European journal of American studies, 11-2

European journal of American studies

11-2 | 2016Summer 2016

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

ÉditeurEuropean Association for American Studies

Référence électroniqueEuropean journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016, « Summer 2016 » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 11 août2016, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11535 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11535

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SOMMAIRE

The Land of the Future: British Accounts of the USA at the Turn of the Nineteenth CenturyDavid 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 ofInnocence as a Dialogic NovelSevinc Elaman-Garner

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

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

“Why Don’t You Just Say It as Simply as That?”: The Progression of Parrhesia in the EarlyNovels of Joseph HellerPeter Templeton

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

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

The State You’re In: Citizenship, Sovereign Power, and The (Political) Rescue of the Self inKazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian LegacyAndrea Pacor

At the Meetin’ Tree: Reading, Storytelling, and Transculturation in Daniel Black’s They TellMe of a HomePekka Kilpeläinen

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

Sex and the City: A Situationist Reading of Jens Jorgen Thorsen’s Film Adaptation of HenryMiller’s Quiet Days in ClichyJennifer Cowe

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

Smart Geopolitics, Dangerous Ideas: Energy security, Ideology, and the Challenges ofAmerican Policy in the Persian GulfDiego Pagliarulo

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

European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016

1

The Land of the Future: BritishAccounts of the USA at the Turn ofthe Nineteenth CenturyDavid 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).


2

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


3

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


4

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.

10 By 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.

11 Among 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).


5

3. Anglo-American Union

12 Where 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.

13 Reade’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

14 Size 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


6

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.

15 Brydges 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

16 By 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.

17 Barr 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


7

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.

18 Where 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

19 The 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;


8

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).

20 In 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.

21 Stead’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


9

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.

22 The 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.

23 From 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.

24 Stead 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).


10

Figure 1

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

25 Stead 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

26 The 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),


11

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.

27 Stead’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.

28 The 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


12

London read like futuristic news accounts, culminating in an idealized combination of

British imperial strength and American commercial and military inventiveness.

29 A 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.

30 Rudyard 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

31 Despite 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


13

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.

32 At 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.


14

Figure 2

‘Triumphal March of American Products’

5. Wells and the New Order

33 It 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

34 The 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 railwaysof to-day, of clean, clear pavements free altogether from the fly-prolific filth ofhorses coming almost, as it were, of their own accord beneath the feet of apopulation that no longer expectorates at all; of grimy stone and peeling paint


15

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.

36 Before 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).


16

Figure 3

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

37 In 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 andChesterton

38 One 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.

39 For 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


17

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).

40 Ultimately 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.

41 In 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


18

rebuilding, Chesterton is moving towards the machine rhythms evoked in later works

like the 1936 film Modern Times.

7. Coda: Aldous Huxley

42 The 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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---. The New America. The New World. New York: Macmillan, 1935. Print.

---. The Discovery of the Future. Ed. Patrick Parrinder. London: PNL P., 1989. Print.

Wilson, Angus. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling. London: Granada, 1979. Print.

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


22

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.


23

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


24

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,


25

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


26

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


27

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.

10 James’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.


28

11 In “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).

12 For 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.

13 As 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.

14 James’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.


29

15 As 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

16 James 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.

17 Maud 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


30

“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.”

18 A “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?

19 It 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).

20 James’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


31

in them. Nevertheless, this interest does not situate her among James’s “plain” women

as she remains in the realm of critical readers.

21 In 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:

22 The 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)

23 In 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.”

24 Even 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


32

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.

25 The 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:

26 Following 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)

27 In “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


33

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).

29 Thus, 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

30 James 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


34

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


36

Contradictory Depictions of the NewWoman: Reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a DialogicNovelSevinc 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


37

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


38

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

and struggle.

2. The New (American) Woman and New WomanFiction

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, challengedaccepted ideals of marriage and maternity, chose to work for a living, or who, inany way argued the feminist course, became the commonplace in the works of...


39

writers [of New Woman fiction] and were firmly identified by readers and reviewersas 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.


40

10 Bakhtin’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.

11 I 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 becomic, ironic or parodic discourse, the refracting discourse in the language of acharacter and finally the discourse of a whole incorporated genre—all thesediscourses are double–voiced and internally dialogized. A potential dialogue isembedded in them, one as yet unfolded, a concentrated dialogue of two voices, twoworld 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


41

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.

13 Because 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

14 In 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


42

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).

15 In 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


43

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.

17 The 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.

18 Thus 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 haveno 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 carefullytrained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriagebecoming... a dull association of material and social interests held together byignorance 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


44

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.

20 The 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 agehad been through, and emerged from... an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinctionbetween 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 alwayscriminal of the woman... The only thing to do was to... to marry a nice girl, and thentrust 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


45

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 inwhich pride in his own masculine initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for herabysmal purity. ‘We'll read Faust together… by the Italian lakes...’ he thought,somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honeymoon with the masterpieces ofliterature 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.

23 The 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).

24 As 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


46

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.

25 The 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.

26 It 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 worldcompared to the one you lived in. And it’s ruled, in spite of appearances, by a fewpeople with—well, rather old–fashioned ideas.... Our ideas about marriage anddivorce are partially old–fashioned. Our legislation favors divorce—our socialcustoms 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.... Theindividual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be thecollective 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


47

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.

29 However, 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


48

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.

30 All 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.”

31 In 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.

32 As 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


49

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.

33 Near 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.

34 One 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).

35 By 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


50

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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press,

1980. Print.

Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 1990. Print.

Bakhtin, Mikhael, M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Carly Emerson and M.

Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print.

---. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Carly Emerson. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1984. Print.

Bauer, Dale M., and S. Jaret McKinstry, eds. Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic. Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1991. Print.

Castle, Gregory. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell, 2007.

Print.

Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. London and Basingstoke: The

Macmillan Press, 1978. Print.

Fryer, Judith. “Purity and power in The Age of Innocence.” American Literary Realism 17 (1984): 153–

68. Print.

Godfrey, David A. “‘The Full and Elaborate Vocabulary of Evasion’: The Language of Cowardice in

Edith Wharton’s Old New York.” The Midwest Quarterly 30.1 (1988): 27-44. Print.

Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends, Rivals. London: University Press of New England,

1990. Print.

Heilmann, Ann. The New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester

University Press: Manchester, 2004. Print.

Holbrook, David. Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man. New York: St. Martin Press, 1991. Print.

James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Critical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

Jasinski, James. “Heteroglossia, Polyphony, and the Federalist Papers.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly

27.1 (1997): 23–46. Print.


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Jay Jessee, Margaret. “Trying it On: Narration and Masking in The Age of Innocence.” Journal of

Modern Literature 36.1 (2012): 37–52. Print.

Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester and New York:

Manchester University Press, 1997. Print.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Vintage, 2008. Print.

Matthews, Jean V. The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875–1930. Chicago:

Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Print.

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


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


52

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–siecle 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


53

“Nothing Can Touch You as Long asYou Work”: Love and Work inErnest Hemingway’s The Garden ofEden and For Whom the Bell TollsLauren 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


54

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 handand another loop of it around his wrist and the gravel beside the road under hisknees he was not lonely nor did he feel in any way alone. He was one with the wirein 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 ofthe 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


55

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


56

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.

10 Both 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.

11 But 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.


57

12 David 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).

13 In 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.

14 When 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).

15 But 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


58

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).

16 Catherine 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

17 Although 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.

18 Once 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).


59

19 Perhaps 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.

20 As 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.

21 That 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.

22 While 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

23 David’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.

24 Critics 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.

25 According 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


61

Marita’s increasing influence from the posthumously published novel, the importance

of negotiating relationships for the male artist would be even more apparent.

26 In 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 maleprinciple signifies for her… she wants a love relationship with David. For him thispattern is significantly reversed. He wants simply to write; and when he can dothat, David needs human companionship only as part of a menu of sensations thatrestore the writer—eating, drinking, making love, sun tanning, and swimming—allof which were once part of his and Catherine’s transformative endeavors, but arenow 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.

28 In 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 outhis copybooks, and wrote and wrote, happy, tired, hungover, ebullient, depressed,whatever his mood it was cast off, discarded, and as the creative juices began toflow, he entered another world and if we were lucky and it was good enough he leftit 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).

31 This 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.

32 Both 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.

33 Because 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.

34 Although 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


64

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).

35 Invested 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.

36 Maria 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.

37 Although 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 wantedanything? Nor thought of anything except the movement and the winning of thiswar? Truly I have been very pure in my ambitions. I have worked much and now Ilove thee and,’ he said it now in a complete embracing of all that would not be, ‘I


65

love thee as I love all that I have fought for. I love thee as liberty and dignity andthe rights of men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that wehave 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 lovemost in the world and I love thee more. I love thee very much, rabbit. More than Ican 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.

39 Although 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).

40 Because 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


66

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.

42 In 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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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.

Pizer, Donald. American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State


Rudat, Wolfgang E. H. “The Other War in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Maria and Miltonic Gender-Role

Battles.” The Hemingway Review 11.1 (Fall 1991): 8-24. Print.

Silbergleid, Robin. “Into Africa: Narrative and Authority in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.” The

Hemingway Review 27.2 (Spring 2008): 96-116. Print.

Sinclair, Gail D. “Revisiting the Code: Female Foundations and ‘The Undiscovered Country’ in For

Whom the Bell Tolls.” Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Ed. Lawrence R.

Broer and Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 93-108. Print.

Spilka, Mark. Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Print.

Strong, Amy Lovell. “Go to Sleep, Devil’: The Awakening of Catherine’s Feminism in The Garden of

Eden.” Hemingway and Women. Ed. Broer and Holland. 190-203. Print.

Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 2003. Print.

Trogdon, Robert W. “Money and Marriage: Hemingway’s Self-Censorship in For Whom the Bell

Tolls.” The Hemingway Review 22.2 (Spring 2003): 6-18. Print.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave: 2007. Print.

---. “The Romance of Desire in Hemingway’s Fiction.” Hemingway and Women. Ed. Broer and

Holland. 54-69. Print.

Willingham, Kathy. “Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Writing with the Body.” The Hemingway

Review 12.2 (Spring 1993): 46-61. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harvest, 1981. Print.

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.


69

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’ArcyMcNickle’s (Re)Valuing of NativeAmerican PrinciplesJohn 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.

10 In 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.

11 The 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.

12 Archilde 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.

13 McNickle 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 twocenturies, at least, it has been the capital of wit andlearning. 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. Iheard nothing else, in fact.” He hesitated over hisnext words. “Is it so wonderful then? Is it worthsacrificing a great deal to be here?’

‘Yes, some people will give everything—do youknow 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.

15 Archilde’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


75

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.

