The Global Remapping of American Literature [Course Book ed.] 9781400836512

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The Global Remapping of American Literature

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The Global Remapping of American Literature Paul Giles

pri nceton uni v ersit y pr es s pri nceton a nd ox f o r d

Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved press.princeton.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Giles, Paul. The global remapping of American literature / Paul Giles. p.   cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13613-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature-History and criticism. 2. Geography in literature. 3. Boundaries in literature. 4. Space in literature. 5. Regionalism in literature. 6. National characteristics, American, in literature. 7. United States--In literature. I. Title. PS169.G47G55 2010 810.9’32--dc22   2010021517 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Deterritorialization of American Literature

1

Part One: Temporal Latitudes 1

Augustan American Literature: An Aesthetics of Extravagance Restoration Legacies: Cook and Byrd The Plantation Epic: Magnalia Christi Americana New World Topographies: Wheatley, Dwight, Alsop

2 Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and the “Map of the Infinite” Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée “Medieval” Mound Builders and the   Archaeological Imagination Hawthorne, Melville, and the Question of Genealogy

29 29 42 55 70 70 86 97

Part Two: The Boundaries of the Nation 3

The Arcs of Modernism: Geography as Allegory Postbellum Cartographies: William Dean Howells Ethnic Palimpsests, National Standards

111 111 120

“Description without Place”: Stevens, Stein,   and Modernist Geographies

125

4 Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Space and the Rhetoric of Broadcasting “Voice of America”: Roth, Morrison, DeLillo Lost in Space: John Updike The MTV Generation: Wallace and Eggers

141 141 154 161

Part Three: Spatial Longitudes 5 Hemispheric Parallax: South America and the American South Rotating Perspectives: Bartram, Simms, Martí Regionalism and Pseudo-geography: Hurston and Bishop Mississippi Vulgate: Faulkner and Barthelme

183 183 199 212

vi  •  Contents

6

Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest Reversible Coordinates: The Epistemology of Space Orient and Orientation: Snyder, Le Guin, Brautigan Virtual Canadas: Gibson and Coupland

223 223 232 242

Conclusion: American Literature and the Question of Circumference

255

Works Cited

269

Index

305

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Matthew Lotter, “A Plan and Environs of Philadelphia” (1777) 4 “Latin America in 1830” 6 “Five Hundred Year Map,” from Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991) 20 Map of America by Arnoldo di Arnoldi (ca. 1600) 30 William Hogarth, “Columbus Breaking the Egg” (April 1752) 42 “A New Map of North America, according to the Newest Observations,” by Herman Moll (1721) 45 “An Exact Mapp of New England and New York,” frontispiece to Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) 51 “New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pensilvania,” by Herman Moll (1708) 53 Town plan of Central Cahokia, ca. 1150 88 “Map Showing the Proportion of the Foreign to the Aggregate Population,” from Francis A. Walker, Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874) 112 Surrealist “Map of the World” (1929) 129 “A north pole–centered map best shows relationships in an aeronautical World,” from George T. Renner, Human Geography in the Air Age (1943) 134 Portrait of Philip Roth, by Nancy Crampton (2004) 149 “Map Showing the Comparitive Area of the Northern and Southern States east of the Rocky Mountains” (1861) 185 Sebastian Münster, map of the New World (1540) 209 Elizabeth Bishop, title page to Geography III (1976) 211 Ursula K. Le Guin’s map of the town of Sinshan in Always Coming Home (1985) 239

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Acknowledgments

This book was written entirely in Oxford, England, where I worked as professor of American literature until my move to the University of Sydney in January 2010. The project began with a series of lectures I gave in 2004 on “The Deterritorialization of American Literature” at the Oriental Institute, Naples; and then at Yale University, the University of Manchester, the MLA convention in Philadelphia, and, in 2005, at the University of Cambridge, as well as at a “European Perspectives in American Studies” conference held at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin. This talk, which became in revised form the opening chapter of this book, was also published in an earlier version in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Lawrence Buell and Wai Chee Dimock (Princeton University Press, 2007), while an Italian translation, splendidly rendered by Cinzia Schiavini as “La deterritorializzazione della letteratura e cultura degli Stati Uniti,” appeared in Acoma: Rivista Internazionale di Studi Nordamericani later the same year. At the kind invitation of Lawrence Buell, a version of chapter 1, “Augustan American Literature: An Aesthetics of Extravagance,” was given in August 2007 at the International Association of University Professors in English (IAUPE) conference in Lund, Sweden, and it was subsequently published in the IAUPE conference proceedings edited by Marianne Thormahlen (Lund University Press, 2008). An early and shorter version of chapter 2, “Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and the ‘Map of the Infinite,’” was published in REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 23: Transnational American Studies, edited by Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler (Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 2007), while I also presented versions of this second chapter as plenary lectures at the Emerson, Poe and Hawthorne societies conference held in Oxford in June 2006 and at the New Perspectives on the American Nineteenth Century postgraduate conference held at the University of Nottingham in October 2008. A very early part of chapter 2, dealing with the theme of medievalism in Melville’s Pierre, was also presented at the MLA convention in San Diego in 2003. With regard to the later parts of this book, an abridged version of chapter 4 was published under the title “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace,” in Twentieth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (Fall 2007). A brief extract from chapter 5 appeared as “The Parallel Worlds of José Martí” in Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004), while an

x  •  Acknowledgments

invitation from Robert S. Levine and Caroline Levander to contribute an afterword to the fine special issue they edited on hemispheric approaches to American literary studies—American Literary History 18, no. 3 (Fall 2006)—also helped crystallize my thinking for this chapter. The section of chapter 5 discussing Zora Neale Hurston was first explored in a talk at the “Transatlantic Exchanges: The South in Europe—Europe in the American South” colloquium held in Vienna in September 2006. This contribution was subsequently published as “Hemispheric Parallax: Zora Neale Hurston and the Triangulation of Race” in the conference proceedings edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Richard Gray (Austrian Academy of Sciences—British Academy, 2007). A portion of chapter 6, on the Pacific Northwest, was given as a talk to the American Studies seminar at the University of Glasgow in November 2008. Versions of this book’s concluding chapter were presented in different forms as plenary lectures at the Italian Association for American Studies convention in Macerata, October 2007; at the American Studies Association of Norway/Nordic Association of Canadian Studies meeting in Bergen, October 2008; and at the MELUS-India conference held in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, November 2008. The Italian and Indian associations subsequently published different forms of this talk in their volumes of conference proceedings. I owe specific thanks to Nancy Crampton, who graciously allowed us to reproduce her photographic portrait of Philip Roth; to Ursula K. Le Guin, for permission to use a map from her book Always Coming Home; and to Rosemarie Cerminaro, at Simon and Schuster in New York, whose assistance with obtaining other copyright permissions for illustrations was invaluable. Other, more personal debts are not so easy to quantify. Many have observed before that as academic authors move through their careers their prefaces tend to get shorter, not because there are fewer people to acknowledge but because the webs of influence and indebtedness become increasingly entangled and so more difficult to identify. I certainly benefited from the resources at Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute (RAI), of which I was director between 2003 and 2008, where there was not only a splendid library but also a stream of distinguished visitors from the worlds of academia and public affairs willing to engage in discussions about the place of the United States in the contemporary world. (My reference in the introduction to “a senior diplomatic figure from the U.S. Embassy in London” derives from a talk given under Chatham House rules at the RAI.) I also served as president of the International American Studies Association (IASA) between 2005 and 2007, and my own work was assisted, probably in oblique and subliminal ways, by the kinds of awkward, uncomfortable questions about American global relations that were posed at the IASA congresses held at

Acknowledgments  •  xi

Ottawa in 2005, Lisbon in 2007 and Beijing in 2009. One of the characteristics of academic life since the development of the Internet in the mid1990s has been the feasibility of exchanging ideas with colleagues over a much wider geographical range, and with much greater ease and frequency, than had previously been possible, thereby creating the valuable resource of a virtual scholarly community alongside the more immediate local one. This has been crucial not only to the development of my own work since I returned to Britain from the United States in 1994 but also, I think, to how the field in general has evolved over the past fifteen years. Across a broad international spectrum, my work has been helped in various dimensions by exchanges with interlocutors in different locations: in Australia, Ian Tyrrell; in Germany, Georgiana Banita, Winfried Fluck, and Heinz Ickstadt; in India, Manju Jaidka; in Ireland, Liam Kennedy; in Israel, Shira Wolosky; in Italy, Marina Camboni, Cristina Giorcelli, Giorgio Mariani, and Renata Morresi; in Japan, Sheila Hones, Julia Leyda, Tatsushi Narita, and Takayuki Tatsumi; in the United Kingdom, Susan Castillo, Dick Ellis, Richard Gray, Susan Manning, Michael O’Brien, and Stephen Shapiro; and in the United States, Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Bill Boelhower, Larry Buell, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Wai Chee Dimock, Jane Desmond, the late Emory Elliott, Sandra M. Gustafson, Andrew Hoberek, Gordon Hutner, Djelal Kadir, Bob Levine, Joel Pfister, Larry J. Reynolds, Sandhya Shukla, Len Tennenhouse, and Werner Sollors, as well as Hanne Winarsky at Princeton University Press. One of the readers for Princeton of this manuscript was Don Pease, and I owe him a particular debt of gratitude for many acts of scholarly generosity extending back now over two decades. Oxford November 2009

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The Global Remapping of American Literature

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INTRODUCTIO N

The Deterritorialization of American Literature

The theme of this book is the relationship between American literature and global space and how this equation has fluctuated and evolved over time. My concern will be not only with works of fiction or poetry that are organized explicitly around particular conceptions of place but also with how a wide range of texts are informed implicitly by other kinds of geographical projection, of the type found in cartography and other forms of mapping. My thesis will be that the interrelation between American literature and geography, far from being something that can be taken as natural, involves contested terrain, terrain that has been subject over the past four centuries to many different kinds of mutation and controversy. I will argue that these instabilities have too frequently been overlooked in the ways the subject of American literature has been codified and institutionalized, especially over the past hundred years. Cultural geographer David Harvey has written about the desirability of reconstructing a matrix of “historical-geographical materialism” within which social formations of all kinds might be analyzed (Condition 359), and to reconsider American literature specifically in the context of geographical materialism is to think through the variegated forms of its imaginary relations to the real dimensions of physical space. Concomitantly, I will suggest that the association of America, and by extension the subject of American literature, with the current geographical boundaries of the United States is a formulation that should be seen as confined to a relatively limited and specific time in history, roughly the period between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and the presidency of Jimmy Carter, which ended in 1981. During the colonial period and the early years of the republic, the country’s more amorphous territorial framework engendered parallel uncertainties about the status and authority of American discourse; similarly, since about 1981, the multidimensional effects of globalization have reconfigured the premises of U.S. national identity in relation to a wider sphere. The identification of American literature with U.S. national territory was an equation confined to the national period and not something that was equally prevalent either before or afterward. I am not, therefore, attempting simply to describe American literature as a global phenomenon, as if the subject could imperially claim the whole world as its rightful sphere; more modestly, I am seeking to trace historical

2  •  Introduction

variables in the uneven ways American literature has imaginatively mapped itself in relation to a global domain over the past three hundred years. My critical method involves the use of spatial and temporal coordinates that are themselves, of course, metaphorical constructions. While it is important to acknowledge how any boundary that historians or geographers draw, in time or space, must inevitably be arbitrary in some way, it is also important not to lose sight of the valuable cultural work that such a perspectival process of remapping can perform. As Fredric Jameson observed in his classic essay “Periodizing the 60s,” the value of this kind of historicization lies in the way it can bring to light structural analogies between apparently disparate events within particular eras. Such an orientation has the beneficial effect of moving narratives of the past away from both anecdotal self-indulgence and merely sentimental forms of nostalgia; instead, there is, in Jameson’s words, a contrary insistence that “[h]istory is necessity,” that the past “had to happen the way it did, and that its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation” (178). Arjun Appadurai has similarly described the identification of “isomorphic” correspondences between disparate points on a grid as a way of bringing into juxtaposition events that might in other circumstances have been considered entirely unrelated (Modernity 182), thereby elucidating significant correspondences that would otherwise have remained hidden. In The Shaping of America, his multivolume attempt to obtain “a geographical perspective on 500 years of history,” D. W. Meinig cuts the historical cake slightly differently, outlining an “Atlantic America, 1492–1800,” followed by “Continental America, 1800–1867,” “Transcontinental America, 1850–1915,” and finally “Global America, 1915–2000.” Like Meinig, I see the prerevolutionary period as “a vast, unplanned, uncontrolled, unstable” landscape (I, 205) and the nineteenth century as a time when the national territory was consolidated, although Meinig sees globalization as emerging in embryonic form at the beginning of the twentieth century, whereas I argue for more of a disjunction between modernist and postmodernist periods. The crucial point, though, is not so much where any particular emphasis or hypothetical boundary might lie but the ways in which geographical consciousness enters subliminally into American cultural narratives, evoking tensions and crosscurrents that destabilize the reproduction of a self-authenticating literary subject. My second theoretical caveat, following from the paradox of periodization, derives from Paul Ricouer’s observation in Time and Narrative of how cultural historians have no choice other than to read time backward, as what Ricoeur calls “retrodiction” rather than prediction (I, 135). This method inevitably involves projecting from effect to cause,

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  3

rather than the other way around. This means not only that all history is narrative but also that we reorganize such narratives in the light of what Ricoeur calls a “redistribution of horizons” (III, 173), changing our view of the past in accordance with revised expectations about the present and the future. This in turn lends all historical remapping a reflexive dimension, since scholars necessarily find themselves imitating the formula that Edgar Allan Poe ascribed to the writing of detective stories and other fictional narratives, starting with the “dénouement” and then retracing forward what had already been traced backward.1 This kind of structural double bind has manifested itself recently in the manifold attempts to change the genealogy of American literary history, to revise beginnings rather than ends. Cyrus Patell has written of how readings of contemporary American ethnic authors typically run alongside a revisionist critique of the literary canon, so that “US culture’s reception of previous texts by minority authors influences the production and reception of future texts from emergent literary cultures” (“Representing” 64). As an example of this teleological mise-en-abîme, he has described the Dutch ethnic legacies embedded in cosmopolitan New York as more of a corollary to multicultural, twenty-first-century America than the time-honored Puritan origins of New England (“New Capital”). The pattern that we impose upon the past, in other words, is necessarily intertwined and enmeshed with concerns of the present. This recognition of the inevitably perspectival slant of institutional narratives can, therefore, serve beneficially to demystify the established canonical framework of American literary studies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly apparent that twentiethcentury narratives of American cultural history, framed as they were by assumptions about the country’s national destiny, became accustomed to looking out for phenomena that seemed to anticipate the national power of the United States, power that had been consolidated in hegemonic terms only relatively recently. The very category of the “early republic” is itself, of course, an anachronistic term, implying there was a later republic into which these anterior events naturally led. This is why, for example, the Puritan poet Edward Taylor was often celebrated in the last century as a harbinger of the tortuous romantic spirit of Emily Dickinson, in the same way that Anne Bradstreet was hailed as an honorary ancestor by post-1945 writers such as John Berryman, who prized her confessional aspects, and Adrienne Rich, who emphasized her sturdy spirit of feminist independence.2 All these misprisions involve a creative and interesting For an exposition of this theory, see Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition” 13. The most systematic critique of this retroactive critical teleology has come from studies by Spengemann. 1  2 

Figure 1. Detail from Matthew Lotter, “A Plan and Environs of Philadelphia” (1777).

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  5

use of the past, but in a historical sense they are manifestly misleading, since they tend to gloss over Taylor’s Calvinist silences and Bradstreet’s courtly, Renaissance conservatism in the interests of aligning them with a national narrative that is projected backward so as to validate American national culture of a later time. There is, however, little to suggest such a sense of national triumphalism appeared a fait accompli to American themselves in the first half of the nineteenth century, when their structures of governance and tentative moves toward political cohesion were based on what many at the time considered to be the dubious theoretical hypothesis of federal union. In the first sixty years of U.S. history, in the aftermath of the colonial period, the country’s sense of national identity was as uncertain, as provisional, as its cartography. The map of Philadelphia drawn in 1777 by German cartographer Matthew Lotter (figure 1) symptomatically illustrates the gaping discrepancy between a tiny rational grid at the heart of the city center and the sprawling, amorphous terrain in the unmapped, unregulated countryside of surrounding Pennsylvania (Boelhower 495). The western part of the present-day United States was even more inchoate: to look at a historical map of Latin America in 1830 (figure 2) is to see the territories of Mexico extending up through present-day California, Arizona, and New Mexico, with the shape of the nation itself appearing very different from the “sea to shining sea” model with which we are familiar today.3 The point here, quite simply, is that when Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his 1844 essay “The Poet” about America being a “poem in our eyes” (22), it was precisely that: a hypothetical or imaginative conception or at least one that had not yet achieved any firm sense of territorial grounding or enclosure. Walt Whitman’s nationalistic poetry in the 1850s similarly encompasses a tentative, optative dimension, something that is frequently overlooked because of the blustering and hortatory tone of his verse. Anne Baker has described how the structural anxieties attendant upon annexing “vast tracts of uncharted territory” (1) in the nineteenth century played themselves out in obsessions among American writers about “a fear of boundlessness and a need to impose form on space” (27), something apparent in Henry David Thoreau’s punctilious surveys of the natural world, as well as Herman Melville’s more parodic engagement with “parallels and meridians,” which Mardi describes as “imaginary lines drawn round the earth’s surface” (9–10). All the political investments in notions of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s, the drive to expand westward and to claim the land in the name of the 3  On the instability of U.S. nationalism in the West in the early nineteenth century, see Waldstreicher.

