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Jillian Sayre Dissertation Copyright by Jillian J. Sayre 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Jillian J. Sayre certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Work of Death in the Americas: Narrative, Necropolitics and the Historical Romance in the Post-Revolutionary Era Committee: ___________________________________ Martin Kevorkian, Supervisor ___________________________________ Nicolas Shumway ___________________________________ Diane Davis ___________________________________ Joshua Gunn ___________________________________ Neville Hoad ___________________________________ Jossianna Arroyo Martinez ___________________________________ Hannah Wojciehowski The Work of Death in the Americas: Narrative, Necropolitics and the Historical Romance in the Post-Revolutionary Era by Jillian J. Sayre, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2010 For Nathan. Because mourning makes us who we are. But some of us more than others. Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Won- derer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping --page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and Naomi--to God's perfect Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms! -Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have endured endless macabre conversations as I worked through the ideas in this project and thanks are due for their patience and support. To all of my families, I wish to express my deepest gratitude for pretending to understand what I am doing and never questioning my work, even while allowing me to question it. I would like to thank Martin Kevorkian, Josh Gunn and Diane Davis, in whose classes and company the seeds for the project sprouted and were nourished. Special thanks are due to Martin Kevorkian, one could not wish for a more careful and generous reader and I am indebted to him for letting me pursue the project in my own voice. Of course my greatest debt is to Jim Brown, who suffered through my every doubt and frustration and always answered it with “it’s going to be great.” My work and life is better because of you. v The Work of Death in the Americas: Narrative, Necropolitics and the Historical Romance in the Post-Revolutionary Era Jillian J. Sayre, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Martin Kevorkian This dissertation is a transnational study that argues that a structure of mourning, spoken through and effected by the historical romance, underlies the narrative of national culture as it emerges in the Americas during the early nineteenth century. The writing, consumption and preservation of these texts reveal not only the psychic life of community but also the material basis for that psychic life. Writing and reading, the production and circulation of texts, plays a crucial role in developing this psychic life, and the historical romance was particularly important in the Americas for imagining a national legacy. Current criticism emphasizes the sexual coupling and generative romantic structure of the marriage plot around which many of these novels circulate. This criticism emphasizes the somatic nature of the genre, the corporeal language of romance that is read in the tears of joy and grief spilled by its characters as well as its readers. But while I agree that a libidinal energy is at the heart of both the narrative and its readers’ responses, I argue that the focus on sexual coupling neglects to consider another bodily discourse: that of death and mourning. Mourning enacts a simultaneous identification with and desire for a lost object, a fetishistic relationship that brings together the Freudian “to be” and “to have” and so invests the lost object with both narcissistic and communal attachments. These texts offer their readers the bodies within the narratives, as well as the texts themselves, as the vi material of a cultural heritage, constructing a nativism that ties the subjects to the land and to the community through a shared lost artifact, their history. Through mourning a common object, the subjects become citizens, native Americans that distance themselves from Europe while supplanting the Amerindian. In combining modern studies of material culture with post Freudian psychoanalytic criticism, the dissertation works to make explicit the relationship between death, citizenship and textuality in order to show the cultural work of fictional historiography in the making of the American nations. vii Table of Contents Prolegomenon Working Through John Brown’s Body, An Exercise in Mourning.....................................1 The Meteor...................................................................................................1 Writing the Event/The Angel of Light.........................................................6 Being Impressed and Other Signs of Conscription....................................13 How do I speak my own death?.................................................................16 Chapter One Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the American Historical Romance........................................................................................................28 The sky falls over Zion...............................................................................28 The Scryptural Economy ...........................................................................42 Books Buried in the Earth..........................................................................50 Chapter Two Clearing ground: Sovereign Tears, or, The Indian is History............................................67 Sovereignty: A Vanishing Act...................................................................67 La Patria Ha Muerto. ¡Viva la patria!........................................................85 “Ha de Venir”: The Fatal Book of Destiny...............................................104 Chapter Three The Shadow of the (m)Other: A story of forefathers.......................................................124 On the frontier, a gravestone....................................................................124 In that grave, my mother..........................................................................138 AnOther Mother.......................................................................................163 Chapter 4 The Task of the Translator: A Key into the Languages of America................................181 “A Darkening Varnish”............................................................................181 The Question of What I am Eating: The Case of the Buffalo Hump.......195 viii Works Cited.....................................................................................................................208 Vita...................................................................................................................................224 ix List of Illustrations “The Great Meteoric Shower” ..........................................................................................27 x Prolegomenon Working Through John Brown’s Body, An Exercise in Mourning “Unfortunately, nothing can be said which in [the historians’] opinion has not been said before, and truly the same prophecy applies to all future times; for since human reason has for many centuries speculated upon innumerable objects in various ways, it is hardly to be expected that we should not be able to discover analogies for every new idea among the old sayings of past ages.” -Kant, Prolegomena I. The meteor The history of December 2, 1859 begins for us in 1865, with a novelist-turned-poet who, being struck by the imminent victory of the Union, takes up his pen to draw. Herman Melville had not published in eight years when he started his Battle-Pieces, and it was the urge to paint an elegy for the war, to render in words the scenes of struggle and death, that brought him back to storytelling. The poems attempt to document “the terrible historic tragedy” by resurrecting its ghosts and presenting them in an aggressively visual manner (Melville 202). Battle-pieces were then better understood as a genre of painting and the poems’ evocative presentations of bodies and lands mimic the sketches and paintings to which the title refers.1 Melville’s was a history made present to the reader, or rather the reader made witness to the events of history, a method 1 Hennig Cohen notes: The figurative use of battle-pieces as a literary term is now more common than its use to indicate a genre of painting, but when Melville took it as the title for his collection of war poems, he did so with an awareness of its primary meaning…Its visual connotation was important to him, and to make certain that his readers were apprised that he was presenting a series of pictures, he added the subtitle “Aspects of the War”(15) 1 that not only served a documentary process but also a cultural mourning that attempted to heal and reconcile a community by forcing it to relive, once again, its own pain, suffering, and dissolution. Melville ends the book with just this meditation on the (re)constructive work of mourning. “Let us pray,” he says, “that the terrible historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment
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