16 His 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.

17 As 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).

18 The 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.

19 They 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).

20 It 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.

21 In 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


76

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.

22 While 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.

23 The 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.

24 It 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.

25 The 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


77

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

26 Archilde’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.

27 Although 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.

28 One 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.

29 Second, 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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30 For 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.

31 Also 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.

32 Conflicting 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.

33 This 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.

34 Communal 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.

35 As 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.

36 In 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 intoeach other, became intertwined, and life was no mere matter of existence, no mereflash of time. It was time that made the difference. The time that was consumed inmoving one’s feet along the earth, in learning the smell of coming snow, inenduring hunger and fear and the loss of pride; all that made a difference. And astill greater difference was this entangling of lives. People grew together likecreeping vines. The root of beginning was hard to find in the many that had cometogether 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.

38 Unlike 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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39 The 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.

40 McNickle 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

41 The 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.

42 In 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.

43 The 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.

44 The 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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45 In 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.

46 As 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 asSimply as That?”: The Progressionof Parrhesia in the Early Novels ofJoseph HellerPeter 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


85

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-sufficiencyor independence, … consequently, most of their preaching seems to have beendirected against social institutions, the arbitrariness of rules of law, and any sort oflife-style that was dependent upon such institutions or laws. In short, theirpreaching was against all social institutions insofar as such institutions hinderedone’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 werepledging allegiance to the flag, with trays of food balanced in one hand, in order tobe allowed to take seats at the table. Already at the tables, a group that had arrivedstill earlier was singing ‘the star spangled banner’ in order that they might use thesalt 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 unforgivingexpressions with a hard, vindictive surface, glowing in their narrowed eyesmalignantly like inextinguishable coals. Clevinger was stunned to discover it. Theywould 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).

11 Fear 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.

12 It 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).

13 One 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 fiftymissions. There were more of them now than whenYossarian had gone into the hospital, and they werestill waiting. They worried and bit their nails. Theywere grotesque, like useless young men in adepression. They moved sideways, like crabs. Theywere waiting for the orders sending them home tosafety to return from Twenty-seventh Air Forceheadquarters in Italy, and while they waited they hadnothing to do but worry and bite their nails and findtheir way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several timesa day to ask if the order sending them home to safetyhad come.

They were in a race and they knew it, becausethey knew from bitter experience that ColonelCathcart might raise the number of missions again atany 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.

15 Blau 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).

16 It 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.

17 The 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).

18 If 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.

19 Yossarian 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.

20 Heller’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

21 The 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)

22 It 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 thesefive people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, andeach 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 onehundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and allof these one hundred and forty five people are afraid of the twelve men at the topwho helped found and build the company and now own and direct it. (SomethingHappened 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 menin the office hierarchy operate in two directions at once. Not only are men who aresubordinated in this hierarchy subject to fear from those above, but those above arealso fearful—one might say paranoically so—of those below, since it is the menbelow 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.

25 Power 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).

26 This 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.

27 The 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 spacesof work and home. Although the demands are different in each of theseenvironments, Slocum struggles to switch from the demand that he act a certainway at work to the demand that he act a certain other way at home. Instead ofrelating to his wife and daughter as his wife and daughter, he treats them in thesame way that he treats his colleagues at work, that is competitively and withsuspicion. (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.

29 Heller’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, Hellershould come up with such lame tomfoolery as this. Yes, there is acknowledgementof 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).

31 Here, 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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32 Good 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.

33 Though 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 doboggle his mind. He has a framed copy of your review of his My Year in the WhiteHouse under the glass top of his desk in the Oval Office so he can reread it all daylong during vital conversations on agriculture, housing, money, starvation, health,education, and welfare, and other matters in which he has no interest.’ (Good as Gold122)

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.

35 This 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).

36 Perhaps 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).

37 Heller’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 Likea Paradise. It Was Not, He Knew”:Suburbia and the MaladjustedAmerican Male in John Cheever’s Bullet ParkHarriet Poppy Stilley

1 Often pictured as a time of exceptional stability by the

popular culture of later generations, the postwar Americanepoch of 1950s complacence and consensus placidity inreality marked a moment of rapid social change. Certainlyfor white, middle-class men the period connoted one ofexpeditious adjustment, as a pervading managerial, service-based and family-orientated template of masculinityemerged, respectively reducing the influence of anytraditional delineations of American manhood based onproduction or control. Rather than welcoming these societalchanges, however, social commentators of the 1950s stillclung to the self-made man type as the only acceptable formof hegemonic masculinity. A combination of sociologists,psychologists, historians and literary critics took umbragewith the materializing managerial mold in the belief thatsuch abrupt alterations in work and community haddiminished the public space for the performance ofmasculinity and, as such, caused men to subject themselvesto the control of other men and institutions.

2 William Whyte’s study of postwar middle-class

consciousness affirms this belief, claiming that the declineof the free entrepreneur and the rise of the dependent


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employee on the American scene paralleled the withdrawalof the independent individual and the ascent of a conformist“organizational man” in the American mind. Like so manyprofessional men in the postwar era, Whyte’s organizationman worked in middle management within a largecorporation. He was characteristically a “committee” man,who assumed as a matter of habit that “the group,” acommittee of compatible members committed tocooperation with one another in pursuit of some mutuallyconceived project, could accomplish more in the way ofprogress and proficiency than the individual acting alone.Whyte attributed such a presumption to the “social ethic,” acontemporary body of thought defined by its belief in“belongingness” as the ultimate need of the individual; abelief which not only resulted in a decline in individualitycentral to self-made man masculinity, but moreover made“morally legitimate the pressures of society against theindividual” (Whyte 7).

3 Whyte’s contemporary characterological profiling, to

this end, highlights a level of organization fealty thatsubsumes the individual to a group while simultaneously“[converting] what would seem in other times a bill of norights into a restatement of individualism” (Whyte 6). It isimportant to recognize, therefore, that while Depressionera thinkers had largely been concerned with issues ofeconomic deprivation and social injustice, mid-centurysocial critics like Whyte were increasingly turning theirattentions to the cultural malaise at the heart of Americanself-making, together with the distinct emotionaldiscontents that sprang directly from the blind pursuit of amarketplace masculinity. K.A. Cuordileone maintains that,“never before had the self come under such scrutiny,” ameasure of the debilitating psychological implications of amodern “mass society” in which the individual, “unloosedfrom 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 ofautonomy, namely the achievement of an “independent,well-fortified sense of self within [such a] society,” was,Cuordileone states, the “single most compelling problem forpostwar intellectuals and social critics” (99). Of course, thisstep away from “public institutions and their limitations”toward more “private ailments and inner dissatisfaction”ultimately reflected the postwar economic recovery and thearrival of an affluent society (Cuordileone 98). In addition,prosperity, far from delivering a sense of personal liberationfrom the constraints and deprivations of the past, seemed


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only to “augment the psychic burdens of being a man,” withthe great retreat into private life generating chronicconcerns about the psychological effects of consumerism,materialism, and widespread suburbanization on theAmerican character (Cuordileone 138).

4 Appearing as it did in this period of economic ease and

monopoly capitalism, the suburban landscape therebystands as the material counterpart to specific wants andtendencies in American culture apparent from the postwaryears onward. Instantly recognizable from what RobertBeuka describes as its “uniform architectural [style] andlandscape designs,” the American suburb routinely calls tomind a familiar “string of images,” of “loaded signifiers”that, taken together, denote a contemporary Americanvision of the ‘good life,’ or what passes for it (2-4). From thepostwar years onwards, people hence flocked to thepromised land of suburbia in pursuit of a utopianperfectibility, ultimately representative of a patriotic andinnocent bygone era in America. Yet given the Fordistcommercial climate of this postwar period, meant anyutopian morals associated with suburban living were ineffect reduced to paying off a mortgage.

5 For suburban historians Rosalyn Baxandall and

Elizabeth Ewen, such fostering of a “suburbanization,” intruth, served only to facilitate the emergence of a new,landed middle-class, amid which “property [couldtransform] greenhorns into middle-class Americans” (147).It was the satisfaction of prestige—the “keeping up with theJoneses,” if you will—by way of socially conditionedconsumption, not production, that was paramount, with thesuburban terrain acting as the “new illusory frontier ofconsumption” (Potter xxiii). Needless to say, these suburbanhomes and their abundant consumer contents couldnonetheless never be authentically associated with theconsolations of ownership, or the productive function ofproperty to mark, even constitute, identity that has beenbranded “possessive individualism.” Catherine Jurcausefully identifies, instead, the postwar ascendency of asuburban “sentimental dispossession,” wherein middle-class identity was grounded, not so much in these safehavens or homes, but in its “alienation from the veryenvironments, artifacts, and institutions that have generallybeen regarded as central to its identity” (7). Emerging asthe immediate by-product of modern advertising andconsumer culture, this sentimental dispossession principallyrefers to the “affective dislocation” by which suburbanites


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began to then experience themselves as “spiritually andculturally impoverished by prosperity” (Jurca 6).

6 An effective “organisation man at home” in this

“dormitory of the new managerial class,” the malesuburbanite, exchanging personality, privacy, and thecertain satisfactions of pride of craftsmanship forsomething abstrusely defined as the social ethic, thusquickly became the object of sociological scrutiny (Whyte267). Indeed, the plight of the suburban male was aprominent theme for numerous postwar novelists, providingthem with the means to explore the specific social andeconomic conditions that informed and created this sense ofexistential crisis in the politics of subjectivity. Whether it beRichard Yates’ Frank Wheeler of Revolutionary Road(1961), one such “neat and solid” (12) corporate dronewhose “lack of structural distinction” leaves him awash in ashallow bath of “adjustment… and togetherness” (129); orelse Eliot Nailles, the exemplary suburban “henpecked”husband and father of John Cheever’s Bullet Park (1969),whose sentimental dispossession and executive alienationconsign him to “[living] a life… without any genuineemotion or value” (168); the growing disparity between anauthentic masculine ideal and the avenues available forwhite, middle-class men to realize that ideal, fuelled thecontentious social dynamics of the century’s major works ofsuburban fiction.