Figure 2.  “Latin America in 1830,” from Patrick Imbert and Marie Couillard, Les Discours du Nouveau Monde au XIXe siècle au Canada français et en Amérique latine (1995). Shelfmark: CO4 R1179. Map from back cover. Reproduced with permission by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  7

Stars and Stripes, speak to a desire to, as it were, fill in the blank spaces on the map, to subjugate the continent in a cartographic as well as a military sense. Indeed, the frequent U.S. wars in the early nineteenth century— with the British in 1812 culminating in the Battle of New Orleans, with the Mexicans in the 1840s over Texas and the southwest territories, and with Native Americans over the question of Indian removal—all speak to an impulse to redescribe the map of the nation. This is one reason maps themselves were so popular in America at this time, as Martin Brückner has shown (140–41), and why geography came to be considered a basic, compulsory subject in American schools, occupying a more prestigious place on the curriculum than history; the textbook Geography Made Easy, produced by the “father of American geography” Jedediah Morse in 1784, had gone through twenty-two editions by 1820, and during this antebellum era geographical writing was considered, in Bruce A. Harvey’s words, a “patriotic genre” (28). The reciting of place names became as familiar in American educational contexts at this time as the learning by rote of spelling or multiplication tables in other countries, and it testified to the pioneering attempt imaginatively to appropriate what was, of course, a dauntingly large and unsettled continent. To talk of the territorializing impulse of early nineteenth-century American culture, then, is to suggest that its way of identifying itself as something different did not necessarily involve simply a mimetic reflection of locality. The writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson have traditionally been thought of as a source for the national identity of American literature because of his principled emphasis on what he calls in “Nature” (1836) an “original relation to the universe” (7). But there is, in fact, very little description of the natural world in this or any other part of Emerson’s writing, and the way he marks his originality is not through mimesis but through intertextuality, through taking icons and ideas from classical European culture and spinning them round in a new way. The exuberantly weightless quality of Emerson’s prose thus derives from the way he remaps nineteenth-century American culture in relation to the classical monuments of the past. Just as Handel’s biblical oratorios of a hundred years earlier rehouse epic mythologies of the past within a radically disjunct neoclassical environment, a form of what Ronald Paulson calls “sacred parody” (Hogarth’s 214) that flaunts ebulliently the gap between past and present, so Emerson presents himself in a deliberately belated fashion as the intellectual heir of Plato and Montaigne, someone whose project involves the vertiginous transformation of one culture into another. In academic terms, it is unfortunate that Emerson has been designated by the twentieth-century critical tradition of American romanticism most closely associated with Harold Bloom as the institutional progenitor of American literature—the ultimate source of tran-

8  •  Introduction

scendentalism, pragmatism, William James, Wallace Stevens, and so on— without an equivalent emphasis on what Emerson describes in his essay “Experience” (1844) as the inherently intertextual quality of perception: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads,” he writes, “and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus” (30). “Experience,” with its “focus” on what Emerson calls the attainment of a soul’s “due sphericity” (46), exemplifies ways in which, for inhabitants of the United States in the 1840s, their home would have appeared to be positioned in a paradoxical situation somewhere between the empirical and the abstract, between place and placelessness. It is one of the burdens of Emerson’s writing that location itself is always relative and arbitrary, that Goethe is his neighbor as much as the man in the next street, that, as he remarks in “The Poet,” banks and tariffs are “dull to dull people” but in fact rest on “the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphi” (21–22). To read Emerson in intertextual terms, in other words, is to deterritorialize him, to extract him from the limiting circumference of antebellum New England and to think about ways in which he attempts deliberately to reconceptualize Enlightenment universalism within an alternative New World environment. In the 1850s, geography itself increasingly became part of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the United States. The American Geographic Society was established in 1851, three years before Arnold Guyot, the most influential American geographer of his era, took up the chair at Princeton he was to occupy for the next thirty years. Emerson himself owned the 1851 edition of Guyot’s The Earth and Man, in which the author’s project was to develop a theory of hemispheric evolution as providential and thus as entirely consonant with the exceptionalist qualities of U.S. national identity. The “vital principle” (17) of geography, asserted Guyot, was the “mutual exchange of relations” (19) between “inorganic nature” and “organised beings” (17), so that the physical world should not be seen merely as an inert or inanimate object, but as a phenomenon “organised for the development of man” (293–94). According to “the decrees of Providence” (28), he claimed, “nature and history, the earth and man, stand in the closest relations to each other, and form only one grand harmony” (29). Guyot’s conception of hemispheric symmetry was of a piece with his narrative of westward historical progression, the notion that the center of civilization, which had originated in Asia, was now passing from Europe to North America. Guyot further verified the cultural superiority of North to South America by presenting this hemispheric antithesis as analogous to that which appertained in Europe: “The contrast between the North and South, mitigated in the temperate regions of the mother country, is reproduced in the New World, more strongly marked,

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  9

and on a grander scale, between North America, with its temperate climate, its Protestant and progressive people, and South America, with its tropical climate, its Catholic and stationary population” (284). It is not difficult to see why this version of geographical providence would have appealed especially to Emerson in the 1850s, after the war with Mexico, the annexation of Texas, the evacuation of the British from the Pacific Northwest, and the American incorporation of the Oregon Territory. In his journal for 1853, Emerson notes how “Columbus was the first to discover the equatorial current in the ocean” (XIII: 5), and in a later journal entry, he cites with approbation a passage from The Earth and Man, where Guyot declares it “beyond a doubt . . . that the waters of the ocean, move with the heavens; that is, in the direction of the apparent course of the sun and stars, from east to west” (XIII: 169). What crucially changed the cultural and political landscape of the United States was, of course, the Civil War, which after its conclusion in 1865 consolidated the geography of the nation by ensuring it would henceforth be integrated into one political territory. It is not surprising that scholars, particularly in the United States, have kept returning compulsively to the Civil War as a turning point of national destiny because, despite all the internecine regional and racial conflicts it highlighted, the outcome of the war also facilitated the emergence of the United States as the world’s leading economic power in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was then that the country began to take the continental shape that we know today: California was admitted to the union in 1850; Oregon in 1859; Kansas in 1861; Nevada in 1864; Nebraska in 1867; Colorado in 1876; the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington in 1889; Idaho in 1890; and so on. The joining together of the North and the South, in other words, ran in parallel with the joining together of the East and the West; America was metamorphosed from a series of local economies into an imposing continental edifice. Given the simultaneous growth in communications and technology at this time, the expansion westward of the railways, the development of the telegraph, and so on, it becomes easy to see how the United States could understand itself as a coherent political and economic entity by the year 1900 in a way that simply had not been possible when Emerson wrote “Nature” in 1836.4 This incorporation of the United States as a culturally and politically unified entity was anticipated during the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln, who in his Gettysburg Address invoked a self-replicating, circular structure of representation—“government of the people, by the people, for the people”—as though the country were modeled around a myth of egali4  On the cultural and economic development of the United States in the late nineteenth century, see Trachtenberg, Incorporation.

10  •  Introduction

tarian democracy, something that was certainly very far from the minds of the founding fathers eighty years earlier.5 Not coincidentally, it was around Lincoln’s time that the United States began to take on the form of a singular noun, rather than the plural noun that had conventionally been used in the first half of the nineteenth century, with this shift from plural to singular exemplifying again the consolidation of the nation into a state of indivisible unity. It was also around the turn of the twentieth century that the notion of the land as bearing inherent national values came to be invested with a sacred aura. Florida and New Orleans, for instance, were bartered and traded quite happily in the early nineteenth century, but, as Benedict Anderson has observed, after the Civil War the idea of the United States as a national space became mystified in such a way that no politician would have dared thenceforth to think of paying off the national debt by, say, simply selling off the Florida Keys or southern California to the highest bidder. In this sense, America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million in 1867 was the last major commercial transaction of its kind, although the United States also bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million, a transaction motivated in part by security concerns during World War I. Much of the critical language in this era of burgeoning U.S. nationalism tended to involve a justification of American difference, of the particular qualities of American scenes and locations, such as we see in the novels of Theodore Dreiser, William Dean Howells, and others. This was also the era of the mythology surrounding Ellis Island, through which immigrants were to be socially assimilated and homogenized into American citizens. The high-water mark of immigration to the United States was 1.3 million in 1907, the year before Israel Zangwill produced his play The Melting Pot, which promulgated the myth of America as a land of immigrants even in critiquing its efficacy. This kind of double vision, simultaneously constructing and deconstructing an image of America as promised land, was characteristic of the way American modernism tended to be wrapped into a rhetoric of nativist utopia, a rhetoric that served as the foundational basis and underlying grid for all the subsequent vacillations and ironies that permeate its texts.6 Although Randolph Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America,” published in 1916, starts off in its first sentence by proclaiming “the failure of the melting pot” in the face of “diverse nationalistic feelings” (107) among the American immigrant population during World War I, the penultimate paragraph of Bourne’s 5  For an analysis of how the nineteenth-century “democratic society was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected,” see G. Wood 365 6  On the complementary aspects of racial identity and textual irony in American modernist narratives such as The Great Gatsby, see Michaels, Our America 41–42.

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  11

essay looks forward prophetically to a new version of the United States predicated on a greater tolerance of ethnic diversity, what Bourne calls “a future America, on which all can unite, which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more warmly” (123). Thus, American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tends not only to be saturated in locality but also to understand that locality as a guarantee of its own authenticity and its patriotic allegiance, something articulated most explicitly by the polemical essays of Howells in defense of the methods of realism. This is the realm of what Philip Fisher has called “hard facts,” where the relationship between the local and the national becomes self-allegorizing, in the sense that the value of particular places—Willa Cather’s Nebraska or Robert Frost’s New England or William Carlos Williams’s New Jersey—are validated not by their specific local characteristics or phenomenological qualities but from their synecdochic embodiment of a national impulse, their sense of being, as Williams put it, “in the American grain.” Tom Lutz’s work on literary cosmopolitanism has emphasized the extent to which regional writing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was mediated by an external perspective that sought to integrate region and nation as the geographical corollaries of each other, as patriotic manifestations of what Howells called “our decentralized literature” (Lutz 38). John Dewey’s 1920 essay “Americanism and Localism” paradoxically declared “locality” to be “the only universal” aspect of American national identity (15), while Carrie Tirado Bramen, in The Uses of Variety, has described how an emphasis on diversity, both ethnic and regional, became an “inviolable sign of national exceptionalism” for twentieth-century American culture (1). Tracing this discourse of material and spatial abundance back to William James’s writings on pluralism in 1909, Bramen shows how, far from opposing identitarian politics, James became the precursor of latter-day theorists such as Cornel West who, even as late as the 1990s, imagined a commitment to multiculturalism to be emblematic of the way in which an open U.S. culture might differentiate itself from the more repressive, restrictive systems of other countries (Bramen 297). This move to integrate and reconcile local variation within a larger national matrix was perpetuated in the early twentieth century through the rationalized industrial methods perfected by Henry Ford and others, which were based around a factory system where the national model was reproduced in every state of the union. The defining issue in John Dos Passos’s novel USA, published as a trilogy in 1938, is how by this time national similarities have become more important than regional differences, how an industrial model of mass production and consumption has worked its way into every corner of the United States. (The title of USA’s first volume, The 42nd Parallel, is taken pointedly from the geographical

12  •  Introduction

line of latitude that extends east to west across the U.S.) All this generated tremendous political cohesion and economic wealth for the country in the middle part of the twentieth century, enabling it to intervene decisively in World War II and to establish itself iconically, particularly in Europe, as an emblematic land of the free, a cold war alternative to both the brutality of Fascism and the poverty of Communism. It was in the aftermath of World War II that the American Studies Association was founded in the United States, in 1951, and most of the American studies programs in Europe also originated around this time. All these programs traded off the idea of America as an exemplary and exceptional nation, a beacon of both material regeneration, through its laissez-faire economic system, and of cultural modernity. Such modernity was thought to emerge through a stylistic emphasis on colloquial informality, typified in the 1950s by jazz and other forms of popular culture, as well as in the incisive vernacular of Saul Bellow and the Beat writers, all of which seemed to imply a welcome escape from the ossified class structures and social hierarchies of Europe. In a Time cover story of 1941, Henry Luce, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, famously described the twentieth century as “the American century.” As Neil Smith has observed, such a prophecy on Luce’s part necessarily involved an assumption of “geographical amnesia” (460), a putative triumph over the coordinates of physical space, the replacement of an imperial design based on territorial possession by one driven instead by a liberal internationalism, through which American economic and cultural ideas would penetrate overseas markets. As in the American studies model, U.S. national identity became associated with the export of goods across national borders, with the aim ultimately of consolidating the exceptionalist aspects of nationalist iconography. What I want to suggest, though, is that the United States has now moved in significant ways beyond this national phase and that since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president in January 1981 the country has entered what we might call a transnational era, one more centered around the necessarily reciprocal position of the U.S. within global networks of exchange. To give greater historical specificity to this matrix of transnationalism, we can look back to the idea of deterritorialization first broached in 1972 by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their psychoanalytical work Anti-Oedipus, to describe how flows of desire traverse the boundaries of distinct, separate territories: The decoding of flows and the deterritorialization of the socius thus constitutes the most characteristic and the most important tendency of capitalism. It continually draws near to its limit, which is a genuinely schizophrenic limit. . . . [C]apitalism, through its process of production,

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  13

produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear. (34) Far from seeing in the State the principle of a territorialization that would inscribe people according to their residence, we should see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement of deterritorialization that divides the earth as an object and subjects men to the new imperial inscription, to the new full body, to the new socius. (195) The State can no longer be content to overcode territorial elements that are already coded, it must invent specific codes for flows that are increasingly deterritorialized. (218) This term deterritorialization has subsequently been used in a broader cultural and political context by critics such as Caren Kaplan, who has related it to the experience of women and ethnic minorities in “becoming minor” or living on the edge (“Deterritorializations” 359), and by Appadurai, who has discussed it more specifically in relation to the processes of globalization: [M]y approach to the break caused by the joint force of electronic mediation and mass migration is explicitly transnational—even postnational. . . . [I]t moves away dramatically from the architecture of classical modernization theory, which one might call fundamentally realist insofar as it assumes the salience, both methodological and ethical, of the nation-state. . . . Until recently . . . imagination and fantasy were antidotes to the finitude of social experience. In the past two decades, as the deterritorialization of persons, images, and ideas has taken on a new force, this weight has imperceptibly shifted. (Modernity 9, 53; my italics) Speaking in 2004, a senior diplomatic figure from the U.S. Embassy in London expressed the view that the crucial political shift within his own professional lifetime was not the election in 2000 of George W. Bush rather than Al Gore to succeed Bill Clinton, but the country’s decisive move in 1980 from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. Of course, as noted earlier, all such imaginary divisions in history are arbitrary and approximate, but this dividing line might have some plausibility because, during the 1970s and 1980s, the economic infrastructure of the United States began to change significantly. Richard Nixon anticipated this shift toward a global economy in August 1971 when he announced that the United States would no longer redeem currency for gold, thereby effectively abandoning the gold standard and ushering in an era of fluctuating exchange rates. David Harvey dates the decline of “the Fordist regime” from 1973, the same year that money became

14  •  Introduction

“de-materialized,” as a fully floating system of currency conversion was adopted so that money no longer had “a formal or tangible link to precious metals” (Condition 140, 297). With the loss of the mechanism that effectively regulated the growth rate of the country’s money supply, the United States, like other nation-states, found itself increasingly drawn into the marketplace of global exchange, something given greater momentum in the 1980s by the free-market philosophies of President Reagan, and in the 1990s by the dramatic growth in information technology that made it increasingly possible to transfer capital around the globe at a moment’s notice. These developments were replicated slightly later in other parts of the world: in Britain, for instance, the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1979 brought to an abrupt end the postwar years of liberal social consensus in that country, but the key symbolic event in Europe was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which not only effectively ended the cold war but also fatally undermined the social and economic cohesion of what had been postwar Europe’s most successful corporate state, West Germany. Michael Denning sees the fall of the Berlin Wall as heralding the crucial break between what he calls the age of three worlds, demarcated according to the discrete geopolitical zones that dominated area studies in the cold war period, between 1945 and 1989, and the subsequent era of globalization. Denning makes the point that pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the transfer of finance capital across national borders crucially destabilized at this time the autonomy of inward-looking political regimes of all kinds, “Manley’s social-democratic Jamaica as well as de Klerk’s apartheid South Africa” (Culture 46). It is important to emphasize how these forces of deterritorialization have also operated insidiously to disturb and dislocate the national identity of the United States itself, in particular the relationship between its domestic space and the wider world. In Empire, produced not coincidentally at the height of the neoliberal economic boom in 1999, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri described international capitalism as “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii), and they suggested this was a “new imperial form of sovereignty” (xiii), one not to be identified with any particular “nation-state” (xiv). But such a version of imperialism would appear to be oddly reminiscent of a disembodied transcendentalism, wherein finance capital, rather than Emerson’s transparent eyeball, has become the force field whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere: “Empire presents a superficial world,” write Hardt and Negri, “the virtual center of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface” (58). By seeking simply to supersede spatial geography, Hardt and Negri implicitly mimic

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  15

the rhetoric of empire in the way they render territorial formations obsolete, so that, as Neil Smith puts it, their “recognition of empire remains clouded by the lost geography ideologies that should be its target” (457). Within a world of geographical materialism, however, the actual experience of deterritorialization manifests itself as more jagged and fractious, bound up with tensions and inconsistencies that cannot be comfortably subsumed within global systems or regimes of capital accumulation. One fictional representation of this fraught state can be found in the novel Primary Colors by Joe Klein, published as an anonymous account of Bill Clinton’s election campaign in 1992. The presidential candidate, called there “Jack Stanton,” addresses a group of workers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and says he will not delude them into thinking he can protect their jobs for life in a new situation where transnational corporations can swiftly pull investment in and out of the country in a way that would never have occurred to Henry Ford sixty years earlier: So let me tell you this: No politician can bring these shipyard jobs back. Or make your union strong again. No politician can make it be the way it used to be. Because we’re living in a new world now, a world without borders—economically, that is. Guy can push a button in New York and move a billion dollars to Tokyo before you blink an eye. We’ve got a world market now. And that’s good for some. In the end, you’ve gotta believe it’s good for America. . . . I’ll fight and worry and sweat and bleed to get the money to make education a lifetime thing in this country, to give you the support you need to move on up. But you’ve got to do the heavy lifting your own selves. I can’t do it for you, and I know it’s not gonna be easy. (161–62) Stanton (or Clinton) deliberately positions himself here in relation to the flexible conditions of the global marketplace, the realm of outsourcing and transnationalization. He acknowledges that American corporate interests can often be served more easily by relocating service or production industries to Mexico or Asia, where wages are lower and costs are cheaper, rather than through domestic investment. This effectively means the stable patterns of middle-class prosperity and security that characterized the earlier Henry Ford era have all but evaporated. Corporate profits have, of course, increased rapidly; but their growth is not related directly to or shared by large sections of the working population, as tended to be the case in the mid-twentieth century, when corporations such as Ford usually took a benevolent, patriarchal interest in the long-term welfare of their employees. The interaction between American culture and globalization is a vast topic interwoven with developments in telecommunications and media as well as the expansion of transnational corporations, and the main point

16  •  Introduction

to be noted here is simply that it happened. For example, the hamburger chain McDonald’s only opened its first two foreign outlets, in Canada and Puerto Rico, in 1967; but by 1999, overseas sales for McDonald’s had actually overtaken domestic sales, and today a majority of its outlets, approximately 17,000 out of 30,000, are located outside the territorial boundaries of the United States (N. Ferguson 18). Indeed, the relationship between geographical location and cultural identity has changed so radically in the wake of recent changes in communications technologies that Linda Basch and others argue traditional distinctions between migrants and immigrants no longer hold good. They point, for example, to the Grenadian constituency in New York that remains socially, politically, and often economically part of its ancestral domain; of Grenada’s official population of 90,000, in fact, only 30,000 of them actually live there, and this has led to a new construct of what Basch et al. call a “deterritorialized” nation-state, within which people can remain active electronically in their old countries. Such two-way relationships have increasingly been legally formalized: since the late 1980s, for example, the Philippine state has continued to collect income tax on all Filipino citizens residing abroad on a special overseas visa issued by the government. This has meant also that the U.S. Congress has found itself increasingly under direct pressure from Filipino voters in the United States to involve itself directly in Filipino domestic politics, with the consequence that the traditional distinctions between domestic and foreign have come to appear increasingly unclear. Nor should this Filipino example be seen as especially anomalous; in The Transnational Villagers (2001), Peggy Levitt offers a case study of how migrants from Miraflores, a town in the Dominican Republic, to Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston, participate simultaneously in the social, political, and economic lives of their homeland and their host society. The transnational village, in Levitt’s sense, functions not through spatial proximity but through cheap telecommunications and airfares, and to conceive of a nation-state that stretches beyond its traditional geographical boundaries is also to imagine, by a reverse projection, an American state whose territory is no longer automatically synonymous with the interests of U.S. citizens. This is neither to present neoliberalism or globalization as a simple fait accompli nor to suggest that local or national politics have no part to play in the organization and redistribution of resources. What it is to argue, in relation to the study of American literature and culture, is that since the 1980s, the rules of engagement have changed so significantly that old area-studies nostrums about exceptionalist forms of national politics and culture, pieties about American diversity or whatever, have become almost irrelevant. In terms of ways in which this move toward a transnational infrastructure has manifested itself in American literature,

