même, les héros de l’ordre comme Wyatt Earp devaient, pour être à la hauteur de leurs adversaires violents, pour être capables de lutter sur leur terrain et avec leurs armes, les connaître intimement et leur ressembler en bien des points (ce que soulignent, grâce à des parallélismes appuyés, des films comme Règlement de comptes à O.K. Corral6 ou L’Homme aux colts d’or7, adaptés de la légende de Wyatt Earp et de Doc Holliday) ; par leur mode de vie (par leur violence et leur mobilité) ils n’appartiennent donc pas à l’ordre légal et bourgeois qu’ils instaurent, et par leur action en faveur de la loi ils deviennent étrangers au monde sauvage qui était le leur.

3. Signification politique de cette culture du récit

11 Ainsi, dans ces légendes, la fondation de la communauté apparaît non pas comme le résultat de la concordance des volontés individuelles autour d’un contrat commun, ni comme un don divin, ni même comme l’œuvre d’un individu exceptionnel qui bâtirait le corps politique et lui donnerait sa loi, mais plutôt comme un processus qui est rendu possible grâce à l’action violente et toute négative d’un homme qui est et demeurera étranger à la communauté fondée ; le défricheur ou le marshal n’est ni prince ni législateur8, il se contente d’écarter le danger qui jusque là empêchait la société de s’instituer (la nature inhospitalière, l’Indien, ou le cowboy violent étant les trois grandes figures du danger à l’Ouest) ; son action décisive n’est pas une fabrication de la cité, mais consiste seulement à marquer l’espace où il est possible de fonder une cité, et à quitter cet espace une fois qu’il a été délimité. La dimension narrative des mythes de l’Ouest est précisément ce qui nous révèle ce caractère non démiurgique de la fondation — une institution divine, l’énonciation d’une loi nouvelle ou la conclusion d’un accord juridique ne sont en effet pas des choses qui pourraient être racontées comme on raconte l’histoire de la fondation de l’ordre politique sur la Frontière.

12 Pourquoi peut-on dire d’une telle représentation de la fondation qu’elle est déterminante pour la construction de la « conscience de soi » politique de la nation américaine — pour la mise en scène de son identité — et pour l’élaboration de son rapport à l’action à venir — pour sa disposition politique ? Tout d’abord, malgré la grande diversité des interprétations de cette légende de l’Ouest (plus ou moins nostalgiques, plus ou moins progressistes ou populistes9) et malgré la diversité du type de scènes qu’elle offre (guerre contre les Indiens, chasse, colonisation, poursuite des gangs de cowboys, qui chacune évoque un aspect spécifique de la fondation et instaure un régime propre de représentation politique), le trait majeur de cette légende est de faire reposer la fondation sur une action humaine et violente : cette action est accomplie par des individus que le récit distingue, mais elle ne prend son sens qu’au sein de la

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pluralité d’un peuple qui la voit, la commente, l’accompagne, la prolonge, et constitue pour elle une chambre d’écho indispensable. De cette action on peut donc dire, premièrement, qu’elle possède à la fois une dimension individuelle et une dimension collective, deuxièmement qu’elle est ce par quoi la violence peut mettre un terme à la violence et, enfin, qu’elle est ce dont le propre est de produire des histoires plutôt que des choses10 ; et placer ce genre d’action à la racine de l’ordre civil n’est pas sans conséquences pour l’idée qu’on se fait de la nature même du politique.

13 La première thèse sous-jacente à cette représentation est la négation de l’idée d’une autosuffisance du politique : l’ordre politique se fonde sur son contraire, ou plutôt sur sa marge individuelle et violente, et il se régénère à sa frontière ; la fixité s’institue par la mobilité. Se représenter ainsi l’existence de la communauté politique comme conditionnée par son autre et son dehors ancre dans le rapport à soi du groupe la conscience de sa précarité et de la fragilité de toute institution. Et la conséquence pratique de cette représentation est alors une disposition à retrouver l’esprit de la fondation dans une certaine violence11, dans une action qui se joue sur les frontières.

14 L’autre thèse, plus implicite, qui sous-tend cette image de la fondation porte elle aussi sur les conditions prépolitiques du politique, mais insiste sur la nécessité de la légende violente elle-même pour la fondation. L’action individuelle est certes indispensable, mais c’est seulement le fait qu’elle prend la forme de l’épopée, du récit légendaire qui circule dans la communauté, qui lui permettra de produire son effet spécifiquement fondateur ; c’est en tant que héros de légende que l’homme de l’Ouest peut établir l’ordre civil dans la prairie, plutôt que par la seule vertu de ses actes. Ce sont en effet les récits des exploits des défricheurs qui suscitent l’enthousiasme pour la conquête de l’Ouest, et ce sont les chansons et les brochures vantant les prouesses au colt des shérifs et des marshals qui assurent d’abord à la loi son aura ; dans ce dernier cas, la contre- violence qui se donne pour but d’être convertie en puissance d’institution a besoin d’être accompagnée du discours légendaire qui la chante pour être lue comme fondatrice d’un ordre politique, et non pas comme simple prolongation du cycle des violences. On peut alors interpréter l’ensemble des productions épiques appartenant aux traditions de l’Ouest américain comme un facteur déterminant de l’institution effective de l’ordre civil dans les anciennes terres sauvages. La constitution de genres artistiques liés à l’histoire de la Frontière (genres musicaux, littéraires, puis cinématographiques) a en elle-même une signification politique, une fonction : accompagner le mouvement par lequel la société américaine s’institue.

15 Les films westerns les plus élaborés, ceux qui, tout en étant fidèles aux standards du genre, effectuent en leur sein même une réflexion sur ce que fait le genre, mettent en scène cette mise en scène, exposent le processus de mise en légende, et en montrent la nécessité pour que la fondation soit réalisée. C’est le cas de L’homme aux colts d’or de Dmytryck, où une bourgade qui n’a pas encore de statut juridique ne trouve pas d’autre solution, pour faire respecter un semblant de loi dans ses rues, que de recourir aux services tarifés d’un marshal free-lance dont la première force réside dans sa réputation, c’est-à-dire dans la légende violente sédimentée autour de son nom, ce qui a pour effet de rassurer les bourgeois et d’intimider les bandits — et qui va effectivement permettre à la petite ville de passer du règne des cowboys à celui des marchands. Et c’est surtout le cas de L’Homme qui tua Liberty Valance, de John Ford, dont la réplique la plus célèbre est prononcée par un journaliste à qui un important homme politique de l’ancienne Frontière vient de révéler le mensonge sur lequel s’est construite sa propre réputation ;

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il déchire les notes qu’il a prises pendant l’entretien et répond : « This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend ! »12. La construction même de cette phrase traduit la conjonction entre trois éléments : la spécificité de la situation (l’Ouest), la manière dont la déformation des événements, qui permet la fondation (ici, la mythification consistant à raconter que l’homme politique en question a héroïquement défié et vaincu en duel le plus dangereux bandit du territoire), devient le fait lui-même dans la tradition (c’est-à-dire comment le personnage joué par James Stewart devient « l’homme qui a tué Liberty Valance ») et la nécessité de prolonger, dans la façon dont on va imprimer l’histoire dans la presse, le mensonge originel, sous peine de faire s’écrouler l’édifice qui avait été bâti sur ce mensonge, et qui n’est rien de moins que la civilisation, que la transformation du désert en jardin. Ces trois éléments, pris ensemble, font toute l’équivocité du film qui, en montrant à la fois la légende et la mise en légende, ne se réduit ni à la poursuite de la mystification constitutive du genre western, ni à sa pure et simple démystification, mais instaure un régime de lucidité dans lequel on ne peut ignorer ni le prix moral de la fondation de l’ordre politique, ni la nécessité de payer ce prix.

16 Mais il faut ici s’arrêter sur une autre réplique, moins souvent commentée, et qui révèle d’un autre point de vue ce caractère vital de la légende : dans le flashback qui occupe la majeure partie du film, lorsque, des années plus tôt, le personnage joué par John Wayne apprend à celui qui est interprété par James Stewart qu’il n’est en fait pas l’homme qui a tué Liberty Valance, et qu’il lui enjoint d’endosser malgré cela ce rôle usurpé, il lui rappelle qu’il avait, quelque temps auparavant, appris à lire et à écrire à la femme qu’ils aiment tous les deux : « You taught her how to read and write : now give her something to read and write about ! »13. C’est précisément cela qu’est, d’après l’étymologie, la légende : ce qui est à lire ; et l’institution sociale de l’école, l’existence d’une tradition, d’une transmission écrite, ne prennent leur sens qu’à condition qu’il y ait effectivement une matière narrative à partager, autrement dit une légende qui concerne un public en lui donnant un monde commun, voire qui le constitue par le partage de cette référence commune à des personnages et à des actions.

17 Et la mise en scène de l’identité américaine se signale justement par son recours fréquent au story-telling, à la narrativité, plutôt qu’à l’image fixe, au symbole, ou à la définition d’une identité de sang ou de terre. Il semble que l’on puisse mettre cette tendance en relation avec la constitution, dans la culture américaine, et particulièrement au cinéma, de grands genres narratifs, notamment le polar, le western et le film de guerre, qui ont un intérêt politique non seulement en vertu de leur objet (la défense de la société contre le crime, le combat de la civilisation contre le monde sauvage, la défense de la patrie ou de la liberté) mais aussi en vertu de leur réception populaire massive ; autrement dit ces grands genres sont les relais privilégiés de la représentation que le peuple américain se fait de ce qu’il est et de ce qu’il fait. Et que cette représentation soit avant tout narrative révèle l’importance de l’action dans la définition de cette communauté politique — par différence avec une conception identitaire de la nation ou avec une représentation exclusivement abstraite et juridique de l’ordre politique, qui ne passent pas par la médiation de récits d’action, et avec lesquelles les légendes se trouvent en situation de concurrence.

18 Cependant, cette narration épique des histoires de la Frontière d’une part n’est pas uniforme (les épisodes en sont variés et peuvent être mobilisés à des fins très diverses14) et d’autre part n’est pas le seul registre dans lequel les Etats-Unis expriment

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leur rapport à eux-mêmes (ils définissent aussi leur identité politique en référence à des hommes de l’Est ou à des textes fondateurs qui ne sont pas intrinsèquement liés à l’aventure de la Frontière). Il semble clair, en tous cas à la lecture de la trilogie que Richard Slotkin a consacrée à la postérité et aux usages du mythe de la Frontière du XVIIe à la fin du XX e siècle (1973, 1985 et 1992), que l’importance et la tonalité des reprises et des commémorations de la conquête de l’Ouest dans la culture et dans la politique américaines dépendent essentiellement de la qualité de la conjoncture où elles apparaissent ; autrement dit, et c’est là que se situe l’enjeu de cette légende du point de vue de la philosophie politique, l’histoire de l’Ouest serait une sorte de miroir que l’Amérique se tendrait à elle-même dans certaines circonstances, en mettant l’accent sur les aspects de la conquête qui l’intéressent au présent, et afin de produire un effet déterminé sur les représentations que les Américains se font d’eux-mêmes, de leur espace et de leur capacité à agir. Ces conjonctures critiques particulières qui, par les réinterprétations polémiques qu’elles suscitent, redonnent vie au mythe de la Frontière ont été analysées par Slotkin, et ce n’est pas ici le lieu de les étudier pour elles-mêmes ; en revanche, le sens général de cette démarche par laquelle une nation se réfère à un aspect essentiel de sa fondation par le biais d’une telle légende doit encore être interrogé.

19 Comme cette légende évoque la fondation de la communauté par ses marges spatiales et sociales, sa remémoration crée de fait un décentrement et une ouverture dans la conception de ce qu’est le groupe politique américain, qui n’apparaît alors ni réductible à ses institutions, ni souverain dans sa définition de lui-même. La légende de la Frontière instaurerait ainsi une forme de lucidité sur la précarité du politique et inviterait à sortir des cadres institutionnels établis pour en défendre l’existence, ce qui explique qu’une telle représentation rencontre un écho plus vif chaque fois que la communauté semble menacée. Ce que produit cette conscience de soi, ce n’est alors pas un repli sur une identité ethnique ou sur un espace acquis, mais une incitation à l’action, à la refondation par l’action, qui définit un rapport spécifique à l’espace s’appuyant sur les propriétés spatiales de l’Ouest. On l’a vu, l’Ouest est un espace mobile, sans cesse réorganisé par des hommes itinérants et par les récits, qui eux- mêmes circulent, des actions de ces hommes ; mais, plus radicalement, l’Ouest est un lieu où l’on va, comme le dit la formule synthétique popularisée par Horace Greeley « Go west, young man, and grow up with the country ! » ; ce n’est pas un espace où l’on peut être immobile, car il est défini en tant que tel par la mobilité de ses héros. Non seulement ce n’est pas un espace qui correspond à une délimitation géographique précise, mais c’est un espace mythique dont le propre est d’être le lieu vers lequel le mouvement s’oriente (s’il est permis de parler ici d’orientation) ; en d’autres termes il n’y a pas de West sans « Go west ». La frontière de l’Ouest est donc un espace investi par l’imaginaire politique comme l’espace de l’expansion coloniale et de la mobilité par excellence, comme étant ce mouvement lui-même, et son évocation dans la légende intervient dans des conjonctures où la communauté ressent de nouveau ce besoin d’air, d’espace ouvert aux possibilités indéfinies, qui se trouve par principe aux marges, à l’extérieur de l’espace politique institutionnel15.

20 A partir du moment où naît le sentiment que la Frontière s’est refermée, lors donc que l’Ouest n’est plus le lieu mobile et indéterminé vers lequel tout mouvement se dirige, c’est le thème de la « nouvelle frontière » qui, dès avant Kennedy et après lui, commande les relectures conflictuelles de la première frontière dans les grands moments de refondation, comme la sortie de la Grande Dépression, la lutte pour les

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Droits civiques, la conquête spatiale, entre autres… Dans ces rhétoriques de la nouvelle frontière, la référence à la Frontière n’a pas nécessairement de signification spatiale, mais elle constitue cet espace-mouvement qui permet de penser et de produire les conditions d’une action politique qui soit à nouveau fondatrice, qui régénère la nation et lui offre des possibilités qui excèdent le champ clos du territoire concret des États- Unis et de leurs institutions.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Arendt, Hannah. Condition de l’homme moderne. Paris: Pocket Agora, 2002.

Barthes, Roland. « Le mythe, aujourd’hui. » In Mythologies. Paris : Le Seuil, Points, 1970. 179-233.

Bayertz, Kurt. « Zur Ästhetik des Western ». In Zeitschrifft für Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Eds. Josef Frucht and Maria Moog-Grunewald. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Ferlag, 2003. 69-82.

---. « Hegel und der wilde Westen ». In Hegel-Perspektiven seiner Philosophie heute. Ed. Bernhard Heidtmann. Köln : Pahl-Rugenstein, 1981. 131-48.

Bazin, André. « Le Western ou le cinéma américain par excellence ». In Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? Paris : Cerf, 1961. 217-228.

Gérard, Valérie. « Politique et violence selon Hannah Arendt. » In Violences. Anthropologie, politique, philosophie. Ed. Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc. Paris : Europhilosophie Éditions, « Bibliothèque de philosophie sociale et politique », 2010. 29-53. Disponible en ligne : http://www.europhilosophie-editions.eu/fr/spip.php?article40

Hegel, G. W. F. Esthétique. Quatrième partie, « La poésie » Paris : Flammarion, « Champs », 1979.

---. La Raison dans l’Histoire. Paris : 10-18, Plon, 1965.

Pippin, Robert B. « What Is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford’s The Searchers » In Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009). 223-253. Disponible en ligne : https://webshare.uchicago.edu/users/rbp1/Public/Searchers.pdf ?uniq =p1tndg

Repris dans: Pippin, Robert B. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: the Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

---. The Fatal Environment the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization. 1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985.

---. Gunfighter Nation: the Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New-York: Atheneum, 1992.

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NOTES

1. « The Greeks have the Iliad; the Jews, the Hebrew Bible; the Romans, the Aeneid; the Germans, the Nibelungenlied; the Scandinavians, the Njáls saga; the Spanish have the Cid; the British have the Arthurian legends. The Americans have John Ford » (Pippin 224, je traduis). Dans ce passage, Robert Pippin renvoie aux textes de Bayertz (1981 et 2003), ainsi qu’à Bazin (1961). 2. En partant des critères hégéliens de définition de l’épopée, on pourrait même considérer que les légendes classiques de l’Ouest, qui apparaissent pour ainsi dire à même la Frontière, sont davantage conformes au concept de l’épique que ne l’est, par exemple, l’Énéide de Virgile, qui est une composition poétique tardive, et non pas un récit authentiquement fondateur circulant depuis les origines dans la culture populaire. L’absence de distance et le sérieux dans le traitement du sujet sont deux conditions indispensables à la production du genre épique qui étaient réunies dans l’âge classique du Western, mais qui furent perdues dès lors que l’on cessa de croire à la puissance fondatrice de l’aventure de la Frontière—et c’est justement à ce moment-là que le genre perdit son caractère proprement national. 3. De nombreux films westerns montrent des héros entrant dans une ville précédés des récits de leurs exploits et insistent ainsi sur l’importance de leur réputation (qui concerne en général l’habileté au colt) pour l’accomplissement de leur action. Il en sera question dans la dernière partie de cet article. 4. « L’homme-qui-connaît-les-Indiens » (« the man who knows Indians ») est précisément l’une des figures majeures héritées du mythe de la Frontière, dont Slotkin retrace le destin dans Gunfighter Nation (1992). 5. La Prisonnière du désert ; titre original : The Searchers, réalisé par John Ford (1956). 6. Règlement de comptes à O.K. Corral ; titre original : Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, réalisé par John Sturges (1957). 7. L’Homme aux colts d’or ; titre original : Warlock, réalisé par Edward Dmytryck (1959) et tiré du roman d’Oakley Hall (Warlock, 1958) qui, en changeant les noms des lieux et des personnages, revisitait très directement la légende de Tombstone, et le célèbre gunfight opposant le marshal et le clan des bandits. 8. S’il arrive parfois à certains héros de proclamer « Je serai la loi » (« I’ll be the law »), comme le personnage joué par Henry Fonda dans L’Homme aux colts d’or (op. cit., 16'12), il ne s’agit en aucun cas d’une prétention à donner une loi durable à la communauté, à fonder souverainement son ordre légal à venir, mais « seulement » de décréter que tant que sa mission n’est pas terminée, la ville ne connaîtra d’autre loi que les décrets qu’il prendra et fera appliquer lui-même. 9. Nous reprenons ici les catégories qu’utilise Richard Slotkin (1992, 29-62) pour analyser notamment les différences entre la lecture de la Frontière par Frederick Jackson Turner et celle qu’en fait Theodore Roosevelt. 10. Cette analyse des liens entre l’action et le récit s’inspire principalement du chapitre V de Condition de l’homme moderne, de Hannah Arendt. Pour une discussion des rapports ambivalents entre l’action politique et la violence, voir "Politique et violence selon Hannah Arendt", par Valérie Gérard, art. cité en bibliographie.

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11. C’est à partir de cette disposition que R. Slotkin forge le concept de « régénération par la violence" (« regeneration through violence »), qui donne son titre au premier volume de sa trilogie de la Frontière (Slotkin 1973). 12. « C’est l’Ouest, ici, Monsieur. Quand la légende devient le fait, imprimez la légende !" (je traduis). In L’Homme qui tua Liberty Valance ; titre original : The Man who shot Liberty Valance, réalisé par John Ford (1962), 1h54'50 » . 13. « Tu lui as appris à lire et à écrire : maintenant, donne-lui quelque chose à lire et à écrire !" (je traduis). In L’Homme qui tua Liberty Valance, 1h53'36 ». 14. La dimension raciale de certains des mythes de l’Ouest montre, par exemple, qu’ils peuvent même être mobilisés à des fins littéralement antipolitiques. Mais les réduire à cette seule dimension serait faire peu de cas de ce qu’ils nous disent, par exemple, des rapports du droit et de la force, ou de la politique et de la violence. 15. Chaque fois que ces « marges » seront comprises en un sens purement spatial, on recherchera évidemment la régénération de la communauté politique dans la continuation de l’aventure coloniale, c’est-à-dire dans l’impérialisme. Mais cette lecture n’épuise pas les réinterprétations politiques de l’histoire de la Frontière.

RÉSUMÉS

La mise en scène mythique de la mobilité des héros de l’Ouest et de toute la société de la Frontière instaure un rapport singulier à l’espace qu’il convient d’élucider si l’on veut essayer de comprendre la représentation que l’Amérique se fait de son identité politique. À cette fin, nous analyserons d’abord le rapport entre le contenu des légendes de l’Ouest et le contexte de leur formation, avant d’étudier la signification politique des représentations de la fondation à l’œuvre dans ces légendes.

The mythic staging of the mobility of western heroes, and of the whole Frontier society, establishes a specific relation with space, a relation whose nature should be defined in order to understand America’s vision of its own political identity. In this perspective, we will first analyze the link between the content of western legends and the context of their making, and then study the political significance of the depictions of the founding at work in these legends.

INDEX

Keywords : philosophy, west, hero, frontier, space, mobility, politics, myth, legend, narrative, epic, violence, cinema, western movies, United States Mots-clés : philosophie, héros, frontière, espace, mobilité, politique, mythe, légende, récit, épopée, violence, cinéma, western, Ouest américain

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AUTEURS

DANIEL AGACINSKI Doctorant Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Staging American Mobility

Acte II. Errances : Regards sur l'Amérique / Act II. Wanderings: Visions of America

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The Constant Traveller: Staging Mobility in the Poetry of Robert Frost

Candice Lemaire

1 I was thinking of the extravagance of the universe, […] what an extravagant universe it is. And the most extravagant thing in it, as far as we know, is man […]. And poetry is a sort of extravagance, in many ways. It’s something that people wonder about. (Poirier 902)

2 As American poet Robert Frost explains to the students of Dartmouth College in November 1962 (in an address entitled On Extravagance: A Talk), his poetical art is placed under the guidance of the concept of extravagance. More than a mere expression of American extravagance (understood as “eccentricity”, “excess”, or “spectacular flamboyance”), Frost’s poetry can be seen as a product of an extreme “extra-vagance”, understood as a poetry of wandering rather than of wondering. Frost’s poetical “extravagance” is his constant wandering beyond his bounds, within and beyond the geographical limits of his territory (as the Latin etymology of “extravagance” justifies: extra-vagari, to wander outside, to exceed the bounds of a space).1 Robert Frost—“extra- vagant” artist and traveller-poet—turns his poetry collections into the geographical stage of his constant mobility over the American space and abroad, framing and illustrating his eastbound journey as a wanderer, a speaker, a walker and a farmer, on the open stage of the United States as well as within his own secret theater of New England.

1. “Going for water”: the conq(W)est of the East

3 Robert Frost’s poetical work is the faithful reflection of his constant geographical and mental displacement—a wandering between the enclosed and the open, between the thrill of the limitless gradually made home and the warm cosiness of the limited, as Frost himself would emphasize: “I never tire of being shown how the limited can make

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snug in the limitless” (Poirier, 738). This comfort of the vast and the speakers’ slow appropriation of the geographical unknown in the collections are accounted for by the poet’s fascination for the figure of the cast-away and the wanderer: when asked what his favorite books were, Frost ranked, as written in 1936 to the Massachusetts Library Association, The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe and Thoreau’s Walden in his top-three. Robinson Crusoe is never quite out of my mind. […] Walden has something of the same fascination. Crusoe was cast-away; Thoreau was self-cast away. Both found themselves sufficient. (Poirier 738)

4 Frost shared with his New England predecessor Thoreau this liking for sporadic disappearances from the social sphere and the human world, in an intentional retreat to some protective margins—his cabin in Vermont, his farms in New Hampshire, or his winter houses in southern Florida’s Key West and Miami. Casting himself away into the society of trees was the poet’s saving “step backward taken,” or rather his step eastward taken since Frost’s poetical mobility over the first part of his life was an eastbound movement, from the West Coast to the East Coast of America and beyond, further East, to England (in 1912). Literary icon of his country, Frost pushed back his poetical Frontier from the Californian suburbs of San Francisco to the waves of the Massachusetts coast, in the opposite direction his nation’s history had taken, embracing his homeland’s vastness in one stride as “A Record Stride” narrates: In a Vermont bedroom closet With a door of two broad boards And for back wall a crumbling old chimney (And that’s what their toes are towards) I have a pair of shoes standing Old rivals of sagging leather Who once kept surpassing each other But now live even together. They listen for me in the bedroom To ask me a thing or two About who is too old to go walking With too much stress on the who. I wet one last year at Montauk For a hat I had to save. The other I wet at the Cliff House In an extra-vagant wave. Two entirely different grandchildren Got me into my double adventure. But when they grow up and can read this I hope they won’t take it for censure. I touch my tongue to the shoes now And unless my sense is at fault On one I can taste Atlantic On the other Pacific, salt. One foot in each great ocean Is a record stride or stretch. The authentic shoes it was made in I should sell for what they would fetch. But instead I proudly devote them To my museum and muse; So the thick-skins needn’t act thin-skinned About being past-active shoes. And I ask all to try to forgive me For being as over-elated

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As if I had measured the country And got the United States stated. (Poirier 267-8)

5 The two shoes are the “extra-vagant” subjects of this poem, written after a short comeback visit to San Francisco in 1931: Jeffrey S. Cramer notes that Frost hyphenated the word “extra-vagant” in the fourth stanza to either act on the metrical length of the line or to allude to Thoreau who also hyphenated the word in Walden, reinforcing once more the feature of “extra-vagance” they share. 2 From the Cliff House restaurant on the Pacific shoreline in San Francisco (where Frost used to go when he was a little boy) to the Vermont chimney, the pair of shoes–a physical fragrance of leather and salt, the taste of American vastness finally bridged–stands as the gustative (Marcel Proust-like) remembrance of the speaker’s West to East crossing of the territory. While tongue- tasting their itinerary, the shoes are also tongued and made to speak to their journeys. Punning on the plurality of the word “record”, the shoes are both recording, i.e. sensorily recalling the instant of a metaphorical junction between two sides of the same continent, and breaking the record of distance in striding over the American land, making of such a geographical feat a record stride for the speaker and a record stretch for America. The giant strides of the shoes combine the two coasts into one nation, as the constant pun on the pair “one/two” illustrates: “once, one” versus “two boards, too old, too much, into”, blending into “a pair, double, one and the other”. The ambivalent Frostian foot is therefore the physical emblem of a geographical journey across the American space and the metrical means of a poetical journey “across spaces of the footed line[s]” in the poems.

6 As Frost’s biographer Jay Parini wrote: Because Frost is so intimately associated with rural New England, one tends to forget that the first landscape printed in his imagination was both urban and Californian. That he came to appreciate, and to see in the imaginative way a poet must see, the imagery of Vermont and New Hampshire has something to do with the anomaly of coming late to it. 'It’s as though he were dropped into the countryside north of Boston from outer space, and remained perpetually stunned by what he saw', Robert Penn Warren observed. […]'A native takes, or may take, a place for granted; if you have to earn your citizenship, your locality, it requires a special focus'. (Parini 3)

7 Geographical mobility gave Frost a special focus, an accurate prism to depict New England, by being born and having spent eleven years on the other coast. Frost’s mother and her three children left San Francisco for Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1885, after her husband’s death, travelling with the coffin on a train over a long, sad journey east. Though still a very young boy when he reached New England, Robert Frost would later stage his Californian recollections over several of his volumes, remembering San Francisco’s beach sand in “A Peck of Gold” (1928), superimposing it onto the then long- finished Gold Rush and the 1870s new boom in silver mining: Dust always blowing about the town Except when sea fog laid it down And I was one of the children told Some of the blowing dust was gold. […] Such was life in the Golden State: Gold dusted all we drank and ate And I was one of the children told 'We must eat our peck of gold.' (Poirier 228)

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8 The golden dust of the Golden State pervades and clogs this Californian seaside stage made of sandy mirages and children feeding on stories of past glories. Place of the origins for Frost, frame of his boyhood memories “once by the Pacific”, first Californian (aquatic) garden before his poetry recreates it in New England, the Pacific coastline is evoked as the starting-point of his American eastbound journey, the wings to his New England poetical theater.

9 “Going for water” (as mentioned in the eponymous poem from A Boy’s Will) from one coast to the other, moving from the Golden to the Green Mountain State of mind, Robert Frost—both “New England stranger” and “chosen Poet Laureate of Vermont”,3 liked to call himself the bard of America, thus reflecting his poetical activity on the American territory—“barding about”, spreading his words, playing his part of poet- walker and constant speaker.

2. The leaf treader: “barding about”

10 Robert Frost tended to consider that his life as an artist fell into two distinct parts: writing poems and “barding about”4, one being the financial consequence of the other. What he meant by “barding about” was travelling the country, giving readings and talks in colleges, teaching, being a poet in residence on American campuses, winning prizes and honorary degrees at home and abroad (four times Pulitzer-prized), and earning a living from the fees paid for these activities.5 The climax of such a promotional occupation was reached towards the end of his life, when reading for President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration ceremony, in January 1961, turning Frost into the highly-acclaimed public poetical figure of America as which he is still remembered. Sent away on cultural missions arranged by the State Department (to Brazil, Great Britain, Israel, Greece and most importantly to the then Soviet Union during the Cold War),6 appearing on covers of literary magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Review (of Literature), as well as on mega-circulations such as Time and Life,7 Frost had become “the first American who could be honestly reckoned a master-poet by world standards” (Shribam vii). Over his career, spanning half a century, each public reading or talk was carefully staged, and Frost always made it a point to remain a speaker more than a reader, “saying poems”8 more than merely reading them out: Frost the lecturer was then in reading performance, directly addressing his audience, making them laugh, react and interact, embodying the perfect [...] performance artist, [with his] constant gestures of the hands, [his] frequent nod of the head, [his] stance, [his] changing facial expressions—a natural presence not soon forgotten. (Shribman xx)

11 Besides such body language in public speeches, the ultimate Frostian props on this stage of verbal seduction were his eyes whose color blue was best described by his Florida neighbor and friend, historian Helen Muir:

12 Attempting to describe the exact shade of blue for Robert Frost’s eyes, we went from 'sky blue' to 'electric' until I decided to use 'arresting' blue eyes. I did so on the grounds that Robert Frost would have leaned more in that direction, knowing fully well that the entire idea would have amused him no end. (Muir 173)

13 Such a concern for his audience’s reaction to his attempt at sharing out his reading accounts for Frost’s interest in conversational poetry and regional speech patterns. The

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poems of his first volumes aim at describing the lives of ordinary working people in Frost’s turn-of-the-century New England—touches of archaic diction and Yankee dialect are regularly used.

14 It is then not surprising that a very conversational tone is chosen for poems in early collections like North of Boston and New Hampshire, in which most of the poems are long dramatic monologues, based on a constant interaction and interplay between the speaker and the audience (in Frost, an addressee stated as “you”), with one special occasion or experience taking place in the present and leading to a revelation in the speaker.9 The poem “A Servant to Servants” (from North of Boston) is a good example of strict dramatic monologue: I didn’t make you know how glad I was To have you come and camp here on our land. I promised myself to get down some day And see the way you lived, but I don’t know! With a houseful of hungry men to feed I guess you’d find…. It seems to me I can’t express my feelings any more Than I can raise my voice or want to lift My hand (oh, I can lift it when I have to). Did ever you feel so? I hope you never. It’s got so I don’t even know for sure Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything. There’s nothing but a voice-like left inside That seems to tell me how I ought to feel And would feel if I wasn’t all gone wrong. […] Bless you, of course, you’re keeping me from work But the thing of it is, I need to be kept. There’s work enough to do—there’s always that; But behind’s behind. The worst that you can do Is set me back a little more behind I sha’n’t catch up in this world, anyway. I’d rather you’d not go unless you must. (Poirier 65-69)

15 The “voice-like left inside” effect the poem is using is at the core of Frost’s dramatic and theatrical tactics, highlighting this apparent conversation between two unnamed voices, one superimposing on the audience of the poem, reader or listener. The “I” of the poem is identified as a woman telling her auditor-friend how glad she is to have her camping on her land. The speaker’s self-revelation comes through the projection of her own lifestyle against the background of her friend’s way of living (“the way you lived”) —she gradually reveals her unhappiness as the wife of a New England farmer who has devoted his life to hard work and frugality. The woman’s existence was then only made of heavy house chores, such as cooking for “a household of hungry men”. Beside this loss of her sense of pleasure in life, the end of the poem offers her passive nature as the reason for such unhappiness, and the inability to voice her true feelings: “I can’t express my feelings anymore”. This fake conversation uses the auditor as a mere rhetorical receptacle and an aletheiac device to bring the speaker to her intimate truth. In this poetical staging of a personal epiphany, the theatrical prop used is otherness, this “someone else additional to him” that Frost’s poetry is forever seeking. Many of Frost’s poems owe a large part of their success to their dramatic nature and draw their energy from the dramatic tension between two or more speakers (for instance “Home Burial” which stages the confrontation between a husband and his wife over their

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baby’s death)—two of his dramatic-dialogue poems were indeed adapted and produced for the stage (“The Death of the Hired Man” and “Snow”).

16 But Frost’s link with drama is broader than a mere dramatic potential drowned in his verse, since he was also—though not generally known as such—a dramatist and a lifelong lover of the theater. He wrote several plays, notably A Way Out in 1917 (a one- act play depicting an encounter between a hermit and a murderer), The Guardeen (a five-scene play about a college student hired as the guardian of a cabin to protect supplies of cider), and In an Art Factory (a one-act conversation play between an artist and his model), both published after his death. His most important plays, however, remain his two masques, A Masque of Reason (in 1945) and A Masque of Mercy (in 1947) which both deal with the human relationship to God.10 Frost’s early poetry (especially the conversational poetry volumes) can therefore be perceived as performance- oriented, as verse that did not “declare itself in form”, as Frost himself stated in his 1929 preface to A Way Out11, emphasizing the vital importance of the staying power of poetry due to its dramatic quality: “If it doesn’t [have a dramatic accent], it will not stay in anybody’s head. It won’t be catchy … Catchiness has a lot to do with it” (Poirier 853).

17 Though catching his audience’s attention was Frost’s prime concern when “barding about,” he understood his poetry readings as “voyages of discovery” for his auditors, and his volumes do reflect the travelling and walking dimension of his own character. Frost “the leaf-treader”, eponymous poem from A Further Range, indeed paved the way for his barding journey thanks to the motif of the shoe in his volumes. As the epitome of Frostian mobility over and outside the American space, the shoe—both a symbol and an object of the poetical “extra-vagance”, of the wandering—runs through the collections, connected to the act of treading or even trampling on the ground: I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn- tired. God knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired. Perhaps I have put forth too much strength or been too fierce from fear. I have safely trodden underfoot the leaves of another year. (Poirier 270)

18 The multiplication of the polyptotons “tread/treading/trodden” in the quatrain—a haunting musical transfer of the trampling sound of footsteps on the autumn leafy ground, reinforced by the systematic run-on-lines which cut the staccato effect of the treading—fill up the beginning of the poem with disquieting fricative and dental sounds (“treading/autumn/tired/trodden/put/too/strength/underfoot” and “form/forth/ safely/leaves”, and the wind blowing-sounding ternary rhythm “fierce from fear”). Metonymically replaced by the foot in the quatrain, the shoe is the crushing item of the Frostian walk over the lands—the symbolical element of the speaker’s escape in the poem “Away!” which Frost quotes in his talk on extravagance: Now I out walking The world desert And my shoe and my stocking Do me no hurt. (Poirier 426)

19 Most of the action verbs and the modals have been erased in this telegraphic, jazz-like quatrain, in which the calf of the speaker—metonymically fragmented into shoe and stocking—transitively walks the world and not around the world, embracing in one

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footstep all the numbed and etherised Frostian “desert places”12. The Frostian pair of shoes-the two “extra-vagant” tools of a travelling body—stride over America, from the Golden to the Green Mountain State, as “A Record Stride” (already quoted in part I) reads. The two old leather rivals, forever competing in travelling but statically dwelling in peace in the “Vermont bedroom closet”, are only obsessed with knowing which of the twin shoes will first take the road again (“About who is too old to go walking/With too much stress on the who”). Genuine measures of America’s continental greatness, the grandchildren-shoes taste of American width, stretching from one salty water border to the other—instruments of a past glory (“past-active shoes”) and cradle for America’s fifty states (“got the United States stated”), birth of the nation and origin of a walking civilization, a frontier pushed forward from Long Island (“Montauk”) to San Francisco, and back (following the Frostian movement of poetical taming of the territory). Friends of the “leaf-treader,” the Frostian shoes are also (and above all) means of poetical creation, devoted to the artist’s “museum and muse”, new writing boards13 and enclosed spaces of inspiration. Helen Muir gives us the key to Frost’s ritualized use of shoes as props of poetical diversion against stage fright: The first time [Robert Frost] had attempted to 'say' one of his poems before an audience, he was so overcome he had to turn it over to somebody else. He cured that one night by filling his shoes with pebbles. There was blood in his socks when he finished but it served to cure him, by putting his mind on something else. (Muir 10)

20 Robert Frost’s cathartic pebble-filled shoes14 are eventually turned into powerful and dissuasive metrical weapons in the poems, following the notorious—though fascinating for Frost—example of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev who used his shoe as a “parliamentary gavel, […] taking [it] off and pounding it on the desk before him in an effort to bring [his] assembly to attention”, as George Monteiro points out: Only a person well used to walking [like Frost] would have the natural resourcefulness to see that a familiar shoe might be put to uses that had nothing to do with feet. In the poem 'The Objection to Being Stepped On', Frost talks about such useful conventions. (Faggen 2001, 227-8) You may call me a fool But was there a rule The weapon should be Turned into a tool? And what do we see? The first tool I step on Turned into a weapon. (Poirier 460)

21 Frost’s recollection of Khrushchev’s politically rhythmical use of his shoe is used here in the final distich of the poem to pace the trimeters, reproducing the triple banging of the shoe within the line, and also sounding the three knocks of the Frostian theater stage.

22 Theatrical speaker, play-acting bard on the American territory, and giving the beat to his own poetical journey through the leitmotiv of the shoe, Frost’s geographical mobility as a national poet is best understood nonetheless through the regional frame of his New England microcosmic theater—his own secret and blurred “North-East of Eden”.

