European journal of American studies

11-2 | 2016 Summer 2016

Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11535 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.11535 ISSN : 1991-9336

Éditeur European Association for American Studies

Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016, « Summer 2016 » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 11 août 2016, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11535 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11535

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021.

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SOMMAIRE

The Land of the Future: British Accounts of the USA at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century David Seed

The Reader in It: Henry James’s “Desperate Plagiarism” Hivren Demir-Atay

Contradictory Depictions of the New Woman: Reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a Dialogic Novel Sevinc Elaman-Garner

“Nothing Can Touch You as Long as You Work”: Love and Work in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and For Whom the Bell Tolls Lauren Rule Maxwell

People, Place and Politics: D’Arcy McNickle’s (Re)Valuing of Native American Principles John L. Purdy

“Why Don’t You Just Say It as Simply as That?”: The Progression of Parrhesia in the Early Novels of Joseph Heller Peter Templeton

“The Land That He Saw Looked Like a Paradise. It Was Not, He Knew”: Suburbia and the Maladjusted American Male in John Cheever’s Bullet Park Harriet Poppy Stilley

The Writing of “Dreck”: Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White Rachele Dini

The State You’re In: Citizenship, Sovereign Power, and The (Political) Rescue of the Self in Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy Andrea Pacor

At the Meetin’ Tree: Reading, Storytelling, and Transculturation in Daniel Black’s They Tell Me of a Home Pekka Kilpeläinen

Quest/ion of Identities in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Post-revolutionary Drama Mehdi Ghasemi

Sex and the City: A Situationist Reading of Jens Jorgen Thorsen’s Film Adaptation of Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy Jennifer Cowe

Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses Michael Wainwright

Smart Geopolitics, Dangerous Ideas: Energy security, Ideology, and the Challenges of American Policy in the Persian Gulf Diego Pagliarulo

Letting Go of Narrative History: The Linearity of Time and the Art of Recounting the Past Ari Helo

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The Land of the Future: British Accounts of the USA at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

David Seed

1 Ever since the declaration of independence a sustained and complex dialogue took place between British and American writers. What Sylvia Strauss calls the “American Myth” of fresh, libertarian beginnings has persisted in debate throughout the nineteenth century (Strauss 66). Towards the end of that century anxieties began to grow in Britain over the emergence of the USA as a major economic power and as a player on the imperial world scene. At the turn of the nineteenth century an increasing number of works were published which Genevieve Abravanel has designated “Ameritopias,” meaning “texts that imagine the future through America.” These works for her represent an important part of a broader attempt to “rethink nation and empire.” (Abravanel 25) Although Abravanel’s coinage carries implications of utopian celebration which is by no means a standard feature of turn-of-the-century writing, both commentators have rightly recognized that speculations on possible futures repeatedly included the USA in their scenarios as a major driving force for change. When the Scottish editor of the 1893 Baedeker guide to the USA, James Muirhead, attempted to sum up the national consciousness, he did so in terms of space and time, declaring that “it includes a sense of illimitable expansion and possibility; an almost childlike confidence in human ability and fearlessness of both the present and the future” (274).

2 In what follows a range of writing will be examined from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to see how their projections of the future are tied to a heightened awareness of the USA as an emerging economic and imperial power. The discussion will draw on Stephen Kern’s study of the Western spatio-temporal culture between 1880 and 1918, particularly where he identifies two modes of imagining the future. The one is a matter of expectation, the other “active mode,” as he calls it, pursues a future, using technology to bring about desired change (Kern 92-93).

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1. Bulwer-Lytton

3 In his 1871 novel The Coming Race, Edward Bulwer-Lytton was one of the first writers to articulate fears of Britain’s imperial supremacy being usurped by the United States. As early as 1861 he reflected on the rise and fall of empires, worrying that Britain’s might collapse under its sheer size. The divisions of the Civil War offered a welcome relief to Britain because otherwise “America would have hung over Europe like a gathering and destructive thunder-cloud” (Bulwer-Lytton, 1861). This sombre foreboding was to inform the conclusion to his novel.

4 The Coming Race opens when an American descends into a mine shaft and then falls through the Earth into a subterranean world of the future. His subsequent discussions with the Vril-ya, as these people are called, call into question the narrator’s brash nationalism by showing how his people will be superseded by more rational, technologically advanced beings. When questioned about his “primeval” origins, the narrator indignantly replies that he “has the honour to belong to one of the most civilised nations of the earth” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 25). As Lillian Nayder has shown, Lytton displaces his imperial anxieties underground, depicting a possible future in a speculative space whose plausibility depends less on the credibility of life underground than on Lytton’s extrapolation from the facts of his present era (212-221).

5 The simple fact of the narrator’s fall carries negative implications for the evolutionary process, which was regularly figured as an ascent. Similarly, the humans underground are surprisingly tall, another suggestion of superiority. When he expounds the “present grandeur and prospective pre-eminence of that glorious American Republic” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 25), it becomes clear that Lytton is dramatizing a clash between the national optimism of the USA and a longer-term evolutionary possibility.i The Vril-ya society seems to be a utopian realization of democracy in its absence of class and of competition, and therefore of “hazardous speculation.” More importantly, they are united by their common faith in a “future state” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 51), although this future seems to offer the prospect of indefinitely extending their current well-being. As the novel progresses, the narrator gradually loses any doubts that they will displace himself and his race, hence his concluding direction to the reader to pay heed to his “forewarnings.” The narrator attempts to stave off the imminence of racial defeat, reflecting: “the more I think of a people calmly developing… powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force… the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 144). Lytton’s tortuous syntax mimes out a delay in his reluctant conclusion of inevitable change.

6 The first signs that the narrator receives of Vril-ya technology come with the “automata” he sees gliding around their dwellings and the devices which are operated by touch terminals. During a crisis when he attacks one of these beings, he is felled “as by an electric shock” (Bulwer-Lytton 2005, 20). Eventually the force is named as “Vril”, which the narrator explains: “I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature” (Bulwer-Lytton, 2005, 26). Bulwer-Lytton himself stated that he was trying to straddle the known and unknown: “I do not mean Vril for Mesmerism. But for electricity developed into uses only dimly guessed [suggesting] the one great fluid pervading all Nature” (Mitchell 230). In short, it was to suggest the force of forces. In his earlier works Lytton had repeatedly referred to

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electricity as a chain linking spirit and matter, and in the novel Vril figures as a versatile force enabling land, air and sea transport, public and domestic lighting. The American title of the novel foregrounded this force as the true protagonist: Vril, the Power of the Coming Race.Transmitted through a hand-held staff, it is a force whose application does not depend on physical strength and it that respect it symbolizes new- found gender equality, one of the main areas of anxiety in the novel. Its application disempowers the narrator, reducing him to a passive state of expectation of the future. Bulwer-Lytton’s last unfinished novel, The Parisians (1873), continues the dialogue between present and future of The Coming Race by dramatizing the differences between European and American women and by having a character assert that America will “eclipse” Europe.

2. Electrical Futures

7 In Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel, Vril is dramatized through a series of events which disrupt the leisurely exposition of underground society: the immobilization of the narrator, the killing of a monster emerging from a lake, and so on. The sheer speed and ease of its application thus runs counter to the general reflective pace of the action and anticipates the prominence given to electricity in later writing. Not only associated with the future, it was mythologized as a preternatural force. The engineer A.E. Kennelly, for instance, described it in 1890 as “an Ariel before which time and place seem to vanish” (Kennelly 102).ii

8 Nunsowe Green’s A Thousand Years Hence (1882) unusually introduces its description of a future world by describing a London debating society whose members discuss the likely developments in the near future.iii The volume shifts from abstract discussion into future retrospect as the narrator reflects on the last 1000 years, on a future where electricity has magically accelerated transport and opened up new possibilities for travel. By 2882, “the air is the ordinary medium of our daily locomotion” (Green 45) and an unlimited food supply. Electricity, like radium decades later, “opened to man a new range of power over the material universe” (108). Green’s future links the elements of electrical energy and flight in a world where the USA has become assimilated into the world economy. “Old California” has become a key energy source and “Old Cincinnati” an expanded meat centre. A key development towards this global economy is the union between Britain and the USA “in the way of bridging the intermediate Atlantic,” which is realized through massive ferry-boats resembling “swift-travelling cities” (121). This union immediately triggers a surge in transatlantic travel and an expansion of a shared economy, while Britain gradually loses its empire from failing to recognize the democratic current in political evolution.

9 Green’s future world has transformed itself thanks to the discovery of electricity as a limitless power source. Similarly in W.S. Lach-Szyrma’s Aleriel (1883), set on another planet at an unspecified time in the future, control of electricity has revolutionized transport and communication.iv However, one of the most through- going electronic utopias was Scottish-born John Macnie’s The Diothas or, A Far Look Ahead (1883), where the narrator falls asleep during a mesmeric experiment and awakes in the ninety-sixth century. As he gazes across the New York of the future (“Nuiore”), he registers the “unbroken lines of colonnade stretching toward the distant horizon” (Macnie 5). Apart from functioning as an emblem of order, the perspective

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line in this description implies the long vision of planners and even the perspective of time itself. We will encounter other instances of temporal perspectivism in this body of writing. In The Diothas the narrator’s perceptions of space are supplemented by a character’s account of how the late nineteenth century has been studied because it was “remarkable as a period of transition” (61) when many things seemed about to pass away. In this way the narrator develops a sense of his own present as history, as a transitional period giving way to a welter of inventions ranging from the “tachygraph” (a kind of dictaphone), color photography, and even a primitive form of cinema. Once again the overwhelming characteristic of this future society lies in its accelerated and varied means of communication.

10By the 1880s electricity had become a standard feature in the evocation of future worlds. In his pioneering study Domesticating Electricity, Graeme Gooday shows how during the following decade “dozens of speculations about the future electrical home and society” were published (137), triggered particularly by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888).v In the latter, the narrator is told: “electricity, of course, takes the place of all fires and lighting” in the home (113), an important emphasis since the first widespread applications of electricity took place in the public not domestic sphere. Bellamy does not even give a token explanation of this transformation, instead using electricity as the symbolic sign of social well-being. Thus Kenneth Folingsby’s Meda (1891) describes the world of 5575, when the discovery of how to store electricity has been applied in rail transport, countless domestic machines, the telephone, and even a form of television.vi The narrator, visiting from the year 1888, learns that a key event in subsequent history yet again has been the union between Britain and the USA.vii Folingsby’s narrator is left in no doubt about his evolutionary status when he is addressed as “specimen” by the inhabitants of the future world. Macnie’s narrator suffers an even more explicit humiliation. His unqualified admiration for the “magnificent race” he encounters leads him to imagine that he has been pushed backwards down the evolutionary scale: “I felt within me that I belonged to the dark ages of the past” (Macnie 17). Thisfuture world has become a single state with a universal language based on English. In short, the globe has turned American.

11Among the successors to Looking Backward, H.W. Hillman’s Looking Forward (1906), unusually includes a substantial American view of a transformed Britain. The role of electricity in imminent material progress is reflected in Hillman setting his account in 1912, in a future where every area of social life from the domestic to that of transport has already reaped the benefits of the new resource. Hillman’s characters visit Britain, and as soon as they dock in Liverpool, they “see how rapidly England had taken up the various applications of electricity” (123). Everywhere they go, they see electrical heating, buses and even aeroplanes, but the high spot of their tour comes with a visit to a huge factory complex run by an American industrialist. The easy combination of US know-how and British industrial enterprise contrasts starkly with some UK accounts of the economic threat from across the Atlantic, as we shall see. For Hillman, however, the influence reflects a simple lesson in technology: “the merchants of England were very quick to learn of the great results secured by the merchants in America about the year 1906” (132-133).

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3. Anglo-American Union

12Where Hillman blithely assumes that a unification of British and American technology can take place without any political problems, most writers on Anglo- American union either present it as an ultimate desired goal or focus on the difficulties of bringing it about. One of the most positive assertions of joint progress was made only one year after The Coming Race by the explorer William Winwood Reade in his “universal” history, The Martyrdom of Man (1872), which was to have its influence on H.G. Wells.viii Reade’s premise was that America was both the happiest and “most civilized nation on earth” (510-511). That being the case, the USA becomes the measure of progress and “that England may become as prosperous as America, it must be placed under American conditions” (511). Reade does not present this as a warning so much as a statement of necessity and underpins his assertion with two technological necessities: the “discovery of a motive force which will take the place of steam” and the “invention of aerial locomotion” (513). For subsequent writers the force in question was clearly electricity.

13Reade’s utopian links between flight and a technology to replace steam were embedded in Percy Greg’s 1880 novel Across the Zodiac, which uses an elaborate frame for its account of a future world. The primary narrator is a British traveler touring Fenimore Cooper’s America in 1874. He meets and befriends a former Confederate officer who recounts how in 1865 he discovered a container in the ruins of a flying vessel which at first resembled a “brilliant star” (Greg 1880, I.13). Within this container he finds the record of a flight to Mars made in the 1820s by a scientist who has discovered a force he has named “apergy.” Society on Mars represents a possible future containing a whole series of technological innovations like electric ploughs and carriages, a device called a “voice-writer,” and factories with minimal operatives. The streets are even more magnificent than “the finest and latest-built American cities” (Greg, 1880, I.199). The multiple framing of the narrative within American history and the use of the USA as a reference point for progress suppress our consciousness of Greg’s own nationality. Indeed a character in his 1878 debate volume, The Devil’s Advocate, declares that American democracy was the “most certain irresistibly growing and controlling tendency of the age” (Greg 1878, II.323). In Greg’s novel time on Mars is measured from a single event: the “union of all races and nations in a single State” (Greg 1880, I.125) which took place thousands of years in their past. Mars thus functions as speculative location for technological change offset by the presence on the red planet of autocracy and conflict.ix

14Size becomes an index of evolutionary superiority in Harold Brydges’ A Fortnight in Heaven (1886), which describes the voyage to Jupiter of an English sea-captain’s “spiritual double.” Here he finds gigantic humans populating an alternative futuristic America. One of the first spectacles to confront him is a new Chicago, transformed into a city of crystal. The main force behind this transformation is electricity, powering “electric pedestrianism” (through a kind of accelerated bicycle) and “aerial ships.” Despite its labored humor in parodying a form of socialism, A Fortnight clearly projects a conviction that America’s future lies in its technology. The traveler reflects that “such an America as he imagined may result on Earth after another century of progress” (17). Once the apparent shock of novelty has worn off a process of recognition takes place as the captain realizes that the “wonders” before him were

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either “looming in the near future” or already being projected at the time of his flight, dated at 1886 (46). Thus the trajectory of the narrative temporarily estranges the captain from his present so that he arrives at a new understanding of the signs of an imminent future.

15Brydges made the American theme explicit in his 1888 portrait Uncle Sam at Home, which concludes its national sketches with a consideration of Manifest Destiny. Dismissing the bombast of politicians, he nevertheless insists that “it is unquestionably the “manifest destiny” of America to leave all the nations of the world far behind.” Brydges looked forward confidently to the “ultimate dominance of the English race” (Brydges 1888, 236), by which he meant a union between the USA and Britain. In this belief he was explicitly following the Anglo-Saxonism of the American political philosopher John Fiske, who saw it as the mission of both nations acting together to establish a “higher civilization” in the world. Rhetorically he veered between asserting the joint destiny of the “English race” to rule the world and celebrating American supremacy. In the conclusion to his American Political Ideas (1885) he grandly predicted that “in the United States a century hence we shall... doubtless have a political aggregation immeasurably surpassing in power and in dimensions any empire that has as yet existed” (Fiske 181). With encouragement from T.H. Huxley in Britain, Fiske presented the nation as an evolving racial aggregate where the two nations would work together to fulfill their destiny, although in the passage above one partner is conspicuous by his absence.x

16By the 1890s many writers had come to accept that the destinies of the USA and Britain were intertwined. The journalist and editor Robert Barr lived out this connection, residing variously in Canada, the USA, and then Britain. Two of his short stories offer cautionary tales about the failure of cooperation between the two countries and the unforeseen dangers which might arise from collaboration. “The Doom of London” (1892) is narrated by a clerk in a chemical company who draws parallels with the fate of Pompeii to attack the “feeling of national conceit” (70) characterizing his era. He describes how an American inventor approaches his boss with a “health machine” that produces oxygen. Sir John dismisses his visitor and soon afterwards falls victim like the rest of London to that city’s smog. As the latter reaches critical density, the narrator tries to find a train in Cannon Street station and witnesses a spectacle of deadly futility: “The electric lights burned fitfully. This platform was crowded with men, who fought each other like demons, apparently for no reason, because the train was already packed as full as it could hold. Hundreds were dead under foot, and every now and then a blast of foul air came along the tunnel, whereupon hundreds more would relax their grips and succumb” (77). Barr austerely refuses any consolatory ending, with the narrator narrowly surviving a subsequent train crash while the deaths continue to mount up. The moral is clear. Conservatism, not destiny, decides the fate of the metropolis. The action is set in the very near future and time is speeded up so that the narrator actually witnesses mass deaths, which ultimately result from the expansion of London during the nineteenth century, described as if through first-person reportage.

17Barr returned more problematically to the combination of American enterprise and British capital in his 1900 story “Within an Ace of the End of the World,” where a young American develops a form of nitrogen extraction which revolutionizes food production. Herbert Bonsel has worked with Edison and so appears to have impeccable

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scientific credentials. Then he strikes lucky in finding a rich aristocratic backer in Britain and together they form the Great Food Corporation. So far so good. But when they start production a lone critic warns against the dangers of nitrogen depletion, a warning that falls on deaf ears. Then a worldwide series of conflagrations take place which destroy the world’s cities and most of the population. Decades before the spectacle of nuclear explosions came to haunt our imagination, Barr describes a surreal transformation of New York: “the city itself presented a remarkable appearance. It was one conglomerate mass of gray-toned, semi-opaque glass… The outlines of its principal thoroughfares were still fairly indicated, although the melting buildings had flowed into the streets like lava, partly obliterating them” (Barr 2000, 456). The national ironies of his earlier story have now given way to a concern with ecological balance. The narrative describes a major catastrophe which Barr tries to rationalize awkwardly as a kind of ethnic and pacifist cleansing: “the race which now inhabits the earth is one that includes no savages and no war lords” (457). What is most striking about both of Barr’s stories, however, is the disparity between the scale of events and the brevity of each narrative.xi The effect is as if he has taken different hypothetical scenarios, both emerging from late nineteenth-century technological experimentation, and then accelerated their development so that the reader is left in no doubt at all about consequences. Essentially each story revolves around specific events which disrupt the flow, and therefore the grand narrative of social evolution. The one reflects a failure of what Stephen Kern has called the “active mode” of engaging with the future, the second the misapplication of technology.

18Where Barr focuses on technology, Arthur Bennett uses a Swiftian parable of empire, The Dream of an Englishman (1893), to speculate on the political future. John Bull is getting old and having increasing difficulties managing his colonial “children,” Africa, India, and others. The imperial federation he forms is reinvigorated by the younger Brother Jonathan and concludes on a climactic note: “And some of the boldest of ‘the coming race’ were looking out upon the stars, and wondering if there were worlds to conquer there. And the federations which their poets sang of, now, were federations of the solar system” (189-190). Bennett is explicitly referencing Bulwer- Lytton here, with the difference that the Vril-ya are “othered” as a threatening superior race, whereas here the present shades easily into a future where Anglo- American hegemony is unquestioned. For Bennett the imperial gaze presumes a desire, indeed a right, to conquer.

4. W.T. Stead, Kipling and the Anglo-Saxon Race

19The journalist and editor W.T. Stead had a complex attitude to the USA, by no means uniformly favourable. In the 1890s he wrote extensively on municipal reform, particularly in Chicago and New York.xiiIf Christ Came to Chicago! (1894) takes its lead from James Russell Lowell’s poem “A Parable” to apply the notion of a “Citizen Christ” to the problems of homelessness, electoral abuse and monopolies in the life of that city. As Stead declares, “I came to America to see what Mr. Carnegie described as the Triumph of Democracy. I found instead the Evolution of Plutocracy” (349). His allusion here is to Andrew Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy (1886), which presents an extended celebration of the material prosperity of the USA. Carnegie makes his position clear when he declares that “in population, in wealth, in annual savings, and in public credit;

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in freedom from debt, in agriculture, and in manufactures, America already leads the civilized world” (Carnegie 1886, 1). Carnegie deploys a whole range of statistics to demonstrate the staggering growth in national production, extrapolating the process and articulating freedom in market terms as the “march of the world towards the free and unrestricted interchange of commodities” (195). Despite this universal progress, Carnegie attributes the prosperity of the USA to race: “fortunately for the American people they are essentially British” (16). Indeed the explicit aim of his book is to provide for British readers overwhelming evidence for the community of interests between the USA and Britain. In contrast with Carnegie’s celebration of statistics, Stead uses Christianity to give him an external perspective on the abuses he witnessed in Chicago, which he documents in considerable detail. Where Carnegie extrapolates his statistics into an ever more prosperous future, Stead focuses on the material conditions of the present. Even here, however, his ambivalence over the USA is reflected in a major change of tone towards the end of his volume when he moves away from urban abuses and waxes enthusiastic about the civic revival which he sees as taking place there which transforms Chicago into the “ideal city of the world” (Stead 1894, 410).

20In his preface to the British edition of If Christ Came to Chicago! Stead claims the symbolism of fusing the cultures of America and Britain: “this volume, written in Chicago, printed in Edinburgh, and published in London is typical of the unity of the English-speaking world” (iv). Stead promoted the cause of Anglo-American union in the 1890 launch issue of his journal the Review of Reviews, where his appeal “To All English- Speaking Folk” asserted that “among all the agencies for the shaping of the future of the human race, none seem so potent now and still more hereafter as the English- speaking man. Already he begins to dominate the world. The Empire and the Republic comprise within their limits almost all the territory that remains empty for the overflow of the world” (Stead 1890, 15). Stead combined imperial optimism with a secular faith in progress. He confidently rides the crest of a perceived direction to evolution celebrated in this appeal which combines the old and the new. Thus he insists that “to save the British Empire we must largely Americanize its constitution” (16). There is a clear warning here against narrow nationalism which is bolstered by an evangelical fervour in the essay. Stead insists that empire forms part of a divine mission, declaring: “the English-speaking race is one of the chief of God’s chosen agents for executing improvements in mankind” (17). He went on to give an even higher profile to the USA.

21Stead’s conviction that the future lay with America was further elaborated in his novel From the Old World to the New, which made up the Christmas 1892 issue of his journal. Built on a conventional romance narrative, the novel describes how a group of tourists visit the Chicago World’s Fair. The relation of the USA to Britain is debated by them before they set off on their travels and Stead sets up a contrast between British conservatism and antiquity against American youthfulness and inventiveness. The novel opens on Christmas Eve, symbolically suggestive of a new era. The aerial view of the fair together with the novel’s sub-title—A Christmas Story of Chicago Exhibition— which appeared on the cover of the first edition tacitly invest the fair with a spiritual dimension which feeds into the narrative. The protagonists are in effect time travelers moving out of the past into the future, the old into the new, out of the world of tradition into technological inventiveness. Indeed the tourists’ arrival in New York takes on a visionary dimension. To one character, “the lights of New York, through the

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soft twilight of June, seemed a mystic hieroglyph, in which he read a prophecy of things to come” (54). It is not so much the details in the image as its means of visibility which is being stressed here. Electricity is power source of the future.

22The illustrations which punctuate the novel serially reinforce the transitions experienced by the travelers. Picturesque images of Chester and Stratford give way to a new emphasis on technology. Thus the first illustration of New York shows the elevated railroad; then we see the luxury of the train to Chicago; finally, the visual climax to the novel comes with a two-page spread giving a bird’s eye view of the forty-acre exhibition site. After this arrival, the novel shifts into a discursive guide to the fair and the boundary of its fiction blurs into a series of advertisements for American transport. Although the fair was called the World’s Columbian Exhibition in honor of Columbus’ landing in America, its exhibits were directed towards the imminent future, where domestic and industrial life would be revolutionized by its new inventions.

23From the Old World is not only a romance and travelogue. It also contains extended debates over the cultural contrasts experienced by the travelers. Even before they set out, they engage in heated arguments over the relation of America to Britain, its supposed barbarism and lack of history. But then a character enters the narrative who is clearly designed to be Stead’s mouthpiece. Jack Compton is an entrepreneur defined by his potential energy rather than by his past.xiii Appropriately in mid-ocean, since he is convinced that a new era is about to dawn, he points out the real importance of Stead’s narrative: “what is at stake at Chicago is the headship of the English-speaking world” (38). He warns his listeners that Britain may lose this by default because they are so distracted by Irish affairs.

24Stead returned to the relation between the two nations in his best-known work of political commentary, The Americanisation of the World (1902). Here he makes no bones about his position, asserting that “the advent of the United States of America as the greatest of world-powers is the greatest political, social, and commercial phenomenon of our times” (5). The dilemma faced by Britain is how to participate in this surge of modernity and Stead calls for an acceptance of its inevitable loss of imperial supremacy by forming a “race union” with the USA. There is no issue of power involved since both nations share the same “family,” a standard metaphor within the discourse of Anglo- Saxonism in this period. Stead returns to the fears that were preoccupying Bulwer- Lytton and deflects them on to the working of the evolutionary process: “the Briton, instead of chafing against this inevitable supersession, should cheerfully acquiesce in the decree of Destiny, and stand in betimes with the conquering American” (9). Indeed, the cover to Stead’s book shows americanization as a fait accompli with the stars and stripes waving over the globe. Glancing probably at the United States’ appropriation of Spain’s former colonies, Stead speculates on the sources of American energy and finally attributes it to the flood of immigrants, which produces a “composite race.” Stead’s notion of race is shifts according to his local argument and is basically drawn on to bolster his faith in Anglo-American world supremacy.xiv Once again a key technological development becomes the hallmark of modernity: “The Americans have done with electricity what the British did with steam” (137).

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Figure 1

W.T. Stead, The Americanisation of the World (1902)

25Stead acknowledges with a citation one of his source texts for this piece of polemic. In 1893 the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie joined the debate in an essay entitled “A Look Ahead,” where he declared the need for a “race confederation” between the two countries. This was hardly a disinterested proposal because it would have opened up enormous markets, but Carnegie poses the case, like Stead, as an evolutionary inevitability: “the only course for Britain seems to be reunion with her giant child, or sure decline to secondary place, and then to comparative insignificance in the future annals of the English-speaking race” (Carnegie 1893, 697). Again like Stead, he visualizes Anglo-Saxon supremacy through suppressing imperial or racial rivals. There are, however, two contrasting strands to Carnegie’s prediction. Against the entropic decline of an isolationist Britain he foresees a millenarian future where Anglo-American naval fleets would rule the world and usher in a period of universal peace. In answer to the objection that this is utopian, Carnegie can only insist: “I see it with the eye of faith” (710). When Stead read Carnegie’s piece he wrote to congratulate a kindred spirit, declaring: “I am delighted to see how vigorously you are pushing forward the great idea of our race.”xv

26The cause of union was actively pursued by the novelist Walter Besant, who in his 1896 article, “The Future of the Anglo-Saxon Race,” spelled out the many cultural links between the USA and Britain. The future for him lay with America which was “destined to become far more glorious in the future” (134), whereas the growth of republicanism in the British colonies could only result in transformation at the very least and perhaps even the loss of empire. For Besant only two possible futures presented themselves: one of strife between the two powers or a rational pooling of interests. The most profitable way forward would be for the countries to form a “great federation of our race” (143),

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which would stand as an example to the world. This cause was not only a matter of political conviction for Besant. In 1900 he founded the Atlantic Union club, which was dedicated to improving relations between Britain and the USA and whose membership included Arthur Conan Doyle.xvi In 1901 Besant more forthrightly proclaimed that the question facing the new century was whether government by the people was possible. The answer was unambiguous: “it is to America,” he declared, “and to America alone, that we must look” (Besant 1901, 21). And so yet again America functions if not as a direct example, then as an instructive lens through which the future can be read.

27Stead’s vision of an Anglo-American future was ultimately shared by a 1906 account of technological innovation by “Tems Dyvirta” with the Wellsian title “London’s Transformation. A Suggestive Sketch of Days to Come.” Here Cornelius Tush, an American financier, develops an elaborate scheme to divert the Thames (hence the author’s pseudonym) and build over the river bed in London. When Tush stands on Westminster Bridge to contemplate the transformed city, his perception is anything but Wordsworthian. Where the poet found an emblem of order in the city, Tush sees an urban utopia which bears testimony to American enterprise: “What he now looked down upon was an extensive view of the finest street in all the world [the Thames bed has become “Libertia Street”] On either hand rise magnificent new buildings of imposing architecture” (“Tems Dyvirta” 339).xvii Shops and business houses have their entrances on the ground floor, while walkways run along the roofs and across footbridges. Horse-drawn traffic, as befits an anachronism, is segregated into a separate road and running down the centre of the new city is an “avenue of fresh green trees, bordering a gravel walk” (“Tems Dyvirta” 339). The perspective line supplied by this avenue draws Tush’s eye into the depths of the scene and into vistas of prosperity.

28The only complication lies in the Londoners. Tush’s attitude towards the British veers round to overt hostility when they resist his take-over. Coincidentally at this point Tush runs successfully for president on an anti-British packet and economic colonization rapidly shifts into overt warfare. The Americans win a major naval battle thanks in part to their new “huge submarine battleship (“Tems Dyvirta” 366) and they then send forces to invade England. Here the tide of the war begins to turn against them, despite the advantages of American military know-how. The banks of the New Thames offer such efficient fortifications that the Americans fail to subdue the metropolis. Furious at this defeat, the self-styled “emperor” of America suffers a seizure and dies, being succeeded by his daughter who immediately calls for an armistice and then proceeds to marry the British heir to the throne. In her commentary on this sketch Genevieve Abravanel argues that the “utopian aim of the story is to dream of a geopolitics where British Power remains frozen in a static vision of unending progress; a vision only made possible by the assimilation of the burgeoning world power across the Atlantic” (Abravanel, 28). It’s not clear how progress can be static and the end result of the dynastic marriage is better described as a merger producing “unity, peace and concord” (“Tems Dyvirta” 368). “London’s Transformation” describes serious conflict, often fatal, between the two countries and the marriage symbolically unites younger more forward-looking members of each regime. Indeed one meaning to the sketch’s title could be the change brought about in the national consciousness by events. The narrative accelerates change into a rapid montage of visual spectacles—the use of the descriptive present in the new view from Westminster Bridge is revealing. The accounts of the naval battle and the siege of

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London read like futuristic news accounts, culminating in an idealized combination of British imperial strength and American commercial and military inventiveness.

29A similar but more drawn-out trajectory is followed in Louis Tracy’s 1896 novel of the, The Final War, whose action takes place in 1898, which dramatizes a clash between national futures. France and Germany attack Britain and are then joined by Russia. At this point the ties of kinship overwhelm American neutrality and the USA—“the western branch of the great Saxon race” (Tracy 264)—throws in its lot with Britain. The world war finally concludes with victory by the two national instruments of the Divine Will, which issue a joint proclamation outlawing armies and munitions (except in Britain or the USA). It has been the war to end war and, just in case the reader should miss this point, Tracy points the concluding chapter to point the moral in no uncertain terms: “this, then, is the mission of the Saxon Race—slowly but surely to map itself over the earth, to absorb the nations, to bring to pass that wonderful dream of a world united in a single family and speaking a common speech” (462). The assertion of kinship, initially used to rationalize American entry into the war, is here given global extension as the pacifist millennium dawns and here a paradox emerges in Tracy’s novel. In his preface he describes it as a “story of adventure,” whose specifics are extrapolated from the imperial politics of the period. However, the culmination to the action is an indefinite period of peace where such war has become an anachronism. Within the new dispensation a tale of adventure would be a historical document and Tracy’s imminent future already a thing of the past.

30Rudyard Kipling similarly believed fervently in an imperial destiny shared by Britain and the USA. He famously wrote his poem “The White Man’s Burden,” originally sub-titled “The United States and the Philippine Islands, 1899,” as a call to the United States to take up their share of imperial responsibilities, whose success would be judged by posterity. Judith Plotz has shown that Kipling’s writing assume an Anglo-American world hegemony and argues that Kipling never lost a conviction that the USA was “potentially estimable if an imperial partner.” In 1889, for instance, he envisaged the “Man of the Future” as “Anglo-American-German-Jew,” which prioritizes the first two race labels (Plotz 40, 47).xviii

31Despite Kipling’s faith in a shared imperial mission, the second of his futuristic tales shows real ambivalence about the future he is evoking. Both “With the Night Mail” (1905) and “As Easy as A.B.C.” (1912) present a post-national future ruled by a technocratic elite where air power is paramount. In the first an Aerial Board of Control, is described as the “semi-elected, semi-nominated body [which] controls this planet” (Kipling 1951, 138), a body whose slogan is “Transportation is Civilization.” In the later story transportation is also power, however, because when Northern Illinois withdraws from the global electronic network, airships hover over Chicago temporarily blinding and deafening the rebels with electronic weapons. Electricity is clearly the key resource in this global economy, although Kipling’s story is oddly ambivalent about the future, perhaps because written against the background of impending war. The key imagistic contrast falls between the darkness of the landscape, as if the local population has reverted to barbarism, and the lights from the airships signifying the new technology. Kipling limits the chronology of his story to an opposition between now and then, where all periods of the past blur together into the “days of the Crowds and the Plague” (Kipling 1952, 11). It is as if the passage of time has moved into an extended millenarian present where time itself has become an anachronism. Thus, a character

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describes how Chicago “used to be in the forefront of what they used to call ‘progress’” (Kipling 1952, 4). The ambiguities of the story are complex because, as Angus Wilson has argued, the narrative starts at a moment of breakdown and all the officials seem disillusioned with their system (Wilson 331). Kipling seems to evoke a federal future which includes Britain and the USA, but singles out America as an oddly old-fashioned source of dissidence.

32At the turn of the century works proposing a union between the USA and Britain sometimes include conflict, if only as a consequence to be avoided. Stead’s term “americanization” suggests a far more gradual cultural influence, quite distinct from its usage within the USA where it denoted the process of assimilating new immigrants. The Scots-Canadian journalist Frederick McKenzie deployed the terminology of empire in The American Invaders (1901), whose title implies that Britain is under attack. His real target, however, is British commercial complacency. McKenzie presents a whole detailed catalogue of instances to show that in every field of life American commerce is superseding that of the British because of their out-dated practices and laws. The first illustration to his volume, entitled “Triumphant March of American Products” shows Uncle Sam marching confidently into the left foreground, leading a whole train of American goods while a bewildered John Bull, presumably thrown off his feet by the sheer scale of this activity, gazes on helplessly.xix The illustration graphically represents a quasi-military occupation taking place without any opposition. Although McKenzie presents his volume as a wake-up call, insisting that “the future still lies before England if England will but have it” (10), the sheer number of his instances pull against this dutiful expression of hope. Indeed, he concludes the volume by admitting that “the most unpromising factor in the situation to-day is the way Americans are preparing for the trades of tomorrow” (155). And so it seems that after all the future lies with America because it has become woven into their commercial planning.

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Figure 2

‘Triumphal March of American Products’

5. Wells and the New Order

33It is a sign of the times that H.G. Wells’s lecture to the Royal Institution in 1902, “The Discovery of the Future,” should analyze the concern central to the writings examined here and also that it should take as its premise his assertion that “we are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone” (Wells 1989, 35). Wells carefully stressed that he meant a whole process rather than a single epochal event, but cultural change for him required a change in mentality away from retrospectively measuring the present against the past to a new active capacity to speculate inductively on the future. Although Wells did not visit the USA until 1906, he already included it in his 1902 volume on current technological progress, Anticipations. Here he speculates on a “great synthesis of the English-speaking peoples” (Wells 1902, 260), foresees that America’s ascendancy in industrial output may lead to imperial supremacy, and even considers a joint Anglo-American flag.xx

34The dominant impression he recorded from his 1906 visit in a volume revealingly entitled The Future in America was one of boundless technological growth and with that an accelerated tempo of life.xxi As the long avenues of New York open up perspectives on the future for Wells, he visualizes utopian change through a series of cinematic dissolves: One has a vision of bright electrical subways, replacing the filth-diffusing railways of to-day, of clean, clear pavements free altogether from the fly-prolific filth of horses coming almost, as it were, of their own accord beneath the feet of a population that no longer expectorates at all; of grimy stone and peeling paint

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giving way everywhere to white marble and spotless surfaces, and a shining order, of everything wider, taller, cleaner, better [.] (Wells 1906, 43)

35 These are not directly visual images so much as glimpses of a virtual future America seen through the specifics of contemporary actuality.

36Before Wells sailed to the USA, he had already visited that country through the works of commentators like Stead and Edgar Saltus, whose 1905 article “New York from the Flatiron” is cited in The Future immediately before the passage quoted above. Saltus uses the new vantage point offered by the Flatiron Building to engage in futuristic speculation. His text glosses a series of aerial panoramas of New York, where Broadway, Fifth Avenue and other routes draw the observer’s gaze into the deep background of each image, offering perspectives on the future. The illustrations supply concrete examples of urban technological achievement where the dwarfed human figures down at street level hint at the constant activity of the city.Saltus stresses process in the “ceaseless skyscrapers ceaselessly going up” and makes his temporal perspective explicit when he declares that the Flatiron’s “front is lifted to the future” (Saltus, 1905, 382-3, 390). Time, however, is also measure vertically as new buildings rise above the old and even new beings will emerge: “In the mounting wonders of the city to be, humanity will mount also.... You get a vision of that in the significant sunsets and prophetic dawns” (390). Wells borrowed this rhetoric of epochal emergence in The Future in America and explained how his heightened sense of change desubstantialized the sights before him: “there are times indeed when it makes life seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an equally transitory series of consequences” (Wells 1906, 4). Robert Frankel makes the important point that, despite his title, Wells was consciously not engaging in prophecy in this work, but rather scrutinizing the American present to extrapolate its cultural direction (Frankel 85).

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Figure 3

‘View from the Flatiron Building, looking to the southeast, down Broadway to Union Square and beyond.’

37In 1906 Wells was already speculating on a possible union between Britain and America, and increasingly expressed the hope that the USA would initiate a new world order after the disruptions of the First World War.xxii In The Shape of Things to Come (1933), elaborately edited as the “dream book” of a Wellsian speculator named Philip Raven, the USA spearheads the world’s move away from old-style national interests. Wells introduces a utopian presidential figure called “Roosevelt II,” whose book Looking Forward becomes a best-seller in Europe and which marks a step towards the formation of a world state. However, Wells’s hopes for such a synthesis are undermined by the increasing hiatuses and final disorder of Raven’s manuscript.

6. Skyscrapers Magical and Otherwise: James and Chesterton

38One of the most dramatic sights confronting British travelers to America was the New York skyline, which impressed Wells, although he gave more symbolic importance to the Brooklyn Bridge. For the novelist Arnold Bennett on his 1911 visit, the night scene of the skyscrapers was “stupendous, and resembles some enchanted city of the next world rather than of this” (Bennett 1912, 38). Skyscrapers, in short, became the visual tokens of American enterprise. Against such a perception, we turn here to one account which refused such symbolism and another which ironically revised it.

39For Henry James the very signs of American modernity are summed up as a “Frankenstein monster,” his choice of phrase in an 1898 essay where he comments on

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the post office, newspaper and railway (James 1984, 664). Where other writers would see these as the positive signs of an emerging future, James links them with the classic narrative of unforeseen destruction. In The American Scene (1907) he elaborated on this figure to express his bewilderment at the transformation of his native country. New York was the test case for most visitors because it was the usual port of arrival and because Manhattan presented the most startling spectacle of technological development. James recoiled from what he saw because throughout The American Scene he was concerned with the past, how the USA related to its own history and to his own personal memories. Extrapolating from the Brooklyn Bridge, he has a nightmare vision of an expanding mechanism running under its own impetus: “The appearance of the bold lacing-together, across the waters, of the scattered members of the monstrous organism—lacing as by the ceaseless play of an enormous system of steam-shuttles or electric bobbins (I scarce know what to call them), commensurate in form with their infinite work—does perhaps more than anything else to give the pitch of the vision of energy.” Unable to stabilize his impressions from the sheer scale of the sights before him, James struggles for expression and resorts to the metaphor of an enormous machine “working at high pressure, day and night, and subject, one apprehends with perhaps inconsistent gloom, to certain, to fantastic, to merciless multiplication” (James 1993, 418).

40Ultimately James is expressing a fantasy of displacement before this spectacle of industrial activity because he cannot imagine having any role within it. He does register a vision of the future, but far from celebrating progress, James glimpses a nightmarish process at work, endlessly expansive and apparently without any control. In that sense he is compelled to recognize an imminent future in America which he deploys his tortuous rhetoric to refuse. A similar strategy operates in his treatment of one of the visual hallmarks of American progress—the skyscrapers of New York. James reads them as brash advertisements for a system he distrusts: “they are impudently new and still more impudently “novel”—this in common with so many other terrible things in America” (James 1993, 419). His reaction is to diminish the skyscrapers to a pin cushion and to displace them from commerce on to the domestic. James justifies his strategy by insisting that the skyscrapers have no history, the ultimate condemnation in The American Scene. The past for him becomes the prime measure of quality and here a polemical edge enters James’s descriptions. His denial of stature to the skyscrapers of course reflects his unease about the growing commercialism of America; but it also suggests that James was consciously writing against those visitors who were celebrating the spectacle of American innovation as an indication of its emerging future.

41In a more positive spirit, after he visited America in the 1920s, G.K. Chesterton recorded his amazement at the constant process of reconstruction which was going on in New York. Fascinated as he was by the sheer height of the skyscrapers, he nevertheless proposed scaffolding as the primary visual structure in that city, because it seemed to reflect so well what he called its “scene-shifting.” Rather than focusing on either past or present, Chesterton explained how the city possessed a unique relation to time itself in its constant change: “ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, which with us [Europeans] are the growth of age like mosses, that one half expects to see ivy climbing quickly up the broken walls as in the nightmare of the Time Machine, or in some incredibly accelerated cinema” (71). In his perception of a tempo to building and

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rebuilding, Chesterton is moving towards the machine rhythms evoked in later works like the 1936 film Modern Times.

7. Coda: Aldous Huxley

42The relation of the USA to the future was a complex subject for the writers discussed here, one characterized by ambivalence. While there is a general recognition of the startling growth in output and urbanization since the middle of the nineteenth century, British writers also expressed reservations about the possible consequences of this growth, especially in threatening Britain’s economic and military superiority. This ambivalence was registered by Aldous Huxley, who recorded, after his first visit to America in 1926, his overwhelming impression that “change is accepted in America as the first and fundamental fact.” When he visited the Hollywood studios Huxley saw models being made of the “architecture of the remote future” (Huxley 1930, 263), this could stand as a symbol of the direction being taken by American productive energy. Despite his intellectual recoil from the brash excesses of the culture, as Peter Conrad has argued, Huxley “thought of America as a laboratory in which the society of the future was being experimentally constructed” (Conrad 243).xxiii In the year following his visit Huxley sweepingly declared that “the future of America is the future of the World” (Huxley 2001, 185). In this essay, “The Outlook for American Culture” (1927), he not only makes a prediction of how the world might develop, but also offers a way of reading the present moment through the lens of time. “Literally everything in the present has some significance for the future,” he declares (185). Huxley here follows the practice of earlier British visitors to the USA in reading the cultural landscape for signs of change and in attributing to America global leadership in that process. Huxley also addresses change to daily time in stressing the emerging problem of leisure. As machines replace human activity, the need grows for distractions to fill the time freed as a consequence and this was to become one of Huxley’s main satirical themes in Brave New World. His perception of the USA as a future-directed culture did not prevent him from making Los Angeles the site for a post-nuclear recession into barbarism in his 1948 novel Ape and Essence.

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NOTES i. Bulwer-Lytton elsewhere describes the Monroe Doctrine, explicitly referenced in The Coming Race, as an example of Americans “fondly colonizing Futurity” (Bulwer-Lytton 1864, p.167). ii. One of the earliest novels to base its speculative society on the discovery of electricity was Another World (1873), set on another planet. Published under the pseudonym “Hermes,” its author was Benjamin Lumley, the manager of a London theatre. These edited fragments give glimpses of how different kinds of electricity can revolutionize engineering. iii. Other than the fact that he was British, the identity of Nunsowe Green remains unknown. iv. In his preface Lach-Szyrma acknowledges a connection between his subject and Bulwer- Lytton’s but insists that he hasn’t merely copied The Coming Race. v. In 1890 Macnie changed the title of The Diothas to Looking Forward; or, The Diothas to emphasize its relation to Looking Backward, only to be accused of plagiarising from Bellamy’s novel. vi. Meda. A Tale of the Future is constructed as an edited account by a visitor to the year 5575 who falls into a “trance-like slumber.” Apart from all the social changes, he learns that in 3334 union was achieved between Britain and the USA. vii. American writers were also describing union between Britain and the USA, but after overt war. The narrator of Samuel Barton’s The Battle of the Swash (1888) looks back from 1930 on the pointless destruction in war before an armistice gives the USA the whole of North America. Frank R. Stockton’s The Great War Syndicate (1889) describes a war triggered by a fishing dispute. The eventual alliance between the countries transforms the future of the world: “after the formation

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of this Syndicate all the nations of the world began to teach English in their schools, and the Spirit of Civilization raised her head with a confident smile” (128). An Anglo-American alliance is signed without conflict in the journalist Stanley Waterloo’s Armageddon (1898). viii. In his introduction to The Outline of History Wells praised Reade for his “presentation of human history as one consistent process” (vii). ix. In 1887 Greg published his two-volume History of the United States from the Foundation of Virginia to the Reconstruction of the Union. x. At Huxley’s suggestion, Fiske’s first lecture series, “America’s Place in History,” was delivered at University College, London in 1879. The original title for Fiske’s 1880 lecture series was “American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Evolution” (Fiske xxiv). xi. “The Doom of London” first appeared in The Idler (November 1892) and was collected in The Face and The Mask (1894). “Within an Ace of the End of the World” first appeared in McLure’s Magazine for April 1900. xii. If Christ Came to Chicago! (1894) and Satan’s Invisible World Displayed (1897), discussed in Frankel, chapter 1. xiii. Cf Frankel 58. xiv. Robert Frankel argues judiciously that Stead is strategically vague about exactly what form an Anglo-American union should take, while at the same time insisting on its urgency (55-56). xv. Quoted in: Frankel 68. Duncan Bell has argued that the cause of Anglo-Saxon unity was espoused by Stead, Carnegie and Wells through “expressions of utopian desire” for perpetual peace, triggered partly by the revolution in global communication brought about by the electric telegraph (12-16). xvi. V. Besant’s prospectus essay, “The Atlantic Union,” in Besant 1900. xvii. Edgar Wallace’s The Man Who Bought London (1915) similarly combines U.S. enterprise with British commercial activity. The American millionaire King Kerry establishes a financial trust in London because he alone possesses a vision of its future development, recording in his diary: “I see London extended to St. Albans on the north, New bury on the west, and Brighton on the south” (chapter 6). xviii. For further commentary on Kipling’s views on America, see Brogan. xix. Without John Bull of course, this graphic anticipates the opening of the 1930s newsreel series The March of Time, where material and social progress is enacted as a stream of national figures march into the foreground of their imminent future. xx. As Anticipations was coming out in serial form, it was being enthusiastically read by W.T. Stead, who played a key role in Wells’s career by publishing a positive review of The Time Machine (Baylen 59). xxi. Wells returned to this perception in The New America, The New World (1935), where found an even more striking acceleration in the tempo of American life. For a detailed analysis of his views on America, see Frankel, chapter 3. xxii. Wells’s sense of the cultural collapse brought about by the First World War that in 1922 he grimly warned: “in a little while, within my lifetime, New York City may stand even more gaunt, ruinous, empty and haunted than that stricken and terrible ruin, Petersburg” (Wells, 1922, chap. 1). His sense of how precarious the future had become clearly led him to choose as an example the one city where such a catastrophe seemed the least likely to happen. xxiii. For further commentary on Huxley and America, see Meckier.

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ABSTRACTS

This article examines the ways in which British travelers to the USA at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries articulated their different perceptions of a nation which was emerging as a major imperial competitor. Characteristically these responses showed an ambivalent tension between respect for the growing commercial energy of the USA and a suspicion that it was posing an increasing threat to British national self-perception. Works examined here include those which attempt to yoke together the two nations in a common “Anglo-Saxon” destiny. The essay analyzes the expressive means used by writers to depict the USA as a culture of the future. The discussion includes famous figures like Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells, but also covers a range of turn-of-the-century speculative writers like the journalist W.T. Stead.

INDEX

Keywords: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, speculative fiction, travel writing, W.T. Stead

AUTHOR

DAVID SEED Liverpool University

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The Reader in It: Henry James’s “Desperate Plagiarism”

Hivren Demir-Atay

1 Although numerous scholars have considered Henry James a master of realism, some of his fictions have been interpreted as “writable” or “impossible” texts, in Roland Barthes’s terms, for exposing the reader to a distressing practice of reading. A “writable text” entails not only the reader’s uneasy experience of reading, but also the writer’s loss of mastery in “desperate plagiarism” (Barthes, The Pleasure 22). “The Story in It” (1902)—one of his shortest texts—stages both James’s mastery and its loss through characters’ conversations about novels and romances. On the one hand, these dialogues reflect some of James’s discussions regarding the possible representations of love, passion, sexuality and female characters, while on the other hand they create a mise en abyme by dramatizing the characters’ own contamination by the act of storytelling. Problematizing the border between the story and its teller as well as the story and its reader, “The Story in It” locates its characters in a position that they themselves question and judge. While this dramatization amounts to the story’s own loss of origin, James's conceptualization of realism in this bottomless abyme, together with his writing style, turn the incongruities to a performance actualized by an ironic spiral. I aim to discuss the contagious nature of this performance which affects not only the characters but also the writer and the reader.

1. Reading French versus British Novels

2 “The Story in It” opens with a scene of writing and reading. With the rainy and stormy weather in the background, Mrs. Dyott writes letters, while her visitor Maud Blessingbourne reads an “obviously good” novel. As the third-person narrator informs us, the reader is happy with her book and her happiness illustrates that she probably reads a French author. After a silence of half an hour, the two ladies begin to converse about reading and living. Maud Blessingbourne draws a sharp border between the two when she tells Mrs. Dyott, “I know you don’t read, ... but why should you? You live” (309). This distinction is reiterated by Mrs. Dyott’s second visitor, Colonel Voyt,

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who says, “Well, I am a small child compared to you—but I’m not dead yet. I cling to life” (311). Though Voyt’s statement lacks direct reference to reading, the subject of his ongoing dialogue with Mrs. Dyott implies that his choice of clinging to life alludes also to his clinging to Mrs. Dyott, who lives, rather than to Mrs. Blessingbourne, who reads. In fact, the text’s discussions pertaining living and reading are colored by the discussions about love, as Mrs. Dyott tells Voyt that Mrs. Blessingbourne is in love with him, like herself. Mrs. Blessingbourne denies that she is fond of romances and calls them “vulgar.” The characters’ discussions regarding novels, romances, love, and vulgarity illustrate how they lose their innocence “in” the stories that they read and criticize for moral reasons.

3 In “The Story in It” the dialogue on French and British novels reflects a tension between the two women. Mrs. Dyott’s mishearing of Maud's statement that the book is “a little mild” because of the sound of the storm is a sign of this tensed atmosphere. Mrs. Dyott's misunderstanding—“A little wild?” (208)—is significant since Maud reads a French novel. Indeed, the sequence continues with Mrs. Dyott’s question, “Do you carry [French novels] by the dozen," to which Maud replies with another question: “Into innocent British homes?” (309). The innocence of British homes implies the “mild” British novels. They are “mild” according to both Maud and Colonel Voyt. In the second part of the story, Voyt agrees with Maud that he cannot read British or American novels as they seem to “show [their] sense of life as the sense of puppies and kittens” (315), referring to the human beings who have passion and desire to seek relations. Hence, adopting life from the street results in the writings of “poor twangers and twaddlers” (315). Representing at this point James's concerns of representation and morality, Voyt means that the artist should relate the relations as an aesthetic adventure.

4 James’s approbation that Balzac replicated “every sentiment, every idea, every person, every place, every object” shows his expectation of the inclusiveness of the art work (“Balzac 1875-78” 66). Even if this inclusiveness should be selective, the artist should approach the window with “an air of selection” to see the “wild” weather out. The human scene is like wild weather with its adventurous nature or, as Voyt explains, “intimate, curious, suggestive” relations (315). The “adventures of innocence” are, indeed, “what the bored reader complains of” (320). However, in contrast to Voyt’s assertion, Maud seems to be bored with the “wild” relations. According to Voyt, Maud's protests of “the same couple” portrayed in French novels spring from her interest "in something different from life.” While Voyt believes that passionate adventures are natural parts of life, Maud is concerned with “vulgarity”: “I love life—in art, though I hate it anywhere else. It’s the poverty of the life those people show, and the awful bounders of both sexes, that they represent” (317).

5 “The poverty of the life” in relations becomes more important for comprehending James’s realism, considering that Maud reads not only French authors but also the Italian writer D’Annunzio (309). Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, according to James, “has really sailed the sea and brought back the booty,” is the only writer named in “The Story in It” (“Gabriele D’Annunzio” 296). James’s essay “Gabriele D’Annunzio” (1904) describes the aesthetics of adventure and misadventure. According to James, D’Annunzio has a high degree of aesthetic consciousness through which he makes beauty, art, and form the aims of his life. In the case of D’Annunzio, “ugliness is an accident, a treachery of fate, the intrusion of a foreign substance—having for the most

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part in the scheme itself no admitted inevitability” (280). Writing “great” erotic relations freely, D’Annunzio does what the English novelists are unable to do. Yet James seems to be as reserved as Maud about this freedom as it may result in the danger of falling prey to “vulgarity” and depicting “the poverty of life” in an attempt to represent “every person, every object, every detail,” including sexual passion. In this article, James echoes Maud’s words that “[she] love[s] life in art though [she] hate[s] it anywhere else.” D'Annunzio, who derives sexual passion from some “detached pictures” and finds its “extension and consummation” in the rest of life, stands in a risky position: “shut out from the rest of life, shut out from all fruition and assimilation, it has no more dignity than—to use a homely image—the boots and shoes that we see, in the corridors of promiscuous hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms” (295). It is the integration of life and art that deems erotic relations an aesthetic adventure rather than a representation of “boots” and “shoes” in “promiscuous hotels.” Similar to James, Maud considers life and love in art as aesthetic adventures. Her “keeping up” with authors instead of with “somebody” illustrates her wish to position herself “up” without falling “down.” Her escape from vulgarity, however, would result in her own destruction. According to Voyt, Maud’s wish to read about “decent women” in fiction creates a ruining illusion: “life you embellish and elevate; but art would find itself able to do nothing with you, and, on such impossible terms, would ruin you” (318). Ironically, however, although her presumed love for Voyt is the victim of her diffidence, this “shy romance” (326) does not locate her “out” of the story.

6 On the one hand, James argues that the mimetic task of the novelist should not succumb to vulgarity, while on the other he believes this kind of caution may result in the poverty of life. Love and passion are included in the picture of life, which is “comprehensive” and “elastic” (“The Future of the Novel” 244), while the English novel omitted the color of passion and sexuality in its paintings—“I cannot so much as imagine Dickens and Scott without the ‘love-making’ left, as the phrase is, out,” James says (249). Nonetheless, he goes on, there occurred a big change in the outlook of women, so “we may very well yet see the female elbow itself, kept in increasing activity by the play of the pen, smash with final resonance the window all this time most superstitiously closed” (250). Therefore, when women begin to look out, “great relations” enter in, showing the richness of life, the “wild” weather out.

7 James's style of storytelling based on “showing” rather than “telling” is collateral to his reservation about writing passion and sexuality. As showing implies an erotic staging versus a pornographic exposition, “The Story in It” employs a seductive contract that erases the border between “in” and “out.” When Mrs. Dyott tells Voyt that Maud is in love with him, Voyt asks why she has told him this story. Mrs. Dyott’s reply implies the tacit contract: “I mean for her to know you know it” (325). This calculation is reminiscent of Barthes’s reading of “Sarrasine,” in which he places desire at the origin of narrative and underlines its reciprocal nature. The narrator attains “a night of love for a good story” by means of a metonymic chain of desire: “the young woman desires the Adonis and its story: a first desire is posited that determines a second, through metonymy: the narrator, jealous of the Adonis by cultural constraint, is forced to desire the young woman; and since he knows the story of the Adonis, the conditions for a contract are met” (S/Z 88-89). Likewise, in “The Story in It,” Mrs. Dyott’s story functions as a seductive contract. She demands that the story seduce Voyt and leave Maud out of the romance, although this does not change the fact that Maud is

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in it. The dramatization of narrative desire’s metonymic nature—a process in which the listener partakes alongside the storyteller—is also a dramatization of reading literature. It is, indeed, Voyt's question that connects love and passion to storytelling: “if a relation stops, where is the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence?” (319)

2. Reading Relations as Adventure and Relations as Récit

8 Walter Benjamin describes the storyteller as “the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story” (“The Storyteller” 108-09). According to him, storytelling cannot be an innocent act as the storyteller has life stories and counsels to share like teachers and sages. Because the messages are inherent in the stories, there is a contract, as it were, between the teller and the listener pertaining to the shared experience. In other words, the transmission of a message requires the consent of the audience, who is expected to perform the difficult task of listening; however, once the message is transmitted from the former to the latter, the listener, entering into the “aura” of the teller, begins to be seduced by him/ her.

9 Benjamin speculates that the art of storytelling is expiring since individuals lost the ability to share their experiences during the age of information, a result of which was the replacement of giving counsel by reporting. This transformation was “a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing” (87). The novel and the short story, rising in the age of literacy, were also the products of the process Benjamin describes. Nonetheless, there also exist short stories and novels that dramatize oral storytelling, most commonly through frame tales. Henry James’s “The Story in It” provides an example of such dramatizations, notwithstanding that it dramatizes the frame structure itself together with storytelling.

10James’s explanations of the story in his preface to Daisy Miller reflects his strong preference for textual dramatization. He states that the brevity of “The Story in It”— one of the shortest literary texts he wrote—was acquired by a special effort. Despite this, he adds, “it... haunted, a graceless beggar, for a couple of years, the cold avenues of publicity” (xxii). In the end, it was published by an old friend in a magazine, but for James, the story was more than a magazine could carry, as he dives “into the deep sea of a certain general truth” in it (xxii). This general truth, as James tells us, was inspired by a novelist’s answer to a question about the female characters of his novels. The question was why the adventurous women in his fiction were not those who respected themselves, to which the novelist replied that “ladies who respected themselves took particular care never to have adventures” (xxii). Such demureness, James believes, might preserve their respectfulness, yet it has a pernicious effect on literature, for a literary work needs to be vitalized by an exciting picture of life. According to James, this vivid picture of life is produced not only by the dramatization of human relations but also by that of literary discussions: relations as adventure and relations as récit often touch each other in James’s fiction.

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11In “The Story in It” the intimate relationship between love affairs and narration finds expression in Voyt's reaction to Maud's will to read decent women in fiction: “the relation is innocent that the heroine gets out of. The book is innocent that’s the story of her getting out. But what the devil—in the name of innocence—was she doing in?” (320). Voyt voices the idea that being both “out of” and “in” in an adventurous relation would mean to be “in,” with which Mrs. Dyott agrees, hence her assertion that “you have to be in, you know, to get out” (321).

12For Voyt, both in relations as adventure and relations as récit everything occurs “in” once one is involved. Voyt believes that Mrs. Dyott's story cannot be innocent as she tells it to Voyt both for giving messages to him and for the sake of Maud “know[ing] [he] know[s] it.” The blurry border between “in” and “out” in relations and storytelling resonates, as well, with the story’s title, which itself crystallizes the uncanny question, “the story in what”? Even though the narrator's final question, “Who but a duffer… would see the shadow of a ‘story’ in it?” (326), seems to expect the reader to “read” the story in the story, the reader's stupidity insists with the story's creation of endless stories within stories. The reader becomes blind when he/she forgets the original story. Neither “the story in what?” nor “what is the story in it?” is known by the reader who then becomes the “duffer” described by the narrator.

13As a story of mise en abyme, “The Story in It” stages its truth, leading us to involve James in the story as well. The reader in it, then, implies the reader in James's oeuvre, especially considering James’s placement of truth in a Lacanian signifying chain during revision of his fiction. In contrast to Barthes’s suggestion that the text never denies, so “never apologize, never explain” (The Pleasure 3), James persistently explained. He wrote Prefaces to his works, theoretical and critical essays on the works of other writers and argued against other critics’ affirmations. This effort seems to aim at writing the story of his literary story.

14James’s biographer and editor Leon Edel presents the historical background of James’s prefaces. He informs us that in a period during which everyone finds James’s works “enigmatic, over-subtle, analytic,” he is disappointed by being recognized as an unsuccessful artist. Edel tells us how James worked for the publication of a definitive edition of his works when he returned to New York in 1904 after more than twenty years: “it required days of laborious effort, of re-writing and re-arrangement: his ‘uncanny brood,’ he felt, needed tidying; there were imperfections to be ironed out, emendations to be made, early works to be raised to the level of his mature, critical, exigent taste” (24). However, his attempts to tidy his “uncanny brood” seem to have bred his uncanny re-visions. James’s act of revision may well be called a process of re- seeing, going in and out of his works, and claiming mastery while simultaneously realizing its impossibility. “James may have intended writing many reminiscences, but he soon wandered from his autobiographical intentions and ‘the story of one’s story’ proved to be detailed, haphazard, quite loose and yet quite complete exposition of Henry James’s art in fiction” remarks Edel (26). In fact, James’s attempts to write “the stories of the stories” resulted in “the stories in the stories,” each attempt drawing a new frame of reference for readers. The fact that James’s aesthetic theory has not produced its confluent readings is evidence of the lack of “a” frame. Adding to the readerly challenge posed by his oblique writing style, complex thought, and changing time are James’s re-visions which render arduous the task of the reader.

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15As Gayatri Spivak suggests in her introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, the preface “involves a norm of truth” since its purpose is to signify a text (x). The text as a signified has a title, an identity, or a meaning. She suggests that “humankind’s common desire is for a stable center, and for the assurance of mastery—through knowing or possessing,” adding that a book as a concrete entity satisfies this desire. Yet she asks, “But what sovereign subject is the origin of the book?” (xi). While the question of origin underlies the question of reading, the instability of this center renders the act of reading a preface to subsequent readings or close encounters with text. Similarly, James’s prefaces—which represent him as reader—refer to a deferral in his failed attempt to “explain” his works thus emphasizing the undecidability of both author and reader as sovereign subjects. If James the writer's failure in explaining his works implies his loss of authority as the origin of the book, the same failure also illustrates that neither can the reader be sovereign subject. In the unstable centers of literature, one always finds oneself in a process of transformation that blinds the interpreter. The transformative effect of storytelling as well as the accompanying loss of innocence induces in readers the experience of jouissance and the contamination of “desperate plagiarism,” (Barthes The Pleasure 22) reminding us of Voyt's question, “What the devil —in the name of innocence—was she doing in?” (320).

3. Shy Romances, Fore-pleasure, Jouissance

16James cannot conceive of reading as independent from writing. According to him, “the analytical appreciation” of a story designates the awareness of the act of writing. It is the critic or the critical reader who will look for secrets in a literary work. In another of James’s short stories, “The Figure in the Carpet,” Vereker, an author, says that “[t]he critic just isn’t a plain man... if he were, pray, what would he be doing in his neighbor’s garden” (311). “The subtlety,” as Vereker calls it, as a trait of the critic both implies the necessity of vigilance to overcome complexities and arouses the question of innocence. If storytelling is not an innocent act, then what is the role of the listener/ reader in this contamination? How does the seductive power of literature oscillate between writing and reading? “It isn’t for the vulgar”: this is what Vereker means by “subtlety” according to the narrator’s friend Corvick (315). The reader as someone who should be more than simply reading “the story” transcends the plain man. Considering that this is not only Vereker’s but also James’s expectation from the reader, Maud’s position as a reader in “The Story in It” leads us to ask if she is also a plain woman. An inquiry of this question will return us to the erotic zones of the text which may help us see how, in the fetishistic unfolding of the text, the possibility of jouissance emerges.

17Maud reads too many writers, including the French ones and D’Annunzio. Furthermore, “it sticks out of [her]” that she herself also writes (316). Being both a reader and a writer, then, Maud should exemplify a good reader with aesthetic sense. Yet, Maud as a female reader reminds us of James’s remarks in “The Future of the Novel” which complicate this assumption. In accordance with his interest in the notion of “the book” as a possession and his interest in literature as an object of aesthetic value, James relates the vulgarization of literature to the population increase of women and child readers owing to the diffusion of educational opportunities. Then, the books began to be consumed as a means of diversion by “the reader irreflective and uncritical” (245). Associating women with children, James addresses these readers as

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“boys and girls”: “the larger part of the great multitude that sustains the teller and the publisher of tales is constituted by boys and girls; by girls in especial, if we apply the term to the later stages of the life of the innumerable women who, under modern arrangements, increasingly fail to marry—fail, apparently, even, largely, to desire to” (243). It can be inferred from this statement that women remain childish if they are un- married. This situation bears upon the leisure possessed by boys and “girls.” Even though Maud is not a “girl,” as she was once married, she does not remarry because, according to Mrs. Dyott, “she likes too many men,” perhaps “not to like any of them too much” (312). In Mrs. Dyott’s view, Maud “fails” to desire to remarry but also reads and experiences a “shy romance.”

18A “shy romance,” for Mrs. Dyott and Voyt, is nevertheless a “romance.” Maud’s will to “get more life for [her] money” (314) places her among those consumer women who, according to James, regard the novel as a commodity. Yet Mrs. Dyott’s insinuating remark to Maud that “she wants her romance cheap!” is met by Maud with protest: “Oh, no—I should be willing to pay for it. I don’t see why the romance—since you give it that name—should be all, as the French inveterately make it, for the women who are bad” (318). According to Mrs. Dyott, “they” pay for it; hence, Maud, who buys these novels, is included in the “badness.” Although Maud situates herself on the innocent side by criticizing these novels, she plays a role in her contamination by paying for them. Voyt apologetically suggests to her that “their romance is their badness. There isn’t any other. It’s a hard law, if you will, and a strange, but goodness has to go without that luxury. Isn’t to be good just exactly, all round, to go without?” (318) As a reader, Maud is positioned by Mrs. Dyott and Voyt among the “girls” in James’s category. But considering that good and bad are always neighbors for James, cannot we claim that she is merely in the neighbor’s garden?

19It is obvious from his Preface to The American that James regards vulgarity as a trait of romance. He questions how the “air of romance” replaces the principle of reality. This “air” surrounds the entire text (themes, figures, images) with its effect. Although James calls it a “deflexion,” he adds that “the cause of the deflexion... must lie deep, however; so that for the most part we recognize the character of our interest only after particular magic, as I say, has thoroughly operated—and then in truth but if we be a bit critically minded, if we find our pleasure, that is, in these intimate appreciations” (278).

20James’s in-depth search for the effect of the romance evokes a Freudian model of reading. James’s definition of romance suggests that the pleasure offered to the reader stems from a deep source, while the themes, figures, and images present the reader a “fore-pleasure,” liberating the tensions in their minds. The experience in a romance is, as James describes it, “liberated, disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered” (280). Therefore, the reader of the romance expects unconsciously to liberate his/her tensions. In that sense, James’s category of “girls” is constituted by those who repress their desire, considering that, for him, marriage is the only way of satisfying sexual desire. Hence, the women who “fail to desire to marry” need to read the romances as an “incentive bonus,” in Freud’s terminology, to fulfill their fantasies (Freud, “Creative Writers” 443). When Mrs. Dyott asks Maud why she keeps reading what she calls romances, Maud replies penitently: “I don’t! .... At all events, I sha’nt any more. I give it up” (316). Neither Maud’s regretful attitude nor her wish to read decent heroines changes the fact that she keeps reading romances; in fact, she apparently is interested

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in them. Nevertheless, this interest does not situate her among James’s “plain” women as she remains in the realm of critical readers.

21In his definition of the romantic, James joins the critical mind with pleasure since he considers the romantic as a field which can be reached “only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and desire” (279). He finds it inadequate to define romance as based on danger, risk, love, or uncertainty, or as a matter of the villains, ghosts, forgers, or degenerate women. Instead, he believes the following:

22The panting pursuit of danger is the pursuit of life itself, in which danger awaits us possibly at every step and faces us at every turn; so that the dream of an intenser experience easily becomes rather some vision of a sublime security like that enjoyed on the flowery plains of heaven, where we may conceive ourselves proceeding in ecstasy from one prodigious phase and form of it to another. (280)

23In romance, the secret force of evil derives meaning from its encounter with the good. This encounter constitutes life which is uncanny enough to give birth to dreams that might be more secure than life itself. For this reason, one needs theater stages or dramatization in order for one’s phantasies to be liberated. Reading romance, in other words, induces ecstasy. In this model of reading, desire—which indispensably relates to the unconscious—plays a significant role. Peter Brooks defines melodramatic imagination as a “mode of excess.” Exemplifying this mode with Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, he argues that “the world is subsumed by an underlying manichaeism, and the narrative creates the excitement of its drama by putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil played out under the surface of things” (The Melodramatic Imagination 4). Thus, hidden relationships, dark characters and mystical powers assume a “true subject” wrapped up in these images and figures. Moreover, Brooks explains that the drama as the “moral occult” shows us the novelist’s “spiritual values” in disguise. He maintains that “it bears comparison to unconscious mind, for it is a sphere of being where our most basic desires and interdictions lie, a realm which in quotidian existence may appear closed off from us, but which we must accede to since it is the realm of meaning and value” (5). Brooks's observation explains why reading melodramas, the genre of many romances, appears as a repressed ecstatic experience in “The Story in It.”

24Even if, as James describes it, Maud goes into ecstasy while reading romances, she represses her desire under the guise of morality. Whereas the superego, or the laws of morality, might influence Maud to conceal her desire to read romances, her inescapable involvement in a romance dramatizes her unconscious desire to be a “woman” rather than a “girl.” If this dramatization represents the realm of “as-if,” the transference that is at stake here “lend[s] itself to its eventual revision through the listener's 'interventions'” (Brooks, Psychoanalysis 53). Likewise, Maud's unconscious desire that is transferred from the pages of romances to the novel’s present time lends itself to reader intervention, which manifests itself in readerly desire for the text. While Maud's repressed desire for romances is reiterated in her repressed desire for Voyt, the metonymic chain of desire not only is transferred to the text itself but also extends to the reader. In other words, stories are opened to new stories, calling for new actors/actresses to perform in their dramas. Firstly, Maud as a reader of romances finds herself in a romance. Secondly, Voyt and Mrs. Dyott are both players in the romance that constitutes the story’s theme as well as performers who voice James's hesitant views on realism and the representation of sexuality and passion. Thirdly, the

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reader of “The Story in It” finds him-/herself in the story with its dramatization of the impossibility of innocence. This impossibility is performed through the story's mise en abyme, which places characters in the positions they criticize, and through a narrative desire that is transformed into a readerly drive.

25The story in it becomes the reader’s story in “The Story in It,” as long as it is read by the text, reminding us of Barthes's suggestion that “the text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me” (The Pleasure 27). In fact, the reciprocal fetishistic desire of the reader and the writable text illustrates the point at which James's realism intersects with the experience of jouissance. Lacan, influenced by Jakobson, associates realist literature with metonymy and symbolic literature with metaphor. Jakobson makes an analogy between the metaphoric process and the literary movements of Romanticism and Symbolism which, according to him, has already been acknowledged by many others. Meanwhile, the analogy between the metonymic process and Realism remained unrecognized:

26Following the path of contiguous relationships, the Realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina’s suicide Tolstoj’s artistic attention is focused on the heroine’s handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches ‘hair on the upper lips’ and ‘bare shoulders’ are used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong. (“Two Aspects of Language” 130)

27In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan considers the realistic representation of people, objects, and details in “the rails of metonymy” (429). In contrast to metaphor, which is associated with knowledge in the vertical axis of the signified, metonymy is associated with desire in the horizontal signifying chain. Accordingly, one signifier is displaced by another signifier in metonymy, as exemplified by the connection between ship and sail. This connection is “nowhere other than in the signifier,” Lacan suggests, basing metonymy on the word-to-word nature of this relationship (421). According to him, metonymic structure installs a “lack of being [le manque de l’être] in the object relation,” which defines desire as always yearning for something displaced (428). This metonymic structure shows also the barred human subject together with the resistance of signification in the relationship between the signifier and the signified (428). The subject’s desire resists expression through speech. On the other hand, metaphor, which is formulated as “one word for another,” implies one signifier’s substitution for another signifier. It is this substitution which creates the poetic signification effect. The bar is crossed to give rise to the signifier’s passage to the signified (429). In other words, by virtue of maintaining the bar between signifier and signified, metonymy represents insistent lack in the human subject as well as the structure of desire and fetishistic perversity: “its ‘perverse’ fixation at the very point of suspension of the signifying chain at which the screen-memory is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish becomes frozen” (158). Narrative fetishism similarly suspends the reader in the metonymic chain, keeping him/her in the realm of fore- pleasure.

28 One can suggest that “The Story in It” exposes a reciprocal fetishism. There occurs a break-up in the metonymic chain of fore-pleasure when the text as a fetish object begins to desire the reader as well. Along with Maud, who hysterically plagiarizes what she reads, the reader—being the part of this contamination—is also

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fetishistically suspended in the story. In other words, the reader becomes a “duffer” who cannot “understand” the story in it, as “the story” alludes to an origin. Felman's interpretation of “The Turn of the Screw” is useful for understanding “The Story in It”: “the story’s origin, actually situates its loss, constitutes its infinite deferral. The story’s origin is therefore situated, it would seem, in a forgetting of its origin” (122). “The Story in It” presents another example of such deferral as that to which Brooks draws attention in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling: “‘The Story in It,’ Henry James entitled one of his short stories, and narratives repeatedly speak of the problem of what there is to know and to tell, of the problematic boundaries of telling and listening, and of the process of transmission” (221). The problematic boundaries of the story enhance the fetishistic perversion of text and reader, ultimately inducing reader satisfaction in the traces of the text. The reader's encounter with the impossibility of mastering the text together with the text's dramatization of his/her impotence leads the reader to fall into an abyss, “laughing at a mistaken, mystified assumption he was making about himself” (de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” 214).

29Thus, the text stages its own truth, if we borrow from Derrida's observation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” The “truth” here is the one that “inhabits fiction as the master of house, as the law of the house, as the economy of fiction” (“Le Facteur de la Vérité” 426). Pursuing Derrida's track, we can suggest that James's house of fiction is a “silent house of death,” as economy derives from the same origin as oikēsis (“Différance” 4). Tracing différance, Derrida refers to the silent difference between the vowels “a” and “e,” a distinction seen but not heard, and suggests that the vowel “a” remains “silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikēsis” (4). Stemming from the same origin as “economy,” oikēsis denotes the silent house of death. Therefore, différance becomes the tomb that has an inscription on stone. This connotation clarifies how, in James's uncanny house of fiction, relations—e.g. love and récit—are enigmatic enough to place readers before the laws of literature. Even if “truth” forecloses James's house of fiction via his theories, prefaces, and explanations, it is the silent house of writing that “shows” rather than “tells” the truth.

4. Conclusion

30James not only is renowned for his mastery of realist representation but also theorizes realism in miscellaneous writings, from his critical essays to prefaces. Although he considers the representation of historical truth as an indispensable function of literature, he argues that the artist's subjective experience is not independent from this representation. James's metaphor of the “house of fiction” envisions “dead walls” that should be revived by the artist's subjective experience (“Preface to Portrait of a Lady” 290-91). However, his stance on realism is ambivalent— that is, while he expresses his reservation about the representation of sexuality as an individual experience, he also argues that art should not deal solely with “agreeable” issues. “The Story in It” reflects this ambivalence by hinting at James's realist vision on the one hand and by creating a mise en abyme through the dramatization of the characters' own situations on the other hand. The characters' divergent views on romance and vulgarity mirror James's questions about literary representation of life, sexuality and passion. Although it seems impossible to argue that a particular character voices James's thoughts, his writings nevertheless dramatize—in various forms—his

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questions and concerns. Still, the literary force of “The Story in It” lies not in characters’ discussion of themes reflecting James’s personal inquiries but in characters’ contamination in the stories they read and tell. While these characters, who read romances and French, Italian, and British novels, lose their innocence in the acts of reading and storytelling, actual readers of James’s work are also confronted with the question of “what the devil—in the name of innocence” are they doing “in.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Print.

---. S / Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 83-109. Print.

Brooks, Peter. Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Print.

---. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976. Print.

De Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 187-229. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Baas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 1-29. Print.

---. “Le Facteur de la Vérité.” The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 411-96. Print.

Edel, Leon. The Prefaces of Henry James. Paris: Jouve & Cie, 1931. Print.

Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 94-208. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New Yorkand London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. 436-43. Print.

Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” Of Language. Ed. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995. 115-33. Print.

James, Henry. “Gabriele D’Annunzio.” Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Morris Shapira. New York: Horizon Press, 1964. 265-96. Print.

---. “Honoré de Balzac. (1875-1878).” The Art of Criticisim. 59-90. Print.

---. Preface. Daisy Miller, Pandora, The Patagonia, and Other Tales. (The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, Vol. XVIII) New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1922. v-xxiv. Print.

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---. “The American” (Preface). The Art of Criticism. 271-85. Print.

---. The Art of Criticisim: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction. Ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1986. Print.

---. “The Figure in the Carpet.” Collected Stories. Vol 2. Ed. John Bayley. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 303-40. Print.

---. “The Future of the Novel.” The Art of Criticism. 242-51. Print.

---. “The Portrait of a Lady” (Preface). The Art of Criticism. 286-99. Print.

---. “The Story in It.” The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1964. 307-26. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 412-45. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Translator’s Preface. In Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: Routledge, 1991. 213-19. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Henry James, who is often cited as the master of realism, nevertheless expresses his reservation about realist representation of love, passion, sexuality and female characters in his critical writings. This article suggests that James’s short story entitled “The Story in It” stages this situation through characters’ conversations about American and European literature. Focusing on the dynamics of storytelling, which the conversations revolve around, and particularly engaging in Barthes’s concept of “desperate plagiarism,” the article discusses the possible implications of “it” in the title of the short story. It concludes that “The Story in It” illustrates how storytelling cannot be an innocent act with its contagious nature which results in listeners/ readers’ partaking in the stories told.

INDEX

Keywords: desperate plagiarism, fore-pleasure, Henry James, mise en abyme, reader, romance, storytelling

AUTHOR

HIVREN DEMIR-ATAY Mersin University

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Contradictory Depictions of the New Woman: Reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a Dialogic Novel

Sevinc Elaman-Garner

1. Introduction

1 Although critical accounts of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence vary in their assessment of the novel, analyses have tended to have two overarching concerns regarding the novel’s main characters: first, the analysis of Newland Archer’s conflict between social convention and individual desire;1 second, the way that the novel appears to create a series of binaries between “new” and “old” female stereotypes by contrasting the “dark,” “experienced,” “whore” Ellen Olenska with the “fair,” “innocent,” “virgin” May Newland.2 With the developing critical interest in Wharton during the 1970s and 80s, feminist scholars offered a new way of reading The Age of Innocence and changed the understanding of Wharton’s work, focusing on the way Wharton constructed a feminist social realism in its narrative. However, they have often addressed the representations of her female characters and the ways in which these figures revealed an oppressive social order for women. Furthermore, perhaps in line with the common perception that Wharton was an “innate conservative” who “never allied herself with the feminist movements of her day” (Goodman 35), feminist critics have often overlooked the celebratory and hopeful note in the novel’s conclusion. According to Hermione Lee, for example, Ellen is cast away from New York society and this is seen as reflecting a typically gloomy prognosis regarding the fate of women in Wharton’s work: “it is the women in Wharton who have to suffer betrayal and social punishment” (186).

2 Although these points are important and contribute to our understanding of The Age of Innocence and the social structure in which Newland and Ellen move, there has

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been no sustained critical analysis examining the dialogic properties of the narrative, in which a multiplicity of ambivalent voices and points of view on the issues of womanhood, marriage and divorce are juxtaposed. Furthermore, the following questions still need further elaboration: what does Ellen’s flight, away from conventional New York—which she once referred to fondly by stating “this dear old place is heaven” (Wharton 14)—to a life in Paris, convey? Is it, as Lee maintains, an unhappy ending that shows “there is no escape” (580)? Or, as Elizabeth Ammons suggests, the “failing” of the heroine (127)? Can we go beyond these pessimistic interpretations and read the ending as an indication of the heroine’s struggle for independence and agency?

3 Bearing these questions in mind, this article will expand on previous critical approaches to The Age of Innocence by analyzing the ways in which the text delivers— through its dialogic narrative—a fragmented, ambiguous and contradictory depiction of New Womanhood. It advances two broad arguments: first, I argue that the novel displays many of the characteristics of New Woman fiction, both thematically and stylistically. Thematically, it depicts the conflict within the heroine, as Lyn Pykett has observed about the characteristics of New Woman writing, “between a fluid and charging experience of subjectivity and the fixed identity imposed by conventional social gender roles” (57). As is typical of New Woman fiction, the novel portrays Ellen’s dilemma between her love for Newland and her freedom. With its treatment of the themes of womanhood, marriage and divorce, the text also displays important stylistic characteristics of New Woman fiction, in which “in place of the wise and witty sayings, and the moral and social guidance of the omniscient narrator, we find a decentered narrative, and (particularly in marriage-problem novels) a polyphonic form in which a multiplicity of voices and views on current issues are juxtaposed” (57). Secondly, building on this observation about the way that The Age of Innocence is presented in such a polyphonic form, I argue that, instead of reading the text as representing Ellen in the context of a “corrupting temptress” female stereotype, we can read her depiction as a “problematization and unfixing of identity” (57) that is common to New Woman fiction. I argue that like the depiction of the heroines in the New Woman novels, that of Ellen the New Woman in The Age of Innocence is complex, fragmented and contradictory.

