European Journal of American Studies, 3-3 | 2008, “Autumn 2008” [Online], Online Since 09 October 2008, Connection on 08 July 2021

European journal of American studies

3-3 | 2008 Autumn 2008

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/2283 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.2283 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 3-3 | 2008, “Autumn 2008” [Online], Online since 09 October 2008, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/2283; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.2283

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

From Man of the Crowd to Cybernaut: Edgar Allan Poe’s Transatlantic Journey—and Back. Paul Jahshan

‘The Dream of the Unified Field’: Originality, Influence, the Idea of a National Literature and Contemporary American Poetry Ruediger Heinze

The Migration of Tradition: Land Tenure and Culture in the U.S. Upper Mid-West Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger

Judas Iscariot: The Archetypal Betrayer and DeMille’s Cine-Biblical Salvation within The King of Kings (1927) Anton Karl Kozlovic

“New York and yet not New York”: Reading the Region in Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions James Peacock

All Work or No Play: Key Themes in the History of the American Stage Actor as Worker Sean Holmes

Zuckerman’s "Blah-blah Blah-blah Blah": a blow to mimesis, a key to irony Arnaud Schmitt

“New” “American Studies”: Exceptionalism redux? Marc Chenetier

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From Man of the Crowd to Cybernaut: Edgar Allan Poe’s Transatlantic Journey—and Back.

Paul Jahshan

The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and… it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years. (Poe 183)1 ‘This old man,’ I said at length, ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds…and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that es lässt sich nicht lesen. (P 188) Here a change in his demeanor became evident. He walked more slowly and with less object than before—more hesitatingly. He crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly without apparent aim; and the press was still so thick, that, at every such movement, I was obliged to follow him closely. (P 184-85)

1 The three short passages above convey three characteristics in Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction which have proved to be crucial elements in detective fiction from 1840, the date of publication of “The Man of the Crowd,” until the present day, namely, the detective-as- physiognomist, the ontological quester, and the flâneur. I will show how these three constants crossed, as it were, the Atlantic, received from Europe renewed impetus in the shape of a postmodern sensibility, and then returned to the New World, powerfully shaping the American detective genre. There, modern and contemporary fiction, most notably that of Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and E. L. Doctorow, on the one hand, and cyberpunk, on the other hand, picked up where Poe had left, added to it, and reached a culmination in the eventual decentering of Dupin’s original position and the reclaiming of the flâneur as a new discursive strategy in detective fiction. The new, third-millennium detective has been endowed with Poesque visitations similar to those encountered, more than a century and a half earlier, by the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” but later acquired a unique status made only possible by the transatlantic journey.

2 It is a well-known fact that Poe created the detective story, and critics have been quick to associate the detective with the flâneur in Poe’s fiction. Gerald Kennedy, in 1975,

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described “The Man of the Crowd” as having “long been one of Poe’s most perplexing tales,” where the protagonist, instead of fleeing his double, like in “William Wilson,” in fact pursues him. To Kennedy “The Man of the Crowd” marks the beginning of Poe’s “ratiocinative cycle,” and the humorous “The Oblong Box,” in 1844, marks its end. Kennedy, however, is just as dismissive about the end as he is about the beginning, and advises his readers to stay away from both, focussing instead on the more mature Dupin stories in between. Interestingly, Kennedy’s problem with “The Man of the Crowd” is the narrator’s inability to understand the rules of investigation later used by Dupin, and his self-delusion.

3 But it is precisely this consciously accepted failure by the story’s narrator that has fueled renewed contemporary interest in Poe’s investigative philosophy and firmly anchored his descendents in a long metaphysical tradition, culminating in postmodernism and beyond. The ontological problem raised by Poe in “The Man of the Crowd,” his acknowledgment that it “will be vain to follow,” that no more can be learned from the stranger stalking the streets in search of an identity amidst the crowd, was to develop later into the metaphysical, the postmodern, and finally the cybernaut investigator.

4 The flâneur, a creation of early nineteenth-century Paris, is a recurring element in Poe’s tales, especially those termed “ratiocinative,” and a major focus of interest since Charles Baudelaire, and later Walter Benjamin, popularized the study of this unique product of the densely populated urban space. Dana Brand’s The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature focussed on Poe’s detective flâneur and on Walter Benjamin, and Keith Tester called the flâneur “a very obscure thing” (qtd in Werner 5). James Werner took up Benjamin’s view in ascribing the rise of the detective to precisely the creation of the flâneur, writing: The triumph of societal forces was putting the flâneur to use as detective [… ]The rise of the detective reflects society’s uneasiness about the flâneur and its pressure to mitigate his elusiveness. (6)

5 Werner firmly links the flâneur with the detective in Poe’s tales, putting flânerie at the “very heart” of his ratiocinative techniques, and calling “The Man of the Crowd” one of the “most successful instances of flânerie in Poe” (10). Contrary to what Kennedy and Brand believed, the narrator in “The Man of the Crowd” and Dupin are, to Werner, one, and the detective is best seen in Poe as he is engaged in the act of flânerie. Werner is also astute enough to maintain that the detective and flâneur in Poe make up for the uncanny ability to be “in the scene yet removed from it” (11), a crucial dichotomy as regards the investigative flânerie of the cybernaut.

6 The Poesque detective, ontological quester, and flâneur, have had to go through a transatlantic “pilgrimage” in order to acquire the much-needed elements which have made contemporary American detective fiction what it is today. Indeed, much ink (and now countless digital bytes) has been spilled over the question of Poe’s influence on European literature and vice-versa. The pull to own Poe has been strong enough to warrant heated discussions on both sides of the Atlantic. As early as 1927, F. M. Darnall, in an article entitled “The Americanism of Edgar Allan Poe,” attempted to show that the elements of Americanism, namely, idealism, romance, and individualism, are outstanding characteristics of Poe, despite opinion otherwise. In addition, Poe’s imagery, to Darnall, is deeply rooted in American history, and harks back to the time of the Puritan Fathers. Conversely, John Matthew, in 1936, claimed that Poe was not only

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an influence on French literature, but was also deeply indebted to it to begin with. Marcel Françon, in 1945, explained Baudelaire’s “déjà vu” feeling upon encountering Poe by claiming that Poe was initially influenced by French/European writers like Coleridge, Schelling, Novalis, Mme de Staël, and Balzac. More recently, Robert Shulman, in “The Artist in the Slammer,” placed Poe with Hawthorne and Melville in the group of writers who saw America as a prison and looked across the Atlantic for fulfillment and recognition. Monika M. Elbert, in the opposite camp, was even more vocal when she said, in the context of “The Man of the Crowd,” that: There has been a French plot to purloin our American Poe. It is time to bring Poe back to American soil, to place him in the context of his time, as a representative American man of the mid-nineteenth century. (16)

7 The transatlantic battle to win Poe was, of course, initiated by translations of his tales into French as early as 1845, with Baudelaire subsequently trying to contact Poe’s first “secret translator,” Amédée Pichot, for his original sources (Bandy). Such was the interest in Poe in France that Edith Philips, in 1927, went into the minute tracing of the use of French words and expressions in the American writer’s tales, and Claire-Eliane Engel, in 1932, reported on the voluminous state of academic research on Poe in France. 2 A decade later, Dudley R. Hutcherson summed up the heated discussion surrounding Poe’s reputation in England and America a year after the writer’s death until 1909, delineating the works of Poe’s moral detractors and defenders. Joseph N. Riddel presented the ambivalence still existing about Poe and French literature, where, to some, the American writer is a pure French creation, whereas, to others, he invented symbolist poetics. Studies by Eleonore Zimmermann on Poe and Mallarmé, by Reino Virtanen on Poe and Valéry, and by James Lawler on Poe and the symbolists, are examples of the numerous research done on the American writer’s influence on the French symbolists.

8 Of course, Poe’s reputation as the first detective story writer and his influence across the Atlantic are not restricted to France. Charles Dickens, R. L. Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. C. Bentley, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and others testify to the popularity of the genre. Robert Ashley, in 1951, traced Poe’s influence on the British detective story, citing Collins as the link between Poe and Doyle. As with the French connection above, Poe’s legacy to the British Isles has been adequately documented.

9 If Collins was the link between Poe and the English detective scene, it is undoubtedly Benjamin who united, with his studies of the flâneur in the Parisian arcades, Poe’s theme of the crowd with that of the detective and paved the way for the fusion of the two into an existential questioning that would eventually lead to the postmodern detective. The flâneur, with Benjamin, is not only the dandy who slides among the city crowds, observing their features and trying to get at the bottom of their hidden motives; he is also, according to Rolf J. Goebel, the “personification of geographic dislocation, cultural transgression, and conceptual reconfiguration” (378). As such, the flâneur, envisioned—and, by the same token, re-created—by Benjamin, is an observer and an actor in the drama facing humanity at the dawn of the twentieth century, a drama which, as I will show, shows no sign of abating even as this humanity is being ushered into yet another era, that of digital information.

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10 The narrator-observer in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” sitting behind the window of a café and recuperating after some illness, was safely situated in an interior which provided him with all the amenities of seclusion: With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street. (P 179)

11 When the narrator first sees the old man and tries, in vain, to decipher his secret, he has to leave the interior, his position behind the window-as-screen and go outside, in the midst of the very crowd he had been observing: Hurriedly putting on an overcoat, and seizing my hat and cane, I made my way into the street, and pushed through the crowd in the direction which I had seen him take; for he had already disappeared. (P 184)

12 The passage from the interior to the exterior is important to the dialectics of the detective as flâneur. Benjamin writes, in The Arcades Project: The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated […] Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces. Poe […] in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior. (9)

13 Yet, it is when the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” leaves and moves from the interior to the exterior that he gradually loses his composure and ultimately plunges into the unknowability of the crowd, of the exterior, of the unfathomable. Benjamin writes, quoting Baudelaire on Poe’s story: From behind the window of a café, a convalescent, contemplating the crowd with delight […] Finally, he rushes into the crowd in search of an unknown person whose face, glimpsed momentarily, fascinated him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion. (442)

14 Poe’s foray into what will be, more than a century later, the common grounds of postmodernism, will not be repeated, and Dupin is seen to be much more at ease in interiors than in exteriors. As Peter Schmiedgen remarked, the city is “one of the loci of both hope and fear within modernity,” and the café, to Benjamin, is the “partial crystallization out of the ever changing crowd” (47, 50). To the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” the exterior was just a screen to be gazed at, leisurely and safely, a spectacle which could be shut off at will. The tension between a detection of the interior as detective and a more real exchange in the exterior as flâneur is probably the central theme of the story. Benjamin states: It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller […] He [the flâneur] seeks refuge in the crowd. Early contributions to a physiognomics of the crowd are found in Engels and Poe. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria—now a landscape, now a room. (10)

15 Benjamin credited Poe with creating “a character who wanders the streets of capital cities [calling] him the Man of the Crowd” (96). The cityscape is an ambivalent space which both lures and repels, and it is precisely this space, so daunting to Poe in 1840, which is taken up and exorcized in contemporary American detective fiction and in the treatment of cyberspace.

16 The advent of postmodernism will not only take up where Poe left in awe, but will also alter classical detective fiction forever, and what is known as the “Ellery Queen

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yardstick” for detective fiction, that is, a detective who detects, who is the story’s protagonist, and who triumphs over the criminal (Ashley 48), will be severely challenged. That this change took place initially in France before leaving a trail in the rest of the world has been acknowledged by most historians of thought. François Cusset, in French Theory, admirably set out to trace the influence of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and many others on the intellectual life of the United States. The influence is so pervasive that Cusset himself is puzzled by the extent of what he sees as an “invasion” (21). What this epochal moment effected has been the subject of countless studies; briefly put, one can mention the decentering of authorial voice, the undecidability of meaning, the deferred role of the critic, a re-evaluation of more than 2,000 years of western philosophy and the premium place it accorded to an ultimate Signified or Truth, and the realization that all interpretive practice, at all levels, is a kind of writing, and this writing itself a fictional construct.

17 Indeed, William V. Spanos pointed out that if Poe and Doyle were presenting a comforting view of the universe, postmodern writers like Pynchon were experimenting with the anti-detective fiction, the antithesis of the positivistic universe with its totalitarian implications, and thus did their best to subvert the classical notions of plot. What became known as the “metaphysical” detective novel was the opposite of the classical ratiocinative tales started by Poe’s Dupin and taken over by Doyle, and the new genre was characterized by its overt attempts at defeating the previously established “syllogistic order” (Cannon 46). As mentioned above in the context of the innovations of postmodernism, JoAnn Cannon writes that detection is a metaphor of all reading, and that it “dramatizes the operation performed by the reader of all texts” (46).

18 The classical detective’s panoply, enriched with postmodernism’s legacy of open- endedness and reader empowerment, was also ready to embrace the newer version of the flâneur, the Deleuzian nomad moving in the smooth and rhizomatic spaces of the new urban landscape. In Mille Plateaux, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the contemporary nomad: The nomad has a territory, he follows habitual paths, he goes from one point to another, he does not ignore points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points) …The water point is there only to be left, and any point is a relay and exists only as relay […] the nomad goes from one point to another only as consequence and necessity: in principle the points are to him relays in a trajectory. (471)

19 Like Poe’s old man in “The Man of the Crowd,” described as moving from one point in the crowd to another, the nomad-detective-flâneur is content to peregrinate from one event to another, leading behind him the reader, just as the old man did with the bemused and then irritated narrator. The difference is that the reader-turned-detective has learned to understand—and to enjoy—the seemingly meaningless meanderings of the text.

20 What is also interesting is that the dichotomy between the interior and the exterior, so acutely felt by Poe in “The Man of the Crowd,” is placed by Deleuze and Guattari in a more definable rapport: The nomad distributes himself in smooth space; he occupies, he lives, he holds this space, and it becomes his territorial principle. It is thus wrong to define the nomad by movement […] Of course the nomad moves, but he is sitting, he is never as much moving as when he is sitting (the galloping bedouin). (472)

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21 The narrator behind the café’s window had to move out to pursue his investigation, but the reader moves with the narrative without moving, just as the cybernaut, in front of the computer screen, can travel the whole world of data without leaving his/her seat. Reading becomes nomadic and it is not enough anymore to discover, along with the writer-narrator-detective, multiple and open-ended meanings, but also to produce them (Briggs), and the reader becomes engaged in a Barthesian writerliness mirrored by the detective’s own ramblings in the textual spaces of the city.

22 The movement from the classical, ratiocinative tales of Poe and Doyle, to the “aristocrat/gentlemanly” thriller of manners of Bentley, Christie and Sayers, to the “hard-boiled,” realistic novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, has been vividly painted, among others, by George Grella, Michael Holquist, and Carl D. Malmgren, and although a lot has been written on contemporary mystery writers like Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo, and Doctorow, the link to Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” and to the transatlantic metamorphosis needs to be more firmly anchored.3

23 Kenneth Kupsch has found Poe overtones in Pynchon’s 1961 novel V., and wrote that the “V” puzzle is answered in a way which opens up instead of closing the book, and that readers must be willing to do the legwork, like Stencil, the detective in the novel. More recently, Daniel Punday explored the Pynchon-Deleuze connection in a similar context. In the novel, a spy is carrying with him a secret which later becomes the rallying point of different characters whose stories meet. Pynchon’s flâneur in the crowd is reminiscent of that in Poe’s story: He watched the tourists gaping at the Campanile; he watched dispassionately without effort, curiously without commitment […] those four fat schoolmistresses whinnying softly to one another by the south portals of the Duomo, that fop in tweeds and clipped mustaches who came hastening by in fumes of lavender toward God knew what assignation; had they any notion of what inner magnitudes such control must draw on? (V. 184)

24 Four years later, with The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon went deeper into the interaction between the crowd, the voyeuristic gaze, and the city. As Oedipa Maas tries to find the post-horn symbol, she goes through the realization that the city is offering itself to her gaze: Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a facially- deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek. (Lot 49 85)

25 Oedipa’s wanderings in the city leave her at the mercy of an unknown crowd she thought did not exist, and the realization is enough to transform her as deeply as the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd.”

26 The metaphysical/postmodern detective was first clearly identified in Auster’s 1985 New York Trilogy. As Steven E. Alford pointed out, Auster’s characters in the Trilogy face the constant deferral of knowing themselves, an ontological problem reflected in the impossibility of solving, satisfactorily, all detective investigations. In true Poesque vein, Auster’s detectives are confronted with the “es lässt sich nicht lesen” (“it does not let itself be read”) of “The Man of the Crowd.” To William G. Little, the “interminable wandering,” “re-tracing,” and “perpetual crossing” done by the protagonists of City of Glass, the first story in the Trilogy, “lead to no final illumination, no climactic discovery” (133-34).

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27 Not all critics, however, have seen the Poe influence in that way, preferring to see Dupin as the only embodiment of the detective. John Zilcosky, for example, sees Auster as simply overturning the classical rules of detective fiction set out by Dupin and disregards the flâneur-quester side. Yet, New York, to Auster’s detective, Quinn, is a Benjaminesque and Deleuzian labyrinth: The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long […] By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. (Trilogy 4)

28 Quinn’s double is a character taken from Poe, William Wilson, his pseudonym for writing detective stories, and the mind-boggling shuffling and interchanging taking place in the Trilogy between real author (Auster), narrator (Quinn), writer (William Wilson), and persona (Auster, twice), answers what Quinn already knows when he says: “In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable” (Trilogy 9). Quinn is a true nomad writer and reader, moving from one story to another: “What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories” (8). In a passage almost identical to Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” Quinn searches the crowd in a train station for Peter Stillman, the old man supposedly come back to New York to kill his son, also named Peter Stillman: Soon the people were surging around him […] Quinn watched them all, anchored to his spot, as if his whole being had been exiled to his eyes […] he rapidly shifted his expectations with each new face, as if the accumulation of old men was heralding the imminent arrival of Stillman himself. For one brief instant Quinn thought, “So this is what detective work is like.” But other than that he thought nothing. (Trilogy 66)

29 Almost ten years later, Auster’s Oracle Night evinced this same preoccupation. The narrator, a writer who writes about writers is, like the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” recovering from a long illness and, as the story starts, is out among the crowds: I had lived in New York all my life, but I didn’t understand the streets and crowds anymore, and every time I went out on one of my little excursions, I felt like a man who had lost his way in a foreign city […] I drifted along like a spectator in someone else’s dream, watching the world as it chugged through its paces and marveling at how I had once been like the people around me. (1-2)

30 The unknown also lurks in DeLillo’s Mao II, where the narrator vividly describes the fascination found in observing and detecting individual traits in the crowd. The Poesque and Deleuzian “bedouin” allusions are obvious: There are still more couples coming out of the runway and folding into the crowd, although “crowd” is not the right word…there are curiosity seekers scattered about, ordinary slouchers and loiterers, others deeper in the mystery, dark-eyed and separate, secretly alert, people who seem to be wearing everything they own, layered and mounded in garments with missing parts, city nomads more strange […] than herdsmen in the Sahel. (4)

31 The reporter’s lens serves, in Mao II, the same function as the window in “The Man of the Crowd,” shielding yet revealing at the same time: Crowds […] People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked…Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd. (70)

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32 DeLillo goes a step further in Cosmopolis and has his protagonist, the “multi-billionaire” Eric Packer, move around Manhattan in an armored car, where he conducts actual meetings, listens to reports from his counselors, and even has a medical checkup. As Packer begins his day, he is connected to a bevy of data-displaying units, ranging from the stock exchange rates to TV news, to surveillance cameras placed in strategic places. As a futuristic nomad, Packer is moving around the city without moving, his mobile office going wherever he is. Yet Packer’s isolation, like that of his staff, will in the course of the novel lead him to reconsider his priorities, until the final confrontation which will take place in “real life.” In the meantime, Packer is mesmerized by the power he has, from the cameras placed in his car or from behind his coated windows, of watching others watching crowds: These were scenes that normally roused him, the great rapacious flow, where the physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds shape every anecdotal moment. (41)

33 The world as seen from behind the screen is a source of pleasure and power but, as DeLillo shows at the end, also provides a false sense of security. As the plot unfolds, however, Packer intermittently crosses from his interior to the exterior and mingles with others, albeit sporadically. Near the end of the novel, Packer comes across a film shooting taking place in the middle of the street with “three hundred naked people sprawled in the street” (Cosmopolis 172). It is clear that Packer’s initial shock at seeing so much exposed flesh is due to a violation of the machine-like nature of the interior, the false safety of the window/screen/monitor, and an invitation to step out, like the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” onto the exterior spaces, an invitation he decides to accept: It tore his mind apart, trying to see them here and real, independent of the image on a screen in Oslo or Caracas […] He wanted to set himself in the middle of the intersection, among the old with their raised veins and body blotches and next to the dwarf with a bump on his head […] He was one of them. (176)

34 It is this Benjaminesque mapping of life over the Poesque city streets that also informs Doctorow’s City of God. The streets are not empty, however, and the narrator, in this novel featuring a priest-detective with a degree in divinity-detective, “D.D.,” pauses to reflect on the metaphysical nature of the crowd and the need to walk and immerse oneself among them, like the old man in “The Man of the Crowd”: But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet […] For all the wariness or indifference with which we negotiate our public spaces, we rely on the masses around us to delineate ourselves. (11)

35 Doctorow describes crowds as “the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world” because he felt, like DeLillo above, and like Poe a century and a half earlier, that the big city, a construct of stone, steel, and glass, is set, maybe indefinitely, to compete with the flesh. What cannot let itself be read, as in Poe’s phrase, is the crowd’s ultimate fleshiness, the undecidability and unknowingness of the human mind. Mapped onto the city-scape, the detective/reader has to leave the prison of the interior and stalk, flâneur-like, the uncertain reaches of the human text.

36 It will come as no surprise, then, that with the advent of the “new technologies” and their attending concepts of simulation and virtual reality, the dichotomy between the

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interior and the exterior, so prevalent in Poe, Benjamin, and the postmodern detective, becomes more acutely felt. As Lawrence Frank said in the context of Poe’s detective tales, the appearance of new genres takes place when historical circumstances need it. Likewise, the appearance of the cyber-detective-flâneur has followed the development of the “new technologies,” and its best representation has been cyberpunk. Steffen Hantke wrote that Poe’s “close association with the beginnings of science fiction alone secures him a place in the genealogy of steampunk” (247), and Paul C. Grimstad not only reiterated Poe’s position as the inventor of the analytical detective story, but also as the writer who laid the groundwork for cyberpunk writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, also tracing Gibson’s debt to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Others, like Randy Schroeder, have dubbed Pynchon the “grand-daddy” of Stephenson’s Snow Crash (89). The link between cyberpunk and postmodernism, particularly the French flavor of it, has been set by Cusset: The science fiction genre itself has made way to French theory […] With the pioneer of the genre, William Gibson—who invented in 1982 the term “cyberspace”—they are many famous novelists who associate themselves with French authors. Often quoting Deleuze or Baudrillard in their interviews, they are read by their critics, or by their learned fans, through the prism of the simulacrum or, as metaphor of the Net, of the “body without organs” […] We are here indeed in the realm of theoretical science fiction. (269)

37 Gibson’s landmark novel, Neuromancer, set the tone in 1984 for the new genre of cyberpunk and its close cousin, steampunk. Gibson’s characters, in what will be a trilogy including Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), move in a world described by Jason Haslam as having a “retro-future feel,” where “space-age computer technology co-exists with grime, filth, and […] an all-encompassing urban decay, characterized by Gibson as ‘The Sprawl’” (Haslam 93). The futuristic city is crowded, on one level, with people and, on another level, with the exchange of data making up the daily business of mega-companies, a traffic of flesh and information. The city crowds, as in Poe’s story, are made of shoppers who stroll in search of goods to buy: “Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification” (Gibson 60).

38 As Werner remarked, the danger for the flâneur is “of being reduced to the status of passive window-shopper or consumer” (6), obviously referring to Benjamin’s sad observation, in the Arcades Project, that the flâneur’s “final ambit is the department store” (448). Yet, when Case, Gibson’s protagonist, “jacks in” to his holodeck and plunges into cyberspace, he is stepping into a space which is neither the interior nor the exterior of everyday reality. His trip transports him into a virtual space which combines both the observer and the observed, a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” (Gibson 67). Benjamin, in the Arcades, called Poe’s interior/exterior dichotomy the “dialectic of flânerie”: [O]n one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man. Presumably, it is this dialectic that is developed in ‘The Man of the Crowd’” (420).

39 Stephenson takes the simulatory nature of the crowd a step further in Snow Crash, where he envisions cyberspace as a huge virtual construct called the “Street.” As Hiro, the protagonist, puts on his VR goggles, he feels at home in the construct and leisurely walks the heavily crowded but simulated urban spaces. As on the streets of London in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” the “Street” in Snow Crash is also the rallying place of

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the stranger, the character who observes, but here as if twice removed from what is being observed, shielded twice, first by the interiority of his location in real space, second by his mingling in the virtual crowd: [H]e can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity […] persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans […] they can’t even get close in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. (38)

40 The detective-as-stalker is also one of the main themes in Greg Bear’s 1990 Queen of Angels, where LAPD police officer and detective, Mary Choy, is stalking the elusive psychopath killer Emanuel Goldsmith. In the course of her investigation, she has to go to the island of Hispaniola and is involved in another case. In the meantime, Goldsmith is found and two researchers enter his brain, inside what they call the “Country of the Mind,” in a simulation to trace the source of Goldsmith’s evil inclinations. Expectedly, the landscape visited is that of a city: In their movement and bustle, the inhabitants had very little real individuality. Their images conveyed a blur of color, a flash of indistinct limb or clothing, an instant of expression like a hastily applied cutout from a photo gallery of faces. The effect was more than impressionistic; Martin and Carol truly felt themselves alone in this crowd. (357)

41 The researchers, simulated detectives of the mind, are once again facing the unknown and, as the story unfolds, fail to “read” the killer’s mind. In fact, they end up being infected themselves, in tune with the original Poe-Benjamin dialectic of gazing.

42 It is, indeed, with cyberspace that the full potential of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” was to be unleashed: after having traveled across the Atlantic and back, the new cyber- detective, in the guise of the cybernaut, can stalk the vast digital reaches as a true Deleuzian nomad. From behind a screen, the cyber-flâneur lurks among the other visible yet invisible cybernauts, safely ensconced behind an anonymity of person, class, position, and gender.4 As soon as the cybernaut logs in, he/she is instantly transported to a twilight region which is neither the interior nor the exterior, a region which, as in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” is teeming with different people, nay, with different cultures, tongues, and traditions of bewildering and previously unheard-of variety. Cyberspace, as metropolis, what Mike Featherstone called a “data city” (911), vastly outnumbers any city on earth in diversity and range of experience, and cyber-flâneurs can choose to invisibly stalk—if they have the technological know-how—the digital polis or, on the contrary, to engage in the exchange of data or consumer goods. If what brought the original flâneur to his end was, according to Benjamin, Parisian motor traffic and if, as Susan Buck-Morss aptly said, today’s would-be flâneurs, “like tigers or pre-industrial tribes,” are indeed “cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passageways” (102), could virtual reality be the flâneur’s ultimate revenge?

43 Yet is it really the case? Michael Dibdin, in his detective novel Blood Rain, has his protagonist’s daughter discover, upon setting up a network for the special police, a “virtual draught,” a “flaw in cyberspace, a seepage of information from the system,” felt “almost physically,” like a “malaise” (42). Later on, just before she is killed, her laptop displays the words: “FATAL ERROR MESSAGE! THIS COMPUTER HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN” (148). Is cyberspace the culmination of The Man of the Crowd’s transatlantic voyage and back, or is it still the

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same angst experienced by Poe which really comes from the inside and masquerades as otherwise? Is this virtual city the locus, once again, of that ever-present and also ever- increasing danger of turning human flesh into what is worse that machines, into data bits?

44 Poe’s legacy, particularly that of “The Man of the Crowd,” is as strong and as relevant as ever. As the creator of the detective story, Poe was courageous enough to peer into the theoretical abyss which would be soon slowly building up after the demise of positivism at the end of the nineteenth century. Fortified by those other daring minds of the mid-twentieth century across the Atlantic, Poe’s concept of the flâneur- detective-ontological quester went far beyond Dupin’s initial apprehensions, and came back to occupy contemporary American fiction, ultimately providing twenty-first- century Homo Cyberneticus with the tools needed to deal with the bewildering changes ahead.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works Cited

Alford, Steven E. “Mirrors of Madness: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.” Critique 37.1 (Fall 1995): 17-33.

Ashley, Robert P. “Wilkie Collins and the Detective Story.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6.1 (Jun. 1951): 47-60.

Auster, Paul. Oracle Night. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.

---. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Bandy, W. T. “Poe’s Secret Translator: Amédée Pichot.” MLN 79.3 (May 1964): 277-80.

Bear, Greg. Queen of Angels. London: Millennium, 2000.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999.

Briggs, Robert. “Wrong Numbers: The Endless Fiction of Auster and Deleuze and Guattari and . . .” Critique 44.2 (Winter 2003): 213-24.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (Autumn 1986): 99-140.

Cannon, JoAnn. “The Reader as Detective: Notes on Gadda’s ‘Pasticciaccio’.” Modern Language Studies 10.3 (Autumn 1980): 41-50.

Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom, CD-ROM, Activision, Inc., 1996.

Cusset, François. French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis. Paris: La Découverte, 2003.

Darnall, F. M. “The Americanism of Edgar Allan Poe.” The English Journal 16.3 (Mar. 1927): 185-92.

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Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. London: Picador, 2004.

---. Mao II. London: Vintage, 1992.

Dibdin, Michael. Blood Rain. London: Faber & Faber, 2000.

Doctorow, E. L. City of God. New York: Plume, 2001.

Elbert, Monika M. “’The Man of the Crowd’ and the Man outside the Crowd: Poe’s Narrator and the Democratic Reader.” Modern Language Studies 21.4 (Autumn 1991): 16-30.

Engel, Claire-Eliane. “L’État des travaux sur Edgar Allan Poe en France.” Modern Philology 29.4 (May 1932): 482-88.

Featherstone, Mike. “The Flâneur, the City and Virtual Public Life.” Urban Studies 35.5/6 (May 1998): 909-25.

Françon, Marcel. “Poe et Baudelaire.” PMLA 60.3 (Sep. 1945): 841-59.

Frank, Lawrence. “’The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.2 (Sep. 1995): 168-88.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

Goebel, Rolf J. “Benjamin’s Flâneur in Japan: Urban Modernity and Conceptual Relocation.” The German Quarterly 71.4 (Autumn 1998): 377-91.

Grella, George. “Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 4.1 (Autumn 1970): 30-48.

Grimstad, Paul C. “Algorithm-Genre-Linguisterie: ‘Creative Distortion’ in Count Zero and Nova Express.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.4 (Summer 2004): 82-92.

Hantke, Steffen. “Difference Engines and other Infernal Devices: History According to Steampunk.” Extrapolation 40.3 (Fall 1999): 244-54.

Haslam, Jason. “Coded Discourse: Romancing the (Electronic) Shadow in The Matrix1.” College Literature 32.3 (Summer 2005): 92-115.

Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” New Literary History 3.1 (Autumn 1971): 135-56.

Hutcherson, Dudley R. “Poe’s Reputation in England and America, 1850-1909.” American Literature 14.3 (Nov. 1942): 211-33.

Kennedy, Gerald J. “The Limits of Reason: Poe’s Deluded Detectives.” American Literature 47.2 (May 1975): 184-96.

Kupsch, Kenneth. “Finding V.” Twentieth Century Literature 44.4 (Winter 1998): 428-46.

Lawler, James. “Daemons of the Intellect: The Symbolists and Poe.” Critical Inquiry 14.1 (Autumn 1987): 95-110.

Little, William G. “Nothing to go on: Paul Auster’s City of Glass.” Contemporary Literature 38.1 (Spring 1997): 133-61.

Malmgren, Carl D. “The Crime of the Sign: Dashiell Hammett’s Detective Fiction.” Twentieth Century Literature 45.3 (Autumn 1999): 371-84.

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Matthew, John. “Poe’s Indebtedness to French Literature.” The French Review 9.3 (Feb. 1936): 217-23.

Niesz, Anthony J., and Norman Holland. “Interactive Fiction.” Critical Inquiry 11.1 (Sep. 1984): 110-29.

Philips, Edith. “The French of Edgar Allan Poe.” American Speech 2.6 (Mar. 1927): 270-74.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Writings. London: Penguin, 1979.

Punday, Daniel. “Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon.” Studies in the Novel 37.1 (Spring 2005): 109-11.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. London: Vintage, 2000.

---. V. London: Vintage, 2000.

Riddel, Joseph N. “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe.” Boundary 2 7.3 (Spring 1979): 117-44.

Schama, Simon. “New York, Gaslight Necropolis.” The New York Times, June 19, 1994.

Schmiedgen, Peter. “Abraham and the Flaneur: Levinas, Benjamin, and Urban Life.” Philosophy Today 49.1 (Spring 2005): 46-54.

Schroeder, Randy. “Inheriting Chaos: Burroughs, Pynchon, Sterling, Rucker.” Extrapolation 43.1 (Spring 2002): 89-97.

Shulman, Robert. “The Artist in the Slammer: Hawthorne, Melville, Poe and the Prison of their Times.” Modern Language Studies 14.1 (Winter 1984): 79-88.

Spanos, William V. “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination.” Boundary 2 1.1 (Autumn 1972): 147-68.

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. London: Penguin, 1993.

Virtanen, Reino. “Allusions to Poe’s Poetic Theory in Valéry’s ‘Cahiers’.” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 2.1 (1969): 113-20.

Werner, James V. “The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, the Flaneur, and the Physiognomy of Crime.” American Transcendental Quarterly 15.1 (Mar. 2001): 5-21.

Zilcosky, John. “The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory.” Critique 39.3 (Spring 1998): 195-206.

Zimmermann, Eleonore M. “Mallarmé et Poe: Précisions et Aperçus.” Comparative Literature 6.4 (Autumn 1954): 304-15.

NOTES

1. All references to Poe will be indicated by “P” followed by the page number. 2. Works in French have been translated by me. 3. Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s father, a fervent admirer of Poe, named his son after him (Schama). 4. Within a decade, most of what had been advanced by theoreticians of post-structuralism like Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, and others, was being uncannily translated onto the silicon chip and later, given the unprecedented development in computer power, onto the Internet. One

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of the first experiments involving the digital reader-as-detective was interactive fiction (IF), also known as text-based adventures. Willie Crowther’s pioneering game, simply called “Adventure,” was soon followed by more sophisticated IF games, many of them, interestingly, of the detective type, like Infocom’s “Deadline,” (subtitled “A locked door. A dead man. And 12 hours to solve the murder”) (1981) “The Witness,” (1983) “Suspect,” (1984) “Moonmist,” (1986) and “Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels,” (1988) all complete with manuals, blueprints, transcripts, and other familiar detective paraphernalia. IF kept the classical ingredients of the detective story, but added the player as detective with unparalleled freedom of choice and action. For more on this interaction and the empowerment of the reader/player becoming a digital flâneur, see Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland, as well as their parallels between Pynchon’s stories-within-stories and the immersive capabilities of these “new technologies.”

INDEX

Keywords: Postmodernism, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Crowd, detective, flâneur, cybernaut, contemporary fiction, nomad, city, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Auster, Greg Bear, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Dibdin, E. L. Doctorow, William Gibson, Félix Guattari, Neal Stephenson.

AUTHOR

PAUL JAHSHAN Associate Professor of American Studies, Notre Dame University, Zouk, Lebanon

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‘The Dream of the Unified Field’1: Originality, Influence, the Idea of a National Literature and Contemporary American Poetry

Ruediger Heinze

1. Paradigm Lost

1 On the back cover of the 1994 Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry, a commentary claims that the collection is the first to “fully represent the movements of American avant-garde poetry.” Beginning with a poem by Charles Olson from 1953, it contains 411 poems by 103 different poets, from the Beats, the New York School and the Projectivists to a general “array of poetry written since 1975.” The selection ranges from John Cage, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac to Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and Amiri Baraka to Jerome Rothenberg, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian. The last entries are from 1992, thus the volume covers a time span of just short of forty years. Apart from the fact that this anthology is not the only one to lay claim to a representative selection of “avant-garde” American poetry – conflating with a sleight of hand “avant-garde” and “postmodern” – the range and variety of the selection in effect empties the title term “postmodern” of all definitive quality. The exclusion of some poets, such as Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, for the inclusion of others, such as Bruce Andrews or Charles Bernstein, affords no marked difference to other similarly wide-ranging anthologies of contemporary American poetry, as long as “contemporary” is taken to cover the period after WWII. As a matter of fact, it appears that for this particular anthology the substitution of the term “postmodern” for a rather bland “contemporary” would not amount to a qualitative difference of any import, except for the fact that the same publisher also offers an anthology of modern and contemporary American poetry.2

2 Although the editors, Hoover and Chernoff, introduce the collection by arguing that they do not view postmodernism as a single style but rather as “an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology” (Hoover xxvi), this merely relegates the problem to

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another, similarly illusive, arena; apart from the fact that the logical consequence of such argument would be that Ginsberg, who by now has become an icon of American poetry and very much mainstream, is somehow more subversive than, for example, Robert Lowell. The collection is thus an attempt and simultaneously testimony to the failure of such an attempt to come to terms with contemporary American poetry by arguing for a literary historical genealogy arranged around the opposition of mainstream and subversiveness. This in turn is implicitly based on the idea of the aesthetic and significantly moral inadequacy of mainstream poetry, versus the authenticity and truly poetic success of subversive poetry. Needless to say, such authenticity commonly is the defining characteristic of a genuinely American poetic tradition that, according to such argument, almost inevitably goes back to Whitman and Dickinson.

3 A similar, more recent argument is made in Alan Kaufman’s introduction to the 1999 Outlaw Bible of American Poetry: Here are the […] poets who don’t get taught in American poetry 101, yet hold the literary future in their tattooed hands. […] The Academy had best make room for these descendents of Whitman’s ‘Roughs’ and Emerson’s ‘Berserkers’: Our poets can whip your poets’ asses. (Kaufman xxv)

4 Not surprisingly, the collection is not as wild as it heralds to be. Whitman, Williams, Ginsberg, Reed and other fairly “101” poets have made it into the collection alongside a number of well-known “outlaws” (Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Jackson Pollock, Kathy Acker), genre benders (Diane diPrima, Richard Brautigan, David Lerner), and native American and “ethnic” poets (Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Luis Rodriguez, Victor Hernández Cruz). What is perhaps the most remarkably “outlaw” feature of the collection is the variety of texts that are gathered under the auspices of “poetry.” The “tattooed hands” that “whip asses” here only give a less academic expression to the “resistance to mainstream ideology”-sentiment found in the Norton anthology.