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3. The constant gardener: staging the “North-East of Eden”

23 Besides the figure of the constant traveller, Robert Frost also endorses the part of the “constant gardener” of his New England territory: Frost (as a public figure) was appreciative of his own private New England garden for giving him the opportunity to shut his eyes to the world in favor of some personal leisure, such as walking alone through the countryside, planting flowers or raising poultry. Frost’s poetical New England garden is very often superimposed onto the Biblical Garden of Eden in the collections, turning the area into a framed vegetation stage located in the “North-East of Eden” as Kenneth Lincoln puts it.15 But the Frostian Northeastern Eden is presented as somehow post-lapsarian and the speaker is made the gardener of a cankered nature, as “A Winter Eden” (1928) exemplifies: A winter garden in an alder swamp Where conies now come out to sun and romp As near a paradise as it can be And not melt snow or start a dormant tree. […] A feather-hammer gives a double knock. This Eden day is done at 2 o'clock. An hour of winter day might seem too short To make it worth life's while to wake and sport. (Poirier 232-3)

24 These two quatrains in iambic pentameters offer the closest thing to paradise in the Frostian universe–a somewhat chaotic, swampy garden after the Edenic fall, a snow- bound secret and muffled paradise, in which undisturbed sleeping trees are the new playground for loud rabbits. On this earthly paradise cyclical stage in which gravity and weightlessness blend, feathers are turned into hammers to strike the time on heaven bells–only two knocks, lacking a third for the Edenic performance to really take place and add this extra “hour of winter day” to make it “worthwhile to wake and sport”.

25 Frost manages to stage the blurred geography of his “North-East of Eden” through a rhythmical system of name dropping, as in his opening and eponymous poem of the New Hampshire collection, in which the reader is confronted with a random series of American historical landmarks and New England state or city names: “New Hampshire, Dartmouth, Daniel Webster, John Smith, Isles of Shoals, Boston, Harvard College, Salem, Connecticut, Franconia, Massachusetts”.16 The notion of “North-East of Eden” is also apt to describe Frost’s poetical territory insofar as it connects New England to a territory of eternal “extra-vagance”: the Biblical East of Eden territory (before becoming a John Steinbeck reference), as stated in the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis, is called the land of Nod-the place where Cain was exiled to, after killing his brother Abel, located on the east of Eden. “Nod” is the Hebrew root for the verb “to wander”, turning Cain into a man cursed to wander the land forever, in an everlasting “extra-vagance”.17

26 The Frostian vegetation stage, as embodied by the winter garden, is also doubled by another type of large-scale wild garden, thanks to the motif of the meadow in the volumes, acting almost as a stage direction when used in the first line of the poems: “There were three in the meadow by the brook” (first line of “The Code”), “There’s a place called Far-away Meadow” (first line of “The Last Mowing”). Frost the “literate farmer” uses the meadow to direct his personae’s lives, and puns on the sound effect of the word to recreate a theatrical meadow-stage in the poems: the noun “meadow” is

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indeed the sounding combination of the noun “mead” (pronounced [mi:d]—also meaning “field, meadow” for poetic licence purposes) and the suffix “-ow”—close correspondence to the wooden “O” of the Elizabethan stage (i.e the round shape of the Globe Theater). The Frostian meadow (“mead-O”) can therefore be both understood as the “O-shaped stage in the field” and the “medieval O” of the Elizabethans.18 The most common props on this Frostian-O are the flowers mushrooming over the collections: a telephone-flower between the personae in the poem “The Telephone”, “dancing flowers”, a “flower boat”—all used to guide and gather the personae-actors around them on the vegetal stage of the meadow. The two poems “Flower Gathering” and “Flower Guidance”, in which the bee-like persona “went from flower to flower”, illustrate this unifying role of flowers ranging from the rose, the iris, to the asphodel and the several species of orchids, framing up the natural setting of the Frostian pastoral stage.

27 Poetical conqueror of the East and forever outward bound, Robert Frost’s work can therefore be better understood through the prism of a constant displacement. From the San Francisco shores, to the Florida sun, the Vermont mountains, to the British thatched houses, and the Russian landscapes, his poetry questions the concept of mobility in its most physical definition. Often “barding about” the stage of the American continent—“saying” poems and wearing off his metrical shoes—this “extra- vagant” and extravagant artist always came back to his favorite New England flowery stage and audience, down in the meadow of his theatrical “North-East of Eden.” In turn actor, performer, cultural ambassador and wanderer on the world’s stage until the end of his life, Robert Frost-poet of “not only regional but hemispheric significance”19— always dreamed of bringing down the fourth wall of his own vegetal stage: I had withdrawn in forest, and my song Was swallowed up in leaves that blew always; And to the forest edge you came one day (This was my dream) and looked and pondered long But did not enter, though the wish was strong: You shook your pensive head as who should say 'I dare not—too far in his footsteps stray— He must seek me would he undo the wrong. Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all Behind low boughs the trees let down outside; And the sweet pang it cost me not to call And tell you that I saw does still abide. But ’tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof. (Poirier 25)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Bible, Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1997.

D'Avanzo, Mario L. A Cloud of Other Poets: Robert Frost and the Romantics. New York: UP of America, 1991.

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Faggen, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

---. The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Harrap’s Chambers Dictionary. London: Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2004.

Hope, Warren. A Student Guide to Robert Frost. London: Greenwich Exchange, 2004.

Lewis Tuten, Nancy and John Zubizarreta (eds.). The Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Muir, Helen. Frost in Florida: A Memoir. Miami, FL : Valient, 1995.

Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1999.

Poirier, Richard and Mark Richardson (eds.). Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays. New York: Library of America, 1995.

Reeve, F.D. Robert Frost in Russia. Zephyr Press, 1970.

Shribman, David M. Introduction. In Robert Frost Speaking on Campus: Excerpts from His Talks (1949-1962). Ed. Edward C. Lathem. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2009. i-xxv.

NOTES

1. The medieval Latin extravagans is the present participle of the verb extra-vagari (to wander beyond/outside, to exceed the bounds of something). Extravagance is therefore the wandering beyond geographical limits, the crossing of borders, the image of a never-ending journey, but also by extension in modern language an excessive, eccentric, unrestrained, unreasonable and wasteful behavior. For further etymological details, see the Harrap’s Chambers Dictionary (409). 2. “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough” (Walden, “Conclusion” — in Henry David Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer, Yale University Press, 2004), quoted in Lewis Tuten, 301. 3. “Whose horse had pulled him short up on the road/By me a stranger […],” in the long poem entitled “New Hampshire,” opening the New Hampshire collection, and “Breathes there a bard who isn’t moved/When he finds his verse understood /And not entirely disapproved /By his country and his neighborhood?”, from the poem “On Being Chosen Poet of Vermont,” (Poirier 158, 477). 4. Title of a poem from A Further Range collection (Poirier 270-1). 5. Warren Hope gives a precise definition of such “barding about” activity in his Student Guide to Robert Frost (36). 6. Robert Frost was sent as American cultural ambassador to Brazil in August 1954 (with William Faulkner), to Great Britain in 1957, to Israel and Greece in 1961 and to the Soviet Union in August 1962. 7. Frost appeared on the cover of the Saturday Review on the May 30, 1936 and on the April 25, 1942 issues, on the cover of The Atlantic Monthly in February 1964 and November 1966, on Time magazine in October 1950 and on Life in March, 1962. 8. See for instance the end of his Bread Loaf English School Address on June 30, 1955: “I’ll say one of the old [poems] Doc Cook asked me to say” (Poirier 829). 9. “A classification of Frost’s dramatic monologues can rest on [the following criteria]: speaker, auditor, and the revelation of character. […] Two poems in Frost’s canon—ˈThe Pauper Witch of

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Graftonˈ and ˈA Servants to Servantsˈ—prove to be strict dramatic monologues,” as Paola Loreto justifies (Tuten 85). 10. “In A Masque of Reason, Frost dramatizes a confrontation between God, Job and Job’s wife Thyatira. […] A Masque of Mercy focuses more on God’s treatment of the individual. Specifically, the masque probes the prophet Jonah’s difficulty in reconciling Old Testament justice with New Testament mercy” (Tuten 82-84). In English royal courts during the Renaissance period (mostly Elizabeth Ist’s court), a masque was “a dramatic entertainment performed to music by masked actors” (Harrap’s Chambers Dictionary, 732). 11. “Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing” (preface to A Way Out, 1929, in Tuten 84). 12. “Desert Places” is a poem depicting the loneliness of the soul as a downward correspondence to the natural emptiness and void of the world’s desert places – interestingly enough, this poem is located right before “The Leaf Treader” in the A Further Range collection. 13. “I never write except with a writing board. I’ve never had a table in my life. And I use all sorts of things. Write on the sole of my shoe”, Robert Frost, ˈParis Reviewˈ Interview (with Richard Poirier) (Poirier 873). 14. Frost the orator curing his stage fright using pebbles is an interesting image since it directly brings back to the technique used by another prominent orator, Ancient Athens statesman Demosthenes (384-322 BC). As a boy, Demosthenes had a speech impediment-an inarticulate and stammering pronunciation-which he cured practicing speech with pebbles in his mouth. 15. Lincoln, Kenneth. “Quarrelling Frost, Northeast of Eden”. Southwest Review, 2008, 93-111. 16. Dartmouth College is located in Hanover, New Hampshire. Harvard College is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Salem is a Massachusetts city. Daniel Webster (1782-1852) was an American statesman who rose to regional prominence through his defence of New England shipping interests. Captain John Smith (1580-1631), Admiral of New England, was an English soldier and explorer, remembered for his role in establishing the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia. The Isles of Shoals are nine small rocky islands about ten miles southeast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Franconia is the location of one of Robert Frost’s farms in New Hampshire. 17. Before being taken up by John Steinbeck for his 1952 novel, “East of Eden” is a Biblical phrase referring to the Land of Nod, as Genesis, 4:16 reads: “And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden” (Genesis, 4:16 in The Bible, Authorized King James Version 5). 18. mead /mi:d/ n, poetic or old use: a meadow (Harrap’s Chambers Dictionary 737). 19. Letter to Robert Frost written by US assistant Secretary of State Henry F. Holland, dated July 26, 1954, stressing the mission’s importance, on Frost’s attending the World Congress of Writers in São Paulo, Brazil (Tuten 368).

ABSTRACTS

Robert Frost’s poetical work, analyzed through the prism of a constant displacement and wandering over the American territory and beyond, questions the concept of mobility in its most physical definition—from his Californian birthplace to his chosen homeland, the garden-setting

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of New England he likes to stage in his volumes. Treading and wearing off his (metrical) shoes on the various territories the poems frame (whether they are an Edenic environment or a meadow- stage), the Frostian lines voice the silent desire for theatrical performance.

Poésie du déplacement constant, de l’errance sur le territoire américain et au-delà, l’œuvre de Robert Frost interroge le concept de mobilité dans son sens le plus physique, depuis son Ouest natal jusqu’à sa nouvelle terre d’attache : le décor-jardin de Nouvelle-Angleterre, qu’il met en scène dans ses recueils, foulant les territoires du pied, du bout de la chaussure, cherchant à les cadrer sous l’aspect d’Eden ou d’une prairie, dans un désir silencieux de représentation théâtrale.

INDEX

Keywords: American poetry, mobility, staging, California, New England, travel, extra(-)vagance, shoe, meadow, Eden Mots-clés: poésie américaine, mobilité, mise en scène, Californie, Nouvelle-Angleterre, voyage, extra(-)vergance, chaussure, prairie, Eden

AUTHORS

CANDICE LEMAIRE ATER Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Mobilité et immobilité dans les romans américains de Georges Simenon

Christine Calvet

1. Introduction

1 Dans l’imaginaire d’un lecteur ou d’un spectateur, une intrigue de Georges Simenon renvoie plus volontiers aux bords du quai des Orfèvres, longés par la pipe et le chapeau mythiques du commissaire Maigret qu’à la vie sur le continent américain. Pourtant, dans l’abondante production écrite de l’écrivain belge et, bien que son œuvre forme un tout indissociable, on peut aisément repérer une période dite américaine. Elle correspond précisément à des textes rédigés pour la plupart entre 1945 et 1955. Mais c’est dès ses jeunes années que Simenon fait l’expérience de la mobilité puisqu’il finance, en 1935, grâce à son activité de journaliste, un premier tour du monde, en vendant ses reportages aux magazines et aux journaux.

2 Après la difficile période de la guerre qu’il a vécue en Europe, l’écrivain belge s’embarque pour l’Amérique où, toujours aussi productif, il écrit plus de quarante romans, dont une quinzaine retiennent plus particulièrement notre attention, puisque leur contenu fictionnel, tout comme celui de ses reportages publiés à la même époque, renvoie directement à sa perception du nouveau monde.

3 Du Canada à New York, du Connecticut au Nevada, bref, au fil de ses déplacements, Georges Simenon n’en finit pas de tracer la route de sa nouvelle vie, laissant tomber le rideau sur les scènes de guerre qui ont frappé la vieille Europe, cherchant à la fois l’oubli et la construction de ce que l’on pourrait appeler, en reprenant le titre d’un de ses romans, Une vie comme neuve1. Si le changement de cadre entraîne un changement de mode de vie radical, en revanche, sa méthode de création demeure inchangée de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique. Comme à l’accoutumée, ses capacités mémorielles lui permettent d’engranger de multiples sensations et de nombreux ressentis : New York, la Floride, la Louisiane, le Texas, l’Arizona, la Californie, constituent autant de terres où

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le romancier s’installe et prend racine pour un temps non déterminé et dont il repart subitement pour s’implanter dans un nouvel espace géographique. S’ensuit une sorte de sédimentation des contenus ainsi accumulés. C’est dans ce fonds-là que le romancier trouve les éléments nécessaires à la mise en place et au développement de ses intrigues. Aussi nous proposons-nous de fonder l’essentiel de notre réflexion sur le cadre fictionnel de trois romans particulièrement représentatifs de la période américaine de Georges Simenon. Les personnages du romancier, dans les diverses mises en scène de leurs vies quotidiennes, reflètent une forme d’identité américaine dont le miroir est en réalité constitué par les expériences vécues par Georges Simenon lui-même dans ses pérégrinations sur le continent nord-américain.

4 Les déplacements des individus occupent une place et une fonction prépondérantes dans l’économie des trois romans et entraînent le lecteur dans des espaces de vies multiples.

5 Le premier roman, Trois Chambres à Manhattan, paru en 1946, tient à l’évidence de l’autobiographie. L’intrigue se fonde en effet sur une passion amoureuse naissante entre deux êtres, directement inspirée du coup de foudre vécu par Georges Simenon et sa seconde femme, rencontrée à New York en 19452. Le lecteur erre en noctambule dans les rues de Manhattan au rythme des pas du couple amoureux qui ne cesse de déambuler dans les artères de la ville. L’errance urbaine constitue en quelque sorte le moteur de l’action. Le second roman Feux rouges, paraît en 1953. Le lecteur quitte le réseau des rues rectilignes pour vivre, entre les états de New York et du Maine, l’interminable et éprouvant trajet d’un couple dont la voiture est prise dans un bouchon de quarante cinq millions d’automobilistes, expérience faite par Simenon lui- même sur la route fédérale N° 1. La route n’est pas un simple ruban d’asphalte déroulé pour mettre en place un décor fictionnel, elle constitue un facteur de tension dramatique, puisqu’elle conduit le personnage principal de bar en bar, au point que l’alcoolisme qui ravage le couple entraînera sa rupture. La route n’est pas seulement un cadre, mais un élément déterminant de l’action. Le troisième roman, paru en 19473, est moins directement autobiographique bien qu’à travers le regard de Maigret, que le romancier a emporté dans ses bagages, pointent les souvenirs de Georges Simenon débarquant dans la grande ville de New York. Sorte de théâtre dans le théâtre, les réactions du commissaire enquêteur-voyageur sont susceptibles de nous livrer un point de vue on ne peut plus franco-français sur l’univers policier américain.

6 Dans ces trois romans nous allons d’abord nous intéresser aux changements de décors et à leurs enjeux : le changement de continent entraîne-t-il un changement de décor radical ? Les nouveaux cadres de vie mis en place sur la scène fictionnelle sont-ils en rupture avec les précédents ? Quels en sont les éléments les plus représentatifs et peut- on réellement parler de renouvellement ? Ensuite nous analyserons les interactions qui se produisent entre les « espaces-temps » et les individus qui les habitent : la mobilité contribue-t-elle à « libérer » les personnages et peut-on considérer que les parcours accomplis sous les yeux du lecteur s’inscrivent dans ce qu’il est coutume d’appeler « le rêve américain » ? Nous pourrons alors constater qu’en fait, dans les romans américains de Georges Simenon, la fiction ne résiste pas à une sorte cristallisation des mouvements humains et des déplacements identitaires : les individus se construisent dans les péripéties des crises qui les « agitent », et n’ont d’autre recours que de se mouvoir dans les marges étroites de leurs destinées.

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2. Changement de continent, changement de décor

7 En débarquant sur le continent américain, Simenon pénètre dans l’immensité d’un nouvel espace : neuf millions de kilomètres carrés sont à découvrir. Fidèle à son appétit de vie et à sa volonté de tout voir et tout connaître, il le parcourt de région en région. S’appropriant les « paysages », l’œil du romancier enregistre des éléments qu’il réinvestit inévitablement dans les romans rédigés pendant cette période. Si l’Amérique oriente incontestablement de manière nouvelle le regard du romancier, l’intériorisation de la vision propre à la fiction contribue à façonner une autre Amérique. Somme toute, on peut avancer qu’à tout point de vue, mémoire et imaginaire « déplacent les lignes » : des titres aux résonances d’un genre et d’un style inédits font leur apparition, comme par exemple, Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters4. C’est alors que le poêle ronflant des auberges françaises est détrôné par le ronflement de la vie américaine moderne avec ses highway, ses lumières néon, ses clubs de jazz si différents des guinguettes de Montmartre. La bière et l’absinthe sont remplacées par le whisky et le coca-cola.

8 Paradoxalement et en dépit de l’inflexion nouvelle que l’on peut déceler dans les romans de cette période — même si l’on sait que Simenon ne cherche jamais à imposer des conclusions — le lecteur peut s’étonner du peu de commentaires concernant la vie outre-Atlantique, de l’absence de jugements de valeurs et, finalement, de l’utilisation « globalisée et globalisante » de l’Amérique dans la matière fictionnelle. Cela s’explique en partie par l’attitude personnelle du romancier qui ne situe pas le drame social au centre de la littérature. Par ailleurs, Simenon n’écrit pas systématiquement des romans dont l’action se déroule à l’endroit où il vit. Un temps de décantation, lié à son mode de création, lui est nécessaire. Il mémorise nombre de ressentis, qui seront la matière d’une écriture constamment motivée non par le simple désir, mais par un besoin impérieux, une sorte d’urgence. Ainsi, bien que séjournant en Amérique, est-il capable d’écrire une intrigue se déroulant en plein Paris ou en Afrique. Le romancier est habité par une étonnante faculté de mobilité créatrice et ce qui fixe son attention est parfois totalement inattendu. A cela s’ajoutent une capacité descriptive efficace, rapide, héritée des années de journalisme, et une perception très sensitive des lieux et des gens. Et de fait, les éléments qui donnent une couleur américaine à certains de ses romans sont discrets tout en constituant un ensemble de détails, dont l’importance est précisée dans le reportage de 1946 intitulé L’Amérique en auto : Je ne sais pas si vous êtes comme moi ? Chaque fois que je lis une étude sur un pays que je ne connais pas, je me dis : – Tout cela est fort intéressant. Mais comment est le vestibule, la cuisine, la salle à manger ? Qu’est-ce que les gens mangent à leur déjeuner ? A quoi ressemble le tramway qui les conduit à leur travail ?... C’est peut-être naïveté de ma part, mais tous ces petits détails de la vie courante me manquent, le plus souvent, pour m’imaginer leur vie. Combien gagnent-t-ils ? Combien payent-t-ils un kilo de pommes de terre ou un verre de bière ?... (L’Amérique en auto, 626)

9 Derrière la naïveté apparente, ces petits détails, observés dans la réalité quotidienne, fixent la vie dans le discours narratif. Le voyageur a toutefois une conscience aiguë de la richesse des multiples décors qui s’offrent à lui : Chacun qui débarque, après être passé devant la statue de la Liberté, peut, en quelque sorte, choisir l’Amérique qu’il désire. Il est à peu près sûr de la trouver. Que ce soient les faubourgs hantés de gangsters, les petites villes puritaines, les palais

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de milliardaires, les cafétérias où l’on se nourrit en rang devant un comptoir nickelé, que ce soient les plantations du Sud aux nègres nonchalants, les réserves d’Indiens et les lacs immenses, la fièvre de Broadway la nuit, ou la fièvre diurne de Wall Street, tout y est, de même que dans les magasins on trouve sans exception tout ce qui est annoncé sur le catalogue. (L’Amérique en auto, 626)

10 Simenon ne cherche pas à dresser un catalogue exhaustif des lieux traversés, ni à mettre en scène la réalité du quotidien américain, au contraire, il saisit quelques éléments dans leur nouveauté et, de manière contrastive, par touches impressionnistes, il en fait les témoins discrets de la spécificité culturelle avec laquelle il est en contact.

11 Le lexique, par exemple, s’enrichit, marquant de manière spécifique la description des décors. Apparaissent alors, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns, les termes de drive-in, cafeteria, juke-box, living corn, log cabin ou motel. Pareillement, la galerie des personnages se renouvelle, lorsque entrent en scène le détective privé, le gangster, le shérif ou la call girl…, qui « imprègnent » la fiction romanesque : dans Feux rouges, par exemple, le regard du narrateur se fixe sur l’emblématique et moderne appareil à musique des années trente : « Ici, il n’y avait pas de télévision, mais un juke-box lumineux, jaune et rouge, dont les rouages luisants maniaient les disques avec une fascinante lenteur. » (Feux rouges, 767).

12 Même si la trace d’une réelle admiration pour les objets de la vie moderne est perceptible dans le discours, leur caractère pittoresque est comme dilué dans les romans. Les objets ou les personnages nouveaux et typiquement américains subissent le même traitement que ceux de n’importe quel autre continent. Après la phase habituelle d’appropriation du milieu environnant et de ses spécificités, le romancier utilise la nouvelle pâte fictionnelle dont il dispose sans mettre l’accent sur les aspects emblématiques et les valeurs symboliques qu’elle contient, ainsi qu’en témoigne, de manière autobiographique, le personnage du commissaire Maigret devant le panorama de la ville de New York : « C’était sa première traversée, à cinquante-six ans, et il était tout étonné de se trouver sans curiosité, de rester insensible au pittoresque. » (Maigret à New York, 577).

13 A l’image de son personnage, Simenon se désintéresse du pittoresque. Bien au contraire, les lieux, quels qu’ils soient, se reflètent les uns les autres, ne serait-ce que par leurs traits communs, comme par exemple leur monotonie, caractéristique des mises en scène spatiales. Ainsi en est-il du « lieu-cliché » occupé par le couple amoureux de Trois Chambres à Manhattan : L’appartement était tout petit, tout bête, un appartement comme il devait y en avoir des milliers à New York, avec le même cosy-corner dans le salon, les mêmes tables basses, les mêmes guéridons et les mêmes cendriers près des fauteuils, à portée de main, le même tourne-disque et la même bibliothèque minuscule dans un angle, près de la fenêtre. (Trois Chambres à Manhattan, 269-270)

14 En dépit de la modernité lexicale, le décor se dilue dans la répétition lancinante du « même », n’affichant en définitive que l’image d’un conformisme sans grand intérêt. A bien considérer le standard émergeant de l’époque, le nouveau confort de la vie moderne qui place tout « à portée de main », n’allège pas nécessairement le quotidien des personnages. Simenon suggère les limites des facilités apportées par le progrès et souligne la similitude des lieux, gommant leurs différences et les rendant étouffants et statiques, dans son discours même, sans rien commenter toutefois, laissant son « libre arbitre » au lecteur. Il n’hésite pas à mettre sur le même plan des lieux distants pour

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mettre en relief leur relative similitude. Dans Maigret à New York, figure une comparaison inattendue entre New York et une petite ville provinciale de la Loire5 : Il pleuvait. On roulait dans un quartier sale où les maisons étaient laides à en donner la nausée. Etait-ce cela New York ? Dix jours… Non, neuf jours avant, exactement, Maigret était encore installé à sa place habituelle, au Café du Cheval-Blanc, à Meung. Il pleuvait aussi, d’ailleurs. Il pleut aussi bien sur les bords de la Loire qu’en Amérique. (Maigret à New York, 580)

15 L’immensité de la ville de New York, son image grandiose et incomparable, sont réduites, dans l’esprit du personnage, à l’espace familier de la petite ville française et à la considération météorologique la plus plate.

16 Ainsi, l’univers américain simenonien échoue-t-il en partie dans sa fonction testimoniale : il ne livre pas d’indices originaux ou spectaculairement révélateurs quant aux lieux et aux comportements de vie du continent nord-américain, dont il serait cependant imprudent de sous-estimer l’importance, puisqu’ils peuvent être les véritables moteurs de l’action, occupant alors dans le récit une fonction narrative essentielle. Ainsi, dans Trois chambres à Manhattan, le romancier exploite-t-il les potentialités du réseau des rues de New York, pour transformer une rencontre en liaison passagère, puis en amour passionné. L’intrigue se noue dans l’espace de la rue : Et ils y allèrent, de si bonne heure que le spectacle de la rue leur semblait plein de saveur inconnue. Sans doute avaient-ils déjà parcouru les rues l’un et l’autre de grand matin, mais ils ne l’avaient pas encore fait ensemble. Eux qui avaient tant traîné, la nuit, le long des trottoirs et dans les bars, ils avaient l’impression de se laver l’âme dans la fraîcheur matinale, dans le débraillé allègre d’une ville qui fait sa toilette. (Trois Chambres à Manhattan, 269-270)

17 Notons que ce paragraphe pourrait correspondre au décor de n’importe quelle grande ville d’Amérique ou d’ailleurs. Il s’agit bien de New York, mais la ville n’est plus nommée en tant que telle ; elle n’est même plus reconnaissable dans son évocation, et se trouve réduite à un simple pronom indéfini et au cliché universel d’une ville personnifiée qui se réveille.

18 Même lorsqu’il construit un « effet de réel » concernant « l’ailleurs » en utilisant des « localisateurs » spécifiques, Simenon n’exploite pas la veine exotique. Observons le personnage principal, François Combe, dans l’avenue new-yorkaise la plus célèbre : Ce matin, il était sans amertume. Il avait marché jusqu’à Washington Square, où il avait pris l’autobus qui parcourt la Cinquième Avenue de bout en bout. Par goût, pour jouir du spectacle de la rue, il était monté sur l’impériale et il continuait, au début tout du moins, à se sentir allègre. L’avenue était claire, les pierres des buildings d’un gris doré, donnant parfois l’illusion de la transparence, et le ciel, là-haut, d’un bleu pur, avec quelques petits nuages floconneux comme on en voit autour des saints sur les images pieuses. (Trois Chambres à Manhattan, 254)

19 Le personnage, arrivé dans la ville six mois auparavant seulement, semble s’être intégré à son nouvel espace de vie qu’il embrasse du regard le temps d’un trajet en autobus. Pourtant des modalisateurs atténuent la jouissance du « spectacle de la rue » : « semblait », « au début tout du moins », « illusion », autant de mentions qui annoncent que tout est trop beau pour être vrai. L’univers décrit est ramené à l’image d’un décor artificiel qui permet au romancier d’annoncer les difficultés à venir : ici, précisément, dans l’économie du récit, la peur du personnage de perdre son nouvel amour. La description du trajet s’achève sur une image stéréotypée qui fixe le sort de du

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personnage de Combe et le fige paradoxalement dans une forme d’immobilité, ou si l’on préfère dans l’immuabilité de son destin.

20 De la même manière, les motifs de la route et du trajet sont utilisés comme ressorts de dramatisation. Dans le reportage L’Amérique en Auto, Simenon rapporte les pénibles sensations vécues au cours d’un trajet effectué sur la route fédérale N° 1, finalement bloquée par un gigantesque bouchon : Depuis Boston, je voyais la route devenir toujours plus large, mais je constatais aussi avec inquiétude qu’à chaque mille elle devenait plus infernale, littéralement noire de voitures trépidantes, de sorte qu’à la fin je finissais par conduire comme dans un rêve, dans un cauchemar plutôt, suivant le flot, me poussant à gauche ou à droite quand j’apercevais un trou dans la pâte mouvante. Les feux rouges, qui vous ordonnent impérieusement de stopper, les flèches indicatrices, est-ce que je les distinguais encore ? Je fonçais, parmi des milliers d’autres voitures qui fonçaient tout autour de moi et j’avais conscience que, s’il m’arrivait par malheur de ralentir, toute la colonne m’entrerait dans le derrière. (L’Amérique en Auto, 649-650)

21 Ce phénomène de circulation massive n’a pas d’équivalent en son temps sur les routes européennes. Simenon saisit ici le fruit de son expérience personnelle et le réinvestit dans Feux rouges, non pour témoigner sociologiquement du phénomène en lui-même, mais pour utiliser le caractère hostile du milieu environnant qui étouffe son personnage et le pousse dans ses retranchements. Le décor fictionnel fige le mouvement : on se déplace, mais on n’avance pas. Le lecteur, qui suit le trajet du personnage, vit une succession d’événements au ralenti, la fluidité de la circulation étant constamment perturbée par l’affluence des automobilistes. Le décor est un agent direct de pénibilité tout au long du trajet : ce sont les conditions météo, ajoutées à la circulation difficile, qui mettent en place l’étau dans lequel le personnage va se trouver pris : Ce qui tendait ses nerfs, c’était le bruit obsédant des roues des deux côtés, les phares, qui, de cent mètres en cent mètres, se précipitaient à sa rencontre, c’était aussi la sensation d’être prisonnier dans le flot, sans possibilité de s’échapper à gauche ou à droite, ou même de ralentir, car son rétroviseur lui montrait un triple chapelet de lumières qui le suivaient pare-chocs à pare-chocs. (Feux rouges, 754-755)

22 Alors que l’œil du reporter se fixe sur les faits et les événements réels, celui du romancier donne toute sa force poétique au souvenir et pousse l’utilisation du cadre de la route jusqu’à son paroxysme, passant du réel à l’onirique : Les enseignes au néon avaient commencé à surgir sur la droite où, avec les pompes à essence, elles constituaient les seuls signes de vie. Sans elles, on aurait pu croire que la grand-route était suspendue dans l’infini et qu’au-delà n’existaient que la nuit et le silence. Les villes et les villages étaient tapis plus loin, invisibles, et ce n’était que rarement qu’un vague halo rougeâtre dans le ciel laissait deviner leur existence. La seule réalité proche, c’étaient les restaurants, les bars qui jaillissaient du noir tous les cinq ou dix miles, avec, en lettres rouges, vertes ou bleues, le nom d’une bière ou d’un whisky. (Feux rouges, 754-755)

23 La route devient un ressort de la dramatisation, un espace imprécis et déstabilisant : sur une scène dangereuse un personnage oppressé, de verre d’alcool en verre d’alcool, va perdre les pédales. « Les phares se précipitent », « les néons surgissent », ce sont donc les éléments du décor qui mènent le jeu, et qui, par le choix de la voix active, leur donnent le statut de sujet pilotant les événements. Le conducteur passe au second plan et subit la situation. Le décor devient une instance autonome active, un acteur de l’action qui « manipule » les personnages. Nous allons regarder de plus près comment

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s’opèrent ces manipulations, ou, plus exactement, comment se développent les interactions entre les « espaces-temps » et les personnages qui les « habitent ».

3. Interactions entre « espaces-temps » et personnages

24 Les intrigues des trois romans choisis ont en commun la mobilité des personnages principaux. Dans Trois chambres à Manhattan, Combe parcourt inlassablement le réseau des rues ; dans Feux rouges, le couple des parents, Nancy et Steve, effectue plusieurs centaines de kilomètres pour aller chercher ses enfants dans un camp de vacances au sud du pays ; dans Maigret à New York, le casanier commissaire traverse pour la première fois l’Atlantique. Les déplacements des personnages, dans tous les cas, prennent dans la fiction une dimension expérimentale. Combe, tout en réalisant son parcours amoureux, cherche à construire son identité ; les parents en difficulté sont mis à l’épreuve dans un embouteillage qui accentue les tensions au point de séparer le couple ; le commissaire, dépaysé, mène son enquête en terre américaine, et ses déplacements le conduisent à découvrir peu à peu les fondements de la justice et les méthodes de la police outre-Atlantique. Simenon observe les réactions de ses personnages dans leur milieu environnant à la manière d’un biologiste examinant la forme que prend la vie dans une boîte de Pétri. En les plongeant dans un univers inconnu, il rend compte des interactions entre les décors, les « paysages » et leurs comportements, cherchant à mettre à nu leur intériorité. Plus qu’à l’aspect matériel de l’environnement, il s’intéresse à « l’humain ».

25 Comme c’est fréquemment le cas dans l’intrigue simenonienne, le personnage principal se sent mal à l’aise et éprouve le besoin irrésistible de bouger. Le commissaire Maigret lui-même, ne supportant pas le dépaysement, a du mal à s’orienter dans New York et il finit par quitter l’hôtel luxueux dans lequel il a été accueilli pour gagner un lieu plus modeste et plus populaire. Au cours d’une conversation téléphonique, il répond à son confrère américain, le capitaine O’Brien : Mais oui, j’ai trouvé un hôtel. Le Berwick. Vous ne connaissez-pas ? Je ne sais plus le numéro de la rue. Je n’ai jamais eu la mémoire des chiffres et vous êtes ennuyeux avec vos rues numérotées. Comme si vous ne pouviez pas dire rue Victor-Hugo, rue Pigalle ou rue du Président je ne sais qui… (Maigret à New York, 605)

26 Le personnage perd ses repères lorsqu’il quitte son univers d’origine : il tente de s’adapter à la structure géographique et à l’atmosphère de la ville de New York en gagnant un lieu qui lui correspond mieux. Dès qu’il parvient à reconstruire une ambiance un peu plus familière, le malaise s’estompe : Il était de bonne humeur, et même d’humeur enjouée, sans raison bien précise, peut-être simplement parce qu’il se retrouvait dans une atmosphère qui lui était familière. D’abord, il aimait ce coin bruyant et un peu vulgaire de Broadway, qui lui rappelait à la fois Montmartre et les grands boulevards de Paris. (Maigret à New York, 606) […] Le Berwick, déjà, l’avait réconcilié avec l’Amérique, peut-être à cause de son odeur d’humanité, et maintenant il imaginait toutes les vies tapies dans les alvéoles de ces cubes de briques, toutes les scènes qui se déroulaient derrière les stores. (Maigret à New York, 610)

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27 La mobilité nécessaire à Maigret pour reconstruire un cadre de vie plus familier et plus modeste ne gêne personne dans un pays où l’on peut aller et venir, et s’installer à sa guise. En revanche, la mobilité excessive de la population d’un lieu de vie à un autre, quant à elle, entrave la méthode d’investigation du commissaire. En effet, le mode de vie des américains provoque un déracinement constant et ne permet guère de percer un anonymat omniprésent. Dans les quartiers populaires, les habitants ne se fixent pas durablement, déménagent fréquemment, comme le constate le commissaire lors des traditionnels interrogatoires qui jalonnent une enquête : – Savez-vous si, dans la maison, il y a encore des locataires qui s’y trouvaient déjà il y a une trentaine d’années ? On fronçait les sourcils, car c’était bien là la question à laquelle on s’attendait le moins. A Paris, à Montmartre par exemple, ou bien dans le quartier qu’il habitait, entre République et Bastille, il n’existait peut-être pas un immeuble de quelque importance où il n’eût trouvé aussitôt une vieille femme, un vieil homme, un couple installé dans la maison depuis trente ou quarante ans. Ici, on lui répondait : – Il n’y a que six mois que nous sommes arrivés… Ou un an, ou deux. Le maximum était quatre ans. (Maigret à New York, 624)

28 La vie des locataires entassés se fige sur elle-même et devient étanche au monde extérieur.

29 Pourtant, dans ses reportages, Simenon ne souligne pas son enthousiasme devant la capacité d’assimilation de la population étrangère dans et par le « Nouveau Monde » : Vous êtes ici ? Bon. C’est que vous avez le droit d’y être. Vous bénéficierez automatiquement du préjugé favorable. Ce n’est pas à vous de prouver que vous êtes en règle, ou que vous êtes innocent. C’est aux autorités de prouver que vous êtes coupable. Vous êtes norvégien, russe, français, italien ? Vous ne parlez que votre langue natale ? A votre aise. Tirez vos plans. Personne ne vous empêche d’ouvrir boutique si bon vous semble ou de choisir n’importe quelle profession. Parce qu’au fond, l’Amérique sait bien que, dans un peu de temps, quelle que soit votre race, vous serez un Américain cent pour cent parce qu’elle a confiance en votre force d’assimilation. (L’Amérique en Auto, 685)

30 Dans la fiction romanesque, les choses paraissent moins faciles pour les personnages qui, bien que parvenant à s’adapter, ne sont pas réellement assimilés. Cette contradiction apparente correspond à la logique de deux écritures. Tandis que le journaliste jette un coup d’œil sur la vie réelle, le romancier la scrute d’un regard lucide et distancié, dans la constante préoccupation d’en exploiter les éléments à des fins purement narratives : dans le roman, Simenon en reste au simple constat, n’utilisant le fait de société que pour freiner le rythme de l’enquête.

31 Le commissaire rencontre des difficultés, liées aux conditions de vie des Newyorkais, pour mener son enquête à son terme, mais, au bout du compte, avec l’expérience des hommes qui est la sienne, il s’accommodera. Il se montrera même capable, lui qui n’aime pas changer de lieu de vie, de goûter le soleil américain avec plaisir : Pour la première fois, depuis qu’il avait débarqué à New York, il était accueilli à son réveil par un soleil vraiment printanier : il en pénétrait un petit bout dans sa chambre et dans sa salle de bains. A cause de ce soleil, d’ailleurs, il avait accroché son miroir à l’espagnolette de la fenêtre, et c’était là qu’il se rasait, comme à Paris, boulevard Richard Lenoir, où, le matin, il avait toujours un rayon de soleil sur la joue quand il se faisait la barbe. N’est-ce pas une erreur de croire que les grandes villes sont différentes les unes des

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autres, même quand il s’agit de New York, que toute une littérature représente comme un sorte de monstrueuse machine à malaxer les hommes ? Il y était, à New York, lui, Maigret, et il y avait une espagnolette à la bonne hauteur pour se raser, un rayon de soleil oblique qui lui faisait cligner de l’œil et, en face, dans des bureaux ou des ateliers, deux jeunes filles en blouse blanche riaient de lui. (Maigret à New York, 646)

32 C’est finalement non dans un décor particulier mais dans les menus gestes du quotidien que l’homme devant son miroir se reconnaît et s’adapte à son nouveau cadre de vie. New York, réchauffée par un rayon de soleil universel, devient une ville « humaine », accueillante, bienveillante, et sa réputation se réduit à un simple cliché. Mais ce n’est que superficiel, l’ironie dans l’attitude moqueuse « des jeunes filles en blouse blanche » étant perceptible.