4 I begin with a brief account of the emergence and definition of the New Woman, in particular in the United States of America during the early twentieth century, and the characteristics of New Woman fiction that are reflected in The Age of Innocence. I explain briefly Bakhtin’s analytical concepts related to dialogism (authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, and hybrid construction) and their relevance to the analysis of the text. In the close readings of the novel that follow, I analyze the ways of Old New York in relation to the issue of New Womanhood in the light of these Bakhtinian concepts. The focus of the discussions will include Newland’s conflicting perceptions of womanhood, his constant vacillating throughout the novel between the fields of marriage and romance, and thus between May and Ellen. A particular emphasis will be given to the contradictory perceptions of Ellen Olenska by Old New York and her dilemma between her love for Newland and her desire for personal freedom to highlight the ambiguities of the novel regarding the image of the New Woman of the era in which the novel was written. Finally, by exploring the multiple subjectivities of Ellen, my feminist dialogic analysis of the novel shows that the novel’s concluding commentary on Ellen’s choice to leave Newland and go to Paris can be read as instances

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of the disruption of hegemonic discourses and a recognition of female voice, agency and struggle.

2. The New (American) Woman and New Woman Fiction

5 The New Woman, as represented in fiction and in media, was an amalgam of contradictions. She was portrayed, by turns, “as either a cause or a symptom of cultural disintegration and social decline, or as the cure for current social ills” (Pykett 17). In American society, she was perceived as a radical figure, “a symptom of cultural disintegration” who “challenged existing gender relations and the distribution of power” (245). Jean Matthews argues that the most popular image of the New American Woman was the so-called “Gibson Girl,” named after her creator, the artist Charles Dana Gibson, who drew her for Life magazine in the 1890s (13). She became an embodiment of the New American Woman, along with her youth, education and independence, and a reputation for being “highly competent and physically strong and fearless” (13). Consequently, the popular image of the New American Woman was a controversial one in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American society: a figure defined by her challenge to conventions in behavior and dress, her education and aspirations for greater public and private recognition, independence of spirit, competence, fearlessness, and a thirst for marital and sexual independence.

6 These characteristics were also reflected in fictional depictions. According to Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, the New Woman in American fiction was brought to popular attention by American writer Henry James (1843-1916), who portrayed this feminine type as a young, unmarried woman who challenges social conventions and acts independently (such as Daisy, the heroine of Daisy Miller, or Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady) (176)... One of the defining features of New Woman fiction as a body of work was its challenge to the era’s hegemonic definitions of womanhood and related prescriptions on “how a woman should be.” In an attempt to reassess the old clichés and moral codes of femininity, feminist writers began to think about the formulation of new codes of female behavior, a new morality and new sexual ethics. This made the New Woman fiction a source of controversy as it sought to unsettle conventional images and accounts of women and add momentum to the push for political and social change. The close link between literature and social reform, as Heilmann notes, was seen as the backbone of feminism and this link was essential to the New Woman writers of the fin-de-siècle who considered the novel an important tool for social reform (2). In the 1890s, a group of popular writers such as Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Eagerton and Olive Schreiner took up this cause and began to write about topics associated with New Woman fiction such as unhappy marriage, sexual transgression, divorce, death, “fallen” women, seduction, betrayal and adultery.3 Cunningham points out that, although the authors of New Woman novels were not consciously creating a distinctive category of writing, their work displays some common characteristics. Defining the fictional representation of the New Woman as an “intelligent, individualistic, and principled person,” she notes that: [H]eroines who refused to conform to the traditional feminine role, challenged accepted ideals of marriage and maternity, chose to work for a living, or who, in any way argued the feminist course, became the commonplace in the works of...

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writers [of New Woman fiction] and were firmly identified by readers and reviewers as New Women. (3)

7 Cunningham lists other important characteristics of New Woman fiction as “the education and reading [of the heroine],” “frankness about sex,” “strictures against marriage,” “heavy emphasis placed upon nervous disorder,” “disease and death” (46– 49). Such features signify a questioning of domestic and social arrangements and their implications for women and indicate some of the ways in which the New Woman fiction addressed issues of marriage, sexuality, female victimization and women’s independence. The kinds of themes addressed in New Woman fiction were already common in novels throughout the nineteenth century; as Cunningham notes, “all the data of the New Woman novel were present in earlier fiction” (20). However, it was the treatment and interpretation of such themes which “so radically differed” and set New Woman fiction apart from earlier fiction (20). For instance, in earlier fiction of the mid nineteenth century, the fallen woman, Cunningham suggests, was read as a “stain” on society and her suffering and death were interpreted as her punishment. The same subject, the fallen woman, was expressed later by some of the New Woman novelists, such as Thomas Hardy, and it was suggested that “women conventionally ‘fallen’ might actually have chosen their state on moral grounds,” indicating that the death or suffering of the heroine does not always refer to her condemnation in the novel (21). Further, Lyn Pykett has pointed out that many New Woman novels challenge conventional fictional accounts of domestic reality, particularly the marriage plot: marriage, the destination of the plot of the mainstream Victorian novel, and the resolution of all of its (and supposedly the heroine’s) problems, became, in the New Woman novel, both the origin of narrative and the source of the heroine’s problems (57).

8 In the analysis of the novel, I will attempt to show that The Age of Innocence displays these general characteristics of New Woman fiction. I will draw on some of the above observations about New Woman fiction to explore the way in which the issues of womanhood, marriage and divorce are addressed in the text, examining the portrayal of the New Woman and assessing the extent to which the text challenges hegemonic definitions of womanhood and related prescriptions on “how a woman should be” in Wharton’s time.

3. Bakhtin and the Dialogic Novel

9 To build on such observations I have turned to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and the concepts related to it (authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, and hybrid construction) as analytical tools because they permit a reading that is attentive to the presence of different voices, ideologies and discourses in the text, as well as to the exchanges that take place between them. Drawing on Bakhtin’s ideas about the dialogic novel as being “constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 18), I approach the novel as made up of dialogues between different points of view on womanhood in a way that reveal the presence of marginal, subversive and feminist voices. These voices have the effect of challenging and disrupting the dominant, monologic and hegemonic discourses in the text.

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10Bakhtin’s concepts of “authoritative” and “internally persuasive” discourses have been particularly useful here. By “authoritative” discourse Bakhtin simply refers to monologic, dominant and centralizing voices that assert, as Dale M. Bauer puts it in her feminist literary deployment of Bakhtin, “masculinised or rationalised public language” (2). By “internally persuasive” discourse he refers to dialogic, marginal and decentralizing voices that disrupt the narrative of authoritative discourse. Drawing on these concepts, the central concern of this article is to explore the way in which the dialogic narrative of The Age of Innocence orchestrates a dialogue between these two narratives of dominance and subversion through the multiple voices of its characters and narrators. These concepts greatly aided me in developing the theoretical and methodological framework through which I analyze the text. I refer to authoritative discourse and the voices that represent it as a surface narrative that asserts the dominant ideologies of the age concerning female roles and that attempts to delimit the New Woman and define her within fixed terms. I use the term counter narrative in reference to internally persuasive discourse which reveals the explicit or implicit voices of marginal feminist discourses that puncture the surface–narrative and indicate the text’s feminist critiques of hegemonic structures.

11I draw in particular on Bakhtin’s understanding of double–voicedness and hybridization to examine Wharton’s novel as a dialogic text. In his essay “Discourse in the Novel” published in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin explores the double–voiced discourse which contains two separate voices or consciousnesses (of characters, groups or general opinion) that exist together in one utterance yet remain in tension or conflict. One voice may be stronger and may try to control or overcome the other, yet they are both present and separate, contributing to the presence of diverse voices and ideologies in the text and often allowing for the subtle commentary of one voice upon the other. The interrelationship of different voices and the existence of these voices are made manifest through shifts in tone, punctuation and other linguistic, ideological, or idiolectical markers (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 447). As Bakhtin notes: Double–voiced discourse is always internally dialogized. Examples of this would be comic, ironic or parodic discourse, the refracting discourse in the language of a character and finally the discourse of a whole incorporated genre—all these discourses are double–voiced and internally dialogized. A potential dialogue is embedded in them, one as yet unfolded, a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages.(The Dialogic Imagination 324)

12 In this way Bakhtin’s double–voicing offers a particularly useful way to analyze the interactions and tensions between idioms, languages, or ideologies within the text in question and, in Jasinski’s words, to“help subvert various forms of monologic interpretation by leading the critic and historian to the recovery of the dialogic moments or elements inscribed in the text.” (24).Bakhtin introduces hybrid– construction as a particular form of the double–voiced discourse in a dialogic narration. When I use the term “narration” I refer to Bakhtin’s notion of hybrid– construction which Bakhtin defines as “an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two languages, two semantic and axiological belief systems” (The Dialogic Imagination 305–306). This means that, in contrast to one narrator, there is often a more complex polyvocality at work in dialogic texts as the voices of characters can be entwined within a passage. In addressing this feature of The Age of Innnocence, double–voicedness and hybridization

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draw explicit attention to the ways in which the voice of the narrator fuses with the speech of another and places the ideology and languages of different characters, groups, or publics in dialogue. Hybrid–construction sensitises the reader to the presence of multiple voices in a passage (and, therefore, different perspectives, ideologies or belief systems), indicated by signals such as exclamation and quotation marks; shifts in idiolect; the choice of particular words that represent a certain social group, a particular character or the voice of “public opinion”; changes in the intonation and tone of the speech or narration (ironic, sarcastic, sympathetic, critical). Further, attention to such hybrid constructions enables me to explore the complex formation of the ideological consciousness of the New Woman heroine as we see her struggling with the conventions and constraints of patriarchal ideologies. When I study The Age of Innocence, I will therefore pay close attention to such hybrid constructions and the range of perspectives and opinions that are brought to bear on the New Woman and her struggle for independence.

13Because The Age of Innocence presents Ellen’s story mainly from the perspective of Wharton’s male character, a particular emphasis will be given to the double perceptions of Newland—as representing the surface narrative (or authoritative discourse, in the Bakhtinian sense)—regarding women and divorce because his narration reveals the male tendencies as depicted in the novel to create fantasies about the heroine and control her at the same time. As Margaret Jay Jessee observes, “readers are given Newland’s perceptions of May and Ellen, not as who they actually are, but as his desire situates them” (49). The purpose of examining Newland’s conflicting perception of womanhood is to demonstrate how the male character—Newland, as a member of Old New York society—perceives the New Woman and how biases and pressures against divorce serve to reproduce patriarchal gender relations. In addition, I will demonstrate how the counter narrative, through the presentation of Ellen’s multiple subjective positions, acts as a counterpart to this male tendency by allowing the New Woman character to act within and outside patriarchal boundaries. That is, attention to the subversive counter narrative of the text (internally persuasive discourse) helps to highlight Ellen’s performances of shifting subjectivities (the rebel who is seeking a divorce, the unfortunate victim of an unfaithful husband, the lover who desires a new life) and to draw out the conflict that exists within the text with the masculine monologic language of the surface narrative (authoritative discourse) that seeks to delimit the New Woman within fixed frameworks.

4. Ellen: The New Woman in Multiple Guises

14In The Age of Innocence, from the opening scene at the opera, we are given Newland’s perceptions of Ellen and May, highlighting the conflict between the two (authoritative and internally persuasive) opposing discourses: Ellen and May as representatives of “New Woman” and “True Woman” respectively. Newland first sees Ellen in the Mingott’s opera box at the old Academy where she appears as “the lady in the Empire dress” (9) wearing a dress more daring than the dictates of New York fashion allow in that year. Noticing the attention drawn to Ellen, the divorcee and suspected adulteress, who is sitting in the same opera box with his fiancée, May Welland, Newland gets annoyed: “It was annoying... that the box which was thus attracting the undivided attention of masculine New York should be that in which his

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betrothed was seated between her mother and aunt” (9, my emphasis). This hybrid construction, as Bakhtin would describe it, reveals the clash of the surface and counter narratives (the male perspective and the ironic tone of the narrator that mocks this perspective): it begins with Newland’s free indirect discourse expressing his disapproval of this “lady in the Empire dress” in an irritated tone (“it was annoying”) and the italicized portion of the passage is permeated with the ironic intonation of the narrator, mocking Old New York’s (and therefore Newland’s) “masculine,” conventional perception of women. Thus, the hybrid construction has two accents (the character’s accent and narrator’s “ironic transmission... mimicking of the irritation of the character”) as Bakhtin would put it (The Dialogic Imagination 318).

15In order to highlight Newland’s perception of Ellen as an “improper female” in opposition to May as a “proper” one, the novel shifts its focus to May, depicting her as a representation of a figure whom we might describe, following Barbara Welter’s “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” as a “True Woman” with four cardinal feminine virtues: “piety, domesticity, submissiveness and purity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman” (Wharton 152). May’s depiction evokes this traditional American womanhood as she is referred to as an “angel in the home,” with “this whiteness [in dress] radiance, goodness” (Wharton 21). In other words, she is depicted as the representative of the values of Old New York and repeatedly is described as the fair, “pure,” “proper,” blonde “innocent” in contrast to the dark– haired, “sensual,” “unconventional” female, Ellen (who, as David Holbrook puts it, is seen as an “intruder” [Wharton 13] to the conventions of Old New York). However, the novel interrogates the image of True Womanhood when we hear the text’s subtle indictment of this womanhood and the enforced values on her when we read, for example, the ironic tone in the language that describes her marriage to Newland. Their marriage seems to suggest the uniting of “the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money” (Wharton 25). The sarcastic tone in this passage indicates the feminist narrator’s criticism toward the material values of these two “great,” “fundamental” families which are then referred to with the belittling “and all their clan.” This marriage also aims to emphasize that the union of a couple in Old New York society always relies on the suitability of the match. As Mrs. Archer feels, “[t]here was no better match in New York [for her son, Newland] than May Welland” (Wharton 7).

16The text’s dialogic narrative works to re–emphasize the tension between the discourses of True Woman and New Woman, exposing further Newland’s judgmental perception of Ellen. The references to Ellen’s defiant characteristics (her New Woman attributes) are numerous: she is modern, creative and interested in literature, painting, dance and music. She criticizes Old New York society for its “blind conformity to tradition” (Wharton 242). She is seen “parading up... at the crowded hour with Julius Beaufort” (29), a married man, in an act described as “a mistake” for Old New York (29). All these features, her education and experience in Europe, her challenge to social norms of her society, have made her a different woman than American society has produced. But in the eyes of Old New York, she is the “black sheep that their blameless stock had produced” (10), a woman with an “unscrupulous” life (25); in short, a threat to the hegemonic social system of Old New York. For example, when she asks Newland to “come and see [her] some day” (29), Newland, a product of Old New York, finds this irritating because “she ought to know that a man who’s just engaged doesn’t spend his

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time calling on married women” and he thinks to himself how glad he is to be a New Yorker and that his bride–to–be, May is “one of his own kind” (29), indicating his view of Ellen as “other” and “improper.” Ellen’s departure from convention is re– emphasized when, during a party, she leaves her company, (the Duke of St. Austrey) and sits next to Newland, talking to the young man. Ellen’s depiction in this episode echoes Sally Ledger’s observations on the New Woman in that “the putting–on ‘masculine’ attributes (having ‘straight talks to young men’) was thoroughly characteristic of the textual New Woman” (Wharton 13). But this action creates further tension between the internally persuasive discourse of the New Woman and the authoritative discourse of Old New York: Ellen receives comments of disapproval because “it was not the custom in New York drawing–rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another” (Wharton 60). These scenes clearly portray Ellen as the New Woman who makes her own decisions and repeatedly defies Old New York’s rules.

17The New Woman’s defiance of the authoritative [male] discourse through which we have seen her as an “improper” female earlier in the opening scenes of the novel is demonstrated further through the impact she has made on Newland’s view of her. Ellen’s rejection of convention and her question to him had made an impression on him as she “had stirred up old settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind” (Wharton 40). He begins to question his perception of society after he had met Ellen. He thinks she brings rich European culture to the “damnably dull” Old New York society which has “no character, no color, no variety” (242). He believes “women should be free—as free as we are” (39). His feelings about May (the True Woman) also begin to change as he “felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity [May] so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long–dead ancestress” (34); a woman of “the sameness, like one of those dolls cut out of the same folded paper” (59). These ideas are flowing through Newland’s mind and create a constant tension between his way of thinking of old and new society.

18Thus far, it seems that we are witnessing Newland’s perception of women being released from convention. However, through this hybrid construction above, the novel repeatedly presents counter narratives that expose Newland’s contradictory positions —and his hypocrisy. As Carol J. Singley notes, Newland constantly “vacillates between May and Ellen and the opposing fields that they represent in the eyes of Newland: of marriage and romance, of social convention and individual desire” (506). The conflict between these “opposing fields” (May (social convention) and Ellen (individual desire)) is illustrated in the passage below, this time by referring to the gender roles in marriage, revealing the dilemma and contradictions in Newland’s mind further: What could he and she [May] really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a ‘decent’ fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? .... He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming... a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. (41, emphasis mine)

19 The hybrid narration above complicates the distinction again between the character and the (feminist) narrator. The italicized passage with the use of quotation marks for the word “decent” [fellow], and its ironic tone, suggest the narrator’s (and the counter

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narrative’s) subtle criticism toward Newland and Old New York society (here, surface narrative) concerning the double–standard of sexual morality and of the role of men and women in marriage. The following hybrid passage exposes these ideas further in Newland’s mind. When Sillerton Jackson accuses Ellen of living with M. Riviere, her former lover, Newland says: “Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t? I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots.... Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life: that doesn’t make her an outcast” (39, emphasis mine). The same hybridization, in Bakhtin’s words, “mixing of accents and erasing boundaries” between Newland’s speech and the general opinion of Old New York, is also present here. Although on the surface narrative Newland appears to support Ellen’s freedom to live her life as she wishes, on closer examination he is again shown to hold conventional views of Old New York when he refers to other women who live with Ellen’s husband as “harlots.” Newland’s assumption that he has come to represent a liberator to Ellen is then undercut in the following sentence: “‘Women ought to be free—as free as we are,’ he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences” (39, emphasis mine). The italicized commentary of the narrator here offers an insight into Newland’s internal conflict: he adopts Ellen’s claim that women should be free, but with irritation and a sense of its “terrific consequences.” By revealing this tension between the surface and counter narrative (Newland’s specious attitude toward women’s freedom and then his fear of the consequences of this freedom), the text successfully exposes his ambiguity, and its feminist critique of male hypocrisy.

20The novel further unmasks patriarchal hypocrisy regarding approaches to women through Newland’s reflecting on his past sexual experience and his pride to be marrying a “pure” and “innocent” girl. Although he seems to be proud of marrying May, he also takes pride in his own sexual experience in a lengthy and “agitated two– year relationship” with a married woman, Mrs. Rushworth. This is referred to earlier in the text when he contemplates May and wishes that “his wife should be as worldly-wise and as eager to please as the married lady [Mrs. Rushworth]... which had so nearly marred that unhappy being’s life” (5): an implication that Newland gained experience from this relationship whereas Mrs. Rushworth was left with a notorious reputation. But, for Newland, this is not that significant because: [T]he affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from... an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied... when ‘such things happened’ it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman... The only thing to do was to... to marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him. (69, emphasis mine)

21 In this hybrid passage we see incorporated the “parodic stylization of the language” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 304) of Old New York within Newland’s mode of thought. The shift into this style is signaled by the use of words and attitudes derived from the general opinion of Old New York society and expressed through the narrator’s language with “ironic transmission” of the male perception (“good” women to love and “bad” women to enjoy; cheating makes man “foolish” and women “criminal”; marrying a nice girl to look after him). Further on—and again in the language of the counter narrator (and consequently in a different style)—the narrator’s use of words here in quotation marks (“such things happened”) casts a sarcastic, critical glance at this

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general opinion and throws its hypocrisy into relief. For Bakhtin, “such a characterization turns out to be ‘another’s speech,’ to be taken... in quotation marks” (The Dialogic Imagination 303). In the following passage, we observe a similar, hybrid account of Newland’s pride in his “masculine initiation” and mastery over his bride: He contemplated her [May’s] absorbed young face with a thrill of possession in which pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity. ‘We'll read Faust together… by the Italian lakes...’ he thought, somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honeymoon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride [.] (Wharton 57, emphasis mine)

22 The beginning is Newland’s mode of thought (surface narrative). What follows is the narrator’s language (counter narrative) in the form of the concealed speech of another (the italicized part) which adds a sarcastic tone again with words such as “thrill of possession,” “masculine initiation” and “manly privilege,” subtly mocking Newland’s pride in his “masculinity” and his view of May as a symbol of “abysmal purity.” We then hear Newland’s direct speech, indicated by the speech marks (“We’ll read Faust together... by the Italian lakes”) and what follows is the indignant and ironic tone of the narrator’s speech, mocking Newland’s sense of superiority and duty to enlighten his bride–to–be with “the masterpieces of literature.” The effect here is to expose Newland’s ambiguity and unmask his hypocrisy regarding the role of women and introduce a counter narrative that disturbs the male accounts of women in the novel.

23The spaces where authoritative and internally persuasive discourses constantly struggle appear again when we observe the New Woman as the “other” and as the “victimized” woman. Discussing the perceived challenge of the New Woman to the status quo at the fin–de–siècle, Sally Ledger explains that the view of New Woman as “a threat to the institution of marriage” was one of the defining features of the dominant discourse on the New Woman (11). Similarly, by associating Ellen the character as the “other” for Old New York, the novel depicts Ellen as a threat to society, invoking a patriarchal (authoritative) discourse. The Old New York tribe rejects her as one of them because for them she is “poor” (21), “Bohemian” (215), has “lost her looks” (58) and her dress is “unusual” (19). Worst of all, “she means to get a divorce” (37). These various perceptions regarding Ellen reveal Old New York’s views of her from different voices. This allows us to listen to different points of view and observe how Old New York disapproves of Ellen’s “improper” behavior and her desire to divorce her husband. The way in which Ellen is represented from the characters’ points of view above also echoes Elaine Showalter’s account of the New Woman as a disruption to the social order, a female type against whom the voices of Old New York (or the authoritative discourse) are “united in condemnation… and in celebration of the traditional female role” (40).

24As Singley aptly observes, for Old New York, “Ellen’s habitus—including orphancy, guardianship by an eccentric aunt, unhappy marriage to a Polish count and European culture—is alien and disruptive to Old New York ways” (502). But Newland no longer sees her in this way: for him, “[s]he’s ‘poor Ellen’ certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage” (Wharton 37). Newland’s initial view of her as the “improper” woman turns into pity and he begins to regard her in the light of a “victim” of a cruel husband that treats a wife as one of his possessions. Despite all the negative perceptions of her, Newland supports Ellen’s desire to divorce her husband. His voice offers the only hope for Ellen in a society where even the word of “divorce” creates the effect of a “bombshell” (Wharton 38) and where change, or more precisely women’s

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freedom, is beyond question. For Newland, though, Ellen is no longer the “other”: she “has had an unhappy life [and] that doesn’t make her an outcast” (Wharton 38). His perception of Ellen here suggests a feminist consciousness (and an instance of internally persuasive discourse)inviting the reader’s sympathy for the “victimized” female. Through Newland’s voice, the text appears to offer Ellen’s side of the story, implicitly inviting us to question and interpret the views on Ellen and evoking her voice as if in absentia.

25The text, however, continues to dramatize the tension between the two opposing (authoritative and internally persuasive) discourses again through Newland’s changing perceptions of Ellen. His view of Ellen is still wavering: in the above passage, Newland seems to be stating his support of her in her decision to divorce her husband. But as the novel proceeds, we realize that Newland’s attachment to her remains only at the level of fantasy because he is a conventional man at heart. This is revealed when Ellen’s family enlists his service as a lawyer in an attempt to persuade her to remain married; that is, to keep her within the order of social norms or, to use a more Bakhtinian phrase, within the limits of authoritative discourse. Despite his feelings for Ellen, he yields to his clan: he may have “read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world” (6) than the men in his society, but “grouped together they represented ‘New York,’” and as part of this “New York,” the narrator reveals to the reader that “the habit of masculine solidarity made him [Newland] accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral.” Here, the use of “masculine solidarity,” “doctrine,” and “issues called moral” suggest the sarcastic tone of the narrator and of the text’s subtle indictment of the way in which people in Old New York are led to believe all its norms and rules in the name of “morality.” Newland, in this case, is no exception.

26It is after this point that Ellen’s position becomes more elusive than before as she begins to oscillate between a rebellious female and submission to social convention. Newland warns her about the negative consequences that she would face if she divorces her husband. When she asks “what harm could [her husband’s] accusations... do me here?,” he answers: [F]ar more harm than anywhere else!.... New York society is a very small world compared to the one you lived in. And it’s ruled, in spite of appearances, by a few people with—well, rather old–fashioned ideas.... Our ideas about marriage and divorce are partially old–fashioned. Our legislation favors divorce—our social customs don’t. (108-109)

27 In this episode, Ellen seems defeated, yielding to the “social customs” that do not allow her to divorce her husband. But she is also frustrated, seeking desperately a way out. Feeling as if she has been “dead and buried... [for] centuries and centuries” (14) in her marriage, Ellen finally bursts out with fear and frustration: “But my freedom—is that nothing” (110). She questions the prevalent double–standard in gender relations. Newland, on the other hand, can only resort to conventional doctrines, as in the following words to her: Think of the newspapers—their vileness!.... One can’t make over society.... The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention that keeps the family together— protects the children, if there are any[.] (110)

28 Newland’s assertion on the “convention that keeps the family together” indicates a final blow that breaks Ellen’s spirit and she finally yields to this doctrine with her “so

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faint and desolate” tone (110). This dialogue between Newland and Ellen draws attention to the mechanism of a patriarchal ideology that silences women’s threat to the institution of marriage by seeking to assert the unchangeability of convention and “collective interest.” It appears here that Old New York has silenced the New Woman. Ellen changes her mind to pursue divorce against her husband as the double strain of struggling to achieve her freedom while at the same time bearing the full force of family and society disapproval weakens her challenge to society. In other words, she dutifully obliges what is expected of her, transforming herself from the “victimized” female to the “self–sacrificing” female. Thus, her depiction as a New Woman is simultaneously changing, from the “other” to an “improper”; from a “challenging,” to a “victimized” and a “self–sacrificing” female figure; a fragmented, ambiguous and contradictory figure that problematizes the simplistic categories that are used to define her. It is also after this point that Ellen’s depiction as a “victimized” and “self– sacrificing” female (yielding to the pressure of her society—the voice of authoritative discourse—for the sake of collective contentment) becomes inconsistent with the self– reliant and independent image of the American New Woman.

29However, the irony here is that, although it is Newland who persuades Ellen to remain married to her husband, he still wants to be with her; another indication of male hypocrisy depicted in the text. Both Ellen and Newland know that he cannot go beyond the constraints of his community that forces him to marry May; that is, forces him to remain with the boundaries of Old New York social customs by choosing the True Woman, representation of the values of Old New York. We observe Newland oscillating between these old and new ideologies (May and Ellen). He is to marry May, a suitable bride for his class, a woman who will allow him to fulfill the social expectations that he was trained to respect; yet, he is attracted to Ellen’s free spirit; that is, to the New Woman, to a new community, one which lives on ideas and art, not on money and fine clothes, a community into which Newland cannot fit. Finally coming to a realization that release from the “web of customs,” the words Wharton uses to refer to social customs (35) seems impossible, he tries to push Ellen to the position of another female role, one that suits his interest: “mistress.” He even asks Ellen to run away with him. But Ellen has come to realize his hypocrisy, and a sense of indignation towards the constraints that Old New York places upon women is evoked when she reflects to Newland: “Isn’t it you who made me give up divorcing—give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice one’s self to preserve the dignity of marriage” (122). This tension continues between Ellen and Newland, when Newland suggests that she be his mistress. He says “I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—won’t exist” (293). And in response to this, Ellen asks ironically: “where is that country? Have you ever been there?” (293), demonstrating her rejection of his offer and inviting us to observe the differences between their contrasting perceptions. Although his desire for Ellen is obvious, Newland’s experience here bears out Bakhtin’s observation on “the struggle and dialogic interrelationship” of authoritative (here, his genteel society) and internally persuasive discourses (here, his passion) within his individual consciousness (The Dialogic Imagination 342). Newland still insists on making Ellen his mistress: he appears willing to challenge those patriarchal myths and “categories” that confine their identities within the authoritative discourse and suggests running away with Ellen to escape them, yet at the same time he gives no indication that he is ready to depart his position as May’s future–husband. As the narrator informs the reader at

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earlier points in the novel, he is still “at heart a dilettante” (5); still the “terrifying product of the social system” (36); incapable of making the sacrifices necessary for their freedom. Ellen, on the other hand, is realistic: she becomes aware of Newland’s position as a “product of his society” (she tells him for example that: “You’ve never been beyond. And I have”) (294)) and understands that there is no place free from those “categories.” This also implies that she rejects becoming the object of male fantasy. Thus, the passage articulates a feminist critique of the male point of view’s tendency to weave fantasies around the New Woman.

30All the female roles that have been presented to Ellen in the novel she has rejected; in doing so, she seems to persistently defy convention, a New Woman who refuses to conform to the categories that are prepared for her by Old New York. Her rebellion against conventional obligation reaches its climax when she finally begins to search for new ways to live her life, a life that will allow her to escape from the restrictions and conventions of Old New York. She is aware of the fact that she is seen as a threat to Newland/May’s marriage and she uses this situation to her advantage to convince her wealthy grandmother Catherine Mingott to provide her with money to live an independent life in Paris. She convinces her grandmother to see that “if I return to Europe I must live by myself” (234). The voice behind this sentence is adamant, suggesting her choice to rely on herself, not on the others around her. This suggests that she has chosen neither Newland nor her husband Count Olenski, who has been waiting for her to return to him, but a life in Paris. We see her refer to the city with “its splendor and its history... the riches of Paris” (363) and how it can offer a life in which she will have the chance to meet artists, musicians, writers, philosophers; a life which, for her, means “freedom.”

31In the chapters that follow, the focus re-shifts to the friction between the discourses of marriage and feminism. Newland yields to his New York clan and finally is married to May. He easily adapts to the requirement of his conventional marriage. This is indicated through the following hybrid construction in which we can explore the complex arrangements of the narrator’s and the character’s voices: “Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform to the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied” (196, emphasis mine). This hybrid construction starts with Newland’s free indirect discourse and gives insight into his conversion back to his “old” and “traditional” ideas about marriage. His viewpoint here echoes the authoritative discourse of marriage suggesting that conforming to the norms of marriage for Newland is a better option not only for himself but also for the sake of others (May, Ellen, and perhaps for all his family). The italicized part, through its ironic tone (“theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied”), reveals a counter narrative against the male discourse by implying that he has forsaken the progressive ideas of his youth and reverted, out of expediency, to a conventional approach in his treatment of May. Through this conflict between two clashing points of view, the text alerts the reader to the male’s hypocrisy.

32As always, Newland vacillates between Old New York and his desire to break away from society. In odd contrast to the image of Newland that we are presented in the above episode as a conventional husband reverting to the “old inherited ideas about marriage,” the following episode goes on to reveal his awareness that his life—and his marriage to May—is shaped and controlled by the force of his community. This he

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finally sees and understands: “I AM dead—I’ve been dead for months and months” (298). He proves ambivalent again. He desperately wants to break away from the restrictiveness of Old New York but paradoxically he also believes in “the dignity of a duty,” that is, one’s social duty toward society: “Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty.... Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways” (Wharton 350).The passage presents the voice of marriage as surface narrative (authoritative discourse): Newland’s duty in marriage over romantic love. We are also given a summary of the decency of his life as he sees it from within the moral frameworks of Old New York, whose conventions have gained authority in his mind again, suggesting to the reader that even if his marriage was “a dull duty,” at least he kept his “honor” and respect for “his own past” and finally asserting the superiority of “the old ways” (May and convention) over new community (Ellen and freedom from the constraints of convention). However, by depicting Newland’s constant vacillation between “new” and “old,” “romance” and “marriage,” this passage also implicates the counter–narrative that questions Newland’s slavish devotion to the restrictive customs of Old New York.

33Near the end of the novel, we learn that Ellen has been single and living in Paris for years. Newland’s wife has been dead for several years and Newland, who kept Ellen’s memory like “a relic in a small dim chapel” (365), is now fifty–seven years old. On discovering his father’s passion for Ellen, Dallas arranges a meeting between the two of them in Paris. Dallas tries to encourage his father to go upstairs and meet Ellen but Newland refuses and sits on a bench instead. He says: “It’s more real to me here than if I went up” (259). In other words, he finally understands that he has never been able to put his so–called liberal ideas into action; instead he has lived a “shy, old– fashioned, inadequate life” (365). When Dallas asks: “But what on earth shall I say?,” Newland smiles and replies: “Say I’m old–fashioned” (365), an acknowledgment of his conventional character and a sharp contrast to Ellen’s new independent feminist role, a woman of her own, one that breaks the limits of the authoritative discourse.

34One wonders at the end of the novel what promise Ellen’s story holds. For Hermione Lee, it is “extremely hard to read The Age of Innocence as a novel with a happy ending,” because it shows “there is no escape, in place or time, for the person (especially the woman) who has been stigmatized” (580). In one sense, Lee is right: the novel speaks of women who are stigmatized and seek a place to escape. But it is misleading to view the novel’s ending as necessarily a pessimistic one. By placing Ellen in such a rigid society and showing the heroine’s struggle to survive, first in an oppressive marriage, then in an oppressive and restrictive society, and finally leading her to her freedom in Paris, the novel not only foregrounds Ellen’s determination to achieve her freedom, but also heightens its power as a feminist criticism of the society that has driven her away. As Singley explains, Ellen’s expulsion from New York society “can also be said to be defying society’s rules, for in returning to Europe—that is, in refusing to play Old New York’s game—she shows that she can rise above the game” (504).

35By reading the novel as a dialogic narrative, we are given various perspectives through which we observe the New Woman’s movement in the guise of Ellen Olenska, repositioning herself in relation to the voices around her, and presenting this figure in multiple guises (such as the rebel who is seeking divorce; the unfortunate victim of a

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brutal husband; the sensual lover) only to challenge each in turn. The Bakhtinian concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses—in particular his notion of hybrid construction—help us to elucidate the subversive language (counter narrative) of the text and to situate the heroine within the multiple points of view and conflicting ideological positions that the text presents. In this way we can also observe Ellen as a New Woman who is rewarded with her freedom at the end of the novel.

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Pykett, Lyn. Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Print.

Showalter, Elaine. “New Women.” Sexual Anarchy, Gender and Culture at the Fin De Siècle. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1992. Print.

Singley, Carol J. “Bourdieu, Wharton and Changing Culture in The Age of Innocence.” Cultural Studies 17.3 (2003): 495–519. Print.

Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Print. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18.2(1966): 151–174. Print.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. Berkshire: Penguin, 1996. Print.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumphs of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

NOTES

1. For example, Cynthia Griffin Wolff refers to the restrictive effects of society upon its members and argues that the novel presents a “Portrait of a Gentleman,” emphasizing Newland’s conflict between his desire and the constraints of society (5). Similarly, focusing on Newland’s entrapment by the values of Old New York, Fryer writes that Newland is trapped “both by his own limitations and by forces he does not understand” (161). In the same vein, Godfrey considers Newland as a representative of the Old New York class and an entrapped individual who suffers “from stunted development and a bad case of cowardice” (31). Drawing on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social interaction and structuration (“individuals and their environment work together to shape habitus, which is in turn self–shaping”),Carol J. Singley points to Newland’s dilemma between May and Ellen—and “the opposing fields that they represent: of marriage and romance, of social convention and individual desire” (495). Taking an approach close to mine is Margaret Jay Jesseewho argues that the novel uses “multiple figures of masking or ‘trying on’ of disguises,” questioning the distinction between May and Ellen as representatives of opposing female stereotypes (38). 2. For example, Elizabeth Ammons suggests that the novel is a tale of the victory of the “angel” over the “dark lady”: one in which the opposing qualities of Ellen and May serve to reinforce patriarchal representations of “angelic” and “monstrous” female identities. She further argues that the novel is about the male who prefers the innocent “fair–haired child woman” (May) to the experienced, dark–haired, “sexually vibrant, passionate” one (Ellen), suggesting the theme of “male fear of mature women” (13). Referring to Ellen as the direct opposite of “innocent” May, David Holbrook also describes Ellen as “a guileless temptress” (13). 3. There are many other cogent studies of the New Woman and New Woman fiction. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine

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Showalter (London: Virago, 1989); Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997); Lyn Pykett, ed., The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin–de–siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1978).

ABSTRACTS

Critical debate pertaining to the themes of gender and marriage in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) has often focused on May and Ellen as the representation of two contrasting images of female identity: “angelic” and “monstrous” respectively. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic novel, this article offers an alternative reading. In particular, it aims to examine the previously overlooked complexities in the novel’s decentered narrative, notably its dialogic form in which a multiplicity of contending voices and perspectives on women, marriage and divorce are juxtaposed. By adopting this theoretical and methodological stance, the article offers fresh analytical perspectives on the novel and argues that, by depicting Ellen’s performances of shifting subjectivities (the rebel who is seeking a divorce, the unfortunate victim of an unfaithful husband, the lover who desires a new life), the novel not only undermines the dominant ideologies of Victorian womanhood but also disrupts the image of the radical, independent New Woman who challenges social conventions.

INDEX

Keywords: Bakhtin, dialogic novel, Edith Wharton, the New Woman

AUTHOR

SEVINC ELAMAN-GARNER University of Manchester

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“Nothing Can Touch You as Long as You Work”: Love and Work in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and For Whom the Bell Tolls

Lauren Rule Maxwell

1 Toward the end of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden (1986), Catherine Bourne lashes out at her husband, David, by trying to diminish the thing that is most important to him—his work. Upset that he is no longer writing their honeymoon narrative, Catherine disparages his writings as “dreary dismal little stories about [his] adolescence with [his] bogus father,” calling them “pointless anecdotes” (210). After the heated exchange, David considers Catherine’s words, registering that “she was trying to hurt him” and telling himself that “you must try to grow up again and face what you have to face without being irritable or hurt that someone did not understand and appreciate what you wrote… you’ve worked well and nothing can touch you as long as you work” (211). Although David thinks that nothing can touch him or his work, over the course of the novel we see that David’s relationships with those around him do affect him and his work in powerful ways. Throughout The Garden of Eden, we see that David’s assertion that “nothing can touch you as long as you work” is simply not true; he imagines his writing, his “work,” to be a life’s work that necessarily responds to seeks connection with others.

2 Analyzing the depictions of work in The Garden of Eden reveals why writing and the relationships David derives from it matter so much to him; David “cared about many things,” but he “cared about the writing more than anything else” (216). When David is conflicted over his feelings for Catherine and Marita, the woman whom Catherine has introduced into their relationship, he reminds himself to “remember to do the work. The work is what you have left” (127). David insists upon the importance of his writing and calls it “work” throughout the novel because it is a type of vocation for him, a calling to create a shared experience, to draw others into his art. David’s does not engage in the solitary task of writing, as some critics have suggested, merely because

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by doing so he can remove himself from interpersonal conflicts. Through his writing, he hopes to make sense of the world for himself and for those who read his work, “sharing what… he had believed could not and should not be shared” (203).

3 The coordinated bridge-blowing in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is another shared experience that one might believe “could not and should not be shared,” but this unified act of resistance changes the characters involved and their view of the world, creating an amazing sense of connectedness. Anselmo, one of the members of the Republican resistance, has the following thoughts as he waits for the explosion: And now, as he crouched behind the marker stone with the looped wire in his hand and another loop of it around his wrist and the gravel beside the road under his knees he was not lonely nor did he feel in any way alone. He was one with the wire in his hand and one with the bridge, and one with the charges the Inglés had placed. He was one with the Inglés still working under the bridge and he was one with all of the battle and with the Republic. (443)

4 The Inglés is Robert Jordan, the novel’s protagonist, who designs the plan for the explosion and whose work is the focus of the novel. At the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls, after Jordan is fatally wounded, he reflects on his own connectedness—he is “completely integrated now” (471)—and he thinks, “I hate to leave, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had” (467). Robert Jordan uses his “talent” to plan, draw, and execute the destruction of bridges for the greater “good,” the Republican cause. This is what he refers to throughout the novel as his “work.”

5 It is this work that has brought Robert Jordan back to Spain; as he tells Pilar, “I am very preoccupied with my work.” In fact, Jordan insists that he will enjoy “the things of life” only when they do not “interfere with my work” (91). For Whom the Bell Tolls—in addition to being a love story and a story about the Spanish Civil War, as many critics have claimedi—is also at its heart a story about work. For Whom the Bell Tolls asks the reader to consider what it means to commit oneself to a life’s work, the degree to which one’s work relies on others, and how one’s work makes a meaningful impact on others’ lives. A man true to his word, Jordan allows himself to experience what many readers would describe as the finest thing of his life—his love with Maria—because she takes pains not to “interfere with” his work. On the contrary, Maria supports his work and even enriches its meaning.

6 Hemingway’s entire oeuvre—and many of the biographical examinations of his life —can be read in terms of the tension between love and work. Although many critics have focused on sexuality, androgyny, gender identification in Hemingway’s fiction,ii the theme of work and the relationship between work and romance have been largely neglected. This essay focuses on two novels that center on their protagonists’ work, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Garden of Eden, and suggests that the dynamics between male-female relationships and work are essential for understanding Hemingway’s imagination of the male artist. The essay investigates why the protagonists devote themselves to their work and explains how the relationship of the protagonists’ love interests to their work helps define them. The “work” of these novels differs, but in both cases it is an art that substantiates the protagonists’ masculinity in part by forming meaningful, lasting connections with other people; this is true even in the case of Robert Jordan, whose art is destruction by design.iii In these novels, Hemingway also explores the ironies of work. In addition to the irony of Jordan’s bridge-blowing, another irony of the work seen both novels is that the artist must separate himself

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from those closest to him in order to execute the work and, through the work, inspire others.

7 Although the theme of work dominates these two novels, there is relatively little written about the topic. Scholars have addressed work in other of Hemingway’s writings, but these studies have not focused primarily on the effects of romantic attachments on work.iv In “‘Working on the Farm’: Hemingway’s Work Ethic in The Sun Also Rises,”Judy Hen has focused on the work ethic of Jake Barnes. Highlighting Hemingway’s own commitment to a Protestant work ethic, Hen associates that ethic with Jake, who serves as a counterpoint to the community of American expatriates. Donald Pizer likewise examines Jake’s work ethicin his book American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment. Pizer notes that Jake “works hard,” but says that his “circuit of productivity is broken… by his wound in all its symbolic force” (79). Pizer also discusses work as a theme of A Moveable Feast, stating that “the idea of work functions successfully as a literary construct.”

8 In this essay, I focus on David Bourne and Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s characters most vocal about doing their work well, because they collectively depict the importance of the male artist’s negotiating relationships. These novels, like other of Hemingway’s writings, depict art as a masculine pursuit. Linda Wagner-Martin is right in noting that women “are never central to any Hemingway work on their own terms,” that even for “all of our interest in Catherine and Marita in The Garden of Eden, David Bourne is the narrative center of that novel, and the women are key only in their relationship to David” (“Romance of Desire” 57). That is true, too, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, where Robert Jordan, not Pilar or Maria, is the central character. But Hemingway’s depiction of work and his treatment of gender dynamics surrounding work are more complicated than they first appear. Even though Hemingway centers these novels on the male characters, he does not align all work with masculinity. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example, Hemingway takes great care to show the value of Pilar’s work; without her leadership, Robert Jordan could not complete his mission, and without her nurturing, the band and individuals within it would fall apart. “Without the woman,” Jordan clarifies, “there is no organization nor any discipline here and with the woman it can be very good” (63). What good exists in the novel can emerge because Pilar has worked to bring it about, and this good she fosters despite the efforts of her own partner, Pablo, to undermine her. But ultimately the design of the bridge blowing, the art of destruction, is left to Robert Jordan. Like Pilar must enforce boundaries between herself and Pablo to run the camp, Jordan must separate himself from Maria to execute his design. Focusing on the dynamics of Jordan’s relationship with Maria and how it contributes to his art, this essay suggests that their relationship is crucial for Jordan’s understanding the importance of his work and for our understanding of Hemingway’s conception of the male artist.

9 In recent years, most critical discussions of male artistry in Hemingway’s works have centered on The Garden of Eden’s David Bourne. The Garden of Eden has received a great deal of critical attention due to its undermining of traditional gender roles, but reading the novel alongside For Whom the Bell Tolls suggests that it also complicates our reading of masculinity in Hemingway’s works by redefining Hemingway’s portrait of the male artist, showing the importance of his relationships to his humanistic pursuit. In The Garden of Eden, David Bourne’s work—his writing, his art—is alternately hampered by and supported by his relationships with two women, Catherine and

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Marita. Looking at David’s work/love dynamic with these two women provides a useful starting point for examining Hemingway’s depictions of the relationship between love and work because the effects the women have on David’s ability to work well are so strikingly different: While Catherine tries to redirect David’s writing and ultimately destroys what he considers to be some of his best work, Marita appreciates his work, gives him constructive feedback on it, and leaves him free to do it. Most critics have typified the women as being either good or bad partners, but I would suggest that their contributions to David’s work are more complicated than that. By analyzing how these women respond to David’s writing and what they value as art, we can see how they both influence him as an artist.

10Both women want to be involved with David’s writing to some degree because, ultimately, what he writes defines them, too. While they both admire David’s writing ability, they have very different opinions about the things he chooses to write: Marita is deeply moved by it and appreciates its aesthetic value, whereas Catherine sees it as a distraction from what she thinks David should be writing, the story of their love. Catherine belittles the pieces inspired by David’s past as “dreary dismal little stories,” but Marita “loved” the book David wrote; she says that when she read it, long before meeting David, “It made me cry” (220, 111). Catherine knows that David is a very good writer, but in her eyes the two main problems to his work are its focus and the broad audience it engages. Instead of writing the stories that compel him, Catherine tells David to write a narrative account of their experimentation with sexuality and gender during their honeymoon. She emphasizes her desire for control when she gloats over her plans for his writing: “I’m so proud of it already and we won’t have any copies for sale and none for reviewers and then there’ll never be clippings and you’ll never be self conscious and we’ll always have it just for us” (77-78). She uses terms of “we” and “us” to describe the narrative she wants David to write, but it is not the story he wants to compose. In saying that David will “never be self conscious,” Catherine betrays her fear that David will have an identity and public life apart from her. In part because of this fear, Catherine not only wants to shift the focus of David’s writing to their relationship, but also wants to become his sole and ideal reader.

11But Catherine’s plan for David’s writing is ill-conceived because he is already an established author who finds great satisfaction in connecting with his readers—having an audience is important to him. He was a successful writer before he met her; even people who don’t know him read his books and are moved by them (as Marita was). The clippings suggest that David is a writer like young Hemingway, an up-and-coming author. We know that David takes pride in the good reviews and the “sensational” reception to his work because he saves the clippings (23), and he is a professional writer in the sense that he earns his living from his books. Although we see David calculating his earnings in the second chapter, we get the sense that the money is not of utmost importance to him—the work itself, writing truly, is. David’s assessment of the value of his art derives from the extent to which he can overcome artifice—to make the world of his writing come alive for the reader so that it no longer seems constructed, “to make it so that whoever read it would feel it was truly happening as it was read” (201). As a writer devoted to his craft, David strives to make connections with people through his words, to make a shared experience. By demanding that David write only for her, Catherine puts her desire for a unique intimate experience before that effect of David’s work that most fulfills him: creating connections with others.

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12David acknowledges early on Catherine’s jealously of his work and her disdain for his public notoriety. In the beginning of David and Catherine’s marriage, he thinks about his upcoming work and worries about its effect on their marriage: “It would be good to work again but that would come soon enough as he well knew and he must remember to be unselfish about it and make it as clear as he could that the enforced loneliness was regrettable and that he was not proud of it. He was sure she would be fine about it and she had her own resources but he hated to think of it, the work, starting when they were as they were now” (14).

13In this passage we see the demands of time and space—the “enforced loneliness”— required for David’s work. David tries to tell himself that Catherine has “her own resources,” but Catherine makes clear that she does not have the same type of resources as David. She tells him to “write for me too” (77), lamenting that she cannot write the way he can: “I know wonderful things to write and I can’t even write a letter that isn’t stupid. I never wanted to be a painter or writer until I came to this country. Now it’s just like being hungry all the time and there’s nothing you can ever do about it” (53). Although David tells himself that Catherine “would be fine about” his work, he betrays the anxiety that she will resent his isolated work environment and private acts of creation, which she resents even more because she herself is a frustrated artist. When David receives a package of clippings about his book, reminders of his work that threaten Catherine, she says, “I’m frightened by them and all the things they say. How can we be us and have the things we have and do what we do and you be this that’s in the clippings?” (24). Even before David puts pencil to paper and begins his writing at le Grau du Roi, it is clear that his work and his identity as a writer are incompatible with Catherine’s vision for their relationship.

14When David begins to write again, he insists that he needs a space of his own in which to work.v Before they secure another room for David’s workspace, Catherine asks David if he “could work here in the room if [she] were out” until they “found some place” that could be his own (37). Both Catherine and Marita realize the importance of this space for David to find what he repeatedly calls the “clarity,” to attain, in Miller’s words, the “state of poise” required to craft his sentences well (14, 204). “Know how complicated it is,” David tells himself, “then state it simply” (37). Doing the work, presenting the complicated realities of life in simple language, takes discipline, and David is better able to exercise this discipline in a space without the distractions of his lovers, or even food or drink, around him. After he “work[s] for a time,” he carefully puts “his work away” until the next session, locking it in a suitcase (42-43). The door of “his work room” serves as the portal between his inner and outer worlds (138).

15But even before he sits down to write, David starts preparing himself mentally for his work by distancing himself from those around him and the concerns that weigh on him. We are told that David’s “coldness had come back as the time for working moved closer” (a coldness that is also associated with Robert Jordan’s approach to his work). When Marita frets over David’s coldness, he tells her not to worry: “I’m only getting ready to work” (194). While Marita accepts the coldness as necessary for his work, Catherine resents it, saying “[a]ny girl would be discouraged and frankly I’m not going to put up with it” (216). Catherine concedes that Marita is more supportive of what David needs to work, simply stating, “[s]he took care of you [David] today and I didn’t” (210). The distance David creates from his life and loved ones allows him to work, to enter the narrative space of his stories. In this way, he becomes detached from present

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time and space. But afterwards, and “[a]s soon as he started to think beyond his work, everything that he had locked out by the work came back to him” (108). He mentally locks out and physically blocks out distractions by entering his workspace and then returns to his domestic life. He allows Marita greater access to his work than he does Catherine, letting her read the work because she “really knows” it (204). David relays this access in terms of proximity and entrance when he tells her, “I’m going down to my room where I work…. There’s a door to yours that bolts on each side,” and he “unlock[s] the door of his room and then unbolt[s] the door between the rooms” (126). When he is working, though, he must be alone; he “must go back into his own country, the one that Catherine was jealous of and that Marita loved and respected” (193).

16Catherine is jealous of this narrative space, described here as David’s “country,” because it is associated with the writing he wants to do, the African stories he has to “write now or lose” (93). Catherine, however, wants David to write the story of their lives, the honeymoon narrative that would bear witness to the “dark magic” of the gender transformations she has introduced in their relationship (30). Though he does write several pages of the honeymoon narrative to appease Catherine, it is not the “better” book he has in mind to write (34); it is not his real work, though Catherine would like it to be.vi Ultimately, David tells Catherine he “is through with the narrative,” and this is seen as a betrayal by Catherine, who calls his abandoning their project “dirty” (188). Catherine is indignant when David tells her that he “didn’t want to get the work mixed up”; she insists that “the stories are just [his] way of escaping [his] duty” (190). Because Catherine is not a writer, she relies on David to represent her vision by composing the narrative; she tells David that there is “nothing except through yourself” (53).vii

17Although Catherine respects David’s talent and wants to support his writing, she undermines his work by insisting that it be about her.viii She admits more than once that she “was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again” (54, 143). The simile she uses to describe her condition is telling in that it reveals both her frustrations as an artist in her own right and her investment in David’s writing the narrative: “like a painter and I was my own picture” (54). In this view, art does not just depict life; art becomes it. As this performance plays out, Catherine is not sure what she’s created; she worries that as time passed, “the colors started to be false” (162). Catherine has created a new identity for herself, but that identity is false because it is dependent on another. To complete her vision, she must change David, both his private work and his public identity as an author.

18Once David gives up the honeymoon narrative, he is compelled to write the “story that he had always put off writing,” one that offers its own set of challenges, but one that he nonetheless knows and can master. He has moved from unknown territory to his own country—from Catherine’s personal narrative to his true work.ix With this new focus, he is able to work well, working for so long that he missed breakfast (109). After he emerges from this writing session and Catherine and Marita see him for the first time that day, it is Marita who asks, “Did you work well, David?” To this Catherine replies, “That’s being a good wife…I forgot to ask” (109). Marita repeats, “Did you work well, David?” (110). And Catherine answers, “Of course he did…That’s the only way he ever works, stupid” before David can answer, adding, “We didn’t work at all. We just bought things and ordered things and made scandal” (110).

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19Perhaps more than any other conversation in the novel among the members of the threesome, this scene reveals the women’s varying attitudes toward David’s work. Marita demonstrates her commitment to supporting David’s writing and to herself being “happy the way [he] said to be” (111). Catherine is more interested in her own performance and diminishes David’s identity as an author; she asserts that she doesn’t “think he’s a writer when I kiss him” and asks Marita if she thought “of him as a writer when [she] kissed him and liked it so much?” (112). Catherine implies that Marita’s loving David because—not in spite of—his being an artist is somehow disingenuous. Marita’s desire to put David’s art first becomes evident at the end of this conversation with Marita’s saying, “Nothing that I do is important.” In Marita’s assessment, David is the one doing the serious work here. Although Catherine soon after tells David, “you’re my true partner,” it is clear that David doesn’t want a “true partner,” but an understanding and supportive lover.

20As the novel goes on, Marita assumes Catherine’s place (115). It is Marita who will ask, after David’s work sessions, “Did you work well?,” and when David confirms he did, she will say, “I’m very happy then” (139). Marita will be the one “deeply moved” by a story both “[b]ecause David wrote it” and “because it is really first rate” (156). And it is Marita about whom he would think, “Christ, it was good to finish today and have her there. Marita there with no damned jealousy of the work and have her know what you were reaching for and how far you went. She really knows and it’s not faked” (204). What David needs is a companion who respects his work and honors his making time and space for it; Marita not only meets this need but also goes beyond that by understanding the importance of his writing as an aesthetic and humanistic undertaking. She is a companion who, instead of hampering his work, actually makes his writing better.

21That Marita both inspires and appreciates David’s work as art becomes evident toward the end of the novel when he finishes the African story. After telling David once again that she loves him, Marita asks, “Can’t I read it so I can feel like you do and not just happy because I was happy like I was your dog?” David gives her the key, something “he had never done…before with anyone and it was against everything he believed about writing” (203). This giving of the key represents a new level of intimacy with David and highlights the new role of a female companion in his artistic life. He now has a compulsion to share the work and a vulnerability in allowing it to be evaluated as art: “He could not help wanting to read it with her and he could not help sharing what he had never shared and what he had believed could not and should not be shared.” The hard-to-write story was also hard-to-share, but he is compelled to do so because of the profound connection with Marita, who tells him she is “so very happy and prouder than you are.” Although David “felt the story was good,” he “felt even better about Marita. Neither had been diminished by the sharpening of perception he had now, and the clarity had come with no sadness” (204). What David experiences with Marita is what Robert Jordan experiences with Maria—a “clarity,” understanding, and “sharpening of perception” about the quality of his art that confirms that the work to produce it matters.

22While David is feeling great about Marita, he muses that “Catherine was doing whatever she was doing and would do whatever she would do” (204). It makes sense that David distances himself from Catherine; she does much to frustrate and undermine his work. She mocks his identity as an author; claims to “never interfere” but then

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tears the notebook with the Africa story in two; calls him “a monster” and tells him “I hate you” because of what he wrote about his own past before he met her; taunts him with her financial support of his work;x enters his workspace and reads his work without his permission; and ultimately burns the stories he has worked so hard to create along with the clippings about his writing (156, 158). When looking at Catherine on the one hand and Marita on the other, it might seem that one partner is clearly the destroyer of David’s work and that the other is the supporter of it. But the influences of the two women are not that clear-cut. For all that Catherine did to spite David’s work, she did foster his creative energy.xi

23David’s most compelling writing in the novel, the elephant story, can be read as both a reaction against and a depiction of Catherine’s influence on his life and work. Suzanne del Gizzo has argued that the “hunt story… represents the risk and danger associated with the writer’s need to cultivate empathy, since the bull elephant that is the object of that empathy is killed by David’s father and the story so carefully remembered about the elephant is destroyed by Catherine” (193). Catherine is clearly associated with the elephant in the story—as she sympathizes with the elephant’s fate, we sympathize with hers—but the elephant also represents, as del Gizzo asserts, “the challenge, mystery, and danger of authorship” (194). While I agree that the story represents all of these aspects of writing, what I believe is most important to understand about the depiction of authorship in the story is the irony of the emotional impact of David’s (and, by extension, Hemingway’s own) writing: that while the product, the work, causes Catherine to feel empathy and a sense of connection, his very act of composing it, the act of working, is brought about by distance and disconnection from her and her demands upon his writing. This tension is one that causes David’s relationship with Catherine to suffer and ultimately fall apart, but it allows him a deep level of understanding about distance and intimacy that allows him to produce his best work.

24Critics have noted the troubled relationship of David’s writing to his marriage, but they tend to see the work of writing and relationships as oppositional; I argue that they don’t have to be. Robert E. Fleming, for example, writes that Hemingway’s depiction of “the act of creating literature” casts David as a “successful artist but unsuccessful husband” (142-43). “From his depiction of David as a triumphant young writer to a nearly defeated one struggling against writer’s block,” Fleming explains, “Hemingway deals with the working problems of the artist” (145). Although I do not see David’s writing as a “narcotic” or “escape mechanism” as Fleming does (144), I do agree that the struggle to work well while maintaining relationships is the problem to which the novel devotes the most attention.

25According to Rose Marie Burwell, this struggle is also central to the manuscript ending of the novel—the 39 unpublished pages that appear after the point where Tom Jenks, who edited the published version of the book for Scribner’s, chose to close the novel: “those pages consist primarily of statements by Marita about how she will handle David like a trainer handles a big race horse, and of David’s reiteration of how difficult it is for him to get out of the world of his writing and into the world of living human relationships” (105). This unpublished ending, further complicating the dynamic between Marita and David, emphasizes the negotiation of love and work that I see as central to the published novel. If Jenks chose not to omit these indications of

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Marita’s increasing influence from the posthumously published novel, the importance of negotiating relationships for the male artist would be even more apparent.

26In deciding to remain with Marita and distancing himself from Catherine, David acknowledges that he and Catherine have different needs. In the manuscript, he concludes, “She needs the sun as I need to work” (qtd. in Burwell 104). But Catherine needs love even more, as Burwell suggests; she wants a connection to give her “wholeness”: Catherine pursues some wholeness in striving for connection with what the male principle signifies for her… she wants a love relationship with David. For him this pattern is significantly reversed. He wants simply to write; and when he can do that, David needs human companionship only as part of a menu of sensations that restore the writer—eating, drinking, making love, sun tanning, and swimming—all of which were once part of his and Catherine’s transformative endeavors, but are now merely sensations and necessary rest from the writing. (116)

27 In this passage Burwell describes Catherine’s needing “connection” and David’s desire to write, implying that David does not need love. I am not convinced of that, and furthermore I would argue that his desire to write is also in fact motivated by connection. The dedication to work, in my mind, does not mean that David doesn’t need to connect with others, that he “needs human companionship only as part of a menu of sensations that restore the writer,” but instead that writing is precisely the way in which he forms the connections that give him the greatest satisfaction. David’s changing relationships with others and his work in the novel challenge critical interpretations that link Hemingway’s depictions of the artist to machismo bravado and attention solely to the objects of art, instead gesturing toward an artistic humanism based on relational ethics.

28In addition to depicting writing as work, The Garden of Eden shows that relationships take work, too—even more work if one partner is dedicated to his or her art. In fact, Catherine demonstrates the work relationships take with her own use of the word “work.” Although David uses “work” almost exclusively to discuss his writing, Catherine uses the word “work” to describe actions she takes to improve her relationships with David and Marita—she tries to work out problems. In one instance, Catherine pushes David to go to Madrid even after he has said that he wants “to finish this story first” and that he “can’t work any harder” on it than he already is. The discussion that follows is full of “work”: Marita argues that David is “working” and cannot go now, and Catherine responds, “He could work in Spain. I bet I could write well in Spain if I was a writer.” After Marita chastises Catherine for her lack of conscience, Catherine asks her “to be polite and not interfere when someone is trying to work out what’s best for everyone” (152). Earlier in the novel Catherine assures David and Marita that “[w]e’ll work out everything” about the particularities of their relationships, including matters of inheritance should anything happen to her (145). That Catherine uses the word “work” in these instances is important because underlying the necessity to work out problems is David’s commitment to his work; the choice of the phrasal verb “work out” suggests that, in Catherine’s eyes, the problems wouldn’t be so bad if the work were out of the picture, or at least if it were not so central to it. By describing the negotiation of needs and wants in terms of work in this scene, Hemingway demonstrates that relationships themselves take work and draws our attention to the many ways that the work affects relationships.

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29“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” Hemingway stated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.xii The “enforced loneliness” we see from David Bourne is something that Hemingway experienced, too. Many studies have noted similarities between Hemingway’s own life and The Garden of Eden, citing Hemingway’s biography and the events in the novel and manuscript.xiii In the essay “The Garden of Eden Revisited,” Valerie Hemingway, who served as Hemingway’s secretary in 1959 when he was working on the novel, writes, “it became apparent to me over the subsequent months that David Bourne was Ernest Hemingway”: Like David every morning Ernest got out of bed, sharpened those pencils, took out his copybooks, and wrote and wrote, happy, tired, hungover, ebullient, depressed, whatever his mood it was cast off, discarded, and as the creative juices began to flow, he entered another world and if we were lucky and it was good enough he left it to us to enjoy forever. (108)

30 There are, no doubt, meaningful correspondences between Hemingway and his character David Bourne, particularly in their approaches to work and struggles involving writing. Linda Patterson Miller explores the possibilities for tracing these correspondences using Hemingway’s own letters in her essay on teaching The Garden of Eden contextually. Noting the novel’s “theme regarding productive and destructive marital roles,” Miller discusses how the letters can lend “understanding of the precarious alignments between husbands and wives and artists” (111-13). Miller explains that “Garden’s exposé of the Bournes’ marital relationship, …in light of the correspondence of Hemingway and his friends, works to advance the novel’s larger concern with writing and the writer’s dilemma: How to get at and record artistically the heart of truth” (113). Using the letters helps illuminate Hemingway’s commitment to writing truly, which is certainly important to the novel.xiv But perhaps the more consuming writer’s dilemma in The Garden of Eden is negotiating how to work well while maintaining relationships, a dilemma that the letters to and from Gerald Murphy reflect. As Miller observes, “Garden’s narrative structure recreates the dueling forces of the artist’s inner sanctum at odds with an outer world that threatens to intrude and destroy. This conflict comprises the novel’s structural tension and its thematic brilliance” (114).

31This tension between the artist’s inner sanctum, which protects the work, and the outer world, which encroaches on it, is present in For Whom the Bell Tolls, too. In fact, the thematic importance of work in For Whom the Bell Tolls becomes much more evident when viewed in the context of The Garden of Eden and David Bourne’s commitment to his work. These two novels, more than any of Hemingway’s others, focus on characters that are preoccupied by their work and want their work to matter. As Hewson notes the “tone and theme” of For Whom the Bell Tolls mark a departure from Hemingway’s earlier novels (“Matter of Love” 171); a major thematic difference is the focus on work.

32Both David Bourne and Robert Jordan are more concerned with their work and its effect on others than their own well-being. David “had lost the capacity of personal suffering, or he thought he had, and only could be hurt truly by what happened to others” (148), and Robert resolves to risk his safety only in the interests of furthering his work: “my obligation is the bridge and to fulfill that, I must take no useless risk of myself until I complete that duty” (63). Both Bourne and Jordan are craftsmen whose work is inspired by and based on past experience. David’s present work revisits his childhood in Africa, and Robert, a Spanish instructor from the States, returns to Spain to aid the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War: “He fought now in this war

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because it had started in a country that he loved and he believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable for all those people who believed in it” (163). “Spain,” Jordan thinks to himself, “was your work and your job was natural and sound. You had worked summers on engineering projects and in the forest service building roads and in the park and learned to handle powder, so the demolition was a sound and normal job too. Always a little hasty, but sound” (165). In these passages, Jordan distinguishes between different levels of destruction, between the demolition of bridges—and the killing and destruction that results from it—and the larger and more ominous destruction of the Spanish Republic, the way of life of the people he has adopted as his own. Jordan, like Bourne, demonstrates a type of relational ethics that applies to his art. The irony is that he designs and carries out the blowing of bridges “for all of those people who believed” in the Republican cause: He destroys physical bridges to preserve others, the social, cultural, and political ties that he deems good and just.

33Because Robert Jordan is so committed to these people, he leaves his university position in Montana and risks everything in his demolition role. He has no fear of dying and subsumes himself and those around him to the larger good he associates with the Republic: “You are instruments to do your duty. There are necessary orders that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn. As it can turn on everything that happens in this war. You have only one thing to do and you must do it” (43). Like David is compelled to write, Jordan is compelled to serve by orchestrating the destruction of bridges, but he does so aware that he is sacrificing a great deal. He tells Pilar that he is not “a very cold boy”— he is just “very preoccupied with [his] work” (91). So although he “[v]ery much” enjoys “the things of life,” he will not allow them “to interfere with [his] work.” He applies this discipline to the realm of romance, too, telling Golz at the beginning of the novel that “there is no time for girls” and explaining to Pilar later that “I like them very much, but I have not given them much importance” (7, 91). Pilar pushes him on this subject and says, “I think you lie,” when he states, “I have not found one that moved me as they say should move you” (91). Pilar knows, she has read it in his hand, that Maria does and will move him, and this prediction plays out when the earth moves when they make love.

34Although Maria and Robert Jordan have only a short time together, she transforms his life, changing the way he views everything, and causes him to reconsider his work: “Two days ago I never knew that Pilar, Pablo, nor the rest existed, he thought. There was no such thing as Maria in the world. It was certainly a much simpler world. I had instructions from Golz that were perfectly clear and seemed perfectly possible to carry out although they presented certain difficulties and involved certain consequences” (228). The difficulties and consequences are compounded after he becomes attached to these people, particularly Maria, whom he loves as he has loved nothing before: “I did not know that I could ever feel what I felt, he thought. Nor that this could happen to me. I would like to have it for my whole life. You will. You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now…So now do not worry, take what you have, and do your work and you will have a long life and a merry one” (169). He tells Maria that “[n]o other thing [than their being together] has importance,” and in the wake of their lovemaking, their “alliance against death,” he “held her tight as though she were all of life… and it was true” (262).xv But when daylight comes, so does the cavalryman he has to kill, and Maria “had no place in his

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life now” (267). This does not mean that Jordan does not love Maria or that the truth from the night before ceased to be true. Instead, we see that at that moment Robert has to work alone, and Maria, like similarly named Marita in The Garden of Eden, respects the need for space and knows it must be so. He tells Maria, “One does not do that [work] and love all at the same moment” (270).

35Invested in the same cause and committed to the same degree as Jordan, Maria wants to help him do his work, and ultimately she realizes that helping him means leaving him alone when he is working and helping him detach from the work when he’s done. After the encounter with the cavalryman, she asks, “Can I go with thee?,” and then insists, “I’m coming,” saying, “I could hold the legs of the gun in the way thou told Anselmo” (267). “Get thee back now,” Jordan tells her, “There is much work to do” (267). Maria would like to learn more about his work, which he has explained to and diagramed for her before; the night before the bridge blowing, she asks: “Should we speak of tomorrow and of thy work? I would like to be intelligent about thy work” (342). But Robert needs to escape from the pressures of what he knows will be a doomed mission and instead wants to fantasize about the future. In this scene and many others, Maria keeps Jordan from worrying about his work. At the beginning of the novel, he tells himself not to worry, that “[t]o worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult,” reminding himself that he “had only one thing to do and that was what we should think about and must think it out clearly” (8-9). But as it becomes clearer and clearer to Jordan that these are “bad orders” and that there will be great casualties from his mission, he tells himself to “[t]hink about something else” (43). He thinks about “the girl Maria” then and on many occasions like this one when he tells himself, “you keep your mind too much on your work” (43, 171). Maria both gives him space when he needs to do his work and provides a haven for him when he worries about the work.

36Maria tells Robert, “you must not worry about your work because I will not bother you nor interfere. If there is anything I can do you will tell me” (170). This distance— Maria’s “not bother[ing]” Robert’s work—allows him the clarity that is necessary also for the work of David Bourne. Jordan approaches his work with a detached precision— Pilar draws attention to his being “very cold” in the head, and he registers this coldness himself (91). In a scene that parallels one in The Garden of Eden between Marita and David, Maria asks Robert, “can I help thee with thy work?” (172). “No,” Robert replies, “What I do now I do alone and very coldly in my head.” Although his work is solitary, he does not hide it from Maria, and, when it does not endanger her or the operation, he enjoys her company as he works. While he sits “figuring all the technical part of the bridge-blowing,” Maria sits “beside him and look[s] over his shoulder” (225). In this way, Maria, like Marita in The Garden of Eden, can understand and appreciate what he does.

37Although when he first meets Maria he says, “I have no time for any woman,” we see that her presence in his life makes everything, especially his work, more meaningful (24). But the contrary is also true, that the work makes him better equipped for love, better able to see the connection to the individual person and well as the collective people: ‘Do you know that until I met thee I have never asked for anything? Nor wanted anything? Nor thought of anything except the movement and the winning of this war? Truly I have been very pure in my ambitions. I have worked much and now I love thee and,’ he said it now in a complete embracing of all that would not be, ‘I

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love thee as I love all that I have fought for. I love thee as liberty and dignity and the rights of men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and I love thee more. I love thee very much, rabbit. More than I can tell thee.’ (348)

38 This passage echoes the importance of connectedness seen in the epigraph of For Whom the Bell Tolls, lines from John Donne that begin “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a part of the maine” and end “any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” Robert Jordan’s work, his serving the Republican cause, involves his seeing himself as part of a larger whole. But experiences in the war, both in killing and in loving, show him that everything is much more connected than he first believed. As he lays wounded at the novel’s end, he “was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything,” realizing the bigger picture (471): “He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything” (393). His love with Maria made clear to him just how much he was sacrificing for his work. But in loving Maria he also realized just how important his work was, how much Maria and countless others were suffering, how meaningful was his working for the greater good.

39Although he ultimately wants what is best for the Spanish people, Robert Jordan realizes that his work causes suffering too. At first he had “accept[ed] the idea of demolition as a problem,” so “it [was] only a problem,” but after he realized the human costs he knew “there was plenty that was not so good that went with it,” and he laments that he “took it easily enough” (165). He muses that he “will get rid of all that by writing about it,” telling himself, “Once you write it down it is all gone. It will be a good book if you can write it” (165). Here we see a metafictional aspect of For Whom the Bell Tolls that becomes magnified when compared to The Garden of Eden. Hemingway has written the “good book” that has shown the complexities of this war, including the sacrifices of those who made their life’s work fighting in it, while revealing the connections that bind us all, all of us trying to make meaning of our lives, all of us making a mark of some sort. David Bourne tries to make sense of his own life and the world around him in his writing, and Robert Jordan daydreams that he could do the same if and when he returns to the States: “I am going back and earn my living teaching Spanish as before, and I am going to write a true book. I’ll bet, he said. I’ll bet that will be easy” (163).

40Because Robert has written a book before, an unsuccessful book on Spain, he knows how hard writing is. He wishes he could tell stories like Pilar: “He would try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it… I wish I could write well enough to tell that story, he thought” (134). But Karkov, “the most intelligent man he ever met,” tells him, “I think you write absolutely truly and that is very rare” (231, 248). With this talent, Robert Jordan resembles a young David Bourne or a young Hemingway. He tells himself that he “would write a book when he got through with this. But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew” (248). “I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle them,” he thinks, since the “things he had come to know in this war were not so

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simple” (248). He notes earlier in the novel that “there would be plenty of material to draw them from. There was plenty already. There was too much sometimes” (136).

41 Claiming that the “blowing of a bridge is the supremely apt metaphor for the meaning and cost of the creative process, which makes connections only at the cost of a disengaged breaking of connections,” Robert E. Gajdusek has explored how the blowing of the bridge can be read as metafiction in For Whom the Bell Tolls (50). Seen this way, the blowing of the bridge functions like the shooting of the elephant in The Garden of Eden— both serve as figurative representations of the work of writing. “What is fascinating to observe,” Gajdusek explains, “is that the preparations for his destruction of the bridge are the very strategies and devices that Hemingway the writer must forge…to write the book that can only be completed as he brings his protagonist and cast of characters to the successful completion of their task” (45). Referencing Jordan’s lament “I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned… I was learning fast there at the end” (467), Gajdusek notes that Hemingway was learning, too, learning about how to write on the creation of art (51). I would argue that he was also learning about how to write about the ways love affects that creation. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway provides a screened depiction of the work of writing; he does not tackle writing a novel that presents that work unvarnished until The Garden of Eden, which he never finished. Representing how the work connects with everything was a project that frustrated Hemingway until his death. Like his character Robert Jordan, who acknowledges that “things he had come to know in the war were not so simple,” the manuscript of The Garden of Eden reveals that what Hemingway had come to know about art and working and loving was not so simple, either.

42In a March 1939 letter to Ivan Kashkin, Hemingway explains that, though he would like to go see him, “what I have to do is write” (Selected Letters 481). He at the time is 15,000 words into For Whom the Bell Tolls and insists, “I have to work.” Instead of selling out and writing “shit” for Hollywood, he wants to do meaningful work: “I am going to keep on writing as well as I can and as truly as I can until I die.” After thanking Kashkin for help with translations, he discusses the solitary work of writing: “But you know something funny? The only thing you have to do entirely by yourself and that no one alive can help you with no matter how much they want to (except by leaving you alone) is to write.” Hemingway felt the tension between his creative needs and personal relationships his entire life. In an ironic inversion of the Donne epigraph to For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway felt the need to isolate himself in order to create the work that connected him so powerfully to his readers.When things were “foul,” he just kept writing (Selected Letters 473). “You have to climb up in that old tower to do your work every so often,” he tells Arnold Gingrich, “even if the flood keeps rising until the seat of your pants is wet. A writer has to write and beyond all other things it can make you feel good when it comes out right” (Selected Letters 473). As Hemingway’s fiction and letters show, he was a writer truly devoted to his work, a writer who struggled to find a mate who inspired and did not detract from his writing. With Marita and Maria, Hemingway depicts partners who allow the artist to work, support his art, and make the work of art more meaningful. These novels are not merely love stories, but more complicated depictions of how love affects work. And as is true of Hemingway himself, it is the work at the heart of For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Garden of Eden that makes their characters, their loves, and the novels themselves so compelling.

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Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Churchwell, Sarah. “ ‘$4000 a screw’: The Prostituted Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. European Journal of American Culture 24.2 (2005): 105-129. Print. del Gizzo, Suzanne. “Tracking the Elephant: David’s African Childhood in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.” Hemingway and Africa. Ed. Miriam B. Mandel. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. 176-198. Print.

Eby, Carl. Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Print.

Gajdusek, Robert E. “Is He Building a Bridge or Blowing One?: The Repossession of Text by the Author in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The Hemingway Review 11.2 (Spring 1992): 45-51. Print.

Fleming, Robert E. “Hemingway’s Later Fiction: Breaking New Ground.” The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson, 128-148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Banquet Speech.” 1954. Web. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-speech.html

---. Death in the Afternoon. 1932. New York: Scribner, 1996. Print.

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---. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner, 1986. Print.

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Hen, Judy. “‘Working on the Farm’: Hemingway’s Work Ethic in The Sun Also Rises.” Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy. Ed. James Nagel. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. 165-178. Print.

Hewson, Marc. “A Matter of Love or Death: Hemingway’s Developing Psychosexuality in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Studies in the Novel 36.2 (Summer 2004): 170-184. Print.

---. “Memory and Manhood: Troublesome Recollections in The Garden of Eden.” Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory. Ed. Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2010. 3-17. Print.

Jones, Robert B. “Mimesis and Metafiction in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.” The Hemingway Review 7.1 (Fall 1987): 2-13. Print.

Josephs, Allen. “Hemingway’s Spanish Sensibility.” The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson, 221-242. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.

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Monteiro, George. “Grace, Good Works, and the Hemingway Ethic.” The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era. Ed. Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997. 73-90. Print.

Miller, Linda Patterson. “‘In the Stream of Life’: Teaching The Garden of Eden Contextually.” The Hemingway Review30.1 (Fall 2010): 107-115. Print.

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NOTES i. Linda Wagner-Martin argues in “The Romance of Desire in Hemingway’s Fiction” that “the general reader wanted…a good love story, and Hemingway learned increasingly to write that. Whether in the guise of a war novel or bullfight adventure, Hemingway’s real subject was eroticism. And the form he needed to tell that story, to entice the general reader, was the romance” (55). She asserts that For Whom the Bell Tolls “concentrates on that narrative line,” that “narrative attention focuses almost entirely on the Maria-Jordan relationship” (66). In “Hemingway’s Spanish Sensibility,” Allen Josephs views For Whom the Bell Tolls as both a war story and a love story: “Hemingway seems to have had two goals in mind as he sat down to write For Whom the Bell Tolls. On one hand he wanted to write about the specifics of the war” and on the other he wanted “to write a great romantic war novel…a love story between the American volunteer Robert Jordan and the Spanish girl Maria with the real war as background” (236-37). ii. See, for example, Carl Eby’s Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood.

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iii. The OED has many definitions of art, beginning with “Skill; its display, application, or expression,” and including “Skill in the practical application of the principles of a particular field of knowledge or learning; technical skill,” “A practical pursuit or trade of a skilled nature, a craft; an activity that can be achieved or mastered by the application of specialist skills,” “Skill in an activity regarded as governed by aesthetic as well as organizational principles,” and “The expression or application of creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting, drawing, or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” All of these definitions fit the work of both David Bourne and Robert Jordan. iv. In “‘Working on the Farm’: Hemingway’s Work Ethic in The Sun Also Rises,”Judy Hen has focused on the work ethic of Jake Barnes. Highlighting Hemingway’s own commitment to a Protestant work ethic, Hen associates that ethic with Jake, whom, she argues, serves as a counterpoint to the community of American expatriates. Donald Pizer likewise examines Jake’s work ethicin his book American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment. Pizer notes that Jake “works hard,” but says that his “circuit of productivity is broken…by his wound in all its symbolic force” (79). Pizer also discusses work as a theme of A Moveable Feast, stating that “the idea of work functions successfully as a literary construct.” v. Cf. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. vi. Amy Lovell Strong proposes that the “narrative” is, in fact, a more important text than the stories are; characterizing Catherine’s “deconstructive” behavior, she calls Catherine’s burning of the stories “acts of self-preservation” (192). vii. In “Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Writing with the Body,” Kathy Willingham argues that Catherine is an artist whose art is in fact frustrated by her reliance on David as a scribe. viii. As many critics have noted, Hemingway associated this behavior with Zelda, whom he claimed hampered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. In a September 1929 letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway tells him “how glad I am you are getting the book done,” warning him of “giving up [the] writing” for those who “depreciate all work and think the only thing is to go to pot gracefully and expensively” (Selected Letters 304-05). ix. Many scholars have argued that David’s beginning the African stories marks a commitment to his writing; Robert Jones is typical: “David Bourne’s resolve to put aside the honeymoon narrative and write the elephant story symbolizes the reclamation of his identity as a man and as a writer” (6). x. Finances were on the mind of Hemingway, too. As Robert W. Trogdon demonstrates in “Money and Marriage: Hemingway’s Self-Censorship in For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls without expletives with the hope of Book-of-the-Month Club publication, which would give him financial independence from his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, and the ability to marry the woman who would become his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. xi. Marc Hewson argues that Catherine does “reenergize[] him creatively” through her “inversions” (“Memory” 10). Robin Silbergleid points out that the “timing of David’s return to the African stories” begins “as Catherine’s experimentation the gender peaks and she invites Marita into their marriage,” spurring “David’s psychological need to write the stories” (104). Kathy Willingham might overstate Catherine’s contributions when she claims that “contrary to critical assumptions,” Catherine “does not victimize the male protagonist,” that “Catherine enriches David’s life; she does not destroy it” (60). But Willingham rightly points out that David gains something valuable from Catherine’s enabling him “to see beyond restrictive binaries” (60). xii. “Ernest Hemingway’s Banquet Speech,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-speech.html xiii. For a biographical account of “the fluidity of the author’s self as it developed through his relationships with the women he married,” see Linda Wagner-Martin’s Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life (ix).

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xiv. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explains, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things” (153-54). xv. See page 103 of Sinclair’s essay for a discussion of the importance of this “alliance.”

ABSTRACTS

Hemingway’s entire oeuvre—and many of the biographical examinations of his life—can be read in terms of the tension between love and work. Although much has been written on sexuality, androgyny, and gender identification in Hemingway’s fiction, the theme of work and the relationship between work and romance have been largely neglected. This essay focuses on two novels that center on their protagonists’ work, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Garden of Eden, and suggests that the dynamics between male-female relationships and work are essential for understanding Hemingway’s imagination of the male artist. The essay investigates why the protagonists devote themselves to their work and explains how the relationship of the protagonists’ love interests to their work helps define them. The “work” of these novels differs, but in both cases it is an art that substantiates the protagonists’ masculinity in part by forming meaningful, lasting connections with other people; this is true even in the case of Robert Jordan, whose art is destruction by design. Exploring the ironies of work, Hemingway shows that the artist must separate himself from those closest to him in order to execute his work and, through that work, inspire others. The Garden of Eden has received a great deal of critical attention due to its undermining of traditional gender roles, but reading the novel alongside For Whom the Bell Tolls suggests that it further characterizes Hemingway’s depiction of the male artist by showing the importance of his relationships to his humanistic pursuit.