5 What is at stake here is not an intervention in the already overly strained debate over the use of “postmodern” and “subversion vs. mainstream” for discussing contemporary American poetry, but closer attention to the underlying rhetoric that suffuses critical discussions around the aesthetics, poetics and cultural and material conditions of American poetry. Under the precept of originality, poets and critics call for and on occasion celebrate a specifically American, coherent national poetry.3 Conversely, others bemoan the “forfeiture of grand opportunities” exactly because contemporary American poetry fails to contribute to a genuinely innovative national literature due to the “academization” and “inbred professionalism” of the creative writing programs (Altieri, Self 205). I would argue that these two lines of argument are only in apparent opposition to each other: both are based on similar notions and specifically American traditions of a poetics of influence from Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot to Harold Bloom. As this essay will further argue, these two arguments usually appear in the context of discussions around the idea and ideal of a national literature. 2. Forfeiture vs. Coherence No poet since Whitman has tapped into so many distinctly American voices and, at the same time, so preserved his utterance against the jangle of influences (Schultz on John Ashbery 1).

6 Looking back on the preceding decade, the poet Robert Shaw asserts that “the drink of the 1890s was absinthe; that of midcentury was gin; that of the 1990s appears to be Cranapple Juice” (Shaw 217), possibly wholesome but definitely not stimulating. He

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finds a “reflexive caution” among contemporary poets, a “forfeit of grand opportunities” (Shaw 219). This is, he claims, largely due to the fact that a whole generation of poets has been raised in the incestuous system of the creative writing programs at universities, where students are streamlined in the process of being taught the mechanics of writing poetry and the imperative to avoid risks. Creativity, so the criticism, is presumptuously assumed to be teachable, while at the same time the future poets are deprived of the chance to wean themselves off the influence of their tutors in order to establish their own individual voices and, following Pound’s notorious dictum, “make it new.” According to this argument, it is hardly surprising that such a system should fail to produce great American poets.4

7 Indeed, there has been an increasing institutionalization of poetry in the MFA programs (gradschool.com lists 161 MFA graduate degree programs in the US) and writers’ conferences. A substantial number of writers actually earn their living by writing and teaching, a situation which, considering its uniqueness in comparison to other countries, should not be underemphasized since it furthers the proliferation of professional writers. This itself is reason enough for many attacks because the notion of writing as a profession in which money can be earned (even if little) does of course leave hardly any space for a notion – or self-projection – of writing romantically connoted with creativity, genius and societal marginality.5 The self-sustaining nature of this institutionalized system has naturally come under attack especially from those outside it. Critical essays on American poetry are saturated with disdainful remarks about academic (or “commodity”) poets on the grounds that writing for money compromises the quality of the work, aesthetically and politically. They are, paradoxically, criticized for their “homogenizing tendencies, […] for producing too much poetry too quickly and for emphasizing quantity at the expense of quality” (Beach 37) exactly in the name of a qualitative, implicitly homogeneous national poetry that needs to be salvaged and defended against these epigones.6 While few critics care to specify their notion of the ‘academic poet,’ there doubtlessly are possible detrimental effects to university programs that are maintained by recruitment from their own system. However, evidence to the contrary is tendentiously ignored: many of the poets most widely recognized as productive and innovative, such as John Ashbery, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Adrienne Rich, are also at least to some extent products of and/or participants in that system and have – in the words of Adrienne Rich – profited from not having to worry about how “to put bread on the table” (40). It is not so much the fact of the existence of the writing programs themselves that should be critiqued – nor necessarily their institutional affiliation or monetary interests – but the underlying double bind: yes, one can learn how to write poetry, there is something like a common base that students can potentially acquire and contribute to, a base that is also the ground for the “maturation” of a national poetry; but on the other hand there is the imperative to be original, uninfluenced. In effect, this implies that to write American poetry means to be original, an equation which echoes Pound’s imperative to “make it new.”

8 Apparently, the celebration of a coherent and unified national American poetry with a clear lineage would seem to run counter to this argument. In 1999, the Poetry Society of America invited poets to a panel discussion on what is American about American poetry. The poets’ responses can still be found on the society’s internet site (www.poetrysociety.org/whatsamer.html). While no single definition or short list of

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criteria can be abstracted from the responses, the topic itself indicates interest in poetry as a – specifically national – cultural database and a function of cultural archive and memory: Catherine Bowman (poetry correspondent of the NPR show All Things Considered) finds that current poetry is based on the rhythms of American speech and on a reinforced oral tradition (Bowman xv) proliferating in open-mic readings frequently held in bars, poetry slams, and other public venues.7 This would contradict the view that poetry is the “most private and least public of traditional literary genres” (Göske 229). Edward Hirsch writes (1ff) that the great invitation of American poetry, namely Whitman’s, is still true: Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? / And why should I not speak to you? (Whitman 14)

9 According to this view American poetry can “contain contradictions and multitudes” and poets should “resist much, obey little.” Campbell McGrath states in an interview that the “poems my students write in Spanish or Jamaican patois still feel like American poems to me – it’s in the cadence, the energy, the cultural database, the concerns of immigration, acculturation, Americanization” (http://www.pitt.edu/ ~nidus/archives/fall2002/mcgrath.html). The well-known problem is that the idea of a national identity achieved through literature (poetry) is a foreshortening of the multitude of different voices in American poetry (Göske 229ff) if that multitude is not taken as a defining feature of that national poetry, which in turn makes delineation extraordinarily difficult. The reference to an American poetry and a distinctly American national literature and tradition is not ontological but mostly ideological in the Althusserian sense and part of political discourses, though not always, as Benedict Anderson points out in a recent interview, to negative effect. It may indeed serve a utopian function of projecting a Good Nation in the abstract (www.culcom.uio.no/ aktivitet/anderson-kapittel-eng.html). Nevertheless, in practice, “[t]he eagerness to construct ‘national’ genealogies produces questionable results” (Göske 230) because differences are inevitably subsumed under the mission of projecting the idea of a national literature with a common national lineage, although it should be granted that considering the notion of “Americanness” is not per se unproductive as long as that notion is acknowledged as ideological and complemented by a larger context of historical, political and international influences (231). However, as Göske points out, this manner of selection will always run the danger of losing sight of transnational aspects, translation, immigration, etc. 3. The Influential Fallacy A great man quotes bravely. (Emerson, Letters 183) [N]ot imitation, but creation is the aim. (Emerson, Works, Vol II 209)

10 If contemporary poets forfeit grand opportunities and fail to write “great American poetry” because the writing programs obstruct their finding of an individual voice, the assumption is that creativity and originality can only be had through a struggle against the influence not only of one’s tutor but of the entire tradition of American poetry. Yet to allow for later incorporation into an American tradition, poetry at some point needs to be recognized as distinctly American. This is what John Ashbery is lauded for in the above quote from the introduction of a collection of essays entitled The Tribe of John: being American yet being distinct, maintaining one’s discernible voice among the many voices of American poetry. The romantic myth of the independent, individualistic and potentially solipsistic genius who finds his or her authentic voice in a struggle to simultaneously repudiate, acknowledge and somehow master a great tradition is at the

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core of such rhetoric. As David Herd neatly points out in his study on Ashbery, the latter is ideal for such appropriation because he is regarded by a host of critics as both mainstream and avant-garde (Herd 1) and can consequently be enlisted for a variety of critical projects. Accordingly, contemporary American poetry is a continuous falling away from the image of perfection of the great, self-reliant American artists and their artistic tradition. Likewise, celebrating a distinctly American national poetry or even just holding up the idea as an ideal evokes the notion of a long lineage of great American poets who have through consecutive influence on their respective “progeny” built and contributed towards this national literature. In the extreme, this would imply that all contemporary poetry (or at least the “good”) could basically be traced back to a few model figures, say Stevens, Williams, Whitman and Dickinson. Indeed, over the course of time a substantial number of literary critics have argued exactly that, especially in the early formative period of American studies. Carl Bode introduces his collection of essays by other critics, Great Experiment in American Literature (1961), by arguing that “[o]ne of the signs of the American character is an interest in trying something new” (Bode vii), a unique experimentalism that discards with tradition to find new ways. Bernard Duffey’s Poetry in America (1978) proclaims the Age of Bryant, Whitman and Pound respectively, while Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s American Poetry (1987), identifies four distinct lines from Emerson, Poe, Whitman and Dickinson. The most recent example of this kind of artistic genealogy is contributed by Angus Fletcher’s New Theory for American Poetry (2004), which once again takes Whitman as its starting point.

11 The problem is not that there is no influence but rather that there is too much, or in other words: there cannot not be influence, at least as long as one uses language and lives on this planet; as an inverse consequence, influence cannot be disproved. This is so basic an assumption as to seem facetious, but only its continued disregard can explain the fact that “influence” is rarely specified but frequently taken to account for too much and thus excluding too much (usually in the service of some particular interest), and –which is more than ironic – used without consideration for its history and tradition. For example, the collection The Tribe of John has gathered various essays which are supposed to testify to the influence of John Ashbery on contemporary poetry (the title suggests a tribal following) and provide examples of the kind of influences.8 According to this collection, influence can manifest itself concretely in similar topics, syntax, imagery, length of lines and formal arrangement, and more abstractly in a rejection of closure, a play with absences and the repudiation of a coherent lyrical voice. Influence here means resemblance, variation, analogy etc. on the level of one poem, an entire collection or even an entire “period” in the poet’s production. The collected essays almost without exception provide insightful and expert readings of Ashbery’s poetry, but also patently demonstrate the vagueness of the term: influence is attested in so many different ways as to empty the term of almost all meaning. In effect, if a contemporary poet lays claim to or denies having been influenced by Ashbery, there is little definitive ground for disproving or endorsing the claim, whichever it is. Even if we do not credit the poet’s statement, influence could come about by rejection and/or inversion, it could be non-intentional or disjunctive. To put it bluntly: while influence exists in multifold abundance, it would appear to be almost impossible to systematize, quantify, or qualify. Chance, however, is not a methodologically appealing category. Why, then, the continuing reference – implicit or explicit – to influence? As I argued above, both the idea of forfeiture and the idea of

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coherence, respectively national poetry, more or less implicitly resort to and rely on a shared assumption of influence. This assumption deserves more scrutiny.

12 Harold Bloom’s is perhaps one of the best-known and influential (pun intended) contemporary comment on influence. He argues that every strong poem is a misreading of those that precede it so that poets can “clear imaginative space for themselves” (Bloom 5). Influence here mostly manifests itself in intertextuality. Strong creative will and individuality are of utmost importance and manifest themselves in an original and innovative (mis-)reading of the model. The strong poet is thus an anxiety- ridden adulator and iconoclast. This manner of intertextual reference and reverence is reminiscent of what T. S. Eliot demanded for strong poetry in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” According to him, “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” (Eliot 4). At the same time, the individual talent with each new creation alters what precedes it, rewriting the tradition, an idea that resonates with Borges contestation that every writer creates his or her own precursor.

13 Both Bloom and Eliot stand in the tradition of Emerson, and occasionally their texts even read like a paraphrase of the master: All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation. (Emerson, Letters 178)

14 Similarly to Eliot and Bloom, Emerson elaborates on the paradox of borrowing and inventing, emulating and misreading, tradition and originality: “Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor” (Emerson, Letters 204). In this tradition, the poet is a strong-willed individual whose creative genius allows him or her to write with and against an overwhelming tradition, altering it and thus leaving an imprint of their originality on the genealogy of great American literature.

15 These notions have not gone uncontested: if intertextual reference, whether by allusion, paraphrase, or parody, is taken to be inevitably a form of misreading because of its re-location in a new context, as Derrida claims in his dispute with Searle, then Bloom’s argument holds true because all such references are then misreadings, but is also deprived of its argumentative strength because strong creative will and intention lose their relevance.9 Moreover, it would be inordinately difficult to delimit the intertextual play found in contemporary poetry by seeking effects of anxiety or the strain to establish a new tradition, a poetic voice free of and different from its predecessors, possibly because of the recognition that such attempts stand in the tradition of a romantic author-concept disparaged by Foucault and Barthes.10 Nevertheless, exactly this notion of influence is at the core both of claims that academy workshops cannot produce good poetry, where good poetry stands in the tradition of contra-mainstream and thus typically American poetry (a tradition of the exceptional, so to speak), and that there is a recognizable, coherent national lineage of great American poetry continued to today.11 As contested as the idea may be, without it both lines of reasoning would collapse and with it two convenient and highly politicized discourses on a national literature.

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16 Consequently, it should not surprise that there is much contemporary criticism on poetry that fits these ideas, a criticism which, indeed, has its own longstanding, one might ironically say: specifically American literary tradition. As MacGowan points out, for “many nineteenth-century English writers and critics […] American literature, if such a thing existed, was merely a provincial offshoot of English literature” (McGowan 276). Against this bias, laying claim to an American original identity and independence, of nation and literature, was an obvious counter, most emphatically pronounced by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Alexander de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Subsequently, at the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of the university and its literature departments, the call for/claim of the necessity, and simultaneous decrying of the absence of a national American literature continued a century old debate, a debate, indeed, that in its structure is common to all struggles about a national literature and thus not specifically American. The critic Van Wyck Brooks chimes in with the lament of not having strong writers (191) in his last of Three Essays on America (1934), a lament that Howard Mumford Jones takes up in a chapter entitled “A National Spirit in Letters” (48-78) in his Theory of American Literature (1948). Complementing these complaints are attempts at defining just what is originally American about American literature and poetry, continuing to today: its quintessential modernity (Auden), its portrayal of “how Americans live in America” (van Doren 2), the persistence of the theme of the dignity of man (Pearce), the continuing centrality of Emerson (Waggoner), or, more contemporary, the dialectic between a formal sensibility and social responsibility (Altieri).

17 Common to most of these literary histories are dialectic structures of opposites, in turn more often than not based on implicit ideas of forfeiture and coherence, originality and influence. As pointed out above, these lines of reasoning can be illuminating, but also restrictive. Just what kind of faultlines are left out can be seen in the thematically organized table of contents of Stephen Fredman’s Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2005): feminism, queerness, immigration, mysticism, war, transnationalism, science, philosophy, etc. One way to avoid the influence of these dialectic literary histories of originality and influence is to seriously acknowledge the multiplicity of contemporary American poetry, not just to give it “a nod of recognition,” then to be “simply absorbed into the more or less same-as-usual American canon,” as Robert Lee describes a typical gesture for ethnic texts (Lee 5).

18 4. Once More: The Multiplicity of Contemporary American Poetry One defining characteristic of American poetry is its diversity, its inability to be pigeonholed or represented by one or two major figures and models. There is no binding consensus on what is essential in our poetry right now. This superabundant complexity may seem maddening to those whose business it is to impose rational categorization upon disorder – namely critics and theorists – but to poets it ought to feel like an entirely welcome and delightful state of affairs. (http:// www.poetrysociety.org/mcgrath.html)

19 In an essay on American poetry of the 1990s, Willard Spiegelman starts with a literary parlor game, making two separate lists of poets and asking what sets them apart (Spiegelman 206). There appears to be no distinguishing criterion, but there is: one group won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in the last decade, the other did not. The list of Pulitzer poets – the Pulitzer Prize is surely one powerful mechanism of marketing and canonization – indicates that even such a fairly popular award honors an increasingly

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diverse and multicultural American poetry. Even more radically experimental, on-the- fringe, marginal and/or ethnic poets are being canonized and institutionalized. One need not look far to find them published in the respective anthologies by, for example, Douglas Messerli, Charles Bernstein or Ron Silliman.

20 These anthologies as well as smaller collections with different purposes (e.g. by Finch and Varnes, Bowman and Lehman) give witness to apparently important developments in American poetry and as a corollary also to the foremost ideological nature of a national poetry, for several reasons. First, the extreme division between new-formalists and l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets, New York School and Projectivists and countless other movements has evidently long become obsolete and increasingly useless for discussing contemporary poetry. Granted, the affiliation of a poet with a particular school and/or tradition might still be helpful in order to locate him or her within certain traditions (e.g. Ted Kooser or Charles Wright), but despite all polemical contention to the contrary (for example by Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews or Robert Bly), these affiliations are dissolving. As poet David Kellogg points out, “there is no one site for resistance or authenticity” (qtd. in Finch and Varnes 2). One of the reasons for the dissolving affiliations is a shifted attitude towards formal experiment. The output of literature journals and book publishers shows that the poetry published in the US is more open to a variety of forms – formal verse, prose poems – than it used to be twenty years ago; there is a noticeable shift in attitude towards formal matrices as well as to a less polemically fraught attitude towards formal experiment per se, though so-called free verse is admittedly still the preferred “form.” For the most part of the last century formal matrices were eyed suspiciously because “many poets and critics, both traditional and experimental, have suggested that to write in certain forms is incompatible with postmodern insights about the contingency and fragmentariness of the self” (Finch and Varnes 2).12 For some time now, however, there has been a prolific and occasionally playful resurgence of formal matrices, e.g. such arcane forms as the sestina or the canzone, in the poetry of a number of older and younger contemporary poets.

21 Second, what currently goes under the label contemporary “American” poetry has been making use of the multifarious ethnic voices and traditions in “American” literature, often by incorporating passages in languages other than English, and of a wealth of transnational imports, as Daniel Göske demonstrates for Robert Bly, Anthony Hecht and Amy Clampitt; so much so that it often – consistent with the argument of this essay – becomes difficult to say just what nationality a text may be if the author’s citizenship ceases to be the sole defining feature. For the ideal of a national poetry, this raises several problems. Many ethnic poets make use (in a number of ways) of their specific cultural background and literary traditions. They are often either labeled as American poets reflecting the intrinsically varied tradition of American literature, or as poets with a hyphenated affiliation whose work derives its merit precisely from not being part of a mainstream American poetic tradition and canon. Both views are as foreshortened as they are ideologically invested, and combined they sit uneasy with the ideal of a national poetry. Ironically but consistently, the incipient comparative trans- ethnic, trans-national criticism that would circumvent these two perspectives sits just as uneasy with that ideal. In addition, the label “ethnic” only goes so far in dealing with poetry, as every poet, to differing degrees, makes use of his or her culturally specific

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background – in fact cannot help but do so –, which may or may not coincide with the elusive idea of a national identity.

22 An example: Jorie Graham, surely one of the most prominent canonical, mainstream “non-ethnic” poets, is regularly placed at least partially under the influence of John Ashbery and thus as belonging to the tribe of John. On the back cover of The End of Beauty an excerpt from Helen Vendler’s review in The New Yorker announces Graham’s status by invoking Blake, Whitman, Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery, names which sooner or later show up in most of her reception. It would of course be possible to enlist Graham for the project of a coherent national American literature; she makes abundant intertextual references to Whitman, Emerson, etc., has indisputable status as an influential contemporary poet with a purportedly distinct voice and an alleged lineage to key figures in American literature. It would be just as possible to question the enthusiasm with which she is commonly greeted and label her as a typical product of an “academic poetry” aesthetics geared mostly to an exclusive and intellectual audience.13 While quotations from Whitman and Emerson show her affiliations to American literature, the reference to Emerson, being the first American scholar to extensively adopt Plato into his thoughts, already alludes to further references that reach far beyond a purely American literary and cultural canon, even if most of them remain within the realms of western “high” culture (e.g. continental philosophy and literature, physics, but also less canonical texts such as Audubon’s Journals or Etiquette manuals).14 Also, her manner of citation formally raises the question of what counts as a poem and what not, apart from the fact that the citations are not to be fully trusted (as she often alters sequence and layout of the original). In short: there are far too many and diverse references and influences and far too much formal complexity for Graham’s poetry to be easily categorized. Her problematization of poetic form per se, her formal variations, her predominantly transnational intertextual references, all of these demand a reading beyond the two critical narratives of forfeiture of or coherence with the tradition of American poetry. 5. Conclusion 23 Jorie Graham is only one case in point. As overcome as the ideal of a national American poetry and, by extension, literature may appear, it has played (and still does play) an important political and literary historical role, even, as Anderson points out, a utopian one. It would appear that defining a national literature is more a question of identifying specific thematic preoccupations and thus a matter of content rather than formal variation. This, however, is misleading. American poetry in particular has been identified with its schools, manifestos and diverse poetics of how a poem should be. Rootedness in place and time is necessarily of importance. But the majority of poets have been characterized by their use of form, style and formal aesthetics rather than thematic focus. Scrutinizing the extant formal variety of contemporary poetry thus constitutes a viable way of widening the impression of what is “going on” in American poetry. The predominance of the two narratives of forfeiture and coherence and their foundation on a notion of influence must hence be seen as a political (more so than aesthetic) attempt to exclude post- and trans-national trends in poetry and criticism, as well as anything else that does not fit the picture, from the projection of a national American poetry. If both of these narratives inherently testify to the continuing import of influence, in whatever form, and thus implicitly to the valid and legitimate need for negotiating issues of cultural identity and memory, then the notion of influence and the concomitant negotiation of cultural identity should be revised so as to do justice to

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the fact that 1) influence is never just national and individual but transnational, multifold and complex, 2) there is no necessarily logical and systematic connection between the existence of writing programs and the quality of contemporary (American) poetry, 3) there is an abundant variety of poetry and poetic forms in contemporary (American) literature, and 4) the idea and ideal of a national literature is, for what it is worth, surprisingly resilient and, perhaps, more an ideological construction than many of us may still want to admit. Works Cited Altieri, Charles. The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. New York: Blackwell, 2006. – – –. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Anderson, Benedict. “Interview with Benedict Anderson: ‘I like nationalism’s utopian elements.’” CULCOM: Cultural Complexity in the New Norway. >http:// www.culcom.uio.no/aktivitet/anderson-kapittel-eng.html> (13 November 2006). Andrews, Bruce. “The Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.” Textual Operations Talk Series. White Box, New York City. Sept. 25, 2001. Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Beach, Christopher. Poetic Culture. Evanston: North Western UP, 1999. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Bode, Carl, ed. The Great Experiment in American Literature. London: Heinemann, 1961. Bowman, Catherine, ed. Word Of Mouth. New York: Vintage, 2003. Brooks, Van Wyck. Three Essays on America. New York: Dutton, 1934. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Transl. M.B. DeBevoise. Cambrigde: Harvard UP, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Duffey, Bernard. Poetry in America, Durham: Duke UP, 1978. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Letters and Social Aims. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. – – –. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. II. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1979. – – –. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. III. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1983. English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Finch, Annie, and Varnes, Kathrine, eds. An Exaltation of Forms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 2004. Fredman, Stephen. A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. New York: Blackwell, 2005. Gery, John. “Ashbery’s Menagerie and the Anxiety of Affluence.” The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Susan Schultz. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. 126-145.

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Göske, Daniel. “Hanoi, Buchenwald, Nueva York: (Trans)National Identities in Contemporary American Poetry.” Negotiations of America’s National Identity. Vol. II. Ed. Roland Hagenbüchle and Josef Raab. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2000. 229-247. Gradschools.com. “English Language and Literature Graduate School Programs.” November 2004: http://gradschool.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm? site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gradschools.com%2Flistings%2Fmenus%2Feng_lang_menu.html. Graham, Jorie. Materialism. Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1993. – – –. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994. Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1995. – – –. The End of Beauty. Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1998. Herd, David. John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester, Manchester UP, 2000. Hirsch, Edward. How To Read A Poem. San Diego: Harcourt, 1999. Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994. Jones, Howard Mumford. The Theory of American Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1948. Kaufman, Alan, ed. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999. Lee, Arthur Robert. Multicultural American Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Lehman, David, ed. Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. – – –. Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. New York: Scribner, 2003. MacGowan, Christopher. Twentieth-Century American Poetry. New York: Blackwell, 2004. McGrath, Campbell. “What’s American About American Poetry?” Poetry Society of America. 20 November 2004 . Menand, Louis. “All That Glitters.” The New Yorker Dec.-Jan. 2005/06. 20 March 2006 . Messerli, Douglas. From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Perloff, Marjorie. “Normalizing John Ashbery.” 25 October 2005 . Poetry Society of America. 20 March 2006 . Ramazani, Jahan, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 2 vols. 3rd ed. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium. 2 vols. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1995. Schultz, Susan M., ed. The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa etc.: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Shaw, Robert. “Tragic Generations.” Poetry January (2000): 210-19. Silliman, Ron, ed. In the American Tree. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. Spiegelman, Willard. “The Nineties Revisited.” Contemporary Literature 42:2 (2001): 206-237. Van Doren, Carl. What is American Literature? New York: W. Morrow & Co., 1935.

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Vendler, Helen. The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Waggoner, Hyatt H. American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present. Boston: Mifflin, 1968. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1965. poetry; American; contemporary; originality; influence Ruediger Heinze, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany

NOTES

1. The title is taken from a poem and a collection of poetry by Jorie Graham of the same name. 2. The making of anthologies as a process of canonization rightly begs questions of quantitative and qualitative representation, of ideology, censorship and processes of exclusion. While these aspects are given ample attention in current discussions on canonization and anthologizing, irrational and random aspects of selection, admittedly difficult to analyze, are mostly ignored. For example, mood and topical personal disposition of the editors, questions of taste regarding layout and cover letter or chance aspects of lost manuscripts etc. always influence selection to a degree which is difficult to assess, let alone quantify. 3. All of these are problematic and freighted terms, just as the “innovative” and “genuine” to follow. 4. It would of course be unreasonable to suggest that this is the main and only tenet of Shaw’s argument. In fact, these comments mark only the conclusion of his essay on the fin de siècle poetry of the not-quite-so “tragic generation” of poets following the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties. As a conclusive remark, however, the comments are anything but marginal. 5. For a partial critique of this romantic myth of the writer vs. the reality of the marketplace see The Economy of Prestige by James English (2005) and The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova (2005), or Louis Menand’s review of them in the Dec. 26, 05/Jan. 2, 06 issue of The New Yorker. 6. Christopher Beach in his book Poetic Culture is one of the few to comment extensively and not derogatorily on the poetry academy system. 7. Here, too, the internet plays an important role. Web radio and audio files of poems facilitate the distribution of poetry as read. 8. A more subtle reading within that rhetoric is John Gery’s essay in the same volume. Incidentally, Ashbery’s poetry is also the center of a “breakthrough narrative” debate that structurally resembles the opposition between coherence and forfeiture. For a summary of the key points, see Marjorie Perloff’s essay “Normalizing Ashbery.” 9. More precisely, Derrida claims that iterability governs language, although logically the exact context (time and location) of the speech act cannot be repeated, nor its illocutionary aspect. Quotation is thus not a proof – contrary to what Derrida claims

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and in accordance with Searle – of language’s iterability but rather of its differences, while paradoxically iterability implies difference. Nevertheless, Searle reciprocally conflates text and speech act intention. Important for this discussion is the notion that while a text may be iterable through citation, its intention and original illocutionary context are not, so that citation or “re-reading” necessarily means “misreading.” It should be kept in mind that the meaning of “misreading” in the context of this debate is restricted to language philosophy and does not connote voluntary distortion. 10. Though not always; see, for example, Foucault's book-length study of Roussel, or any number of essays by Barthes, e.g. on Queneau and Sollers. 11. According to the criticism of commodity poetry, the distinction between “good/ original” poetry and “mass-produced workshop” poetry is, ironically, often tantamount to the distinction between high and pop culture, although classroom/workshop poetry of course almost always has as its aim “high art” as opposed to “popular” poetry, for example Hallmark Card verse, rock lyrics or rap rhymes. 12. In their anthology An Exaltation of Forms Finch and Varnes have collected a substantial number of poetic forms used or invented by contemporary American poets, among them Anthony Hecht, Maxine Kumin, Marilyn Hacker, Pat Mora and Lewis Turco. 13. This attack is also revealing because it is frequently used without further reflection as a corollary to the “Hallmark” attack mentioned earlier: both taken together constitutes a logical fallacy. 14. These remarks refer to her volume Materialism and her selected poetry The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize.

ABSTRACTS

This paper collates two critical ideas about American poetry: originality and influence. Under the precept of the former, poets and critics call for – and on occasion celebrate – an originally American, more or less coherent national poetry, while the latter hosts complaints about the “forfeiture of grand opportunities” (Shaw) exactly because contemporary American poetry fails to contribute to a genuinely innovative national literature. This failure is argued to be the result of an inability of poets to free themselves from incapacitating literary influences due to the “academization” and “inbred professionalism” (Altieri) of the creative writing programs. Both ideas, this essay will argue, although apparently oppositional, are based on the same – inherently inconsistent – notion of influence and predominantly appear in the context of discussions around the project/idea of a national poetry/literature. The paper will examine the critical history of these two ideas and their connection to the conception of an American national poetry.

INDEX

Keywords: Poetry, American, contemporary, originality, influence

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AUTHOR

RUEDIGER HEINZE Ruediger Heinze, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany

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The Migration of Tradition: Land Tenure and Culture in the U.S. Upper Mid-West

Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger

1. Introduction

1 Between 1815 and 1915 about 50 million individuals emigrated from Europe to overseas destinations, 35 million of whom went to the United States of America. A large number of these settlers, especially from Western and Northern Europe, followed a rural-to- rural migration pattern in that they came from peasant backgrounds and settled in agricultural areas in America. The region known as the upper Middle West, often labelled the heartland of the nation, was the destination for a large number of these immigrants. Due to the great ethnic diversity of the region, it forms an ideal locale for a comparative study of the various forms of cultural transplantation from Europe. Agrarian emigrants from Western and Northern European originated from areas with different practices of landownership, but they all hailed from societies where land was regarded as the most significant symbol of wealth. Furthermore, it formed the connection between economic ability and social standing in society. This article shows to what extent American land law influenced land transfer strategies among Germans and Norwegians, based on the criteria that both groups started their emigration prior to the American Civil War and that both to a large extent were tied to agriculture. 1

2 The relationship between the land and those that occupied it has been significant for many perceptions of the American West. In this respect, few historians have exerted greater influence in the field of American national history than Frederick Jackson Turner. When the Superintendant of the Census of 1890 stated that the era of free land was over and that settlement had come to an end, Turner pointed to the significance of the closing of the frontier. In his ground-breaking thesis, he praised the extensive territory known as the “frontier” as the means by which European immigrants were assimilated and moulded into a mixed race of Americans. According to Turner, the advance of the frontier thus meant “a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.” Especially visible in the

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colonization of the Middle West, the most significant effect of this process was the promotion of democracy in America. The frontier thesis and its perception of the open environment as a place where the American people was forged made a deep imprint upon new generations of American historians in the field of immigration history. A school of historians (the ‘ethnic Turnerians’) developed Turner’s thesis further by focusing on the grass roots, writing “history from the bottom up,” putting the immigrants from Europe and their offspring into American history, and considering the preconditions for migration in their respective homelands.2 2. Ideal Types of Farmers: the Yankee and the German 3 Despite the influence of Turner’s frontier thesis, early twentieth century scholars acknowledged that the native born and the immigrants behaved in quite different ways.3 Writing in 1922, agrarian historian Joseph Schafer drew distinct contrasts between the American and the European, who he termed as the “Yankee” and the “German” or the “Teuton.” In choosing the state of Wisconsin with its large German population, he discussed the varying attitudes of the two groups toward the land and their attitudes as farmers. The German, he asserted, looked at his patrimony as a basis for livelihood, valued land as his home, and usually purchased a piece of land in order to “establish a family estate.” In most cases a very limited acreage sufficed to achieve this goal through intensive labour and persistence. The Yankee, on the other hand, was “more speculative to the last, more imaginative and space-free, drawn by the […] lure of wealth quickly and easily acquired.” Thus, the Yankee did “regard land lightly;” to him land was a money-making business, “a desirable commodity,” and by no means “a sacred trust.” This resulted in the Yankee’s ambition to acquire larger tracts of land than his German counterparts that he could eventually sell to go elsewhere, “confident of success on a new frontier” if the farm did not meet his expectations.4

4 In addition to the various attitudes regarding land found among Yankees and Germans, Schafer also presented a dichotomy regarding their traits in farming. According to Schafer, Yankee leadership was the dominant influence in innovative agriculture, for example in breeding and improving livestock. As the organizers of the farmers’ movement through their optimism, sense of investment and speculative spirit, they formed the basis for the strong position of dairy business in the state. However, he credits Germans, Scandinavians, and other foreigners for implementing the ideas “by virtue of their agricultural morale […] their patience and perseverance.” Germans persisted as farmers by managing their smaller farms more carefully than Yankees, and in instances when the latter offered their farms for sale, “Germans were among those who were the keenest bidders for their farm properties.” Schafer concludes that Wisconsin’s agricultural success may be attributed to the “fortunate blend” between the two groups.5

5 In his seminal essay “Immigration and Expansion” published in 1940, another student of Turner’s, Marcus Lee Hansen, both repeated and expanded Schafer’s examples of cultural variation. Forms of succession were a key difference between native and foreign-born farmers. He wrote that “The ambition of the German-American father […] was to see his sons on reaching manhood established with their families on farms clustered about his own.” Due to the availability of land, an entire family could “take complete possession of a township.” The American father, on the other hand, had a different attitude and “made no such efforts on behalf of his offspring.” These strategies created different migration processes. European immigrants observed the

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mobility of the Yankee and the “sacrilegious attitude of agriculturists toward the ‘holy earth’,” where “they traded farms in the same light-hearted spirit that they swapped horses.” The mobility among the Yankees opened up opportunities for newcomers to become landed and to expand their settlement through land purchases.6

6 Many scholars have since reinforced Schafer’s and Hansen’s conclusions.7 Sociologist Sonya Salamon in the 1970s and 1980s conducted studies on the relationship between farm family land transfers and culture in Illinois. She asserts that in ideal form the two attitudes toward the land shown among German and American farmers symbolized the tensions existing in nineteenth-century American rural society. Whereas Germans represented agrarianism as a tool to promote family welfare, Yankees practiced capitalistic and individualist aims in farming. In her study on the cultural patterns of land ownership among German and Yankee farm families in Illinois from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century she employs the terms “yeoman” and “entrepreneur” to distinguish between the two patterns. These are influenced by the motivation of the two groups regarding land acquisition, management, and succession strategies to achieve strategic goals. According to Salamon, the two groups followed different strategies, both of which were successful in terms of competition and efficiency. Yeomen farm families made risk-aversive business choices, held on to their inherited land and emphasized succession and family continuity. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, strived to make profits, took risks in their business choices, willingly sold inherited land, and negotiated succession. As a result of farm consolidation, mean farm size was higher in entrepreneur-dominated areas than in yeomen communities.8

7 Although the dichotomy between the German and Yankee farmer regarding land tenure is presented in an ideal form, it does illustrate interesting differences between the two groups. The assertion here is that native American farmers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were familiar with American law and that their behaviour regarding to land tenure and land transfer was based on national law. But how did the American environment affect land transfer strategies among European immigrant groups that arrived in the United States prior to the Civil War? 3. Land Law in America 8 Two main factors influenced the development of American land law: the American Revolution, and the abundance of land on the American continent. Due to the different systems of inheritance in England, both primogeniture and partible inheritance co- existed in the early days of the colonial period. On the one hand, English common law dictated primogeniture descent for the land whereas personal property was divided in equal shares according to the Statute of Distribution. On the other hand, partible inheritance was practiced from a very early date in most of New England. Following the American Revolution lawmakers in America disposed of European law regarding land ownership and inheritance. Instead, laws were reformulated into egalitarian provisions according to a developing tradition of individual rights, freedom, and progress. Influenced by republican ideas based on equality and liberty, the states of the union by 1800 had greatly modified the law of descent of lands by abolishing favoured treatment for eldest sons. In other words, the new legislative bodies held that personal property was to be distributed in equal shares to all children in place of the favouring of one heir.

9 A common view among legal scholars is that the abundance of land in the new colonies contrasted with the scarcity of land in England. American land actions were regarded

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as simpler, freer and more innovative than those in England in the mid-eighteenth century as they were rooted in a society where land was regularly traded. As a consequence, the laws were adapted and both land practice and statutes were simplified. Instead of regarding rights pertaining to land as matters of family, birth, and tradition, economic thought gradually transformed land into another commodity that was traded on the open market. Landed holdings in England had been preserved undivided by one heir, with compensation in cash given to others. In America, on the other hand, land was plentiful to be bequeathed to both sons and daughters. Professor of Law Lawrence M. Friedman thinks that the influence of republican sentiment on American land law may have contributed to the abolition of primogeniture in the eastern states. He reasons that lawmakers in a republic with egalitarian ideals at its core wanted to discontinue the use of an English system of primogeniture which had existed to perpetuate an aristocratic social structure and political system.9

10 The passing of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organizing the Northwest Territory, including a large portion of the Midwest, prescribed basic law and granted any new states carved out from the Territory a permanent republican constitution. Representing a stronger, more centralizing code than earlier documents, the Northwest Ordinance became a powerful model for state constitutions and instructed colonization policy for generations to come.10 In the Northwest Ordinance, one of the provisions stated that property was to be divided equally among heirs, thus upholding the New England system of partible inheritance. In addition, individual laws legalizing equal inheritance to children, concerning both real and personal property, were repeated in the statutes of the states in the upper Midwest, including the territory of Wisconsin in 1839 and the state of Minnesota in 1866. The Wisconsin and Minnesota statutes formed the basis for the systems of inheritance and the real estate transfers that Norwegian immigrants encountered in the upper Middle West. When the two states entered the union in 1848 and 1858, respectively, they stayed with the common law in forming their constitution and laws.11

11 Consequently, the contrast between American individualism and European communitarianism is clear. But to what extent did the two cultures clash on the American scene? And how did these cultural conflicts influence customs tied to land tenure that European immigrants transplanted to the agricultural areas in the upper Midwest? 4. German and Norwegian Land Transfer Strategies 12 Empirical evidence in part corroborates the difference in approach between the Yankee and the German regarding attitudes toward land and inheritance. Kathleen Neils Conzen in 1985 published a case study on land transfer strategies among German, Irish, and Yankee settlers in St. Martin Township in Stearns County in west central Minnesota. Frontier Minnesota conditions permitted German immigrant farmers and their children to maintain and revitalize traditional familial values through old- country strategies. These immigrants originated from areas in Germany where both partible and impartible inheritance were practiced. Immigrants from the Rhine Province, for example, hailed from a region where the imposition of the Code Napoléon ensured that sons and daughters inherited equally. Estates in this region were frequently distributed during the lifetimes of the parents, and their support in retirement by one or more co-heirs formed part of the settlement agreement. Those from Bavaria or Westphalia, on the other hand, came from an area where impartible

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inheritance prevailed. This inheritance pattern was characterized by open-field agriculture and larger, unified holdings where peasants lived on their own farms. Here, the parental couple and the single heir and his family shared a common residence, and non-heirs received compensation from the estate in forms other than land.