33 Simenon met donc en scène des individus qui, en dépit de la mobilité imposée par la vie, s’efforcent, sinon de s’assimiler à leur nouvel univers, du moins de s’y adapter. Mais les ressources qu’offre le continent américain au romancier ne l’intéressent pas tant pour leur spécificité que parce qu’elles lui permettent de réinvestir les thématiques qui lui sont chères. Les lieux où se déroule l’action conduisent les personnages au désir impérieux de la fuite, de l’ailleurs, et cette espèce de frénésie de mouvement ne semble pouvoir s’arrêter, tant ses conséquences sont difficiles, voire impossibles, à maîtriser.

4. Immobilité et mobilité, deux pôles complémentaires et indissociables

34 Le continent américain qui, dans l’imaginaire collectif, représente une terre d’accueil et de rêve, reçoit un traitement inattendu dans les romans de Simenon. Non seulement, le romancier en néglige les éléments qui permettraient de restituer le pittoresque, mais il fond les différents lieux qu’il utilise en une sorte de pâte fictionnelle indifférenciée, au point que leurs descriptions pourraient sans difficulté prendre place dans n’importe lequel de ses romans. Les villes, les quartiers, les logements, les objets du quotidien semblent se cristalliser pour ne constituer qu’un espace global où l’homme, quel qu’il soit, tente de « mener sa vie ». Ainsi, les lieux de vie rappellent-ils d’autres lieux de vie, les hommes qui vivent dans des microcosmes rappellent d’autres hommes vivant dans d’autres microcosmes. En plein New York, par exemple, Maigret pénètre dans le quartier de Greenwich Village, qui constitue une sorte de « réduction » de la grande ville : C’était lui qui lui avait donné au taxi une adresse dans Greenwich Village et Maigret découvrait, au cœur de New York, à quelques minutes des buildings, une petite ville encastrée dans la ville, une cité quasi provinciale, avec ses maisons pas plus hautes qu’à Bordeaux ou à Dijon, ses boutiques, ses rues calmes où l’on pouvait flâner, ses habitants qui ne paraissaient pas se soucier de la cité monstrueuse qui les entourait. (Maigret à New York, 646)

35 Et lorsqu’il pénètre dans l’appartement d’un particulier : Et on avait l’impression d’accomplir, rien qu’en franchissant l’étroit obstacle d’un paillasson troué, un immense voyage dans l’espace et le temps. On n’était plus à New York, à deux pas des gratte-ciel qui, à cette heure, jetaient tous leurs feux dans le ciel de Manhattan. (Maigret à New York, 636)

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36 En passant du « il » représentant Maigret à l’indéfini « on », le narrateur donne une valeur générale à son discours. Greenwich Village est un monde dans un monde, un repli du décor sur le décor d’une petite humanité dont l’appartenance géographique n’a plus guère d’importance. La concentration de l’espace et du temps révèle la relative uniformité de mondes qui entrent en résonance.

37 La mobilité des personnages est conditionnée par le milieu ambiant qui, paradoxalement la détermine et l’entrave systématiquement. Les personnages bougent, tentent de s’adapter et de prendre place dans un « espace-temps », où en dépit du mouvement et du nombre, la solitude triomphe. Le narrateur utilise le regard du commissaire Maigret, en focalisation interne, pour constater : Rares étaient les gens qui se connaissaient d’étage à étage. […] Les paliers, qui étaient vastes, constituaient en quelque sorte des terrains neutres où l’on entassait tout ce qui ne servait pas dans les logements. […] Il était difficile de concentrer plus de vies humaines dans aussi peu d’espace et pourtant on ne sentait aucune chaleur, on éprouvait plus que nulle par ailleurs un sentiment d’irrémédiable isolement. (Maigret à New York, 625)

38 La « solitude dans la multitude »6 reste une constante, même si l’on vit dans un Nouveau Monde où tout semble possible, comme en témoigne, toujours en focalisation interne, Trois Chambres à Manhattan : Et tout ce qu’il voyait autour de lui, ce pèlerinage dans un monde de grisaille, où des hommes noirs s’agitaient dans le rayon des lampes électriques, ces magasins, ces cinémas avec leurs guirlandes de lumières, ces boutiques à saucisses ou à pâtisseries écœurantes, ces boîtes à sous, à musique, à lancer des billes dans des petits trous, tout ce qu’une grande ville a pu inventer pour tromper la solitude des hommes, tout cela, il pouvait le regarder enfin, désormais, sans écœurement ni panique. […] Une seule angoisse encore, l’ultime, qu’il traînait avec lui de bloc de maisons en bloc de maisons, ces cubes de briques le long desquels courent des escaliers de fer, pour les cas d’incendie, et dont on se demande, non pas comment les gens ont le courage d’y vivre, ce qui est encore assez facile, mais le courage d’y mourir. (Trois Chambres à Manhattan, 316)

39 Simenon exploite le cadre américain et le foisonnement de vie qu’il semble proposer comme une variation sur ses thèmes de prédilection. Le changement de cadre nourrit son imaginaire, il n’est qu’un alibi pour réactiver des préoccupations de type universel, comme la solitude des hommes ou la pesanteur de la mort. Les escaliers de fer, qui illustrent la volonté de l’homme de sécuriser les lieux de vies et devraient constituer une vision rassurante, polluent au contraire le cadre de vie. Objets récurrents dans les décors américains de Simenon, ils sont aussi l’objet de l’attention de Maigret, évoquant davantage la descente vers la mort et l’enfer que la garantie de la vie : Bientôt, le long des rues rectilignes, interminables, on ne vit plus guère circuler que des gens de couleur. C’était Harlem qu’on traversait, avec ses maisons toutes pareilles les unes aux autres, ses bloc de briques sombres qu’enlaidissaient par surcroît, zigzagant sur les façades, les escaliers de fer pour les cas d’incendie. On franchissait un pont, beaucoup plus tard. On frôlait des entrepôts ou des usines — il était difficile de distinguer dans l’obscurité — et c’était, dans le Bronx, de nouvelles avenues désolées, avec parfois les lumières jaunes, rouges ou violettes d’un cinéma de quartier, les vitrines d’un grand magasin encombrées de mannequins de cire aux poses figées. On roula plus d’une demi-heure et les rues devenaient toujours plus sombres, plus désertes, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin le chauffeur arrêtât sa machine et se retournât en laissant tomber d’un ton dédaigneux : – Findlay. […] Dans la perspective noire, on voyait se découper le rectangle de quelques

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boutiques comme il en existe dans les quartiers pauvres de Paris et de toutes les capitales. (Maigret à New York, 610)

40 Le monde américain devient un théâtre dont le décor se découpe en petits rectangles, en petits morceaux de vie devenant de simples matériaux uniformes. Le monde n’est plus qu’une vaste scène où les visages deviennent des masques, portant le poids de la résignation. Et des tramways passaient, pleins de visages livides et secrets. Et des enfants, de petits bonhommes tout noirs dans le gris, rentraient de l’école en s’efforçant, eux aussi, d’atteindre à la gaieté. Et tout ce qu’on voyait dans les vitrines était triste. Et les mannequins de bois ou de cire avaient des poses hallucinantes, tendaient leurs mains trop roses en des gestes d’inadmissible acceptation. (Trois Chambres à Manhattan, 316)

41 Les citadins se déplacent dans « leur » tramway, accomplissant des trajets répétitifs qui les fixent dans leur quotidienneté. Automatisés dans une vie au jour le jour, sans surprise, résignés, ils sont peu différents des mannequins des vitrines et vivent sans réelle prise sur l’orientation et le sens de leur existence.

42 Pourtant, le Capitaine O’Brien rappelle à Maigret combien on se soucie du bonheur des hommes, en respectant le principe de la liberté individuelle, notamment celle de se déplacer, qu’il s’agisse de mobilité physique ou sociale. Il argumente auprès de Maigret : Les formalités pour entrer aux Etats-Unis ont peut-être été longues mais du moins, une fois terminées, notre homme est absolument libre. – Saisissez-vous ? – Tellement libre qu’à moins qu’il tue, qu’il vole ou qu’il viole, nous n’avons plus le droit de nous occuper de lui. (Maigret à New York, 598)

43 Ce souci du respect et de la protection de la liberté individuelle s’inscrit pourtant dans une inexorable fatalité. L’utilisation par le romancier de la circulation et de ses dangers, n’est pas seulement emblématique du Nouveau Monde, mais symbolique : elle traduit l’imminence de la mort à chaque tournant de la vie. Dans Feux rouges, la route devient un univers non maîtrisé, présenté comme dévorant des vies en quantité monstrueuse, et les statistiques annoncées sur les ondes radio ont le ton de la fatalité : Un monsieur sans veston, sur l’écran de la télévision, aux lunettes à grosse monture d’écaille qui paraissaient donner chaud, annonçait d’un ton de morne conviction : – Le National Safety Council prévoit pour ce soir de quarante à quarante-cinq millions d’automobilistes sur les routes et évalue à quatre-cent trente cinq le nombre de personnes qui, d’ici, lundi soir, perdront la vie dans des accidents de la circulation. Il continuait, lugubre, avant d’être remplacé par une réclame de bière : – Evitez d’en être. Soyez prudents. (Feux rouges, 750)

44 Derrière l’humour, Simenon met en scène le destin. Sur tous les continents, dans tout le roman, lui seul, à l’image de ce qu’il constate partout dans la vie réelle, décide du sort et du mouvement des hommes. Les romans américains de Simenon ne sont, en ce sens, pas différents de l’ensemble de son œuvre. Il écrit à propos de la création romanesque : Je veux qu’un livre ait la même résonance à New York ou à Boston qu’à Londres, à Liverpool et à Paris. Tant qu’un roman n’a pas obtenu ce degré de vie là, dans six ou sept pays au minimum, à mes yeux, il n’a pas fini de naître. (Klinkenberg, 133)

45 Simenon se sert de la nouveauté apportée par le continent américain pour poursuivre son inlassable quête de « l’homme nu ». Ses personnages, si désireux d’échapper à leur mal-être, si avides de se construire ailleurs une « nouvelle vie », toujours prêts à fuir, ignorants le plus souvent que c’est eux-mêmes qu’ils fuient, sont en réalité figés dans ce

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qui ne peut être que leur destinée. Ils sont paradoxalement immobiles, et leur mobilité, si visible, comme l’agitation ou les reflets à la surface de l’eau, recèle en profondeur une incontestable forme d’immuabilité. En définitive, l’étude de la mobilité, le suivi des déplacements pour une compréhension de parcours divers permet au romancier de mettre à nu les crises internes de personnages confrontés malgré eux à l’inexorabilité de leur destin.

5. Conclusion

46 Du simple point de vue biographique, il est certain que Georges Simenon a subi l’attraction du Nouveau Monde, au point d’envisager un temps de demander la nationalité américaine. Mais le romancier n’a en fait pas d’autre identité que celle de créateur des mondes et des personnages de son œuvre. Sa vie durant, il a poursuivi le même projet : rendre compte de « l’homme nu », quels que soient son milieu social, sa culture, sa langue, son implantation géographique ou ses lieux de séjour. L’ensemble de ses romans vise à construire l’identité universelle de l’homme tel qu’il est, partout et toujours.

47 A son retour d’Amérique, il continuera à écrire des romans sans pour autant se référer particulièrement à l’expérience vécue outre-Atlantique. Peu importe le décor dans lequel se déroule la fiction et l’influence de ce décor sur la vie des personnages mis en scène, seul compte « l’homme », dans son immobilité profonde, pris aux pièges de ses incessants déplacements et condamné à vivre et mourir en scène, dans la tragédie de sa destinée.

48 Pour ce qui est de la poétique du roman simenonien, elle est beaucoup plus complexe qu’il est coutume de le dire, et les romans dits américains donnent de l’épaisseur à de nombreuses interrogations. Assurément le behaviourisme est présent dans l’œuvre de Simenon, sous la forme d’une recherche constante de compréhension des comportements humains, soigneusement observés, et l’ensemble des romans constituent une vaste mosaïque, voire une fresque, cohérente. Les procédés du roman réaliste et naturaliste sont utilisés, certes, notamment pour construire des « effets de réel », mais Simenon n’a personne pour « modèle privilégié », ni Zola, ni Maupassant, ni même Dostoïevski, malgré de très réelles influences. En revanche, son exploitation des ressentis et des souvenirs, sa prospection des analogies, son travail d’écriture qui confronte souvent mémoire et imaginaire, rappellent parfois étrangement la démarche proustienne. Sa conception de l’homme, loin de toute prise d’engagement « existentialiste », est bien proche des constats de Camus. Quant à sa poétique, elle emprunte autant à la poésie qu’à la prose narrative. Comment ne pas songer à Baudelaire, à cet « Amer savoir » « qu’on tire du voyage »7, ou encore à la chute des « Hiboux »8 : Leur attitude au sage enseigne Qu’il faut en ce monde qu’il craigne Le tumulte et le mouvement ; L’homme ivre d’une ombre qui passe Porte toujours le châtiment D’avoir voulu changer de place. (Baudelaire, 67)

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Baudelaire Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. [1861] : Paris : Gallimard, La Pléiade, tome I, 1971.

---, Le Spleen de Paris. [1869]. Paris : Gallimard, La Pléiade, tome I, 1971.

Carly, Michel. Sur les routes américaines avec Simenon. Paris : Carnet Omnibus, 2002.

Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie. Lire Simenon. Réalité, fiction, écriture. In reCollectif, Bruxelles : Ed. Labor, 1980, 117-142.

Simenon, Georges. Trois Chambres à Manhattan [1946]. Paris : Omnibus, tome I, 2002, 209-324.

---, Maigret à New York [1946]. Paris : Omnibus, Tout Simenon, tome I, 2002, 577-684.

---, Feux rouges [1953]. Paris : Omnibus, Tout Simenon, tome VI, 2002, 747-849.

---, L’Amérique en auto, Mes apprentissages. Reportages, 1931-1946. Paris : Omnibus, 2001, 625-693.

NOTES

1. Simenon, Georges, Une Vie comme neuve. [1951]. Paris : Omnibus, Tout Simenon, Tome 5, 2002. 2. Il s’agit de Denise Ouimet que Simenon épousera en 1950. 3. La rédaction et la publication, dans la plupart des cas, se succèdent sans long délai. Généralement, le roman achevé paraît quelques mois seulement après la fin de la rédaction. 4. Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters, Paris : Presses de la Cité, 1952. 5. Meung sur Loire est une ville de 6000 habitants environ, à notre époque. 6. Baudelaire, Charles, Le Spleen de Paris, Les Foules, XII, 291-292. 7. Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Voyage, CXXVI, 133. 8. Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mal, Les Hiboux, LXVII.

RÉSUMÉS

Dans l’abondante production de Georges Simenon, on peut aisément repérer une période dite américaine, de 1945 à 1955, qui correspond aux dix années passées en Amérique durant lesquelles l’écrivain belge écrira une quarantaine de romans. Après la guerre, Simenon cherchera en effet l’oubli et la construction d’Une vie comme neuve : changement de cadre et changement radical de mode de vie, mais la méthode demeure inchangée. Au fil des déplacements, la mémoire enregistre de multiples sensations qui se sédimentent pour constituer le fonds dans lequel puise le romancier et c’est le cadre fictionnel de trois romans de cette période américaine qui sont au cœur de cette étude : Trois chambres à Manhattan, (1946), Feux rouges (1953) et Maigret à New York

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(1946). Dans ces trois ouvrages, au caractère autobiographique marqué, l’analyse porte sur les spécificités et les enjeux des changements de décor, puis sur les interactions entre les personnages et les « espaces-temps » qu’ils habitent. De manière paradoxale, il ressort que « mobilité » et « immobilités » sont les deux paramètres d’une « immuabilité fondamentale » celle du destin tragique de « l’homme nu ».

Within Georges Simenon’s abundant production, a so-called American period is readily identifiable. It corresponds to the years 1945 to 1955, which the Belgian writer spent in America and during which he wrote approximately forty novels. After the war, Simenon sought to forget, aspiring to A New Lease of Life: a change of surroundings and a radical change of lifestyle. His method, however, remained unchanged. From one journey to another, Simenon’s memory recorded feelings and impressions, forming sediment on which the novelist subsequently drew. The fictional framework of three novels of this American period, Trois Chambres à Manhattan, (1946), Feux rouges (1953) and Maigret à New York, is the object of the present study. The analysis of these three markedly autobiographical works focuses on the specificities and of the changes of scenery and their mechanism, then on the interactions between the characters and the « space- times » in which they live. Paradoxically, « mobility » and « immobilities » are the two parameters of a « fundamental immutability », that of the tragic destiny of « the naked man ».

INDEX

Mots-clés : cristallisation, conformisme, décor, destinée, espace américain, fiction, identité, imaginaire, immobilité, itinéraire, mise en scène, mobilité, modernité, narration, parcours, paysage, pittoresque, réalité, récit autobiographique, rêve américain, roman policier, tragique, ville Keywords : crystallization, conventionality, scenery, fate, American space, fiction, identity, imaginary, immobility, itinerary, staging, mobility, modernity, narration, route, landscape, picturesque, reality, autobiographic narrative, American dream, detective story, tragedy, city

AUTEURS

CHRISTINE CALVET Ingénieur d’étude Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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“You Need to Come Here… to See What Living Is Really About”. Staging North American Expatriation in Merida (Mexico)

Eve Bantman-Masum

1. Introduction

1 In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement brought Canada, the United States, and Mexico closer than ever. Almost two decades later, the process of North American integration has also led to a closer relationship between the three American peoples.1 While Mexicans continue to move up North, in search of a better life and more work opportunities, a growing number of both Canadian and U.S. citizens now choose to relocate South of the border. Part tourists, part residents, Canadians and Americans are resettling in Mexico to lead the good life—to spend less, afford more, and enjoy themselves. This article explores the way this mobility is staged among the Anglo expatriate community in Merida, capital city of the state of Yucatan, focusing on the discourse around buying and renovating local houses. This complex discourse is replicated in many genres—the expatriate autobiography, the expatriation handbook, the interior design coffee-table book—while the existence of beautiful and affordable houses in Mérida is promoted on local websites, videos, and during the Merida House and Garden Tour.

2 This work is based partly on fieldwork conducted in the Yucatan in 2010-11, and partly on a literature review of four related genres. The case study is prefaced with a discussion of tourism and expatriation in Mexico, leading to a review of autobiographies and expatriation handbooks designed to help newcomers relocate abroad, and more specifically in Mexico or Merida. From there, we will first look at how expatriates perceive local houses, and then describe the local real estate market. The last part will be dedicated to the Merida House and Garden Tour, a weekly event hosted

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by the English Library in Merida (MELL) and simultaneously a community ritual during which representations of house renovation come alive. Both writings and tour provide a powerful incentive for an increasing number of foreigners—U.S. citizens and Canadians, as well as Mexican expatriates in the United States—to come and lead the good life down in the Yucatan.

2. Perspectives on tourism and expatriation

3 For at least a century, U.S. citizens have been establishing themselves south of the border, into Mexico, forming large expatriate groups in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Cuernavaca, San Miguel de Allende, Puerto Vallarta, Oaxaca, and recently, Cancun. Immigration to Mexico has steadily intensified over the last decade, leading to the formation of hundreds of other, smaller communities of both U.S. and Canadian citizens in Mexican towns of all sizes across the country. There have been surprisingly few studies on expatriation, and existing works have mostly focused on the numerous and growing retiree communities (Lizarraga Morales), and on North and Central Mexico (Bloom in San Miguel de Allende, Truly on Ajiic, Croucher on San Miguel and Ajiic).

4 Today, both the idea of expatriation and our understanding of the process are evolving very rapidly. In her recent essay on U.S. expatriation, Nancy Green charted this history over the last two centuries, insisting on the changing meaning of departure. Initially a synonym for nation-building, expatriation has been successively redefined as a form of immigration closely related to economic entrepreneurship, as a questionable, potentially unpatriotic, practice, and lastly as an expression of global mobility and privilege. Green’s insights into U.S. expatriation are of course relevant here, particularly her review of the lasting influence of expatriation to Europe and her call for more studies on North-South migration (Green). Indeed, except for notable exceptions, expatriation is largely absent from academic literature on migration in North America. Conversely, and somewhat ironically, writings by expatriates continue to shape the expectations of readers tempted by relocation.

5 As far as Mexico is concerned, studies of expatriation must be traced back to scholarship on tourism, mostly published over the last decade. In spite of a well- established tradition of tourism studies, spearheaded by the Annals of Tourism Research, very few scholars had explored Mexico’s tourism before the early 2000s (notable exceptions include Daniel Hiernaux, Pierre Van der Berghe, and Quetzil Castañeda). Thomas Clancy’s Exporting Paradise (2001) was the first of a series of books to systematically describe and interpret the history of tourism in Mexico. In the following years, Dina Berger’s The Development of Mexico’s Tourism (2006) and Nicholas Bloom’s Adventures into Mexico (2006), among others, signaled the emergence of a new academic interest for tourism. Close scrutiny revealed the highly heterogeneous nature of tourism, resulting in more specialized studies by geographers, historians, and anthropologists. The connection between tourism and expatriation was pointed by various authors, including Bloom, Truly, and later Croucher. Expatriation should be examined as the last step in a complex process of mobility that commonly encompasses a tourist experience in Mexico. Nowadays, a growing number of Anglo tourists to Merida are in fact looking for a house to buy.

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6 Today’s mass tourism and Anglo expatriation to Mexico— to be discussed next—must of course be viewed as consequences of globalization—particularly of crucial improvements in transportation and communication. IT and cheap travel fares have undoubtedly facilitated Anglo relocation to Mexico over the last decade (Croucher, chapter 2). As a consequence, an experience that was once restricted to a minority has presently become an option for millions of Americans. But even before the current hype around the idea of globalization, U.S. citizens had travelled and resettled in Mexico, often to become major players of local economic development. Lisa Pinley Covert’s examination of tourism promotion in San Allende covers the long-term impact of U.S. presence in the town, pointing to the interactions between Mexican politicians and entrepreneurs, as well as foreign promoters (Pinley Covert). This applies to the Yucatan Peninsula, our case-study, where Anglos have resided for over a century, boosting development and simultaneously promoting tourism and expatriation.

7 In the Yucatan peninsula, the largest group of expatriates may be found in the state of Quintana Roo at Cancun, with satellite communities scattered along the Caribbean seaboard—including one in Merida which has its own U.S. Consular Office. In fact, the first expatriates to have settled in the Yucatan lived in Progresso and Merida, one of the richest cities in the world at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the time, the local economy—a variation on the classic Caribbean plantation system—was booming, with haciendas producing and exporting henequen. A century later, thousands of Anglo residents are living in Merida, and spilling into all the adjoining beach towns. There are remarkable differences between beach communities (often nicknamed “Paradise”) and town communities like Merida, the Yucatecan capital, explored in this work, to which we will return shortly. Not all expatriates wish to live in “paradise”, with many opting instead for cities, particularly cities with a colonial center. These days, Merida, the capital of the state of Yucatan is ranked as a top destination for retirees in Mexico, leading to the arrival of hundreds of foreign residents each year. Though the retiree rush to Mexico is not a primary focus here, senior citizens do account for an ever- larger proportion of the total, growing population of Anglo-American residents in the country. This expatriation boom may aptly be descried as the local manifestation of a wider trend whereby elderly citizens leave post-industrial countries of the North to relocate in the South (Baumann).

8 Officially, Anglos account for less than 1% of the total population of Mexico, but the Mexican Census grossly underestimates their importance. Officials record less than a million foreigners residing in the country (Inegi). However, the US Embassy in Mexico reports “one million American citizens resident in Mexico and over twelve million American citizens visiting Mexico for business or tourism each year” (U.S. Embassy). According to the 2010 Census, the total population of Merida is 781,146, and the number of foreign residents 1667 (Inegi). Interestingly, part-time residents are not registered as residents by pollers, even if expatriates who are based in Mexico regularly return to their home country. Privately, expatriates mention far higher figures, talking of more than 10,000 U.S. residents living in Merida. The official figures undoubtedly dwarf the importance of large national groups: in addition to U.S. and Canadian nationals, the country has long hosted vast groups of Italian, French, and Latin American residents (chief among which the Guatemalans).

9 In the absence of reliable statistics, we must rely on empirical data as well as expatriate narratives to describe the composition of the expatriate community in Merida. With a

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population of several thousand souls, this heterogeneous community includes a majority of Canadian and U.S. citizens, joined by numerous Europeans. While senior citizens comprise a sizeable proportion of the whole, they belong to different groups: long-term residents, long-term visitors (returning tourists), or newcomers who have decided to relocate temporarily or permanently in Merida. There is also a surprisingly large population of working-age Anglos, including many businessmen and women – a fact noted by long-term residents2. Diversity results in great variations in class: this is one if the issues that will indirectly be discussed in this article. Although we cannot provide an accurate picture of income and asset distribution among the community, we will examine expatriate perception of upward mobility related to buying and renovating a house in Merida. Houses bought by residents vary from modest to exclusive, a result of differences in taste as well as purchasing power. Some expatriates are extremely wealthy, by both U.S. and Mexican standards, while the majority is wealthy only in comparison to the average Mexican citizen of Merida. In addition, acquiring a house in Merida routinely implies refurbishing it, a costly operation beyond the means of many natives of Merida. But buying and renovating a house will also translate in upward mobility due to steady real estate appreciation.

10 While Mexicans have always welcomed foreigners (particularly political refugees), they do not consider their country to be a natural recipient of international migration. The expatriation boom could create bitter controversy over government preference for foreigners and pro-American policies worsening U.S. political, economic, and cultural influence in Mexico. Until recently, even tourism was controversial among nationalists who routinely compared it to an unacceptable form of Americanization. In fact, the poor statistics on expatriation may be traced back to political uneasiness about the extent of recent Anglo migration to Mexico, and its impact on real estate, urban renewal, income distribution, etc. However, we shall see that this vision of immigration is slowly changing among Mexicans who increasingly endorse Anglo migration to Mexico. In 2011, the Merida City Hall conducted a poll to learn more about the expatriates’ needs and assets. A growing number of Mexicans are also working for U.S. and Canadian citizens as maids, gardeners, builders, lawyers, realtors, etc. Elite and popular perceptions of Anglo expatriation are undoubtedly changing.

11 Because expatriation is now popular among North Americans, publishers have released many handbooks for readers who are considering the move. Books on expatriation may be subdivided into different genres—the autobiographical expatriation narrative, the handbook on how to move into a specific country or city, and the guides on how to do business or retire somewhere are the most common ones. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence is a modern classic. It was first published in 1989 but is now a global best- seller–7 million copies have been sold across the world—translated into 22 languages. Mayle’s opus, followed by several sequels, described his first year in Southern France, his discovery of the local culture and the risky but rewarding experience of buying and renovating an old farm in the Lubéron. Indeed, this type of travel writing typically mixes technical information about moving to a specific country with cultural material —i.e. generalizations about the local people and praise for the culture. Contrary to the narratives published by famous artists of the past, expatriation narratives recount the experience of the common man, not the exceptional individual.

12 Because of the long history of migration to Mexico, U.S. citizens have long written about living South of the border. Artists and intellectuals who wrote recounted their

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experience rarely discussed houses at all rarely. Political exiles preoccupied with their fate developed a more socially engaged view of the experience (Schreiber). One of the earliest examples of the type of expatriate narrative we are considering here was published in 1974. Jack Smith’s God and Mr. Gomez is an autobiographical tale about buying a land plot and building a house near the beach in Mexico. The subgenre had since flourished—a variation on this model, Gringos in Paradise, was published in 2006 by a contributor to the American Association of Retired Persons (Golson).

13 The bulk of expatriate narratives was published after 1990, expounding on life in specific places. Readers tempted by expatriation may select destinations depending on their budget, needs, and aspirations. Favorite destinations for the wealthier set are located in Europe: France (Paris, the Dordogne, the Lubéron) or Italy (Rome, Tuscany). In the New World, Mexico is competing with other Central American countries, chief of which Panama. Books like Tony Cohan’s On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel (2001) clearly play a part in drawing Anglo Americans into deep Mexico. Unlike Smith and Golson who describe life on the beach (“paradise”), Cohan expounds on living in a beautiful colonial town. San Miguel de Allende features prominently in this literature, because it hosts one of the oldest and most famous Anglo expatriate community, and one that pioneered many strategies now reproduced in other Mexican cities. As intuited by Nicholas Bloom The low cost of living and antique charm of these places … make them destinations for growing numbers of American retirees. San Miguel de Allende’s fifty years of American colonization makes the city a provocative urban premonition of what may happen elsewhere (Bloom, 191).

14 Indeed, there are now Anglo communities everywhere, replicating many features of the San Miguel de Allende model: development of expatriate clubs and institutions, real estate and hospitality boom, formation of a highly visible downtown “Gringo Gulch.” But the reproduction of the San Miguel model across Mexico owes little to inevitability. Crucially, community expansion should be traced back to the existence of national and transnational social networks that allow and facilitate foreign mobility and minority entrepreneurship (Granovetter). Numerous groups and institutions operate at a national level, and are ready to help newcomers (Croucher, 35). Like many other towns, Merida possesses its own organizations and clubs, including several businesses specialized in expatriation-related services, from webzines to legal assistance firms or real estate agencies. This expatriate network is clearly driving the expatriate boom, promoting town and community, boosting house sales and the renovation business.

15 In addition to promotion originating in the network, handbooks on how to relocate are tapping into the profitable expatriate market. There are numerous such guides covering popular destinations, like the Living Abroad series which provides information on developed countries of the North (Italy, Spain, Japan, and France) as well as developing countries located for the most part in Central America: Costa Rica, Belize, and Mexico. Living Abroad in Mexico is but one example—several similar opuses have already been published, beginning in the late 1980s. All handbooks cover more or less the same topics: they give information about the country, its different regions, and important issues such as organizing the move, lodging and housing, education, and healthcare. Because Mexico is now a popular expatriation destination, candidates will also find books on specific cities. Living in Merida, first published in 2008, is the local guide. The first edition was written with the help of an Anglo resident in San Miguel de

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Allende (McCarthy & Kelley, 5), another example of networking and of the influence of San Miguel de Allende on other expatriate communities.

16 The Mexican expatriate network operates across cities and regions, covering the entire North American territory, and actively promotes the good life. Contrary to immigration, expatriation does not involve painful separation from the homeland. Book titles emphasize opportunities and well-being: Live Better South of the Border, Leaving Easy in Mexico, Mexico: New Land of Opportunity, Tales of Retirement in Paradise, all published after 1995, are recommended by Living Abroad in Mexico. Expatriation in Mexico is a specific form of immigration, from North to South, which is publicized and often experienced as a smart move. According to Sheila Croucher, author of the only general study on American expatriation to Mexico: Americans … are moving to Mexico in growing numbers. They cross the same geographic border as their Mexican counterparts, but are headed in the opposite direction and typically with access to a more advantageous array of economic, political, and cultural resources (Croucher, 2).

17 The situation of Anglo residents is therefore in sharp contrast to that of other immigrant and local groups. Even if there will always be exceptions, Americans and Canadians moving to Mexico clearly belong to the wealthy segment of the population in Mexico. In fact, they have moved to Mexico to lead the good life. Immigrants born in post-industrial countries of the West rarely join the ranks of working-class Mexicans; those who do work in Mexico tend to occupy high-paying, or at least enviable jobs. They tend to hire maids (there is a section on this aspect of expatriation in most handbooks, including Choose Mexico for Retirement, Live Better South of the Border in Mexico, and Living in Merida). As we shall see, crossing the border definitely feels like moving up the social ladder. Buying a beautiful, well-kept home in town acts a central pull factor for our Anglo expatriates.

3. The Mexican dream house and the market

18 Mexican houses take centre stage in this history of the good life down in Mexico primarily because they are comparatively cheaper than their U.S. or Canadian equivalents. Many of these houses are also special places: like San Miguel, Merida is a beautiful town, with a large colonial center and historic mansions built by Spanish colonists and nineteenth century latifundistas and industrialists. The existence and availability of grand old homes is a central factor in luring North Americans into White City (one of Merida’s most common nicknames). The town’s outstanding architecture is an asset when examining the reasons why the city is now extremely popular with Anglo expatriates. Partly to satisfy lifestyle aspirations and partly due to favorable exchange rates, foreigners initiated a new trend, that of buying and renovating houses in the center of town. The trend soon resulted in a real estate boom, the classic corollary to the expatriate boom.

19 Before describing the actual houses, let us explain how the real estate market developed. The 1917 Mexican Constitution had banned foreign ownership of land in an effort to limit direct foreign investment, regain control of natural resources (most crucially oil), and reverse economic dependence on the United States. A first constitutional amendment known as the Foreign Investment Law was introduced in 1973: it allowed foreigners to purchase property anywhere in Mexico except in the

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restricted zone (50 miles from the coast and 64 miles from any border). But in the 1990s, after Nafta was signed but before it took effect, Mexican law was once again amended in significant ways, cancelling limits to foreign ownership of land. The 1994 amendment allowed foreigners to acquire property through a bank trust (fideicomiso) in the restricted zone next to the coast, in places like Merida.

20 The reform triggered major changes in the local real estate market: by lifting the ban of foreign land ownership, the 1994 amendment opened a world of opportunities for foreign investors who could suddenly buy property everywhere in Mexico. Over the last 17 years, Mexico's real estate has become increasingly integrated into the wider North American market: cheap property attracted potential clients and professional realtors. These new foreign players drove prices up, creating a real estate boom that opened opportunities for brokers willing to help Northern investors. Suddenly, millions of Dollars were poured into dormant towns, transforming them into hubs for both Northern capital and immigrants. Nowadays, a significant proportion—the majority?— of foreign residents who do work are active catering to tourist or expatriate demand: they advertize, sell, or renovate houses; they provide information to visitors; they run businesses to meet foreign demand for special products or services (from legal assistance to yoga classes).

21 To be sure, many houses in and around Merida are astounding by U.S. and Canadian standards because they are unique, not jerry-built. They are routinely classified by type (the hacienda, the colonial mansion, old or recent houses), renovation style (restoration, modernization, complete reconstruction), location (in the historical center, in the modern parts of town, outside Merida), or use (retirement or relocation house). The hacienda—former master house at a plantation—is clearly the most expensive kind, while colonial mansions located in the historical center are both prestigious and in high demand. The hype around local houses has brought new goods into this real estate circuit, including more modest homes, and even ruins, both in and around the historical center. Historic, modest, as well as dilapidated houses often require substantial, hefty renovation or reconstruction work. Mexican houses sold by Mexicans to foreigners often require drastic revamping to accommodate their new owners.

22 Descriptions of houses abound in expatriate narratives, handbooks, city guides, as well as local websites, most importantly YucatanToday and Yucatan Living (both were created by Anglo expatriates in Merida). Yucatan Today was founded in 1988 to cater to tourists, while Yucatan Living, founded in 2005, serves the expatriate community. Descriptions of colonial homes will typically praise building materials, solidness, stylishness, and comfort: The colonial homes in the historic center of Mérida combine European elements— the carved doors and high ceilings of Spain, for example—with the fine craftsmanship of Mexican artisans in tile, wood, and wrought-iron work. (Yucatan Today)

23 Colonials will make luxurious homes to many residents from the United States accustomed to living in new rather than old houses. Colonials will usually be composed of several areas: the house proper (living room, dining room, bed-rooms, bathrooms, and kitchen) and the garden and pool area. Descriptions published on Yucatan Today, Yucatan Living and other websites will typically introduce readers to strikingly

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luxurious houses. At a subtler level, they are also suggesting what it feels like to live in such a house: Enclosed gardens and inner courtyards not only give privacy and muffle street noise, they bring the outdoors inside, creating a sense of lushness and tranquility. Fountains, fish ponds, and swimming pools add a water element, creating a cool and peaceful environment (op.cit.).

24 Buyers often recall buying their Merida homes on impulse, just like Jack Smith and Barry Golson before them. But the abundance of information about local real estate and house renovation must surely have some influence on buyer behavior. Websites about local homes help readers make a better decision: handbooks and local websites guide readers in choosing and renovating a house that will meet their budget and aspirations. In the following excerpt, from a Yucatan Living article entitled Houses of Merida Video: The Good Life, notice how the writer combines description of architecture and interior design with more subjective information about Anglo lifestyle in Merida: When you walk into this house, though, it is almost as if the house flings open its architectural arms in exuberance, inviting you to revel in all the space that it has to offer and you have to enjoy. This coral-colored room is quite large … large enough to hold string quartets and audiences of 100 comfortably. Though unplanned, this room has wonderful acoustics and has been the site of more than a few musical events since it was built. (Yucatan Living)

25 Articles like this one encourage readers, who may already be thinking about buying a local house, to identify with the owners of this house. As we shall see, the writer’s continuously describes the house as it is and as it feels: some of the description is factual but most of it is a projection. The reader’s imagination travels freely from reality to dream life. Buying and renovating a house is about picturing oneself in a better, ideal place, a central motivation for expatriates who are, after all, leaving their former lives behind. In addition, the renovation and remodeling process will also be experienced as a creative experience. Interior decoration typically incorporates local elements as well as foreign features. Note how the description stresses the greatness of the house. Frequently, house renovation will be used to make a statement about class: The elegant floor tiles from Mosaicos Peninsular (very Versace-esque!), the white- lined arches that march down each side and the beautiful flower arrangements add to the grandeur that is this Great Room. (op.cit.)

26 This renovated house is inspired by both tradition and global trends in interior design. The end product is a grand home that seems destined to host prestigious guests and events. Colonial homes may actually be very similar to modern houses; many are large, fully-equipped homes with a front and back part separated by a central pool/garden area. Sophisticated electrical appliances, pools, fashionable furniture, and art are generally absent from middle-class Mexican households. Such renovation process therefore transforms classic Merida homes into luxurious places, turning houses into symbols of upward mobility. In the process, many expatriates are also transformed into real estate and renovation experts, just like the writer of this short piece: Beyond that, away from the house, is a large open-air swimming pool with plenty of places to sit in the sun (…). This garden has shade under an open-air poolhouse with a red-tile roof, with seating for lounging and dining and enjoying the view. (op.cit.)