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  17

some of the most illuminating instances occur in the works of writers such as Douglas Coupland and William Gibson—one brought up in Vancouver, Canada, but who writes about the Pacific Northwest as a transnational region; the other born in South Carolina, but resident in Vancouver since 1972—whose representations of American digital culture, as we shall see in chapter 6, are organized obliquely around parallel computer universes. There is an extended treatment of the theme of deterritorialization in Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003), whose heroine works for a public-relations company called Blue Ant, described in the book as “more post-geographic than multinational” (6). As she shuttles across national boundaries, Gibson’s heroine thinks back to her father, who for twenty-five years had been “an evaluator and improver of security for American embassies worldwide” and whose watchword had always been “secure the perimeter” (44). But the old cold warrior is lost in Manhattan on the morning of 9/11, with his wife subsequently suggesting, as a possible solution to the enigma of his disappearance, “that when the second plane hit, Win’s chagrin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist” (351). Gibson’s novel, written and published in the shadow of what one of its characters calls the “recent unpleasantness” in New York City (310), highlights ways in which 9/11 has become for the United States the most visible and haunting symbol of the permeability of the country’s borders, its new vulnerability to outside elements. In this sense, it is no surprise how the enormous stress on “homeland security” in the administration of George W. Bush (2001–9) should have operated as a reaction against this widespread sense of dislocation and trauma. To turn a home into a “homeland” is, by definition, to move from a zone in which domestic comforts and protection could be taken for granted to one in which they had to be guarded anxiously and self-consciously; in that sense, the very phrase “homeland security” could be seen as a contradiction in terms, since it rhetorically evokes the very insecurity it is designed to assuage. As Jean Baudrillard has said, terrorism might be seen as an almost inevitable counterpart to the development of international market economies, since its enabling structures are almost identical, based as they are around the exploitation of computer and aeronautic technologies, rapid capital transfers, the wide dissemination of scientific and other kinds of information, and the all-encompassing power of a global media: above all, the power of terrorism trades off a culture of TV spectacle (“L’Esprit” 409). Whereas for most Americans, World War II and the subsequent cold war took place in alien locations, the distant world of European battlefields or the shadowy realm of spies coming in from the cold, the most uncomfortable

18  •  Introduction

thing about 9/11 was the way it demonstrated how borders separating the domestic from the foreign could no longer be so easily policed or, indeed, even identified. Such permeability became conflated in the minds of many Americans both with a threat to Christian fundamentalist values and with the loss of job security for large numbers of people in what Edward Soja has called a “postfordist” economic landscape (Postmodern 3), one driven by internationally mobile capital and technology rather than by labor or other traditional forms of production. The powerful impact of 9/11 might thus best be understood in terms of how it appeared not as an entirely unexpected event, a bolt from the blue, but how, on the contrary, it resonated as a symbolic culmination of the various kinds of deterritorializing forces that had been gathering pace since the Reagan years. The larger framework here relates to the gradual diminution rather than the agglomeration of U.S. power. Political theorist Immanuel Wallerstein has concluded that the relative decline of American hegemony over the next fifty years is inevitable, not because of any particular policies pursued or not pursued by U.S. presidents but because of more structural reasons: in particular, the increasing modulation of domestic economies within a transnational axis of geopolitical space. The amorphous processes associated with globalization will affect the United States politically as well as economically: as Niall Ferguson has pointed out, any nation is less powerful politically if it has a thousand nuclear weapons when every other nation has one than if it has one and other nations none at all (299). One of the policies pursued by George W. Bush, a policy surely doomed to long-term failure, was to freeze nuclear “proliferation,” as the American administration called it, at a stage most favorable to the United States (Wallerstein 287). This is a familiar enough ploy within the annals of imperial history, going back to the ancient Romans, who attempted strenuously to prevent potential enemies from getting their hands on all kinds of dangerous weapons. But given the way the Internet has speeded up global exchanges of information, so that scientific knowledge is no longer locked within cold war vaults but rather dispersed among many different centers, such an ambition of exceptionalist superiority and isolationism, geared toward preserving U.S. world domination, would appear to have little chance of long-term success. Nor is it at all likely that, for all its politically calculated rhetoric about the “axis of evil,” U.S. governments themselves have been unaware of how this balance of power is slowly shifting. Indeed, one of President G. W. Bush’s own advisory bodies, the National Intelligence Council, produced in December 2004 a report entitled Mapping the Global Future, which described globalization as “an overarching ‘mega-trend,’ a force so ubiquitous that it will substantially shape all the other major trends in the world of 2020,” so that “how we mentally map the world in 2020 will change radically.” The

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  19

report went on to predict openly that, although the U.S. will continue to be “the most important single country across all the dimensions of power” by 2020, it will also see “its relative power position eroded” (10–11). In this light, one of the most interesting aspects of contemporary American literature is how it represents ways in which these pressures of deterritorialization are being internalized and understood affectively. John Updike, for instance, came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s by chronicling the fortunes of Harry Angstrom in the Rabbit series of novels, and especially for the way he drew analogies between the fate of his main character and the contemporary condition of the United States. As we shall see in chapter 4, though, part of the structural difficulty with this Rabbit sequence is that the parallels between the life of a white Pennsylvania automobile worker and the fate of the country as a whole seem ultimately to become forced and exclusionary. Updike’s Rabbit novels are attuned specifically to the nationalist ethos of a post–World War II era when white, middle-class America was assumed to represent the fate of the country at large and when the national radio and television networks imagined themselves to be speaking on behalf of a unified people. However, in Seek My Face (2002), there is a specific meditation on what Updike’s narrator calls “the fading Protestant hegemony” (70–71) and on the erasure of the national security that formerly went along with such a clearly defined sense of American identity. Ensconced at the age of seventy-nine in her house in Vermont, the painter Hope Chafetz thinks of how “[o]wning this house restored her to certain simplicities of childhood, when houses and yards demarcated territories of safety and drew upon deep wells, mysterious cisterns brimming with communal reserves” (81). She also watches the evening news on television and sees in place of the regular NBC newscaster, Tom Brokaw, what she calls “a perfectly stunning young woman, light topaz eyes as far apart as a kitten’s,” whose “name wasn’t even Greek, it was more like Turkish, a quick twist of syllables like an English word spelled backward. The old American stock is being overgrown,” she thinks: “High time, of course: no reason to grieve” (11). The elegiac tone in this novel is related not only to Hope’s personal sense of aging but also to her recognition of how the old American order itself is passing, how the traditional iconography of national identity now appears to be as insecure as the superannuated charms of Christian theology, whose demise, in typical Updike fashion, is also lovingly chronicled in this book. Another kind of map is provided by Leslie Marmon Silko as a preface to her 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead, a narrative that ambitiously rewrites the history of America from the standpoint of Native American communities. Centered on Tucson, Arizona, this “five hundred year map” extends from the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in the north to Mexico City

20  •  Introduction

The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted

Figure 3.  “Five Hundred Year Map,” reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 1991 by Leslie Marmon Silko. All rights reserved. From Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991).

in the south, and it represents the current U.S.–Mexico border as incidental to the flow of human and cultural traffic through this land across the centuries (14–15). The novel itself, like the cartographic image preceding it (figure 3), encompasses a perspective of inversion that involves redrawing the map of the United States in space as well as time. Silko’s novel deliberately eschews the chronologies of U.S. history to establish for the Arizona region an entirely different kind of cultural vantage point, seeing the American Southwest in the context of Aztec civilizations and the Apache wars, thereby rendering the familiar national narrative of the United States contingent and reversible. This in turn works as a corollary to the chronology of “the people’s history” (742) in the last section of this book, which foregrounds slave history and chooses provocatively to overlook the celebrated landmarks of established U.S. history. Silko herself has described the U.S. government as an illegitimate enterprise founded on land stolen from Native American peoples, though Alma-

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  21

nac of the Dead portrays American culture more in terms of a complex legacy of mixed ancestries, a hybrid concoction of Spanish and other indigenous cultures interlinked with the apparatus of the global village. Elsewhere, Silko has written in her essay “The Border Patrol State” of the shift after 1980 by agencies of the U.S. government away from an exclusive emphasis on guarding the mythical “Iron Curtain”; instead, the Immigration and Naturalization Service sought at the end of the twentieth century to prevent free travel not only across but also within U.S. borders, especially in the American Southwest, thereby constructing the kind of defensive mechanisms against a perceived threat of mass migration and “illegal aliens” (121) that anticipated the subsequent fetish of “homeland security.” Indeed, Native American culture offers an interesting microcosm and symbol of the current fate of U.S. culture, since the concept of deterritorialization was forcibly applied to Native American people in the early nineteenth century, when Andrew Jackson, president of the United States between 1829 and 1837, urged the nation to accept the loss of Indian tribes as inevitable. In The Pioneers (1823), James Fenimore Cooper represents the breakup of the ice on Lake Otsego as an organic analogue to the historical dispossession of Native American peoples, a process that the author tries effectively to naturalize.7 From this perspective, one might say that the loss of territorial security that was visited upon Native Americans in the nineteenth century has now become, in different ways and under different circumstances, something that is afflicting U.S. culture as a whole. My general hypothesis, then, is that the nationalist phase of American literature and culture extended from 1865 until about 1981 and that the current transnational phase actually has more in common with writing from the periods on either side of the War of Independence, when national boundaries were much more inchoate and unsettled. The geography scholar Robert David Sack has linked the idea of territory above all to themes of power, protection, and political control, themes sometimes projected onto the territorial formation itself, as in the familiar notion of something being “the law of the land” (33). He has also written of how the notion of territory has frequently been endowed with an idea of mythical content, as in the way the ancient division of the Chinese Empire into four quarters was fondly imagined to be “a mirror of cosmic order” (77). Such forms of sublimation involve what Deleuze and Guattari called a process of “reterritorialization” (258), where the appropriation of territory is designed to occlude its own material flux, an approach that manifests itself, often in circuitous ways, even in contemporary readings of American literature. For instance, in Landscape and Ideology in 7 

For a discussion of this historical process, see Lipscomb.

22  •  Introduction

American Renaissance Literature, Robert E. Abrams invokes the idea of what he calls “negative geography” (2) to explain the resistance of Thoreau and others to rationalistic cartographies, cartographies understood by Abrams as alien impositions from the European world on a pristine American scene. In this reading, the escape from abstract geographical mapping into what Abrams calls “a sense of indefinite existential promise” (12) becomes an implicit guarantee of an American literary nationalism that justifies itself by its escape from “the hallucinatory authority of centralized, panoptic vision” (78), defining itself instead through its relationship to the unmapped sublime. Abrams thus critically recapitulates the classic transcendentalist move whereby the erasure of specific locations in history and geography becomes the sign of the writer’s separatist self-reliance and American authenticity. But to place culture and geography in this kind of mutually exclusive relationship is, of course, to overlook ways in which their narratives are inextricably intertwined. In this sense, Abrams’s version of “negative geography” operates much like a traditional form of dehistoricization, a transliteration of material conditions into a version of mythic idealism from which the lineaments of time and space are frozen out. By contrast, a discourse of geographical materialism would seek to restore these spatial dynamics to American literature. In an era of global warming and various other forms of transnational circulation, when issues of the environment cannot be reduced simply to local or national specificities, such a dissolution of spatial relations into “negative geography” must surely appear a parochial strategy. One of the conceptual problems associated with the study of U.S. literature has always been an inbred tendency toward a relatively constricted theoretical matrix, with the culture’s own distinct preference for familiar terms of reference and supposedly natural affinities with the native soil engendering a self-perpetuating loop through which American writers were critically validated for being identifiably American. On the other hand, the displacement of U.S. territorial autonomy has the potential for opening up new possibilities for the study of America’s place within the world, so that theorists of transnationalism whose first allegiance is to alternative political formations might usefully be read against the grain of the American polis. For example, in We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, French political thinker Etienne Balibar discusses ways in which nations have traditionally attempted to guard their borders so as to preserve the integrity of their public sphere and have consequently defined themselves primarily through various mechanisms of exclusion. Balibar also points out, though, how in the twenty-first century such borders are no longer “entirely situated at the outer limit of territories” but are—through international media, finance, and so on—

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  23

dispersed everywhere within them: “border areas . . . are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center” (1–2). The primary concern of Balibar’s work is the changing political system in Europe and its slow evolution into something more like a federal union; but, by Ricoeur’s logic of “retrodiction,” it is possible that such altered conditions in twenty-first-century Europe will help provoke a radical reexamination of the culture and history of the United States. Over the next fifty years, suggests David Crystal, Europe will probably evolve into a more integrated political state within which English will emerge as the dominant language, even though this use of English as a lingua franca will exist alongside a range of other European languages historically embedded in particular national cultures (5–7). What this would produce is a model of political union where multinationalism and multilingualism are the norm, and this may well induce scholars in the twenty-first century to reappraise American literary history of earlier eras, when, as we shall see in chapter 3, the official rhetoric of melting-pot assimilation and monolingualism tended simply to gloss over the many aspects of U.S. culture that did not conform to these hegemonic ideals. Rather than seeing Europe as positioned in the kind of conceptual opposition to America that characterized the exceptionalist impulse of American studies in the twentieth century, this transnational dynamic would provide an impetus for scholars to think of relations between the United States and the rest of the world in terms of more complex, analogical processes of convergence and divergence. Deterritorialization as used by Deleuze and Guattari, then, had a quite specific psychoanalytical meaning, but the term can be extrapolated to make inferences about ways in which subjects of all kinds, both individual and national, find themselves compelled to relate to what Appadurai calls the “theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, diacritics” (Modernity 3). Rather than merely understanding U.S. power to be a “colossus,” in Niall Ferguson’s imperious phrase, there is an important sense in which we should read the United States itself as one of the objects of globalization, rather than as merely its malign agent, so that all the insecurities associated with transnationalism are lived out experientially within the nation’s own borders as well. The Global Remapping of American Literature thus seeks to inscribe an alternative version of American literary history, one turning upon an international rather than a nationalist axis. By restoring a matrix of historical and geographical materialism to the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we come to understand how the idea of American culture has always been bound up inextricably with particular configurations of space, configurations that have changed their shape many times over the past 300 years.

24  •  Introduction

It is, of course, impossible to encompass everything, and the aim of this book is not to write an encyclopedic survey but rather to offer symptomatic readings that shed a kind of refractive light on anomalies, inconsistencies, and blind spots within canonical national narratives. By relating individual authors to larger orbits and making illuminating juxtapositions between different temporal and spatial categories of American literature, I hope to raise the kinds of questions that are often occluded in “close” readings of particular texts, where meaning is treated as an immanent phenomenon. In this sense, to place American literature within a larger spatial circumference might be seen as analogous to reading it across different temporal dimensions; part of my aim in this work is to bring the conventionally partitioned field of “early” American literature more into comparative juxtaposition with the modern and postmodern periods. Indeed, the organization of this book, the first section centered on temporal and the last on spatial dimensions, is designed to offset what Doreen Massey has called the academic tendency to tame and homogenize the aleatory conditions of space by turning “geography into history, space into time” (5). Massey argues that any critique of the “historicism” of globalization—“its unilinearity, its teleology, etc.”—must also involve “reframing its spatiality,” so that such a “reconceptualization could (should) be of temporality and spatiality together” (89). By cross-cutting temporal latitudes with spatial longitudes and by considering specific U.S. regions (the South, the Pacific Northwest) alongside historical developments, this book will attempt to recognize the heterogeneous quality of global narratives, how their trajectories have operated in interestingly uneven ways across different geopolitical locations. I am aware, of course, that a choice of different geographic zones would have produced different perspectives, and chapters 5 and 6 are intended merely as examples of ways in which the spatial and temporal aspects of American literary culture have been intertwined. At the center of this book, in Part Two, is a consideration of how the subject of American literature became consolidated and institutionalized in the modernist era, together with an account of the pressures this national model came under in the second half of the twentieth century. I use the “rhetoric of broadcasting” as a way of gaining a particular analytical purchase on these changing conceptions of space, though it is, of course, not my intention to suggest that electronic media were the only contributory factors to these processes of dislocation. Edward Said’s notion of “adversarial internationalism” (Culture 244) might be said to take many forms, and here such a critical internationalism is designed to cut across conventional formations of American literature, suggesting how, despite the ways in which it has been buttressed by the ghosts of American exceptionalism, forms of global space have always been inherent within it. From this perspective, deterriorialization, like

Deterritorialization of American Literature  •  25

transnationalism, can be seen as a doubled-up, recursive term that seeks to bracket off or problematize the trope associated with a prior metanarrative: territory, nation, or homeland. It speaks to a paradoxical situation where affective loyalties, local affiliations, and subliminal legacies are ironically traversed by larger vectors of political and economic disenfranchisement, vectors that threaten to push the nation further and further away from the representative center of its own imagined community. To speak of American literary culture under the rubric of deterritorialization is thus not simply to encumber it within monolithic orders of globalization or imperialism but, rather, to think of it as a socially constructed, historically variable and experientially edgy phenomenon, whose valence lies in the tantalizing dialectic between an illusion of presence and the continual prospect of displacement.

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PART ON E

Temporal Latitudes

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C HAPTER 1

Augustan American Literature: An Aesthetics of Extravagance

Restoration Legacies: Cook and Byrd As Karen Ordahl Kupperman has noted, the study of geography “blossomed” in Europe after Christopher Columbus’s voyages of the 1490s (1), with the New World becoming central to discursive treatments of space that moved away from medieval symbolic maps with Jerusalem at their center. Under the influence of navigation, exploration, and, by extension, the allure of wealth, there was increasing interest in how different spatial perspectives could be aligned with new ways of seeing the world. The ancient Roman geographer and astronomer Ptolemy enjoyed his own renaissance at this time, and the force of Ptolemy’s description of geography as a form of painting can be seen in the artistic composition of the map of America produced by the Italian Arnoldo di Arnoldi in Siena around 1600 (figure 4).1 Arnoldi’s interest here is in framing America by juxtaposing it with other parts of the world: we see Britain, France, and Spain in the top right corner of the map, Iceland in the far north, Asia in the top left corner, New Guinea in the bottom left, and what was then known as “Terra Australe Incognita,” the unknown southern land, at the bottom. Working a hundred years after Columbus, Arnoldi’s concern was to represent America cartographically in relation to a global picture of exploration, to position America on the world map. Because of the nationalist emphasis that has traditionally circumscribed the study of early American literature, however, these more variegated geographical and global dimensions have often been excluded from the way the subject has been constructed. As noted in the introduction, the very notion of an “early” period is itself a prolepsis, a projection back from a nationalist idea of American literature in order to uncover supposed precursors or foreshadowings of later events.2 Moreover, as Emory Elliott observed (6), it is only since about 1970 that American literature of the prerevolutionary period has been taken seriously at all; the old canard that American literature began in the 1830s with a cultural declaration 1  2 

On Ptolemy and Renaissance exploration, see Hale 16–18 and Padgen 68. On this topic, see De Prospo, “Marginalizing,” Tennenhouse, and Spengemann, New.