INDEX

Keywords: artist, Ernest Hemingway, humanism, love, masculinity, relationships, work, writing

AUTHOR

LAUREN RULE MAXWELL The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina

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People, Place and Politics: D’Arcy McNickle’s (Re)Valuing of Native American Principles

John L. Purdy

1 Contemporary discussions of issues that revisit the links between environment and socioeconomic conditions often draw upon historical comparisons. Recent financial woes, often referred to as “the Great Recession” in the media, drive comparisons with the Great Depression, the notable, seminal, global economic event of the early 1930s that had such profound formative effects upon the world, history, and our own lives by shaping a generation’s values, ideals and actions.

2 Since it had such myriad effects upon our world, the Great Depression also had an equally profound effect upon literature, where current events and issues were explored and evaluated, and, at the best of times, alternative ways of thinking and living were posited. One of the great works of U.S. literature emerged from this moment: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This classic is concerned about contemporary culture and community, but also the environment, which in the 1930s of the Dust Bowl had been severely damaged through the drive for short-term gain and the achievement of the “American Dream” for a few to the detriment of the many.

3 It is not the purpose of this article to revisit the broad body of literature from the 1930s and the extensive corpus of historical and critical studies that has emerged from it. Instead, it is to explore a “non-canonical” literature that offers other possibilities, and, by doing so, to raise questions for further consideration and discussion using one author’s alternative vision, which emerged from that historical era. Simply put, the readership of the 1930s in the U.S. is not the same as it is today after all the social changes that have transpired since Steinbeck published his novel, and this includes the Civil Rights movement, the “culture wars,” the environmental movement and the expansion of the American literary canon. Therefore, I would like to look at one writer from the 1930s whose work is largely unknown, but whose canon cuts across many of the issues that consumed public discourse in the latter half of the twentieth century, including discussions of the environment. At moments of crisis like the Great

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Depression, there is an enhanced danger of placing an increased burden upon our natural resources and therefore ecosystems, and this impulse is, at its core, an issue of cultural values and social justice.

4 The subject of this study is the author D’Arcy McNickle. Born in 1904 in St. Ignatius, Montana, McNickle descended from cultures that have lived in North America for tens of thousands of years through “sustainable” means. A Métis (mixedblood of Cree/French and Irish descent), he lived in that rural Montana ranching and farming community until 1913, at which time he—like so many other Native children across the country—was shipped off to federal boarding school in Oregon: the Salem Indian Training School, later known as Chemawa Indian School. After finishing his three-year enrollment, he returned home for a short time to live with his mother and her second husband. In 1918, he moved with his family to Langley, Washington, where they lived for three years before returning, once more, to Montana.

5 The year of their departure is an interesting one as a barometer of the political climate of Montana in the era in which McNickle came of age. In 1918, 79 Montanans, largely from rural areas and the working class, were arrested, tried, and convicted under the state’s infamous sedition law.i Some of those imprisoned were members of the Industrial Workers of the World. All were critical of the government, three of these in print, and many were of German or Austrian descent. Since the country was at war with Germany, this reactionary law reflects that historical moment and public sentiment, but also—like so many others in the country’s history, perhaps the present included—it provides an event that brings into sharp relief the tensions between differing visions of the country and its citizens, one staunchly conservative and nationalistic and the other liberal and egalitarian. For this discussion, it also marks a moment when a government’s laws were imposed upon a marginalized population as the result of military conflict. At once citizen and not-citizen, whose first culture and language marked them as “different,” those immigrants imprisoned would, ironically enough, find much in common with the populations of Indian reservations throughout the West, or with other immigrant communities today.

6 Like the German immigrants/activists, McNickle’s family was not native to Montana. His grandfather, Isidore Plante Parenteau, moved his family from an area of Canada that had been embroiled in an armed conflict between the Métis and the Canadian government for quite some time. Variously referred to as “The Northwest Rebellion” and “The Riel Rebellion,” the fighting ended in 1885 with Louis Riel’s capture and execution, and this is when Parenteau crossed the international border into Montana where, in 1905, McNickle, his mother, and sisters were officially adopted by the Salish, if not the larger Anglo community. Refugees from war and dispossessed of the region of their birth, the family attempted to fit into their new surroundings, which were undergoing a dramatic transformation at the flute end of Manifest Destiny as the West was brought into the twentieth century and modernity was embraced. The landscape of Montana was being “settled,” with all its implications of extractive economies and radical transformations of place such as hydroelectric projects and “modern” farming practices.

7 As a result of their adoption, all four received land allotments on the reservation under the Dawes Act, often referred to as the General Allotment Act of 1887. For the purposes of this discussion, this event is of note. The Act had several purposes, including the continued appropriation of Native lands, but also the establishment of

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individual property rights in communities that were, more often than not, based in a communal sense of ownership.ii In other words, at its core is the concept of private property, so fundamental to capitalist ideology (as well as the American Dream) and central to the colonized history of the West. And, as we see historically, there is often a push-pull between those who consider ownership as free license to make use of land in any way the owner wants and those who call for a long-term stewardship of place. In effect, though, the Act fragmented many Native communities, as most federal policies had previously and would again later, most notably during the 1950s and the era of “termination.”iii

8 However, the sale of his allotment provided McNickle with the funds, in 1925, to travel to Europe. Although he had completed most of his undergraduate degree in English at the University of Montana, he hoped to receive his degree from Oxford. Instead, he found himself living in France for a time. Returning to the U.S., though, McNickle settled in the east, ultimately finding employment in the Bureau of Indian Affairs under its new Commissioner, John Collier, who was appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose policies brought the country out of The Great Depression.iv It was in this milieu that McNickle published his first novel, The Surrounded. Moreover, the novel (published in 1936, three years prior to The Grapes of Wrath) is a radical departure from its earlier draft, and some of the differences underscore McNickle’s revised thinking about the politics of people and place.v

9 Finally published in 2007, thirty years after McNickle’s death, the earlier draft— The Hungry Generations—originates in the time before the Great Depression and it describes the development of a young, mixedblood Salish man as he matures into a model of respectability in the fictional community of St. Xavier, Montana: a wealthy, educated and prudent landowner.vi Archilde Leon is a model of the success story of the American Dream, which at its heart is the colonial dream: prosperity and ease for the individual through the exploitation of place and people.

10In The Hungry Generations Max, Archilde’s father, persuades him to leave for college and thus avoid the consequences after his mother, Catherine, kills a game warden immediately after the warden has killed her son, Louis. This is how Archilde comes to be in Paris, and how he meets Claudia, the only person from these Paris days who returns to the West (and the plot), ostensibly to marry him. Like many of his generation, this expatriate explores the center of western culture of the post-WW I era, as the title suggests with its slant allusion to the Gertrude Stein term for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, et al., “the lost generation” of young radicals who questioned contemporary American society and social values. Unlike those notable writers, though, Archilde does not like what he finds, with one exception: Claudia.

11The daughter of an American railroad pensioner, a pioneer who helped “open” the West for the masses, Claudia and her family are the embodiment, perhaps the stereotype, of the regional (western) American trying to acquire cosmopolitan culture, the ultimate goal for those who “settled” the West and shaped it to conform to the social land-use paradigms that immigrated from Europe.vii Much like the well-to-do of American society who traveled to the Continent to “enrich” their lives, westerners who aspired to climb the social ladder of class followed the same convention. The American novelist Henry James built a career interrogating this phenomenon, and Mark Twain by

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satirizing it, but McNickle, as an indicator of his emerging perspective, attempts to deconstruct the myth of high culture, but from a distinctly western point of view.

12Archilde resists the urge to become a member of the upper class, as it was manifested in the eastern U.S. and Europe in the era; Claudia Burness’ family is the embodiment of the convention, but it is dysfunctional. At once the result of an over- domineering mother and reluctant children, it is also one that shows the ways the West has rewritten the psyche and identities of those who have lived there. When Mrs. Burness questions Archilde’s intentions, alleging that he has some diabolical plan to harm her family by befriending her husband, he reveals a sense of kinship based in a shared valuing of the western experience: “Your husband has become interested in me because I’m from the West; ... and he seemed tickled to meet someone from the West— it was almost as if he had known me before—he was so enthusiastic” (236). It becomes obvious that she is the only family member who wants to live this American fairy tale of privilege and cultured affluence. The children, it seems, do not want to become the sophisticated artisans their mother wishes them to be. This does not mean, however, that they are immune to the mythos of Paris with its freedoms and exotic charm. It is just that they do not want to work or study while they explore the city’s potential for the individual. For Archilde, however, this mythos becomes an object of study.

13McNickle critiques the Parisian expatriate culture: once more, the American drawn to the hub of the culture and art of the colonizers. Archilde functions much as a cultural anthropologist as he walks the streets of Paris and shadows the life of the expatriates as described in the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, et al. At one point, he and Claudia, who is fully engrossed by the mythos, debate the relative merits of the city: ‘Paris is more than the capital of France—for two centuries, at least, it has been the capital of wit and learning. All the scapegraces in the world come here —and most of the brilliant minds. You’ve heard that, haven’t you?’ ‘Yes, that is what I heard when I came east. I heard nothing else, in fact.” He hesitated over his next words. “Is it so wonderful then? Is it worth sacrificing a great deal to be here?’ ‘Yes, some people will give everything—do you know what I mean by everything?—just to linger on.’ (221)

14 As one can see in this seemingly innocuous conversation, McNickle’s prose is layered, as it is throughout his canon. The linking of scapegraces and brilliant minds is of note, as is the dialogue’s revelation that Claudia has internalized the mythos of Paris wholly.

15Archilde’s reply to her is equally telling because it appears to reverse the path of colonialism and Manifest Destiny and the concepts of wealth and ease derived from the exploitation of the environment that are embodied in them. As presented, this exchange replicates the discourse of western expansion. The lure of the West developed a similar mythos of potentiality, where rogues rubbed elbows with cultural heroes and the possibility for the dramatic reinvention of self existed in an atmosphere of freedom and relative anonymity. However, once the land had been “settled,” the attempt to construct community called for a settling of identity based upon social paradigms of the east and Europe, including enforcement of laws and rules to protect the private ownership of lucrative resources. While this may, at first, seem a stretch, the

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interrogation of Manifest Destiny and the potential the West presented to those in the east is found in several places in McNickle’s canon and it is the basis of the American Dream.

16His short story “The Hawk is Hungry” is a good example. Set in Montana in the settlement era, the story describes a visit from the protagonist’s sister, who has remained behind in Connecticut as her brother goes west to build a ranch. Through her inquisitiveness about her brother’s life, we find a fit description of the region and its “new” imported lifeways, but through their visit to the farm of fellow settlers from the east, the Brown sisters, McNickle provides his commentary on Manifest Destiny writ large. At the end of the story, the sisters’ prize chicken—the rugged individualist “Molly” who roams free and is, for the sisters, the “idea of personal integrity” (Hawk 62)—is struck and hauled away by a hawk as they helplessly watch, unable to intervene. The intention of living an idealized, romanticized lifestyle by moving to a “new” land and rewriting one’s lot is deflated in quick fashion; reality strikes home through something as mundane (but also naturally fit for its environment) as a hungry hawk feeding itself—to the detriment and chagrin of the colonizer. Here, the pastoral ease of a gentrified life cannot be realized, nor can it withstand the natural world’s systems; the Brown sisters try to make the land conform to their dreams rather than shape their expectations and understanding to the land and its ways.

17As the brother and sister return to his ranch, she ruminates on the Brown sisters’ subsistence lifestyle and bleak prospects, and then articulates McNickle’s point: “Anne stirred one sceptic thought, however, which has stayed in my mind ever since. She said, ‘I wonder—was it worth it—if that’s the way the West was settled?’” (Hawk 64).

18The same question drives the conversation between Claudia and Archilde in Paris: is living here worth it? What, exactly, is the “everything” that people will sacrifice to “linger on” in this intelligentsia colony? To try to answer that, Claudia takes Archilde to meet another expatriate, a well known writer who has lived in Paris for years.

19They track Dave Marsh to a café. At first, Archilde is attracted to the man, apparently due to his size and thus commanding presence. “He was tall and stoop shouldered. Indeed, he would have been an exceedingly big man but for his shoulders, which were rounded and stooped to such an extent that he gave the impression of being a cripple” (223). Although Archilde at first warms to him, it is this first impression—“stooped” linked with “cripple”—that provides Archilde’s final judgment of the poet, but also the mythos of Paris. “He was no longer interested in Marsh” (226). And what is it that results in such a sudden reversal? In a word, decadence, but not in the usual sense. In this world, ease leads to atrophy. The poet is no longer a poet but an inconsequential hack. “[His] poem was stupid” (227).

20It is difficult to ignore the potential allusion to Ernest Hemingway whose first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published while McNickle lived in France, and his protagonist, Jake Barnes, lives a lifeway in Paris very similar to Marsh. And, like Marsh, he is “crippled,” in this case due to a war wound that drives much of his character; he is impotent. While Hemingway explored the implications for American senses of masculinity, McNickle extended his critique to the milieu of the author. Marsh suffers from a self-inflicted wound; he lives a life of his own choosing, and that makes a difference for the fledgling Archilde.

21In Europe, the western spirit is lost in this place where Americans “linger on” and even a man of stature lives with no effort or drive. “What should a man do, then, with a

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big body and powerful shoulders? Let them rot?” (226). This early incarnation of the character Archilde subscribes to the concept of the self-made man of the West and this concept is incongruous with the cosmopolitan lifeways to be found in the East and Europe, which have nonetheless propelled numerous events over history that have had dire consequences, the subjugation of indigenous nations, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl included.

22While there are qualities to this first manuscript that carry the seeds of the first published version, one can see Archilde’s alignment with the popularly held ideals and values of the West of the time and thus the environmental issues that have emerged from them. Despite the potential for challenging the class structures and power differentials of the era, though, The Hungry Generations falls short. As mentioned, at the end of the novel Archilde is a successful citizen: well educated, well to do, and well worth the non-Native damsel. Although the idea that her daughter is attracted to an Indian is vexing for Mrs. Burness, Archilde waits for Claudia to arrive “back home” in Montana, underscoring McNickle’s valuing of the West over the decadence of the Old World, but also reaffirming the social structures of both. Archilde may seem to be driven by an egalitarian ideal, but it is muted by the fact that he lives within the social framework that has worked to supplant the earlier egalitarian values of his homeland and the Salish as expressed in the social structures, economic system, and cultural practices McNickle describes in his final draft.

23The Surrounded is a very different story. While McNickle retained the plot about the killing of the game warden, which at its basis is a conflict between colonizer and colonized but also two views of land/resource use, and keeps many of the characters, he dramatically transformed them. One easy illustration is found in Archilde’s extended family, particularly the character Modeste (his uncle) and Mike and Narcisse (his nephews). In The Hungry Generations the former has a cameo appearance and the latter provide a conflict over private ownership of the ranch. In The Surrounded Modest is a central character, a respected elder who retains the crucial elements of his culture, and the nephews grow close to Archilde and begin to practice that culture. In essence, this reclaims the ancient convention of the role of uncles (Modeste and Archilde) as the mentors for the young, the next generation. The earlier draft describes the fragmentation of the family with the rise of the successful individual property owner; the first published version describes the growth of that individual into a central element of a tribal community reclaiming its culture and right to self-determination in an environment made sustainable through the practicing of ancient values.

24It is important to reconsider that all the action of The Surrounded takes place solely in Montana. The long section in the earlier draft set in Paris is gone. The novel opens with Archilde’s homecoming, after living in Portland, Oregon making a living as a musician and underscores Archilde’s plan: to visit home for a short while and then to go forth into the wide world and make it on his own.

25The plan is never realized, and the complicating factors that defer it are given in subtle fashion, beginning with the very opening scene. As Archilde walks the lane to his father’s ranch, he comes to a fork in the road: one leads to his European-immigrant father’s affluent ranch house—a sign of the material change that has come to the land— and the other to his mother’s rustic cabin. There are several binaries suggested by this divergent path—modern/primitive, American/Salish, male/female and all their variations—but for the young man who is trying to find his way in the West as it

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transforms itself after “settlement,” it also denotes assimilation/resistance. The latter is not unique to Archilde or to the Salish themselves; it is the same dilemma that indigenous individuals and nations have faced since 1492. In clever fashion, McNickle interrogates that dilemma and then deconstructs the binaries to offer a reevaluation of the assumptions that determine the valuing of one over the other, including people/ place. Archilde takes the path to his mother’s cabin. And that has made all the difference.viii

26Archilde’s visit comes as his father, Max, anticipates his wheat harvest. As he prepares for this event, one common to the region in modern times, he shares with readers his good fortune as a settler, for he sold his timber interests in time to avoid financial ruin, and his crops will continue his prosperity, apparent in his home but also his new car. He lives the American Dream of the colonist turned settler, the modern self-made man, with one exception. He is alone.

27Although a daughter, Agnes, tends house for him, and her sons, Mike and Narcisse, live with her, he is alone, and without an heir to his holdings. He has driven his sons away. He consoles himself in the belief that, as he tried to make them develop a good western work ethic and a sense of responsibility, and thus demonstrate their worthiness to inherit what he has built with his own hands and good sense, they appeared inherently lazy, shiftless and without morals: the recurrent stereotypes of “improvident” Natives found throughout American literature from James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau to contemporary graphic novels such as Scalped. He tries to beat them into submission to the Euroamerican value systems he represents— the lens through which he ascribes value to the land and its people—thus driving them further and further away. As Archilde returns home, the last, Louis, has turned into a horse thief and is hiding in the mountains with a herd he hopes to sell.

28One must remember the historical context for the release of the novel, and the lingering tensions within the region, particularly those between Native and nonnative, and conflicting views of sustainable futures for all people. Considering this tension, there are two things to note in this plot summary. First, Max represents the “modern” values that have immigrated to this region through Manifest Destiny, and that adhere in the popular perception of “America” to be found in McNickle’s audience of the time. Inherent in this is the idea of private ownership of property, as transplanted from Europe, the self-centered use of the land in ways that were also transplanted by the colonists, and the passing of ownership, following the concept of primogeniture, through the male line. Max does not value women in the ways the Salish do; to do so would seem less than masculine and masterful in the social paradigm he represents.

29Second, Max’s sons resist this paradigm and follow an older tradition of conducting business in this land. The two societies’ value systems are obviously in conflict and although McNickle carefully avoids declaring that Louis’ thievery is laudable, he certainly toys with two conflicting conceptions of correct behavior: Salish social mores that shaped behavior in the past, and the “law and order” the settlers now impose upon everyone. This comparison of what was with what is in a landscape transformed by the radical trauma called colonialism can be found several places in the book, and slowly—for an audience that subscribes to the idea that the change has brought prosperity and civilized society to the region—the point of view McNickle would have us consider accrues, and it is one at odds with this popular ideal.

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30For instance, in the opening of Chapter Four, McNickle describes the town of St. Xavier as belonging “to two ages” but as he compares the “Townsite” of the new immigrants to the “Indiantown” of the Salish, he makes a curious valuation, for the latter is left to its own devices: “Its lack of plan and sanitation saved it” (35; emphasis mine). He goes on to note that there is, indeed, a plan to the order of the houses, since they all center on the church, but that the new arrivals cannot perceive it.

31Also in the opening chapters, Archilde’s mother, Catharine, thinks back to the day the priests came sixty years earlier, and looks around to find “her sons developing into creatures such as had never lived in her childhood (a son might steal horses but a mother was respected)” (22). And one of the original missionaries to the region, Father Grepilloux, has returned to the valley to die, but as he looks at the aftereffects of his ministry, he sees dissolution, chastising Max for his self-centeredness: “You lose your sons, but these people have lost a way of life, and with it their pride, their dignity, their strength.” He then shares the one thing that, in his cultural framework, may mitigate that loss: “Of course... they have God” (59). McNickle’s irony is subtle. Grepilloux dies before the resilient strength of the Salish is revealed as they reject his teachings and return to their old lifeways, with Catharine leading the way. She was the first one baptized when the priests arrived but the night before the Salish summer dance, Catharine recounts to the Salish elders a dream she’s had that calls her to renounce her baptism. The Salish reclaim a lifeway that had sustained them for millennia before the priests’ and the American’s arrival.

32Conflicting culturally defined senses of right and wrong, law and order abound in McNickle’s canon. One example might prove illustrative here, since it deals directly with the concepts of private ownership that are explored in the novel. McNickle’s short story “Hard Riding” begins with the Indian Agent to the Salish riding hard to a meeting with their elders. He whips his horse as he does so, thus providing one sense to the title, but also reflecting Max’s behavior toward his sons in the novel as well. The agent, a patriarchal authority figure, has the goal to “ride hard” on the Salish, too, so that he can coerce them into establishing a court and appointing judges to deal with the rash of cattle thefts from the herd that threaten to derail his economic plans for the tribe. As we come to find out, the thefts have purpose. Tribal members have taken the cattle to feed poor people in the community who are starving.

33This communal obligation—a residual element of Salish culture despite the imposition of federal laws/policies and new ways of doing things that focus upon the individual—is fundamental; it defines the community and its core values, and it runs counter to the economic interests of the agent and the government. Responding to the power structure imposed by the government, the elders agree to establish the court, thus satisfying the letter of the request, but certainly avoiding its spirit: they appoint judges who are mentally incapable of judging and who have no stature in the community. The court exists, but it is dysfunctional. No one will listen to it.ix Their resistance is ironic.

34Communal obligations to others and to place are found throughout the novel. In fact, at one point during its creation, McNickle wrote to Professor William Gates, whose work on the ancient civilizations of the Americas attracted him. Offering to work for Gates, McNickle assures him that he does not want to obtain materials from the effort, because he has his own study underway: “a fictionalized study of the development of an Indian boy.”x Archilde’s development is, once again, very different from that of the

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original draft in which he becomes the quintessential capitalist, self-centered landowner.

35As noted, Archilde returns in time for the harvest, which takes place in the early chapters. In The Hungry Generations, this is how the book concludes, with him harvesting the wheat on the ranch he now owns after Max’s death. Harvesting is, of course, symbolic of the culmination of the western dream, the realization of profit after the hard work is done. In The Surrounded, McNickle reverses the linear process with its attendant goal. To Max’s astonishment, Archilde works with the hired hands to bring in the wheat, thus establishing him—at least for the father whose pride in a son is a new emotion—as an effective participant in the economic enterprise that “tamed” the West and brought fruit from the “barren wilderness,” as the rhetoric of the time would have it. However, the plot that follows takes Archilde further from his father’s ideal and more into the center of another American dream that predates it and ultimately resists its basic underlying assumptions: from his father’s values to those of his mother.

36In the concluding chapters of the novel, as Archilde makes preparations for his final departure from the valley, he returns from a trip into the mountains to find his mother dying. McNickle’s description of the moment is telling: He knelt at his mother’s head.... It was a different matter now. People grew into each other, became intertwined, and life was no mere matter of existence, no mere flash of time. It was time that made the difference. The time that was consumed in moving one’s feet along the earth, in learning the smell of coming snow, in enduring hunger and fear and the loss of pride; all that made a difference. And a still greater difference was this entangling of lives. People grew together like creeping vines. The root of beginning was hard to find in the many that had come together and spread their foliage in one mass. (258)

37 This is but one articulation of the recurrent motif of tribalism in McNickle’s canon after the years of the Great Depression, here driven home by the passing of a woman who has renounced the religion that for decades had worked against her society and its inherent sense of communal ownership of land, resources, and—in this instance—souls. Moreover, its metaphoric use of the environment underscores what, at this moment of crisis, is to be valued: people and place.

38Unlike The Hungry Generations with its happy ending and validation of the American values of the time, The Surrounded ends with Archilde—once more in the center of his Salish extended family—fully embodying resistance to the contemporary social systems of the settlers and the governmental mechanisms that protect them and that came to the valley with the immigrants. With the local sheriff dead at his feet, Archilde raises his arms to accept the shackles the Indian Agent orders. Although he did not shoot the sheriff, he is complicit, for as his friend Elise moves to defend her man from the injustice that he will certainly experience, he senses her purpose: “He wanted to stop her. He could have reached out his hand and held her back. He stood motionless, seeming to hold his breath” (294). Despite his arrest—or perhaps because of it—Archilde becomes the symbol of a radical reclamation of a Salish identity and thereby a culture and values of an indigenous lifeway. In an era of assimilation that called for the shedding of old values of communalism and adopting the rugged American individualism of the westerner, this was not a popular message, as those jailed under the sedition law can attest. Tellingly, Archilde is silent at book’s end, while in the manuscript he walks off scene singing.

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39The book did not sell; it dropped out of print after one run; but it was resurrected in the late 1970s and has been in print ever since. In other words, it was reissued after the demise of the “melting pot” metaphor, in an era that gave rise to environmentalism, rights for people of color and women, and a generation that questioned nationalistic overreach after Vietnam. One wonders what it offers for us today.

40McNickle published only one other novel in his lifetime: Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize. It is of significance in this discussion, even though it was written for a young audience. It is set in pre-Columbian times, and was published in the 1950s. The novel was commissioned by Henry Holt as part of a series for young adults. The fact that it was published in the year 1954, often referred to as the year of “termination” because of the federal policy that would have set aside the government’s treaty obligations with several tribes, is of significance.xi Also significant is the fact that it was written during the Cold War as Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted his communist witch hunts.xii

41The novel describes the journey of a young man, Salt, whose travels take him from present-day New Mexico through the various ancient cultures that inhabited Mexico and Central America on a quest to find the things necessary to help his people survive a radical change in their environment that, previously, had sustained them for thousands of years. (His journey takes him into the heart of those civilizations McNickle found in the work of William Gates.) With each successive nation he visits, Salt finds cultures that are more and more materialist and as a result more militaristic and rigidly class- structured, qualities that so clearly identify 1950s America during the Cold War. Although subtly presented, McNickle’s point is clear: a society that becomes progressively obsessed with these elements of human experience is doomed for it will ultimately begin to feed upon itself and its environment. Salt rescues a young slave woman, Quail, from human sacrifice and together they return to his village bringing the things the people need for their survival: new “blood” and a new strain of corn, but also the cautionary stories of Salt’s experiences.

42In the twenty years since the publication of his first novel, McNickle’s vision had matured and solidified into a philosophy that had at its core a reclamation of the communal qualities of tribal communities, and their empowerment in contemporary times: their right to self-determination as independent societies inside the borders of the U.S. and sovereignty over their environment and resources. This was not a popular message—in the 1930s or the 1950s, or today—but it is a future for which he worked as an activist, as a bureaucrat, and as a writer. And his work was prophetic.

43The year 1954 was important for the policy of termination, as mentioned above, but it was also the year that French colonial forces were surrounded and forced to surrender at Dien Bien Phu, thus escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which would consume a generation of American youth (and produce Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant); within two years, Allen Ginsberg would publish “Howl,” his poem critiquing American materialism and describing the blood god Moloch consuming the youth of America, as did Vietnam.

44The tensions felt in the country at large were also felt in the region of McNickle’s birth, and these tensions resulted in a fundamental questioning of identity and social order. The changes coming to the region and nation were, in their own way, as traumatic as the change that came with the settlers.

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45In conclusion, I would argue that McNickle was seeking a way to survive in contemporary realities—economic, political, social (including gender and racial), and environmental—and to do so he developed a strong sense of identity as a Native individual: an individual who is responsive to a larger community and the place it lives, but also an individual whose actions are driven by a firm commitment to the communal good. Through this process, he became, in a way, an ideological hybrid mediating two sometimes conflicting value systems to produce ideals that are driven by tribal imperatives within a modern, western society.

46As a budding cultural anthropologist, he recognized that all cultures change over time. This understanding resulted in his commitment as a political activist as he worked to promote Native cultures’ inherent right to determine how to react to and/or direct that change by maintaining their communal values. In any event, his life and attempts to interrogate the events taking place in the region’s environment, but also the U.S. at large, and offer new alternatives based in ancient practices mark him as a visionary whose works certainly anticipate the canon of Native literatures as it evolved through subsequent generations in the last century. His works also foreground the ways humanity has survived over millennia on this continent despite sweeping changes, and thus they provide responses to the social changes that took place in the country as a whole within his lifetime. Perhaps, they also offer a poignant lesson for the country as it seeks the means to survive in a world at times of crisis when natural and social resources are under unprecedented stress.xiii

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aaron, Jason. Scalped. Vol. 1 Indian Country. New York: Vertigo, 2007. Print.

McNickle, D’Arcy. The Hawk is Hungry and Other Stories. Birgit Hans, Ed. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992. Print.

---. Letter to William Gates, 25 March 1934, McNickle Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago.

---. Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1987. Print.

---. The Surrounded. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1936. Print.

---. Wind From an Enemy Sky. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1988. Print.

Mickenberg, Julia L. Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Parker, Dorothy. Singing an Indian Song: A Biography of D’Arcy McNickle. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. Print.

Purdy, John Lloyd. The Legacy of D’Arcy McNickle: Writer, Historian, Activist. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996. Print.

--- with James Ruppert. Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. Print.

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---. Word Ways: The Novels of D’Arcy McNickle. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1990. Print.

Work, Clemens P. Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2005. Print.

NOTES i. For a full exploration of this history see Clemens P. Work’s Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West. ii. Under this Act, each reservation’s lands were divided into plots of a certain acreage and families from the tribal community were to sign a tribal roll to receive their allotments. Many refused, since signing the roll would be a de facto acknowledgement that the federal government has the right to dispense with tribal lands and to determine who is a tribal member. iii. This will be discussed later in the essay. iv. Interestingly, the rhetoric leveled at F.D.R. and his proposals is very similar to that against President Barak Obama’s handling of the recession plaguing the country when he took office, both of whom were branded “socialist.” v. In McNickle’s papers, one can find evidence that the original draft had at least gained some positive response from publishers. At one point, in 1934, he had a contract for a version, “Dead Grass.” However, there has been no evidence identified to suggest that the radical revisions he undertook in The Surrounded were under the direction of an editor. Instead, his diaries suggest his revisiting of the precepts woven into the original, handwritten manuscript of The Hungry Generations. vi. It is also a phrase from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” McNickle was, after all, an English literature major. vii. It is an interesting phenomenon to be found in many “boom” towns of the West, where opera houses, ladies societies, and mansions supplanted the rustic homes and meeting houses of an earlier time. In The Surrounded, this is manifested in one scene where Archilde visits his uncle, Modeste. His uncle’s place has a teepee, rustic cabin, and modern frame house in close proximity, cleverly acknowledging the change that has come, but also the contemporary theory of social evolution, including social Darwinism. One should also note that McNickle’s own father was a railroad worker. viii. While in New York, McNickle took a poetry-writing course from Robert Frost, whose poem “The Road Not Taken” carries a similar idea and poetic line. ix. This story can be found in The Hawk is Hungry. x. “Letter to William Gates,” 25 March 1934, McNickle Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. xi. The U.S. Congress has engaged in the debate of the “Indian Problem” many times over the centuries, as well as today. In essence, the 1950s saw a renewed post-war debate that would renege on the treaties of the past by supposedly shifting funding of indigenous nations’ programs from the government. This means it wanted, in a way, to “buy out” treaties and thus avoid the obligations found in them. Several nations fell into this program initially, such as the Klamath in Oregon. Subsequently, the policies were overturned, thanks in part to the efforts of people like McNickle who lobbied intensively against them. xii. For a wonderful examination of the direction the careers of many leftist artists took at this time, see Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. xiii. One cannot help but wonder what the literature that comes from the current socio- economic conditions and recent historical events will look like.

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ABSTRACTS

Today, societies have intensified their discourse about the concept of “sustainability,” a term that has expanded to consider the viability of political and economic systems once believed to be inevitable and inviolable. Of course this is not the first time we have searched for a deeper understanding of the interaction between humanity and its surroundings. By looking at the literary production of one Native American author, D’Arcy McNickle, who reached maturity in the 1930s—during the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarian governments—this article considers some implications of the author’s vision of the intersections between political power, human rights, and environmental change: the values that drive our decision-making and subsequent actions. By turning to literature, it asks us to listen to the voices of those who may offer alternative ways of understanding what has happened to our world and where we must go to promote its survival.

INDEX

Keywords: D’Arcy McNickle, Environment, Great Depression, Human Rights, Indian Literature, Native American

AUTHOR

JOHN L. PURDY Western Washington University

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“Why Don’t You Just Say It as Simply as That?”: The Progression of Parrhesia in the Early Novels of Joseph Heller

Peter Templeton

1 The critical placing of Joseph Heller (1923-1999) has long been underdeveloped, likely as a result of the dominance of Catch-22 (1961). As George J. Searles suggested in 1977, Heller was often dismissed as “simply another example of that peculiarly American literary phenomenon, the ‘one book’ author” (74). Despite the five Heller novels that followed the publication of Searles’ article, Catch-22 has seemingly continued to pull the vast majority of critical attention towards it and, consequently, the wider perception of Heller’s early novels has been somewhat neglected. When focus has progressed beyond Yossarian and the island of Pianosa to Heller’s other two early novels (Something Happened [1974] and Good as Gold [1979]), there is a tendency to place his work primarily in ethnic terms, as in the work of Frederick C. Stern (who identified that after the publication of Something Happened, the tendency was to see Heller’s characters as Jewish) andWayne C. Miller. This folds Heller into a larger group of Jewish-American authors writing roughly contemporaneously, including Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and perhaps the voice that now dominates such discussions, Philip Roth. However, Stern also suggests that “another category into which Heller fit was that of ‘dark humorist’” (15). This has been echoed in more recent criticism which has equated Heller with the then-growing trend of black humor that dealt with taboo subjects by “comedians like Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Mort Sahl, and Lenny Bruce” (Fermaglich 61), a direction which might also be seen as re-inscribing Heller’s Jewishness, given the ethnic background of each member of this group.

2 This emphasis, not just on ethnicity or on comedy but on that need to probe into subjects considered off-limits by mainstream American society during the 1960s and 1970s, may provide us with the beginning of a more satisfying critical placing for Heller. While the desire of some critics to move back through the catalogue of Heller’s

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work and begin to understand the important Catch-22 as more Jewish than anyone— perhaps even the author himself—had imagined is completely understandable, if we wish to go further and attempt an understanding of the early-Heller oeuvre more widely, then we must consider the recurring features of his work: Heller’s status as a humorist and the bitter tone of his comedy, as well as his repeated railing against ruling figures and organizations. It is this repeated focus on the public sphere, rather than the more intimate spaces afforded by the self or the family, that means a biographical or ethnic approach to Heller’s work will always be less than fully satisfying. It is imperative, then, that we focus on “the double binds, the catch-22s, the entrapments variously represented in Heller’s fiction by military regulations, corporate bureaucracies, or political machines” (Pinsker 2).

3 It is when thinking about Heller’s repeated returns to the organizational structures that bind us that the later work of Michel Foucault can be instructive. Fearless Speech, published in 2001 by Semiotext(e), “was compiled from tape-recordings made of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall term of 1983” (Pearson 7). The work deals with the topic of parrhesia which “is ordinarily translated into English by ‘free speech’” (Fearless Speech 11). Foucault explores the original Greek concept of parrhesia at some length in terms of its first proponents, the Cynics: For the Cynics, the main condition for human happiness is autarkeia, self-sufficiency or independence, … consequently, most of their preaching seems to have been directed against social institutions, the arbitrariness of rules of law, and any sort of life-style that was dependent upon such institutions or laws. In short, their preaching was against all social institutions insofar as such institutions hindered one’s freedom and independence. (Fearless Speech 120)

4 Significantly, Foucault intimated in an interview with Pierre Boncenne in 1978 that “the analyses that were current during the 1960s defined power in terms of prohibition: power, it was said, is what prohibits, what prevents people doing something” (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 102) Foucault would of course disagree with this assessment of power as prohibitive, given that he states elsewhere that power “is not the renunciation of freedom,” but his comments refer to a conception of power very much current in the cultural milieu in which Heller’s early novels were drafted and published (Essential Works 340). Heller likely became one of the chosen authors of the card-carrying anti-authoritarians of this period precisely because of this rather limited attitude towards organizational or political power.

5 At a thematic level, then, it is not difficult to draw a comparison between the restrictive notions of power that were prevalent in countercultural philosophies of the post-war US, such as the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the parrhesia of the Greek Cynics. In his lectures that became the book Fearless Speech, Foucault argues that even in the modern era, “Preaching is still one of the main forms of truth-telling practiced in our society, and it involves the idea that the truth must be told and taught not only to the best members of the society, or to an exclusive group, but to everyone” (120). This notion of preaching as a kind of democratic oratory from the heart of ancient Greece seems to underpin if not Heller’s authorial intentions (though this perhaps comes more to the fore in aspects of his 1988 novel, Picture This), then at least his inclinations, when confronted by the social and political practice of post-war America.

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6 The thematic comparisons between the two, however, do not address the question of stylistics, which one might see as the greatest obstacle to equating Heller with a form of parrhesia. If the term applies to the most direct form of speech available, then the kind of linguistic game-playing that we encounter in Heller’s novels might seem to situate him rather differently, as much more of a rhetorician than a straightforward preacher. And, indeed, I would not want to argue that Heller is not a writer who is well versed in irony. Rather, this article suggests that Heller’s early novels develop from an ironic mode and the levels of linguistic and allegorical complexity are stripped away until Heller enters the realm of parrhesia. I would also stress, however, that by reading Heller’s development in the light of parrhesia some of the distinctive strands of his unique brand of irony might also be thrown into greater relief.

7 Though Heller’s novels depend heavily on situational irony he writes very differently from some other authors. Though each is devastating in its own way, Heller’s irony is often deployed as something of a blunt instrument. This is not to say that his writing lacks skill or finesse, so much as it is a statement on effect: one is far less likely to miss the underlying message of Heller than with many other practitioners of irony. Indeed, each of his early novels might well be called a polemic, with each taking aim at various American institutions. He speaks out against, for example, the corporate world, potentially in Catch-22 and more explicitly in Something Happened. In this development, we can see Heller progressing towards far more plain speech: though each novel provides a criticism of American corporations and each is heavily dependent upon a strong ironic style, the subject is addressed directly in the latter novel rather than being realized through allegory. His vitriol appears in its most concentrated form in patches of his third novel when, during the poisonous political climate of the 1970s, he critiques American political institutions—and Henry Kissinger in particular—in Good as Gold, in which moments Heller’s style gives way to pure parrhesia. This attitude is visible early in his development as a novelist; a reviewer of Catch-22, before it became the canonical work it is today, complained that it “gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper” (Balliett 247).

8 The most telling reason that we must see Catch-22 as a novel that is addressing the post-war American condition, rather than merely a belated reaction to his time in the USAF, is the number of times in which the novel satirizes American culture of the 1950s. One of the most obvious examples of this is Heller’s condemnation of McCarthyism, demonstrated through the character of Captain Black. Typically, Heller is less than subtle when he writes that “Captain Black knew he was a subversive because he wore eyeglasses and used words like panacea and utopia, and because he disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of fighting un-American activities in Germany” (Catch-22 42). Here, the novel is still operating very much within the limits of situational irony, as an American officer during the Second World War admiring Hitler clearly contradicts our expectations. There is, however, more happening here; the phrase “un-American activities” immediately recalls Joseph McCarthy and his influence on post-war American politics. The character of Captain Black mirrors McCarthy as the novel progresses, as he sets up the institution of loyalty pledging: At the far end of the food counter, a group of men who had arrived earlier were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays of food balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. Already at the tables, a group that had arrived still earlier was singing ‘the star spangled banner’ in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there. (Catch-22 128)

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9 In this vignette, Heller has created a world in which one must demonstrate patriotic feeling in order to receive even the most basic rights. Though an exaggeration, McCarthy is recognizable here, as is Executive order 9835, “which established federal loyalty review boards, [and] legitimated subsequent ‘loyalty’ investigations of employees across the land, local and state as well as federal, private as well as public” (Fried 28). We might focus here on the weighty significance of the word “loyalty” or the strong nationalist bias on display, but equally clear is the agenda of such procedures, which is shown through the attitudes of the investigators in the trial of Clevinger. This is revealed to be clearly not justice, but a rabid, monomaniacal attempt to identify threats to the American system, much as the actual loyalty investigations sought to root out communist sympathizers. Heller composes the scene so that the board investigates Clevinger, a character as supportive of the ideals of the authorities as any character in the novel, to make an additional point. If someone like Clevinger can be tried for un-American activities, then anyone is vulnerable to such charges. Rather poignantly, it is the patriotic Clevinger who is the last to fully grasp the situation: It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, uncloaked, inexorable hatred of the members of the Action Board, glazing their unforgiving expressions with a hard, vindictive surface, glowing in their narrowed eyes malignantly like inextinguishable coals. Clevinger was stunned to discover it. They would have lynched him if they could. (Catch-22 92)

10 At this moment, we can see that Heller is not employing irony in the way that he does elsewhere in the novel. Though he has not yet reached the level of pure, direct speech we would associate with parrhesia, his intention is to highlight the underlying injustices of McCarthyism. The hatred shown by the Board ensures that an accusation is as good as a conviction. In an interview in 1974 Heller described McCarthyism as “misuse of the FBI, the CIA, misuse of the courts, the attorney general’s office, and so forth. Political persecutions” (Sorkin 119). In the early years of the Cold War, people were terrified to criticize accepted positions and scared into submission by such authoritarian policies. This is a particularly extreme example of what Foucault called governmentality, one of the functions of which is that we police our own behavior rather than having the agents of the state fulfill that role. It is only the consent of the governed that separates this from more deliberately coercive or repressive associations. But Heller’s fiction suggests strongly that the consent has been undermined through scare tactics, and that agencies of the state designed to protect the citizenry have, in fact, been twisted against them. Thomas L. Dumm writes of Foucault’s work, and the same can be applied to Heller here, that “it served as a harsh repudiation of the pieties of so many who thought that their own political motives are pure, by demonstrating the ways in which the premises of their political commitments themselves operate as means of domination” (10). The obvious parallels with McCarthyism offer some of the most compelling evidence for reading the novel as a wider satire on public life (be that corporate or political through the 1950s), and it is here that Leah Garrett’s (admittedly compelling) case for Yossarian’s Jewishness does have to give way to some of the other, more prominent readings that she mentions in her recent article: though the barbs aimed at Yossarian by Colonel Cathcart “such as ‘suspicious’ and ‘socialist’… are typical slurs against Jewish Americans,” the strand of the novel involving Captain Black, added to all other evidence, suggests that Yossarian as a more universal “stand in for all those

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who have been victimized by McCarthyism” will resonate more clearly with most readers (Garrett 397).

11Fear is not the only way of using power to control people that Heller rails against; his novels routinely feature an unnavigable bureaucracy or overly complex administration. On bureaucracy, Paul Du Gay has written that in today’s world, “the bureau carries a very hefty ‘charge sheet,’ inscribed with multiple offences ranging from the relatively banal—procrastination, obfuscation, circumlocution and other typical products of a ‘red tape’ mentality—to the truly heinous—genocide, totalitarianism, despotism” (1). He also notes the inherent contradiction here, since clearly the bureaucrat cannot be both a bumbling, incompetent, lazy administrator and simultaneously a scheming, malevolent one who acquires power through endlessly circular legislation. One question to ask is whether Heller’s presentation of bureaucracy follows the lines laid down by Du Gay, or whether it repeats the charges that he lists and is seen as a controlling and oppressive structure.

12It would be negligent not to begin with Catch-22, a novel whose title has entered the cultural lexicon as meaning a double bind, not least of all in the bureaucratic sense. As Foucault has observed, “relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state” (Essential Works 120). Military bodies are not only fighting forces: they also exist as large administrative bureaucracies, and it is in those moments of Catch-22 when the focus shifts towards hierarchical arrangements or the business world that the military becomes an allegory for bureaucratic structures in post-war American civilian life, such as in the control that Milo Minderbinder is able to exert over the military hierarchy due to the success of his dubious enterprises. As Martin Albrow summarizes Max Weber, the sociologist and most important theorist of bureaucracy, “The modern army officer, the Roman Catholic bishop, the factory manager were all officials also, spending much of their time in their offices interpreting and transmitting written instructions” (41-42). In this framework, the modern army or air force officer is essentially a bureaucrat. Other American soldier-writers, such as John Dos Passos in Three Soldiers (1921) and Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead (1948), had already tended to take aim at the administrative controls placed on soldiers and their movements as much or more than they had focused on the horrors of actively pursuing war itself. Following the criteria laid down by Weber, it is easy to draw a comparison between his conception of the official’s role and a number of characters in Catch-22. The group commander Colonel Cathcart is a bureaucrat responsible for the administration of lower ranks, and his presentation alludes not only to the fear of the prejudiced and vengeful official who uses his or her role for their own gain, but to the harmful effects of the bureaucrat at a remove from the work that they administer. Cathcart’s power stems from his control the assignment of missions, yet he admits sheepishly to Milo Minderbinder that he has flown just four missions. Comically, Milo replies to this: “It’s generally known that you’ve flown only two missions. And that one of those occurred when Aarfy accidentally flew you over enemy territory while navigating you to Naples for a black market water cooler” (393).

13One of the problems with the contemporary bureaucratic situation has been articulated by Peter M. Blau and Marshall W. Meyer, who suggest that “the dependency of bureaucratic subordinates upon their immediate superior produced by his rating power engenders frustrations and anxieties for adults. It forces employees to worry

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about their supervisor’s reaction at every step of the way” (66-67). This is evident in Cathcart’s group, since in controlling who flies what mission he comes as near as possible to holding the power of life and death. Consequently, the men in his group fear his reactions because they affect their chances of survival. Heller explores the psychological effect of this at some length: They were men who had finished their fifty missions. There were more of them now than when Yossarian had gone into the hospital, and they were still waiting. They worried and bit their nails. They were grotesque, like useless young men in a depression. They moved sideways, like crabs. They were waiting for the orders sending them home to safety to return from Twenty-seventh Air Force headquarters in Italy, and while they waited they had nothing to do but worry and bite their nails and find their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several times a day to ask if the order sending them home to safety had come. They were in a race and they knew it, because they knew from bitter experience that Colonel Cathcart might raise the number of missions again at any time. (Catch-22 34)

14 Heller’s target is still the corporation in passages like this, with the focus clearly on organisational structures rather than the horrific aspects of fighting, but this allegory of the post-war corporation is intensified through the setting. The stakes here are clearly life and death. Cathcart is, in essence, buying his way to the rank of General with the lives of men such as Snowden, Clevinger and Nately.

15Blau and Meyer make reference to another problem within bureaucracy, this time relating to the idea of goal-oriented targets. They say that “a difficulty with these ratings systems is that they can encourage useless or careless work” (131). In Catch-22, this is made manifest in the ridiculous emphasis on bombing patterns. Cathcart becomes obsessed with this system, even remarking to the Chaplain that he “think[s] a tighter bomb pattern is something really worth praying for” (208).However, a later conversation reveals that General Peckem has merely invented the term without reason, with the added irony present in his observation that he has “all sorts of people convinced I think it’s more important for the bombs to explode close to one another and make a neat aerial photograph. There’s one colonel in Pianosa who’s hardly concerned anymore with whether he hits the target or not” (345).

16It has been noted by many critics that one of the things that make bureaucracy such a potent force in Catch-22, and which has helped the novel achieve its immense popularity despite its undeniably dark subject matter, is the ironic pseudo-logic that rests at the heart of the system. Yossarian and his comrades come to see that the logic which controls them is endlessly circular, and almost elegant in its brazenness. But though some eventually understand the controlling mechanisms, for much of the novel the overwhelming feeling is one of bewilderment, with events seeming to be dictated by chance rather than logic. Perhaps the most famous instance of this in Catch-22 sees the allegory extend to the increasing corporatization and computerization of post-War American life, reflected in the character of Major Major being promoted to the rank of Major by a glitch in the mechanics of the system. However, in true absurdist mode he is forced to assume this new role, and in a move that reveals the meaninglessness of the

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entire hierarchy he is a major before completing basic training. This will eventually lead to the exchange between Major Major and Lt. Scheisskopf in which the commanding officer is paradoxically outranked by his subordinate, and the two call each other “sir” a total of seven times in three sentences (99). The people who must operate within this system are kept at a remove from the underlying logic. A man can outrank his commanding officer and that will be accepted, because that which is written down will have precedence over any sensible protestations raised against it. The relationship between the two men is complicated, humorously in this instance, through a quirk of the system which keeps them both visibly off-balance.

17The official administrative record has primacy in Heller’s novel, even over facts that might be considered blindingly obvious. This is most clear after McWatt’s plane crashes. Doc Daneeka is incorrectly listed as a passenger on the plane, which leads to a character saying (presumably with a straight face): “The records show that you went up in McWatt’s place to collect some flight time. You didn’t come down in a parachute, so you must have been killed in the crash” (363). Bernard S. Silberman has written of bureaucracy that its “structural characteristics are seen as possessing a kind of allocative and relatively frictionless efficiency,” but what we can see here is a bureaucracy that has become too efficient; it has become self-propagating to the point at which it pays no heed to the world that it is supposed to be recording (20). The paper is law to such a degree that, when Daneeka attempts to contest his status as a corpse, “Colonel Korn sent word through Major Danby that he would have Doc Daneeka cremated on the spot if he ever showed up at Group Headquarters” (365). As Pinsker says, “such is the long reach of death in a novel where bureaucracy is a more efficient killing machine than German bullets” (33).

18If Heller’s fiction operates primarily as a social critique of the post-war US, this is often achieved by his utilization of characters who either operate on the margins of society, or those whose relationship with hegemonic forces is unstable or otherwise fraught. For Dan Beer, “The outsider represents a space where some freedom still exists. S/he has a symbolic importance as s/he defies power’s universalizing ambitions, and reveals power’s creations to be imposed inventions rather than necessary, natural or permanent formations” (111). When Heller’s outsiders stand in contravention of various social organizations and hierarchies, their dissent exposes the tactics by which the latter act to constrain individuals. As David Seed says, “Yossarian’s actions confirm Heller’s assertion that he is ‘innocent and good’ by constantly asserting the simple truisms which a manic bureaucracy obscures” (30).If as readers we find that we root for Yossarian, it is because his moral structure is certain; unlike the unthinking but murderous Aarfy, Yossarian will never be seduced into thinking that the military crime of being off base without a pass—effectively nothing more than a bureaucratic restraint of liberty—is worse than murder.

19Yossarian is a natural place to begin, not only because he is the protagonist of Heller’s first novel, but also because he is the author’s great rebel: the character who “engaged our sympathy by defining a morality for the absurd world and whose conclusion suggested an optimistic hope for escape” (Strehle 550). But we should not stop with Yossarian. In most of his later novels, Heller’s principal characters still always seem to maintain some distance from, or discomfort with, the structures of their respective corporate and political arenas (the notable exception perhaps being King David in God Knows [1984], although even he is alienated at the point of narration). Even

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Bob Slocum—the central character in Heller’s explicit excoriation of corporate America, Something Happened, and possibly the protagonist of Heller’s we are least likely to sympathize with—has some redeeming features, and this double edge to his personality affects the formal elements of the novel since “the oxymorons in Slocum’s style correspond to the contradictions in his behaviour. He simultaneously wants to succeed in his company and mocks that success” (Seed 121).A central character who embodies oxymorons seems to suggest that Heller’s second novel will rely as heavily on ironic devices as his first, and indeed, there are some stylistic echoes of Catch-22 in Something Happened: but in this novel, Heller does not veil his criticism of post-war American corporate culture in allegory. The subject matter is addressed more directly, and the purpose of the irony remains similarly pointed.

20Heller’s protagonists often mock the illogic of established social systems, and they can stand at some critical distance from them, but they can never escape their power completely. As Foucault says, “a society without power relations can only be an abstraction” (Essential Works 343), and Yossarian, Slocum and Bruce Gold all exist within satirically enhanced but essentially recognizable American social environments. Though the world Heller presents is often exaggerated there is a recognizable world beyond the hyperbole. It is the power dynamics of their respective recognizable spheres that serve to squeeze and warp Heller’s characters. This is most explicit in Something Happened, as the fear that Heller imagines to be inherent in the office environment of contemporary corporate America warps his central character and his view of the world. As Pinsker has noted, “no word is more charged, more fraught with psychic energy, more repeated, than fear” (61). This anxiety is instilled into its narrator, Bob Slocum, seemingly by everyone he meets. Also, though we cannot be certain due to the personal narration, it is strongly implied that Slocum is a source of fear to many others. Those who strive for success on the corporate ladder, like Slocum, are perfect embodiments of the self-policing nature of governmentality. Stern writes that

21The hell into which Bob Slocum (and, as it were, looking over his shoulder, Heller) looks is the corporate hell, the world in which money and security are acquired at the cost of constant, self-destroying, pervasive fear, the world of those ‘inwardly breached by the incalculable warp of time and change’, as lived in the penumbra of the corporate world. (10)

22It might seem unusual at first that a novel set in an American office would describe more explicit fear than one in which the protagonist is constantly obsessed with his death in battle, but the world of Something Happened is a warped one in which the inhabitants are kept off-balance and uncertain: so much so that they consume themselves from within. The entire novel, one described as “a redundant text, one in which clearly limited elements—characters, actions, words—are combined, recombined in probable ways, and even repeated,” is brought into being through the focused repetition of this state of anxiety (LeClair 246). Pinsker suggests that “Slocum’s unnamed company… is a study in benign neglect and organizational inertia” (46), but there is a strong impression that there is something much more malevolent about the presentation of the American workplace here. The first time we are introduced to the world of Slocum’s office, we are confronted by the fear that exists there: In the office where I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred

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and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it. (Something Happened 19)

23 While the fear of those in a more privileged place in a hierarchy might be considered normal, and indeed not far removed from what we see in Catch-22, it becomes apparent as Something Happened progresses that the fear in this office space is not unidirectional. Slocum’s boss, Jack Green, “is afraid of me because most of the work in my department is done for the Sales Department, which is more important than his department, and I am much closer to Andy Kagle and the other people in the Sales Department than he is” (22). What exists here is a corporation in which the higher echelons of management keep everyone in check through an intricate, implicit system of reciprocal fear. Graham Thompson says: Interestingly, then, the institution of relationships of terror and fear between men in the office hierarchy operate in two directions at once. Not only are men who are subordinated in this hierarchy subject to fear from those above, but those above are also fearful—one might say paranoically so—of those below, since it is the men below who can ensure their ‘obsolescence.’ (113)

24 Middle management has authority over the lower orders of the company, and this cultivates a relationship of fear over their underlings. However, through corporate structuring anomalies (such as Slocum doing most of his work for Kagle although he is in Green’s department), the higher echelons are able to instill levels of fear within their middle management team, and create politics and divisions within that structure. These divisions lead in turn to mass paranoia, and suspicion of everyone that can influence your career, which in this office environment is everyone you encounter, both superior and inferior in rank to yourself. In an interview with Ann Waldron in 1975, Heller suggested that he modeled the company on Time because “I did not want to write a book about economic exploitation. I wanted a neutral corporation” (Sorkin 136). Heller clearly aims here to target a society which would use fear as a control mechanism, rather than the corporation generally or capitalism itself. However, the trouble with taking aim at this kind of society is that it is profoundly capitalist in nature, and is therefore devoted to both the reproduction of hierarchy and a destructive competitive ethos which, indeed, underlies the rationale for the use of fear in the first place.

25Power relations in middle-management seem to operate on the principle that knowledge is a weapon. In Something Happened, fear often stems from how information kept from a character might be used against them. Slocum admits that “I always feel very secure and very superior when I’m sitting inside someone’s office with the door closed and other people, perhaps Kagle or Green or Brown, are doing all the worrying on the outside about what’s going on inside” (58). Thompson remarks that “to be on the outside, then, induces fear and paranoia,” and suggests that Slocum is only happy if the door is closed behind, rather than in front of him (117).There is a perceived safety inherent on being on the inside of a situation, while to be the outsider marks you out as one who has cause to be afraid. Comically, Slocum does not know, nor seem to care, which colleague fears him in this situation. All we know is that he wants to believe that someone is worried by his meeting in the way that he would be if the situation were reversed. Slocum has to feel as if he is intimidating others, or in a world of

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metaphorical kill-or-be-killed he will be insecure and intimidated himself. He seems to express regret, but undercuts this: “I don’t ever really want to frighten any of them and am always sorry and disgusted with myself afterward when I do. Almost always. But only after I succeed in bullying them; if I try to bully them and fail, I am distraught. And frightened” (163-164).

26This last quotation, although it highlights exactly how Slocum feels about the use of coercion as a tool in the workplace, does not refer to his colleagues, and leads to possibly the most sinister element about the fear that dominates the corporate world in Something Happened. Stern argues that “Even sexual life within marriage, Slocum is telling us, is dominated by the money ethos. The only objective of corporate life—the making of money—creeps, indeed leaps, into the marriage bed” (24). It is unsurprising that at the root of much of the critique in Something Happened lies the transgression of the private sphere by the coercive and aggressive nature of business. This manifests itself in the novel through the infection of all of the connections in Slocum’s life, since the corporate world stretches not just to his wife, but has seeped through and colors his relationships with his entire family.

27The desire to accumulate that is instilled by consumer capitalism is, by this point in time, so acute as to be total. Thompson suggests: Part of the problem for Slocum here is the difficulty of moving between the spaces of work and home. Although the demands are different in each of these environments, Slocum struggles to switch from the demand that he act a certain way at work to the demand that he act a certain other way at home. Instead of relating to his wife and daughter as his wife and daughter, he treats them in the same way that he treats his colleagues at work, that is competitively and with suspicion. (120)

28 Slocum is programmed by his work, becoming an automaton that cannot shut down and act differently outside the office. This has consequences not just for the family, but for his relationships with friends, too. Slocum admits that he enjoys the misfortunes of friends “because he cannot condone their weakness” (Something Happened 135). He admits that once his mother is no longer of use to him she becomes a “dead record in [his] filing system,” a metaphor that not only has corporate associations but recalls another American figure broken by his work, Herman Melville’s Bartleby (108). Even his perception of his son, with whom he has the best relationship, is tainted by the logic of the corporation, since signs of weakness in his son conjure up thoughts of violence: “I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence” (334). Slocum shows remorse for this initial feeling, but his first reaction is unadulterated hatred. He sees his son as a weakling, one who would not survive in the business world, and wants to kill him in much the same way that he wants to attack and excise other visible points of weakness, such as Andy Kagle’s limping leg. This corporate influence on the family life of Slocum can be analyzed with reference to Brian Massumi’s work on everyday fear. Though Slocum is part of this system rather than a consumer, his condition is indicative of what Massumi describes as “ever present dangers blend[ing] together, barely distinguishable in their sheer numbers. Or, in their proximity to pleasure and intertwining with the necessary functions of body, self, family, economy, they blur into the friendly side of life” (10). The end result, including the seamless transfer of the fear evident in the corporate world to the domestic sphere, is that “Slocum’s condition… gradually becomes a scathing, uncompromising portrait of contemporary life” (Pinsker 54). Put another

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way, if Yossarian is trapped by the army and by law, “Bob Slocum is most surely and instructively trapped in a mode of thinking in the language of that thinking” (LeClair 246). He is trapped by the logic of corporate America.

29Heller’s third novel, Good as Gold, aims right at the heart of American administration and the political system of Washington D.C. Perhaps more significantly, however, it is this novel in which Heller will occasionally abandon some of the stylistic choices that he had used in his first two novels, such as ironic language and allegory, and lurch most strongly towards outright parrhesia. While Good as Gold was a profitable venture for Heller, securing a sizeable advance, it never achieved the kind of critical success that Catch-22 had, and took a beating from some critics. Anthony Fowles says of Heller’s portrayal of Washington: It seems absolutely incredible that, writing hard on the heels of Watergate, Heller should come up with such lame tomfoolery as this. Yes, there is acknowledgement of political ‘spin’ here. But there is no indication of the profound dangers of double- think which Orwell is (just about) able to make real. (49)

30 However, this scathing attack does Heller something of a disservice. Pinsker’s more moderate comments suggest that “it wasn’t at all clear how its apparently disparate stories… merged into a satisfactory novel; nonetheless, there were whole scenes that struck Heller’s fans as pure Heller, complete with the dark, absurdist humor and biting satiric energy that have been his trademarks” (64). If the novel works, it is as this polemical document, and to expect the myriad of other plot strands to cohere is to mistake Heller’s work for something it is not. Heller may have been attempting to write a novel of Jewish-American experience in Good as Gold, but it is clear that the other many impulses at work are checked, and indeed engulfed, by the need to act as a commentator on the kind of political establishment in which someone like Kissinger can reach such eminence. Though it is true the novel is far from Heller’s most complex in terms of narrative style or form, innovation and aesthetics are somewhat foregone in favor of a brutal condemnation of the bureaucratic and openly mendacious nature of Washington D.C., a city in which unelected partisan officials, chosen arbitrarily, hold far too much power. Consequently, there is an added level of directness about his parrhesia in certain sections of Good as Gold. When the job of Secretary of State is dangled in front of Gold and he raises his lack of experience, the objection is brushed away by Ralph Newsome with the comment: “That’s never made a difference” (Good as Gold 60).

31Here, Washington is full of wasteful, self-serving officials, with daily expenses of up to a thousand dollars. They also try and bamboozle at every turn. Like Catch-22, the bureaucracy Heller creates in Good as Gold is actively repressive, and is designed to subdue. Eva Elzioni-Halevy has said that ‘bureaucracy is becoming more and more independent and powerful and the rules governing the exercise of that power are not clearly defined’ (87); that is the aspect of administrative power that Heller targets.He exaggerates the flaws in systems to the point of absurdity in order to allow the reader to see where bureaucracy can go if it remains unchecked. Like Catch-22, all of this is accomplished through the power of language, and Heller’s playful use of situational irony is evident once again. The character most associated with this kind of linguistic gymnastics in the novel is Ralph Newsome, whose language, according to Pinsker, is “designed to cancel itself out… in short, the slippery language of equivocation, endlessly flexible and designed to almost say what desperate people want to hear” (73).

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32Good as Gold interrogates the more explicit complexities of American political bureaucracy. Elzioni-Halevy writes that since the age of Jefferson, “party service was considered as a legitimate prerequisite for appointment to office and party dissent as a cause for dismissal” (164). This perfectly describes the political establishment in Good as Gold. One of the most important attributes that makes Gold so appealing to the Washington elite is his ability and willingness to fit into the existing ideology and practice of the government: or, as Newsome puts it, “This President doesn’t want yes- men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them. You’ll be entirely on your own” (54). Here, Heller’s meaning is once again completely evident beneath his rhetoric; he excoriates the procedure by which appointments of Washington officials are made, with aptitude unimportant compared with being of the ‘correct’ political persuasion.

33Though showing elements of parrhesia, the novel uses situational irony in much the same way as Catch-22. The picture of the President is so cynical as to be simultaneously hilarious and frightening: ‘The President will be pleased I’m seeing you today, if he ever finds out. You sure do boggle his mind. He has a framed copy of your review of his My Year in the White House under the glass top of his desk in the Oval Office so he can reread it all day long during vital conversations on agriculture, housing, money, starvation, health, education, and welfare, and other matters in which he has no interest.’ (Good as Gold 122)

34 In short, the President is an egotist who takes no interest in government, and later it emerges that he spends much of his time napping. The ominous aspect of this emerges when Ralph reveals that his autobiography takes priority over running the country, and rather than calling for the book to be ghost-written, unelected advisors instead perform the tasks associated with the presidency. In Good as Gold, then, unelected bureaucrats have supplanted democracy, as the President is essentially a PR man, with his chosen officials actually governing the country. This makes it all the more absurd that the only criterion for their appointment is the ability to tow the party line.

35This explains much of the novel’s (and Heller’s own personal) antipathy towards Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was appointed as Secretary of State by Richard Nixon, and a significant amount of the novel’s final pages emphasize that it was Kissinger “who could joke about brutalizing the Vietnamese with massive bombings as a face-saving gesture as we accepted their terms. It is he who could see no moral issues in the invasion of Cambodia. It is he who comes to embody the very nature of the power politics of the modern nation state” (Miller 9).And it is in the treatment of Kissinger that Heller abandons his rhetorical style and the use of irony and turns to pure parrhesia. Heller’s personal feeling seems to bleed through the pages as he writes that Kissinger displayed “an arrogance and naïveté… that merited contempt” (Good as Gold 348). But typically, most of Heller’s attention is not personal, but relates to Kissinger’s role in the public sphere. He observes that “not once that Gold knew of had Kissinger raised a voice in protest against the fascistic use of police power to quell public opposition to the war in Southeast Asia” (Good as Gold 347). Here, Heller highlights Kissinger’s immoral attitudes towards protesting citizens of the United States, demonstrating in clear language what he has elsewhere shown through the use of irony and verbal trickery: a system turned against its own people. Heller also describes Kissinger as surrounded by “a cloud of corruption,” before also lambasting “the gaudy militarism of the portly trombenik [that] was more Germanic than Jewish” and

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comparing him with prominent Nazis, including Adolf Hitler (366). It is here, rather than in Catch-22, that the specter of fascism seems most vivid, and it is used to accuse Kissinger. A few pages on, Heller writes of Kissinger that “He was never altogether comfortable with Congress and was said to prefer a dictatorship without any parliamentary body to restrain him” (369), again showing his antipathy to democracy and the rule of law. Far from being a rhetorical device, an overstated comparison for effect, this criticism seems to be motivated by there being any similarity between Kissinger and the tactics of the Nazis, and the outrage at such a man being considered Jewish. Heller puts denunciations into the mouths of both Bruce Gold and his father: the latter splutters at the television while the younger Gold thinks that Kissinger “in all but the most confining definitions of cultural anthropology or bigotry, was no more Jewish, let’s say, than Nelson Rockefeller, the prismatic apogee in a succession of patrons Kissinger had always managed to secure at pivotal moments in his career” (367).

36Perhaps most telling of all, though, is the outrage at Kissinger’s dishonesty. Heller writes that Kissinger “lied about peace and lied about war; he lied in Paris when he announced ‘peace was at hand’ just before the Presidential elections and he lied again afterward by blaming North Vietnam or bad faith when all his hondling went mechuleh” (Good as Gold 368). Again, Heller is more direct here than elsewhere, not dressing Kissinger’s deceit in ironic wordplay but using the word “lied” repeatedly. However, these moments reveal the underlying targets elsewhere: because ultimately, it is dishonesty and manipulation that are the targets of Heller’s irony in the first two novels. Catch-22—and, indeed, Catch-22 itself—is the most famous example of the way that Heller uses language to make clear how regulations are crafted to control, or the practices and logics employed by self-serving elites. Though Catch-22 is largely couched in allegory, and Something Happened is a novel still characterized by linguistic and structural complexity, by the time of Good as Gold Heller’s ire has risen to the point that, in talking of Kissinger, he states outright that “he’s so full of shit, that self-seeking schmuck” (Good as Gold 350). Given the development across the first three novels, Heller almost seems to be following the advice that the character Lieberman gives the protagonist just a few pages later: “well, why don’t you just say it as simply as that?” (Good as Gold 353).

37Heller’s early novels, then, are all set in different environments, but what is common to them all is the attempt to reveal the destructive or illegitimate aspects of post-World War II social structures. “Heller chronicles the abuses… of systems so familiar, so logical in their illogic, that we accept the absurdities as normal” (Pinsker 8). When read alongside the later works of Foucault, we can understand this impulse in Heller as cynical in nature, and Heller’s novels develop stylistically through this early period until reaching the point at which Heller speaks most directly. Though Heller would doubtless have struggled with some of the Cynic tenets (such as abjuring sexuality and wealth), the way in which Heller’s blunt, direct satire dominates his novels suggests a compulsion to speak the truth for the good of society in the best spirit of parrhesia. Though there is a development in terms of stylistics across the three novels, consideration of this highlights that they are thematically homogeneous in one key respect, in that they all point towards the restrictive or repressive elements that administrative or corporate structures have on the individual spirit, whether that system is commercial or political in nature. They also tend to highlight the more oppressive power that underpins such systems and uses fear as a control mechanism.

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For Heller, as for his more aware protagonists, the logic of such systems appears absurd and is particularly ripe subject matter for the dark comedy so common to Heller’s work in these early novels.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albrow, Martin. Bureaucracy. London: Pall Mall, 1970. Print.

Beer, Dan. Michel Foucault: Form and Power. Oxford: Legenda, 2002. Print.

Blau, Peter M. and Marshall W. Meyer. Bureaucracy in Modern Society. New York: Random House, 1971. Print.

Du Gay, Paul. In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics. London: Sage, 2000. Print.

Dumm, Thomas L. Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Print.

Elzioni-Halevy, Eva. Bureaucracy and Democracy: A Political Dilemma. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Print.

Fermaglich, Kirsten, “Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967-2007.” American Studies 48.4 (2007): 59-87. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Ed. Joseph Pearson.Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001. Print.

---. Politics, Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

---. Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

Fowles, Anthony. Joseph Heller. London: Greenwich Exchange, 2005. Print.

Fried, Albert. McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Garrett, Leah. “Joseph Heller's Jewish War Novel Catch-22.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.3 (2015): 391-408. Print.

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. London: Corgi, 1981. Print.

---. Something Happened. London: Corgi, 1980. Print.

---. Good as Gold. London: Corgi, 1981. Print.

Heller, Joseph, and Sorkin, Adam J. Conversations with Joseph Heller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Print.

Lansley, Stewart. After the Gold Rush. London: Random House, 1994. Print.

LeClair, Thomas. “Joseph Heller, Something Happened, and the Art of Excess.” Studies in American Fiction, 9.2 (1981): 245-260. Print.

Massumi, Brian, ed. The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993. Print.

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Miller, Wayne C. “Ethnic Identity as Moral Focus: A Reading of Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold.” MELUS 6.3 (1979): 3-17. Web. 13 Apr 2016.

Moss, Jeremy, ed. The Later Foucault. London: Sage, 1998. Print.

Pinsker, Sanford. Understanding Joseph Heller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Print.

Savil, Nikil. ‘Bartleby’s All!’. Dissent, 61.4 (2014): 22-26. Web. 13 Apr 2016.

Searles, George J. “Something Happened: A New Direction for Joseph Heller.” Critique. 18.3 (1977): 74-82. Print.

Seed, David. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan, 1989. Print.

Silberman, Bernard S. Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Print.

Sniderman, Stephen L. “‘It Was All Yossarian’s Fault’: Power and Responsibility in Catch-22.” Twentieth Century Literature 19.4 (1973): 251-58. Print.

Stern, Frederick C. “Heller’s Hell: Heller’s later fiction, Jewishness and the Liberal Imagination.” MELUS 15.4 (1988): 15-37. Print.

Strehle, Susan. “‘A Permanent Game of Excuses’: Determinism in Heller's Something Happened.” Modern Fiction Studies 24.4 (1978): 550-56. Web. 11 Apr 2016.

Thompson, Graham. Male Sexuality under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. Print.

ABSTRACTS

This article combines Foucault’s exploration of the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia with the novels of Joseph Heller to attempt to arrive at a more complete critical position for an author whose work, aside from his first novel, is often critically neglected. The article explores the way in which Heller’s writing progresses over his first three novels, becoming more explicit in its social critique. It also explores his uses dark humor—a popular device for comics, authors and filmmakers in the period—in his first three novels to preach against the way that American systems of a military, political, or corporate nature control the actions of supposedly free citizens, through intricate bureaucratic webs which border or tip into absurdism, and the fear which stems from the underlying covert threat to the citizen’s wellbeing.

INDEX

Keywords: Catch-22, Good as Gold, Joseph Heller, Michel Foucault, parrhesia, Something Happened

AUTHOR

PETER TEMPLETON Loughborough University

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“The Land That He Saw Looked Like a Paradise. It Was Not, He Knew”: Suburbia and the Maladjusted American Male in John Cheever’s Bullet Park

Harriet Poppy Stilley

1 Often pictured as a time of exceptional stability by the popular culture of later generations, the postwar American epoch of 1950s complacence and consensus placidity in reality marked a moment of rapid social change. Certainly for white, middle-class men the period connoted one of expeditious adjustment, as a pervading managerial, service- based and family-orientated template of masculinity emerged, respectively reducing the influence of any traditional delineations of American manhood based on production or control. Rather than welcoming these societal changes, however, social commentators of the 1950s still clung to the self-made man type as the only acceptable form of hegemonic masculinity. A combination of sociologists, psychologists, historians and literary critics took umbrage with the materializing managerial mold in the belief that such abrupt alterations in work and community had diminished the public space for the performance of masculinity and, as such, caused men to subject themselves to the control of other men and institutions. 2 William Whyte’s study of postwar middle-class consciousness affirms this belief, claiming that the decline of the free entrepreneur and the rise of the dependent

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 101 employee on the American scene paralleled the withdrawal of the independent individual and the ascent of a conformist “organizational man” in the American mind. Like so many professional men in the postwar era, Whyte’s organization man worked in middle management within a large corporation. He was characteristically a “committee” man, who assumed as a matter of habit that “the group,” a committee of compatible members committed to cooperation with one another in pursuit of some mutually conceived project, could accomplish more in the way of progress and proficiency than the individual acting alone. Whyte attributed such a presumption to the “social ethic,” a contemporary body of thought defined by its belief in “belongingness” as the ultimate need of the individual; a belief which not only resulted in a decline in individuality central to self-made man masculinity, but moreover made “morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual” (Whyte 7). 3 Whyte’s contemporary characterological profiling, to this end, highlights a level of organization fealty that subsumes the individual to a group while simultaneously “[converting] what would seem in other times a bill of no rights into a restatement of individualism” (Whyte 6). It is important to recognize, therefore, that while Depression era thinkers had largely been concerned with issues of economic deprivation and social injustice, mid-century social critics like Whyte were increasingly turning their attentions to the cultural malaise at the heart of American self-making, together with the distinct emotional discontents that sprang directly from the blind pursuit of a marketplace masculinity. K.A. Cuordileone maintains that, “never before had the self come under such scrutiny,” a measure of the debilitating psychological implications of a modern “mass society” in which the individual, “unloosed from traditional social kinship or spiritual moorings,” became ever more overwhelmed by the impersonal, self- crushing forces of a mass-produced homogenous culture (98). The fear and neurosis surrounding the issue of autonomy, namely the achievement of an “independent, well-fortified sense of self within [such a] society,” was, Cuordileone states, the “single most compelling problem for postwar intellectuals and social critics” (99). Of course, this step away from “public institutions and their limitations” toward more “private ailments and inner dissatisfaction” ultimately reflected the postwar economic recovery and the arrival of an affluent society (Cuordileone 98). In addition, prosperity, far from delivering a sense of personal liberation from the constraints and deprivations of the past, seemed

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 102 only to “augment the psychic burdens of being a man,” with the great retreat into private life generating chronic concerns about the psychological effects of consumerism, materialism, and widespread suburbanization on the American character (Cuordileone 138). 4 Appearing as it did in this period of economic ease and monopoly capitalism, the suburban landscape thereby stands as the material counterpart to specific wants and tendencies in American culture apparent from the postwar years onward. Instantly recognizable from what Robert Beuka describes as its “uniform architectural [style] and landscape designs,” the American suburb routinely calls to mind a familiar “string of images,” of “loaded signifiers” that, taken together, denote a contemporary American vision of the ‘good life,’ or what passes for it (2-4). From the postwar years onwards, people hence flocked to the promised land of suburbia in pursuit of a utopian perfectibility, ultimately representative of a patriotic and innocent bygone era in America. Yet given the Fordist commercial climate of this postwar period, meant any utopian morals associated with suburban living were in effect reduced to paying off a mortgage. 5 For suburban historians Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, such fostering of a “suburbanization,” in truth, served only to facilitate the emergence of a new, landed middle-class, amid which “property [could transform] greenhorns into middle-class Americans” (147). It was the satisfaction of prestige—the “keeping up with the Joneses,” if you will—by way of socially conditioned consumption, not production, that was paramount, with the suburban terrain acting as the “new illusory frontier of consumption” (Potter xxiii). Needless to say, these suburban homes and their abundant consumer contents could nonetheless never be authentically associated with the consolations of ownership, or the productive function of property to mark, even constitute, identity that has been branded “possessive individualism.” Catherine Jurca usefully identifies, instead, the postwar ascendency of a suburban “sentimental dispossession,” wherein middle- class identity was grounded, not so much in these safe havens or homes, but in its “alienation from the very environments, artifacts, and institutions that have generally been regarded as central to its identity” (7). Emerging as the immediate by-product of modern advertising and consumer culture, this sentimental dispossession principally refers to the “affective dislocation” by which suburbanites

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 103 began to then experience themselves as “spiritually and culturally impoverished by prosperity” (Jurca 6). 6 An effective “organisation man at home” in this “dormitory of the new managerial class,” the male suburbanite, exchanging personality, privacy, and the certain satisfactions of pride of craftsmanship for something abstrusely defined as the social ethic, thus quickly became the object of sociological scrutiny (Whyte 267). Indeed, the plight of the suburban male was a prominent theme for numerous postwar novelists, providing them with the means to explore the specific social and economic conditions that informed and created this sense of existential crisis in the politics of subjectivity. Whether it be Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler of Revolutionary Road (1961), one such “neat and solid” (12) corporate drone whose “lack of structural distinction” leaves him awash in a shallow bath of “adjustment… and togetherness” (129); or else Eliot Nailles, the exemplary suburban “henpecked” husband and father of John Cheever’s Bullet Park (1969), whose sentimental dispossession and executive alienation consign him to “[living] a life… without any genuine emotion or value” (168); the growing disparity between an authentic masculine ideal and the avenues available for white, middle-class men to realize that ideal, fuelled the contentious social dynamics of the century’s major works of suburban fiction. 7 Certainly, with few other American writers of the twentieth-century remaining more directly or definitively associated with a narrative of the suburban middle-class, it is the “definitely commercial… showroom… quality” of John Cheever’s fiction that frames the suburbs as a perfect picture window through to the grey flannel world (100). In his calling attention to this inevitable conflict between the demands of the corporate organization and the dormant desires of the atomized suburbanite in texts like Bullet Park, Cheever’s literary brand of suburban disillusionment effectively conceives the dysfunctional dimensions of masculine dejection as being somehow derivative of suburbia’s larger malady, which is rooted in the very impossibility of the imaginative “apple pie order” it represents (11). Accordingly consumed by suburbia’s “artificial structure of acceptable reality” and “stubbornly [refusing] to admit the terms by which [he] [lives],” Eliot Nailles, a commercial chemist and apparently model family man dedicated to the “intenseness of his monogamy,” thus

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fittingly reprises the final endpoint of capitalism’s pursuit of happiness (23). His central status as a “henpecked doormat” serves to highlight the “domesticated” ideology of the Bullet Park suburbs, while further underscoring the suburban subordination of what could have once been Nailles’ heroic and pioneering “migratory [instinct],” into the regimented and largely “painful experience of being forced into the role of a bystander” (89-90). Yet despite this “immutable emptiness” (61) he expectedly experiences at the hands of the social ethic, Nailles nevertheless continues to “sell himself” the uniformly “adjusted” character one is supposed to have, and the appropriate inner experiences as well as the outer appearances that go with it (65). The emasculating effects of such a “commodious and efficient” (65) existence in this numbingly materialistic setting result, then, in the outright reduction of the typical Eliot Nailles suburbanite to little more than a depersonalized civic cog, who “[mows] his lawns” while the neighbors watch and think, “what a nice man [Mr. Nailles] must be” (235).

8 Viewed together in a doppelganger narrative with Paul Hammer, the illegitimate, “maladjusted” son of a socialist kleptomaniac, and chaotic antithesis to the “happily married… simple life” the suburbs stand for, the two men signify halves of the overburdened American psyche (95). Like his counterpart, Hammer wants nothing more than to fit in and belong. Yet amid the suburban social ethic, “one seldom saw a lonely man,” and so Hammer’s “bastardy [appears] a threat to organized society” (173). As a result he accredits belongingness to the illusory, commercial suburban “way of life” epitomized by Nailles (52). For Hammer, Nailles did not “[arrive] [in] Bullet Park [so much] as to have been planted and grown there,” but this is, of course, “untrue,” with “disorder, moving vans, bank loans at high interest, tears and desperation… [characterizing] most of [the residents] arrivals and departures” (4). To this end, Cheever posits a dislocation at the heart of the postwar suburban experience, exposing any organic idea(l) of the suburbs for the utterly self-centered materialism that it is. Throughout the novel, the author in fact specifically seeks to challenge this prevailing view of suburbia as a pillar of security, stability, and social adjustment through disclosing a disturbing reality of insecurity, instability and maladjustment. Subsequently, Cheever succeeds in estranging his readers from this environment they thought they knew so well, by means of stressing that essentially

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 105 inescapable hammer and nail bond between affluence and abjection.

9 However, more than mere “comedies of suburban manners” or “didactic essays on the ‘dystopian’ aspects of suburbia,” such works by Cheever adopt this elusive dream of 1960s American suburbanization so as to foreground the psychological and cultural construction of suburbia as a theoretical ideal, revealing in the process the “consequent tensions that underlie the suburban experience” (Beuka 15). Bullet Park hence not only considers the moral dislocations of the second half of the twentieth century, but also directly addresses the fractured principles of America’s traditional values and beliefs. It is important to recognize, therefore, that while in many ways the new suburban landscape certainly disrupted traditional national conceptions of American manhood, it also equally resembled the principal nature of such conceptions. Indeed, given that masculinity is about power and the exhibition of that power, it remains a construct that is demonstrated for other men’s approval. With masculine worth always reliant on external authorization, suburban masculinity evolves, then, merely as another manifestation of a hegemonic masculine ideology grounded in surface performances defined by cultural ideals. By way of considering this late sixties text by Cheever as such, the rest of this essay will hence proceed to examine both Nailles and then Hammer, so as to explore in what ways, and to what extent, the author’s portrayal of a disenchanted suburban ennui in Bullet Park treads the fault lines of laissez-faire capitalism, whilst furthermore succeeding in uncovering the sources of masculine dissatisfaction in their more true and underground origins.