27 This description is tailored to help readers picture themselves living in the house. The writer suggests that the living is easy in a house that seems destined to entertain guests or simply relax to contemplate its beauty. Mentions of the good life abound in expatriate narratives that elaborate on the virtues of relocating abroad. The renovated

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home symbolizes a new way of life, promoted in expatriate narratives, handbooks, web magazines, as well as interior design volumes. The local houses are systematically presented as dream houses and act as mesmerizing representations of what life could be like in Mexico: expatriation is repeatedly depicted as a pleasurable experience of exclusive home comfort. Simultaneously, buying and renovating houses is not just about lifestyle: it is an experience in upward mobility, partly as a result of the real estate boom. Compiling information provided by handbook writers about houses, it becomes apparent that buying and renovating a house in Merida is good business too. Between 2004 and 2008, the price for a small colonial house-described by Living Abroad in Mexico as “a small two-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a big sala (living room), dining room, kitchen, and a small garden area, in the heart of the historic center ” jumped from $ 12,500 to $ 60,000 (Luboff, 159-160; Merida Verde, 76).

28 Discussions about the value of real estate abound in the literature on expatriation. A potential buyer may get a fairly good idea of the market by reading these accounts and updating them with regular visits to specialized websites. Upon arriving in Merida for the first time, many buyers are already familiar with the local house scene. In Merida, they will be able to gain access to even more specific information, such as the very accurate descriptions of specific neighborhoods in the local expatriate handbook, Living in Merida. All writers insist on the fact that foreign buyers are making a good deal. This cannot be discarded as mere business: expatriates working in real estate are making a living out of it but they are also genuinely trying to help. Because houses are cheap by American standards, those who can afford to buy a house in Merida will get a lot in return for their Dollars. Access to local property is therefore a key step in the expatriation process as a form of upward mobility. When local experts signal that the local house market is rapidly internationalizing and adjusting to North American standards, they are registering the impact of expatriation on real estate. Quoting prices for the second edition of Living in Merida, the writer is careful neither to encourage nor discourage readers: Renting and leasing are very reasonable in Mérida compared to other desirable cities and town. … The rental and leasing scene in Mérida is so attractive that some expats never do get around to buying, although, with an 8-15% per year appreciation of real estate values over the last ten years, renters might do well to consider a purchase if that works for them. (Merida Verde, 75-6).

29 The figures are also very misleading: house values have tended to stagnate in recent years, because of the subprime crisis but also because most buyers favor the cheaper houses to be renovated rather than the grand remodeled expatriate homes. Prices for renovated homes mentioned by Luboff and the 2011 edition of Living in Merida are strikingly similar, at about $ 350, 000 (Mérida Verde, 26). However, most expatriates seem to favor affordable houses because they will have to survive on limited income when they move to Merida. To expatriates, the real estate boom is both an asset—as houses become more valuable, owners become wealthier—and a liability. As prices wax, chances of living comfortably in Merida wane. The renovation process, though tedious, is a necessary step in the path to upward mobility. The people who bought colonials for $ 15,000 and sold them for $ 300,000 clearly moved up the social ladder. At the same time, owners of renovated houses will also transition from one social group to the next because they will get more out of life in a beautiful colonial house maintained by housekeepers paid on average $ 50 a week. In the eyes of expatriates, acquiring a house is now intricately linked to a second process-that of upward mobility.

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4. Showcasing the community, re-inventing the American dream

30 One house that was indeed a bargain is that which now hosts the English Library in Merida (MELL). The story of this specific building captured the visitors' attention on Wednesday March 16th, 2011 for one of the last House and Garden Tours of the season. The event is a unique occasion to stage house renovation and promote the expatriate lifestyle as a symbol of both upward mobility and community values. MELL has been running the weekly tour from October to March (high season) for over a decade. Visitors must pay $ 200 MEX (about $ 20 USD) to attend, and the fee provides funding for the Library, the most important community institution. The tour typically brings together expatriates, part-time residents, returning tourists, potential retirees, as well as first-time visitors. It is a fascinating moment, an occasion to showcase the community and its values for both insiders and outsiders to contemplate. Houses are embodiments of the expatriate dream life in Merida, and are staged as such during house visits like the House and Garden Tour, as well as virtual visits of houses available online.

31 On 16 March 2011, the tour opened with a short history of Mérida, its architectural tradition and heritage, and the story behind the Library. The house was bought for $ 8,000 and donated by the owner (a single North American lady who had retired in Merida) to the Library upon her death. The anecdote had the crowd whooping with glee at the low sum paid to acquire the house, but the tour leader, a local real estate agent and interior designer, had clearly anticipated the reaction and added that prices are now much higher and that this modern construction could not be counted to be very valuable anyway. The real value of the building lies elsewhere—MELL is a rallying point for the expatriate community. In the past, before the rush to Mexico, it was the only meeting place for expatriates, and provided many crucial services to them, making books in English accessible to all, helping newcomers connect with other foreign residents, and organizing events that the entire community could attend. Today, the Library continues to welcome new residents but is also actively publicizing the achievements of the local expatriate community, best epitomized by the house restoration activity.

32 This House and Garden Tour consists of a guided walk around several recently renovated houses (three houses on 16 March 2011—all owners were Anglo Americans). Interestingly, a grander house tour had been organized the weekend before by Merida Verde, the charity that publishes Living in Merida. On March 16th, the visit always began with a short presentation by the tour leader who described the original condition of the house before it was renovated, situating the type of remodeling operated by the owner (colonial restoration, a mixture of old and new, modernization, complete makeover, etc). Owners were present to welcome visitors and answer questions about the renovation. They had left pictures of the house on tables for visitors to visualize the change: in the last house, they showed blocks of concrete and mud, slowly forming into walls and floors, and miraculously becoming a house. These grim photographs were displayed on the fashionable concrete kitchen table of a grand modern, with ceiling reaching 10-15 meters high. Lines of visitors formed around these testimonies to the resilience of expatriates who struggled to make their dream villa come true. The crowd

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stared at the pictures and then at the house around them, discussed the works, and marveled at the result. Many participants, hoping to buy a house soon, also talked to the owners and tour guides about how to proceed with renovation.

33 During the tour, participants were allowed to wander around the house for twenty minutes, forming lines to visit the terrace, taking pictures of different rooms. They sat on sofas, exchanging views with other visitors but also rehearsing for the life they might soon be leading. Comments tended to focus on hard work, style, and wealth. The scene was repeated in the two other houses. Visitors treated owners with deference, acknowledging their taste, sound sense of profit, and insightful understanding of life. Very few Mexicans (a couple with their teenage son) attended on March 16th, and almost all visitors (35 in total) were English speakers. Since most of them were approaching retirement age, including many toying with the idea of buying a house in Merida, the Tour also served as an introduction to the local real estate market. Information about prices and costs was logically part of the exchange. The fact that expatriates profit from the real estate boom was not kept secret: the tour leader willingly acknowledged that a lot of expats including himself make a living out of buying, renovating, and selling restored houses. One of the houses was actually his. Tourees therefore gained access to experts who might in the future help them with practical issues (buying a house, planning a renovation, finding contractors, etc).

34 But even as the Merida House and Garden Tour connects potential buyers to real estate professionals, it serves another vital functions—capturing the imagination of all visitors who experience, for the duration of the tour, the sweetness of life in a Merida home. Moving to Merida and acquiring a beautiful colonial house is a defining moment in the lives of community members because it allows them to reconnect with long-lost values. The value of renovated houses lies not only in the money that can be extracted from them but, more importantly, in a community ethos—similar to the Protestant Work Ethic—which glorifies hard work, entrepreneurship, genius, and private property. The Tour stages the ethos of the expatriate community in Merida, whose members take pride in having superior values—love for local culture and a great sense of hospitality. The members are welcoming, willing to share their experience in how to lead the good life. Frankness and kindness are essential features of the house tour narrative, which provides an occasion to define and display the values of the local expatriate community. Implication in hospitality and charity often go together: after all, Merida House and Garden Tours both showcase the homes of members of a prosperous community and provide money to non-profit organizations staffed by a majority of expatriates.

35 The renovated house is not just a real estate product, but also a home, and as such, a vehicle for the American Dream. In Merida, families will be able to afford a beautiful mansion with rooms for the kids, a garden for the dog, and parking for the car. Commodities will be cheap and neighbors will soon become friends. The value of houses is therefore both economic and symbolic. To many, the city of Merida stands as an alternative to urban sprawl and the grim reality of the real estate market in the United States. Sprawl—characterized by the absence of a center where citizens can live, interact, work and shop—has become the negative symbol marking the decline of American values. To many, it acts as the antithesis to the American Dream (Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck). In the historical center of Merida, expatriates live next to neighbors, shops, monuments, public buildings, and parks. Overall, this makes their

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lives fuller: residents stress that the people of Merida fell like family to them now3, praising the thoughtfulness of strangers they had missed in the United States4.

36 Because it is deeply meaningful, the Tour is a particularly pleasing, mesmerizing experience for both insiders and on-lookers, one that is often replicated virtually online. Films introducing renovated houses may be found on the websites of Yucatan Today and Yucatan Living, and on in the Yucatan which produces videos about houses, real estate, and realtors. All sites feature house tours as well as real estate videos, two separate but closely related genres: while houses are goods to be traded, homes are synonymous with values and lifestyles. Altogether, videos and house tours (whether commercial or cultural) illustrate the complex meaning of house renovation as both an increasingly popular path to upward mobility and a vehicle for community values. That the value of Merida houses is both economic and sentimental is obvious in the language used to describe them in the numerous articles and videos posted by expatriates on local websites. Many English-speaking realtors in Merida are now copying this powerful discourse on houses and playing on Anglo nostalgia for the old days now miraculously returned. In the words of Jim Mann, a real estate agent who moved to White City ten years ago: “You need to come here. You need to see. You need to feel. You need to experience Yucatan, to see what living is really about” (Briehl). One need not even mention houses, because references to lifestyles and community values suffice. Over time, the narrative around houses has become self-explanatory.

37 Sales pitches now typically encompass more than one realm: descriptions of houses will refer to the solidness of colonial architecture, to the house as a combination of tradition and modern comfort (justifying the added value brought by the renovation, and praising the creative re-use). To expatriates, houses mean more than just than money: they stand for a loftier ideal, a transformative experience that allows them to reconnect with long-lost values. Part business, part lifestyle, the hype around buying and remodeling houses is also about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To many North Americans, moving to Mexico is more appealing than staying in the United States or Canada where many have found they can no longer afford to live well, a recurrent idea in the literature about renovating Mexican houses. Collectively, the expatriate community is therefore doing more than just a profitable real estate operation: they are salvaging heritage, not just for the United States but also for Mexico. Again, from Jim Mann's commercial: One of the wonderful things here is the wonderful architecture, the beautiful old houses here. So many had fallen to disarray. So many foreigners—and Americans especially—have looked at magazines, dreamed of owing one of these old colonial homes and been able to live the lifestyle of a day gone by, a golden day (sic). (op.cit.)

38 Interestingly, the house renovation movement has attracted a lot of praise from both insiders and outsiders—architects and interior decorators, as well as visitors. Articles on renovated houses in Yucatan Living systematically elicit comments from Mexican readers living in Merida, elsewhere in Mexico and abroad, complimenting foreign expatriates who have understood the greatness of Mexico. The following comments were posted in response to the article for the renovated colonial house described earlier: “Jose …” said on July 11th 2010: “Thanks for showing what many expatriates are doing and contributing to beautify this unique and magnificent city of Merida. (…) There is a significant number of newcomers from the United States and Canada and

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other parts of the world who live in less ostentatious surroundings with an equal, or perhaps better, quality of life compared to what they left behind. Merida happens to be a “Mexican Metropolis” proudly endowed with world class facilities to make life less stressful and comfortable for all of us who consider ourselves very lucky to live here. “Alex …”said on July 26th 2010: “I am a Mexican citizen that is looking forward to return to his country. I don’t have a lot of money but I would like to know how much do you think I would need to buy and remodel a 2 bedroom house in Merida. (…) I love the houses if merida (sic) segment of your website, thank you for all your beautiful work.” (Yucatan Living)

39 Both readers thank the editors for showcasing the houses as well as renovators who have restored the colonial houses and revealed the existence of outstanding architectural heritage to the world. The two comments also illustrate in very different ways the global dimension of restoration. Rather dramatically, Jose talks of a “Mexican Metropolis” in highly patriotic language which includes, rather than excludes, expatriates who have propelled Mérida to world class status. Simultaneously, he has integrated the idea that for many foreigners, moving to Merida means moving upward. Equally significant, Alex’s post signals an interesting inversion: Mexicans now consult foreigners to learn more about Merida. The discourse on House Renovation reveals complex evolutions in Mexican nationalism: expatriates act as Mexican nationalists when they renovate local houses and showcase local architectural heritage; as a consequence, they are regarded as patriots by Mexican nationalists like Jose.

40 An interesting example of how expatriates become model citizens in Mexico may be found in Joanna van de Gracht de Rosado‘s Magic Made in Mexico. This expatriate autobiography was published by a Canadian resident who moved to Merida in 1976. She describes herself as equally Yucatecan and Canadian, and exhibits great pride in the local culture. As a long-term foreign resident, she was obviously struck by changing patterns of immigration into Merida and her book includes bittersweet remarks on the recent expatriation boom: newcomers tend to be retirees, whose goal is not necessarily to become full-fledged Yucatecans, nor even to become part of Mexican society at all. While she seems to disapprove of this, she interprets the new interest in houses as a sign of understanding and appreciation of the local culture-a positive contribution to Merida:

F0 F0 Initially, most 5B new foreign residents 5D struggle with the language, but after a period of time, they find they have learned enough “to get by”. Others go pass that point and take classes to further improve their Spanish. Many buy crumbling older houses and tastefully restore them, enriching our city (Van der Gracht, 102-4).

41 Positive accounts of house renovation abound, and our last example will further illustrate the relationship between house restoration and upward mobility. Praise for North American renovators may be found in interior design books devoted to local houses, particularly the landmark opuses published by Merida experts Joey E. Carr (writer) and Karen Witynsky (photographer): The New Hacienda (1999), Casa Yucatan (2002), and Hacienda Style (2007)5. Similar books have been published on many types of dream houses: in this field, Mexican houses are competing with equivalents in the South in Morocco, Cuba, Argentina, etc. Books like these, published in English, tend to essentialize local styles for foreign rather than local readers. They also feature houses that more often than not belong to foreigners—here prominent members of the expatriate community. These books typically contain glamorous, colorful, full-page

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pictures of outstanding mansions as well as comments on the art of discovering, renovating, and decorating houses in the Yucatan. The authors systematically praise owners, individuals who glimpsed greatness where others saw nothing but ruins. Because the following excerpt deals with hacienda renovation, the owners may be said to belong to the wealthy segment of the population. The author’s commentary elaborates on the connections at work between the local and global spheres: The overall heightened interest in architectural preservation and adaptive reuse has fueled Mexico's burgeoning restoration movement in the last decade, catapulting restored haciendas and colonial homes into the international spotlight with their new extended lives as luxury hotels and unique homes. Nationals and foreigners alike are rescuing and reviving Mexico's architectural treasures, and sparking design inspiration throughout the world (Carr and Witynsky, 2007, 16).

42 These books are not just about great houses, but also—strikingly—about superior lifestyles and owners. The renovators’ ability to identify artifacts of exceptional origin and outstanding value has earned them a place among a cosmopolitan elite of aesthetes. In a masterful act of upward mobility, renovators now stand on a par with members of a local, even global elite of prestigious home lovers and owners. This way, the discourse on houses and renovation becomes a variation of the wider discourse on expatriation as a form of privilege analyzed by Nancy Green. This version of the house narrative systematically stages houses of self-evident beauty in deep, contrasting colors: brick-red restored walls set against lush green landscape gardens sitting next to the turquoise, tranquil water of a pool to lounge by. To readers, Merida houses stand as promises of a dream life in retirement, semi-retirement, part-time residency, or merely during a relaxing holiday. To residents, the glossy surface also reflects the growing importance of a respectable, well-integrated expatriate community.

5. Concluding remarks

43 Buying and renovating a house is only a step—albeit a crucial step—in budgeting the move away from life on a limited income in the United States and Canada. The hype around buying and remodeling houses in Merida signals the existence of a vast community of Anglo expatriates. This community is driving the local real estate boom, with foreign residents active as buyers, sellers, realtors, and renovators. Beyond mere economics, interest in Merida homes is deeply related to respect for tradition, both local and foreign. Colonial mansions capture the imagination of North Americans, indicating not just wealth, but the possibility of it for those smart enough to work for it. At a symbolic level, renovating a house is a sign of genius, an occasion to display may forms of capital (social, cultural and economic) and intelligence in realizing the intrinsic value of local real estate. For all of these reasons, the owner will naturally move upward, and in a gesture of democratic spirit, will show the way to others. Renovating houses in shambles is also a very meaningful contribution to the Mexican majority in Merida: it shows respect for tradition and understanding of the value of local heritage; it also participates to the regeneration of Merida, a local manifestation of a wider trend for urban renovation and gentrification that is transforming decaying urban centers worldwide. For all these reasons, expatriate passion for buying and remodeling local houses has elicited praise from local Yucatecans, proud to live in a safe and prosperous city.

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44 With instability now a permanent feature of the economy in the West, a growing proportion of middle class Americans are less frightened by expatriation. While retirees have attracted more attention than others, many working-age citizens are also leaving the United States and Canada. Economic slump in the United States has resulted in growth for expatriate communities in Merida, throughout Mexico, as far as Panama, and beyond. Expatriates have felt both the negative and positive impact of globalization, and so have Mexicans. Alongside tourism, expatriation is booming in the Yucatan, burgeoning resident communities of foreigners are translating into economic opportunities for Mexicans too. Clearly, not every Mexican is in a position to benefit from the presence of high-spending Gringos: housing costs are shooting up and cheap local businesses have been forced out of Centro Historico for the same reasons. But the expatriate community is truly pumping money into Mérida. Even if it is fostering tensions, the Gringo Gulch is also easing them, allowing Mexicans to benefit from North American prosperity without having to cross the border. To a certain extent, North American immigration to the Yucatan can therefore be viewed as a mutually beneficial development in the protracted history of U.S.-Mexico relations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baumann, Eveline. “Vieillir ailleurs, de préférence au soleil.” Revue Française de Socio-Economie. N). 7: 2011/1: 5-11.

Berger, Dina. The Development of Mexico’s Tourism. Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

Berger, Dina and Wood, Andrew G. (eds). Holiday in Mexico. Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen (ed.). Adventures Into Mexico. American Tourism Beyond the Border. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006.

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen. “To Be Served and Loved: The American Sense of Place in San Miguel de Allende” in BLOOM (2006).

Briehl, Erich. People: Jim Mann and Adele Aguirre. 15 Feb. 2011. 15 Ap. 2011. .

Carr, Joey E. & Karen Witynski. Casa Yucatan. Layton: Gibbs Smith, 2002.

---. Hacienda Style. Layton: Gibbs Smith, 2007.

Clancy, Michael. Exporting Paradise. Tourism and Development in Mexico, Pergamon, 2001.

Croucher, Sheila. The Other Side of the Fence. American Migrants in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Duany Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. Suburban Nation. The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

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Granovetter, Mark. “Economic Action and Social Structure: the Problem of Embeddedness. ”

Mark Granovetter & Richard Swedberg (eds) The Sociology of Economic Life. Westview, second edition, 2001.

Golson, Barry. Gringos in Paradise. An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico. New York: Scribner, 2007.

Green, Nancy. “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transformation of a Concept.” The American Historical Review 114: 2 (April 2009): 307-328.

INEGI. Migracion internacional. 3 March. 4 Ap. 2011. .

Lizarraga Morales, Omar. “La inmigracion de jubilados estadonunidenses en Mexico y sus practices transnacionales. Estudio de Caso en Mazatlan, Sinaloa, y Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur.”Migracion y Desarrollo, 2008 Secundo Semestre.

Luboff, Ken. Living Abroad in Mexico. Avalon Travel Publishing, 2005.

McCarthy, Jane & Bruce Kelley. Living in Merida. Yucatan Today: Mérida, 2008.

Merida, Verde A.C. Living in Mérida. Mérida: Yucatan Today, 2011.

Pinley Covert, Lisa. “Colonial Outpost to Artist’s Mecca. Conflict and Collaboration in the Development of San Miguel de Allende’s Tourist Industry” in Berger and Wood, 183-217.

Schreiber, Rebecca. Cold War Exiles in Mexico: US Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Stock M. (coordination) et al Le tourisme. Acteurs, lieux et enjeux. Belin Sup Géographie, 2003.

Truly, David. “The Lake Chapala Riviera: The Evolution of a Not So American Foreign Community.”In BLOOM (2006).

U.S. Embassy. ”U.S.-Mexico Affairs. At a Glance." 4 Ap ;2011.

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Van de Gracht de Rosado, Joanna. Magic Made in Mexico. Live Your Dream in Mexico.Mazatlan: Editorial Mazatlan, 2011.

Yucatan Living Houses of Merida. The Good Life. 19 Ap. 2011.

Yucatan Today. Real Estate – Colonial Homes. 19 Ap. 2011.

NOTES

1. For lack of adequate terms, we shall be referring to U.S. and Canadian residents/ expatriates as Americans, North Americans, or Anglos. There is no English equivalent for the more specific Mexican terms estadounidense and gringo. 2. Long-term resident with a Yucatecan husband, interview with author, Mérida, March 2011. 3. Long-term working-age resident, phone interview with author, April 2011

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4. Retiree living in Merida for 5 years, interview with author, March 2011 5. While we have focused on colonial houses in the center of town, the above- mentioned books dwell on the more prestigious hacienda buildings, except for Casa Yucatan.

ABSTRACTS

This article explores discourses of expatriation in Merida (Mexico) developed in autobiographies, handbooks for expatriates, local house tours, websites and videos, as well as interior design books. In the city of Merida (Mexico), buying and remodeling a colonial home has become a central theme in expatriation narratives. North American expatriates have become house renovation experts and are fueling a local real estate boom. But for U.S. and Canadian residents, the houses of Mérida also embody lofty community ideals–upward mobility, the American Dream, the Protestant Work Ethic, and even nationalist pride.

Cet article analyse le discours de la communauté nord-américaine de Mérida (Mexique) tel qu’il est développé dans les récits autobiographiques, guides pour expatriés, visites guidées, sites internet, vidéos, et livres de décoration. L’achat et la rénovation de maisons est désormais un thème central des récits d’expatriés qui sont devenus des experts de la rénovation de belles maisons. Cette activité alimente la croissance et le dynamisme du marché immobilier en Amérique du Nord, mais par-delà leur valeur marchande, les maisons de Mérida permettent de définir les idéaux de cette communauté : la possibilité de l’ascension sociale, le Rêve Américain, le respect de la tradition et le gout du travail, jusqu’au sentiment nationaliste.

INDEX

Mots-clés: expatriation, immigration, Mexique, Amérique du Nord, spéculation immobilière, communauté Keywords: expatriation, immigration, Mexico, North America, real estate, community

AUTHOR

EVE BANTMAN-MASUM Maître de Conférences Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Staging American Mobility

Acte III. Le capital en marche : mise en scène et mise en espace / Act III. Capital on the Move: Stage Space

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Facteurs de mobilité ou mobilité des facteurs (de production) ? La mise en scène urbaine du capitalisme américain

Frédéric Leriche

1. Introduction

En économie, les facteurs de production peuvent être réduits à deux entités : le capital (ou capital constant) et le travail (ou capital variable). Les États-Unis, sur la base d’un substrat historique et culturel original — marqué durant l’essentiel du XIXe siècle par l’expansion physique de l’espace national de référence — et comparativement aux autres grands pays industriels, sont caractérisés par une très grande mobilité spatiale de ces deux facteurs de production. À travers une analyse géographique, ce texte décrit comment la mobilité du capital se traduit dans un processus de consommation et de production d’espace, ou, plutôt et plus précisément, dans un processus de transformation et de « destruction créatrice » (pour reprendre l’idée de Schumpeter1) d’espace, et, parfois, de réabsorption dans le circuit économique d’espaces précédemment laissés à l’abandon. Concrètement, cette production d’espace par le capital prend la forme d’usines et d’entrepôts, d’immeubles de bureaux, mais aussi d’infrastructures diverses et de multiples espaces construits associés à l’impératif de la reproduction sociale. Dans ce processus, nous considérons que la mobilité du capital est motrice, qu’elle stimule et provoque la mobilité du travail. À ce titre, le capital, facteur de production mobile, est aussi facteur de mobilité (du travail). L’ambition première d’une telle analyse est de comprendre quelles sont les répercussions de cette mobilité des facteurs de production — et au premier chef le capital donc — sur les paysages urbains. En d’autres termes, cette analyse pose la question de savoir comment cette mobilité du capital se met en scène, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, dans les espaces

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urbains, lieux par excellence de la concentration et de l’amalgamation bien souvent frictionnelle du capital et du travail. Dans cette perspective, précisons que l’espace n’est pas considéré ici comme la scène passive des stratégies du capital, ou, plus largement, comme le réceptacle inerte et impuissant de la vie sociale et économique. Si les recherches en économie centrées sur les firmes envisagent bien volontiers l’espace comme un simple lieu d’exercice plus ou moins neutre des stratégies du capital en mal de « localisation », nous considérons ici tout au contraire, en accord avec les analyses développées en particulier par Harvey (2001)2, que l’espace est la pierre angulaire et l’enjeu central du capitalisme. En d’autres termes, la maîtrise de l’espace, c’est-à-dire la maîtrise des ressources, de la main d’œuvre et des marchés inscrits dans l’espace géographique, s’avère être un élément crucial des stratégies du capital, dans sa course pour l’accumulation et dans sa quête du profit. Fields (2004) par exemple, en comparant les entreprises G.F. Swift et Dell3, montre comment la question du contrôle de l’espace via les moyens de transport et de communication, permettant aux entreprises de maîtriser et de structurer les réseaux d’approvisionnement et de distribution, ainsi que, finalement, les marchés, est un élément déterminant pour asseoir la prospérité et la rentabilité de ces firmes. Comme Fields l’explique: At the center of this comparison is a story of how transformations in business organisation are part of a general process of innovation within the firm and how the emergence of innovative enterprises reshapes the geographical territory of profit making. (1) La mise en scène de la mobilité des facteurs de production (le capital « scénariste » et « metteur en scène » versus le travail « acteur », voire « acté ») se traduit aux deux extrémités du processus de transformation/destruction de l’espace sous les figures emblématiques et opposées des espaces urbains où s’affiche la puissance du capital, d’un côté, et, de l’autre, des espaces où s’expriment l’échec individuel et la relégation sociale, sortes de fruits blets voire pourrissants abandonnés par le capital après usage. Cet article vise au final à montrer comment la mise en scène des succès du capital, à travers des projets urbanistiques et architecturaux d’envergure — souvent à finalités essentiellement fonctionnelles, mais aussi parfois dotés d’objectifs symboliques, communicationnels et médiatiques —, peut être comprise comme la résultante d’une stratégie d’entreprises ayant pour finalité d’accroître leur notoriété et leur expansion, et comment cette mise en scène s’accompagne — comme en « coulisse »— d’un processus parallèle de fragilisation du salariat. Ce drame, à l’échelle de l’histoire des États-Unis, se joue en cinq « actes » (au sens théâtral donc), que nous analyserons successivement à partir de trois éclairages différents (moteur technologique et industriel, inscription spatiale, mise en scène du capitalisme). Commençons néanmoins par expliciter le cadre théorique dans lequel s’inscrit notre lecture de la mobilité géographique du capital.

2. La mobilité géographique du capital aux États-Unis : technologie, industrie, espace

Avant d’évoquer les cinq actes de la mobilité géographique du capital, il nous faut donc expliciter le cadre théorique qui permet de définir la structuration et la temporalité de ces actes. Ce cadre insiste sur le caractère dynamique — en termes fonctionnels et

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spatiaux — de l’industrialisation, dynamique au cœur de laquelle se trouve la technologie. Soulignons au demeurant que pour analyser l’inscription de cette dynamique dans l’espace géographique, nous retenons l’échelle nationale, évacuant corrélativement de notre champ de réflexion la question de l’expansion internationale du capitalisme américain. Certes, par bien des aspects, le capitalisme américain n’est pas très différent des autres formes de capitalisme identifiées en particulier par les économistes de l’école de la régulation (voir Boyer 2004)4. De manière générique, le fonctionnement du capitalisme (quelle qu’en soit sa forme nationale) est en effet régi par deux lois fondamentales : la baisse tendancielle des taux de profit (diminution sur le long terme des taux de profit des entreprises) et la péréquation des taux de profit (égalisation sur le long terme des taux de profit entre les branches d’activité) (Marx [1867]). À la recherche de taux de profits élevés, le capital généré par le processus de production, sous la forme de la plus- value capitaliste, tend — pour partie — à s’investir de manière exploratoire dans de nouveaux secteurs industriels aux marges bénéficiaires plus importantes, stimulant ainsi l’essor de nouvelles technologies, mais aussi de nouveaux matériaux, de nouveaux produits, de nouveaux procédés de production, et de nouvelles entreprises. Cette dynamique exploratoire renouvelle en conséquence continuellement les bases technologiques et industrielles du processus d’accumulation. Dans cette perspective, cherchant à expliquer les cycles longs identifiés par Kondratieff [1935]5, Schumpeter (1942) avance la notion de « destruction créatrice » qui, selon lui : [R]évolutionne incessamment de l’intérieur la structure économique, en détruisant continuellement ses éléments vieillis et en créant continuellement des éléments neufs. Ce processus de la Destruction Créatrice constitue la donnée fondamentale du capitalisme. (106)6 Schumpeter souligne que ce processus de renouvellement n’est pas régulier et qu’il connaît, tout au contraire, des phases d’accélération liées aux vagues d’innovation technologique puis des phases de ralentissement liées à l’essoufflement de ce même cycle technologique. La thèse de Schumpeter est donc que ces cycles se développent par sauts successifs, et non pas de manière linéaire et régulière, sous la forme de « grappes technologiques ». Cependant, comme le rappellent Storper et Walker (1989)7, la notion de destruction créatrice renvoie à un processus qui ne se déroule pas sans tensions et sans contradictions. En effet, cette notion implique que la croissance économique, telle que définie par Schumpeter, n’est pas uniquement un processus cyclique de genèse de technologies, d’entreprises, d’industries, de méthodes de production et de produits, destiné à relancer le processus d’accumulation du capital, mais qu’elle est aussi un processus dans lequel sont mis en tension l’innovant et l’existant. La notion de destruction créatrice fait donc référence à un processus plus général qui voient s’affronter des produits nouveaux et des produits anciens (innovation de produit), des manières de travailler nouvelles et des manières de travailler anciennes (innovation de procédé), etc., mais aussi, comme le soulignent Storper et Walker, des lieux de production nouveaux et des lieux de production anciens frappés d’obsolescence. En conséquence, l’approche géographique de la question soulevée par la notion de destruction créatrice permet de montrer, de manière complémentaire à l’approche schumpétérienne, que ce renouvellement des bases technologiques et industrielles de l’accumulation s’accompagne d’un processus d’expansion spatial du capital à la fois « consommateur » et « producteur » (ou « créateur ») d’espace, ou plutôt

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« transformateur » et « destructeur » d’espace. Ce processus est particulièrement marqué dans le contexte américain, dans lequel la réserve d’espace est — par opposition au contexte européen — immense. Cette approche permet finalement de souligner à quel point l’espace est une composante vitale de la dynamique générale du capitalisme en offrant toujours des opportunités pour s’extraire des contraintes imposées par les configurations spatiales héritées des phases antérieures d’accumulation. Niveau de rémunération du salariat, rapport de force capital/travail, caractéristiques du marché du travail local, caractéristiques de la matrice industrielle locale, fiscalité, ressources passives ou construites disponibles, configuration concrète du cadre bâti et de l’espace physique, etc. sont autant de contraintes que cherche à contourner le capital (voir Harvey 1985, 2001, 2007 ; voir également Messine 1987)8. Depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle, le processus d’industrialisation est structuré par la succession de cinq grappes technologiques schumpétériennes (tableau 1), donnant naissance à des cycles longs dont la datation précise reste l’objet de débats chez les économistes9. Ces grappes constituent le socle fondamental de la croissance capitaliste agrégée. Elles sont également le socle technologique qui étaie les différents régimes d’accumulation qui se succèdent au cours de l’histoire du capitalisme industriel. Ou encore, comme l’expriment Storper et Walker (1989): The expanding forces of production are the hard foundation for every regime of accumulation, on which the institutional regulation of the balance between production and consumption is constructed. (203) Ces grappes technologiques sont, en d’autres termes, le socle sur lequel les modes de régulation des régimes d’accumulation peuvent se bâtir, à tâtons faut-il souligner, comme le montre la manière pragmatique et empirique dont F. Roosevelt a forgé la politique du New Deal, laquelle posait les bases de l’État-Providence, dont la cohérence n’est apparue pleinement qu’a posteriori. Pour autant, les répercussions de ces grappes technologiques ne se limitent pas au système de production ou à leur capacité à générer la croissance générale de l’économie capitaliste, dans la mesure où elles ont également un impact sur les produits mis sur le marché, sur le renouvellement de la classe capitaliste, mais aussi sur la santé économique des régions et des nations intégrées les unes après les autres dans cette dynamique de l’industrialisation capitaliste.

Tableau 1. Les grappes technologiques de Schumpeter et les cycles longs : Périodisation, moteurs technologiques et industriels

Point de Cycle Datation Moteurs retournement

1 1788-1848 1815/1820 Charbon ; machine à vapeur ; coton et textile

Charbon ; acier et sidérurgie ; chemin de fer ; machine- 2 1848-1896 1873 outil

Electricité ; industrie chimique ; industrie pétrolière ; 3 1896-1948 1918/1929 moteur à combustion ; automobile

1948-1992 Pétrole ; nucléaire ; électronique ; automobile ; 4 1973 (1998 ?) aéronautique et espace ; pétrochimie et pharmacie

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1992/1998- Industries de haute technologie ; fonctions directionnelles 5 2017 ? ? et financières ; industries culturelles

Source : d’après Arnold et Guy (1989)

Chacune de ces grappes technologiques (et corrélativement chaque cycle long d’expansion du capitalisme américain) est associée à une configuration géographique singulière. Cependant, la lecture de la géographie de l’industrialisation aux États-Unis est difficile dans la mesure où cette industrialisation produit une « cartographie » de l’industrie extrêmement complexe. Plusieurs paramètres viennent en effet brouiller la lecture de l’espace économique américain. Premièrement, la carte actuelle de l’industrie aux États-Unis est le fruit de la sédimentation historique des cinq cycles longs d’expansion (décrits ci-dessous), lesquels se combinent, s’hybrident et se chevauchent. Deuxièmement, chaque grappe technologique est étroitement associée à un espace moteur initial, considéré comme l’espace central du cycle correspondant. Troisièmement, l’émergence de chaque grappe a tendance à s’inscrire dans un lieu nouveau par rapport au cycle d’expansion précédent, provoquant le déplacement du centre de gravité de l’impulsion industrielle, et provoquant l’essor successif de villes, voire de régions entières à l’échelle des États- Unis, mais aussi de nations nouvelles à l’échelle globale10 ; corrélativement, à chaque cycle, l’économie-monde s’élargit (Hall 1985). Quatrièmement, à mesure que se déroule un processus de maturation des secteurs industriels, les espaces centraux liés aux grappes technologiques successives tendent à déconcentrer vers des espaces périphériques les fonctions de production banale ; c’est par exemple le cas de la Silicon Valley, dans le secteur de l’industrie électronique, qui « délocalise » à partir des années 1980 certaines fonctions de production dans le Sud-ouest des États-Unis, comme à Phoenix par exemple, ou en Asie du Sud-est (voir Norton et Rees 1979 ; Markusen 1985 ; Scott et Angel 1987). Cinquièmement, les espaces centraux d’une industrie peuvent se déplacer vers d’autres régions ou d’autres nations à l’occasion de l’apparition de nouvelles techniques ou de nouvelles technologies qui, pouvant transformer les produits pour les rendre plus attrayants sur le marché et les méthodes de production pour les rendre plus performantes, seraient mieux maitrisées par de nouveaux lieux centraux de production. C’est précisément ce qui se produit dans le cas de l’industrie cinématographique américaine qui bascule de New York à Hollywood entre 1915 et 1920 (Scott 2005 ; Leriche et Scott 2008). Sixièmement, des espaces dont le développement repose sur des technologies apparues lors des précédentes phases d’expansion sont susceptibles de connaître de graves difficultés, voire de s’effondrer complètement, si leurs industries ne sont pas à même d’absorber les nouvelles technologies ou si leur tissu industriel n’est pas capable d’opérer un changement sectoriel radical (à l’instar de Pittsburgh ou Detroit). Septièmement, depuis les années 1980, les investissements directs à l’étranger (IDE) en provenance d’industries de pays extérieurs (d’Europe ou d’Asie en particulier) utilisent les États-Unis dans leurs propres stratégies de développement, plaçant éventuellement les espaces américains dans une situation périphérique (à l’instar des groupes automobiles Japonais et Allemands qui ouvrent des usines de production dans le « Southern Auto Corridor »). Le premier point évoqué à l’instant est crucial et mérite quelques éclaircissements. Chacun des cinq cycles longs d’expansion économique s’inscrit en effet dans une

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structure géographique propre ; cette expansion, à la fois technologique, industrielle et spatiale, décline ainsi les cinq actes du drame de la mise en scène urbaine du capitalisme américain.