13 Unlike the German pattern, Yankee settlers waited until death to dispose of their land, and thus none of the original Yankee settlers handed down the farm to the next generation. Yankee settlers, who only counted six original families, either sold out or rented out their land and then sold their inheritances after a period of joint ownership. Consequently, all Yankee families had disappeared from the township by 1905. Irish settlers, on the other hand, managed to create stable intergenerational farms. Following a process tied to Irish land transfer tradition, they practiced impartible inheritance by assisting one son directly and continuing to reside with the child who inherited the land. Yet the Irish in St. Martin shared the Yankee transfer pattern in that they waited until old age or impending death to deal with their disposal of their land.12

14 Other studies tracing European migrants to different parts of the Midwest have claimed that immigrants kept to themselves in the social and religious sphere but were ‘American’ in economic life. Historian Walter Kamphoefner states that Westphalian immigrants in Missouri adjusted rather quickly to the geographic conditions of their new home in adopting many American crops and farming techniques, although they kept more to themselves in the social and religious sphere. Other scholars have accepted and extended Kamphoefner’s conclusions. Historical geographer Robert C. Ostergren found evidence that the immigrant farmer lived simultaneously in two worlds; his or her social cultural world was based on kinship, religion, and continuity with the past, while the economic world “was modern and alien, but absolutely essential.” He states that most immigrant farmers became Americanized in their encounter with the alien environment, in spite of maintaining a distinct cultural identity. Their encounter with their American environment made them engage in experimentation of new agricultural techniques and tools and the borrowing new ideas, notably from Americans. Economic adaptation also became inevitable due to the fact that they all belonged to a larger economic community where business was conducted on American terms.13 Recent research shows that specific characteristics among descendants of immigrant German farmers remained distinctive from those of native-born Americans even a century after settlement. Yet, we must add that scholars in their research acknowledged that the density of clustered settlement was essential for community formation and, thus, the maintenance of immigrant farming patterns over time.14

15 Norwegian farmers in the upper Midwest illustrate that also other old European immigrant groups practiced inter-generational land transfers. We will first relate three central customs connected to inter-generational land transfers in Norway and to what extent these customs were transplanted to American soil. We will thereafter investigate to what extent these were adapted to an American environment.

16 Like the Germans, Norwegians have a strong rural bond which fitted well with the American ideal of the small, independent freeholder. The 1900 and 1910 federal censuses showed that Norwegians were the most rural of any nineteenth-century immigrant group. In 1900 only a little more than a quarter of the approximately 337,000 Norwegian-born persons in the United States resided in towns with more than

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25,000 inhabitants, the lowest percentage for any European group. Second-generation Norwegians also had a higher percentage among farmers than any other ethnic group, with 54.3 per cent. In 1910, still only 42 per cent of first- and second generation Norwegians were urbanized, which means that they lived in towns with 2,500 or more inhabitants. We may compare this number to native-born Americans in the same census, where 46 per cent were town-dwellers, compared to 72 per cent for all foreign- born. Historian Robert Swierenga claims that “[The] Norwegians were the most rural and clannish of the Scandinavians.” In 1880, the Scandinavians were the only major foreign-born group over-represented in agriculture, and in 1918 the Scandinavians were still over-represented by 123 percent. This was more than twice the proportion of Germans (51.8), and way ahead of native-born Americans (7.7).15

17 What can explain this immigrant group’s attachment to the land? Norway remained rural for a long time, and its rural areas experienced a heavy out-migration to towns and cities in the era of mass emigration between 1875 and 1899; whereas 17 percent of Norway s population lived in cities and urban areas in 1855, 45 percent did so in 1920. For example, as many as 95 percent of those who left Norway prior to 1865 came from rural areas, and as late as 1940 more than half of all Norwegian-Americans in the upper Midwest lived outside of towns with more than 2,500 inhabitants.16 Swedish historian Birgitta Odén has observed the degree of attachment to industry and urban life in the United States among Swedes, Danes, and Finns as compared to the rurality among Norwegians, and attributed the difference to conditions in their respective homelands. For example, the strong Swedish and Finnish assimilation with industry in America could be tied to the scattered nature of local industry that thus influenced a large number of the agricultural population. In turn, they easily came in touch with urban life in their new homeland.17

18 The persistence of family farms in Norwegian peasant society was generally regulated by the size of the farm and the opportunities to seek alternative work elsewhere, and in these cases a younger brother or sister had the chance to assume ownership of the property. As a symbol of paternalism, sons, and especially the eldest heir, were usually favoured over daughters, but the heir also was subject to certain obligations to help his parents. The old peasant society in Norway has been regarded as a society where the eldest son succeeded the father for several generations, thus ensuring the stability of ownership and the transfer of ancestral land within the same family over time. According to Norwegian historian Oscar Albert Johnsen, the freeholder, subject to the allodial right, the odelsbonde, tenaciously kept his farm through periods of economic hardship in contrast to the tenant farmer.18 Formally, Norwegian peasant society was characterized by a paternalistic and a parental culture, which is especially visible at the smallest unit of society, the family. As the household head, the husband practiced discipline in the family household according to his husbondsrett (the right and authority that the master of the household exercised over household and servants). He consequently had a formal superior position toward his wife and daughters, and sons were favoured in terms of inheritance. Sons inherited double shares as compared to their sisters and were the most likely to acquire real property, the symbol of economic and social wealth in society. Thus, the allodial right, the right of primogeniture and impartibility, and the support agreement were all advantageous for the male heir. Consequently, in Norway one heir, usually the eldest son or occasionally the daughter in cases where the family consisted of girls, inherited the family farm, leaving younger

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siblings to either migrate or lead an uncertain and often landless future in the home community.19

19 The Valdres region in south central Norway, a mountain district that consists of a large inland valley and several side valleys, is linked to several settlement areas in the upper Midwest through channels of migration (see figures 1 and 2 below). The allodial right (odelsrett), the right of primogeniture and impartibility of estates (åsetesrett), and the support agreement made in connection with farm transfers are the most important institutions connected to the inter-generational transfer of land in Norwegian peasant societies (føderåd). These customs were deeply ingrained in Norwegian rural society by the time of the large-scale transatlantic migrations. The significance of the odelsrett and the åsetesrett lies in the fact that they were given constitutional protection in 1814. 20 Moreover, these two institutions and the agreements regulating the rights of the seller and buyer in connection with land transfers (føderåd) were included in a separate law of 1821.21 Figure 1: Map of the Valdres region, including administrative townships and valley parishes.

Source: Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger: “Emigration from Reinli, Valdres to the upper Midwest: A Comparative Study,” in Odd S. Lovoll ed., Norwegian-American Studies, 35 (2000), 153-196.

20 ` The first of the three institutions studied is the allodial right, termed the odelsrett in Norwegian.22 The main purpose of the allodial right has been to preserve the landed family property for the family that has been attached to it for a certain time period. Thus, the land was connected to the family and not to a right of ownership. More specifically, the allodial right is termed as an individual’s special right to own agricultural land because they or their ancestors have owned it for a certain time period. Moreover, it is characterized by the right of pre-emption and redemption of the next of kin to real estate, exercised by a person if land had been sold out of the family. The right is mentioned in both provincial and national laws in Norway in the Middle

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Ages, and probably dates from farther back. According to historian Per G. Norseng, the allodial right was considered singularly Norwegian, a cornerstone of democracy, and an important part of national historiography and political custom.23

21 The process known as “the transition to freeholding” was a prerequisite for the practice of the odelsrett. In general, the transition to freeholding describes a process of change in land ownership whereby peasants under the system of tenancy acquire ownership of their farms. In the region studied here, the transition to freeholding was completed around 1725, whereas a large number of farm units were later established through the clearing of new farms, subdivisions from older farms, and the ascribing of crofts with freehold status. The percentage of freehold land in the region increased from 44.3 percent in 1677 to 74.6 percent in 1723. By 1850 practically all assessed farms in the Valdres region were freehold, establishing a basis for the odelsrett.24

22 The right of primogeniture and impartibility (åsetesrett) is the right of a living heir to assume the undivided ownership of landed property in cases where a deceased leaves agricultural property. More specifically, it refers to the right of the elder of two or more co-heirs to claim the åsete (the main holding), provided that the other co- inheritors be compensated with other lands or moveable property. The right of primogeniture probably was introduced in the early sixteenth century, although it did exist in earlier law codes. Thus, the institution as a rule favoured the eldest son according to the principle of impartible inheritance, but in the absence of sons the eldest daughter in the family became the heir to the landed unit. The pattern of land tenure was echoed in most agrarian cultures where sons usually received land while daughters were compensated with chattels. Furthermore, in most agrarian cultures women were subordinated to men in that they were almost without legal rights. The legal rights of women varied according to their civil status; whereas married and unmarried women were legally defined as minors until 1865, widows held a unique position as they could freely dispose of their own property.25

23 The third institution connected to farm property transfer in the Norwegian peasant society was the social system tied to the transfer of the right of use and the right of ownership of a freehold. In practice, the support agreement, termed føderåd in Norwegian, is an arrangement under which the owner(s) of a farm transfers the title to a buyer, often a son, in return for a promise to support the seller(s) for the rest of their life. In this regard, the strategy is closely linked to the Norwegian succession arrangement including the allodial right (odelsrett), the right of primogeniture, and the inheritance of undivided landed property (åsetesrett). The føderåd system dates back at least a thousand years, to the provincial laws of the Norse period, and the first written support agreement dates back to the Middle Ages. Whereas both the odelsrett and the åsetesrett have been included in separate laws and put under constitutional protection, the support agreement has never been regulated by law. In most cases the individuals subject to the føderåd agreement had at their disposal a chamber in the freeholder’s dwelling house. Only a minority lived in a separate dwelling house.26

24 Kjeld Helland-Hansen has identified two types of farm transfer on freeholds; transfers through the distribution of an estate, and transfers through warranty deeds. We will here distinguish between the inter vivos transfer, signifying that transfer took place while the seller was living, and the after death transfer. According to the former, in use until the eighteenth century, the selling party gave up their estate and organised its distribution between the heirs in return for support from one or more of them. The

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timing of farm transfer may relate to the bargaining situation between the seller and his offspring, often tied to the time of marriage of the heir, but the influence exerted by the parents in the old farm communities over their children’s marriages could heavily influence this process.27

25 Norwegian emigrants thus brought with them a cultural baggage to American rural areas in the nineteenth century. To assess how far these customs were retained, and to what extent they fit legislation in the new homeland, the following case study illustrates the succession patterns among Norwegian immigrants in the Blue Mounds settlement in Wisconsin and the Pope County settlement in Minnesota. The settlements were formed through a process of chain migration, and this study is based on the emigration of a cohort consisting of 22 immigrant families from the Valdres region to the two settlement areas in the upper Midwest, and their descendants for three generations. One half of all male emigrants were landowners or hailed from landed families, the rest were crofters or had been raised in landless families. The sample of farms located within each of the two settlement areas are representative of their respective areas in that they share a common environment and equal opportunities within social and economic life.28

O South Valdres settlements

X North Valdres settlements

Figure 2: Map of Valdres colonies in the Upper Midwest. The two areas of study in the upper Midwest, the Blue Mounds settlement in Wisconsin and the Pope County settlement in Minnesota, are both marked on the map. Source: Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger: ”Emigration from Reinli, Valdres to the upper Midwest: A Comparative Study, ” in Odd S. Lovoll, ed., Norwegian-American Studies, 35 (2000), 153-196.

5. Farm Family Support Strategies

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26 To what extent did the migrants adapt to their new surroundings in terms of land transfers? Through the cross-examination of records linked to the inter-generational transfer among the sample group, it is clear that a type of agreement between the parents and their son or daughter did exist in all families studies. The only exception was in cases where both parents had passed away before the transfer had taken place. Analogous to the function of the support contract in Norway, the contract in America made up a part of the inter vivos farm transfer between parents, or one parent if the spouse was deceased, and a child, usually a son. The former usually transferred the title to the farm to the latter in return for a promise of support in kind or in money. However, under the increasing pressure of economic forces and structural change in the twentieth century, especially in the post-war years, the paternalistic impact of inter-generational land transfer strategies brought to the upper Midwest by European immigrants has gradually changed.29

27 In many cases the money paid by the younger to the older generation enabled the older

28 holder to buy or rent a house in town. One strategy employed in cases of inter vivos transfers included the use of monetary instalments. In these cases the heir, usually a son, purchased the farm from his parents by establishing a mortgage by which he paid monetary instalments to his parents until he had paid the debt. This in turn ensured that the parents were supported for the rest of their lives. In addition both explicit bonds of maintenance agreements and wills are used in the first generation in the Blue Mounds and Pope County settlements, respectively. In cases of after death transfers, on the other hand, the surviving spouse, usually the widow, was cared for by dower and homestead rights both in intestacy cases and in most testacy cases. A second characteristic of the support system in Norwegian peasant society was the practice of landed households co-residing with the farm couple, either in a separate dwelling house or living under one roof. In America, this tradition was continued by most farm families in the study, but they were also influenced by traits practiced by their neighbours. Dwelling houses set aside for the older generation were also common in the two areas of study. In an interview from 1949 a farmer related that his grandfather in Moscow Township in the Blue Mounds settlement had a room in the back of the house where he would go almost every evening to hear tales about Norway. In Pope County, on the other hand, there was an instance where the widow of the first owner lived in a separate house on the farm.30

29 Similar to the changes that occurred in the use of support contracts, the immigrants and their offspring gradually altered their form of attachment to the family farm following the farm transfer to the next generation. Starting around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, retired members of the Norwegian immigrant generation started to move to the nearest village or town instead of moving to the farm, a pattern that increased in following generations. In most cases, they would purchase a dwelling house in a town or village nearby prior to their retirement where they could live for the rest of their lives. Thus, they replicated the migration pattern among native-born Americans. In accordance with the notion of stressing individual rights and independence, Yankees moved to town with capital that they gained from the sale of their land; in town they could pursue an education for their children or invest their money. Recreated by New Englanders and New Yorkers based on their image of towns farther east, towns were usually established as agricultural trade centres serving their surrounding area. As Norwegian farm couples retired to the

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nearest village, they both obtained individual freedom in old age while neglecting the advantages of living with family members.31 6. The Right of Primogeniture 30 The principles of the åsetesrett, the right of primogeniture and impartibility, were continued among Nowegian immigrants in America. The institution included the exclusive right of the eldest heir, in most cases a son or a daughter in case there were no sons, to assume ownership of the main property after the death of the parents. Equal to the Norwegian law of inheritance of 1854, legal provisions in the state constitutions of Wisconsin and Minnesota stated that children were to be treated equally in terms of inheritance to both real and personal property. The concept of primogeniture had been abolished in America by 1800, but the majority of Norwegian immigrants in this study continued this practice. Thus, the eldest son was favoured in a majority of instances as the farm heir in America as in Norway into the third generation.

31 Impartible inheritance was the ideal type of inheritance in Norwegian rural communities. Thus, the whole property usually was sold in one piece when it was transferred from one generation to the next much like the ideal in Norway, although there were instances where one person initially bought up several tracts of land and later divided them between his children, notably between his sons. In these cases the land did not include the homestead but rather consisted of additional parcels of land to the acreage that made up the family farm. The following example may illustrate this: Arne Erlandsen Røste emigrated from Bruflat parish in the municipality of South Aurdal to the Blue Mounds settlement in 1850. Once settled there, he purchased many acres of land prior to his death two years later. His widow Siri Andersdatter remarried another immigrant from Bruflat parish, Anders Mikkelsen Byffelien. The latter took care of the property until the children grew up and also extended the family holding by purchasing more acreage that he added on to the original homestead. He then sold parts of the property to his stepsons. One of Anders Byffelien’s younger stepsons was Anders Ruste, who later adopted the name of Andrew E. Arneson. In 1857, at age 16, his stepfather purchased 80 acres in Brigham Township, Iowa County as a strategy to pass on the property to Andrew when he reached the age of 21. When Andrew turned 21 in 1861, he purchased the acreage from his stepfather, and this later became the nucleus of his 286 acre farm.32

32 In relation to the right of primogeniture, a difference from the Norwegian pattern was that in many cases it was a younger son who took over the family farm in the two areas of study. Rather than reflecting birth order, transfers were regulated by other factors including timing related to the decision when parents wanted to retire and the interest of one particular child to become a farmer. Thus, inter-generational land transfers generally occurred less according to the Norwegian rules of primogeniture. In cases where the eldest son did not take over the home farm, he had usually purchased a neighbouring farm or had moved away from the area before the timing of transfer from the parents to one of his siblings. Moving to a different part of the state or to another state to have an education or to find work also affected land transfer, especially in the cases where it was the only son in the family who left.33

33 The focus on the male heir indicates that paternalistic traits were continued in America. The traits may be explained by the strong position of the male gender in the agricultural sphere. Yet tradition and law could clash in relation to family farm

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transfers. Legislation in America was based on egalitarian laws stressing an inheritance system favouring all heirs. However, egalitarian provisions that were transferred to newly established states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota following the declaration of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 were not followed by the mainstream of Norwegian immigrants. Instead, they adhered to paternalistic and traditional land transfer patterns including the favouring of male heirs and the use of inter vivos transfers, thus replicating both the general pattern in Norway. This type of transfer in Norway strengthened the position of the heir following declining mortality rates and the pressure on available land through population growth. In American society, on the other hand, land was regarded as a commodity. Therefore the inter vivos transfer became a significant strategy to plan the transfer of the family property.

34 In this study, inter vivos transfers were most common among Norwegians in both settlements. All told, inter vivos land transfers took place in 32 out of all 44 cases in connection with the transfer to the second and third generations, making up 73.8 per cent of all transfers. Inter vivos transfers were the only type of transfer used among first generation Norwegian-Americans in the Blue Mounds settlement in Wisconsin. The remaining 12 types of transfer took place after the death of the family head. However, in 9 cases out of 12 the deceased was testate, that is, he had written his last will and testament. The strength of inter vivos patterns are coherent with similar patterns of transfer found in other European American communities typified by linearity. Yet testacy remained the most common means of transferring property in the Upper Middle West.34

35 The real and personal estate in all intestate cases in Pope County, Minnesota were distributed according to the state statutes in the period 1885-1972, that is, in cases where the deceased had not written a will. Persons who had drawn up a will, on the other hand, to a greater extent favoured certain family members, especially sons, instead of following the state statutes. Sons were also favoured by other ethnic groups. In several instances real estate was transferred to sons on the provision that they pay a cash sum to sisters. In several instances the spouse was favoured with all real and personal estate as long as she remained unmarried. Other relatives were favoured in almost an identical number of cases. The drawing up of wills, a casual business in America, was used in cases where the owner wanted to ensure that the widow or vulnerable family members like retarded siblings received a share of the estate. Intestate cases occurred in instances of unexpected death, family disorganization, or because a family could not agree on the division of property. Lastly, the liquidation of farms took place in instances where the parents wanted to sell their farm to an outside party. Both the drawing up of a will and intestate cases had to go through the probate system.

36 Through the use of the last will and testament testators could direct their property freely to whom they wanted, and the will was usually echoed in the final decrees of distribution. The main difference between testate and intestate cases lay in the distribution of land and cash sums, as the testator could direct to whom he or she wanted. Personal property, on the other hand, in a majority of cases was divided equally between all heirs in the same manner as in intestate cases. In Pope County, Minnesota for example, real estate was distributed according to the statutes of Minnesota in six cases, whereas an identical number applied to intestate persons. Spouses still were favoured with a one-third interest in the homestead and other lands,

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whereas the balance was divided between the remaining heirs. Daughters were provided with an inheritance other than land, usually including money or personal estate much like the German pattern of land distribution. Sons were favoured before daughters in one-third of the cases where the testator usually directed his homestead and other lands to one or more sons while other sons and daughters received cash. The case of Syver Aaberg of Blue Mounds Township in Pope County may serve as an illustrative example. When his estate was distributed to his heirs in 1920, he left a widow, four sons, three daughters and two grandchildren as legal heirs. As the owner of 240 acres in said township he had directed the division of the lands as follows: his two eldest sons were to receive 80 acres, his third and fourth son received 40 acres each whereas his daughters and his two grandchildren were each to receive 40 acres jointly. If any of the daughters died without leaving any heirs, the land was to descend to brothers and sister who were then living. Instead of receiving her usual dower in lands the widow was entitled to rents and profits during her lifetime as long as she did not remarry. The personal property was distributed in equal shares between the spouse and the children.35 7. The Allodial Right 37 The allodial right, or the odelsrett, defined by the rights of pre-emption and redemption, never had any equivalent in American legislation. Rather, findings from this study indicate that its old function in Norway was replaced by a mentality related to ensuring community stability, farm family persistency and a bond to the land in America. Both written and oral data material collected in connection with my study suggest that there was a pronounced wish by many to keep the farm in the family. Yet there was not a pronounced wish that the oldest son must be favoured as the farm heir. A Norwegian immigrant explained that all his sons insisted upon owning farm lands in America although only a few of them became farmers, largely for reasons of sentiment, in harmony with the old conception of land ownership.36 This sentiment could be a reformulation of the old Norwegian institution of odelsrett in an American environment where it was non-existent. In other words, the rights of pre-emption and redemption that marked the odelsrett institution in Norway could have been replaced by a mentality tied to farm persistency and attachment to land found among Norwegian farmers.

38 A majority of all those interviewed stated that their families belonged to close-knit communities. The following example may represent the bond between family and their land that was expressed by several interviewees. A male farmer, born in 1931, is the third generation that resides on the family farm in Pope County that his grandfather homesteaded in 1875. He contends that there is a lot of family pride in residing on the farm: It’s about family. You want to keep it as good or better when you go and leave as when you got it. [ ] We do see a lot of people that buy up land, you know, and there’s so much of this corporate farming going on. Buy the land and then they sell the building site to some people who aren’t too conscious about keeping it nice, you know, and this is wrong. [ ] Save family farms, because it’s hurting rural America. [ ] [A] lot of people sell the farm and go to town. I don’t think they are cared for as well if they stayed here because a neighbour in town isn’t like a neighbour in the country.37

39 This attachment to land among Norwegians is reflected in other studies. In their study on Norwegian-American tobacco farmers in south-west Wisconsin, scholars found that the rural culture among the ethnic group affected their use of a conservative and

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traditional production strategy in their tobacco cultivation. In general, they were not interested in tobacco for their own sake, and the use of a strict dairy strategy concentrating on a loss and profit statement was not the sole goal and measure of satisfaction. Instead, they employed a farming strategy that combined tobacco growing with dairying, and by concentrating on family labor based on sustenance these farmers were better prepared to survive the farm crisis of the 1980s than those who chose alternative strategies and acquired more debt. The authors related the success of the dairy-tobacco strategy to a Norwegian rural culture that centred around the family farm and the personal and community values attached to it. According to an interdisciplinary study presented by C.F. and H.C. Midelfort on ethnicity and family therapy among Norwegian families, the love and loyalty to family, which had kept Norwegians on the same farm in Norway for centuries, continued to influence them in the United States. In Norway, where it was considered a tragedy if the family farm passed out of the family’s hands, attempts to break away from the family were often accompanied by intense feelings of guilt, anxiety and resentment.38

40 The high status of the Lutheran Church among Norwegian-Americans in the rural areas studied was significant in terms of social continuity. For example, the conservative attitudes of the Norwegian Synod were visible in the way local pastors admonished only Lutherans, and preferably Norwegians, to buy land within the congregation. In keeping the land in the family, they kept the community vibrant and the Lutheran church going. An extremely aggressive Lutheran pastorate encouraging farming as a way of life may in part explain why Norwegians stayed on the land in such large numbers. An article in The Glenwood Herald of 1910 illustrates this trait. Following a service in the Nora Lutheran Church, a birthday party for one of the parishioners was held with pastor A.O. Dolven speaking on behalf of the guests. The newspaper related the following: Mr. Dolven made a special plea for retaining the homes and farms in the family, to keep one of the boys on the home farm and thus pass it on from father to son and let the succeeding generations continue the splendid work begun by the pioneers. The pastor, pleading for families to retain the land they lived on in the same family, here reflected the conservativeness of the Norwegian Lutheran Church.39

41 In his study of seven Swedish communities in Minnesota, Robert Ostergren discovered that those marked by inter vivos transfers and estate planning were linked to conservative self-contained parish communities in Sweden with population stability and strong freeholding traditions. Farm liquidation and after death transfers of property occurred in more liberal communities marked by significant changes in the social and economic system. These had more diverse economic opportunities where the importance of small freehold was not so important. Moreover, the conservative communities were Lutheran, while those with the highest liquidation rates lived outside community boundaries and were unchurched. In his study on the migration from Balestrand to the Upper Middle West, Jon Gjerde found that immigrants that were church members were less transient than others in the region as they remained part of an informal network of activities with economic and social advantages.40

42 Ostergren’s and Gjerde’s findings are coherent with the findings in this study. In all but four instances, the family attended the same Lutheran church for all three generations. In one case the change occurred in the second generation and in three of the cases in the third generation. The change in most cases took place where the person attached to the farm family studied attended the spouse’s church but in one case was influenced by

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the move of the farm family to the nearest town. In one of these cases the change occurred when the farmer married a German Lutheran girl and became a member of her church. Moreover, several interviewees said that the church promoted segregation, especially in the first and the second generations.41 Consequently, the findings of the study indicate that the local Lutheran church guaranteed social continuity. How do these findings relate to farm family persistency?

43 The study looked at the heads of household in two townships in Pope County by ethnicity in the 1905 state census for Minnesota in order to find out if ethnicity was significant regarding the period of residence. By 1905, 83 Norwegian heads of household had lived in the same enumeration district for 21 years and more, making up a total of 59.3 per cent of all Norwegian households. Moreover, the numbers fairly well reflect the persistency rates among the children in Pope County in the second and third generations. Due to a lack of data for the Wisconsin settlement area, a school district was picked out at random that consisted of 38 farms and building sites in which Norwegian-Americans made up a majority of the population for several generations. A total of 26 farms are found within the boundaries of the school district, of which Norwegian immigrants established 20. In all cases the farm had remained in the same family for at least two generations at least once since initial settlement. Only six farms, all Norwegian, had remained in the same family for three generations and more. More importantly, a rural bond existed despite farm persistency on a limited number of farms; in 23 out of 38 families one or both spouses in several instances were natives from the same school district or the neighbouring school district.42

44 To sum up, the ideal of the allodial right was brought over by Norwegian immigrants and adapted to a mentality tied to the love of the family farm, the love for a rural way of life, and a strong interest to keep the farm in the family. This adaptation was done through a continuous process of negotiation through the generations, thus changing its original meaning. 8. Conclusion 45 The focus of this article is the relationship between American land law and the degree to which customs were transplanted from Europe in inter-generational land transfers. Norwegians were characterized by a rural bond and an attachment to the family farm. These traits were identical to cultural traits tied to German farm families in America. A third common trait between the two groups is the community formation around cohesive neighbourhoods based on common background down to the parish level. According to Robert Ostergren, land, from an entrepreneurial angle, was a material advantage and a source of speculation or quick profit where materialism outweighed communal and non-economical goals. In another sense, land was giver of life, symbol of familial accomplishment, independence and identity within community; here the ultimate goal was its orderly inheritance in the interest of maintaining family and community continuity.43 If we attribute the first attitude as a “Yankee” trait and the second choice as “German,” the Norwegians are closely identified with the latter.

46 The three Norwegian customs of the allodial right, the right of primogeniture and impartibility, and the support agreement were never fully transplanted to American soil. Instead, they were reformulated in a new environment based on flexible and practical solutions among Norwegian immigrants and their offspring. Patterns of land transfer from strong and traditional freeholding regions in Norway that were based on the ties between family and land were meaningful for emigrants who left the

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homeland. Cultural traits that develop from the adaptation process must be understood on their own terms as Norwegian-American. They have ensued from a separate historical development through the negotiation and re-negotiation of identity between the immigrant and host society in a multicultural society. Terje Hasle Joranger, University of Oslo

NOTES

1. Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order Upon the Land, The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country (New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 7-8. 2. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1958 [1920]), 1-5, 22-30, 127-156, 243-268; Jon Gjerde: ‘Forum: Immigration Hitory – Assessing the Field: New Growth on Old Vines – The State of the Field: The Social History of Immigration to and Ethnicity to the United States,’ Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 (Summer 1999), 41-46. 3. Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United States (New York: Houghton-Miffin, 1909), 29 ff, cited in Jon Gjerde, ‘The “Would-Be Patriarch” and the “Self-made Man”: Marcus Lee Hansen on Native and Immigrant Farmers in the American Middle West’ in Birgit Flemming Larsen et al, eds., On Distand Shores: Proceedings of the Marcus Lee Hansen Immigration Conference, Aalborg, Denmark June 29-July 1, 1992 (Aalborg, Denmark, 1993), 36. 4. Joseph Schafer, ‘The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin: I. Characteristic Attitudes Toward the Land,’ Wisconsin Magazine of History, 6 (1922), 142-145. 5. Ibid. 277-279. 6. Marcus Lee Hansen, ”Immigration and Expansion” in The Immigrant in American History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1940), 53-76. 7. Gjerde, ‘The “Would-Be Patriarch,” 35-49. 8. Sonya Salamon, Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, & Community in the Midwest (Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 1-9, 19-33, 252-255. 9. Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, & Michel Dahlin, Inheritance in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 6-16, 24-44, 55-66, 83, 112-121; Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 20-25, 58-65. 10. Johnson, Order Upon the Land, 7. 11. Wisconsin Revised Statutes 1849, Chapter 62: 338, Minnesota Statutes 1867, Chapter XLVI: 353; Friedman, A History of American Law, 160-167; Shammas, Salmon, & Dahlin, Inheritance in America, 95-86, 236-251. 12. Kathleen Neils Conzen, ‘Peasant Pioneers, Generational succession among German farmers in frontier Minnesota,’ in Steven Hahn et al, eds, The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 259-285; Sonya Salamon, “Ethnic Differences in Farm Family Land Transfers,” Rural Sociology, 45 (Summer 1980), 290-308.

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13. Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 128-134; Robert C. Ostergren, “European Settlement and Ethnicity on the Agricultural Frontiers of South Dakota,” South Dakota History, 13 (Spring/Summer 1983), 49-82. 14. Myron Gutmann et al, ‘German-Origin Settlement and Agricultural Land Use in the Twentieth Century Great Plains,’ in Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds., German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective (Madison, Wisconsin: Max Kade Institute, 2004),138-168; Salamon, ‘Prairie Patrimony,’ 21. 15. Odd S. Lovoll, ‘Norwegians on the Land’ in the series Historical Essays in Rural Life (Marshall, Minnesota, 1992), 1-2; Robert P Swierenga., “Ethnicity and American Agriculture,” Ohio History 89 (Summer 1980), 323-344. 16. Brynjulv Gjerdåker, ‘continuitet og modernitet,’ Norges Landbrukshistorie, vol. 3, 1814-1920 (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2002), 165; T.A. Hoverstad, The Norwegian Farmers in the United States (Fargo, North Dakota: Hans Jervell Publishing Co., 1915), 11-12. 17. Birgitta Odén, ‘Emigrationen från Norden till Nordamerika under 1800-talet, Aktuella forskningsuppgifter,’ Historisk tidskrift, 83 (1963), 274-277. 18. Oscar Albert Johnsen, Norges bønder: utsyn over den norske bondestands historie (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1936), 301. 19. Rigmor Frimannslund, ‘Søstre fra Middelalderen og ny tid,’ in Tradisjon, 14 (1984), 74-78; Amund Helland, ‘Topografisk-statistisk Beskrivelse over Kristians Amt,’ vol. 5 b2 in the series Norges Land og Folk (Kristiania (Oslo): Aschehoug, 1913), 310. 20. Per G. Norseng, ‘Odelsrett: the Norwegian retrait lignager,’ in Tore Iversen & John Ragnar Myking, eds., Land, Lords and Peasants, Peasants rights to control land in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period Norway, Scandinavia and the Alpine region, Seminar Report, Department of History and Classical Studies, Norwegain University of Arts and Sciences (Trondheim 2005), 202. 21. Law of June 26, 1821 regarding the odelsrett and the åsetesrett (the Allodial Right, the Right of Primogeniture, and impartibility). The title reads the following in Norwegian: "Lov av 26. juni 1821 angaaende Odelsretten og Aasedesretten." The law was revised and modernized when the Norwegian Parliament passed the new "Lov om odelsretten and åsetesretten" on June 28, 1975. 22. Jon Skeie, Odelsretten og åsetesretten (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1950), 7; Harald Bjorvand et al, Våre Arveord. Etymologisk Ordbok (Oslo: Novus Forlag, Institutt for sammenlignende kulturforskning, 2000), 681. 23. Norseng, ‘Norwegian retrait lignager,’ 203-205. 24. Anders Frøholm, Gardar og slekter i Vang, vol. 1:B in Ivar Aars, ed., Valdres Bygdebok (Gjøvik: Valdres Bygdeboks forlag, 1990), 176-181; Harald Hvattum, Framgang, oppbrot og motstraumar. Valdresbygdene si historie 1800-1914, vol.3:2 in Ivar Aars, ed., Valdres Bygdebok (Fagernes: Valdres Bygdeboks forlag, 2004), 238-242. 25. Skeie, Odelsretten og åsetesretten, 15-16, 39-40; Norseng, ‘Norwegian retrait lignager,’ 215-216; Frimannslund, ”Søstre fra Middelalderen og ny tid,” 74; Gjerdåker, ‘Kontinuitet og modernitet,’ 114-115, 121. 26. Kjeld Helland-Hansen, Føderådsordningens historie i Norge, vol. 3, CD-ROM edition (Oslo 1997), 3-8, 22-23, 239-242. 27. Ibid., 391; Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger, The Migration of Tradition? A Study on the Transfer of Traditions Tied to Intergenerational Land Transfers among Emigrants from the Valdres region, Norway to the Upper Midwest and their Descendants for Three Generations, 1850-1980, PhD dissertation; Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, 2008, 363-400.

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28. Joranger, The Migration of Tradition?, 3-5, 17-24. 29. Mark W. Friedberger, Farm Families & Change in Twentieth-Century America (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 74-98. 30. Joranger, The Migration of Tradition?, 271-272. 31. Ibid., 275-286; Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1997), 4-9.199-200. 32. Joranger, 256-265. 33. Ibid., 298-299. 34. Mark W. Friedberger, ‘Handing Down the Home Place: Farm Inheritance Strategies in Iowa,1870-1945,’ Annals of Iowa, 47 (1984), 518-536, Friedberger, Farm Families, 78-79; Joranger, The Migration of Tradition?, 254-255; Gjerde, The Minds of the West, 207. 35. Joranger, The Migration of Tradition?, 260-264; Friedberger, ‘Probate and Land Records in Rural Areas,’ Agricultural History, 58 (1984), 123-126; Pope County Probate Court, Final decrees of distribution, 1867-1982, filed June 7 1920, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota. 36. Knut Gjerset: ‘A Norwegian-American Landnamsman: Ole S. Gjerset,’ in Studies and Records, 3 (Northfield, Minnesota: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1928), 94, cited in Theodore C. Blegen, Norwegian Migration to America 1825-1860 (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1931]), 6. 37. Interview with male farmer, age 69, August 15, 1995. 38. Robert A. Ibarra and Arnold Strickon, ‘The Norwegian-American Dairy-Tobacco Strategy in Southwestern Wisconsin,’ Norwegian-American Studies, 32 (Northfield, Minnesota: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1983), 3-29; C.F. Midelfort and H.C. Midelfort, ‘Norwegian families,’ in Monica McGoldrick et al, eds, Ethnicity and family therapy (New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1982), 438-456. 39. Playford V. Thorson: ‘Scandinavians’ in William C. Sherman et al, eds: Plains Folk: North Dakotas s Ethnic History (Fargo, North Dakota: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies and University of North Dakota, 1988), 190; The Glenwood Herald (Minnesota) June 17, 1910. 40. Robert C. Ostergren, ‘Land and Family in Rural Immigrant Communities,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 71 (September 1983), 400-411, Gjerde, From Peasants to Farmers, 164-165. 41. Joranger, The Migration of Tradition?, 292-293. 42. Perry Historical Center. The Historic Perry Norwegian Settlement (Daleyville, Wis.: The Perry Historical Center, 1994), 156-169; Joranger, The Migration of Tradition?, 294-296. 43. Robert C. Ostergren, A Community Transplanted. The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West, 1835-1915 (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 262-263.

AUTHOR

TERJE MIKAEL HASLE JORANGER Terje Hasle Joranger, University of Oslo

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Judas Iscariot: The Archetypal Betrayer and DeMille’s Cine-Biblical Salvation within The King of Kings (1927)

Anton Karl Kozlovic

1. Hollywood’s Best-Known Unknown, and the Jesus Genre

1 The legendary Cecil B. DeMille1 (1881-1959), affectionately known to colleagues as “C.B.” (DeMille 43), was a cofounder of Hollywood and a progenitor of Paramount studio who helped turn an obscure Californian orange grove into a fully-fledged movie colony that became the synonym for filmmaking worldwide, and made DeMille as recognised as his famous actors (Birchard; DeMille and Hayne; Edwards; Essoe and Lee; Higashi Guide, Culture; Higham; Koury; Louvish; Noerdlinger; Orrison; Ringgold and Bodeen).

2 As a seminal film pioneer, innovative producer-director2, and self-confessed pop culture professional (DeMille and Hayne 195), DeMille instituted the “Age of Hollywood” (Paglia 12), helped develop the classical narrative style, and became “the man most identified with the biblical epic” (Lang 13) with his indelible classics: The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927), Samson and Delilah (1949) and The Ten Commandments (1956). His views about religion and American society transmitted through this innovative media modality significantly shaped the culture of his country in ways that would be churlish to deny and unsafe to ignore, especially as “an architect of modern consumption” (Higashi Culture 203) who “had considerable influence on the craft of motion-picture making and on the popular culture of the United States at large” (Wexman 84).