10The overall structure of the novel is divided into three parts. Part One deals with the shrink-wrapped life of socialite suburbanite Eliot Nailles and the standardized formulation of his “rigid,” yet essentially apathetic “sense of social fitness” (52). Part Two, on the other hand, offers an internalized “insight into how lonely and horny mankind is” through its more detailed account of Paul Hammer’s neurotic mind, as well as the various sources of his masculine discontent (133). Though they occasionally run into one another in the first two parts of the novel—along with their numerous other disaffected Bullet Park neighbors —it is in Part Three that their dual narratives ceremoniously coincide. Respectively “bound together” in this antagonist

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 106 structural doubling between stereotypical middle-class conformity and anomic non-conformity, the two men and their split narratives significantly evoke a sense of division to which the individual mind in conflict with itself is susceptible (19). As Paul Coates suggests, “the double” exists in literature due to our “inchoate knowledge that we are incomplete and that we cannot master ourselves” (18). Moreover, it implies that identity is a “false category,” for if two men are comparable, or in a simplified “Hammer and Nailles; side by side” (Cheever 19) relationship, neither has a “unique, well-defined identity of his own” (Coates 18-19). Compelled to satisfy the life plan that society deems “honest, reliable, clean and happy” (Cheever 53), and with excessive emphasis thereby placed on social stability, domestic harmony, and corporate responsibility, the fractured perspective of Hammer and Nailles—two neighboring men who were “the same weight, height and age” (230)—eludes, then, to the male suburbanite’s inability to maintain a “balanced” or “united view” within this contemporary homogenous culture (Coates 19). Thus, whereas select critics such as Benjamin DeMott have dismissed Cheever’s “flawed novelistic structure” as nothing else but a “broken-backed,” unconvincingly “tacked together” attempt to “[stretch] a short story into a novel” (40), it seems far fairer to argue that, through this very three-part configuration, the author in fact succeeds in creating an allegorical format in which the suburban male emerges as a locus of contradictions in a reality of conflicting discourses and discursive practices; with “the setting in some way at the heart of the matter” (Cheever 3).

11Outwardly obliging and sociable inasmuch as he sees “utility” in “[manufacturing] and merchandising” the spirit of community (100), the novel’s opening elucidation of Nailles and his character’s mandatory sense of “responsibility to… the [social] fitness of things,” can be read as first of all documenting performance in the known and perceptible surface world of suburbia (27). Despite the “utter artificiality of [his] sentiments” (33), the perpetual need to “[work] out a reasonable and patient character like a character in a play… and then [to] [try] and act the part,” underscores this faithful suburbanite’s excessive sensitivity, if not “self-conscious” anxiety, over the opinions and attitudes of his neighbors (114). Such dread of disapproval and the respective damage it could prove to Nailles’ social standing corroborates the tormented social subjectivity that was particularly pertinent in the postwar American suburb.

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For with its more fluid social mobilities and pervasive topographical connotations of economic success and individual achievement, the loss of suburban status becomes all the more fearful, while the imperative to belong and get along with others grows even more profound.

12It is, of course, important to appreciate from the outset, the extent to which Nailles, and his innate “belief in the fitness of things,” is directly synonymous with the precepts of his culture, so much so that any individual agency or autonomous characterization effectively evaporates into a generic classification (Cheever 27). His narrative is likewise so deliberately devoid of any clear sense of personality or plot other than suburban conformity, that the succeeding discussion of his opening section almost exclusively parallels the leading critical literature on American masculinity in suburbia at the time. Indeed, taking his social ‘cues’ from others—peers, bosses, teachers, advertisers—Nailles essentially embodies a new characterological adjustment, whereby the individual “no longer follows the dictates of conscience,” but, instead, becomes highly responsive to the “fluctuations and crosscurrents of the day-to-day” (Potter 54). In other words, Cheever’s Nailles deliberately “[discounts] the wilderness of the human spirit” in favor of the approbation of his suburban community (5), and proceeds to externally manipulate his entire “way of life” (52) just so he can measure up to the inordinate “display of elegance [and] friendly talk [of those] well-dressed men and women” around him (238). Such socialized behavior, in which his contemporaries are a constant source of guidance, in turn, aptly correlates Nailles with David Riesman’s astute portrait of the “other-directed” personality type as outlined in The Lonely Crowd (1950). A “shallower… friendlier” person, who is “freer with his money [and] more uncertain of himself and his values,” Riesman coined this term “other- directed” to describe white-collar men of the fifties (Lonely 19). In stark contrast to the highly individualized, “inner- directed” (Lonely 19) masculinity of the previous century— whose self-assured sense of self drove him as he ventured into unexplored frontiers—Nailles symbolizes this kind of “marketer, … middle-class male child” masculinity which, “[presenting] [itself]… with the air of [a] [salesman] pointing out the merits of a new car in a showroom,” was

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 108 understood as developing in contemporary, bureaucratic America (Cheever 100).

13An indiscernibly “plain man dressed plainly in grey” (171), Nailles’ claim to “rectitude and uniformity” (239) is similarly indicative of what Fromm identifies as a contemporaneous “escape from freedom” (61). According to Fromm, human beings naturally tend to fear freedom and the terrifying sense of ambiguity it inspires in the individual. Hence, when acting independently in a democratic American society and confronted with the existential anguish of making choices and exercising responsibility, Nailles adopts a new “herd” mentality in which any “gratification” or “sense of identity” (Fromm 61) depends on his acting in line with the “requirements of the culture” (77). Indeed, attuned to others but never to himself, such capitulation through “compulsive conforming” (Fromm 19) allows Nailles to hide in a hierarchy within which his place and his role seem certain, and to withhold the “agony, confusion and humiliation,” all those “symptoms of panic” (Cheever 123) freedom effects, by paradoxically “frustrating [all] other urges” and fusing himself with the “lonely crowd” (Lonely 3). Thus, when he claims, “what I wear, what I eat, my sex life and a lot of my thinking is pretty well regimented but there are times when I like being told what to do,” he exhibits an essentially conventionalized, if not contrived desire which applies extensively to all the intimate areas of his life, for the order and certainty authoritarianism offers; because “[he] can’t figure out what’s right and what’s wrong in every situation” (Cheever 67).

14In this regard, the “moderate, calm, a little bored and absentminded” character in the interest of which Nailles acts verifies the prototypical, “other-directed” social self of suburbia (Cheever 126); a self which does not perform “of [its] own volition” (217), but is essentially constituted by “the [role] written for [him]” (34) by the social ethic and which, in reality, is simply a “subjective disguise for the objective social function of man” in a given society (Fromm 101). The term “other-directed” itself notably suggest such “shallowness and superficiality,” with direction “coming from the outside” and simply being “internalized” (Lonely 159). Nailles’ “principal occupation with the merchandising of Spang,” a commercial mouthwash, as being “[reflective] of his dignity,” no doubt then serves to give credence to this claim (Cheever 103). According to Nailles, “bad breath was

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 109 a human infirmity like obeseness and melancholy… [which] came between young lovers, friends, husbands and wives. [It] could lead to divorce, alimony and custody suits, [or] sap a man’s self-esteem, posture and appearance” (104). His central concern with “[curing] it,” so as to save the “victim who would mumble into his shirt, hoping to divert the fumes downward,” is, as such, based on Spang’s possible surface result, that is, on how the recipient social other would receive and respond to it, as opposed to how the individual sufferer may directly experience it (104). This externally oriented, people-minded process is, of course, principally “other-directed,” however, the belief that the “sales of Spang would increase if its taste was more unpleasant,” furthermore suggests the disturbingly synthetic preoccupations of this suburban community (Cheever 105). 15Sure enough, with its patent connotations of cosmetic pain and torturous intrusion, the analogous metaphoric reference to a “dentist [turning] on the light above his drills” (193), or “preparing utensils for an extraction” (198), embellishes the notion of exterior “cleanliness” being associated here with an uncomfortable, interior “bitterness” (105). Nailles’ foremost “anger… and unease [toward any] [obscenely]… intimate… human allusions” (21), be it “[stains]… domestic rubbish,” or the “faint unfreshness of humanity… exhaled… at the end of the day” (79), similarly figures this suburban environment as an artificial “precinct of disinfected acoustics” (9), one so inauthentically “crude, flagrant and repulsive that it [amounts] to an irony” (124). Indeed, with the somewhat hostile veneer of “success” very much to be desired, and in many cases favored to any human substance, anything remotely “vagrant” from Nailles’ rigid and sanitized “sense of the fitness of things,” proceeds to directly “[offend] his nose [and] his sight” (86), until all that is left is “nothing, nothing, nothing at all except the blandness of the scene,” which, after a while, would “[get] so [boring]… [it] would [itself] be offensive” (238).

16Cheever further explicates this notion through his repeated reference to “wax flowers,” which serve as a subtle symbol for the beautifully preserved and polished, pristine world of suburbia, at the same time as a demonstrative indication of its inert and imitational, commoditized nature (26). Given that “wax flowers meant death” (130) and Nailles often “dreamed [of]… his own… funeral” as if he were dead already (57), foregrounds the

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 110 contrived conservation of this style of life as derivative of the deadening, “no good for anything” materialism that governs affluent middle-class American society (88). Consistently “weighted down with rugs and chairs” (32) and “[tables] set [with] wax flowers” (12), Cheever in effect allegorizes the suburban locale as a pale imitation of the real thing, a counterfeit community where nature itself becomes merely another element of maintaining visual evidence of dominant class status. The direct parallel made between the customary household “display of wax flowers” (130) and the male “principal member” being described as a “discouraged and unwatered flower” (30), likewise, suggests a sense of alienation from nature occasioned by the commodification of the suburban environment. Such imagery, moreover, discloses the essentially castrating atmosphere of this sterile environment, which ensues to “transform the organic into the inorganic,” so as to render all “living persons” into “things [which] can be controlled and ordered,” if not displayed (Fromm 41).

17Certainly amid these contemporary postwar conditions, the resolve to externally keep up appearances usurps the internal struggle for existence every time, thereby generating a sort of false consciousness in which “falsehood, confinement, exclusion and a kind of blindness [seem] to be [the] only means of comprehension” (Cheever 33). AsMills explains, “in dressing people up and changing the scenery of their lives,” the exclusive suburban experience effectively cultivated a “great faith in the religion of appearance” (169). Just like a “masquerade party,” all Cheever’s suburbanites have to really do, therefore, is to “get [their] clothes at Brooks, catch the train and show up in church once a week and no one will ever ask a question about [their] identity” (54). For above all else, these suburbanites who “look like people and yet they’re really not” (Cheever 26), exemplify “a new cast of actors performing the major routines of twentieth-century society” (Mills ix). Of course, within the narcissistically immersive “commercial center” that is Bullet Park (Cheever 5), this performance principally involves the acquisition of appropriate props, for if you “don’t have a pool [yourself], frankly it’s something of a limitation” (13). 18Not wanting to “find [themselves] left out of the conversation… when people start talking about pool chemicals and so forth” (13), Cheever’s characters consistently maintain a position of superiority in what

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Pierre Bourdieu calls the “culture game” (1). According to Bourdieu, there exists at the center of modern affluent societies an “economy of cultural goods” that function in accordance with a “specific logic” (1).i One’s “place” in the social landscape is dictated, as such, by their ability to demonstrate possession of discriminating tastes and propriety, or what Bourdieu refers to as “cultural capital” (1). Following this contention, Cheever presents the “well- bred, beautiful, wealthy” (55) citizens of Bullet Park as subject to the “symbolic ecology” of suburbia,in which evidentiary display of cultural distinction through inconspicuous consumption serves not only as the surveyor of social status, but as a measure of individual worth.ii Certainly Nailles’ sense of his own significance is frequently experienced by means of socio-economic factors extraneous to himself, as if his life in suburbia rests solely on some “substructure of talismans” which determine human value in the same way the market determines the price of a commodity (241). The allegorical reference to Nailles’ house being “made of cards” effectually substantiates this idea, by way of alluding to his home in the idiom of a game, and so factoring its worth in the same tenuous terms as a card’s figurative value within a card game (46). Amidst this vain “game of culture” (Bourdieu 3), the material reality of any object to which Nailles can relate with the reality of his own person is, therefore, exchanged for what Fromm terms, “phenomenon of abstractification” (61). 19When “[relating] oneself to an object in an abstract way” (61), namely, “emphasizing only those qualities which it has in common with all other objects of the same genus,” Fromm argues that objects can only ever be “experienced as commodities,” that is, “as [embodiments] of exchange value” (112). Thus, when the citizens of Bullet Park repeatedly refer their neighbor’s house according to its “estimated resale price” (Cheever 6), they are not centrally concerned with its use as a home, that is to say, “with its concrete qualities,” but are speaking of it only in other- directed terms as a relative product, the main quality of which is its exchange value (Fromm 111). Indeed, with Cheever’s suburban population conditioned to prioritize the abstract form of “the Howestons (7 bedrooms, 5 baths, $65,000) and the Welchers (3 bedrooms, 1 ½ baths, $31,000)” (Cheever 9), they demonstrate a receptive marketing orientation whereby they must respond to the given object even if it “poorly serves their actual needs” (Whyte 324). Chiefly acquisitive for the good life inferred

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 112 from the socio-economic structure of suburbia, money itself becomes, then, secondary. As Karl Marx explains, “money” works only inasmuch as it “transforms real human and natural powers into… abstract ideas, and… imperfections and imaginings, the powers which only exist in the imagination of the individual, into real powers” (300-301).iii For Nailles, consumerism is therefore essentially the “satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies” (Fromm 130); that is, a phantasy “extension of [his] [affairs]” (Cheever 201) whose reality is mainly the fiction the advertising campaign has created, “like the ‘healthy’ dental paste,” or, in this case, mouthwash (Fromm 61). 20Rather than an effective means to an end, the social pressure to excessively consume hence comes to be the aim in itself; specifically, an irresponsibly displaced pursuit of happiness in which the materialistic “suburban rhythm” of a newly affluent America obeys the profitable investment pattern of capital (Whyte 316). To this end, Elaine Tyler May’s definition of the postwar suburban home as a “secure, private nest removed from the dangers of the outside world” is rendered somewhat problematic, for what May understands to be the ideal version of “American home,” namely a domestic “bastion of safety in an insecure world,” has from the outset been but an abstract stage on which a drama of perfect nuclear family life should ideally be played out (9). Nonetheless, it seems still necessary to acknowledge the suburban autonomy May describes, specifically its complacent contentment with itself, as an allegorical expression for the situation of postwar America in Cheever’s work, as well as in the outside world as a whole. As Fredric Jameson explains, to shift from the “realities” of a period such as the 1960s, to the “representation” of that rather different thing, the sixties, obligates us in addition to underscore the “cultural sources of all attributes with which we have endowed the period,” many of which seem very precisely to derive from “its own representation of itself” (281). The both intensely personal, and extensively abstract, image-saturated space of Cheever’s Bullet Park therefore seeks to highlight that normatively held “happy picture… of a man and a woman and two children” (Cheever 134), which not only was a “staple of the… sitcoms of the 1950s,” but indeed of postwar American culture’s homogenous “vision of suburbia” (Beuka 108). In this way, Cheever denotes the extent to which that over determined “sense of permanence” (181) so characteristic of suburban

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 113 representation, expresses a cultural tendency to misread and misremember the suburbs, a tendency which suggests a fundamental desire “to be immortal” (69). This commodification of history, or “nostalgia for the present” if you will (Jameson 279), moreover, allows Cheever to offer a “corrective vision” to those mass cultural representations of congenial community and “stable patriarchal domesticity” (Beuka 107-108)—namely those comforting, codified narratives of the suburbs in the era’s image of itself—which were so simplistically, and yet forcefully promulgated in an attempt to dissociate the postwar American present from sites of conflict and trauma, as if “nothing bad has ever or will ever happen here” (Cheever 186). 21The notable absence of any rudimentary explanation regarding Eliot Nailles’ past, that is to say, his narrative’s clear disregard for any account of his personal history, serves to then juxtapose his character against the cultural presumption that the postwar suburbs were rootless and “free of trouble” (186), by way of presenting him as having been “grown there… [in] Bullet Park” (4). As Arthur Kroker expounds, the suburban inhabitant like Nailles personifies the “colonial subject” of suburbia, who is “tied umbilically” to a way of life that “grows on [him], feeds on [him], parasites [him]” (Kroker 214), with the aim of turning him into something “repulsively unlike his nature” (Cheever 239). With this, the “quite literal promise” (168) that “if [you] could only possess this [life] [you] would be [yourself] … industrious and decent,” that individuals could, indeed, finally realize their deepest desires here, in a zone of supposed security and comfort, is essentially subverted (185). Cheever intimates, instead, that by the very anaesthetizing nature of its physical space, the suburban reality was for all genuine expressions of desire to not just be blocked, but uprooted in their very conception. 22In this sense, the foregoing discussion of the process of abstractification extends “far beyond the realm of objects,” with the people of Bullet Park experienced, too, as the personification of a “quantitative exchange value” (Fromm 113). What this means is the way in which the “[commercially] handsome” personality package of suburbia became an instrument for capitalist purposes, and sentiments mere “hallowed” tokens by which societal status is obtained (Cheever 100). Removed from the inner feelings they supposedly express, Nailles’ relationship with his fellow man hence becomes a superficial interaction to which there was “less dimension than a comic strip” (25). Indeed, despite his investment in the personality market of

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 114 the culture game, Nailles is markedly aware that his “society had become… automative and nomadic,” with “means of communication [being] established by the use of… suitable signals” (21). Nevertheless, consisting of the correct commodities, appropriate apparel and proper participation in social activities, these essentially empty signifiers deemed “suitable” continue to formulate a “prized image of self” which permits Nailles to cling to the false consciousness of his status position (Mills 258). The extent to which Nailles is correspondingly intended as the poster- boy for suburbia is made clear when Paul Hammer finds a “photograph and a brief article about his promotion to head of the Mouthwash Division at Saffron” (Cheever 145), which convinces Hammer “whoever lived there [in Bullet Park] lived a useful and illustrious life” (179). Certainly as a “member of the Bullet Park Volunteer Fire Department and the Gorey Brook Country Club,” Nailles offers an engaging image of suburban success (45). However, the fact that this ubiquitous surface image of “exceptional innocence and purity” is the principal portrait we have of Nailles’ character, even with his first person narrative voice, suggests the degree to which he is wholly trapped by his public persona (198). 23The use of rhetorical questions across the novel’s opening section no doubt serves as an astute literary indication of Nailles’ cumulative vacancy and self- estrangement. Having acquired an organizational, outward numbness, Nailles has grown equally out of touch with his internal self. So while may be experiencing a feeling, he is incapable of identifying neither “what” it is nor “why” he is feeling it (61). This abstractly disorientating “force of separateness” (128) is innately symptomatic of a contemporary American male malaise, or what Roger Horrocks loosely terms “male autism” (107). For Horrocks, the autistic male is “deeply ashamed” of himself, of feeling “vulnerable” or “enthusiastic” over anything since it threatens his self-control (107). It is, of course, Nailles’ ceremonial duty to the social ethic of suburbia that produces such shame, as it obliges him to favor self- respectability over self-respect. 24So as to manage the “[profound] loneliness” which logically accompanies such repression, Nailles therefore adopts an “outer deadness” (Horrocks 107) by means of removing himself from true experience, and masking the “black [abyss] at the edge of everything” with the repeated use of a “massive tranquilizer” (Cheever 128, 121). Cheever’s allusion to drug addiction here is allegorically indicative of suburbia’s larger capitalistic dependencies

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 115 which, both “mercenary and dishonest,” made “any reflection—any sort of thoughtfulness or emotional depth— impossible” (167). Needless to say, Nailles is so completely invested in the social system of suburbia that, “just like a drug addict [dependent] on his drug” (Fromm 155), he renounces any experience of his self as an autonomous entity with “any genuine emotion or value,” or as anything more than a saleable commodity reliant on the external approval of others (Cheever 168). Even though consciously trapped in this “position that [seems] desperate and abject” (61), Nailles cannot fathom a life beyond the “rosy nimbus” (121) of his “white house and his office” (65). Hence, in an effort to pretend that “[everything] was the way it was when it was so wonderful” (59), and satisfy that elemental nostalgia for the present, Nailles utilizes the apathetic “guise of forgetfulness” (176) through quite literally “drugging [himself]” (168). Whilst this may evidently prevent any sense of a specifically masculine “valor” from ever being seen or effectively realized (138), if Nailles were to even begin to discover the despairing depths of his deprivation, that is to say, “why [he is] so disappointed… why everything [seems] to have passed [him] by… why… there [is] no brilliance or promise in [his] affairs” despite the fact “[he] tried, [and] tried, [and] did the best [he] knew how to,” it would surely lead to a great crisis (10).

25In consequence, other than that his “sense of being alive was to bridge or link the disparate environments and rhythms of his world,” we are purposely denied any full or immediate access to Nailles’ emotional state (65). In order to gain a frank insight into what happens to the male psyche when “one of [those] principle bridges… collapses” (65), we have to hence look to the other side of the tracks from middle-class conformity, specifically to the “maladjusted… parasite” that is Paul Hammer (207). Introduced as both bachelor and bastard “at a time when the regard for domesticity had gotten so intense” (145), Hammer is constitutionally inept in his adjustment to the commercially normative, socio-psychological fit of sixties suburbia, whereby an “amiable man” would, for example, “play some golf” (208), and always appear “perforce with one’s wife [and] one’s children” (145). Supposedly too unstable to fulfill this life trajectory deemed “clean and happy” (Cheever 53), and with no room on “the golf course [of]… the good life” for what Barbara Ehrenreich dubs “the mature bachelor” (44, 14), Hammer is considered to be a “threat to organized society” (Cheever173). A “pervert… with severe emotional problems” (Ehrenreich 14), his “best

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 116 defense” (Cheever 174), or else his “only defense” against the “cruel injustice… [of] illegitimacy” (163), is to hence incessantly “[prey] on the happiness of others” (207). Accordingly, Scott Donaldson insists that, if Nailles is the passive “preserver of family and community,” then Hammer represents the otherwise “obsessed and deranged destroyer” (243). It is important to realize, however, that whilst there is certainly justification in Donaldson’s determination of Hammer and Nailles as respective “fragments of a single divided psyche,” he critically undercuts this contention by claiming that, “hate rules [Hammer’s] existence as love dominates that of Nailles’” (Donaldson 247). Indeed, whereas Donaldson maintains that Nailles is fundamentally “content with his lot” (246), it would be far sounder to argue that, in fact, Hammer emerges half way through the novel as the anomic by- product of the “grey miasma of conformity that gripped… men” like Nailles, and beneath the surface of which there had always resided a latent residue of inarticulate pain and masculine terror (Ehrenreich 44).

26It is obvious that the compulsion for conformity provides a “source of anxiety” for Nailles (Cheever 102). Thus, to read “the love [Nailles] felt for his wife”—that “seemed like some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would surround [her], cover [her], preserve [her] and leave [her] insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic” (Cheever 25; emphasis my own)—in the same way as Donaldson, namely as demonstrative of Nailles’ individual “capacity to… love… admire [and] protect,” neglects to consider the anxiously commoditized temperament of Nailles’ descriptive language (Donaldson 25). In truth, this vivid detail directly corroborates the duplicitously covered, preserved, insular, and visible surface principles of suburbia. This is made further evident when Nailles professes that it was his “manifest destiny… to love [his wife] Nellie” (Cheever 23). Here Nailles ensues to distort the conventional rhetoric of American imperialism within the domestic context of suburbia so as suggest the extent to which the “hallowed institution of holy matrimony” had become the new national doctrine of success, at the same time as detracting any emotional or affectionate, spousal association (Cheever 100). It is not “love” as such that therefore governs Nailles’ existence, but rather the precarious American pursuit of suburban happiness that limits Nailles’ masculine influence to the close-up scenes of job, family and neighborhood, whilst ultimately denying him

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 117 any human capacity to either “fall in love” (55) or to “have… hate” (193).

27As a result, given that he is initially presented as a societal outcast, Hammer’s isolated version of events offer a window onto what lies outside these rigid structures of suburbia’s dominant value system, and onto the “savage and unnatural… appetites” which contradict the “visionary… summit of [Nailles’] perfection” (18). Cheever’s use of doubling here is, however, less a transgression from, and more an explicit emphasis of the oppressive nature of fixed suburban male role patterns. For despite deviating from the dictates of the social ethic, Hammer is nevertheless unable to escape their emasculating impact as he “[begins] to suffer from… a form of despair that seemed to have a tangible approach” (174). Described as a pathological “cafard [that] followed him” (182), this “profound… melancholy,” which gave Hammer “difficulty breathing” or “getting out of bed” (219), can be seen as the affliction of a culture in which expectations for self- realization were greater than ever before. With an “adequate income” (174), Hammer certainly believes he is entitled to individual self-fulfillment, and hence he articulates a solipsistic “sublime feeling of rightness” (235), whereby he regards the “earth” as “[his] property,” fittingly “paved” and “ready” for his “occupancy… [and] contentment” (183-188). But of course, this notion of individual aspiration is only attainable in terms of one’s adjustment to society’s “normal spectrum” (219), thereby fostering Hammer’s sense of masculine “ridicule and despair” (174) by promoting “normative, mature male role expectations” and pathologizing those who seek a lifestyle “outside of the conventions of the time” (Cuordileone 138). It is through the subsequent autobiographical account of Hammer’s “intolerable sense of his aloneness” that the reader is able, then, to observe the actuality of “squalor, spiritual poverty and [monotonous] selfishness” compressed behind the façade of Nailles’ cohesive suburban selfhood (Cheever 149).

28As Riesman portends, “in a society of any size there will be some who are pushed out of that tight web” (Lonely 241). Within the “aggressively hostile,” heteronormative gated community of suburbia this is a particularly prominent phenomenon (Lonely 212), and it is precisely Hammer’s “inability to cope with the social demands of modern [suburban] culture” (Lonely 244) that respectively

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 118 vilifies him with the “incriminating… judgment” of homosexuality (Cheever 146). Having failed to adjust to normative and mature male role requirements—which involved “attaining a respectable job, getting married, maintaining a home, and establishing a family” (Cuordileone 146)—Hammer is assumed to suffer from the same combination of “infantile fixation, dread of responsibility, and fear of the opposite sex” (Cuordileone 146) which supposedly compel the “deviant homosexual” into “an unnatural way of life” (Cheever 177). Hence, when visiting a psychiatrist in the hope of locating the “source of [his] cafard,” Hammer is informed that, without an adequately “efficient disposition,” he must be a “repressed transvestite homosexual,” acutely “ashamed of, … [and] intimidated... [by his] sexual guilt” (Cheever 177-179). Of course, what this overtone essentially underscores is the extent to which, in postwar therapeutic culture, the male homosexual and the bachelor were condemnably equated as “fundamentally immature and maladjusted,” but unlike the bachelor, the homosexual had allegedly “given up entirely on fulfilling a normative masculine role in society” (Cuordileone 146-7). What is more, through this episode Cheever conveys the way in which contemporaneous psychiatric judgment localized the “catalyst” for male homosexuality within “external sociological factors,” as opposed to “innate biological drives,” in an attempt to rationalize the apparent increase in the incidence of homosexuality (Cuordileone 147). 29The notion that male homosexuality was on the rise certainly distinguishes the sexual anxieties of this period from others before it. Nailles in point of fact states that, “[he] [didn’t] dislike boys like that…, it’s just that they [mystified] [him], they [frightened] [him] because [he] didn’t know where they [came] [or] where they’re going” (Cheever 116). Following the same line of contention, writers of the fifties such as Abram Kardiner recognized the specific social drifts and disorders of the postwar period as providing the basis for what he described to be this “large- scale flight from masculinity” (164). Kardiner candidly points to the existing external circumstances of suburban affluence, particularly one’s “inability to keep up with the Joneses” (Kardiner 170), as that which subsequently affected a man’s ability to “prove that [he] was truthful and manly” (Cheever 177), along with his “voluntary” sex-object choice (Kardiner 170). To this end, Hammer comes to signify what was then popularly believed to be “the [man]

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 119 who [is] overwhelmed by the increasing demands to fulfill the specifications of masculinity,” and who has to “flee from competition because [he fears] the increased pressure on what [he] [considers] [his] very limited resources” (Kardiner 175). It is, of course, through this very prevalent view of homosexuality as a socially assimilated trait that Cheever actually succeeds in calling attention to the diminishing sense of options available for men in postwar America; for despite the growing perception of entitlement to personal freedom and self-fulfillment, the “division between [the] two forces [of] [natural] instinct [and] [social] duty… seemed [to Hammer] like a broad river without bridges” (Cheever 128). 30Signi ficantly, Hammer encounters numerous potential homoerotic incidences as a “direct consequence of [his] being alone” (146), which all together suggests that, in suburbia, the only “other [way] of doing it besides being joined in holy matrimony and filling up the cradle” is to be “queer” (117). Most notably on the beach, where one was expected to “[appear] with [his] wife, [his] children, sometimes [his] parents or a brace of house guests,” but never as a “lonely man,” Hammer meets the “amorous and slightly cross-eyed gaze… [of] a comely and tanned… faggot” (145-146). At the same time, however, Hammer spots another man on the scene, “a conscientious desk worker with a natural stoop and a backside broadened by years of honest toil” (146). While the “faggot” advances to “[hook] his thumbs into his trunks and [lower] them to show [Hammer] an inch or two of [his] backside,” this “honest… desk worker,” who was “in no way muscular or comely,” attempts to “fly a kite… with his wife and two children” (146). No doubt Cheever is chiefly concerned here with exploiting a closely interrelated set of contradictory attitudes, which, Bernice Murphy contends, “can most clearly be expressed as a set of binary oppositions” (3). The juxtaposition of these two men is, therefore, particularly interesting, for it forces Hammer to overtly “[declare] [which] world [he]… [chooses] to live in,” whilst congruently accentuating the abundant lack of options available to the middle-class male beyond the dichotomous paradigm of suburban adjustment or maladjustment (Cheever 147).

31For fear he be further outcast, Hammer hence dismisses “the [faggot’s] [throw] [of] another sidelong glance,” together with the additional “absentminded pull of his trunks,” and resolves to “[get] to [his] feet and [join] the man with the kite,” at which point the “faggot [wanders] off

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 120 as [Hammer] intended that he should” (147). In this respect, the “filament of kite line” proves to be an important metaphor inasmuch as it “succinctly [declares] [Hammer’s] intentions to the faggot,” as if to “possess some extraordinary moral force” (147). Sure enough, as Hammer “[helps] to unsnarl the line” it unfolds into a symbolic boundary marker of community, albeit one, like the garden gate, which is inherently permeable (147). Hammer quickly realizes as such, that there is little, if nothing more than this synthetically “fine… line” (147) to separate suburban normality from the “baser qualities” that lurk “under the… brilliant… grass… and fir trees” (58). The standardized “two-car family” (53) kind of existence he has not much choice but to try to emulate, likewise, is essentially “bound together by just such a length of string—cheap and colorless” (147). Thus, when Hammer does eventually marry his wife Marietta, he similarly identifies her as “always [wearing] a white thread on her clothing” (204). He alleges that, “even if [he] bought her a mink coat there would be a white thread on it,” and it is this very “white thread,” in the same manner as the kite string, that holds the “mysterious [catalytic] power… [to] [clarify] [Hammer’s] susceptibilities” (205). Of course, the fact that Hammer nevertheless still “[longs] for a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of string,” confirms the fragility of newly established suburban identities, as well as the visionary vacuousness upon which their verities are founded (147).

32It is important to note, therefore, the way in which, following this scene, Hammer comes to appreciate the “hopeful gaze of a faggot on the make” (181) as that of “all lonely men” (217), who have been “driven by the sameness of [their environment] to authenticate [their] identity by unnatural sexual practices” (181). The fact that Hammer disappoints to greet this gaze all the same, “[lowering] [his] eyes chastely to the floor” (181), furthermore reiterates just how hard it is for the individual male suburbanite, even at the expense of his own “honor, passion, … intelligence, [and] [genuineness],” to justify to himself a departure from the social norm (26). The “[serious]… doubt” (202) Hammer expresses over the tenuous tenets of suburban normality even as he “[retires] in defeat” (102), in this regard, corroborates the “fractured personality” of the male suburbanite, who is perpetually torn, as Cheever’s novel is divided, between the “paradoxical comforts and perils of

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 121 conformity” (Murphy 4). Indeed, whereas Nailles is firmly indoctrinated in the togetherness ethos of suburbia, to the extent that he associates conformism with the security and certainty of belonging, Hammer cannot help interpreting the cultural lack of “uniqueness” as a “[serious] [threat] to [his] own uniqueness” (Cheever 181). With nothing in the homogenously tepid, artificial landscape of Bullet Park to “distinguish it from a hundred, hundred others” (181), Hammer fears there “might be nothing about [him]” (181), that is to say, nothing “true to life” (30) left in him, to “set [him] apart from other men” (181). This leads us then back to this idea of identity as a “false category,” and Cheever’s narrative employment of the doppelganger as a means to underscore the break down of any “well defined [male] identity” in contemporary American society (Coates 18).

33For Gordon Slethaug, in the contemporary doppelganger text such as Bullet Park, the double starts to “[take] on a new identity” removed from the “universal absolutes” of an “indivisible, unified, continuous, and fixed identity,” and toward the representation of a “divided and discontinuous self in a fragmented universe” (3). It was the principle “mission” of the author of the double, as such, to “decenter the concept of the self,” to view “human reality as a construct,” and to explore the “inevitable drift of signifiers away from their referents” (Slethaug 3). Rather than a division wherein “[different] characters represent opposing qualities” (Slethaug 12), the split narratives of Hammer and Nailles - apportioned like “spaghetti and meatballs, salt and pepper, oil and vinegar” (Cheever 56-7) - thereby work to “raise questions about fixed categories and constructs,” especially about the notion that any human being has a “unified identity” (Slethaug 5). Thus, what appears in Nailles’ conditioned surface account like an interrelated identity and communal belonging, Hammer’s “intense emotional vertigo” (Cheever 181) no doubt purposefully serves to conclude as a “faulty first person [narrative]” (Slethaug 5); within which the then questionable basis of human perception has been caught in the culturally “monotonous [regulation] [and] dehumanization of man” (Whyte 398).

34Hammer’s neurotic fear, “not of falling but of vanishing” (Cheever 181), in this sense, critically reproaches the embittered “spiritual conformity” and personal disintegration that are the “unavoidable consequence of [organized] society” (Whyte 396). It is, however, Hammer’s

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 122 subsequent desire to get “back [to] the mountains” (Cheever 60), and “back” in touch with the “most natural [of] human [conditions]” so as to “[fend] off [his] cafard” (182) and reclaim the original “excellence and beauty [he] had lost” (174), which couples this suburban disillusionment, crucially, with a much deeper false consciousness regarding American masculinity. Throughout his narrative, Hammer diagnoses the anaesthetized climate of suburbia as fatefully affronting the “[arduous]… natural man” of hegemonic masculine ideology (171); that is he, “the hardy man,” who according to Riesman’s study, Individualism Reconsidered (1954), “pioneered on the frontiers of production, exploration, and colonization” (27). Nina Baym correspondingly illuminates how this idea of an essential Americanness—and within that, an essential American manhood—expounded with the emergence of such influential mid-century works of criticism as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) and R.W.B Lewis’ The American Adam (1955). According to Baym, these works consistently maintained that, “as something artificial and secondary to human nature,” society exerts an “unmitigatedly destructive pressure on individuality” (126). They likewise narrate a confrontation of the American individual, “the pure American self divorced from specific social circumstances,” with the “promise” offered by “the idea of America” (Baym 126). Behind this promise is, of course, the assurance that “individuals come before society, that they exist in some meaningful sense prior to, and apart from, societies in which they happen to find themselves” (Baym 127). 35The best prescription or defense against effective suburban castration, in Hammer’s mind, therefore lies in rediscovering the “[frightening] massiveness” of nature (Cheever 102), for like Michael Kimmel suggests, “if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to… live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, [and] to set out on that uncharted territory into the rebellious imperatives of the self” (Kimmel 144). This prescription, or promise, is, needless to say, a “deeply romantic one,” wherein the natural landscape of America, “untrammeled by history and social accident,” purportedly permits the American individual to achieve “complete self-definition” (Baym 126). It is, thus, important to recognize the fact that, instead of physically venturing into nature, Hammer chooses to

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 123

“summon those images that represented for [him] the excellence… that he had lost,” the first of which was “a snow-covered mountain [that] seemed to represent beauty, enthusiasm and love,” thereby demonstrating the extent to which American masculinity, in truth, consistently relies on a reservoir of mythological and romanticized images with which men sustain themselves in proving their manhood (Cheever 174-5).

36In a sense, this supposed promise of America and its manhood has, for a number or recent feminists at least, “always been known to be delusory” (Baym 127). Certainly for Baym, by the twentieth century this mythic “melodrama of beset manhood” had been transmuted into the evocation of an infantile “flight for its own sake” (127), as seen in contemporaneous suburban works such as John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960). Not unlike Hammer, Harry Rabbit Angstrom knows the truth, that “the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it, no flight would reach it” (208), and yet Harry continues to “run, run, run,” to run across Updike’s tetralogy as he is repeatedly told, “You can’t run enough” (54). Like Baym, Annette Kolodny, too, theorizes how the American pastoral concedes a “landscape of the mind to be projected upon and perceived as an objective and external ‘real world’ landscape” (156). No longer subject to the correcting influence of everyday experience, what occurs, then, is a kind of “communal act of imagination” (Kolodny 156). In these regards, given that Cheever’s reader is presented early on in the novel with an advertising billboard, wherein a “great big colored picture of… mountains covered with snow” promotes “[looking] at the mountain” to take one’s “mind off his troubles” (134), implies that Hammer’s masculinist fantasy, sure enough, does not derive from the real authentic experience that he believes, as a man, he is entitled to and “[has] lost,” but rather precedes reality with the intent of “corresponding to [that] vision,” as if by some perverse consumer obligation (182).

37It becomes necessary to distinguish, therefore, that it is not so much the “flagrant… imitation” facet of suburbia which hinders Hammer from retrieving his masculine potential, but rather that these precepts of American masculinity, like a “disinfectant… advertised to smell of mountain pine woods,” are themselves insincerely concocted, and so never there for him to ‘lose’ in the first place (Cheever 124). This outlook, needless to say, critically

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 124 undercuts traditional essentialist conceptions of American manhood by inferring that the original “inner directed” frontiersman, in the same way as the suburban organization man, acted merely in accordance to a social code. Nonetheless, it is credible to deduce that these original men were, in effect, simply guided by “internalized ideals,” which made them “appear to be more individualistic than they actually were” (Individualism 27). The extent to which Hammer is continually “condemned to exile” (Cheever 190) as the result of his inability to societally perform to the dictates of the suburban ethic, in consequence, directly mimics the masculine prerequisite to constantly reaffirm one is inherently “man enough” through outward “public display” (Kimmel 1).

38Whether through the gendered capital of money or muscles, perpetually proving one’s maleness for hope of other men’s approval was, and is, “one of the defining experiences of men’s lives” (Kimmel 1). It is always other men, as such, who then evaluate the performance of masculinity, which resolves American masculinity as a historical and changing, “other-directed” construct, and suburban masculinity, too, as just another manifestation of a hegemonic masculine ideology that is fundamentally based on a surface performance defined by concomitant cultural ideals. For this reason, Nailles’ pronunciation of Nellie as “his deliverer” evocatively distinguishes suburban manhood in relation to a woman, and thereby within a relative sociological power structure as opposed to upon a masculinist essence (Cheever 241). As his wife and housewife, Nellie’s “pleasant… composure” (31-32), deferentially “freed from the mortal bonds of grossness and aspiration,” permits Nailles to uphold the hierarchical male image of suburban patriarch at the same time as delivering him from an otherwise “contemptible” bachelorhood (241). Conversely, as the maladjusted other, Hammer is not delivered but rather stagnated by his “[frequent]… groping” for this “procrustean” masculine mythology (230) that he feels “he [has] lost” (191)—so much so that, ironically, he cannot conform to the prevailing male ideals of suburbia and has to seek delivery through destruction. As Patrick Meanor explains, “once [Hammer] is released from his habitual condition of spiritual stasis” and into an awareness of the “nihilistic [bleakness]” of his life, he unsurprisingly “loses control,” and any sense of “real freedom” is “immediately transformed into the most obvious self- destructive behavior” (Meanor 145). It is, of course, this

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 125 subsequent “provoked rage” (Cheever 234) that provides an alternate view onto the depraved “psychological… disorder and illegality” hiding behind the calm exterior of Nailles’ suburban façade, and which has been waiting to erupt in the pathological form of Hammer’s wanton devastation of either himself or his society (Slethaug 19). 39Interestingly enough, the closing section of the novel, wherein Hammer conjures “[his] crazy old… plan to crucify… and murder Nailles” (219), later changing his victim to Nailles’ son Tony, succeeds to cumulatively deploy the uncannily familiar tropes of the suburban gothic, which are only mildly insinuated across the first two thirds of the novel in the shape of Mrs Wickwires’ unexplained “arm in a sling” (6) or Harry Shinglehouse’s “highly polished brown loafer lying on the cinders [of] the [train] track” (61). In his study of the suburban gothic, Martin Dines describes its literary potential for “formal and epistemological disturbance” through the gothic use of “doublings… and ruination,” which altogether serve “to disrupt the overly familiar way in which stories about the suburbs tend to be told,” whilst furthermore “[saying] something unsettling about the most familiar of American spaces” (961). What is most “unsettling” about the conclusion of the novel, however, is not so much the disruptive terror Hammer reigns on Bullet Park, but rather the “overly familiar” way in which such perturbation is stylistically expressed. There is scarce detail or emotion as Nailles breaks through the door of Christ Church with a chain saw, nor resolute explanation as to why Hammer is just “sitting in a front pew, crying” (Cheever 244). Moreover, once Nailles “[lifts] his son off the alter and [carries] him out in to the rain,” the novel concludes in an objective journalistic reporting of the facts: “Paul Hammer, also of Bullet Park, confessed to attempted homicide and was remanded to the State Hospital for the criminally Insane.… He carried Nailles to the church with the object of immolating him in the chancel. He intended, he claimed, to awaken the world” (244). 40This anti-epiphanic close to the novel is, in turn, most significant, as it succeeds to undercut the view that either literary character must of necessity “learn something new [or] grow to maturity and psychological wholeness” (Slethaug 5). What is more, it simultaneously confirms that, in suburbia, you can either adjust and nail yourself to the inescapable set of narrow default options, or let yourself be hammered out of the system and perish - but there are no other alternatives. Ominously, Nailles therefore continues

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 126 to drug himself, and “naively” dismiss “the news in the paper… [of] a maniac with a carbine [massacring] seventeen people in a park…, [of] wars… raging, … [of] a hairdresser [shooting] his wife, his four children, his poodle and himself,” as merely “news from another planet” (Cheever 64). Cheever’s suburb, that looks “like a paradise” although we know “it [is] not” (58), as a result, persists as a haunting trope for the unresolvable and uncanny horrors of normality; which, like the matter of fact “news in the paper” (64), are in constant danger of entering and contaminating your “beautiful happy [suburban] picture” (134). Indeed, of turning you into an Eliot Nailles, insidiously ensconced into a slow death by conformity, whereby you must nonetheless incessantly refrain “everything [is] as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it [has] [ever] been” (245).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows. New York: Basic Books. 2008. Print.

Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-139. Print.

Beuka, Robert. SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Fiction and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Print.

Cheever, John. Bullet Park. London: Vintage, 1969. Print.

Coates, Paul. The Double and the Other: identity as ideology in post-romantic Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1988. Print.

Cuordileone, K.A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

DeMott, Benjamin. “A Grand Gatherum of Some Late Twentieth Century Weirdos.” New York Times Book Review (27 April 1969): 40-41. Print.

Dines, Martin. “Suburban Gothic and the Ethnic Uncanny in The Virgin Suicides.” Journal of American Studies 46.1 (November 2012): 959-975. Print.

Donaldson, Scott. John Cheever: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1988.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Anchor Books, 1983. Print.

Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. New York: Open Road Media, 1955. Print.

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Horrocks, Roger. Masculinity in Crisis. London: Palgrave, 1994. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “Nostalgia for the Present.” Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. 297-296. Print.

Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth Century American Novel. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print.

Kardiner, Abram. Sex and Morality. Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954. Print.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Print.

Kroker, Arthur and David Cook. The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper Aesthetics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Print.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Print.

Meanor, Patrick. John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Print.

Mills, C. Wright. White Collar. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Print.

Murphy, Bernice M. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Potter, David M. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print.

Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Print.

---. Individualism Reconsidered. London: The Free Press of Glencoe Collier-Macmillan Limited, 1954. Print.

Slethaug, Gordon. The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction. Carbondale, Illinois: SIU Press, 1993. Print.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. Print.

Whyte, William. The Organisation Man. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956. Print.

Wood, Robert C. Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963. Print/

Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. London: Vintage, 1961. Print.

NOTES i. Although Bourdieu’s work is of course about the French rather than the American culture and society, his insights clearly can and do apply to other cultural contexts. ii. Albert Hunter defines the “symbolic ecology” of a particular landscape as the collection of “processes by which symbolic meanings of environment [are] developed” (199). iii. Karl Marx, “Nationalökonomie und Philosophie” (1844). Die Frübschriften, Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1953, pp. 300, 301 (Translation by Erich Fromm, Sane Society, pp. 128).

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ABSTRACTS

This essay explores the issue of masculinity in John Cheever’s somewhat critically overlooked novel, Bullet Park (1969), so as to call attention to the inevitable conflict between the conformist ideologies of the postwar corporate world and the dormant desires of the atomized male suburbanite. By way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous sociological and psychological theory, this essay foreparts the dysfunctional dimensions of masculine dejection as being derivative of suburbia’s larger malady, which is rooted in the very impossibility of the imaginative “apple pie order” it represents. A detailed interpretation of Cheever’s use of the doppelganger narrative will moreover allow for an assessment of the dislocation at the heart of the postwar suburban experience. Bullet Park may be read this way as not only critiquing the prevailing cultural view of suburbia as a pillar of postwar American security, stability, and social adjustment through its portrayal of a disturbing reality of insecurity, instability and maladjustment, but also as directly addressing the fractured principles of America’s traditional values and beliefs. Considering this late sixties text by Cheever as such, this essay hence works to highlight in what ways, and to what extent, the author’s portrayal of a disenchanted suburban ennui in Bullet Park treads the fault lines of laissez-faire capitalism, whilst furthermore succeeding in uncovering the sources of masculine dissatisfaction in their more true and underground origins.

INDEX

Keywords: 1960s, American masculinity, John Cheever, suburbia, the double

AUTHOR

HARRIET POPPY STILLEY The University of Edinburgh

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The Writing of “Dreck”: Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

Rachele Dini

The anonymous narrator of Donald Barthelme’s “The Rise of Capitalism” (1970) opens his story by saying he has made a mistake (198). He thought he had understood capitalism, but now realizes it eludes his grasp. In the ensuing ten passages, the narrator taking the reader through a series of increasingly bizarre scenes populated by factory employees, monarchs, Catholic saints, the woman to whom his story is directed, and the members of a country club. The events he narrates are startling. “Honoré de Balzac [goes] to the movies,” he states (200). “Capitalism ar[ises] and [takes] off its pyjamas” (201). Meanwhile, the narrator bemoans various current crises, including the allegedly polluted state of the Ganges, which he attributes to the by-products of the Western wig factories that line it: Strands of raven hair floating on the surface of the Ganges. Why can't they clean up the Ganges? If the wealthy capitalists who operate the Ganges wig factories could be forced to install sieves, at the mouths of their plants. And now the sacred Ganges is choked with hair, and the river no longer knows where to put its flow, and the moonlight on the Ganges is swallowed by the hair, and the water darkens. By Vishnu! This is an intolerable situation! Shouldn't something be done about it? (201) From this proto-environmentalist diatribe, the scene cuts to a dinner party of generic bourgeoisie discussing capitalism over crudités and elegant place settings, while parenthetically considering the value of human beings: Friends for dinner! The crudités are prepared, green and fresh. The good paper napkins are laid out. Everyone is talking about capitalism (although some people are talking about the psychology of aging, and some about the human use of human beings, and some about the politics of experience). (201) Capitalism, Barthelme posits, is both insidious and intangible. Its language and logic permeate every aspect of Western culture, while its physical by-products clog the arteries of the earth, as vividly rendered by the allusion to the environmental impact of

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the West’s outsourcing of manufacturing to the developing world. The story’s anonymous voices and plot-less narrative give expression to a cultural context from which truth and meaning are obscured. The only certainty, Barthelme suggests, lies in our capacity to make mistakes and bad decisions that will most likely wreak havoc, and in our ability to turn the physical remnants of those choices into something approximating a narrative. Barthelme’s story is paradigmatic of a broader preoccupation with waste and aesthetic re-use that runs throughout his fiction. It is also emblematic of Barthelme’s experimental approach to form: his fiction is characterized by fragmented, montage- like narratives that appear driven less by plot than by chance, and in which characters frequently resort to the rhetoric of advertising and marketing to make their points. The fascination with waste objects, incompletion and re-purposing that permeates Barthelme’s work bears the imprint of Surrealism and, more broadly, what Peter Bürger defines as the “historical avant-garde”—those movements including Surrealism and Dada that sought, through their radical experimentations, to democratise art, re- imbue it with political purpose and thus counter the influence of capitalist commodity culture (Bürger, 28). Artists associated with these movements often borrowed from the culture they critiqued, either through the use of mass-produced objects as exemplified by Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain series, or through the re-purposing of cast-offs, to which they attributed new aesthetic or metaphysical value (Bürger, 72 and 49; Chipp, 366-455; Waldman, 10). André Breton’s concept of the found object, for instance, hinged on ascribing new meanings to discards found on the street. Seeking out these meanings required approaching the object in something other than commercial terms, in what Elizabeth Wilson has termed a “modern materialism” or “Surrealist Marxism” that aimed to “dissolve the distinctions between the material and the ideal” (62-63). The novels of Breton and his contemporaries sought to apply this logic: Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926)and Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1935) are essentially stories about urban pilgrimages, in which the cast-offs of consumer society provide clues to an alternative way of being. The first-person narrator in Nadja describes how he enjoys haunting the Saint-Ouen flea market, where he goes “searching for objects that can be found nowhere else: old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse” (52). Barthelme’s fiction, and particularly his first novel, Snow White (1967), extends this approach to critique consumerism and the encroachment of advertising and marketing rhetoric into every facet of public life, adding to it an element of ecological consciousness absent in the work of his predecessors. In doing so, Barthelme reclaims waste to create radically innovative narrative forms that seek to challenge the status quo. This paper explores the interplay between waste and value in Snow White, paying particular attention to the role of physical waste objects in his work. While studies of the relationship between waste and the governing aesthetic of Snow White abound, these discussions focus on Barthelme’s deployment of “verbal waste”—advertising slogans, slang and patois, and sentence fragments—while they read the physical waste in his work allegorically. William Gass’ oft-quoted summary of Barthelme’s project as “constructing a single plane of truth, of relevance, of style, of value—a flatland junkyard—since anything dropped in the dreck is dreck, at once, as an uneaten porkchop mislaid in the garbage” is emblematic of critics’ focus on the semantic slippage between “trash” or “low-brow” culture and actual waste, and the tendency to overlook the actual physical waste objects in his work (Gass, 101).i Of course, this is not

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to discount the significance of such readings. The preponderance of references in Barthelme’s work to news events, advertising, and television, and the frequent parodying of marketing rhetoric indeed exemplifies the tendency Paul Maltby identifies in “dissident” or countercultural fiction under late capitalism, which “explore[s] the political and ideological implications” of a cultural landscape suffused with “conceptually impoverished discourses” (37; 30). My aim is to demonstrate how a literal reading of Barthelme’s representations of waste might complement these analyses of verbal effluvia, and shed new light on his work. Through the dual lenses of New Materialism and waste theory, I will consider the extent to which Snow White’s radicalism depends upon a radical understanding of material waste as a fluid and dynamic category. Waste scholarship tends to approach waste either from a Douglasian perspective, as “matter out of place,” or from a Thompsonian one, as a temporal category—a thing which an object becomes once it has lost its original value (Douglas, Purity and Danger, 203; Thompson, Rubbish Theory, 7).ii In Rubbish Theory, Michael Thompson classifies objects as “transient” (objects that will eventually lose their use-value), “durable” (objects such as antiques that accrue value), and “rubbish,” which are objects of no value (Thompson, 9).To my mind, this latter approach is a more fruitful way of conceiving of something that in Barthelme’s novels is in fact both unfixed and fundamentally unstable. Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualization of commodities as “things in a certain situation, a situation that can characterize many different kinds of thing, at different points in their social lives” suggests how waste itself might be viewed as a phase or process (Appaduari, 3-63).Where Appadurai argues the merits of acknowledging “the commodity potential of all things” I argue that Barthelme’s work, like that of his avant-gardist predecessors, is acutely concerned with the waste potential of all things. His narratives hinge on foreshadowing the imminent obsolescence of the objects his characters use and decoding the things they have discarded. This reading owes much to recent developments in New Materialism, a field concerned with what Jane Bennett terms the “vitality” or “agentic capacity” of matter, which is to say the capacity of the nonhuman to participate in and even determine the course of human events (4). As Maurizia Boscagli describes it, where historical materialism sees matter’s fate under capital as “invariably one of commodification and reification,” New Materialism explores the fluidity of all matter, including commodities (24). Such an approach provides a new way into understanding waste in Barthelme as a phase or process in an object’s life that is dialectically inseparable from its life as a commodity or use-value. Under capitalist exchange relations, the one is capable of being alchemized into the other—waste can be mended, re-purposed, or granted the status of collectable or antique, while a commodity can, at the proverbial blink of an eye, become obsolete. Barthelme’s fiction is at pains to understand the implications of this duality. Barthelme was not the only novelist of the 1960s and 70s to consider the relationship between shortened product cycles and the growth of landfills. Much of Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) takes place in the sewers of Manhattan, where protagonist Benny Profane has been hired to hunt a swarm of alligators (43). The alligators are the physical outcome of a passing fad: the fashion for baby alligator pets among the children of the Manhattan elite, which, once over, led to them being flushed down the toilet. Profane is in turn aware that once he has killed all of the alligators, he will be out of a job. Pynchon thus parodies progressive obsolescence and the cycles of employment

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and redundancy. Commodity culture’s excretions, out of sight, are not out of mind. The traces they leave remind us of the fickleness of our market-driven desires, while literally breeding new forms (146; 148). The entire plot of Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), is driven by a quest for a grail-like mailbox, which is eventually revealed to be nothing more than a trash can with the painted initials “W.A.S.T.E.” Every object in the novel, including the mail box-trash can, is entirely self-referential, as attested by the acronym of W.A.S.T.E, which is ultimately shown to stand for nothing but itself. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972)approaches waste from a very different perspective: in the novel, Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan aboutLeonia, a city defined less by the things its inhabitants produce, than by those they excrete to “make room for the new,”and by the sense of purification resulting from such disposal (114). Calvino posits consumer waste as a threat to our assumptions about sovereignty: the ultimate irony of capitalist imperialism is that its posterity is measured in rubbish. Finally, William Gaddis’ JR (1975) is populated by valueless stock options, unfinished manuscripts of dubious worth, and piles of unsold inventory, which serve to parody the increasing reliance of capitalist economies on speculation following the de-regulation of the financial markets and unpegging of the gold standard.iii Amplifying and complicating the interrogations of over-consumption that Pynchon, Calvino and Gaddis raise, and extending the experimental approaches of the historical avant-garde, Barthelme’s fiction reclaims waste to critique commodity culture’s insidious effects, while creating a radically new aesthetic. Snow White,as its title suggests, is a fairy-tale pastiche that situates the 1937 Disney version of Snow White in modern-day New York. Barthelme re-casts Snow White’s seven dwarfs as labourers Bill, Clem, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward and Dan, who earn their living by manufacturing Chinese baby food and washing buildings (except for Dan, who works at a plastic hump-making plant). The dwarfs share a passion for “dreck,” the Yiddish word for excrement, nonsense or junk, and whose first known use in English was James Joyce’s Ulysses (Gold, 218). While the dwarfs work or ponder the hidden value of waste, Snow White tends to the housekeeping (111). And in their leisure time, they all enjoy sex together in the shower. The novel’s villains are Jane, “the evil stepmother figure,” and Hogo, a millionaire who has fitted a General Motors advertisement into the ceiling of his mansion but disposes of his garbage by throwing it out of the window (82 and134). Like Barthelme’s short fiction, Snow White is disjointed and at times even nonsensical, featuring partial dialogues, brief vignettes, odd lists of seemingly unrelated objects and frequent references to waste and its disposal. And it is very funny. Considered by many to be the archetypal postmodernist text, it has more recently been recognised as a descendant of the historical avant-garde.iv Barthelme himself acknowledged this debt in an interview with The Paris Review published in the summer of 1981, in which he recalled receiving a copy of Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism from his father (a renowned modernist architect), and noted the enduring influence of Surrealism on his work (O’Hara, 187). In the same interview, Barthelme described his fondness for “all the filth on the streets” of New York, elaborating: it reminds me of Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters used to hang around printing plants and fish things out of waste barrels, stuff that had been overprinted or used during makeready, and he’d employ this rich accidental material in his collages. I saw a very large Schwitters show some years ago and almost everything in it reminded me of New York. Garbage in, art out (202).

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The testimonial is fascinating not only in its suggestion one bring Schwitters’ aesthetic to bear on Barthelme’s work, but in its suggestion that all city writing, if not the urban experience itself, has been indelibly shaped by the historical avant-garde and its appreciation for waste: to view collage is to be reminded of urban waste, and to view urban waste is to be reminded of collage. The two are intertwined. This identification of the inherent interrelation of the historical avant-garde, the city and waste is key to Barthelme’s aesthetic, as is the notion that the fiction writer, like the collage artist, might put waste to aesthetic use. The latter is comically voiced by a character in Barthelme’s story, “See the Moon” (1966), who envies painters, since: They can pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of course, there’s that), and lo! People crowd about and cry “A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!” Fantastic metaphysical advantage… Fragments are the only forms I trust.’ (91) Waste on the street is in fact more authentic than any representation, and fragments convey truth more than a whole. Barthelme’s own predilection for collage is well- documented—he explained it at length in a series of correspondences with Jerome Klinkowitz between 1971 and 1972, and confessed, in the introduction to Guilty Pleasures (1974) his “secret vice” of “cutting up and pasting together pictures.” (Roe, 98; Barthelme, 1).It would likewise be difficult to name a text of his that does not make reference to waste and its potential hidden meanings. The fragment-loving character in his short story “See the Moon” mounts old objects from his past onto his wall in the hope that they will “will someday merge, blur—cohere is the word, maybe—into something meaningful. A grand word meaningful” (91). “Brain Damage” (1970) opens with the narrator recounting his discovery of a book “in the first garbage dump,” implying that each of the following disjointed passages takes place in other, different, dumps (149). “Sakrete” (1983) recounts a male artist’s efforts, at his wife’s instigation, to find out who has been stealing the neighbourhood garbage cans (193). Perhaps most famously, “The Indian Uprising” (1965), which imagines the defeat of the US empire by a tribe of Native Americans and their ghetto-dwelling allies, features multiple references to pollution, mobile garbage dumps and barricades made out of household items (102-108), which the story’s first reviewers assumed to be references to the New York City garbage crisis and critiques of “the sense of unreality created by television when newsreels of carnage run smoothly into advertisements for the good life” (Kroll, 112; “Social Science Fiction,” 106). In each of these instances, Barthelme deploys waste to disrupt the narrative and hint at a broader malaise underlying popular culture. Philip Nel’s contention that “The Rise of Capitalism” “behaves like modern advertisements, sending a knowing wink toward the prospective consumer, an invitation to partake of a hip ironic awareness” can in fact be extended to Barthelme’s oeuvre more broadly (84). His texts, as Nel says of “The Rise of Capitalism,” provide a “satiric take on both Marxist critiques of capitalism and naïve boosters of capitalism”— an interplay that results in a “potent radicalism… cloak[ed in] humor” (84). Moreover, as many scholars besides Nel have argued, the co-option, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, of the avant-gardist forms of collage and montage by the culture industry essentially depoliticised them.v In deploying these same strategies in his own social critiques, Barthelme also reclaims their radical potential. His work is thus recuperative on two levels, re-purposing waste objects as well as reclaiming the radicalism of the historical avant-garde’s formal devices, including the reclamation of waste.

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A late scene in Snow White provides a salient example of the role of waste objects in the novel. Faced with the quandary of disposing of a “well-known aesthetician” tasked with judging the merits of their shower curtain, the dwarfs contemplate shredding him in their electric wastebasket: The electric wastebasket is a security item. Papers dropped into it are destroyed instantly. How the electric wastebasket accomplishes this is not known. An intimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration, one assumes. It is not emptied. There are not even ashes. It functions with a quiet hum digesting whatever we do not wish to fall into the hands of the enemi [sic]. The record of Bill’s trial when he is tried will go into the electric wastebasket. When we considered the destruction of the esthetician we had in mind the electric wastebasket. First dismemberment, then the electric waste basket. That there are in the world electric wastebaskets is encouraging. (135) Note the meticulous description of the basket and the dwarfs’ enthusiasm for its numerous, more or less classified, functions. This is but one of many passages in which the reader is alerted to the bureaucratic nature of Barthelme’s dwarfs, with their staunch work ethic (Bill, the only one to leave a vat of baby food unattended, is dutifully tried and hanged) and their adhesion to strict rules and rigorous research methods. Indeed, the above-mentioned aesthetician is only deemed unsuitable and hence to be disposed of because he lacks a reputable methodology with which to adjudicate value, thus casting doubt on the “truth” of his judgement—that theirs is, in fact, the “best” curtain. Likewise, the reference to “First dismemberment, then the electric wastebasket” brings to mind the efficiency of the electric chair. What Larry McCaffery describes as of Barthelme’s tendency to confront his characters with “worn- out systems [that] fail to operate successfully” (104) is embodied in a technological device that removes all trace of past mistakes, or those who make them, including the out-dated criteria by which aesthetic value itself is judged. The passage’s comedy lies in the idea of disposing with those in charge of deciding what is worth keeping—a fine solution for dealing with one’s critics! The heart of Barthelme’s conceptualization of waste and value can be found in the novel’s oft-quoted landfill scene. Here, Dan discusses the “‘blanketing’ effect of ordinary language”—those words that “fill in” sentences rather than straightforwardly signifying—and claims their value: “‘That part, the ‘filling’ you might say, of which the expression ‘you might say’ is a good example” is “the most interesting part” as it comprises the largest part of our exchanges (111). The seemingly value-less has value. One is reminded of Franco Moretti’s conceptualization, after Roland Barthes, of narrative “fillers”—those non-events that furnish the nineteenth-century novel without our really noticing them (Moretti, 364-399; Barthes, 141-148). In his seminal study of realism, “The Reality Effect,” which was published the same year as Snow White, Barthes distinguishes between narrative episodes with a cardinal function (“nuclei”) and the unimportant things that occur between them (“catalysers”).Moretti uses these to trace the evolution of narrative description in the nineteenth-century novel, which he argues came to attend to both “nuclei” which he calls “turning points,” and “catalysers” which he re-names “fillers” (380). The narrative filler’s role is to help convey time’s passage and amplify the narrative’s realism without actually modifying it, thus offering up a circumscribed sense of uncertainty that effectively channels what Max Weber termed the bourgeois logic of rationalization under capitalism (Weber, 154, as cited by Moretti, 381). Fillers enable the author to “rationaliz[e] the novelistic universe:

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turning it in to a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all” (Weber, 154, emphasis added by Moretti). In this passage, however, it is not the value of objects that is in question: it is the narrative value of the individual words used to identify those objects. What other value can a word have, beyond advancing plot or meaning? Perhaps it depends on what Dan the dwarf means by “the ‘blanketing’ effect of ordinary language.” In the context of a novel in which characters constantly parrot the language of corporate board meetings, advertisements, and market forecasts, the reader can assume the expression refers to the proliferation of commercially inflected discourses that emerged during the post- war boom, and that Barthelme and many of his contemporaries sought to expose as vacuous, meaningless “trash.” It is what Barthelme himself describes in one of his last essays as the “pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense— I mean our devouring commercial culture—which results in a double impoverishment: theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer” (Barthelme, 15).Put differently, Dan confronts the reader with what Maltby terms the proliferation of “easily consumable” language forms and “diminished use-value of language” resulting from late capitalism’s emphasis on maintaining and improving the conditions of commodity production and consumption (36; 57; 54). Dan suggests as much when he draws a parallel between the “stuffing” of this ordinary language and the plastic buffalo humps produced by his manufacturing plant: [T]he per-capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965, the last year for which we have figures, and is increasing at the rate of about 4% a year… I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where it’s 100%. Now at such a point, you will agree, the question turns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating its qualities… because it’s all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to ‘dig’ it— that’s slang, but peculiarly appropriate here. So that’s why we’re in humps, right now, more really from a philosophical point of view than because we find them a great money-maker. They are ‘trash,’ and what in fact could be more useless or trash-like? It’s that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon… and that’s why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon. (112) Dan presents the reader with a system of equivalences. The logic governing the mass production of the “useless” plastic buffalo humps is the same, essentially misguided, logic governing mass consumption and mass disposal, which are, in turn, driven by the language of mass marketing and mass media. The interrelation of meaningless lexicons, material waste and mass production of useless products in this passage goes some way towards explaining scholars’ abiding fascination with Barthelme’s “verbal waste” and the interpretation of his oeuvre as piecing together and imbuing new meaning in popular culture’s discards. Such readings however tend to obscure the causal relationship between the mountains of waste described by Dan and the language—in the form of advertising campaigns and market research reports—that has contributed to their growth. The invitation to appreciate the hidden qualities of trash is an exhortation to recognize not only the verbal trash of commercial culture but the physical relics that testify to its power. Barthelme draws attention to the symbiotic relationship between marketing-speak and the remainders of products purchased and disposed of at its behest. There is thus an underlying radical potential in Dan’s contention that the objects circulating from factory to shop floor to home to landfill have a narrative, perhaps even anthropological, value—what Barthelme once described

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in interview, in relation to the barricade of relics in “The Indian Uprising,” as “an archaeological slice” of culture (O’Hara, 199). This becomes clearer when one considers the extent to which Barthelme recognizes, and in fact gestures towards, the status of his own texts as physical entities and commodities. A page-long description of Snow White’s scouring of the dwarfs’ books to rid them of “book lice” underscores the volumes’ physicality, positing them as objects that must be cleaned and looked after if they are to escape the Thompsonian category of “rubbish” (Thompson, 9). But Barthelme then undermines this by specifying that Snow White is cleaning the books with a “5% solution of DDT” (Barthelme, 1967,43). Why, the reader might ask, is Snow White spraying these books with the toxic pesticide that was made infamous, and subsequently banned, following Rachel Carson’s revelation in 1962 of its carcinogenic effects? First published in three instalments of The New Yorker (the magazine for which Barthelme regularly wrote), Carson’s Silent Spring described in minute detail the effects of DDT on animal (including human) tissue, and is generally credited with spawning the environmental movement in the United States, augmenting existing anxieties about the effects of super- industrialization, and influencing much of the American subculture of the 1960s and 70s (MacFarlane, 86). Barthelme would thus have been familiar with the book, and DDT’s dangers. His figuration of his fairy-tale housewife spraying “book lice” with the twentieth century’s most powerful and maligned chemical fertilisers is almost Beckettian in its absurdity, re-enacting the absurdity of the original DDT scandal: that the thing meant to prevent crops being consumed by pests and becoming waste was in fact a mass killer. It can likewise be seen as a comment on the erosion of culture, embodied, here, in a library being given cancer by one of modernity’s failed attempts at efficiency. However, Maurizia Boscagli’s identification, after Zygmunt Bauman, of the ontological threat to hygiene, security, and stable categories that waste in modernity is perceived to pose, provides another way of reading the passage. Boscagli notes how: Trash, refusing to give up its foreignness and otherness, becomes a threat, for it suspends any opposition between a classificatory order and the chaos of hybridity. The spaces and time scales of waste are disturbing because they seem to collapse in the métissage of a new category. Disused or decaying matter, in its liminality, plasticity, and abjection, occupies space in new, unexpected ways. (231) From this perspective, the eradication of book lice and effort to preserve the books in their current state reads as an attempt to resist hybridity and ambiguity. It is an attempt to prevent the books from “breeding” new and unfamiliar forms or devolving into something “other”. Snow White’s cleaning of the books is not only ecologically unsound and absurdly toxic in a literal sense. It reads as a fascistic attempt at maintaining order and the status quo: in this case, the categories of good literature and bad, of classical fairy tales and “contaminated” ones such as the adulterated version of Snow White the reader holds in their hands. The irony of course is that that adulteration has already occurred: there is nothing this fairy tale heroine can do to undo the corruption of the story in which she is housed. From a New Materialist perspective, then, the passage reads as a parody of the role of consumerism and the lexicons of hygiene and efficiency in the environmental crisis, but also as a comment on capitalist modernity’s peculiar affection for fixed categories of value/worthlessness, cleanliness/ uncleanliness, which exists alongside a paradoxical de-valuation of language and literature.

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A similarly absurd meditation on the physicality, value, and (limited) durability of books occurs in the following passage: I read Dampfboot’s novel although he had nothing to say. It wasn’t rave, that volume; we regretted that. And it was hard to read, dry, breadlike pages that turned, and then fell, like a car burned by rioters and resting, wrong side up, at the edge of the picture plane with its tires smoking. Fragments kept flying off the screen into the audience, fragments of rain and ethics. Hubert wanted to go back to the dog races. But we made him read his part, the outer part where the author is praised and the price quoted. We like books with a lot of dreck in them, matter that presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of ‘sense’ of what is going on. This ‘sense’ is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them and so arriving at a feeling of… having read them, of having ‘completed’them. (112) Reading Dampfboot’s novel is “hard” as in difficult to read, but it is also hard to the touch, like dry bread. The pages turning are analogous to “a car burned by rioters and resting, wrong side up, at the edge of the picture plane,” a startling image that brings to mind Compte de Lautréamont’s description, oft-quoted by the Surrealists, of a youth’s beauty as “the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella” (263). But then the pages-qua-burning car becomes, in the next sentence, a movie screen from which fragments of “rain” and “ethics” fly, and then a physical book once more, identifiable by the promotional material and price on the back cover. Each sentence undermines the meaning of the last as well as the physical shape, genre, and form of the text discussed. Together with the ensuing explanation of the dwarfs’ preferred reading material, the passage self-consciously gestures towards the ambiguous form and content of the novel the reader holds in his/her hands, which is similarly composed of “matter that presents itself as not wholly relevant.” The dwarfs’ preference for literature that does not require one to “rea[d] between the lines (for there is nothing there, only white spaces)” is both a playful recommendation and a reminder of the novel’s own status as a physical object, of which some aspects, such as the lines of text, are worth more than others (for example, the space between them). These different meditations on value and waste coalesce in a consumer survey with which the reader is faced midway through the novel: 1. Do you like the story so far? Yes () No () 2. Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember? Yes () No () 3. Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure? Yes () No () 4. That Jane is the wicked stepmother? Yes () No () 5. In the further development of the story, would you like more () or less emotion? () …. 8. Would you like a war? Yes () No () .… 13. Holding in mind all works of fiction since the War, in all languages, how would you rate the present work, on a scale of one to ten, so far? (Please circle your answer) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 14. Do you stand up when you read? (Lie down? () Sit? () 15. In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? () Two sets of shoulders? () Three? () (82-83). The passage parodies the concepts of the consumer survey and consumer research, which emerged as a discipline in the late 1950s out of the earlier field of “motivation

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research,” which combined anthropology, sociology, and clinical psychology to understand consumer behaviour (Fullerton, 212-222).vi Among the earliest instances of such research were Franklin B. Evans’ 1959 study of the personality differences of Chevrolet and Ford owners, which challenged established ideas regarding automobile brand imagery and, more importantly, raised public awareness of the discipline, and Arthur Koponen’s 1960 study of 9,000 cigarette smokers, which found that male cigarette smokers scored higher than average in their needs for aggression, achievement, sex, and dominance (Evans, 340-369; Koponen, 6-12). The passage’s comedic element stems from its treatment of literature as a product to be improved upon by finding out what the reader-qua-customer wants, and from the suggestion that the writer apply the basic principles of consumer research to ensure their book’s success. It exemplifies in fact what Paul Maltby terms the “triumph of banalization” at play in much of Barthelme’s work: that is, the tendency of his texts to critique the culture of late capitalism by mimicking, or making use of, its debased language forms (69-70). Barthelme’s survey both demonstrates the economic imperative underlying cultural production under late capitalism, and makes fun of it, asking the reader to assist in the development of the ideal product-qua-book—a paradoxical and self- defeating exercise, given that by its very definition a new aesthetic must shock and surprise. Question 8, “Would you like a war?” is particularly telling in this regard. Potentially referring to the reader’s predilection for violent conflict in literature, it can also be interpreted as gauging the reader’s views on America’s involvement in Vietnam —a reference to the treatment of war as entertainment as well as to the tendency of market researchers to advise companies to adapt their messaging based on the ideological and political views of their target audience. A true descendent of the historical avant-garde, Barthelme grapples with the repercussions of treating works of art as commodities to be valued or disposed of. One is reminded of Barthelme’s bemused acknowledgement, in interview, of the fact that his short stories published in The New Yorker were inevitably flanked by advertisements for luxury products. In a context in which a vitriolic piece of fiction titled “The Rise of Capitalism” can be interrupted by ads for luxury watches and yachts, it is perhaps not so unrealistic to imagine a novel being interrupted by an invitation to the reader to rate their customer experience. The 12 December 1970 edition of The New Yorker, in which “The Rise of Capitalism” was first published, also features full-page print advertisements for brands including Boda Crystal and DeBeers Diamonds. The tagline of the former, “Art you use,” suggests the objects’ value lies in their utility—where most art has no purpose, here is art with which to impress one’s guests (see fig. 1). The tagline of the DeBeers ad, “Diamonds are for now,” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to “Diamonds are forever,” the slogan De Beers coined in the late 1940s to promote diamonds as the only suitable gem for an engagement ring (Howard, 49-59). Where the original tagline promoted diamonds as a symbol of enduring love, the 1970 ad plays on conspicuous consumption (the many rings gracing the knuckles in the photograph) and instant gratification (see fig. 2).

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Figure 1

“Art you use.” Boda Crystal, The New Yorker, 12 December 1970, p. 59

Figure 2

“Diamonds are for now.” DeBeers, The New Yorker, 12 December 1970, p. 62

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The world Barthelme seeks to represent is a world in which works of art are products to be consumed or, more frequently, disregarded entirely—as attested by the depiction of Paul (the “prince-figure” who paints) upon completing a painting: ‘It is a new thing I just finished today, still a little wet I’m afraid.’… Paul leaned the new thing up against our wall for a moment. The new thing, a dirty great banality in white, poor-white and off-white, leaned up against the wall. ‘Interesting,’ we said. ‘It’s poor,’ Snow White said.… ‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘one of my poorer things I think.’ ‘Not so poor of course as yesterday’s, poorer on the other hand than some,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘it has some of the qualities of poorness.’ ‘Especially poor in the lower left-hand corner,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘I would go so far as to hurl it into the marketplace.’ (Barthelme, 1967, 54) Never referred to as a painting or a work of art, Paul’s “thing” is dismissed in the same breath as it is acknowledged—and once its poor quality has been determined it is relegated, not to the dust-bin, but to the marketplace, where any old trash will sell. The passage recalls the ethos underlying Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista (“Artist’s Shit”)(1961), an installation of ninety sealed tin cans, which, as the title suggests, were each purported to contain thirty grams of the artist’s own excrement, and which cumulatively provided a strident response to the commercialization of art.For Jon Thompson, Manzoni’s packaged excrement is a metaphor for “the work of art as fully incorporated raw material, and its violent expulsion as commodity” (45). In a not dissimilar fashion to Paul, who chooses to “hurl” his painting into the dust bin- marketplace, “Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging, marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum” (45). In this particular case, the market value of Manzoni’s work remains tied to whether critics believe the cans to contain faeces, and whether those faeces are the artist’s—two points that have never been confirmed either way. Meanwhile, the Thompsonian notion of value accrual, whereby an artwork gains value over time, eventually becoming a “durable,” are rendered absurd in a manner akin to Barthelme’s joke: is the reader really to believe that fifty-year-old faeces are any more valuable than fresh ones? It should be noted that in a 1976 interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman, Barthelme himself claimed not to be “overly fond of” conceptual art, commenting that it seemed “entirely too easy” both to understand and to produce (Herzinger, 218). Perhaps for this same reason however his opining on the matter belies a natural understanding of the critique at the heart of Manzoni’s installation: “Had I decided to go into the conceptual-art business I could turn out railroad cars full of that stuff every day” (Herzinger, 218). The expression “turning out railroad cars” full of “stuff” hinges on the same notion communicated by Manzoni’s cans, and is even articulated through the same metaphor: the skill involved in making this particular work, or genre of art, is equivalent tothat required by mass production, which is in turn equated withshitting. Both Manzoni’s piece and Barthelme’s passage equate ease of “making” with a lack of quality and a high price tag—essentially assuming good art and a high price to be mutually exclusive. The easily produced, low-quality work of art, once made, can be flung into the market to secure a high fee. In turn, Paul’s decision in Snow White to “hurl” his “poor” painting into the marketplace anticipates Barthelme’s later quip, in “Not Knowing” (1987) about the “seductions of silence,” given the speed with which art is appropriated by commercial culture: “it takes, by my estimate, about forty-five minutes for any given novelty in art

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to travel from the Mary Boone Gallery on West Broadway to the display windows of [the luxury women’s clothing retailer] Henri Bendel on Fifty-seventh street” (18; 19). It also recalls the writer’s own description, in an interview with Jerome Klinkowitz, of Harold Rosenberg’s “anxious object,” which asks, upon completion: “Am I masterpiece or simply a pile of junk?” (Herzinger, 204). As in the passages discussed thus far, Barthelme inverts our understanding of value and suggests that it is through commodification (or technological efficiency, as in the case of the DDT) that things become waste. The marketplace in late capitalism is an immense dustbin, the objects circulating in it financially valuable but frequently void of aesthetic or semantic worth. Snow White extends the historical avant-garde’s experimentations with language and form to critique the rhetoric of market research, advertising, and finance, and to debunk the myths of post-war consumerism. Barthelme carries on the avant-garde’s legacy by placing waste at the centre of this critique. By tracing the many paths objects travel on their way to and from the landfill and the frequency with things under capitalism gain and lose value, Barthelme shows waste to be a fluid category that underscores the tenuousness of capitalism’s ascriptions of worth. In turn, the unique ways in which his characters put waste to (often comic) use evidence the enduring potential for countercultural literature to give voice to other discourses and throw into relief the humor at the heart of our systemic failures.

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Whitaker, Jennifer Seymour. Salvaging the Land of Plenty: Garbage and the American Dream. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Print.

Wilson, Elizabeth. Cultural Passions: Fans. Aesthetes and Tarot Readers. London: IB Tauris, 2013. Print

NOTES i. For a sense of readings following this vein, see McCaffery 1982, 99-150; du Plessis 1988, 443-458; Montresor 1989, 74-84; and Sloboda, 109-23. ii. For an insight into Douglasian readings of waste in literature, see Gee 2009; Morrison 2015; Viney 2013. iii. For an in-depth account of these changes, see Harvey 2005, 141-188 and Harvey 2005, 1-38. iv. For examples of readings of Barthelme and the avant-garde, see Nel 2002,73-95; and Sierra 2013, 153-171. Among the most useful studies of Barthelme’s relationship to postmodernism is Maltby’s Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Pynchon, Coover (1991), which focuses specifically on the ideological challenge posed by Barthelme’s experimentations with form. v. The most famous articulations of this view are Bürger 1984 (1974); Habermas 1981, 3-14; and Jameson 1991. For an insight into the discussion more broadly, see Hobbs 2000, particularly 119-123 and Sim 1998. vi. For an excellent account of the history of market research from the immediate aftermath of the World War I to the present see Ardvisson 2003, 1-19. Ardvisson notes that the sector’s exponential growth throughout the 1950s coincided with its establishment as a scientific discipline. Accessed 5 January 2016.

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www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(4)/prehistory.pdf.

ABSTRACTS

This paper examines the relationship between material waste, late capitalism, and the language and structure of Donald Barthelme’s fiction, with particular attention to Snow White (1967). Going against established modes of allegorizing the theme of waste in Barthelme’s work, I suggest the fruitfulness of a literal reading, and propose that his waste objects are framed as inevitable outcomes of a successful advertising campaign. They are the physical evidence or counterpart to the lexicons of marketing and advertising that so preoccupied the author. Such a reading is particularly apt given that Barthelme’s early fiction coincided with the birth of the environmental movement, and builds on recent scholarship in the fields of New Materialism and waste studies. By examining Barthelme’s depictions of waste through the dual lens of New Materialism and waste studies, and in relation to the work of his contemporaries as well as the literary experimentations of earlier avant-gardists, the paper establishes the different ways in which Barthelme articulates value.