7 Certainly, with few other American writers of the

twentieth-century remaining more directly or definitivelyassociated with a narrative of the suburban middle-class, itis the “definitely commercial… showroom… quality” of JohnCheever’s fiction that frames the suburbs as a perfectpicture window through to the grey flannel world (100). Inhis calling attention to this inevitable conflict between thedemands of the corporate organization and the dormantdesires of the atomized suburbanite in texts like BulletPark, Cheever’s literary brand of suburban disillusionmenteffectively conceives the dysfunctional dimensions ofmasculine dejection as being somehow derivative ofsuburbia’s larger malady, which is rooted in the veryimpossibility of the imaginative “apple pie order” itrepresents (11). Accordingly consumed by suburbia’s“artificial structure of acceptable reality” and “stubbornly[refusing] to admit the terms by which [he] [lives],” EliotNailles, a commercial chemist and apparently model familyman dedicated to the “intenseness of his monogamy,” thus


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fittingly reprises the final endpoint of capitalism’s pursuit ofhappiness (23). His central status as a “henpeckeddoormat” serves to highlight the “domesticated” ideology ofthe Bullet Park suburbs, while further underscoring thesuburban subordination of what could have once beenNailles’ heroic and pioneering “migratory [instinct],” intothe regimented and largely “painful experience of beingforced into the role of a bystander” (89-90). Yet despite this“immutable emptiness” (61) he expectedly experiences atthe hands of the social ethic, Nailles nevertheless continuesto “sell himself” the uniformly “adjusted” character one issupposed to have, and the appropriate inner experiences aswell as the outer appearances that go with it (65). Theemasculating effects of such a “commodious and efficient”(65) existence in this numbingly materialistic setting result,then, in the outright reduction of the typical Eliot Naillessuburbanite to little more than a depersonalized civic cog,who “[mows] his lawns” while the neighbors watch andthink, “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 socialistkleptomaniac, and chaotic antithesis to the “happilymarried… simple life” the suburbs stand for, the two mensignify halves of the overburdened American psyche (95).Like his counterpart, Hammer wants nothing more than tofit in and belong. Yet amid the suburban social ethic, “oneseldom saw a lonely man,” and so Hammer’s “bastardy[appears] a threat to organized society” (173). As a resulthe accredits belongingness to the illusory, commercialsuburban “way of life” epitomized by Nailles (52). ForHammer, Nailles did not “[arrive] [in] Bullet Park [so much]as to have been planted and grown there,” but this is, ofcourse, “untrue,” with “disorder, moving vans, bank loansat high interest, tears and desperation… [characterizing]most of [the residents] arrivals and departures” (4). To thisend, Cheever posits a dislocation at the heart of thepostwar suburban experience, exposing any organic idea(l)of the suburbs for the utterly self-centered materialism thatit is. Throughout the novel, the author in fact specificallyseeks to challenge this prevailing view of suburbia as apillar of security, stability, and social adjustment throughdisclosing a disturbing reality of insecurity, instability andmaladjustment. Subsequently, Cheever succeeds inestranging his readers from this environment they thoughtthey knew so well, by means of stressing that essentially


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inescapable hammer and nail bond between affluence andabjection.

9 However, more than mere “comedies of suburban

manners” or “didactic essays on the ‘dystopian’ aspects ofsuburbia,” such works by Cheever adopt this elusive dreamof 1960s American suburbanization so as to foreground thepsychological and cultural construction of suburbia as atheoretical ideal, revealing in the process the “consequenttensions that underlie the suburban experience” (Beuka15). Bullet Park hence not only considers the moraldislocations of the second half of the twentieth century, butalso directly addresses the fractured principles of America’straditional values and beliefs. It is important to recognize,therefore, that while in many ways the new suburbanlandscape certainly disrupted traditional nationalconceptions of American manhood, it also equallyresembled the principal nature of such conceptions. Indeed,given that masculinity is about power and the exhibition ofthat power, it remains a construct that is demonstrated forother men’s approval. With masculine worth always relianton external authorization, suburban masculinity evolves,then, merely as another manifestation of a hegemonicmasculine ideology grounded in surface performancesdefined by cultural ideals. By way of considering this latesixties text by Cheever as such, the rest of this essay willhence proceed to examine both Nailles and then Hammer,so as to explore in what ways, and to what extent, theauthor’s portrayal of a disenchanted suburban ennui inBullet Park treads the fault lines of laissez-faire capitalism,whilst furthermore succeeding in uncovering the sources ofmasculine dissatisfaction in their more true andunderground origins.

10 The overall structure of the novel is divided into three

parts. Part One deals with the shrink-wrapped life ofsocialite suburbanite Eliot Nailles and the standardizedformulation of his “rigid,” yet essentially apathetic “sense ofsocial fitness” (52). Part Two, on the other hand, offers aninternalized “insight into how lonely and horny mankind is”through its more detailed account of Paul Hammer’sneurotic mind, as well as the various sources of hismasculine discontent (133). Though they occasionally runinto one another in the first two parts of the novel—alongwith their numerous other disaffected Bullet Park neighbors—it is in Part Three that their dual narratives ceremoniouslycoincide. Respectively “bound together” in this antagonist


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structural doubling between stereotypical middle-classconformity and anomic non-conformity, the two men andtheir split narratives significantly evoke a sense of divisionto which the individual mind in conflict with itself issusceptible (19). As Paul Coates suggests, “the double”exists in literature due to our “inchoate knowledge that weare incomplete and that we cannot master ourselves” (18).Moreover, it implies that identity is a “false category,” for iftwo men are comparable, or in a simplified “Hammer andNailles; side by side” (Cheever 19) relationship, neither hasa “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 withexcessive emphasis thereby placed on social stability,domestic harmony, and corporate responsibility, thefractured perspective of Hammer and Nailles—twoneighboring men who were “the same weight, height andage” (230)—eludes, then, to the male suburbanite’s inabilityto maintain a “balanced” or “united view” within thiscontemporary homogenous culture (Coates 19). Thus,whereas select critics such as Benjamin DeMott havedismissed Cheever’s “flawed novelistic structure” asnothing else but a “broken-backed,” unconvincingly “tackedtogether” attempt to “[stretch] a short story into a novel”(40), it seems far fairer to argue that, through this verythree-part configuration, the author in fact succeeds increating an allegorical format in which the suburban maleemerges as a locus of contradictions in a reality ofconflicting discourses and discursive practices; with “thesetting in some way at the heart of the matter” (Cheever 3).

11 Outwardly obliging and sociable inasmuch as he sees

“utility” in “[manufacturing] and merchandising” the spiritof community (100), the novel’s opening elucidation ofNailles and his character’s mandatory sense of“responsibility to… the [social] fitness of things,” can beread as first of all documenting performance in the knownand perceptible surface world of suburbia (27). Despite the“utter artificiality of [his] sentiments” (33), the perpetualneed to “[work] out a reasonable and patient character likea 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 andattitudes of his neighbors (114). Such dread of disapprovaland the respective damage it could prove to Nailles’ socialstanding corroborates the tormented social subjectivity thatwas particularly pertinent in the postwar American suburb.


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For with its more fluid social mobilities and pervasivetopographical connotations of economic success andindividual achievement, the loss of suburban statusbecomes all the more fearful, while the imperative tobelong and get along with others grows even moreprofound.

12 It is, of course, important to appreciate from the outset,

the extent to which Nailles, and his innate “belief in thefitness of things,” is directly synonymous with the preceptsof his culture, so much so that any individual agency orautonomous characterization effectively evaporates into ageneric classification (Cheever 27). His narrative is likewiseso deliberately devoid of any clear sense of personality orplot other than suburban conformity, that the succeedingdiscussion of his opening section almost exclusivelyparallels the leading critical literature on Americanmasculinity in suburbia at the time. Indeed, taking hissocial ‘cues’ from others—peers, bosses, teachers,advertisers—Nailles essentially embodies a newcharacterological adjustment, whereby the individual “nolonger follows the dictates of conscience,” but, instead,becomes highly responsive to the “fluctuations andcrosscurrents of the day-to-day” (Potter 54). In other words,Cheever’s Nailles deliberately “[discounts] the wildernessof the human spirit” in favor of the approbation of hissuburban community (5), and proceeds to externallymanipulate his entire “way of life” (52) just so he canmeasure 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 hiscontemporaries are a constant source of guidance, in turn,aptly correlates Nailles with David Riesman’s astuteportrait of the “other-directed” personality type as outlinedin The Lonely Crowd (1950). A “shallower… friendlier”person, who is “freer with his money [and] more uncertainof himself and his values,” Riesman coined this term “other-directed” to describe white-collar men of the fifties (Lonely19). 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 venturedinto 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


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understood as developing in contemporary, bureaucraticAmerica (Cheever 100).

13 An indiscernibly “plain man dressed plainly in grey”

(171), Nailles’ claim to “rectitude and uniformity” (239) issimilarly indicative of what Fromm identifies as acontemporaneous “escape from freedom” (61). According toFromm, human beings naturally tend to fear freedom andthe terrifying sense of ambiguity it inspires in theindividual. Hence, when acting independently in ademocratic American society and confronted with theexistential anguish of making choices and exercisingresponsibility, Nailles adopts a new “herd” mentality inwhich any “gratification” or “sense of identity” (Fromm 61)depends on his acting in line with the “requirements of theculture” (77). Indeed, attuned to others but never tohimself, such capitulation through “compulsive conforming”(Fromm 19) allows Nailles to hide in a hierarchy withinwhich his place and his role seem certain, and to withholdthe “agony, confusion and humiliation,” all those “symptomsof 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 Iwear, what I eat, my sex life and a lot of my thinking ispretty well regimented but there are times when I likebeing told what to do,” he exhibits an essentiallyconventionalized, if not contrived desire which appliesextensively to all the intimate areas of his life, for the orderand certainty authoritarianism offers; because “[he] can’tfigure out what’s right and what’s wrong in every situation”(Cheever 67).

14 In this regard, the “moderate, calm, a little bored and

absentminded” character in the interest of which Naillesacts verifies the prototypical, “other-directed” social self ofsuburbia (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 andwhich, in reality, is simply a “subjective disguise for theobjective social function of man” in a given society (Fromm101). The term “other-directed” itself notably suggest such“shallowness and superficiality,” with direction “comingfrom the outside” and simply being “internalized” (Lonely159). Nailles’ “principal occupation with the merchandisingof Spang,” a commercial mouthwash, as being “[reflective]of his dignity,” no doubt then serves to give credence to thisclaim (Cheever 103). According to Nailles, “bad breath was


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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 divertthe fumes downward,” is, as such, based on Spang’spossible surface result, that is, on how the recipient socialother would receive and respond to it, as opposed to howthe individual sufferer may directly experience it (104). Thisexternally oriented, people-minded process is, of course,principally “other-directed,” however, the belief that the“sales of Spang would increase if its taste was moreunpleasant,” furthermore suggests the disturbinglysynthetic preoccupations of this suburban community(Cheever 105).