3 Despite public cynicism about religious filmmakers more concerned with selling seats than saving souls, DeMille was “a genuinely and deeply religious man” (Butler 144) from a profoundly religious family. As he proudly claimed near the end of his life: “my ministry was making religious movies and getting more people to read the Bible than anyone else ever has” (Orrison 108). He achieved that consciousness-raising goal

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magnificently having become “virtually the Sunday school teacher for the [American] nation” (Beck 27) and the rest of the Western world.

4 Although he was “the King of Hollywood” (Louvish 438), DeMille’s career and auteur artistry have frequently been overlooked, dismissed or devalued, whilst the numerous social, political and cultural issues surrounding his seventy feature films have not often been debated or documented beyond the regular handful of favourites (Bourget) and sometimes artistic praise (Berthome). Even in the post-millennial period, “Of all the great Hollywood pioneers, Cecil B. DeMille has been the one most commonly neglected and slighted, his importance marginalized” (Welsh 317), in fact, “De Mille rarely receives the serious academic recognition and study that he deserves” (Smoodin 251), thus ironically making him Hollywood’s best-known unknown.

5 Furthermore, DeMille was often derided by decrying critics and academia alike. For example, Virginia W. Wexman considered his films to be “generally superficial and frequently meretricious … they added nothing to film art” (83). Giannetti and Eyman claimed that: “It is no longer fashionable to admire De Mille” (40), whilst Norman Bel Geddes complained that: “Inspirationally and imaginatively, CB was sterile. His stories, situations and characters were, almost without exception, unintelligent, unintuitive, and psychologically adolescent” (Green 191). These unflattering views are misleading and thus firmly rejected by the writer. DeMille was a man of profound artistic talents that were frequently unidentified simply because they were subtle, not expected nor actively sought, but then as Henry Wilcoxon had prophesised decades ago: “True recognition for DeMille’s greatness will come many years after his death [in 1959]” (276).

6 What is urgently needed today is a serious re-examination of DeMille’s entire filmic oeuvre to reveal the true artistic depths of this quintessential American artist, piece- by-piece if necessary. For example, DeMille’s silent New Testament epic about Jesus Christ, The King of Kings was a watershed film in the history of world cinema, American film and the Jesus genre. As the “uncontested highpoint of the era of the silent film” (Baugh 12), it had firmly “established the style of the reverent epic” (Walsh Reading 2), “became the template for Jesus movies for the next eighty years” (Goldburg 13), and is still considered by many commentators today to be “one of the best religious pictures ever filmed” (Kinnard and Davis 44), if not “the best Jesus movie ever made” (Grace 48).

7 DeMille’s powerful portrayal of the gentle Jesus (H.B. Warner) was certainly radical in its day wherein any cinematic image of Jesus was usually avoided; let alone a full-face slowly emerging on the screen to greet the audience’s gaze. Equally noteworthy, if less appreciated, was DeMille’s deft construction of Judas Iscariot (played by Joseph Schildkraut), the archetypal biblical betrayer that became DeMille’s cine-biblical salvation in upholding his legendary reputation as a “stickler for authenticity” (Mickey Moore quoted in Orrison 96); and to belie those commentators who cannot go beyond viewing DeMille as only “the king of box-office hokum” (Eames 61).

8 Consequently, utilising humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens (i.e., examining the textual world inside the frame, but not the world outside the frame— see Bywater and Sobchack), the critical state-of-the-art DeMille, film and religion literature was selectively reviewed and integrated into the text to enhance narrative coherence (albeit, with a strong reportage flavour). This was followed by a close examination of the construction of DeMille’s Judas, a brief comparison of the character

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with some of his cinematic rivals, and a tentative exploration of DeMille’s Christian true believer orientation encoded therein.

9 This investigation complements and expands upon the writer’s previous research on the theme of Judasean betrayal within DeMille’s films (Kozlovic). Furthermore, this renewed critical approach employing old paradigms and traditional methodologies will give new insights into DeMille and the Jesus genre previously ignored. 2. The Scriptural Judas 10 The biblical character “Judas Iscariot” (Matt. 26:14; Mark 14:10; John 12:4)3, the “Judas surnamed Iscariot” (Luke 22:3), son of Simon (John 6:71) is the infamous rogue Apostle who betrayed Jesus Christ. He is not to be confused with Juda the ancestor of Jesus (Luke 3:30), or Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), or the Apostle Judas, the son of James, also called Thaddaeus (Mark 3:18), or the “Judas … not Iscariot” (John 14:22). Nor is he to be confused with one of Jesus’ four half-brothers called Judas (Matt. 13:55), or the Judas that Saul of Tarsus resided with (Acts 9:11), or “Judas surnamed Barsabas” (Acts 15:22) who accompanied Paul on his mission to Antioch.

11 The world-famous Judas is the quintessential biblical villain who “has become the archetype of traitors for all time, his name an immediately understood reference, in hundreds of languages, for betrayal” (Parris and Angel 140). Within Christian folklore, mythology and Western culture, he is the personification of evil, malice, greed, pride, mistrust, hypocrisy, scheming and betrayal. “His villainy was definitive” (Parris and Angel 139), especially when Jesus claimed: “woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed” (Luke 22:22). However, like Jesus, there is nothing known “about his background, about his physical appearance, or about his personality” (Parris and Angel 140).

12 Before becoming reviled throughout Christendom, Judas was selected by Jesus to be an Apostle, “one of the twelve” (Matt. 26:14; Mark 14:10; Luke 22:3; John 6:71), one of the “disciples” (John 12:4) responsible for promoting Jesus’ teachings. His apostolic position was so important that after his ignominious death, Matthias took his place and missionary duties (Acts 1:15-26). Within that elite group of Jesus companions, Judas was entrusted with their finances, which has been interpreted within many Bible translations as “in charge of the disciples’ funds” (John 12:6 TLB), “keeper of the money bag” (John 12:6 NIV), “the bag (the money box, the purse of the twelve)” (John 12:6 TAB). Since Judas is the group’s chosen treasurer, it implies his dependability, trustworthiness and honesty to warrant such a responsible position.

13 However, most Christians do not doubt his negative reputation today. He was last on the list of the Apostles and referred to as “Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him [Jesus]” (Matt. 10:4), and elsewhere characterised as “the traitor” (Luke 6:16), “a thief” (John 12:6) and “a devil” (John 6:70-71). However, the Gospel account of his corruption is sparse, incomplete, vague, differing and sometimes ambiguous, with John suggesting that Judas was motivated by greed, which came to a head at the house of Simon the leper in Bethany (Matt. 26:6-14). Therein a “woman” (Mark 14:3), “Mary” (John 12:3), had poured “very precious ointment” (Matt. 26:7), the “ointment of spikenard, very costly” (John 12:3), “very precious” (Mark 14:3) over Jesus’ “head” (Matt. 26:7; Mark 14:3). She also “anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair” (John 12:3), but “when his disciples saw it, they had indignation” (Matt. 26:8) [my emphasis], “some that had indignation within themselves” (Mark 14:4) [my emphasis]. Therefore, “one of his [Jesus’] disciples, Judas Iscariot” (John 12:4) spoke up saying:

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“Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” (John 12:5).

14 In the remaining Gospels, Judas was not named or singled out, in fact, there appeared to be a small group of disciples against wasting the precious ointment upon Jesus. For example, “To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor” (Matt. 26:8-9). “Why was this waste of the ointment made? For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her” (Mark 14:4-5) [my emphasis].

15 Jesus defended Mary and her anointing action, in what could be seen as an act of divine self-pampering (Matt. 26:10-13). John goes a step further by casting dispersions upon Judas claiming: “He did not say this because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, he used to help himself to what was put into it” (John 12:6 NIV) [my emphasis]. Alternately, “he took for himself what was put into it” (John 12:6 TAB), “sometimes would steal from it” (John 12:6 TBFT), “he was a thief … and pilfered what was put in” (John 12:6 Moffatt). After Christ’s rebuff of the disciples and/or stinging Judasean putdown after the Last Supper, Judas committed the infamous act that severed him from Jesus, his Apostle peers, and the rest of Christendom forevermore. Namely, “one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests” (Matt. 26:14) “to betray him [Jesus] unto them” (Mark 14:10). So, Judas “went his way, and communed with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray him [Jesus] unto them” (Luke 22:4). 3. Judas: Crooked or Concerned? 16 At this narrative juncture, it appears that Judas was understandably concerned about costs and waste as the keeper of the group’s purse, but unlike Richard Walsh who considered that DeMille’s “greedy Judas [was situated] between [the] equally greedy Caiaphas and the ethereal Jesus” (Reading 35), the writer argues that DeMille’s prime motivation for his Judas going to the priest-leaders was rooted more in disappointment and revenge than money. After all, Judas could have worn the chastisement, bided his time and continued to drain the moneybag if he really was a despicable thief as John asserts. Why kill the proverbial golden goose and lose easy money in the long-run by such a disastrous short-term strategy?

17 If money was a factor, then it appeared to be only a minor secondary motivation. When Judas met with the high priests, he said: “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him [Jesus] unto? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him” (Matt. 26:15-16). “And when they heard it, they were glad, and promised to give him money. And he sought how he might conveniently betray him [Jesus]” (Mark 14:11), “And he promised, and sought opportunity to betray him unto them in the absence of the multitude” (Luke 22:6).

18 At this fateful meeting, there is no outrageously high price demanded by Judas, there is no compromise counter-offer, there is no haggling process at all for an allegedly greedy man. (DeMille would dramatically show this haggling process between Rameses [Yul Brynner] and Dathan [Edward G. Robinson] in the second The Ten Commandments when Dathan, who knew who Baka’s [Vincent Price’s] murderer was and could ensure Rameses ascendency to the pharaohship). The strong impression is that Judas would have taken anything offered, or done it for free, if nothing was offered. In fact, Judas does not ask for money per se, but rather, the vaguer question: “What will ye give me”? This request could have included money, but was not limited to it, especially

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when sex, power, position, gifts and favours are traditional substitutes. In fact, it was the priests who first offered Judas money, thus forging another long association between religion, Jews and currency.

19 Although greed is implied in this scene, DeMille’s Judas is not even interested in the money because he is “hunched over his knees, hands clasped, the picture of misery … [while] Caiaphas counts out the coins on the table in front of him” (Reinhartz 156). One would imagine a covetous eye upon the money and its correct counting, followed by intense personal satisfaction (not misery) if greed was truly Judas’ root motivation. Even then, the priestly financial offer was primarily symbolic, not commercial: Thirty pieces of silver ($66, if shekels) was the price offered. (Mt 26:14, 15) The sum fixed by the religious leaders appears designed to show their contempt of Jesus, viewing him as of little value. According to Exodus 21:32, the price of a slave was 30 shekels. Carrying this forward, for his work as a shepherd of the people, Zechariah was paid “thirty pieces of silver.” Jehovah scorned this as a very meager amount, regarding the wages given to Zechariah as an estimation of how one faithless people viewed God himself. (Zec 11:12, 13). Consequently, in offering just 30 pieces of silver for Jesus, the religious leaders made him out to be of little value (WTBTSP/IBSA 130).

20 In short, Caiaphas’ (Rudolph Schildkraut’s) financial offer was nothing that would even remotely tempt a truly greedy man. As Parris and Angel put it: “Yet for selling his Messiah for only thirty pieces of silver, Judas Iscariot deserves a measure of sympathy. He got a worse deal than countless successors who were to sell less for more” (139). For example, even in the Old Testament, when Delilah betrayed the secret of Samson’s strength, she got 1,100 pieces of silver from each of the lords of the Philistines (Judg. 16:5), traditionally assumed to be five (Judg. 3:3; 1 Sam. 6:16), thus, 5,500 pieces of silver in total. Judas’ thirty pieces of silver was so pitifully small (i.e., 0.5% of Delilah’s take) that when he remorsefully attempted to return the money, the scheming Caiaphas refused it and contemptuously said: “What is that to us?” (Matt. 27:4). This callous comment referred to the amount of money or Judas’ back-pedalling desire for restitution, or both. Caiaphas’ unwavering and villainous rejection of this “easy” money is even more significant given the popularly perceived reputation of the Jew’s love of money (and DeMille’s intertitle claim of him caring “more for Revenue than for Religion”).

21 The alleged Judasean greed motivation pales even further because of the scripturally based spiritual cause of Judas’ betrayal, and which was not presented as symbolic, namely, “supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot … to betray him [Jesus]” (John 13:2), “Then entered Satan into Judas” (Luke 22:3), “Satan entered into him” (John 13:27). Not only did the devil/Satan enter into Judas, but: “Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly” (John 13:27). This was apparently part of the divine plan for as Jesus said: “And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined” (Luke 22:22) [my emphasis], “remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified” (Luke 24:6-7) [my emphasis]. If Judas was possessed by the devil/Satan, with Jesus’ knowledge and speed request, can Judas legitimately be held accountable for his subsequent betrayer actions? Judas acted like a cosmic puppet whilst being encouraged, condoned and tacitly approved of by the knowing Christ.

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22 Alternately, was Judas possessed by the devil/Satan as part of God’s larger plan? Similar to King Saul being harassed by God when “the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him (1 Sam. 16:14) [my emphasis], or when Samson demanded to be married to an outsider/foreigner/Philistine woman instead of one from his own tribe/religion /ethnicity (Judg. 14:1-3). Why? Because “his father and his mother knew not that it was of the Lord, that he sought an occasion against the Philistines” (Judg. 14:4) [my emphasis]. That is, it was “part of a deliberate divine strategy that might be described as a policy of “pretext,” by which Samson’s connection with Philistine women was intended to provide him justification for harming the Philistines by a series of annoyances and not by wars of deliverance” (Berlin, Brettler and Fishbane 541). “Samson is an unwitting tool, manipulated by YHWH” (Streete 54), he is a cosmic patsy who subsequently acted like “a Danite Terminator … It is in fact his God-ordained duty to behave irrationally—he is meant to get the rebellion started, to “begin the deliverance of Israel” [Judg. 13:5]” (Wurtzel 47).

23 God/Jehovah/YHWH likewise manipulated the Pharaoh of the Exodus and even told Moses his battle plan, namely: “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart” (Exod. 7:3) [my emphasis], which he repeatedly did (Exod. 7:13-14), despite the Pharaoh repeatedly capitulating to God. However, God kept interfering with Pharaoh as part of his divine charade for holy exemplar reasons: “I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, that I might shew these my signs before him” (Exod. 10:1) [my emphasis]. The deliberate hardening of Pharaoh’s heart by God occurred after the plague of locusts (Exod. 10:20), and after the plague of darkness (Exod. 10:27), and after the killing of the first born of Egypt (Exod. 11:10; 12:29) utilising Moses as some sort of Hebrew union representative. Then God allowed the Pharaoh to let his people go (Exod. 12:31-32), but soon after the exodus started, God hardened the Pharaoh’s heart and of his servants, charioteers and horsemen, yet again (Exod. 14:4, 5, 8, 17), thus leading to the horrendous drowning of the pursuing Egyptians in the collapsing Red Sea.

24 The Pharaoh was set-up by God, yet today the Pharaoh is the personification of anti- God recalcitrance! DeMille put his unique spin on this biblical fact within his second The Ten Commandments when Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) said: “Who else can soften Pharaoh’s heart? Or harden it?” and Moses (Charlton Heston) replied: “Yes—you may be the lovely dust through which God will work His purpose” (i.e., conceding that the pagan Egyptian Nefretiri could be an instrument of God for the salvation of the Hebrews).

25 Therefore, is not Judas in the Bible and The King of Kings just another example of God’s divine charade in accordance with Jesus’ prayer to God where he dutifully reported playing his part so “that the scripture might be fulfilled” (John 17:12)? After all, Jesus was aware of his divine destiny: “For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him” (John 6:64). “For he knew who should betray him” (John 13:11), which involved hands, eating, dishes and bread as prophesised from days of old (Psalms 41:9), as confirmed in Jesus’ time (Matt. 26:23) and subsequently re-enacted (John 13:26-27).

26 Jesus even confirmed Judas as the predicted betrayer: “Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said [it]” (Matt. 26:25), and so one can see Judas-the-martyr being part of God’s divine plan for the greater cosmic good. “Indeed, one might even argue that Judas’ betrayal had good consequences. His action led to Christ’s death, and Christ’s death redeemed us, saving

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countless human beings from eternal damnation. If any action in the history of the world has produced the greatest good for the greatest number, surely this one did!” (Lannstrom 249). “Of course, theologically, Jesus’ death was part of God’s plan. For, had Jesus not been persecuted and crucified, there would be no redemption” (Deacy 121) and maybe no Christianity as we know it today.

27 The greed motivation for Judas’ betrayer behaviour also fails for a second time. After Judas betrayed Christ in the garden of Gethsemane with the now famous Judas kiss, Jesus was arrested and forcibly taken away (Matt. 26:47-49; John 18:1-13). Consequently, Judas felt great remorse for his deed and the following day repented, admitted his sin of betraying innocent blood, and tried to return the thirty pieces of silver to the high priests and their henchmen to get some absolution. Yet, they refused him and the money, so Judas threw away the pieces of silver into the temple and proceeded to kill himself (Matt. 27:1-5).

28 This was hardly the selfish act of a greed-infected person, but more understandable if Judas really was devil/Satan possessed. Why? Because after the evil deed was done, presumably once the possessing entity had departed, Judas reverted to “normal” and realised the enormity of his (evil spirit-inspired) treacherous deed. He then tried to correct it, was rebuked, and so failing in that self-cleansing task sought to punish himself with a deed commensurate with his perceived crime. Judas’ self-sacrifice for personal reasons had therefore prefigured Jesus’ self-sacrifice for cosmic reasons.

29 Alternately, if the treacherous motivation was truly an evil intent, whether a literal devil/Satan possessing Judas, or just a symbolic metaphor for revenge (whether psychologically or emotionally induced), financial greed is still a very weak motivation for betraying Jesus. Some biblical scholars even argue that Judas was Jesus’ friend and was grossly misunderstood (see Klassen); however, few biblical scholars go beyond the traditional greed-based interpretation, but very refreshingly, not Jesus filmmakers. How one cinematically portrays Judas is ultimately rooted in whether one is a Christian true believer or not. As Gerald Forshey argued: Did God plan to have his son murdered? According to the Gospel accounts, Judas caused the crucifixion because that was his role in the divine plan. But for those who do not believe that the supernatural intervenes into the natural order, Judas loses his legitimacy. This raises the question of why Judas betrayed Jesus— complicated by an additional consideration: Was it possible that the infallible Christ made a mistake in choosing Judas as a disciple? Or given divine foreknowledge of his fate, did Jesus masochistically seek self-destruction? Various film interpretations of Judas’s role seek to resolve those perennial questions (801). 4. DeMille’s Judas: Disaffected, Diseased or Demonic?

30 But what of DeMille’s Judas played by Joseph Schildkraut? DeMille-the-lay-biblical- scholar did not believe that “thirty pieces of silver” (Matt. 26:15) was sufficient financial motivation for Judas to betray Jesus (Solomon 113). Consequently, his Judas only expressed political disappointment with Jesus after he rejected his king-making attempts and when “all hope of earthly kingdom gone,” not because he could no longer pilfer from the Apostle’s money bag, or make a financial killing with the High Priest’s contemptuously small amount of silver. Indeed, DeMille’s Judas already looked rich and wealthy as indicated by his dapper appearance and ability to afford the company of such high-class courtesans like Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) operating within her sumptuous palace with multiple handmaidens, servants, animals and exotic zebra- drawn chariots. This wealthy Magdalene thought Judas so important (and rich?) that

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she left her palace (and presumably her other paying customers) to pursue Judas who found the company of some wandering carpenter from Nazareth preferable to her own attentions (i.e., the defection of a paying customer worthy of her time, financial losses and personal reputation). In short, DeMille’s Judas simply did not need such a small amount of blood-money.

31 He openly signalled his non-greed interpretation in an intertitle that did not identify Judas the Greedy, but rather: “Judas Iscariot … the Ambitious, who joined the Disciples in the belief that Jesus would be the nation’s King, and reward him with honor and high office.” The crucial turning point for DeMille’s Judas occurred when Jesus preached about a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one, which severely disappointed Judas-the- ambitious and led him to betray Jesus to the High Priest. His ambitious desires were also indicated earlier when Jesus cured the blind child and Judas lamented: “Would He [Jesus] but shun the Poor, and heal the Rich, we could straightaway make Him King— with me on His right hand!” [my emphasis]. DeMille also captured the expression of the utterly baffled Judas who appeared unable to grasp the notion of a transcendental kingdom, and so when the promise of an earthly political kingdom evaporated and Judas’ ambitions were well-and-truly dashed, he spiralled into depression-filled decline.

32 Although Judas’ character was initially portrayed as being situated “between greedy, earthly Caiaphas and unearthly Jesus” (Goldburg 13), DeMille-the-film-artist reflected Judas’ personal and political disappointment as a king-making wannabe via his rapid physical deterioration on-screen. Judas’ usually neat, combed hair become tangled and unkempt as he slowly dissolves into a dishevelled lunatic bordering upon insanity prior to betraying Jesus to the High Priest, and then despairingly choosing suicide—the ultimate act of personal deterioration. By resorting to psychologically-induced deterioration instead of spirit possession by the devil/Satan, DeMille had opted for a religiously safer, if more mundane cause. This dramatic choice also reflected his auteuristic trademark of engineered ambiguity because it could be argued that the evil devil/Satan idea was just a metaphor for psychological infirmity using a medical model of illness.

33 DeMille-the-fundamentalist-and-Christian-true-believer should have portrayed the spirit possession interpretation according to an uncomplicated literal reading of Scripture, but DeMille-the-rational-modernist won this interpretative battle. In either case, DeMille accurately showed that Judas’ betrayal was due to “other” forces than the traditional greed motive. Thus, in this sense, he is more authentic to the scriptural accounts than those who cannot transcend the greed interpretation of Judas’ betrayal. DeMille was also biblically accurate in depicting his Judas being remorseful, guilt- ridden, and throwing the money back at the temple to repudiate his deal with the Jewish religious hierarchy. This was followed by his suicide, with the implication that it was a momentary aberration of peak grief, excessive depression or temporary insanity (spiritual possession?) which bore tragic consequences. If DeMille disappoints it is because he did not follow traditional anti-Judas folklore, but chose sacred fact over secular accretions. At least, DeMille was more truthful in his cinematic depiction than the second-century Bishop of Hierapolis in Papias whose description of Judas with a swollen body, recessed eyes and repellent genitals is so hyperbolic that it is unbelievable (see Parris and Angel 140-41).

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34 DeMille-the-master-synthesiser foreshadowed Judas’ betrayal by employing shifty eye movements, lack of attention to Jesus’ words, and by placing him in dark, shadowy corners as opposed to Jesus who is in well-lit, centred areas. This gives the impression that Judas is in the background plotting for power with, and then later against, Jesus. DeMille accentuated the difference between the earthly-focused Judas and the heavenly-focused Jesus in three ways. Firstly, Judas held children back in an unkind way, whereas Jesus lovingly embraced them with fatherly compassion, including fixing a child’s broken doll. Not only is DeMille’s Jesus the mender of dolls, but this physical act spiritually resonated with the Gospel function of Jesus-the-heavenly-Father compassionately mending human souls.

35 Secondly, the doll scene also resonated with God as the maker and shaper of humankind’s form in his role as divine Creator, and with the accompanying image of an interventionist God who fixes things if asked, and which Jesus’ physical incarnation on Earth dramatically demonstrated. DeMille’s doll scenes made Jesus look majestic and humble, heavenly and earthly, ethereal and pragmatic at the same time.

36 Thirdly, within the New Testament, good children figuratively represent those exercising faith in Christ and are worthy of being called “the children of God … heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:16-17). Jesus endearingly referred to his disciples as “Little children” (John 13:33), “the children which God hath given me” (Heb. 2:13), and argued that: “whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me” (Matt. 18:5). Rather than being a kitsch scene mired in the mundane (although it works well on this level), DeMille’s on-screen children made an important, if indirect, theological point. Namely, as Judas had rejected the children, the “joint- heirs with Christ,” DeMille was saying that Judas had rejected Jesus and the “good” disciples, thus reinforcing the overall Judasean theme of betrayal and separation. Indeed, the biblical harsh punishment for rejecting children (Matt. 18:6) paralleled the harsh punishment for rejecting Jesus (Matt. 26:24). Judas rejected the children in the doll scene and later he died a grisly, regretful death (Matt. 27:5; Acts 1:18), thereby confirming Jesus’ word and divine status. It was another brilliant example of DeMille’s multi-layered meaning-making, albeit, frequently ignored by decrying critics all too eager to deride him for his kitsch aesthetics and so did not actively look for any deeper theological meaning.

37 Indeed, DeMille engaged in his own subtle form of Judasean character assassination, which jibbed with his auteur penchant for fusing the comic with the serious. This occurred when Judas attempted to mimic the Masters’ divine healing ability. As Gordon Thomas described the scene: During the miracles that make up the first half of the film, Judas … can be charmingly befuddled. In his best scene, while waiting for Jesus to show up, he attempts to cure a demented (retarded?) child; he passes his hand over him in the exact manner of the Master, but it’s a no go. There’s a lighthearted feel: the other disciples are bemused by his efforts (there he goes again), an even Judas is exasperated only fleetingly, like he’s trying to fix a busted radio and can’t—but only because Jesus has access to better parts (3).

38 DeMille-the-harmoniser’s construction of this scene allowed for at least five different interpretations. Firstly, for the anti-Judas forces, Judas was presumptuous and impertinent for trying to out-do the Master (i.e., Judas thought that he was as good as Jesus), which acted as a highlighter of Judas-the-ambitious and a binary precursor to his subsequent downfall.

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39 Secondly, because his fellow disciples looked down upon his fumbling efforts, this implied that Judas was “stupid” for misunderstanding his place and/or role in the grand scheme of things (i.e., Judas was the Apostle’s equivalent of a village idiot).

40 Thirdly, Judas was ineffectual in his divine healing efforts (i.e., a failure; possibly a poor or slow learner), which further served to highlight Judas’ demonstrable difference- cum-outsider status.

41 Fourthly, Judas’ behaviour indicated that he was not made of the “right stuff” to be a “good” disciple (i.e., presumptuous, low frustration tolerance; a lack of personal persistence, foolish, gullible, ineffectual), which further underscored his “bad” disciple status and associated character assassination.

42 Fifthly, for anti-religionists and atheists, Judas’ attempt to mimic Jesus implied his naivety because he foolishly assumed these healing powers were literally real and could be duplicated by “normal” others. It also implied Jesus’ potential chicanery because the healing feat could not be duplicated (with repeatability being a scientific criterion of truth).

43 Overall, the audience could view this scene selectively and find some support for their differing personal biases. The satisfaction of so many customers simultaneously would have made DeMille-the-businessman happy as he nattily executed his Jesus business plan. 5. A Bunch of Betrayers: Some Rivals of DeMille’s Judas 44 There are many on-screen Judas characters to choose from and discuss (see Goldburg; Paffenroth, Depictions, Images; Reinhartz; Telford; Walsh Myth), and thus many root motivations to explore, but if one briefly examines some selected examples, what is found, and how do they compare? For example, Judas (Robert G. Vignola) in Sidney Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross was rebuked by Jesus when he complained about the waste involved when a woman anointed Jesus’ feet with costly perfume. Consequently, a miffed “Judas goes out after Jesus scolds him, suggesting it was at this point that he decided to betray Jesus” (Lang 46).

45 Judas (Ian McShane) in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth was more concerned with the politics of Roman oppression than Jewish prophecy. He was unaware of the Sanhedrin’s plot to kill Jesus and wanted to use Jesus as a vehicle for Jewish political aspirations, the rejuvenation of the Israelite kingdom, and an earthly reign of peace and stability, just like DeMille’s Judas. Zeffirelli’s Judas did not see Jesus as the Messiah of the spiritual arena, nor did he comprehend the transcendental aspects of his ministry. Rather, he saw him as a local messiah, a political deliverer of superior intellect and ability who had brilliant tactical strategies against the Romans. When Judas realised that Jesus was not interested in earthly political power, he abandoned loyalty and devotion to him. This turning point is clearly given via the fictional character of Zerah (Ian Holm) when he refers to Jesus’ lack of political shrewdness, therefore, Zeffirelli’s Judas betrayed Jesus as a test of his true Messiahship, but which backfired badly (Barclay 92).

46 In Charles Robert Carner’s Judas, Johnathon Schaech portrayed Judas Iscariot as a hot- headed, cynical, embittered, manipulative political zealot who chaffed under Roman tyranny, who did not understand Jesus’ spiritual mission, and repeatedly wanted Jesus (Jonathan Scarfe) to follow him rather than the other way around. He desperately advocated the path of anti-Roman violence rather than the path of peace, and

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eventually betrayed Jesus as a form of revenge when his revolutionary aspirations were dashed and he became disenchanted. To accentuate Judas’ difference, he was characterised as a city sophisticate whilst the other Apostles were rural disciples, almost country bumpkins in demeanour.

47 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ugly Judas (Otello Sestili) in The Gospel According to St. Matthew implied that he betrayed the beautiful, black-robed Christ (Enrique Irazoqui) out of deceit, hatred and jealousy.

48 Martin Scorsese’s Jesus (Willem Dafoe) in The Last Temptation of Christ was betrayed by the pushy, red-haired, New York accented Harvey Keitel as Judas, referred to on-screen as “the red devil.” His black clothing dramatically contrasted the white/ cream coloured robes of the other disciples. Unlike DeMille’s or Pasolini’s Judas, Scorsese’s Judas committed his act of betrayal out of loyalty to Jesus’ mission in the tradition of William Klassen’s Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? Scorsese’s wimpish, neurotic Jesus doubts his divinity and mission and so Judas acted as a messianic coach-cum-catalyst, otherwise, Jesus would have failed to get himself crucified for the good of humanity. Therefore, Scorsese’s Judas was as important as Jesus for the enfolding of God’s divine plan. DeMille’s spiritually, morally and physically weak-Judas (but strong-Christ) appears to be more in harmony with biblical sentiment than Scorsese’s strong-Judas (but weak-Christ) inversion of the scriptural account.

49 Another powerful and physically distinctive Judas was Carl Anderson in Jesus Christ, Superstar. He is fascinating because this Judas was a Negro (i.e., not white or an olive ethnic Jew), thus cinematically associating the archetypal betrayer with the black community (instead of that other persecuted ethnic group—the Jews). There is hint of a racial slur here because he is easily differentiated from the rest of the Apostles who are not black. Artistically, it was even more of a revelation to audiences when “this black singer-actor, dressed in a sparkling white disco outfit, boogies down to the beat of the song “Jesus Christ Superstar” while his dancing soul sisters in silvery bikini tops magically appear behind him. To complete this feast for the eyes, a series of bright neon crosses appear, and begin waving back and forth in time to the music” (Medved and Medved 98-99).

50 Although not as hip-and-cool as Carl Anderson, DeMille’s Judas was also distinctive for his day. DeMille portrayed him as young, handsome, elegant, clean-shaven, richly garmented, a playboy type, and according to Peter Matthews, a “foppish, young blue blood, rising politico” (1). This immediately tagged him as different from the other disciples who were predominantly bearded, less dapper, earthier, older looking, more serious in demeanour and not politically ambitious. He certainly did not match the usually bearded, radical or rough-looking cinematic Judas in the ancient symbolic tradition of beauty-equals-goodness-and-purity, whilst ugliness-equals-evilness-and- immorality (Lorand). Nor did DeMille match the physiognomy practices of Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Gospel According to St. Matthew whose evil Judas (Otello Sestili) was physically ugly in the symbolic tradition of blight-equals-moral corruption.

51 At first glance, it was an uncharacteristic binary inversion for DeMille-the-auteur that implied a “beautiful/good” Judas characterisation, as also indicated by his Judas giving up a bad woman (i.e., Mary Magdalene) to follow a good man (i.e., Jesus Christ). However, this criticism is quickly mitigated when one acknowledges that the biblical Judas was originally good enough for Jesus to select him as one of the twelve Apostles, but who subsequently goes “bad” (for whatever reason). In fact, DeMille-the-cinematic-

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lay-preacher had been biblically authentic concerning the palpable decline in Judas’ moral career by tracking his inner decay as reflected in Judas’ declining outer appearance (i.e., from handsome to dishevelled ugliness). DeMille should be congratulated for portraying this pronounced moral metamorphosis unlike other cinematic Judases who appear to be consistently “evil” from beginning to end, and thus scripturally unauthentic.

52 Carl Anderson’s Judas in Jesus Christ, Superstar is also important from a screen- time perspective. This Jesus film is as much about Judas’ passion as it was about Jesus’ passion. Both holy characters were treated as if they were just two different sides of the same missionary coin. Indeed, Judas Iscariot (Johnathon Schaech) became the star of his own film in Charles Robert Carner’s Judas. This film explored his single-parent family and working life as a lowly wine-seller, the crucifixion death of his equally revolutionary father, and the illness-cum-death of his loving mother whom he dearly loved and for whom the High Priest Caiaphas (Bob Gunton) gave him the infamous amount of silver to cover her funeral expenses (but not for betraying Jesus). In a thematically resonant plot twist for this infamous betrayer, Judas was himself betrayed by a close friend to the Jewish authorities and eventually became Caiaphas’ spy in Jesus’ camp as a consequence.

53 DeMille’s Judas also gets extra (not scripturally recorded) screen time and other extra- cinematic references indicative of his pivotal role in the filmic scheme of things. Particularly, at the beginning of the film when Mary Magdalene (Jacqueline Logan) was upset because Judas favoured the company of a vagabond carpenter to her own erotic company. Originally, “DeMille was insistent on developing a love story between Judas and Mary Magdalene, which was derived “out of some ancient and little-known German legend of the Middle Ages” (Birchard 219), but the idea was eventually abandoned and only an echo of this relationship remained in the film’s opening sequence.

54 Nevertheless, DeMille’s ranking in the cast list of “The Twelve Disciples” (Ringgold and Bodeen 252) indicated further subtle evidence for Judas’ importance in DeMille’s schema. Instead of being the last of the twelve according to the Gospel listings (Matt. 10:4; Luke 6:16), Judas is ranked second, just under Peter (Ernst Torrence) and before James (James Neill). Yet, in the Apostle cast list for Jesus of Nazareth in William Barclay’s novelisation and the Jesus of Nazareth. The Easter Message promotion booklet photographed by Paul Ronald (n.p.n.), Judas Iscariot is rightfully placed last on the list of twelve Apostles (128).

55 In Pontius Pilate, John Drew Barrymore played both Jesus and Judas Iscariot (in back views) which symbolically suggested that the directors thought Jesus-Judas were an intimate pairing beyond time, location and history. In Godspell, David Haskell played both John the Baptist and Judas Iscariot, thus suggesting another intimate pairing, whereas the intimate pairing in The King of Kings was not between Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) and Jesus (H.B. Warner), but between Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) and Caiaphas (Rudolf Schildkraut). They were a father-and-son acting team and Jews in real life, which had deep symbolic ramifications for DeMille’s view on the degree of culpability of the Jews for Jesus’ death (see Kozlovic).

56 Judas is a fascinating character, the subject of many telemovies, miniseries and feature films (Campbell and Pitts), and a very important fine arts character inextricably linked to Jesus, particularly the Judas kiss betrayal scene (Bernard 210, 211; Dore 205). All of which are important, the focus of DeMille’s own intense research, consultative and

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artistic efforts (DeMille and Hayne 254-56; Higham 161-62), but beyond the scope of this research. 6. The Death of Judas and the Cine-Biblical Salvation of DeMille 57 Judas’ death is intriguing and where DeMille-the-auteur had proved himself a Christian true believer, an innovative filmmaker, and a master of the American biblical epic. According to Matthew 27:5, Judas “went and hanged himself” in the “field of blood” (Matt. 27:8), but according to Acts 1:18, Judas went “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.” The place where he died was called “Aceldama … The field of blood” (Acts 1:19).

58 Therefore, which scriptural account is correct—hanging or disembowelment? Traditionally speaking, hanging is the most favoured cinematic option, as dramatically portrayed in Judas, however, DeMille did not avoid this apparent dilemma, as George Stevens did in The Greatest Story Ever Told via the completely unscriptural depiction of Judas (David McCallum) falling into a fiery pit in the temple courtyard to end it all, and with no hanging rope in sight! Nor did DeMille depict just a hanged Judas or just a disembowelled Judas, rather, he synthesised both scriptural accounts into one credible harmonising whole, even if cinematically favouring the hanging scene a little more than the disembowelling.

59 In a series of dramatic intercut scenes, DeMille depicted a despairing Judas watching Jesus’ crucifixion from afar whilst high atop the edge of a small cliff face. This spot had a tree with a single thick limb jutting out over a precipice. Judas was palpably shocked by the painful agony Jesus was suffering and so he became increasingly unhinged and slowly prepared to kill himself as a consequence. He deliberately wrapped a rope noose around his neck, stood on the edge of the precipice, and (unseen) launched himself into oblivion (and biblical immortality). His ignominious dead body was seen hanging from the outstretched limb of the tree, which dangled precariously over the precipice. An earthquake linked to Jesus’ death immediately demolished the cliff face and uprooted the tree, which plummeted into the cavernous earth below (metaphorically Hell) carrying Judas’ body with it to inevitably rupture upon impact at the bottom of the deep ravine (unscreened but strongly implied).

60 Overall, it was a cine-biblical depiction of Judas’ death worthy of a Christian true believer, a master synthesiser, and an innovative lay biblical scholar that also firmly belied the claim that DeMille’s films “added nothing to film art” (Wexman 83). Not only does it justify C.B.’s artistic salvation, but theologically speaking, half-a-century later, DeMille’s depiction was deemed a fair and reasonable solution to the apparent biblical conundrum. Why? Because “Matthew seems to deal with the mode of the attempted suicide, while Acts describes the results. Combining the two accounts, it appears that Judas tried to hang himself over some cliff, but the rope or tree limb broke so that he plunged down and burst open on the rocks below. The topography around Jerusalem makes such an event conceivable” (WTBTSP/IBSA 130). Of course, one wonders how much DeMille’s cinematic solution helped latter day biblical scholars come to the same conclusion. 7. Conclusion 61 Overall, DeMille was technically more accurate, his nuances much subtler and richer, his drama more dramatic, and his cinematic sins less grievous than many of his directorial rivals right up to and including Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, whose own depiction of Judas is equally fascinating (see Lannstrom). Yet, despite

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DeMille’s legendary status and popular acclaim, his biblical artistry is still grossly unappreciated, let alone applauded or honoured as befitting a master of the American biblical epic. As demonstrated above, his Judas had skilfully encoded many interlocking theological issues and aesthetic layers about this most famous of biblical betrayers, which was unacknowledged previously.