INDEX

Keywords: advertising, capitalism, commodification, consumerism, Donald Barthelme, environmentalism, re-use, recycling, waste

AUTHOR

RACHELE DINI University College London

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The State You’re In: Citizenship, Sovereign Power, and The (Political) Rescue of the Self in Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy

Andrea Pacor

O my country and my home, I pray I never lack a city, never face a hopeless life one filled with misery and pain. Before that comes, let death, my death, deliver me, bring my days to their fatal end. For there’s no affliction worse than losing one’s own country. Chorus, from Euripides’s Medea

1 Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (1999) is the English-language memoir of Kazuko Kuramoto, a woman of Japanese ancestry born in colonial Manchuria in 1927, who was forcefully repatriated after the collapse of the Japanese empire in the Second World War. Repatriation began a trying time of adjusting to harsh post-war conditions in a homeland Kuramoto found, in many ways, foreign and inhospitable. Eventually, she set out to acquire US citizenship, thereby embracing a new national identity that appeared to function on a voluntaristic rather than an ethnic basis. This voluntaristic element is crucial in granting Kuramoto access to the naturalization that postcolonial China could not concede, especially to a daughter of former colonial masters. The biopolitical relevance of this memoir, I argue, emerges from each radical change in Kuramoto’s circumstances marking a fracture in her relation with a sovereign state entity, beginning with the loss of her colonial identity as a Japanese citizen in Manchuria, and culminating with the restoration of political and ontological security in her acquisition of American citizenship.

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2 The emergence of modern autobiography as a genre, its reception and criticism, are crucially linked to the idea of national identity as a principle of social aggregation and political legitimacy. Indeed, several literary traditions have claimed a special affinity with a form that transcends the mere record of a life to express a collective identity in all its historical and cultural specificity. American literary critics, for instance, have noted that autobiography enters the western literary canon more or less concurrently with the establishment of the Unites States as a new political subject, implicitly casting the entire form as the manifestation of the desire for self-government of the American nation (Olney 377–378). In this usage, the terms “American nation” or “America” become shorthand for the complex political, economic and cultural processes leading to the gradual creation of the new nation-state. As a result, a causal link is commonly assumed between the cultural nation and the body politic, whereby the latter is empowered and enabled by a rising to political self-consciousness in the former. Autobiography’s role is, then, to affirm a synecdochical relation between the autobiographical self and the nation, and to chronicle the degree and manner of the self’s inclusion in the collective entity. This is not intended reductively. Life writing in America, say, from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, Anais Nin to Maxine Hong Kingston, covers a spectrum that is both broad and deep. It is broad to the extent that it represents subjectivities adopting a mainstream, marginal or oppositional stance; it is deep as new contributions challenge a naively normative reading of past autobiographies, and encourage the recurring revision of the existing paradigm of national identification and its founding myths.

3 In this spectrum, Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy is a textual prism that refracts with particular intensity the political nature of the mechanisms through which the individual constructs a viable selfhood that is then validated in a relation of reciprocal recognition with the nation. In the modern world, the nation is the largest social group to remain open to individual identification; a group that is simultaneously abstracted in the concept of sovereign power and reified in the territorial boundedness of the state. In writers like Benjamin Franklin and Henry Adams the autobiographical act carries the subject’s implicit claim to representativeness and relevance to the national discourse; Kuramoto is denied access to this salvific stance. This is because the canonical autobiographical text does not generally function as a plea, a sort of application for acceptance in the national body, but as the belated justification of an already established presence. What is usually at stake is the self’s relative centrality within the social, cultural and political order to which one already feels one belongs. Not so with Kuramoto, for whom personal history intersects multiple crises of political sovereignty deriving from a dramatic failure of state power; crises in which the required isomorphism between individual and nation (the reified collective self) can only be (re)constituted through a radical ideological realignment towards a new political referent. Such forceful detachment of the self from the polis may derive from banishment, denationalization, genocide, civil war, catastrophic military defeat of the state of reference, occupation of the national territory by a foreign force, colonial and post-colonial displacement, or any other instance that severs the crucial relationship of reciprocal recognition between the individual and sovereign power.

4 This analysis will highlight elements in Kuramoto’s autobiographical narrative that intimate how, during the Second World War and in its aftermath, she finds herself in a zone of indeterminacy where the political underpinnings of national identification

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dissolve. In the crisis, both the political mediation of national identity and the formal protection of the law become inaccessible to the individual, leaving her to stand completely vulnerable, as naked life, before the constitutive (rather than constituted) thrust of sovereign violence (Benjamin). This violence inevitably brings to the surface the original bio-political relation theorized by Giorgio Agamben and located in what he calls the “grey zone” of modern politics.

5 In the newly emerged bio-political relation, Agamben argues, the biological body which sustains and carries human life is never simply left to itself, but always incorporated in the calculations of sovereign power. In turn, this sovereign concern for the citizen’s body produces (calls into being), in specific locations and under precise circumstances, the naked life of the homo sacer as the threshold where nature and culture are articulated.This articulation, Agamben continues, occurs in a zone of indistinction between inside and outside where banishment takes the peculiarly modern and paradoxically legalistic form of the state of exception. In this state, or zone, political and ontological categories become fluid, bodies become malleable and open to fundamental re-inscription, with radical consequences for the subjects involved. This vulnerability and indeterminacy structures the traumatic experience Kazuko Kuramoto has recorded in her memoir. In turn, the memoir itself becomes the instrument of a recovery of the self under the postulate (empirically verified by Kuramoto) that the personal cannot function without the political. The rub lies in Kuramoto’s unintentional proof that it does not matter which state-structure picks up the other end of the lifeline cast by the autobiographical subject, as long as one does. Once this is accomplished, the self is, once again, biopolitically anchored.

6 The bio-political paradigm, originally developed by Foucault to explain modern power and its need for docile bodies (Foucault 140–143), is not, however, transparent to the autobiographical subject. The latter is too intensely engaged in the construction of a coherent and autonomous individuality in the residual space between the limited demands of an intermediate social circle like the family, and the total demands of the nation-state. In part, this opacity stems from the pathos of nationalist discourse which labors to conceal the true nature of the bio-political relation. Only the loss of a political referent in the national state, either through expatriation, denationalization, banishment, or dissolution, can reveal how vertiginous the stakes are for the individual who stands to lose everything: identity and solidarity, freedom and possibility, and life. The stakes are high because, as Georg Simmel notes, the modern state seeks to undermine the internal cohesion of all intermediate groups which may function as alternative and (reasonably) self-sustaining social and economic structures.

7 This restructuring of family relations occurs, historically, as the modern state seeks a more direct rapport with the individual, bypassing all other social groups. For Simmel, the Platonic ideal state has “merely extended this line of development by dissolving the family altogether, setting in place of this intermediate structure only individuals, on the one hand, and the state, on the other” (Simmel 274). In this project, the category of citizenship is deployed to make the individualized subject directly visible to sovereign power in an unequal relation of reciprocal recognition that validates primarily the nation state and only secondarily our identity. As Hannah Arendt notes, when the French Revolution constituted naked human life as the bearer of universal rights in the declaration of 1789, this mere existence was immediately subsumed in the qualified life of the citizen (Arendt 293).

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8 Arendt’s work reveals that what it means to be human, and consequently the bearer of “human rights,” is never, at any point, a settled question. This is because “humanity” is not an essential quality possessed by the subject but a battleground on which the individual’s inclusion in this category is decided. As a result, the concept, one that is frequently deployed in a variety of political discourses (past and present), is fundamentally unstable, except for its concrete effects through modern legal frameworks of citizenship. The crucial question, here, is whether anything of value is left when the category of citizenship becomes inaccessible to the individual. Kuramoto’s memoir raises fundamental doubts on the possibility of answering in the affirmative and bears witness to a modern catastrophe in which our collective political and cultural values do not measure up to our yearning (sincere or otherwise) to discover a universal humanity in ourselves and in others.

9 As a modern individual, Kuramoto finds herself positioned between state and nation, and is held there by national identity’s dependence, for historical viability, on control of a newly established or existing state structure (cf. Breuilly, Gellner, Giddens, Hobsbawn, and Kedourie). The addition of the national dimension to the toolbox of political power has thus allowed the industrial, technocratic, and sovereign state to extend its already formidable hold on the productive body of the citizen-subject beyond the discipline of labor, military exercise and punishment, to the ideological determination of the ultimate limits of self, conscience and ethics. The nation-state’s leverage on the individual is two-pronged: by extending or withholding positive reinforcement, it exploits our need to establish reciprocal relations with larger social circles; by threatening divestiture of the national attribute and, thus, complete dehumanization (the subject becomes a non-person), it exploits the primacy of state- sanctioned national identity as the sole recognized marker of inclusion and sole legal vehicle of associated rights (Arendt 290–302; Agamben, Homo 126–135). In turn, by documenting how Kuramoto’s identity was questioned, negated, derailed and reconstituted, Manchurian Legacy exemplifies the functioning of these technologies of power in an array of concrete situations that only a rare combination of exclusion, mobility, necessity and possibility can bring to the foreground.

10 The ties between self-definition (even fruition of the self) and national identity are revealed in the opening chapter of the memoir and remain a central concern throughout. Kazuko Kuramoto was born in Dairen, currently Dalian, in eastern Manchuria, in 1927, the daughter of the local representative of the Japanese imperial government. Japan had acquired the city at the close of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, and kept it until the arrival of Soviet forces, in 1945. Thus, Kuramoto forms her sense of self and of the ties that bind her to the larger social group in a province of the Empire where, as a member of the ruling elite, she enjoys significant privileges. But once the shield of colonial power is removed, with the Japanese defeat in World War II, these privileges abruptly come to an end and Kuramoto experiences a dramatic reversal of status from ruling class to refugee; from highest to lowest on the value scale of political relevance.i But let us proceed in order.

11 Manchurian Legacy revealingly sets off with a chapter entitled “The Young Patriot” in which Kuramoto introduces her family as it is being engulfed in the general mobilization of Japanese society for all-out war in the Pacific. Two brothers had already been drafted in the service of the Emperor, and now, close to graduation from a junior college for girls, Kazuko also wishes to do her part by enlisting in the Japanese Red

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Cross Nurse Corps. Her admiration for the uniformed girl portrayed on the recruitment poster matches the tone and rhetoric of the propaganda to which she was exposed at school. The image before her speaks of romantic adventure, independence, and loyal commitment to the supreme good of the nation. To the attentive reader, it also suggests that while the discursive production of modern identity remains heavily gendered, the distinction between masculine and feminine roles is much less pronounced than in traditional society. The modern state, with its vast pragmatic needs, favors the erosion of old strictures and empowers individuals to stand up to anachronistic social models based on a relation of direct and exclusive subordination to the larger subject. Of course, this realignment of individual loyalty occurs at the expense of intermediate social circles like the family. The latter’s system of mechanical solidarity can hardly compete with a political entity which recognizes the individual as the direct subject of sovereign power, bypassing all other social ties.

12 The disruptive force of state nationalism within the family manifests itself the moment Kazuko informs her parents she plans to join the Red Cross. The moment she voices her patriotic intentions, her mother and father are divested of their parental authority by the power of nationalist discourse which posits the nation as the highest moral and social value. Clearly, the force of this disruption does not stem from the specific institution (in this case the Red Cross), where power is directed inward at controlling the recruit, but from the state as the political entity that accords its many apparatuses legitimacy, unity of purpose and direction. Whereas separate institutions exercise specialized technologies of power and of the self to fulfill equally specialized functions (i.e. training nurses or soldiers), the nation-state, as a transcendent whole (transcending its bureaucratic subdivisions, that is), provides the affective focus of wide-circle social bondedness.

13 The individual, however, is not entirely powerless in this relation. Modern bureaucracy, economy, and warfare are all organized on the industrial model and thus necessitate the direct involvement of unprecedented numbers in all aspects of state life. The energies released by the mobilization of the masses to political and economic ends invariably accentuate the total character of the state, expressed in administrative form, which must now respond to the increased (though diffused) bargaining power of the general population. Due to the political risks involved in such bargaining, the modern state develops apparatuses and technologies for the production of loyalty based on the biopolitical idea that national homogeneity is a necessity which guarantees the biological life of the nation in the continuing political life of the state; the two become homologous. For this ideological operation to succeed, however, the nation must be naturalized. To this end, nationalist rhetoric deploys paternalistic analogies between the nation and the family which must constantly and simultaneously both co-opt and undermine parental authority to foster a sentiment of exclusive loyalty towards the state.

14 Unsurprisingly, though with little enthusiasm, Kuramoto’s parents capitulate. They are, Kazuko senses subconsciously, trapped in a web of nationalist discourse which threatens to alienate their daughter if, by resisting her wishes, they force everyone involved to acknowledge the fundamental conflict of interests between family and nation in these specific circumstances. Neither Kazuko nor, for that matter, her parents, are equipped to see through to the biopolitical nature of the conflict. This is evident when the young volunteer is at a loss before her mother’s anguish. After all,

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she felt entitled to the same joyful parting ceremony her brothers had received when drafted into the Imperial Army, which involved a celebratory red rice meal and a war hero’s public farewell to the triple cry of Tenno-heika, Banzai! (Long live the Emperor). At seventeen, Kuramoto’s autobiographical persona fails to discern her family’s true feelings about the war. Nevertheless, her recollection of her brother, Kay’s, send-off records a clear note of sarcasm amidst the toasting and singing. Kay and his friends subvert the traditional cry to the Emperor (ideally, a Japanese soldier’s last words before heroic death) to honor Kay’s mother instead. Emboldened by the rice wine, they cry out: "Okaa-san, Banzai! (Long live Mother!)" (Kuramoto 3).

15 This is not to say that familial loyalty is an inevitable biological fact; only that, in the development of individual consciousness, it takes precedence over socialization in the larger group. It will thus continue to maintain a primary claim on an individual’s sense of obligation, security, and trust. In this regard, Kuramoto’s memoir clearly shows the traces of the conflict between the (for us moderns) irresistible biopolitical demand of national affiliation and the mechanical urgency of familial loyalty. Gradually, Kazuko realizes family and nation are not as homologous as nationalist discourse claims them to be.

16 This contraposition cannot be productively understood by applying the classical distinction between public and private on which the bourgeois theory of self and society is predicated, for it is too likely to derail analysis into false and simplistic dichotomies. Georg Simmel provides a more sophisticated heuristic in what he calls the “differentiation drive.” Individuals, he maintains, are “surrounded by concentric circles of special interests”; not just two, like in the opposition of public to private, but many (Simmel 261). The self is thus embattled between, on the one hand, the individual search for autonomy and freedom and, on the other hand, the conflicting demands of intermediate social circles like the family, and large social circles like the caste, party, or nation. The literary translation of these tensions reveals how, for the modern autobiographical self, the allure of the national state is unmatched in breadth and intensity, also because “the larger circle encourages individual freedom, the smaller restricts it” (Simmel 269).

17 Simmel’s differentiation drive proceeds in two directions: toward individualization and toward nondifferentiation (identity). As social groups increase in complexity, so increases internal differentiation between the entities that constitute them. The complexity of this model is immediately apparent if one considers, with Simmel, that the differentiation drive is not exclusive to the psychological person and her relations, but applies equally to groups. Like persons, groups also strive for individuality that can only come from internal cohesion. Such cohesion, however, comes at the expense of internal differentiation between individuals whose identity with one another (nondifferentiation) is stressed over their autonomy. The more complex and large the social group, the more it accentuates internal differentiation. This creates favorable conditions for the development of individual freedom where smaller groups would restrict it. This very process, however, diminishes the individuality of large groups that come to resemble other entities at the same level of structural complexity (thus, different states resemble each other more than any state resembles the social groups that constitute it, like, for instance, the family).

18 Applied to national identity, Simmel’s heuristic reveals that a large group like the nation may yearn for an autobiography of its own. In political terms, to argue that a

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social group possesses a distinct national character, a self, is, concomitantly, a claim for national self-determination and sovereignty to be realized through the seizing or establishing of a concrete state structure. Conversely, on the cultural level, national identity functions as an enormous echo chamber for projects of individual self- narration or self-invention, but only when these are aligned, ideologically, with the larger framework. When they are not, such attempts are considered to be irrelevant, displaced, competing claims from non-conforming subjects who may have to be ignored, relocated or silenced.

19 Kuramoto’s stint in the Red Cross introduces her to the loudest part of the cultural echo chamber linking the individual to the nation. The retrospective mode of the autobiographical act, however, reveals that this experience only accentuates Kuramoto’s sense that the demands made on the individual by family and nation may be, at crucial times, incongruous. She begins to notice fissures in the dominant national narrative when the glamour of war is diminished by the depersonalizing strategies of military training and, especially, by the clear disparity between war as existential fact and its ideological representation. Although she never experiences combat, the dire need for medical personnel at the front prompts the school to admit her (and her cohort) to early hospital training. This involves the dissection of a cadaver, a Chinese “coolie,” which provokes the most intense reactions in the young women in her class, both to the materiality of death and the dehumanizing effects of using an “other” (doubly so as non-Japanese and as corpse) as a pedagogical tool. Under institutional pressure, however, any temptation to generalize their revulsion is immediately suppressed: “None of us talked about this experience during the rest of the day, going through the motion of daily tasks as if nothing had happened” (Kuramoto 7). Only at night, in their beds, shrouded by darkness, they dare vent their distress with sobs and whimpers that, having no audience, remain empty of immediate political content.

20 In the Red Cross, like in the Army, the process of indoctrination in the national ideal reaches the operational limits of mere ideology and becomes more overt, harsher, less subtle. It is here that, for Kuramoto to resist total conformity and the concomitant flattening of the self on a particular institutional role, she must adopt an oppositional stance toward authority. The individual, as Erving Goffman argues, is not completely determined by his or her identification with, and commitment to a particular social unit or organizational structure; she is, rather, a “stance-taking entity” that always seeks some “elbow room” for the development of an autonomous self (Goffman 319– 320). Total institutions like Kuramoto’s Red Cross tend to encroach on this elbow room, make opposition unbearably costly, and force the individual to redefine her own selfhood by severely shifting the balance between nondifferentiation and individualization toward the former; toward identity (with others) and sameness. When no residual space is left, and the individual is reduced to a sheer state of necessity, a figure akin to the Muselmann can be produced; this figure, often mentioned by survivors of the Shoah as the last stage of dehumanization, as a form of living death before death, is the material foundation on which Giorgio Agamben theorizes the liminal bio-political figure of the homo sacer (Agamben, Homo).

21 If Goffman’s model is applied to the individual’s identification with the national state, however, where can the necessary oppositional space, the elbow room, be found? Is there a viable “outside” to the nation? Kuramoto’s decision to join the Red Cross is only the first step toward a crisis that will force her to come to terms with this problem,

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while her circumstances as a Manchurian Nisei (second generation Japanese expatriate) make conventional, hyper-patriotic solutions unavailable or unacceptable to her.

22 Kazuko’s desire to serve in the military state apparatus unmasks a disquieting disparity between the official rhetoric of Japanese femininity, derived from traditional models that emphasize purity and submissiveness, and the readiness with which this rhetoric is set aside for the sake of achieving the state’s operational and strategic goals. This ideological disharmony surfaces in the memoir when a baffled cousin Toru can only rationalize Kazuko’s decision to join the auxiliaries as an attempt to overcome social strictures on feminine behavior. His perplexity becomes even greater when he tries to make light of her “playing soldier” and is informed that they (for she is no longer an individual but part of a group) had received drills from a regular army sergeant. Expressing the surprise of a society not yet entirely up to speed with the necessities of the modern state, Toru exclaims: “Drills? Girls doing drills?” (Kuramoto 23).

23 Induction in the Red Cross marks Kazuko’s transition from the relative autonomy of civilian life to a regime that shows many of the characteristics of a total institution. As a cadet nurse she is segregated from her habitual social surroundings, including family and friends, and is integrated in a regime that leaves no room for the expression of individuality or dissent. In this regime (or regimen) all activities conform to a comprehensive rational plan, fulfill specific goals, are collective and coordinated, and occur according to a predetermined schedule. Privacy is abolished by communal living and by constant staff surveillance; all aspects of life are supervised and directed by a single authority; all communications with the outside are monitored and censored, as Kazuko realizes when the Chief Nurse confronts her with a personal letter in which she describes the Red Cross as a “glorified prison” (Kuramoto 7–8).

24 Kazuko’s dissatisfaction with institutionalized life makes her more receptive to the subversive discourse she encounters in a letter from her childhood friend, Kunio. Bitter over the conduct of the war and the Japanese military and the civilian elite’s blindness to impending defeat, Kunio lashes out against the generational sacrifice in pursuit of national goals. He and Kazuko realize that war quickly turns from a profession, or a duty, or a romantic adventure, into an existential condition in which the individual is entirely at the mercy of vast and irresistible forces locked in their own operational logic. Drilling, coordination, the use of technology, industrial and strategic planning, give war an appearance of rationality that does not hold up against the reality of its conduct. In this exchange, Kunio and Kazuko have glimpsed the fundamental nature of the modern state: the inclusion of biological life in the calculations of sovereign power; a condition clearly reflected in the total character of modern warfare which, in turn, is best defined as the mobilization of civil society and all national productive forces to one single end (cf. Poggi 112).

25 Since no aspect of social and individual life is exempt from state interest, if not direct supervision, the aims of industrialized warfare are radicalized in the contraposition of total victory to total defeat. A case in point is the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, with which the U.S., Britain, and China demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender, promising utter destruction if the terms were not accepted. Japanese negotiators unsuccessfully sought a Russian mediation to obtain acceptable peace terms; they proposed disarmament and demobilization, the conduct of war-crime trials under Japanese law. However, the terms excluded explicitly the presence of occupation forces on the home islands, and required the preservation of the figure of the Emperor. At this

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point in the war it was clear that, for the Japanese, “unconditional surrender [was] the only obstacle to peace” (Zinn 423). Clearly, f or the upper echelons of the Japanese Army annihilation was preferable to the complete surrender of national sovereignty, and, even after the allies made good on their promise of destruction by dropping the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, army representatives continued to maintain that Japan should resist invasion at all costs (Beasley 249).

26 In the nation-state model, any loss or limitation of sovereignty appears to political actors as an existential threat to the state and the entire national population. War of this kind, total war, dramatizes to the point of absurdity the crucial link between the attribute of nationality and political citizenship for the determination of what constitutes a human being and a life worth living. The prospect of losing citizenship rights is, thus, terrifying, as is clearly exemplified in Kuramoto’s record of the fear and sense of abandonment that engulfs the colonists after the Japanese surrender, notably before her home town is overrun by enemy troops. With the sudden collapse of the imperial structure, she and her family are transformed instantly into refugees in her native Manchuria. Indeed, the very intensity of her reaction to the radio announcement of the surrender reveals the ideological inevitability of the nation in modern state politics, and the subordination of individual identity to the national idea.

27 From the inception of her memoir, Kuramoto makes it quite clear that she considered Manchuria her home. It is also clear that, by joining the Red Cross, she proclaims her loyalty to Japan, to which Manchuria is politically attached, but from which it remains geographically, historically, and culturally distinct. Piqued by her display of patriotism, cousin Toru provokes her into a clever “nationality game” in which statelessness is, simultaneously, square one and the highest penalty. After baiting her to say that Koreans are “almost” Japanese, he asks: “Suppose you were stateless, and given a choice of becoming Korean or Manchurian, which would you choose?” Unhesitatingly, Kazuko answers “Manchurian” and argues that her choice is motivated exclusively by familiarity with Dairen and her complete ignorance of Korea (Kuramoto 25). Toru, who expected this answer, readily counters that, as a Manchurian Nisei, she is equally ignorant of Japan. What is, then, the source of a connection so powerful to induce her to put her life on hold and don a uniform that symbolizes loyal service to a country she has never seen? After all, as Toru understands, the choice is between two equally alien alternatives of national affiliation.

28 Kuramoto’s immediate rejection of Korea is disingenuous, but very revealing of the contradiction between the nationality principle and the political economy of imperialistic expansionism. According to Kazuko, Koreans were almost Japanese. In other words, the annexation of 1910 made them part of the Japanese state, as subjects, but not of the Japanese nation. Since nationality is now crucially linked with sovereignty, even in a constitutional monarchy like Japan at the time, it cannot be diluted without endangering the already precarious stability of the entire political structure. Kazuko’s argument is particularly interesting because her peculiar subject position as a Nisei induces her to answer Toru’s challenge by selectively applying the two principles by which citizenship is determined: by place of birth (ius soli) and by descent (ius sanguinis). She can thus argue that she retains a vital political connection with Japan by right of blood and claim, at the same time, Manchurian citizenship by right of birth. Both options appear entirely natural to her, even though they point to different geopolitical referents.

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29 At this point in her life, Kazuko is still able to resolve Toru’s hypothetical because, for the time being, the hold of Japanese state power irons out all inconsistencies. After the Japanese defeat, however, as Kazuko and her family hear the Emperor announce the unconditional surrender, the same problem will reappear with the seriousness of a life- and-death predicament. Trapped in the provincial town of Furanten, and fearful of the advance of the Soviet Army from the north, Chiang Khai-shek’s Nationalist Army from the south-east, and of the activities of the Communist guerrillas, the Japanese colonists decide to take refuge in Dairen. When they arrive, they find the city transformed and Kazuko realizes quickly that the privileges she had taken for granted, starting with segregated public transportation, had vanished. It appeared that her birthright, her blood connection with Japan, was now worthless, and she had to start building a new identity. With everything at stake this time, she attempts to reinvent herself as a native Dairenian, as if the loss of Japanese imperial protection had lifted an artificial identity to reveal the natural self underneath. However, in the logic of national identification ius soli lacks the authenticity of blood, and therefore constitutes a weaker claim to citizenship. To bolster her standing, Kuramoto’s autobiographical persona attempts to establish a more meaningful connection with the native Chinese on the cultural level, by studying the local language. On the symbolic level, the autobiographical text then tries to bridge the bio-political gap between self and nation by prefacing her resolution to become “naturalized” with the childhood memory of an anonymous Chinese man saving her from drowning (Kuramoto 70–71). It is a second gift of life which, Kuramoto hopes, may represent a viable surrogate of the missing blood connection with Manchuria.

30 If her plea were successful, she may not be forced to leave her native city for a distant place to which she felt bound by nothing more than borrowed ideological ties. Affectively, repatriation seems tantamount to deportation, and she wishes to resist it. But in the “nationality game” it would be unwise to risk remaining unattached and stateless because of misplaced sentimentality. Thus, she and her family join the Japanese refugees who flock to Dairen from all over Manchuria and fill the city’s every nook with their politically uncomfortable presence: “They were the forgotten people in the middle of the crowd, a silent discordance in the maddening crescendo” (Kuramoto 101–102). Discord and madness symbolize the indeterminacy of their status as politically relevant human beings. It is an exclusion that threatens to reduce them to creatures of subsistence, naked life waiting to be ransomed back into political existence by a state willing to call them citizens again.

31 After having lost all hope of maintaining a meaningful connection with Dairen, Kazuko remembers that her father had set up a lifeline with the old country. As soon as the children were able to write, she tells us, he had forced them to memorize the family’s legal address in Japan (Kuramoto 108). Once again, the political asserts itself as the primary ontological category in the individual’s construction of her identity. To better understand this claim it is necessary to step back to the moment when Kazuko and her family hear the Emperor announce the surrender in a radio broadcast. Their first reaction is one of desperate confusion, consistent with the manufactured feelings of nationalist doctrine which prompt Kuramoto to describe the idea of a Japanese surrender as unthinkable. What is truly unthinkable, however, is not the surrender itself but the consequent prospect of life under a non-national government.

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32 Unconditional surrender implies the dissolution of the sovereign power which establishes the boundaries separating a civilized inside from a hostile and barbaric outside. In consequence of this collapse, the people of Japan, and Kuramoto with them, fear being exposed to a violence unrestricted by the habitual bonds of mutual obligation that bind sovereign and subject. Without an autonomous state to give shape to the corporate body of the nation, each individual faces the terrifying prospect of having to stand alone before a supreme force that is in no way limited by the formal constraints of law or the moral strictures of justice. Refugees, stateless persons, the conquered, and the interned exist in a condition of anomie in which they may suffer violence without recourse. For these reasons, while contemplating the possibility of defeat, Kazuko’s father is certain that the only options are resistance to the bitter end or government-sanctioned collective suicide (Kuramoto 40).

33 In Kuramoto’s description of the tension that follows the broadcast, confusion rapidly gives way to anger and to a sense of betrayal because the nation-state, once thought invincible, has allowed the veil of ontological security to be torn in this manner. Kazuko felt “betrayed by Japan, the God-chosen country with a noble mission, the country that could do no wrong” (Kuramoto 42). Clearly, right and wrong are understood as a function of national sovereignty. For as long as Japan remained independent, it preserved the capacity to determine, by sovereign decision, the difference between the proper and the improper, the lawful and the illicit, down to the basic moral concepts of right and wrong. This is not the foundation of new ethical systems but the much more modest assertion, in politics, of a moral relativism whose only guiding principle is the interest of the state and of the nation, made indistinguishable. In the name of this supreme good, the sovereign can condone and forgive any action or omission. Conversely, when the sovereign loses its prerogatives, all acts priorly undertaken in the name of the nation are potentially subject to criminal prosecution or outright revenge.

34 Kazuko is thus intuitively correct in her opinion that “the loser becomes the criminal and everyone throws rocks at you” (Kuramoto 78). Furthermore, this is directly relevant to herself since, as a former member of the Japanese Red Cross, she believes she harbors the secret of a war crime of her own. Everyone, in post-war Japan, is implicated, but powerful ideological mechanisms are at work to shift the blame for the war onto a fanatical minority, the militaristic elite, and to explain popular support and participation as an effect of indoctrination (Kuramoto 128). The fiction of the wartime unity of the Japanese people is substituted with the equally fictive assumption of the essential blamelessness of the general population, so that a new, peace-loving, democratic Japan could be legitimately constructed under US supervision. Once again, Rousseau is proven correct: the nation is never wrong. At the very least, we need it not to be, to bestow legitimacy on a political order of which the nation-state (not the nation) is the true constitutive element.

35 As John Breuilly notes, “someone unfortunate enough to be excluded from the rule of a state, a stateless person, becomes both in theory and in practice a sort of non-person” (Breuilly 369). Faced with the problem of statelessness in a world of nation states, Kuramoto, as a Manchurian Japanese, clearly fears having become that someone. Once the initial shock of the surrender subsides, the Japanese colonists in Manchuria realize that the loss of sovereign protection had placed them in immediate physical danger, not from the advancing Russian and Nationalist Chinese armies, which may abide by

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agreements between states (improperly called “international”) on the treatment of prisoners of war, but from local mobs. Suddenly, there are no laws, neither domestic nor colonial, to protect them from former neighbors who feel authorized to exact direct retribution for their prior subordination. In the middle of the night, Kazuko and her family flee to the woods to hide under cover of darkness; in the woods, their former, markedly ideological reaction to the Emperor’s announcement begins to appear remote and feeble. Compared to the potent rush caused by fear of immediate harm of a distinctly physical nature, the ideological angst generated by the manufactured feelings of national identification, which prompted them to wish for death, appears thoroughly unconvincing. At this point, the emotional expenditure is enormous and Kazuko succumbs to an absolute fatigue: “Suddenly, I was tired. So tired that I didn’t care what had happened to what was going to happen” (Kuramoto 53).

36 From this moment onward, the narrative presents the loss of status suffered by the Japanese as a progressive descent into the survivors’ biological nature. Still, their dehumanization is never complete because their complete objectification is hindered (in the last instance and in Agambenian fashion) by the presence of a witness, the reader, who is forced to correlate even the most degrading experience suffered by the autobiographical self to their own humanity. The victim of a radical exclusion is thus reclaimed at the last moment, making the representation of complete dehumanization impossible to realize discursively. Still, Kuramoto’s narrative contains, in Mr. Kawano, a clear instance of pure violence of the kind identified by Agamben, which kills the human being without destroying the biological life that sustains it. Mr. Kawano, a family friend and former chief of police, had survived a severe beating from resentful Chinese, but remained brain-damaged. When Kuramoto notices him in a crowd of refugees, she initially fails to recognize him. In this passage, the deliberately slow pace of the description matches the absolute care and attentiveness the man puts into the simple task of peeling and eating a boiled potato. Mr. Kawano performs this task with “vacant intensity” amidst the general apathy of bystanders (Kuramoto 102). Kazuko is horrified by the transfiguration of this formerly vital personality into a creature of necessity entirely absorbed with its own sustenance and yet barely able to procure it.

37 Reduced to almost a bundle of physiological functions, Mr. Kawano functions as the literal and narrative embodiment of a horrific destiny that remains open for all human beings caught in the anomie of statelessness. However, as Agamben argues, all refugees remain in constant relation with the political, not in spite of having been pushed to the threshold of irrelevance, but because of it. This is because the threat of radical exclusion that is a constant prerogative of sovereign power enmeshes biological existence and political life not only in the victim, but also in the perpetrators and the witnesses, and, in doing so, traces the limits of the existing order across the bodies that it excludes (Agamben, Homo 28–29). For Nietzche’s Zarathustra, “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss” (Nietzsche 14). Pity that modernity has tied the political end of the rope, where our humanity is defined in relation to the humanity of others, to the state, and the biological end, where all social and political obligations should mercifully cease, to the nation.

38 This intimacy between life and nationhood also structures the biopolitical intuitions of Manchurian Legacy which are voiced most forcefully when a frightened man speaks out in the Furanten auditorium where the Japanese colonists consider whether to undertake the perilous voyage to Dairen:

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‘We should all have died the day Japan surrendered,’ the man says. ‘Japan is crushed and has given up Manchuria. We are abandoned. We are on our own in the middle of the enemies. We are trapped in a no-man’s land! What’s the use of running? Let’s finish ourselves here and now! You can get us enough arms to kill ourselves, can’t you?’ (Kuramoto 54)

39 Abandonment by one’s national community is described as a condition not unlike death. Unattached and forsaken, the colonists struggle to find value in a life trapped in the “no-man’s land” between national identities; this sentiment is confirmed when Kazuko’s father, a former public official, manages to infuse a measure of optimism in the dejected crowd by offering his compatriots the task of rebuilding Japan from its ashes, not for themselves, but for the sake of the children. The unity of biology and nation is thus reestablished, if not as a promise, at least as a possibility. Clearly, mere survival does not suffice.

40 For Kazuko, however, Japan offers little comfort. Harsh post-war conditions and the hostility with which she and the other refugees are received enfeeble the already tenuous connection. If the nationality game she plays with Kunio, early in the memoir, intimates that her patriotic sentiments are purely ideological and lack a concrete referent, her reaction to occupied Japan, a country she finds alien and hostile, supports this reading. Upon arrival, the Manchurian refugees are greeted with unpleasant sanitary procedures established by the occupation forces, which confirm their apprehensions for the absence of a sympathetic sovereign. Thus, upon being doused with DDT powder, Kuramoto expresses her resentment to the reader with a note of bitter and distinctly unpatriotic sarcasm: “Welcome home, you miserable maggots! Welcome home to the land of the Rising Sun!” (Kuramoto 114). The fault, she seems to imply, lies with the defeated nation-state.

41 In Kazuko’s eyes, post-war Japan is “a world with no order, no future,” a world in disarray where nightclubs, bars, dance halls, and prostitutes cater to the desires of outsiders, and the absence of an autonomous political order makes the very concept of the future meaningless (Kuramoto 146). By contrast, the future figures prominently in the fictitious life of the nation-state as modern ideological construct: the future of technological progress, the future of national reform, reconstitution, and aggrandizement, or the messianic future of emancipation. Without the sovereign’s representation of an order in which such a desirable future might occur, all that is left is an eternal present, dominated by necessity, with no purpose beyond simple being. In order to break out of this eternal present, in the Furanten auditorium, Kazuko’s father appealed to his compatriots’ national pride to create the illusion of a future for which it might be worthwhile to survive and sacrifice. Ironically, back in Japan, his own daughter is unable to embrace that fiction and her unorthodox behavior leads to her further marginalization. Her relationship with an American civilian in particular is construed as a betrayal of her obligations towards family and nation, leading her mother to regard her as a war casualty. By contrast, her decision to join the Red Cross without consulting her parents did not elicit a reaction so extreme.

42 Each stage of Kazuko’s metaphoric descent from full humanity towards mere biological life is marked by the loss of a particular ordering principle of social life. The first structure to fail her is the nation, whose military defeat and occupation signaled the inability of the sovereign to guarantee the political space in which qualified existence is possible. As a result of this failure, during Kuramoto’s time as a refugee in Dairen, the family had to step in and shoulder the entire burden of structuring group identification

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for its members. The family thus regressed beyond both its modern function and its traditional, pre-modern function, to its primeval role of coordinating a barely (though sufficiently) productive division of labor, and providing its members with a reasonably effective mutual support system. It did not, however, revert to the level of Durkheimian mechanical solidarity; the chronic uncertainty of necessity-driven post-war living conditions ensured that role assignment within the group remain relatively loose rather than rigid.

43 Paradoxically, with everyone taking multiple roles as need dictates, it is as if the refugees had attained a higher level of individual indifferentiation within the new group-category created by the emergency; higher, that is, than was allowed in a traditional family, under normal circumstances. A clear indication of relaxed role- assigning is the sudden inclusion of Kazuko in conversations on unseemly subjects like rape, prostitution, and abortion from which, in different circumstances, she would have been excluded (Kuramoto 90). This indicates that the boundary between maiden and woman is no longer patrolled by family enforcers of social convention, because it is no longer relevant. The family still provides some degree of differentiation, but the inherent social, economic, and existential instability of the refugee’s Umwelt (environment, or subjective world) prevents it from becoming the authoritative structure that determines the boundaries within which the individual must construct their sense of self against the push and pull of individualization (autonomy) and indifferentiation (conformity).

44 In post-war Japan, however, this autonomy dissipates and, in the general anomie, parents relinquish their authority over their children as if parental qualifications were conditional on the success or failure of the nation. Only later in the process of national reconstruction the family reasserts itself, not like in Dairen, as a site of security and freedom (limited only by necessity), but as the enforcer of collective values. When Kazuko chooses to associate with an American, she undermines the slow and painstaking reestablishment of a clear distinction between inside and outside, between what is Japan and what is foreign. Military occupation has broken the unity of people and territory on which depends the legitimacy of the modern nation-state, and has muddled the friend-enemy distinction that is, for Schmitt, the essence of the political (Schmitt). In these conditions, a viable discourse of national sovereignty must perforce stress social separation to compensate for the temporary impossibility of true political autonomy. Kazuko’s violation is therefore unforgivable, and it warrants her social death. Banished from her native Manchuria and, now, rejected by her family for failing to conform, Kazuko’s isolation and dejection deepen until the human is pushed to the margins of the narrative and almost erased. In the narrative, this effect can only be achieved obliquely. Any attempt to engage the reader directly would nullify the erasure by drawing attention to the protagonist’s jeopardized humanity and thus produce pathos. Instead, Kuramoto is able to displace, for a moment, the presence of the narrator’s consciousness with the image of the cicada call: “There is no music in the call of the cicada. No joy, no life. It is a gloomy and irritating noise, made by the scraping of their membranes, amplified by the hollow space in the insect’s abdomen. They live only long enough to mate and lay eggs” (Kuramoto 147).

45 Hollowness, sound without structure, life without qualification (without joy) all hint at the gradual impoverishment of Kazuko’s perceptive horizon as a sign of her progressive desubjecitification. It lasts only a moment (rhetorically), but the

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experience is comparable to the extreme processes of subjectification/ desubjectification Agamben describes in Remnants of Auschwitz. Agamben starts from the premise that subjectivity is a defining characteristic of “man,” though not an essential characteristic of the human animal. In other words, the structure of subjectivity is neither primary nor necessary for the functioning of the organism. Subjectivity is, rather, what is at stake in the modalities of our relation with the objects and conditions that fall within our subjective universe, our Umwelt.ii The more restrictive our conditions of existence, the more our subjectivity diminishes in depth and range. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more visible than in Auschwitz, a location devoted to the desubjectification of the individual and, to put it bluntly, the industrial production of corpses. Primo Levi and other witnesses of the Shoah provide Agamben with the measure of the success of this program in the tragic figure of the Muselmann, Levi's “total witness” in whom the person is transformed into a non-person while the body still lives (Levi 91–92).

46 For Agamben, human subjectivity is given at the point of intersection of four ontological operators, or currents: “possibility” and “contingency” as the operators of subjectification, and “impossibility” and “necessity” as the operators of desubjectification (Agamben, Remnants 148). Subjectivity appears between power and impotence, as the possibility (not the choice) of an autonomous self in relation to a contingency. When the contingent is eclipsed by the necessary, Agamben argues, the self can no longer (or less and less) position itself as subject, but it does not, for this reason, cease to exist. On the contrary, even in the extreme conditions that produced the liminal figure of the Muselmann, the non-human survives the human as a continuation of naked life. This sea-change from person to object is never complete or irreversible since, for Agamben, there is no human essence to be destroyed or saved. There is only a fracture between life and logos, an ontological gap in which the human being appears as the threshold across which flow the currents of subjectification and desubjectification (Agamben, Remnants 134–135). For this reason, no matter how radical the process of desubjectification, it can never result in the complete reduction of the subject to an object, or in the perfect identity between the human and the non-human (cf. Bataille 221; Scheler 208)

47 The closest analogy to the Muselmann in Manchurian Legacy is (not without irony due to his role in Japanese repressive state apparatus) the already mentioned police chief Mr. Kawano whose embarrassing resuscitation as a creature of necessity is witnessed by Kazuko. The witness, however, is herself caught in the downward spiral of necessity. Indeed, she reaches the most complete form of desubjectification after her repatriation to Japan, at the moment when, excluded from her family, she loses this last structure of identification. When, in this condition, the naked sound of the cicada catches her attention, the perceiving “I” is reduced, by juxtaposition, to mere biological datum, to existing “only long enough to mate and lay eggs,” in a damning, living indictment of the failure of nation and family to open possibilities for the autonomous self rather than foreclose them in the interest of nondifferentiation (Kuramoto 147). Could she, then, follow a friend’s advice, and live life as she sees fit? Unfortunately, freedom of this kind is not available to her. Only John, her American partner, seems to be able to exist outside the constraints of civilization, perhaps only because Japan is, to him, a foreign world of temporary residence. When Kazuko realizes that he, too, has betrayed her, she attempts suicide, but not for John’s sake. The desire to cease to exist, as she

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frames it, is linked to feelings of intense homesickness for Dairen that have perdured ever since her repatriation, four years earlier.

48 Kazuko tries to end her life by ingesting an excessive dose of the sleeping pills she was taking to control her insomnia, the physical symptom of an existential distress. Unable to sleep, she spends her nights watching war movies and war-related newsreels. Her fascination with this material clearly indicates that it bears some relevance to her personal situation, although, for the moment, the link remains obscure. After her failed suicide, and after she is pronounced lucky to have survived, we learn, from a flashback to a conversation among “colonial-born repatriates,” that the mesmerizing war scenes on TV seemed to represent a preemptive solution to their predicament of biopolitical indeterminacy. It is clear to them that no positive value can be attached to mere survival and that a qualified death, the death of a national hero, might be preferable: “Then a mournful groan came out from the darkness, ‘Lucky were those who have died in glory.’ ‘Yeah, had they believed in it,’ quickly responded a cynic. ‘They did! I know they did!’ an angry voice hissed at the cynic” (Kuramoto 164; emphasis in original). The cynic must be silenced to maintain the illusion that a certain kind of death can provide the meaning that escapes a certain kind of life.

49 If Kazuko’s attempted suicide marks the lowest point of her descent towards biological life devoid of political relevance, the next chapter, the last in the memoir (except for the short epilogue), signifies her acquisition of a new, politically viable identity. This ascent from the merely biological to the political, however, cannot be accomplished outside the established category of national identification. Since she has lost all connections with Manchuria, and since her inability to conform prevents her from establishing new links with Japan, she must find a third alternative. This opportunity comes through her marriage with an American, John, which gives her access to US citizenship. It allows her to do what colonialism and war denied her in Dairen: to make a conscious commitment of allegiance to a single country of her choice — a commitment that she seals by renouncing her Japanese citizenship immediately after becoming a naturalized American. From experience, she has clearly learnt that, in time of conflict, only unambiguous affiliation to a single nation-state can offer a limited guarantee of (physical and ontological) security, especially to those who straddle borders that the nation-state system, in its logic, understands as absolute biopolitical divides. Still, that protection remains conditional. One’s presence may not constitute a disturbance to the perceived internal homogeneity (nondifferentiation) of the national population, whether measured with an ethnic, racial, or cultural yardstick. At the same time, the subject must never represent a threat to the claimed homogeneity of the nation-state by confusing (culturally, racially, or ethnically) the inside with the outside, the friend with the enemy. Confusion of this kind played an important part in the internment of Japanese Americans during the war.

50 Participation in a corporate body is always a matter of affiliation, from Latin affiliare (to adopt). Birth might enter an individual into an assortment of rights and obligations towards a larger community, but it does not guarantee that membership will never be revoked. This possibility gives substance to social pressures to conform in order to demonstrate that one is deserving of being part of the group. A sufficiently grave violation of group values or interests may warrant expulsion or, to use Agamben’s terminology, banishment. The subject of the ban is then no longer protected by the laws and customs of the collectivity and is deprived of the possibility of recourse and

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redress. The law itself withdraws from the banished, leaving them completely vulnerable before their former community, before the world, and before nature (Agamben, Homo 17–18; 28–29).

51 As if to underscore this essential yet hidden component of national affiliation, Kuramoto’s memoir ends with two adoptions: the first is her acquisition of American citizenship, which naturalizes her elective membership in the nation; the second is her adoption of a child of mixed ancestry, Junko, whose name she changes to June-Marie, and whom she begins to permeate with an American identity: I took her to the P.X. (post exchange) to buy her a few necessities such as jeans, T- shirts, and sneakers. A transformation, the creation of an ‘American’ girl. Then I noticed. I noticed that in her old neighborhood Junko had stood out, looking Caucasian, and now in her new neighborhood on the American army post she looked surprisingly Japanese. My friends smiled at her and whispered to me, ‘She is beautiful. What nationality is she?’ (Kuramoto 168)

52 Kuramoto is certainly not naive about the difficulties of integration, especially when one’s appearance does not match the current ideal representation of the biological body on which political homogeneity is predicated. Still, she is not discouraged by ethnic or racial barriers and finds comfort in her adoptive daughter’s feistiness. She interprets it as an indication that June-Marie will not accept being marginalized. At the same time, she associates the visible expression of national affiliation with a necessity of life, a condition of human happiness. It is as if the family were unable to sustain the happiness of its members without attaching itself to a fully legitimate corporate body: the nation. When that connection is abruptly severed, as was the case with Kazuko in Dairen, the loss of identity can be catastrophic. Paradoxically, the modern ideal of a universal humanity (with all attendant human rights) is recognizable in the individual only in relation to the fictive life of the state, mediated by the concept of citizenship. Thus, any real or perceived threat to the individual’s full inclusion, any real or perceived attack on the existing homogeneity, and any attempt to reconfigure it according to different criteria of inclusion, will excite intense defensive reactions. Some social actors will take refuge in nationalism and pledge their unconditional loyalty to the collective entity by parading its symbols (the anthem and the flag), which are inevitably also the symbols of the state; others, like Kazuko Kuramoto, may seek assimilation in a new national community. It bears noting that Kazuko’s acquisition of American citizenship and her adoption of Junko are both juridical acts by which the recipients are taken across the threshold that separates what is inside the political order from what lies outside.

53 Kazuko Kuramoto’s experience between Manchuria, Japan and the United States shows how thoroughly these new forms of national identification envelop the individual, to the point of representing the sole possible foundation of a worthwhile existence. Colonization, war, defeat and military occupation of the home country force Manchurian Legacy to deal with the eruption, within the existing order, of anomic spaces where individuals are divested of the prerogatives that come with citizenship. Kuramoto’s defense against anomie is to seek new options of national affiliation in the acquisition of American citizenship, which certainly marks a high point in the narrative, alongside the adoption of June-Marie. Ironically, only a few years earlier American citizenship, whether acquired through birth or naturalization, would have offered her no protection in wartime United States; she would have been evacuated to concentration camps with the rest of the West-Coast Issei and Nisei (cf. Commission on

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Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians; Weglyn). Clearly, the salvific quality of Kuramoto’s new status is specific to her situation and cannot be generalized.

54 The memoir ends with a somber reference to Japanese orphans who, having been abandoned in Manchuria, were raised, oblivious of their nationality, by local Chinese families. In adulthood, many of these returned to Japan in search of their roots. Kuramoto blames imperialism and war for creating conditions in which individuals cannot be content with familial happiness but must wander the world, seeking a place where the congruity of state and nation would promise them meaning beyond mere existence (Kuramoto 176). The hidden content of this restlessness is the search for a clear sign of unequivocal recognition by a national state in the form of full and undisputed citizenship. From this relation between state and individual, mutual obligations arise that can be mediated very effectively, for both parties, through nationalistic discourse.

55 Manchurian Legacy shows how identities are constructed in unequal transactions between the individual and a single state entity, often at the expense of intermediate social groups like the family. The nation-state system represents, for individual nation- states, a more general structure which, unlike the abstract yet all-embracing notion of humanity, contains entities that are irreducibly antagonistic to each other because, extending Simmel’s heuristic from the social to the political sphere, this antagonism guarantees their external individuality and internal nondifferentiation. Kuramoto’s singular life story also suggests that, for the modern individual, the urgency of identification with a national referent is not solely the product of these sets of multiple antagonisms/recognitions between nation-states; it derives, also, from her anxiety over the risk of becoming stateless and of being thus banished to the non-place of modern politics where no transaction involving mutual recognition with a sovereign power is offered to shield the individual from the absolute vulnerability of a bare life devoid of political significance.

56 When it comes to our relation with sovereign power and its prerogative to define the boundaries of political relevance and moral action, the question that remains unanswered is, where can the modern individual find the elbow room to preserve the autonomy of the self as an ethical agent in the world? Could this be done in reasonable safety, without resorting to self-denying sacrifice? Kuramoto’s memoir can help frame the problem by showing how we become implicated in the biopolitical mechanisms that govern modern politics, and how much is at stake when the ties that bind us to the state in a relation of mutual recognition are, for any reason, rescinded. The loss is complete. Given propitious circumstances, it is possible to find a remedy within the global system itself by shifting affiliation with a juridical act, as does Kuramoto; still, this solution leaves one forever vulnerable to restrictive claims made on nativist grounds. Absence of a political referent shielding the individual from the brutal forces of necessity, be they natural or man-made, abandons the human being in a space where the exercise of power knows no limits, nor does the violence against those who are excluded from a reciprocal relation with the sovereign.

57 Although the modern (western or westernized) world belongs, ideologically, to the individual (one thinks of the Cartesian subject), the seemingly infinite possibilities for individualization produced by political, social, and technological modernity are boxed in by the biopolitical boundaries of nondifferentiation at the national level. Individuals who, for any reason, find themselves in the interstitial spaces between state-attached

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national identities, uncover, as their defining existential trait, not the unadulterated core of their own humanity, but an emptiness and a solitude that coincides with the unmediated awareness of their naked, biological life. Modernity is not the cause of that emptiness and solitude; but it has generated a set of historical circumstances which forces this awareness on larger and larger numbers who become trapped between an impossible demand of conformity and the terror of complete autonomy.

58 i. Notes

59 Kuramoto’s experience is far from unique. The refugee problem exploded in Europe after the First World War when displaced populations numbering in the millions were shifted from one nation-state to the next as Europe’s political geography was being redrawn to reflect the nationality principle (Kolko). In 1939, Sir John Simpson Hope compiled a report on the refugee problem for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, from the First World War to the Nazi expulsion of German Jews in the mid and late thirties (Simpson). Hannah Arendt relied on this report for her theory of statelessness. Displaced populations, Arendt argues, concluded correctly that loss of national rights implied the loss of human rights since the latter have no juridical platform on which to stand save the state-sanctioned institute of citizenship (Arendt 292).

60 ii. Agamben borrows the term Umwelt from early nineteenth-century zoologist Jakob von Uexküll who developed a theory of meaning according to which living organisms exist in unique and complete subjective universes that are constructed on the basis of the insight provided by receptor organs and effective organs locked in a functional cycle. It follows that there are as many subjective universes as there are subjects perceiving them, and that they are of greater or lesser complexity depending on the complexity of the organism. Objects populate these universes, richly or sparsely, as meaning carriers (von Uexküll 31).

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ABSTRACTS

This article investigates the significance of Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (1999) as a life narrative that foregrounds the biopolitical implications of modern subjectivity in the context of the global system of nation states. Using the theoretical insights of, primarily, Giorgio Agamben, Carl Schmitt, and Georg Simmel, I argue that Kuramoto’s record of her own experience between Manchuria, Japan, and the United States, showcases the fundamental conflict between the nation and the family as the largest and smallest social circles vying for the individual’s allegiance. This discussion will show that the nation-state’s claim is preeminent and that the political is fundamental to the construction of a viable subjectivity in the modern world, leaving complete exclusion as the only alternative.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Kazuko Kuramoto Keywords: autobiography, biopolitics, life narrative, nation-state, nationalism, sovereign power, state of exception

AUTHOR

ANDREA PACOR John Cabot University

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At the Meetin’ Tree: Reading, Storytelling, and Transculturation in Daniel Black’s They Tell Me of a Home

Pekka Kilpeläinen

1. Introduction: Mobility and Transculturation

1 African American experience is often associated with a sense of collective dislocation that can be traced back to the history of transatlantic slave trade. As Paul Gilroy points out, “in the history of the black Atlantic…movement, relocation, displacement, and restlessness are the norms rather than the exceptions” (133). In this context, it is common for mobility to be conceptualized as a way of responding to the sense of dislocation and homelessness. It is also a central issue in They Tell Me of a Home (2005), the debut novel by the African American writer Daniel Black. Mobility in Black’s novel may be read in terms of this impulse to relocate and move or, in Gilroy’s words, as “the tension between roots and routes” (133). The main conflicts in the novel revolve around the problematic homecoming of the protagonist and the personal and ideological issues that his homecoming raises. Tommy Lee Tyson, or T.L., as he is usually called, returns to his home in the black community of Swamp Creek in rural Arkansas after a ten-year absence, during which he has received a Ph.D. in Black Studies in New York. He arrives with a rather self-assured, elitist view of his home community and its values, but his attitude eventually changes, in significant ways, as his reencounter with his cultural origins forces him to reevaluate the issues that made him leave.

2 T.L.’s mobility may be understood in terms of the tension between the diasporic displacement that Gilroy discusses and the socially transformative agenda suggested by Weert Canzler, Vincent Kaufmann, and Sven Kesselring, who endorse “the idea of using spatial movement as a ‘vehicle’ or an instrument for the transformation of social

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situations and in the end to realize certain projects and plans” (3-4). T.L. left his rural home in order to pursue academic goals as a result of his profound disagreement with the conservative values of his Southern community. His home was always a place where he experienced the immediate effects of those values in an intensely personal and intimate way that made him feel alienated and excluded. In other words, home has always signified displacement and dislocation to him, instead of providing a safe haven and a sense of belonging. His reasons for returning home are rooted in the same conflicts and endeavors; that is, he comes back home because of his longing to reconnect with his cultural roots and, in a somewhat idealistic and elitist sense, to address and solve the problems he has perceived in his community.

3 In this article, I will discuss the ways in which T.L.’s homecoming interrupts the conservative, patriarchal order of Swamp Creek and, significantly, also leads him to reassess his problematic, arguably elitist relation to his cultural heritage. It is crucial to notice that the novel does not, in the end, endorse a colonization of the values of the Southern black community of Swamp Creek by the values of academic intelligentsia, although T.L.’s thinking initially seems to run along these lines. Rather, the outcome of this clash of cultures and ideologies implies the establishment of new, meaningful cultural exchange between T.L. and his community, as he arrives at an enhanced appreciation of the communal practice of oral storytelling in Swamp Creek and manages to initiate a transformation in the attitudes of the community toward education. This reading of They Tell Me of a Home seeks to explicate the ways in which the novel represents African American oral tradition and literature and their ideological underpinnings. My approach to the novel uses the concepts of transculturation, mobility, and cultural trauma as theoretical tools. My intent is to encourage critical discussion of a novel that tackles several important questions, but has, to my knowledge, hardly received any serious critical attention. Where appropriate, I will also refer to Black’s fourth novel, Twelve Gates to the City (2011), a sequel to They Tell Me of a Home, since many of the same issues are in focus in both novels.

4 The clash of academic and local values establishes intriguing premises for a transcultural reading, primarily on two different levels. Firstly, on the ideological level, T.L. re-encounters the oppressive and reactionary modes of thinking—such as sexism, heteronormativity, and incredulity towards education—that played a significant role in his decision to leave Swamp Creek and pursue an academic career. It is important to stress, however, that these phenomena are by no means exclusive to the rural Southern black community. Instead, the patriarchal values of Swamp Creek should be read as resulting from attempts to conform to the norms of the prevailing ideological climate in the Southern United States. Secondly, on the aesthetic level, the conflicting sets of values are mainly connected to their respective modes of cultural representation, that is, oral storytelling and literary expression. The ways in which these cultural encounters are negotiated produce glimpses of transculturality in the sense of working towards an enhanced understanding of both of these cultural modes and the possible outcomes of their interaction.

5 The concept of transculturation provides tools for analyzing and understanding the cultural clash between T.L. and his community. My concept of transculturation is based on Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of the contact zone as the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing

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relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. (6)

6 It must be noted that in the case of T.L.’s homecoming, we are not dealing with a colonial context but, rather, an intracultural one involving people sharing the same geographical, historical, and cultural heritage. It is important to understand, however, that in some ways, T.L.’s ten-year absence and return to his birthplace give rise to similar phenomena to those described by Pratt, albeit on a different scale. This is because T.L. has always been an outsider in Swamp Creek, alienated from the ideological and cultural conventions of the small black rural community. Although he has lived most of his life in this social context, he has never been able to adhere to its conservative values. What is at stake here may be read in accordance with Frank Schulze-Engler’s account of transculturation as “the productive communicative processes by which individuals and social groups make sense of culture in the contemporary world” (93). This is exactly what occurs in They Tell Me of a Home, as T.L. re-encounters the conservative, patriarchal culture of his home and community and attempts to redefine his relation to and position in it, eventually leading to new visions of reconciliation.

7 Read against the backdrop of African American history, the conflicts in the novel may be understood in terms of what Gilroy has famously termed “the memory of slavery” (39). As Ron Eyerman points out, “the notion of ‘African American’ is...a historically formed collective identity” and the memory of slavery has been central in this process of identity formation, “not so much as individual experience, but as collective memory” (76). The memory of slavery is a cultural trauma that continues to have significant effects on the present and requires ongoing negotiation. According to Eyerman, “cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion” (61). Rooted in the history of involuntary mobility, forced servitude, and all the related phenomena and consequences, the traumatic memory of slavery provides a key to reading the issues grappled with in They Tell Me of a Home. In their conflicting ways, both the agrarian community of Swamp Creek and T.L. attempt to deal with the memory of slavery and its cultural trauma, and it is T.L.’s homecoming that forces these two ways of remembering into cultural contact with each other. It is crucial to notice, however, that the memory of slavery is not exclusively about the disastrous effects of oppression, but should be thought of, as Gilroy does, “as a living intellectual resource in [black] expressive political culture” (39). This is exemplified in the novel by both the oral storytelling tradition of Swamp Creek and the African American literary tradition endorsed by T.L. These modes of African American cultural production may be regarded as both creative and critical manifestations and negotiations of cultural trauma. Similarly, mobility is understood both as a manifestation of and as a way of negotiating the loss of roots through enslavement.

2. Homecoming and Ideological Conflict

8 The central conflicts in They Tell Me of a Home are triggered by the act of homecoming, which brings the concept of home and its complex history in the African American context into focus. The African American experience of home tends to diverge from the conventional, idealized conception of home as a place of shelter, stability, security, and

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comfort. As Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty contend in their article “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” “[b]eing home” refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. (196)

9 Largely defined by the sense of “not being home,” the African American experience of home carries an intensified historical and traumatic weight, as it may be understood as a collective reference to the lost homeland of Africa and the search for a safe haven in the United States under the harsh conditions of slavery and the subsequent forms of institutionalized racial discrimination that continue to prevail in our day. This has been manifested on various levels: in the mass migrations of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North, in religious metaphors and allegories— such as the exodus from the bondage in Egypt towards the promised land—coined by civil rights leaders, in literature, music, and other forms of art. Home has therefore become an ambiguous metaphor of security and freedom, and, simultaneously, of their absence. As Valerie Sweeney Prince suggests in Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature (2005), “home is ubiquitous and nowhere at the same time” (2).

10 It is crucial to point out, however, that even under the brutal conditions of slavery, African Americans have been able to establish a sense of “being home.” bell hooks emphasizes the political function of home in African American culture by defining it as a place of resistance in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990): Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world. (42)

11 In hooks’s view, home is characterized as an enclave within the system of institutional racism, a place of safety and freedom created and maintained primarily by women, who are responsible for building “a community of resistance” against white supremacy (Yearning 42). This argument runs parallel with Prince’s suggestion that [t]he act of place making, like all other constructions of identity, is necessarily communal. It operates in terms of inclusion and exclusion, and consequently precipitates the construction of binary oppositions like inside versus outside or “us” versus “them”—and these are debatable constructs. (69)

12 It becomes evident in the narrative that T.L. has never been able to experience home as a place of safety and resistance against the hostile world outside. Instead, he remembers it as a place of oppression, a confining structure, where he hardly experienced any sense of belonging or unity, and which prohibited him from making use of his intellectual capacity: Daddy worked me to death and said, “Dat’s life round here, boy.” So I had to leave. Hay fields, pea patches, cotton picking—I had had enough. I didn’t ever acquire a nostalgic love for the place. (6)

13 This conflict between the idealized notion of home as a safe place and T.L.’s personal experience appears as a central issue in the novel. A major reason for T.L.’s sense of homelessness arises from his difficult relationship to Momma, who is not his biological mother. As is eventually revealed to T.L. himself only after his homecoming, he was

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actually born out of wedlock as a result of an affair between Daddy and Ms. Swinton, the school teacher (100). The fact that Momma is not T.L.’s biological mother is offered as an explanation for the difficult relationship between them, as she was forced to nurture and take care of the living, tangible token of her husband’s infidelity (Twelve Gates to the City 32). Although Momma largely fulfils her role in maintaining home as a safe haven, her efforts tend to fail to extend to T.L., who has always felt excluded.

14 The ambiguity or unreliability of home is symptomatic of the traumatic memory of slavery that underlies the central antinomies of They Tell Me of a Home. The tension between the collective, traumatic sense of homelessness and rootlessness and, on the other hand, the ideal of home as a safe haven sets the stage for T.L.’s homecoming. I...felt compelled to return to the place of my origin. Exactly why I didn’t know, but for some reason I felt the need to go home. My heart, or my head, had begun to twist, to beg for familial clarity, in the last several years, and maybe, I hoped, Swamp Creek could help. Or maybe I dreamed of returning and finding a picturesque family into which I could safely place myself. (6)

15 T.L. comes back home in search of his familial and communal roots that he has, in effect, abandoned and rejected in his ten-year absence and complete lack of contact. He is driven by the desire to negotiate his sense of homelessness in order to arrive at what Katharina Schramm characterizes as “the comforting illusion of homecoming as the achievement of closure” (19). A significant part of this is his wish to reunite with the only member of his family with whom he has shared an affectionate relationship, that is, his little sister, Cynthia, usually referred to as Sister. It turns out, however, that she has died under obscure circumstances, and this substantially complicates T.L.’s homecoming. In addition to the personal endeavor to reestablish his cultural roots, T.L. is also motivated by a larger agenda, his idealistic impulse to change the world, to address what he regards as the main ideological problems of Swamp Creek, that is, social and political stagnation, incredulity towards education, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.

16 In some ways, T.L.’s return home is reminiscent of the diasporic mode of homecoming, a frequent theme in postcolonial literatures, in which, according to Avtar Brah, home often appears as “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination” (192). In his exile, T.L. has not crossed any national borders or oceans between continents, but has, however, crossed a significant cultural boundary between his rural Southern community and the academic circles of New York. Despite his success in the academic context, the sense of displacement and dislocation that he experienced in his home and community in Arkansas has not vanished, and this has led him to travel back to his rural home. This complies with Schramm’s notion of “the yearning for home as a coming to terms with one’s own historical and political placement” (19). T.L. is haunted by the fear of abandoning his cultural heritage and roots, not necessarily in terms of the African American heritage in a larger sense, but primarily regarding the heritage of his more immediate and local cultural context at the level of family and community.

17 What makes T.L.’s homecoming particularly problematic is the fact that, ever since his childhood, he has never conformed to his community’s sexism or heteronormativity. He has also resisted its commitment to physical labor, its skepticism about education, and what he perceives as a lack of communication and emotional expression. Many of these traits have been dominant in the discourses of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy (see, for example, R. W. Connell 18, 55, and 128;

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bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity 2-12; and Sylvia Walby 19-21) and related to the patriarchal order in many agrarian cultures (see Deborah Simonton 57-69, 82). As a result of his failure to conform, T.L.’s relation to his community has always been characterized by a sense of estrangement and alienation.

18 These exclusionary ideologies are largely embodied in the novel by T.L.’s stern and strict father, who largely appears as T.L.’s binary opposite with his “patriarchy, sexism, and self-assumed superiority” (103). Interestingly, T.L.’s reading of his father’s attitudes is infused with critical concepts that he has learned at the university in New York. After his homecoming, T.L. is immediately forced to realize that his ten-year absence has not altered their relationship: I felt immobilized by his authoritative presence, and Daddy knew it. Since childhood, I was afraid of the sound of his voice. He would yell at me and cause sweat to break out all over my body, even in the winter. Whenever he was around, my equilibrium was shot, because I couldn’t hold anything steady or speak without stuttering heavily. To one extent or another, he affected everyone in the family this way. (59-60)

19 Daddy’s hegemonic position in the family is also expressed metaphorically in the text: The old family car standing in the field, overgrown by grass and probably snakes, symbolized his divinely ordained position as head of the family and reminded me that, in whatever direction the family evolved, it was Daddy’s life we were following. (168)

20 Highlighted in this passage is the politically stagnant and regressive quality of this patriarchy: the old car has been left in the field, unmoving, rusting, in effect, useless, but still maintaining its position as the iconic symbol of the status quo. In addition, the dominant power position of Daddy’s patriarchal values is evident in the lack of communication between the members of the family: “Our family had always reverted to silence when speaking threatened to annihilate our comfort zones” (93).

21 The negative effects of patriarchy are not limited to the internal dynamics of the Tyson family; indeed, they become clearly visible in the novel in various instances, which all seem to possess a common denominator, that is, the reluctance of the community to accept difference. What underlies this is the illusion of cultural homogeneity and adherence to the cultural and social status quo that the people of Swamp Creek seek to uphold. One of the most conspicuous examples is articulated in T.L.’s reminiscence of how two women, Ms. Janey and Ms. Pauline, were excommunicated from the church because of their non-normative sexuality. The following passage exposes both the heteronormativity and the moral hypocrisy of the community: Deacon Blue got up in church and said he had an announcement to make: “It hath been reported that some of our members is funny.” Immediately everyone began to look at Ms. Janey and Ms. Pauline. “We all know God don’t like dat. De Bible say homosexials is goin’ to hell.” “Amen,” people chimed. “The Bible say fornicators are going, too,” Ms. Janey said defensively and stood to her feet. “So if I’m goin’, Blue, I’ll definitely see you there!” Everybody knew, back in the day, Deacon Blue had been a ladies’ man, and Ms. Janey was making sure Deacon Blue understood God’s judgment to

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affect every life. Her case didn’t carry her far, though. The church voted unanimously to excommunicate them. (77)

22 Although T.L. was still an adolescent at the time, he strongly disagreed with the decision to banish the women from the church: I knew even back then the church was dead wrong, but Momma and everyone else said the two women had to go because they were “funny” and God didn’t like that. Whether they were funny or not, both women were kind to me. If they loved each other, I thought, they’d done better than any of us. (72-73)

23 For T.L., the same-sex relationship offers a glimpse of the possibility of love that stands in a striking opposition to the apparently unsatisfying heterosexual relationship between Momma and Daddy and the patriarchal, heteronormative order of their family. The prejudice towards same-sex desire is evidently one important constituent of the ideological divide between T.L. and his community. This is where They Tell Me of a Home establishes a link to another contemporary Southern African American writer, Randall Kenan, and especially his novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), which explores the issue of heteronormativity in the rural black South.

24 Another central issue underscored by the text is the way in which patriarchal ideology seeks to maintain a disproportionate power balance between genders. This becomes exemplified through Momma’s subordinate position as she has to succumb to Daddy’s will and take on the role as T.L.’s mother. Her life under patriarchal control has inevitably shaped her way of thinking: Momma embraced all men as the same. If a woman was to have a man at all, and every woman needed a man, Momma said, she would simply have to tolerate his shit, and there was nothing she could do about it. I found it funny as a child that Daddy got all kinds of breaks while Momma was told to endure or get the hell out. (103)

25 Although Momma seems to wield some power within the domestic sphere, the point is that, within the patriarchal order, Daddy’s will prevails and she has little choice other than to live with the consequences. This issue is further elaborated in the sequel, Twelve Gates to the City, in a discussion between Momma and T.L., where Momma explicitly articulates her position as a mother whom “yo’ father treats like shit and still expects to cook his food and raise his bastard child. And I did it” (32).

26 Somewhat paradoxically, in the same discussion, she betrays her own adherence to patriarchal thinking by mocking T.L. for his indecision concerning his life, that is, for not behaving like a man should: “Grow up. Be a man. Decide where and how you gon’ live, and stay there....I’m sayin’ be man enough to make up yo’ mind. Then do it” (32). Momma’s situation and her words resonate with David Ikard’s claim that “black patriarchy is partly sustained by unintentional black female complicity” and that [t]he cultural affirmation of self-sacrifice compels black women to ignore suffering under patriarchy to support black men and preserve cultural solidarity, thereby rendering black women accomplices in their own subjugation. (5)

27 Through Momma the novel highlights the difficult position of black women between the responsibility to be committed to the family and tradition and, on the other hand, their own happiness and wellbeing, as responsibility and happiness do not necessarily coincide within patriarchal order.

28 One of the central dividing lines between T.L. and his father is the stance towards physical labor:

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Daddy’s work came before everything else. Always. He believed, at the expense of everything, a man ought to work by the sweat of his brow, and Daddy upheld this conviction. He was obsessed with physical labor, afraid that one moment of rest would automatically prove him lazy, and Daddy would never allow anyone the opportunity to call him lazy. This was a principle he lived by and one he made all the rest of us live by, too. (They Tell Me of a Home 8)

29 T.L., conversely, abhors physical work, and he would rather devote his time to his greatest passion, that is, reading. As a result, from T.L.’s perspective, physical labor and the intellectual practice of reading have become binary opposites, the former representing conservative thinking and political stagnation, whereas the latter stands for social ascension, development, and change. It is crucial to note, however, that Daddy’s “obsession” with work may be seen as driven by economic necessities and realities of life, that is, the position of post-slavery poverty that the family occupies under the conditions of late capitalism in the 1980s. Hard, physical labor becomes, therefore, a question of day-to-day survival, which also gives rise to the stance against reading and education as threatening the short-term view on the issue of livelihood and survival. This is spelled out by Daddy: “First thang he got to learn is how to work. All dat readin’ ain’t gon’ put no food in his mouth. How a man s’pose’ to make a livin’, sittin’ round on his ass wit’ a book in his hands?” (8). The world as it appears to T.L.’s father is governed by the tough and relentless struggle for survival through hard physical work. The ongoing poverty in African American rural communities is a manifestation of the persistence of the effects of slavery and its aftermaths, to which hard physical work is both a practical and an ideological response.

30 Daddy’s attitude assumes even more substantial weight when read in relation to historical developments. As Bernard W. Bell argues, the rise of the novel as a dominant cultural form was inherently related to the “social factors that mark the change of traditional, agrarian, oral cultures to modern, industrial, literate cultures” (73). Daddy’s resistance to reading and literature therefore appears as emblematic of the resistance to larger social and cultural transformation and highlights the oppositions between the rural and the urban, the agrarian and the industrial, the oral and the literary. What complicates this position even further is the complex history of African American literacy. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., learning to read and write was a profoundly political act for black people during slavery because written culture was deemed as a precondition of humanity and, therefore, a potential step towards freedom from bondage (“Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext” 147). Daddy’s refusal to acknowledge the significance of literacy is one of the most conspicuous manifestations of the repression of history in the novel.

31 The Southern rural values and norms prevailing in Swamp Creek evidently involve questions of black identity in a larger, historical sense. The text emphatically proclaims that the feelings of inferiority and lack of self-worth evident in this black community are inextricably intertwined with conservative thinking and especially with the negative attitude towards education and reading. These issues find their clearest expression in the diaries of the school teacher of Swamp Creek, Ms. Swinton, which T.L., after finding she is his biological mother, acquires and reads: I see the brilliance in the eyes of my students when they arrive early in the morning smelling like cow manure. The problem is that they don’t see brilliance. That’s why their homework doesn’t get completed properly. They, and their parents, equate country with intellectual ineptitude. It’s truly strange. The people in Swamp Creek

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function with the unspoken notion that “real intelligence” is an anomaly in southern, rural places. It’s sad. And they teach their children likewise. (238)

32 According to Ms. Swinton, the most negative outcome of this distrust of learning is that generation after generation, the children of Swamp Creek have internalized the racialized stance of inferiority: “They’re dying constantly. They think they’re too black and too stupid to be of any value. Unfortunately, their folks inadvertently reinforce such notions” (156).

33 Although white racism and racial slavery are rather seldom mentioned in the text, it may be argued that the intellectual inertia of Swamp Creek results from the traumatic memory of slavery and its effects on African American identities. The fact that this collective memory has been largely repressed in the text may be read in terms of Fredric Jameson’s idea of the political unconscious—as developed in his seminal work The Political Unconscious (1981)— evading direct expression, but present in its effects, as “an absent cause” (35). That is, the issues of racism and racial slavery have been pushed away from the consciousness of the people and from the surface of the narrative, but they play a crucial role via this collective political unconscious which surfaces in the guise of the abovementioned feelings of inferiority and intellectual ineptitude. This political unconscious may be detected in the text, for instance, at a metalevel, in the texts that are read within this novel, such as Ms. Swinton’s diaries.

34 As T.L. returns home from the academic world of New York, where his thinking has become further distanced from the conservative agrarian ideological climate of Swamp Creek, a clash of values is imminent. This is articulated in the text allegorically through the Meetin’ Tree, which assumes the position of a cultural icon that represents the values and practices of the black agrarian community. The tree is characterized in the text as “a great elder watching over a flock of children” (3). This allegorical reading of the Meetin’ Tree may be pushed further by comparing two incidents in the novel. Firstly, T.L. reminisces how, in his childhood, the leaves of the tree would provide shelter from the rain, “like a big umbrella” (7), that is, functioning as a shield from outside influence, change, and growth represented by the rain in this dry, sun-scorched land. As he descends from the bus on the excruciatingly hot Arkansas afternoon of his homecoming, T.L. realizes that he is unable to rely on the tree in his search of shelter from the heat: “the Meetin’ Tree didn’t do me much good the Saturday I arrived, for even in the shade, I was still dripping with sweat” (7). The Meetin’ Tree does not shelter the outsider from the heat that is characteristic of the summers in Swamp Creek. In addition, the hot air is completely stagnant despite T.L.’s attempt to cool himself by fanning the air with a notebook that contains drafts of his literary texts: “It did no good. Cool air had completely abandoned Swamp Creek” (7). The still, unmoving air is a metaphor for the conservative ideological and cultural climate of the community that refuses to be stirred by the movement of T.L.’s notebook, that is, an emblem of literature and education.

3. Cultural Memory and Transcultural Spaces

35 The clash of agrarian and academic values is represented on the aesthetic level in the novel through the modes of cultural expression to which they are primarily connected. This is where the tension between African based orality and Euro-American literacy becomes an important issue. The point of view represented by T.L., and also by Ms.

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Swinton, the school teacher who is his biological mother, emphasizes the importance of literature and reading; whereas the preferred mode of cultural expression in Swamp Creek is oral storytelling. According to Simon Featherstone, orality is often associated with illiteracy, and, therefore, as “a barrier to knowledge and progress, and a badge of cultural and economic backwardness” (185). Although T.L. initially seems to subscribe to this condescending, elitist stance, he eventually finds a new kind of appreciation for oral storytelling culture. This development highlights the redemptive possibilities of orality, that is, its emphasis on collectivity and capability to adapt to change. As Featherstone points out, [o]ral communication of memory is, therefore, always socially based, constructed within a given moment of performance and, theoretically at least, open to response, debate and challenge. (187)

36 It may be argued that as a mode of cultural expression, oral storytelling opens up possibilities to deal with the problems of the community, but, as depicted in the novel, this has not been done profoundly enough. The black people of Swamp Creek have not, therefore, been able to relinquish the collective, internalized sense of racial inferiority and its intersectional collateral effects, such as sexism and heteronormativity. In other words, the capacity of orality to adapt to change has not been fully realized in Swamp Creek.

37 This is also where the issue of spatiality becomes central in the novel, as both modes of cultural expression (oral storytelling and writing) are connected to specific spaces within the contact zone created by T.L.’s homecoming. As far as reading and education are concerned, the novel discusses two specific sites: T.L.’s grandmother’s house and Ms. Swinton’s house. These spaces that clearly offer refuge from the surrounding ideological climate of Swamp Creek are crucial for T.L.’s future as a scholar of black studies, the former by providing him a chance to cultivate his talents and his passion for reading and the latter as an enclave of academic learning. Perhaps the most significant space in the novel is the Meetin’ Tree, which assumes a crucial position, firstly, through its function as the space of the communal practice of oral storytelling and, secondly, as the primary scene where the ideological clash that becomes manifest through T.L.’s homecoming is negotiated.

38 In T.L.’s childhood, his grandmother’s house used to be his refuge because she was one of the few people in Swamp Creek who diverged from the typical, hostile stance towards reading and encouraged him to use his talents: When I started memorizing excerpts from black writers, Grandma said, “Amen! You comin’ on home!” She loved my Dunbar recitations the best. His dialect poems made her laugh and cry simultaneously. After she gave me the first Dunbar book, she started getting me black books every Christmas and made me promise to read them and recite parts of them to her. I never failed....Grandma and I had created a sacred space there, sharing secrets and crying tears together. (28-29)

39 Grandma’s house became a cultural and intellectual oasis for T.L., a place where he could cherish his devotion to reading and learning, an enclave surrounded by the conservative agrarian culture with little space for anything else than hard physical labor. In this cultural context, Grandma’s house may be read as what Michel Foucault has referred to as a heterotopia, a real, existing place where the conventions and values of the community are represented and, simultaneously, contested (“Of Other Spaces” 24).

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40 Another heterotopic space of reading and learning is Ms. Swinton’s house, which reached well-nigh mythical proportions in T.L.’s mind during his adolescence: “It had once been my dream mansion” (146). Ms. Swinton has become the embodiment of learning in Swamp Creek and therefore T.L.’s primary role model. She used to keep her house and garden in an impeccable shape, displaying her impressive “ability to transfer her academic standards to the maintenance of a flower garden” (146). This proof that academic knowledge and practical competence are not mutually exclusive informs T.L.’s thinking and his eventual ideas of making use of his academic learning in order to help resolve the dilemmas of his community. When he returns home and goes to see Ms. Swinton, who is seriously ill, he is startled to see the deteriorating house and untended garden. Ms. Swinton’s failing strength implies that the community might have a place and role for T.L. as her successor. This also implies the possible outcome of the cultural clash that caused by his homecoming. Inside the house, T.L. is amazed at all the books and the concomitant air of wisdom and knowledge: I shoved the heavy mahogany door open and stepped into a literary gold mine. There were books everywhere. I found myself gawking around the room in awe, amazed to see books on the floor, on the sofa end tables, on shelves, and on the dining room table. I had never seen a million books in one room in my life. (147)

41 It is only later that T.L. finds out that Ms. Swinton is his biological mother, and this obviously puts everything in a new perspective. The books that he sees in the house, particularly by such iconic African American writers as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright, draw the entire tradition of African American literature into the texture of They Tell Me of a Home. Later in the narrative, as T.L. finally discovers the maternal link between Ms. Swinton and himself, the house assumes an even more important and personal meaning for him and, in Twelve Gates to the City, eventually becomes his home.

42 Both Ms. Swinton’s house and Grandma’s house play central roles in shaping T.L.’s consciousness and preparing him for what eventually becomes his calling, that is, his vocation as Ms. Swinton’s successor as the school teacher of Swamp Creek. His indecision concerning Ms. Swinton’s proposal to answer the call of his communal heritage and to pursue the rather underpaid career of educating the black community, “trying to lift the veil of inferiority” (The Tell Me of a Home 239), is established as one of the quintessential issues of the novel. Directly connected to this is the passage which depicts T.L.’s anticipatory fantasy of working as a teacher in Swamp Creek. It may be argued that the heterotopia of Ms. Swinton’s house with all the literary learning and wisdom contained therein is inscribed and mediated to the textual level in her journals, which T.L. later reads in his old room. Reading the texts produced in the heterotopic space of Ms. Swinton’s house gives rise to T.L.’s fantasy, the initial scene of which is the classroom, where T.L. teaches African American literature, culture, and history to the children. As he talks about slavery and the Underground Railroad, he takes the children to see an abandoned house which allegedly used to function as a hideaway place for fugitive slaves. Walking towards the house, T.L. detects a profound change in the children: For the first time in most of their lives, the children walk with a confidence unshakable. I begin to cry as I watch them transform into the ancestors we were studying only moments before. They don’t walk like poor country children anymore. They have been endowed with the power of self-love and self- beauty....They have only one aim in mind, and that is to see if, in fact, the famous Underground Railroad came through Swamp Creek. I presume that if the children

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can actually see the dungeon, they will be convinced that their home is sacred, too. They need to verify that slaves ran to Swamp Creek to find safety. It will make their lives and the lives of all their people much more meaningful because then they can speak of themselves as significant contributors to American history. (243)

43 This scene is based on T.L.’s idea of using academic learning to contravene the internalized sense of inferiority inherited from the time of slavery and maintained by more recent forms of institutional racism. This endeavor is a direct continuation of Ms. Swinton’s legacy and her conviction “that the power of education will transform the minds of the self-loathing” (240). This is also a manifestation of how the repressed memory of slavery functions as the political unconscious in the novel and becomes visible through its symptoms in this imaginary scene that T.L. constructs in his fantasy. What is at stake here may be read in accordance with Jameson’s account of literary works as symbolic acts that produce imaginary solutions to real social contradictions (The Political Unconscious 79).