15 Sure enough, with its patent connotations of cosmetic

pain and torturous intrusion, the analogous metaphoricreference to a “dentist [turning] on the light above hisdrills” (193), or “preparing utensils for an extraction”(198), embellishes the notion of exterior “cleanliness” beingassociated 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 ofhumanity… exhaled… at the end of the day” (79), similarlyfigures this suburban environment as an artificial “precinctof 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” verymuch to be desired, and in many cases favored to anyhuman substance, anything remotely “vagrant” fromNailles’ 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 allexcept the blandness of the scene,” which, after a while,would “[get] so [boring]… [it] would [itself] be offensive”(238).

16 Cheever further explicates this notion through his

repeated reference to “wax flowers,” which serve as asubtle symbol for the beautifully preserved and polished,pristine world of suburbia, at the same time as ademonstrative indication of its inert and imitational,commoditized nature (26). Given that “wax flowers meantdeath” (130) and Nailles often “dreamed [of]… his own…funeral” as if he were dead already (57), foregrounds the


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contrived conservation of this style of life as derivative ofthe deadening, “no good for anything” materialism thatgoverns affluent middle-class American society (88).Consistently “weighted down with rugs and chairs” (32) and“[tables] set [with] wax flowers” (12), Cheever in effectallegorizes the suburban locale as a pale imitation of thereal thing, a counterfeit community where nature itselfbecomes merely another element of maintaining visualevidence of dominant class status. The direct parallel madebetween the customary household “display of wax flowers”(130) and the male “principal member” being described asa “discouraged and unwatered flower” (30), likewise,suggests a sense of alienation from nature occasioned bythe commodification of the suburban environment. Suchimagery, moreover, discloses the essentially castratingatmosphere of this sterile environment, which ensues to“transform the organic into the inorganic,” so as to renderall “living persons” into “things [which] can be controlledand ordered,” if not displayed (Fromm 41).

17 Certainly amid these contemporary postwar conditions,

the resolve to externally keep up appearances usurps theinternal struggle for existence every time, therebygenerating a sort of false consciousness in which“falsehood, confinement, exclusion and a kind of blindness[seem] to be [the] only means of comprehension” (Cheever33). AsMills explains, “in dressing people up and changingthe scenery of their lives,” the exclusive suburbanexperience effectively cultivated a “great faith in thereligion of appearance” (169). Just like a “masqueradeparty,” all Cheever’s suburbanites have to really do,therefore, is to “get [their] clothes at Brooks, catch thetrain and show up in church once a week and no one willever ask a question about [their] identity” (54). For aboveall else, these suburbanites who “look like people and yetthey’re really not” (Cheever 26), exemplify “a new cast ofactors performing the major routines of twentieth-centurysociety” (Mills ix). Of course, within the narcissisticallyimmersive “commercial center” that is Bullet Park (Cheever5), this performance principally involves the acquisition ofappropriate props, for if you “don’t have a pool [yourself],frankly it’s something of a limitation” (13).

18 Not wanting to “find [themselves] left out of the

conversation… when people start talking about poolchemicals and so forth” (13), Cheever’s charactersconsistently maintain a position of superiority in what


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Pierre Bourdieu calls the “culture game” (1). According toBourdieu, there exists at the center of modern affluentsocieties an “economy of cultural goods” that function inaccordance with a “specific logic” (1).i One’s “place” in thesocial landscape is dictated, as such, by their ability todemonstrate possession of discriminating tastes andpropriety, or what Bourdieu refers to as “cultural capital”(1). Following this contention, Cheever presents the “well-bred, beautiful, wealthy” (55) citizens of Bullet Park assubject to the “symbolic ecology” of suburbia,in whichevidentiary display of cultural distinction throughinconspicuous consumption serves not only as the surveyorof social status, but as a measure of individual worth.ii

Certainly Nailles’ sense of his own significance is frequentlyexperienced by means of socio-economic factors extraneousto himself, as if his life in suburbia rests solely on some“substructure of talismans” which determine human valuein the same way the market determines the price of acommodity (241). The allegorical reference to Nailles’house being “made of cards” effectually substantiates thisidea, by way of alluding to his home in the idiom of a game,and so factoring its worth in the same tenuous terms as acard’s figurative value within a card game (46). Amidst thisvain “game of culture” (Bourdieu 3), the material reality ofany object to which Nailles can relate with the reality of hisown person is, therefore, exchanged for what Fromm terms,“phenomenon of abstractification” (61).

19 When “[relating] oneself to an object in an abstract

way” (61), namely, “emphasizing only those qualities whichit has in common with all other objects of the same genus,”Fromm argues that objects can only ever be “experiencedas commodities,” that is, “as [embodiments] of exchangevalue” (112). Thus, when the citizens of Bullet Parkrepeatedly refer their neighbor’s house according to its“estimated resale price” (Cheever 6), they are not centrallyconcerned with its use as a home, that is to say, “with itsconcrete qualities,” but are speaking of it only in other-directed terms as a relative product, the main quality ofwhich is its exchange value (Fromm 111). Indeed, withCheever’s suburban population conditioned to prioritize theabstract 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 receptivemarketing orientation whereby they must respond to thegiven object even if it “poorly serves their actual needs”(Whyte 324). Chiefly acquisitive for the good life inferred


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from the socio-economic structure of suburbia, money itselfbecomes, then, secondary. As Karl Marx explains, “money”works only inasmuch as it “transforms real human andnatural powers into… abstract ideas, and… imperfectionsand imaginings, the powers which only exist in theimagination of the individual, into real powers” (300-301).iii

For Nailles, consumerism is therefore essentially the“satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies” (Fromm130); that is, a phantasy “extension of [his] [affairs]”(Cheever 201) whose reality is mainly the fiction theadvertising campaign has created, “like the ‘healthy’ dentalpaste,” or, in this case, mouthwash (Fromm 61).

20 Rather than an effective means to an end, the social

pressure to excessively consume hence comes to be the aimin itself; specifically, an irresponsibly displaced pursuit ofhappiness in which the materialistic “suburban rhythm” ofa newly affluent America obeys the profitable investmentpattern of capital (Whyte 316). To this end, Elaine TylerMay’s definition of the postwar suburban home as a“secure, private nest removed from the dangers of theoutside world” is rendered somewhat problematic, for whatMay understands to be the ideal version of “Americanhome,” namely a domestic “bastion of safety in an insecureworld,” has from the outset been but an abstract stage onwhich a drama of perfect nuclear family life should ideallybe played out (9). Nonetheless, it seems still necessary toacknowledge the suburban autonomy May describes,specifically its complacent contentment with itself, as anallegorical expression for the situation of postwar Americain Cheever’s work, as well as in the outside world as awhole. 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 sourcesof all attributes with which we have endowed the period,”many of which seem very precisely to derive from “its ownrepresentation of itself” (281). The both intensely personal,and extensively abstract, image-saturated space ofCheever’s Bullet Park therefore seeks to highlight thatnormatively held “happy picture… of a man and a womanand two children” (Cheever 134), which not only was a“staple of the… sitcoms of the 1950s,” but indeed ofpostwar American culture’s homogenous “vision ofsuburbia” (Beuka 108). In this way, Cheever denotes theextent to which that over determined “sense ofpermanence” (181) so characteristic of suburban


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representation, expresses a cultural tendency to misreadand misremember the suburbs, a tendency which suggestsa fundamental desire “to be immortal” (69). Thiscommodification of history, or “nostalgia for the present” ifyou will (Jameson 279), moreover, allows Cheever to offer a“corrective vision” to those mass cultural representations ofcongenial community and “stable patriarchal domesticity”(Beuka 107-108)—namely those comforting, codifiednarratives of the suburbs in the era’s image of itself—whichwere so simplistically, and yet forcefully promulgated in anattempt to dissociate the postwar American present fromsites of conflict and trauma, as if “nothing bad has ever orwill ever happen here” (Cheever 186).

21 The notable absence of any rudimentary explanation

regarding Eliot Nailles’ past, that is to say, his narrative’sclear disregard for any account of his personal history,serves to then juxtapose his character against the culturalpresumption that the postwar suburbs were rootless and“free of trouble” (186), by way of presenting him as havingbeen “grown there… [in] Bullet Park” (4). As Arthur Krokerexpounds, the suburban inhabitant like Nailles personifiesthe “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 himinto something “repulsively unlike his nature” (Cheever239). 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 ofsupposed security and comfort, is essentially subverted(185). Cheever intimates, instead, that by the veryanaesthetizing nature of its physical space, the suburbanreality was for all genuine expressions of desire to not justbe blocked, but uprooted in their very conception.

22 In 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 thepersonification of a “quantitative exchange value” (Fromm113). What this means is the way in which the“[commercially] handsome” personality package ofsuburbia became an instrument for capitalist purposes, andsentiments mere “hallowed” tokens by which societal statusis obtained (Cheever 100). Removed from the inner feelingsthey supposedly express, Nailles’ relationship with hisfellow man hence becomes a superficial interaction towhich there was “less dimension than a comic strip” (25).Indeed, despite his investment in the personality market of


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the culture game, Nailles is markedly aware that his“society had become… automative and nomadic,” with“means of communication [being] established by the useof… suitable signals” (21). Nevertheless, consisting of thecorrect commodities, appropriate apparel and properparticipation in social activities, these essentially emptysignifiers deemed “suitable” continue to formulate a “prizedimage of self” which permits Nailles to cling to the falseconsciousness of his status position (Mills 258). The extentto 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 headof the Mouthwash Division at Saffron” (Cheever 145), whichconvinces 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 andthe Gorey Brook Country Club,” Nailles offers an engagingimage of suburban success (45). However, the fact that thisubiquitous surface image of “exceptional innocence andpurity” 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 hispublic persona (198).

23 The use of rhetorical questions across the novel’s

opening section no doubt serves as an astute literaryindication of Nailles’ cumulative vacancy and self-estrangement. Having acquired an organizational, outwardnumbness, Nailles has grown equally out of touch with hisinternal self. So while may be experiencing a feeling, he isincapable of identifying neither “what” it is nor “why” he isfeeling it (61). This abstractly disorientating “force ofseparateness” (128) is innately symptomatic of acontemporary American male malaise, or what RogerHorrocks loosely terms “male autism” (107). For Horrocks,the autistic male is “deeply ashamed” of himself, of feeling“vulnerable” or “enthusiastic” over anything since itthreatens his self-control (107). It is, of course, Nailles’ceremonial duty to the social ethic of suburbia thatproduces such shame, as it obliges him to favor self-respectability over self-respect.