62 Further investigations into DeMille studies, Hollywood epics, and the emerging interdisciplinary field of religion-and-film are recommended, warranted, and already long overdue. Areas of specific interest would be the exploration of the diverse reception of his biblical films per religious grouping (e.g., Catholic, Protestant, Jewish) within the United States of America and cultures outside of it. This effort will further broaden the scope of the research, enrich the diverse pluralist content found therein, and significantly renew appreciation of the unsung portions of DeMille’s life, art and career as the acknowledged “master of the grandiose and of biblical sagas” (Louvish xiv).

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DeMille, Cecil B., and Donald Hayne, ed. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. London: W.H. Allen, 1960. deMille, William C. Hollywood Saga. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939.

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Forshey, Gerald. “Jesus on Film.” The Christian Century 105.26 (1988): 801.

Giannetti, Louis, and Scott Eyman. Flashback: A Brief History of Film. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996. Goldburg, Peta. “Selling Jesus: Judas the Betrayer in Film.” Religious Education Journal of Australia 20.2 (2004): 12-16.

Grace, Pamela. “Gospel Truth?: From Cecil B. DeMille to Nicholas Ray.” A Companion to Literature and Film. Ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 46-57.

Green, Jonathon. Dictionary of Insulting Quotations. London: Cassell, 1997.

Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall & Co, 1985.

------. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Higham, Charles. Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

Kinnard, Roy, and Tim Davis. Divine Images: A History of Jesus on the Screen. New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1992.

Klassen, William. Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.

Koury, Phil A. Yes, Mr. De Mille. New York: Putnam, 1959.

Kozlovic, Anton Karl. “The Deep Focus Typecasting of Joseph Schildkraut as Judas Figure in Four DeMille films.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 6 (2004): 1-34. .

Lang, J. Stephen. The Bible on the Big Screen: A Guide from Silent Films to Today’s Movies. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007.

Lannstrom, Anna. “Forgiving Judas: Extenuating Circumstances in the Ultimate Betrayal.” Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy: The Cross, the Questions, the Controversy. Ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. 234-45.

Lorand, Ruth. “Beauty and Ugliness.” New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Volume 1: Abolitionism to Common Sense. Ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005. 198-205.

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Louvish, Simon. Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press, 2008.

Matthews, Peter. The King of Kings. Cecil B. DeMille: Showman of Piety. (2006, May 24): 1-2.

Medved, Harry, and Michael Medved. The Golden Turkey Awards. London: Angus & Robertson, 1980.

Noerdlinger, Henry S. Moses and Egypt: The Documentation to the Motion Picture The Ten Commandments. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1956.

Orrison, Katherine. Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s epic, The Ten Commandments. Lanham: Vestal Press, 1999.

Paffenroth, Kim. “Film Depictions of Judas.” Journal of Religion and Film 5.2 (2001a): 1-12. .

------. Judas: Images of the Lost Disciple. Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2001b.

Paglia, Camille. Vamps & Tramps: New Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Parris, Matthew, and Nick Angel, ass. ed. The Great Unfrocked: Two Thousand Years of Church Scandal. London: Robson Books, 1998.

Reinhartz, Adele. Jesus of Hollywood. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Ringgold, Gene, and DeWitt Bodeen. The Complete Films of Cecil B. DeMille. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1969.

Ronald, Paul. Jesus of Nazareth. The Easter Message. London: Collins, 1978.

Smoodin, Eric. “Cecil B. De Mille.” International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers - 2. Directors. 4th ed. Ed. Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 248-51.

Solomon, Jon. The Ancient World in the Cinema. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1978.

Streete, Gail C. The Strange Woman: Power and Sex in the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.

Taylor, Mark D. The Complete Book of Bible Literacy. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1992.

Telford, William R. “The Two Faces of Betrayal: The Characterization of Peter and Judas in the Biblical Epic or Christ Film.” Cinema Divinite: Religion, Theology, and the Bible in Film. Ed. Eric S. Christianson, Peter Francis, and William R. Telford. London: SCM Press, 2005. 214-35.

Thomas, Gordon. A Tale of Two Kings: DeMille’s Silent Classic on DVD – in Both Versions. (February 2006): 1-8 Walsh, Richard. Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2003.

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------. “The Gospel According to Judas: Myth and Parable.” The Bible in Film— The Bible and Film. Ed. J. Cheryl Exum. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 37-53.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania/International Bible Students Association [WTBTSP/IBSA]. Insight on the Scriptures. Volume 2: Jehovah - Zuzim. Brooklyn, NY: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York/ International Bible Students Association, 1988.

Welsh, Jim M. “C. B. DeMille: 70 Annotated Films.” Literature/Film Quarterly 32.4 (2004): 317-18.

Wexman, Virginia W. A History of Film. 6th ed. Boston: Pearson/A and B, 2006.

Wilcoxon, Henry. “The Biggest Man I’ve Ever Known.” DeMille: The Man and His Pictures. Ed. Gabe Essoe and Raymond Lee. New York: Castle Books, 1970. 263-76.

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Filmography

Godspell (1973, dir. David Greene)

From the Manger to the Cross (1912, dir. Sidney Olcott)

Jesus Christ, Superstar (1973, dir. Norman Jewison)

Jesus of Nazareth (1977, dir. Franco Zeffirelli) Judas (2001, dir. Charles Robert Carner)

Pontius Pilate (1961, dir. Irving Rapper & Gian Paolo Callegari)

Samson and Delilah (1949, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini)

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965, dir. George Stevens)

The King of Kings (1927, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, dir. Martin Scorsese)

The Passion of the Christ (2004, dir. Mel Gibson)

The Ten Commandments (1923, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Ten Commandments (1956, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

NOTES

1. Many scholars have spelled Cecil’s surname as “De Mille” or “de Mille” or “deMille” however, the correct professional spelling is “DeMille” (DeMille and Hayne 6), which will be employed herein along with its concomitant “C.B.” as appropriate. 2. There is not one DeMille but many DeMille personas who did numerous jobs and played multiple roles. His career was so long, complex and multi-faceted that to describe, let alone justify each aspect would be prohibitive. Therefore, concise hyphenated compound terms will be used herein to help disentangle his various roles and avoid needless explanation, repetition or reader boredom.

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3. The Authorized King James Version of the Bible (KJV aka AV) will be used throughout, unless quoting other translations (i.e., Moffatt, NIV, TAB, TLB, TBFT), because most of the biblical phrases that are embedded in Western culture are from the King James Version, which is one of the most widely used English translation today (Taylor ix, 71).

ABSTRACTS

Cecil B. DeMille, the legendary cofounder of Hollywood, progenitor of Paramount studio, and unsung Christian auteur was a master of the American biblical epic whose indelible classics became the template for numerous ancient epics thereafter. Utilising humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens, the critical DeMille, film and religion literature was selectively reviewed and his silent Jesus film, The King of Kings (1927) was closely examined to reveal his dramatic construction of Judas Iscariot, which was briefly compared to some cinematic rivals to highlight its frequent superiority. Often unappreciated was DeMille’s harmonisation of the conflicting hanging versus disembowelment accounts of Judas’ demise. It was concluded that DeMille was a defter biblical filmmaker than has been hitherto appreciated. Further research into DeMille studies, Hollywood epics, and the emerging interdisciplinary field of religion-and- film is recommended, warranted, and already long overdue.

AUTHOR

ANTON KARL KOZLOVIC Anton Karl Kozlovic, Screen Studies, School of Humanities, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia

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“New York and yet not New York”: Reading the Region in Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions

James Peacock

1 Is Brooklyn “the conscience of New York?” Jonathan Lethem believes so: While Manhattan tears everything down and changes everything, Brooklyn does a similar thing, but fails miserably at it. It is a crazy quilt of a place. A mongrel place of sorts. It mixes old and modern in a haphazard way. It represents a tiny microcosm of the world—a functional utopia. There is also a weakness for nostalgia here, but it is a flinty and cold-eyed nostalgia. Brooklynites sort of have a built in shrug about nostalgia while still caring about it (Kushner 14).

2 Anthony LaSala’s and Seth Kushner’s project The Brooklynites, from which the quotation is taken, trades on the kinds of largely benign tensions Lethem identifies. From the two hundred or so interviews with Brooklyn citizens (ranging from fishermen to handball players, photographers to celebrity authors), there emerges a composite picture of a cohesive community, comprised nonetheless of quirky, unique individuals. Shabby, gentrified, friendly and dangerous, Brooklyn is a place where the neighbors will always chat with you and “your local baker [...] knows how many sugars you have in your coffee” (Kushner 106). It epitomizes the diversity Carrie Tirado Bramen argues has become axiomatic in almost all discussions of American identity (Bramen 5).

3 How regional identity is revealed through recent novels about Brooklyn is the subject of this article. From Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) to Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970) and latterly in Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), Brooklyn novels have always regarded the borough as “a crazy quilt of a place,” even if, as in Desperate Characters, the main theme is bourgeoisification and the fear of difference. Lethem’s metaphor again takes diversity as a given, but the reference to nostalgia implies the danger of that diversity itself becoming fossilized, undynamic, existing in situ as local color rather than as a part of continuing transcultural negotiations. As Philip Joseph observes in his recent book on literary regionalism,

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the history of regionalism has been suffused with longing for primeval communities, determined not by worldly subjects in dialogue with each other but by local traditions putatively rooted in land and in blood (10).

4 Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) is a famous example of this. In eulogizing Brooklyn’s diversity, the writer runs the risk of rendering it a “local tradition” rather than a process.

5 Philip Joseph’s study concerns itself with a literary regionalism that speaks most pertinently to us when it recognizes a dynamic, mutually informing relationship between members of a locality on the one hand and the institutions and cultures of a globalized world on the other (7).

6 Communities, he argues, work most effectively when “they accommodate citizens who live in an interconnected, nomadic world” (6). This is certainly the case; in fact, literary regionalism has always dramatized, to varying extents, negotiations between the local and the global.

7 Where this article departs from Joseph is first in the choice of primary material. Regionalism is the starting point, but it will become clear that not all of the Brooklyn fictions dealt with are “regionalist” in any conventional sense, that is, combining romanticism and realism in a depiction of specific regions full of local detail and description. In fact, the more effective Brooklyn fictions depart from this model into more abstract, ethical territory. And while Joseph focuses on the present-day transformative potential of texts from the widely-studied period of literary regionalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Willa Cather), the primary interest here is in the contemporary. This is because it is in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that terms like “community,” “locality” or “region” are - for reasons connected with, amongst other things, global capital, global media, and the threat of terrorism - particularly hard to define and therefore consistently up for debate.

8 Zygmunt Bauman, for example, records a number of factors leading to a contemporary “devaluation of local opinions” and a degradation of regional community in his book Community (63). While acknowledging that there has always been a tension between freedom and security in community (20), he acknowledges that travel and informatics have further destabilized the notion by elevating “extraterritoriality.” Extraterritorial individuals are mobile, liquid, global, cosmopolitan, yet have no interest in “a new global cultural synthesis” (55). Rather, their ideal is a private, individualistic aloofness, a secession from intimacy based on “a series of new beginnings” (53). Bauman attributes this “self-chosen exile” (52) quite specifically to consumerism. Another consequence is the “aesthetic community” which looks to celebrities for authority, and is as remote from a spirit of local community as the famous lives it aspires to (66). With such issues in mind, it is rewarding to explore how contemporary works of literature reflect changing notions of community, locality, and region. Do they celebrate the new extraterritoriality, or reassert conceptions of community based on land, family, tradition? How do they reconcile the fact that “large portions of the United States, from Tucson to Milwaukee and from Seattle to Tampa Bay, look and feel largely identical” (Kowalewski 12) with their evocations of regional distinctiveness? This article also departs from Philip Joseph’s analysis, then, in assuming quite simply that there is more at stake and more of relevance to contemporary issues in looking at contemporary literary communities as a twenty-first-century reader.

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9 And although this is not an article about 9/11, the events of that day lie beneath its readings of Brooklyn fictions, and occasionally break the surface. With cities from New York to London to Rangoon so relentlessly portrayed in the media as sites of conflict, violence and tension between ethnic communities, there is urgency in defining the parameters and the culture of community against the backdrop of grand narratives of religion, global politics and war, narratives responsible in the final analysis for a tragedy like 9/11. Brooklyn, proud of both its globally representative population and its de-centered urban regional status, is an ideal test case. Paul Auster can say of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Park Slope, that [e]veryone lives there, every race and religion and economic class, and everyone pretty much gets along. Given the climate in the country today, I would say that qualifies as a miracle (3 Films 18).

10 It is necessary to dig deeper into such sentiments, to filter them through literary portrayals and consider to what extent they represent a celebration of that miracle or a denial of wider ethical and socio-political factors.

11 So in what sense is Brooklyn “New York and yet not New York?” This description is taken from Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies (2005). Clearly influenced by Blue in the Face, the ramshackle follow-up to the 1995 film Smoke, Auster’s novel can be viewed as a contemporary updating of a regionalist literary mode Bramen dubs “urban picturesque” (157). In the late nineteenth century, the urban picturesque was characterized in novels such as William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) by “a dramatic chasm between rich and poor combined with ethnic heterogeneity,” and was hence the “aesthetic expression” of modernity’s drive toward diversity (Bramen 156, 157).

12 If it was intended at that time to aestheticize and thus to defuse the immigrant threat by “linking New York cosmopolitanism with modern Americanism” (Bramen 158), the picturesque’s function in texts such as Brooklyn Follies and, as we shall see, Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos is different, if still somewhat reactive. Here, cosmopolitanism is neither alarmingly nor refreshingly new; it is the given fabric of Brooklyn society. Yet the Jamaican drag queens and Jewish grandmothers of Brooklyn Follies, the Polish artists of Solos, are all under threat from a malevolent outside force which, to risk employing an over-simplification the novels themselves fail to avoid, one might call “Manhattan.” When Jonathan Lethem, in Motherless Brooklyn (1999), describes the clients of the Boerum Hill Inn as “Manhattanized,” he is referring to a willed negation of past narratives, a melancholic spirit of newness and a homogenizing impulse spurred on by capital’s desire to maximize a white, aspirant, bourgeois consumer market. This “dressed-up crowd at the inn” is “oblivious to the neighborhood’s past or present reality” (Lethem 239). Similarly, it is no accident that Tab Hartwell, the villain of Solos, is associated with the metropolitan center. His run-down building on Crosby Street is “a rotten tooth in a mouthful of glossy caps,” surrounded by luxury loft developments and is soon to become gentrified and indistinguishable from the rest (Florey 222).

13 Brooklyn, then, is “not New York” not only because “it retains a poignant sense of lost, prelapsarian identity” from before its assimilation into New York City in 1898 (Lopate), but also in the sense that its geographical proximity in no way presupposes any cultural or ethical propinquity with its more illustrious neighbor. Ostensibly, then, the starting point of contemporary Brooklyn regionalism is in opposition to the rapacious

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globalization symbolized by Manhattan.1 Indeed, in contrast to Manhattan’s perceived shallow glamour, one might suggest, as Martin Tucker puts it, that Brooklyn has played the fictional role of sheltering home and quasi-family, almost akin to those regional novels in which the central characters fall back on rural and small-town values to sustain them in their journeys outward (9).

14 What is remarkable initially is that the fears expressed by some Brooklyn writers over the bleaching of difference embodied by Manhattan are the same fears articulated by Henry James in The American Scene. Yet this eradication of alterity stems not from a desire to achieve an “American” identity, as it did in James’ analysis, but from the global homogenization of economic and material desires under capitalism. Thus, Brooklyn fictions pit borough against center in order to discover where real community lies - in the maintenance of cultural, ethnic and socio-economic diversity, or in the sameness of bourgeois aspiration.

15 It is a brand of regionalism laden with ironies and tensions, however, as literary regionalism always has been. Tom Lutz goes further than Philip Joseph and asserts that, for a regionalist text even to be designated “literary,” it must hold in precarious balance both “local and larger perspectives,” and that for a text to come down emphatically on the side of local color is simply “to absolve its readers emotionally of accepting the very invitations to openness the form affords” (Lutz 192). To be literary is to engage in debate and not to resort to partiality or polemic. For Lutz, “[r]egionalist literary texts represent both sides of the major cultural debates of their time” and “dramatize the differences between and within classes, regions, sexes, and communities, but not with the intention of resolving them” (28). And, of course, it is frequently the very presence of a colonizing other which heightens awareness of regional identity in the first place, an irony noted by R. P. Draper (5). The danger for the Brooklyn regionalist is the retreat away from “cosmopolitan ideals of cultural inclusiveness” into an exclusive “urban elite fantasy” which narrows the focus almost to street level in a bid to retain an assumed ideal of authenticity (Lutz 25).

16 Both texts dealt with in the first section of this article – Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos (2004) and Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn (1990) – inhabit the predominantly domestic territory Philip Lopate notes has been typical of Brooklyn fiction since A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It is also true that both deal with diversity, as well as touching on that prickly relationship between Brooklyn and Manhattan. However, they adopt different approaches to these themes, and treat them with unequal complexity. While one should hesitate to wield Lutz’s term “subliterary,” Florey’s brand of regionalism, which comes in fact much closer to traditional definitions of the term, is less satisfactory because it subsists merely in the multiplication of quirky surface details. These are intended to evoke geographical and cultural specificity, but succeed only in creating a kind of taxonomy of local color which it is the protagonist’s (and the author’s) responsibility to “capture.” In so doing, she risks becoming complicit in their disappearance by indulging in a form of - to borrow Fredric Jameson’s phrase - nostalgia for the present. Schwartz, on the other hand, avoids local detail, instead choosing to employ a central metaphor which actually dramatizes a multifaceted literary perspective. Such a “double vision” (Schwartz 5) reflects on the ever-present difficulty for the regionalist writer: does she write most “authentically” from “inside,” “outside” or somewhere in between? In fact, Schwartz’s text can be seen as an unmasking of the pretences and denials necessary to preserve a brittle sense of

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regional identity. Hers is less a regionalist novel than a deconstruction of more anodyne types of regionalism.

17 The borough represented in Solos, in keeping with classic Brooklyn novels such as Last Exit to Brooklyn and, more recently, Michael Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (1994), is a place of immigration. Rather than Hispanic or second-generation, working- class Irish immigrants, however, Florey’s Williamsburg is populated by an eccentric set of artists, writers and dog lovers who have moved in from the suburbs or from other sections of the city for cheaper rents and a bohemian ambience: Emily moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn because that’s where her friend Gene Rae Foster went to be with her boyfriend Kurt. It was only one subway stop across the river from Manhattan, and Gene Rae said the neighborhood was cheap and eccentric and full of artists and other interesting people. So it proved to be: Williamsburg was an urban wilderness of warehouses and factories, desolate streets, and crumbling, asphalt-fronted row houses you could see had been pretty once, with grand cornices and intricate iron fences, but were now ratty little boxes. The streets were almost bare of the delights of nature and the amenities of civilization. There was the occasional ailanthus, some sycamores, a few linden trees with their starry spring blossoms, and the vast but barren park. There were two delis, a dubious natural foods store, a Polish restaurant and a Polish bakery, a café near the subway entrance, two stores catering to the neighborhood pigeon flyers, and rumors that an art gallery was planning to open on North Ninth. Someday. You wouldn’t know you were in New York City if the maddening, magnificent towers of Manhattan hadn’t glittered just across the river (Florey 51-52, italics added).

18 This passage deserves closer scrutiny, for in many ways it is representative both of Florey’s style and of the prejudices her style reflects. The narrator is a struggling photographer with a palindromic name, Emily Lime. As she describes the initial pull of Williamsburg, one might call the descriptive mode here (and elsewhere in the novel) “aggregative,” in that the texture of the neighborhood is evoked largely through lists of loosely-associated elements – trees, shops and houses – from which the protagonist and reader are bound to construct something resembling a community. It is a technique also employed by Paul Auster in The Brooklyn Follies.2 Evidently, the presiding spirit is the Brooklyn Bard, Walt Whitman. Yet what is missing from the Florey extract is the avowedly federative impulse centered on the all-encompassing gaze of Whitman’s plural “I.” Instead, Florey offers an omniscient narrator who is, nonetheless, close to Emily’s point of view.

19 Of course, this is in some ways a more accurate representation of the individual’s relationship with the mass urban environment than Whitman’s. For, as James Kyung- Jin Lee makes clear, one cannot hope to perceive the whole of the city; objects appear and disappear rapidly and hence a Whitmanian “urban vision of American Romantic correspondence” is untenable (Lee 145). Fragmentation is the texture of one’s urban experience, and it has two significant consequences. First, it persistently threatens alienation and dictates that one actively strive for a sense of community. Secondly, it encourages a concern with things, with the material and significatory elements which help to compose the environment. Such a concern, which drives the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, is laudable when it ensures attention to the material reality of a place and to how that reality shapes the collective consciousness.

20 But the attendant danger is that the concern with things becomes an obsession which leads not to a striving for society but rather to an atomization of the environment itself. Moreover, the need to locate significance in these things may inspire not a

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communal consciousness but an individual signifying consciousness which treats objects and other people as participants in a pre-devised symbolic system.

21 There is evidence of such an incorporative strategy in the narrator’s/ Emily’s thoughts on Williamsburg. It is revealed through a curious lacuna in the passage which betrays a distinctly colonial mindset. Emily’s initial attraction to Williamsburg is its cheapness, as well as the “artists and other interesting people.” Yet the following phrase, “So it proved to be,” is followed by a lengthy description not of this supposed artistic community, but of the area’s desolation, of its almost total lack of “civilization.” Walt Whitman is careful to include poverty and degradation as part of the rich spectrum of human experience, but, notably, Florey’s portrait is distinctly lacking in human content, apart from desultory mention of the “neighborhood pigeon flyers.” What she presents is a wilderness space cleared for bohemian settlement, such that “So it proved to be” refers forward to a mythical “someday” when Emily and Gene Rae’s pre- determined vision of a culturally eclectic Williamsburg can be fulfilled. There is something familiar and mythical occurring here: a dream of a wild empty frontier space fit for colonization and civilization. The colon adumbrates the semantic elision in the text, reflecting the subjective vision of a cultural gap to be filled.

22 In the following quotation one can see what the wilderness comes to be filled with – signs: They pass the sushi place, the Mexican restaurant, the video store, the Syrian deli, the Polish bakery (whose BREAD sign Emily has photographed a dozen times), the new baby shop that has a pair of studded black leather booties in the window, and Marta’s Beauty Salon, whose faded pink-and-green sign has probably not been retouched since 1966. They pass Mr. Suarez, with his Chihuahua, Eddie, in his pocket and a shopping basket full of soda cans. They pass the Pink Pony Thrift Shop with the WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND sign on the door, and the used-book store and its new café, where they can smell the hot apple cider all the way out on the sidewalk. The smell seems exactly right, a perfect match to the brown leaves on the ground and the V of geese overhead and the signs in the drugstore window advertising Halloween candy (Florey 2-3).

23 This is very much a city of words, and Solos is a novel which, despite its apparent love of human society, operates systematically at the level of signifier. Emily is a photographer whose chief subject matter is signs: “it was words she wanted to photograph,” we are told (52). In addition, her friend Marcus moved to Williamsburg on the strength of its palindromic zip code, 11211 (8). For Emily, the neighborhood is structured around an aggregate of familiar signs, and her fear is that these will eventually be replaced by signs epitomizing the globalizing, homogenizing tendency associated with Manhattan, an example of which are the “LUXURY LOFTS” signs surrounding Tab Hartwell’s apartment block (221). What Emily fails to acknowledge, and the novel likewise, is that her framing of region is predicated on a wholly subjective myth-symbol complex which reduces it to a chosen caché of signs, and that the changes Emily so fears are themselves precipitated by the increasing affluence brought about by the arrival of boho immigrants.

24 It is no coincidence that the signs Emily admires, and many of the telling details she records (the shopping basket full of soda cans, the booties in the window) are connected with shopping. The aestheticization of consumption connoted here is not, in fact, a million miles from the converted, Manhattanized apartments in Emily’s block which she finds “banal, boring, pretentious, untrue to the spirit of Brooklyn in general

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and Williamsburg in particular” (23). In other words, she unwittingly apes the Manhattan consumerist ethic she purports to resist. Florey here resorts to a mode one might label “consumer picturesque”: diversity exists solely at the point of consumption, and the sometimes harsh economic realities of labor and production are elided.3 As Carrie Tirado Bramen notes, the facile celebration of ethnic food as metonym of cultural diversity is a recurring example of this elision, even in academic accounts of cosmopolitanism (Bramen 6-7). Emily’s preoccupation with bakeries, cafés and soda cans is indicative of the same mystifying impulses.4

25 Moreover, repeated employment of the historical present tense combines at important reflective moments with the listing of signs, to produce the novel’s characteristic wistful tone: She sighs and logs off. Before the noon light bleaches everything out, she should get out on the streets, to photograph them for her new project, “Disappearing Brooklyn,” the memorialization of the neighborhood before it dies. Death is on the way, she knows. There will come a day when the Polish meat markets and the Hispanic delis will be replaced by fast food outlets. When bookshops won’t be called ksiegarnias, when trilingual signs like DRUGSTORE/FARMACIA/APTEKA will be taken down, and garish plastic DRUGMARTCO signs raised in their places (Florey 200).

26 Suffused with a sense of imminent obsolescence, and an entropic turn toward Manhattan-style sameness, the mood is one of nostalgia for the present. This pre- lapsarian present can only be believed in through strict denial of any previous “civilization” (as the first passage indicates). And it is a mood directly attributable to the taxonomic impulses of the characters – that is, the obsessive recording of things about-to-be-lost – and to the novel’s style. It is as if the region itself must be under threat to exist at all, and that its imminent disappearance is the draw. But as one character is perceptive enough to point out, “‘Things change, Em. They have to. And sometimes it’s okay’” (268).

27 If, overall, it seems far from “okay” in Solos, it is because apparent authorial identification with the protagonist obstructs a more balanced perspective which might refuse unequivocally to come down on the side of local color. In the end, the novel fails to fulfill the promise offered by its palindromic title and the various palindromic names and figures within the narrative. Instead of seeing in regionalism a variety of mutually enriching pasts and presents, replacing nostalgia with a transitivity born of difference, the novel attempts to arrest change. The palindrome becomes a conservative figure: whichever way you look at it, the neighborhood must remain the same, just as one has mythologized it.

28 Once again, there is a wider discussion to be had in the light of 9/11, a discussion which regrettably must be reserved for a later date. Suffice to say for now that the attractions of this nostalgic retreat are obvious. In the face of malevolent grand narratives, retreat into taxonomies of local color is easier and preferable to a head-on confrontation with the bigger issues. Ironically, the reduction of the region into signifying details is in its own way a destructive act. It is akin to looking too closely at a canvas, deliberately aiming to miss the whole picture. As Theo Perowne says in another post 9/11 novel, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, “the bigger you think, the crappier it looks” (34). Solos thinks small, 5 and yet for a contemporary reader it is haunted by the specter of bigger questions, just as Brooklyn is still overlooked by “the maddening, magnificent towers of Manhattan” (52).6

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29 The intention here is not to be too harshly critical of Florey’s novel, but merely to point out that it lacks the necessary self-consciousness of the fact that region is to a large extent an internal construct, even if determined by the material environment. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn displays a much higher degree of reflexivity, and in so doing offers a radically different view of urban regionalism. It is not a regionalist novel in any traditional sense, but more a meditation on how region has traditionally been imagined, leading to a possible alternative. “The Brooklyn of my story is a state of mind or perception,” claims Audrey, the narrator, or the shadow field on which my good and bad eyes staged their struggle. [...] It moves from place to place wherever opposing visions struggle, but unlike a shadow it never changes with the light. One can only live in it or flee (Schwartz 16).

30 The key phrase here is “opposing visions.” Although it is ostensibly built around binary oppositions, most significantly that between the redacting self and “that girl I was” (7), the logic of the novel’s structure pivots on a highly resonant ocular metaphor which dismantles any simple oppositions. Ultimately this includes, one should stress, the opposition between living and flight suggested above. For Audrey, who has had an injury to her right eye since being dropped at birth, realizes that “common binary vision” – that is, fully functioning sight – is not, as the term suggests, anything to do with duality but in fact with the operation of two eyes in tandem to provide a perception of the world “of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together” (4). In contrast, her right eye’s fragmented gaze offers a unique view of the tensions and distortions lurking behind this “seamless skin.” Leaving Brooklyn is therefore a coming-of-age narrative which, while pivoting on sexual experience, describes the blossoming of a specifically literary awareness. Through this awareness, Schwartz is able to tackle both the regional and the global, and to offer a critique of the kind of domesticated Brooklyn fiction exemplified by A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and latterly Solos. She illustrates that Brooklyn is indeed “a state of mind or perception” (16). And, in almost casually stating that “[i]t could as readily be called Cleveland or Rouen or Johannesburg” (16), Audrey, via Schwartz, makes it clear that Brooklyn is a representative (or indeed a self-allegorizing) place. Thus the novel is less about the problems of leaving this specific borough than about the mentality of urban regionalism itself, using Brooklyn as a model.

31 Whereas Solos offers a bohemian fantasy world mostly narrated in the historical present to give an illusion of timeless qualities, Leaving Brooklyn is keen to historicize both the action of the plot and, importantly, the collective fabrication of a parochial mindset. This is “Brooklyn on the eve of war, a locus of customs and mythologies as arbitrary and rooted as in the Trobriand Islands or the great Aztec city of Teotihuacán [...]” (1). It is an urban area which, in a time of conflict, affects a down-home regionalism, a presumption of state-of-nature innocence, an imaginative amnesia, and a disregard of evidence such as photographs of skeletal figures in striped pyjamas clawing at barbed wire [...] (13).

32 (One is reminded of Solos’ airbrushing out of 9/11’s consequences.) Most importantly, this image of region as nurturing safe haven, remote from the world at large, is quite self-conscious and deliberate. “Whatever depth perception there was in Brooklyn,” Audrey observes, “was flattened by the collective will” (15). Concerned to preserve the regionalist idyll, the citizens of Brooklyn admit of “no gulf between image and reality” (13).

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33 If Schwartz is commenting wryly on the suffocating coziness of Brooklyn fictions such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she goes further by explaining that in a supposedly postmodern world in which “‘image’ has detached from reality to acquire independent life” (13), such fictions are untenable. She is right: one could also argue that the contemporary world offers a volatile admixture of, to use Simon Malpas’ expression, resurgent “grand narrative politics” (41) and an ever-increasing multitude of micro- narratives and subjectivities. This is, as we have seen, a point Solos chooses not to acknowledge.

34 In such a world there is a need for a sophisticated treatment of regionalism like Schwartz’s, and it is young Audrey’s deviant eye which opens up the possibility of such a treatment for “this I who makes up stories,” the adult, writing Audrey (145). Left alone, the “good” left eye would settle for the assumed parochial innocence of Brooklyn, “the principle of cohesiveness” at work. The right eye, however, allows Audrey secret insight into “the great world,” where “a naughty, mercurial principle of divisiveness, entropy and unsettling” operates (37).

35 The following passage offers the most comprehensive picture of the eye’s unique vision: The eye was of scant use in seeing what had to be seen in daily life in Brooklyn. It was made for another sort of vision. By legal standards it was a blind eye, yet it did see in its idiosyncratic way – shapes and colors and motion, all in their true configurations except all turned to fuzz. Its world was a Seurat painting, with the bonds hooking the molecules all severed, so that no object really cohered; the separate atoms were lined up next to one another, their union voluntary, not fated. This made the world, through my right eye, a tenuous place where the common, reasonable laws of physics did not apply, where a piece of face or the leg of a table or frame of a window might at any moment break off and drift away. I could tease and tempt the world, squinting my left eye shut and watching things disintegrate, and when I was alone my delight was to play with the visible world this way, breaking it down and putting it back together. I had secret vision and knowledge of the components of things, of the volatile nature of things before they congeal, of the tenuousness and vulnerability of all things, unknown to those with common binary vision who saw the world of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together. My right eye removed the skin of the visible world (Schwartz 4).

36 Atomization is the eye’s chief function, the disintegration of the seamless version of the world to which her parents’ Brooklyn aspires, but the important point here, and the quality which differentiates the text from Solos, is that Audrey is able to break down and re-assemble the world by means of squinting or closing one or other eye. In other words, the fractured and the seamless perspectives are held together in exquisite tension, just as within the passage there is a mix of simple sentences and complex sentences broken into many sub-clauses. Most significant, for this argument, is Audrey’s recognition that the atoms comprising the world are held together by “voluntary, not fated” union. This is, then, an anti-essentialist standpoint – there is nothing given about Brooklyn’s character (even its diversity), despite her parents’ generation’s insistence to the contrary.

37 For the young Audrey, Manhattan possesses all the attractive qualities woefully underrepresented by the older generation’s parochial Brooklyn. Manhattan is the place where “the big men” can be found (30); it is “mythic,” “jewelled,” and “impossibly sophisticated” (62). In a reversal of Solos’ regional ethic, Manhattan offers the infinite

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variety and the depth young Audrey is constantly seeking. Audrey, bedazzled by its cosmopolitan style, is not prepared to exercise the same deconstructive gifts here that she applies to Brooklyn. However, when it becomes clear that the eye doctor she is sent to see by her mother is sexually attracted to her, she is forced to open her mind to untenable thoughts, to a universe where human nature was not as Brooklyn conspired to portray it, progressing towards ever more expansive plateaus of decency and tolerance, but rather where people were driven chaotically by impulses, everyone wanting something from everyone else and staggering about to get it (67-68).

38 In short, the visions of the seamlessly fabricated, ordered world and the entropic world compete for supremacy just as much here as they do in Brooklyn.

39 Through her subsequent affair with the eye doctor, Audrey learns of a tactile reality beyond the life of the mind (74), and of the “monotony” which inevitably follows the excitement of desire (91). Most of all, she learns the true value of her rogue eye. Rather than simply being a means of carrying her momentarily beyond the confines of Brooklyn and “down those broader paths” (30), it represents the gift of an incisively literary or critical standpoint. When the writing Audrey declares, as the affair draws to an awkward close, that “[s]he was me, at that moment. She already knew what I know” (114), it is a recognition that a generic distinction is no longer acceptable between “Brooklyn” and “the world,” and indeed between “the world as it is” and “the world as people wish to see it.” After all, the eye itself embodies the contradictions: it can be both a “wayward eye” (30), constantly seeking adventure beyond the domestic, and a “lazy” eye, “an incarnation of the body’s dearest tropism, the leaning towards more somnolent forms of life” (65).

40 Schwartz appears, then, to present what Tom Lutz calls the “dynamic of alternating cultural visions structuring a reading that exceeds them all [which] occurs in the great regionalist writing.” He continues: Regionalist texts represent the arguments alive in the culture about city and country, nature and culture, center and periphery, tradition and modernity, high and low, masculinity and femininity, the costs and benefits of progress, and any number of other issues; but instead of resolving these debates, they oscillate between the sides, producing, finally, a complex symphony of cultural voices and positions whose only resolution lies in the reader-writer compact to survey the fullness of the scene (Lutz 31).

41 In other words, the writer and the reader have a privileged overview of the competing visions portrayed in the regionalist text and are therefore in a position to make informed judgments. This, one could argue, is an inflated and inaccurate ideal of their roles, a point returned to at the end of the article. Suffice to say for now that, on the surface, the mature Audrey appears to believe in her ability “to survey the fullness of the scene,” through realizing that “there [is] life in Brooklyn” (144) just as there are denial, secrets and monotony in Manhattan.

42 However, Schwartz does not even allow the reader to settle unquestioningly for a split between the naïve, Brooklyn Audrey and the wise, literary adult Audrey who informs us that she did eventually leave the borough (145). The last page takes the form of a disquisition on memory, in which adult Audrey muses on the concatenating tendency of her literary vision:

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Perhaps I haven’t succeeded in finding the girl I was, but only in fabricating the girl I might have been, would have liked to be, looking backwards from the woman I have become (146).

43 In this sense, the generic boundaries of the coming-of-age narrative itself are blurred: the more or less neat transition from immaturity in the regions to full knowledge in the big world outside is shown to be retroactively constructed. Finally, Audrey reminds us that the storytelling impulse represents the final combination of the fragmentary and the coherent visions: By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corner of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particles, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions – what happened and what might have happened – come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight (Schwartz 146).

44 The blurring described here is, ironically, essential for a clarity of vision which can accommodate the merging of fact and fiction, real and imagined, in the portrayal of autobiography and urban region. “Brooklyn” has therefore become simultaneously a real place, a testing ground for an ambiguous literary perspective, and a model of how memory works.

45 For Kitty Burns Florey, regionalism consists in the fossilization of signifying details, the fear of change over time. For Schwartz, ultimately, it is an ongoing process, something worked through persistently in the act of writing, and interminable. As Audrey says: “I left Brooklyn. I leave still, every moment. For no matter how much I leave, it doesn’t leave me” (145).

46 This may appear to be no more than a sophisticated articulation of the adage, “You can take the girl out of Brooklyn [...],” but the ceaseless interplay of staying and leaving it describes is central to the argument. Time and again in contemporary Brooklyn fictions one sees this model of urban region-as-process rehearsed. In each instance, the process consists of arrivals and departures – continual movement between local and global perspectives, between urban region as material reality and imagined community, between pasts and presents, and between region as geographical specificity and heterotopic everyplace.

47 The Brooklyn of Michael Stephens’ The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, for example, is resistant to the family legends of its main characters, the Cooles, a large and unruly Brooklyn Irish family. It rejects the “myth of geography and forebears” (72). Despite “lending itself more to the imagination than facts” (23), like Audrey’s Brooklyn, it is too bound up in historical and demographic change to allow itself to be defined by one family’s myths. As the Coole brothers and sisters return to “East New York” for the funeral of their father (37), the “flinty and cold-eyed nostalgia” identified by Jonathan Lethem usurps any attempt at idealization of anecdotal family history. After all, it is impossible to feel the warm glow of nostalgia for a place that never was primeval or based on rootedness rather than transition. As the narrator puts it, “[e]ven before the ’77 riots, that notion of getting out pervaded anyone who was in here” (93). The preposition “in” connotes incarceration in both the material reality of squalid tenements and treeless streets, and the futile dream of mapping the area ancestrally through “land and blood” (Joseph 10). Pessimistic about the borough’s potential to bring unity or understanding, The Brooklyn Book of the Dead reads like an anti-regionalist novel.