3. Acte I : L’industrie entre en scène

La première grappe technologique et du coup l’ensemble des secteurs industriels moteurs du premier cycle long (ensemble dans lequel l’industrie textile est assurément un secteur clef) provoque l’essor de la « première » révolution industrielle11. Celle-ci est associée à une « révolution » des techniques et de la performance de l’agriculture, qui libère une main d’œuvre nécessaire au développement industriel urbain. Ce premier cycle long (1788-1848) émerge dans les villes portuaires et les villes marchandes du Nord-est du pays, sur la façade atlantique donc, lieu de la première colonisation européenne en Amérique du Nord. Dans ces villes, l’industrie se développe sous la forme de districts industriels, c’est-à-dire de denses agglomérations géographiques de producteurs où l’articulation entre lieu de travail et lieu de résidence des salariés est forte ; cette proximité s’impose d’elle-même dans la mesure où à cette époque, faut-il le rappeler, les moyens de transport sont encore peu développés. Dans des entreprises qui sont généralement de très petites entreprises domine la figure de l’ouvrier qualifié qui, justement parce qu’il maîtrise une large palette de compétences, bénéficie d’un certain pouvoir dans sa relation avec son employeur. Ces agglomérations sont marquées par un haut degré de désintégration du processus productif entre de très nombreuses entreprises spécialisées12. Cette organisation productive, reposant sur des économies d’échelle externes13, favorise les capacités d’innovation technique et commerciale. Ainsi, la Nouvelle-Angleterre voit-elle émerger les industries mécaniques et d’armement, mais aussi plus localement l’industrie du cuir et de la chaussure à Boston (Massachusetts), l’industrie textile à Hartford (Connecticut) ou à Lowell (Massachusetts). New York se développe grâce aux industries de l’habillement, la joaillerie, mais aussi en maitrisant les activités financières et le commerce transatlantique. Plus au Sud, le tissage du coton s’ancre à Philadelphie. Cependant, à mesure que se développe et se transforme l’industrie, de nouvelles villes s’industrialisent. Progressivement, de nouvelles villes situées plus à l’intérieur des terres comme Cincinnati, Albany ou Troy se développent grâce aux industries du textile ou du travail du fer. Lowell fournit un bel exemple de l’architecture industrielle du XIXe siècle, massive, sobre, fonctionnelle. Espace transformé et produit par cette première phase d’industrialisation, puis abandonné avant d’être absorbé à nouveau dans le circuit économique, la ville de Lowell est désormais mise en scène, par des capitaux publics et privés combinés, en valorisant l’histoire locale. Fondée en 1821 par quelques hommes d’affaires de Boston, la ville de Lowell compte 2500 habitants en 1826, et 33000 en 1850 ; elle est alors la seconde ville du Massachusetts derrière Boston. Qualifiée en 1846 de « Manchester de l’Amérique » par Thoreau, Lowell se développe encore dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, avant de connaitre une crise sévère au XXème siècle. Le renouveau n’apparaît qu’à partir des années 1970, lorsque l’État du Massachusetts fonde une université et que l’entreprise Wang installe un établissement (Mangin 2002). Désormais située dans l’orbite de la métropole de Boston, Lowell a réhabilité son patrimoine industriel. Traduction de l’intérêt naissant pour l’Heritage industry, nouveau pilier du

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développement économique local susceptible d’attirer des touristes et de revaloriser l’image de marque d’un lieu, l’usine dite « Mill Building » est dans cette perspective transformée en musée (cf. figure 1)14 ; dans la même veine, Lowell valorise son statut de lieu de naissance de Kerouac (en 1922), et organise depuis le milieu des années 1980 un festival folk de renom.

4. Acte II : L’ère de la machine et des barons d’industrie

La deuxième grappe technologique, à l’origine du deuxième cycle long, ouvre la voie à l’« ère de la machine », dans la mesure où, dominée par le travail de l’acier, elle est associée à l’apparition des machines-outils. Celles-ci accroissent le pouvoir de l’homme sur la matière travaillée, en particulier pour la transformation de l’acier, ouvrant ainsi l’éventail des réalisations possibles et accroissant continuellement la productivité. Du coup apparaît une quantité considérable de produits nouveaux : biens d’équipements pour l’agriculture, produits liés à l’essor du transport ferroviaire (locomotive, wagon), biens intermédiaires pour la construction (poutrelles, escaliers roulants et ascenseurs), biens de consommation (bicyclette, conserves alimentaires), etc. La nature des technologies mises en œuvre et des produits mis sur le marché, requérant des masses importantes de capital et de travail, offre des conditions favorables à l’émergence des premières sociétés géantes du capitalisme américain (comme Carnegie ou Pullman). Cette deuxième grappe technologique est le support de l’accumulation capitaliste de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Elle stimule la croissance urbaine de villes dans lesquelles lieux de travail et lieux de vie sont, toujours, situés à proximité. Cependant, l’une des conditions essentielles rendant possible cette accumulation est le recours massif et continuel à l’immigration — en provenance d’Europe — qui a le double intérêt d’alimenter le marché du travail en main d’œuvre et d’étendre le marché de la consommation (Leriche 2009). Par ailleurs, la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle est caractérisée par un mode de régulation articulant accumulation extensive et régulation concurrentielle (Boyer 1986)15. En d’autres termes, le rapport salarial est régi de manière concurrentielle, ouvrant la voie à des relations de classes conflictuelles (en particulier en phase « descendante » du cycle d’expansion, dans le dernier quart du XIXe siècle), comme l’illustrent les luttes parfois extrêmement violentes, à l’instar des premiers mouvements de grève à Chicago en 1886 (le 1er mai) puis à nouveau en 1894 (Pullman Strike), ou encore à Pittsburgh en 1892 (usine de Carnegie Steel à Homestead). Face à la puissance du capital incarné par les grands barons d’industrie de la fin du XIXe siècle, la classe salariale se trouve en difficulté pour négocier des niveaux de rémunération suffisamment élevés, et elle reste en marge de la sphère de la consommation. En outre, consécutivement, le rythme d’expansion est modéré et erratique. Ce deuxième cycle long (1848-1896) correspond donc à l’« âge de la machine » et de l’acier, mais aussi à l’âge d’or du « capitalisme sauvage ». Nombre de villes de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, et de la façade Atlantique plus généralement, continuent à se développer grâce à l’industrie, comme Waltham dans la banlieue de Boston, qui connaît un essor renouvelé à partir de 1854 grâce à sa spécialisation dans la fabrication de montres et d’instruments de précision. Philadelphie voit émerger les industries chimiques et mécaniques, New York ajoute l’édition dans la palette de ses industries, Baltimore devient un site de production sidérurgique et de chantiers navals (Sparrows

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Point). La hiérarchie urbaine est cependant bouleversée par le développement de villes industrielles souvent localisées vers les Grands Lacs, dans les vallées de l’Ohio et de ses affluents (Allegheny et Monongahela) ou dans le Midwest (Akron, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Saint-Louis, etc.). Au Nord des Appalaches, sur un site riche en charbon, Pittsburgh, adoptant en 1875 le procédé Bessemer16, se développe pour devenir un pôle majeur de l’industrie sidérurgique mais aussi de l’industrie du verre. Sise dans une aire de production agricole, Chicago devient un grand pôle industriel grâce à l’industrie agroalimentaire (et à ses abattoirs, comme ceux de l’entreprise G.F. Swift), à l’industrie de la machine-outil et à l’industrie du transport ferroviaire. Dans ces villes, l’activité motrice prend parfois au départ un caractère de mono-industrie marqué, comme à Minneapolis-St-Paul (minoterie) et Milwaukee (brasserie) qui se développent sur la base de la transformation de ressources locales. Ces industries et ces villes deviennent alors les moteurs d’un nouveau processus de développement régional, qui donne naissance à la désormais classique Industrial Belt autour des Grands Lacs. Dans des usines de plus en plus grandes sont expérimentées de nouvelles méthodes de production à grande échelle marquant les prémisses des développements industriels ultérieurs. Pour autant, d’autres sites industriels émergent, comme sur la côte Pacifique où San Francisco se développe en valorisant un savoir-faire acquis dans la production de matériel d’extraction minière progressivement constitué à partir de Ruée vers l’or de 1848 (Walker 1996). Comment, finalement, le capital se met-il en scène ici ? L’usine de l’une des sociétés fondatrices et emblématiques de la brasserie à Milwaukee (Cochran 1948), le Pabst Brewery Complex, dont la finalité est productive et fonctionnelle, permet de donner un exemple de la manière dont le capital se met en scène dans l’espace urbain (cf. figure 2)17. L’usine ferme en 1997 suite aux difficultés de l’entreprise. Immense complexe de bâtiments difficiles à réutiliser sans traitement urbanistique et architectural en profondeur, sorte de verrue urbaine sise non loin de downtown Milwaukee, l’établissement industriel est racheté en 2006 par un promoteur immobilier qui y conduit une opération de redéveloppement mêlant espaces résidentiels, bureaux d’entreprises, espaces commerciaux ; une partie du site (les espaces de bureau et le Visitor Center) est restaurée afin de relier le projet immobilier à l’histoire du lieu industriel. L’opération de redéveloppement n’est pas achevée en 2011. Espace produit par l’industrialisation amorcée à Milwaukee à partir du milieu du XIXe siècle, puis tombé en désuétude, le Pabst Brewery Complex est donc en cours de réinsertion dans le cycle économique, par l’intermédiaire capitalisme immobilier ; celui-ci met en scène cette reconversion et le changement d’usage du site en évoquant l’héritage historique ainsi que l’attachement du porteur de projet à Milwaukee18.

5. Acte III : L’électricité et l’automobile entrent en scène

La troisième grappe technologique, reposant sur l’électricité, la chimie et le moteur à combustion, voit se diversifier encore la gamme des industries et des produits. Correspondant à l’ère du taylorisme, elle structure le troisième cycle long. Cette phase de l’expansion industrielle est sans doute celle qui transforme le plus spectaculairement la société américaine (et la société occidentale dans son ensemble). Un processus continuel d’innovation permet en effet de mettre sur le marché une

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incessante cascade de biens et de services nouveaux (du tramway électrique à l’automobile, en passant par l’électrification des foyers, la radio, les premiers équipements électriques du foyer, et une série quasi-infinie de produits plastiques par exemple). Dans une matrice industrielle de plus en plus complexe, les connaissances, les savoir-faire et les technologies se diffusent souvent de manière transversale et interindustrielle, en fonction des spécificités et des besoins techniques des industries ; par exemple, les progrès de l’industrie chimique autorisent le développement de l’industrie photographique (grâce aux pellicules photo popularisées par Kodak vers 1900), les progrès de la maitrise de l’électricité permettent la mise au point de démarreurs automobiles (vers 1910-1915). Clef de voûte et emblème de cette phase du développement industriel, l’industrie automobile a des conséquences considérables, tant sur le mode de vie (bouleversé par le produit automobile) que sur les méthodes de production (la combinaison du taylorisme et de la chaîne d’assemblage mise au point dans les usines de Ford se diffuse dans de nouveaux secteurs industriels comme les biens d’équipement ménager). Mais l’industrie automobile — tout comme les autres secteurs industriels en expansion — a aussi des effets d’entrainement sur la croissance urbaine, car elle provoque la création d’usines parfois gigantesques19, draine de grandes quantités de travailleurs, et induit corrélativement une croissance urbaine rapide, tandis que d’immenses infrastructures routières et autoroutières sont aménagées. Au cours de la période correspondant à cette grappe technologique, le mode de régulation articule accumulation intensive sans consommation de masse et régulation toujours concurrentielle. Le rapport salarial prend alors progressivement une forme taylorienne instituant une profonde réorganisation du procès de travail ; les méthodes de production définies par Taylor, l’organisation scientifique du travail (OST), sont de plus en plus systématiquement appliquées, dessaisissant progressivement les ouvriers des anciennes manufactures de leurs savoir-faire polyvalents, et donc aussi d’une partie de leur pouvoir (voir Aglietta 1997). En outre, ce rapport salarial ne modifie pas de manière importante le mode de consommation de la classe ouvrière. La croissance est relativement soutenue mais cyclique. De plus en plus performant en termes de capacités productives, grâce à la diffusion des normes tayloriennes de production, le processus d’accumulation associé trouve ses limites lors de la crise de 1929. Tout au long de ce troisième cycle long (1896-1948), l’expansion industrielle stimule le développement urbain dans les grandes villes de l’Industrial Belt. Taylorisme et standardisation permettent d’améliorer la productivité, d’abaisser les coûts de production et de renforcer la compétitivité des entreprises. De nouveaux produits, de consommation plutôt que d’équipement, apparaissent, et les économies d’échelle autorisées par la production de séries longues permettent continuellement d’étendre le marché vers de nouvelles strates de consommateurs. Les économies d’échelle renforcent en outre la spécialisation régionale de l’industrie (Krugman et Obstfeld 1995). Les évolutions amorcées dans la phase précédente se confirment donc sous la forme du développement de centres industriels parfois très spécialisés, comme les villes emblématiques de Pittsburgh (sidérurgie) ou Detroit (automobile), parfois plus diversifiés, comme Chicago (machine-outil, mécanique). La période 1910-1930 marque « les années triomphales de Detroit » (Bergeron et Mauillari 1997) ; la population de la ville passe entre 1900 et 1930 de moins de 300000 à plus de 1,5 millions d’habitants, les entreprises locales commencent à diffuser géographiquement leur production en investissant ailleurs aux États-Unis et à l’étranger20. Les industries exploitant l’électricité (appareils électroménagers, mais aussi radio, cinéma, machines de bureau,

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téléphone, etc.) se développent à New York et alentour, les industries chimiques, pharmaceutiques et cosmétiques se développent dans les régions de New York et Philadelphie, jusqu’à Wilmington (Delaware)21. La Californie du Sud devient un pôle de développement des industries du pétrole, du cinéma, de l’aéronautique et de l’armement (Scott 1991), tandis qu’émerge en Californie l’agriculture capitaliste irriguée et ses industries associées (conditionnement agro-alimentaire)22, et que l’industrialisation périphérique conduit les producteurs de Detroit à y installer des usines, au point que Los Angeles devient alors le deuxième pôle de production automobile du pays (Soja, Morales et Wolff 1983). Si la géographie économique des États-Unis devient plus complexe, malgré tout, pour un temps, la ceinture des Grands Lacs s’impose comme le cœur industriel du pays. Inaugurée en 1908, l’usine historique de Dearborn, usine emblématique de cette troisième phase de l’industrialisation américaine, est désormais flanquée d’un musée relevant du Henry Ford Museum, le Ford Rouge Factory Visitor Center (cf. figure 3)23, destiné à valoriser l’image de marque de l’entreprise. À l’heure où l’industrie automobile américaine traverse une crise sans précédent, Ford cherche à profiter de l’engouement du public pour le tourisme industriel, mettant ainsi en scène (et commercialisant au passage) son savoir-faire industriel et ses compétences techniques. Cette stratégie de communication — faire savoir le savoir-faire — n’est pas sans quelque emphase relevant d’une démarche de théâtralisation du travail de production industrielle. Ainsi, la société chargée de l’animation de ce Visitor’s Center, BRC (Brand Cultural Entertainment Media & Events), vante-t-elle les mérites de ce site en le présentant comme étant une attraction touristique majeure. Comme l’explique BRC: Here, BRC created and produced a world-class visitor experience highlighting the people, products, and processes behind Ford Motor Company’s commitment to a sustainable future for industrial manufacturing. (…) Visitors get to walk through part of the assembly plant and explore the environmentally friendly 21st-century automotive production techniques employed by Ford Motor Company24. Si l’idée de promouvoir le tourisme industriel peut séduire, la rhétorique très « tendance » vantant les préoccupations de Ford pour l’environnement laisse quant à elle quelque peu circonspect.

6. Acte IV : Le Fordisme, l’avènement des industries de haute technologie

La quatrième grappe repose sur des technologies de plus en plus sophistiquées alimentant de nouvelles industries : aéronautique, électronique, nucléaire. Les industries motrices de la phase antérieure, comme l’automobile ou les biens d’équipements ménagers, n’en continuent pas moins à jouer un rôle prépondérant dans les dynamiques de l’accumulation capitaliste. Les « nouvelles » technologies liées à cette grappe sont la source de secteurs industriels puissants qui, n’ayant qu’un faible impact concurrentiel et substitutif, se surajoutent donc aux industries fordistes. L’électronique a un statut particulier ; en tant que technologie transversale, elle est à même de se propager dans l’ensemble de l’industrie mais aussi de susciter une immense vague de produits de consommation nouveaux. Ce cycle long est également associé à la production d’infrastructures énormes, en particulier les aéroports, tandis que s’accentue le développement des autoroutes et que s’accélère la croissance urbaine. Les secteurs de l’aéronautique, de l’espace, de l’armement et du nucléaire, dans un

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contexte marqué par la guerre froide, connaissent une expansion rapide adossée à des dépenses fédérales importantes. Le mode de régulation correspondant à cette grappe technologique est fortement marqué par le processus d’accumulation de la phase antérieure. Ce mode de régulation (souvent dit « fordiste ») combine accumulation intensive centrée sur la consommation de masse et régulation monopoliste d’État. S’il se met progressivement en place à partir des années 1930, il ne s’impose définitivement qu’après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Le rapport salarial prend alors une forme dite « fordienne », codifiant la progression concertée — le collective bargaining — et parallèle de la production et de la consommation. Pendant une longue période (les « Trente glorieuses »), grâce à ces dispositifs établis sur une base nationale et alors que les systèmes productifs nationaux se ferment relativement aux périodes antérieures25, la croissance est soutenue et relativement stabilisée. Ce régime d’accumulation fordiste entre en crise au cours des années 1970, en raison même des dynamiques de l’industrialisation capitaliste qui a conduit à l’apparition de produits plus adaptés aux goûts des consommateurs — se substituant donc à des produits obsolètes —, à des surinvestissements productifs dans de nombreux secteurs, et à l’émergence de concurrents aux méthodes productives plus performantes comme, en particulier, le Japon. Dès lors, l’économie des États-Unis entre dans une période de croissance ralentie et cyclique, et l’industrie nationale essuie une crise sévère et alarmante (voir Bluestone et Harrison 1982). Ce quatrième cycle long (1948-1992/98) correspond à ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler le haut fordisme. Au cours de cette phase d’expansion, les industries de production de masse continuent à se développer dans l’Industrial Belt, qui devient alors quasiment le centre économique du monde. Investissant dans d’autres régions du pays et, de plus en plus, à l’étranger afin de prendre place et de tirer profit des marchés émergents, les entreprises de ces industries continuent à pratiquer la déconcentration spatiale de la production. Le pôle dominant pour les activités d’extraction et de raffinage du pétrole et les activités pétrochimiques se déplace vers le Texas et la Louisiane, l’agriculture capitaliste irriguée se diffuse en Arizona et en Floride. Surtout, les industries de haute technologie amorcent un développement spectaculaire géographiquement ancré dans quelques lieux : nouveaux matériaux et aéronautique à Seattle et Los Angeles, industries liées à la défense (missiles, radars, etc.) en Californie du Sud, électronique et industrie informatique au Sud de San Francisco (Silicon Valley), technologies d’information et de communication dans des lieux variés comme Boston, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Phoenix, etc. (Castells 1989). Au cœur même de cette phase d’expansion fordiste émerge donc un nouveau paradigme industriel à l’origine d’une nouvelle géographie économique nationale, perceptible à travers les dynamiques démographiques des principales métropoles du pays. La Sunbelt, correspondant au Sud et à l’Ouest du pays, résulte d’une redistribution géographique du capital adossée à des dépenses publiques d’armement massives à partir des années 1950 en raison de la guerre froide26. La crise des années 1970 frappe sévèrement les industries de production de masse et les espaces associés (comme la fameuse Industrial Belt qui se transforme par endroits, comme Pittsburgh, en Rusbelt, le Nord-est Atlantique, sans oublier la Californie du Sud)27. Entreprise emblématique du dynamisme des industries de la haute technologie, fondée en 1977 par Larry Ellison, la société Oracle symbolise le dynamisme économique et territorial de la Sunbelt (cf. figure 4)28. Grâce à une croissance rapide, elle est désormais, en termes de chiffres d’affaires, la troisième société mondiale du secteur du software

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informatique derrière Microsoft et IBM. Son siège social, situé dans la Silicon Valley (Redwood City), met en scène, via son architecture moderne et sa localisation en bordure d’un lac aménagé sur la baie de San Francisco, au détriment de l’écosystème de la baie, une conception relativement ostentatoire mais aussi esthétiquement séduisante de la réussite économique. En outre, et dans le même ordre d’idée, Larry Ellison, grand adepte de la communication « spectaculaire » et de la médiatisation, participe à la Coupe de l’America (America’s Cup), en association avec le constructeur automobile Allemand BMW ; son équipe (BMW Oracle Racing), sur son bateau trimaran (Oracle), remporte la coupe en février 2010.

7. Acte 5 : L’ère de l’après-fordisme

Enfin, la cinquième grappe technologique (technologies d’information et de communication, nouveaux matériaux, biotechnologies) est celle qui anime le cycle long contemporain, lequel repose également sur l’essor des fonctions directionnelles et financières (stimulées par la mondialisation), et sur les industries culturelles (stimulées par l’évolution des goûts des consommateurs). Ces technologies sont à l’origine de nombreux produits, comme les ordinateurs personnels, les téléphones portables29 ou les produits multimédias par exemple. En outre, en raison de leur caractère universel et transversal, les technologies d’information et de communication ont un potentiel considérable pour transformer les méthodes de travail dans la plupart des secteurs d’activité. Même si les industries de haute technologie connaissent bien souvent une croissance sectorielle soutenue, le cycle d’accumulation induit par ces technologies reste marqué par une croissance générale médiocre et au caractère erratique30. Par ailleurs, le cycle d’expansion contemporain est marqué par la mise en concurrence accrue des capitalismes nationaux via l’accélération de la mondialisation, par la flexibilisation des méthodes de production, mais aussi par la fragilisation de la classe salariale et par la remise en question de la régulation keynésienne héritée du fordisme. En réaction à la performance du modèle industriel japonais, les industries traditionnelles américaines adoptent depuis les années 1980 des stratégies innovantes d’organisation du travail, fondées sur la flexibilité. Phénomène particulièrement sensible dans des secteurs tels que l’automobile, la “firme-réseau” remplace la firme pyramidale aux relations plus clairement hiérarchiques de la période précédente (voir Lung 1991). Cependant, d’autres formes de flexibilisation apparaissent, via le recours à des stratégies de redistribution spatiale des établissements de production manufacturière, via le recours aux technologies innovantes (comme la robotisation), mais aussi via une refonte en profondeur du marché du travail. Au final, cette transformation radicale du marché du travail, qui débouche sur la remise en cause du rapport salarial fordien fondé sur le contrat à durée indéterminée (CDI), conduit au retour de la fragilité du salariat (Castel 1995). Ce cinquième cycle long (1992/98- ?) correspond à l’ère de l’« après-fordisme »31. Les dates bornant au départ ce cycle restent en débat ; 1992 correspond à la reprise de la croissance aux États-Unis, 1998 à la reprise de la croissance en Europe. Même si nous manquons encore de recul, les grandes lignes des structures spatiales de ce cycle peuvent être identifiées. Les industries motrices de ce cycle (haute technologie, finances, industries culturelles) permettent à certaines métropoles de la Sunbelt (Californie, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Floride surtout) d’avancer sur leur trajectoire de

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développement. Ce sont par exemple Los Angeles avec l’industrie cinématographique articulée de plus en plus aux technologies numériques de traitement de l’image (Scott 2005), ou la région de San Francisco qui voit se développer les biotechnologies et désormais les « greentech » (voir Ktitareff 2009 ; Sengès 2009), ainsi que différentes composantes de l’économie culturelle ou de l’économie de la connaissance (Leriche et Rubin 2011). Ces industries motrices permettent également à la plupart des métropoles du cadran Nord-est du pays de réussir une reconversion économique parfois spectaculaire, à l’instar de Minneapolis (production d’ordinateurs), de Boston (équipement électronique et informatique), ou encore de Chicago (activités directionnelles et financières). Après des difficultés considérables au cours de la décennie 1970 (voir Castells 1976), l’économie new-yorkaise en particulier a trouvé un nouveau souffle grâce aux activités financières et directionnelles qui font de cette métropole le principal centre de commandement de l’économie mondiale (Sassen 1991). Dans ce nouveau paradigme économique centré sur les industries créatives et les industries de la connaissance, les universités et centres de recherche jouent un rôle prépondérant dans les dynamiques territoriales de l’industrie. Dans cette perspective, le Nord-est du pays reste, en dépit de la croissance de la Sunbelt, un pôle majeur à l’échelle du pays et même au-delà, tant la puissance scientifique, culturelle et universitaire, industrielle, financière et directionnelle du quadrant Nord-est du pays reste considérable. La Sears Tower, localisée dans le Loop de Chicago, est emblématique de la puissance du quadrant Nord-est des États-Unis, à l’échelle du pays et sans doute à l’échelle globale (cf. figure 5)32. Inaugurée en 1974, cette tour est destinée initialement à regrouper en un même lieu les personnels du siège social de la société de commerce de détail Sears Roebuck & Cie éparpillés en différents lieux de Chicago. Néanmoins, au-delà de cet impératif fonctionnel, la Sears Tower est aussi le fruit de la volonté de l’entreprise de mettre en évidence sa puissance sur la scène urbaine de Chicago, contribuant ainsi activement à la transformation de la skyline de la métropole. La Sears Tower reste le plus haut gratte-ciel du monde entre 1974 et 1998 ; dessinée par Bruce Graham (1925-2010) du cabinet Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), la tour est aussi le symbole du savoir- faire de Chicago en matière d’architecture. Néanmoins, s’inscrivant dans le cadre du mouvement plus général de suburbanisation des fonctions directionnelles — qui concourt au développement des edge cities (Garreau 1991) —, la société Sears quitte le bâtiment au milieu des années 1990 pour s’installer en banlieue. Rachetée, la tour change de nom et devient officiellement la Willis Tower durant l’été 2009. Si cette course à la construction d’immeubles de grande hauteur (IGH) manifeste la volonté d’affirmer sa puissance de la part du capitalisme américain, il est à noter que cette volonté est aujourd’hui battue en brèche par le capitalisme de la Chine ou des pétromonarchies.

8. Conclusion : mise en scène et trompe-l’œil

Comme nous l’avons vu, la mobilité sectorielle et géographique du capital conduit à l’émergence continuelle de nouveaux espaces industriels, comme la Silicon Valley qui, depuis les années 1960, fait office de figure emblématique de la capacité de renouvellement du capitalisme américain (voir Saxenian 1994). Inversement, cette mobilité provoque l’obsolescence et l’abandon des anciens espaces industriels, à l’instar de quelques-unes des plus grandes métropoles et de nombreuses villes de l’Industrial

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Belt, du coup transformée en Rust Belt, comme Detroit, Pittsburgh ou Akron. Cependant, comme le montrent les exemples du Mill Building à Lowell, du Pabst Brewery Complex à Milwaukee ou du Ford Rouge Factory Visitor Center, il peut arriver que certains espaces soient réinsérés dans la machinerie économique. En de telles occasions, ces espaces changent d’usage, la fonction originelle et première — essentiellement manufacturière — des bâtiments cédant alors la place à une fonction plus idéelle et sémiotique (diffusion de la culture historique, éducation, divertissement). Cette mobilité du capital et les répercussions de cette mobilité sur le développement régional sont à considérer comme une sorte de toile de fond (le décor de la pièce de théâtre), sur laquelle prend place la mise en scène urbaine du capital (le texte de la pièce) (voir Ryngaert 2000). Les fonctions de production (faire et savoir-faire d’un côté) et de communication (faire et faire savoir de l’autre) sont donc indissociables. Si les tâches banales, les tâches industrieuses, se traduisent par la genèse d’espaces plutôt fonctionnels (usines, entrepôts, etc.), les tâches directionnelles tendent à se traduire par la genèse d’espaces à forte charge symbolique (immobilier d’entreprise et bâtiments prestigieux, etc.). L’architecture est, dans cette perspective, un outil de communication particulièrement performant ; la multiplication des immeubles de grande hauteur est la parfaite illustration de l’idée de Jonhson (1996) selon qui : Dans le monde du commerce, le gratte-ciel est né parce nous n’avions pas d’autre religion à exprimer. Mais il s’agissait d’une volonté d’expression, et non pas d’une nécessité économique (7)33. Les Central Business District, qui à travers l’ensemble du territoire des États-Unis connaissent en conséquence un processus de « Manhattanization » (Brugmann et Sletteland 1971), sont les premiers bénéficiaires de cette mise en scène du capital. Néanmoins, à l’autre bout du spectre sociogéographique, certains quartiers sont sévèrement touchés par le sous-emploi et la misère sociale ; en d’autres termes, si le capital, de différentes manières que nous n’avons fait qu’effleurer, se met en scène dans l’espace urbain, laissant accroire que sa mobilité résulte d’un processus cyclique et heureux d’expansion géographique et de succès économique, la réalité mérite quelques nuances. L’exemple de l’opération Renaissance Center à Detroit illustre à l’envi cette contradiction inhérente au capitalisme, capable de créer conjointement des espaces symbolisant la réussite et la performance, et des espaces symbolisant l’abandon, l’obsolescence et la misère (cf. figure 6)34. Detroit illustre de manière sans doute caricaturale comment les stratégies du capital peuvent masquer des réalités peu glorieuses. Construit entre 1973 et 1977 sur des financements de General Motors (GM), Renaissance Center est un immense complexe immobilier constitué des sept gratte-ciel hébergeant essentiellement des bureaux — dont le siège social de GM — et un hôtel de luxe35. Censé incarner la « renaissance », justement, de Detroit, le complexe fait pourtant, dès les années 1980, figure de chant du cygne pour l’économie locale, à mesure que les constructeurs automobiles de Detroit subissent la concurrence des constructeurs européens et, surtout, nippons, et qu’ils déploient parallèlement des stratégies capitalistiques débouchant sur le rachat de sociétés à l’étranger et sur le sous-investissement dans l’outil productif domestique. Cette mise en scène du capital du secteur automobile américain, sous la forme d’un projet architectural et urbanistique ambitieux, moderne et spectaculaire à la Debord [1971], est la traduction d’une stratégie plus générale de communication et de marketing destinée à augmenter la notoriété, le prestige et, au final, le chiffre d’affaires et les profits des entreprises. Néanmoins, pour le cas spécifique de Detroit, cette mise en scène évoque finalement un

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décor de carton-pâte digne des studios hollywoodiens ; loin du Central Business District, les quartiers populaires s’enfoncent dans le chômage et la misère (voir Staszack 1999). Les difficultés économiques et sociales de Detroit depuis les années 1980 sont telles que la métropole en arrive aujourd’hui à incarner l’envers du « rêve américain » (Popelard et Vannier 2010).

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NOTES

1. Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), économiste autrichien ; théoricien de l’innovation technologique, des cycles économiques et du développement capitaliste, il avance la notion de destruction créatrice, qu’il considère comme un moteur de l’expansion économique. 2. David Harvey est l’un des plus célèbres géographes Américains contemporains ; il est connu en particulier pour ses analyses critiques des dynamiques du capitalisme. 3. G.F. Swift est l’entreprise pionnière et leader en matière d’industrialisation du conditionnement de la viande de bœuf à la fin du XIXème siècle ; Dell est une entreprise majeure du marché contemporain des micro-ordinateurs, spécialisée dans la production d’ordinateurs spécialisés et adaptés au client. 4. L’« école de la régulation » est une école hétérodoxe de la recherche en économie. D’inspiration néo-marxiste, l’approche épistémologique et méthodologique de cette école repose sur la prise en considération de la réalité concrète des faits économiques. École extrêmement influente à travers le monde, elle se divise en deux courants ; un courant « parisien » (représenté en particulier par Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer ou Alain Lipietz) et un courant "« grenoblois » (représenté essentiellement par Gérard Destanne de Bernis). Après avoir étudié les transformations du capitalisme dans le temps, l’école de la régulation a étudié la variété des formes du capitalisme dans l’espace.

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5. Économiste Russe, directeur de l’Institut de conjoncture de Moscou, Nikolaï Kondratieff « découvre » dans les années 1920 que les économies capitalistes se développent selon un rythme cyclique d’environ 50 années. Il publie un article (en russe) en 1925, traduit en allemand en 1926, puis en anglais en 1936 (« The long waves in economic life »; le texte n’est pas disponible en français). La signification de cette thèse est claire : le capitalisme est doté de capacités internes de rebond, et après chaque crise structurelle, il connaît une nouvelle phase d’expansion. C’est donc reconnaître la vitalité intrinsèque du capitalisme, sa pérennité potentielle, malgré les crises. Cette thèse, pour un régime soviétique qui parie sur la chute finale du capitalisme, est jugée comme étant hérétique, et provoque une profonde discorde entre Kondratieff et Trotski en particulier. En 1930, Kondratieff est déporté dans un goulag, si bien que si sa date de naissance est connue (1892), la date de son décès est incertaine (1930 ou 1938?). 6. Voir aussi, sur ce point, l’ouvrage Business Cycles (1939), non disponible en français. 7. Michael Storper et Richard Walker, géographes Américains, sont parmi les plus éminents spécialistes de géographie économique dans le monde. Ils appartiennent à ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler l’"école de géographie de Californie". 8. Si les travaux théoriques de David Harvey sont essentiels sur cette question, l’analyse plus empirique que propose Philippe Messine (1987) de la stratégie spatiale du capital (General Motors en l’occurrence) pour tenter de résoudre ses difficultés en créant une nouvelle marque automobile (Saturn) dans un nouvel espace (le Tennessee) est remarquable. Cette stratégie est l’occasion d’une remise à plat en matière de relations entre le patronat et les syndicats (clef de voûte du projet), mais aussi, consécutivement, en matière de positionnement commercial, de technologie industrielle (la robotisation), de méthodes d’organisation de la production. 9. Qui plus est, l’existence même de ces cycles continue à être débattue par certains économistes. 10. Sur le déplacement géographique et historique des centres d’impulsion de l’économie, voir Angus Maddison (2001) qui étudie cette question à l’échelle spatiale mondiale et à l’échelle temporelle du millénaire. 11. « Première » entre guillemets, puisque les historiens médiévistes ont mis en évidence qu’une véritable révolution industrielle s’est produite au Moyen Age. Comme l’explique Jean Gimpel (1975) : « La première » révolution industrielle date du Moyen Age. Les XIème, XIIème et XIII ème siècles ont créé une technologie sur laquelle la révolution industrielle du 18ème siècle s’est appuyée pour prendre son essor. (…) La société médiévale remplaça le travail manuel, souvent forcé des esclaves, par le travail des machines. (9) Une fois cette nuance établie, il convient de préciser que ladite (par convention) « première » révolution industrielle est généralement considérée comme la Révolution Industrielle (c’est nous qui soulignons). 12. Cette forme de désintégration du processus productif renvoie à la notion de « division sociale du travail » entre les firmes, mise en avant initialement par Adam Smith [1776]. 13. Les économies d’échelle (ou rendements croissants) peuvent être compris comme une baisse des coûts de production—associée à l’amélioration de la productivité—par unité de bien ou service produite, à mesure que s’allongent les séries de ces biens et services produits. Autrement dit, il y a des économies d’échelle quand le doublement (par exemple) des intrants dans une entreprise (on parle dans ce premier cas

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d’économies d’échelle internes) ou une industrie (on parle dans ce second cas d’économies d’échelle externes) accroit la production finale d’un facteur supérieur à deux. 14. Figure 1. Source : Wikipedia. < http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Fichier:Mill_Building_%28now_museum%29,_Lowell,_Massachusetts.JPG> consulté le 18/03/11. 15. Les économistes de l’école de la régulation ont peu (voire pas) travaillé sur la période antérieure à 1848. 16. Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), ingénieur Anglais, invente un procédé innovant qui révolutionne la technique de production de l’acier (brevet déposé en 1856). 17. Figure 2. Source : Wikipedia. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Former_brewery_Pabst_Brewing_Company_in_Milwaukee_Wisconsin.jpg> consulté le 18/03/11. 18. Sur le site Internet de la société de promotion immobilière, le promoteur — Joseph Zilber — est présenté comme un philanthrope amoureux de la ville où il a grandi. consulté le 18/03/11. 19. C’est en particulier le cas de l’immense usine créée par Ford à Dearborn en 1908. 20. Les investissements américains à l’étranger ont cependant commencé bien plus tôt, dès la fin du XIXème siècle en Amérique latine (principalement pour accéder aux ressources primaires du continent). Dans les premières décennies du XXème siècle pour accéder aux marchés, les industries de masse émettent des IDE, à l’instar de Ford ou de General Motors (qui rachète le producteur Allemand Opel en 1926). 21. Wilmington, DE est le berceau de l’entreprise Du Pont de Nemours. 22. La stratégie de développement de l’agriculture irriguée est aussi (surtout?), pour la Californie du Sud, une stratégie de développement destinée à tirer profit de la rente foncière via une promotion immobilière adossée à une véritable campagne publicitaire qui diffuse dès le dernier quart du XIXème siècle le slogan « Oranges for health, California for wealth ». Comme le rappelle Gordon DeMarco (1988) : « The citrus industry made sure the message was taken to all parts of the nation » (49). Sur cette stratégie (le boosterism, terme intraduisible en français) destinée à développer la Californie du Sud, voir aussi Mike Davis (1997). 23. Figure 3. Source : Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). consulté le 18/03/11. 24. Source : Brand Cultural Entertainment Media & Events (BRC). < http:// www.brcweb.com/brand/fordRouge.html> consulté le 18/03/11. 25. Cette fermeture relative se mesure par la part du commerce extérieur dans le PIB. Pour la plupart des pays industriels, cette part atteint son plus bas niveau depuis la fin du XIXème siècle au milieu des années 1960. Comme le souligne Alain Lipietz (1990) : [C]’est vers 1965 que le rapport entre les exportations et le marché intérieur, dans la plupart des pays capitalistes industrialisés, atteint son point bas historique. (85) Les systèmes productifs nationaux sont alors à un degré de cohérence économique maximum. 26. Sur l’impact des dépenses d’armement dans la reconfiguration de la géographie économique des Etats-Unis, voir les travaux sur la « Gunbelt » de Ann Markusen et Peter Hall (1991).

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27. Pour la Californie du Sud : sur l’histoire de l’industrie sidérurgique, voir Mike Davis (1997) ; sur la reconversion industrielle, voir Allen Scott et Allan Paul (1991). 28. Figure 4. Source : Wikipedia. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Oracle_Headquarters_Redwood_Shores.jpg> consulté le 18/03/11. 29. L’Europe, via la société Nokia en particulier, a cependant joué un rôle clef dans le développement de ce type de technologies et de marchés. 30. En ce sens, la croissance contemporaine semble renouer avec les modalités de la croissance de la fin du XIXème siècle. 31. Définir un objet scientifique par ce qu’il n’est pas est assez dérangeant, et ce terme de l’après-fordisme est peu satisfaisant. Faute de terme approprié, nous l’utilisons tout de même. 32. Figure 5. Source : Wikipedia. consulté le 18/03/11. 33. Voir l’entretien que Philip Johnson a accordé à Judith Dupré (1996). 34. Figure 6. Source : Wikipedia. consulté le 18/03/11. 35. L’architecte en est John Portman, du cabinet SOM.