24 So as to manage the “[profound] loneliness” which

logically accompanies such repression, Nailles thereforeadopts an “outer deadness” (Horrocks 107) by means ofremoving himself from true experience, and masking the“black [abyss] at the edge of everything” with the repeateduse of a “massive tranquilizer” (Cheever 128, 121).Cheever’s allusion to drug addiction here is allegoricallyindicative of suburbia’s larger capitalistic dependencies


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which, both “mercenary and dishonest,” made “anyreflection—any sort of thoughtfulness or emotional depth—impossible” (167). Needless to say, Nailles is so completelyinvested in the social system of suburbia that, “just like adrug addict [dependent] on his drug” (Fromm 155), herenounces any experience of his self as an autonomousentity with “any genuine emotion or value,” or as anythingmore than a saleable commodity reliant on the externalapproval of others (Cheever 168). Even though consciouslytrapped 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 aneffort to pretend that “[everything] was the way it waswhen it was so wonderful” (59), and satisfy that elementalnostalgia for the present, Nailles utilizes the apathetic“guise of forgetfulness” (176) through quite literally“drugging [himself]” (168). Whilst this may evidentlyprevent any sense of a specifically masculine “valor” fromever being seen or effectively realized (138), if Nailles wereto even begin to discover the despairing depths of hisdeprivation, 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” despitethe fact “[he] tried, [and] tried, [and] did the best [he] knewhow to,” it would surely lead to a great crisis (10).

25 In consequence, other than that his “sense of being alive

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


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defense” (Cheever 174), or else his “only defense” againstthe “cruel injustice… [of] illegitimacy” (163), is to henceincessantly “[prey] on the happiness of others” (207).Accordingly, Scott Donaldson insists that, if Nailles is thepassive “preserver of family and community,” then Hammerrepresents the otherwise “obsessed and derangeddestroyer” (243). It is important to realize, however, thatwhilst there is certainly justification in Donaldson’sdetermination of Hammer and Nailles as respective“fragments of a single divided psyche,” he criticallyundercuts this contention by claiming that, “hate rules[Hammer’s] existence as love dominates that of Nailles’”(Donaldson 247). Indeed, whereas Donaldson maintainsthat Nailles is fundamentally “content with his lot” (246), itwould be far sounder to argue that, in fact, Hammeremerges 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 therehad always resided a latent residue of inarticulate pain andmasculine terror (Ehrenreich 44).

26 It is obvious that the compulsion for conformity provides

a “source of anxiety” for Nailles (Cheever 102). Thus, toread “the love [Nailles] felt for his wife”—that “seemed likesome limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that wouldsurround [her], cover [her], preserve [her] and leave [her]insulated but visible like the contents of an aspic” (Cheever25; emphasis my own)—in the same way as Donaldson,namely as demonstrative of Nailles’ individual “capacityto… love… admire [and] protect,” neglects to consider theanxiously commoditized temperament of Nailles’descriptive language (Donaldson 25). In truth, this vividdetail directly corroborates the duplicitously covered, preserved, insular, and visible surface principles ofsuburbia. This is made further evident when Naillesprofesses that it was his “manifest destiny… to love [hiswife] Nellie” (Cheever 23). Here Nailles ensues to distortthe conventional rhetoric of American imperialism withinthe domestic context of suburbia so as suggest the extent towhich the “hallowed institution of holy matrimony” hadbecome the new national doctrine of success, at the sametime as detracting any emotional or affectionate, spousalassociation (Cheever 100). It is not “love” as such thattherefore governs Nailles’ existence, but rather theprecarious American pursuit of suburban happiness thatlimits Nailles’ masculine influence to the close-up scenes ofjob, family and neighborhood, whilst ultimately denying him


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any human capacity to either “fall in love” (55) or to“have… hate” (193).

27 As a result, given that he is initially presented as a

societal outcast, Hammer’s isolated version of events offer awindow onto what lies outside these rigid structures ofsuburbia’s dominant value system, and onto the “savageand unnatural… appetites” which contradict the“visionary… summit of [Nailles’] perfection” (18). Cheever’suse of doubling here is, however, less a transgression from,and more an explicit emphasis of the oppressive nature offixed suburban male role patterns. For despite deviatingfrom the dictates of the social ethic, Hammer isnevertheless unable to escape their emasculating impact ashe “[begins] to suffer from… a form of despair that seemedto have a tangible approach” (174). Described as apathological “cafard [that] followed him” (182), this“profound… melancholy,” which gave Hammer “difficultybreathing” or “getting out of bed” (219), can be seen as theaffliction of a culture in which expectations for self-realization were greater than ever before. With an“adequate income” (174), Hammer certainly believes he isentitled to individual self-fulfillment, and hence hearticulates 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 ofindividual aspiration is only attainable in terms of one’sadjustment to society’s “normal spectrum” (219), therebyfostering Hammer’s sense of masculine “ridicule anddespair” (174) by promoting “normative, mature male roleexpectations” and pathologizing those who seek a lifestyle“outside of the conventions of the time” (Cuordileone 138).It is through the subsequent autobiographical account ofHammer’s “intolerable sense of his aloneness” that thereader is able, then, to observe the actuality of “squalor,spiritual poverty and [monotonous] selfishness” compressedbehind the façade of Nailles’ cohesive suburban selfhood(Cheever 149).

28 As Riesman portends, “in a society of any size there will

be some who are pushed out of that tight web” (Lonely241). Within the “aggressively hostile,” heteronormativegated community of suburbia this is a particularlyprominent phenomenon (Lonely 212), and it is preciselyHammer’s “inability to cope with the social demands ofmodern [suburban] culture” (Lonely 244) that respectively


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vilifies him with the “incriminating… judgment” ofhomosexuality (Cheever 146). Having failed to adjust tonormative and mature male role requirements—whichinvolved “attaining a respectable job, getting married,maintaining a home, and establishing a family”(Cuordileone 146)—Hammer is assumed to suffer from thesame combination of “infantile fixation, dread ofresponsibility, and fear of the opposite sex” (Cuordileone146) which supposedly compel the “deviant homosexual”into “an unnatural way of life” (Cheever 177). Hence, whenvisiting a psychiatrist in the hope of locating the “source of[his] cafard,” Hammer is informed that, without anadequately “efficient disposition,” he must be a “repressedtransvestite homosexual,” acutely “ashamed of, … [and]intimidated... [by his] sexual guilt” (Cheever 177-179). Ofcourse, what this overtone essentially underscores is theextent to which, in postwar therapeutic culture, the malehomosexual and the bachelor were condemnably equated as“fundamentally immature and maladjusted,” but unlike thebachelor, the homosexual had allegedly “given up entirelyon fulfilling a normative masculine role in society”(Cuordileone 146-7). What is more, through this episodeCheever conveys the way in which contemporaneouspsychiatric judgment localized the “catalyst” for malehomosexuality within “external sociological factors,” asopposed to “innate biological drives,” in an attempt torationalize the apparent increase in the incidence ofhomosexuality (Cuordileone 147).

29 The notion that male homosexuality was on the rise

certainly distinguishes the sexual anxieties of this periodfrom 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 thespecific social drifts and disorders of the postwar period asproviding the basis for what he described to be this “large-scale flight from masculinity” (164). Kardiner candidlypoints to the existing external circumstances of suburbanaffluence, particularly one’s “inability to keep up with theJoneses” (Kardiner 170), as that which subsequentlyaffected a man’s ability to “prove that [he] was truthful andmanly” (Cheever 177), along with his “voluntary” sex-objectchoice (Kardiner 170). To this end, Hammer comes tosignify what was then popularly believed to be “the [man]


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who [is] overwhelmed by the increasing demands to fulfillthe specifications of masculinity,” and who has to “flee fromcompetition because [he fears] the increased pressure onwhat [he] [considers] [his] very limited resources”(Kardiner 175). It is, of course, through this very prevalentview of homosexuality as a socially assimilated trait thatCheever actually succeeds in calling attention to thediminishing sense of options available for men in postwarAmerica; for despite the growing perception of entitlementto personal freedom and self-fulfillment, the “divisionbetween [the] two forces [of] [natural] instinct [and] [social]duty… seemed [to Hammer] like a broad river withoutbridges” (Cheever 128).

30 Significantly, Hammer encounters numerous potential

homoerotic incidences as a “direct consequence of [his]being alone” (146), which all together suggests that, insuburbia, the only “other [way] of doing it besides beingjoined in holy matrimony and filling up the cradle” is to be“queer” (117). Most notably on the beach, where one wasexpected to “[appear] with [his] wife, [his] children,sometimes [his] parents or a brace of house guests,” butnever as a “lonely man,” Hammer meets the “amorous andslightly cross-eyed gaze… [of] a comely and tanned…faggot” (145-146). At the same time, however, Hammerspots another man on the scene, “a conscientious deskworker with a natural stoop and a backside broadened byyears 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 withexploiting a closely interrelated set of contradictoryattitudes, which, Bernice Murphy contends, “can mostclearly be expressed as a set of binary oppositions” (3). Thejuxtaposition of these two men is, therefore, particularlyinteresting, for it forces Hammer to overtly “[declare][which] world [he]… [chooses] to live in,” whilstcongruently accentuating the abundant lack of optionsavailable to the middle-class male beyond the dichotomousparadigm of suburban adjustment or maladjustment(Cheever 147).

31 For fear he be further outcast, Hammer hence dismisses

“the [faggot’s] [throw] [of] another sidelong glance,”together with the additional “absentminded pull of histrunks,” and resolves to “[get] to [his] feet and [join] theman with the kite,” at which point the “faggot [wanders] off


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as [Hammer] intended that he should” (147). In thisrespect, the “filament of kite line” proves to be animportant metaphor inasmuch as it “succinctly [declares][Hammer’s] intentions to the faggot,” as if to “possess someextraordinary moral force” (147). Sure enough, as Hammer“[helps] to unsnarl the line” it unfolds into a symbolicboundary marker of community, albeit one, like the gardengate, which is inherently permeable (147). Hammer quicklyrealizes as such, that there is little, if nothing more thanthis synthetically “fine… line” (147) to separate suburbannormality 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 muchchoice but to try to emulate, likewise, is essentially “boundtogether by just such a length of string—cheap andcolorless” (147). Thus, when Hammer does eventuallymarry his wife Marietta, he similarly identifies her as“always [wearing] a white thread on her clothing” (204). Healleges that, “even if [he] bought her a mink coat therewould be a white thread on it,” and it is this very “whitethread,” in the same manner as the kite string, that holdsthe “mysterious [catalytic] power… [to] [clarify][Hammer’s] susceptibilities” (205). Of course, the fact thatHammer nevertheless still “[longs] for a moral creationwhose mandates were heftier than the delight of children,the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of string,”confirms the fragility of newly established suburbanidentities, as well as the visionary vacuousness upon whichtheir verities are founded (147).