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48 The final text under consideration, Jonathan Lethem’s own Girl in Landscape (1998), takes the idea of region-as-process even further and travels further even than Schwartz from the geographical specificities and local color of Florey’s Brooklyn. It should be clear by now that the preoccupation here is not with regionalist literature in any traditional sense, but more with the differing uses to which Brooklyn as a real or imagined space is put in contemporary texts. On the surface, Lethem’s novel (like Schwartz’s) certainly carries few of the hallmarks of classic American regionalism. For a start, it is set on a distant planet inhabited by the mysterious Archbuilders, a race of aliens made of “flesh and fur and shell and frond,” with hair resembling “a bungle of calla lilies” and a habit of adopting bizarre yet strangely poetic English collocations for names, such as “Hiding Kneel” (61). Yet, in chronicling the arrival of human settlers on the planet, and their subsequent relationships with the Archbuilders, the novel does reflect an enduring regionalist theme: the effect on a community of the arrival of outsiders. In this case, the outsiders are the Marsh family, evacuees from a blighted Planet Earth of the future. And like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, it is a coming-of-age narrative, a story of how a young girl achieves adulthood through hardship and calls upon her community for support. Here, however, the community is not yet established; it is on the brink of foundation, at a stage of frontier encounter.

49 Girl in Landscape is a Brooklyn fiction, though one in the abstract, in which the borough undergoes a radical transposition. Here, past and future, earth and space, reality and fantasy, all collapse in a genre-twisting meditation on the reconciliation of inner impulses and the formation of a community from melancholic fragments. In this novel, Brooklyn is “not New York” and not of this earth. Yet in interview, Lethem has admitted that after the outlandish fictions of Gun, With Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon and As She Climbed Across the Table, his fourth novel represents a sort of homecoming and a confrontation with his past: For years, I was overwhelmed by Brooklyn [...]. The richness of my own upbringing was too much for me to contend with, either in my life or my writing, and so I was in a kind of flirtation. When you see me going back in the first couple of chapters of Girl in Landscape, you’re seeing me daring myself to open that box and really let it come (Zeitchik 37).

50 In these opening chapters, we meet the Marsh family who, after the father’s loss of an election and of his political reputation, are set to emigrate to the Planet of the Archbuilders. Before leaving, they embark on one last family outing to the beach, travelling by subway through the shattered urban topography and under the blasted, DeLillo-esque skies of a vaguely futuristic Brooklyn. Global warming has reached its logical conclusion. The sun is now “the enemy: horrible, impossible, unseeable” (9).

51 Pella, the teenage protagonist, is nonetheless reluctant to leave Brooklyn, and her fears are compounded by the sudden death from a brain tumor of her mother, Caitlin. Given that Lethem’s mother died in 1978 when he was fourteen, and that the absent mother theme is reprised in both Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, one has to regard Caitlin’s departure as a pivotal moment not just in the narrative of Girl in Landscape but in Lethem’s writing career. It is the first direct attempt to “open the box” of his autobiography. For Lethem, as for Pella, Brooklyn is inextricably connected to the loss of the mother. However, Lethem’s technique here is to relocate and re-imagine the maternal Brooklyn in the Planet of the Archbuilders, a surreal and melancholic landscape littered with ancient ruins from former Archbuilder civilizations. As fragmented as the Brooklyn left behind, this is a “landscape of remembrance” (49) not

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just because the ruins are testimony to the ambitious creativity of previous generations, but also because Pella envisages it as a maternal landscape. “Caitlin had left but was still here,” we are informed, “[h]er voice hung over this landscape” (49, 48).

52 As Carl Abbott observes, Girl in Landscape (along with sci-fi novels such as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles) is a homesteading novel which uses archetypal frontier narratives to dramatize concerns about the future. More specifically, it deals with the evolution of community through the settlement of disparate individuals. What distinguishes it from more traditional frontier narratives, however, is not simply the alien environment, but the way in which the alien landscape speaks simultaneously of the mourned past and of the optative future, as well as linking the personal and collective concerns.

53 For Pella, the development of the new community is co-terminous with the traditional elements of the coming-of-age narrative (in particular the rejection of paternal authority), and with her personal project to externalize the mourning of her mother in the landscape. These symbolic connections are confirmed by her culminating verbal rejection: “He’s nothing without my mother.” The words snuck out of her like a thread between her lips, a betraying filament that stretched back to Brooklyn, to Pineapple Street (240).

54 For the first time, the symbolic linking of her former home and the alien landscape is explicitly acknowledged. Pella’s aim is thus to become “a feature of the landscape” (173), but this is not a form of retreat. Rather, it signals her awareness of what the landscape represents: a chance to reassemble the scattered fragments of memory in the establishment of a new community. The town of “Caitlin” which she founds at the close of the novel is her maternal Brooklyn re-imagined, the culmination of the mourning process (279).

55 While Pella might appear to fabricate a myth-symbol complex every bit as incorporative and solipsistic as Emily Lime’s in Solos, or the Cooles’ in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, there is in fact a fundamental and redeeming difference. Whereas Solos’ nostalgia for the present requires, as we have seen, a denial of what came before (thus locating it in a mythic tradition which includes Thomas Cole’s Essay on American Scenery and Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis), Pella recognizes the importance of the indigenous inhabitants, the Archbuilders, in the development of the new community. In an obvious allegory of the encounter with Native Americans (and less obviously of contemporary immigration issues), Girl in Landscape envisages the new Brooklyn as a process of continual meetings with absolute otherness, a transgression of the boundaries of the self. Pella ultimately distinguishes herself ethically, and truly comes of age, when she realizes this: None of what happened was really about Archbuilders, Pella decided [...]. It was still all about the humans, what they saw when they looked at the Archbuilders [...]. Maybe now they would meet them. Maybe the Archbuilders would buy the bread. (279)

56 Breaking free of the solipsistic gaze frees the self from a colonial or parochial settler mentality (the kind evinced in Solos) and allows a conception of regional community which, in this context, not only combines the local with the global, but transcends worlds.7

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57 What Schwartz, Stephens and Lethem’s Brooklyn fictions share is not only their nuanced portrayals of a region both specific and representative, but also the sense that all three texts are allegories of reading. Audrey’s coming-of-age, as we have seen, is commensurate with the emergence of her literary perspective. In the process of reading about it, we are in effect taught how to read Brooklyn, to exercise our deviant eyes and disassemble the skin holding together a belief in primeval regional values. Proceeding from the death of the author (the father), The Brooklyn Book of the Dead presents us with a multi-vocal, fragmented structure, shifting chronologically and in space from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs where a number of the Coole siblings now live. Our reading thus participates in a regionalism not ahistorical, as in Solos, but rhizomic, formed not by patrilinearity, but through ceaseless negotiations across history and between center and suburb, borough and metropolis.

58 Entering the landscapes of Girl in Landscape as a reader is by no means a wholly comforting experience. Indeed, Pella’s isolation throughout the novel stems largely from the epistemological and ethical supplement she is afforded as the most perceptive reader of events. It is she who has the “lonely knowledge” that the whole truth is never available (66), but at the same time she witnesses, during a series of out-of-body experiences brought about by exposure to the planet’s native viruses, a number of secrets. These include her father’s affair with the biologist, Diana Eastling (166) and the artist Hugh Merrow’s sexual relationship with an Archbuilder (121-23). In bearing witness to these events “[i]t was Pella who was most alone in the end, knowing all she knew” (169). Yet her transition from adolescence to adulthood, somewhat like Audrey’s, combines an awareness that reading is partly the uncovering of secrets with an understanding that, in the end, the textual landscape will always retain a certain “clandestinity” amenable to ethical reading (Newton 246). That is, any attempt fully to “know,” or to take in “the fullness of the scene,” becomes an incorporative strategy like Emily Lime’s, a desire to possess.

59 Crucial to this understanding, once again, are the Archbuilders: their irreducible difference, which “burn[s] a hole in the world, change[s] it utterly” (62), refuses incorporation. The ethical challenge they issue is symbolized by the figure of the arch itself: reading is an individual or solitary act, but to enter the landscape of “crumbled arches [...], [f]allen bridges, incomplete towers, demolished pillars” (48) constitutes an ethical conjunction to “explore the boundaries” (125), to become a member of a wider community founded on true difference, not superficial diversity. An arch, after all, is something with the potential to connect.

60 Clearly, Lethem sees the real Brooklyn in similar terms to the Archbuilders’ landscape: It’s a place where the renovations that are so characteristic of American life never quite work. It’s a place where the past and memory are lying around in chunks even after they’ve been displaced (Zeitchik 37).

61 Viewed in this way, it is very much a “broken land” of mourning.8 As this article has suggested, Pella’s success, and Girl in Landscape’s, lies in taking the process of private mourning – for Caitlin, and for the author’s own mother – and in forging a community from it in the foundation of “Caitlin.” Distinct from the pre-lapsarian cravings of nostalgia, or the hagiography of ancestors that is the weakness both of the Coole brothers and of the Archbuilders (GL 241), such mourning is the recognition of the inseparability of past experience from the communal present and future. Most importantly, it lies at the heart of all reading. Every reading experience combines

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remembrance of stories which have passed with a series of encounters, negotiations and inventions of new relationships.

62 Therefore, Pella’s translocated maternal Brooklyn is not an atavistic utopia, but rather a regional space representative of what readers do: the bringing of internalized fragments of memory and experience to bear on the ethical encounter with the alien (yet strangely familiar) landscapes of the text. In light of Lethem’s vision, and indeed Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s, one might be tempted to modify the traditional conception of the novel as a created world: in continually staging negotiations between the reader’s personal perspective and its inherently dialogic, transitive nature, the novel functions something like a region itself. In the end, contrary to Tom Lutz’s assertion, the most successful Brooklyn fictions are those which deliberately disallow protagonists and readers access to “the fullness of the scene.” Solos thinks small in order to hold on to a personal fantasy of diversity which is nonetheless complete within in its own solipsistic confines; thus, for all its nostalgia for community, it represents the kind of secession from connection described by Zygmunt Bauman. Leaving Brooklyn and Girl in Landscape, in contrast, use abstracted Brooklyns – “broken lands” – as allegories of fragmented reading. They demonstrate that the individual needs others to complete the scene, and that the resultant community is an endless series of what Martin Buber calls “relational incident[s]” (46). Those Brooklyn fictions which actually stray away from local color, from signifying details, and from facile comparisons with Manhattan, dramatize the ethical endeavor involved in constructing regions and communities, and involve the reader more directly in that endeavor. In so doing, they reconfigure Brooklyn itself as an ethical space, not simply Manhattan’s friendlier neighbor.

63 Works Cited

64 Abbott, Carl. “Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier.” Science Fiction Studies 32.2 (July 2005): 240-64.

65 Auster, Paul. The Brooklyn Follies. New York: Henry Holt and

66 Company, 2006.

67 - - - . 3 Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge. New York: Picador, 2003.

68 Bauman, Zygmunt. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.

69 Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Bantam Books, 1950.

70 Bramen, Carrie Tirado. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

71 Buber, Martin. I and Thou. 1937. London: Continuum, 2004.

72 Cole, Thomas. “Essay on American Scenery.” American Monthly Magazine 1 (Jan. 1836): 1-12.

73 Draper, R. P. (ed.). The Literature of Region and Nation. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.

74 Florey, Kitty Burns. Solos. New York: Berkley Books, 2004.

75 James, Henry. The American Scene. 1907. London: Penguin, 1994.

76 Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347-58.

77 - - - . Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.

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78 Joseph, Philip. American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007.

79 Kowalewski, Michael. “Contemporary Regionalism.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Ed. Charles L. Crow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 7-24.

80 Kushner, Seth and Anthony LaSala. The Brooklynites. Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2007.

81 Lapote, Phillip. “Destination Brooklyn.” Salon. 3 July 2006.

82 .

83 Lee, James Kyung-Jin. “The City as Region.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Ed. Charles L. Crow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 137-53.

84 Lethem, Jonathan. Girl in Landscape. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

85 - - - . Motherless Brooklyn. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.

86 Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.

87 Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2004.

88 Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.

89 McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Vintage, 2006.

90 Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

91 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Leaving Brooklyn. London: Mandarin, 1990.

92 Sohn, Amy. My Old Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

93 Stephens, Michael. The Brooklyn Book of the Dead. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1994.

94 Tucker, Martin. « What Is This Thing Called Brooklyn ? » The World of Brooklyn : An Appreciation by Brooklyn Writers. Ed. Martin Tucker. Brookville, NY : Confrontation Magazine P of Long Island U, 1988. 7-11.

95 Varvogli, Aliki. « Thinking Small Across the Atlantic : Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life. » Symbiosis 11.2 (Oct. 2007) : 47-59.

96 Zeitchik, Steven. « A Brooklyn of the Soul. » Interview with Jonathan Lethem. Publishers Weekly. 15 September 2003. 37.38.

NOTES

1. This is not to say that one should endorse such a view, only that setting up such a dichotomy is convenient for the purpose of many Brooklyn authors. One could argue that Manhattan itself felt the full force of global narratives on 9/11, and therefore the comparison is largely a tactless or unfair one in reality. 2. For example: “Now, as we took our walks up and down Seventh Avenue, passing the dry cleaner, the grocery store, the bakery, the beauty parlor, the newsstand, the coffee shop, she was assaulted by a plethora of different tongues. She heard Spanish and

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Korean. Russian and Chinese, Arabic and Greek. Japanese, German and French [...]” (Auster 229). 3. In Amy Sohn’s My Old Man (2004), the consumer picturesque is reconfigured as what one might call “the sexual picturesque.” Here, diversity is expressed through the sexual peccadilloes of Cobble Hill’s resident nymphomaniac Liz Kaminsky and the racial characteristics of her many partners. Her rapacious sexuality is itself a type of consumerism, expressed in generalising terms: “She enjoyed having her own asshole violated, and said the reason she loved black guys was because they were more open to doing so” (43). Like many other Brooklyn novels, the underlying fear is of gentrification and homogenisation. In My Old Man, the narrator moves to Cobble Hill just as “the honkeys started coming out to play” and “the Puerto Ricans had long ago sold their religious article shops and hightailed it back to the island” (13, 14). The sexual picturesque is a way of holding on to local color on an individualistic level, while largely ignoring the larger economic and demographic issues. 4. The Brooklynites provides yet more evidence. It ends with “a simple list of some of the food and beverages consumed on this journey,” including sushi, Thai cuisine, pizza, falafel and turkey sandwiches. This is a taxonomy clearly designed to stand as a metonym of cultural and ethnic diversity. The consumer picturesque is in fact a form of, “cognitive mapping,” to employ Fredric Jameson’s influential term, though it is a form which makes no attempt to resist the commodification of experience, but rather provides the individual with a sense of regional and global position explicitly through commodity consumption. 5. I am indebted to Aliki Varvogli for the idea of “thinking small.” See her article “Thinking Small Across the Atlantic: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life” in Symbiosis 11.2 (Oct. 2007): 47-59. 6. Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies works slightly differently. Rather than resolutely thinking small, it saves the intrusion of 9/11 for the very last page. That way, the action of the novel, the accumulation of small lives of ordinary people, acts as a retroactive preparation for and defence against the tragedy. 7. Although a detailed philosophical analysis is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that Pella’s recognition of the Archbuilders has a distinctly Levinasian tincture. Their alien otherness ruptures the securities of human conception. Pella, however, is able to move beyond a view of the Archbuilders as generic mass to an appreciation of their singularity through language. The key moment comes toward the end of the novel, when Pella goes looking for the imprisoned Archbuilder, Hiding Kneel: “‘Hiding Kneel?’ she whispered. The words were odd in her mouth. She’d never called an Archbuilder by its name. She said the name again, a bit louder” (251). Through the simple utterance of the name, Pella feels the strangeness of the Other, the strangeness of her self, and learns that the world is not hers alone. There are strong parallels here with Levinas’ description of the encounter with the Other in Totality and Infinity. 8. Brooklyn’s name derives from the original Dutch settlement Breukelen, meaning “broken land.”

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ABSTRACTS

The article analyzes the depiction of Brooklyn as an urban region in a number of recent American novels, including Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn and Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos. It argues that Brooklyn is frequently defined in opposition to Manhattan: the former being viewed as the epitome of American ideals of community-in-diversity, the latter as homogenizing, globalizing and obsessed with newness. In a time when regions and communities are frequently regarded as under threat from, amongst other things, globalization and terrorism, it is interesting to examine whether the ideals of diversity and community associated with Brooklyn are based on nostalgic, mythic notions of land and family or are in fact based on superficial signifiers of diversity and a range of consumer choices. The article goes on to argue that the complex interactions between the regional and the global in these novels can be seen as analogous to processes of reading regional texts themselves.

INDEX

Keywords: Regionalism, Joseph, Brooklyn, community, diversity, picturesque, consumerism, local color, reading, Auster, Paul, Abbott, Carl, Bauman, Zygmunt, Bramen, Carrie Tirado, Buber, Martin, Cole, Thomas, Crane, Hart, Florey, Kitty Burns, Fox, Paula, Howells, William Dean, James, Henry, Jameson, Fredric, Philip, Kushner, Seth, Lapote, Phillip, LaSala, Anthony, Lee, James Kyung-Jin, Lethem, Jonathan, Levinas, Emmanuel, Lutz, Tom, Malpas, Simon, McEwan, Ian, Newton, Adam Zachary, Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, Selby Jr., Hubert, Smith, Betty, Sohn, Amy, Stephens, Michael, Tucker, Turner, Frederick Jackson, Whitman, Walt, Williams, William Carlos

AUTHOR

JAMES PEACOCK James Peacock, Keele University

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All Work or No Play: Key Themes in the History of the American Stage Actor as Worker

Sean Holmes

1. Introduction

1 When stage actors in the United States walked off the job in the summer of 1919 in protest at the persistent refusal of the major theatrical producers to recognize their union, most commentators were unwilling to take the strike seriously, preferring instead to exploit the moment for cheap laughs. “Perhaps we soon shall see . . . [actor] DeWolf Hopper . . . in front of some Broadway theater, banner on shoulder, aided and supported by the dapper but militant [musical-comedy star] Francis Wilson,” joked one reporter, playing upon the apparent incongruity of prominent stage performers engaging in actions more closely associated with the industrial working class. “Tottie Tootles and her thirty-five beautiful charm cavorters might refuse to cherry their lips or paint their eyebrows . . . and thereby destroy the illusion of the stage for a century,” suggested another newsman, casting chorus girls not as exploited wage earners but as temperamental bundles of commodified sexuality.1 More than eighty years on and little had changed. In October 2000, when actress Elizabeth Hurley was barracked by pickets from the Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG) at the premiere of her movie Bedazzled for breaking a strike over payments for commercials, the international press paid far more attention to the protestors’ placards—most memorably the one that read “Liz Scabley You Make Me Hurl”—than to what was at stake in the dispute.2

2 Historically, the problem that has confronted actors whenever they have engaged in struggles for workplace justice is that acting, whether on stage or in front of a movie camera, is rarely perceived as work. The reasons for this are rooted firmly in the way that the commercial entertainment industry in the United States operates. As film theorists have pointed out, performance is an unusual commodity in that it is a labor process exhibited before and consumed by an audience. As the key component in this process, the actor is both the producer of the commodity and its embodiment. Yet the system of production in the commercial entertainment industry masks this duality. In

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transforming actors into fetishized objects of consumption, it detaches them from the industrial workplace and defines their calling almost entirely in terms of the rewards that accrue to it, with the consequence that their collective grievances have rarely elicited much in the way of public sympathy.3 To quote one recent commentator, [w]e’re not about to wear ribbons of solidarity with Tom Cruise because he’s down to his last $50 million with no prospect of immediate employment. And the only scabs worth worrying about in Hollywood, surely, are the ones picked up from a working girl on the corner of Sunset and Vine.4

3 Even academics have found it difficult to take actors and their working lives seriously. Until recently, the experience of work and the character of labor relations in the commercial entertainment industry remained largely unexamined outside the pages of official trade-union histories and a handful of rather dated industrial relations studies.5 For the generation of labor historians who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, actors were a frivolous bunch and somehow less worthy of scholarly attention than the craft workers, machine operatives, and unskilled laborers who were the primary focus of both the “old” labor history and the “new.” Over the last two decades, however, scholars have finally acknowledged that actors are significant not simply as cultural commodities but also as key players in the process of cultural production. Working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, they have begun to explore the nature of work in the commercial entertainment industry; the constantly shifting economic and cultural contexts in which actors have sold their labor; and the ongoing efforts of actors to construct a coherent occupational identity.6 The aim of this article is to make use of this growing body of literature, along with material gathered from archives, to illustrate the key themes in the history of actors as workers. Focusing on the legitimate theatre in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the goal is to establish what it meant to work as a stage performer in an era of unprecedented economic and technological change. In the process, I have done my best to restore voices to a group of workers whom scholars have too often assumed were silent about their experiences on the theatrical shop floor. 2. Establishing ‘Legitimate Theatre’ 4 In the context of the commercial entertainment industry in the United States in the early twentieth century, the term “legitimate theatre” carried considerable ideological baggage. As a straightforward descriptor, it differentiated full-length plays and musicals from vaudeville, burlesque and musical revues and it was expansive enough to incorporate not only the metropolitan theatre but also the resident stock companies and travelling shows that catered to the audiences of small-town America. As theatre historian Mark Hodin has demonstrated, however, it was also used to structure the market for theatrical entertainment hierarchically by marking out conventionally staged drama as “the best occasion and opportunity for acquiring cultural prestige . . . commercially.” For its middle- and upper-class devotees, theatrical legitimacy was a bulwark against mass culture and a vehicle for reasserting hierarchies of race and class in the face of the corrupting effects of immigration. For the men and women who earned their living on the legitimate stage, it was a source of status, something that set them apart from other supposedly lesser performers and played a key role in defining their view of the work in which they were engaged. As far as they were concerned, they were the elite of the American stage.7

5 Like other branches of the commercial entertainment industry in the United States, the so-called legitimate theatre underwent a radical restructuring at the end of the

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nineteenth century. Following the economic downturn of the early 1870s, “combination” companies, groups of actors touring the country in productions designed to showcase the talents of a single star performer, began to displace the resident stock companies that had hitherto been the principal source of theatrical entertainment in the United States. Stripped of their role as producers, theatre managers had to reinvent themselves as theatrical shopkeepers, travelling each summer to New York City, the emergent capital of the entertainment industry, to book shows for the upcoming season. In its early years, the so-called combination system was characterized by intense and unrestricted competition. In an effort to combat the problems that this raised, theatre managers began to group their theatres into circuits, a strategy that strengthened their bargaining position immeasurably because it made it possible for them to offer touring companies the opportunity to book several weeks of business in a single transaction. In the wake of this shift, enterprising businessmen in New York City set themselves up as booking agents. As their businesses prospered, they expanded their operations, investing in theatres of their own and gradually building up regional distribution networks. In 1896, the most successful of these entrepreneurs—Abraham Erlanger and Marc Klaw, Samuel Nixon and J. Fred Zimmerman, Charles Frohman, and Al Hayman—agreed to pool their resources. Of the seven, only Charles Frohman was directly engaged in the creative process and their agreement marks the moment at which the theatrical middleman emerged as the lynchpin of the system of production in the American theatre. What contemporary commentators referred to as the Theatrical Syndicate rapidly came to exercise an iron grip over the theatre industry, compelling both theatre managers and independent producers to work through it and freezing out anyone who refused to do so. At the height of its power, it was responsible for booking more than seven hundred theatres across the country.8

6 However, this dominance over the U.S. theatre industry did not last for long. After the turn of the century, the Shuberts, three brothers with a chain of theatres in upstate New York, challenged the Syndicate’s virtual monopoly by buying up theatrical real estate across the country and offering their services to theatre managers and producers who had fallen victim to its exclusionary practices. In 1905, Sam Shubert, the eldest of the Shubert brothers and the driving force behind their business operations, was killed in a railroad accident but his younger siblings, Lee and J.J., proved capable executors of his vision. Masquerading as advocates of fair play and a free market for theatrical entertainment, they adopted what they termed an “open door” policy, opening their theatres to any production regardless of whether it had played in a Syndicate house. No sooner had they achieved their objectives, however, than they slammed shut the open door, embracing with enthusiasm the type of restrictive practices that had been pioneered by their rivals in the Syndicate. By 1910, they had achieved parity with the Theatrical Syndicate in terms of the booking and routing of attractions. In the subsequent struggle for market dominance, they took advantage of recently developed corporate techniques of capitalization, management, and strategy to establish themselves as the preeminent purveyors of theatrical entertainment in the United States.9

7 Seduced perhaps by the anti-monopoly rhetoric of Progressive-era commentators on the entertainment business, historians have tended to overplay the parallels between the so-called theatre trusts and the oligopolies that came to dominate other sectors of the American economy in the early twentieth century. In terms of the scale of their

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operations, the levels of capitalization that underpinned their businesses, and the number of workers they employed, even the most powerful theatrical producers were small-time operators by comparison with the mighty corporations that had emerged out of the second industrial revolution. Nor was their control of the market for theatrical entertainment entirely unchallenged. Though the Theatrical Syndicate and the Shuberts exercised a very tight grip over the metropolitan market, resident stock companies offering cut-price versions of Broadway hits and repertory companies performing on the small-time circuits of the rural hinterland continued to account for some four-fifths of theatrical production in the United States. The managerial revolution that underpinned the rise of the modern business enterprise, moreover, left the business of the theatre largely untouched. Even the most cursory trawl through the Shubert Archives reveals that it was Lee and J.J. Shubert, and not salaried managers, who remained the key decision-makers within the Shubert Organization through the 1920s. Such qualifications should not obscure what the new-style businessmen of the theatre achieved, however. By creating national entertainment networks that integrated the processes of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception, they transformed American show business and, by extension, the conditions under which theatrical workers sold their labor.10 3. The Production of Theatre 8 Like other culture industries in the United States, the theatre industry in the early twentieth century was geared towards the production of a standardized commodity.11 Though the need to differentiate one show from another fostered some degree of experimentation and left space for theatrical innovators to work, the general tendency was towards imitation and repetition, and the main drive for the biggest theatrical producers was the desire to identify a successful formula and then replicate it. The Shuberts were untypical of the businessmen who controlled the commercial theatre in that, unlike all but Charles Frohman among their rivals in the Theatrical Syndicate, they were actively involved in the process of theatrical production. The business over which they presided, however, both exemplified the trend towards mass production in the commercial entertainment industry and took it to its logical extreme. Recognizing the importance of establishing clear lines of authority within their theatrical empire, the brothers divided producing responsibilities between them, with Lee Shubert supervising dramas and comedies and J.J. Shubert overseeing musical offerings. Lee Shubert was not directly involved in the task of putting together shows, preferring to delegate creative authority to theatre professionals and comparing his role to that of a newspaper magnate directing the activities of a team of editors and writers. J.J. Shubert, by contrast, took a hands-on approach, running what theatre historian Foster Hirsch has termed “a theatrical sweatshop” in which a team of largely uncredited writer-lyricists, directors, and choreographers working to his specifications put together the operettas and musical revues that came to define the Shubert brand. Though titles, settings, routines, and casts changed, the content of the shows varied very little from one theatrical season to the next. The Shuberts’ Winter Garden revues, for example, followed a format—elaborate sets, comic sketches, and big production numbers performed by scantily-clad chorus girls—that guaranteed commercial success but, as contemporary critics frequently pointed out, left little space for innovation. “For the twentieth time, the Shuberts have changed the show or at least the title of the show at the Winter Garden,” began one review of the Shuberts’ Show of Wonders in

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December 1916, continuing “You would scarcely realize that anything is new, however.”12

9 In the reconfigured theatrical economy of the early twentieth century, the market for actors’ labor was highly segmented. Even in an era of expanding opportunities, the majority of the 30,000 or so professional performers in the United States never made it on to the New York stage or toured with a first-class combination company.13 The minority that did had to negotiate the vagaries of an occupational hierarchy—the so- called star system—that afforded vast salaries to the handful of players that occupied its upper strata but meager rewards to the far greater number of performers that eked out a living at its base. If the often rather sensationalistic reports that appeared in popular periodicals during the period have any basis in fact, the stars of the legitimate stage were astonishingly well rewarded for their labor. Well-placed by virtue of their perceived exchange value to negotiate lucrative deals with the production managers who employed them, they were often paid both a fixed weekly salary and a percentage of the profits from the show in which they were performing. For a forty-week national tour in 1911, for example, John Drew, the senior member of the Drew-Barrymore acting family, was reportedly able to command a salary of $500 a week and a cut of the box office takings that ultimately amounted to $85,000.

10 For the great majority of actors, however, the fruits of theatrical success were more elusive. At the turn of the century, the average performer earned an annual salary of $875 for a typical season of twenty-five weeks—$328 more than the average salary of a public school teacher but $44 less than the average salary of a postal worker. With the supply of labor always far exceeding the number of available parts, moreover, unemployment rates among actors in the early twentieth century were perennially high, with about one-third of stage performers in the United States out of work at any given time.14 Even moderately successful performers routinely experienced marked fluctuations in their fortunes from one year to the next. Looking back on her childhood in the early 1900s, actress Margalo Gillmore, daughter of one-time leading man Frank Gillmore, recalled the degree to which her family’s standard of living went up and down according to the vicissitudes of her father’s stage career: Whenever we had a maid, it was a sign that Daddy was in a successful play. Whenever Dad opened in a new play, [my sister] Ruth and I . . . used to add to our nightly prayers not only a petition for our father’s personal triumph but a strong hint that the play should be a rousing success so that we could go to [the Long Island resort of] Sconset for the summer.15

11 Further down the occupational ladder, few performers could hope to emulate the lifestyle of a Frank Gillmore, much less that of a John Drew. As one observer put it in 1908, the “second-rate” actor was more likely to talk about “rent, the leak in the gas range, the cost of storing furniture, the best place to buy colored shirts, [and] the advantages of home laundry” than “the flavor of champagne, the rise in the cost of diamonds, [and] the favorites at the race track.”16 4. Gender and Discrimination 12 Gender shaped the experience of actors as workers in ways that both reflected broader patterns in American society and marked acting out from other lines of work. An aversion to cross-gender casting meant that in the commercial theatre, as in other occupations where men and women worked together (office work and social work, for example), two distinct career ladders existed, one male and one female. What made theatrical work unusual and possibly even unique was that the process of segmentation

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did not always work to the disadvantage of women.17 Prior to the 1850s, the star as a cultural construct was inextricably bound up with prevailing notions of masculinity. Leading actresses, usually restricted to roles as virtuous heroines in domestic melodramas, received neither the acclaim nor the rewards that were accorded to leading male performers like Edmund Kean and Edwin Forrest. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the way in which stardom was defined became less explicitly gendered, a cultural shift that opened up the show-business firmament to women, and by the early twentieth century, female stars were at least as well rewarded as their male counterparts.18 For a forty-week run in What Every Woman Knows in 1909, for instance, the actress Maude Adams received $1000 a week and a share in the show’s profits that ultimately amounted to over $200,000.19 Not all female performers were so fortunate, however. Closer to the base of the occupational hierarchy, the young women of the Broadway chorus lines, for example, lived a far more precarious existence. Segregated on the basis of their sex, they earned wages that were only marginally higher than those available to other groups of “unskilled” female workers.20

13 What complicated the picture still further was that the career earnings of the vast majority of women in show business, as in other occupations that commodified female sexuality, generally lagged behind those of men because the shelf lives of female performers, regardless of their status, tended to be shorter. Chorus girls in the early twentieth century, for example, rarely lasted more than four or five seasons on the Broadway stage. According to Florenz Ziegfeld, theatrical impresario and self-styled “Glorifier of the American Girl,” he and his fellow producers had little use for them once they hit their early twenties. Beyond that age, he explained in a 1919 magazine article that made explicit the connection between age, attractiveness, and the employability of women in show business, “the eyes grow a little less clear, the cheeks sag just a trifle, and the chin shows a fatal inclination to become a pair.”21 With a few notable exceptions of whom Lillian Russell and Marie Dressler are probably the most celebrated, few chorus girls graduated to more important theatrical roles. Most simply left the stage and got married. Census statistics also suggest that most female performers had to trade on their youthful beauty and few were able to continue working beyond their early forties. Of the 4000 female performers working in Manhattan in 1920, almost forty percent were under twenty-four as compared with only twelve percent of male performers, while less than eight percent were over forty- five.22

14 Female sexuality entered into the exchange process in other ways as well. Anecdotal evidence suggests that female performers routinely encountered sexual harassment at the hands of their male employers and that the myth of the casting couch is firmly rooted in the historical realities of a labor market in which supply consistently outstripped demand. According to their most recent biographer, Lee and J. J. Shubert, the most powerful theatrical producers of the first half of the twentieth century, were incorrigible womanizers who had no qualms whatsoever about using their position to get chorus girls into bed. “What they did to those girls wasn’t fair,” observed one former Shubert employee in hindsight. “If you didn’t sleep with them, you didn’t get the part.”23

15 We ought perhaps to be wary of assuming that stage and screen performers who trade sexual favors for career advancement were always innocent victims. In an interview with theatre historian Foster Hirsch, Anna Terolow Reissman, an actress who worked

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on Shubert road shows in the early 1940s, denied that the chorus girls who slept with her bosses were being taking advantage of in any way. “They were hard-bitten bitches, for the most part,” she insisted, “and going on the casting couch was nothing to them.”24 Even so, there is ample evidence in the archives to suggest that the unwanted attentions of predatory employers were a perennial source of resentment for women in American show business. A complaint submitted to the Actors’ Equity Association in 1921 by an actress who had been importuned for sex by her employer while lying sick in a railroad sleeping car provides a graphic illustration of how traumatic such an experience could be: [H]e came into the stateroom and turned out the light. Then he came over to my bed and began feeling all over my body and he asked me if I would be his “friend” and [said] that if I would, he would sure put me up in the swellest hotel, and buy me nice dresses and clothes. He then asked me if I would not do business with him and screw him.

16 Though the woman, whose husband was also employed in the company, succeeded in defusing the situation by threatening to call for assistance, the incident left her feeling deeply aggrieved, not least because of her assailant’s subsequent lack of remorse. According to her statement, when she informed him the next day of her intention to leave the show on account of his outrageous behavior, his only response was to tell her that “he always did like blondes and that he sure hated to see ‘his little blonde’ leave him.”25 5. Race and Discrimination 17 If the variable of race is factored into the occupational equation, it quickly becomes apparent that non-white performers in the American theatre in the early twentieth century fared considerably less well than performers who succeeded in laying claim to whiteness. The experience of African Americans in the theatre industry, for example, was defined by limited opportunities and a lengthy struggle to escape the constraints imposed by images of blackness that sprang from the collective consciousness of whites. Though blackface was a staple of theatrical entertainment (and a fast track to the cultural mainstream for performers from immigrant backgrounds) from the 1820s onwards, African-American performers remained a rarity on the American stage for most of the nineteenth century. Ira Aldridge, a black tragedian who made his debut in New York in 1821, had to leave the United States, where stardom as a cultural construct was highly racialized and Shakespeare was the exclusive preserve of whites, for Europe in order to establish himself as a major star. When African Americans finally began to make their way into the theatrical mainstream in the 1870s, they did so via the minstrel show, a cultural form that was, to quote theatre historian Thomas Postlewaite, “both an avenue to professional opportunity and the dead-end of professional development” for black performers. On the one hand, it gave them access to white theatres in the major cities of the Northeast and Midwest. On the other, it required them to conform to a set of racial stereotypes that were always limiting and often deeply demeaning.26

18 With the massive growth of musical theatre and vaudeville around the turn of the century, the range of options available to African Americans in the commercial entertainment industry began to expand. Shows like In Dahomey, a black musical featuring the talents of vaudevillians George Walker and Bert Williams and one of the biggest hits of the 1902-03 theatrical season, helped open up Broadway to African- American talent and laid the basis for a re-imagining of stardom in less rigidly racial terms. Spoken drama, however, remained a resolutely white art form. Though all-

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black companies performed abridged versions of Broadway hits for black audiences in black neighborhoods in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit, a color bar continued to operate on Broadway that denied black actors access to serious dramatic roles. Not until Charles Sidney Gilpin was cast in the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in 1920 did an African-American performer find acceptance at the highest level of the cultural hierarchy.27 Even in the musical theatre, opportunities for black performers to display their talents in racially integrated companies remained very limited through the 1920s. In the hands of impresarios like Florenz Ziegfeld, George White, and Earl Carroll, for instance, the Broadway chorus line was an almost impregnable bastion of whiteness. “Most of the pretty girls in our companies are Americans,” explained Ziegfeld in an article that reflects a broader tendency in American culture in the early twentieth century to define not only stage beauty but also national identity in explicitly racial and ethnic terms. By that I mean not only are they native-born, but that their parents and grandparents and remoter ancestors were also natives of this country. There are more types of beauty, more varieties of charm, among strictly American girls than among those of any other nationality.28

19 Only when non-white performers concealed their racial identities—as did one of the Floradora girls, the sextet of chorines who immortalized the “Tell Me Pretty Maiden” routine in the musical Floradora in 1900—were they able to infiltrate this whitest of institutions on the Great White Way.29 6. Theatrical Production and the Impact of Film 20 The shop-floor experience of individual performers was determined in large part by their position in the theatrical hierarchy. In a number of key respects, the position of the actors and actresses who occupied the upper rungs of the occupational ladder was analogous to that of the skilled craftsmen that David Montgomery has placed at the center of his analysis of machine production in the late nineteenth century. 30 Though they were engaged in a highly repetitive labor process, often having to reprise the same role eight times a week for the duration of a season, the control that they exercised over their performances permitted them a high degree of functional autonomy. The stars of the legitimate stage were able to use their elevated status to carve out what film theorist Barry King, writing on stardom in the context of the Hollywood film industry, has termed a “maneuverable space” in the workplace.31 When Al Jolson was appearing on Broadway in the musical comedy Bombo in 1921, for example, he would often step out of character and ask the audience if they would prefer to hear him sing rather than watch the rest of the show. If they responded in the affirmative, as they invariably did, he would send the rest of the cast home early, instruct the stage manager to lower the curtain, and perform solo for the remainder of the evening.32 Chorus girls, by contrast, had more in common with assembly line operatives. Interchangeable components in a complex productive process, they were subordinated to technical specialists who deployed them in highly disciplined dance routines that stripped them of their individuality and left them with little space for self-expression. As Ned Wayburn, Florenz Ziegfeld’s technical director, put it, “No-one may ever be in the wrong place. No-one may ever have a spasm of laughing hysterically. Out front are hundreds of people who have paid thousands of dollars to see real work—not monkey shines.”33

21 What it meant to work as an actor was something that had to be renegotiated in the opening decades of the twentieth century as new technologies opened up hitherto

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unimagined ways of packaging performance for popular consumption. Prior to the late nineteenth century, performance was only ever an ephemeral commodity, something which was indivisible from the individual performer and which, though it could be repeated, could not be duplicated. It therefore ceased to exist at the very moment of its production/consumption. With the advent of moving pictures, however, performance could be captured on celluloid and mechanically reproduced, a development that made it possible to detach the moment of consumption from the moment of production and to sever actors from the product of their labor. The effective application of film as a technology also necessitated new approaches to the processes by which performance was constructed. The so-called “primitive” cinema of the period prior to about 1909 left many of the conventions of the theatre intact, situating the spectator at a fixed distance from the action and filming each scene continuously and in sequence in a theatrical-style set. But as cinematic innovators like D. W. Griffith began to experiment with closer framings and shifting perspectives, the shot replaced the scene as the basic unit of cinematic construction, a change in practice that fragmented performance as a work process and undercut the autonomy of the individual performer.34

22 Unlike many of the new technologies introduced in other sectors of the economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, film did not have the effect of rendering the skills associated with older modes of production obsolete. What it did instead was to create a second market for actors’ labor in which acting prowess in the traditional sense counted for little. As the film industry expanded, it quickly became apparent that the theatrical labor market and the cinematic labor market were, for all practical purposes, mutually exclusive, and though there was always movement back and forth between the two, the relationship between stage actors and screen actors became an essentially adversarial one. Denied the use of their voices and stripped of what Barry King has termed “the pacing and behavioural architecture of [their] performances”, the leading stage players of the early twentieth century failed, with a few notable exceptions, to translate their stage reputations into screen success.35 They reacted not by recognizing the specificity of screen acting as a mode of artistic expression and acknowledging the achievements of its practitioners but by dismissing it as the bastard offspring of more elevated cultural forms and, as such, unworthy of comparison with the high art of the legitimate stage.