Figure 4.  Map of America by Arnoldo di Arnoldi (ca. 1600). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Augustan American Literature  •  31

of independence by Ralph Waldo Emerson has gradually been replaced by an increasing recognition of the historical complexity and aesthetic variety of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work. Nevertheless, as David Shields has remarked (“Aching”), no period in American literature remains still so neglected as that between 1700 and 1765, while Sandra M. Gustafson makes the point that there is a need for more dialogue between early Americanists and U.S. Americanists about how the entire field might position itself in relation to issues such as empire and transnationalism, questions that traverse the subject’s conventional chronological and spatial parameters (107). Although T. S. Eliot was complaining as far back as 1919, in his review of the first Cambridge History of American Literature, about the disproportionate homage paid to New England writers at the expense of writers from the South such as Edgar Allan Poe or Mark Twain, much of the twentieth-century work on prerevolutionary American culture was shaped by Perry Miller’s monumental intellectual histories of what he called “the New England mind.” Equally influential have been Sacvan Bercovitch’s studies of the 1970s, The American Jeremiad and The Puritan Origins of the American Self, the latter arguing for the nonconformist, apocalyptic temper of seventeenth-century Calvinist thought as the progenitor of both nineteenth-century individualism and critical theories of American exceptionalism. Bercovitch’s scholarly legacy subsequently became institutionalized through his role as general editor of the second Cambridge History of American Literature, which published its first volume, on the period 1590 through 1820, in 1994. In this first part of the sequence, Bercovitch chose to finesse the problem of the eighteenth century by incorporating two substantial contributions, one from Robert Ferguson on the “American Enlightenment” after 1750, the other from David Shields titled “British-American Belles Lettres.” The latter is an account of polite literature written and circulated in the early eighteenthcentury colonies, drawing upon the brilliant work of textual reclamation in Shields’s first book, Oracles of Empire. The consequence of this strategy, however, was to leave the “Puritan origins” story largely intact. By locating Augustan American literature in the coffeehouses of Maryland and Pennsylvania in the reigns of Queen Anne and the first two King Georges, Bercovitch’s editorial trajectory implicitly reinforced the old idea of a cultural time lag in the colonies, whereby the artistic innovations of Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison were only given expression in America a generation or so later. One argument I want to make here is that a conception of Augustan American literature might usefully be pushed back into the preceding century, thereby complicating the rather too neat sequence of development whereby seventeenth-century Puritanism is succeeded by a more

32  •  Chapter 1

worldly eighteenth-century idiom. Another argument, one expounded by Thomas Scanlan in his discussion of the “fundamentally anachronistic” American exceptionalist thesis (1), is that the cultural traditions of Britain and America from 1640 onward were much more closely intertwined than has usually been imagined, so that the idea of Augustan literature can be seen to operate on a transatlantic axis in the wake of the English Civil War. As David Norbrook has shown, when Oliver Cromwell was lord protector of the commonwealth in the 1650s he deliberately associated himself with the model of Augustus Caesar, a parallel reinforced by the poet Edmund Waller, who iconographically installed Cromwell as the true heir of both the Roman emperors and the Stuart monarchs (306). Today we tend to associate the idea of Augustan England with the Restoration of monarchy in the 1660s: Francis Atterbury, in his 1690 preface to Waller’s Poems, asked rhetorically “whether, in Charles the Second’s reign, English did not come to its full perfection; and whether it has not had its Augustan Age as well as the Latin” (121). But it is important to recognize how this image of Augustus was politicized and contested in the second half of the seventeenth century and how there were claims for a republican interpretation of the Augustan narrative as well as a monarchical version. Far from being locked into their own isolated world, the New England community was heavily involved and invested in these debates: Sir Henry Vane, who succeeded John Winthrop as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, subsequently returned to England and became one of the parliamentary leaders who was then hanged upon the restoration of Charles II in 1660, while two of Winthrop’s own sons, Stephen and Fitzjohn, fought for Leveller regiments in England during the 1640s. Despite all this, the legacy of the English Civil War has tended to remain curiously obscure in the annals of what has become known as “early American literature.” As Andrew Delbanco has remarked, Vane himself has been more or less “expunged from the historical record” (114), while the recognition of New England as an immigrant community, with strong ties on both sides of the Atlantic, has in general been overwhelmed by the teleological narrative of American exceptionalism. This is the spirit that would seek to transform history into typology, thereby fulfilling the logic of Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” which, in a prefiguration of the book of Revelations, identified America with a separatist city on a hill. In The American Jeremiad, Bercovitch describes seventeenth-century New England as a “community without geographical boundaries” (26), where the biblical prototype of the “story of Israel becomes the background for the act of will which transforms geography into eschatology” (42). But such biblical hypotheses were never universally admitted in seventeenth-century America, not even in the Puritan

Augustan American Literature  •  33

colonies. Indeed, one useful point of entry into Augustan American literature is to consider the significance of the word plantation itself. This is a word Increase Mather did not care for because he found it too redolent of the vulgar material world: “Let there then be no more Plantations erected in New England where people professing Christianity shall live like Indians,” he wrote in 1676 (Brief History 23); and again, this is Increase Mather in 1689: “Other Plantations were built upon Worldly Interests, but New-England upon that which is purely religious” (Brief Relation 3–4). Yet that kind of sublimation of commerce into piety is precisely what we do not find in other New England writing of the mid-seventeenth century. For example, the anonymous work Good News from New England, published in London in 1648, is interesting precisely because it positions itself textually between various boundaries: between old England and New England, between—as the puns on “new” in the poem’s title suggests—geographical location and scriptural tidings and also formally between prose and poetry. All this befits an environment of “mixt men,” as the poem describes it (5), with “diversity of minds” (6), a scenario in which the “unlevel’d” nature of the landscape fittingly represents a world in which religion and profit keep house together (7). The author writes in his preface to this work: “some Latin and Eloquent phrases I have picked from others, as commonly clowns used to do, yet be sure I am not in jest: for the subject I write of requires in many particulars the most solemn and serious meditation that ever any of like nature have done. Favour my clownship if I prove too harsh, and I shall remain yours.” To highlight such a notion of “clownship,” betokening an apparently incongruous interpenetration between spirit and matter, is to restore more of a material base to seventeenth-century New England culture. Michelle Burnham, in another example of this desublimating approach, has discussed the economic implications of the Antinomian heresy, looking at ways in which documents of the controversy pun continuously on “good estate,” a phrase that swings ambiguously between “the experience of conversion or election” and the “resonance of property or wealth, of a more specifically economic condition” (343). To trace such double strands is to restore links between American Puritan writing and other cultures in both time and space, since it would suggest affinities between New England and the other more overtly mercantile colonies to the south, as well as implying the significant continuities between Puritan radicalism and its Augustan counterpart. It is important to recognize how Augustan American literature at the turn of the eighteenth century did not involve simply a retreat into the polite world of urban coffeehouses; more importantly, it was dealing with the often fractious nature of relations between the sacred and the secular, along with the fallout from the English Civil War just one generation earlier.

34  •  Chapter 1

We find a more overt style of “clownship” running through Ebenezer Cook’s long poems The Sot-Weed Factor and Sotweed Redivivus, written in Maryland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, A Voyage to Maryland, first published in London in 1708 and described on its title page as “in Burlesque Verse,” chronicles the adventures of a tobacco “factor” or merchant who comes over to Maryland from England, with the poem being organized around patterns of change, crossing, and transgression. This movement across geographical borders is replicated formally in the poem’s generic transposition from epic to mock-epic. Many of the critical debates around The Sot-Weed Factor, such as they are, have centered on the issue of the kind of lesson the author was hoping readers might infer from his comic narrative, whether he is ridiculing the factor himself or the Americans or both (Egan 388); but this attempt to attribute a specific satiric intention is of less interest than the way Cook’s work adroitly imitates and manipulates the form of Samuel Butler’s long poem Hudibras, published between 1662 and 1677. Crucially, it is not just the metrical form of Hudibras Cook is mirroring in The Sot-Weed Factor. Hudibras, with its colloquial language and clumsy rhymes, seeks specifically to debase the high-flown rhetoric prevalent during the English Civil War, and the powerful effect of Butler’s poem derives from its cynical humor, its description of Presbyterian synods (for example) as “mystical Bear-gardens” (91), and its frequently scatological demystifications of the “Saints” (23) and their idea of “inward Light” (93), so that within the world of Hudibras all comes to appear “Arsieversie” (84). The premise of Butler’s poem is of human culture as a mixed condition where spirit and matter are conjoined by an absurdist dynamic, and it looks back to the years in Britain between 1648 and 1661 as an era when religion became a pretext for the acquisition of power and wealth. The second part of Hudibras includes a long discourse on whipping as a form of self-gratification disguised as the altruistic imposition of order, and Butler’s work is generally scathing about what it takes to be humanity’s proneness to airy forms of self-delusion: the poet remarks in his notebooks how we cannot “draw a true Map of Terra Incognita by mere Imagination” (xxiii). Hudibras is especially hostile to the advocates of a “godly-thorough-Reformation” (7) who seek to deny the material reality of both the natural world and their own body, and he uses the paradoxical structure of mock-epic to force these occluded corporeal impulses back into public view: This Zelot Is of a mungrel, diverse kind, Clerick before, and Lay behind; A Lawless linsie-woolsie brother,

Augustan American Literature  •  35

Half of one Order, half another; A creature of amphibious nature, On land a Beast, a Fish in water. (95) “Linsey-woolsie” is a material woven from a mixture of wool and flax, and this serves to emphasize how the idea of hybridity in Hudibras becomes both a moral and political imperative. The argument put forward by Bruce Ingham Granger, that Hudibras was simply advancing a “highchurch, monarchical argument,” is much too one-dimensional (3). The power of the poem, still apparent in parts today, lies in its dark, glittering cynicism, its remorseless reduction of the world to a parade of vanity and self-interest. Hudibras was very widely read and admired when its first part was published in England in 1662, but as memories of the English Civil War began to fade and the topical references began to lose their immediate resonance, so the poem’s popularity faded. However, one place where the saints still reigned was New England, and Cook’s The Sot-Weed Factor seeks deliberately to transfer the anti-Puritan invective of the post–Civil War era across the Atlantic. Even the language of The Sot-Weed Factor— “Wars of Punk” (27), “ambodexter Quack” (29), and so on—directly recalls Hudibras, and just as Butler’s poem seeks to demystify religious rhetoric, so The Sot-Weed Factor evokes a heterogeneous world of Anglos and Indians, civic politics and economic profit, whose idiom involves, as the poem says, “mixing things Prophane and Godly” (23). Starting as it does with a homage to the “Vagrant Cain” (12), Cook’s poem is predicated on an aesthetic of transgression, of breaking through the boundaries of conventional knowledge so as to explore what might lie on the other side: To touch that Shoar, where no good Sense is found, But Conversation’s lost, and Manners drown’d. I crost unto the other side, A River whose impetuous Tide, The Savage Borders does divide . . . (13) Broke thro’ the Barrs which Nature cast, And wide unbeaten Regions past. (20) Geographical exploration thus becomes a corollary here to epistemological extravagance, in that word’s strict etymological sense of moving beyond conventional bounds: Latin extra, outside, and vagari, to wander. For Cook, then, the form of burlesque itself becomes an ethical intervention, a way of deconstructing the idea of utopian phantoms and inscribing instead a material base for social culture. Following as it does in the footsteps of Hudibras, The Sot-Weed Factor consequently epitomizes

36  •  Chapter 1

John P. McWilliams’s point about the generic proximity of epic to mockepic in American eighteenth-century poetry: the idea of mock-epic was not to mock the epic, as such, but rather to ridicule human aspirations to epic status, so that the discrepancy between epic form and mundane content became a paradox on which Augustan American literature tended to thrive (67). We see this especially in Cook’s later poem, Sotweed Redivivus, or the Planter’s Looking-Glass, published in 1730, where the titular image of a looking-glass advertises a poem “In Burlesque Verse, Calculated for the Meridian of Maryland.” Cook’s poem is predicated on an aesthetics of diminution, self-consciously inverting Virgil’s “Phoebian Fire” (36) and shifting its scene instead to the humdrum world of Maryland trade politics. Sotweed Redivivus discusses the need for the colony to build up its wealth through global trade in agricultural commodities to replace a tobacco economy that is failing in part because of the royal “Duty” being imposed upon it (43). The witty transposition here of epic to mock-epic—“Bound up to Port Annapolis / The famous Beau Metropolis / Of Maryland, of small Renown” (39)—thus becomes a formal correlative to the transposition of Maryland from a planter economy to one organized around a nexus of international trade, and the poem’s discussions about the viability of “Paper Currency” are also commensurate with this theme of “ready Change” (40). The guiding principle throughout Sotweed Redivivus is one of transference and exchange: Nothing is wanting to compleat, Fit for the Sea, a trading Fleet, But Industry and Resolution, Wou’d quickly heal our Constitution, Were we unanimously bent, Impending Evils to prevent. Can ne’er think to grow Rich and Great, But by an Independent State; Or hope to thrive, unless we try, With Canvas Wings abroad to fly. We then about the World might roam; See how our Staple sells at home; Barbadoes and Jamaica drain; Bring hither, from the Mines of Spain, Moidores, Pistoles, and Cobbs, full Weight; The very best of Spanish Plate. (49) Moidores, pistoles, and cobbs are Spanish and Portuguese coins, and the political program of resituating Maryland within a global marketplace becomes associated here also with the exploitation of the Caribbean and with the Atlantic slave trade, something that, of course, touched all mer-

Augustan American Literature  •  37

cantile activity at this time. Whereas Increase Mather sought to preserve the protected space of the New England plantation from material contamination, Cook’s plan is to “Upon Mercator turn the Tables,” to use “Mercator’s Chart” to resist reified conceptions of spatial location by political efforts to encourage commercial circulation, to “force a Trade” and “export your Grain / To Islands in the Western Main” (48–50). Cook again uses the image of “vagrant Cain” in this later poem (49), but whereas in The Sot-Weed Factor this idea was associated with a transgressive aesthetic, in Sotweed Redevivus the notion of looking beyond the horizons of home is represented as a more urgent social and economic necessity. Jack Greene has suggested that the colonial South was not peripheral within eighteenth-century America but was more on the cusp of modernization in the way it was beginning to develop an international economy, so that it was rather New England, clinging as it did to its old myth of a redeemer nation, that was increasingly becoming the odd colony out. As Philip Gura has observed, this has significant implications in relation to early American literature, where the traditional emphasis on the typological mission of the Puritan colonies has tended unduly to marginalize the different kinds of work being produced in other regions (109). This geographical recentering of Augustan American literature in the southern colonies would also be relevant to the writing of William Byrd II, who knew Restoration dramatists such as William Wycherley and William Congreve personally from the years he spent in London between 1715 and 1726 and who attempts to integrate the Addison model of civility within the rural conditions of Virginia and North Carolina. Byrd subsequently adduced Horace’s versions of pastoral to explain the charms of Virginia to his high-born English friends, while the trajectories of his travel narratives, mixing comic pseudonyms (“Firebrand,” “Meanwell”) with multiple subplots but binding all their farcical “misadventures” within the confines of a safe return home, have about them something of the air of Restoration comedy. As with Cook, the whole tenor of Byrd’s writing turns upon transposition, upon doubling and division, as he traverses the line between England and America, the official record and the private record, classical prototype and empirical reality. Ralph Bauer has aptly called Cook and Byrd “colonial Creoles” in the way they playfully juxtapose “imperial” ways of knowing with the different conditions of knowledge on “the colonial frontier” (199). As a surveyor, Byrd’s professional model of cartography involved a form of abstraction, and his History of the Dividing Line in the Year 1728 recounts an expedition to map out the disputed boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. In the opening section of his History, which Byrd never published but allowed to be circulated

38  •  Chapter 1

in manuscript, he sets this particular controversy in a larger perspective of colonial appropriation going back to a time before the English Civil War, when, as he observes, the territory of Virginia according to the grant obtained by Sir Walter Raleigh from Queen Elizabeth I in 1584 encompassed all North America under the dominion of the British monarch, as far south as the Cape of Florida. By tracing the variable nature of Virginia’s geography through time—he writes, for example, of the formation of New York as “another limb lopped off from Virginia” (164)—Byrd also draws attention implicitly to the unstable conditions involved in mapping of all kinds. This emerges also in his account of how little the “bordering inhabitants” of a “mighty swamp” in his vicinity are able properly to rationalize its topographical features, “notwithstanding,” as he says, “they had lived their whole lives within smell of it. Yet, as great strangers as they were to it, they pretended to be very exact in their account of its dimensions and were positive it could not be above seven or eight miles wide, but knew no more of the matter than stargazers know of the distance of the fixed stars” (188). This disjunction between experiential and geographic knowledge is epitomized for Byrd in the figure of a Mr. Wilson, who “lives within sight” of the swamp, “and yet he knows as little of it as he did of Terra Australis Incognita” (190). There is a play with perspective throughout this History whereby the exploration of this boundary zone is associated with exploratory voyages of much wider scope to the Pacific and other uncharted territories in the early eighteenth century. The author says at one point that the boundary inhabitants “do not know Sunday from any other day, any more than Robinson Crusoe did” (195); and, by linking Daniel Defoe’s marooned hero to his own isolated compatriots, Byrd effectively endows his mock-epic discourse with an epic status, suggesting ways in which, despite their more obviously domestic circumstances, the members of his party hacking their way through the swamp do in fact share the character of heroism with more exalted pioneers. Indeed, one of the things distinguishing this History of the Dividing Line from The Secret History of the Line, which Byrd also finished in 1729, is the idea of real danger and seriousness of purpose; the risks of fatigue and starvation involved in this hazardous business of exploration emerge much more clearly in the longer work. The relativity of perspective endemic to the History manifests itself in a passage where Byrd contemplates the possibility of discovering gold in a river called Cockade Creek: The stream, which was perfectly clear, ran down about two knots, or two miles, an hour when the water was at the lowest. The bottom was covered with a coarse gravel, spangled very thick with a shining substance that almost dazzled the eye, and the sand upon either shore

Augustan American Literature  •  39

sparkled with the same splendid particles. At first sight, the sunbeams, giving a yellow cast to these spangles, made us fancy them to be gold dust and consequently that all our fortunes were made. Such hopes as these were the less extravagant because several rivers lying much about the same latitude with this have formerly abounded with fragments of that tempting metal. Witness the Tagus in Portugal, the Heber in Thrace, and the Pactolus in Lesser Asia; not to mention the rivers on the Gold Coast in Africa, which lie in a more southern climate. But we soon found ourselves mistaken, and our gold dust dwindled into small flakes of isinglass. However, though this did not make the river so rich as we could wish, yet it made it exceedingly beautiful. (242) The familiar Byrd structure of comic deflation, raising great expectations only ironically to lower them again, is apparent enough here. But also significant is the way he relates the country geographically to other parts of the globe on “the same latitude,” thereby creating parallels both metaphoric and spatial. When Byrd talks in the next paragraph about “the frequent inundations that happen in this part of the world” (243), he is using the phrase “part of the world” in an exact rather than a merely colloquial sense, since he is concerned to track ways in which the Virginia country can be correlated with scenes in other parts of the globe. Similarly, his notion that the idea of finding gold in Virginia is not “extravagant” is based on a specific geographic rationale: for him, the idea is not beyond the scientific bounds of reason, as witnessed by the parallel lines of latitude adduced here. Byrd uses the word “extravagant” in exactly the same way later in his History, when contemplating the Blue Ridge Mountains. He mentions the possibility of discovering here “very valuable mines,” and goes on: “Nor would it be at all extravagant to hope for silver mines among the rest, because part of these mountains lie exactly in the same parallel, as well as upon the same continent, with New Mexico and the mines of St. Barb. [Santa Barbara]” (272). Again, Byrd categorizes a scientific hypothesis according to the logistics of geography. As with Cook, Byrd’s sense of geographic relativity derives partly from his sense of the world as increasingly interdependent, both culturally and commercially. “There is no climate that produces everything since the Deluge wrenched the poles of the world out of their place,” he writes; “nor is it fit it should be so, because it is the mutual supply one country receives from another which creates a mutual traffic and intercourse amongst men.” Indeed, it is this “traffic,” in his eyes, that helps prevent “wars betwixt bordering nations” (291). Ignorance in Byrd’s world involves an incapacity to cope with strangeness, as when he observes how local inhabitants stared at his surveying party “with as much curiosity as if we had lately landed from Bantam or Morocco” (196). Moreover, Byrd’s