32 It 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 “alllonely men” (217), who have been “driven by the samenessof [their environment] to authenticate [their] identity byunnatural sexual practices” (181). The fact that Hammerdisappoints to greet this gaze all the same, “[lowering] [his]eyes chastely to the floor” (181), furthermore reiterates justhow hard it is for the individual male suburbanite, even atthe expense of his own “honor, passion, … intelligence,[and] [genuineness],” to justify to himself a departure fromthe social norm (26). The “[serious]… doubt” (202) Hammerexpresses over the tenuous tenets of suburban normalityeven as he “[retires] in defeat” (102), in this regard,corroborates the “fractured personality” of the malesuburbanite, who is perpetually torn, as Cheever’s novel isdivided, between the “paradoxical comforts and perils of


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conformity” (Murphy 4). Indeed, whereas Nailles is firmlyindoctrinated in the togetherness ethos of suburbia, to theextent that he associates conformism with the security andcertainty of belonging, Hammer cannot help interpretingthe cultural lack of “uniqueness” as a “[serious] [threat] to[his] own uniqueness” (Cheever 181). With nothing in thehomogenously 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 backto this idea of identity as a “false category,” and Cheever’snarrative employment of the doppelganger as a means tounderscore the break down of any “well defined [male]identity” in contemporary American society (Coates 18).

33 For Gordon Slethaug, in the contemporary

doppelganger text such as Bullet Park, the double starts to“[take] on a new identity” removed from the “universalabsolutes” of an “indivisible, unified, continuous, and fixedidentity,” and toward the representation of a “divided anddiscontinuous self in a fragmented universe” (3). It was theprinciple “mission” of the author of the double, as such, to“decenter the concept of the self,” to view “human realityas a construct,” and to explore the “inevitable drift ofsignifiers away from their referents” (Slethaug 3). Ratherthan a division wherein “[different] characters representopposing qualities” (Slethaug 12), the split narratives ofHammer and Nailles - apportioned like “spaghetti andmeatballs, salt and pepper, oil and vinegar” (Cheever 56-7) -thereby work to “raise questions about fixed categories andconstructs,” especially about the notion that any humanbeing has a “unified identity” (Slethaug 5). Thus, whatappears in Nailles’ conditioned surface account like aninterrelated identity and communal belonging, Hammer’s“intense emotional vertigo” (Cheever 181) no doubtpurposefully serves to conclude as a “faulty first person[narrative]” (Slethaug 5); within which the thenquestionable basis of human perception has been caught inthe culturally “monotonous [regulation] [and]dehumanization of man” (Whyte 398).

34 Hammer’s neurotic fear, “not of falling but of vanishing”

(Cheever 181), in this sense, critically reproaches theembittered “spiritual conformity” and personaldisintegration that are the “unavoidable consequence of[organized] society” (Whyte 396). It is, however, Hammer’s


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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 suburbandisillusionment, crucially, with a much deeper falseconsciousness regarding American masculinity. Throughouthis narrative, Hammer diagnoses the anaesthetized climateof suburbia as fatefully affronting the “[arduous]… naturalman” of hegemonic masculine ideology (171); that is he,“the hardy man,” who according to Riesman’s study,Individualism Reconsidered (1954), “pioneered on thefrontiers of production, exploration, and colonization” (27).Nina Baym correspondingly illuminates how this idea of anessential Americanness—and within that, an essentialAmerican manhood—expounded with the emergence ofsuch influential mid-century works of criticism as HenryNash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) and R.W.B Lewis’ TheAmerican Adam (1955). According to Baym, these worksconsistently maintained that, “as something artificial andsecondary to human nature,” society exerts an“unmitigatedly destructive pressure on individuality” (126).They likewise narrate a confrontation of the Americanindividual, “the pure American self divorced from specificsocial circumstances,” with the “promise” offered by “theidea of America” (Baym 126). Behind this promise is, ofcourse, the assurance that “individuals come before society,that they exist in some meaningful sense prior to, and apartfrom, societies in which they happen to find themselves”(Baym 127).

35 The best prescription or defense against effective

suburban castration, in Hammer’s mind, therefore lies inrediscovering the “[frightening] massiveness” of nature(Cheever 102), for like Michael Kimmel suggests, “if thefate of twentieth-century man is to live with death fromadolescence to premature senescence, why then the onlylife-giving answer is to… live with death as immediatedanger, to divorce oneself from society, [and] to set out onthat uncharted territory into the rebellious imperatives ofthe self” (Kimmel 144). This prescription, or promise, is,needless to say, a “deeply romantic one,” wherein thenatural landscape of America, “untrammeled by history andsocial accident,” purportedly permits the Americanindividual to achieve “complete self-definition” (Baym 126).It is, thus, important to recognize the fact that, instead ofphysically venturing into nature, Hammer chooses to


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

36 In 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). Certainlyfor Baym, by the twentieth century this mythic “melodramaof beset manhood” had been transmuted into the evocationof an infantile “flight for its own sake” (127), as seen incontemporaneous suburban works such as John Updike’sRabbit, Run (1960). Not unlike Hammer, Harry RabbitAngstrom knows the truth, that “the thing that has left hislife has left irrevocably; no search would recover it, noflight would reach it” (208), and yet Harry continues to“run, run, run,” to run across Updike’s tetralogy as he isrepeatedly told, “You can’t run enough” (54). Like Baym,Annette Kolodny, too, theorizes how the American pastoralconcedes a “landscape of the mind to be projected uponand perceived as an objective and external ‘real world’landscape” (156). No longer subject to the correctinginfluence of everyday experience, what occurs, then, is akind of “communal act of imagination” (Kolodny 156). Inthese regards, given that Cheever’s reader is presentedearly on in the novel with an advertising billboard, whereina “great big colored picture of… mountains covered withsnow” promotes “[looking] at the mountain” to take one’s“mind off his troubles” (134), implies that Hammer’smasculinist fantasy, sure enough, does not derive from thereal authentic experience that he believes, as a man, he isentitled to and “[has] lost,” but rather precedes reality withthe intent of “corresponding to [that] vision,” as if by someperverse consumer obligation (182).

37 It becomes necessary to distinguish, therefore, that it is

not so much the “flagrant… imitation” facet of suburbiawhich hinders Hammer from retrieving his masculinepotential, but rather that these precepts of Americanmasculinity, like a “disinfectant… advertised to smell ofmountain pine woods,” are themselves insincerelyconcocted, and so never there for him to ‘lose’ in the firstplace (Cheever 124). This outlook, needless to say, critically


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undercuts traditional essentialist conceptions of Americanmanhood by inferring that the original “inner directed”frontiersman, in the same way as the suburban organizationman, acted merely in accordance to a social code.Nonetheless, it is credible to deduce that these originalmen were, in effect, simply guided by “internalized ideals,”which made them “appear to be more individualistic thanthey actually were” (Individualism 27). The extent to whichHammer is continually “condemned to exile” (Cheever 190)as the result of his inability to societally perform to thedictates of the suburban ethic, in consequence, directlymimics the masculine prerequisite to constantly reaffirmone is inherently “man enough” through outward “publicdisplay” (Kimmel 1).

38 Whether through the gendered capital of money or

muscles, perpetually proving one’s maleness for hope ofother men’s approval was, and is, “one of the definingexperiences of men’s lives” (Kimmel 1). It is always othermen, as such, who then evaluate the performance ofmasculinity, which resolves American masculinity as ahistorical and changing, “other-directed” construct, andsuburban masculinity, too, as just another manifestation ofa hegemonic masculine ideology that is fundamentallybased on a surface performance defined by concomitantcultural ideals. For this reason, Nailles’ pronunciation ofNellie as “his deliverer” evocatively distinguishes suburbanmanhood in relation to a woman, and thereby within arelative sociological power structure as opposed to upon amasculinist essence (Cheever 241). As his wife andhousewife, Nellie’s “pleasant… composure” (31-32),deferentially “freed from the mortal bonds of grossness andaspiration,” permits Nailles to uphold the hierarchical maleimage of suburban patriarch at the same time as deliveringhim from an otherwise “contemptible” bachelorhood (241).Conversely, as the maladjusted other, Hammer is notdelivered but rather stagnated by his “[frequent]… groping”for this “procrustean” masculine mythology (230) that hefeels “he [has] lost” (191)—so much so that, ironically, hecannot conform to the prevailing male ideals of suburbiaand has to seek delivery through destruction. As PatrickMeanor explains, “once [Hammer] is released from hishabitual condition of spiritual stasis” and into an awarenessof 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


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subsequent “provoked rage” (Cheever 234) that provides analternate view onto the depraved “psychological… disorderand illegality” hiding behind the calm exterior of Nailles’suburban façade, and which has been waiting to erupt inthe pathological form of Hammer’s wanton devastation ofeither himself or his society (Slethaug 19).

39 Interestingly enough, the closing section of the novel,

wherein Hammer conjures “[his] crazy old… plan tocrucify… and murder Nailles” (219), later changing hisvictim to Nailles’ son Tony, succeeds to cumulatively deploythe uncannily familiar tropes of the suburban gothic, whichare only mildly insinuated across the first two thirds of thenovel in the shape of Mrs Wickwires’ unexplained “arm in asling” (6) or Harry Shinglehouse’s “highly polished brownloafer lying on the cinders [of] the [train] track” (61). In hisstudy of the suburban gothic, Martin Dines describes itsliterary potential for “formal and epistemologicaldisturbance” through the gothic use of “doublings… andruination,” which altogether serve “to disrupt the overlyfamiliar way in which stories about the suburbs tend to betold,” whilst furthermore “[saying] something unsettlingabout the most familiar of American spaces” (961). What ismost “unsettling” about the conclusion of the novel,however, is not so much the disruptive terror Hammerreigns on Bullet Park, but rather the “overly familiar” wayin which such perturbation is stylistically expressed. Thereis scarce detail or emotion as Nailles breaks through thedoor of Christ Church with a chain saw, nor resoluteexplanation as to why Hammer is just “sitting in a frontpew, crying” (Cheever 244). Moreover, once Nailles “[lifts]his son off the alter and [carries] him out in to the rain,” thenovel concludes in an objective journalistic reporting of thefacts: “Paul Hammer, also of Bullet Park, confessed toattempted homicide and was remanded to the StateHospital for the criminally Insane.… He carried Nailles tothe church with the object of immolating him in thechancel. He intended, he claimed, to awaken the world”(244).