23 As long as the men and women of the silver screen had the confidence of their employers, they could afford to ignore such slights. With the advent of sound, however, their position was suddenly rendered considerably less secure. Desperate for performers with trained voices and experience of delivering dialogue, Hollywood producers turned once again to the Broadway stage for acting talent, a shift in recruitment policy that presented the old theatrical elite with an opportunity to reassert its primacy within the acting community. Established screen performers responded angrily to the sudden influx of stage actors into the Hollywood film studios, fearful that they were about to be displaced. Their anxieties proved to be largely misplaced. Like their predecessors fifteen years earlier, the stage performers who took the motion-picture plunge in 1928 and early 1929 were unable to stamp their authority on a medium that even in the sound era continued to prioritize the visual over the aural. Even so, the uncertainties of the conversion period left a lasting legacy of bitterness on the part of the men and women of the silver screen that manifested itself in their subsequent refusal to defer to the grandees of the metropolitan theatre on any matter relating to their professional lives. “Once we of the motion picture world

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listened with eager ear to every piece of advice that dropped from the lips of the theatre,” wrote one screen actress in 1929. “Today, hard experience has taught us that we know more of our own work than any outsider can teach us.”36

24 As Benjamin McArthur has demonstrated, the shared experience of a life spent treading the boards gave rise to a powerful sense of group identity. Regardless of their status in the occupational hierarchy, all actors partook of a common set of behaviors, beliefs, and values that was rooted in the nature of acting as work. Whatever the work culture of actors may have done in terms of fostering worker solidarity within the acting community, however, it also did a great deal to undercut it. As leading man Howard Kyle put it in the early 1920s, “those associations imposed by the work of the stage are often more trying than those of any other occupational group.”37 Stage performers resented the popular perception that they were all prone to petty squabbling, but archival evidence suggests that actors’ quarrels were a real and often very disruptive feature of the theatrical landscape. In 1923, for instance, actor John Litel, a leading man in the resident stock company at the Forsyth Theatre in Atlanta, wrote to the Actors’ Equity Association accusing his co-star, Belle Bennett, of deliberately humiliating him in front of an audience. “At today’s matinee of Daddy Long Legs,” he asserted in a wonderfully vivid account of a spat between actors, “Miss Bennett . . . made a statement to the audience which was untrue, hurtful to me and my reputation and unwarranted.” On a certain speech that I had rehearsed and played last night from the left of Miss Bennett she had in her part that I should have been on her right. After the show she spoke to the director telling him that I was on the wrong side and he agreed. He however forgot to tell me and as I had rehearsed and played it from the left I naturally did so today. Miss Bennett under her breath said, “You are on the wrong side. You are very unfair. It is very unfair.” Naturally, I was puzzled and asked under my breath what was unfair. She turned and said aloud “What did you say?” I said, “I beg your pardon. I thought you spoke to me.” She said “No, I am trying to say my lines to the people on my left.” I said, “Go ahead, I won’t stop you.” Then there was a long pause. The stage manager threw Miss Bennett her line but she could not get it. I walked over to her and gave it to her. She tried to repeat it and then in a white rage turned to the audience and pointing to me said, “This is the reason I am leaving Atlanta.” After several seconds in which the audience condemned her more than praised her, she pretended to faint. . . . The story in spreading about town is distorted by her friends and followers until I figure as a heavy man.

25 Informed of the complaint against her, Bennett hit back with a counter-charge to the effect that Litel had been conducting a concerted campaign of verbal and physical abuse against her. Over the next two weeks, Litel and Bennett, both of whom commanded large local followings in Atlanta, appealed to their respective fans for support, and the manager of the Forsyth Theatre was inundated with letters defending the professional honor of one performer or the other. The uproar only began to subside after Bennett left Atlanta to join another resident stock company in New Orleans.38

26 The way in which the theatrical labor market operated also encouraged the men and women of the legitimate stage to think in highly individualistic terms about the nature of the work in which they were engaged. As workers in an industry in which the supply of labor perennially outstripped demand, they were always in competition with one another for a limited number of parts. Like most white-collar professionals, moreover,

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they tended to see their occupation as a career and, as such, set apart from supposedly “lesser” jobs by the opportunities it offered for upward mobility. Among many of the actors and actresses who scaled the heights of the star system, success gave rise to an inveterate status-consciousness that made it difficult for them to identify with the plight of performers further down the occupational ladder. Leading actor Richard Mansfield, for example, was notoriously imperious in his dealings with the actors and actresses who worked alongside him. “In rehearsal and on tour, he behaved like a member of royalty,” claims one-time theatre critic Brooks Atkinson in his classic history of the Broadway stage. He spoke to no-one on tour; he treated all his actors as if they were serfs. On tour he played God. He lived and took his meals in his private car from which all other members of the company were excluded. . . . If members of his company got into trouble on tour or became ill, he was generous with money that he sent through an emissary. But he would not deal with them in person. When he was walking the street one day in a city outside New York, a member of his company whom he had helped stopped to thank him. Mansfield would not recognize him or speak to him. Through a secretary, he sent word to the actor that he was not to be accosted on the street.39 7. The Need for Unions

27 When stage performers finally began to seek collective solutions to the problems they encountered in the theatrical workplace at the beginning of the twentieth century, the strategies they embraced were determined, in large part, by their understanding of the work in which they were engaged. For musicians, vaudevillians, and actors employed in the thriving Yiddish theatre, their sense of themselves was closely tied to the ideal of the artisan, and as a result early twentieth-century craft unionism, with its emphasis on upholding the interests of skilled workers and maintaining occupational standards through peer discipline, held considerable appeal. For legitimate stage actors, a group of performers who saw themselves as artists and, as such, detached both from the industrial working class and from the general process of commodity production, the organized labor movement was anathema and they embraced it only as a last resort.40 The growing resentment of the men and women of the legitimate stage towards the conditions under which they were employed eventually found institutional expression in the founding of the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) in 1913. But it was not until 1919—by which time it had become abundantly clear that the producing managers had no intention of yielding any of their control over the terms under which actors were employed—that its members voted to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

28 Even after the men and women of the legitimate stage had embraced the principle of trade unionism, their cultural prejudices made it difficult for them to make common cause with performers in other branches of the commercial entertainment industry. One of the factors that delayed the entry of the AEA into the organized labor movement, for instance, was that the AFL had already issued a charter covering the entire theatre industry to the vaudeville actors’ union. Unwilling to relinquish autonomy to a group of performers who lacked their cultural legitimacy, Equity leaders refused even to consider affiliation until the AFL had revoked the vaudevillians’ charter and created a new umbrella organization, the Associated Actors and Artists of America (AAAA), in which they were the major players.41 A decade later, when the AEA launched a campaign to extend its jurisdiction to the film industry, a similar set of problems surfaced. Though many lesser movie actors responded positively to the AEA’s

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promise of protection against unfair employment practices, most of Hollywood’s big- name performers resented what they saw as an attempt on the part of the old theatrical aristocracy to “Broadwayize” Hollywood and chose to remain loyal to the studio heads. Without their support, the efforts of the AEA to organize the motion- picture industry were doomed to failure.42

29 If the men and women of the legitimate stage struggled to get along with vaudevillians and movie actors, their relations with other groups of trade unionists, both inside and outside the commercial entertainment industry, were even more fraught. When members of the AEA struck for union recognition in 1919, one of the things that swung the battle decisively in their favor was the support they received from other groups of key workers—not only stagehands and musicians but also billposters, baggage handlers, and railroad switchmen.43 No sooner had the AEA secured a standard contract and the right to bargain collectively on behalf of its members, however, than its leaders moved to distance themselves from the organized labor movement by refusing financial support to striking steelworkers, an action that incensed their fellow trade unionists. “Actor folks are great little unionists, yes they are not!” ranted the editor of one labor newspaper in an article that not only condemned Equity officials for their lack of fraternal spirit but also implicitly impugned their masculinity. A few months ago when they were on strike for this or that thing, the proudest of their boasts was that they were “brothers” of the horny-handed sons of toil who worked in the steel mills, the coal mines and the other places where life is won by the sweat of one’s brow. But now! Mercy! The very thought of being allied to the steelworkers, the sons of labor! It is enough to make one shrink and scatter perfume over one’s silk shirt!44

30 By the mid 1920s, the stage actors had alienated their erstwhile allies in the AFL even further, largely as a consequence of an assurance they had given to the producing managers in 1924 that they would never engage in sympathy actions. When the AEA launched its abortive organizing drive in Hollywood in 1929, neither the stagehands nor the musicians, key groups of unionized workers with the collective power to shut down the film industry both at the point of production and at the point of consumption, were willing to back it.45

31 For all their ambivalence towards organized labor, however, the denizens of the legitimate stage were remarkably successful in terms of putting the principles of trade unionism into practice, in large part because the nature of their work gave them access to resources that were simply not available to other workers. When they walked off the job in the late summer of 1919 in an effort to force the producing managers to recognize the AEA and to agree to the introduction of a standard theatrical contract, the odds were heavily stacked against them. With a large and multi-talented pool of non-union labor still available to them, the producing managers were able to reopen the majority of shows that were playing on Broadway within a matter of days. But the striking actors hit back by taking their struggle out onto the streets of New York City and transforming it into an entertainment spectacle. Comedians regaled the crowds around Times Square with familiar comic monologues rewritten as attacks on their employers. Other groups of strikers acted out scenes from the shows that had not closed as a consequence of the strike, concluding each performance with a warning to would-be theatre-goers not to pay good money to see the scabs and blacklegs who had replaced them. Chorus girls got dressed up in all their stage finery to distribute pamphlets setting out the AEA’s demands in the merchant banks and brokerage houses

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of the financial district. Strikes in the United States had long had an important performative element, with picketing serving not only to halt production but also to dramatize workplace struggles for public consumption. What set the men and women of the stage apart from other groups of strikers, though, was that they were objects of popular fascination whose mere presence on the streets was enough to define the strike as an entertainment experience as well as an industrial dispute. Without access to detailed records of box office receipts over the course of the strike, it is difficult to measure the impact of their actions on ticket sales. But anecdotal evidence suggests that most theatre fans were happy to forgo the more conventional entertainments on offer inside the theatres in order to watch what was happening on the streets outside.46 8. Conclusion 32 What is immediately apparent from this overview of the American theatre industry in the early twentieth century is that for all their sense of occupational distinctiveness, stage actors had much in common with other groups of workers in industrial American, both wage laborers and salaried professionals. As in other sectors of the economy, the industry in which they worked had undergone profound changes at the end of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the dual processes of consolidation and rationalization. Though the enduring appeal of live theatre meant that they could still practice their craft in much the same way as it had always been practiced, technology had transformed the wider context in which they labored, opening up new ways of packaging their labor and undercutting their status as an occupational elite. The market for their labor, like the market for the labor of most other workers, was highly segmented and, though women and minorities generally fared better in the theatre than in other lines of work, gender, race, and ethnicity were key determinants of individual opportunity. Like many other groups of wage earners who aspired to middle-class status (teachers and social workers, for example), they struggled to reconcile the goal of defending their collective interests with practices that they associated with the industrial proletariat, and their relationship with organized labor was a very uneasy one.

33 It is equally clear, however, that the project of relocating actors from the sphere of consumption to the sphere of production is still far from complete. In trying to identify key themes in the history of the actor as worker, each answered question only raises new questions demanding attention. If actors in the early twentieth century were more likely to be working outside the theatre industry than in it, for instance, we need to know more about what they did to make ends meet when “resting” and what strategies they adopted to avoid remaining in the jobs they took on in order to survive. Though we have a good sense of the constraints that were placed upon African Americans by the operation of the theatrical labor market, we need to develop a better sense of what happened to them on the theatrical shop floor—in all-black companies as well as integrated ones. If we are to write a comprehensive history of actors as workers, we must also broaden the scope of our investigations in order to seek out the continuities that bind the experiences of early-twentieth-century stage actors with those of other groups of performers in other industrial contexts and at other historical moments. We need to think more carefully, for example, about the continuing impact of new technologies both on the market for actors’ labor and on the nature of performance as a work process. We need to determine whether actors’ views of the work in which they are engaged have continued to be bound up with wider notions of cultural hierarchy and whether they have always struggled to reconcile the

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individualism that permeates their ranks with the mutual ethics of trade unionism. We might want to look more closely at the industrial disputes in which actors have been involved to determine whether they have always been as successful in using their celebrity status against their employers as the performers who took to the streets of New York City in 1919. And in all of this, we need to finally put to rest the myth that actors have left us with little to work with in the way of primary source material. From “Tottie Tootles” in the Broadway chorus line to the biggest stars of stage and screen, actors have left us vivid accounts of their working lives. As scholars, we have a responsibility to seek them out and to pay careful attention to what they say. Dr. Sean Holmes, School of Arts, Brunel University, England.

NOTES

1. Cincinnati Times Star, n.d. [August 1919], AEA scrapbook, n.c. 11,538, (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, NY); Buffalo Evening News, August 12, 1919, AEA Scrapbook n.c. 11,539, p. 13 (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts). 2. See, for example, Kevin O’Sullivan, “You Ugly Scab, Liz; Hurley is Mocked as Demo Ruins Premiere,” Daily Mirror (London), October 19, 2000, 3. 3. On the commodification of actors’ labor, see Barry King, “Stardom As An Occupation,” in The Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul Kerr (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 154-184; Barry King, “Articulating Stardom,” Screen 26 (September-October 1985), 27-50; Barry King, “The Star and the Commodity: Notes Towards A Performance Theory of Stardom,” Cultural Studies 1 (May 1987), 145-161. 4. Brian Viner, “Don’t Strike—It’s Not Good For Your Image,” Independent (London), March 8, 2001, 4. 5. See, for example, Alfred Harding, The Revolt of the Actors (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1929); Paul Fleming Gemmill, Collective Bargaining by Actors: A Study of Trade-Unionism Among Performers of the English-Speaking Legitimate Stage in America, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 402 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926); Leonard I. Pearlin and Henry E. Richards, “Equity: A Study of Union Democracy,” in Labor and Trade Unionism: An Interdisciplinary History, ed., Walter Galenson and Seymour Martin Lipset (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1960), 265-281; Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: The Unionization of Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941). 6. See, for example, Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); David Prindle, The Politics of Glamour: Ideology and Democracy in the Screen Actors Guild (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Sean P.

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Holmes, “All the World’s A Stage!: The Actors’ Strike of 1919,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005), 1291-1317. 7. On the evolution of the term “legitimate theatre,” see McArthur, Actors and American Culture, pp. x-xi; Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 75-76. Mark Hodin, “The Disavowal of Ethnicity: Legitimate Theatre and the Social Construction of Literary Value in Turn-of-the Century America,” Theatre Journal 52 (May 2000), 212. 8. Alfred Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre (New York: Actors’ Equity Association, 1932), 28-63; Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 4-21; McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 5-12, 214-216. 9. Foster Hirsch, The Boys From Syracuse: The Shuberts’ Theatrical Empire (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 29-57; Peter A. Davis, “The Syndicate/Shubert War,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 147-57. 10. On the broader changes in business practice that were transforming American industry, see Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 11. For a useful discussion of culture industries in the United States, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 17-26. 12. Hirsch, Boys From Syracuse, 131-139 13. Figures for the approximate number of professional performers in the United States are from U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Population, vol. IV, Occupations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,1923), 356-57. 14. On actors’ salaries, see “What the Player Earns,” American Magazine 69 (December 1909): 264-272; Archibald Pollard, “What the Actors Really Earn: The Actual Incomes of People We See on the Stage,” Ladies’ Home Journal (October 1911), 19, 82-83; McArthur Actors and American Culture, 24. 15. Margalo Gillmore, Four Flights Up (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 16. 16. “Husbands and Wives Whom the Stage Keeps Apart,” American Magazine 66 (July 1908), 306. 17. On gender segregation in other occupations, see Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 72-103; Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 93-95; Daniel J. Walkowitz, Working With Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 12-13. 18. Bruce McConachie, “American Theatre in Context,” in The Cambridge History of the American Theatre, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998-2000), I, 166-168. 19. “What the Player Earns,” 264-272. 20. On chorus girls as workers, see Glenn, Female Spectacle, 188-215. 21. Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., “Picking Out Pretty Girls for the Stage,” American Magazine 88 (December 1919), 119.

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22. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1171, 1173. 23. Hirsch, Boys From Syracuse, 100. 24. Hirsch, Boys From Syracuse, 157. 25. Affidavit of Mrs. Billy F. Stohlman, December 5, 1921, folder 10, box SC23, Actors’ Equity Association Collection, Robert Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York, NY (hereafter AEA Collection). 26. Thomas Postlewaite, “The Hieroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post- Civil War to 1945,” in Cambridge History, II, 181. On Aldridge, see Joseph Roach, “The Emergence of the American Actor,” in Cambridge History, I, 356-359. On the infinite complexities of blackface as a cultural form, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). On blackface and the construction of whiteness, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 115-131. 27. On the development of black musical theatre, see David Krassner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre, 1895-1910 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Thomas L. Riis, Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890-1915 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989); Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre from Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). On the gradual opening up of Broadway to black stars, see Daniel J. Watermeier, “Actors and Acting,” in Cambridge History, II, 479-482. 28. Ziegfeld, Jr., “Picking Out Pretty Girls for the Stage,” 119. 29. John Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 194-195. 30. On skilled craftsmen and the efforts of managers to undermine their functional autonomy, see David Montgomery, “Workers’ Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,” in Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 9-31. On the application of scientific management in a white-collar context, see Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 15-62. 31. King, “Stardom As An Occupation”, 167-168. 32. Hirsch, The Boys From Syracuse, 146. 33. Ned Wayburn, “Chorus Girls Make the Best Wives,” Collier’s 77 (March 27, 1926), 21. For a more detailed discussion of the application of scientific management in a theatrical context, see Glenn, Female Spectacle, 174-185. 34. On the shift from the primitive mode of production to the classical mode, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 157-173. On Griffith and the development of new acting styles, see Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 38-51. 35. King, “Stardom as an Occupation,” 167-168. 36. Carmel Myers, “Why Stage Actors Fail in the Talkies,” Theatre Magazine 49 (February 1929), 32. For more on the tensions between stage actors and screen actors in the 1920s, see Sean P. Holmes, “And the Villain Still Pursued Her: The Actors’ Equity Association in Hollywood, 1919-1929,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 25 (March 2005), 27-50.

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37. Howard Kyle, “Henry Miller,” undated typescript, Howard Kyle Papers (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts). 38. John Litel to Walter Marshall, June 26 1923, Folder 29, Box SC19, AEA Collection. For Bennett’s countercharges, see George S. Trimble to Walter S. Baldwin, July 18 1923, Folder 29, Box SC19, AEA Collection. For examples of letters from fans, see Cecilia Griffith and Mrs. Robert W. Smiley to Litel, July 6 1923, Folder 29, Box SC19, AEA Collection. 39. Brooks Atkinson, Broadway (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1970), pp. 23-24. 40. On craft unionism in the early twentieth century, see, for example, Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Patricia A. Cooper, Once A Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 107-08, 112-13, 123-24; Dorothy C. Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 6-7, 115-41. On vaudevillians and organized labor, see Snyder, Voice of the City, 76-81 and Kibler, Rank Ladies, 171-98. On the Hebrew Actors’ Union, see McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 221. On actors in the legitimate theatre and the organized labor movement, see Holmes, “All the World’s A Stage,” 1296-1298. 41. Holmes, “All the World’s A Stage,” 1299. 42. Holmes, “And the Villain Still Pursued Her,” 38-45. 43. Holmes, “All the World’s A Stage,” 1313-1315. 44. Undated clipping, Pittsburgh Dispatch [December 1919], AEA Scrapbook n.c. 11,548 (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, N.Y.). 45. For evidence of the hostility of many trade unionists to the AEA, see Report of the Proceedings of the forty-fifth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor Held at Atlantic City New Jersey, October 5 to 16, Inclusive 1925 (Washington, DC: The Law Reporter Printing Company, 1925), 337-338. On the refusal of IATSE and the AFM to back the AEA’s efforts to organize Hollywood, see Holmes, “And the Villain Still Pursued Her,” 42-43. 46. Holmes, “All the World’s a Stage,” 1305-1308.

AUTHOR

SEAN HOLMES Dr. Sean Holmes, School of Arts, Brunel University, England.

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Zuckerman’s "Blah-blah Blah-blah Blah": a blow to mimesis, a key to irony

Arnaud Schmitt

1 Philip Roth’s American trilogy1 is indeed a poignant description of seminal periods of contemporary America. Reading these three outstanding novels, one feels entitled to use the fictional data included to improve or modify one’s knowledge of crucial events such as the Vietnam War, McCarthyism or Clinton's peculiar second term. And this is roughly how this work has been depicted in most reviews, as a powerful "mimetic feast." Today, Roth's talent seems to lie mainly in his ability to create a fictional world which is both fascinating and extremely similar to reality. This may come as a surprise if one remembers that the same author had quite a fling with the postmodern at the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's, particularly in books like The Counterlife or Operation Shylock. Those experiments garnered criticism, but everything seems to have been forgotten since the author is apparently back on the right track, the mimetic track. Zuckerman's narratological autobiography 2 There are nevertheless a few things that should be considered, among which is Zuckerman's return. Nathan Zuckerman appeared for the first time in My Life as a Man in 1974. Roth has used him nine times since. Yet his first appearance is worth mentioning: Nathan is not just a simple character but both character and narrator of an "embedded narrative."2 My Life as a Man is composed of three narratives; the first one is narrated by Zuckerman, who becomes just a simple character in the second one, the narrator of the third part being Tarnopol, who eventually turns out to be the narrator of the primary narrative,3 and retrospectively the author of the first two pieces. Zuckerman is Tarnopol's creation. Thus, the former didn't seem to have such a great future in Roth's fictional world. In fact, his first biographical outline is slightly hazy: As he did in “Courting Disaster,” the second of the “Useful Fictions” in My Life as a Man, Roth again alters aspects of Zuckerman’s life and background to offer still a different “legend of the self.” In Zuckerman Bound Nathan was born and reared in

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Camden, New Jersey, not Newark; his father is a chiropodist, not a “shoedog”; he now has a younger brother, Henry, instead of an older brother, Sherman, or a sister, Sonia; he has attended the University of Chicago, not a small liberal arts college; he is a writer, not a teacher; and his three marriages, all ending in divorce, have been to exemplary women, as recalled (not dramatized) in The Anatomy Lesson. But Zuckerman is nonetheless recognizable as a character (Halio, 214).

3 Nathan Zuckerman resurfaces in The Ghost Writer, the first part of what will turn out to be a tetralogy (or a trilogy plus epilogue as the Penguin paperback edition advertises), Zuckerman Bound. Nathan is the first-person narrator4 of the primary narrative, his own recollection of a one-night stay at the home of the great American writer, E.I Lonoff, back when Nathan was in his early twenties. (Zuckerman, at the time of narration, is supposedly twenty years older.)

4 Putting his character in the narrating seat allowed Roth to bring him to the fore with force, giving him more authority. Indeed, The Ghost Writer's narrating voice is more mature, even self-ironical. Actually, Thomas Pughe noted that Nathan's voice in the first novel of the tetralogy makes him sound like “a wiser man than the writer we encounter in the subsequent novels, perhaps with the exception of The Counterlife” (Pughe 86). By losing his narrating control in the two subsequent novels, Nathan seems at the same time to lose control over his life. In Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson he is just a puppet in the hands of a less than peaceful fate.

5 Even if narration in Zuckerman Bound is seemingly less complex than in My Life as a Man, it is an unstable process, related to questions of identity, authority and power, and in this specific way, it foreshadows the main themes of the American trilogy.

6 Furthermore, one of the main functions of the tetralogy is to define Zuckerman as an author, not just a narrator or a character. Zuckerman Bound is definitely a portrait of the artist: first a self-portrait, then a portrait of the artist in the clutches of a "noisy and distracting mass culture" (Franzen 6).

7 In his notorious next novel, The Counterlife, Roth uses the authorial identity of his character to deconstruct any idea of centrality, unity and stability. Zuckerman is the overt narrator of some chapters, or - more precisely - the author, because these chapters are supposed to be a transcript of his writing. But he is missing in other chapters, simply because he is dead. They are narrated by an undeclared narrator. The Counterlife offers a wide range of narrative devices, but mostly a heterogeneous whole, since the different chapters contradict each other: authorial voices, a series of primary and embedded narratives (the two kinds merging in the end), narration from beyond the grave, free indirect speech through Henry (Nathan's brother). Who is dead? Henry or Nathan? Ultimately, who is narrating? It is easy to understand that The Counterlife doesn't aim at answering those questions with certainty, the book's energy coming from its uncertainty, its countertexts. Nathan can be perceived as either a tyrannical narrator or, on the other hand, the victim of a vicious author. Whatever the angle from which the reader chooses to look at it, The Counterlife describes a "text-eat-text world" (Danziger 19) and Zuckerman is Roth's perfect postmodern tool.

8 The Counterlife and three of Roth's four following books ( The Facts, Deception and Operation Shylock) have one thing in common: they represent Roth's most daring metafictional venture. At that time, the author seemed keen on putting the emphasis more on the way the story was told (diegesis) than on what it was telling (mimesis) - or, to put it differently, the way the story was told was the story.

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9 The end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's epitomize Roth's experimental period. But even then, even if the novels didn't seem to be totally coherent in a traditional way, he was most of all an outstanding creator of linguistic energy, chaotic energy, by means of superbly antagonistic voices. Although these voices don't seem to be leading anywhere, they represent moments of mere aesthetic flamboyance. Roth has never been a minimalist. At his postmodern best, he created contradictory linguistically-dynamic books. But after all these meta-excesses, Roth gave the impression of being drawn to a less complex style of narration. Zuckerman the writer 10 After having taken Zuckerman to such meta-heights, Roth appeared to have reached a dead-end as to what to do with his character - he used him for what seemed to be the last time in The Facts, as the censor of his own autobiography. In order to up the ante, Roth decided to cast Zuckerman aside and to include himself in his fiction: “To compromise some “character” doesn’t get me where I want to be. What heats things up is compromising me” (Roth, Deception 177). This is what he did in Operation Shylock. He didn’t summon up Zuckerman for his next novel either - Sabbath's Theater, his nineties' version of Portnoy's Complaint. It seemed difficult to recycle a character that had already been used in so many different ways. Zuckerman was washed out, ready for oblivion.5

11 Yet, quite surprisingly, Roth finds him something to do in his American trilogy. At first glance, Zuckerman's situation has changed altogether. Roth has taught him humility; his voice appears more withdrawn. He is only occasionally a part of the story told, which is nevertheless always centered on a different character - someone from his past for American Pastoral and I Married a Communist. Nathan is no longer someone who acts but someone who listens and remembers, thus becoming a remote figure. It would be odd to dub the American trilogy a Zuckerman book in the same way The Ghost Writer and the three books that followed were called Zuckerman Bound. To a newcomer to Roth's fiction, Zuckerman in the trilogy (maybe with the exception of The Human Stain) doesn't seem to be as indispensable. The real attraction is a heartrending description of a painful period seen through the eyes of a character who experienced it, at his own expense.

12 But if one takes a closer look, and this is what academics are supposed to do, the fictional situation is much more intricate. This newfound humility is partly feigned, his control over every aspect of the fabula both obvious and discreet. Actually, Zuckerman, as mentioned above, is less important as a character than he used to be. In American Pastoral, he is the narrator of the primary narrative - tales from his old age, his memories of Swede Levov, his childhood idol, and his chance encounter with Swede's brother, Jerry - in which is embedded what turns out to be an imaginary narrative6 (the major part of the content of the novel, Swede's life as imagined and narrated by Zuckerman himself, though he is not “actant”7 in this part). The next two novels offer a similar pattern. In I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, Nathan remains more or less in the background. He acts as a witness, who sometimes has to find a second and more reliable witness (for instance, Murray Ringold in I Married a Communist, with whom he conducts "memory sessions") to fill in the numerous gaps of his ailing memory.

13 Contrary to Zuckerman Bound, Nathan is more a narrating-I than a narrated-I. He sometimes is an imagining-I ( American Pastoral) or a remembering-I ( I Married a Communist), and sometimes he is both (The Human Stain). In nine years, he went from

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protagonist and occasional narrator to tenured narrator but "deutéragoniste."8 Zuckerman is now more a voice than anything else; the fact that one speaks implies that one perceives, so Nathan is obviously a perceiver who tries to offer his perception of others' perception, Levov's, Ringold's, Coleman's).

14 Choosing a writer as character very often means that the author is ready to offer his reader some deep thinking on the pangs of creation, on the figure of the author in the world or to play a game of identity that postmodern addicts relish; and in a way this is what Roth did with Zuckerman Bound and The Counterlife. An author can even include himself/herself in a novel to play the role of the writer (Roth in Operation Shylock or Fowles's apparition at the end of The French Lieutenant's Woman, to give two examples among many). But choosing a writer as a narrator is a totally different commitment with formal consequences. Narration becomes a protean act. Indeed, the narrator is then a fictitious author who, for instance, is writing his own autobiography. Furthermore, in Roth's case, this narrator-author-character can strongly resemble the image of the empirical author the reader created for himself/herself, based on some biographical data available in newspapers, magazines or Roth's own autobiographical writings. Thus, the reader knows that in the past this very same author enjoyed clouding the authorial issue and casting doubts in his fiction and auto-fiction on the identity of his characters, but mostly on the identity of the helmsman, the narrator. This is the American trilogy's background, in which narration appears less complex; however, for the reader who is willing to interrogate the source of his information and the identity of the person with whom he has signed a reading contract, complexity and multiple-subjectivity are still very much relevant.

15 As most people know, writing fiction doesn't mean writing the way a journalist does, F0 F0 9 the latter having a direct relationship with his reader (journalist DE contentDE reader). In the case of fiction, the relationship is much more sophisticated (Martin, 154). Above all, an author is someone who narrates: ‘‘Narrating is something completely different from writing; the distinction of the former is its indirectness” (Mann in Cohn 132). This is what Dorrit Cohn calls ‘‘the disjunctive model” (Mann in Cohn 126). The author is different from the narrator, whether the latter is declared or not, personalized or non- personalized.

16 However, what Roth has done with Zuckerman is quite unique in the history of literature. The fact of creating a kind of alter ego - an official narrator or a character- author-narrator - is not something deeply original, but the combination of the three through the years makes Roth a pioneer of characterization.

17 He hasn't simply invented a double; he has imagined the absolute double since Zuckerman is quite simply the author of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. This assertion must be clarified. The American trilogy does not only propose a fictional mimesis. It does more than that: it presents itself as textual mimesis: it is the mimesis of the diegesis written by Zuckerman. The concept of make-believe here revolves around the idea that Roth has written a book supposedly written by Zuckerman. To be precise, Roth is not really or not only the author of the book: he is first and foremost the creator of the author of the book. What makes it even more complicated is that Zuckerman is not an occasional author. He has his own biographical background familiar to Roth's faithful readers and is quite experienced as an author. He has an impressive bibliography (The Ghost Writer, potentially Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson,10 parts or the whole of The Counterlife according to one's

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interpretative strategy, and then the American trilogy). Roth's voice is actually, most of the time, Zuckerman's. Roth's style is an imitation of what Roth thinks Zuckerman's should be11: Between the author and the language of the work there is no immediate relationship, as there is between a speaker and what he says. […] Consequently the author of works of narrative is not the narrator of these works (Martinez-Bonati in Cohn 126).

18 John Barth wrote about his two novels The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy that they "imitate the form of the Novel" and they are written by "an author who imitates the role of the Author" (Barth in Richter 84). Roth is not very far from this approach.

19 We are confronted to the text of a text. This distinction is essential because Zuckerman's narration is the medium through which any description of reality, any character's point of view or linguistic bravado has to go. Every embedded story is embedded into Zuckerman's master narrative, which is far from being a neutral zone. It is a familiar subjective entity which colors everything it touches. Roth and the concept of conflict 20 Before studying the implications of such a device for the reader and his quest for meaning, we may speculate on Roth's motivations. His use of Zuckerman in the eighties was quite clear: he saw his main character as a conflict-magnet. Nathan was in trouble because he was drawn to people in trouble – or, at least, they were drawn to him: "Roth’s protagonists, like Bellow’s, are nothing if not alive and in trouble" (Halio 5). Here are some various quotations from Roth, summing up his manifesto: My fiction is about people in trouble (Searles 2). Thinking back over my work, it seems to me that I’ve frequently written about what Bruno Bettelheim calls “behavior in extreme situations” (Searles 65). A character in his predicament is what I have to begin with (Searles 163). It was too big [Portnoy's Complaint’s success] ... A few weeks after publication, I boarded a bus ... and holed up at Yaddo, the writer’s colony, for three months. Precisely what Zuckerman should have done after Carnovsky - but he hung around, the fool, and look what happened to him. He would have enjoyed Yaddo more than he enjoyed Alvin Pepler. But it made Zuckerman Unbound funnier keeping him in Manhattan, and it made my own life easier, not being there (Searles 176).

21 It is my contention that the dynamics of Roth's work stems from conflict. In every nook and cranny of his fiction, strife is brewing12 in its content and in its form. Antagonism is the fabula's engine. Zuckerman Bound and The Counterlife introduce relentless verbal fighters, Alvin Pepler (Zuckerman Bound) being their leader. It offers Roth the opportunity to demonstrate his remarkable linguistic skills, consisting mainly in producing characters who are compulsive talkers without sensible things to say. Pepler's lengthy tirades on quiz shows and the fall of Newark represent Roth's linguistic trademark. We are snowed under with endless hyperboles yielding an incredible energy, created from the mix of streetwise vernacular and literary consistence. A perfect example can also be found in Operation Shylock with Roth's double, Moishe Pipik, spokesman of a new diaspora encouraging Jews to leave Israel and settle back in Eastern Europe where, of course, they would be most welcome. The author offers his character numerous pages to explain his theory. Once again, what matters is not what is said but the energy produced. Deception's narrator, an author named Philip, regrets the dullness of London Jews and longs for the energy of New York Jews:

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Jews with force, I’m talking about. Jews with appetite. Jews without shame. Complaining Jews who get under your skin. Brash Jews who eat with their elbows on the table. unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument, and impudence. New York’s the real obstreperous Zion, whether Ariel Sharon knows it or not (Roth, Deception 198).

22 Of course, there are many other aspects to New York's Jewish community, but this is the one Roth as a novelist is interested in, and it has put him occasionally into trouble, people having difficulty understanding that the Jews he portrays in his fiction are not a realistic description of a whole community but a bunch of characters used to keep the engine roaring. And beyond the verbal dynamics, Roth's narrative scheme is based on a series of oppositions, conflicts between his group of available characters. It would be too long to show all the antagonistic combinations, but we can nevertheless mention some of the most important ones. As far as the narrative dynamics is concerned, the American trilogy is not different from Zuckerman Bound for example. The concept of family feud is present in the overwhelming majority of Roth's novels. The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Bound sometimes give the impression of being only about this topic with, as a climax, Zuckerman's father calling his son a "bastard" just before passing away. Another powerful and intrusive father, Lou Levov, can be found in American Pastoral, but the idea of breaking away from one's family is also omnipresent in I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. This source of conflict has been used by Roth throughout the years. The individual versus society is another source which, once again, is a common denominator of the Zuckerman novels in the eighties and the trilogy. Whatever the combination, the idea is to find a nemesis for a character, and this is where the main difference between Zuckerman Bound and the American trilogy lies: Roth used to imagine a nemesis for Nathan; now he is appointing Zuckerman to find Lou Levov, Ira Ringold or Coleman Silk a nemesis, and he finds them in spades. Roth's novels are mimesis of conflicts maybe because, as the narrator of The Anatomy Lesson (Zuckerman?) puts it, “the experience of contradiction is the human experience” (Roth, Zuckerman Bound 467). Similarly, we can quote a passage from The Human Stain which almost speaks for itself: 'You know how European literature begins ... With a quarrel. All of European literature springs from a fight’. And then he picked up his copy of The Iliad and read to the class the opening lines. ‘Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles ... Begin where they first quarreled, Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles' (Roth, Human Stain 4).