44 The central transcultural space, in my reading, is the Meetin’ Tree, where cultural memory is manifested and negotiated. In addition to its role as a gathering place where the communal cultural practice of storytelling occurs on Friday nights, it evidently carries a lot of metaphorical significance in the context of African American history and literature. First of all, trees have become invested with the history of slavery and white racism through the practice of lynching, famously portrayed in the song “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol (under the pseudonym Lewis Allan), a Jewish American teacher and poet, and performed by Billie Holiday. A well-known literary example of this may be found in James Baldwin’s gruesome piece of short fiction, “Going to Meet the Man.” Toni Morrison’s prize-winning novel Beloved (1987) with its depiction of the tree-shaped scar tissue in Sethe’s back as a graphic representation of the memory of slavery and, simultaneously, as a sign of healing, is one of the best known references to trees in African American fiction. It may be argued that the Meetin’ Tree assumes the function of a chronotope in They Tell Me of a Home. Mikhail Bakhtin defines the chronotope as “time-space.” A unit for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented....The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring. (425-26)

45 It is my argument that the Meetin’ Tree functions as a chronotope in which the spatio- temporal history of African America in condensed. It becomes a site of the memory of slavery and its aftermath in the guise of other manifestations of racism that penetrate the entire history of black America. Importantly, the tree does not remain a mere idle reflection of racial injustice, but also becomes a token of survival and resistance.

46 The historical symbolism of the Meetin’ Tree enhances its role as a site of storytelling and of the cultural encounter between T.L. and Swamp Creek. The social significance of his special site may be understood in parallel with the communal importance of oral narratives, largely inherited from traditional West African cultures. According to Bernard W. Bell, in an anthropological sense, oral narratives as verbal art forms have four principal functions. They transmit knowledge, value, and attitudes from one generation to another, enforce conformity to social norms, validate social institutions and religious rituals, and provide a psychological release from the restrictions of society. (73)

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47 To varying degrees, all of these main functions may be detected in the storytelling gatherings at the Meetin’ Tree. The ways in which the oral narratives performed at the Meetin’ Tree produce communality and a sense of collective identity in Swamp Creek correspond to the idea of oral storytelling as a representation and vehicle of cultural memory. As Ansgar Nünning has pointed out, storytelling functions as a “medium of creating cultural coherence, of enhancing community feeling, and of forging collective identities” (172). This is in accordance with how, as James Fentress and Chris Wickham point out in Social Memory (1992), “social memory identifies a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future” (25).

48 The stories told at the Meetin’ Tree gain additional importance vis-à-vis the cultural clash caused by T.L.’s homecoming. Content-wise, they appear in the novel as mainly humorous, sometimes ironic narratives of incidents in the lives of either the storytellers themselves or other members of the community. In terms of form, many of the conventions and recurring motifs of the traditional African American folklore are explicitly present. Particularly central examples of this include, firstly, the trope of telling lies. As Dwight N. Hopkins argues, discussing Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), “[l]ies are stories or tales delivered with verbal dexterity. They embody the art of living or how to be black in America” (286). At the Meetin’ Tree, everyone in the audience knows that the story is too outrageous to believe, but the storyteller insists on every word being true. Reciprocity is another important formal feature in the storytelling situation. The audience participates actively by spurring the storyteller on, at times confirming what is being told and, at times, contradicting and accusing the speaker of lying. This process adopts the call-and-response pattern, which, as Gilroy points out, is a fundamental formal feature in the cultures of the black diaspora (78). These formal characteristics largely define the storytelling incidents as depicted in the They Tell Me of a Home.

49 Another important formal point is that the principal storytellers, Mr. Blue and Mr. Somebody, the most respected elders of the community, come across as trickster figures in their mastery over language, especially their use of black American English, and their ability to turn rather mundane events into hilarious stories and make the people who gather at the Meetin’ Tree convulse with laughter. This also involves the use of the timbres of the voice and nonverbal gestures: Mr. Somebody’s antics alone induced chuckling. His eyes, mouth, and hands worked together, like a puppet’s, in perfect gestural unity. Accompanied by a squeaky soprano voice far too high for most people’s liking, his trembling arthritic hands shaped each word he spoke, forcing others not only to listen but to watch him. (265)

50 The reference to the old man’s high, effeminate “squeaky soprano voice” is especially noteworthy, since trickster figures in many cultures tend to play with and transcend the boundaries of gender. A famous example of this is the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, Esu-Elegbara, explicated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988) (see esp. 29). Interestingly, Mr. Somebody’s androgynous character seems to suggest that the norms of gender and sexuality that prevail in the community are not inherently inscribed, but, instead, questioned in the storytelling tradition. The failure of the community to acknowledge this is one of the reasons for T.L.’s mobility and the eventual cultural clash. The exceptional, trickster-like quality of Mr. Somebody’s character is further enhanced as he leaves the Meetin’ Tree that night: “As he walked away, his body disappeared slowly

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into the abyss like a mystical being with spiritual powers of levitation” (276). As Featherstone argues, “the performance itself—its body and its moment—is necessarily part of the act of memory” (188). Read in this light, the oral storytelling in this novel functions as an instance of cultural memory, reaching beyond the memory of slavery all the way to African oral cultures.

51 The storytelling event is where the issues of spatiality are brought into focus. The Meetin’ Tree becomes the most significant heterotopia in the novel and may be read in accordance with Foucault’s definition, as a real, tangible space, where the phenomena of society can be at once represented and challenged (“Other Spaces” 12). In this special cultural space, the people of Swamp Creek provisionally transcend the categorizations that define them and their everyday lives in society: The darkness erased the particulars of people’s expressions and made all of us seem like spirits gathered at the tree. Who was cute and who wasn’t and who had money and who didn’t proved absolutely meaningless. We were all contributors unto a communal joy that was enough to sustain everyone.... As a child, I never noticed how wonderful it was to watch people abandon their daily roles and laugh out loud as they fashioned their own survival in a world prepared to kill them. This was one place and time where the power of white folks was of absolutely no consequence. (268)

52 In this passage, the heterotopic space undergoes a transformation. It becomes reconfigured as an imaginary space, as an allegory of a new kind of communality, a vision of a world where the significance of social categorization is radically diminished. In Fredric Jameson’s terminology, this space becomes a utopian enclave, an imaginary space where “new wish images of the social can be elaborated and experimented on” (Archaeologies of the Future 9). This reading is further supported by the following quotation: The old, the young, the unsure, the desperate, the loud, the soft-spoken all put in their two cents as we constructed, if only temporarily, a world where everyone was free. The differences that disallow unity in America never interrupted our space as we listened to story after story, regardless of who was telling it. (They Tell Me of a Home 268)

53 This dissolving of identity categories at the Meetin’ Tree is accomplished through the collective act of storytelling, which functions as a way of negotiating the traumatic cultural memory of slavery and racism in the United States. The empowering communal functions of storytelling are clearly present in these passages in providing people with a sense of unity and relief from the burdens of everyday life.

54The reading proposed above, however, introduces some complicated issues as far as the political functions of oral storytelling are depicted in the novel. The stories told at the Meetin’ Tree rarely deal with the larger problems that the community is facing. This is an important point, because it may be understood as a symptom of the repressed political unconscious of the novel, that is, the traumatic memory of slavery and its ongoing effects on the community. While the fundamental social functions of storytelling are implied in the narrative, what comes across most explicitly is the aspect of psychological release from societal restrictions: [P]eople relinquished their inhibitions freely and shared intimacies otherwise taboo. Folks who were solemn all week laughed easily once they arrived at the tree, for somehow the space released Swamp Creek residents from the confinements and constructs of the world, which told them they were not supposed to have joy. (259)

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55 In these instances, the people at the Meetin’ Tree are provisionally able to escape the harsh realities of the poverty and tough physical labor that largely define their everyday lives. The primary function of storytelling and its heterotopic space at the Meetin’ Tree, as suggested in the text, seems to be to provide a survival strategy to help the people to cope with the hardship of their lives, but it does not really lead to any fundamental change. In a political reading, this practice comes dangerously close to politically idle escapism. Although the ecstatic storytelling occasions at the Meetin’ Tree undeniably serve important beneficial social functions within the black community, they tend to fall short of addressing the internal problems of the black rural community and of the larger American ideological and political status quo, particularly the racist, sexist, and heteronormative tendencies and their practical effects in society. This may be understood as a result of the fact that the huge, fundamental dilemmas that underlie the more clearly manifest problems within the black community, that is, the issues of white supremacy and the internalized black inferiority, tend to be repressed, rather than polemically addressed. This reading also complies with the ideological climate of Swamp Creek that seems to resist change: “People there loved words, but they weren’t interested in changing their ideas” (124).

56 The stories told at the Meetin’ Tree are simultaneously negotiations and instances of repression, of revelation and disillusion. As Alisa K. Braithwaite argues, the stories we tell each other and ourselves help us to negotiate our environment, particularly when much of our environment is out of our control. These stories also help us to understand (and sometimes prevent us from understanding) ourselves. Our cultures are produced through collections of narratives that support and refute each other and that evolve as we continue to collect more information. (83)

57 This applies to the storytelling practice of Swamp Creek. The oral narratives allow the people a much needed break from the toil of daily life and work, but do not directly challenge the social status quo. They function as a means of survival and communality, but fail to question the exclusionary and oppressive ideologies that prevent the development of the community and seriously complicate the lives of those who do not conform to its norms. In effect, they operate at the intersection of the preservation of the continuity of tradition and the reactionary and oppressive identity politics of the community.

58 This is where T.L.’s role and the process of transculturation become crucial. His presence at the Meetin’ Tree interrupts the traditional merrymaking and the carnivalesque air of the gathering and reconfigures this cultural space and its sociopolitical functions. He produces a counternarrative that partly refutes and partly aligns with the cultural practice of storytelling at the Meetin’ Tree. He supports the ways in which oral narratives transmit cultural memory and produce communality and collective identity, but, simultaneously, he uses the oral tradition to confront sexism and heteronormativity, influenced by his academic studies and such African American writers as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. As a consequence, he becomes a transcultural mediator between the storytelling tradition of the black rural community and the literary cultures that he has studied at the university.

59 On the Friday night when he participates in the storytelling gathering after his ten- year hiatus, T.L. is more than ever impressed by the event and its empowering communality: “We are already in the land of milk and honey because we’re black and together” (268). His own contribution to the gathering reaches its peak as his remarks

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inspire Mr. Blue and Mr. Somebody to discuss what they perceive as the negative effects of education: “If education don’ bring us closer together as a people, then it ain’t no good. Dat’s brainwashin’ and white folks is benefittin’ as our communities is fallin’ apart. You college-degree children can go to white schools and live in white neighborhoods, and y’all thankin’ y’all done progressed. Shit! You done gone straight backward! You know why? ‘Cause you love his shit more than you love yo’self.” (269)

60 These words spoken by Mr. Blue reveal a fundamental fear that this black rural community has concerning education: that the educated leave the community and reject its traditions and heritage permanently in hopes of climbing the social ladder. Therefore, individualistic social ascension and respect for one’s communal and cultural heritage become established as opposites in the text.

61 To an extent, this may be understood in terms of the gap between older and younger generations, exemplified by the fundamental ideological disagreements between T.L. and his father. In fact, the former comes across as a Du Boisian figure, a representative of the Talented Tenth, who advocates radical social ascension and the power of education, whereas T.L.’s father could be read in accordance with Booker T. Washington’s more conservative views. The text, however, suggests that T.L.’s father and a majority of the black community hold and perpetuate a strictly negative attitude towards education, which stands in opposition to Washington’s pro-education agenda. The generational gap cannot, in the end, explain the ideological differences, since most of the younger generation seems to have adopted the same hostile principles of the older generation towards education, as suggested in Ms. Swinton’s diaries discussed above.

62 The same issues are also represented at some length in Twelve Gates to the City, in a similar storytelling incident, where the outrageous, humorous stories momentarily give way to more serious reflection on the state of the community and the related issues of cultural heritage and education: “That’s why black folks can’t keep no young people in our communities no more. We send ‘em away. We tell ‘em to go find a life when we shoulda been teachin’ ‘em the beauty o’ the life we had!” (106)

63 This balancing act represented in both novels is that between tradition and change. The problem is that for this community tradition and change seem to be mutually exclusive: tradition translates into stagnation and political passivity, while change is believed to lead inevitably to a complete rejection of tradition. T.L. understands this fear of change and rejection, but counters it through his own example, returning home and participating in the storytelling event. Mr. Blue acknowledges this: “Learnin’ is a good thang when it’s done right, and black people could use a whole lot of it. Like take dis boy hyeah for ‘xample. ... He done gone off to school and got a whole buncha degrees, but he can still come home and laugh and talk wit’ de rest of us wit’out thankin’ he’s too good to swat mosquitoes and listen to old nigga stories.” (269)

64 This is where T.L.’s role as a transcultural mediator between the conflicting cultures becomes clearly visible.

65 When he is asked to present what he has learned concerning African American history and culture, T.L. raises the issue of black slave owners, which the people at the Meetin’ Tree initially write off as impossible. By elaborating further on the issue and backing it up by referring to academic research, T.L. eventually manages to convince

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the people. This results in Mr. Blue’s proclamation: “‘See? Now dat’s what education s’pose to do. You s’pose to learn something dat make you think’” (271). At this moment and in this space, the old storytelling tradition of Swamp Creek and literary learning, represented by T.L., clash in a productive way, which creates an enhanced sense of mutual respect and understanding. T.L. finds a renewed appreciation for the cultural tradition of his home community, and it is exactly this that enables him to become the transcultural mediator between storytelling and reading, between the agrarian culture of Swamp Creek and the academic world. As a consequence, the seeds are sown in the community for a more positive kind of attitude towards learning and change. This is the moment when the position of the Meetin’ Tree as a utopian enclave is confirmed, highlighting the possibility of erasing the inherited, internalized sense of intellectual ineptitude and inferiority, carried by the cultural memory of slavery, without rejecting the valuable black cultural heritage.

66 There is also another level on which T.L. assumes the position as an embodiment of transculturation. In addition to his academic pursuits, he is an aspiring creative writer and poet whose work is based on the fusion of literary conventions and the tradition of African American storytelling, that is, the stories told at the Meetin’ Tree: “The stories people told at the Meetin’ Tree became my text and gave me foundation for understanding the art of good literature” (121). This transcultural fusion of oral and literary traditions is a significant characteristic of African American literature, and its presence at a metalevel of the narrative, in the form of T.L.’s literary ambitions, adds to the aesthetic dimensions of transculturation in the novel, where oral and literary narratives are intertwined. Interestingly, these ambitions also clearly contain a didactic and political agenda: Nothing intrigued me more than to tell stories of how black people survived and how we created laughter in the eye of the storm. I wanted my words to heal hearts, incite joy, evoke tears, and initiate change....I wanted such power in order to get on the inside of people and help them fix things. My dream was that, one day, one of my poems or short stories would make people cry or love themselves into their own liberty. (121)

67 Following the example of African American literary tradition, T.L.’s literary efforts seek to combine aspects of both African American oral storytelling and literary expression and thereby to facilitate social and political change. In the context of the cultural clash represented in the novel, this strategy would avoid the problems of political passivity and intellectual ineptitude that haunt Swamp Creek without rejecting the immeasurable value of African American cultural traditions. This is how content and form function in conjunction to enhance the transcultural processes in the novel.

4. Conclusion

68 Although They Tell Me of a Home focuses on what could be thought of as an intracultural context, in the sense that the protagonist, T.L., returns to his all-black, southern, agrarian community, the novel is marked by a process of transculturation that occurs at the intersection of academic values and the traditions of the Southern black community of Swamp Creek. This results in the reassessment of the initial conflict between the seemingly backward, conservative cultural heritage of Swamp Creek and the ideals of education and academic literary learning. In many ways, T.L. becomes the personification of this transculturation process, as he functions as a mediator, as a

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bridge between worlds and across boundaries. As Ms. Swinton, the legendary school teacher of Swamp Creek and his biological mother, names T.L. as her successor, his role is further enhanced, although his eventual decision to accept the vocation is merely implied at the end of the novel. He becomes the potential savior figure who is supposed to carry the burden of erasing the racialized sense of inferiority inherited from the history of slavery and racism, or, to paraphrase Pratt’s account of the contact zone, the devastating conditions of the aftermath of colonialism and slavery (4), in which the people of Swamp Creek struggle to live their lives.

69 In my reading of They Tell Me of a Home, transculturation is understood as a reciprocal process. The novel seems to point out that regarding oral storytelling and reading as mutually exclusive binary opposites, leads to either communal political stagnation or individualistic elitism. By the end of the novel, however, they appear as parts of the same “cultural ensemble that cannot be apprehended through the manichean logic of binary coding,” to borrow Gilroy’s words (198). The narrative trajectory of the novel works to combine both of these aesthetic modes into a new synthesis. What emerges from the text is an idea of education which would not endorse a colonization of the black cultural heritage by academic ideals, but would, rather, celebrate the strengths and negotiate the problems of both. In effect, both of these seemingly contrary traditions would be divested of their exclusionary and oppressive tendencies. This becomes especially clear after the storytelling event, when T.L. finally understands why he decided to come home in the first place: I left the tree, however, realizing my coming home was because, in all my academic pursuits, I had missed the most critical lesson any student can learn—that transforming the world begins with love of one’s own people. (277)

70 In the end, T.L. has acquired a new and enhanced appreciation of his cultural heritage, especially the ability of the people to “sing their troubles away” (6) and also managed to start the process of convincing the people of Swamp Creek that education does not necessarily lead to the rejection of one’s cultural and communal roots. This is where transculturation in its characteristically utopian guise assumes the center stage in the narrative. By gaining a deeper understanding of the strength of the cultural heritage of his community, T.L. becomes equipped to help it survive and develop instead of remaining in a state of stagnation and withering. He is, in the end, firmly rooted in the traditions of his home community, while remaining critical of its shortcomings and ideological distortions. As a consequence, he becomes the messenger of hope for the future of the black community of Swamp Creek, a site where the threats and their potential remedies are embodied. In other words, T.L. evolves into a cultural mediator, a transcultural personification and prospective resolution of the conflicting political and cultural impulses in the novel. He stands, in terms of Gilroy’s thinking, at the intersection of “two great cultural assemblages”: African and Western (1). He may, therefore, be regarded as an embodiment and personification of the black Atlantic; a site where these conflicting cultural traditions and their respective modes of expression meet and intertwine.

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Martin, Biddy, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986. 191-212. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. London: Vintage, 1997. Print.

Nünning, Ansgar. “Narrativist Approaches and Narratological Concepts for the Study of Culture.” Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Ed. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. 145-83. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: New York, 1992. Print.

Prince, Valerie Sweeney. Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print.

Schramm, Katharina. African Homecoming: Pan-African Ideology and Contested Heritage. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2010. Print.

Schulze-Engler, Frank. “Transcultural Modernities and Anglophone African Literature.” Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe. Ed. Elisabeth Bakers, Sissy Helff, and Daniela Merolla. Spec. issue of Matatu 36 (2009): 87-101. Print.

Simonton, Deborah. A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present. London: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Walby, Sylvia. Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Print.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Norton, 1996. Print.

ABSTRACTS

This article offers a transcultural reading of the issues of cultural trauma and mobility in Daniel Black’s novel They Tell Me of a Home (2005). The protagonist, T.L., returns to his agrarian home community, Swamp Creek, in Arkansas, after a ten-year absence in which he received a PhD in black studies in New York. His homecoming foregrounds the cultural clash between the patriarchal black community and the elitist academic world that T.L. represents. This is articulated in the novel at the aesthetic level as the tension between the oral storytelling tradition of the black community and the literary expression favored by T.L. The opposite sides of the cultural clash and their respective modes of cultural production are understood as ways of dealing with the cultural memory of slavery and its aftermaths. The Meetin’ Tree, the site of storytelling in Swamp Creek, becomes a transcultural space where these issues are negotiated. T.L. eventually adopts a newfound appreciation for his cultural roots and also initiates a change

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in the negative attitudes of the community towards education and reading. He thereby becomes a transcultural mediator between these conflicting cultures, aiming to stress and combine their strengths and to negotiate their weaknesses.

INDEX

Keywords: African American fiction, cultural memory, mobility, spatiality, transculturation

AUTHOR

PEKKA KILPELÄINEN University of Eastern Finland

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Quest/ion of Identities in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Post-revolutionary Drama

Mehdi Ghasemi

1. Introduction

1 Innovative and unconventional, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks belongs to the continuum of African American playwrights who have contributed to the quest/ion of identities for African Americans. In her plays, Parks emphasizes the exigency of reshaping African Americans’ identities through questioning dominant ideologies and metanarratives and drawing out the complicity of the media in perpetuating racism. She also rehistoricizes African American history, encourages reflections on the various intersections of race, class and gender orientation and proffers alternative perspectives to help the readers and/or audiences think more critically about issues facing African Americans.

2 Under the influence of the Black Arts Movement, which emphasized the role of performance in reshaping African American identities, the quest/ion of identities for African Americans took a new turn. The movement identified poetry and drama as its dominant genres and realism as its preferred mode. Due to their accessibility to the masses as a tool for racial empowerment, collective poetry readings and performances could generate immediate responses and mobilization. In addition, the use of realism due to its linearity and descriptive nature as well as straightforward language and matter-of-fact manner could explicitly depict the bitter experience of the African American community. In his definition of “Black Theater,” Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), known as the movement’s undeclared founder, widened W. E. B. Du Bois’s “by/for/about/near” formulation of theater (Du Bois 135). He added two more features to it, claiming that theater must also be “revolutionary” and “liberating” (Baraka 1-3).

3 Baraka’s one-act play Dutchman (1964), a paradigmatic example of the Black Arts Movement’s revolutionary aesthetic, advocates separatism, revolution and community involvement. The play depicts racial conflicts and gives vent to frustration with racial stereotypes, while struggling to provide moments of self-expression. James Baldwin’s

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Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) also condemns racial inequality, the conventional stereotypes of African Americans and the killing of African American men believed to pose a hyper-sexualized threat to society. These plays encourage African Americans to struggle against discrimination and stereotyping and to be active in performing their own identities.

4 Alice Childress and Sonia Sanchez also came to prominence during the Black Arts Movement. In some of her plays, Childress deals critically with “anti-woman” laws, made by white men to deny black women’s rights and to make their personal and social lives unbearable (Curb 58). In Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966) and Wine in the Wilderness (1969), Childress draws on a number of problems—including interracial love, prohibitions against miscegenation and patriarchal oppression— encountered by black women in the segregated South. Her characters, coming mostly from the working class, communicate their bitter experiences of race, sex and class inequalities.Likewise, Sanchez’s The Bronx is Next (1968) and Sister Son/Ji (1969) deal with the violence and oppression directed towards African American women, while urging African American men and women to unite and take action against white oppression.

5 Inspired both by the Black Arts Movement and the postmodern revolt against it, Parks has concentrated on crafting provocative plays that represent and emphasize the concerns and quest/ion of identities for African Americans. Unlike Du Bois and Baraka, who laid their emphases on racial particularity in black theater, Parksoffers a different definition of black theater in her “New Black Math,” writing that “a black play is of the people by the people and for the people” (576). Parks’s definition shows that she is interested in questioning the former constructed racial boundaries of blackness and revolutionary ideologies of the Black Arts Movement without turning a blind eye to the concerns of African American community. Through this kind of practice, Parks manages to call into question dominant race boundaries in her plays. This is in contrast to Baraka, who upholds racial boundaries in his plays and writes in a linear progression with the introduction of characters and the representation of racial conflicts, though in an avowedly revolutionary manner. Hans-Thies Lehmann, the German theater scholar, labels Parks’s type of theater “postdramatic” (13). Lehmann deals with a number of traits and stylistic features which have been used in drama and theater since the late 1960s. His postdramatic theatre “is not primarily focused on the drama in itself, but evolves a performative aesthetic in which the text of the drama is put in a special relation to the material situation of the performance and the stage,” and thus lays its emphasis on fluidity of any type, including race, gender and performance fluidity (Gemtou 3-4).

6 Parks’s complex plays suggest post-revolutionary views of identity. Her dual strategy is to call racist paradigms into question while providing a staging ground for developing African Americans’ identities. In the present essay, I show how Parks calls racial demarcations into question and attempts to escape the traditions of the Black Arts Movement, which depended on conventions of narrative realism and straightforward language to transmit its revolutionary messages. My goal is to show how Parks’s plays make use of postmodern aesthetics and paradigms to transform the conventional features of playwriting, create indeterminacies toward dominant systems of oppression and raise the quest/ion of identities for African Americans in a post- revolutionary manner.

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Suzan-Lori Parks and the Quest/ion of Identities

7 As a point of departure, I should note that postmodern drama is a fairly recent phenomenon that still does not have one single constitutive definition. According to Josh McDowell, Bob Hostetler and David Bellis: “Trying to define and truly understand postmodernism can be a lot like standing in an appliance store trying to watch three or four television shows at once. It defies definition because it is extremely complex, often contradictory, and constantly changing” (12). Taking this complexity into account, postmodern drama might be sketched as a set of critical, rhetorical and strategic practices using a wide range of techniquesthat transform both the forms and contents of drama.

8 To transform the forms and contents of her plays, Parks rarely uses stage directions and avoids using figure and/or characteri descriptions. As she writes: “The action goes in the line of dialogue instead of always in a pissy set of parentheses. How the line should be delivered is contained in the line itself. Stage directions disappear” (1995b, 15-16; emphasis in the original). Likewise, in the interview with Han Ong, she contends: 95 percent of the action, in all of my plays, is in the line of text. So you don’t get a lot of parenthetical stage direction. I’ve written, within the text, specific directions to them, to guide their breathing, to guide the way they walk, whether or not they walk, whether or not they walk with a limp, whatever. They know what to do from what they say and how they say it. The specifics of it are left up to the actor and the director. The internals are in the line, the externals are left up to them. (39; emphasis added)

9 The absence of figure and/or character descriptions and dearth of stage directions—in line with postmodern aesthetics—manifest Parks’s desire to free the performersii from her imagined authority and to grant performers freedom to decide over their productions. The French theater critic Bernard Dort refers to this condition as “the emancipation of performance” (qtd. in Connor 145), which results in the performance fluidity and “impersonalism,” implying “a ‘disconnection’ of author from work” (Caramello 25). The emancipation of performance makes the playscript distinct from its diverse performances, since each performer inevitably interprets and implements the playscript in a different manner and in some cases has the power to decide about the race, gender and age of a number of figures and/or characters. In this intellectual climate, each new production of any of her plays has the potential to be a new gestalt.

10For example, the absence of figure descriptions in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World creates gender and age fluidity, since the performers must decide on the gender and age of a number of figures, including Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread and Voice on Thuh Tee V, whose gender and age are not explicit in the playscript. Moreover, the absence of character descriptions in Fucking A is a source of race fluidity, which blurs the racial demarcation. Thus, the performers should decide if Canary, Waiting Women, Monster, Jailbait, Butcher, 3 Freshly Freed prisoners and Hester are white, black or something else.

11In addition to the absence of figure and/or character descriptions and dearth of stage directions, the use of Rests and Spells makes Parks’s dramatic forms and contents transformative and ever-shifting. Parks defines Rest as: “Take a little time, a pause, a breather; make a transition” and Spell as follows:

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An elongated and heightened (rest). Denoted by repetition of figures’ names with no dialogue. Has a sort of architectural look: The Venus The Baron Docteur The Venus The Baron Docteur This is a place where the figures experience their pure true simple state. While no action or stage business is necessary, directors should fill this moment as they best see fit. A spell is a place of great (unspoken) emotion. It’s also a place for an emotional transition. (1997, [iv])

12 As seen in Parks’s definition, in Spells, a name is printed on the page of the playscript, but against expectations, it is not followed by a line of dialogue or stage direction.

13In Parks’s plays, Spells provide the performers with some options, since the performers are free to choose how to fill in the blank spaces or just leave them as they are. In a sense, Spells require the performers to engage in performing duets with the playscripts. Ihab Hassan refers to such blank spaces as “paracriticism,” which he defines as “an attempt to recover the art of multi-vocation” (1970, 91). This is to say that the paracriticisms produced by different performers are different, and this creates multivocality. Moreover, the repetitive use of Spells creates non-textuality and ruptures the linearity of Parks’s plays.

14For example, throughout Fucking A Parks uses Restsone hundred and twenty four times and Spells sixty seven times. Major parts of Scenes 4 and 8 are in the form of Spells. Rests and Spells create short and long silences, which may represent the historical silence and submission imposed on oppressed members of society. The use of Spells may also help to place the readers and/or audiences and performers in the authorial position to rewrite the play and to fill in the gaps with their own interpretations, which can catalyze the participation process. This can be seen as a transition from having passive readers and/or audiences and performers to active agents who can function as co-producers of the plays. In this regard, Liz Diamond in her interview with Steven Druckman comments that rehearsals of Parks’s plays allow the performers to collectively discover what to do with Parks’s “dynamics,” and that while the performers are not always sure what to do, they know that they need to take action (Druckman 70). I agree with Diamond’s view that Parks’s play creates both participation and indeterminacies for the readers and/or audiences and performers. Since attempts to fill in the gaps differ, the plays encourage a plurality of interpretations.

15In Fucking A, the Spells have different significations in different locations, and each reader and/or audience may decipher them differently. For instance, Spells can express undecidability, such as the Spells in Scenes 4 and 8 when Monster is trying to initiate passionate relationships with both Canary and The First Lady (137 and 156, respectively). Undecidability manifests itself in Spells further in Scene 14 where The First Lady wonders whether to keep the baby or to abort it (190), and it is emphatically extant when Monster begs his mother to kill him before Hunters capture him, while his mother is hesitant to slit his throat (219). Elsewhere, a Spell may express irresolution, for example when Canary begs The Mayor to marry her (152), or it can stand for internal conflict, such as when Hester and Canary plot to abort The First Lady’s child (196). In addition to Rests and Spells, Parks uses long monologues in Fucking A. Scene 9, wherein Butcher enumerates his daughter’s crimes, is an example of a long monologue.

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It goes on for two pages (160-61). The long monologues direct attention toward the speaking subjects and their topics of discussion. Taken together, the Spells and long monologues are constituent components of postdramatic theatre which, according to Lehmann, “knows not only the ‘empty’ space but also the overcrowded space” (25).

16The dearth of stage directions and lack of figure and/or character descriptions along with the employment of Rests and Spells makes plurality of readings possible in Parks’s plays. The plurality of readings makes postmodern drama dynamic, ceaselessly oscillating between two poles of “presentation” and “representation,” “making” and “unmaking,” “signifier” and “signified.” This condition creates an illusion of reality and simultaneously impugns the illusion it has just created. As Linda Hutcheon writes, “postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges” (1993, 243). As a result, interpretation becomes “prejudicial, uncertain, and suspect” (Hassan 1987, 449), and the nonstop oscillations between poles of “presentation” and “representation,” “making” and “unmaking,” “signifier” and “signified” create a plurality of interpretations. Plurality of interpretations also results from “indeterminacies,” which according to Hassan “include all manner of ambiguities, ruptures, and displacements affecting knowledge and society…and pervade our actions, ideas, interpretations” (1986, 504-505). Indeterminacies save the texts from closure and make them ambiguous, interrupted and open to different interpretations. Consequently, indeterminacies may be unsatisfying to those who seek clarity and simplistic meaning. In her interview with Ong, Parks talks about a young man who stood up in the theater after watching The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World to complain that he did not understand a single word (43).

17Like Rests and Spells, the use of temporal distortion and omnitemporality further fragments Parks’s plays and creates indeterminacies. As a result, time in Parks’s plays— in contrast to the Black Arts Movement’s aesthetics—no longer presents a progressive, coherent linear movement, and it intermingles past, present and future. Although Parks marks the time of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World as “The Present,” her play leaps backward and forward at once. This condition manifests the collapse of the sequential and linear time scheme and provides opportunity for Parks to deal with different events occurring in different ages. For instance, in one section of the play the Black Man With Watermelon is lynched, while in later section he is watching the news of the death of “a spearhead in the Civil Rights Movement” (110). According to Deborah R. Geis, “the Black Man speaks of living in both the past and the present at the same time, though his way of putting it is amusingly confusing” (58). A part of the confusion arises from the distortion of the borderlines between past and present tenses and the oscillation of figures between past and present events. For instance, Black Woman With Fried Drumstick says: “Coming for you. Came for you: that they done did. Comin for tuh take you… Cut off thuh bed-food where your feets had rested” (105). To offer another example, Old Man River Jordan says: “Do in dip diddly did-did thuh drop? Drop do it be dripted?” (116). Here Old Man River Jordan renders past and present tenses unidentifiable, and the use of the consonant “d” in the form of alliteration as well as the use of “Do” and “Did” as past and present tense identifiers in one single question magnify the temporal distortions.

18As a result of mixing different tenses together, “memories converge, condense, conflict, and define relationships between past, present, and future” (Malkin 23). As

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Black Man With Watermelon says: “That’s how it has gone. That’s how it be wenting” (119). Through the continuous swing between past, present and future, Parks draws upon the past to philosophize about the present and future. This may reflect the “irreparable damage thesis,” claiming that the damage of the past continues to persist in the present and the future (Hill Collins 60). Parks’s temporal experiments serve as a warning that if the damages and consequences of the past are not remedied, they might persist in the future. Parks projects a future time based on the past and present conditions in order to make the readers and/or audiences cognizant of how history might repeat itself, and what has happened to African Americans might continue to recur if African Americans do not improve their conditions.

19In some of her plays, place becomes dislodged in analogous ways. In The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, no particular location has been set for the play, and this dislocation signifies the nomadism of the figures who come from different historical ages and locations. Parks describes her play Fucking A as “An otherworldly tale” (2001, 113), indicating that the play is not confined to a particular location. Verna A. Foster argues that “Fucking A is…set in a kind of futuristic alternate universe that grotesquely incorporates and exaggerates some of the worst features of both Antebellum and contemporary America” (78). However, I argue that Fucking A is unlimited in place and can serve as a social critique of any society, including America. Scene 2 is set in “a small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere” (129; emphasis added), while Scenes 4 and 8 are described to be located in a park “in the middle of nowhere overlooking the sea” (136 and 154; emphasis added). I argue that “nowhere” signifies a kind of anywhere.

20To further complicate her plays and enhance indeterminacies, Parks uses language in deliberately puzzling ways, playing with numbers, wordplays and puns. This language complexity activates the infinite play between signifiers and signifieds and accordingly makes Parks’s plays, in Roland Barthes’s terms, a “writerly text” or “text of bliss,”iii which discomforts the readers and/or audiences. The use of language complexity, which brings the readers’ and/or audiences’ relationships with language to a crisis and makes the decodification of language complicated, stands in contrast to the use of straightforward language favored by the Black Arts Movement’s playwrights.

21Panel III of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World provides a good example of the puzzling use of numbers. Black Man With Watermelon says: “Our one melon has given intuh 3. Calling what it gived birth callin it gaw. 3 August hams out uh my hands now surroundin me an is all of um mines?” (117; emphasis added). In yet another case, Black Woman With Fried Drumstick says: “93 dyin hen din hand…93 dyin hen din hand with no heads let em loose tuh run down tuh towards home infront of me” (106; emphasis added). The readers and audience members might be at a loss as to how to decode “3 August.” They may wonder whether August refers to the eighth month of the year, and if so, what is special about the date of 3 August? Or August might be an adjective, meaning grand and majestic, and modifies “hams.” Or “August ham” stands for watermelon. If the latter, what does the number 3 signify beyond the most obvious reference of the trinity? Likewise, the use of number “93,” which modifies dying headless “hens”—signifying both female chicken and women—puzzles the readers and/or audiences who may fail to find its significations or doubt it has any specific meaning at all.

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22The use of wordplay, as another source of undecidability, creates a sense of lexical and structural ambivalence, mainly because the words and phrases, in cases with variant spellings, bring to fore unexpected undertones and multiple meanings. Parks declares: “I play with words, I think the world is telling us. Telling us telling us something that is present but not written down” (Nelson 2013). As an example,in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger introduces himself as follows: “Sir name Tom-us and Bigger be my Christian name” (115; emphasis added). Through wordplay, Parks demonstrates how the identities of African Americans were assaulted, as the enslaved had to adopt the “surname” of their masters. The word “Tom” which alludes to Uncle Tom as a verb means to make someone obedient and submissive and signifies the ways that white masters employed to make their slaves comply with their orders. In yet another intriguing example, in Fucking A Canary uses “Hizzoner” to refer to The Mayor (123). The term is a humorous version of “His Honor” and has traditionally been used as a title for the man holding the office of mayor for example in the United States. The term also suggests either “His owner” or perhaps “He’s on her.” It may also be read as “He’s won her” as the play reveals that The Mayor, as a representative of malestream,iv has sexual relationship both with her wife and Canary, recalling ownership status in the slavery system in which white men owned their wives and mistresses, while he intends to usurp his wife’s wealth.

23The use of puns as another form of language complexity complicates the readers’ and/or audiences’ access to a definite interpretation. In The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Black Man With Watermelon says: “They…[p]ulled me out of thuh trees then treed me then tired of me” (119; emphasis added). The use of puns, complete with alliteration, express how these people first were cut off from their family trees and then were chased and enslaved after which they were overused, exploited and even murdered under different pretexts. Parks also uses puns in her play Venus. Venus dramatizes the dismal story of Saartjie Baartman (popularly called Venus Hottentot), a South African girl of the Khoikhoi tribe, who was lured to London by false promises of prosperity, sold into slavery and displayed seminude as a “freak” during the 1810s first in England and then in France. What made her worthy of public display was her biological oddity—her protruding posterior. Prior to her death, Dr. Georges Cuvier “commissioned an artist to make a plaster molding of her body” (Miranda and Spencer 913). After her death, he autopsied her body “in front of an audience of scientists,” and her remains and the plaster molding were displayed at the Musée de l’Homme, France (913). Two centuries later, in 2002, her remains were returned to South Africa and buried in her birthplace, ending her long and demanding journeys.

24Parks describes Thev Venus’s attraction in the Overture as such: An ass to write home about. Well worth the admission price… Coco candy colored and dressed all in au naturel She likes the people peek and poke. (7; emphasis added)

25 In this excerpt, Parks uses the term “ass” as a pun both to mean buttocks and the animal, two prominent images in this play. The term “coco” also appears as a pun, which means “buttocks” and also refers to a style of African-influenced musical show. It also stands for the abbreviation of coconut palm, and it recalls hot chocolate. Moreover, the icon of “coco” signifies the remarkable back or the past that has been

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exploited aggressively throughout history for profit or pleasure. By the end of the play, The Venus regretfully says: I would live here I thought but only for uh minute! Make a mint. Had plans to. He had a beard. Big bags of money! Where wuz I? Fell in love. Hhh. Tried my hand at French. Gave me a haircut And thuh claps. (159; emphasis added)

26 The Venus’s dreams of becoming rich have been deferred, and although she has undergone mental agony and physical suffering to improve her condition and prove her talent, she has not achieved her goals. Rather, she and her body have been abused to postulate racist theories in order to justify black racial inferiority and to protect systems of oppression. The use of the phrase “thuh clap” as a pun in the excerpt implies both applause and the sexually transmitted infection, used colloquially for “gonorrhea.”

27Parks in Venus includes some documentation in the form of footnotes, excerpted from anatomical notebooks and Baartman’s autopsy reports—which Cuvier delivered as lectures in 1817—as well as from newspaper clippings, advertisements, court documents and spectators’ diaries. These footnotes are widespread throughout the play and, as such, halt the linearity of the play. For instance, Footnote #3 reads: Historical Extract. Category: Literary. From Robert Chambers’s Book of Days: (Rest) “Early in the present century a poor wretched woman was exhibited in England under the appellation of The Hottentot Venus. The year was 1810. With an intensely ugly figure, distorted beyond all European notions of beauty, she was said by those to whom she belonged to possess precisely the kind of shape which is most admired among her countrymen, the Hottentots.” (Rest) The year was 1810, three years after the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade had been passed in Parliament and among protests and denials, horror and fascination, The Venus show went on. (36; emphasis in the original)

28 Parks’s footnote first introduces Robert Chambers’s Book of Days (1864), which provides the readers and/or audiences with further information about the events dramatized in the play, and then reveals the illegality of Baartman’s shows during the 1810s under the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Such footnotes, which in some cases engulf the main text, refer the readers and/or audiences to historical documentation, while at the same time inviting criticisms that call their validity and objectivity into question.vi

29In line with the concerns of the Black Arts Movement’s playwrights, Parks’s plays call the validity of stereotypes and negative portrayals of African Americans into question. To this end, she turns to postmodern aesthetics to voice plural identities. Her

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goal is to disrupt prevailing stereotypes of African Americans and the dominant ideologies which have been used to deprive African Americans of their rights, shifting attention to the figures and/or characters trapped within systems of oppression. In The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Parks depicts a figure named Black Man With Watermelon who repeatedly insists that the watermelon is not his: “This does not belong tuh me. Somebody planted this on me. On me in my hands” (105). In another instance, he asks: “melon mines? –. Dont look like me… Was we green and stripedly when we first comed out?” (107). Black Woman With Fried Drumstick responds to his questions: “Thuh features comes later” (107; emphasis added). Parks takes advantage of the watermelon, which is part of a racist stereotype, to show how stereotypes work in general. The negative assessment comes first, and the “features,” whether they be stripes on a watermelon or the physical traits of the body, can be made to fit the negative assessment later. Black Man With Watermelon should be seen, not as an individual in this play, but as someone who is forced to serve as a representative of his race. Parks reiterates some of the racist and sexist stereotypes, created by whites about African Americans, in an ironic way. Assigning unorthodox names to the figures —which are evidence of both the reality of the African Americans’ experiences and their representations and identifications in the outside world—satirizes American history and culture and its racial injustices.

30In the same play, Parks refers to the biblical story of Noah cursing his dark- skinned son Ham and his descendants, often invoked by advocates of slavery “to justify slavery and discriminations against people of color” (Veltman 2006). Old Man River Jordan allusively says: “(Ham seed his daddy Noah neckked. From that seed, comed Allyall.)” (122). By employing Ham, Parks exposes and satirizes the long history of racial injustice and distortion, ascribed to the religious myth.Furthermore, the employment of Voice On Thuh Tee V not only contributes to the dematerialization of the stage and to the disturbance of traditional perception with regard to dramaturgy but also criticizes the key roles of the media in disseminating negative portrayals of African Americans. Voice On Thuh Tee V appears eleven times in the play, announcing the following repeated and revised piece of news: Good evening. I’m Broad Caster. Headlining tonight: the news: is Gamble Major, the absolutely last living negro man in the whole entire known world—is dead. Major, Gamble, born a slave, taught himself the rudiments of education to become a spearhead in the Civil Rights Movement. He was 38 years old. News of Majors death sparked controlled displays of jubilation in all corners of the world. (110)

31 This piece of news deliberately recalls the assassination of Civil Rights Movement leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) and Malcolm X (1925-1965), but it also suggests the complicity of the media in violence directed against African Americans and contains a cautionary note about the impact of the media on the quest/ion for/of African American identities.

32To sum up, Parks’s plays represent and emphasize the concerns and quest/ion of identities for African Americans. Parks’s redefinition of black theater enables her to distance her writing from the racial demarcations that once played a central role and to embrace more fluid models of identity. Her deliberately generalizing and depersonalizing monikers are attempts to show, at the level of dramatis personae, how racism negates the possibility of individual personal development. Parks uses the aesthetics of postmodern drama to transform the conventional features of playwriting and to challenge African Americans’ static and over-determined identity. In her plays,

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Parks employs a nonlinear progression through such disruptive devices as time distortion and dislocation to create fluid multi-perspectival settings and enable her figures and/or characters to travel back and forth in history. In order to promote nonlinearity, she also uses Rests and Spells as well as footnotes. The utilization of such devices in addition to typographical manipulation, lack of figure and/or character descriptions and a dearth of stage directions make Parks’s dramaturgy post- revolutionary.

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Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Second Edition. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997. Print.

Curb, Rosemary. “An Unfashionable Tragedy of American Racism: Alice Childress’s The Wedding Band.” MELUS 7.4 (1980): 57-67. Print.

Drukman, Steven. “Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-Diddly-Dit-Dit: An Interview.” The Drama Review 39.3 (1988): 56-75. Print.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre.” The Crisis 32 (1926): 134-36. Print.

Foster, Verna A. “Nurturing and Murderous Mothers in Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood and Fucking A.” American Drama 16.1 (2007): 75-89. Print.

Geis, Deborah R. Suzan-Lori Parks. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Print.

Gemtou, Eleni. “Exploring the Possibilities of Postdramatic Theater as Educational Means.” International Journal of Education and the Arts 15.12 (2014): 1-15. Print.

Hassan, Ihab. “Frontiers of Criticism: Metaphors of Silence.” Virginia Quarterly Review 46.1 (1970): 81-95. Print.

–––. “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective.” Critical Inquiry 2.3 (1986): 503-20.

–––. “Making Sense: The Trials of Postmodern Discourse.” New Literary History 18.2 (1987): 437-59. Print.

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Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism.” A Postmodern Reader,Eds.Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993. 243-72. Print.

Jacobus, Lee A. “Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks.” Bedford Introduction to Drama. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus, 1632–1633. Boston, MA: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s P, 2001. Print.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jurs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Malkin, Jeanette R. Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. Print.

McDowell, Josh D., Bob Hostetler, and David H. Bellis. Beyond Belief to Convictions. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2002. Print.

Miranda, Carlos A., and Suzette A. Spencer. “Omnipresent Negation: Hottentot Venus and Africa Rising.” Callaloo 32.3 (2009): 910-33. Print.

Nelson, Cory Elizabeth. “Notes on the Production: Topdog/Underdog.” New Repertory Theatre, 2013.http://www.newrep.org/0405topdognotes.php. Web. 10 Jun. 2016.

Ong, Han. “Suzan-Lori Parks.” Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries.Eds. Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young. New York: Routledge, 2014. 37-45. Print.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995a. 99-131. Print.

–––. “Elements of Style.” The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995b. 6-18. Print.

–––. Venus. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997. Print.

–––. Fucking A. The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001. 113-225. Print.

–––. “New Black Math.” Theatre Journal 57.4 (2005): 576-83.

Sanchez, Sonia. The Bronx is Next. Sonia Sanchez: I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays, Ed. Jacqueline Wood. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2010. 25-35. Print.

–––. Sister Son/ji. Sonia Sanchez: I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays, Ed. Jacqueline Wood. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2010. 36-43 Print.

Veltman, Chloe. “Bebop Beauty.” SFWEEKLY Culture, 2006. http://www.sfweekly.com/ sanfrancisco/bebop-beauty/Content?oid=2160156. Web. Jun. 8, 2016.

NOTES i. In a number of her plays, like in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,Parks calls the cast “figures” (1995a, 100). As Parks says in an interview with Lee Jacobus, “The most important things about the figures is that they are figures and not characters. They are signs of something and not people just like people we know” (1633; emphasis in the original). In addition, as she writes in her essay “Elements of Style,” “They are not characters. To call them so could be an injustice. They are figures, figments, ghosts, roles, lovers maybe, speakers maybe, shadows, slips, players maybe, maybe someone else’s pulse” (1995b, 12; emphasis in the original). These figures,

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who are all dynamic, constantly evade fixity even at the close of the play. Thus, the figures are always about-to-be as their identities are, manifesting a type of purposeful figures in search for motion and promotion. However, in some other plays, including Venus and Fucking A, Parks refers to them as “characters”(1997, [ii] and 2001, 115, respectively). ii. Performers in my definition include not only the actors and actresses but also the directors, lighting engineers, stage and costume designers and others who are directly and indirectly engaged in the production of a play. iii. In his S/Z (1974), Roland Barthes draws a distinction between lisible (“readerly”) and scriptible (“writerly”) texts. The readerly texts, Barthes argues, are presented in a plain, linear, straightforward manner which demands no special effort in order to be digested. In such texts, meaning is fixed and pre-determined, since they avoid the use of elements that would open up the text to multiple interpretations. By contrast, in writerly texts, meaning is no longer evident; readers are not passive receivers of information as they are required to take part in the construction of meanings. Later, in The Pleasure of the Text (1975), Barthes introduces and distinguishes two types of texts: plaisir (“pleasure”) and jouissance (“bliss”). Their distinctions correspond to the distinctions between readerly and writerly texts. The text of pleasure corresponds to the readerly text, while the text of bliss corresponds to the writerly text which explodes the literary codes and provides the grounds for readers to come up with multiple meanings. Barthes defines “text of bliss” as “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language” (1975, 14). iv. By malestream, I mean dominant patriarchal and hierarchal systems in which men hold hegemonic power and accordingly predominate in roles of political and social leadership and economic control. v. Parks uses the definite article “The” before the names of all of the characters in Venus. The use of the definite article signifies that the characters are particular ones whose identities are known to the readers and/or audiences. This is perhaps to both generalize and individualize the characters through establishing a prototype of them for all people, blacks and whites. In addition, some of the characters are nameless or unnamed, including The Man, The Brother and The Young Man. This state of being unnamed may be accounted as another attempt to generalize the characters. vi. Parks does not offer any suggestion of how to perform the footnotes on stage. Thus, the performers have to decide how to implement them in any way they desire. In a number of performances of Venus, including the one performed under the direction of Karla Koskinen in November 2010 at the Alys Stephens Center Odess Theatre, University of Alabama, The Negro- Resurrectionist reads the footnotes on stage.

ABSTRACTS

Inspired both by the Black Arts Movement and the postmodern revolt against it, Parks has concentrated on crafting provocative plays that represent and emphasize the concerns and quest/ion of identities for African Americans. In the present essay, I argue that Parks is interested in questioning the former constructed racial boundaries of blackness and revolutionary ideologies of the Black Arts Movement without turning a blind eye to the concerns

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of African American community. I show that Parks attempts to escape the traditions of the Black Arts Movement, which depended on conventions of narrative realism and straightforward language to transmit its revolutionary messages. My goal is to show how Parks’s plays make use of postmodern aesthetics and paradigms to transform the conventional features of playwriting, create indeterminacies toward dominant systems of oppression and raise the quest/ion of identities for African Americans in a post-revolutionary manner.

INDEX

Keywords: fluidity, identity, indeterminacies, language complexity, post-revolutionary theater, postdramatic theatre, postmodern drama, stereotype, Suzan-Lori Parks, the Black Arts Movement, the media

AUTHOR

MEHDI GHASEMI University of Turku, Finland

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Sex and the City: A Situationist Reading of Jens Jorgen Thorsen’s Film Adaptation of Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy

Jennifer Cowe

1 If ever a film maker and writer were made to collaborate on a project, it was Jens Jorgen Thorsen and Henry Miller. Despite using different mediums, both men’s work expressed their ambivalence towards the role of the state, capitalism and sexuality. Each saw himself as fundamentally at odds with the cultural norms of his respective country: Miller the countercultural sexual iconoclast, experimenting with language and narrative structure to produce novels and pamphlets that demanded a re- evaluation of how the individual lived within capitalism; Thorsen the product of hippy communes and art collectives, determined to expose the sexual hypocrisy of Danish society. By the time they met each other in the late sixties, Miller had long established his counter cultural credentials through works like Tropic of Cancer (1934), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) and Quiet Days in Clichy (1956). Miller’s work often took on the guise of autobiographyi, although it is debatable whether he meant his novels to be read as such, and they included scenes of an extreme sexual nature. Miller’s initial aim in writing was to write in a language that was recognizable to the man on the street. He wrote about his own life (as he saw it) and the lives of those around him, often the destitute, sex workers, criminals and fellow artists down on their luck. Miller’s reputation is sadly still that of a writer of dirty books, who at best can be seen as a forerunner of the more sexual permissive society to come. I would argue that this ignores the inherent complexity of Miller’s work, especially early novels like Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring (1936). His novels deal with complex philosophical and psychological issues, specifically through utilizing the theories of Henri Bergson and Otto Rankii. Miller plays with concepts of time and time interpenetration, the nature of memory and reality and the role of the artist. Miller’s joyful acceptance of sex, his hatred of advanced capitalism

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and his unswerving belief in his own creative journey must surely have attracted Thorsen to filming Quiet Days in Clichy. Miller liked to cause trouble just as much as Thorsen, and both believed that the artist’s role was to shake things up and expose double standards.

2 Thorsen has been described as “the rowdiest gate-crasher and general shit- stirrer” (Stevenson 157) of Danish cinema; however, it is important to consider the cultural climate that Thorsen came of age in. Born in Copenhagen in 1932, Thorsen had clear memories of the Nazi occupation and unsurprisingly developed a hatred of authority and state control. Thorsen studied architecture and art history after high school leading to jobs as varied as brick layer, jazz musician and museum assistant. By the time the more culturally liberal climate of the 1960s and 70s came around, Thorsen was already an established member of the Danish avant-garde. He was close friends with both Asger Jorn and his brother Jorn Nash. By the early 1960s Jorn and Nash were, openly for the latter and clandestinely for the former, in revolt against the restrictions they saw within the Situationist International (SI) and were busy creating their own faction named CO-RITUS in 1962.iii It is important to fully understand what the SI was and why it had such a profound effect upon Thorsen’s creativity and way of life. The SI provided Thorsen with a philosophical foundation in which to experiment with both his filmmaking and how he conceived of everyday life around him.

3 For many the Situationist International is remembered as a group of artists, writers and activists indelibly linked in the imagination to Paris, understandably so, as the group truly came to international prominence during May 1968. Founded in 1957 by Guy Debord, the group emerged out of the Letterist International’s attempt to make contact with various international artistic collectives who were thought to share similar political and philosophical traits.iv The SI was primarily made up of anti- authoritarian Marxists who acknowledged that capitalism had changed since Marx’s formative writings, but that several of his theories remained pertinent, specifically his theory of alienation. They examined the misery of modern social alienation and commodity fetishism, whilst rejecting advanced capitalism’s palliatives of technology and increased leisure time: The misery of material poverty may have diminished, but life in capitalist society was still made miserable by the extension of alienated social relations from the workplace to every area of lived experience. The leisures and luxuries gained from capitalism can only be consumed: there is more free time, choice, and opportunity, but the commodity form in which everything appears serves only to reproduce the alienated relations of capitalist production. (Plant 2-3)

4 Crucial to their theories was the concept of the spectacle; the idea that social relations were conducted through objects rather than lived experiences. In advanced capitalist societies, individuals no longer directly fulfilled their individual, authentic desires, but rather by proxy through commodities and consumption. Ideas of value and worth are dictated by capital, leading to passive alienation. When Debord writes of “the spectacle” what he really means is modern mass media. Debord believed that the age of the spectacle began in the 1920’s with the advent of a more sophisticated approach to advertising and public relations. In its simple form the notion of the spectacle continues on from Marx’s theory of reification, the course through which objects become separated from the process of their production. “The Spectacle” involves an ever-increasing barrage of images and places values upon them. Over time the individual becomes nothing more than a passive consumer, with his experiences and

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feelings as commodified as any object. Debord would enlarge upon his initial theory in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) to break down “the spectacle” into three different categories: The Concentrated Spectacle, The Diffuse Spectacle and The Integrated Spectacle.v To counteract the society of the spectacle, Situationists tried to create events that aimed to reinvigorate and liberate the individual. This can be as simple as Détournement, the concept of reappropriating the signs and symbols of capitalism and subverting the message. The publication of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (1968) cemented the Situationists as the leading anti-capitalist artistic collective in this period. It is important to acknowledge the international aspect to the SI’s membership and leadership and not see it purely as a French movement. Due to the fact that it drew its membership from various earlier associations, including the aforementioned Letterist International, but also the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the London Psychogeographical Association and COBRA (an anagram of the founders home cities; Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam), it is not surprising that many of the founding members of the SI were not French. Of the founding members Raoul Vaneigem was Belgian, Constant Nieuwenhuys was Dutch, Alexander Trocchi was Scottish, Attila Kotanyi was Hungarian and Asger Jorn was Danish.

5 It is Asger Jorn that provides the link between Thorsen and the SI. Thorsen was already living on the periphery of Danish society by the time he came across the ideas of the SI, but with the creation of CO-RITUS with Nash we can begin to see these concepts explored on film. Gruppe SPUR was included in Nash’s new Second Situationist International and Thorsen began his film making within the new collective. In the early years the collective moved to Jorn’s farm Drakabygett in Sweden, becoming a real hippie commune with all the accompanying stereotypes. Film was an essential component in the group’s aim to subvert society; they organized pop-up film festivals that showcased their experimental films. Thorsen’s first film was Pornoshop (1965), a short film made in conjunction with two other filmmakers from the collective (Novi Maruni and Niels Holt). Pornoshop explores the commoditization of sex from an SI perspective. By juxtaposing outtakes from commercial pornographic films and scenes of normal couples having sex, Thorsen explored the influence of capitalism on how we imagine, consume and conceptualize sex. The film caused great controversy within Denmark and Sweden with screenings being raided by police, but it cemented Thorsen’s countercultural credentials. As observed by Jack Stevenson in his examination of the Scandinavian pornography industry during this period Scandinavian Blue (2010), Thorsen was at the very pinnacle of the cultural agenda that was aiming to fundamentally change Danish society, yet his conceptualization of what this meant was not straightforward: Pornography was Thorsen’s weapon of choice in his ongoing crusade to provoke the authorities and unsettle the bourgeoisie, and while his use of porn in the service of such idealistic ends seems hopelessly quaint today, it must be seen in the context of the times. In Denmark censorship was predominately seen as a way to control, not to protect. It was viewed as a means of repression....Consequently the fight for sexual freedom was considered a political as well as a personal struggle. In some circles free love was even deemed to be a socialist act, a rejection of jealousy, which was a capitalist emotion—treating people like personal property, owning another person. Yet Thorsen was never so doctrinaire. He was more of a happy anarchist. To him sex was a joyous thing, an affirmation of individuality and a declaration of freedom. (Stevenson 235-236)

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6 Thorsen was undoubtedly a part of a generation and an artistic community that sought to bring fundamental change to the society they lived in, yet intrinsic within this is the need to follow an individual path, to break away from the collective movement that provided his impetus. His creativity was nourished by his interaction with CO-RITUS and the Drakabygett collective, but I agree with Stevenson’s appraisal of Thorsen as “a happy anarchist” intent on using pornography as a means by which to subvert the capitalist state’s appropriation of sex. These ideas are clearly influenced by the SI, and I will examine them in closer detail in regards to Thorsen’s film version of Quiet Days in Clichy; however, it is also important to pause and consider how these ideas link Thorsen to Miller. Stevenson is right when he describes Thorsen as non-doctrinal and as seeing sex as an affirmation of freedom and selfhood, and these observations could just as easily be applied to Miller.

7 By the 1960s Henry Miller was finally enjoying the fruits of his labor. After decades of censorship in both America and the United Kingdom, his most famous and controversial work Tropic of Cancer was finally published in his homeland in 1961. vi Miller had endured years of financial hardship, surviving on unreliable royalties from foreign presses and by begging from patrons and friends. Hailed as a countercultural icon by many, Miller’s day-to-day existence had been anything but easy since his return to America in 1940. The 1960s would be the decade in which Miller was feted around the world; he was invited to be on the jury at Cannes in 1960, he appeared at the Edinburgh World Writers Conference in 1962 and the remainder of his back catalogue had been published in America by 1965, including his novella Quiet Days in Clichy (1956). The question must surely be how did this world renowned writer come to collaborate with an underground, avant- garde film maker from Denmark? The answer must surely lie in their shared belief that sex was a joyous, free act that had become a tool by which capitalism controlled and manipulated gender relations. Rather than the reciprocal and revelatory experience that both believed it to be, sex had become commodified and commercialized into the institution of marriage and the accompanying consumerism that was a prerequisite to gaining sex. Leaving aside the admittedly problematic notion of pornography as somehow a means by which to subvert said institutions, both Thorsen and Miller sought a return to what they believed was a more natural and fair sexual arena, where men and women gave sex freely without inhibition or hope of financial or societal reward.vii Miller and Thorsen also shared an innate individuality that did not necessarily trust the collective. Miller was never a joiner of political, artistic or religious groups; his belief system was fundamentally Zen Buddhist, and he placed the responsibility for change purely within the individual. Thorsen also goes his own way; he flits in and out of artistic groups as it suits him and he was hardly a doctrinal member of the SI, although I would argue that their ideological influence are clearly manifest in his work, if filtered through his own creative needs. Miller and Thorsen shared many of the same fundamental beliefs regarding sex, culture and the inhibiting role of society to control the natural evolution of the individual.viii

8 The plot of Quiet Days in Clichy lends itself perfectly to a Situationist reading. Joey and Carl, aka Miller and best friend Alfred Perlès, are living in dire financial straits in a working class area of Paris called Clichy. They spend their days and nights searching for free meals and sex. Quiet Days in Clichy is a chronicle of their bizarre sexual adventures and pursuit of food. Joey and Carl walk all over Paris, with no other compass than their hard-ons and empty stomachs. Set in the 1930s by Miller, Thorsen’s

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film updated the action to the present day. Their lives do not resemble in any way the expatriate picture postcard image of Paris. They live a peripatetic life in a poor arrondisement rarely holding down jobs for more than a few weeks, liberated from the concerns of so-called productive members of society. Thorsen shows the viewer the importance of these meanderings through the Situationist concept of the Dérive or in English “Drift.”ix

Image 1

“The Naked City,” Guy De Bord, 1957

9 The Dérive is a critical part of the wider Situationist theory of Psychogeography. Psychogeography is the “specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (Maciocco 93). The Dérive is an unplanned walk through an urban landscape fuelled purely by the feeling induced in the walker by the landscape. Debord described the state as, The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places—these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account. (Debord 10)

10 The Dérive is a state of wandering in search of discovering the real and authentic. The city is a space of stratified hierarchies, shaped by material wealth and government control, which limits the responses of the individual: In the Dérive one or more persons, during a certain period, drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find

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there….But the Dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. (Knabb 50)

11 This will lead the individual to a freedom of experience generated only by his own authentic engagement with his surroundings.

12Joey and Carl’s psychogeographical experience of Paris is fueled by their need to eat and get laid. Thorsen shows us this in full, minute after minute of Joey walking around Paris with no destination and with no apparent progress to the plot of the film. The opening credits of the film show Joey’s aimless meanderings through different arrondissements until he chooses a random cafe in which to have a beer. As the streets of Paris bustle around him, Joey seems to glide above all the meaningless activity. He does not belong with the throngs of tourists shuffling between sites of pre-determined interest, nor is he an employee governed by sequential time slots of activity. He is free to interact with the space as he wishes. The cinematography of Jesper Hom adds to the atmosphere of a city within a city, as he shot mostly around the dilapidated districts of Place de Clichy and Montmartre. As gentrified as Montmartre has become, in the 1960s it was still a working class district and we can see its roughness clearly. Place de Clichy remains rather seedy to this day, with its proximity to the sex shows and shops of Pigalle, Thorsen and Hom capture this coarseness well. This is not the beautiful Parisian street-shots of so many films; it has a griminess that hints at the daily squalor just off the main boulevards. Hom’s depicts the area much as Miller had described it: Montmartre is sluggish, lazy, indifferent, somewhat shabby and seedy-looking, not glamorous so much as seductive, not scintillating but glowing with a smouldering flame....worn, faded, derelict, nakedly vicious, mercenary, vulgar. It is, if anything, repellant rather than attractive, but insidiously repellent, like vice itself. There are little bars filled almost exclusively with whores, pimps, thugs and gamblers, which, no matter if you pass them up a thousand times, finally suck you in and claim you as a victim. (Miller 5)

13 In Howard Thomson’s New York Times review of September 1970, Hom’s cinematography is one of the few positives he sees in the whole film: Twanging away in the background, like a rusty bedspring, is the guitar accompaniment of Country Joe McDonald, who strategically yodels some dirty songs during action that speaks for itself. And as the grapplings and cavortings get more playful—and downright infantile—the music gets friskier. The picture gets more redundant and even dull. However, during one sequence, when Valjean escorts a toothsome favorite to the countryside, the sound track does hold a philosophical musing on sexuality and time that is interesting, earthbound Miller. And the one really solid thing about the picture is its Parisian stamp, with the camera grainily scouring byways and burrowing deep into small cafes and shops. (Thomson 1970)

14 Thomson seems to prefer the film version of Tropic of Cancer (1970), which I find rather surprising. I would argue that the criticisms he levels at Quiet Days in Clichy—the mundane sex scenes, bad acting and lack of depth—could just as easily be levelled at Tropic of Cancer, arguably a much harder novel to do justice to on film. When Thomson writes “The film tries to zap it up with obscene words, phrases and sentences pasted against the footage, some of it economically visual...post-card-style,” I cannot help but think that he has fundamentally misunderstood what Thorsen is trying to do. Thomson has failed to comprehend the film as using SI concepts to engage with the original text

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in an innovative way, although it is debatable what worth Thomson sees in Miller himself: The picture is funny—just once—when the two men have an uneasy showdown with the parents of a 15-year-girl, a dimwit of Gibraltar durability. The wise, wide-eyed and studiedly stupid expression on the face of the youngster, placidly watching the encounter and gnawing a lollipop, is the best commentary on “Quiet Days in Clichy” and, for all we know, Henry Miller. (Thomson 1970)

15 One could also argue that this was a more sophisticated version of techniques Thorsen had employed in the past. In an article entitled “The Basic Concepts of Film,” written in the early 1960s but not published until 1980, Thorsen explained his own approach to montage and phenomenological aspects of film material such as “autokinetic effect” and “emulsion effect,” his names for the innate movement of the “grains” within still images projected in a filmic manner. Carl Norrested examines Thorsen’s early film Vietnam (1969) for these effects in his chapter on “The Drakabygget Films” in Expect Anything, Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (2011): Vietnam...consisted of a single still of a dead Vietnamese with a crushed head held for several minutes—the soundtrack played the “Internationale” and the American national anthem. The previous year he had made the montage-orientated Viet Nam Nam, which starts with the initial frame countdown followed by a collage of various heads of state ending with a picture of Ho Chi Minh, exploding. Many of Thorsens’s festival films consist of reworked montages of chopped-up mainstream film material that forms fascinating, alienating aggregates. (Norrested 37)

16 This use of montage and “grains” is something that Thorsen will employ again in Quiet Days in Clichy, especially in relation to use of the SI concept of Détournement.

Image 2

“The Avant-Garde Doesn't Give Up,” Asger Jorn, 1962

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17Détournement is the turning of an image against itself, or more specifically its uses by the capitalist state. This can take the form of recognizable art or advertising being remade to express views that are contrary and antagonistic to the original. The fact that such a familiar image reflects a new and subversive message shocks the viewer into a reaction. We can see the similarities between Jorn’s “The Avant Garde Doesn’t Give Up” and Thorsen’s use of the same technique in Quiet Days in Clichy. Both Jorn and Thorsen take recognizably traditional images and subvert the image by defacing it; in Jorn’s case, nineteenth century portraiture, in Thorsen’s, places of pilgrimage for tourists in Paris.

18It is perhaps the SI concept that Thorsen employs most in his films. Again we can see an early example of it in Thorsen’s Do You Want Success? (1963) using an old Brylcreem advertisement to question the validity of capitalist notions masculinity and success. He repeats the scene with a speedboat, employed clumsily with all the stereotypes of male virility and financial success, until the sheer brainless monotony of the advertiser’s message is swept away to reveal an “absurd minimalism” (Norrested 38). This is a classic example of Détournement, taking an image that is supposed to elicit feelings of envy, aspiration and power in the audience and subverting it to show its authentic message, one of blind greed and impotence.

19Thorsen would use Détournement repeatedly in other works, including Fotorama (1964) Herning 65 (1965), Tom, Empty, Vide, Leer (1966) and Kaptajn Karlsens flammer (1984). Thorsen also disrupted chronological order as a form of Détournement; viewers were used to films following a linear plot with actions and consequence following an understandable time frame, but Thorsen was uninterested in such conventional plot devices as he explained in an interview with Carl Norrested and Helge Krarup: In fact I’ve worked with film since I was in the fourth grade. At that time I was given a table projector, so I sat editing together clips from the cinema—and whatever else I could get my hands on. At a place called Fagfoto you could actually buy old film clips. That’s probably why I never took an interest in plot in film, only in the visual and rhythmic. Most of my experimental films are based on pre-existing material. Production of that kind of film really picked up when we began mounting film festivals....We really wanted to make something that was outside the frame, but in fact it intensified our interest in the popular, something everyone could use, some material known to everyone—archetypal….I’ve always preferred to work with 35mm film, 16mm is too small. I’m fascinated with the leap from clip to clip...a leap that is often more radical and faster than those you can make in your imagination. (Krarup and Norrested 38-39)

20 Thus by the time Thorsen came to make Quiet Days in Clichy he was well versed both in the philosophical and technical processes he wished to use.

21Miller would have appreciated Thorsen’s non-linear approach as this is something that Miller had employed in his earlier works, specifically Tropic of Cancer. In Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn (1939) and Black Spring (1936) Miller played with Bergsonian notions of the interpenetration of time, utilizing Bergson’s theories on time, timelessness and memory play with plot, narrative, but most importantly, the freedom that comes to the individual when he refuses the constricting nature of advanced capitalist society. We see Thorsen use both Dérive and Détournement to great effect in the opening credits. Thorsen takes what looks like holiday photos featuring famous Parisian landmarks and incorporates the word “cunt” repeatedly, whilst alternating the photos with footage of Joey’s Dérive-driven wanderings.

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Image 3

Quiet Days in Clichy (Film Still), Jens Jorgen Thorsen, 1970

22These are techniques that Thorsen has perfected over numerous previous films, and they are used with a certain knowing sophistication and humor in Quiet Days in Clichy.

23It is impossible to discuss Thorsen’s adaptation without acknowledging the strongly pornographic nature of the work and its arguably misogynistic representation of women, consistent with Miller’s text. The main female characters in the novel are prostitutes, a nymphomaniac who happens to be a somnambulist and Carl’s underage lover, Colette. Thorsen revels in the coarse sexuality of Miller’s work and the women truly are nothing more than “cunts,” again showing a Situationist detachment and acceptance of “fucking for fuck’s sake.” There is no moral judgement here, just blissful enjoyment of what is. The role of Colette is especially problematic as there is something very distasteful about watching a balding, middle-aged man using an apparently underage girl (she is 14 years old in the novel) as a sexual plaything. Colette is not a fully fleshed out character in either the novel or the film, in fact none of the female characters are. She is represented as only good for sex and housework, the latter of which she is mocked for as being too stupid to do effectively. Thorsen has no problem showing an actress who looks like a young teenager engaged in a sexual relationship with a much older man. Sex has become a commodity like any other object within advanced capitalism; it has to be classified and approved by society before it can be deemed acceptable. Colette chooses to live with and engage in sexual relations with both Carl and Joey; the fact that she is a minor in the eyes of the law has no relevance to the men. The film refuses to disguise the nature of the sexual relationship,x rejecting the right of advanced capitalist society to commodify and delegitimize sex which is given and enjoyed freely. Free will triumphs over legally mandated constructs regarding sexuality. This is life lived authentically and pleasure taken at first hand rather than through the prism of capitalist sanctioned enjoyment. As problematic as this may seem to a contemporary audience, and I would imagine it was challenging in

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1970 too; it demands that viewers ask themselves questions regarding their preconceived ideas of the fetishization of female sexuality and childhood in general.

Image 4

Quiet Days in Clichy (Film Still), Jens Jorgen Thorsen, 1970

24Likewise the unnamed Surrealist’s mistress and the situation she finds herself in are troubling in the extreme. The reader never learns her name and it is debatable if Joey and Carl ever take the trouble to find out. This character is clearly in a vulnerable position and Joey and Carl take full advantage whilst acknowledging the crossing of ethical, if not criminal, boundaries: She returned our greeting as if in a trance. She seemed to remember our faces but had obviously forgotten where or when we had met....She accepted our company as she would have accepted the company of anyone who happened along. (Miller 31)

25 The woman is clearly not of sound mind with both men at different times calling her schizophrenic, a goofy, out of her mind, in a trance and sleepwalking. She accompanies them to their apartment without ever asking where they are taking her and upon arrival announces that she needs 200 Francs for rent and will have sex with both men to get it. In the novel she writes poetry as she has sex with both men, never acknowledging in any way what is being done to her. In the film she disappears into the bathroom to write her poetry on the walls whilst naked and seems to be having some kind of violent fit as Carl has sex with her, only for Joey to pour water over her. This act seems to return her to reality and she excuses herself and leaves. In the next frame “Yes, it was a period when cunt was in the air” is blazoned across the screen.

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Image 5

Quiet Days in Clichy (Film Still), Jens Jorgen Thorsen, 1970

26 Both Miller and Thorsen play this scene for laughs, creating a comic character who the men take advantage of in bawdy, good humoured fashion: You can watch us—she doesn’t give a damn. She’d fuck a dog if we asked her to. She’s a somnambulist....In an instant I had a tremendous erection. I got up and shoved my prick inside her. I turned her around, got it in front wise and, lifting her off her feet, I dragged her over to the bed. Carl pounced on her immediately, grunting like a wild boar. I let him have his fill, and then I let her have it again from the rear. When it was over she asked for some wine, and while I was filling her glass she began to laugh. It was a weird laugh, like nothing I had ever heard before. (Miller 33-36)

27 The men then proceed to cheat the woman out of her 200 Francs before putting her in a taxi whilst congratulating each other on keeping their money and having “fucked her good and proper” (31). The frat boy attitude and the obvious vulnerability of this woman are extremely distasteful to modern audiences, but in the time before the awareness of date rape, both Miller and Thorsen represent its comic value, with Thorsen’s dialogue sticking very close to the original.

28As I have already noted Miller’s reputation as a misogynist remains strong to this day and from the above passage it is not hard to see why. In her review of Frederick Turner’s Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer (2012), Jeannette Winterson forcefully took Miller to task for his hypocrisy and I think it is as applicable to Thorsen’s adaptation as it is to Miller’s original work. Winterson exposes Miller’s treatment of women in his own life and how his freedom was often at the cost of theirs, but also how ethically dubious his conception of capitalism is in regards to gender: When Miller sailed for Paris he had a copy of “Leaves of Grass” in his luggage....He left behind him an ex-wife and small daughter for whom he had made no provision, and a current wife, June, who was his lover, muse and banker, until Anaïs Nin in Paris was able to take over those essential roles....Turner never troubles himself or the reader with questions about Miller’s emotional and financial dependency on women. Miller was obsessed with masculinity but felt no need to support himself or the women in his life…. It never occurred to him that no matter how poor a man is,

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he can always buy a poorer woman for sex. It does not occur to Frederick Turner either, who calls Miller throughout a “sexual adventurer.” This sounds randy and swashbuckling and hides the economic reality of prostitution. Miller the renegade wanted his body slaves like any other capitalist—and as cheaply as possible. When he could not pay, Miller the man and Miller the fictional creation work out how to cheat women with romance. What they cannot buy they steal. No connection is made between woman as commodity and the “slaughterhouse” (p. 84) of capitalism that Miller hates....(Winterson 2012)

29 Thorsen and Miller aim to expose the duplicity and emptiness of life in capitalist societies, exploring how something as natural as sex has become commodified, yet as Winterson shows this really only applied to men. Women remained a commodity to be bought, sold, cajoled and sometimes abused. These are issues that are impossible to ignore, although one would hope that gender analyses of Miller’s work does not overshadow or exclude other analyses, as they have done for the last forty years.

30Thorsen seems to have been well aware of the controversy surrounding the making of the film and I would argue was not above using the tools of “the spectacle” for his own ends. Several Danish pornographic movies were doing well in America during this time, taking advantage of the contrived idea of Scandinavian lasciviousness. Thorsen let it be known that he was trying to hire Lena Nyman as one of the female characters in Quiet Days in Clichy. Nyman was at the pinnacle of her rather dubious fame during this period as the star of I am Curious (Yellow) (1967), a pornographic film that was making tremendous money in the States. Nyman did not sign on, but the rumor kept the movie at the forefront of people’s minds. As Jack Stevenson suggests, Thorsen could be a cynical operator to say the least and the controversy regarding the treatment of the female actors during and after filming shows him in a less than flattering light. Thorsen let it be known that the film would feature real sex scenes with full penetration. After all the publicity regarding casting, in the end the female performers were all mostly unknowns. Crucially they were not professional actors and thus were not unionized. Thorsen used this to his advantage in that he did not have to let them see how he was editing the film as it went along, although it is debatable how much control pornographic actors have over their work then or now.

31After the film’s official opening at Cannes in 1970 (outside competition), some of the female actors questioned the validity of the hard core cut being shown, ridiculing Thorsen’s claims of no “cock-tease” fakery (Stevenson, 149). In the end it would appear that Thorsen added two scenes of full penetration in post-production without the knowledge or permission of the female actors. This led to one actress Louise White (the Surrealist’s mistress) filing a lawsuit against Thorsen. The technique of combining outtakes and real footage was not new to Thorsen; he had used it in many of his earlier films, specifically Pornoshop. With Pornoshop Thorsen used the insertion of real sex scenes into commercialized romantic love scenes to draw attention to the commodification of sex and stunted gender relation, I am not so sure his reasoning on Quiet Days in Clichy is quite so intellectual. The treatment of the female actors does have more than a hint of exploitation attached to it. They were denied any right to see how the film as it was being edited or to see the final cut before its screening in Cannes. It could be argued that Thorsen, much like Miller before him, only sees women as “cunts” to be made use of. Sexual equality for women seems to mean being sexually available and uncomplaining with their male partners, in film and in life, rather than an equal participant with a voice and sole control of their bodies. It could be argued that

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Thorsen uses women in a ruthless, capitalistic manner reminiscent of criticism leveled at Miller.

32The furore around the film meant good box office returns, selling 100,000 tickets in Denmark in the first three weeks of circulation. Its reception within Europe varied; it was wildly successful in Sweden and Germany, initially banned in Scotland and France. It was a film that seemed to reflect, and at times magnify, the complex cultural changes within a country at the time of viewing, leading to debate regarding censorship, feminism and sexuality. Sales in Europe, however, were nothing compared to what Thorsen and the studio expected in America. Miller’s public visibility and viability where at their peak; the publication of his entire back catalogue, the respect he received from contemporary American writers like Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg all led to a certain name recognition and cachet amongst the general public and cognoscenti alike. Large Hollywood studios wanted to adapt Miller’s novels for the screen; with Paramount buying the rights to make Tropic of Cancer (1970) around the same time that Miller gave Thorsen the rights to Quiet Days in Clichy for a fraction of the price.xi

33Thorsen had the backing of SBA Agency, the large Scandinavian company which specialized in booking music acts. Grove Publishing, the American publisher of Miller’s novels, paid Thorsen 100,000 dollars for the American rights and it is safe to say that everyone thought they had a hit on their hands. Several factors combined to prove everyone wrong, anyone of them would have been unfortunate individually but not lethal; however in combination they meant that no one was going to make a penny from the film after release. The first problem related to Grove Publishing, which simply did not have the money, clout or experience to turn a sinking ship around; secondly the fascination with Scandinavian pornography in America had reached saturation point; thirdly the legal difficulties of trying to show the film country wide led to lawsuits from more conservative states; and finally the nature of the sexuality in the film itself was controversial. In relation to this paper the most important of these is without doubt the final point. Arguably Quiet Days in Clichy is not expressly pornography, either in book or film form. Thorsen fully brought to life the anarchic, joyful nature of Miller’s prose. Sex within the film is not there to titillate, although as I have shown Thorsen was happy to exploit certain hard core tropes to gain publicity; rather the foundation of the film is one of carefree living and personal fulfilment. There are deeper messages at play within the film than the average pornographic filmgoer may have anticipated or wanted, and this may in part explain its low returns: the film just was not pornographic enough. Thorsen’s representation of Miller’s congenial milieu combined with his exploration of SI theories was not your normal cinematic fare, especially if you were turning up expecting something more akin to I am Curious (Yellow). Much like Michael Thomson some viewers must surely have been bored and puzzled by the episodes in which Thorsen used Dérive and Détournement to tell the story. It is one thing to visit the cinema to watch an exercise in European debauchery, but quite another to watch an exercise in European intellectualism.

34Thorsen’s adaptation of Quiet Days in Clichy may not have been the massive financial success that everyone involved expected, yet I would argue that it is the most successful film adaptation of any of Henry Miller’s novels to date. Despite moving the story to the present day, Thorsen maintains Miller’s raucous sexual humour and the general rowdiness of the novel. Using SI theories as a new way to unpack and engage

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with Miller’s text provided it with a seriousness that it had not been approached with previously. They bestow the novel, which has mainly been read as nothing more than dirty stories, with a timeless quality, but also show that even at his most entertaining, Miller is occupied by his quest for individual autonomy. Thorsen would continue to shock with his proposed next project The Sex Life of Jesus,xii a hard-core pornographic film that would show Jesus engaged in a variety of homosexual and heterosexual sex acts. Miller and Thorsen both sought to expose the hypocritical, authoritarian control that the advanced capitalist state imposed upon the individual; they wanted to draw attention to these iniquities and wake their readers and viewers from their collective, state sponsored inertia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000. Print.

Cowe, Jennifer. Killing the Buddha: Henry Miller's Long Journey to Satori. PhD Thesis. University of Glasgow, 2016.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 2010. Print.

Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso, 1990. Print.

Do You Want Success? Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1964. Film.

Fotorama. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1960. Film.

Herning 1965. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1966.Film.

Hutchison, Earl R., and Elmer Gertz. Tropic of Cancer on Trial: A Case History of Censorship. New York: Grove, 1968. Print.

Iustinus, T. A., ed. Letterist International. Maryland Heights: Cel, 2011. Print.

Jesus Vender Tilbage. (The Return of Jesus). Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1992.Film.

Kael, Pauline. “Tropic of Cancer.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 1970. Web. 22 June 2016. < http://cosmotc.blogspot.ca/2008/05/filming-tropic-of-cancer>

Kaptajn Karlsens flammer. (Captain Karlsen’s Flames). Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1984. Film.