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unabashedly neoclassical style of tropological parallelisms, predicated on a rhetoric of symmetry and balance, works as a perfect counterpart to this expansive transnational perspective, since he is concerned always to balance different parts of his conceptual and spatial hemisphere against each other. Wayne Franklin called Byrd an “ironist by temperament” (128), and we see this two-way, cosmopolitan idiom in his remark that since “the northern and southern parts of America” are “joined by the Isthmus of Darien, if there were lions in either they would find their way into the other, the latitudes of each being equally proper for that generous animal” (255). This discursive investment in equal and opposite reactions is even more marked in The Secret History of the Line, where boundaries of all kinds are represented as ontologically fluid. Just as the geographic line between Virginia and North Carolina is itself unstable, so Byrd takes delight in this private journal in emphasizing the crossovers between human and animal: North Carolina men eating so much “swine’s flesh” that they become “extremely hoggish in their Temper” (60), the chaplain growling over his meal of venison like a wild cat over a squirrel, and so on. The whole notion of a boundary, and what it implies in a larger sense, is foregrounded more clearly in the Secret History: “boundary Christians” is a phrase used here (46), and this sense of “settling the bounds” (56) is contrasted deliberately with “the nakedness of our country,” against which official lines of mensuration are doomed frequently to fail: “the last time the Commissioners met, their instruments vary’d several minutes, which we hope will not happen again” (45). There is, in other words, a conceptual analogy drawn in The Secret History between geographic entropy and an absence of Christian restraint: the focus here on sexuality and other human appetites implies Byrd’s skepticism about whether the country can ever be properly mapped, whether an abstract cartographic pattern can ever be imposed on the “nakedness” of man’s corporeal estate. Butler’s Hudibras is mentioned in both the History (233) and the Secret History—in the latter, Dr. Humdrum is “disturbed at Astrolabe’s reading Hudibras aloud” (130)—and Butler’s way of comically and bathetically dragging the pretensions of rationalism back into a more mundane environment is a recursive mode to which the constitutional doubleness of Byrd’s style pays homage. Walter D. Mignolo has written about ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mapping was organized around “border gnoseology” rather than “territorial gnoseology” (11), on identifying specific local markers rather than attempting to encompass space for administrative purposes. Byrd’s methods of surveying are caught between these two competing models. On the one hand, his mode of administrative abstraction anticipates the projects of Enlightenment cartography that, as Martin Brückner has shown, were increasingly being used to develop

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the idea of America as a unified country rather than just a fragmented series of spaces. This was linked also to the development of a nationalist consciousness which, as Robert Ferguson notes, culminated in the signatories to the Constitution in 1787 being grouped in geographical order, from north to south (“Ideology” 162). On the other hand, Byrd remains attached to local conditions as expressed through what Brückner calls “geodetic writing,” focused on the materiality of the plat, a “genre of self-distinction” that resisted state demands for accurate topographical records (48). This is linked as well to Byrd’s implicit recognition of the mutable nature of the dividing line between Anglo-Europeans and Native Americas: he traces similarities as well as differences between the two races in terms of expression of religious belief and so on, even if, as Dana D. Nelson has argued, his tone of sympathy is ultimately overcome by a “profoundly conservative” stance on the question of racial hierarchy (35). In his New Voyages to North-America (1703), Baron de Lahontas declared the American Indians “are as ignorant of Geography as of other Sciences, and yet they draw the most exact Maps imaginable of the Countries they’re acquainted with, for there’s nothing wanting in them but the Longitude and Latitude of Places” (Schwartz and Ehrenberg 132). Byrd, similarly, recognized how the Native Americans he encountered on his surveying expeditions possessed the kind of immediate local knowledge that threw more grandiose schemes of cartography on behalf of the state into ironic relief. The world of Augustan American literature, therefore, differs in tone from that of the English cultural scene described by Paul Fussell in The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism. Fussell evokes a conservative world of reverence for the authority for the past and acquiescence in the bounded circumference of custom, what he calls “the closely circumscribed country of the humanist imagination” (300). Instead, the Augustan American idiom takes pleasure in bringing contraries into collision, in exploring systematic incongruities between mind and matter. It is true that the idea of antithesis and conflict was itself an integral part of an eighteenth-century humanist dialectic everywhere, but Augustan American aesthetics characteristically develop this particular strain further and do not seek to vitiate the intensity of their paradoxical dynamic by seeking ordered closure or by establishing clear hierarchical distinctions between rational and irrational. Byrd’s dividing lines have less in common with those of Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson than with the more fluid lines of beauty developed by William Hogarth, who became very famous in America during his own lifetime partly because of the way he delighted in transposing boundaries, in turning contradiction itself into a generic principle. Ronald Paulson has written of Hogarth’s method as taking skepticism to the edge of blasphemy through the way he redescribes the-

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Figure 5.  William Hogarth, “Columbus Breaking the Egg” (1752). Courtesy of the author.

ology as aesthetics, as in the series of engravings A Harlot’s Progress (1732), described by Paulson as “a demystification of the mystery of the Virgin Birth” (The Beautiful 17). Hogarth explicitly associates this fractured style with the discovery of America in his etching Columbus Breaking the Egg (1752), where it is the ability to think laterally that introduces new ways of seeing; Columbus tells his doubting audience how it is possible to stand an egg on the table, and he confounds their conventional assumptions by breaking it in two to do so (figure 5). Paulson also remarks on how what seventeenth-century theorists meant by travesty and burlesque is “something very like what Calvin meant by sacramental metonymy—making the incomprehensible comprehensible,” by reconfiguring abstruse notions in more worldly terms (Hogarth’s 22). The crucial point here is that the burlesque form in eighteenth-century America, as it emerges in writers such as Cook and Byrd, is not simply a flat mode of comic realism but also, in its own way, a metaphysical response to the disturbing interplay between epistemology and experience, between authority and transgression. This is the kind of hybrid style we see also in

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George Frideric Handel’s oratorios, which belatedly reconstitute biblical stories within a baroque frame, and also in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, itself a parody of Handel’s operatic mode. The works of both Gay and Handel were very popular in eighteenth-century America, and they speak to an Augustan American culture organized around a transposition of boundaries, a parodic shift of register, whose valence derives from the momentum generated by an incongruous meeting of opposites.3 The Plantation Epic: Magnalia Christi Americana To consider Cook and Byrd under the rubric of Augustan American literature is not just to adumbrate a counterculture centered on the colonies of the American South that might be seen as a complement to New England Puritanism. Equally significantly, the argument might be widened to think about ways in which the narrative of New England itself might change if the South, rather than the North, were to become a discursive focal point. Although the history of the South today has become closely identified with slave culture, we should not forget that slavery also flourished in the northern colonies during the eighteenth century, since it was not abolished in Massachusetts until 1783 (1784 in Connecticut); indeed, as John Donoghue has remarked, the extent of chattel slavery in New England, and even John Winthrop’s own support of slavery for economic reasons, are understudied aspects of life in colonial New England (154), and this is something that a reverse geographical perspective, going from south to north, can help redress. Another reverse geographic perspective, going from west to east, can also be useful in relation to the question of how early American literature might be situated within a wider global domain. What one might call a Whig version of early American history was outlined in 1708 by the Somersetshire historian John Oldmixon, in his book The British Empire in America. Oldmixon was acquainted personally with William Byrd from their time in London, and in his preface to the second edition, he acknowledges the value of Byrd’s work for his own section on Virginia (1741: I, x). Oldmixon sees America generally as an advantage to Britain, particularly in terms of its commercial possibilities, and he pays close attention in his work to charters and other ways of facilitating trade. He was particularly enthusiastic about the potential of Barbados and the Caribbean, and in this work he carefully describes the geographical 3  On the fame of Hogarth and Handel in America, see Silverman 12, 475. On the popularity of Gay in America, see Kate Keller 69. On the links between Hogarth and Gay, see J. Bender 87–136.

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location and climate of the various American colonies while also including various maps of individual regions drawn by Herman Moll, the most famous London mapmaker of the early eighteenth century. The second edition of Oldmixon’s book boasted as its frontispiece Moll’s “New Map of North America,” which situates the country geographically between the “Western Ocean” (the Atlantic) and the “Great South Sea” (the Pacific), between the “Arctick Circle” and the “Tropick of Cancer” (figure 6). Moll’s maps were “generally concerned to display the British empire to its fullest extent” (Gronim 388), and here he deploys the amplitude of American space for imperial purposes. For Oldmixon, similarly, the genius of the British Empire lay in the way its mercantile interests had fostered a climate of civilized exchange as well as economic profit. He wrote approvingly of Maryland, commending the importance of its tobacco trade and how the “Justice and Moderation” of Lord Baltimore had brought about a climate of religious toleration there (1708: I, 191), but for him New England was another story. Though he draws heavily for his source material in this section on Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, published six years earlier in 1702, Oldmixon is quite scathing about the religious aspects of New England, describing the Church’s “Articles of Worship and Discipline” as “more tedious than edifying” (1708: 1, 105) and dismissing the colony’s “Learning” as full of “that wretched Affectation which we commonly call Cant” (1708: I, 108). Oldmixon, more concerned with progressive political issues, did not see how such “formal Nonsense and miserable Jargon, tho ’tis larded with hundreds of learn’d Quotations, can have any effect on a reasonable Mind” (1708: I, 108), and he singled out Mather’s Magnalia as a particularly egregious example of what he took to be this anachronistic idiom: “of all the Books that ever came from the Press with the venerable Title of a History,” wrote Oldmixon, “’tis impossible to shew one that is so confused in the Form, so trivial in the Matter, and so faulty in the expression, so cramm’d with Punns, Anagrams, Acrosticks, Miracles and Prodigies, that it rather resembles School Boys Exercises Forty Years ago” (1708: I, 109). Mather for his part returned the favor by denouncing Oldmixon’s book as “the most foolish and faithless Performance” in history writing “that ever Mankind was abused withal,” and he punningly castigated its author in one of his letters as “Old Nick’s Son” (Murdock 31). My purpose here is not to take Oldmixon’s side against Mather’s, or vice versa, but rather to think about what would happen to our understanding of Mather’s major work if we were to reconsider it along a geographic axis and read it within a transatlantic context, as an example of Restoration style being creatively reconfigured within an American context.

Figure 6.  “A New Map of North America, according to the Newest Observations” by Herman Moll (1721). From John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 2d ed. (1741).

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There is a certain heretical quality to such an approach, not only because it goes against the Bercovitch line of New England as a protected space bound into an apocalyptic rhetoric of “New World promise” but also because it cuts across the premise that the organizing principle of the Magnalia is “generational” (Puritan Origins 75, 130), with Mather seeking to bind New England in a diachronic continuum across time. There is clearly a filiopietistic strand to the Magnalia, with Mather paying homage to his father Increase, to John Winthrop, and many others as he seeks to canonize New England history and to institutionalize its legacy. But if the content of the text is filiopietistic, the form, I would argue, is primarily Augustan, owing less to Increase Mather than to John Dryden, the arch-enemy of the Puritans, as Cotton Mather oddly imitates Dryden’s official role as historiographer royal through a series of elaborate historical narratives that seeks self-consciously to shape the world of New England into monumental artifice. Mather engages with Dryden directly in his 1705 poem “Vigilantius,” where he refutes the English Catholic poet’s attribution of pride to Puritan writers: Dryden Sayes, Look the Refomation round, No Treatise of HUMILITY IS FOUND. Dryden, Thou Ly’st; They Write, and more than so, They Live Humility; they can be low. (Meserole 328) To accuse Mather merely of self-contradiction here, of undermining his own protestations of humility through the acerbic manner in which he admonishes Dryden, would be overly simplistic; there were clearly crucial doctrinal and temperamental differences between them that should not simply be collapsed. But there are also significant parallels between these authors, with respect to their literary style as well as their quizzical attitude toward history: like Dryden—indeed, even more so—Mather was devoted to puns and other forms of ornate verbal gamesmanship, and he revised his rhetorical forms carefully to ensure balanced, parallel structures in his texts. Mather also read Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, both of which were in his personal library, and these baroque miscellanies would have helped shape his idiosyncratic blend of Restoration finesse and Puritan piety.4 To read Cotton Mather as the contemporary of Browne, Dryden, and Oldmixon is thus to open up perspectives customarily overlooked when the Boston writer is positioned more parochially as the son of Increase.

4  On Mather’s fondness for “balance and antithesis,” see Manierre 498. For Mather’s ownership of Browne’s Religio Medici, see Tuttle 319. For the way Tuttle erroneously overlooked the inclusion of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in Mather’s library, see Arbour.

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It is, of course, not especially difficult to historicize Magnalia Christi Americana. Larzer Ziff and others have discussed Mather’s work in relation to the cultural politics at the end of the seventeenth century, when the legal status of New England as an independent self-governing colony was a controversial and highly volatile affair. The old Massachusetts Bay charter was annulled by James II in 1683, leading to the institution of a royal administration in 1686 in Boston—“the Metropolis of the English America,” as the Magnalia calls it (I, 32)—before Increase Mather managed to negotiate a new, revised charter for the colony in 1691, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution in England. But, as Ziff says, “the push and pull between royal policy and New England policy” during the last twenty years of the seventeenth century were intense (208), and this clearly indicates ways in which American literature of the time needs to be seen within the context of a British imperial imaginary, just as David Armitage has written about how “the ideological origins of the British empire” shaped political relationships at the turn of the eighteenth century. To consider the Magnalia as immersed in history makes it in any case a funnier and sharper work. There are some brilliant vignettes in book 3 describing the lives of New England clergymen: Mather talks, for example, about how Peter Bulkly cuts his hair very short and avoids “all novelties of apparel” as he conducts his ministry (I, 401), while he also compares the more tedious preaching styles of those who wrote out their sermons longhand with that of John Warham, who preferred to talk extemporaneously from notes (I, 441); this is a true guide to the daily practices of scholarship in the late seventeenth century. Mather always has a sardonic eye for those who fail to accord with God’s providence, and there is a touch of black humor in his description in book 4 of the ne’er-do-well first president of Harvard College, Nathaniel Eaton, “a blade who marvellously deceived the expectations of good men concerning him; for he was fitter to be master of a Bridewel than a Colledge” (II, 10). Mather’s paradoxical relish for what he called “nonsensical blasphemies and heresies” (II, 644) comes through again in the final book, where, in the chapter “Wolves in Sheeps’ Cloathing,” he tells the tale of a London barber who comes to New England pretending to be a cleric and stealing sermons in order to “recruit his broken fortunes” (II, 551), but who is subsequently found out by Mather’s intransigent interrogation of him on theological issues. There is a human vividness to all this that is too often overlooked in the general critical consensus on Mather as a pedantic dullard and religious zealot, but it would be a mistake to let such a reputation overwhelm Mather’s value as a cultural historian. Out of the seven books that comprise the Magnalia, the only really tedious one for a secular reader is the fifth, whose tone is more dryly theological in the way it describes how various doctrines have been negotiated by the churches

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of New England. Elsewhere, there is both historical range—in book 4, there is a long discussion of the involvement of his uncle Samuel Mather with Cromwell’s forces in London during the 1650s, how he went with Cromwell to Ireland in 1655 and died in Dublin after the Restoration— and astuteness in portraiture. Samuel Mather himself, for instance, is said to have been “never a man of words, but of a silent and a thinking temper, a little tinged with melancholy” (II, 57); John Cotton is “a walking library” (I, 273); while the perturbations brought about by Roger Williams are brilliantly compared to the “rapid motion” of a “Windmill in the Low Countries” (II, 495). One of the dominant strains in the Magnalia is the tension between history and allegory, the stresses involved in the struggle to bring temporal events into alignment with a providential pattern. This precisely links Mather again with Dryden, whose historical satires, “Absalom and Achitophel,” and other works play with both the analogies and the disjunctions between contemporary monarchs and mythological or biblical archetypes. The whole idea of parallelisms is highly significant tropologically for Mather in the Magnalia, something evident at both a microcosmic level—as when he takes delight in recounting how Samuel Stone was born in Hertford in England and died in Hartford in New England (I, 435)—and also a macrocosmic level. The latter is particularly important since the motif of parallax, of moving backward and forward in time to create both temporal and spiritual conjunctions—“hopeful prolepsis” as Mather himself puts it (I, 53)—is one of the book’s key concerns. Throughout the Magnalia, indeed, the search for parallels becomes selfconscious, even compulsive. When he comes to Sir William Phips, late governor of New England, Mather declares, “So obscure was the original of that memorable person, whose actions I am going to relate, that I must, in a way of writing like that of Plutarch, prepare my reader for the intended relation, by first searching the archives of antiquity for a parallel.” His trawl through “the archives of antiquity” leads him to consider and reject the examples of Eumenes, Marius, Iphicrates, Dioclesian, and Bonosus, before finally deciding to look instead toward “the New World” by opting for the prototype of Francisco Pizarro (I, 166). In his introduction to the third book, Mather cites Gregory’s observation “that patterns may have upon us the force which precepts have not” (I, 233), and the whole of the Magnalia is in some sense a search for meaningful pattern, for a teleology of cause and effect. Yet the author is always pondering self-critically the question of how far parallels of any kind might legitimately be pursued. At one point he quotes Increase Mather’s comparing Urian Oakes’s appointment as president of Harvard to the prophet Samuel’s becoming president of the college of Najoth, but he then goes on to cite Increase’s reluctance

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to push this biblical analogy too far: “And in many other particulars, I might enlarge upon the parallel,” he admits, “but that it is inconvenient to extend such instances beyond their proportion” (II, 117). The Magnalia is bestrewn with omens, dreams, and portents, and indeed it is one of the book’s charms that it does not generally confine itself to narrow Christian dogma but offers a variety of tentative, sometimes fantastic hypotheses about the supernatural without subjecting them to premature theological dismissal. Mather, for example, openly criticizes “the foolish cant of astrology” (II, 620), yet the Magnalia itself is haunted by astrological signs that darkly shadow his narrative of God’s providence. When describing the clergyman Jonathan Mitchel, he tells us: “The precise day of his birth is lost, nor is it worth while for us to enquire, by an astrological calculation, what aspect the stars had upon his birth, since the event has proved, that God the Father was in the horoscope, Christ was in the mid-heaven, the Spirit in the sixth house, repentance, faith and Love in the eighth; and in the twelfth, an eternal happiness, where no Saturn can dart any malignant rays” (II, 81). Mather’s witty parody of astrology here, as with all parody, involves a double narrative that both imitates and deviates from its prior model. Clearly, the author seeks to supplant the pagan idea of fate as prime mover with the idea of a Christian God; clearly also, though, his text represents points of crossover and convergence between these two divergent faculties. Similarly in book 4, Mather confesses himself troubled by the propensity of New England divines to act as astronomers, exemplifying his argument by discussing the case of Samuel Danforth: [A]mong the divines, that have been astronomers, our Mr. Samuel Danforth comes in with a claim of some consideration. Several of his astronomical composures have seen the light of the sun; but one especially on this occasion. Among the “four hundred and odd comets,” the histories whereof have been preserved in the records of learned men, a special notice was taken of that which alarumed the whole world in the year 1664. Now, although our Danforth had not the advantages of Helvelius, to discover how many odd clots, compact and lucid, there were in the head of that blazing-star, with one thicker than the rest, until it was grown to twenty four minutes diameter, nor to determine that it was at least six times as big as the earth, and that its parallax rendered it at length as remote from the earth as Mars himself, nevertheless, he diligently observed the motions of it, from its first appearance in Corvus, whence it made a descent, crossing the tropick of Capricorn, till it arrived unto the main top-sail of the ship, and then it returned through Canis Major, and again crossed the tropick of Capricorn, passing through Lepus, Eridamus, and the Equinoctial, and