RÉSUMÉS

Les États-Unis sont caractérisés par une très grande mobilité spatiale des facteurs de production, à savoir le capital et le travail. Reposant sur une analyse géographique, cet article décrit comment la mobilité géographique du capital (considéré ici comme un élément moteur de la transformation des espaces américains) se traduit dans un processus de consommation/ production d’espace. L’ambition d’une telle analyse est de comprendre comment la mobilité du capital se met en scène dans les espaces urbains, lieux par excellence de la concentration et de l’amalgamation du capital et du travail. Le « drame » de la mobilité spatiale du capital et de sa mise en scène, à l’échelle de l’histoire des États-Unis, se joue en cinq « actes », analysés successivement à partir de trois éclairages différents (moteur technologique et industriel, inscription spatiale, mise en scène paysagère du capitalisme). L’article commence néanmoins par expliciter le cadre théorique dans lequel s’inscrit cette lecture de la mobilité du capital.

Intensive mobility of the factors of production (capital and work) is a major feature of the United States. Based on a geographical analysis, this paper describes the way in which the geographical mobility of capital (considered here as a driving force behind the reshaping of the American landscape) generates a process of both consumption and production of space. This approach aims at understanding how the mobility of capital is staged in urban spaces; such urban spaces are, by excellence, places of concentration and amalgamation of capital and work. The « drama » of the spatial mobility of capital and of its staging, which has unfolded throughout the history of the United States, falls into five « acts ». The present article will analyse these five acts from three different angles: from the perspective of technological and industrial engines, of spatial

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inscription, and eventually from that of the visual staging of capitalism. Nevertheless, the paper will begin with an explanation underlying our understanding of the spatial mobility of capital.

INDEX

Mots-clés : capitalisme, technologie, industrialisation, métropoles, architecture Keywords : capitalism, technology, industrialization, metropolises, architecture

AUTEURS

FRÉDÉRIC LERICHE Professeur Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines [email protected]

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Occasional papers Articles hors-thème

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Metamorphoses of the Uncanny in the Short-Story “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl

Jacques Sohier

1 Towards the end of his famous essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche (1919), Freud admits: “The foregoing remarks clearly do not exhaust the possibilities of authorial licence and the privileges that fiction enjoys in arousing and inhibiting a sense of the uncanny” (Freud 1919, 157). Even the master of a discursive practice that deals with the elusiveness and persistence of desires, acknowledges a form of defeat at the hands of a notion that evades hard and fast definitions and taxonomy. What Freud called Das Unheimliche in his native tongue has been translated in English as “the uncanny” and in French as l’inquiétante étrangeté, “disquieting strangeness”. Each time slight shifts in meaning are lost in translation as in the very depths of semantic associations these words command.

2 We will go back to these interesting shifts in the course of commenting on Roald Dahl’s short-story, “The Landlady”, but first we would like to begin by giving a bird’s eye view of such an irretrievably plural concept.1 Then, we will tackle Roald Dahl’s short-story by analyzing the ways the writer sets in motion his uncanny story of the landlady of a Bed and Breakfast of a very special kind. The basic idea will be that for the uncanny to claw at the reader, as it pounces upon a character, there has to be a firm ground of rationality.

3 The next step will be to concentrate on “the moment of the uncanny”. In the short- story, this moment occurs when the main protagonist−a young man–comes under the spell of an uncanny feeling. He feels somehow compelled to ring the bell of a bed and breakfast that looks to him, in many ways, so like home, and finds out later, when it is too late, that he has just stepped into a demonic house. Lastly, we will focus on humorous details in the story. Whether it is meant in the very texture of the story or brought in cunningly by the reader “the serious uncanny” deserves its underside: what we have called “the humorous uncanny”.

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The inexhaustibility of the uncanny

4 As Freud said, exhausting the possibilities of the uncanny is beyond anyone’s power. Nicholas Royle, the author of an interesting book on the subject, was brave enough to call his study, The Uncanny. The author defines this notion tentatively: The uncanny can be a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above all death and corpses, cannibalism, live burial, the return of the dead. But it is also a matter of something strangely beautiful, bordering on ecstasy (‘too good to be true’), or eerily reminding us of something, like déjà vu. It can involve a feeling of something beautiful but at the same time frightening, as in the figure of the double or telepathy. It comes above all, perhaps, in the uncertainties of silence, solitude and darkness. The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light (Royle 2).

5 In the study of Roald Dahl’s short-story, we will not be concerned with the less palatable aspects of the uncanny, namely cannibalism, live burial, the return of the dead, but on the other hand, we will be involved in gruesome deaths and corpses and also with a process which seems to come up as a supplement since it has escaped the attention of the list maker, namely taxidermy.

6 This involvement in sinister aspects is inevitable because the uncanny hinges on the central Freudian idea of a death instinct at work in human behaviour. Although the death-drive and life-drive contend with each other, they are not in strict opposition. The death instinct constitutes the drive par excellence. It underpins all the other drives that are subsumed under the word “Eros”. The mythical description of a constant war between Thanatos and Eros misrepresents the state of things since the death-drive has “always already” won the field. It is only a question of time, detours and delays, before death wins: The two kinds of instincts seldom–perhaps never−appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and very different proportions and so become unrecognisable to our judgement. In sadism, long since known to us as a component instinct of sexuality, we should have before us a particularly strong alloy of this kind between trends of love and the destructive instinct; while its counterpart, masochism, would be a union between destruction directed inwards and sexuality […] I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with eroticism; but I can no longer understand how we have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life (Freud 1961, 119-120)

7 Freud repeatedly uses the word “alloy” to suggest that the death-drive is an elusive, silent, devious component of the life-force. In short, the death-drive is “uncanny” in its very permanence and unobtrusiveness. “The Landlady” could be said to explore the intricacies of the death-wish. Indeed, the owner of a Bed and Breakfast at which a young man calls for the night remains nameless. The fact that she performs taxidermy not only on her pets but also on unwary young men, makes her into an uncanny woman, a figure of death, a representation of the death-drive. The “dame”, as she is called in the short-story, impersonates death because she killed and stuffed two young men and is about to proceed with a third one, the hero of the story, Billy Weaver. The landlady is to all appearances in the throes of a compulsion to repeat her crimes. She is a serial killer, but she exhibits at first, along with her house, all the signs of the

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familiar, das Heimliche. In a very Unheimlich fashion, we will further on dissect this character since Roald Dahl makes her through an arresting characterisation, a strange “alloy”, to use again Freud’s expression, a mix between maternal instincts and truly demonic intentions.

8 Before analysing the short-story, we need to highlight certain aspects of the uncanny by referring to Tzevtan Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique, which will help us to distinguish between different literary genres. T. Todorov makes helpful distinctions between the uncanny, the marvellous and the fantastic. The fantastic involves a moment of uncertainty, of ambiguity, “the fantastic occupies the moment of this uncertainty” (Todorov 15). In the marvellous, on the other hand, Todorov states that “the laws of reality remain intact” but other laws must be accepted, he says, while in the uncanny, the disquieting event can be explained rationally (Todorov 16). There are cross-over categories of course, since we can come across the “fantastically strange”, “the fantastically marvellous” and “the scientifically marvellous”, better known as science-fiction. These terms help us to step into a vast territory where “unknown worlds and powers live”, as H.P. Lovecraft would term it (Todorov 29, 37).2

Setting the uncanny into motion

9 For the uncanny to be set into motion, the world represented in the short-story, the diegesis, must have firm foundations. In “The Landlady”, a young man of seventeen is described as being sent on a professional assignment. He is sent from the Head Office in London to Bath and most of the textual space is devoted to his encounter with the strange landlady who welcomes him in her Bed and Breakfast. From the beginning, the hero is depicted as admiring successful businessmen because they are full of purpose and walk briskly: He walked briskly down the road. He was trying to do everything briskly these days. Briskness, he had decided, was the one common characteristic of all successful businessmen. The big shots at Head Office were absolutely fantastically brisk all the time. They were amazing (144).

10 “Absolutely fantastically brisk”, “the big shots”, “they were amazing”, all these statements which are familiar or close to orality give expression to the admiration of the young man who singles out one trait he means to imitate: briskness. Success is closely connected with outward speed. In an uncanny short-cut, success becomes the equivalent of speed, and speed, so goes the logic of youthful ambition, brings success, since the character adopts an exterior attitude, a mere empty outward form.

11 So far, desire has nothing uncanny about it. The protagonist identifies with the men that make up his working environment and he caricatures the logic of purposefulness. Billy Weaver might even be said to fit the bill describing him as a “nice boy”. He is observant of hierarchy and acts straightaway on his boss’s instructions: “Find your own lodgings”, he had said, “and go along and report to the Branch Manager as soon as you’ve got yourself settled” (144). Appearing as they do in direct speech, the instructions are presented as having clearly registered on Billy Weaver’s consciousness. Therefore, the world of work figures as a background tapestry that is not at issue in the short-story. “Lodgings”, “report”, “get yourself settled”, these words ironically resonate in unison with what is to come. The hero does get himself settled, he finds lodgings prior to his being “unsettled”, disturbed as his encounter with the familiar

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becomes strange. Likewise, the word “briskness” contains in a nutshell the program that will be expanded at leisure in the story since briskness masks the word “risk”, briskness. Risk underpins the whole story. For example, when the landlady offers her host tea: “he turned and saw his landlady sailing into the room with a large silver tea- tray in her hands. She was holding it well out in front of her, and rather high up, as though the tray were a pair of reins on a frisky horse” (149). The metaphor is incongruously amusing as it makes the reader see the landlady as a frolicking dame not in complete control of her demeanour.

12 In a very writerly way, Roald Dahl inscribes the risks that lie ahead for the character. In a paragraph at the opening of the story, the weather and stylised landscape are presented in a way that combines the misleadingly familiar elements with potentially murderous suggestions: “It was about nine o’clock in the evening and the moon was coming up out of a clear starry sky over the houses opposite the station entrance. But the air was deadly cold and the wind was like a flat blade of ice on his cheeks” (147).

13 This could be read as a Poesque “affect-landscape” (to borrow a concept from Gilles Deleuze).3 The innocence of a clear starry sky passively sustains the efflorescence of the moon, a feminine symbol. The very earth, with the air “deadly cold”, and the wind “like a flat blade of ice” are inimical and even downright hostile or murderous, suggesting images of death and potential laceration. “The houses opposite the station entrance”, usually a world of repose and movement, are not much concerned with the private scene of the uncanny.

The moment of the uncanny

14 Interestingly, Roald Dahl’s short-story gives much textual space to the moment when the main character experiences the moment of the uncanny. This moment occurs when hesitation is at work and induces a strange response from the character, as if a powerful demonic force had him in its grip. Let’s read the following passage at some length: Suddenly, in a downstairs window that was brilliantly illuminated by a street-lamp not six yards away, Billy caught sight of a printed notice propped against the glass in one of the upper panes. It said BED AND BREAKFAST. There was a vase of pussy- willows, tall and beautiful, standing just underneath the notice. He stopped walking. He moved a bit closer. Green curtains (some sort of velvety material) were hanging down on either side of the window. The pussy-willows looked wonderful beside them. He went right up and peered through the glass into the room, and the first thing he saw was a bright fire burning in the hearth. On the carpet in front of the fire, a pretty little dachshund was curled up asleep with its nose tucked into its belly. The room itself, so far as he could see in the half darkness, was filled with pleasant furniture. […] After dithering about like this in the cold for two or three minutes, Billy decided that he would walk on and take a look at the Bell and Dragon before making up his mind. He turned to go. And now a queer thing happened to him. He was in the act of stepping back and turning away from the window when all at once his eye was caught and held in the most peculiar manner by the small notice that was there. BED AND BREAKFAST, BED AND BREAKFAST, BED AND BREAKFAST. Each word was like a large black eye staring at him through the glass, holding him, compelling him, forcing him to stay where he was and not to walk away from that house, and the next thing he knew, he was actually moving across from the window to the front door of the house, climbing the steps that led up to it, and reaching for the

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bell. He pressed the bell. Far away in a back room he heard it ringing, and then at once–it must have been at once because he hadn’t even had time to take his finger from the bell-button–the door swung open and a woman was standing there (145-6).

15 This is the language of the uncanny, “a queer thing happened to him”, he was “held in the most peculiar manner”. There is some mystery at work since the context bears all the characteristics of Das Heimliche. From the bright fire in the hearth to the living- room filled with pleasant furniture, it all works to write large the signs of the homely. The uncanny is triggered by the moment of hesitation felt by the character. For the time being the signs of the homely remain stable, but the hero’s sense of the world becomes uncertain. He means to have a look at the pub called the Bell and Dragon before making up his mind, but the decision is uncannily made for him. Billy Weaver wavers, he dithers, until the decision is taken for him. It is taken in a forceful manner that is underlined by the repetition of near synonyms, “holding him, compelling him, forcing him”.

16 The protagonist behaves like an automaton. He is mesmerized not by a magician but by the homely words−BED AND BREAKFAST─which produce a weird effect on him. At first sight, it is not clear why the homely sign should have such an uncanny effect on him, but perceived as the unconscious work of desire, it acquires the meaning of a profoundly repressed wish coming true. His gaze fantastically locks onto the sign which suggests all the amenities that come from a secure environment and also all the nurturing necessary to sustain life. This is actually what the landlady proposes to Billy Weaver when she shows him his room with a warm bed ready, asking him whether he wants to eat something before going to bed. The uncanny character of desire “briskly” takes the young man at his word. The experience is weird because the unconscious acts with a momentous and shattering effect. As Freud said in The Uncanny, the unconscious can be thought of as a demonic force: For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts–a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their demonic character (Freud 1919, 145).

17 This force can be uncanny in its manifestation and so the comparison present in the short story is very apt, “each word was like a large black eye staring at him”. It is eery, it is weird and spooky but it nicely conveys the idea of an evil eye that freezes all movement.

18 That life and fiction should provide similar experiences of the uncanny is interesting, but fiction is insurmountable, as Freud himself willingly agrees, to suggest dense and ghost-like intensities. Roald Dahl’s short-story does just that. It protracts the moment of the uncanny experienced by the character to include the reader in its web. Since Billy Weaver is very slow and naïve before it dawns on him that his landlady is a murderess, the uncanny becomes reader-oriented as we are made to fear that the young man will become the perfect prey in the hands of his executioner. The short- story undergoes a process of intensification of the uncanny as the very signs and objects that were given as stable begin to alter. At first, the parrot and the dachshund perceived by the character as good signs−“animals were usually a good sign in a place like this”−turn into deceptive signs. What at first was perceived as alive is now seen as dead. The animals are dead, but since they are stuffed they take on the uncanny aspect

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of sleeping creatures, “And suddenly, he realized that this animal had all the time been just as silent and motionless as the parrot.” And uncannily enough, from the point of view of the reader, the character feels neither disgust nor fear: He put out a hand and touched it gently on the top of its back. The back was hard and cold, and when he pushed the hair to one side with his fingers, he could see the skin underneath, greyish-black and dry and perfectly preserved. ˈGood gracious me ˈ, he said. ˈHow absolutely fascinatingˈ. He turned away from the dog and stared with deep admiration at the little woman beside him on the sofa (153).

19 Instead of feeling uneasy at the sight of stuffed animals he had first thought to be alive, and in the very presence of the taxidermist herself, the character feels, of all things, admiration for the technical skills involved in stuffing animals.

20 This is amusing and frightful at the same time. It is not unlike the moment in the story when the two characters (the landlady and Billy Weaver) seem to hover together over a black hole. The hero has just written his name down in the guest-book and notices two other names, Gregory Temple and Christopher Mulholland. These two names are those of young men killed by the landlady three years before for the former, and two years before for the latter. These names fall down into Heimlichkeiten, into a dungeon of oblivion.4 Billy Weaver keeps thinking he has already seen those names in the headlines of newspapers and that “somehow” they are connected. The meaning of it all eludes him however and the landlady is not at pains to suggest another possibility, “Oh no, my dear, that can’t possibly be right because my Mr Mulholland was certainly not an Eton schoolboy when he came to me. He was a Cambridge undergraduate” (151). On the face of it, it is only a question of identity and knowing where to place things and names but, precisely, the uncanny is concerned with identities and the names of objects becoming unstable and uncertain. The whole story becomes rampant with uncanny effects. Billy Weaver’s very identity becomes subjected to drifts: “ˈHow time does fly away from us all, doesn’t it, Mr Wilkins’. It’s Weaverˈ, Billy said. W-e-a-v-e-rˈ” (150). As J. Derrida puts it: “The fact that a so-called living voice proceeds to space out its constituents in writing is what actually binds up originally this writing with its own death” (Derrida 1967, 59). The uncanny is so pervading and “w(e)avering”, so to speak, so meandering in its processes that spacing out the letters is a stop-gap, as much as writing them in upper case; it fails to stop the seeping in of uncertain forces of meaning for ever on the lookout for chances to intervene: ˈYou did sign the book, didn’t you?ˈ ˈOh, yes.ˈ ˈThat’s good. Because later on, if I happen to forget what you were called, then I can always come down here and look it up. I still do that almost every day with Mr Mulholland and Mr... Mr…ˈ ˈTempleˈ, Billy said, ˈGregory Templeˈ (153). 21 Writing down names helps the memory of the uncanny woman, but the written names might not be recalled at all as madness and monstrosity gain ground. The insistence on writing, on “signing the book”, is pregnant with frightful implications that connect writing with issues of death and life. The landlady plays “pharmakeus”, the sorceress, by associating writing and “the law of the land”. But this is done in a very uncanny way: “would you be kind enough to step into the sitting-room on the ground floor and sign the book? Everyone has to do that because it’s the law of the land, and we don’t want to go breaking any laws at this stage of the proceedings, do we?” (148). Writing one’s name, signing the book, becomes the equivalent of a first step, the first graph, into the world of death. The signature of a proper name serves as a helpful

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“pharmakon” for the “pharmakeus” since the names are meant to serve as reminders of a presence that was once alive, but as “the proceedings” get under way the presence that once was will be testified, verified and reiterated. As for the “pharmakos”, he is already dead as the scapegoat is depicted as being ahead of himself, desiring against all laws the uterine security of the womb/tomb.

The humorous uncanny

22 Towards the end of The Uncanny, Freud found the ghost in Oscar Wilde’s tale The Canterville Ghost “irresistably comic”, because it could not be taken seriously (Freud 1919, 158). In the same fashion, there are moments in “The Landlady” that acquire amusing undertones that bring relief to the uncanny atmosphere. For example, when the landlady is described as popping out of her house at the mere ringing of her bell it seems to undercut the intriguing hypnotic effect young Billy Weaver is experiencing: Normally you ring the bell and you have to wait at least a half-minute’s wait before the door opens. But this dame was like a jack-in-the-box. He pressed the bell–and out she popped! It made him jump (146).

23 The innocent prey has just rung the bell and here is the executioner diligently introducing the victim into her house. That leaves nothing to be desired for those who admire “briskness”.

24 In keeping with this principle of connecting different segments of the text to hear the ironic resonance there might be in it, we can make a connection between the monstrous woman and the name of the pub, the Bell and Dragon to which Billy Weaver intended to go. The hero never makes his way to the pub, but the pub’s very name undergoes a process of literalization. Billy Weaver rings the bell of the landlady’s Bed and Breakfast and gets the “dragon” that was only a quiescent and fixed sign outside the pub.

25 This evocation of the romantic dimension of fairy tales makes the protagonist into a knight who sets out on a journey that brings him to a strange place. This place might be defined as the field of in-betweenness, an unstable space where forbidden desires come and meet in uncanny and “funny” ways. At the heart of the in-betweenness is the coming together of the two characters. Each character definitely wants something from the other who might not be the one he/she thinks he/she is. At the beginning of the short-story Billy Weaver is depicted as being desperate for a home fitted with all the qualities suggestive of snugness and pleasantness. He sees and makes an inventory of all the homely signs he can see in the landlady’s living-room. Being away from home, he yearns for the familiar place that a mother makes secure. The hero turns his back on the social life of the pub where “there would be beer and darts in the evening and lots of people to talk to” (145). Instead of a social space where different people can communicate, he favours the exclusive space of the homely. This, however, is not done without some resistance: “He had never stayed in any boarding-houses, and, to be perfectly honest, he was a tiny bit frightened of them. The name itself conjured up images of watery cabbage, rapacious landladies, and a powerful smell of kippers in the living-room” (145). Beyond the rationalisation of fear, we can read an incestuous desire for a mother who is not the mother. As he enters the Bed and Breakfast, the narrator articulates for the reader what is at stake: “The compulsion or, more accurately, the desire to follow after her into that house was extraordinarily strong” (146). For the

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reader, the slyly humorous rises out of the context when a young male character whose forbidden desire for the mother is “extraordinarily strong” meets its perfect match in so unholy and unhomely a mother that she is prepared to embalm the unwary son. We might summarize Billy Weaver’s whole trajectory by saying that he runs briskly and eagerly to a mother that is a phantom-like mother. The character is portrayed as running to ˈa mumˈ and gets in effect the full treatment, “a mummification”.

26 It is not unlike J. Lacan’s description of the mother as a potential “crocodile” whose very mouth might snap shut at any moment without forewarning. Or as Lacan puts it : “Un grand crocodile dans la bouche duquel vous êtes–c'est ça la mère. On ne sait pas ce qui peut lui prendre tout d’un coup de refermer son clapet. C’est ça, le désir de la mère” (Lacan 1991, 129). The hero of this story gets plenty of warnings, as when he repeatedly smells the drug that will send him to sleep: Now and again, he caught a whiff of a peculiar smell that seemed to emanate directly from her person. It was not in the least unpleasant, and it reminded him– well, he wasn’t quite sure what it reminded him of. Pickled walnuts. New leather? Or was it the corridors of a hospital? (151).

27 The hero is so blinded by his extraordinarily strong desire that he has not the imagination to see the unseen, or to make some sense out of the undecidable smells. Yet, he is described as seeing something that is not there in the surroundings of the landlady. He does not see any signs suggesting there might be a man in the house: “There was no other hats or coats in the hall. There were no umbrellas, no walking- sticks−nothing” (150). This could be a formula for the uncanny: what should be present is absent. And what should be absent is present, since there is a surfeit of homely signs.

28 The landlady herself is an ambiguous sign that deserves consideration beyond simply and solemnly stating that she is evil, hiding her malicious intentions behind a mask of benevolence. She exemplifies the duplicity of signs and sense making in general. It is in keeping with this rampant ambiguity that she should be characterized by a madness that does not say its name.

29 As we have already mentioned, the landlady keeps forgetting the names of her victims. She is becoming spectral to her own self. When Billy Weaver enters her house she expresses relief: “ˈI’m so glad you appearedˈ, she said, looking earnestly into his face. I was beginning to get worriedˈ” (148). The uncanny is concerned with appearing and appearances, with disappearances and re-appearances. But what if what is said and done amounts to no blurring of the distinction between imagination and reality? Then, perhaps, the uncanny enters the zone of the gothic. There are a few segments in the text that insist to be taken as pure signs of terror and horror. At one moment, the landlady exclaims as Billy Weaver is telling her his age: ˈSeventeenˈ, she cried. ˈOh, it’s the perfect age! Mr Mulholland was also seventeen. But I think he was a trifle shorter than you are, in fact I’m sure he was, and his teeth weren’t quite so white. You have the most beautiful teeth, Mr Weaver, did you know that?ˈ ˈThey’re not as good as they lookˈ, Billy said. ˈThey’ve got simply masses of fillings in them at the back’. ‘Mr Temple of course, was a little older,’ she said, ignoring his remark. ˈHe was actually twenty-eight. And yet I never would have guessed it if he hadn’t told me, never in my whole life. There wasn’t a blemish on his body. ˈA what?ˈ ˈHis skin was just like a baby’sˈ (152).

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30 What might we not deduce from those desires that are strung together in an unholy saraband? What is expressed is a desire for the perfection of the skin, the fascination of the body, that could be associated with a desire for whiteness, the whiteness of teeth and, in the same breath, with an insistent apprehension of age and ageing, the whole compounded of a desire for a baby. This is an intoxicating narrative beverage for the reader, replete with hints of a castration complex and/or penis-envy that require replay and re-inscription into the ordinariness of things. The landlady, who is forty- five or fifty according to the hero, is indeed the perfect figure of the uncanny that she encrypts. She harbours the frightful fear of death and degradation. Her refusal to acknowledge mortality has made her into the uncertain priestess of afterlife, as this forbidden desire of death makes her a preserver of the dead bodies of young male visitors. Let us not forget that she is an accomplished taxidermist who keeps her dead pets but also embalms the bodies of her visitors. She stuffed her pets which may have died from natural causes, but she is shown as accelerating briskly the life span of her visitors in a mad attempt to suspend life.

31 Perhaps we need the help of an exorcist with his double, an analyst, to reclaim the dying, embalmed sense, whether it be forbidden or not, and bring it back to the world of the living. J. Derrida writes: No more than castration, dissemination–which entails, entrains, ‘inscribes’ and relaunches castration–can never become an originary, central, or ultimate signified, the place proper to truth. On the contrary, dissemination represents the affirmation of this non-origin, the remarkable empty locus of a hundred blanks no meaning can be ascribed to, in which mark supplements and substitution games are multiplied ad infinitum (Derrida 1972, 137, my translation).

32 If this sounds too uncanny an ending, as J. Derrida seems to displace meaning, let us supplement the absence of proper truth with what Freud states at the end of his essay The Uncanny: “As for solitude, silence and darkness, all we can say is that these are factors connected with infantile anxiety, something that most of us never wholly overcome” (Freud 1919, 159).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dahl, Roald. “The Landlady.” Completely Unexpected Tales. London : Penguin, 1980. 144-153.

Deleuze, Gilles. L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. By Claire Parnet. DVD. Montparnasse, 2004.

Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris : Minuit, 1967.

---. La Dissémination. Paris : Seuil, 1972.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. 1919. Trans. David Mclintock. London : Penguin, 2003.

---. “L’inquiétante étrangeté.” Trans. Marie Bonaparte and Mme Marty. Essais de psychanalyse appliquée. Paris : Gallimard, 1933.

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---. “Civilisation and its Discontents.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. vol. XXI. Trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1961.

Lacan, Jacques. L’envers de la psychanalyse. Le séminaire, livre XVII. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Todorov, Tzevtan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris : Seuil, 1970.

NOTES

1. All page references will be integrated into the text. 2. My translations. 3. An “affect-landscape” conveys meaning and suggestions without necessarily a character to refer it to. Gilles Deleuze, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, on DVD. 4. The German word “Unheimlichkeiten” has many shades of interesting meaning apart from the one we have mentioned to include “discretion”, “whisperings”, “secrets”. See for example “L’inquiétante étrangeté”, 170-1.

ABSTRACTS

This study analyzes several metamorphoses of the uncanny that the short-story “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl thematizes. The Freudian notion of the uncanny is connected with the definitions of the fantastic according to Tzevtan Todorov and of the maternal Other by Jacques Lacan. The commentary seeks to define moments in the short-story when the uncanny fractures the diegesis along with the displacements of a death-wish. The image of a demonic mother undermines the becoming-gothic of the short-story in favour of a humorous dimension.

Cette étude se fonde sur l’idée de plusieurs métamorphoses du concept de “l’inquiétante étrangeté” à l’œuvre dans la nouvelle “The Landlady” de Roald Dahl. La notion freudienne de Das Unheimliche est complétée par les définitions du fantastique de Tzevtan Todorov ou de l’Autre maternel selon Jacques Lacan. L’analyse porte sur les nœuds thématiques du texte pour explorer la notion freudienne en liaison avec la pulsion de mort. L’auteur considère l’ultime métamorphose quand l’inquiétant prend des tonalités comiques à mesure que le gothique s’avère une issue impossible.

INDEX

Mots-clés: folie, comique et l’effrayant (le), métamorphoses, désir de l’autre maternel, désir infantile et angoisse, fantastique, gothique, pharmakon, inquiétante étrangeté, instinct de mort Keywords: the uncanny, metamorphoses, death instinct, the fantastic, infantile desire and anxiety, maternal desire, madness, pharmakon, the gothic, the comic and the uncanny

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AUTHORS

JACQUES SOHIER Maître de conférences University of Angers [email protected]

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Symbiose et circulation dans Of Mice and Men de John Steinbeck

Damien Alcade

1 L’intérêt que portait John Steinbeck à la biologie est indéniable, et doit beaucoup à la relation d’amitié profonde qu’il entretenait avec Ed Ricketts, biologiste marin en Californie, avec qui il avait pris l’habitude de converser pour essayer de révéler les multiples ramifications des différents concepts et idées servant de point de départ à ces discussions. Richard Astro, dans son introduction au carnet de voyage que Steinbeck et Ricketts ont écrit en commun, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, cite quelques passages du texte que Steinbeck écrivit à la suite de la mort de son ami en avril 1948, qui résume bien la démarche évoquée ci-dessus : In “About Ed Ricketts”, Steinbeck recalls that “very many conclusions Ed and I worked out together through endless discussion and reading and observation and experiment. ”They had a game, he notes, “which we playfully called speculative metaphysics. It was a sport of looping off a piece of observed reality and letting it move up through the speculative process like a tree growing tall and bushy. We observed with pleasure how the branches of thought grew away from the trunk of external reality. ”Indeed, notes Steinbeck, “we worked together, and so closely that I do not now know in some cases who started which line of speculation since the end thought was the product of both minds. I do not know whose thought it was.” (sic) (Astro, xvii)

2 Parmi les sujets discutés, la biologie et les théories relatives au sujet tenaient une part prépondérante, en particulier les travaux de deux scientifiques, William Emerson Ritter et Walder Clyde Allee, comme l’explique Richard Astro : They spent endless hours in Ed’s lab discussing the work of Allee and Ritter as Steinbeck worked on his novels and short stories and Ricketts studied what he called “the good, kind, sane little animals,” the marine invertebrates of the Central California coast. (Astro, xiii)

3 Ritter est connu pour son concept de superorganisme, qu’il explique en ces termes dans son livre, The Unity of the Organism, or the Organismal Conception : In all parts of nature and in nature itself as one gigantic whole, wholes are so related to their parts that not only does the existence of the whole depend upon the

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orderly cooperation and interdependence of the parts, but the whole exercises a measure of determinative control over its parts. (repris dans Astro, xi)

4 Ce concept est essentiel à une pleine compréhension de l’œuvre de Steinbeck, de même que le sont les travaux de W.C. Allee, en particulier son livre Animal Aggregations, dans lequel il expose ce qu’il appelle le principe de coopération, qu’il définit de la sorte : “an automatic mutual interdependence among organisms” (Allee, 355). Le livre d’Allee recense également les différents types d’agrégations animales que l’on peut trouver dans la nature, et notamment les relations symbiotiques entre deux organismes, un type de relation que nombre de critiques (Brian Leahy Doyle par exemple dans son article “Tragedy and the Non-teleological in Of Mice and Men” paru en 2006) ont cru retrouver dans Of Mice and Men, roman de John Steinbeck publié en 1937. George est un petit brun vivace, tandis que Lennie est un géant simple d’esprit, et ce couple singulier fonctionne de telle manière qu’il est possible d’y voir une application du concept de symbiose à deux individus humains, pour signifier l’étroite interdépendance qui semble unir les deux êtres. Nous allons essayer d’étudier cette notion de couple symbiotique, et voir comment la forte interdépendance de ces deux individus est directement liée à leur circulation de ranch en ranch, circulation dont nous essaierons d’étudier les modalités et la dynamique, en nous appuyant sur les travaux de Ritter, d’Allee, de Charles Darwin mais aussi sur le concept d’animal politique d’Aristote, qui révèle un axe de lecture potentiel pour le roman.

1 Lennie et George comme couple symbiotique

5 Donnons tout d’abord une définition de la symbiose, telle qu’elle est décrite dans le Chambers Biology Dictionary: “An intimate partnership between two organisms, in which the mutual advantages normally outweigh the disadvantages.” Cette définition moderne est restrictive, et doit être nuancée, car les avis diffèrent sur le fait de ne pas qualifier de symbiotique les phénomènes qui ne sont pas nécessairement bénéfiques aux différentes parties impliquées. Il est possible de distinguer trois principaux types de symbiose, tous référencés dans le livre d’Allee, lorsque l’on considère le terme au sens large : • le parasitisme, où un seul des deux individus tire profit de l’association, au détriment de l’autre. • le commensalisme, lorsque l’association ne bénéficie qu’à un seul des deux individus, sans que l’autre soit lésé. • enfin, le mutualisme, qui est bénéficiaire aux deux parties.

6 Le roman met clairement en évidence un rapport étroit, presque fusionnel, entre Lennie et George. La manière dont les deux personnages sont introduits est à ce titre exemplaire : For a moment the place was lifeless, and then two men emerged from the path and came into the opening by the green pool. They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the open one stayed behind the other. Both were dressed in denim trousers and in denim coats with brass buttons. Both wore black, shapeless hats and both carried tight blanket rolls slung over their shoulders. (Steinbeck, 1937, 2)

7 Tout d’abord, la première référence aux personnages est plurielle, “two men”. La deuxième phrase de l’extrait implique que la configuration du groupe ne dépend pas de l’environnement mais bien d’une organisation interne, et qu’elle semble de fait

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immuable. Le couple avance d’un seul bloc, et l’utilisation de l’expression “in single file” s’avère intéressante en ce qu’elle décrit par une entité unique (“a single file”) un couple d’individus. C’est également un des effets de la répétition du pronom “both” pour décrire les deux hommes dans la phrase suivante. Rappelons que “both” fait partie du système du duel en anglais, comme “either” ou “neither”, un système qui se démarque du pluriel en ce qu’il désigne la totalité d’un ensemble à deux éléments, tandis que le pluriel fait référence à une multiplicité d’objets. Avec l’utilisation de “both” plutôt que “they”, qui aurait été possible avec la même syntaxe, c’est l’importance du couple considéré comme un ensemble qui est mise en avant. On voit ainsi comment la matière du texte amène à considérer le couple Lennie/George comme une seule entité dès le début du roman. Les deux individus qui composent ce couple sont différents, mais malgré tout Lennie n’est décrit que dans son rapport avec George dans ce premier chapitre : il est l’opposé de George (Steinbeck, 1937, 2), il est celui qui suit (Steinbeck, 1937, 3), il est le compagnon (Steinbeck, 1937, 3). Les mots qui sont utilisés pour décrire Lennie ne prennent sens que parce qu’il est accompagné de quelqu’un. Ce rapport étroit entre les deux hommes est également mis en avant lorsqu’ils discutent du rêve qu’ils ont d’obtenir ensemble une ferme dont ils pourraient s’occuper. Ce qui différencie Lennie et George des autres travailleurs réside dans le rapport qu’ils entretiennent, et l’importance de ce rapport est mise en avant par l’utilisation d’italiques lorsque George raconte le rêve à Lennie pour la première fois : George went on. “With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jacks jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.” Lennie broke in. “But not us! An’ why? Because… because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why. ” (Steinbeck, 1937, 15)

8 Lennie est également décrit tout au long du roman comme une extension du corps et de la volonté de George. Dès le premier chapitre, il essaie d’imiter George autant qu’il le peut : Lennie, who had been watching, imitated George exactly. He pushed himself back, drew up his knees, embraced them, looked over to George to see whether he had it just right. He pulled his hat down a little more over his eyes, the way George’s hat was. (Steinbeck, 1937, 4)

9 Lorsque George lui demande de faire quelque chose, c’est moins sa volonté que son corps qui répond à l’injonction, comme lorsque George demande à Lennie de lui rendre la souris morte qu’il garde avec lui : “Give it here!” said George. “Aw, leave me have it, George.” “Give it here!” Lennie’s closed hand slowly obeyed. (Steinbeck, 1937, 6)

10 Cette relation de complète dépendance a amené Lennie à se jeter dans une rivière sur l’ordre de George au risque de se noyer, dans une anecdote que ce dernier raconte à Slim, un autre travailleur, ce qui montre à quel point il est asservi à George, à quel point il dépend de lui. George répète plusieurs fois que Lennie ne pourrait même pas se nourrir sans lui : “Well. I could. I could go off in the hills there. Some place I’d find a cave.” “Yeah? How’d you eat. You ain’t got sense enough to find nothing to eat.” (Steinbeck, 1937, 14)

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11 Cet aspect nourricier de George rapproche la relation entre Lennie et George d’un phénomène de symbiose au sens strict, l’un des individus au moins ne semblant pas pouvoir survivre sans être associé à l’autre. Mais s’il est possible de considérer la relation qui unit George et Lennie comme une transposition sur le mode symbolique du phénomène de symbiose à deux individus humains, à l’aune des travaux critiques sur le sujet et des multiples exemples qui émaillent le texte et qui mettent l’accent sur le rapport étroit qui unit les deux individus, il faut maintenant se demander de quel type de relation symbiotique il s’agit.

12 Au premier abord, la relation entre Lennie et George semble se rapprocher d’une relation parasitique, Lennie fonctionnant comme parasite de l’hôte George. En effet, ce dernier semble pâtir de son association avec Lennie, comme il aime à le répéter lorsqu’il est en colère : George went on furiously. “I got you! You can’t keep a job and you lose me ever’ job I get. Jus’ keep me shovin’ all over the country all the time. An’ that ain’t the worst. You get in trouble. You do bad things and I got to get you out.” (Steinbeck, 1937, 12)

13 Il n’est pas nécessaire d’étoffer cette idée selon laquelle Lennie pose des problèmes à George, puisqu’elle est assez évidente au vu de la trame narrative. Que la relation entre Lennie et George soit profitable à Lennie ne fait pas de doute non plus. Il n’est pas nécessaire non plus de s’attarder sur une éventuelle relation commensaliste entre les deux individus, car il est certain que la vie de George est transformée par la présence de Lennie. En revanche, il apparaît que d’une certaine manière George profite de la relation qu’il entretient avec Lennie, au point que les avantages mutuels de cette relation dépassent les désavantages évoqués, pour reprendre la définition de la symbiose donnée précédemment. Il serait alors possible de voir dans la relation entre Lennie et George une relation mutualiste, dont il va s’agir d’étudier les modalités, car c’est dans cette relation de bénéfice mutuel que symbiose et circulation entrent en dialogue.