40 This anti-epiphanic close to the novel is, in turn, most

significant, as it succeeds to undercut the view that eitherliterary 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 theinescapable set of narrow default options, or let yourself behammered out of the system and perish - but there are noother alternatives. Ominously, Nailles therefore continues


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to drug himself, and “naively” dismiss “the news in thepaper… [of] a maniac with a carbine [massacring]seventeen people in a park…, [of] wars… raging, … [of] ahairdresser [shooting] his wife, his four children, his poodleand 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 asa haunting trope for the unresolvable and uncanny horrorsof normality; which, like the matter of fact “news in thepaper” (64), are in constant danger of entering andcontaminating 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 inDonald Barthelme’s Snow WhiteRachele 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 upthe Ganges? If the wealthy capitalists who operate the Ganges wig factories could beforced to install sieves, at the mouths of their plants. And now the sacred Ganges ischoked with hair, and the river no longer knows where to put its flow, and themoonlight on the Ganges is swallowed by the hair, and the water darkens. ByVishnu! 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 papernapkins are laid out. Everyone is talking about capitalism (although some peopleare talking about the psychology of aging, and some about the human use of humanbeings, 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 plantsand fish things out of waste barrels, stuff that had been overprinted or used duringmakeready, and he’d employ this rich accidental material in his collages. I saw avery large Schwitters show some years ago and almost everything in it remindedme 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 theright place, of course, there’s that), and lo! People crowd about and cry “A real BabyRuth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!” Fantastic metaphysicaladvantage… 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.


133

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 destroyedinstantly. How the electric wastebasket accomplishes this is not known. Anintimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration, oneassumes. It is not emptied. There are not even ashes. It functions with a quiet humdigesting whatever we do not wish to fall into the hands of the enemi [sic]. Therecord of Bill’s trial when he is tried will go into the electric wastebasket. When weconsidered the destruction of the esthetician we had in mind the electricwastebasket. First dismemberment, then the electric waste basket. That there are inthe 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:


134

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 dayin 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965, the last year for which we have figures, and isincreasing at the rate of about 4% a year… I hazard that we may very well soonreach a point where it’s 100%. Now at such a point, you will agree, the questionturns from a question of disposing of this ‘trash’ to a question of appreciating itsqualities… 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, rightnow, more really from a philosophical point of view than because we find them agreat money-maker. They are ‘trash,’ and what in fact could be more useless ortrash-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 thatmay 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 itsuspends 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 inthe 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, thatvolume; we regretted that. And it was hard to read, dry, breadlike pages thatturned, and then fell, like a car burned by rioters and resting, wrong side up, at theedge of the picture plane with its tires smoking. Fragments kept flying off thescreen into the audience, fragments of rain and ethics. Hubert wanted to go back tothe dog races. But we made him read his part, the outer part where the author ispraised and the price quoted. We like books with a lot of dreck in them, matter thatpresents 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’ isnot to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in thosewhite spaces) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them and so arrivingat 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 wouldyou rate the present work, on a scale of one to ten, so far? (Please circle youranswer) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1014. Do you stand up when you read? (Lie down? () Sit? ()15. In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? () Two sets ofshoulders? () 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


137

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


139

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 thenew thing up against our wall for a moment. The new thing, a dirty great banalityin white, poor-white and off-white, leaned up against the wall. ‘Interesting,’ wesaid. ‘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 thelower left-hand corner,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ Paul said, ‘I would go so far as to hurl it intothe 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


140

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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Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. Print.

Nel, Philip. “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Postmodernism: Donald Barthelme

and the Historical Avant-Garde.” The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks.

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Web. 8 Dec. 2015.

du Plessis, Michael. “The Postmodern Object: Commodities, Fetishes and Signifiers in Donald

Barthelme's Writing.” Journal of Literary Studies 4. 4 (1988): 443-458. http://dx.doi.org/

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Theory, Culture and Society 31.6 (2014). Print.

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Sierra, Nicole. “Surrealist Histories of Language, Image, Media: Donald Barthelme’s ‘Collage

Stories.’” European Journal of American Culture 32.2 (1 June 2013): 153-171. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.

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Print.

Sloboda, Nicholas. “Heteroglossia and Collage: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White.” Mosaic 30.4

(1997): 109-23. Print.

“Social Science Fiction.” Time (24 May 1968): 106. Print.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World. Boston: Beacon, 2002. Print.

Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

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Thompson, Jon. Piero Manzoni. Exhibition catalogue. London: Charta, 1998. Print.

Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.

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Viney, Will. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

Waldman, Harriet. Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object. London: Phaidon, 1992. Print.

Whitaker, Jennifer Seymour. Salvaging the Land of Plenty: Garbage and the American Dream. New

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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 KazukoKuramoto’s Manchurian LegacyAndrea 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).


148

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


149

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,


150

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


151

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,


152

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


153

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 crushedand has given up Manchuria. We are abandoned. We are on our own in the middleof the enemies. We are trapped in a no-man’s land! What’s the use of running? Let’sfinish ourselves here and now! You can get us enough arms to kill ourselves, can’tyou?’ (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 Inoticed. I noticed that in her old neighborhood Junko had stood out, lookingCaucasian, and now in her new neighborhood on the American army post shelooked surprisingly Japanese. My friends smiled at her and whispered to me, ‘She isbeautiful. 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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Michael W Jennings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

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Press, 2000. Print.

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Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Print.

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Materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Print.

Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New

York: Anchor Books, 1961. Print.

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UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.

Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Print.

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1994. Print.

Kuramoto, Kazuko. Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist. East Lancing: Michigan State


Levi, Primo. “I Sommersi E I Salvati.” Opere. I. Torino: Einaudi, 1987. 652–822. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New

York: The Modern Library, 1995. Print.

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Print.

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Timothy Mooney. Trans. Manfred Frings and Roger L Funk. New York: Routledge, 2002. 203–226.

Print.

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Simmel, Georg. “Group Expansion and the Development of Individuality.” On Individuality and

Social Forms. The University of Chicago, 1971. 251–293. Print.

Simpson, Sir John Hope. The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey. London: Oxford University Press,

1939. Print.

von Uexküll, Jakob. “The Theory of Meaning.” Semiotica 42.1 (1982): 25–81. Print.

Weglyn, Michi. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. New York:

Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1976. Print.

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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 Transculturationin Daniel Black’s They Tell Me of aHomePekka 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 andhistorically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing


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relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, andintractable 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, protectedboundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion ofcoherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression andresistance, 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 wasthe one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where onecould resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people couldstrive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds andhearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore toourselves 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 necessarilycommunal. It operates in terms of inclusion and exclusion, and consequentlyprecipitates 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 anostalgic 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, butfor some reason I felt the need to go home. My heart, or my head, had begun totwist, 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 apicturesque 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. Sincechildhood, I was afraid of the sound of his voice. He would yell at me and causesweat 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 withoutstuttering heavily. To one extent or another, he affected everyone in the family thisway. (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 methat, in whatever direction the family evolved, it was Daddy’s life we werefollowing. (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 anannouncement to make: “It hath been reported thatsome of our members is funny.” Immediatelyeveryone began to look at Ms. Janey and Ms. Pauline.“We all know God don’t like dat. De Bible sayhomosexials 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’mgoin’, Blue, I’ll definitely see you there!”

Everybody knew, back in the day, Deacon Bluehad been a ladies’ man, and Ms. Janey was makingsure 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 excommunicatethem. (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 elsesaid 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 eachother, 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, andevery woman needed a man, Momma said, she would simply have to tolerate hisshit, and there was nothing she could do about it. I found it funny as a child thatDaddy 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 sufferingunder patriarchy to support black men and preserve cultural solidarity, therebyrendering 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 ofeverything, a man ought to work by the sweat of his brow, and Daddy upheld thisconviction. He was obsessed with physical labor, afraid that one moment of restwould automatically prove him lazy, and Daddy would never allow anyone theopportunity to call him lazy. This was a principle he lived by and one he made allthe 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 morningsmelling like cow manure. The problem is that they don’t see brilliance. That’s whytheir homework doesn’t get completed properly. They, and their parents, equatecountry 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 insouthern, 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, constructedwithin 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! Youcomin’ on home!” She loved my Dunbar recitations the best. His dialect poemsmade 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 readthem and recite parts of them to her. I never failed....Grandma and I had created asacred 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 thedining 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 confidenceunshakable. I begin to cry as I watch them transform into the ancestors we werestudying only moments before. They don’t walk like poor country childrenanymore. 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 famousUnderground 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 theirlives and the lives of all their people much more meaningful because then they canspeak 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 thetemporal and spatial categories represented....The chronotope is an optic forreading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which theyspring. (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 fromone generation to another, enforce conformity to social norms, validate socialinstitutions and religious rituals, and provide a psychological release from therestrictions 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 workedtogether, like a puppet’s, in perfect gestural unity. Accompanied by a squeakysoprano voice far too high for most people’s liking, his trembling arthritic handsshaped 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 seemlike spirits gathered at the tree. Who was cute and who wasn’t and who had moneyand who didn’t proved absolutely meaningless. We were all contributors unto acommunal joy that was enough to sustain everyone.... As a child, I never noticedhow wonderful it was to watch people abandon their daily roles and laugh out loudas they fashioned their own survival in a world prepared to kill them. This was oneplace 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 intheir two cents as we constructed, if only temporarily, a world where everyone wasfree. The differences that disallow unity in America never interrupted our space aswe listened to story after story, regardless of who was telling it. (They Tell Me of aHome 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.

54 The 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 otherwisetaboo. 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 andconstructs 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 alsohelp us to understand (and sometimes prevent us from understanding) ourselves.Our cultures are produced through collections of narratives that support and refuteeach 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’sbrainwashin’ and white folks is benefittin’ as our communities is fallin’ apart. Youcollege-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’ ‘emthe 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 wholelot of it. Like take dis boy hyeah for ‘xample. ... He done gone off to school and got awhole buncha degrees, but he can still come home and laugh and talk wit’ de rest ofus wit’out thankin’ he’s too good to swat mosquitoes and listen to old niggastories.” (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


182

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 andhow 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 onthe inside of people and help them fix things. My dream was that, one day, one ofmy poems or short stories would make people cry or love themselves into their ownliberty. (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 academicpursuits, I had missed the most critical lesson any student can learn—thattransforming 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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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


186

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


187

Quest/ion of Identities in Suzan-LoriParks’s Post-revolutionary DramaMehdi 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 alot of parenthetical stage direction. I’ve written, within the text, specific directionsto them, to guide their breathing, to guide the way they walk, whether or not theywalk, whether or not they walk with a limp, whatever. They know what to do fromwhat they say and how they say it. The specifics of it are left up to the actor and thedirector. 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.

10 For 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.

11 In 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:


190

An elongated and heightened (rest). Denoted by repetition of figures’ names withno 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 noaction or stage business is necessary, directors should fill this moment as they bestsee fit. A spell is a place of great (unspoken) emotion. It’s also a place for anemotional 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.

13 In 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.

14 For 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.

15 In 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.


191

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).

16 The 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).

17 Like 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.

18 As 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.

19 In 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.

20 To 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.

21 Panel 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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22 The 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.