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entered into the mouth of the Whale, and so into Aries; where it retired, not leaving any philosopher able to fulfil the famous prophecy of Seneca, in predicting the new appearance of it. He therefore published a little treatise, entitled, “An Astronomical Description of the late Comet, with a brief Theological Description thereof,” in which treatise he not only proves, that a comet can be no other than a “celestial luminary moving in the starry heavens,” whereof especially the “largeness of the circle” in which it moves is a mathematical and irrefragable demonstration, but he also improves the opinion of a comet’s being portentous, endeavouring, as it became a devout preacher, to awaken mankind by this portent, out of a sinful security. Now, though for my own part, I am sometimes ready to say, with a learned man, taedet me divinationis in re tam incerta [I am tired of drawing portents from so uncertain a thing]; yet when I consider, how many learned men have made laborious collections of remarkable and calamitous events, to render comets ominous, I cannot reproach the essays of pious men, to perswade us, “that when the hand of Heaven is thus writing MENE TEKEL, it is not amiss for us mortals to make serious reflections thereupon.” (II, 63–64) What is striking in this passage, particularly for those accustomed to the popular image of Mather as an authoritarian zealot, is its fundamental ambiguity, the way the author chooses to sit on the fence. Although skeptical about the wisdom of “drawing portents from so uncertain a thing,” Mather finds himself reluctant to discount the accumulated wisdom of “many learned men” who have interpreted comets in “ominous” terms. The passage concludes in mealy-mouthed fashion by suggesting such phenomena should at least give rise to “serious reflections,” and there is a radical uncertainty here about what inferences of the natural world can be made by mankind and what has been laid down by God. We know that Mather was proud of his fellowship of the Royal Society, that he admired the scientific advances being made by Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, and that he was fascinated by stars, planets, and telescopes. But both the old superstitions of astrology and the new science of astronomy might be thought of as forms of hubris, as attempts to bring under human sway areas that should rightly be considered the prerogative of divine providence. In this sense, hubris might be seen not so much as a result of the Magnalia but as its central theme: the book examines, deliberately and provocatively, how far the capacities of the human mind can be pushed. The rhetorical basis of Magnalia Christi Americana is thus not as much typology as paradox, since the author is aware of folding together fundamentally incompatible tropes, rather than those linked tightly by hermeneutic homology. He talks at one point about the “trials”

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Figure 7.  “An Exact Mapp of New England and New York.” Frontispiece to Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana or The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702). Shelfmark: A 1.15 Th. (Frontispiece). Reproduced with permission by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

of the New Englanders “in the days of their paroxisms” (I, 123); and that notion of paroxysm as a convulsive cutting across, deriving etymologically from the Greek para (beyond), is one of the author’s recurrent concerns in his epic work. Parody, paradox, paroxysm: the Magnalia works by inscribing orthodoxy and then deviating from it, and it derives its ferocious energy in part from trying to resolve those contradictions that the narrative itself has opened up. Such play with perspective emerges partly from Mather’s readings in the Renaissance literature of exploration, with its interest in opening up different temporal and spatial horizons. Writers such as Richard Hakluyt gave what David Armitage has described as “a geographical turn to historical writing” (“New World” 54) as they commented upon how mere

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sequences of chronicles were not sufficient to accommodate the contemporary extension of space. With respect to his Principal Navigations (1598–1600), Hakluyt told Sir Robert Cecil that “whereas in my two former volumes I was enforced . . . in divers places to use the method of time only (which many worthy authors on the like occasion are enforced unto) being now more plentifully furnished with matter, I always follow the double order of time and space” (Armitage, “New World” 57). A similar sense of geographical specificity is evident in the Magnalia, which in fact opens with “an exact mapp of New England and New York” as its frontispiece (figure 7), something that serves to pair Mather with his rival Oldmixon: Herman Moll produced for the first edition of Oldmixon’s British Empire in America in 1708 a broader map of the region that brings New England into the orbit of New Jersey and Pennsylvania as well as New York, highlighting the roads and other channels of communication between these various places (1708: I, 25; figure 8). Mather, by contrast, sees it as his task somehow to compress and incorporate the traversal of space within an overarching providential design. “I can assert the existence of the American Antipodes,” he writes in the opening chapter of the first book, describing “the inhabitants of America” as “Antipodes to those of the other hemisphere”; yet he goes on to acknowledge how this classical myth of the antipodes has been superseded by a divine plan to reveal “this balancing half of the globe” through the discovery of the American continent, a land mass that had formerly been concealed from the rest of the world. “The Church of God must no longer be wrapped up in Strabo’s Cloak,” he concludes: “Geography must now find work for a Christiano-graphy in regions far enough beyond the Bounds wherein the Church of God had thro’ all former Ages been circumscribed” (I, 41–42). These two maps, produced just six years apart, present very different cartographic projections of New England: Mather’s map, designed on a large scale, magnifies New England as a province set apart, whereas Moll’s map for Oldmixon places greater emphasis on the opening up of the eastern seaboard to lines of commerce and communication. Whereas Oldmixon regarded geography in a more aggressively secular sense, as conducive to the winds of trade and profit, Mather depicts God here as a master geographer who reorients and rebalances the globe to bring it into alignment with His higher purpose. Nevertheless, this repositioning of America in relation to wider global currents accords with the distinctive materiality of the Magnalia, which does not seek simply to eliminate space but to renegotiate it, to position itself at that liminal point where spirit and matter are conjoined. All the most vivid aspects of the book deal with these visible disjunctions, within a terrestrial framework that verges on the grotesque, as, for example, when he describes how Ezekiel Rogers is possessed of “a lively spirit”

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Figure 8.  “New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pensilvania” by Herman Moll. From John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America (1708). Reproduced with permission by the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

in “a crazy body” (I, 410). There is a lot of rumination throughout the Magnalia on physical diseases, with the author taking a grim pleasure in chronicling the fragile nature of the human frame, retelling in gruesome detail how the “putrid juices” in the blood of Nathaniel Mather “burst asunder the thread of this pious life” (II, 175). This is why Michael Warner is surely wrong to suggest Mather believed the “utility” of books lay only in their “practice of internalization” (19): this is to emphasize the “lively spirit” and altogether to disregard the “crazy body,” whereas the power of Mather’s writing derives precisely from the bizarre and incongruous interface between mind and matter, from the stressful attempt to wrestle the corporeal state into submission. Incongruity is a trope to which Mather is greatly attached: he describes how Lord Fairfax dies of a corn in his foot and the anatomist Spigelius of a tiny glass scratch, while others who have had a hatchet stuck in their skull have survived, something that testifies not only to the miraculous “power and goodness of God” but also to the crazy and illogical nature of events on planet Earth (II, 606). Consequently, Michael Winship’s account of the Magnalia as

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“the last great document in the orthodox providential tradition” (74), like Bercovitch’s insistence on reading the book typologically, risks glossing over the historical contradictions and terrestrial ironies that galvanize the narrative. In “Pietas in Patriam,” the chapter on Sir William Phips— the first royal governor of Massachusetts between 1692 and 1694, under the terms of the revised charter negotiated by Increase Mather—the Magnalia describes how there is an increasing sense toward the end of the seventeenth century of the importance of geography, of the position of New England in relation to the rest of the world. Phips shuttles back and forth across the Atlantic to request English assistance in the colony’s conflict with Canada, assuring the king that “by the Blessing of God, Canada may be added unto the rest of your dominions, which will (all circumstances considered) be of more advantage to the Crown of England, than all the Territories in the West-Indies are” (I, 197). Mather prided himself on being a careful and judicious historian rather than merely an exponent of local interests—he acknowledges, for instance, what “a difficult thing” it is for him to write about his father, Increase Mather (II, 18)—and, in line with his perception of a world constantly changing its political shape, the author himself draws attention in metahistorical fashion to the perplexing nature of the relationship between historical subjects and their refraction into narrative forms: “the eye sees not those objects which are applied close unto it, and even lye upon it; but when the objects are to some distance removed, it clearly discerns them” (I, 223). This is, in other words, not just a form of spiritual amanuensis but a highly self-conscious construction of textual artifice in accordance both with literary models and with a sense of the physical limitations of time and space.5 We know in any case from Mather’s own pride and delight in publishing, including the care he took in sending his manuscripts to better publishing houses in London and the day of special thanksgiving that he spent with his friend Edward Bromfield (who had helped facilitate the book’s publication) when the first printed copy of the Magnalia arrived in Boston in October 1702, that Mather was not exactly disinterested on the question of the materiality of his own books. Some critics have associated the “baroque” qualities of the Magnalia with the labyrinthine aspects of later writers—Mitchell Breitwieser has mentioned Jorge Luis Borges and Herman Melville (Cotton Mather 93–94), while David Levin has suggested William Faulkner (251)—but such anachronistic alignments of Mather, interesting though they may be, do not do justice to the peculiar way in which he develops in the Magnalia an Augustan American style. Drawing deliberately upon classical myth and Virgil’s conception of epic, Mather crosses these features with Christian piety and scientific rational5 

On this theme, see Arch 156.

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ism to create a work whose tortuous energy derives from its manifold rhetoric of self-contradiction.6 The Magnalia is thus in every sense a more capacious work than has normally been assumed, particularly by those scholars, more numerous than they should be, who have made assumptions about this major work without ever having read it through properly. Mather deliberately invokes in his 1,400 pages a world larger than he can properly encompass, and he plays tantalizingly with illuminating disjunctions between enclosure and disclosure, between local teleology and ontological incompleteness. He talks in the third book about what he calls the “meta-grammatising temper” of the preacher John Wilson (I, 319), and Mather himself might similarly be described as a “metagrammatising” author, one whose style is inherently and reflexively selfcontradictory, since he aspires to include material while acknowledging his own epistemological incapacity properly to order or control it. This is not unlike the principle of self-contradiction in Hogarth that, as I noted earlier, Ronald Paulson linked to the Calvinist conception of imperfect knowledge; it is commensurate as well with what Mather referred to in one of his own diary entries for 1697, when talking about the relative merits of praising Christ among the angels in heaven and preaching to mortals on Earth, as a quality of “sacred hilarity” (Levin 276). There is, in other words, a manic dimension to Mather’s work that speaks to the peculiar tenor of Augustan American literature, where the comic insufficiencies of reason as an intellectual phenomenon are brought to light. Despite the obvious temperamental differences between Mather and William Byrd, there are also significant intellectual similarities between them: both were Fellows of the Royal Society, both owned huge personal libraries embracing both Greek and Roman classics and new scientific works— indeed, as Louis B. Wright remarks, they “bought and read many books on the same subjects” (11–12)—and both were attracted to an aesthetics of the dividing line, where boundaries are mapped out according to a problematic logic of inclusion and exclusion. New World Topographies: Wheatley, Dwight, Alsop The Augustan tradition in American literature, then, should not be seen as confined to the world of belles lettres, however culturally interesting such works in themselves might be. Part of the problem with the complex Puritan legacy in general, as Lawrence Buell has pointed out, is the way in which our understanding of it has been shaped retrospectively by George Bancroft and the nineteenth-century Unitarians, who sought 6 

For connections between Mather and Virgil, see John C. Shields.

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to identify Puritanism as the source of their own “libertarian spirit” and for whom Cotton Mather became a “scapegoat” because of his supposed rationalism and rigidity (217–18). But the radical aspect of Cotton Mather’s writing lies not in its aspiration to transcend reason, such as we see in classic nineteenth-century writers, but in the way it winds reason up to such a ferocious extent that it illuminates, as if through a process of backlighting, the outlines or parameters of the rationalist project. This is the idiom of what Karl Keller has called “wilderness baroque,” involving “an aesthetic of outrageousness” and “extravagances surprising even to a modern sensibility” (201–3). Deleuze has characterized “the Baroque” as a form that “refers not to an essence” but that is instead an aesthetic system that “endlessly produces folds,” evoking in the eye of the observer a confusion of realms wherein different orders of space and surface, spirit and substance, are confused; in the baroque, argues Deleuze, “the soul entertains a complex relation with the body. Forever indivisible from the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter” (The Fold 3, 12). Deleuze nominated Gottfried Leibniz as “the Baroque philosopher par excellence” (The Fold 37), but we find a similar paradoxical interpenetration of spiritual and corporeal in Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermons of the 1740s, which depict for the congregation how God “holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider or some other loathsome Insect over the Fire” (16). As Karl Keller remarks, the force of Edwards’s language in the pulpit depends upon an aesthetics of “shock” and “violence”; rather than abjuring the system of Calvinist theology, Edwards was ratcheting up its intensity so that it would come to work its effects through “sensation and sensationalism” rather than merely dry logic (207). The popular appeal of Edwards’s sermons, in other words, derives from the way they break the boundaries of convention, transgressing the strict decorum of church piety with a spirit of excess, folding reason into sentiment. This is another version of the aesthetics of “extravagance,” as Keller defines it: a displacement of the mundane into something approaching “gothic extremes” (213), where the elaborate rhetorical figures of baroque would appear to wander outside (extra– vagance) the transparent revelation of Puritan plain truth. In this sense, as several critics have observed, Edwards was a true contemporary of J. S. Bach, even though he probably never heard his music.7 The power of Bach and Edwards does not involve a simple replication of Lutheran or Calvinist dogma but its transliteration into affective, aesthetic forms. Indeed, the role of music in engendering an aesthetic sensibility in eighteenth-century America is an interesting and generally overlooked 7  For the argument that Bach and Edwards “were working in similar worlds of discourse,” see Marsden 79.

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topic. New York, Philadelphia, and other urban centers had burgeoning musical cultures at this time, while the motto of the Tuesday Club in Annapolis was “Fiddlers, Fools and Farces”; in 1713, Cotton Mather was moved to express his concern about how “the minds and manners of many people . . . are much corrupted by foolish songs and ballads” (Kate Keller 75). William Byrd II in Virginia was also a patron of the musical arts; but, more broadly, the religious revivals of the early 1740s, sparked by the emotive preaching of George Whitefield and others, seem to have brought forth a surge of enthusiasm for spontaneous and heartfelt utterance in religious song. Singing, including the singing of secular folk tunes, became common at revival gatherings during the Great Awakening, and this suggests an increasing willingness to accommodate the austere logic of Calvinist doctrine within more popular and accessible forms.8 There has been much discussion in intellectual history circles of transatlantic influences on American culture during the years leading up to the Revolution. J.G.A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Quentin Skinner, and others have outlined the long philosophical and political argument about republican ideology that followed in the wake of the English Civil War and how this “neo-roman theory of liberty,” as Skinner called it (55), eventually culminated in political independence for the United States. But alongside these more abstract conceptions of liberty, there also developed in eighteenth-century America a parallel tradition of popular or lowbrow republicanism that expressed itself through aesthetic forms of caricature, travesty, or burlesque and that organized itself affectively around a logic of sensation. The growth of democracy in America, in other words, was linked to an idiom of radical demystification, through which the iconic narratives of established order were surreptitiously dismantled. Nancy Ruttenburg has traced the emergence of what she calls “democratic personality” in eighteenth-century America to an “aesthetic of innocence” (291) deriving ultimately from a Puritan ethic of transparency, through which the poor and uneducated could challenge “the symbolical integrity of established and authoritative social and aesthetic forms” (10), thereby inscribing “the essence of genuine American character” (291). My argument is, though, that this emergence of a popular democratic spirit flourished not so much through an “aesthetic of innocence” but an aesthetic of transgression, a mode of systematic extravagance that threatened to stand the established iconography of the old regime on its head. As Lawrence W. Levine has shown, the specific terms highbrow and lowbrow were first used explicitly toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the development of a cultural modernism was beginning increasingly to stratify U.S. society. Simply to project these terms back into 8 

On this theme, see Cooke.

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the previous century, then, would be anachronistic. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that eighteenth-century America did not necessarily share current assumptions about what might constitute high or low forms of cultural expression. As we see from the example of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, the neoclassical idiom was not considered exclusively an elitist form in eighteenth-century America. Wheatley’s collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) draws heavily on classical mythologies and prototypes, yet it does not do so merely in a decorative vein but so as to create different dimensions, hypothetical alternative spaces, through which a virtual republic of Augustan humanism might stand as a counterpoint to the eighteenth-century world of conventional Christian piety. In “To Maecenas,” for example, she co-opts Terence, who freed himself from slavery through his pen, as an honorary African forefather sharing discursive space with Homer, while in “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” Wheatley engineers a series of strategic puns—Cain/sugar cane, spiritual refinement/refinement or distillation of rum—to expose how the economics of slavery operate: Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train. (18) The point here is that, by establishing parallel narratives, Wheatley brings highbrow and lowbrow into juxtaposition with each other. By playing off classical and biblical prototypes against the coercive conditions of slave society, Wheatley effectively demystifies the bland charms of pastoral, using the transgressive force of a neoclassical idiom turned on its head to critique the social order (Gould 66). Whereas Ruttenburg associated African Americans with the disenfranchised groups who looked to the “development of a democratic cultural semiotic in the wake of Puritanism” to give them voice (6), Wheatley is an example of an African American whose voice evolves not from a secularization of Puritanism but from a transvaluation of neoclassicism.9 By recasting Augustan American literature as a lowbrow form, Wheatley creates space for a subversive potential through which the classical archetype evokes an alternative utopian domain beyond the bounds of the actual. In this sense, Karl Keller is right to suggest that the work of eighteenthcentury American writers often seems to verge on becoming a “parody of neoclassical literary forms” (208), though this should be construed not as a negative phenomenon so much as a structural belatedness, an implicit awareness of the incongruities involved in mapping contemporary America onto a mythical archetype. The reputation for staidness and 9  On the significance of “double translation” in Wheatley’s poetry—“from a lost African original into English, and from Latin into English”—see Boggs 38.