2 L’intérêt de George ou le couple symbiotique en mouvement

14 George explique la manière dont sa relation avec Lennie a débuté lorsqu’il s’entretient avec Slim, un personnage qui garde tout le long du roman un statut de confident pour George : “It ain’t so funny, him an’ me goin’ aroun’ together,” George said at last. “Him and me was both born in Auburn. I knowed his Aunt Clara. She took him when he was a baby and raised him up. When his Aunt Clara died, Lennie just come along with me out workin’. Got kinda used to each other after a little while.” (Steinbeck, 1937, 45)

15 C’est le principe de coopération d’Allee qui est illustré ici, où deux individus s’associent de manière quasiment automatique. De cette relation découle l’apprentissage par George d’un certain sens moral, d’une sympathie envers Lennie : One day a bunch of guys was standin’ around up on the Sacramento River. I was feelin’ pretty smart. I turns to Lennie and says, ‘Jump in.’ An’ he jumps. Couldn’t swim a stroke. He damn near drowned before we could get him. An’ he was so damn nice to me for pullin’ him out. Clean forgot I told him to jump in. Well, I ain’t done nothing like that no more. (Steinbeck, 1937, 45-46)

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16 Ce changement dans l’attitude de George marque le développement d’un sens moral qui est le fruit d’un lien social, un développement qui est aussi évoqué par Crooks, le palefrenier qui vit à l’étable : A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell him what’s so an’ what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees something’, he don’t know whether it’s right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ask him if he sees it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by. (Steinbeck, 1937, 82-83)

17 Cet apprentissage de la morale par la présence de l’autre rappelle la notion Darwinienne d’instinct de sympathie. L’influence de Darwin sur Steinbeck a été relevée par la critique – notamment dans le livre de Brian E. Railsback Parallel Expeditions : Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck – et on peut voir dans la description d’un certain sens moral acquis par le biais d’une relation d’amitié avec un autre individu une illustration de ce que Darwin explique dans son livre Descent of Man : The development of the moral qualities is a more interesting problem. The foundation lies in the social instincts, including under this term the family ties. These instincts are highly complex, and in the case of the lower animals give special tendencies towards certain definite actions; but the more important elements are love, and the distinct emotion of sympathy. Animals endowed with the social instincts take pleasure in one another's company, warn one another of danger, defend and aid one another in many ways. These instincts do not extend to all the individuals of the species, but only to those of the same community. […] Sympathy, though gained as an instinct, is also much strengthened by exercise or habit. (Darwin, 324)

18 Le fait que George ait laissé Lennie venir travailler avec lui après la mort de sa tante Clara est l’illustration d’un instinct de sympathie rudimentaire, que la quasi-noyade de Lennie a servi à renforcer. George tire plaisir d’être accompagné par Lennie, comme il le dit lui-même à Slim, servant une fois encore de confident : “It’s a lot nicer to go around with a guy you know” (Steinbeck, 1937, 39). George est également conscient que c’est sa relation avec Lennie qui fait qu’il reste quelqu’un de bon : I ain’t got no people, George said. I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain’t no good. They don’t have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin’ to fight all the time. (Steinbeck, 1937, 46)

19 Voici donc un des premiers bénéfices que George tire de sa relation avec Lennie : guidé par son instinct de sympathie, il acquiert et conserve un sens moral qui fait défaut aux solitaires.

20 Le deuxième bénéfice que George tire de sa relation avec Lennie, peut-être le plus important, est son obligation à circuler de ranch en ranch, à se déplacer. George s’en plaint, comme dans l’exemple cité plus haut: “Jus’ keep me shovin’ all over the country all the time” (Steinbeck, 1937, 12). Dans un accès de colère, il se laisse aller à imaginer quelle serait sa vie sans Lennie : God a’mighty, if I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an’ work, an’ no trouble. No mess at all, and when the end of the month come I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and get whatever I want. Why, I could stay in a cat house all night. I could eat any place I want, hotel or any place, and order any damn thing I could think of. An’ I could do that every damn month. Get a gallon of whisky, or set in a pool room and play cards or shoot pool. (Steinbeck, 1937, 12)

21 Il est intéressant de constater à quel point cette utopie relève de la stase. Sans Lennie, George serait condamné à répéter le même schéma, sans jamais en changer. De la

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même manière, Lorsque Lennie menace George de le quitter, son alternative relève également de la stase : If you don’t want me, you only jus’ got to say so, and I’ll go off in those hills right there – right up in those hills and live by myself. An’ I won’t get no mice stole from me. (Steinbeck, 1937, 14)

22 Il est important de savoir à quel point l’absence de mouvement dans les œuvres de Steinbeck traitant de la Grande Dépression est quelque chose de négatif. Il suffit pour s’en convaincre de lire The Grapes of Wrath avec par exemple le personnage de Muley Graves qui refuse de quitter les terres désolées de l’Oklahoma et dont le nom et l’attitude portent des connotations négatives évidentes. Se déplacer, circuler dans l’espace américain est une nécessité, synonyme de survie pour les migrants de l’Oklahoma dans The Grapes of Wrath. La circulation de Lennie et George est conditionnée par le fait qu’ils sont ensemble, mais elle leur donne aussi un but, cette petite ferme qu’ils souhaitent acquérir ensemble pour obtenir une indépendance, représentation de l’idéal Jeffersonien de l’agrarianisme cher à Steinbeck, idéal qu’il expose également dans The Grapes of Wrath. Que ce rêve ne se réalise pas n’est pas important, c’est l’éventualité de sa réalisation qui le rend valide, et c’est par leur mouvement de ranch en ranch que Lennie et George s’approchent de ce rêve, puisque c’est en allant dans le ranch servant de décor au roman que Lennie et George rencontrent Candy, le vieux travailleur qui leur propose de s’associer à eux pour rendre possible ce rêve en leur prêtant de l’argent. Pour résumer, l’association entre Lennie et George entraîne un mouvement forcé du couple qui se trouve être quelque chose de positif puisqu’il leur permet d’échafauder un rêve commun pour s’élever au dessus de leur condition, que le hasard des rencontres qu’ils font rend palpable.

23 En ce sens, on peut dire, si l’on considère comme valide la comparaison de la relation Lennie/George au processus de symbiose, que cette relation symbiotique s’apparente à un phénomène de mutualisme, les deux individus profitant de l’association, dont les bénéfices dépassent les désavantages. Il est aussi essentiel de noter que ce rêve est consubstantiel à l’existence de cette relation, car lorsque Lennie tue la femme de Curley et disparaît, il est clair pour George que tous leurs projets communs disparaissent également, même si les conditions de leur réalisation n’ont pas disparu, puisque le vieux Candy est toujours là et peut toujours avancer l’argent : Now Candy spoke his greatest fear. “You an’ me can get that little place, can’t we, George? You an’ me can go there an’ live nice, can’t we, George? Can’t we? Before George answered, Candy dropped his head and looked down at the hay. He knew. George said softly, ”– I think I knowed from the very first. I think I knowed we’d never do her. He usta like to hear about it so much I got to thinking maybe we would.” “Then – it’s all off?” Candy asked sulkily. George didn’t answer his question. George said, “I’ll work my month an’ I’ll take my fifty bucks an’ I’ll stay all night in some lousy cat house. Or I’ll set in some poolroom till ever’body goes home. An’ then I’ll come back an’ work another month an’ I’ll have fifty bucks more.” (Steinbeck, 1937, 107)

24 Sans cette relation symbiotique, c’est le retour à la stase, un sentiment qui est accentué par la répétition des termes utilisés par George au début du roman pour décrire ce qu’il aurait souhaité en l’absence de Lennie. La maison de passe, le billard, les cinquante dollars – l’écho intratextuel illustre l’état d’immobilité qui frappe un George alors

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coupé de son binôme. Le jeu sur les pronoms dans les dernières paroles entre Lennie et George illustre à ce titre l’importance du couple pour la survie du rêve : Lennie begged, “Les’ do it now. Le’s get that place now.” “Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta. ” (Steinbeck, 1937, 120)

25 En passant de “I” à “We”, George reconnaît que ce rêve est un rêve commun, qui ne peut pas fonctionner sans ce pluriel essentiel. On retrouve ici un avatar de la théorie du superorganisme de Ritter, puisque c’est le fait qu’ils soient ensemble qui détermine l’objectif à atteindre et qui le rend possible.

26 Bien qu’une lecture basée sur la biologie semble suffisante pour éclairer en partie la transposition sur le mode symbolique du phénomène de symbiose mutualiste qui unit Lennie et George, il semble également que ce faisant Steinbeck rejoint le concept d’animal politique d’Aristote. Ce rapprochement n’est qu’une piste de réflexion qui mériterait une étude plus poussée. Elle est évoquée ici car elle permet d’intégrer une composante politique à la représentation du couple Lennie/George en tant qu’entité symbiotique, une composante qui s’intègre tout à fait aux préoccupations de Steinbeck à cette époque. Steinbeck était un avide lecteur de philosophes antiques, comme le montre son biographe Jackson J. Benson ainsi que les multiples références à Hérodote, Thucydide et Xénophon qui parsèment ses premières œuvres, mais il manque une étude approfondie qui étudierait en détail les affinités de l’auteur avec la philosophie antique. Il est clair que Steinbeck lisait Aristote puisque selon Robert DeMott, dans son livre Steinbeck’s Reading qui recense les livres dont Steinbeck disposait dans sa bibliothèque, ce dernier possédait plusieurs ouvrages du philosophe grec. Cependant, l’influence de ce dernier sur la prose de Steinbeck reste à évaluer en détail. Dans les limites énoncées, il semble que l’on puisse voir dans ce couple symbiotique cherchant à réaliser un rêve symbolisant un idéal de société une application du concept d’animal politique qu’Aristote développe dans son traité Les Politiques.

3 Aristote et la genèse d’une cité

27 Dans son traité sur les politiques, Aristote considère l’homme comme un animal politique. On peut imaginer que le concept ait pu intéresser Steinbeck, lui qui se targuait de considérer l’homme comme une espèce animale avant tout. Dans le second chapitre des Politiques, Aristote explique que la genèse d’une cité provient de l’union de deux individus ne pouvant exister l’un sans l’autre : Ainsi, il est nécessaire tout d’abord que s’unissent les êtres qui ne peuvent exister l’un sans l’autre, par exemple la femme et l’homme en vue de la procréation (et il ne s’agit pas d’un choix réfléchi, mais comme aussi pour les autres animaux et les plantes d’une tendance naturelle à laisser après soi un autre semblable à soi) ; et celui qui commande et celui qui est commandé, et ce par nature, en vue de leur mutuelle sauvegarde. (Aristote, 87).

28 Le rapprochement avec le phénomène de symbiose tel qu’il est métaphorisé dans Of Mice and Men est évident, George étant celui qui commande et Lennie celui qui est commandé. Pour Aristote, de ce couple inséparable naît la famille, puis la communauté formée de plusieurs familles (le village), et enfin la cité qui permet l’accès au bonheur parce qu’elle est en autarcie : Et la communauté achevée formée de plusieurs villages est une cité dès lors qu’elle a atteint le niveau de l’autarcie pour ainsi dire complète ; s’étant donc constituée

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pour permettre de vivre, elle permet une fois qu’elle existe, de mener une vie heureuse. (Aristote, 90)

29 On ne retrouve pas dans le rêve de Lennie et George la volonté de créer une cité, mais l’importance de l’autarcie pour accéder au bonheur est présente à la fois chez Aristote et dans la petite ferme que les deux travailleurs veulent acquérir, ce qui n’est pas étonnant puisque l’autosuffisance est une notion essentielle dans l’agrarianisme jeffersonien dont Steinbeck se fait le héraut dans Of Mice and Men comme dans The Grapes of Wrath. La finalité politique de l’animal humain chez Steinbeck diffère d’Aristote, mais la dynamique est la même : d’un couple dont les individus ne peuvent exister l’un sans l’autre, un couple symbiotique, peut naître une organisation qui est un modèle de société au niveau politique – la cité pour Aristote, et la ferme indépendante pour Steinbeck. L’étape de la famille est essentielle chez Aristote, mais chez Steinbeck ce n’est pas le cas. Il semble que Steinbeck manifeste une affinité avec Allee ici, puisque ce dernier note dans son ouvrage que la fondation familiale n’est pas toujours nécessaire à l’agrégation d’organismes vivants : These illustrations suggest the possibility of the formation of groups of decided social integration as the result of the congregation of individuals, without a family aggregation of any sort appearing in this particular type of organization. (Allee, 346)

30 Ainsi, l’agrégation des individus peut se faire sans le modèle familial comme base, est c’est exactement ce qui se passe dans Of Mice and Men. En effet, c’est ici que le mouvement du couple symbiotique Lennie/George prend tout son sens au niveau politique, car ce mouvement entraîne un regroupement, chacun aidant à transformer le rêve en réalité tangible. Ainsi, le vieux Candy vient s’intégrer au groupe, et se faisant transforme le rêve en éventualité, puisqu’il apporte de l’argent. Le palefrenier noir, Crooks, demande également à se joindre à eux : If you guys would want a hand to work for nothing — just his keep, why I’d come an’ lend a hand. I ain’t so crippled I can’t work like a son-of-a-bitch if I want to. (Steinbeck, 1937, 86-87)

31 Il demande cela à Lennie, et l’arrivée de la femme de Curley coupe court à la discussion, si bien que Crooks ne s’intègre finalement pas au projet, mais c’est la potentialité de l’intégration de Crooks qui est importante, de même que c’est dans la potentialité de la réalisation du rêve d’indépendance que le rêve trouve sa validité. L’intégration du vieil homme dans le projet de Lennie et George et la possible intégration du palefrenier est à rapprocher du développement d’un sens moral tel que l’entend Darwin : [Man’s] sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, so as to extend to the men of all races, to the imbecile, the maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals. (Darwin, 253)

32 Ainsi, le mouvement du couple Lennie/George entraîne l’agrégation d’individus dont le statut —– vieillard, minorité ethnique — montre le développement d’un sens moral permettant l’acceptation de la différence, de la même manière que George apprend à accepter et à apprécier la différence de Lennie. Ce mouvement associé à la potentielle agrégation de ces individus entraîne une possible réalisation d’un rêve d’indépendance symbolisant un idéal de société basé sur l’agrarianisme Jeffersonien. La transposition que fait Steinbeck de la dynamique Aristotélicienne de genèse de la cité, en associant ce concept à sa vision biologique de l’homme fondée sur les théories de Allee, Ritter et Darwin, permet de donner à la circulation du couple Lennie/George de ranch en ranch une chose essentielle : un objectif.

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33 Que cet objectif ne se réalise pas n’est que secondaire, c’est dans l’éventualité de sa réalisation que réside sa validité. A ce titre, la fin du roman intègre, de manière paradoxale, une pointe d’espoir. En effet, lorsque George a exécuté Lennie pour lui éviter d’être lynché, il se retrouve seul, le pistolet en main. Ce n’est pourtant pas la dernière scène du roman. En effet, le tout dernier événement est l’arrivée des poursuivants, et en particulier de Slim, avec qui George s’est bien entendu durant son séjour au ranch. Il est intéressant de constater que le rapprochement entre Slim et George est clairement mis en avant : “Slim came directly to George and sat down beside him, sat very close to him” (Steinbeck, 1937, 121). La répétition insiste sur ce rapprochement, et Slim touche ensuite le coude de George et l’entraîne avec lui : Slim twitched George’s elbow. “Come on, George. Me an’ you’ll go in an’ get a drink.” […] He led George into the entrance of the trail and up toward the highway. (Steinbeck, 1937, 121)

34 Le rapprochement devient un contact physique, et l’utilisation de “Me an’ you” insiste sur la création d’un nouveau binôme, qui quitte l’état de stase pour se mettre en mouvement. A travers ce nouveau couple qui se crée, c’est un espoir qui renaît, le roman ayant démontré comment ce rapprochement entre deux individus est le zygote nécessaire ouvrant le chemin à nombre de potentialités. Comment ne pas voir ici également une autre illustration de l’instinct de sympathie de l’être humain ? Et dans l’optique de lecture mise en avant dans le présent article, les deux derniers mots du roman ne sont pas du tout surprenants, et prennent tout leur sens : Curley and Carlson looked after them. And Carlson said, “Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?” (Steinbeck, 1937, 121)

35 “Two guys ?”, voilà peut-être tout l’enjeu du roman résumé. Deux hommes, et à travers leur mouvement commun un champ de possibilités, que la marque interrogative qui clôture le roman laisse deviner.

Conclusion

36 Steinbeck considère donc l’être humain comme un animal, que l’instinct de sympathie et le principe de coopération poussent à s’agréger pour survivre, ce qui développe également son sens moral. Une des spécificités de cet animal, selon Aristote, est d’être un animal politique, dont la finalité est de créer naturellement une société indépendante que Steinbeck relie à l’idéal Jeffersonien d’agrarianisme qui lui est cher, à partir d’un couple interdépendant originel que Steinbeck représente en s’appuyant sur la notion de mutualisme, type de symbiose où les deux individus participant de la relation tirent un bénéfice de celle-ci. La circulation forcée de ce couple de ranch en ranch entraîne une agrégation, réelle ou potentielle, d’individus autour d’eux, rendant l’objectif final du mouvement tangible. Cette transposition d’idées et de théories diverses entre en résonnance avec le processus de métaphysique spéculative entre Steinbeck et Ricketts évoqué en introduction. Of Mice and Men est un roman d’espoir plutôt que d’espoir déçu, espoir qui naît de la coopération entre les individus, thème que l’on retrouvera dans The Grapes of Wrath. Le titre du roman, Of Mice and Men, contient déjà en germe beaucoup de ces idées : la mise sur le même plan de l’homme et de l’animal, le pluriel qui évoque le regroupement pour former des plans, comme le montre le poème qui a donné son titre au roman, To a Mouse de Robert Burns : “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley”. Que ces plans n’aboutissent pas n’est

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pas aussi important pour Steinbeck que le fait qu’ils existent, et c’est à travers la coopération des individus que cette potentialité se fait jour, car elle pousse le couple symbiotique à circuler, à rencontrer et intégrer d’autres personnes, et par là-même à s’approcher de son rêve.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristote. Les Politiques. Traduit par Pierre Pellegrin. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

Allee, Walder Clyde. Animal Aggregations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931.

Astro, Richards. Introduction to The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941). London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1995.

Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking Press, 1984.

Burns, Robert. The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. New Lanark: Geddes & Grosset. 2000.

Darwin, Charles. Evolutionary Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

DeMott, Robert. Steinbeck’s Reading. New York: Garland Publishing inc, 1984.

Doyle, Brian Leahy. “Tragedy and the Non-teleological in Of Mice and Men.” Steinbeck Review 3.2 (2006): 79-86.

Railsback, Brian E. Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1995.

Ritter, William Emerson. The Unity of the Organism, or the Organismal Conception. Boston : R.G. Badger, 1919.

Rivière, Claude et Larreya, Paul. Grammaire explicative de l’anglais. Paris: Pearson Education France, 2005.

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men (1937). London: Penguin Red Classic, 2006.

--- The Grapes of Wrath (1939), The Viking Critical Library (The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism, ed. Peter Lisca and Peter Hearle), New York: Penguin Books USA, 1997.

Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

Walker, P.M.B. et al. Chambers Biology Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

ABSTRACTS

Relying on the text, this essay highlights the symbiotic relationship which unites George and Lennie, the two main protagonists in Of Mice and Men. It is based on the works of several biologists and naturalists, including Ritter, Allee and Darwin, as well as on Aristotle’s political animal theory, which all participate in showing that the mutualistic aspect of this symbiotic relationship comes from the fact that Lennie and George are constantly on the move.

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Cet article évoque, à partir d’exemples tirés du texte, la relation symbiotique qui unit George et Lennie, les deux personnages principaux de Of Mice and Men. En s’appuyant sur les travaux de plusieurs scientifiques (Ritter, Allee, Darwin) et sur le concept d’animal politique d’Aristote, il met en avant l’aspect mutualiste de cette relation qui provient principalement de la circulation de ce couple symbiotique dans l’espace américain.

INDEX

Mots-clés: symbiose, circulation, mutualisme Keywords: symbiosis, circulation, mutualism

AUTHORS

DAMIEN ALCADE Doctorant Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (dir.) Reviews Recensions

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Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

RÉFÉRENCE

Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature : Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago and London : The University of Chicago Press, [2008] 2010), 429 p, ISBN 978–0–226– 20791–9

1 L’ouvrage de Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature : Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, ne se veut pas une biographie du naturaliste Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911). Bien au contraire. Hooker fut un scientifique véritablement victorien, dont la carrière retrace l’évolution du statut de scientifique, les enjeux et tensions au cœur de la profession et les liens entre scientifiques et naturalistes amateurs. L’étude de Endersby se concentre sur les années charnières de la carrière de Hooker, avant son accession à la tête de Kew Gardens, à un moment où le statut du scientifique est en pleine évolution. Joseph Dalton Hooker, fils de William Jackson Hooker, professeur de botanique à Glasgow University, qui fit lui-même ses études à Glasgow, fut chirurgien assistant à bord du HMS Erebus, commandé par Sir James Clark Ross, où il passa quatre années (1839–43) à explorer les mers du sud. Accostant en Nouvelle Zélande ou Tasmanie, Hooker devint vite le botaniste à bord, collectionnant les plantes de régions jusqu’alors inexplorées. De retour de son périple en Antartique, Hooker, félicité par Charles Darwin pour son travail, commença une longue correspondance avec lui, tout en poursuivant ses voyages (Himalaya, Bengal), financé par le gouvernement Britanique et les Jardins botaniques royaux en attendant un poste de titulaire. Il complèta son Botany of the Antarctic Voyage en 1851, qui sera publié en feuilletons pendant plusieurs années. Ouvrage en 6 tomes, décrivant les plantes des mers du sud, Botany of the Antarctic Voyage (1844–60) permit à Hooker d'être recruté aux côtés de son

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père, alors directeur des Jardins botaniques royaux de Kew, avant de lui succéder en 1865 (jusqu’en 1885).

2 L’ouvrage de Endersby est découpé en chapitres qui retracent l’activité de tout botaniste, mettant en regard les pratiques usuelles et celles de Hooker afin de resituer le botaniste dans son époque. Le voyage naturaliste, l’élaboration d’une collection, la classification, la démocratisation d’instruments scientifiques comme le microscope, la publication des travaux, les tensions entre groupes de scientifiques ou institutions scientifiques et enfin la gouvernance d’un établissement scientifique sont les points abordés au cours de l’ouvrage.

3 Comme le montre Endersby, la carrière de nombreux scientifiques professionnels de l’époque victorienne repose sur le travail d’amateurs, les naturalistes collectionneurs, ceux qui vivent loin des villes, mais dont les spécimens trouvés aux quatre coins du globe forment la base de la recherche scientifique en métropole. Endersby analyse la correspondance entre scientifiques, à un moment où l’empire britannique en pleine expansion envoie ses missionnaires, soldats ou entrepreneurs dans les colonies et que Hooker profite des opportunités. Se créent alors des réseaux entre les scientifiques restés en Grande Bretagne et les citoyens exilés qui ont accès aux spécimens introuvables en Albion. Les dons (de voyageurs, explorateurs ou autres) sont fréquents et permettent de constituer une grande part des muséums d’histoire naturelle. Ce réseau de correspondants capables de collectionner les spécimens est nécessaire aux naturalistes comme Darwin ou Hooker. Bénévoles, offrant gratuitement leurs échantillons, ces amateurs doivent néanmoins être stimulés—et souvent l’envoi d’instruments nécessaires à l’observation des plantes ou de livres pour leur description et classification sert d’appât (ce qui, d’une façon ironique, leur permet de se professionnaliser à leur tour). Mais des tensions se font constamment sentir, surtout dès que les amateurs se rendent compte du rôle qu’ils jouent et de l’absence de rémunération.

4 Hooker engage tout particulièrement des correspondances suivies avec deux collectionneurs, William Colenso (en Nouvelle Zélande) et Ronald Gunn (en Tasmanie), avec lesquels il se liera d’amitié. Ces amitiés masculines fortes entre botanistes collectionneurs isolés dans les colonies sont un véritable phénomène culturel. Ainsi, d’une part, l’étude de ces réseaux de correspondants contredisent l’idée que les colonies étaient un simple réceptacle passif du savoir scientifique britannique : les experts postés dans les colonies nouent avec les botanistes professionnels des liens qui dépassent la simple correspondance, étant souvent plus spécialisés que les scientifiques de métropole. D’autre part, la botanique se présente comme étant de plus en plus une affaire d’hommes. D’ailleurs, d’une façon significative, on déconseille aux femmes de maîtriser le latin pour réciter la classification linnéenne ou de connaître l’anatomie des plantes (identifiées par leurs parties sexuelles). Si la botanique rime pour les femmes avec exercice en plein air, beauté et théologie naturelle, elle flirte en effet également avec des associations bien moins convenables. C’est sans doute à cause des liens entre femmes et botanique que des sociétés savantes, telle la BAAS, principalement dominées par des hommes, se refusent à faire la part belle à la discipline scientifique, les seules sociétés accueillant des femmes étant la Botanical Society et Horticultural Society de Londres.

5 Lorsqu’Endersby se penche sur l’importance du dessin et du microscope, il met en lumière comment la botanique, en passant par le dessin pour la classification des

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espèces, amorce déjà une séparation claire entre les peintres floraux et aquarellistes du dimanche et les scientifiques. En effet, l’analyse des modes de production et de consommation de ces images botaniques est éclairante quant au statut des botanistes et de leur discipline. Car d’une façon assez paradoxale, l’éducation à la botanique passe bien plus souvent par l’illustration plutôt que par une promenade à travers prés. L’illustration botanique se fait technique à partir du milieu du XIXe siècle, bénéficiant des progrès de l’imprimerie, et l’on voit alors dans ce développement de gravures et illustrations techniques se dessiner une science botanique—une discipline qui s’écarte véritablement de l’amateurisme. Ainsi, l’image scientifique botanique passe la porte de nombreux foyers victoriens, soucieux d’offrir une éducation botanique à leurs enfants. Endersby souligne également les problèmes rencontrés par quelques illustrateurs qui n’ont jamais vu certaines plantes, et la nécessité de travailler vite avant que le spécimen ne se détériore. Le dessin botanique est donc avant tout technique, permettant la classification et la nomenclature du spécimen—un spécimen choisi non plus pour sa beauté mais pour ses caractéristiques scientifiques, avec fleurs ou fruits et les parties permettant de l’identifier.

6 Par ailleurs, le débat sur la classification, notamment sur le nom des plantes, va se retrouver pris dans la tourmente des débats impérialistes. Car pour les naturalistes coloniaux, l’identification des espèces locales et la découverte de nouvelles espèces qui porteront leur nom priment sur les préoccupations des experts en métropole, qui doivent nommer d’une façon simple et neutre pour assurer une communication claire au sein de l’empire. En outre, Endersby montre comment les recherches de Hooker se trouvent à l’interface de la géographie, de la météorologie et de la botanique. Cette géographie botanique, développée à bord de l’Erebus, témoigne de la volonté de Hooker de redorer le blason de la botanique : pour Hooker, il s’agit de poursuivre les recherches en distribution géographique pour dépasser la collection et la classification et comprendre les lois entre plantes, latitudes, altitudes, etc. La question est d’importance, car elle touche de près à celle des origines des espèces : si toutes les plantes étaient nées d’une seule plante, comme beaucoup le pensaient, ou bien si les lois naturelles avaient permis la création de plusieurs espèces à plusieurs endroits (les créations dépendant des conditions de terrain, de température, d’humidité, etc.), des espèces identiques à des endroits différents signifiant que les conditions étaient similaires, cela pouvait expliquer l’origine naturelle des espèces. Finalement, Hooker fut le premier scientifique à défendre la théorie de l’évolution lorsque le 29 décembre 1859, un mois après la publication de l’Origine des espèces, il annonçait que contrairement à ce qu’il avait dit quelques années plus tôt (dans Flora Tasmaniae), il ne pensait plus que les espèces étaient immuables mais qu’elles pouvaient bel et bien se transformer par mutations, même si cela impliquait de revoir toute la nomenclature. Il est même fort à parier, avance Endersby, que la sélection naturelle de Darwin et ses commentaires sur la classification dans l’Origine des espèces sont en fait le fruit de réflexions d’un homme de terrain confronté au problème de la classification, laissant résonner derrière nombre de phrases de Darwin la pensée même de Hooker.

7 L’ouvrage se clôt sur les rapports entre Hooker et les scientifiques célèbres de la période, revenant sur la transformation du scientifique et son passage du gentleman au professionnel. Endersby aborde également la compétition entre établissements scientifiques et les attaques entre Richard Owen et Joseph Hooker lors de la construction du South Kensington Museum (Natural History Museum) pour héberger

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les collections d’histoire naturelle du British Museum, Kew et le South Kensington Museum se disputant les collections botaniques, telle celle de Sir Joseph Banks.

8 En mettant en exergue le rôle joué par les colonies dans le développement scientifique pour des scientifiques comme Hooker, Darwin, T. H. Huxley ou Alfred Russel Wallace, et l’évolution de toute une discipline scientifique à travers l’exemple de Hooker, Endersby nous permet ainsi de passer de l’autre côté du miroir, nous faisant voyager jusqu’au bout du monde, là où la science botanique puise ses ressources et son inspiration tout au long du siècle avant de pouvoir fièrement exposer ses spécimens au public, montrant, ce faisant, les difficultés pour élaborer une classification et même une théorie scientifique qui bouleversera la vision du monde naturel. Un ouvrage riche et original, qui ne manquera pas de séduire les amateurs d’histoire des sciences.

INDEX

Keywords : botany, classification Mots-clés : botanique, classification

AUTEURS

LAURENCE TALAIRACH-VIELMAS Professeur Université de Toulouse 2-Le Mirail [email protected]

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Joan Thomas, Curiosity

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

RÉFÉRENCE

Joan Thomas, Curiosity (Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 409 p, ISBN 978–07710– 8417–1

1 Pour ceux et celles qui aiment voyager dans le temps, voici un roman qui permettra aux amateurs d’histoire des sciences de remonter aux premières décennies du dix- neuvième siècle, à un moment où les découvertes de fossiles de plus en plus étranges bouleversent les éminents scientifiques réunis à la Société Géologique de Londres. Le décor est campé dès les premières pages : nous nous trouvons en plein débats pré- évolutionnistes, dans l’Angleterre des années 1820. A Paris, la tension monte entre Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) et Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) et Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) qui avancent tous deux l’idée d’une transmutation possible des espèces. En Angleterre, par contre, la Genèse sert encore de traité d’histoire naturelle. Le roman nous fait voyager de l’Angleterre à la France, contrastant le conservatisme poussiéreux anglais et une pensée métamorphosée par la révolution qui tente de s’émanciper des modèles théoriques du passé, et qui depuis Les Epoques de la nature (1778) de Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, replace déjà l’homme sur une échelle temporelle plus vaste. Cependant, en Angleterre, l’école britannique ne peut dissocier la science de l’histoire sacrée. A des lieues de la vision sécularisée de l’univers issue des philosophes des lumières l’histoire de la terre et celle de l’homme ne font qu’un. Les plus célèbres paléontologues de l’époque, de William Buckland (1784–1856) à William Daniel Conybeare (1787–1857) ou Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), ne lisent d’ailleurs les fossiles que comme les reflets d’un plan de Création. Tous très proches de l’église anglicane, ils lisent le monde naturel comme une chaîne des êtres que les découvertes de fossiles permettraient de dévoiler chaque jour un peu plus.

2 Pourtant, comme le roman le montre, les travaux de Georges Cuvier arrivent bien en Angleterre, en particulier après la traduction de Théorie de la Terre (1813) (Essay on the Theory of the Earth [1813]). Mais les paléontologues anglais se servent des théories du

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pionnier de l’anatomie comparée pour renforcer les principes de la théologie naturelle. Fixiste et catastrophiste, Cuvier pense que l’existence des fossiles est le résultat de grandes catastrophes naturelles, qui ont été suivies de nouveaux processus de création et son anatomie fonctionnelle devient, pour les naturalistes anglais enseignant à Oxford et Cambridge, la preuve scientifique d’un plan de Création. L’idée d’extinction des espèces sous les pressions environnementales avancée par Cuvier cadre mal avec celle de l’Arche de Noé, destiné à la préservation de chaque espèce. Mais les nouvelles découvertes géologiques bouleversent chaque jour un peu plus la théologie naturelle, et l’idée que des fossiles précèdent l’apparition de l’homme met à mal le jardin d’Eden et la notion même de péché originel : comment expliquer la violence dont les fossiles témoignent, tout particulièrement lorsque les paléontologues se penchent sur les coprolithes, fèces de dinosaures révélant leurs pratiques cannibales—un monde de souffrance et de violence que l’on ne peut rattacher à la Chute ?

3 C’est donc au milieu de ce cercle de scientifiques que Joan Thomas nous transporte à chaque page, dans le monde de l’undergroundology, nous permettant de relire l’histoire des sciences en contexte, et redonnant à Mary Anning sa place centrale dans les découvertes de nouveaux fossiles dans la région de Lyme Regis. L’époque est retranscrite à merveille. On découvre ou retrouve une quête obsessionnelle pour les origines de l’homme, que le roman fasse état de l’exposition de la Vénus hottentote à Londres ou que les descriptions de fossiles inquiètent ceux qui cherchent à relire l’histoire de l’Arche de Noé à la lumière des monstrueuses créatures que l’on déterre ou extrait des falaises de Lyme Regis. Les questionnements foisonnent, les dragons volent, nagent ou rampent, les fossiles mis bout à bout proposant de drôles de créatures qui inquiètent les scientifiques qui ne savent plus vraiment où placer l’homme parmi les êtres sauvés lors du déluge.

4 Aucun ingrédient ne manque à l’appel. Les illustres scientifiques de l’époque sont tous ou presque présents, et l’on se délecte à la lecture de leurs traits de caractère. La lecture se fait jeu de piste pour le lecteur amateur d’histoire des sciences, qui redécouvre à chaque page l’époque que Thomas fait revivre du bout de sa plume. Mais le roman est aussi une histoire d’amour, proposant une explication à certaines rumeurs sur Mary Anning, et choisissant parmi ses amants potentiels Henry de la Beche. Ce dessinateur satirique, fiancé à Letitia Whyte, ne peut pendant quelques temps se résoudre à endosser son role d’époux dans le beau monde et oublier celle dont le regard franc sait scruter êtres et falaises à la recherche de la vérité. Agile et intelligente bien que peu lettrée, Mary Anning fascine les scientifiques de passage à Lyme Regis qui n’hésiteront pas à acheter les célèbres fossiles bientôt exposés à Londres, comme à s’approprier ses découvertes. L’histoire met le doigt non seulement sur les débats de l’époque, mais aussi sur les secrets enfouis, l’impensable—une histoire d’amour entre une prolétaire au visage hâlé et aux bottes crottées et un aristocrate. La romance permet à Thomas de nous révéler une Mary Anning visionnaire, qui aura su voir avant les scientifiques par trop conservateurs l’histoire de la terre inscrite à même les falaises de Lyme Regis, dans les couches qu’Henry de la Beche redessinera pour elle, cartographiant le paysage en suivant ses conseils et regardant enfin le monde avec ses yeux. Si la complicité intellectuelle entre Mary Anning et Henry de la Beche n’aura pas raison des conventions, l’histoire d’amour nous fait pénétrer un monde où les femmes n’ont pas voix au chapitre. Elles peuvent ruser, à l’instar de Leticia, qui se fera épouser par de la Beche portant l’enfant d’un autre, mais elles sont exclues du monde scientifique, interdites de lectures trop intellectuelles ou qui affichent des corps mis à

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nu par la science, et d’autant plus lorsqu’elles savent à peine lire et ne lisent l’heure qu’en observant la nature. On achète leurs talents sans leur laisser le droit de passer à la postérité, on les épouse de peur que des rivaux profitent de leurs qualités, comme William Buckland qui convole brusquement en justes noces avec Mary Moreland, alors illustratrice de Cuvier, pour faire un pied de nez au scientifique français. Pourtant, l’intelligence de celle que la science a aujourd’hui oubliée se lit à chaque page, et le lecteur ne manquera pas de sourire à la vue des boucles d’oreille que Mary offrira à en cadeau de mariage à la jeune promise—des coprolithes, excréments d’Ichthyosaures qui se balancent au bout de deux crochets de pêche.

5 Curiosity, un roman qui n’a de cesse de tisser des liens entre science et société, nous offre un voyage au cœur de l’histoire de la terre et de celle l’homme. Thomas nous propose aussi son interprétation de l’histoire, choisissant de la Beche comme l’amant inconnu, celui qui vendra son Duria Antiquior (1830) au profit des Anning et dont le discours à la mort de Mary en 1847 permettra à son nom d’entrer dans les annales de la Société Géologique de Londres. La recherche du fossile introuvable et de l’amour se mêlent pour le plus grand bonheur du lecteur qui suit avidement les mots qui claquent et l’ironie mordante de Thomas, la douceur de ses phrases comme son ton incisif et parfois caustique. Mais Curiosity est aussi une réflexion sur l’humain—un récit qui, en plaçant l’homme entre raison et sentiments, donne à la science un rôle central dans notre lecture du monde et de l’autre/Autre. Pour ceux qui ont été déçus par Remarkable Creatures de Tracy Chevalier et tous les autres, une lecture incontournable et un écrivain à découvrir ou retrouver sans attendre.

INDEX

Keywords : curiosity Mots-clés : curiosité

AUTEURS

LAURENCE TALAIRACH-VIELMAS Professeur Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Marilyn Pemberton (ed.), Enchanted Ideologies: A Collection of Rediscovered Nineteenth-Century Moral Tales

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

REFERENCES

Marilyn Pemberton (ed.), Enchanted Ideologies: A Collection of Rediscovered Nineteenth- Century Moral Tales (Lambertville: The True Bill Press, 2009), 307 p, ISBN 978–0–9791116– 5–5

1 Marilyn Pemberton’s anthology is a collection of twenty-one nineteenth-century “literary fairy tales” with annotations and an introductory essay. If many of the writers remain unidentified, the collection contains tales by the most famous fairy-tale writers and children’s writers of the second half of the nineteenth-century (Edith Nesbit, Mary Sherwood, Dinah Mulock Craik, Mary de Morgan, Evelyn Sharp, Mary Louisa Molesworth), and even by collectors and folklorists, such as Sabine Baring-Gould. The tales, selected from both women’s and children’s magazines, from La Belle Assemblée (1806–32), The Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance (1832–52), The World of Fashion (1824–79) to Aunt Judy’s Magazine, edited by Margaret Gatty and her daughter, Juliana Horatia Ewing, after her mother’s death, were all aimed at women readers (albeit certainly not of the same age).