Knabb, Ken. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. Print.

Lillios, Anna. "Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the Feminist Backlash’." Ed. James M. Decker and Indrek Manniste. Henry Miller: New Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 85-95. Print.

Maciocci, Giovanni. The Territorial Future of the City. New York: Springer, 2008. Print

Miller, Henry. The Air-conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions, 1945. Print.

Miller, Henry. Black Spring. New York: Grove, 1963. Print.

Miller, Henry. Quiet Days in Clichy. New York: Grove, 1987. Print.

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Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer/ Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove, 2001. Print.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. Print.

Palumbo, Allison. "Finding the Feminine: Rethinking Miller’s Tropics Trilogy." Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal 7 (2010): 145-77. Print.

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Pornoshop. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1965. Film.

Jours tranquilles à Clichy (Quiet Days in Clichy). Dir. Claude Chabrol. France. 1990. Film.

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, and Jakob Jakobsen. Expect Anything, Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere. Copenhagen: Nebula, 2011. Print.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge Mass.: MIT, 1998. Print.

I Am Curious (yellow ). Dir. Vilgot Sjöman. USA. 1967. Film.

Stevenson, Jack. Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.Print.

Thomson, Howard. “The Screen: 'Quiet Days in Clichy': Henry Miller Book's ...” The New York Times. The New York Times, 1970. Web. 22 June 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review

Tom, Empty, Vide, Leer. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1966. Film.

Turner, Frederick. Renegade: Henry Miller and the making of Tropic of Cancer. New Haven,Yale University Press, 2012. Print.

Vaneigem, Raoul, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Oakland, CA: PM, 2012.Print.

Vietnam. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1969. Film.

Stille Dage I Clichy. (Quiet Days in Clichy) Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1970. Film.

Winterson, Jeanette. "The Male Mystique of Henry Miller." The New York Times. The New York Times, 2012. Web. 22 June 2016.

NOTES i. Miller offered contradictory accounts of the autobiographical quality of his novels throughout his life. The facts are that characters from Miller’s real life are easily identifiable, even when their names have been changed. Similarly it is easy to identify key periods despite Miller’s changing representations of them. Early in his career, Miller was at pains to make it clear that he was the narrator in his novels. In response to Edmund White’s review of Tropic of Cancer Miller wrote, “The theme of the book is myself, and the narrator or the hero, as your reviewer puts it, is also myself…. it is me, because I have painstakingly indicated throughout the book that the hero is myself” (Cohn 35). This notion would change as Miller wrote arguably his most autobiographical work The Rosy Crucifixion; he preferred to promote the three novels as examples of his spiritual journey, rather than strictly autobiographical. Miller’s use of Bergsonian concepts of interpenetrating time and the re-using of certain “real life” episodes with contrasting

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narratives, makes it difficult to evaluate whether Miller’s novels can be read as autobiographical in the strictest sense. ii. For an examination of the enduring influence of Bergson and Rank upon Miller see: Cowe (2016). iii. Nash’s break with the SI occurred at the fifth International Situationist Congress in 1961. His open support for SPUR, a German radical collective that the SI had decided to exclude, led to his expulsion. This allowed him to create CO-RITUS with Thorsen and gain complete freedom from the SI. Nash proclaimed the Second Situationist International in 1961 and essentially formalized the split between the “French” and Scandinavian SI movements. Thorsen would collaborate on with members of SPUR on his early films. iv. Founded in Paris in the 1940’s by the Romanian poet Isidore Isou (1925-2007), Lettrism has its foundations in Dada and Surrealism. Isou believed that it was no longer possible to create anything new in poetry; Homer had set the standard and everything since was purely repetition. Isou called this phase amplique. He believed that poetry had peaked with Victor Hugo, music with Wagner and painting with Delacroix. These standards had to be destroyed (ciselante) to allow for the new creativity which Isou believed was poetry refined simply to letters, with no semantic content. In time The Letterists would apply these ideas to the visual arts, film and society as a whole. For a detailed examination of the Letterist International see: Iustinus (2011). v. “The spectacle” as a concept continued to evolve over Debord’s lifetime. In its simplest form “the spectacle” is split into three: the “diffuse spectacle” which is found in the democratic West, the “concentrated spectacle” of the totalitarian East and with the approaching end of the Cold War, the “integrated spectacle,” which as the name suggests incorporates both earlier definitions into one. vi. Miller’s struggle to be published in America and the personal toll it took upon him and the wider cultural and social connotations of the trial are explored by Hutchison (1968). Although it should be noted that this book was published by the very publishing house that was in court for illegally publishing Miller’s work. vii. The debate surrounding Miller’s treatment of women has long influenced academic research of his work and public perceptions of his reputation and legacy. Miller was excoriated by Kate Millett in her seminal work Sexual Politics (1970) and this general perception of Miller as an unrepentant misogynist is still at the forefront of criticism of Miller; we need only consider Jeanette Winterson’s New York Times Review review of Frederick Turner’s Renegade: The Making of Tropic of Cancer (2012) to see just how little time has eroded this view. New research which seeks to re-evaluate Miller vis- a- vis gender is now taking place see: Palumbo (2010). Lillios (2015) follows on from Palumbo’s recent feminist reading of Miller, charting the various generational feminist readings of Miller and giving a third-wave feminist reading of Miller that draws inspiration from Helene Cixous’ concept of écriture feminine. viii. Miller had long been an anti-capitalist and it is one of the main themes in his work. The Air- Conditioned Nightmare (1945) charts Miller’s road trip across America after his decade long sojourn in Paris. He was disgusted by what advanced capitalism had done to his country and compatriots. Miller charts the alienation of people from their work and from their land; capitalism controls their every aspect of their lives from work, leisure and aspirations. It is clear to see the similarities with Thorsen and the SI. ix. The city as part of a hostile urban landscape played a large part in Situationist theory. For an excellent examination of this see: Sadler (1999). x. A later film version of Quiet Days in Clichy by Claude Chabrol (1990) completely sanitized the novella. Carl is played by a very attractive, sexually unthreatening Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy is best known as a member of the 1980s Brat Pack group of actors. McCarthy looks about 22 in the film, despite playing a 40-something Miller. The sexual relationship with Collette is mostly

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glossed over and represented as a romantic relationship. The film shows Paris in all its Lost Generation glamour, more Spring Break than real life. xi. Paramount certainly did their best to make Tropic of Cancer a success. With Rip Torn playing the Miller “character,” Ellen Burstyn as his wife Mona and directed by Joseph Strick it was not without star power. Much like Thorsen, Strick moves the action to the present day and Pauline Kael in her review felt this may have been part of the problem: “When the story is made timeless, the characters are out of nowhere, and the author-hero is not discovering a new kind of literary freedom in self-exposure, he’s just a dirty not-so-young man hanging around the tourist spots of Paris.” The New Yorker, February 28 1970. xii. The Sex Life of Jesus, The Many Faces of Jesus and finally The Return of Jesus as it was sometimes known caused no end of controversy both internationally and in Denmark. The film received funding from the Danish Film Institute and was the first film to really test the new anti- censorship laws. Thousands of Christians protested in the streets, The Vatican and various international governments and pressure groups demanded Thorsen be stopped. The funding from the DFI was rescinded then given back and the general debacle continued, much to Thorsen’s pleasure: Whether or not he’s much of an artist in the traditional sense, he is absolutely top level as a stager of happenings. One man has taken on the whole cultural-political establishment here in this country. He has set in motion a cultural debate the likes of which has never been seen before, and one must hope he hasn’t been driven to exhaustion….The Jesus affair will undoubtedly figure as his masterpiece. It has already had greater impact than any film will ever have, and it has given us a new and frightening insight into Danish political life. (Stevenson 242) Works Cited Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000. Print. Cowe, Jennifer. Killing the Buddha: Henry Miller's Long Journey to Satori. PhD Thesis. University of Glasgow, 2016. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 2010. Print. Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso, 1990. Print. Do You Want Success? Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1964. Film. Fotorama. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1960. Film. Herning 1965. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1966.Film. Hutchison, Earl R., and Elmer Gertz. Tropic of Cancer on Trial: A Case History of Censorship. New York: Grove, 1968. Print. Iustinus, T. A., ed. Letterist International. Maryland Heights: Cel, 2011. Print. Jesus Vender Tilbage. (The Return of Jesus). Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1992.Film. Kael, Pauline. “Tropic of Cancer.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 1970. Web. 22 June 2016. < http://cosmotc.blogspot.ca/2008/05/filming-tropic-of-cancer> Kaptajn Karlsens flammer. (Captain Karlsen’s Flames). Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1984. Film. Knabb, Ken. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. Print. Lillios, Anna. "Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the Feminist Backlash’." Ed. James M. Decker and Indrek Manniste. Henry Miller: New Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 85-95. Print. Maciocci, Giovanni. The Territorial Future of the City. New York: Springer, 2008. Print Miller, Henry. The Air-conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions, 1945. Print. Miller, Henry. Black Spring. New York: Grove, 1963. Print. Miller, Henry. Quiet Days in Clichy. New York: Grove, 1987. Print. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer/ Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove, 2001. Print. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. Print. Palumbo, Allison. "Finding the Feminine: Rethinking Miller’s Tropics Trilogy." Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal 7 (2010): 145-77. Print.

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Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Pornoshop. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1965. Film. Jours tranquilles à Clichy (Quiet Days in Clichy). Dir. Claude Chabrol. France. 1990. Film. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, and Jakob Jakobsen. Expect Anything, Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere. Copenhagen: Nebula, 2011. Print. Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge Mass.: MIT, 1998. Print. I Am Curious (yellow ). Dir. Vilgot Sjöman. USA. 1967. Film. Stevenson, Jack. Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.Print. Thomson, Howard. “The Screen: 'Quiet Days in Clichy': Henry Miller Book's ...” The New York Times. The New York Times, 1970. Web. 22 June 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review Tom, Empty, Vide, Leer. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1966. Film. Turner, Frederick. Renegade: Henry Miller and the making of Tropic of Cancer. New Haven,Yale University Press, 2012. Print. Vaneigem, Raoul, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Oakland, CA: PM, 2012.Print. Vietnam. Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1969. Film. Stille Dage I Clichy. (Quiet Days in Clichy) Dir. Jens Jorgen Thorsen. Denmark. 1970. Film. Winterson, Jeanette. "The Male Mystique of Henry Miller." The New York Times. The New York Times, 2012. Web. 22 June 2016.

ABSTRACTS

This paper will explore the influence of the Situationist International (SI) philosophy upon Jens Jorgen Thorsen’s film adaptation of Quiet Days in Clichy (1970). Whilst acknowledging the film’s place within a wider changing Danish culture, I will aim to show that the film engages with the key Situationist theories of Dérive, Psychogeography and Détournement and that it reflects contemporary societal issues whilst remaining true to Henry Miller’s anarchic and joyful novella. Thorsen was unarguably one of Denmark’s most inventive and revolutionary filmmakers and Quiet Days in Clichy can be viewed in relation to his engagement with the concepts of the SI.

INDEX

Keywords: Henry Miller, Jens Jorgen Thorsen, Psychogeography, Quiet Days in Clichy, the Situationist International

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AUTHOR

JENNIFER COWE University of Glasgow

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Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

Michael Wainwright

A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (152) “If I dont go will you go anyways?” Lacey Rawlins asks his friend John Grady Cole, the protagonist in the first part of Cormac McCarthy’s (1933– ) Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses (1992), concerning their proposed relocation to Mexico. “I’m already gone” (27), replies Cole, unconsciously but succinctly testifying to his own mental state. The sixteen-year-old Cole, in response to the necessities occasioned by his maternal grandfather’s death—an event that will leave him homeless after the sale of the deceased man’s ranch—is projecting part of himself, deracinating a certain element of desire, and transforming the psychological thread attached to that element into a guiding clew. This anticipated escape from the broken nuclear family of Cole’s upbringing reiterates at a later stage of psychological maturation and in another guise an unresolved tension of his psychical infancy. Cole’s projected departure from home hereby appeals to a psychoanalytical interpretation, and this critical approach helps to establish and elucidate the psychological depths of McCarthy’s novel. Specifically, the formative “fort-da” (“gone-there”) game, which Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) defines in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and which Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) emends in reconsidering the psychoanalytical subject (or $), slowly emerges as a revelatory means for analyzing John Grady Cole both as a victim of maternal absence and as a representative of a passing cultural phenomenon, the American cowboy. Numerous critics of McCarthy’s oeuvre, including Edwin T. Arnold and Jay Ellis, have read his works from a Freudian perspective, yet few have analyzed a single work from the more hazardous but proportionally more rewarding vantage point of Lacanian

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psychoanalysis.1 Nell Sullivan’s prolegomenon on the paradoxical pleasure of jouissance is the most notable exception to this reluctance, but while the psychoanalytical insights Lacan gleaned from his dialogue with Freud’s conceptualizations require a painstaking appraisal, the restricted space afforded Sullivan by A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy (1995) denies her adequate analytical license.2 In contrast, t he following article answers the Lacanian demand for hermeneutical care, not so much psychoanalyzing All the Pretty Horses, as revealing the psychoanalytical prescience of McCarthy’s text. It is perhaps appropriate, therefore, that this critical furtherance, which contributes specifically to McCarthy studies and generally to the application of Lacanian theories to literary studies, concerns at once a form of absence and the insatiate need to fill that void. The nascent individual gradually answering his subjective absence in the fort-da thesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s eighteen-month-old grandson. This “good boy,” who neither disturbed his parents at night nor misbehaved in general, was especially attached to his mother, “who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help” (8). Only the child’s habit of picking up small objects and casting them away, an exercise he accompanied with the word fort (or gone), perturbed his mother. Indeed, the infant’s enthusiasm for this activity developed to the point where retrieving the jettisoned items became somewhat onerous. Having repeatedly witnessed the boy’s behavior, Freud concluded, “it was a game”: the sole use the infant made of these items “was to play ‘gone’ with them.” A particular observation supported this hypothesis. “The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it,” recounts Freud. “It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did,” as Freud recalls, “was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive fort. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful da [‘there’]. This, then,” states Freud, “was the complete game—disappearance and return” (9). Freud’s initial interpretation of this ludic function relates to his grandson’s achievement in social terms: the child repudiated the instinctual satisfaction gained from not protesting his mother’s absence; this self-discipline exemplified a libidinal renunciation for which the fort-da exercise provided recompense. On reflection, however, this explanation dissatisfies Freud. “The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then,” asks Freud, “does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?” (9). The answer to this question lies in the boy’s passive situation when his mother absented herself. At first, his nascent awareness of her departure overpowered him, reasons Freud, but by simulating the act of maternal departure in the form of a game, the child became an active participant in his own dilemma. “These efforts,” thinks Freud, “might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not.” Notwithstanding the logic of this deduction, Freud rejects this thesis too, submitting two alternative explanations in which the second subordinates the first: the child mastered an unpleasant situation with his fort-da game and the amusement afforded by this exercise expressed his revenge. “Throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone,’” posits Freud, “might satisfy an impulse of the child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him” (10). Thus,

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the fort-da game has “a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself’” (10); the ludic function actualizes a step on the psychological road to personal identity and independence. The parallel I am drawing between Freud’s eighteen-month-old grandson, as a housebound infant, and McCarthy’s John Grady Cole, as a prospective emigrant from his motherland, implies that the teenage Cole is expostulating, “All right, America, don’t mother me (you no longer embody my beliefs, ideals, and practices). I don’t need you. I am leaving you for a surrogate mother, one who meets my needs and expectations: Mexico.” The age difference between the two subjects may seem to argue against my analogy, but disruption of an infantile phase of psychological maturation leaves a legacy that remains active into adult life. Moreover, sociohistorical factors pertain to the unconscious in significant ways, and Freud’s explanation of the fort-da game, which overly relies on the paradigm of the nuclear family, actually works in favor of this interpretational analogy. A nascent subject within Freud’s favored social structure faces two opposed but interlinked demands: he must not only find satisfaction in a single parent, his mother, but also gain that fulfillment despite the repression demanded by orthodox family relations. Although John Grady Cole was born in 1933, when the nuclear family was the standard American kindred structure, McCarthy offers a different scenario in All the Pretty Horses, a scenario that anticipates postwar alterations to the environment formative of attachment behavior. Hence, in terms of a literary hermeneutic, the dissolution of the nuclear family severely complicates the equivalence between the Freudian infant and the infant Cole; instead of Cole’s behavior taxing maternal devotion, his mother’s actions sow the troubled seeds of her son’s psychological maturation. “We were married ten years before the war come along,” Cole’s father latterly tells his son. “She was gone from the time you were six months old till you were about three. I know you know somethin about that and it was a mistake not to of told you. We separated. She was in California” (25). That neither Cole nor his father ever uses the Christian name of Cole’s mother implies the psychological blanking that accompanies the compromised development of the boy’s subjectivity. Ordinarily, cowboy culture operates according to a sexual division of labor, which expects women to superintend the space of domesticity, providing the physical and emotional background that not only supports men’s economic labors outside the home, but also supplies and nurtures the laborers (both male and female) of the future. For the nascent subject, these social relations foreground the maternal while obscuring the paternal presence, a gendered asymmetry that the father’s demands on the mother slowly begin to rebalance. Cole’s mother, however, upsets these standard structures. A double loss informs the nascent subject and this twofold absence necessitates a psychological treatment of McCarthy’s protagonist in All the Pretty Horses. The novel cannot but follow the lead of John Grady Cole’s unconscious. For, unlike the Freudian case, the departure from Texas of Cole’s mother signals not minutes, nor hours, but years of maternal absence. She does not nurture her son and disregards the expectations of maternal responsibility; in consequence, two female house servants, Luisa and her mother Abuela, must tend John Grady. “Luisa looked after you,” confirms Cole’s father. “Her and Abuela” (25). In Freud’s nuclear family, the mother tends her child “without any outside help” (8), but the infant Cole relies on two surrogates. “Una abuela” translates from Spanish into English as “a grandmother,” making Abuela’s Luisa, in effect, “a mother.” These familiar names for blood relations

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belie the fact that the two women’s attendance on the infant Cole, which cannot help but present a shifting female image, is unfamiliar in kindred terms. The cues of kin- related recognition, which Cole’s father provides on the paternal side, remain barely exercised in their maternal register. In short, his mother’s fleeting presence followed by her long-term absence traumatizes Cole’s developing psyche. That he will forever withhold his mother’s Christian name, as a conditional secret respected by his father, expresses through silence his devastating attachment to her absence. Lacan’s emendation of Freudian fort-da theory, which reemphasizes the basic paradigm, but without recourse to Freud’s methodological sleights of hand, helps to interrogate McCarthy’s skill in delineating this form of psychological disturbance. The first of Freud’s prestidigitations involves his data collection. Freud gathered much of his fort-da evidence “not from the episode itself,” chronicles John Brenkman, “but from the boy’s behavior a year later” (148). The second sleight of hand, as Brenkman observes, concerns Freud’s interpretation of the libidinal content of the fort- da exercise, which “clearly derives from the observations made between the time the child was three-and-a-half and nearly six” (149). Adducing his overall analysis axiomatically from a later stage of psychical development is Freud’s third prestidigitation. Thus, the Oedipus complex, weighing in favor of the maturing boy’s desire for revenge, erroneously influences Freud’s interpretation of an earlier stage of psychical development. In contrast, Lacan does not deny the incidence and importance of fort-da behavior as a normal part of psychological maturation, but reinterprets this game in interrelational terms: the nascent subject traverses two successive domains, the “real” and the “imaginary,” before the ludic function draws him into the “symbolic” realm of language. In the neonatal state of the real, maintains Lacan, the infant is a non-subject unable to distinguish between himself and the “Other” that satisfies his requirements. His “first status as an infant,” Éric Laurent explains, “is to be a lost part of that Other” (“Alienation and Separation [II]” 30). The real is the easiest stage of psychical development to define but the most difficult to describe. In a sense, one cannot talk about the real; any such discussion is impossible. The moment the real becomes an object of discourse, its description by symbolic components (individuals and language) negate its existence. One can only study the real in its effects on the imaginary, which is the prelinguistic phase of subjective coalescence, and on the symbolic, which grounds the subject in society. Nonetheless, “as Lacan argues in many different contexts,” and as Brenkman emphasizes, “a child’s dependence on its mother is a dependence on her love” (146). She is the nascent subject’s all-powerful Other. That the psychological limbo of prenatal existence lasts for approximately six months, and that his mother deserts Cole when he is “six months old” (25), are therefore significant details in All the Pretty Horses. Her abandonment of Cole, when she simply “left out of here” (25), imposes on her child a psychical separation from the maternal Other, not as a gradual ontogenetic process, but as a sharp transition dictated from beyond rather than from within the prospective subject. Cole’s delightful freedom of non-presence in the presence of his mother is dramatically curtailed and only the attenuated succor of Luisa and Abuela as substitute mothers accompanies his separation from the maternal Other. This unsatisfactory state of affairs is the “tuché,” or Lacanian trauma, which accompanies Cole’s transition into the imaginary.

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The self-awareness that arises in the imaginary, an ability that Lacan designates as “mirror imaging,” emanates from an evolutionarily fostered fascination with aesthetic form. This developmental phase, in which the infant becomes aware of himself as a fractured collection of parts that are distinct from their surroundings and thereafter slowly learns to appreciate his body as a single unit of interconnected parts, lasts for approximately twelve months. Confronted by his mirror image not only in the specular glass, but also in the movements of other people, and especially in his mother’s actions, the baby eventually recognizes the self-enclosed nature of human physiology. For Cole, the nascent self-awareness suggested by his appearance at the opening of the novel is at once restricted and distorted. The image Cole first presents to the reader, which occurs as he enters his grandfather’s homestead to pay his respects over the dead man’s body, is a form of projection. Whereas “the candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered,” the “black suit[ed]” Cole “stood in the dark glass,” as if trapped within the reflective process of mourning as unfulfilled self-enlightenment. Moreover, the rigor mortis both of his grandfather’s dead body and in “the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscoting” of the hallway repay the young Cole’s obsequies (3; emphasis added). Cole is “initially framed by reflecting glass” (36), as Stephen Tatum notes, but this Lacanian mirroring within a frame amounts to more than Tatum’s motif of “reflections” that “cast shadows” (35). To varying extents, every mature subject’s relation to society is analogous to that nascent subject’s interaction with his mirror image, because the emerging subject’s situation relates to an unattainable ideal. The pall of shadowing in this scene, therefore, connotes two images of perfection beyond Cole’s reach: his mother and his cowboy heritage. Notwithstanding the identification of mirror imaging, the emerging subject does not realize his capacity for independent action at this time—the self-sufficiency of reflected forms goes unnoticed. “Self-identity is thereby caught in the conflict between the experience of an uncoordinated body invested with needs, affects, and unmastered movements,” as Brenkman explains, “and an imaginary body that forms the core of the subject’s ego. At the same time, this experience marks the original split in the subject’s relation to the body; the erotogenic body is divided from the body image” (156). Reflected in his grandfather’s corpse, as in a mirror darkly, is the imaginary body of the black-suited Cole. Enlightenment dawns on Cole, but this is the dark, negative, or absent knowledge that death “was not sleeping. That was not sleeping” (4). Significantly, as one can surmise from Cole’s tendency to avoid his specular image, the curtailment of delightful freedom in his mother’s presence—the suddenness and completeness of which the shifting attendance of his Mexican surrogates only accentuated—dominated his transition through the imaginary. His mother’s withdrawal from the home was formative of Cole’s fractured self-awareness. His Mexican lover, Alejandra Rocha, will briefly inspire Cole with the hope of resetting these psychological shards. “Such harborage,” as Terrell L. Tebbetts points out, “would make him no longer a wanderer over the surface of the earth but a man rooted in it” (51). Hence, on the one occasion when the teenage Cole does contemplate himself in a mirror, which occurs after a drunken fight in response to his permanent split from Alejandra, a self-apprehending gaze confirms Cole’s personal sense of shattered subjectivity. Inaugurated over fifteen years earlier, as the hazy condition of the glass adumbrates, the unmistakable signs emanating from his mother’s initial absence

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persist. Maternal absence, implies All the Pretty Horses, both impels Cole’s self-scrutiny and confirms his self-focused expectations. Cole does not see anything other than his fractured self: “He studied his face in a clouded glass. His jaw was bruised and swollen. If he moved his head in the mirror to a certain place he could restore some symmetry to the two sides of his face and the pain was tolerable if he kept his mouth shut” (255). He can only stand and endure this painful reconfirmation. According to Lacan, self-imagery makes identification and recognition a separate, or distanced, fiction that guides the efforts of the infant toward autonomy. These attempts elicit a specific form of joy, or Lacanian jouissance, when the nascent subject both identifies with his reflected image and recognizes his control over that image. Even so, insists Lacan, the maternal Other is the locus in which subjective characteristics become present, with the mother the ultimate selector and articulator of her child’s jouissance. Paradoxically, while a feeling of articulated control replaces the infant subject’s sense of fractured self, any attendant feelings of independence are an illusion because the infant remains wholly dependent on his mother. Conversely, as “the real substance at stake for jouissance” (Laurent, “Alienation and Separation [II]” 31), the child is constitutive of the maternal Other’s desire. The infant Cole, as a part of his mother’s jouissance, was an obstruction to her own desire. This obstacle presented the threat of aphanisis, which Ernest Jones (writing in Freud’s shadow and prefiguring Lacan) defines in the “Early Development of Female Sexuality” (1927) as “the total, and of course permanent, extinction of the capacity (including the opportunity) for sexual enjoyment.” Aphanisis, insists Jones, is “the fundamental fear which lies at the basis of all neuroses” (23). In McCarthy’s novel, Cole’s mother did not want the restrictions of married motherhood, which her own mother’s position in the paternal homestead had prefigured. Instead of the cares and responsibilities that attend the role of the maternal Other, she desires the freedoms of single womanhood. Cole is her only child, and her divorce from his father is final before her own father’s death. Subsequently, her stage career, on the one hand, and the men that attend her, on the other hand, signify her release from familial and social expectations. That she is an actress, someone who defers to a playwright’s artistic practice, is rather ironic: her freedom is as illusory, or fictional, as the roles she plays on stage. In effect, her career puts a psychological impediment on display. In Lacanian terms, the human self comes into being through a fundamentally aesthetic type of recognition and, as the separation involved in mirror imaging suggests, complete unity of selfhood is unattainable. The partial coalescence of identity results from the identification of the self with a false image of that self. This imaginary Other prescribes a yearning in adulthood for the omniscience of articulated control so fleetingly experienced during mirror imaging. Put simply, what is commonly called “the self” is not the self at all but an imaginary (or illusory) Other, which Lacan calls the “specular I.” Nevertheless, that mirror imaging replaces the feeling of physical inarticulation with an awareness of physiological self-expression indicates that the maturing infant is receptive to articulated systems; as a result, semiotic manifestations come within the purlieu of the developing subject. Lacan appropriates Freud’s account of his grandson’s actions with a cotton reel to trace this stage in psychological maturation. The fort-da game, which responds to the lengthening absences of the maternal Other that accompany the child’s development, and which signals the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, is a phenomenon

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of both consciousness and linguistics: this behavior does not so much express the subject’s wish for revenge as the desire for situational interactions that will acquaint that subject with the symbolic. “Need matures into Desire via recognition from the Other” (73–74), as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan states, and “Desire,” as James M. Mellard notes, “is imaged by Lacan as the ‘dérive de la jouissance’” (121). Paternal authority now comes into play. The father uses language to call the mother, which takes her away from their child and the tasks of motherhood, and the developing subject begins to notice the recurring nature of these summonses. In All the Pretty Horses, two sources of male symbolic usage—neither of which Cole’s father provides—tempt Cole’s mother away from her son: the words of playwrights—the majority of whom are men—and those of her lovers. In the first case, “looking for some point of connection,” relates Tebbetts, Cole “hitchhikes to San Antonio through a long and bitter winter day to see his mother in her play. He hopes to grasp her world, what it is to her.” Their two domains, however, as Tebbetts implies, are mirror images: “she has seen nothing in the ranch, while he loves it; he sees nothing in the play, while she loves it” (40). To one enamored of the stage, or the theatrics of an indoor space, the geographical expanse of a cowboy ranch remains untenable. To one inculcated by cowboy culture, or man’s ecological environing of outdoor spaces, the strict delimitations imposed by the proscenium arch elicit little interest. Thus, men other than her husband keep Cole’s mother from him, and the absence enforced by these Others significantly exceeds the brief departures normally occasioned by the man who shares a home with his wife and son. In Lacanian terms, the absences caused by the male use of language inscribe a trace of “specific castration” in the psyche of the maturing subject. Repeated occasions of calling the maternal Other away from her charge imply that the mother is “not-all.” She represents a lack related to sexual difference, but this absence is symbolic rather than biological, with the signifier that names this female lack being the Lacanian “phallus.” The phallus is the privileged signifier that dominates the symbolic and determines the meanings of other signifiers. Through the process of language, humans discover and learn to accept the symbolic order by repressing what is unacceptable to orthodox standards. Vestigial desire for the real and the joy associated with imaginary mastery become the unconscious part of the psyche. In this way, an individual becomes a fit member of society—what Lacanian terms the “social I.” For Cole, however, attempts to expand the significance of his fort-da game fall foul of interactions and relationships that confirm the initial trauma inflicted by that exercise: his mother’s two-and-a-half-year maternal absence encapsulates not only his transition into the imaginary, but also his shift into the symbolic. The genesis, dynamics, and relays of the fort-da game instantiate a formative subject’s first interpersonal relationship. Hence, the fort-daexercise at once reveals the prospect of intersubjectivity and introduces the subject to language. “The game,” avers Brenkman, “is an appeal to, an opening onto, a leap toward interactions which the situational context of the child’s experience does not immediately provide”; as with the later Oedipus complex,the fort-da exercise is a dialectical rite of passage “between the self-activity of speaking-playing and the institutionally constrained discourses and interactions in the situation itself” (150). Freud, although guilty of methodological sleights of hand, was correct in attributing significance to actions that combine occultation (as in the cotton reel disappearing from his grandson’s sight) with the conjugation of the phonemes fort and da. “No one would dispute that Freud was

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right,” states Lacan in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power” (1958), “to translate” his grandson’s behavior “immediately by the Fort! Da! of the German he as an adult spoke.” Even so, maintains Lacan, “phonetic perfection is less important than phonemic distinction” (497). By entering the linguistic system, the subject begins to assimilate a structure of differences, but must do so in medias res. This absorption is necessary for the child’s development into a functioning member of society, and the world of signs, as a domain characterized by long-standing antinomies, awaits that subject with a predetermined position. In the context of the nuclear family, these binary oppositions include father/ mother, husband/wife, male/female, brother/sister, mother/son, father/daughter, mother/ daughter, and father/son. Lacan’s famous S/s (or Signifier/signified) of urinary segregation, which inverts Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition of the sign as Signified/signifier, underscores this point. Signs that differentiate between washrooms according to gender—“Ladies” and “Gentlemen”—need not denote a difference in signifieds, asserts Lacan in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud” (1957): the water closet for women and men might be separate rooms but can be conceptually identical. In this instance, visual signifiers S1 and S2 do not denote distinguishable signifieds s1 and s 2; rather, S1 and S 2 state and confirm orthodox attitudes toward sexual difference. Put succinctly, signifiers tell subjects where to go and into which segregational category they fit, with Lacan’s reversal of Saussurean precedence emphasizing the Lacanian contention that signifiers hold primacy over signifieds. The maternal Other relays not only the first of these signifiers—initially she is the child’s exclusive language provider—but also a wider sense of otherness to the maturing subject—language is a form of communal expression. The mother dominates her infant’s imaginary domain and oversees (or referees) her child’s fort-da game; as Brenkman points out, “her exclusive discourse defines her ‘omnipotence’” (146). In Cole’s case, the non-presence of the maternal Other during mirror imaging anticipates the master signifier of maternal absence during his fort-da exercise, and his mother’s return to the family approximately eighteen months into the third and final Lacanian phase of her son’s psychological maturation corroborates his primary acknowledgment of his mother’s nonpresence. She is too late to heal Cole’s tuché and her reappearance merely exacerbates his unresolved fort-da tension. “Even when they are together,” Tebbetts observes, “they are apart” (40). Unsurprisingly, a lack of maternal bonding during childhood has instilled in Cole both a precocious awareness of the illusory dimension of human autonomy and a pronounced lack of linguistic articulation. “You dont talk much,” observes a truck driver who picks up the hitchhiking teenager. “Not a whole lot” (19), replies the mutedly grateful hiker, before relapsing into silence. Cole’s bilingualism testifies to the presence during his infancy of an American father and Mexican surrogate mothers, while his reticence bears witness to his formative tuché. The need to heal this scar—a pressure that overemphasizes the “not-all” of womanhood—becomes the unconscious impetus behind Cole’s desire for jouissance. Cole’s father unconsciously helps to transcribe his son’s anxiety onto a related plane by teaching him chess. This ludic translation serves Cole’s unappeased appetite for deracinating a certain element of desire, with chess supplying a repetitive substitute for formative fort-da situations. “Whatever in repetition is varied,” asserts Lacan in The Four Fundamentals of Psycho-Analysis (1977), “is merely alienation of its

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meaning. The adult, and even the more advanced child, demands something new in his activities, in his games. But this ‘sliding-away’ (glissement) conceals what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition in itself” (61). The fort-da game exhibits this glissement. The formative subject manifests itself, argues Lacan, as an insistence that the story should always be the same, that its recounted realization should be ritualized, that is to say, textually the same. This requirement of a distinct consistency in the details of its telling signifies that the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization to succeed in designating the primacy of the significance as such. To develop it by varying the significations is, therefore, it would seem, to elude it. This variation makes one forget the aim of the significance by transforming its act into a game, and giving it certain outlets that go some way to satisfying the pleasure principle. (61–62). The fort-da exercise repeatsthe tuché of the mother’s departure, but is not identical with that trauma; rather, this repetition entails something radically different. “The fort-da game, then, opens a field of playing and speaking,” as Brenkman states, “which can develop various permutations and transformations. There is no reason to assume that the game, however much it takes its significance from repetition, does not also contain the possibility of new uses, elaborations, applications” (147). In All the Pretty Horses, the game of chess, as an iterative source of radical difference, becomes one means by which John Grady Cole temporarily satisfies his need for jouissance. Chess exemplifies a markedly different class of pastime from many kinds of recreation because tactical problems of complete information that exclude chance are not games in the usual sense. “Chess is a well-defined form of computation,” as John von Neumann—the father of game theory—once explained to Jacob Bronowski. “You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution; a right procedure in any position” (324). Every contingency in chess is open to tabulation. The permutations of the game, which rely on projecting various pieces into the territory shared by one’s opponent, as if jettisoning objects to elicit responses from a particular Other, provide an elaborate set of fort-da variations. Cole plays chess against his father until the age of eight. Then, in a parallel to his mother’s absence, Cole’s father leaves home. He must serve overseas in WWII and his son’s major ludic outlet is frustrated. The translation of chess from a fort-da to an Oedipal situation, which would see Cole gain enough experience to beat his father over the chessboard, is indefinitely deferred because Cole Senior’s ordeals as a prisoner of war deplete his mental reserves and, on his return from the East, he has only “the patience to play poker” (11). This recreation soon turns into a kind of a vocation. The remains of his acumen enable Cole Senior to lose himself in the adrenalin surge of semiprofessional gambling rather than the shattered memories of war. On one occasion, John Grady offers to “bring the chessboard” (11) to his father’s hotel room, but Cole Senior is not interested. This denial breaks a gaming provenance handed down from father to son and represents a newly severed family tie. As a result, John Grady opens his ludic faculty to another form of play, with life on his maternal grandfather’s ranch offering him a role, or Lacanian “fantasy,” which not only feeds his lack of jouissance, but also satisfies his desire for independence. This formative vocation also proffers Cole an unconventional mirror. “The souls of horses,” as the old “mozo” (110) Luis will later tell him, “mirror the souls of men” (111), and Cole learns to appreciate equine companionship. Horses become a matter of both

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metaphysical mirroring—somewhat making up in a spiritual way for his shattered mirror imaging as an infant—and corporeal blood consciousness. Unfortunately, with the death of his grandfather, which allies the passing of cowboy culture with a previous social extinction, the demise of the Comanche as a “nation” (5), Cole’s patrilineage hands him another “bum deal.” Ostensible power over Cole’s future—in what John G. Cawelti calls “a depressed West Texas in the immediate aftermath of World War II” (115)—passes to his mother. As inheritrix, his now “all-powerful” mother tries to force Cole’s psychological hand, pressurizing him to enter college. She desires his self- identification with the signifier “student” instead of “cowboy.” Postwar economics supports this shift in designation. Cole disagrees, but she demands that he “go to school.” Commonsense supports her suggestion: “You cant run a ranch,” she insists, “you’re sixteen years old” (15). From the Freudian fort-da perspective, a cowboy in his mother’s judgment is a “bad boy,” while a student is a “good boy.” This attempt at enforced signification has a Lacanian dimension. While Cole identifies with one signifier (s1), his mother affixes a different signifier (s2) to him. His mother’s ideal will impinge on Cole throughout his life, with alienation insisting on the preeminence of that designation. “At the very moment at which the subject identifies with such a signifier, he is petrified,” explains Laurent. “He is defined as if he were dead, or as if he were lacking the living part of his being that contains his jouissance” (“Alienation and Separation [I]” 25). His mother’s attempt to replace her son’s fantasy threatens to remove the jouissance from Cole’s life. That Cole catches sight of his mother in the Menger Hotel, San Antonio, after her evening stage performance, on the arm of an unrecognized man, and that the receptionist finds “no Cole” (22) in the hotel register confirm that his mother has shed her role as John Grady’s source of maternal pleasure. Although alienated from the maternal Other via the superimposition of “student” over “cowboy,” this dominant signifier does not totally define Cole; in consequence, he falls back on the identification tentatively formed during mirror imaging. He unconsciously addresses his need for jouissance through the signifiers “Luisa” and “Abuela” and the trace of their shifting referential presence. This combination of substitutes posits the deracination of Cole’s jouissance from his primary motherland, Texas, and its replanting in the motherland of his surrogates, Mexico. The adolescent Cole’s “gone,” which echoes the “fort” of Freud’s grandson, relates to Mexico, while his “there,” to complete the psychoanalytical schema with a “da,” relates to Texas. In Lacanian terms, Cole’s “I’m already gone” (27) is a subjective expression: “it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained” (62). This urge for psychical relocation is of a chronotopic order, being both spatial and temporal, with the space demarcated by Mexico supposedly offering Cole an autochthonic, less “civilized,” more “natural,” and therefore wholesome, or unitary, environment. “Rocked in his saddle,” as Dianne C. Luce’s metaphor suggests of the horse riding Cole, “this dreaming infant ventures into an alien land” (61). As if on a rocking horse, the teenage John Grady immigrates to Mexico in a play for jouissance, as Lacan’s emendation of Freud’s fort-da analysis substantiates. The cotton-reel is not so much symbolic of the mother as synecdochic of the nascent subject. The baby, attached as he is to the reel via the thread he holds, experiences a psychological form of self- mutilation. This savage projection, which signals a break from the imaginary, starts to

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put the order of significance into perspective. The emerging subject detaches a part of himself in response to what the mother’s absence has created on the frontier of his domain. The reel, which in Lacanian guise manifests the petit object a (autre), is the subject’s formative part. Hence, the fort-da game repeatedly manifests a Spaltung (or division of the subject). Mexico is “the other South,” el otro sud, of which Ann Fisher- Wirth writes with reference to McCarthy’s canon: “not the place one is born but the place the stringent longings of one’s imagination make one come to” (115; emphases added). Freud’s notion of Spaltung is an intersystemic one, which gives rise to the ego-id division. In the process of splitting, as Joël Dor explains, “the subject may be cut off from a part of his psychic contents through the action of repression.” In contrast, Lacan’s understanding of Spaltung is “plurisystemic,” and “proceeds from the subject’s own subjection to a third order, the symbolic” (129). “Lacan argues,” as Ragland- Sullivan observes, “that language is driven by an excess in jouissance itself, denoted by object a. Insofar as the three forms of jouissance—of meaning (the symbolic), body (the imaginary), and the physiological organism (the real)—all seek to maintain consistency (i.e., to close out the conflicts of the real that disrupt the conscious illusion that the body, being, and language work in harmony with one another),” states Ragland- Sullivan, “object a marks a limit point” (188). The fort-da game for Lacan represents a splitting of the object of desire. Spaltung is therefore a defense mechanism that divides an anxiety-provoking referent into a good part and a bad part. Cole’s prorogated answer to the formidable psychological perimeter created around his formative subjectivity by his mother’s prolonged (and now irrevocable) absence is to cross that perimeter during adolescence. Spatial dissection into a hospitable portion (the land of Cole’s prospects) and a hostile portion (the land of Cole’s prememories and memories) characterizes his teenage behavior. Cole leaves America behind as the motherland that has changed beyond recognition (personified by the different roles his mother plays on the stage) and that has forged loyalties with Other parties (his mother’s attachment to lovers other than her husband). The teenager posits Mexico as his welcoming, comforting, and revivifying motherland. Mexico is the nostalgic replacement for the lack inspired by his original but disloyal mother. In semiotic terms, the signified (or mental construct) of a motherland never alters for Cole, but the corresponding referent changes from America to Mexico, as the attendant signifier attests. This strategy, as All the Pretty Horses explores, fits with the sociohistorical sense that cowboys no longer fit seamlessly into the American cultural landscape. The postwar cowboy—a nonconformist of the Truman and Eisenhower years, but one whose countercultural identity was being usurped by a new generation of peripatetic nonconformists, the type of men immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)— was becoming isolated, as James Bowman argues, “in being entirely idiosyncratic” (186). “How the hell do they expect a man to ride a horse in this country?” complains Rawlins on encountering another barbed wire fence on their ride toward the Mexican border. “They dont,” is Cole’s simple but knowing reply (31). On the one hand, as John Blair argues, “Texas has become the United States in its larger, undifferentiated sense, a place where history is no more than the moment, where everything is new and everything is relative” (301). On the other hand, as the metal barbs strung along these Texan fences imply, the cowboy is no longer welcome in a cultural landscape that used to be his own.

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That Cole, Rawlins, and Jimmy Blevins (the preteen runaway who dogs their steps before joining them) undertake their journey south using equine rather than automotive horsepower symbolizes their rejection of this cultural shift. These horses stand out against a background of American industrialization as an anachronistic means of transport,but supposedly help their riders merge into the apparently natural and authentic context provided by Mexico. Such an interpretation supports the first part of Vereen Bell’s thesis concerning All the Pretty Horses, which understands Cole’s aim as a desire to “move back in history,” but not the second part of Bell’s proposal, which somewhat confusingly suggests that Cole also aims for “a place outside of time” (926). John Grady Cole, like the biblical figure with whom he shares the initials JC, banishes himself from his motherland. Cole’s exile takes him into what many of his American contemporaries would deem the wilderness of South America. Nonetheless, wherever Cole travels, and whatever his adventures produce in the way of experiences, an anachronistic quality accompanies him. Nancy Kreml cites McCarthy’s “use of rare and arcane vocabulary” in this regard. Words such as “espaliered” (73) and “isinglass” (242) are not “old or rare enough to be marked as archaic in common dictionaries, yet the reader recognizes them as rarely occurring in common speech” (47). By explicitly italicizing these instances of arcane language, McCarthy marks their distance from the phatic ease of a common mother tongue—and this tendency toward linguistic alienation from the self attends Cole throughout the novel. Cole still requires a maternal substitute, however, and believes that ranching in Mexico will supply that need. At a fundamental level, Cole’s translocation is an attempt to reassign a calming correspondence between the signifier and signified of the stable and comforting sign connotative of his original formative territory, the womb. This wakening dream of prenatal utopia calls on Cole’s desire; as a result, his passage across the river that separates Mexico from the USA has that Heideggerian sense “from which something begins its presencing” (152). They rode across the river “naked” and on the far bank they “turned and looked back at the country they’d left. No one spoke” (45). This river acts as a division between two cultures, cultures that share certain elements, but in which one language (English or Spanish) dominates the other (Spanish or English). In The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes argues that the proleptic edge of such a “faille” (or fault) is a seam, “mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed” (6). Sullivan draws on Barthes’s assertion in her interpretation of “Cormac McCarthy and the Text ofJouissance” (1995). “If, as Barthes suggests, the textof jouissance represents the seam between culture and its destruction, then Blood Meridian [1985],” believes Sullivan, “is the ‘text of jouissance’ par excellence, since it portrays civilization at the meridian.” Cole, Rawlins, and Blevins’s silent fording of the river in All the Pretty Horses supports Sullivan’s general argument at the level of character delineation. At either critical level, however, presence reveals absence; “by extension,” as Sullivan reasons, “nothing will be found lacking in a narrative voice until some other voice contests, creating a rupture in which silence, however momentary, marks an absence, poses a question, or plants suspicion” (120). This silent rupture in All the Pretty Horses, this momentary rapture of rebirth for the three young cowboys, accords with Sullivan’s wider suggestion that McCarthy’s texts of jouissance “are figurations of a provocative desire which reveals

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glimpses of what Lacan calls the ‘want-to-be’ (manque-à-être), our own powerful, unassuageable desire or lack” (122). Although the presencing of the young cowboys begins on the southern side of the river, a sense of haunting still follows them. If “Little Sister Death,” in the guise of “a little dirt girl with eyes like a toy bear’s and two patent-leather pigtails” (972), stalks Quentin Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), then Jimmy Blevins, who is “double bred for death by fire” (68), is “Little Brother Death” to Cole and Rawlins.3 “Many of the trials John Grady endures,” as Luce observes, “derive from Jimmy Blevins” (62). Blevins’s unexpected separation from his companions, which frees the teenagers of responsibility for their younger charge, appears to discount this omen, but this reassurance will prove short-lived. In the meantime, work on Don Héctor Rocha’s ranch answers Cole and Rawlins’s desires, their horse-wrangling skills appearing to seal the success of their Mexican relocation. The name of this ranch, La Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, appears to confirm Cole’s immaculate rebirth, and he and Rawlins are immediately at home with what Phillip A. Snyder identifies as the binary construct of cowboy culture in which “independence/ integration” (203) represents the duality of self-sufficiency and teamwork. Impressing Don Héctor as an aficionado, however, Cole’s horsemanship both reveals and facilitates his continued search for jouissance. This need, which is critical in comparison to Rawlins’s correspondingly muted desire, finds twofold satisfaction on the ranch. In a general sense, Mexico succeeds as Cole’s maternal Other, but in a specific sense, the Padron’s daughter, Alejandra, manifests the female Other of his dreams. Alejandra becomes a libidinal object, an object of Cole’s jouissance, a presence that stills his latent anxiety. Cole’s permanent admittance to the territory of Mexican signification appears imminent. “For Lacan,” writes James D. Lilley, “speech enables us to vocalize our desire for the Mother, to establish an artificial linguistic order in the empty middle ground between ourselves and the absent Mother’s womb” (278). La Purísima, which Linda Woodson calls a self-contained “discourse community” (151), seems to offer Cole the chance to fulfill his ultimate aim: a satisfactory entrance into the symbolic realm of language. McCarthy’s unmarked use of Spanish in an English novel—the occurrence of non-italicized foreign words that are not explicitly translated into the host language— inevitably increase as Cole immerses himself in the discourse community at Don Héctor’s ranch. In an analogy to the physical border between Texas and Mexico, with its implications of rebirth, la Purísima appears to bear Cole into what Kremlterms McCarthy’s novelistic “world of permeable borders between languages” (44). Nevertheless, as Lilley notes, “we can only approximate an encounter with the real, bouncing our ineffectual language off of its surface […] in a vain attempt to establish a connection with, and domination over, our surroundings” (278–79). Cole, the aficionado, successfully breaks horses, but the equine locus is the real, not the symbolic. “ForLacan,” agrees Lilley, “the real represents the underlying, inarticulable nature of reality figured by the Mother’s position in the Oedipal triangle” (278). Cole’s attempt to break in(to) this particular aspect of primary reality necessarily redounds on him. “Analysis has shown us,” states Lacan in “In Memory of Ernest Jones” (1959), “that it is with images that captivate his eros as a living individual that the subject manages to ensure his implication in the signifying sequence” (595). The sight of Alejandra captivates Cole’s formative sense of eroticized meaning, but man-child that he is, Cole

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initially signals his responsive desire through a third party. “Their courtship is a mutual seduction and a not altogether loving contest of wills marked by their riding in turns the lathered stallion hot from his covering the mares. John Grady rides the horse,” notes Luce, “because it gives him the illusion of potencyboth in the sense of control and in the sexual sense” (59). Cole bolsters this fantasy with his recourse to the Spanish language. “Soy comandante de las yeguas,” he tells the stallion, “yo y yo sólo” (128). His subsequent affair with Alejandra seemingly attests to Cole’s successful arrogation of the stallion’s potency, but “I am the commander of mares, I and I alone,” is a statement that Alejandra’s vitality will explode. For, as Lacan states about the general case, and as previously noted about Cole, “the human individual is not without presenting some indulgence toward this fragmentation of his images” (595). One night, on riding back to the ranch from the western mesa, John Grady and Alejandra come to a lake. Indulging specular disintegration, Cole first disrobes before walking out into the water, which is “so dark” that his mirror image disappears completely. He turns his gaze to the “so pale, so pale” (141) Alejandra, who is still on the shore, to embody the fluidly maternal (amniotic) embrace he seeks. Cole has psychosomatically split and inverted his desire. His own body is lost in the dark subliminal water, while the pale female form of the littoral Alejandra reflects his willful need. Alejandra then echoes Cole’s process of specular fragmentation: first, she disrobes, “like a chrysalis emerging” (141); second, she enters the water, leaving part of her (Lacanian real) self on the shore. Significantly, however, “it is not the connections of need, from whichthese images are detached, that sustain their perpetuated impact; rather,” as Lacan maintains, “it is the articulated sequence in which they are inscribed that structures their insistence as signifying. This is why, sexual demand,” avows Lacan, “assuming it need but present itself orally, ‘ectopizes’ images of introjection into the field of ‘genital’ desire” (595). In effect, Alejandra’s immersion in the lake fulfils Cole’s fragmentary desire, which presents him to Alejandra in easily consumable pieces. Their subsequent sexual encountersrealize this psychological state of affairs. “When she comes to Cole’s bed in the bunkhouse on nine consecutive nights,” observes Gail Moore Morrison, Alejandra “is more overtly the aggressor in the consummation of their romance” (181). He penetrates her, but she consumes him. In “drawing blood with her teeth where he had held the heel of his hand against her mouth that she not cry out” (142), as if she were eating Cole, Alejandra enacts a form of assimilation. This female Other tries to absorb her male partner into the symbolic. Alejandra’s attempt, however, is bound to fail. On the one hand, she cannot heal the tuché of Cole’s primary relationship with the maternal Other, because the “not-all” female aura embraces all women. On the other hand, Cole’s feelings for Alejandra are an ontological expression, which not only acknowledges jouissance as the one phenomenon of worth, but also links his overriding desire to a manque-à-être, or absence of being. “Not all of the subject can be present in the Other,” affirms Laurent. “There is always a remainder” (“Alienation and Separation [I]” 24). A myth, as Lacan insists, drives the pursuit of one’s sexual complement: “that it is the other, one’s sexual other half, that the living being seeks in love” (205). Alejandra’s great-aunt, Dueña Alfonsa, recognizes the strength of Cole’s sexual immersion, but warns him of her nephew’s inflexible protection of Alejandra. If Cole does not forsake Alejandra, then Don Héctor will permanently separate them. Alfonsa places this prospect before Cole by ludic means. She invites him to play chess and intends the resultant match to indicate the hidden dangers threatening the young

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couple’s game of love. That a woman is in command of the chessboard, which is a cultural anomaly, should counsel Cole to heed her advice.4 Alfonsa’s lesson plays out over three rounds as she explicitly advises Cole to respect Mexican propriety concerning certain types of miscegenation. “Their chess games,” writes Snyder, “serve as an obvious symbolic counterpart to their conversations, which fluctuate continuously along the rivalry/respect border and reflect Alfonsa’s superiority in determining the most effective overall strategy” (217). In this elaborate fort-da variation, Cole projects his pieces into the shared territory of the chessboard, and Alfonsa becomes another of his surrogate mothers. She lets Cole win their first two games, but these defeats are part of an assessment phase, and when the crucial moment comes in the third encounter, Alfonsa is victorious. La Dueña, or “the woman in charge,” loses the match by two points to one, but wins the competition, because only the last round counts in this situation. Hence, just as their contest goes from two endgames in which “he took her queen” and “she conceded and smiled her compliments” (133) to one in which “he lost his queen and conceded” (134), so Cole should admit defeat in his courtship of “Queen” Alejandra. Alfonsa tells him in the parallel linguistic game that Mexican men never forgive their women. Don Héctor will protect his daughter from breaking the taboo on miscegenation because he at once respects and suppresses his women. The female sex “is very important in Mexico,” but “women do not even have the vote” (230). The sexual division of labor on Don Héctor’s ranch, as Dueña Alfonsa appreciates, echoes this environing situation. She knows the soundness of her advice: her own masculinity, the revolutionary fervor she exhibited in her youth, has left her an isolated and lonely figure. That she lost two fingers when a gun exploded in her young hand signals a reproof of gender crossing.5 “A man may lose his honor and regain it again,” she explains. “But a woman cannot.” Cole ventures to comment: “I guess I’d have to say that that don’t seem right.” Dueña Alfonsa, however, insists: “I am the one who gets to say” (137).6 “She is reminded that with John Grady she is speaking to a child,” as Luce observes, “and one of an alien culture to boot; alien despite his fluent Spanish and his experience with his family’s Mexican American workers” (61). As his sangfroid intimates, Cole gains some unconscious satisfaction from his chess games with Alfonsa, which echo the fort-da exercise of his infancy, but he fails to appreciate Dueña Alfonsa’s lesson. A strategy of unconsummated courtship, with its sense of chivalry, would better serve Cole’s amatory goal than the strategy of selfish exploitation by which the Padron reads the young American’s precipitant actions; gradu mutato, colonial supposition rather than deference to Mexican standards seeds Cole’s downfall in Don Héctor’s estimation. Alfonsa’s winning strategy at chess, which points to Cole’s underdeveloped psyche, and presages the risk he runs against the Padron, is one that the impaired bonding of the young man’s familial circumstances denied him as a child, one that he had “never seen before,” one that is called “the King’s Own opening” (134). The king in this part of the continent is Mexican—and the maternal Other must respond to his call. Cole’s treatment at the hands of Dueña Alfonsa, which is little short of a psychoanalytical session, fails. Worse, her strategy has the unintentional effect of fixating Cole on his embodiment of jouissance, Alejandra; in consequence, he fails to read Don Héctor’s subsequent ludic warning. “Do you play billiards?” asks the Padron. “Yessir. Some. Pool anyways.” They enter “a darkened room” that smells of “must and old wood.” The slate was so “crooked” last time Don Héctor played that he had

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“asked Carlos if he could make the table more level” (143). The servant’s efforts seem to have succeeded and, as the Padron pots ball after ball, he slowly turns the conversation to Dueña Alfonsa’s surprise suggestion that Alejandra sojourn in France. Don Héctor does not wish to banish his daughter to a place beyond his control. The French plan, he tells Cole, is one of Dueña Alfonsa’s strange notions, a vestige of her own education “in Europe” (145). Although he does not say as much, Cole’s departure is the Padron’s preferred solution to Alejandra’s waywardness. If the young man will not leave of his own accord, then Don Héctor will have him forcibly removed, but in an untraceable manner. This alternative solution prefigures violent action. The Padron now bends to pot another ball, but misses. “There,” he tells his young opponent. “You see? You see how this is bad for one’s billiard game? This thinking? The French”—and, by implication, all colonialists, including American cowboys—“have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game? No evil is beyond them” (146). Within days, the Mexican authorities arrest Cole and Rawlins, and now the augury of Blevins’s earlier presence as “Little Brother Death” comes to pass: custody briefly reunites the three Americans, torture and probably rape precede Blevins’s murder, and imprisonment at Saltillo faces Cole and Rawlins. Eventually, after both teenagers have been severely injured in violent confrontations with other inmates—the Padron’s sense of mutilation finding the expression he foresaw if Cole failed to heed his ludic warning—Dueña Alfonsa pays for their release. Rawlins immediately returns to America, but Cole does not accompany him. Mexico having let Cole down where America had previously failed, his “good mother” revealing her identity as another “bad mother,” the reanimation of Cole’s tuché now motivates him. His murder of the army captain who murdered Blevins and who ill- treated both Cole and Rawlins results from this psychic trigger. Cole’s final mastery of the captain, and his closure of their unpleasant interrelationship, is not an expression of sated revenge—that mooted explanation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the fort-da exercise—but a deep engagement with the interrelated systems of order and discourse that surround Cole. The young cowboy has finally realized his own transition into the symbolic realm, which his disrupted mirror imaging had retarded, and which had required a violent psychological impulse to effect. His desire, in accordance with Lacan’s thesis in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953), has become “like the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is henceforth his own affliction.” The subject’s “action destroys the object that it causes to appear and disappear by bringing about its absence and presence in advance. His action,” reasons Lacan, “thus negativizes the force field of desire in order to become its own object to itself.” In addressing an abstract concept, such as Mexico, or a tangible subject, such as the Mexican army captain, Cole unconsciously acknowledges that this object “obeys the negativity of his discourse.” Obedience causes this potential partner to fade away; as a result, the subject seeks “to bring about the reversal that brings the partner back to his desire through a banishing summons.” In short, as Lacan explains, “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (262). Cole “releases” the captain one evening—Cole “cuffed the captain’s bracelets through the wooden stirrups and told him he was free to go as far as he thought he could carry the saddle” (280)—but, as if loyal to a banishing summons, as if psychologically trapped between going and coming, Cole’s companion has not moved by morning. In another turnabout, however, three “hombres del pais” (281), who

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appear overnight out of nowhere, take the captain in hand. These dubious characters relieve Cole of his responsibility for the captain and so release him from the grasp of maternal Mexico. Cole’s return to America on the psychological rebound repeats and reverses his initial attempt to escape a bad mother. He again crosses the Mexican-American river boundary “mounted up naked” (286), but this time he is traveling north, and this time the symbolism of rebirth signals his passage through the Oedipus complex: Cole’s father is dead—no one need tell Cole this, he has felt it for some time, and one morning “when he woke he realized that he knew” (283)—and the teenager reenters America. This sorely tried representative of cowboy culture is the sole member of the Cole genealogy. He is no longer the junior Cole; yet, John Grady’s arrival in Texas coincides with the funeral of Abuela, his sometime surrogate mother, and his actions at her graveside confirm the internal schism that continues to affect him. “He called her his abuela,” as if his maternal grandmother by blood had been a genealogical interloper— for Abuela was “his” Luisa’s mother—“and he said goodbye to her in Spanish,” his bilingualism still resounding to his formative psychological split. “Lacan helps at this point,” admits Tebbetts. “John Grady’s loss on the ranch, his dispossession, along with his mother’s abandonment of him and his abuela’s death, may well capture his irrevocable separation from the feminine. His father’s and grandfather’s deaths and his expulsion by Alejandra’s father,” concludes Tebbetts, “capture the failure of the Father’s symbolic order, in which he finds himself to have no place” (54–55). Appropriately, then, when Cole walks through the cemetery of abuela’s burial, he passes “the little headstones and their small remembrances,” including “a chipped milkglass vase,” noting on his way, “the names he knew or had known,” including “Villareal” (300). Cole has traveled far in his search for an authentic (or “real”) place (or “villa”) to live, but his mirror imaging remains flawed (or “chipped”). While McCarthy’s view of the American continent “is thoroughly postlapsarian and thoroughly undifferentiated” (301), as Blair contends, Cole fails to awaken to this environment. “Cole is,” as Blair maintains, “a remnant himself, anachronistic.” Even so, that remnant is not, as Blair believes, “whole within himself” (307). The repetition and reversal of immigration, signaling the autotelic nature of human desire in general, does little to fulfill Cole’s need of jouissance. A child is the obscure object of maternal desire, and any suffering under this objectification is crucial to the understanding and treatment of resultant psychoses. McCarthy’s figuration of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses exemplifies this Lacanian lesson. Neither motherland—neither America not Mexico—wants to mother the cowboy. Cole remains, as Fisher-Wirth notes, “in almost ceaseless motion” (119). The shifting, fading, reappearing, but ultimately dissolving figure of maternity inculcates Cole with a feeling for what Terri Witek terms McCarthy’s canonic leitmotif of “the impermanence of domestic spaces” (140). Cole, as a psychological subject spiraling into an autotelic mise-en-abyme of unsatisfactory substitutes for the unrealizable state of the (Lacanian) real, begins to fade from the awareness of Others. In McCarthy’s vision of postwar America, the descendents of the original Americans—tribal peoples who have almost faded from the scene owing to the colonialism that expropriated their motherland—are the only individuals who can experience Cole’s kind of disappearance. Thus, the scene through which Cole rides at Iraan, Texas, plays out like a split-screen movie. On one side, there is a field of oil derricks, and on the other side, “indians camped on the western plain.” The people in

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this scene, implies McCarthy, are anachronisms. “The indians stood watching him. He could see that none of them spoke among themselves or commented on his riding there nor did they raise a hand in greeting or call out to him” (301). This scene recalls the opening incident in which Cole envisioned the Comanche’s passing. In this instance, however, the figures merge in mirroring each other: “now he is they,” as Tebbetts recognizes, “a transient with no place his home” (57). These indigenes share Cole’s fate. “They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish” (301). According to Cawelti, “McCarthy evokes that mythical Western scene of the hero riding off into the sunset,” knowing that for Cole “there is no more mythical world to cross over into” (116), there is only the forbidding prospect of American industrial and political might. From Cawelti’s perspective, Cole’s itinerancy has been costly; in effect, the wandering cowboy has paid the psychological price for the end of an era: “horse and rider and horse,” as McCarthy delineates, “passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come” (302). Moreover, as Morrison rightly states, Cole’s journey “is a poignant and sobering rite of passage that leaves him still adrift in time and space.” For Morrison, Cole faces a “somber vision of what is to come” (179), which leaves him in limbo, but more accurately adduced, Cole remains a chronotope apart because he remains a psychologically fractured subject. Mexico cannot supplant America as Cole’s all-powerful Other, but America has forsaken him and his kind for its postwar role as a superpower. Beyond and behind this summation, confirming while supplementing Cawelti’s interpretation, however, is McCarthy’s implementation of the Lacanian understanding of aphanisis. In contrast to Jones’s focus on the capacity for sexual enjoyment, Lacan’s definition of aphanisis in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (1960) concerns the “‘fading’ or eclipse of the subject that is closely bound up with the Spaltung”: the subject “suffers from its subordination to the signifier” (686). As Armine Kotin Mortimer explains, “the repressed subject appears only in the fading of the enunciation” (62), and this elision, as Barthes proposes in S/Z (1970), “enables the utterance to shift from one point of view to another” (41–42). Thus, as Lacan contends, “when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance” (218). In Cole’s case, loyalty to an identity that others deem manifestly timeworn obscures the subject behind his chosen signifier: “cowboy,” where Cole is concerned, “indian,” where Cole’s observers are concerned. What is more, as Mortimer insists, “just like the voice of the subject in psychoanalysis, whose origin is unretrievable, the discourse in the plural text— especially in the modern text—is subject to fading at the moment of rapture, and then culture, the other edge, returns. It is that very hole in its discourse that the modern text seeks as rapture, not the violence of rupture” (62). In the final analysis, then, McCarthy affords John Grady Cole his period of rapture. The isolated cowboy figuratively fades away at the end of All the Pretty Horses; this self- imposed aphanisis is the opening rupture of his rapturous nonappearance in the second part of the Border Trilogy, The Crossing (1994); and this rapture ends violently with Cole’s murder in the urban squalor of Cities of the Plain (1998), the novel that closes McCarthy’s trilogy.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Edwin T. “‘Go to Sleep’: Dreams and Visions.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 37–72. Print.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print.

---. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print.

Bell, Vereen. “‘Between the Wish and the Thing the World Lies Waiting.’” Southern Review 28.4 (1992): 920–27. Print.

Blair, John. “Mexico and the Borderlands in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.” Critique 42.3 (2001): 301–7. Print.

Bowman, James. Honor: A History. New York: Encounter, 2007. Print.

Brenkman, John. Culture and Domination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987. Print.

Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. London: Random, 2011. Print.

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. 1970. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1984. Print.

Dor, Joël. Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured like a Language. Ed. Judith Feher Gurewich and Susan Fairfield. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1997. Print.

Ellis, Jay. “Fetish and Collapse in No Country for Old Men.” Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2009. 133–70. Print.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. William Faulkner Novels 1926–1929: Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitoes, Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury. Ed. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: Library of America, 2006. 877–1124. Print.

Fisher-Wirth, Ann. “El Otro Sud: Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy.” Value and Vision in American Literature: Literary Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White. Ed. Joseph Candido. Athens: Ohio UP, 1999. 115–31. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 18. London: Hogarth, 1961. Print.

Hage, Erik. Cormac McCarthy: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, NC: Farland, 2010. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” 1951. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper, 2001. 141–60. Print.

Jones, Ernest. “Early Development of Female Sexuality.” 1927. Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality. Ed. Hendrik Marinus Ruitenbeek. New Haven, CT : College and UP Services, 1966. 21– 35. Print.

Karpman, Ben. “The Psychology of Chess.” The Psychoanalytic Review: An American Journal of Psychoanalysis 24 (1937): 54–69. Print.

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Kreml, Nancy. “Implicatures of Styleswitching in the Narrative Voice of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.” Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties. Ed. Carol Myers-Scotton. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1998. 41–61. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” 1957. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2006. 161–97. Print.

---. “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power.” 1958. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2006. 489–542. Print.

---. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. London: Penguin, 1977. Print.

---. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” 1953. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2006. 197–268. Print.

---. “In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism.” 1959. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 2006. 585–601. Print.

---. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” 1960. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 2012. 223–49. Print.

Laurent, Éric. “Alienation and Separation (I).” Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Including the First English Translation of ‘Position of the Unconscious’ by Jacques Lacan. Ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1995. 19–28. Print.

---. “Alienation and Separation (II).” Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Including the First English Translation of ‘Position of the Unconscious’ by Jacques Lacan. Ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1995. 29–38. Print.

Lilley, James D. “‘The hands of yet other puppets’: Figuring Freedom and Reading Repetition in All the Pretty Horses.” Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2000. 272–87. Print.

Luce, Dianne C. “‘When You Wake’: John Grady Cole’s Heroism inAll the Pretty Horses.” Sacred Violence: Essays from the First Cormac McCarthy Conference. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. 2 vols. Vol. 2: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. El Paso, TX: Texas Western P, 1995. 57–70. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Picador, 1993. Print.

Mellard, James M. UsingLacan, Reading Fiction. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1991. Print.

Morrison, Gail Moore. “All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 175–94. Print.

Mortimer, Armine Kotin. The Gentlest Law: Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Lang, 1989. Print.

Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1986. Print.

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Snyder, Phillip A. “Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 198–227. Print.

Sullivan, Nell. “Cormac McCarthy and the Text of Jouissance.” Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso, TX: U of Texas P, 1995. 115–23. Print.

Tatum, Stephen. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum International, 2002. Print.

Tebbetts, Terrell L. “In Conflict with Himself: John Grady’s Quest in All the Pretty Horses.” Philological Review 27.2 (2001): 37–58. Print.

Witek, Terri. “Reeds and Hides: Cormac McCarthy’s Domestic Spaces.” Southern Review 30.1 (1994): 136–42. Print.

Woodson, Linda. “Deceiving the Will to Truth: The Semiotic Foundation of All the Pretty Horses.” Sacred Violence: Essays from the First Cormac McCarthy Conference. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. 2 vols. Vol. 2: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. El Paso, TX: Texas Western P, 1995. 149–54. Print.

NOTES

1. With reference to Freud and Carl Jung, Arnold traces the psychological hunger of McCarthy’s southern protagonists, and argues that these characters’ “intense feelings and fears and conflicts” are “nowhere [...] more clearly revealed than in their dreams” (39). In his analysis of No Country for Old Men (2005), Jay Ellis draws briefly on the “primeval scene around a fire” (160) from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930), but soon turns to the notion of “Jungian individuation” (161). 2. James D. Lilley and Terrell L. Tebbetts are other exceptions to the rule, but their forays into Lacanian psychoanalysis are even briefer than Sullivan’s is. 3. “Faulkner,” chronicles Erik Hage, “was such an important influence on McCarthy’s early novels” (97), and has remained a source of inspiration. 4. “Although there have been ladies’ international tournaments,” as Benjamin Karpman observes, “women don’t take avidly to chess” (69). 5. Ironically, however, and as her courage in warning Cole further attests, Alfonsa’s ability at chess confirms that Mexican society has failed to extinguish her nonconformity. 6. “Even the charros at the ranch,” as Woodson remarks, “speak to John Grady about the difficulty of living in a discourse community whose truth is not one’s own” (152).

ABSTRACTS

This article uses Jacques Lacan’s reading of the Freudian fort-dagame to analyze that most American of cultural constructs, the cowboy, at the time of that figure’s fading from the American landscape: the immediate postwar years. With John Grady Cole, the protagonist of All

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the Pretty Horses (1992), Cormac McCarthy provides a suitably situated subject for this critical endeavor, one whose subjective characteristics become present through dramatically playful division of his maternal imago. These games of psychoanalytical maturation, which emerge from the alternation between psychoanalysis in theory and that theory in critical practice, and which trace their subject’s successive relocations to alternative sides of the American-Mexican border, articulate the inevitable though resisted diminishment of Cole’s cultural construction.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Cormac McCarthy, Lacan Jacques, Sigmund Freud Keywords: aphanisis, fort-da, games, jouissance, psychoanalysis, Spaltung

AUTHOR

MICHAEL WAINWRIGHT Royal Holloway, University of London

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Smart Geopolitics, Dangerous Ideas: Energy security, Ideology, and the Challenges of American Policy in the Persian Gulf

Diego Pagliarulo

1. Introduction

1 Years after the withdrawal of US combat troops from the country, conflict and instability in Iraq still make the headlines in the international media.1 Policy-makers in Washington, however, no longer show any particular appetite for large scale military interventions in the Middle East or assertive efforts to reshape the political order in the region.2 US policy toward the area is evolving in parallel with the effort to adapt America's global strategy to new political realities and budgetary constraints. “In the next 10 years,” wrote former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in a seminal policy statement announcing the Obama administration's “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific, “we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy.”3

2 A fresh look at US geopolitical priorities and a shift away from Middle Eastern military adventures seems a wise foreign policy approach indeed. Yet, in spite of plans for a “pivot,” the Persian Gulf is set to remain a major source of concern for US policy- makers. This inescapable trend is demonstrated by the still significant US military presence in the region, by the Obama administration's painstaking efforts to reach a deal aimed at ensuring the peaceful intent of the Iranian nuclear program, and by Washington's military intervention in Iraq in the summer of 2014, in order to sustain a wobbly Baghdad government under heavy pressure from Islamic State – a radical Islamist movement currently in control of large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria.4

3 The challenges that make it so difficult and painful for the US – and for its closest Western allies as well – to work out a policy toward the Gulf region are deep-rooted and extremely relevant. On the one hand, as the painful experience of US military

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intervention in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 has shown, Washington politicians cannot, and should not, be seduced by delusional plans to dominate the region and reorganize it according to their own preferences.5 On the other hand, they cannot afford to ignore such a strategically and economically relevant area. This is why, even after the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq, American military power and a significant US military presence are still a critical factor in the region's balance of power.6

4 As this article argues in the following sections, energy security is the most consistent rationale for US and Western engagement in the Persian Gulf. Both as a superpower and as the West's leading security provider, the US has seen its commitment to the stability of the Gulf region and the preservation of access to its oil supplies increase. US Persian Gulf policy, however, has been shaped not only by pure geopolitical considerations, but also by ideological factors concerning America's status and role in international relations. Until recently, this essay observes, US policy toward the Persian Gulf was distorted by the appeal of America's unchallenged military primacy. Confronted with the contradictions and dilemmas of promoting ideals and protecting the national interest, US policy-makers demonstrated a remarkable penchant for instituting policies that overestimated the potential of America's military power as a tool for creating new political realities and favorable outcomes in the region. Such an approach has proved to be extremely costly and frustrating, while the time seems ripe to explore new strategies. Faced with the painful but inescapable challenges coming from the Gulf, the article concludes, the US, and its Western allies, should focus their efforts in the promotion a more inclusive and less militarized regional order.

2. Energy security and strategy

5 “One does not need to be a rocket scientist,” Gregory Gause points out, “or even a political scientist, to know that oil is why the outside world cares about the Persian Gulf.”7 More specifically, it seems fair to argue that the US's – and the West's – paramount source of concern with regard to the Gulf is to ensure a stable access to, and an uninterrupted flow of, oil supplies from the region.8 It is useful to notice, as observed by Robert Keohane, that, along with a stable international monetary system and the provision of open markets for goods, access to oil at stable prices was one of the key pillars of the international order promoted and directed by the US from the end of the Second World War to the early 1970s.9

6 The modern oil industry was born in the United States, but by the end of World War Two American leaders became aware that the US domestic production of oil would no longer be able to meet the country's expanding demand for energy. As a consequence, Middle Eastern oil came to be seen in Washington as a critical resource to ensure Western Europe's economic revival10 – and by implication as a key pillar of US and Western security.11 Seen through that prism, the different “Doctrines” announced by American presidents since the late 1940s appear strikingly informative and consistent.12 In March 1947 President Truman first rang the alarm bell by arguing that the political stability in Greece and Turkey and the two countries' inclusion in the Western camp were essential in order to counter the danger of “confusion and disorder” throughout the Middle East.13 Ten years later, in January 1957, it was President Eisenhower's turn to ask the US Congress to endorse, and provide financial

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support for, a series of policies aimed at providing the economic and military assistance necessary to ensure the independence and security of “the free nations of the Mid- East.”14 The picture was completed in January 1980, when President Carter famously stated that

7 An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.15

8 Along the same lines, a number of examples, present and past, make it possible to discern a critical element in the logic driving Western and US policies, particularly military interventions, in the Southern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf since 1945: the imperative of ensuring an uninterrupted flow of Middle Eastern oil, and of preventing any “hostile” regime from seizing control of the region's energy resources.16 By the 1950s the Suez Canal was the most important gateway through which Persian Gulf oil reached Western Europe. Nasser's decision to nationalize the canal and the fear of an interruption in the oil flows was a key factor underpinning the awkward and inglorious Anglo-French military intervention against Egypt in collusion with Israel in late 1956.17 Analogous considerations, combined with humanitarian concerns and calculations relating to domestic politics, were at play in 2011 – fifty-five years later – as the same two powers led NATO's military intervention in Libya in support of insurgents fighting to topple the Qaddafi regime. Libya's “sweet” crude oil could not be easily replaced in the production of gasoline by many European refineries.18 US leaders seriously considered the use of military force as a possible response to the embargo announced by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries as an apparent “weapon” to pressure Western countries into abandoning their support for Israel at the time of the October War of 1973.19 Washington did resort to military intervention during the last phases of the Iran-Iraq War, when the Reagan administration decided to re-flag oil tankers from Kuwait and other Gulf Arab monarchies and to deploy US warships in the Gulf in order to counter the threat posed by Iran to the free passage of Persian Gulf oil through the Strait of Hormuz.20 An analogous threat to the flow of oil through the Strait became a major source of concern in 2012 due to the confrontation between the West and Iran revolving around the Teheran regime's nuclear program.21 In fact, the specter of a disruptive military confrontation cast a dark shadow throughout the delicate negotiating process that led to the July 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran, the US, and other major powers.22

9 America's military involvement in the Middle East, particularly in the Persian Gulf, is thus consistent with a well-established pattern of Western security policy, and appears to be the expression of a grand strategy aimed not merely at ensuring the energy needs of the US, but rather at reducing the risk of instability in the global oil market – since global oil shocks would inevitably have negative effects on fuel prices at the pump in the US.23

3. Ideology and American grand strategy

10Geopolitics and energy security have not been the only factors driving US policy toward the Persian Gulf. America's quest for the stability and security of world energy supplies has been strongly influenced, and often distorted, by ideological

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considerations concerning the nature of US power and America's role in international relations.

11During the Cold War, US global strategy was informed by the imperative of containing communism. Hence, American policy toward the Persian Gulf was conceived and implemented within the wider framework of countering the spread of communism and Soviet influence in the Middle East.24 It seems fair, in retrospect, to argue that US leaders tended to overestimate the aggressive designs of their Kremlin counterparts concerning the Gulf area while they failed to appreciate the development of political and strategic challenges from within the region, such as the rise of Islamist extremism.25 However, it is important to acknowledge that the perception of the Soviet threat was not unjustified. By the end of the 1970s, Moscow's rising activism in the Horn of Africa and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan dramatically increased the level of concern among US leaders about the security of the Persian Gulf.26 As noted above, it is indeed from the early 1980s onward that US military involvement in the region began to rise, first with the creation of a Rapid Reaction Force by the Carter administration, and then with the establishment by the Reagan administration of the Central Command (CENTCOM) – a new unified military command tasked with the planning of military operations in the region stretching from the Middle East to Southwest Asia.27

12The collapse of communism and the end of the Soviet threat have imposed a critical reassessment of US grand strategy. Confronted with the challenges of the post- Cold War era, American officials and opinion makers on both sides of the political spectrum found inspiration in the traditional US commitment to the promotion of a liberal and democratic world order.28 An important legacy of the Cold War experience, however, was the reality of America's massive and unchallenged military power.29 It seems indeed fair to argue that the very preservation of such an unchallenged military primacy became an objective per se according to a great many American policy-makers and foreign policy circles.30 As suggested by Andrew Bacevich, “at the end of the Cold War Americans said yes to military power.”31 Post-Cold War US leaders promoted different worldviews and adopted different foreign policy approaches – as well as different plans to revive the American economy and society – but it seems fair to argue that all US presidents and their national security teams were seduced by the idea that as the world's only superpower, the United States enjoys an unchallenged position of material and moral superiority. By implication, leaders in Washington tended to define their foreign policy objectives independently from the specific dynamics of the conflicts in which the US decided to get involved, and almost without paying attention to the interests and the priorities of other great powers or regional actors. Confronted with the contradictions and dilemmas of promoting ideals and protecting the national interest, US policy-makers demonstrated a remarkable penchant for instituting policies that overestimated the potential of America's military power as a tool for creating new political realities and favorable balances of power overseas.32 US policy towards the Gulf somewhat embodies that delusional trend – Washington's military involvement in the region progressively increased since the 1980s, reaching its apex with the Iraq War of 2003.33

13The enormous human and economic costs of US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the financial crisis of 2008, appear to have significantly moderated this historical trend. Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration

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has been remarkably less inclined than its predecessors to put boots on the ground overseas, although it is not entirely clear whether that depends on a profound reassessment of America's role in the world or rather by budgetary constraints and the recent memory of military quagmires.34The Obama administration took office after years of consuming overseas military commitments and in the midst of the worst economic crisis since 1929. Inevitably, the administration's main efforts have concentrated on avoiding economic collapse and promoting reform at home. During the first term, the most pressing foreign policy issue was in fact the need to cope with the challenges inherited by the past administration.35As a newly elected president, Obama articulated an appealing foreign policy outlook, which called for a conception of US global leadership based on institutions and the international rule of law, multilateralism and diplomacy rather than outright military power. This cautious and diplomacy-savvy approach appears to have allowed the US to manage international crises without the need to resort to new, massive, and open-ended overseas military commitments, although not all of the high expectations originally raised by Obama have been turned into actual policies.36 In practical terms, as reported by James Mann, the Obama administration's key foreign policy concept was “rebalancing,” the idea that it was necessary for the US to refrain from military adventures overseas and, in general, to adopt a more pragmatic attitude on the international stage.37However, the increasing resort to air power – particularly drone strikes – and special forces for counter-terrorism operations, as well as the critical US role in the early phases of NATO's air campaign in Libya, suggest that after all Obama and his foreign policy staff are not so shy about using force.38As the end of the second term approaches, the foreign policy approach of the Obama administration has evolved toward a doctrine of “engagement” aimed at improving relations with countries – such as Iran, Cuba, and Myanmar – that have been at odds with the US but appear ready to sit at the negotiating table.39 In the ultimate analysis, however, the Obama administration's foreign policy is still in the making, and it is impossible to assess what its long term legacy will be.

14What seems fair to argue so far is that ideology and perception have encouraged the militarization of US policy toward the Persian Gulf. That, in turn, has contributed to worsen a number of negative regional trends – particularly the growing polarization and radicalization of local political regimes. The Gulf area is a jigsaw of ethnic and sectarian identities that overlap with states whose borders and political institutions are relatively recent and often weakly legitimized in the eyes of the local populations. As a consequence, since the emergence of the Gulf as a “regional security complex,”40 local regimes, especially the most powerful and ambitious among them – Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia – look at each other with suspicion and alarm. The rise of regional powers is perceived by the other regimes in the area as a threat to their own domestic stability, and such a perception is often confirmed by the foreign policies actually pursued – the most blatant example being perhaps the rivalry between Saddam's Iraq and Khomeini's Iran. Furthermore, such a dynamic has been worsened by volatile but increasing oil revenues, which have distorted the pattern of economic and social development of the Gulf countries and placed the region's governments in a position to build disproportionate and pervasive national security apparatuses.41

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4. The United States and the Persian Gulf: the paradoxical implications of the clash between geopolitics and delusions from the Cold War to the War on Terror

15Seen from the point of view of the interplay of geopolitical necessities and ideological imperatives, the story of American involvement in Persian Gulf politics is the story of a long series of unrealistic expectations, lost opportunities, and dysfunctional outcomes.