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dullness that has accumulated around the poetry of Timothy Dwight, one of the Connecticut Wits, has tended to obscure the extreme peculiarities and implicit comic potential of his work, the ways in which it does not accord comfortably with a Federalist political or a Christian agenda. The Conquest of Canäan (1785), an epic poem in eleven books that retells the story of Joshua and the Israelites, is a very odd work indeed. The sheer size of the poem is bizarre in itself, and though it is not difficult to adduce parallels between Joshua leading his people out of Egypt to the Promised Land and the formation of a new American republic—the poem is hyperbolically dedicated “To His Excellency George Washington, Esquire, Commander in Chief of the American Armies. The Saviour of his Country”—it is not difficult either to see Dwight’s poem playing knowingly with the disjunctions as well as the conjunctions between these two heroic figures. “Concave” is one of Dwight’s favorite words in The Conquest of Canäan—as in “And round the concave flames vindictive pour” (14)—and this exemplifies the poem’s theme of a refraction of light, the transposition of God’s “changeless form” (97) into the “strong alternate gleam” (96) that makes up the poem’s “shadowy scene” (125): From shade to shade, unnumber’d tinctures blend; Unnumber’d forms of wondrous light extend. (98) To some extent, this imagery might be related to Dwight’s own visual impairment: he suffered from clinical myopia all his adult life. But this idea of the displacement of lucidity into shadowy forms also correlates with the deliberately “hollow” nature of the “painted scene” (19) echoed here—“At once a hollow wind began to roll” (116), “peals deepmurmuring on the hollow cloud” (117), and so on. The Conquest of Canäan becomes, in other words, a spectacular pageant, predicated on a system of alteration as it transposes divine into human, Joshua into Washington, while simultaneously exhibiting, as Dwight advertises in his preface to the poem, the “pathetic” as well as the “sublime” aspects of such artificial synchronicities (vii). Similar kinds of structural irony also attend The Triumph of Infidelity, a poem that Dwight published anonymously in 1788 and whose authorship he never acknowledged in his lifetime. Dedicated as it is to the arch-infidel Voltaire, The Triumph of Infidelity comprises what John R. Fitzmier has called an “upside-down ecclesiastical history” through the way it follows Dwight’s theological antagonist, Charles Chauncy, by advocating the idea of universal salvation (44). Whatever may have been Dwight’s satirical intention, however, the power of this poem resides at least partly in what it describes as a “laughing spirit,” the way that Satan is represented as a jocular gentleman who comes out with expressions such as “On cap, huzza!” (199–200). Satan is concerned that, in

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the event of this newfangled idea of universal salvation finding favor, he will find himself ushered through the pearly gates along with everyone else, thus bringing his epic career of rebellion to an inglorious conclusion and leaving him with a sense of “wasted years” (184). In this sense, as Colin Wells aptly observes, Dwight’s Satan is less like Milton’s character in Paradise Lost than like one of the Grub Street villains in Pope’s Dunciad (39). Hogarth is also mentioned in The Triumph of Infidelity, in the epithet “Hogarth like” to describe the infidel philosopher David Hume (188), and throughout the poem there are several details that evoke the spirit of Hogarth: the divine with “cheeks of port, and lips of turtle green” (202), for instance, and the sublimely nasty way in which Chauncy is ridiculed as a figure of “palsied age” (199). Dwight would also have known about Hogarth from the discussion of his Analysis of Beauty in Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, which Dwight used for many years as a set text in his course on rhetoric at Yale (Freimarck 235). There is then an unresolved contradiction in Dwight’s poem between the author’s effective use of caricature and his allegiance to the Puritan tenets of plain truth. One of the hazards of The Triumph of Infidelity is that it epitomizes precisely what the title of the work suggests: a triumph of disorder over divine order, or at least an implicit acknowledgment of the challenge posed by satirical comedy to assumptions of ethical or religious self-sufficiency. It is hardly surprising that Dwight preferred always to preserve his authorial anonymity, since part of the mordant irony in this poem stems not just from an anger directed toward Chauncy but also, in a more sinister fashion, toward himself as poet, in particular toward the ways in which, as he recognized, his aesthetic impulses and religious convictions were threatening to fly off in contrary directions. This accords exactly with Dwight’s own view of Pope’s Dunciad, that because of the poem’s depravity of tone, it was “a severer satire on the author than on the objects of his resentment” (Freimarck 253). This is not, of course, simply to equate the scatological violence of The Dunciad with the more cerebral academic arguments of The Triumph of Infidelity but to suggest that Dwight’s artistic investments drew him more closely into realms of “infidelity” than he, as a church leader and pillar of the established order, would have felt comfortable with. This is why interpretations of Dwight’s life and work exclusively in terms of his social or religious philosophy have, in general, failed to do justice to the more manic tenor of his art, where, as with Mather’s Magnalia, the elements of black comedy derive from a metaphysical sense of epistemological insufficiency and of the ontologically irreconcilable. As president of Yale in the 1790s, at a time when the university was in what he called “a most ungodly state”—of the 1796 freshman class at Yale, only one was

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a professing Christian—Dwight set out his stall to counter the atheistic philosophy that had become increasingly fashionable by the way he used reason in his sermons to admonish the burgeoning spirit of rationalism (Cuningham 293, 302). In “The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy,” a sermon Dwight delivered in two parts at Yale in September 1797, he carefully describes the practice of classical philosophers and outlines Hume’s critique of customary assumptions about the relation between cause and effect, before arguing that Christianity itself should be understood as a force of enlightened reason: “Rational Freedom,” he says, “cannot be presented without the aid of Christianity.” Rather than dogmatically setting faith in opposition to reason, Dwight’s argument unfolds more subtly, placing these two faculties in parallel to each other: Christians believe, that the Scriptures are, and Infidels that they are not, a divine Revelation. Neither they, nor we, know; both classes merely believe; for the case admits not of knowledge, nor can it be determined with certainty. The only question, to be decided between the contending parties, is which believes on the best evidence. Infidels are believers equally with Christians, and merely believe the contrary position. (57) The rhetorical brilliance of this passage lies in the way it effectively undermines the claim of the “infidels” that they are disabusing themselves of “superstition” and thereby approaching a condition of pure enlightenment (57). By transposing them to a “contrary position” alongside Christian believers, Dwight turns the argument categorically on its head, just as he does poetically in The Triumph of Infidelity. Later in the sermon, Dwight advocates Christianity on aesthetic grounds, arguing that it produces a system of “beauty and loveliness” rather than “an incongruous and forbidding deformity” (69). Infidelity becomes associated here with the chameleonic and contagious, with a force that always threatens to disestablish the clear boundaries of divine truth by turning the world upside down: “Virtue and Vice, as objects of human esteem, would change their places, and their characters. Pride would then be real virtue, the Lust of power real greatness, and Avarice real honour” (78–79). This is not to dishonor Dwight by suggesting that he was in any sense secretly attracted to infidelity, but it is to acknowledge how his writing is always aware of order and anarchy as parallel, and potentially interchangeable, structures. Immersed as it is in the political complexities of his time—he remarks in a sermon of 1801 that the American War of Independence has encouraged “looser habits of thinking” as well as “looser conduct” (Discourse 19)—Dwight’s work was far more engaged with contemporary events than it is normally given credit for. In this

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same sermon, he rebukes some of the recent “revivals of religion” for their “extravagance,” the failure of their advocates to contain themselves within the boundaries of rational decorum, saying this is a deficiency they share with “infidels” (20); yet such extravagance, borne of flirting aesthetically with a spirit of infidelity, is a hazard that Dwight’s work itself is always prone to. One of the tensions in The Triumph of Infidelity is between New England as a protected, sanctified space and the disruptive abstractions associated with “learning’s little globe” (191); and in this sense, the threat of universalism in the poem carries a geographic as well as a theological rationale. The same kind of dialectic becomes even more apparent in another of Dwight’s epic poems, Greenfield Hill (1794), whose title takes its name from the village in Connecticut where he served as pastor for twelve years before his move back to Yale. Greenfield Hill idealizes the landscape of Connecticut as an epitome both of pastoral tranquility and republican self-sufficiency. In Part One, the author salutes it as a bordered world whose inhabitants are motivated by a need for modest “competence” (12) rather than the snares of luxury: But chief, Connecticut! on thy fair breast These splendours glow. A rich improvement smiles Around thy lovely borders; in thy fields And all that in thy fields delighted dwell. Here that pure, golden mean, so oft of yore By sages wish’d, and prais’d. (17) Yet as the poem develops and expands over the range of its seven books, these emotional affinities and intellectual dedication to the home state are held in check by a variety of different forces. In a formal sense, Greenfield Hill works as a distinctive imitation of English pastoral, explicitly echoing Pope’s Windsor Forest, John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, and other models. This brings into ironic relief the author’s injunction toward the end of Part One: “Change, but change alone, / By wise improvement of thy blessings rare; / And copy not from others” (19). To disavow copying in a poem that itself copies from others so profusely should not be misread simply as hypocrisy, since Dwight’s avowed aim is to improve on Pope and Goldsmith rather than simply to imitate them. But the contradiction skirted around here introduces questions about the authenticity of the scene represented that effectively destabilize the author’s focal point of vision, in the same way as all his convoluted rhetorical questions serve to position Connecticut on the far side of a two-way mirror where its qualities emerge antithetically, through the threat of their potential “exchange” or reversal:

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Say then, ah say, would’st though for these exchange Thy sacred institutions? Thy mild laws? Thy pure religion? morals uncorrupt? Thy plain and honest manners? order, peace, And general weal? (19) Later in the poem, there are many brutal scenes of violence, ranging from discussions of imperial Rome—“Caesar, the butcher of mankind” (79)—to more recent events: war with the Pequods, slavery, the Revolutionary War, and so on. For all its dedication to “sweet civility” (137), Greenfield Hill is in fact haunted by the specters of political conflict and global turbulence, and, as William C. Dowling has observed, part of the poem’s contrary movement involves an internal debate between a “remorselessly cyclical” view of history (77) and its translation into anarrative of redemption, wherein Connecticut would appear as the epitome of American virtue. The reference here to “verdant banks where Thames’s branches glide” (97)—a phrase that evokes primarily the river running through Connecticut but also refers back punningly to the Thames flowing through the heart of the British capital—indicates ways in which the author draws uncomfortable parallels between the old imperial center of London and the new federal authority of America; indeed, the description in the “Argument” to Part Four of the Thames emptying “itself into the Sound, at New London” (92) reinforces this interplay between Old World and New (Kutchen 123). Through the multiple folds of his reflexive consciousness, Dwight’s poem suggests in disorienting fashion how the emergent spirit of American exceptionalism might be countered by a darker knowledge of how, according to the annals of cyclic history, violence and oppression are common to all societies. Part Three of the poem, “The Burning of Fairfield,” which represents the plundering of Fairfield and New Haven by British forces in 1779, rhymes analogically with Part Four, “The Destruction of the Pequods,” which chronicles the annihilation of the Pequod tribe by the Puritans in a swamp just outside Fairfield in 1637, in response to the murderous activities of Indian “savages”: Th’ unpitied victim screams, in tortures dire; The life-blood stains the virgin’s bosom bare; Cherubic infants, limb by limb expire. (103) Dwight’s vision of pastoral regeneration is thus oddly juxtaposed with a more gruesome, almost Sadeian conception of “the death-struck globe” (170), where the world appears to turn on a repetitive axis of violent destruction. Positioned as it is at the interface between domestic enclosure and global disruption, Greenfield Hill leaves, as Dowling says, “a great

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question mark suspended” over the outcome of its pastoral hypothesis (46). The word “home” becomes a kind of magic refrain in Part Five of the poem, “The Clergyman’s Advice to the Villagers”—“Promis’d, see the seed-time come, / And the harvest shouted home!” (117)—and this is reinforced in the final book by an image of geographic specificity, where the spatial coordinates of Connecticut are endowed with a spiritual magnetism: Here too shall Genius learn, by what control, Th’ instinctive magnet trembles to the pole; With curious eye, its system’d errors trace, And teach the mystic longitude of place. (162) Yet even this “mystic longitude” is counterpointed finally by a panorama of the “wide world, outspread from sky to sky,” encompassing “Proud Europe’s towers,” “silken India,” “awaken’d Afric,” and so on (167). Larry Kutchen has aligned this global vision with an embryonic version of U.S. imperialism, which would seek to spread the new nation’s good news about its own political deliverance far and wide and thus to impose its own values of “freedom” upon others; but in his own notes to the poem, Dwight comments in derogatory fashion on the mere abstractions of global consciousness, peremptorily dismissing as fantasists “men who educate children on paper, as a geometrician circumnavigates the globe, in half a dozen spherical triangles” (179). The inference to be drawn from this is that Dwight, with his intellectual and aesthetic investments in the empirical and the particular, was antipathetic as a point of principle to what he considered to be the alien specters of world affairs; nevertheless, Greenfield Hill implies the extent to which his creative imagination was disturbed by their negative shadows. Indeed, just as The Triumph of Infidelity achieves its aesthetic resonance through contamination by a spirit of heresy that the poem ostensibly abhors, so the pastoral charms of Greenfield Hill are paradoxically infused and galvanized by a kind of negative globalization. His epic poem both evokes a version of American pastoral and simultaneously revokes that vision, reluctantly relocating the promised land within a wider spatial and conceptual framework. If prospect appears in Greenfield Hill as the topographical correlative of fancy, as Julie Ellison suggests (144), then what remains out of sight in the poem, just beyond the borders of its purview, is equally as important to the poem’s constitution as these more visible features. Dwight’s last work, Travels in New England and New York—accounts of the journeys he undertook during university vacations partly for health reasons, which were published posthumously in 1821–22—testifies again to his interest in the geographical specificity of his home region. “New England,” he writes in his first letter, “lies between 41° and 48° north

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latitude and between 54° 53´ and 74º 8´ west longitude from Greenwich” (I, 13). The author comments here on the climate and the seasons, the flowers and the animals, in various parts of the country. Again, part of his intention in this work involves generic and intertextual reversal, upending the conventions of travel writing so as to emphasize the splendid sobriety and predictability of daily life in New England, rather than, as in most works of this kind, choosing to dwell on the archaeologically or architecturally spectacular. Yet, as Christopher Grasso has remarked, Dwight’s Travels charts the growth of Connecticut from a self-contained republic to a rapidly developing region, as the opening up of the western frontier in particular changed the state’s relation to the rest of America (384). Rather than simply manifesting an early example of the “paranoid style in American politics,” as Richard Hofstadter imagined (13), it would be truer to say that Dwight’s ferocious intelligence turns his irony back upon himself, so that his narratives find themselves repositioned within a much more expansive horizon. Although rooting itself in parochial landscapes, Travels in New England addresses the question of the growth of American world power, suggesting this will be enhanced by the homology of the English language in the United States and by the gradual disappearance of French, German, and Spanish. The “only parallel” to the bonding of the American republic into “one people,” suggests Dwight, will be “found in the empire of China”; the Russian Empire, he maintains, will be held back by “the serious inconveniences arising from the great diversity of its languages” (IV, 368–69). It is certainly possible to argue that Dwight oversimplifies the argument in his comments here on language, but in the light of this kind of global reach, it is harder to convict him, as V. L. Parrington once famously did, of having his mind “closed as tight as his study windows in January” (Colonial 361). Dwight is a complex and interesting American writer whose work bears only a tangential relation to the dominant institutional narratives of U.S. literary nationalism; however, it benefits significantly from being relocated within a transnational Augustan framework, where the fraught relation between neoclassical prototype and American exemplum, between global and local, becomes in itself a central thematic concern. Global discovery is also a central concern in another American epic poem of the late-eighteenth century that is now read even less frequently than Greenfield Hill: Richard Alsop’s The Charms of Fancy. Alsop’s major poem was written mostly in the mid-1780s, though it was not first published until 1856, long after the author’s death in 1815. Even within the highly selective group of critics that still champions the Connecticut Wits, Alsop’s work is not well known; Leon Howard’s book on the literary circle devotes just one line to Alsop, dismissing him as someone “who was talented enough to become a fine poet had he been willing

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to devote himself wholeheartedly to the art” (201). It is true that much of Alsop’s time was taken up with other affairs: Karl P. Harrington has described Alsop as the “principal coordinator” of the Connecticut Wits (xii), and he was an active editor and businessman as well as a distinguished linguist, who published one of the first translations in America of lines from Dante’s Inferno. Alsop’s interest in comparative mythologies also led him to undertake, although not to complete, an epic poem under the title “The Conquest of Scandinavia.” The bulk of his poetry, though, is political doggerel: this would include Aristocracy: An Epic Poem (1795), where the author ironically pretends to favor the feudal system, and also A Poem Sacred to the Memory of George Washington (1800). In The Charms of Fancy, however, Alsop brought together the two sides to his interests—the comparative mythologist and the American patriot—and the result is a remarkable long poem in four cantos that again self-consciously situates the formation of the new republic within a global context. Whereas for Dwight the idea of mutability was always a threatening phenomenon, for Alsop it is something that gives human scenes poignancy and life. For Dwight, the image of the chameleon, which recurs frequently in his poems, always betokens a sinister element; but for Alsop, the serpent, given its multiple “form and colors,” is something to which “we cannot deny . . . a very great share of external beauty” (85). Alsop comments on the figure of the serpent in his notes to the second canto, and one of the general idiosyncrasies of The Charms of Fancy is that the author’s annotations to his own poem make up a considerable proportion of this work: 70 pages of notes in the first edition, as opposed to 132 pages of the verse itself. This lends The Charms of Fancy an extravagantly metacritical dimension: Alsop is interested not just in evoking the charms of fancy but in theorizing and framing them, so as to position America within a larger intellectual sphere. Much of the poem’s momentum is taken from Alsop’s description at the beginning of the second canto of how “the power of Change! each passing day / Confirms her empire and extends her sway” (45). Like the poets of sensibility and the early romantics—William Collins, Philip Freneau—Alsop is attached to images of ruin and desolation, and in the final canto he evokes the “mouldering relics of magnificence” at Thebes (183), going on to prophesy a similar fate of obsolescence for the United States even before the life of the new nation has properly begun: And shine, Columbia! mid thy favor’d skies, Some future day may see in dust o’erthrown, With brambles shadow’d, and with brake o’ergrown. (197)

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This ubi sunt theme is unexceptional, of course, but what makes The Charms of Fancy unusual is the way it associates this poetic convention of melancholy with the more specific global remappings of time and space that were taking place in the late eighteenth century. In the first canto, Alsop discusses how Indian civilizations in America have been “Lost in the ocean of revolving years” (35), how remains of “ancient fortifications” have been found in Ohio (40), and how there have been various theories, some of “wild Invention” (36), to explain this mysterious disappearance of a civilization that a thousand years earlier appeared to be flourishing. As we shall see in the next chapter, this notion of a lost medieval America was also to haunt writers in the early nineteenth century, and in Alsop’s eyes it throws over the political culture of the new United States the penumbra of an enigmatic past, against which the pressing political concerns of the present are thrown into comparative relief. In the second canto, this comparative mythology is theorized in spatial terms, as Alsop surveys the old civilizations of Egypt, India, Africa, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Borneo, China, and other places. Europe, he says, merits only a “slight mention” (44) on the grounds that it is too familiar already, since Alsop’s primary concern here is to bring to light regions of the world whose cultural achievements have been unjustly neglected: Shall Greece and Rome, those thread-bare themes of praise, Alone deserving claim the poet’s lays? . . . With servile step pursue the common road. The way-worn paths so oft by poets trod; While yet unsung Palmyra’s charms remain, Unsung the wonders of Egyptia’s plain? (65–66) For Alsop, the political establishment of the United States in the 1780s as a new world involved just that: a new world, a reconfiguration of conventional geopolitical maps, since the advent of U.S. political independence served effectively to rebalance the entire globe. Alsop conflates geography and history, spatial enlargement and temporal promise, by describing the first survey of “Japon’s extensive isle” as a “distant region of the newborn day” (66); and he writes in this second canto of how it was a “thirst of knowledge” that led “Adventurous Cook” (57) to discover new lands on his voyages to the Pacific in the 1770s: Wide o’er the immense of seas, in southern skies, Within itself a world, New Holland lies . . . (51) Where e’er he [Cook] roves, see gladdening islands heave, And worlds unknown their shrouds of darkness leave. (57)

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The notes to this canto comment extensively on the kangaroo first described by Captain Cook, on the scientific observations of Joseph Banks (who accompanied Cook on his first Pacific voyage), and of how “The island of New Holland [Australia], by far the largest hitherto discovered, is two thousand miles in length, and surpasses Europe in the number of its square miles” (79). Alsop’s annotations here reveal a marked curiosity about geographic and scientific facts—the Chinese, he notes, “have possessed a standard Dictionary of their language, from nearly two hundred years before our era” (102)—and his metacritical framework suggests ways in which the romantic melancholy that pervades The Charms of Fancy is buttressed by a more hard-edged sense of temporal and spatial relativity. The overall effect of The Charms of Fancy is one of aesthetic incongruity, the juxtaposition of near and far into a scenario whose philosophical vision appears to verge on the comically incongruous. Alsop, for example, brings together the domestically familiar—“Majestic Dwight, sublime in epic strain, / Paints the fierce horrors of the crimson’d plain” (47)—with a much less familiar example from “Persia’s realm”: “In epic state, thy great Ferdousi reigns, / The mighty Homer of the Asian plains” (130). To associate Homer analogically with Asia, or Dwight analogically with Ferdousi, is deliberately to paint a world within which conventional categories are confounded. All this is commensurate with the aesthetic qualities of Augustan American literature more generally, predicated as it is on an art of translation and transposition, the displacement of Puritan epic into mock-epic, the reorienting of neoclassicism as burlesque. The geographic shift south in the world of Cook and Byrd is matched by the inscription of a virtual classical republic in Phillis Wheatley and by the persistence of a low idiom of dark, satanic comedy in the epic poems of Dwight. Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana mediates these different strains, balancing off its apocalyptic propensities against an Augustan sense of rational limitation and generic heterodoxy. Alsop’s culminating image in the last two lines of The Charms of Fancy is similarly one of “wild excess” being counterbalanced by “calm serenity” (211). This oxymoronic art, transmuting apparently irreconcilable forces, is also epitomized through Alsop’s representation in this final canto of the charms of fancy as linked with, and symbolized by, the “bright Morganas of [Childhood’s] magic smiles.” As the author explains in his notes, the latter is a most beautiful aerial phenomenon, observable from the harbour of Messina, and some other places adjacent, in Sicily. . . . In a clear, calm day of summer there rises, above the great current of air, a vapor, which acquires a certain density, so as to form in the atmosphere horizontal prisms, whose surfaces are so disposed as to reflect and represent in

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succession, like a moving mirror, for sometime, the objects on the coast, or in the country contiguous. . . . The common people have given it the name of the Fata, or Fairy Morgana, from a belief entertained by them, that this appearance is produced by that celebrated Fairy. (213) Augustan American literature in general shares something of this quality of a “moving mirror”—as in Cook’s “planter’s looking-glass,” or Dwight’s “concave flames”—within which the conventional outlines of classical tradition and historical representation are reconfigured. In this sense, Augustan American literature involves the creative entanglement of potentially contradictory narratives, and the peculiar power of its art derives from its sense of being deliberately out of place, of transgressing the boundaries of civil convention in the interests of exploration and extravagance.