2 In her introductory essay, Pemberton tries to contextualize the “moral fairy tale” as a kind of subgenre of the literary fairy tale and of children’s literature. The essay, which blends a short history of the development of children’s literature with that of the literary fairy tale makes it hard for the reader to understand what the “tales” included in the collection really are. As Pemberton argues, literary fairy tales constantly mirrored their society, even sometimes pushing for the need for change or reform though at the same time playing a part in children’s “socialization”. Drawing first on Jack Zipes’s view of the literary fairy tale, Pemberton mentions several scholars or

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scholarly approaches to the fairy tale (from structuralist to psychoanalytical) in a confusing way, contending that the adaptation of fairy tales throughout the ages aimed to “accommodate the changing functions of the family and associated perceptions of good practices of child-rearing and education” (11). She arguably sees the literary fairy tale as originating from the “oral folk tales told at all levels of principally adult society from the birth of civilization onwards” (11). She then traces the beginning of children’s literature in the eighteenth century and compares Rousseauist views of gender roles to the French salon fairy tales (Perrault’s tale appears as the Petit Chapeau en rouge [sic]), thus drawing links between the classic fairy tales and eighteenth-century British didactic literature for children by Hannah More or Maria Edgeworth. However, Pemberton explains, even if fairy tales were kept out of the nursery by such evangelical writers who set up and emphasized moral standards (as Sarah Trimmer’s or Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s writings also typify, aiming to keep “the child reader on a very straight and narrow road to salvation” [26]), at the end of the eighteenth century, fairy tales continued to be printed: they were adapted to suit the demands of children’s literature and advocate “piety, diligence, honesty, frugality and self-sacrifice” (27). This, Pemberton argues, paved the way for the creation of a subgenre of children’s literature: the “moral fairy tale”.

3 Pemberton then looks at the evolution of fairy tales in the nineteenth century, the development of industrial England and the explosion of capitalism, most especially after 1850, and explains how new social values and realities informed literature. The period saw the emergence of women’s magazines from which many of the tales in the collection are taken. The home was then “at the height of idealization” (35), giving the nursery a significant part to play in the shaping of female identity. Pemberton’s collection of “moral fairy tales” thus reveals how the middle classes were in search of identity, especially in the last decades of the nineteenth century when the woman question became a key issue and woman’s changing role started being reflected in narratives highlighting women’s new independence.

4 Unlike earlier anthologies of Victorian fairy tales, such as the feminist anthologies of Jack Zipes (Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves [1987]) and Nina Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher (Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers [1992]), or Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Victorian Fairy-Tale Book (1988), Pemberton’s anthology is hard to frame. While some of the tales were published in the first decades of the nineteenth century, two thirds of them appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century, making it hard for the reader to understand if the editor meant to highlight their evolution throughout the century. The reading is made even more problematic because the presentation of the “moral fairy tales” seems completely arbitrary (it is neither chronological nor thematic) making it almost impossible to understand what really unites these tales and these authors. Moreover, the names of the writers do not appear in the table of contents, and the biographical notes on some of the writers at the end of the book do not add much to what is already in other fairy-tale anthologies: they are “the bare bones only” (289), as Pemberton contends, making us wonder as to their usefulness, considering that many of the writers of the tales in the collection remain anonymous. However, the collection might be useful for making accessible tales that would otherwise have remained unknown to Victorian scholars.

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INDEX

Keywords: Victorian fairy tales, children’s literature, children’s magazines, women’s magazines Mots-clés: littérature pour enfants, magazines pour enfants, magazines féminins

AUTHORS

LAURENCE TALAIRACH-VIELMAS Professeur Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Carmen Flys Junquera, Irene Sanz Alonso, Montserrat Lopez Mujica, Esther Lao y Leone (eds), Paisajes Culturales : Herencia Y Conservacion / Cultural Landscapes : Heritage and Conservation

Françoise Besson

REFERENCES

1 This DVD, composed of seventy-five papers in addition to two plenary lectures by Linda Hogan and John O’Keefe (coordinator of the Harvard Forest Fisher Museum of Forestry, who speaks about the way of “presenting landscapes to Museum audiences”), as well as five presentations, contains the proceedings of the third EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment) conference Cultural Landscapes: Heritage and Conservation. It also includes one hundred and two photographs and a videoclip with the beautiful title “Dancing Landscapes”. The proceedings appear as a volume of 621 pages of academic papers in PDF format, to which are added 21 pages of presentations about the situation of landscape in Spain. Those articles are written by academics from all over the world, most of them in English but with some in Spanish and in French; they cover a wide range of topics, from the representations of the

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concept of landscape by land agents or landscape atlas makers to Saint Teresa de Avila’s interior landscapes.

2 This academic sum tackling important subjects in several disciplines (geography, history, literature, art, ecology, politics and law) opens with a warning and appears as a guide concerning our relationship with the planet, as it is beautifully summarized by Linda Hogan: “I learn from the earth. My human journey here is one of understanding and learning and living within the greater terrestrial intelligence. There is an intelligence beyond human. Plants speak to each other, warning there is danger, and it is a language of hormones. There are constant communications all around us, a cosmos of knowledge at work. Once we held treaties with the land and with other animals. We have broken many of those laws that go beyond and go deeper than human laws” (2).

3 The diversity of the approaches provides the reader with a great range of perceptions making that DVD a very interesting tool for all researchers who work on landscape representation, ecocriticism and also on the link between human constructions and nature preservation. “Conceptual realities [with the distinction] between Space, Place and Landscape” are evoked in a useful paper (Guy Achard-Bayle). Some articles deal with landscape as linked with iconography (Sarra Belhassine; Juan Antonio Diaz-Lopez; Carlos Garrido Castellano); one can mention a very interesting link established between painted landscapes and fictitious written landscapes, through a parallel between Turner’s painting and Conrad’s work (Juan Antonio Diaz Lopez). One can also note an original article about the construction of identity in contemporary Indian painting (Carlos Garrido Castellano). Among the studies of fantastic landscapes, one can quote “Supernatural Landscapes: From Poe’s ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ to the Ethics of Earthcare” (Hannes Bergthaller), “The Figure in the Landscape: Landscape and Character in Ann Radcliffe’s Fiction” (Audrone Raskauskiene) and “The Redemptive Role of Nature in Melmoth the Wanderer’s Tale of the Indians” (Alfredo Moro Martin).

4 All kinds of landscapes are studied: the wilderness, the garden, underwater seascapes, frontier landscapes, urban, colonial and cultural landscapes; landscapes from all over the world—from the Alps to Brazilian landscapes—appear together with all forms of representations: painting, sculpture, cinema, atlases, literature—novels, drama, poetry, short stories and comics. The variety of approaches goes together with the diversity of writers whose works are analysed in connection with landscapes: American literature— Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Paul Auster, Truman Capote, Annie Proulx, Peter Matthiessen, an article about Nabokov’s Russian novels—English and Irish literature—Ann Radcliffe, Mathurin, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Tom Stoppard, Elizabeth Bowen—Canadian literature with Margaret Atwood, French literature—Guy de Maupassant, François Mauriac, Marguerite Yourcenar and literature from all over the world give a great range of perceptions of humans’ link with Nature.

5 From the memory of landscape and landscape representation in art to environmental preservation, this DVD is much more than an academic work allowing the proceedings of a conference to be known. It asks fundamental questions about humans’ relationship to the world and the role of art and literature in the awareness of Nature’s preservation. To give but one example of the political reflection meant to associate the preservation of natural areas with urban development, we can quote John O’Keefe speaking about an interesting project at Harvard Forest: “Published in 2005, Wildlands and Woodlands recounts the history of our landscape, presents the greatest current threat to this landscape—the rapid conversion of large areas of forest to suburban

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development though uncontrolled, automobile-driven sprawl, and proposes concentrating future development within designated regions while conserving half the land in Massachusetts as protected forest or farmland” (O’Keefe 14). Human construction is seen here politically in its relationship with nature, and elsewhere the city is seen from a literary point of view, “as character” in some of Paul Auster’s novels “Nature, both inside and outside the human mind, was there to remind us how garden and wilderness, like order and chaos, could be so close to one another” as S. Iovino put it in “Redeeming Nature? The Garden as a Moral Space” (283). We can even learn how to read Beatrix Potter’s comics through the lens of ecocriticism and to see how Potter’s literary ecology, including her engagement with nature and the sources of her inspiration, lie at the roots of today’s ecocritical theory and can be read through an ecofeminist perspective“ (L. Kerslake Young 285). The attempts at preserving nature thanks to sustainable management are not new and in an article entitled ”Butchered Trees, Expelled Gods“ (reminding us of Wole Soyinka’s words in The Road, where a character also expressed the dangers of wood exploitation by linking it to the supernatural world) in which A. Kramer studies a German novel speaking about the crisis of landscape in a biocentric approach to nature, we learn that ”sustainable forest management … was practiced as early as the 14th century (298). We must learn from “the psychology of the tree” which is beautifully analyzed in a paper evoking “living essence and conscience” through the works of a Georgian poet, Giorgi Léonidzé, and of Federico Garcia Lorca.

6 For those who would see literature as an ideal representation detached from the reality of the world, B. Wanning answers: “It is not literature’s task to idealize nature through fictional representation. Rather, literature should aim at raising a consciousness for how endangered natural woods are, it should create an awareness for this insight which is often not seen in theoretical reflection and concrete perception” (579). This DVD offers a very stimulating pluridisciplinary sum of papers asking questions and opening our eyes on the close relationship existing between Nature and culture while showing how art and literature may help nature to be preserved.

INDEX

Mots-clés: préservation, développement, écocritique, écologie, géographie, patrimoine, paysage, littérature, mémoire, nature Keywords: conservation, development, ecocritcism, ecoliterature, ecology, geography, heritage, landscape, literature, memory, nature

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AUTHORS

FRANÇOISE BESSON Professeur Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker and Leigh Wetherall-Dickson, Melancholy Experience in the Long Eighteenth Century

Hélène Dachez

REFERENCES

Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, Clark Lawlor, Richard Terry, John Baker and Leigh Wetherall- Dickson, Melancholy Experience in the Long Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), ix + 246 p, ISBN 978-0-230-24631-7

1 Through the wide corpus it focuses on, this remarkable volume (one introduction and six chapters) aims at answering the following question: “what was depression like before depression existed as a standardized medical concept with a recognizable cluster of symptoms?” (2). The contributors explore the conditions, experience, discourse and representation of melancholy in the long eighteenth century from various perspectives—medical, philosophical, social and literary—and enable the reader to enjoy a thorough analysis of what melancholy meant and how it was considered at the time. Focusing on the “question of continuity and discontinuity” (2), it also offers a valuable insight into what melancholy means today.

2 The introduction by Allan Ingram and Stuart Sim (1-24) appositely focuses on the “medical and cultural inheritances for eighteenth-century melancholy” (3). It establishes valuable links between melancholy and the novel of sensibility—with a focus on “sympathetic attitudes towards those in low spirits” (13)—and draws attention to the importance of religion, and how melancholy people were regarded and treated by physicians. The various works mentioned there illustrate the wide range of sources

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to be found in all six chapters: medical treatises, literary items, mainly novels and poems, and criticism, which make the volume a highly valuable and innovative ensemble.

3 In Chapter 1 (“Fashionable Melancholy”, 25-53) Clark Lawlor, who defines this very adaptable and even unstable disease in relation to hypochondria, the spleen, the vapours, and hysteria (27-28) and whose various degrees and types he analyses, offers enlightening explanations to account for the main paradox of melancholy in the long eighteenth century: why depressive states were viewed as positive, or even desirable— alongside negative, “normal” appreciations of the disease. He also skilfully analyses the links between melancholy and creative genius (a notion inherited from Aristotle), highlighting how melancholy became a sign of class refinement and moral distinction (46-51), going on to focus on the links between melancholy and sensibility in what became a nerve-oriented society, offering very interesting remarks on gender differences and melancholy as it is considered today throughout this chapter.

4 In Chapter 2 (“Philosophical Melancholy”, 54-82), Richard Terry, drawing attention to the different appreciations of melancholy today and in the eighteenth century from a study of the semantic mutations and instabilities of the passions of joy and sorrow, giftedly explores “the relation of depression to unhappiness” (58), and how philosophy deals with melancholy. To do so, he assesses how eighteenth-century people made sense of their sorrow and coped with it, laying strong emphasis on “an amalgam of philosophical and religious teachings” (65), among them the merits of cheerfulness, the genre of “consolatory advice” (64), the notions of acceptance and fortitude, and the complex and much disputed influence of classical stoicism. The author rounds off his demonstration by showing the way stoics were sometimes treated as hypocritical figures of fun, unable to swallow their own medicine, and by analysing the opposition between valuable sensibility and stoical indifference.

5 The aim of John Baker in Chapter 3 (“'Strange Contrarys': Figures of Melancholy in Eighteenth-Century Poetry”, 83-113) is to identify how poetry expresses and comes to terms with melancholy, taking into account the Graveyard poetry tradition. In this very inspired chapter, John Baker focuses in great detail on the voices, recurrent images, metaphors and figures of the poetry of melancholy, and insists on the contrary approaches to and feelings elicited by depression and expressed by various poets: repulsion, affliction, loss, lack, but also attraction, fascination and creativity. He successfully analyses his choice of poems composed by well- or less well-known melancholy poets of the period to explain that poetry is a genre that “at one describes, expresses and transcends melancholy” (91), thereby also showing how through melancholy the individual is united with his fellow beings.

6 In Chapter 4, devoted to the study of “Despair, Melancholy and the Novel” (114-41), Stuart Sim assesses the influence of the spiritual autobiography and the pattern of the “conversion narrative” (114) on a brilliant chronological study of novels ranging from Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress to Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, through novels by Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Hays, Henry and Sarah Fielding, Sterne and Godwin. He enlighteningly focuses on the weight religion— Calvinism—considered as the “cause or cure” (140) of melancholy—plays on the individual’s despair or banishment of despair, and on the devastating influence of patriarchal society on women’s melancholy. His conclusion draws deserved attention to “the secularization of despair” (139), and to the decline of providentialism, reflected in

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the novels of the period, as over the long eighteenth century, a shift took place from “a theology-led to a medicine-led conception of depression” (141).

7 Anchored in the triple context of the influence of the genre of the spiritual biography, of the growing interest in the self and of the rise of autobiography typical of the eighteenth century, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson’s analysis, in Chapter 5 (“Melancholy, Medicine, Mad Moon and Marriage: Autobiographical Expressions of Depression”, 142-69), skilfully tackles four autobiographical accounts of depression—two spiritual narratives and two secular diaries—written by two men and two women belonging to different social classes. The author’s aim is to show how the act of writing “gives shape and meaning to an otherwise destabilising experience” (145) in relation to themselves and society. Writing the self enables women to find a voice and make it heard. While “spiritual autobiographies … depict a shift from a self that has become fractured by suffering to one that emerges whole, cleansed and redeemed”, (157), Leigh Wetherall- Dickson makes it clear that the “audit of character” (168) enabled by these autobiographical accounts of depression sometimes fell short of the writers’ expectations.

8 In the sixth and last chapter (“Deciphering Difference: A study in Medical Literacy”, 170-202), Allan Ingram brilliantly explores “how far were, and are, medical responses actually helping the 'troubled in mind', and … actually contributing to the problem” (170). Comparing both periods, he explains that doctors today regularly resort to the “readily available, and seductively simple, antidepressant solution” (23), and that depression tends to be treated not on an individual basis, as was commonly the case in the eighteenth century when depressive states were addressed in a spiritual perspective, and most physicians lent a Christian ear to their melancholy patient’s plight. In the wake of recent studies and the discovery of the devastating side-effects of depressants, Allan Ingram suggests that our responses to depressive people, too often dictated by the pharmaceutical industry, are inadequate, and should integrate the attention, benevolence, sensitivity and humanity evinced by doctors in the eighteenth century—even if the medicines available then were not always effective—as “the core … is the relationship between doctor and patient, even before the relation between patient and illness” (187).

9 Taken together, the perspectives developed in each chapter by an authority in the field, buttressed by the various cross-references, enable the reader to get a thorough idea of what it meant to experience melancholy at the time. Offering excellent insight into what the eighteenth century can teach us in terms of treatment of depressive states, it will be of great value not only to eighteenth-century scholars and students, but to all persons with an interest in the workings of the human mind and its disorders.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: autobiographie, autobiographie spirituelle, dépression, folie, génie créatif, médecine, mélancolie, poésie des cimetières, sensibilité, stoïcisme, théorie et pratique médicales Keywords: autobiography, creative genius, depression, graveyard poetry, madness, medical theory and practice, medicine, melancholy, sensibility, Stoicism, spiritual autobiography

AUTHORS

HÉLÈNE DACHEZ Professeur Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Tom Dunne and William L. Pressly, James Barry, 1741-1806: History Painter

Muriel Adrien

REFERENCES

Tom Dunne and William L. Pressly, James Barry, 1741-1806 : History Painter (Farnham : Ashgate, 2010), 268 p, ISBN 9780754666349

1 Despite the four books James Barry (1741-1806) authored, and despite his reputation as Britain’s greatest history painter, his achievements were given scant attention until the second half of the twentieth century. One of the reasons may be that his oeuvre is sophisticated and limited (33 pictures), including six murals, which of course cannot be traded on the art market. But this edited collection lifts the veil on many other aspects of Barry's career, suggesting why his work has long remained neglected. The bicentennial of his death in 2006 was the opportunity to engage with his art anew through a major exhibit in Cork, Ireland, Barry’s hometown, and new research by Pressly on Barry’s magnum opus, The Adelphi series. This edited volume publishes the conference papers given on the occasion of the bicentennial Cork exhibition and offers much needed scholarship on an overlooked artist, given the quality of his ambitious oeuvre.

2 In an introductory chapter, Tom Dunne says that Barry was a much more radical and fervent believer in the genre of history painting than Reynolds was himself, and he loudly resented the national development of lesser genres at the expense of the grand style. Barry severely criticized Reynolds for abandoning high art in favour of lukewarm and debased commercial painting, although he did take up with him again later. His uncompromising attitude accounts for his expulsion from the Royal Academy in 1799. Barry commended the ideal classical Greek model, thinking the values it conveyed would transform society into a “republic of taste”. His Progress of Human Culture encoded a pro-Catholic subtext for which he later felt the need to provide an explanation. This unswerving commitment put him at odds with the adverse British art

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world whose market was sustained by other genres. Dunne then mentions how Michael Phillips shed new light on Barry as printmaker. Barry’s radicalism and principled temperament owed him the admiration of Blake, as well as his Fuseli-like attraction for Miltonic themes of exile and expulsion. But Fuseli was more cynical and pragmatic than Barry who remained ever the vocal staunch idealist.

3 David Solkin focuses on Barry’s critical legacy, and starts by saying that Barry’s entombment in St Paul next to Reynolds testifies to his recognition as one of the leading figures of British art. Yet, during his lifetime, he attracted enemies and admirers alike. Some viewed his lack of social polish and worldly graces as consistent with his dedicated pursuit of artistic ambitions, impervious to the requirements of social manners. He antagonized more than one, including Edward Edwards who did not spare him in his Anecdotes of Painters who have resided or been born in England. Solkin then gives an overview of Barry’s legacy, and how opinion slowly shifted in his favour with the publication of Cunningham’s book in 1829-30, and then WB Sarfield Taylor’s, for whom his reputation as odd man out or pretentious misanthrope was less due to his own flawed character than to the obtuse opinions of his contemporaries, and finally the Redgraves’ work, who lauded Barry’s talent at the expense of Benjamin West.

4 Martin Myrone’s chapter starts and ends with Richard Payne Knight’s denigration of Barry, eventually saying that his alienation from the art world might have in fact worked in favour of the later appreciation of his art. Barry was deprecatory of Northern art, deemed trivial and mundane, and called for the pursuit of nobler artistic aims—“hairbreadth niceties”. Myrone analyses the gendered connotations of his argument, that one may find in Burke and Gilpin’s writings as well—but this strategy of naturalising his line of defence (the pure artist detached from any mercenary concern) is self-defeating in that it resorts to culturally constructed concepts of gender. Barry’s stay on the continent coincided with Diderot declaring that the French art was much in need of the expression of heroic sentiments, rather than the dull sentimental degenerate effeminate contemporary productions, a statement that was picked up by Barry, who also thought French art effete and corrupt, and preferred to take Poussin and Le Sueur as models. Yet Barry chose to depict less narrative and fewer figures, whom he endowed with emblematic significance. Burke suggested he concentrate on the anatomical linear and outlined figure rather than composition and tonal modelling, which he did with the probable aid of devices such as the camera obscura. Myrone then dwells on Barry’s self-destructive and abrasive pretentiousness, which he says might have been necessary to his art.

5 Fionnuala McManamon’s article focuses on Barry’s preference for history painting, in spite of Burke’s advice to turn to the lucrative career of a portrait painter. Much to Barry’s displeasure, demand for history painting was lesser than for dainty decorative works—the frivolous agreeable “petite manière” (Boucher, Pierre, Natoire, Lemoyne...) —, but history painting slowly resurfaced in the 1770s thanks to a more active political context. Barry’s feelings were not unlike those of eminent French commentators such as Diderot or Caylus; Le Sueur, Poussin and others of the kind were high on his list of favourites and he fervently copied them. Contemporary works Barry did hold in high esteem were the Jansenist-inspired paintings of Restout, in that they agreed with Barry’s belief that art should promote the civil humanist ideal and the pursuit of virtue and common good. Barry was very sceptical about the quality standard of the teaching by an Academy, given his experience at the Parisian Academy of St Luke.

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6 Margaret Lind next analyses Barry’s intentions when painting his Venus Rising from the Sea. Barry sought to emulate Apelles’s lost work, as well as Raphael, Titian and his contemporaries Reynolds and West (1765), but tried to confer to his painting an intellectual status by drawing on Titus Lucretius Carus’s text on Venus and Homers’ Hymn to Venus. Acutely aware (and a little anxious) that his work ambiguously retained sensual and lustful appeal, he hoped to elevate it by depicting a Venus that would inspire a moral aspiration to refined love and virtue, in line with Shaftesbury’s ideas about history painting. Later versions, such as a stipple engraving published by Boydell, gave it a feminine decorative bent which Barry probably disapproved of.

7 In the following essay, Martin Postle studies the relationship of Barry and Reynolds— who had met through the agency of a mutual friend, Burke—that is, their growing personal estrangement and enmity and ensuing reconciliation. The first rift occurred during the abandoned scheme of 1773 to decorate St Paul, introduced by Reynolds to the General Assembly, although it had been Barry’s initial idea. Moreover, Barry blamed the debacle on Reynolds. It was probably Barry who, under the pseudonym of Fabius Pictor, wrote a press critique questioning Reynolds’s qualifications as history painter. Furthermore, when Barry produced his painting of King Lear—a patriarchal archetype and political model, contrasting with Reynolds’s more prosaic Ugolino—, it was to show, in intaglio, his diverging views with the painter. However, when Reynolds resigned after his fellow Academicians refused to appoint the Italian architect as an Associate Academician and Professor of Perspective, under the pretext that he was a foreigner, the Irish radical Barry performed a volte-face: not only did he support Reynolds then, but he also posthumously promoted his art, and characterized him usefully (albeit incorrectly) as a radical and revolutionary figure who had opposed the cabal of the compromised and lukewarm Royal Academy, and who had assigned him to defend the true aims of the Academy. Both now rest next to each other in St Paul, ironically.

8 Asia Haut then explores the symbolic reasons behind Barry and Fuseli’s depiction of scenes from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Both born in 1741, both foreigners having emigrated to England 1764, before sojourning in Italy, Barry and Fuseli also both found in the Miltonic work—championed as the embodiment of English artistic achievement— simultaneously a way to become assimilated and a way to remain unassimilated, since the theme of exile permeates the text. Satan—as the uprooted archangel and the archetypical genius—became a central persona in their works. For Fuseli, he typified the refusal of a father figure or of any form of artistic lineage, and for Barry, he typified the rejection of the monotheistic model of creativity. In the late 1770s, the political reading of Paradise Lost and the greater attention to Milton’s republican ideas caused interest in his work to become increasingly suspicious in England; but the political overtones of this work encouraged the two artists all the more to depict the Satanic character who represented rebellious challenge to artistic and monarchical authority.

9 David Bindman goes over the representations of envy by Blake and Barry, who both thought they were victims of the envy of other Academicians—hence their ostracized status and their misery. Barry was indeed for Blake the exemplum virtutis in the defense of high art against the malevolence of other Academicians (except Fuseli), and must have been all the more convinced of it by his friend’s paranoid discourse. But their depictions of Satan as emblematic of envy per se can also be accounted for by the fact

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the British tradition, stemming from Shakespeare and Milton, granted the fallen archangel a highly prominent place.

10 John Barrell starts by giving an overview of what historians have said about Barry’s politics, and whose ideas Barry followed or rejected. Barrell assesses Barry’s political opinions in his Letter to the Society of Arts (1793) and the two editions of the Letter to the Dilettanti Society (1798-99), and says they are difficult to pin down as they were intricately mingled with his views about the Royal Academy. Indeed, both were often confused and lumped together in his mind: Barry believed a society that defended high art would also naturally defend the civil rights of its members as well as Christianity as the basis of civil liberties, all of which partook of the same spirit. Barrel revises Barry’s republicanism and refutes his anti-monarchism, at least in Britain, saying that he was highly respectful of George III—the noble patron of the arts, according to him—and that he held the same view of Charles I. He did depart from mainstream Whiggism though, in that he believed the harbingers of civil liberties harked back further than the Whigs would have it, and were to be found in the Catholic resistance to Henry VIII (Thomas More…). Moreover, Barry seems to equate civil liberties with freedom of religion and to overlook other civil liberties. As for his opinion on the French revolution, Barry said Britain should not interfere with the will of the French, but did not totally adhere to the Foxite Whigs’ stance as he deplored the secular character of the new state. However,—and this is more surprising, says Barrell—he approved the civil constitution of the clergy, as the Church in France needed to be reformed, so that Christianity be once again the foundation of society’s respect of the natural and human rights. Barrell suspects that the argument of Barry’s political ideas was but a pretext of Farington’s to expel him. Barry upset him as he was openly and publicly criticizing the policies of the Royal Academy, and not least Farington’s pension scheme which he believed would lead to further corruption.

11 Liam Lenihan examines Barry’s position as regards neoclassicism, and describes how he challenged some of its tenets, in that he preferred an art that was inclusive of the imagination and sensibility of feeling, while acknowledging the power of reason and the need for art to attain universality stripped of particularity. A case in point is his representation of Minerva, which bridges sensibility and understanding. This position is in line with Reynolds’s discourses, which Blake despised, but he never disparaged Barry, his former teacher. Lenihan then moves on to Mary Wollstonecraft’s reaction to Burke’s gendering of the aesthetic experience, and tries to connect their ideas with Barry’s writings.

12 With the help of William Henry Curran’s colourful testimony in the New Monthly Magazine (1823) and the auction sale records of his property in 1807, Michael Phillips very minutely endeavours to describe James Barry’s seemingly rundown house and studio in the fashionable artistic area of Castle Street, Oxford Market. He also recalls how long it took Barry to complete The Birth of Pandora and the Self-Portrait as Timanthes, both acting as pendants in his studio.

13 William Pressly analyses Barry’s Crowning the Victors at Olympia, the principal focus of the series of murals for the Great Room of the Society of Arts—for which he was given unprecedented control and authority. After giving a very detailed account of the characters who feature on the painting, Pressly argues that the scene was a way for Barry to promote an event where the stimulus of glory leads to public virtue, perhaps serving as a model for the Society of Arts. In the same revival vein, Barry’s close friend,

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Giuseppe Baretti, commissioned music for performances of Horace’s Carmen Seculare— poems for a ritual festival celebrating the foundation of Rome—and for which Barry drew the ticket of admission. But even more interestingly, Pressly decodes the Christian subtext embedded in the picture, be it through the analogy between the temperate athlete and the incorruptible Christian, or the use of laurel crowns for champions as well as for martyrs, or the classical procession reminiscent of the Pope carried in his sedia. Religious underpinnings can also be found in other paintings of Barry’s, such as Universal History or Commerce or The Triumph of the Thames. Of course, the meanings were hidden so as to escape the Society’s probable censorship, but they were so well concealed that his audience failed to grasp it—which caused Barry’s frustration ultimately.

14 In a very rich penultimate chapter, Daniel Guernsey reflects on the meaning of the added presence of the French Catholic theologian and Gallican Church supporter of Louis XIV, Bossuet, in Barry’s mural for the Society of Arts (1777-84). On these murals which chart the evolution of Western civilization from Ancient Greece to eighteenth- century England and America, Barry kept adding and retouching the murals until his death in 1806. When he added Bossuet—whose writings insist on Protestantism as a destructive anarchical force throughout history—, Barry wanted to stress the negative “Protestant-related” origin and impact of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Furthermore, the mural shows that Barry evolved from a standpoint where he identified himself with Protestant Dissenters of the American Revolution and their millenarian expectations (especially William Penn, who is foregrounded in the painting)—in line with the liberal religious and economic views of the Society of Arts—to a shift in allegiance to the Catholic Counter-Revolutionary order between 1793 and 1801 (with the addition of Bossuet), which enabled him to challenge the “Protestant ascendancy” (as he termed it) over his beloved Ireland.

15 In the concluding chapter, David Allan first goes over the multiple redecoration schemes of the Great Room of the Society of Arts—whose function also evolved—and the subsequent transformations and cleaning (or not) of Barry’s murals. He also mentions how Barry had to wait for many years before he could gain recognition (1799) and payment from the Society. In a second part, Allan recalls how Barry had fallen into oblivion until scholars in the 1940s pioneered research work to give an in-depth reappraisal of the artist.

16 In re-examining and assessing James Barry’s contribution to the history of art in the light of the history of his own times, this collection of scholarly chapters contributes to establishing fully the recognition of the artistic talent of James Barry—who was far too often dismissed simply as a reputedly eccentric and outlandish artist. The book is undoubtedly an erudite and highly valuable authoritative reference book for students and scholars who want to look into Barry’s achievements.

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INDEX

Keywords: French revolution, neoclassicism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Pandora, Timanthes, Paradise Lost, Foxites, Satan, Cork, Royal Academy, whiggism, King Lear, Ugolino, camera oscura, St Luke’s academy, Venus, St Paul’s cathedral, Greek art, murals, Grand Manner, printmaking, Society of Arts Mots-clés: révolution française, néoclassicisme, protestantisme, catholicisme, Pandore, Timanthes, Le Paradis perdu, Foxites, Satan, Cork, Royal Academy, Whigs, Roi Lear, Ugolino, camera oscura, Académie de St Luc, Vénus, Cathédrale St Paul, art grec, peinture murale, grande manière, petite manière, gravure, Society of Arts

AUTHORS

MURIEL ADRIEN Maître de Conférences Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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Simon Shaw-Miller and Sam Smiles, Samuel Palmer Revisited

Muriel Adrien

REFERENCES

Simon Shaw-Miller and Sam Smiles, Samuel Palmer Revisited (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 167 p, ISBN 9780754667476

1 This edited volume, which compiles chapters by leading historians and curators, aims at revising various clichés of Palmer’s life and at reinstating Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) in the artistic context of his time, despite his legendary outsider status, and although his idiosyncrasies indeed repeatedly put him at odds with the dominant taste of his time.

2 In a very useful introduction, William Vaughan gives a panoramic overview of the critical reception of Palmer’s work throughout history, and of how his art and personality were narrated by the successive art historians—from Kenneth Clark and Geoffrey Grigson to John Berger and Raymond Lister—distorting or, at least, shaping the public’s understanding of the artist, and highlighting how his art came in and out of view according to the ebb and flow of academic and cultural fashion.

3 In a first chapter, William Vaughan studies the early formative years of Palmer, when nothing seemed to hint at his future “visionary powers” which were nonetheless latent. Drawing on neglected material and records, he starts by pointing out that Palmer lived as a youth in the Houndsditch district, a more urban, insalubrious and impoverished area than his birthplace and former home place—a fact that is systematically overlooked by Palmer’s biographers and which may explain his attraction to idyllic rural settings. Vaughan also examines the diary of Benjamin Wrigglesworth Beatson—a classmate of Palmer’s, two years older than him, and a regular visitor to the bookshop of Palmer’s father—to draw information recording the Palmer household’s life then.

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4 In “Ancients and moderns: Samuel Palmer and the 'progress of watercolours', 1822-23”, Greg Smith focuses on Palmer’s earlier artistic period when, suddenly breaking away from his early conventional art, Palmer pitted his art against the development of watercolours, steeped in a triumphant progressive and nationalist discourse: this naturalist genre was deemed perfectly in accord with the humid atmosphere of the British isles. Palmer rejected watercolour as superficial, away from the unadorned grandeur and humble primitive sincerity needed by lofty art. He aspired to greater integrity and personal vision. Earlier on, Blake also had railed against the progressive paradigm of watercolours, adding that the outlines of a picture should not be obliterated in favour of colour. The works Palmer submitted to the Royal Academy for the exhibitions were flat monochrome watercolours, reminiscent of reproductive prints, with a deliberate absence of aerial perspective and naturalism. Yet he did resort to certain technical innovations of watercolours, and later, after the Shoreham period, he played down this early rebellious phase.

5 In “'This very unstudent-like student': Palmer and the education of the artists”, Martin Postle first explains why Palmer was disinclined to get a formal education at the Royal Academy, out of reluctance at the idea of having to copy laboriously and because he was not tough to cope with the ordeals of the Academy. He did attend the odd lecture by Flaxman or Fuseli, encouraged in this by Linnell. His awe-struck encounter with Blake strengthened his conviction that it was needless to conform to the Academy’s prescriptions and training. After his stay in Italy, he became a passionate teacher and took part in the debates around the founding of the Slade School of Fine Arts, which— all agreed—was to foster high art, unlike the Royal Academy. He put a lot of himself in his son Herbert’s education, whom he assailed with drills of all kinds with an academic furore in total contrast with his own free-spirited, casual and almost lax training—to the point that, ironically and sadly, his son eventually burnt much of his father’s work.

6 Christian Payne’s chapter deals with Palmer’s pictures of the sea, which are from the middle period of his life (1840s to 1860s), a corpus as yet unexplored by art historians. Palmer’s visits to Devon in Cornwall reminded him of his former stay at Shoreham and gave him opportunity for open-air sketching. His detailed and naturalistic studies of wave movements was in tune with the general fashion for this theme, at a time when photographers such as Gustave Le Gray and John Dillwyn Llewelyn were exhibiting their own photographs of waves in London. Like his friend James Clarke Hook, he also took interest in common events of British fisher folk, such as shipwrecks, or departures for long voyages and homecomings. Of course, works of such subject matter were more saleable, but they also resonated deeply and symbolically with his own life. His son Thomas More died at the early age of nineteen: the theme of a boy returning from sea or of shipwreck struck a personal chord of intense grief and emotional distress.

7 Paul Goldman’s text focuses on his work as a printmaker. His print production was very limited, yet the slow and intense concentration required by the technique suited him, all the more so as he believed printmaking to be an art form that was close to writing. Inspired by Claude, the all-pervading elegiac peace and suffused light were elements distilled from his Shoreham period and his tours of Devon and Italy. Unfortunately, the only illustrations Palmer did single-handedly were of Dickens’s Pictures from Italy. Although Palmer’s work does relate to some of his Victorian artist contemporaries, his very personal work is more akin to Blake’s and more rightly belongs to an earlier

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period. Goldman also evokes Palmer’s legacy, highlighting Graham Sutherland as the heir with the most similar inspiration.

8 In the last chapter, Simon Shaw-Miller discusses the pastoral in English music contemporary to the first world war, whom he says is not Arcadian, but darker and permeated by disquiet and the notion of death. After a technical analysis of the music of Alan Rawsthorne’s (1905-1971) second symphony, Shaw-Miller gives a biographical account of Ralph Vaughan Williams, linking the tower under which he is buried with The Lonely Tower of Palmer, from whence Palmer grieved for his lost son. Similarly, The Rising of the Skylark is echoed in The Lark Ascending of Vaughan. Vaughan’s Pastoral Symphony is “far from the cow-pat pastoralism” (127), and his inclusion of folk-music testifies to an anti-Wagnerian strain and to a radical anti-Bourgeois outlook. Shaw- Miller ends his chapter with David Matthews’s (b.1943) germinal inspiration in In the Dark Times (1985) which brought about innovations in the pastoral genre.

9 Sam Smiles’s chapter revolves around the influence Palmer had on a group of British printers in the early twentieth century. The Palmer revival was at its most acute in the late 1920s and early 1930s for engravers, and contemporary to the neoromanticism of the 1940s for painters, after which his influence faded. However, in the 1970s, Palmer’s work was called upon to argue for the preservation of the Shoreham landscape threatened by the construction of the M25. He also received notorious attention because of the scandal of the forgeries by Tom Keating, who knew how to serve people with the formulaic paintings they sought—which gives us an idea of how much people had a simplistic idea of Palmer’s work. Then Smiles focuses on his impact on students at Goldsmiths’ group (William Larkins (1901-74)…) and other etchers working in the late 1920s and 1930s, who were alarmed at seeing the urban sprawl gnawing at what they considered the idyllic rural England. Their antimodernist conservative pastoralism jarred with the forces of modernization of contemporary England which Griggs thought led to spiritual impoverishment and spuriousness. Geoffrey Grigson’s book (1947) covertly deprecates those artists for failing to grasp their times and for producing feeble, shallow and escapist art, even though—Smiles argues—their work is not a far cry from primitivist art trends (fauves…) that were also part and parcel of modernity.

10 This group of essays is deliberately fragmented and impressionistic, and refrains from giving a totalising view of Palmer’s trajectory and viewpoints, in that it seeks to restore the complexity and contradictions of Palmer, away from the clichés art history has shut him in. As with any artist conservatively inclined towards the pastoral genre, it is tempting to label him in a very facile manner. But this volume refuses to manipulate his story for some greater art historical purpose, even if that means losing grasp of an univocal straightforward easy picture of the artist. One may regret the lack of colour illustration—since Palmer’s paintings are valued for their bejewelled colours—, but it is also true that this volume dwells mainly with his black and white etchings.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: aquarelle, Royal Academy, Slade School of Fine Arts, gravure, Shoreham Ancients, Goldsmiths’ group, pastorale, eau-forte Keywords: watercolour, Royal Academy, Slade School of Fine Arts, printmaking, Shoreham Ancients, Goldsmiths’ group, pastoral genre, urban sprawl, etching

AUTHORS

MURIEL ADRIEN Maître de Conférences Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail [email protected]

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