23 The 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.

24 Parks 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 naturelShe 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 haircutAnd 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.”

27 Parks 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. FromRobert Chambers’s Book of Days:

(Rest) “Early in the present century a poor wretched

woman was exhibited in England under theappellation of The Hottentot Venus. The year was 1810.With an intensely ugly figure, distorted beyond allEuropean notions of beauty, she was said by those towhom she belonged to possess precisely the kind ofshape 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 inParliament and among protests and denials, horrorand 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

29 In 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.

30 In 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, theabsolutely 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 aspearhead in the Civil Rights Movement. He was 38 years old. News of Majors deathsparked 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.

32 To 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baraka, Amiri. “The Revolutionary Theatre.” Liberator (July 1965): 1-3. http://

nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text12/barakatheatre.pdf. Web. Jun. 10, 2016.

Baldwin, James. Blues for Mister Charlie.London: Michael Joseph, 1964. Print.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z.Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.

Print.

–––. The Pleasure of the Text.Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Print.

Caramello, Charles. Silverless Mirror: Book, Self and Postmodern American Fiction. Florida: UP of

Florida, 1983. Print.

Childress, Alice. Wine in the Wilderness. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1969. Print.

–––. Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1966. Print.

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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http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/bebop-beauty/Content?oid=2160156

http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/bebop-beauty/Content?oid=2160156

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 SituationistReading of Jens Jorgen Thorsen’sFilm Adaptation of Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in ClichyJennifer 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 societywas still made miserable by the extension of alienated social relations from theworkplace to every area of lived experience. The leisures and luxuries gained fromcapitalism can only be consumed: there is more free time, choice, and opportunity,but the commodity form in which everything appears serves only to reproduce thealienated 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 theauthorities and unsettle the bourgeoisie, and while his use of porn in the service ofsuch idealistic ends seems hopelessly quaint today, it must be seen in the context ofthe times. In Denmark censorship was predominately seen as a way to control, notto protect. It was viewed as a means of repression....Consequently the fight forsexual freedom was considered a political as well as a personal struggle. In somecircles free love was even deemed to be a socialist act, a rejection of jealousy, whichwas a capitalist emotion—treating people like personal property, owning anotherperson. Yet Thorsen was never so doctrinaire. He was more of a happy anarchist. Tohim sex was a joyous thing, an affirmation of individuality and a declaration offreedom. (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; theevident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path ofleast resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has norelation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling characterof certain places—these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they arenever envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysisand 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 motivesfor movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and letthemselves 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 calculationof 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.

12 Joey 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, notglamorous so much as seductive, not scintillating but glowing with a smoulderingflame....worn, faded, derelict, nakedly vicious, mercenary, vulgar. It is, if anything,repellant rather than attractive, but insidiously repellent, like vice itself. There arelittle 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 youas 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 guitaraccompaniment of Country Joe McDonald, who strategically yodels some dirtysongs during action that speaks for itself. And as the grapplings and cavortings getmore playful—and downright infantile—the music gets friskier. The picture getsmore redundant and even dull. However, during one sequence, when Valjeanescorts a toothsome favorite to the countryside, the sound track does hold aphilosophical musing on sexuality and time that is interesting, earthbound Miller.And the one really solid thing about the picture is its Parisian stamp, with thecamera 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 withthe parents of a 15-year-girl, a dimwit of Gibraltar durability. The wise, wide-eyedand studiedly stupid expression on the face of the youngster, placidly watching theencounter 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 heldfor several minutes—the soundtrack played the “Internationale” and the Americannational anthem. The previous year he had made the montage-orientated Viet NamNam, which starts with the initial frame countdown followed by a collage of variousheads of state ending with a picture of Ho Chi Minh, exploding. Many of Thorsens’sfestival films consist of reworked montages of chopped-up mainstream filmmaterial 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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17 Détournement 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.

18 It 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.

19 Thorsen 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 givena table projector, so I sat editing together clips from the cinema—and whatever elseI could get my hands on. At a place called Fagfoto you could actually buy old filmclips. That’s probably why I never took an interest in plot in film, only in the visualand 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 filmfestivals....We really wanted to make something that was outside the frame, but infact it intensified our interest in the popular, something everyone could use, somematerial known to everyone—archetypal….I’ve always preferred to work with35mm film, 16mm is too small. I’m fascinated with the leap from clip to clip...a leapthat 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.

21 Miller 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

22 These 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.

23 It 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


24 Likewise 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 buthad obviously forgotten where or when we had met....She accepted our company asshe 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


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 andshoved my prick inside her. I turned her around, got it in front wise and, lifting heroff 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 fromthe rear. When it was over she asked for some wine, and while I was filling her glassshe 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.

28 As 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....Heleft 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 inParis was able to take over those essential roles....Turner never troubles himself orthe reader with questions about Miller’s emotional and financial dependency onwomen. Miller was obsessed with masculinity but felt no need to support himself orthe 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 Turnereither, who calls Miller throughout a “sexual adventurer.” This sounds randy andswashbuckling and hides the economic reality of prostitution. Miller the renegadewanted his body slaves like any other capitalist—and as cheaply as possible. Whenhe could not pay, Miller the man and Miller the fictional creation work out how tocheat women with romance. What they cannot buy they steal. No connection ismade between woman as commodity and the “slaughterhouse” (p. 84) of capitalismthat 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.

30 Thorsen 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.

31 After 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.

32 The 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

33 Thorsen 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.

34 Thorsen’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


213

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.

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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:


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 Sjo man. 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


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.

<www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/books/review/renegade-henry-miller-and-the-making-of-

tropic-of-cancer>

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


215

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


216

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.


217

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. New York:


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 Sjo man. 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


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.

<www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/books/review/renegade-henry-miller-and-the-making-of-

tropic-of-cancer>

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


218

AUTHOR

JENNIFER COWE

University of Glasgow


219

Too Far Gone: The PsychologicalGames of Cormac McCarthy’s All thePretty HorsesMichael 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


220

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,


221

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


222

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.


223

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


224

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 recountedrealization should be ritualized, that is to say, textually the same. This requirementof a distinct consistency in the details of its telling signifies that the realization ofthe signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization to succeedin designating the primacy of the significance as such. To develop it by varying thesignifications is, therefore, it would seem, to elude it. This variation makes oneforget the aim of the significance by transforming its act into a game, and giving itcertain 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


234

“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


235

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


236

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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Library of America, 2006. 877–1124. Print.

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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.

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Jones, Ernest. “Early Development of Female Sexuality.” 1927. Psychoanalysis and Female

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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

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Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1998. 41–61. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” 1957.

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York P, 1995. 19–28. Print.

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All the Pretty Horses.” Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach.

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Snyder, Phillip A. “Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy

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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 theChallenges of American Policy in thePersian GulfDiego 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


242

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

10 Geopolitics 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.

11 During 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

12 The 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

13 The 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.

14 What 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: theparadoxical implications of the clash betweengeopolitics and delusions from the Cold War to theWar on Terror

15 Seen 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

16 America'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

17 The 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

18 That 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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19 Thus, 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.

20 As 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

21 The 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

22 The 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.

23 Bill 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

24 Thus, 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


249

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

25 By 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

26 By 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

27 George 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

28 Overall, 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 “energyrevolution”: smart geopolitics or dangerous ideas?

29 The 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

30 The “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


251

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.

31 The 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

32 The 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

33 Sadly, 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


252

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.

34 It 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.

35 As 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.

36 It 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.

37 The 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


253

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.

38 A 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

39 The 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


254

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 .


256

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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


258



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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


259

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/24.pdf




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












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








http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bassem-awadallah/the-economics-of-the-arab_b_1196473.html




http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25212247




http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-economic-consequences-of-the-arab-revolt




http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fea9cfb0-6044-11e0-abba-00144feab49a,s01=1.html#axzz1SP7vhHNq




http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141213/kenneth-m-pollack-and-ray-takeyh/near-eastern-promises




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-19/american-oil-most-since-first-well-in-1859-signals-independence.html




http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138597/aviezer-tucker/the-new-power-map




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/


260

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/opinion/global/when-america-stops-importing-energy.html?ref=global&_r=1&




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/forty-years-after-opec-embargo-u-s-is-energy-giant.html




http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-07/how-the-booming-oil-patch-helps-u-dot-s-dot-trade




http://blogs.reuters.com/data-dive/2014/01/07/the-improving-state-of-us-trade/




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-07/iran-loses-nuclear-leverage-as-world-ignores-export-drop.html




http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/opinion/the-false-promise-of-energy-independence.html?_r=1&




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






http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21568391-president-barack-obama-would-avoid-entanglement-middle-east-he/






http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27836376

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27836376

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/04/02/parameters-joint-comprehensive-plan-action-regarding-islamic-republic-ir






http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/14/its-a-damn-good-deal-iran-nuclear-agreement-joint-comprehensive-plan-of-action/




http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/oct/22/how-they-failed-block-iran-deal/




http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/28/us-iran-nuclear-gulf-idUSBRE9AR0GS20131128




http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/saudi-arabia-will-go-it-alone.html?partner=rss&emc=rss


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.


261



http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21594314-some-supporters-iran-deal-doubt-there-will-be-long-term-pact-big-gap




http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/21/us-iran-nuclear-talks-idUSKBN0FQ18S20140721




http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/16/us-iran-election-idUSBRE95C1E120130616




http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141209/mohammad-javad-zarif/what-iran-really-wants




http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/iran-at-saban/posts/2013/06/31-iraq-iran-pollack




https://csis.org/files/publication/130821_Alterman_ChinaGulf_Web.pdf




http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/dependence-on-middle-eastern-oil-now-its-chinas-problem-too/259947/






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: TheLinearity of Time and the Art ofRecounting the PastAri 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


263

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


264

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;


265

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.

10 Anyone 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

11 No 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

12 Rather 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.

13 None 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


266

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

14 The 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.

15 To 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

16 Even 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


267

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

17 As 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

18 One 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.

19 No 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.

20 The 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.

21 This 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.

22 In 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.

23 Even 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.

24 Karl 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.

25 This 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

26 Whatever 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.

27 Jefferson 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.

28 Politics 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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29 The 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.

30 The 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.

31 The 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.

32 When 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.

33 Johann 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

34 Letting 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.

35 Bluntly 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

36 Similarly, 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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37 To 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?

38 An 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.

39 Counterfactual 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.

40 In 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


273

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

41 The 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.

42 None 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.

43 As 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.

44 Seeking 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


274

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

45 As 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.

46 As 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.

47 The 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.

48 Thus 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


275

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.

49 Despite 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.

50 If 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.


276

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.


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.


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.


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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European journal of American studies, 11-2

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