4.1 Geopolitics and ideology during the Cold War

16America's involvement in the region has begun to expand dramatically since the early 1970s, in the aftermath of Britain's withdrawal from “East of Suez.” By that time, however, for a variety of reasons Washington was by no means in an ideal position to replace London as the guarantor of the region's stability and balance of power. First, the war in Vietnam had severely eroded Congressional and popular support for military engagements overseas. Second, the protracted military effort in Southeast Asia had significantly contributed to the financial distress that had forced the Nixon administration to suspend and eventually abandon the gold-exchange standard through which Washington had guaranteed international monetary stability since the end of the Second World War. Third, the oil shock of 1973 had put an additional burden on the challenge of reviving the economies of the US and the rest of the industrialized countries of the West. It was within such a daunting framework that President Nixon formulated his doctrine, according to which America's interests overseas would increasingly be protected by relying on regional partners.42 As for the Persian Gulf, the new American strategic outlook translated into the “Twin Pillar” approach, according to which Washington would support – particularly through the sale of larger and larger amounts of increasingly sophisticated weapons – the rise of Saudi Arabia and, even more important, of Iran. The two countries were thus supposed to serve as the guarantors of a regional balance of power favorable to American interests – in spite of the fact that the regimes in Riyadh and Teheran shared very little in terms of ambitions and strategic priorities.43

17The Twin Pillars approach was shattered in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution. As the new regime led by ayatollah Khomeini was still consolidating, the seizure of the US embassy in Teheran and the subsequent diplomatic crisis dramatically poisoned Washington's relations with Teheran. Iran, once perceived as the US's most powerful and reliable partner in the Gulf, was now a nemesis in the minds of Americans and their leaders.44

18That new state of mind strongly informed Washington's attitude toward the war between Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi aggression, incompetently planned and ineffectively implemented45 in September 1980 under the watch of Baghdad strongman Saddam Hussein – at the time an unlikely client of the Soviet Union – came to be seen by strategists in Washington as a sort of opportunity to redress the Gulf's balance of power according to the American interest of preventing a hostile power from achieving hegemony in the region.

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19Thus, a combination of emotions and geopolitical opportunism was at the foundations of the troubled and awkward relationship between the Unites States and Iraq in the 1980s – a relationship tainted by the Iran-Contra scandal and the bombing by an Iraqi fighter jet of a US warship patrolling the Persian Gulf waters, but constantly corroborated by US economic support and intelligence assistance reciprocated by gestures of moderation on the part of Saddam Hussein concerning Iraq's role in the Middle East.

20As bluntly revealed by the Iraqi invasion and seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, however, Saddam's agenda was rather at odds with the wishes of Washington politicians. Within a few hours the Baghdad regime had ended up in possession of a new piece of very valuable real estate – according to estimates widely publicized in the aftermath of the invasion, control of Kuwait ensured direct control of 20% of the world oil reserves and placed Iraq in a position to threaten Saudi Arabia, which possessed an additional 20%.46 Iraq's aggression changed the White House's perception of Saddam, from someone with whom it was possible to “do business” to a “madman” aiming to establish an anti-American hegemony over the Gulf region – a modern version of Adolf Hitler, as Bush père often suggested in public, to the dismay of some of his closest and most pragmatic advisers.47

4.2 Geopolitics and ideology in the post-Cold War era

21The Gulf crisis of 1990-1991 was the first crisis of the post-Cold War era, and, in addition to being essential to the understanding of the foundations of the current US predicament in the Gulf, is emblematic of the dysfunctional combination of geopolitical thinking and ideological delusions that have marked the foreign policy of the US as the sole superpower. The first Bush administration publicly articulated its policy toward the crisis as an effort to restore international law by resisting Iraq's blatant aggression and occupation and liberating Kuwait – a sort of international police operation led by the US under the aegis of the UN. US strategy, however, was geared at achieving additional objectives which were much more at variance with the orientations of the international community as a whole. As seen from the White House, the outcome of the crisis should have been a new balance of power in the Gulf. On the one hand, Iraq's military power should be downgraded, and Iraq should be deprived of any non- conventional military capability – in order not to represent a threat to the US-friendly, oil-exporting Gulf Arab monarchies. On the other hand, Iraq should stay strong enough to serve as a bulwark against Iranian influence in the region.48 A critical component of this post-crisis scenario was an Iraqi leadership strong enough to keep the country united but willing to reorient its foreign policy in favor of the US – what was needed, in other words, was a sort of replica of the idealized perception of the pre-August 1990 Baghdad regime. It is open to question whether such an optimistic outcome was a realistic objective. Yet, as recalled by James Baker, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State, that conviction was particularly popular within the administration – the US military machine was expected to defeat Saddam so blatantly that someone within his own regime, possibly someone from the military, would rise against him, as suggested by the president himself during the Gulf War.49 Thus, as argued by Gideon Rose, “the administration decided that hope could indeed be a plan.” Kuwait would be liberated through a massive military intervention. In the process, Saddam's power base would be

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destroyed, and the US would “wait” for his regime to collapse, as recalled by Bush's National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.50

22The process through which the George H.W. Bush administration articulated its policy and won UN Security Council approval for the implementation of a military solution to the Gulf crisis was a masterpiece in diplomacy, and the swift and amazing success of the US led military campaign against Iraq put the US in a position of unquestioned authority within the international community. In the aftermath of the liberation of Kuwait it became clear that the first Bush administration was endowed with enormous political capital that could be invested not only in the pursuit of a more stable and inclusive security arrangement in the Gulf, but also in the advancement toward the solution of many of the Middle East's most intractable conflicts, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict. The administration's critical priority, however, was to bring Iraq “back into the family of nations,”51 which, in retrospect, clearly meant waiting for the optimist scenario imagined in the run up to operation Desert Storm to unfold. As it became clear that Saddam would not be overthrown in the short term, however, Bush and his advisers were forced to imagine and gather international support around continuous adjustments to their plan. The administration declared its readiness not to violate Iraq's sovereignty or integrity, yet it promoted an intrusive system of international inspections to monitor the dismantlement of the Baghdad regime's non- conventional arsenal. Furthermore, it refused to normalize relations with Iraq and pushed for the continuation of the UN sanctions regime that had been put in place in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion of Kuwait as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power. The White House thus invested most of its political and diplomatic capital on an effort to transform Iraq according to its wishes, at the expenses of exploiting in full the opportunities to negotiate a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East. As a paradoxical result, by the time the George H.W. Bush administration left office, in January 1993, Saddam was still in power in Iraq, the Middle East remained an unstable region, a large and visible US military presence was required to “contain” the Baghdad regime and ensure the stability of the Gulf region, and yet the restoration of Iraq as a major oil producer was postponed indefinitely because of the sanctions regime.

23Bill Clinton and his staff entered the White House with a worldview and a set of priorities rather different from those of their predecessors, yet as far as the Persian Gulf was concerned the new administration didn't question the policy it had inherited. Quite the contrary, it decided to expand its reach, by turning it into a “Dual Containment” approach, intended to use American power to prevent both Iraq and Iran from threatening the stability of the Persian Gulf and to ensure the free flow of oil in the area.52 No one within the Beltway apparently noted that, having been a victim of Saddam's aggression, Iran had been promoting the idea of regime change in Iraq since the 1980s.53

24Thus, in the 1990s US policy toward the Gulf became increasingly based on the assumption of American primacy and on the idea that the US had the power and the authority to marginalize those “rogue regimes” that did not fit into Washington's vision of world order. As part of the Dual Containment strategy, Iraq was kept under a severe regime of economic sanctions and constant military pressure – including recurrent US and allied airstrikes within the country's territory – with dramatic implications for the Iraqi population. From the mid-1990s onward, moreover, a sanctions regime was established against Iran as well, in spite of the rise to power of an

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Iranian leadership deeply interested in domestic reform and the improvement of relations between the Teheran regime and the rest of the world.54 Once again, the paradoxical result was that not only Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq, but now both Iran and Iraq – OPEC's most prominent oil producers after Saudi Arabia – were denied full access to the global oil market.

4.3 Geopolitics, ideology, and the War on Terror

25By the late 1990s the policy of containment toward the Gulf had become increasingly frustrating. It was definitely shattered by the tragedy of 9/11. Al-Qaida's appalling and unjustifiable terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C. were met by virtually unanimous condemnation on the part of the international community. The American leadership was in a position to assemble through a shrewd use of diplomacy a strong and comprehensive international coalition – as the George H.W. Bush administration had done a decade earlier – and use US power and authority to counter the challenge of terrorism and create a more stable and sustainable order in the Middle East.55 The connection between al-Qaida and the Sunni extremist Taliban regime in Afghanistan, moreover, provided a critical opportunity to improve relations between the US and Iran in the Gulf – throughout 1990s Iran, along with other powers such as India and Russia, had been an active supporter of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. (In contrast, the Taliban had been receiving substantial logistical and military backing from the Pakistani intelligence services as well as economic support coming from Saudi Arabia – Pakistan and Saudi Arabia being supposedly two of America's closest partners in the region.)56

26By the time the tragedy of 9/11 unfolded there was indeed a Bush in the White House. He was the son of that President Bush under whose watch the Cold War had ended peacefully and a large coalition led by the US under the aegis of the UN had won the Gulf War, and his administration was packed with veterans of his father's team. However, diplomatists were conspicuously absent from the staff of Bush fils. As a result, the George W. Bush administration decided to meet the challenge posed by 9/11 by embracing in full, and bringing to its extreme consequences, the grand strategy based on American primacy, and opted for a policy of unilateral US military intervention against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In addition, the unilateral pursuit of the “Global War on Terror” launched by the second President Bush, became an opportunity to settle the long-standing conflict between the US and Iraq on Washington terms, by invading the country and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein – first on the basis of an unlikely connection between the Baghdad regime and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, which appeared ungrounded even before the invasion, and then on the basis of very weak evidence concerning Iraq's covert pursuit of non conventional weapons, which turned out to be false in the aftermath of the invasion.57

27George W. Bush's “War on Terror” amplified the effects of the dysfunctional approach endorsed by the American leadership since the end of the Cold War. First of all, soon after regime change, the US found itself struck in the effort to quell bloody insurgencies both in Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries highly heterogeneous on both the ethnic and the sectarian level. Both occupations turned into quagmires, with negative implications for America's global military position and the US treasury. Second, applying the democratic principle to the political reconstruction of Iraq

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implied a redistribution of power within the country in favor of the demographically predominant Shia community – which had been historically deprived of political influence. Thus, a prominent consequence of the US policy of regime change was to open the door to Iran's influence in Iraq. Finally, US military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq had the unintended consequence of freeing Iran of two critical strategic threats – the Sunni extremist Taliban in the East and Saddam Hussein's regime in the West. Seen from Teheran, such an improvement made the case for pursuing a nuclear program even more compelling: a nuclear deterrent would not only ensure the Teheran regime from external threats but also consolidate Iran's power and influence in the Gulf region.58

28Overall, the George W. Bush administration's “Global War on Terror,” far from resolving once and for all the problems of the Persian Gulf, exacerbated them. As Bush fils prepared to leave office in January 2009, the most pressing challenges concerning the Gulf were in fact how to exit the Iraqi quagmire without seeing the country fall back into civil war, or even collapse,59 and how to deal with the challenge of Iran's nuclear program – two issues that were to say the least latent prior to, and even in the immediate aftermath of, 9/11. Both developments had significant negative repercussions in terms of US and global energy security. The distribution of oil revenues was a key source of internal conflict in post-Saddam Iraq, and the civil war that followed regime change shattered the dreams of a smooth revival of the Iraqi oil industry.60 Meanwhile, the mounting tension between the US and Iran and the risk of military confrontation revolving around the Iranian nuclear program restricted Iran's access to the global energy market and contributed to the volatility of prices.61

5. Obama's “rebalancing” and the US “energy revolution”: smart geopolitics or dangerous ideas?

29The withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq in December 2011 appears to have put an end – at lest for a while – to the era of American military adventurism in the Middle East.62 In fact, since 2011, the political landscape in the Middle East has been shaken by a wave of uprisings that have led, with varying degrees of violence, to the fall of some of the most impervious regimes in the region – a process that has become commonly known as the “Arab Spring.” The actual dynamics that are generating upheaval vary significantly from country to country, but it seems fair to observe that the main drivers of change are long lasting domestic economic and social tensions, rather than the designs of foreign powers.63 With the notable exception of Bahrain, the oil rich Persian Gulf Arab monarchies have been remarkably more stable than the rest of the Arab world, but the Gulf states are nonetheless deeply involved in the varied but interconnected processes of political change that are transforming the Middle East.64

30The “Obamians” appear to have tentatively begun to explore new policy approaches concerning the Gulf – such as withdrawing combat troops from Iraq and making the US military presence in the region more discrete, or working out a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue – but they're still far from achieving substantial and long-lasting results. In their quest for a more “balanced” policy toward the region, the president and his advisers should avoid the flawed delusional attitude – oscillating between dreams of outright dominance and dreams of indirect control – that characterized past policy initiatives. In this era of “rebalancing,” moreover, they

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should also be careful not to fall prey to fresh delusional attitudes, such as the idea of a disengagement from the region.65 This option has been made increasingly appealing by the recent “energy revolution” that is boosting the US oil and gas industry, but a close examination suggests that the implications of the new developments in the energy sector for US and Western energy security may be limited.

31The Persian Gulf has proved to be a source of headaches for American leaders. Since the most consistent rationale for US and Western engagement in such a challenging area has been energy security, it seems legitimate to assess whether new developments in the global energy sector may create the conditions for a disengagement on the part of Washington and its Western allies. In fact, recent improvements in drilling and extraction technology have made unconventional hydrocarbon resources increasingly accessible. These breakthroughs have largely expanded the exploitable reserves of oil and gas in the US, and have significantly revived the US oil and gas industry. US oil production has been increasing since 2012, and according to several estimates the US could dramatically reduce hydrocarbons imports and get close to energy self-sufficiency in the coming decades.66 Such a new development has indeed fostered speculation about the geopolitical implications of the possible US “energy independence.” Authoritative commentators argue that newly exploitable non-conventional oil reserves will reduce the geopolitical clout of a number of current major oil producers that tend to be at odds with the US, and that an America less addicted to foreign oil may no longer need to be so involved in intractable issues such as Persian Gulf politics.67

32The recent “energy revolution” in the US will make the US economy more competitive and will have very positive implications for the US trade balance.68 In addition, increasing oil and gas production in the US contributes to the expansion of supply in the global energy markets, so it is likely to moderate global energy price increases and have a positive impact for all energy consuming countries.69 It seems wise, however, to be cautious about its implications for American foreign policy.70 As noted by Daniel Yergin, “Only one oil market exists,” that is, the global oil market. The price of oil is a function of demand and supply dynamics that operate on a global scale, and, as a consequence, instability in the global oil market has, and will continue to have, negative implications in term of the price of fuel at the pump.71 In the ultimate analysis, oil remains the most important energy resource, and the Persian Gulf, with its massive reserves and very low extraction costs, is, and will remain for quite some time, the greatest and strategically most important oil producing region in the world.72 That is why what happens in the region still matters for the security of the US and its closest allies, and there are very few reasons to believe that politicians in Washington will be in a position to neglect the security challenges coming from the area.73

6. The case for pragmatism

33Sadly, besides being a vitally important oil producing region, the Gulf is also an area of instability and inter-state tensions with persistent threats – such as terrorism and nuclear proliferation – contributing to the volatility of global oil prices. The US has played – and continues to play as these pages are written – a most prominent role in the Persian Gulf. Such a role derives from America's status as the greatest military power in the world as well as from its interest in ensuring a stable and abundant supply

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of oil in global markets. As shown by this essay, however, the interplay of strategic, economic, and ideological factors that characterizes American policy toward the region has produced an unsustainable equilibrium that challenges the very rationale of US involvement – global energy security.

34It is important to acknowledge that US policy toward the Persian Gulf has suffered from a lack of realism on the part of American leaders. Washington strategists have too often been ready to believe that they could count on compliant local clients, or that they could opportunistically exploit regional rivalries, or that they could manipulate the region's balance of power by resorting to military power in order to protect their interests without the need to make compromises. Such an approach has largely failed. Massive US military intervention often exacerbated conflicts and instability, and, contrary to the expectations of so many politicians and armchair strategists, it led to restrictions in free flow of oil from the region. Furthermore, although US policy became more and more unilateral, the implications of American actions remained multilateral and ramified – and frequently had the unintended consequence of improving the strategic position of powers, such as Iran, that challenge the US role and presence in the region.

35As observed by Mahmoud El-Gamal and Amy Myers Jaffe, instability in the Persian Gulf seems to have created a sort of vicious circle with cyclical implications on the price of oil in global markets: “petrodollar flows create a military buildup that escalates the risk of conflict, which in turn increases the petrodollar flows and feeds more military buildups and potential conflict, and so on.”74 Because of its approach characterized by massive military involvement but lack of political realism, the US has become part of this vicious circle.

36It seems reasonable to maintain that only the political will of the local populations and their leaders can interrupt this detrimental dynamic. As the story of American involvement in the Gulf suggests, no external intervention, and especially no military intervention, should be considered capable of changing “hearts and minds” on its own. Since some form of engagement between the region and the rest of the world is inescapable, however, a more pragmatic assessment of the interests at stake and the means to protect them on the part of leaders in Washington and in allied capitals could at least reduce the effects of the vicious circle and contribute to create the conditions for improving stability and security in the area.

37The paramount priority for the US, and for the rest of the international community, concerning the Persian Gulf, is to promote the emergence of a more stable and inclusive equilibrium in the area, in order to minimize the effects of geopolitical risk on the global energy markets and reduce the incentives for local regimes to invest their wealth in arms and national security apparatuses. Thus, in the short term, efforts should concentrate on fostering a modus vivendi among the region's greatest powers and encourage the mutual recognition of the regimes in place in the area. From this point of view, the July 2015 Iran nuclear deal – which sets limits on, and increases international supervision over, Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for the gradual lift of international economic sanctions against Iran – appears to be a step in the right direction and possibly a game changer in the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf.75 Nuclear proliferation should always be a source of concern for policymakers, but coercive measures such as sanctions and military strikes are not sustainable long term solutions to that challenge because they fail to address the critical political issues that prompt a

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country to engage in the development of a nuclear deterrent – such as the desire to hedge against a real or perceived existential threat.76 The eventual normalization of relations between Iran and the US is far from certain, and the deal has given rise to political squabbles in the US Congress and to uncertainty and resentment among long- standing US allies in the region.77 Given Iran's potential geopolitical clout, its influence over the Shia communities in the Arab world and the close relations of the Iranian government with the Assad regime in Syria and militant groups such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, these concerns should not be overlooked. Iran's economic and political revival, however, appears to be a critical but inescapable challenge for the stability of the Persian Gulf. Moreover, the country's new leadership appears to be much less inclined to sacrifice Iranian economic revival on the altar of confrontation with the US. 78 Hence, political negotiations, no matter how difficult or embarrassing, must have priority over costly and potentially counterproductive coercive measures. Considering the history of the region, Iran's desire for greater security and a greater role on the regional level is not an unreasonable aspiration, as long as the Tehran leadership understands that Iran should refrain from seeking regional hegemony. As a matter of fact, once a more pragmatic attitude is embraced, it turns out that Iran and the West do have a number of very important interests in common – they want a stable Iraq at peace with its neighbors, they do not want Afghanistan to be dominated by the Taliban, and Iran is the shortest and cheapest route for Caspian oil and gas to reach global markets.79 Building upon those shared interests would not only minimize the risks of nuclear proliferation in the Gulf, but also have positive political and economic implications for the region and beyond.

38A critical long term challenge in the framing of a more stable and inclusive regional order in the Gulf is the need to cope with the imbalance between the oil- producing Arab monarchies and their more powerful neighbors, Iran and Iraq. Until recently, the policy of choice to deal with this problem was a combination of increasing arms sales and increasing direct US military presence in the region. Such an approach has proved to be extremely costly and frustrating, and the time seems ripe to seriously explore new policy approaches. In fact, a careful assessment of the global strategic and economic relevance of the Persian Gulf suggests that not only the US and its Western allies, but also emerging Asian powers, particularly China, have an interest in stability, economic opportunities, and access to energy resources in the area.80Strategists in Washington and allied capitals should not panic over greater involvement of these powers in the region, but rather encourage them to invest constructively their increasing economic and political influence in the promotion of a more cooperative and inclusive regional order.81Enthusiast supporters of American primacy might denounce such an approach as a “declinist” attitude; other, more pragmatic observers and practitioners might welcome it as a useful recognition of the limits of power and a smart way to reduce costly military commitments while fostering great power cooperation on the global level.

7. Conclusion

39The political evolution of the Gulf – and for that matter of the whole Middle East – is something that policymakers in Washington can neither ignore nor control. Hence, the US and its Western allies should not strive to reshape or control the geopolitics of

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the Persian Gulf – both approaches are unfeasible. The idea of disengagement from the region, moreover, appears delusional even when the implications of the unconventional energy revolution are held into account. Rather, America and its allies should focus their engagement on promoting better mutual understanding among regional actors and greater cooperation among the regional and global powers that have a stake in the stability of such a strategically and economically important area. Short of such a framework of coordination and mutual understanding, the resort to US and allied military power should be considered not only ineffective, but even counterproductive. In the long run a less militarized, more stable, and more inclusive regional framework could even become the basis for promoting in the Gulf some of the developments that America's military adventures have failed to achieve, such as the spread of democracy and respect for human rights.

NOTES

1. Joseph Logan, “Last U.S. Troops leave Iraq, ending war”, Reuters, December 18, 2011, http:// www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/18/us-iraq-withdrawal-idUSTRE7BH03320111218 ; Dominic Evans, “A country in peril – Iraq's struggle to hold together,” Reuters, July 27, 2014, http:// www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/27/us-iraq-security-future-idUSKBN0FW06D20140727 . 2. “The decline of deterrence,” The Economist, May 3rd, 2014. 3. Hilary Clinton, “America's Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011, http:// www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/americas_pacific_century . 4. Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, “U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf Afer Exit from Iraq”, The New York Times, October 29, 2011, A1, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/world/ middleeast/united-states-plans-post-iraq-troopincrease-in-persian-gulf.html?_r=1&ref=global- home ; Thom Shanker, Eric Scmitt, and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Adds Forces in Persian Gulf, a Signal to Iran”, The New York Times, July 3, 2012, A1, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/ world/middleeast/us-adds-forces-in-persian-gulf-a-signal-to-iran.html?_r=0 ; Raheem Salman and Isabel Coles, “U.S. bombs Islamic State after Obama call to prevent Iraq 'genocide',” Reuters, August 8, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/08/us-iraq-security- idUSKBN0G808J20140808 . 5. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate. America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco. The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2007); Gilles Kepel, Fitna. Guerre au cœur de l'islam (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 6. “The decline of deterrence,” The Economist, May 3rd, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/ united-states/21601538-america-no-longer-alarming-its-foes-or-reassuring-its-friends- decline#sthash.aIoJwGoB.dpbs ; 7. F. Gregory Gause, III, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 245. 8. Jean-Marie Chevalier, Les grandes btailles de l'énergie (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 306. Ehtan Kapstein, The Insecure Alliance. Energy Crises and Western Politics since 1944 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), viii, 202. 9. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony. Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy [2nd Edition] (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 139.

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10. Leonardo Maugeri, The Age of Oil. The Mythology, History, and Future of the World's Most Controversial Resource (Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2008), 51-61; Kapstein, Insecure Alliance, 47, 62. 11. Daniel Yergin, The Prize. The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: The Free Press, 2009), 409; Michael A. Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf. A History of America's Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf, 1833-1992 (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 20-51; David S. Painter, “Oil, resources, and the Cold War, 1945-1962,” in Melvin P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 1, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 486-507. 12. Michale T. Klare, Blood and Oil. The Danger and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Holt, 2005), 37-50. 13. Harry S. Truman: "Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine," March 12, 1947, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12846 . 14. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East,” January 5, 1957, Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project,http:// www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=11007 15. James E. Carter, “The State of the Union Address Delivered Before a Joint Session of the Congress” January 23, 1980, Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, http:// www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=33079. 16. Michael T. Klare, “Oil, Iraq and American Foreign Policy: The Continued Salience of the Carter Doctrine”, International Journal, 62, No. 1 (Winter 2006/2007): 31-42. 17. Maugeri, Age of Oil, 95; Yergin, Prize, 461-480; Kapstein, Insecure Alliance, 103-105. It seems interesting to note the continuing relevance of the Suez Canal as a key oil choke point: between 2011 and 2013, political instability in Egypt raised investors' concerns about the risk of interruptions in the passage of oil tankers through he canal, with direct consequences on oil prices. “Protest and the pump”, The Economist, February 5th, 2011, 67; Konstantin Rozhnov, “WTI Rises Above $100 on Drop in U.S. Stockpiles, Egypt Unrest,” Bloomberg, July 3, 2013, http:// www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-03/wti-crude-climbs-above-100-on-egypt-unrest-u-s- stockpiles.html . 18. Clifford Krauss, “Why the disruption of Libyan Oil Has Led to a Price Spike”, The New York Times, February 24, 2011, B1. Daniel Yergin, The Quest. Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2012), 294; Paul Taylor, “The West's unwanted war in Libya,” Reuters, April 1, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/01/us-libya-decisions- idUSTRE73011H20110401 ; Michael Hastings, “Inside Obama's War Room,” Rolling Stone, October 27, 2011, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-obamas-war-room-20111013 . 19. Douglas Little, American Orientalism. The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 [Third Edition] (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 243; Palmer, Guardians, 99-100. By the time the “embargo” was lifted, none of the demands concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict had meaningfully been met. Moreover, as a matter of fact, production cuts didn't appear to penalize the industrial countries singled out as the targets of the embargo. It seems more correct to argue that the most significant consequence of the crisis of 1973 was not greater geopolitical clout for the Arab countries, but rather a greater capacity of OPEC countries to coordinate production in order to influence the global supply of oil. M.A. Adelman, Genie Out of the Bottle. World Oil Since 1970 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 112-117; Yergin, Prize, 585-591, 595-614. 20. Palmer, Guardians ,120-127. 21. Ramin Mostafavi, “Iran test-fires missiles in Gulf exercise”, Reuters, January 2, 2012, http:// www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/02/us-iran-missile-idUSTRE80007E20120102 . 22. Kenneth M. Pollack, Unthinkable. Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013); Parisa Hafezi, Louis Charbonneau, John Irish and Arshad Mohammed, “Iran Deal Reached, Obama hails step towards 'more hopeful world,” Reuters, July 15, 2015, http:// www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/15/us-iran-nuclear-idUSKCN0PM0CE20150715 .

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23. “Great sacrifices, small rewards”, The Economist, January 1st 2011, 18. 24. Gary Sick, “The United States in the Persian Gulf. From Twin Pillars to Dual Containment”, in David M. Lesch, ed., The Middle East and the United States. A Historical and Political Reassessment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 291-307. 25. Douglas Little, “The Cold War in the Middle East: Suez crisis to Camp David Accords,” in Melvin P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.) The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. II, Crises and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 305-326; Peter Sluglett, “The Cold War in the Middle East,” in Louise Fawcett, ed., International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65-66. 26. Olav Njolstad, “Shifting Priorities: The Persian Gulf in US Strategic Planning in the Carter Years”, Cold War History 4, No. 3, (April 2004): 21-55; Kapstein, Insecure Alliance, 193. 27. William E. Odom, “The Cold War Origins of the US Central Command”, Journal of Cold War Studies 8, No. 2 (Spring 2006): 59-64; Palmer, Guardians, 112-117. 28. John Gerard Ruggie, “Third Try at World Order? America and Multilateralism After the Cold War”, Political Science Quarterly 4 (Autumn 1994): 553-570; G. John Ikenberry, After Victory. Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 214-255; Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders. Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 29. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment”, Foreign Affairs, 70 (Winter 1990-1991): 22-33. 30. Michael Mastanduno, “Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War”, International Security 21, No. 4 (Spring 1997): 49-88. 31. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism. How Americans Are Seduced by War [Updated Edition] (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14. 32. Bacevich, Militarism, passim; P. Edward Haley, Strategies of Dominance. The Misdirection of U.S. Foreign Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 33. F. Gregory Gause III, “The International Politics of the Gulf,” in Fawcett ed., International Relations, 296. 34. “The decline of deterrence,” The Economist, May 3rd, 2014. For a study of Obama's foreign policy emphasizing the president's quest for a new US role in the world, see: James Mann, The Obmians. The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Penguin, 2012). For an alternative explanation, emphasizing continuity with previous administrations, see: Fawaz A. Gerges, Obama and the Middle East. The End of America's Moment? (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 35. Mann, Obamians, XIX. 36. Michael A. Cohen, “Obama's Understated Foreign Policy Gains,” The New York Times, July 9, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/opinion/obamas-understated-foreign-policy- gains.html?partner=rss&emc=rss ; Michael O'Hanlon, “The Obama Defense,” Foreign Affairs, May 28, 2014, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141473/michael-ohanlon/the-obama-defense . 37. Mann, Obamians, 340. 38. Mann, Obmians; Hastings, “War Room;” Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test for Obama's Principles and Will,” The New York Times, May 29, 2012, http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0 . 39. Thomas L. Friedman, “Iran and the Obama Doctrine,” The New York Times, April 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/opinion/thomas-friedman-the-obama-doctrine-and-iran- interview.html ; Ann-Marie Slaughter, “Leading by Engaging,” Project Syndicate, April 24, 2015, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/obama-foreign-policy-record-by-anne-marie- slaughter-2015-04 . 40. Gause, Persian Gulf, 3-6.

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41. Mahmoud A. El-Gamal and Amy Myers Jaffe, Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises. The Global Curse of Black Gold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14-16, 44-50; Adelman, Genie, 122-124; Gause, Persian Gulf, 8-9; Pollack, Unthinkable, 89. 42. Richard Nixon: "Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam," November 3, 1969, Peters and Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2303 . 43. Gause, Persian Gulf , 25-34. It seems important to observe that the policy of propping up the Gulf's rising powers had an important economic side effect: the sale of weapons would improve the US trade balance by increasing exports toward those countries which were reaping the highest benefits from the increase in oil prices – a scheme known as the petrodollar recycling. El- Gamal and Jaffe, Oil, 121-122. 44. Yergin, Prize, 432-460; Ray Takeyh, Hidden Iran. Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (New York: Holt, 2006), 85-95; As observed by Kenneth Pollack, if the CIA-orchestrated coup that toppled the Mossadegh Government in August 1953 “was the defining moment of the U.S.-Iranian relationship for Iranians, the 1979-81 hostage crisis was the defining moment of the relationship for Americans.” Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle. The Conflict between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), 172. 45. Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 182-188. 46. Robert J. Lieber, “Oil and Power after the Gulf War”, International Security 17, No. 1 (Summer 1992): 161-162, 166-167; Robert Mabro, “The impact of the Gulf crisis on world oil and OPEC”, International Journal 49, No. 2 (Spring 1994): 244; George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 322-323. 47. Bush and Scowcroft, World, 399-400; Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 478 48. Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice. A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2009), 129-131. Norman H. Schwarzkopf with Peter Petre, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 543-544; James A. Baker III with Thomas De Frank, The Politics of Diplomacy. Revolutions, War and Peace 1989-1992 (New York: Putnam's, 1995), 410. 49. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 438-442; “Remarks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science”, February 15, 1991, Public Papers of President George H.W. Bush, http:// bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2709&year=1991&month=2 . 50. Gideon Rose, How Wars End. Why We always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2010), 218. Bush and Scowcroft, World, 433. 51. “The President’s News Conference on the Persian Gulf Conflict”, March 1, 1991, Public Papers of the Presidents: George H.W. Bush, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php? id=2755&year=1991&month=3 . 52. Speech Featuring Martin Indyk, “The Clinton Administration’s Approach to the Middle East”, Soref Symposium 1993, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/print.php?template=C07&CID=61; Anthony Lake, “Confronting Backlash States”, Foreign Affairs 73, No. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1994): 45-55. 53. Javier Perez De Cuellar, Pilgrimage for Peace: a Secretary General’s Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 177-178. 54. Torbat, “Glance,” 86-87; Takeyh, Hidden Iran, 110-116; Pollack, Persian Puzzle, 265-277, 286-289. 55. John Ikenberry, “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Terror”, Survival 43, No. 4 (Winter 2001-02): 19-34; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World. America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 11; Christian Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand. The Bush Dynasty in Iraq (New York: Vintage, 2007), 384-385; Packer, Assassins' Gate, 385-395. 56. Ahmed Rashid, “The Taliban: Exporting Extremism”, Foreign Affairs 78, No. 6 (Nov-Dec. 1999): 22-35; Takeyh, Hidden Iran, 117-134. 57. Ironically, as revealed by interrogations conducted on Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of his capture by American forces, the Iraqi dictator's refusal to release full evidence of the dismantlement of Iraq's WMD program was due to his desire to maintain a certain degree of

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ambiguity in order to deter more effectively an Iranian attack. In other words, by 2002-2203 Saddam Hussein was doing his best to make Iraq a bulwark against Iran, as wished by the architects of the first Gulf War. National Security Archive, “Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI”, Casual Conversation, June 11, 2004, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB279/24.pdf . 58. Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival. How Conflict Within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: Norton, 2006), 185-226. The Iranian government officially maintains that its nuclear program is peaceful. Evidence collected by the US and Western intelligence communities strongly suggest, however, that the Tehran regime has explored weaponization options. Pollack, Unthinkable, 39, 51-52; Mohammad Javad Zarif, “Iran is committed to a peaceful nuclear program,” TheWashington Post, June 13, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mohammad-javad-zarif- iran-is-committed-to-apeaceful-nuclear-program/2014/06/13/491fc982-f197-11e3- bf76-447a5df6411f_story.html . 59. Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble. General Pretraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 327-334. 60. Greg Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire. Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq (London: Vintage, 2012); Yergin, Quest, 160. 61. Yergin, Quest, 298-311; El-Gamal and Jaffe, Oil, 95-96. 62. Joseph Logan, “Last U.S. Troops leave Iraq, ending war”, Reuters, December 18, 2011, http:// www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/18/us-iraq-withdrawal-idUSTRE7BH03320111218 ; Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco. The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2007). By the time these pages are written, Iraq is in fact in the midst of a new spiral of violence and conflict. “Two Arab countries fall apart,” The Economist, June 14th, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/ middle-east-and-africa/21604230-extreme-islamist-groupseeks-create-caliphate- and-spread-jihad-across?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/twoarabcountriesfallapart . 63. Marc Lynch, The Arab Uprising. The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2013); Augustus Richard Norton, “The Puzzle of Political Reform in the Middle East,” in Fawcett, ed., International Relations, 127-147; Bassem Awadallah and Adeel Malik, “The Economics of the Arab Spring,” Huffington Post, January 10, 2012, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/bassem-awadallah/the-economics-of-the-arab_b_1196473.html ; Béligh Nabli, Comprendre le monde arabe (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 223-246; Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012), pp. 1-5; 64. “Arab Spring: 10 unpredicted outcomes,” BBC News, December 13, 2013, http:// www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25212247 . In fact, in the early stages of the “Arab Spring,” the risk of instability in the oil producing Persian Gulf monarchies was a cause of concern among analysts. Nouriel Roubini, “The Economic consequences of the Arab Revolts,” Project Syndicate, March 14, 2011, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-economic- consequences-of-the-arab-revolt ; Ed Morse, “The new geopolitics of oil,” Financial Times, April 6, 2011, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fea9cfb0-6044-11e0- abba-00144feab49a,s01=1.html#axzz1SP7vhHNq . 65. Kenneth M. Pollack and Ray Takeyh, “Near Eastern Promises,” Foreign Affairs, May/June2014, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141213/kenneth-m-pollack-and-ray-takeyh/near- eastern-promises . 66. Asjylin Loder, “American Oil Growing Most Since First Well Signals Independence,” Bloomberg, December 18, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-19/american-oil-most-since- first-well-in-1859-signals-independence.html ; “Energy to spare,” The Economist, November 17, 2012, 64. 67. Aviezer Tucker, “The New Power Map,” Foreign Affairs, January 9, 2013, http:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138597/aviezer-tucker/the-new-power-map ; Ian Bremmer and

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Kenneth A. Hersh, “When America Stops Importing Energy,” The New York Times, May 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/opinion/global/when-america-stops-importing- energy.html?ref=global&_r=1& 68. Robert Bryce, “Forty Years After OPEC Embargo, U.S. Is Energy Giant,” Bloomberg, October 10, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/forty-years-after-opec-embargo-u-s-is- energy-giant.html . As noted by Peter Coy in early 2014: “Want to know how the U.S. managed to narrow its trade deficit to the smallest figure in four years? Look no further than Texas, North Dakota, and other states where oil production is booming.” Peter Coy, “How the Booming Oil Patch Helps U.S. Trade,” BloombergBusinessweek, January 7, 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/ articles/2014-01-07/how-the-booming-oil-patch-helps-u-dot-s-dot-trade . Also see: Ryan McCarthy, The improving state of U.S. trade,” Reuters, January 7, 2014, http://blogs.reuters.com/ data-dive/2014/01/07/the-improving-state-of-us-trade/ ; Also see: Michael Levi, The Power Surge. Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75-76. 69. As pointed out by M. A. Adelman, “Higher output helps consumers and lower output hurts them, no matter where the oil is from or where it goes.” M.A. Adelman, “The Real Oil Problem”, Regulation, (Spring 2004), 19. Also see: Levi, Power Surge, 65. 70. From a short-term perspective, it is important to note that an increased global supply of oil has favored the enforcement of the US-led sanctions policy toward Iran. Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Asjylyn Loder, “Iran Loses Nuclear Leverage as World Ingores Export Drop,” Bloomberg, November 7, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-07/iran-loses-nuclear-leverage- as-world-ignores-export-drop.html . 71. Yergin, Quest, 277-279; Michael A. Levi, “The False Promise of Energy Independence,” The New York Times, December 21, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/opinion/the-false- promise-of-energy-independence.html?_r=1& . 72. Giacomo Luciani, “Oil and Political Economy in the International Relations of the Middle East,” in Fawcett, ed., International Relations, 104; Daniel Yergin, “The Global Impact of U.S. Shale,” Project Syndicate, January 8, 2014, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/daniel-yergin- traces-the-effects-of-america-s-shale-energy-revolution-on-the-balance-of-global-economic- and-political-power . 73. “The masochism tango,” The Economist, December 15, 2012, 34-35, http:// www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21568391-president-barack-obama-would- avoid-entanglement-middle-east-he/ ; Pollack and Takeyh, “Near Eastern;” “Oil market spike on Iraq concerns,” BBC News, June 13, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27836376 . 74. El-Gamal and Jaffe, Oil, 90. 75. “Parameters for a Joint Plan of Action Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran's Nuclear Program,” The White House – Office of the Press Secretary, April 2, 2015, https:// www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/04/02/parameters-joint-comprehensive-plan- action-regarding-islamic-republic-ir ; Jeffrey Lewis, “It's a Damn Good Deal,” Foreign Policy, July 14, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/14/its-a-damn-good-deal-iran-nuclear-agreement- joint-comprehensive-plan-of-action/ . 76. Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better (London: IISS Adelphi Papers, 1981); Scott D. Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?,” International Security 21, No. 3 (Winter, 1996-1997): 54-86. 77. Elizabeth Drew, “How They Failed to Block the Iran Deal,” The New York Review of Books, October 22, 2015, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/oct/22/how-they-failed- block-iran-deal/ ; “Iran's Arab neighbors want assurances nuclear deal not against them,” Reuters, November 28, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/28/us-iran-nuclear-gulf- idUSBRE9AR0GS20131128 ; Mohammed Bin Nawaf Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, “Saudi Arabia will go it alone,” The New York Times, December 17, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/

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saudi-arabia-will-go-it-alone.html?partner=rss&emc=rss ; “A big gap to close,” The Economist, January 18, 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21594314-some- supporters-iran-deal-doubt-there-will-be-long-term-pact-big-gap ; Fredrik Dahl and Louis Charbonneau, “West still struggles to cut feared bomb risk in Iran nuclear talks,” Reuters, July 21, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/21/us-iran-nuclear-talks- idUSKBN0FQ18S20140721 . 78. Zahra Hosseinian, “Iranians count on president-elect Rohani to bring change,” Reuters, June 16, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/16/us-iran-election- idUSBRE95C1E120130616 ; Mohammad Javad Zarif, “What Iran Really Wants,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2014, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141209/mohammad-javad-zarif/what- iran-really-wants . 79. Kenneth Pollack, “Tehran and Washington: Unlikely Allies In An Unstable Iraq,” Brookings, June 3, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/iran-at-saban/posts/2013/06/31-iraq-iran- pollack; Philip Robins, “The War for Regime Change in Iraq,” in Fawcett, ed., International Relations, 316; Yergin, Quest, 59-61; Philippe Sébille-Lopez, Géopolitiques du pétrole (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006), 194-196. 80. El-Gamal and Jaffe, Oil, 150-153; Yergin, Quest, 224-225, 281-284; John B. Alterman, “China's Balancing Act in the Gulf,” CSIS Gulf Analysis Paper, August 2013, https://csis.org/files/ publication/130821_Alterman_ChinaGulf_Web.pdf ; Damien Ma, “Dependence on Middle Eastern Oil: Now It's China's Problem, Too,” The Atlantic, July 19, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2012/07/dependence-on-middle-eastern-oil-now-its-chinas-problem-too/ 259947/ 81. Obama administration officials appear to have explicitly mentioned this kind of reasoning with their Chinese counterparts. Mann, Obamians, 205.

ABSTRACTS

Both as a superpower and as the West's leading security provider, the US has seen its commitment to the stability of the Gulf region and the preservation of access to its oil supplies increase. US Persian Gulf policy, however, has been shaped not only by pure geopolitical considerations, but also by ideological factors concerning America's status and role in international relations. Until recently, US policy toward the Persian Gulf was distorted by the appeal of America's unchallenged military primacy. Confronted with the contradictions and dilemmas of promoting ideals and protecting the national interest, US policy-makers demonstrated a remarkable penchant for instituting policies that overestimated the potential of America's military power as a tool for creating new political realities and favorable outcomes in the region. Such an approach has proved to be extremely costly and frustrating, while the time seems ripe to explore new strategies. The US should not strive to reshape or control the geopolitics of the Gulf, as both these approaches are unfeasible. The idea of disengagement from the region, moreover, appears delusional even when the implications of the unconventional energy revolution are held into account. Rather, America and its allies should focus their engagement on protecting their interests without becoming part of the region’s sources of instability.

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INDEX

Keywords: energy security, geopolitics, ideology, Middle East, oil, Persian Gulf, United States, US foreign policy, US military power

AUTHOR

DIEGO PAGLIARULO Independent scholar

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Letting Go of Narrative History: The Linearity of Time and the Art of Recounting the Past

Ari Helo

1. Introduction

1 I once got into a debate with a group of history students about the narrative character of history.1 They had difficulty grasping my objections, because I questioned the notion of history as a narrative, but refused to hold that it is something else entirely. There is much truth to the view that historians do not simply offer us more or less true representations of the past, but rather create history out of the past, as Alun Munslow among many others insists.2 Yet, instead of engaging in endless erudite disagreements about the epistemologically valid view of reality, let alone past reality, one would do better to view history as historians' ongoing discourse about the best explanation of any given past phenomenon.

2 This essay aims to set aside needless metaphysics about the inherently narrative character of history, a penchant that leads to confusion about the methodological basics of historical research. This entails refuting two—still surprisingly common— misunderstandings about historical research: the first one is that history is about contributing to a presumed metanarrative of humankind; and the second is that our only access to the past is through some more or less mythical notion of telling stories about it. For the high priest of the so-called linguistic turn in historiography, Hayden White, the notion that as an entity history may well lack any rationale is rather the starting point for a serious study of historiography than the result of it.3 While holding that the narrative form of meaning production is the determinant factor of all historiography, White at the same time acknowledges that not all historical studies are narratives with "well-marked beginning, middle, and end phases."4

3 My point is not to prove or disprove the views of White or any other theorist committed to the narrative character of history or historiography. On the practical

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level all that a historian needs to accomplish is to explain a given past phenomenon. When a historian asks, for example, what the Aristotelian conception of justice was, and manages to answer the question, the work is completed. Most likely, the historian would claim that the Aristotelian concept of justice had little to do with the modern notion of the equal rights of all human beings. Rather, it drew on the assumption that every free man should be appropriated his due share of rights and privileges according to his virtuous capacities to contribute to the common good of the polis. The rights of merchants, slaves, women, and children were excluded from this sphere of public justice, which was concerned solely with the relations among the male citizenry. Whether or not this purely tentative description is even close to Aristotle's view, anyone can understand such a conception of justice, even if we cannot subscribe to it any more. Let me add that there is nothing anachronistic in recounting Aristotle's notion of justice in modern terms, providing the historian does not attempt to portray it as merely a forerunner of the modern one.5 History is about explaining the past in the present.

4 Thinking of history as knowledge of the past, and possibly of nothing else, makes it easier for us to grasp the basics of historical research.6 No matter what magnificent reforms politicians manage to put through, it is the historian who eventually decides what reforms are important enough to be noticed in the book of history. Consider, in contrast, if we historians were to accept a politician's use of history in the service of his goals for the future: a good example is President Obama's 2009 Inaugural address, in which he asserted that "those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent ... are on the wrong side of history." There appears to be a right side of history that Obama sees as more or less equivalent to the American way of thinking, given that, according to him, such values as "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism ... have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history."7 For Obama, American history is progressive, and in order to be on its right side, one should assume a progressive attitude to it.

5 It is almost too easy to contextualize some of Obama's political initiatives, say Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), in terms of such a progressive conception of history. As early as 1912, the Progressive Party presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt suggested adopting nationwide health insurance. As for Obama making progressive history with his initiative, one could even claim that in historical hindsight he is about to turn Roosevelt's progressive initiative into an anticipation of this later progressive event, unlike Bill Clinton, who failed in a similar effort. The role of the practicing historian in all this would be that of a mere clerk chronicling the progressive national master narrative as it unfolds over time. Yet with every notion of there actually being a story we are also faced by the question of what its ultimate purpose would be (for every story has a telos) —and we do not know for certain that history has one.8

6 This is why I suggest viewing history, not as a narrative, but as an art of recounting the past, based on the following maxims: 1. The practicing historian alone makes history, because s/he writes it. 2. Everything the historian explains about the past rests on the notion of linearity of time. 3. The accounts vary only according to the questions one poses about a past phenomenon.

7 In the following I will discuss a number of distinctions useful for clarifying these maxims, none of which aims at refuting the narrative character of history, given that

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the point is only to avoid getting caught up in its confusing repercussions regarding the actual job of a historian. First, although history writing is no less a matter of meaning production than is any other use of language, it is worth considering it not as a discourse—in the sense of an event of language alone—but as an ongoing discussion between historians (and other interested parties) over the best account of any given past phenomenon. Second, one should not confuse our shared experience of temporality with any particular traditional framework for grasping the meaning of time, be that the ancient, cyclical notion of time, the Christian conception of meaningful time, or the Marxian view of history, to name but a few. History can be viewed solely as knowledge of the past. Thirdly, it is important not to confuse the politics of the past with the politics of the present. Were we to have a genuinely common understanding of the present condition of all humankind, we would have no political disagreements on where to go from here. Given that we, in fact, disagree on where exactly history has brought us, the safest epistemological position for a historian is that the past is just as messy as our own present. Fourthly, one should distinguish between explaining the meaning of a certain phenomenon in the past and its possible historical significance for the present. The significance of a past phenomenon lies only in the present, but that significance does not need to derive from any preconception of history as a metaphysical whole. Once these distinctions are properly understood, one has a solid rationale to call the profession of a historian the art of recounting the past. In my conclusion I shall propose an answer to the question whether it is any use to study history.

2. History and Meaning Production

8 According to the paradigmatic notion of semiotics and communication studies, meanings are always produced. We constantly create our human reality as communicable by signifying things around us. Our reality is, to a large extent, made up of those meanings we apparently only reduce from a presumably pre-existent reality. How we understand time is an important part of this ongoing meaning production. Hayden White's The Content of the Form (1987) begins with relating how modern history writing was born by distinguishing itself from both medieval annals and chronicles by assuming the narrative form of meaning production. Annals were mere lists of any set of events, and while chronicles connected the events as logically following from one another, they lacked a closing statement of their actual meaning. By contrast, the historical narrative could identify a given "set of events as belonging to the same order of meaning."9 Some kind of closure is immanent to this prioritized form of meaning production shaping a given series of events as if preordained by their end result. The very title of White's book implies that narrative as the particular form of meaning production in history largely predetermines its referential content, namely, what the events in question stand for.

9 There is a simpler way to view the form and content relation as relevant to the academic study of history. History does not necessarily comprise a narrative. Rather, historical discourse is a discourse between historians about what kind of accounts are fruitful about this or that particular past phenomenon. For this ongoing discussion there is a time-honored form to keep the discussants aware of history as a field of research problems. It consists of an introduction, where one states a research problem;

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then follows the report on the evidence; and then the conclusion, where the solution to the problem is given. The formal or implicit "content" of the introduction is that there is, indeed, a research problem, while the formal content of the conclusion is that the problem has been solved, or at least clarified. Whether the report on the evidence (the middle) is a narrative account of the evidence or an analysis of it is more a matter of opting for the most efficient way of communication than of anything else.

10Anyone familiar with Roman Jacobson's thesis on the levels of communication may discern referential, conative, phatic, and other such uses of language in historical explanations as well. For example, Ernest Gellner's classic book, Nations and Nationalism (1983), abounds in such oddly irrelevant witticisms as that "every girl ought to have a husband, preferably her own." Gellner's aim of keeping contact with the reader (the phatic function) is similarly conspicuous in many key formulations of his actual thesis, such as that "nations can be defined only in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than, as you might expect, the other way round."10

11No matter how interesting these linguistic aspects of history writing may be, there is no need to equate the study of history with the study of sheer meaning production. Let me illustrate this by Hayden White's somewhat confusing article "The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History." Given that the topic is method in intellectual history, White unexpectedly provides us with a purely literary analysis of The Education of Henry Adams, a book awarded the Pulitzer in 1919 shortly after the author's death. Focusing on a variety of topics in Adams's text, such as its "rhetoric of asceticism and evasion," its implications about the "nature of all signification," and the author's "fractured persona," White eventually considers all these issues as symptomatic of one or another aspect of meaning production itself. His "unpacking" of this literary work aims at precisely what literary studies traditionally do, namely enriching our understanding of the particular textual sample under scrutiny: "Far from reducing the work," he states, "we have on the contrary, enflowered it, permitted it to bloom and caused it to display its richness and power as a symbolizing process."11

12Rather than considering any historical aspects of Adams's message or its different receptions over time, White is interested in the sheer, ahistorical display of the symbolizing process itself. He also holds that the principal task of intellectual history is to focus on such processes of meaning production, whereas other branches of history may concentrate on the "exchange and consumption" of meanings in terms of economy, politics, social thought, and warfare.12 But why should intellectual history not be about, say how the American founders' "exchange and consumption" of opinions turned into a common decision to fight for independence or about their entirely different exchange of opinions about the Constitution? As research about the past, even intellectual history must contend with particular occurrences, even if their outcome may not fit the big picture: perhaps the best political pamphlet was ignored; perhaps the intended effect never occurred; perhaps the good guys lost.

13None of this is to claim that the linguistic aspects of history writing are insignificant. Consider the old witticism about celebrating the most unassuming self- made man in all American history: "President Abraham Lincoln was born in a tiny Kentucky log cabin, which he had built with his own hands." Even the opening clause, "President Abraham Lincoln was born," is anachronistic, since it took quite a while for this newborn to become President of the United States. Yet, as linguistic studies experts insist, discourse is more than a sentence writ large: it is a complicated process of

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meaning production, which may rest on poetic and rhetorical uses of language, just as much as on sheer logic.13 Many historical concepts arise from mere hindsight: the Renaissance, in its basic meaning of a great revival, cannot be grasped without the notions of the ancient, Greco-Roman civilization and the more or less retrograde image of the Middle Ages. The very title, the Middle Ages, indicates its function as linking the other two. Regardless of whether the prevailing image of the Middle Ages should be dark or sunny, one can be absolutely certain that the Middle Ages never had any impact on the ancient era. This much we know about causality in history, and this is practically all we know about it.14

14The fact that causality never functions backwards in history is not as self-evident as one might wish it to be. Consider the claim that "human beings can will backward as well as forward in time," as Hayden White remarks about Fredric Jameson's view of history.15 True, we tend to see things differently when looking at them from a new (even if only historical) perspective. This notion of willing backwards in time is also the fundamental presumption behind the time-honored notion that every generation writes its own history. The inherent danger of this view is its less often stated, but widely held corollary that every new generation sees the meaning of history better than the previous one, because the previous generation failed to see what its own present truly anticipated. Again, we encounter the notion of history as a grand narrative, gradually unfolding its own meaning, be it the Marxian conception of production relations as the true mold of world history or Obama's set of values comprising the "quiet force of progress" in American history.

15To further illustrate this point, let me cite Allan Megill's summary of why modern historiography tends to be antithetical to any master narrative. First of all, the modern historical view would dismiss the early modern notion of biblical history as well as what is often considered its direct inheritor, the Enlightenment era's notion of progress as something that lent coherence to the apparent chaos of the entire pre- Enlightenment past. Secondly, historians do not subscribe to the Rankean view of an extra-human rationale behind history as a coherent whole, even if the ongoing research cannot yet quite grasp it. Thirdly, many historians would be skeptical about the shift toward the view of J.G. Droysen and R.G. Collingwood that the coherence of history may only derive from the validly defined methodological boundaries of history as an academic discipline—thus comprising a methodologically coherent region within which the professional historian works. What position toward the disciplinary character of history as a whole, then, would be tenable today? The fourth position holds that most probably no coherence can be found, although any clear-cut statement that history has no coherence is vulnerable as well, because it claims to know too much. 16

16Even though narrative is by definition temporal, it may play with the linear conception of time, given that the end determines the actual meaning of the whole story. History does not have this freedom. In purely narrative terms, it is only the appearance of Jesus Christ in the New Testament that gives the prophets of the Old Testament their Christian meaning as predecessors of the true Messiah, whose coming they correctly prophesized (albeit the Jewish reading of all this would be very different). The difference between historical and mythic thinking arises with the linearity of causes and effects. One may conjure the spirits of one's forefathers in a ritual so as to experience their presence anew, and yet subscribe to the fundamental

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linearity of human time in terms of recognizing the forefathers as something other than the living and the not yet born. Celebrating the wisdom of the American founding fathers in every presidential inaugural speech or celebrating the birth of Christ every Christmas does not make those celebrations identical in their historical meaning. Meanings in history arise from the temporal, or occasionally the spatial, distance between any two phenomena of the past.

3. History and Temporality

17As for the even deeper layers of narrativity inherent in the meaning production itself, let us shift to the distinction between temporality and history writing. In Paul Ricoeur's view, temporality (or "the structure of time") appears to be "the content of which narrativity is the form."17 Simply put, one may think of temporality as denoting the idea of viewing time as an eternal present, something that always transcends the past but does not yet reach the future. Our experience of this "eternal now" consists in our constant orientation to the future. Everything we do is future-oriented. This future orientation does not result from our knowledge about the future, but only from our expectations: Perhaps when going to pick up my first cup of coffee in the morning, I realize that I have forgotten to push the power button of my coffeemaker. I cannot undo my error that has already taken place, I need to press the button to get my morning coffee in a future different from the one I expected. Hence, the standard, tripartite notion of time as consisting of the past, the present, and the future is best grasped through the notion of the present as distinguished from the past that one cannot change and one's present as that which gains its very meaning via one's orientation to the future. It is this notion of constantly advancing time that lends support to such metaphysical notions as "every great historical narrative" simply "is an allegory of temporality."18

18One traditional way of grasping the notion of constantly advancing time is the cyclical view, which considers the rotary motion as the fundamental image for meaningful changes. This rotary motion takes the form of a cycle, stretched over the linear line of time. Even the ultimate, or at least the bleakest, Christian image of meaningful time can be viewed as cyclical rather than as linear. After the Fall of man human history is but a series of futile efforts to redeem Adam's initial mistake. The story thus comprises a single cycle—a rotary motion back to the divine Redemption.19 The Second Coming will bring history to its conclusion, and history, in its meaning- making rotary motion, closes precisely where it began. Salvation to true believers and judgment for the sinners ensues.

19No historian is in the position to say that this is not so, although for secular thinkers it may appear just as evident that human history will end in some utter human failure to come to terms with our natural circumstances. Yet, no imagined end of history can function as the standard for writing it in the very midst of the story itself, particularly as we cannot know if history embodies a reasonable story to begin with. This is why professional historians today prefer to keep their storyline open so as not to use it as an explanatory framework for any particular historical event.

20The most frequent mistake made about cyclical history concerns its presumed determinism regarding individual experience of time. The ancient notion of seeing the world in terms of monotonous yearly cycles of sowing and harvesting was far from

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refuting the constant advance of human time. The point was only that no matter how obviously this year's harvest differed from the previous one the change never appeared as permanent. This is the basis for the ancient notion of history as magistra vitae, precursor of life. The perhaps most renowned formulation of the sociopolitical aspects of this notion is the Polybian conception of the transience of governments, centered on the conception of civic virtue and its natural erosion over time. In its most classically republican version, it held that every virtuous monarchy would inevitably fall into a corrupt tyranny, then would follow a virtuous aristocracy and a corrupt oligarchy, then a virtuous republic and then a corrupt mob rule—all this to the effect that a new virtuous monarchy would begin the three-fold cyclical movement again.

21This is why the early modern understanding of the term "revolution"—arising from the notion of something revolving and hence related to rotary motion—referred rather to a return to the olden times than to any genuinely innovative break with the past.20 Yet, for an individual immersed in such a cyclical political history, change could appear as genuinely contingent. Contingency entered the view in the famous imagery of the Roman Goddess, Fortuna. She could rotate her wheel of fortune slowly or quickly to the effect that a corrupt polity could last just as easily for a couple of months as for two centuries. No one knew which precise phase of the cycle it currently occupied. This is why the ancient statesman remained in absolute uncertainty about when exactly it would stand to reason to try to topple a corrupt regime. Even if all history consisted in rotary motion, an individual could not foresee at what precise point of the future the next meaningful (although only cyclical) change would occur.

22In the midst of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson spoke of it as "a rebellion" aiming simply at "a restoration of our just rights."21 Viewed from a classical republican perspective, the American founding generation was simply lucky: their rebellion proved successful. Given their fast division into competing Federalist and Democratic parties after the founding, it is certain that they never shared one comprehensive notion of what American republicanism should look like.

23Even a political conservative is future-oriented in his constant longing for the revival of yesterday's values in tomorrow's world. Indeed, a tradition cannot be neutral, because its actual meaning resides in its capacity to guide us toward the future. A neutral tradition would be no more than a taboo, which typically embraces norms the purpose of which no one can explain any more. Neither should one view every tradition as inherently reactionary. Since the Enlightenment era, one of the most sacred Western traditions has been the reverence toward the dramatic development of empirical, self- correcting scientific thought. Even the hard-core progressive, however, must submit to the notion that insofar as knowledge accumulates, every present must deal with incomplete knowledge. Given the necessity of dealing with incomplete knowledge, the safest epistemological tenets of historiography are comparatively simple. As human beings, we all live in constantly advancing time, which keeps our future open just as it closes alternative options of the past. Given that no one can see at the end of history, there is no way to say that it makes any sense even as a narrative. While historians have the privilege of working with hindsight, there is no hindsight of the future. From the historian's perspective to the past, however, everything is linear.

24Karl Marx may provide an illuminating example of how to separate one's experience of time from one's image of history. Marx's viewpoint is twofold: the utopian aspect of Marxism lies in its view of an entirely different post-revolutionary

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socialist future compared to what Marx saw as the known plot of the past, namely that the forces of production (the base) have always been ahead of the political ordering of society (the superstructure). The continuous tension between the two had been the source of conflict throughout human history. This conflict the socialist revolution was supposed to resolve in the future. Scholars still disagree as to what extent Marx's vision of the future was as predetermined as his view of the past. In other words, one may, or may not view Marx's historical thinking as based on his own metanarrative.

25This is why it is useful to distinguish a historical explanation of the actual causes of an event from its meaning in its own time and from its significance (or insignificance) for us in the present. Most important, this also calls for distinguishing politics from historiography. Politics is always about analyzing the present situation in order to gain a better future. History is about the past.

4. History and Politics

26Whatever the world-historical repercussions of the American Revolution, it did not alter the fundamental characteristics of politics as a struggle over the future. Soon after the Revolution Jefferson found himself entangled in a constant fight with Alexander Hamilton, not over the past, but over the American future. President Obama similarly focuses on the future in arguing that we need to look forward rather than backward. But our view of history has definitely changed since Jefferson's time, just as Jefferson's view was different from that of Polybius.

27Jefferson thought that history has a direction toward a better future, which the "primitive" Native Americans would probably never achieve on their own because their "steady habits permit no innovations, not even those which the progress of science offers to increase the comforts, enlarge the understanding, and improve the morality of mankind."22 This is how he invoked the future in his famous 1824 letter to William Ludlow: "Where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth."23 Jefferson's vision, however, never had to confront such characteristically apocalyptic concerns of our postindustrial age as climate change, worldwide pandemics, or the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Jefferson's belief in historical progress can be assessed regardless of such concerns. A belief in the same today means subscribing to an entirely different claim.

28Politics demands defining the present as somehow distorted; otherwise no political agenda could arise. In history, it is unwise to make too precise claims about the present, because we are apt to disagree politically on where we are, and therefore on what direction to take next. It is just as important for the practicing historian to discern the genuinely political aspects of the past as it is for a politician to politicize things that need politicization. One may discern a number of political meanings behind the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, given that the Court broke with the central common-law principle of relying on precedents and simply nullified the infamous 1896 "separate but equal" decision, thus also providing legal backup for the entire 1960s civil rights movement. The fundamental characteristics of public policy became an issue during the 1970s debate about compulsory busing of children to a distant school in order to put the desegregation of schools into effect. Were children to be used for such a political purpose?

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29The recent debate about the rights of homosexuals to equal marriage also questions the border we tend to assume between the public and private spheres of life, the assumption that private is apolitical. One can always question a societal norm by bringing forth its implicit power claims: the traditional, heterosexual understanding of what kind of intimate relations can be recognized as marriages appears simply as a power claim over all those who would recognize homosexual marriages. Until the claim for recognizing homosexual marriages was made, there was no political conflict about it. Hence, not everything is politics, but anything can be politicized. But any claim that defining the past is as political as defining the present seems to support the metaphysical notion that we are all living some inherently meaningful metanarrative.

30The lure of metanarratives is strong among historians themselves. The advocates of the currently fashionable history of globalization appear to view the growing interconnectedness of the world cultures as such a fundamental characteristic of the world that we should rewrite all our histories to accommodate to this trend. A new master narrative is born. Again, the focus is not where it should be: it is on politics rather than on history, more on the present than on the past. Given the very possibility of politicizing normalcy by questioning its implicit power claim, it is important to remember that we do not share a common view about where we are right now. As the 9/11 attacks well prove, globalization may also serve to intensify the potential enmities among us.

31The uncritical advocacy of globalization as the explanatory framework for meaningful historiography recalls Francis Fukuyma's approach to history in his famous The Last Man and the End of History (1991). Fukuyama's thesis was not exactly that history is at its end, but that the collapse of the Soviet experiment proved that the search for the most feasible political ordering of society is over. The conclusion was that democracy with individual rights in a free market economy would prevail. That interpretation hardly enriched our understanding of history: in light of the recent rise of ultra-nationalism, populism, anarchism, and religious fundamentalism all over the world, one may well ask if we have any idea at all of where we are actually heading.

32When history is at its end, there is no one left to ponder its meaning. Consider the imagery of "the last man" in Fukuyama's title in terms of, say, scientific search after truth. Let us imagine that at the end of days there appears a physicist, who solves all the problems of the string theory and hence grasps the entire character of existence itself. Should this "last of the Mohicans" have a son, who not only fails to grasp his father's insights, but also outlives him (unlike Uncas), are we to conclude that the history of man results in nothing but ignorance? History is not about the end, it is about human events over time and about human experience of that time.

33Johann M. Neem's recent defense of national history in his article "American History in a Global Age" draws on the notion that globalization is nothing but a new master narrative, whose problem is its uncritical attitude to the excesses of global capitalism. Yet, given that, "like nationalism, cosmopolitanism is a narrative project,"24 Neem argues only for a new national master narrative by which to keep critical distance from the cosmopolitan one. Given that "history is a civic enterprise," it appears to him a mere matter of fact that "the moral force" of even transnational narratives "depends on their readers' nationalism."25 No wonder, Neem's new narrative resembles the old one: The founders, believing that "the nation must embody universal values," built "the roof" and the rest of American history is about building "the walls"

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for national liberalism.26 The comparative analysis behind this view is strikingly simplistic in its appeal to the present: violence "continues to wreak havoc" in those non-American "parts of the world where both nationalism and liberalism remain weak."27 Regarding history writing, Neem holds that "forming collective identity is not the only or even necessarily the primary purpose of professional history,"28 which is only to say that it is necessarily one of its purposes, if not the primary. Neem, in fact, contextualizes the notion of seeking truth of the past within totally extra-curricular kinds of concerns for nationalistic identity building. He knows the significance of what national history may reveal prior to the research he is apparently promoting.

5. Explanations and Significance

34Letting go of the metanarrative does not entail losing the concept of historical context. For the classic, Rankean school historical contextualization would be a comparatively simple matter of situating a given phenomenon within the circumstances of its own time. Various modes of historicism subscribe to this view, among them the radical position that there are no other truths than historical ones.29 Even this we do not know. It is good not to lose sight of the possibility of truth being something else entirely. Yet, the problem of historical contextualization solves itself if we think of history simply as a discourse among historians' different accounts of a given past phenomenon.

35Bluntly speaking, historical contextualization can be viewed as a matter of a historian either agreeing or disagreeing with one's colleagues about the historical circumstances of a phenomenon under question. Collingwood's old thesis that "all history must be consistent with itself" may well hold true, given that any two mutually exclusive accounts of a particular past phenomenon cannot both be acceptable.30 Genuinely innovative views tend to arise when a historian takes a fresh view of the circumstances rather than of the event itself. Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange (1972) became one of the initiators of environmental history in studying the huge impact of the European invasion to America from 1492 onwards, but not by focusing on politics, disease, and warfare. Instead, Crosby studied how the Americas changed as natural environments and as cultural landscapes thanks to the introduction of so many new plants and animals as well as the consequent extinction of many others.31

36Similarly, Pekka Hämäläinen's award-winning The Comanche Empire (2009) provides a wholly new perspective on the actual role of one Native-American nation in Western history by offering a convincing set of explanations for what made the Comanche "confederation" so important and successful compared to other Great Plains Indian nations, the Texans, and the Spanish of that era. That Hämäläinen also brings to the fore the ways the Comanches secured their access to carbohydrates alongside their protein-rich food as nomadic hunters complicates matters, however, since the reader is not informed which potential competitor of the Comanche empire failed to secure equally healthy nutrition and to what effect.32 Viewing every possible explanation about a given topic as methodologically equal would presume not only that reality is essentially holistic, but also that knowledge about it must be equally so. Just as we cannot presume a metanarrative, we do not know whether everything is in a meaningful sense related to everything else.

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37To be sure, Hämäläinen's remarks about nutrition do not contradict any other explanations he offers. And the central positive outcome of his approach results from seeing power relations as a much more comprehensive issue in history writing than historians of the American West generally admitted before his book. The idea of integrating his saga of this empire into some larger "metanarrative"33 of American history as some commentators have suggested, is unlikely to help us in determining the quality of his historical research. What would we benefit from further integration of this saga into some metanarrative, except perhaps to subscribe to some such an absurd claim that these people were on the "wrong side of history," because their empire fell?

38An analytic approach to history may well call for counterfactual thinking and yet have nothing to do with so-called counterfactual history. The Journal of American History recently published Gary J. Kornblith's article, "Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise." The author aims to question the inevitability of the Civil War in 1861-65 by positing "the absence of the Mexican-American War" in 1846-48.34 This entire "exercise" consists of reasoning on the basis of what we know not to have been the case. One would get the same amount of historical knowledge by stating that "in the absence of the American founding, no outbreak of the Civil War in 1861." The practitioners of future studies must reason with probabilities because they study the possible future. The so-called "counterfactual" history is not history, because it does not study the past. By contrast, counter-factual analysis can be used in history, for in history there is always a better reason for what happened than for what did not.

39Counterfactual analysis, in Allan Megill's well-known formulation, holds that a cause C is an efficient cause for A to turn into B, provided that without C, B would not have arisen, all other things being equal. Let us think of the best available explanation for the Civil War in light of this. Even if committed to the view of slavery as the ultimate reason for the war, one might think of timing as an important factor. Given that the war erupted so soon after the 1860 Presidential Elections, one could begin by seeking the reasons why Stephen Douglass, J.C. Breckinridge, and John Bell stood as presidential candidates alongside Lincoln. None of them intended to split the southern vote to help Lincoln win the presidency. Given that shortly before the war there were numerous meetings held to solve the situation peacefully, even the Southern leaders appear to have had a living attachment to the Union. This approach might provide one with new hindsight about the point at which no return was possible, perhaps even earlier than April 12, 1861, when the first grenades began flying to Fort Sumter.

40In seeking the Southerners' ultimate reasons for seceding from the Union in the Spring of 1861, there is no escape from the notion that slavery was among them, alongside the decades-long debates over custom duties; the gradual formation of a distinct Southern identity from at least the late 1840s onwards; and competition over the markets of the West. Perhaps the most important factor was the ominous loss of southerners' property value in slaves (dependent on expectations of growth), should the North prevent the expansion of slave economy to the West. No abolitionist, of course, suggested prohibiting the expansion of free labor cotton cultivation to the West. Slavery had been part of Southern society over two hundred years, but only very shortly before the war did it come to be viewed as the reason for secession from the Union.35 Perhaps the industrial revolution might be a contributing factor. As historian Gerald Gunderson has pointed out, thanks to the telegraph, increasing number of newspapers, better transportation, and general economic growth, "Americans not only

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had more income with which they could choose to end the unwholesomeness they saw in slavery, but they were reminded of it far more often as well."36

41The point is not that slavery alone caused the Civil War. The point is that without slavery the other reasons would not have caused it—at least not at the time it erupted. One may speculate which particular aspect of slavery was the crucial one, but certain it is that "without slavery, no Civil War in 1861-65." In other words, slavery is a necessary reason for the Civil War. One might take a step further and ask if slavery was the sufficient reason for the war. The sufficient reason always belongs to the group of necessary reasons, although it may also be a particular juxtaposition of them. To illuminate the case, one might argue that the link between the Civil War and slavery is stronger than that between lung cancer and smoking: while smoking may be the decisive reason for a particular smoker to get lung cancer, it is neither the sufficient nor even a necessary reason of lung cancer, because nonsmokers also get it. Hence, one should not confuse smoking with even the juxtaposition of a number of necessary risk factors that explain lung cancer. By contrast, explaining the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 without slavery is impossible.

42None of this is to argue that the Civil War was not a "war between the states." Neither was slavery the only subject of controversy within the Union pertaining to the erstwhile, Jeffersonian doctrine of states' rights. Moreover, the Civil War did not solve all the issues related to states' rights. Religious freedom was one of those issues, for the national Constitution guaranteed only that the national government would not restrict religious freedom. Even as the author of Virginia's law of religious freedom, Jefferson appears to have never suggested that other states could be compelled to follow suit. Notably, it was only in 1961 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled out Maryland's right to demand religious oaths from its civil servants.

43As for the issue of slavery, Jefferson opposed the early Missouri compromise in 1819 by arguing that the northern abolitionists turned a simple juridical definition of civil rights belonging exclusively to the states into a controversy over the Union. Lincoln himself swore to save the Union whether it demanded freeing all the slaves or freeing none. Thus, it was only in 1865 that all northern states were required to abolish slavery, New Jersey being one of the very latest to do so. It was as late as 1969 that Virginia was compelled to let go of its prohibition of interracial marriage. Was this prohibition a mere remnant of the antebellum laws to consolidate slavery as a racial institution? It was not, because the entirety of post-bellum Jim Crow legislation aimed to restore racial boundaries in lieu of slavery.37 Neither did these laws have anything to do with Jefferson's legacy, for his solution was to deport the entire African-American population from the Union. There are clear historical discontinuities between Jefferson's position and the later ones, which cannot be explained away, because the events in between matter.

44Seeking truth about past is different from turning historical facts into a rationale for present-day conceptions. In disagreeing with the 2012 Supreme Court majority ruling on Arizona's powers to restrict immigration, Justice Antonin Scalia drew on Jefferson's and Madison's two hundred years old statements about states' rights to restrict immigration. In addition, Scalia viewed Samuel Pufendorf, a German expert in natural law from the late 17th century, as an authority on the issue.38 Unlike Jefferson, Pufendorf was not a slaveholder. He was not even a racist, for he thought it unfortunate that slavery was abolished as a social institution among the Europeans.39 Scalia is an

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advocate of the time-honored constitutional doctrine of original intent. The doctrine is simply ahistorical: it looks for the founders' original intent even on issues they never imagined possible. The Civil War permanently changed the balance between states' rights from anything the founders had ever had in mind, just as it destroyed Jefferson's vision of bringing German immigrants to replace the slaves whom he would have deported from the Union. Again, the events in between matter. It is difficult to imagine a serious study of American constitutional history without subscribing to the notion that the meaning of the Constitution has indeed altered over time. None of this is to claim that only discontinuities matter in history. Should a historian prove that there was no essential break where all others have assumed otherwise, that would also be a valid research result.

6. Conclusion

45As argued above, there is no necessary connection between the perhaps inescapably narrative character of history and the historian's absolute commitment to the linearity of time in historical explanation. Narrative may play with the concept of linear time, its ending determining the story's actual meaning; history may not. In history, causation never goes backwards in time. Neither does history inform us about the future.

46As an art of recounting the past, history is about examining a particular past event or phenomenon—be it a war, a famine, a debate, a pattern of behavior, an economic cycle, or a trend of thought—and explaining it as a result of reasons predating it. Stuck inside the constantly advancing time like all other human beings, a historian cannot explain an event by its consequences, even if those consequences rather than the event itself are what make it significant enough to be written in a history book. The significance of an event can be found in the present alone, and no matter how important a given historical event may now seem that may change in the unforeseeable future.

47The presumption that history may tell us something significant in the present is too often associated with our presumably shared understanding about where history has brought us. The existence of such an understanding is vastly exaggerated. Just as in the past, people still have tremendously different ideas about the current human condition. This is why one should avoid politicizing history writing as a "civic enterprise" in itself. The line between the historian's job proper and the act of politicizing the past for one or another presumably good purpose is thin. Yet, it is there. Ending American slavery is neither a political, nor a moral problem for us. We know how it came to its end. As Aristotle once put it, no one deliberates about the past. Only present policies can be put to a genuine moral test, and even justifiable occasions of violence can be viewed as resulting from a political failure, given that politics is conflict solving in peaceful means.

48Thus understood, the main limits of historical research are practical ones, such as the size or complexity of the questions most useful to ask about the past in order to turn past phenomena into history: that is, to provide historical knowledge. None of this is to argue against narrative accounts of the past. The central formal requirement of a historical research project is only that it begins with a research question and ends with the answer to that particular question. The minimum requirement is the same as in all

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academic disciplines: one must avoid so meaningless a research that "it is not even wrong," as physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously stated on a study paper.

49Despite the popular witticisms that "the worst thing about history is that every time it repeats itself, the price goes up," there is no way to prove that history repeats itself. The reason is that we have no common denominator enabling us to define any two temporally distinct phenomena as identical without presuming that absolutely nothing of consequence happened in between. Just like the present, the past is a huge mess of causes and effects. Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, draughts, and other natural occurrences have dramatically affected history. As for deliberate changes, innumerable, conscious and unconscious, intentional human acts have collided with each other and produced events that probably no single agent intended exactly as they eventually took place. This is also why one may well hold that history teaches us nothing—besides, perhaps, historical thinking itself.

50If history teaches us nothing but historical understanding, what is the use of it? Perhaps its only use is to remind us to regard the essentially unforeseeable future with a historical consciousness rather than with one or another mythical notion of a foundational truth—be that the American Constitution or the first book of Genesis. What other use should history have? For a great many people, history speaks only to our recurrent failures to resolve our conflicts peacefully, and to the comparative inefficacy of our very best intentions. Insofar as history may appear elevating to some of us, perhaps the lesson is, to paraphrase J.D. Salinger, that neither we, nor our predecessors, were put here to die for a reason, but to live for one.

NOTES

1. The author wishes to thank Allan Megill and Matti Peltonen for their valuable critical comments. The views expressed are all mine. 2. See Alun Munslow, A History of History (London: Routledge, 2012), 44. I thank Ilona Pikkanen for bringing this quotation to my attention. 3. On history's meaninglessness, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 72; To an extent, the question about the ultimate meaning of history as a metanarrative can be answered by a historian's attitude to it: for an idealist, history manifests human progress; for a cynic, it appears as a sheer tragedy of the continuing degeneration of the human race; and for a skeptic, it unfolds as a great farce with no substantial meaning whatsoever. Given White's ruminations about these, not mutually exclusive, attitudes to history, one may read him as arguing simply (though in a particularly complicated way) that we have no reason to believe that history has a purpose. 4. White, The Content of the Form, 2. White states that "Historians do not have to report their truths about the real world in narrative form. They may choose other, nonnarrative, even antinarrative modes of representation, such as the meditation, the anatomy, or the epitome. Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Huizinga, and Braudel ... refused narrative in certain of their historiographical works." To be sure, in his other writings, White extends the notion of narrative to cover practically all of the other forms as well.

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5. One of the most amusingly distorted uses of the past I have ever seen is that of Harry Jaffa, who holds that "had Aristotle been called upon, in the latter half of the 17th century, to write a guide book for constitution makers, he would have written something very closely approximating Locke's Second Treatise. For he would have recognized instantly those differences from his Politics that prudential wisdom required, in the world of Christian monotheism." Essay by Harry V. Jaffa, "Aristotle and Locke in the American Founding," Claremont Reviews of Books (Winter 2001 Issue), 10; Pdf-file (accessed Aug. 11, 2014) at http://www.unz.org/Pub/ ClaremontRevBooks-2001q1-00010 6. See for this concept, Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), xiii. 7. Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, Jan 20, 2009, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Presidential Speech Archive (accessed July 5, 2011) at http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/ speeches/detail/4463 8. For the sake of clarity: I would personally embrace an even more thorough health care reform, just as did President Obama himself initially, but my political stance has little to do with what I think is interesting in American history, whether considered as a progressive or a regressive entity in itself. 9. White, The Content of the Form, 16. 10. For quotations, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 51, 55. 11. White, The Content of the Form, 206-209. 12. White, The Content of the Form, 209. 13. White, The Content of the Form, 39-40. 14. This is why I would dismiss such mysterious claims as that of Arthur C. Danto, who states that, "If the future is open, the past cannot be utterly closed." Whatever Danto's actual meaning here, one may distinguish between any such an utterly closed past and our constantly changeable image of it. See Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 196. 15. White, The Content of the Form, 150. 16. Allan Megill, "'Grand Narrative' and the Discipline of History" in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 165. 17. White, The Content of the Form, 54. 18. On Ricoeur, White, The Content of the Form, 181. 19. See Pasi Falk's intriguing article, "The past to come" Economy and Society, Vol. 17 (3, 1988), 374-394, esp., 379. 20. See, for example, Hannah Arendt, On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963, 35-36. 21. TJ to John Randolph, Aug. 25, 1775, Merrill D. Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 749. 22. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812, Lester J. Cappon (ed.), The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 307. 23. Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, Sept. 6, 1824, Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson Writings, 1496-1497. 24. Johann N. Neem, "American History in a Global Age," History and Theory, 50 (Feb. 2011), 41-70, quote, 59. 25. Ibid., pp. 52, 70. 26. Ibid., 56, 64. 27. ibid., 70. 28. Ibid., 70.

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29. For a good introduction to these problems, see for example, Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 10. 30. For the Collingwood quotation, see Megill, "Grand Narrative," 163. 31. Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972). 32. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 347-349. On carbohydrates, see, 352. 33. As Ty Cashion writes, " Comanche Empire ... should significantly influence future metanarratives, whether they include all or parts of Texas, the West, the Borderlands, or even general histories of the United States and Mexico." Ty Cashion, "The Comanche Empire (review)," The Journal of Military History, Vol. 73, (2, 2009), 647 (emphasis added). 34. Gary J. Kornblith, "Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise," in The Journal of American History, Vol. 90, No 1 (June 2003), 76-105. 35. For a classic analysis of the causes of the Civil War, see the subchapter "The American Civil War: the Last Capitalist Revolution" in Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 111-158. 36. Gerald Gunderson, A New Economic History of America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 264. 37. For this important distinction between slavery and the general disfranchisement of African Americans in the late nineteenth century as part of the project of Southern whites to restore "race control," see James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 204. 38. For Antonin Scalia's opinion on Arizona v. United States, 567 as of June 25, 2012 see the U.S. Supreme Court website (accessed, June 26, 2012), http://www.supremecourt.gov/ 39. See on Pufendorf's rather surprising stance on slavery, Kari Saastamoinen, "Pufendorf on Natural Equality, Human Dignity, and Self-Esteem," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 71 (1, 2010), 44.

ABSTRACTS

This paper argues that we can let go of the conception of narrative history, not because we know history to be something else entirely, but because the conception too often leads to needless confusion about the methodological basics of historical research among both history students and professional historians themselves. One may view history simply as knowledge of the past and as an ongoing discussion between historians (and other interested parties) over the best account of any given past phenomenon. Given that we politically disagree on where exactly history has brought us, the safest epistemological position for a practicing historian is that the past is just as messy as our own present in which we attempt to find political solutions for a better future. Rather than clinging to any inherently narrative character of history, or of historical representation, the practicing historian may well concentrate on explaining the meaning of a given phenomenon in the past and its possible historical significance for the present, and at least attempt to distinguish between these two.

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INDEX

Keywords: cyclical history, globalization, Hayden White, historical narrative, linearity, politics, temporality

AUTHOR

ARI HELO University of Oulu

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