23 Strife, antagonism, oppositions, conflict are Roth's fuel. To put it differently, they keep the story going. But they do not only take place inside the fiction, they also happen "around it," at the interpretative level. As far as the postmodern reader is concerned, being in conflict with the work she/he reads is a very common situation since being deprived of unity, certainty or meaning is her/his daily quandary. Arguing that Roth is quintessentially postmodern would be too long,13 so this is something we will take for granted, but his work seems to match in an obvious way every definition of postmodernism, and particularly Richard Rorty's: The word ‘postmodernism’ has been rendered almost meaningless by being used to mean so many different things [...]. Various as the definitions of ‘postmodern’ are, most of them have something to do with a perceived loss of unity [...]. The sense that everything has recently fallen to pieces results from combining a renunciation of the traditional theologicometaphysical belief that Reality and Truth are One - that there is One True Account of How Things Really Are - with the inability to believe that things are going to get better: that history will someday culminate in

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the universal adoption of egalitarian, democratic customs and institutions (Rorty 262).

24 The Counterlife is a perfect fictional illustration of such a definition with the final impossibility to find, without having any lingering doubts, a unifying center, a mastertext for all the contradictory chapters. One can easily understand that the role of the reader is not to make sense of the novel in the traditional way, but rather to accept the uncertainty and to learn that fiction, in the same way as life, is at best a series of misconceptions, misrepresentations and mistakes. Or, in the words of Zuckerman himself: The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong (Roth, Pastoral 35).

25 This quotation is not drawn from The Counterlife, but from the first novel of the American trilogy, American Pastoral, in which complexity and chiefly uncertainty are as vivid but in a less visible way. The consequences of Zuckerman's role in it have yet to be explained, but we can however mention the numerous lapses of memory the characters complain of, these lapses offering unstable recollections, doubtful versions, unrecovered facts. Chapters connecting seamlessly are not a guarantee of clarity or certainty. When a whole work's mimesis is based on its characters' memory, and the latter seems to go to pot, the reader is left contemplating his own aspirations and their irrelevance. According to psychoanalytic theory, we find "in the literary work the kind of thing we characteristically wish or fear the most," and we "ward off any potential threat that a narrative poses to psychic equilibrium" (Martin 157). Without jeopardizing the reader’s sanity, novels like The Counterlife and Operation Shylock question the whole concept of sanity and are a serious test of the reader's defense mechanisms. So is the American trilogy, but more subtly, with Zuckerman as its most unsettling tool. Roth and Zuckerman 26 So far, Zuckerman's narratological evolution has been studied, his seminal role in the American trilogy emphasized and the idea of conflict as Roth's main dynamic insisted on. We have seen that, inside the mimesis, Zuckerman is often the one who attracts antagonisms (in the eighties) or is drawn to others' conflicts (in the nineties). We still have to analyze how Roth uses the figure of Zuckerman to antagonize his own reader and how Zuckerman's authorial narration threatens the American trilogy's mimetic balance.

27 Like many writers, Roth has always been appalled by some readers' propensity to make no distinction between the author and a look-alike character. It is true that it has cost him dearly, and insisting on this distinction has been like a crusade to him, but it has also been a great source of provocation. As mentioned before, he went as far as to call a character Philip Roth in one of his novels. Moreover, Zuckerman doesn't seem to be that different from what Roth has been telling about himself.14 The contrast between his "crusade" and his use of characters having similar traits to his has set some critics' teeth on edge.15 One can suppose that this type of reaction is not very far from what Roth has been looking for. Indeed, it seems quite in keeping with the antagonistic logic of his work. Roth then uses Zuckerman as a trap for the reader's lower instincts. He toys with the "conflicts between the beliefs expressed [by Zuckerman for instance] and the beliefs we hold and suspect the author of holding" (Booth 73). Zuckerman is then

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the perfect tool to create dynamic tension; he is looking for trouble inside the fiction, but he is also an "interpretative lure". Thomas Pughe has emphasized the comic side of that tension: Working the inter-subjective situation of the contemporary artist into comic form constitutes Roth’s creative achievement [...]. The author actually invites or even provokes the reference to his own career. His comic “Künstler-Roman” is a symptom of the very process it re-presents. Roth’s obvious ‘plundering’ manoeuvres his readers into a position similar to that of the (fictional) participants, including the writer-hero, who are engaged in textual controversies in his novels, because such ‘plundering’ simultaneously narrates and anticipates the concern of readers and reviewers with the difference between biography and novel, ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ (Pughe 120-122). So, what is the reader supposed to do with this Zuckerman?

28 Paradoxically, with all these postmodern techniques and wrong-footing, Roth has created a perfectly realistic character in a way similar to Twain's or Cervantes's, who "naturalized" their character "by juxtaposing him with the prior book in which he appears" (Martin 67). The more sophisticated the character, the more realistic he is. And in the American trilogy, Zuckerman reaches the peak of his career. He looks more like his creator than he has ever done before, and his narratological sophistication couldn't be better since he is the alleged author of three books in a row. How can a character be more powerful? Yet his presence has been hardly noted in the trilogy, maybe because the mere content of the novels has held the majority of readers and critics spellbound.

29 Let's take a closer look at American Pastoral, the one novel of the trilogy in which Zuckerman's presence seems the most subdued. Roth justified his character's discretion in an interview: Zuckerman was my insider, my knowledgeable wedge into the Swede’s life, who somehow gave me the freedom to know him. On Page 90 I jettisoned Zuckerman - he was no longer necessary (Roth in McGrath 1).

30 So Swede's life story is supposed to come out of Zuckerman's imagination although the latter has been jettisoned? What does it mean? Zuckerman is the narrating source, but one shouldn't pay any attention to it or, as a second solution, there is no difference between Roth's and Zuckerman's imagination. Both solutions are far from being satisfactory. Of course, it is the author's word against the reader’s. Who is he/she to question the author's intentions when they are so clearly expressed? There is a simple answer to that: as a reader, and even more as an academic, one is entitled to question the way meaning can be inferred from a work of fiction. Distrusting the author is a duty, even more in these postmodern and unreliable times.

31 As a distrusting reader, I would like to draw attention to a pivotal passage of American Pastoral. It is not blindingly obvious. One can even skim through it without realizing that something important has been missed. The reader is halfway through the narrative of Swede Levov's life and the narrator is once again getting down to the specifics of Swede's psychology: "And because even though he hadn't liked it one bit he did not believe it was his right blah-blah blah-blah blah, because …" (Roth, Pastoral 252). It sounds like an alarm clock, drawing the reader out of his mimetic dream. No, this novel is not an exact picture of reality and, yes, there is at least one subjective barrier between the text and us. The whole point of American Pastoral, what makes it such a fascinating book, is not the fact that one is reading a portrait of a peaceful father who is

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prey to a family upheaval. The possible heart of the matter is the tension between that character and a narrator who is just at the opposite end on the psychological spectrum. The underlying question of the novel is this: how can a character as complex as Zuckerman be interested in such an insignificant personality? The last two thirds of the novel answer this question. Roth makes Zuckerman reinvent Levov, and also makes him find what Roth has always been interested in and what does not seem to be there at first sight - namely tension, conflict, chaos, mayhem. And once again, Zuckerman, the antagonistic machine, is up to the task. This is also what he does in the next two novels, even if with Ira Ringold and Coleman Silk antagonisms are handed to Zuckerman on a silver platter. The implication of taking the aesthetic decision to give the American trilogy the perfect appearance of books written by Zuckerman is twofold. Firstly, Roth is able to carry on playing his identity game in a much more complex manner, since he seems to disappear totally as an author; on the other hand, his narrator seems to be closing the gap, resembling him more and more. Secondly, it conveys, whether it was the author's primal concern or not, a narrative complexity through several layers of narration: Roth making Zuckerman write a story out of Swede's first-degree then secondary-degree life-story which itself includes embedded stories. It is axiomatic that the more visible the diegesis, the less reliable the mimesis. Through such a degree of sophistication, the reader is reminded that “literature is something other than reality” (Hamburger 9).

32 Of course, one can decide to overlook this blah-blah-blah, to look away from the narrative device – which is quite understandable if the reader is opening a Roth novel for the first time and has never heard of Zuckerman before – and simply enjoy this compelling read. There are many reading degrees, but the one we are aiming at tries to take as much as possible into account. It is true that "even among the most jaded readers - academics – the majority still attempts to read as authorial audience" (Rabinowitz 30). Reading "only diegetically" might simply be an impossible experience which would be devoid of pleasure, anyway. But experienced readers are expected to go back and forth between diegesis and mimesis, both changing each other as the wary reader proceeds with his reading. If not, how is one supposed to answer American Pastoral's final question: "And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?" (Roth, Pastoral 467). To comprehend satisfactorily the ironical complexity of the question, the reader needs to bring Nathan urgently back into the picture. Zuckerman's blah-blah-blah should be heeded.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bal, Mieke. Narratology, Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

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Danziger, Marie A.. Text/Countertext, Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, and Philip Roth. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Epstein, Joseph. “What does Philip Roth want?”. Commentary. Vol. 77, No. 1. (January 1984): 620-27.

Franzen, Jonathan. How to be Alone. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002.

Genette, Gérard. Nouveau Discours du Récit. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983.

Halio, Jay L. Philip Roth Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

Hamburger, Käte. The Logic of Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

McGrath, Charles. “Zuckerman’s Alter Brain.” The New York Times Book Review. 7 May 2000: 8-10.

Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Podhoretz, Norman. “The Adventures of Philip Roth.” Commentary. Vol. 106, No. 4. (October 1998): 25-36.

Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1994.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988.

Richter, David H. Narrative/Theory. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

Roth, Philip. My Life as a Man. 1974; New York: Vintage, 1993.

---. The Counterlife. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.

---. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.

---. Zuckerman Bound, A Trilogy [The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1984)] and Epilogue [The Prague Orgy (1985)]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.

---. Deception. London : Vintage, 1990.

---. Operation Shylock. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.

---. Sabbath's Theater. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

---. American Pastoral. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997.

---. I Married a Communist. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

---. The Human Stain. London : Jonathan Cape, 2000.

Searles, George J. (ed.). Conversations with Philip Roth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

NOTES

1. American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000). 2. Bal, Narratology 142. To refer to events or characters appearing in an embedded narrative, Gérard Genette uses the term "intradiégétique" (Figures III 238). 3. "Narrateur extradiégétique" (Genette, Figures III 252).

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4. "Homodiégétique" (Genette, Figures III 252). 5. “A long time, I thought I had abandoned him [Zuckerman] after ‘‘The Prague Orgy” (Roth in McGrath 1). 6. Second-degree make-believe since any fiction pretending to mirror reality can be dubbed first-degree make-believe, but in the specific case of Swede's so-called life- story, we know it is invented by someone who has been invented. 7. See Bal 26. 8. Someone who tells the story or is a witness to it without being at the front of the stage, like Dr. Watson (Genette, Nouveau Discours du Récit 69). 9. Theorists like Hayden White maintain that every writing is a narrative and though this is quite a sensible view, we can argue that the narrative techniques of an article and a work of fiction are not the same and that, above all, the reference (reality vs a fictional world) is not the same. Dorrit Cohn has made this point with great talent in her excellent book, The Distinction of Fiction. 10. One can argue that he is the undeclared, third-person author-narrator of his own story. 11. Although this is something too complex to be developed thoroughly here, the whole concept of style must be revisited. Talking about an author's style is acceptable only in the case of an autobiography. Fiction implies a narrator whose style has to be invented. An author whose style is similar, whatever the narrative situation, is an author who has played the fictional game only partially. 12. This theory has been developed at greater length in my thesis: “Figures et Enjeux du Récit: la Non-congruence dans la Série Zuckerman de Philip Roth” (Narrative Figures and Narrative Stakes : Non-Congruence in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Novels). 13. I have dedicated a whole chapter of my thesis to it, quoting the works of Hutcheon, Lyotard, Russel, McHale, Smyth or Rorty. 14. Actually, the difference is thinner than it used to be, since Zuckerman is now a recluse, like Roth, living an isolated life in New England. 15. “Moreover, I was irritated by the literary games Roth took to playing in some of his later, “postmodern” novels. These games consisted in virtually forcing the reader into seeing something as autobiographical and then implicitly rebuking him for doing so (how could anyone be so stupid as not to understand that art “transmutes” reality?)” (Podhoretz 33); “Roth has spoken of readers getting a “voyeuristic kick” from reading his autobiography into his books. I think “voyeuristic kick” is exactly the correct phrase, and my first response to it is that, if a writer doesn’t wish to supply such kicks, perhaps he would do better not to undress before windows opening onto thoroughfares” (Epstein 64).

INDEX

Keywords: Postmodernism, Philip Roth, Nathan Zuckerman, Narratology, Mimesis, Irony, Narrative conflict

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AUTHOR

ARNAUD SCHMITT Arnaud Schmitt, Montesquieu University (Bordeaux IV)

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“New” “American Studies”: Exceptionalism redux?

Marc Chenetier

1 The notion of “American Studies” no more goes of itself than any decreed necessity for their “renovation.” The distortions the locution endured over time threaten to head us for the situation derided by Kant1 in which one man tries to milk a he-goat while another holds up a sieve to gather the expected product. Some semantic clean-up is in order, in the light of dominant European views. I aim less at giving a sense of American studies (capital A, lower case s)2 in Europe than at suggesting why most Europeans see the American approach to “American Studies” (capital A, capital S) as not necessarily the only legitimate one.

2 In a nutshell : one can be reluctant to read under the expression “American Studies”: 1) anything other than the body of studies conducted on the subject of the United States of America, 2) more than an attempt to hide under it an absence of method, and 3) the notion that studies of the United States should be exclusively considered on the basis of models now proposed in the American academic community. Simply put, 1) American Studies is a field and not a method, 2) the study of the United States is too serious a concern to be left exclusively to American Americanists, and 3) potentially seminal differences appear when an object is looked at from within or without, or, according to an old rural French proverb, “what is good for the horse may not be good for the donkey.” Basing our reflexion on internal American debates could be an effect of belated hegemonic views: shouldn’t we move on to a genuinely non-imperial view of American Studies in Europe and the rest of the world ? 1) American “American Studies” and its discontent. 3 A notion that bobbed back to the United States after its use as cultural Marshall Plan or ideological Cold-War machine, “American Studies” in the US has long been wondering where it was to sit. Its history has even been defined as “a history of crises.” Few meetings of the ASA have avoided debates on what American Studies might or should be.3 One central question revolved around a problem that appears insoluble when translated in terms of another culture: what could “Norwegian Studies,” say, be in Norway ? Whereas few Europeans would find it difficult to define what “American

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studies” are, in spite of different disciplinary agendas, our American colleagues still seem unconvinced that an outsider’s views can be as fruitful as an insider’s; but, as a Frenchman, I know full well, for example, that without American historian Robert Paxton’s work on World War II in France, our view of the Vichy régime could not possibly have been altered to the point it was.

4 The groping for identity that is legible under ASA’s endemic angst over its tasks seems as open-ended as Gandhi’s retort to the question of what he thought of Western civilization: “That, he answered, would be a good idea.” It also reads as the expression of a desire that American Studies be more than a field of investigation: a discipline founded on exceptionalist or neo-exceptionalist views whereby the United States could be holistically studied, the results projected as a dominant, self-defined general view of the country, the stakes logically becoming those of the ideological nature of that projection. Where the ideological agenda was clear in post-War years, the changes since undergone by American society had as their apparently only possible mode of transcription not an area-by-area critique of the approach thus far favored, but a total revisiting of the ideological angles under which the same global approach could be used. Under the impact of societal changes and theoretical imports, what defines itself as “American Studies,” and whose bane or ontological dilemma lay for the most part in its willful singular, operated a series of lateral moves that did not alter its problems, everything happening as if all disciplines feeding scholarship on the United States had to be changed simultaneously under the impulse of a single new paradigm. “American Studies,” it seems, could not modify its various constitutive parts according to the legitimate demand of intellectual evolutions and discoveries but had to undergo a complete mutation according to new master narratives. What can be seen as an evasion of the nagging question of disciplinary identity happened on two successive planes, temporal and spatial, both coping with the fascination for “the new.” Both departures from an unhappy situation were radical: as radical as in the universal blossoming of the prefix “post-“,4 as radical as in aiming for the “global.”5 But the temptation remains to think that the debates concerning an apparent move from United States-centered American studies to vaguely defined “international” American Studies might be a last- ditch attempt at reconducting still another version of American views of the field. Could not, one wonders, increasingly polemical centrifugal concentration on margins and peripheries, within and without, appear as a gesture to avoid facing the problems posed by an apparently unassailable center, compensate an increasingly felt powerlessness in front of an unchallenged economic system and mode of social development?

5 One can be puzzled by the lack of coincidence between welcome discourses of openness and overture to the other – in particular to the views of Americanists across the world – and a set of principles and practices that remain, seen from the outside, astonishingly American-centered. The fact that academics from different countries should convene in Tokyo to discuss “New American Studies” signals we are following an agenda generated by the current concerns of the Americanist community in the United States. 6

6 But we need not for all that think of different conceptions of our intellectual activity as obsolete for the rest of the world. I was recently reproached for being “retrograde” because I was trying, in the test issue of our new electronic European Journal, to present the variety of European approaches to United States Studies – a presentation very much needed in my eyes, as most of what is being done outside of the United States

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remains largely unknown to our American colleagues. I might as well have been told that the loud principle of openness to “the other” could perfectly do without the actual views held by the other in question. Everything looked as if, a softened version of the original Cultural Studies being the dominant model in the English-speaking world, anybody dealing with American Studies elsewhere had better conform to that version of openness to the celebrated but abstract “other.” The trouble is, however, that the version of cultural studies and of the “internationalization of American Studies” currently prevailing in American-initiated endeavors is not necessarily that which the “international other” is spontaneously willing to adopt for all sorts of historical and intellectual reasons. 2) Against the sloganization of intellectual life.

7 In most of Europe, Americanists train in disciplinary specialties – literature, history, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, political science, photography, law, philosophy or film; one is known as an Americanist because one applies these aptitudes to the society and culture of the United States. The theoretical work accomplished in Europe, and particularly in France over the last fifty years, always had disciplinary bases; its conversion into a decontextualized package of so-called “French theory,” or “theory” for short, has altered, and at times made impenetrable, its original intentions. Thus European scholars of the United States are often puzzled at the success of “cultural studies” for at least two reasons: one is that in countries that, for decades, read the work of Goldmann, Lukacs, Leenhardt or Macherey, Barthes, Althusser, Friedmann, Morin, Bourdieu or Metz, the ideological dimension of disciplines is so obvious that “cultural studies” as practiced with sometimes naïve gusto in the United States looks somewhat like the proud reinvention of the wheel; the other reason is that one of the founding tenets of the originally British “cultural studies,” as elaborated or practiced by Raymond Williams, Thompson, Willis, David Chaney or even John Fiske, i.e. the notion of class, happens to be the one most often slipped under the carpet while the headings of gender, ethnicity and race are allowed to dominate without further reference to problems posed by class appurtenance and structure. “Cultural studies” can thus appear not only as a straight-jacket that leaves aside all sorts of other potentially interesting angles, but also as one that has been deprived of one of its important founding dimensions. Born in Marxism, Cultural Studies is now focusing on ethnicity and gender at the expense of class questions, and this in a country with no political base or organization to relay the suggested social change. Some will read in this blatant fact a trace of the divorce between academic status and activity and the realities of social power in the United States; others will see in it an approach that mimics social evolutions rather than analyzing them, removed from economic and political realities, accompanying the rise and praise of communitarian identity and difference while the holders of real economic power keep laughing all the way to the bank, comforted by the fact that whereas the principle of “divide and rule” used to be essential for power structures, the people themselves (or academics) now seem to make sure this comfortable situation prevails. In the words of Walter Benn Michaels: What is surprising is that diversity should have become the hallmark of liberalism. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. [. . .] as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality. 7

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8 Removing the class dimension from the hallowed tetralogy of “gender, race , ethnicity, and class” generates doubt among European cultures marked by a political history in which the last term has always been an ideological watershed, whether one adhered to or disapproved of the Marxist vulgate. European politics have consistently dealt with inequalities and inequities among gender, race and ethnic origin as linked with, or side effects of, the class structure of society, in cultures that, contrary to a certain American tradition of consensus, never took it for granted that the predominant economic and political systems were the only possible ones. Rid of their class-dimension in American academe, “cultural studies” look to most Europeans as somewhat cosmetic and naïve, not to say, at times, wrong-headed or self-indulgent. As my colleague Pap N’Diaye puts it, “cultural studies frequently—and surprisingly juxtapose a great deconstructionist attention to narratives and very weak contextualization”; he proposes that we substitute to the cultural-studies steamroller humbler, more pragmatic but more efficient modes of intelligibility of American cultures, methods that avoid both the excesses of the “linguistic turn” and the dangers of mythological reification. Furthermore, as Pierre Guerlain remarks, “after fifty years and one transatlantic crossing, cultural studies have radicalized their vocabulary but become acculturated to the dominant ideological system that they think they are able to avoid and transgress.”8 Which reminds him, and us, that transgression, like carnivals, does not question the bases of established systems but makes them tolerable. And he adds that “the disciplinary fragmentation that accompanies the communitarization of knowledge espouses the language of diversity in a society where inequality and injustice abound,” thus masking central issues.

9 The question, in American Studies, also revolves around the lack of specific methods; the catch-all term of “cultural studies” often leads to a somewhat psittacic and deleterious sloganization of intellectual life rather than to the elaboration of adapted tools for the exploration of specific questions. The word “Studies” conveniently occultates the problem. Whereas most European specialists of the United States bank on their disciplinary specialization and call upon others for interdisciplinary collaboration, everything happens as if American Studies took the question of personal interdisciplinary competence for granted, while interdisciplinarity, which indeed has its necessity and merits, can only exist if its practitioners have equal training in the various disciplines they call upon. What threatens to result, otherwise, of a self-decreed interdisciplinary approach is, too often, “I-liked-the-film” literary studies, “this- reminds-me-of-the-situation-at-home” poetics, pop sociology, impressionist history, anthropology-and-milk, “light” semiology, political science-and-water, or the sentimental wishful thinking of “popular culture.” Real interdisciplinarity, as opposed to vague syncretism, requires the possibility of disciplinary transcendence based on the acquisition of an improbable gamut of personal competence. Also, the cultural studies approach to American Studies often looks to Europeans as being detrimental to academic exchange. Not only does the internal multidisciplinary competence of the historian, the literary critic or the semiotician not seem required but the specialization in communitarian areas makes academic dialogue between specialties perilous, knowledge being condemned to localism and often losing its scientific bases in favor of militant positions. As Pierre Nora recently remarked,9 peremptory notions of collective memory threaten the difficult and ever problematic task of history. And the reason “radical American Studies” attempting to concentrate on the links between literature,

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culture and society in a massively referential fashion are often looked at suspiciously in Europe, is less one of distinct ideological choices than a theoretical opposition, on the part of literary scholars, to the questionable measuring stick of “relevance” : they know well enough that literary scholarship itself requires a whole array of competence (from linguistics and semiotics to rhetoric, stylistics and social sciences) and cannot be content with the referential aspect of literary works. Most European literary scholars and historians both deplore the fact that, in the United States, the baby of reading skills should have been thrown out with the bathwater of New Criticism and Agrarian ideology. European academe may not have massively adopted Cultural Studies because it intellectually cannot welcome such statements as, for example, that of Barry Shank: 10 [Cultural Studies] has developed and benefited from an increasing sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality. It resists the codification of its methods and its theories, it desires to remain resolutely anti-disciplinary; and it remains conscious of the fact that there is always 'something at stake' in its work. To this extent, cultural studies sounds like nothing so much as the very best American Studies.

10 Resistance to such a point of view shines through historian Marie-Jeanne Rossignol’s note that “‘cultural studies‘ close at least as many doors as they claim to open.” 11 As Sabine Sielke has noted,12 “ interdisciplinarity does not follow from a [chancy and risky] synthesis of methods,” adding that to do interdisciplinary work primarily means to approach a scientific or scholarly problem or question with a number of methods or theoretical perspectives and through the practice of more than one discipline. This, of course, requires us either to be familiar with the methods of several fields of inquiry or to allow other scholars to provide that expertise.

11 Europeans, on the whole, seem convinced that, in spite of Max Weber’s remark that “we owe many of our best hypotheses and knowledge to dilettantes,”13 disciplinary rigor must remain the order of the day if any kind of academic exchange is to be maintained over and against unistantiated, impressionistic or militant views. The “something at stake” Barry Shank talks about, cannot, in the eyes of European scholarship, be anything other than knowledge arrived at as objectively as possible.

12 The endless recycling of current buzzwords and ill-digested references under collegial pressure, the indiscriminate and often ill-informed use of “French Theory” as a decontextualized tool makes for a weak methodological backbone that cannot be replaced by a conformist or complacent consensus of political correctness. Predictable conclusions derived from partisan premises generate dubious intellectual gain. Few advances can be made through the repetition of a priori convictions. European Americanists massively remain attached to the archive, method, logical hierarchies of notions and phenomena, to context and historicization, semiotic and aesthetic complexities or contradictions; inserting potentially different points of view in arguments, according to the scientific method, is rare in Cultural Studies, the soundness of preferred ideological positions remaining by and large taken for granted. As careful an adequation of tool and object as possible also appears as a key element of judgment. More often than not, “cultural studies” are seen as recycling sloganized thought, crossing methods of analysis used by other disciplines with little care for their compatibility.14 American “cultural studies” often occupy an academic and intellectual field that is that of other disciplines (sociology, semiology or psychoanalysis, for

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example) in other countries. As Guerlain notes, where a number of works would be classified as literature, sociology or history in Europe, they fall under “African- American interest,” “Women's studies,” “gender studies” or “Latino-Latina Studies” in the United States. Favoring “interpreting communities” rather than disciplinary foundations, they are seen as placating pre-established doctrines on all objects, often appear to pursue other goals than the original version of British cultural studies, and seem to create a false impression of coherence where their only common character may be the indiscriminate and often pedantic use of a composite lingo. Finally, the quick rotation of intellectual fashions in the United States explains why the most flamboyant aspects of cultural studies feel ephemeral.

13 Fluck and Claviez’s realistic, both humble and ambitious definition of “American Studies” as “a joint, interdisciplinary academic endeavor to gain systematic knowledge about American society and culture in order to understand the historical and present- day meaning and significance of the United States”15 probably has the suffrage of most Europeans but very few supporters among such as hunger for something “new” or, at least, the latest “hot thing”. 3) For a post-imperial view of American Studies abroad. 14 Last but not least in this set of ironies is in effect that American colleagues who proclaim most loudly the necessity to internationalize American Studies in order to make them “new” do not seem sensitive to a built-in potential contradiction. Just as “American Studies” favors a holistic view of the United States, “internationalizing American Studies” could be construed as a desire to generalize to the rest of the world the modalities of study that mainly exist in an American context. The impressive ignorance of —or disregard for the production of non-American Americanists among American Americanists points to an easier, readily available means of “internationalizing” American studies, i.e.: reading what is being produced elsewhere than in the United States or in languages other than English.

15 As the proposal of “New American Studies” emerges, little militates for the need for non-American Americanists to revolutionize the nature of their work, however illuminating the debate may be. The suggestion that traditional modes of European curiosity about American subjects is no longer relevant may ironically betray yet another imperial attempt at exporting a United States-born new paradigm. But being Americanists does not make non-Americans American, and European Americanists may be skeptical, since the idea can be construed as harboring an unchanged agenda of influence under a vocal anti-hegemonic discourse. As the celebrated “other” sometimes appears as the individual or collective alibi of whoever endeavors to strengthen the reasons they have to remain the same, Europeans have the bad taste of remaining different, and working from different angles with different measuring sticks. That American Americanists should be tempted to encourage a widening of perspectives because the original object of their research and reflexion is no longer something they think they can grasp or account for in comfortable ideological terms does not necessarily mean that European Americanists should trade their specific modes of approach of what to them naturally remains a discernible object of study for the one suggested by their dissatisfied American colleagues. Rob Kroes's recent claim that European Americanists are “redirecting their gaze” towards Europe and that the EAAS, for example, through the public space opened by its publications and the moderating efforts of its board members, does indeed contribute to creating a “meaningful

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community” of European scholars probably comes much closer to defining the “novelty” of European American studies, one that strives for greater independence from American models. Europeans have tended to decide that, overall, good scholarship was more important than contingent politics, and that the devising of new perspectives, the intensification of intra- and extra-European exchanges, the identification of new objects and the elaboration of new intellectual tools seem more productive than joining in the second-hand recycling of buzzwords and the borrowed paradigms of distorted Derrida or tired, late-phase Baudrillard. Solid disciplinary bases that allow for interdisciplinary dialogue and sharing,16 methodological and discursive innovation and instantiated appreciation17 are all the novelty European Americanists may need to envisage. They, after all, should constitute an “interpreting community” holding the same rights as others.

16 On the whole, I doubt whether European Americanists more than rarely see eye to eye with the type of “internationalization” of American Studies recently promoted, often seen as what has already been called a “new” “version of American transnational exceptionalism.”18

17 In his first address to the newly established IASA,19 comparatist Djelal Kadir, expressing a desire to “Defend America against Its Devotees,” adopted a somewhat prophetic, near apocalyptic tone that, besides not being indispensable to the work of the humble researcher, banked on notions Europeans have long interiorized. Referring to “the field of American Studies” even as he invoked a “titanic paradigm shift,” what he then defined as “the challenge of being an Americanist” was not one a non-American Americanist ever needed fear. For a European, “American Studies” obviously cannot be the “national(ist) project” he denounced and none of the reasons for his disquiet hold for Europeans who do not systematically walk in the footsteps of their American colleagues. When Professor Kadir says that “From a national project, America is shifting to an international object with historical density and global signification,” he is making plain what Europeans have known at least since the end of World War II. When he discovers that “From an object of devotion, America is becoming a subject of investigation, scientific scrutiny, and secular criticism,” one wonders whether he has spoken to any European Americanists over the last five decades. While he proposes that “From a generator of epistemic paradigms for its own assessment, America is emerging as a case for study through criteria and scholarly principles that do not originate in America itself,” this has always been seen by non-American Americanists as their task. Stating that “From a sponsor of American Studies, America is becoming a beneficiary of human resources and intellectual capital aimed at examining America and its place in the world,” he merely restates the hope and conviction of Europeans. In other words, Professor Kadir’s misgivings and proposals, for all their invitation to novelty, hardly come as novel to European minds. And when he suggests that “From a discipline in self-denial, American Studies is being revisioned as a powerfully determinative discipline and formative discourse,” I, for one, cannot see how Europeans could ever have thought their activity a “discipline in self-denial” or that they have ever considered their activity as mere “discourse.” I see clear benefits in his desire to integrate a hemispheric dimension to American studies, but I do not suppose any European studying the United States ever had the naivety not to integrate the United States’ various involvements in Latin America to his or her “cognitive map” of the country. I do not suppose European Americanists ever saw the “ideological imaginary encoded variously as ‘the American dream’ or as ‘the American Way,’” as

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“unquestionable” or ever treated it as not susceptible of being “subject to sustainable inquiry and demystification.” In fact, I always thought most of the activities and duties of European Americanists basically consisted in trying to replace an uninformed fascination or repulsion with solid scientific analyses and data. So that when point 8 of Professor Kadir’s agenda proposes that “From a gross epistemic purveyor of pedagogy in realpolitik and geopolitical assessments, America is about to become a net recipient of knowledge production about America,” I am sure the double reaction of European Americanists can only be 1) “It may be time it should,” and 2) “Why haven’t we been read before when we’ve always been here?” All the more so as the recipes advocated (realignment in the hierarchy of disciplinary fields; or a return to the archive) more or less follow the reality of evolutions in American studies at the hands of European Americanists who may not need imported lessons on the manner in which they should think about the United States, the doubts and questions raised here having been theirs for years. To them, the United States is, as a matter of course, a defined object of study: a country, distinct from its neighbors, with its society, institutions, people, cultures, history, artistic life, media, academic life, economy, foreign policy. That the effects of all this, and particularly the latter two, on the outside world should be taken into consideration has always gone of itself, as has international collaboration; but that is no reason to distinguish in principle the study of that particular country from that of others, unless one desires to recycle exceptionalist views in new clothes.

18 The only useful contribution of outsiders is what they can bring precisely because they are outsiders. And non-American American studies do not necessarily need to get involved with vocal “international” issues possibly born not so much from a genuine concern for the views of non-Americans on America but from internal divergences that use American Studies as a political and institutional bone of contention, as one geometrical locus of ideological tensions. Surprisingly enough, European Americanists feel perfectly able to define what American studies should be without outside help.

19 Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, considering the ongoing debates in the United States, writes that “it seems more reasonable to count on Europeans to renew American studies by throwing off the yoke of problematics traditionally imported from the United States and renewing approaches to the subject.”20 A recent newsletter of the Greek association encouraged “notes and impressions on the ways in which our study of the U.S. should/can/must/might be, or objectively is, different from the efforts deployed by our colleagues in the U.S.” Europeans do not have to care about what is “usable” for national self-conceptions, nor to limit their investigations to “what will go down well” with the various components of American academic audiences. As Heinz Ickstadt once put it, “American Studies should accept its name as its limitation and its boundary.”21

20 Freedom of thought requires no Panurgian agenda, new or old. Method can never be a matter of acclaim, applause or referenda. Exceptionalism redux?: in more ways than one, to pick up Sabine Sielke’s humorous aside, “doing American Studies [requires] a large dose of negative capability”22 indeed.

21 American studies in Europe will be new as long as there are scholars who do not feel compelled to follow the most-travelled roads. No new models can be decreed; they evolve out of the logics and necessities of intellectual research and only impose themselves in time if operationally efficient. Real “internationalization” of American studies can only be achieved through multidirectional pooling of ongoing work on the United States. And the young will take care of the new.

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22 That our American colleagues listen to us and read us more than they do: that would be a really good beginning for a true internationalization of American studies that, for Europeans, is, shall, and should remain the aggregate sum of the various disciplinary contributions to the study of the United States. European scholars may not and possibly should not follow American views of American Studies if they want to remain useful to American studies.

23 Anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan once wrote somewhere that “facts tended to go all in the same direction when they were lit from one side only.” It may just be, after all, that the solution to the apparently agonizing issues in American Studies will not consist in anybody’s talking louder but in our American friends’ listening more closely to what goes on elsewhere.

NOTES

1. In The Critique of Pure Reason, through the Hellenistic anecdote first relayed by Lucianus. 2. Precise information on these matters is now available in the trial issue of the European Journal of American Studies . 3. For decades, caught between disciplinary regroupings, (the MLA or the ALA for literature, OAH for history), members of the ASA, barring famous disciplinary figures willing to put their shoulder to the collective wheel and endeavor to define what ASA might be left to deal with, were liable to be interested in areas little studied in disciplinary organizations, so called “popular culture,” loosely defined, being one of the attractive rallying centers in the 1970s and the early 1980s, soon replaced by identity- centered concerns (over 90% of the papers presented at the ASA convention in Atlanta were related to identity in one way or another). But even then, such a renowned scholar as Leo Marx, as dedicated to the cause as he was, called American Studies in the 1960s an "unscientific method," and now calls it a "non-discipline." 4. If there were reasons to talk about “post-modernism” – post-modernity being an infinitely more complex matter, too often reduced to simplistic formulas – if one could indeed talk of the “post-industrial” because of objective changes in techniques and human activity, and if “post-colonial,” given a precise content, can be historically significant, it may be somewhat more difficult to follow the drift that led, no tongue in no cheek, to such self-defeating expressions as “post-human” and, even more disconcertingly, to the “post-woman” I recently read about and makes me long for the soon-to-come period of the post-ridiculous. 5. The recent accent on internationalization may also read as an insistence on the “post-American,” since the fashion now seems to consist in speaking against any United States-centered American studies, all the more freely as that initiative was mostly taken by academics from the United States. 6. This paper was read at the International Symposium (‘New American Studies in Europe Today’) organized at the Tokyo Green Palace Hotel by Professor Jun Furuya in on March 11, 2006.

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7. New York Times Magazine, 11 avril 2004. 8. http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/guerlain.html#11 9. “Pierre Nora et le métier d’historien,” Le Monde 2 n°105, Feb. 18, 2006, pp. 20-27 10. "American Studies: From Culture Concept to Cultural Studies," 1997. Quoted in Kaenel, http://epsilon3.georgetown.edu/~coventrm/asa2000/panel2/kaenel.html, note 5. 11. http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/rossignol.html) 12. European Journal of American Studies, op.cit. 13. Le Savant et le politique, p.64. This is the French edition of two lectures (Wissenschaft als Beruf and Politik als Beruf) delivered at the University of Munich in 1917. Julien Freund edited them as one volume in 1959, and they were then prefaced by Raymond Aron. This quote is excerpted from the new translation by Catherine Colliot-Thélène (Paris : La Découverte, 2003). 14. The confusion of agendas may generate rather surprising results for European eyes. Thus a specialist of Chicano culture like Lomeli feels unembarrassed to quote Toynbee’s but not Marx’s views on the repetition of history however useful the latter would be to assess the return of “political correctness” as “farce” after its tragic use in the Maoist “cultural revolution” in China; one wonders also at hearing numerous specialists of ethnic cultures put a premium on magical and mythical thought which one would have thought 1) had to be examined with particular attention in the light of, for example, the rise of the religious Right in the United States, and 2) had been placed at critical distance by their potential political use as well as by the various elements of an otherwise praised and repetitious use of “French theory” that hardly favors these views, rather inviting defiance vis-à-vis them... 15. Proposed in 2003 by Winfried Fluck and Thomas Claviez in the “Introduction” to their edition of Theories of American Culture, Theories of American Studies, Tübingen: Narr, 2003, ix. 16. The European issue of the Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines, « Stemming the Mississippi », for example, or the current development of collaborations in the visual arts. 17. One example would be Jean-Paul Rocchi’s attempts at moving gender, sexuality and racial studies beyond the usual binary oppositions. See his introduction (“The Other Bites the Dust; La mort de l'Autre : vers une épistémologie de l'identité ») to Cahiers Charles V - n° 40 (The Object Identity : Epistemology and Cross Perspectives). 18. Kaenel (Id). 19. « Defending America against Its Devotees », Leyden, 2003. 20. http://etudes.americaines.free.fr/rossignol.html) : 21. Ickstadt, "American Sudies in an age of globalization, American Quarterly 54.4 (2002) : 554. 22. Op.cit.

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AUTHOR

MARC CHENETIER Marc Chénetier, Emeritus Professor, Université Paris-Diderot; Senior member, Institut Universitaire de France

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