C HAPTER 2

Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and the “Map of the Infinite”

Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée After the revolution, American literature did not so much boldly anticipate the future as brood uneasily on the new nation’s fractious relationship to the past. While the very notion of medieval American literature might seem oxymoronic, the purpose of this chapter is to consider ways in which such a formulation not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen’s once apparently oddball but now thoroughly naturalized conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen, working at Harvard at a time when the Ivy League establishment looked down condescendingly upon the vulgarities of U.S. culture, sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—with seventeenth-century English forerunners: William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, John Milton, Thomas Browne. Matthiessen’s polemical point was that, in terms of both thematic complexity and stylistic innovation, these American authors could be competitively evaluated “in accordance with the enduring requirements for great art” (xi), with the tragic dimensions of Hawthorne and Melville embodying “certain indispensable attributes that are common also to the practice of both Shakespeare and Milton” (xiv). Matthiessen’s parallelism was also indebted to the conception, widespread among the subject’s first generation of scholars, of the Elizabethan roots of American language and literature, a theory propounded by Harry Morgan Ayres in the first Cambridge History of American Literature, published in 1919, and subsequently popularized by H. L. Mencken and others (Boyden 109). This kind of historical analogy has resurfaced in more recent critical variations, such as Robin Grey’s consideration of the “prophetic” tenor of Emerson’s writing alongside the “apocalyptic,” regicidal impetus of Milton’s prose tracts (53). In this sense, to talk about medieval American literature might be seen as nothing new, since it merely takes the old conceit of a metaphorical

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continuity between European and American literature and approaches it from a different chronological perspective. The way in which this Elizabethan world of intellectual discovery and religious reformation was widely mythologized as a cradle of American liberties has, however, subsequently produced a peculiarly slanted version of the American literary domain. Part of the value of the Renaissance in the eyes of nineteenthcentury American historians such as George Bancroft, William Prescott, and Francis Parkman was the way in which it introduced a split between the progressive narrative of rational freedom on the one hand and the reactionary power of feudal aristocracy on the other. In this model, the humanism that began to emerge in the sixteenth century was positioned antithetically to, and indeed partially defined by, a backward-looking medievalism. Conversely, there was a great deal of interest and concern in the United States during the earlier part of the nineteenth century in how the new country might relate to the longue durée of the historical past. Lawrence Buell estimates that between 1790 and 1830 “historical works, including historical fiction, accounted for a quarter or more of America’s best-sellers” (195), climbing to an astonishing figure of more than 85 percent in the 1820s, and much of this popular interest can be explained in terms of a reaction against the dislocating, destabilizing conditions of the postrevolutionary era. Representatives of the new United States frequently tried to compensate for the catastrophic disorientation of suddenly finding themselves without a history by reintegrating the English past as their own, such as we see in Washington Irving’s tributes to Geoffrey Chaucer and Shakespeare in The Sketch Book (1819) or later in Thomas Bulfinch’s widely-read The Age of Chivalry (1858), which argued pointedly that Americans “are entitled to our full share of the glories and recollections of the land of our forefathers, down to the time of colonization thence” (6).1 Fifty years later, in 1908, Brander Matthews, a professor at Columbia, was still describing Chaucer and his contemporaries as part of Americans’ common inheritance (Kammen 175). All literary (and historical) traditions are retrospective fictions, of course, and the point I wish to emphasize here is a metacritical one, illustrating the complicated relationship between past and present in American literary history and the ways in which the institutionalization of the subject over recent times has tended to distort and occlude these complex anterior dimensions. For example, the myth of Puritan origins adumbrated by Sacvan Bercovitch led him to describe John Winthrop’s cosmos as significantly lacking any nostalgic sense of “the harmonious and independent life of the medieval village”; in his sermon “A Model of 1  On the importance of Bulfinch for nineteenth-century American writers, see Moreland 5.

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Christian Charity,” argued Bercovitch, Winthrop effectively secedes from “antiquated feudal ways” by “substituting Christ for the sheriff” (“Winthrop” 88), displacing an old world circumscribed by familial custom and local geography into a modern world based around individual “contract and consent” (“Winthrop” 91). However, as Francis Bremer’s biography points out, to Americanize Winthrop in this way is largely to ignore the first forty-two years of his very active life, spent mostly in East Anglia, where he would have encountered sheriffs (and other English officials) aplenty. Bremer argues that the pragmatic Winthrop sought subsequently to base the civil institutions of Massachusetts “on those of England rather than ancient Israel” (308), on existing worldly models rather than biblical prototypes, having in his legalistic mind analogies between the colony of Massachusetts Bay and medieval states such as Normandy or Gascony, which paid homage to the king of France without, as a “point of government,” being administratively dependent on that country (368). Bremer suggests that Winthrop saw New England as a parallel but not subordinate form of Old England, and one larger inference to be drawn from this thesis is that consideration of a medieval legacy in American culture might help tease out a different version of national identity, one neither so beholden to the idea of the nation-state as an independent, autonomous entity nor so concerned with the imponderable question of its “origins.” If the category of medieval American literature is an oxymoron, then so, of course, is that of medieval English literature. English historian F. W. Maitland in 1908 ascribed the very idea of the feudal system to the ingenuity of the seventeenth-century antiquary Henry Spelman, sardonically locating the “moment of its most perfect development” in the middle of the nineteenth century; Maitland remarked that a good answer to the examination question “When did the feudal system begin?” would be “1850” (142–43).2 More recently, Krishan Kumar has shown how the conception of Old and Middle English as a point of origin for an indigenous tradition of English literature was formalized only when Oxford and Cambridge set up their undergraduate syllabuses in English language and literature in 1893 and 1917, respectively (222). Going back further, Christopher Cannon has also argued it was not until the end of the fourteenth century that a framework of romance became the dominant force for shaping a version of English literature, a definition that subsequently became a hegemonic instrument for marginalizing the more localized, experimental variants of English widespread in earlier centuries (173). These ironies of continual back formation—what Raymond Williams in The Country and the City called the “escalator” of history (10)—are 2 

See also De Prospo, “Patronage of Medievalism” 9.

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not, in themselves, surprising; but, despite all their important contributions over the past two decades, perhaps one of the drawbacks of New Historicist approaches to American literature is that they have tended to suppress the reflexive element that was crucial to Stephen Greenblatt’s approach to Shakespearean culture, the acknowledged incongruity of his attempt “to speak with the dead” (1).3 Instead, in their focus on engagements between literary texts and U.S. domestic politics of various kinds, Americanists have often presented those relations as though they existed in transparent, self-evident forms. A projection of medieval American culture, by contrast, might be understood as a disjunctive defamiliarization of that conventional social state and as a precursor of transnationalism in the way it problematizes the conventional spatial and temporal circumference of U.S. cultural norms. As Lee Patterson has observed, there was in the nineteenth century “a Middle Ages of the right and of the left” on both sides of the Atlantic (xi). A medieval dream of order, based around a Tory sense of feudal hierarchy, inspired various forms of anti-industrial feeling in the works of writers from Walter Scott and Benjamin Disraeli to John Ruskin, while other more radical medieval partisans—William Morris and the PreRaphaelites, for example—were more nostalgic for what they took to be the anarchic charms of the medieval era, its valorization of the individual craftsman and its happy ignorance of science and the machine age (Chandler 223). T. J. Jackson Lears has described how a similar version of medievalism as what he calls a “therapeutic world view” was also prevalent in late nineteenth-century America (No Place xvi), where biographies of the medieval saints proliferated as never before and where Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard was at the center of a Dante cult emphasizing not the theology of the Middle Ages but its aesthetic curiosities and its supposedly natural morality, something that culminated in the writings of Henry Adams at the turn of the twentieth century. Others, though, took a harsher line toward what they took to be anachronistic American attachments to medievalism, with Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi famously castigating Scott’s “jejune” mystification of “an absurd past that is dead” and claiming the American South had become so enamored of “the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization” that its social and economic progress had been retarded “fully a generation” (468–69). The other obvious resonance of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture involved its treatment of Gothic scenarios. Whereas English Victorian Gothic could (and did) hark back to a specific historical era, American Gothic had no such visible legacy of medieval culture 3  For the sardonic but telling comment that “what one hears when one hears the dead speak is actually the sound of one’s ‘own voice,’” see Michaels, Shape 138.

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to draw on, and it is a commonplace in discussions of American Gothic to suggest how its modes of representation consequently got deflected into more figurative forms. Donald Ringe traced its affinities with the dark underside of Enlightenment rationalism, Leslie Fiedler with the inchoate nature of psychosexual terror, Teresa Goddu and others with the long shadows cast by slavery. The stories of Edgar Allan Poe, to take one example, draw frequently on medieval iconography, as with the images of a danse macabre, castellated abbeys, and courtiers in “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). Alfred Kazin saw this “esthetic medievalism” as exemplifying Poe’s rejection of progressive social politics, his implicit attachment to reactionary values, and his stance as “an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy” (94); but Poe’s incorporation of a zone of necrophilia carries a more disruptive and disturbing charge, embodying a form of materialistic reaction that highlights what he took to be the incorrigibly abstract nature of American liberal democracy. The emphasis on corporeal limitation exemplified by the danse macabre in “The Masque of the Red Death” operates as a counternarrative to the transcendental rhetoric that Poe despised, with the author here appropriating the culture of medievalism to throw a sinister reflection over U.S. national narratives of sentimental uplift. Besides being rebuked by Kazin for his conservatism, Poe was notoriously excluded from Matthiessen’s American Renaissance on the grounds of his supposed pessimism and being “bitterly hostile to democracy” (xii). Instead, Matthiessen placed Ralph Waldo Emerson at the center of his magic circle of representative American writers: “To apply to him his own words about Goethe,” said Matthiessen of Emerson, “he was the cow from which the rest drew their milk” (xii). Matthiessen’s positioning of Emerson helped establish the latter as a figurehead for canonical narratives of liberal individualism that epitomized patriotic values: John Updike, commending Emerson, wrote of how it was the “spiritual essence” of the American “self” not to be “dissolved in Oriental groupthink, or subordinated within medieval hierarchy” (“Big Dead” 81). But Emerson’s attitude toward “medieval hierarchy” was more complicated than this popular, patriotic view of him would imply, and his lectures on English literature, given in 1835, offer a very different picture from that more familiar to us from “Nature,” “Experience,” and the other heavily anthologized essays. Whereas “Nature” in 1836 famously advocates an “original relation to the universe” (7), Emerson’s lecture on Chaucer, given on November 26, 1835, antithetically proclaims: “There never was an original writer. Each is a link in an endless chain. . . . The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources” (284–85). What Emerson particularly admires about Chaucer is the fact that he is, as Emerson puts it, “never anxious to hide

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his obligations; he frankly acknowledges in every page or whenever he wants a rhyme that his author or the old book says so” (286). Emerson thus sees the medieval English poet as emblematic of the fact that, as he puts it, “all works of literature are Janus faced and look to the future and to the past” (284). In this rereading of the English literary canon, intertextuality and tradition provide the basis for literary creativity, so that “the question of authorship,” says Emerson, becomes “less important” (285). In his 1835 lecture on medieval romance, “The Age of Fable,” Emerson refers proprietorially to “our native English tongue” (253), positioning himself in a line of continuity with the tradition of English language and literature. The “Chaucer” lecture also portrays the medieval poet as “liberal and republican” in his deliberate break with the formality of Latin and his turn to the vernacular (278), iconoclastic traits that are regarded here as making him an implied forebear of American writers working some five hundred years later. In this same 1835 sequence, Emerson’s lecture on Michelangelo recounts the Italian artist’s institutional tangles with the sixteenth-century papacy, referring to him with typical folksiness as “Michael” (112) and comparing his acceptance of the papal commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel “to the spirit of George Washington’s acceptance of the command of the American armies” (112); yet what Emerson admires most about Michelangelo is precisely that he was “not a citizen of any country” (117), that there is “so little eccentricity” (99) in his representations of, in Emerson’s fine concluding phrase, “the beauty that beams in universal nature” (117). This is, of course, a very different Emerson from the one commonly celebrated for his hostility in “The American Scholar” to the “courtly muses of Europe” (69). The emphasis in “Michel Angelo Buonaroti” on “universal nature” also runs counter to Emerson’s more famous essay “Experience” (1844), which validates particulars, which defines the “true art of life” as “to skate well” on “surfaces” (35), and which is more obviously in line both with the tradition of American pragmatism that runs through William James and with the antiessentialist emphasis that has become de rigueur in poststructuralism. My point is that by foregrounding a highly selective version of Emerson’s writings—“Experience,” “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,” and so on—American critics in the wake of Matthiessen have tended to hypostatize a partial version of Emerson as patriot that is not justified by a wider reading of his works. In his 1850 essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes, “The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense” (104). The idiosyncrasy of Emerson’s version of the “catholic sense” of things is that it always exists in a dialectical tension with terrestrial time, incorporating worldly history in order to disavow it.

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Just as Michelangelo, in Emerson’s interpretation, needed the worldly circumstances of Pope Julius II’s papal court to struggle against so that his statue could come away from the marble, so Emerson’s writing returns compulsively to a failed representation of history, deliberately turning away from a narrative of history as dates and events, causes and effects, and evoking instead an allegory of history as example. Because of the overt antipathy toward fables of the past in some of his writings—in “History” (1841), he expresses disgust with the “shallow village tale our so-called History is” (22)—Emerson is sometimes thought of as antagonistic toward history per se rather than more specifically to the flat, empirical version of history that he associated with institutional annals. The target in Emerson’s sights in “History” is antiquarianism— “antiquary” is the last word of the essay (23)—and he repeats here an observation he had made in his 1835 essay “The Age of Fable,” about how “[m]agic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of science” (19). Emerson, in other words, reads history in Neoplatonic terms, seeking to obliterate categorical distinctions between then and now by reconceiving historical progression as a series of continuities and recurrence of eternal types. It is, however, clearly not the case that for Emerson the idea of medieval history is bunk; instead, he engages systematically with early English culture, exhuming it for his own purposes and reorganizing it in terms of a dialectic between past and present. Just as Emerson attributes the genius of Chaucer’s work to its qualities of intertextual traversal, so Emerson’s own originality consists precisely in spinning things around the other way, in turning tradition on its head, in intertextual argument and displacement rather than in positive statement. There is also a marked resemblance here to Michel de Montaigne, one of the subjects of Emerson’s Representative Men (1850), who similarly resisted the appropriation of history for one-dimensional political or religious purposes. Much to the displeasure of the papacy, which placed his work on the Index in 1676, Montaigne broke explicitly with the Christian tradition of historia, substituting instead the fragmentary form of the personal essay, a form that allowed him scope to suggest absences, omissions, and alternative points of view that the authorities preferred officially to ignore or repress (S. Nicholls 54–56). By reconfiguring the dogmatic mode of historia as an allegory of example, Montaigne and Emerson both effectively disarticulate the more coercive directions of established cultural and political narratives and instead reimagine history as a more fluid, evasive field. One particularly interesting aspect of many antebellum writers is the way in which, during this embryonic period of American literature, they tend to reject the flat-footed narrative that would position the past simply as the chronological precursor of the present. Instead, they consciously

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foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other. For these authors, only two generations away from the exhilarating but traumatic rupture of political independence, the question of how to go about delineating the map of the past was a complicated one, something to be negotiated only provisionally and with due recognition of the incongruities inevitably involved in that operation. To move backward through time, conjoining the era of national independence with a colonial, precolonial, or pre-Columbian history, was equivalent to encompassing the country spatially by superimposing a rational grid on native landscapes that had been the province of many different tribal cultures and so were not naturally susceptible to such linear designs. The idiosyncratic nature of Emerson’s medievalism involves an acknowledgment of such structural duplicities, thereby fulfilling his own criterion of poetic creativeness, which was that it involved neither staying at home nor traveling but, rather, transitioning from one state to the other. Emerson himself used the term “trans-national” in 1845 in relation to the Bhagavad Gīta, which he called a “trans-national book” (Journals IX: 248); and the general point here is that a genealogy linking American literature to medieval culture opens up a different kind of trajectory for the subject, one less obviously bound by the chronological constraints of the national period. It is important to remember, though, that to Emerson’s contemporaries Matthiessen’s nomination of such a marginal figure at the center of an American literary “renaissance” would have seemed willfully eccentric. In their eyes, the much more obvious candidate for such a position would have been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by far the most widely read author in nineteenth-century America and one who, as professor of modern languages at Harvard until 1854, enjoyed academic and critical as well as popular acclaim: Hawthorne, for instance, placed him “at the head of our list of native poets” (Gioia 65). Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha appeared in 1855, the same year as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but the difference in the early reception of these two books could hardly have been greater, with Hiawatha selling thirty thousand copies during its first six months in print. Emerson damned Hiawatha with faint praise when it was published, describing it in a letter to its author as a “safe” poem, “sweet and wholesome as maize” (Letters VIII: 464), while Longfellow reciprocated by telling a friend in a letter of his own that, while he had been “much delighted” by Emerson’s oratorical style, he could remember “nothing” about his lectures afterward (Letters II: 215). Although critical efforts have been made recently to reevaluate the work of sentimental fiction writers of the nineteenth century—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and others—there has not been an equivalent sustained effort to reassess

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Longfellow’s central importance to the American literary canon. In part, no doubt, this is because he seems like such an irredeemably reactionary figure. Poe was in a distinct minority when he jibed in his reviews of the 1840s at “Professor Longfellow,” casting him as disablingly genteel and excessively long-winded, but by the modernist era this view had become commonplace. Matthiessen, finding Longfellow’s work “swamped” by “European influences” (174), dismissed his style as “gracefully decorous” (34), a mode in which “[a]ny indigenous strength was lessened by the reader’s always being conscious of the metrical dexterity as an ornamental exercise” (174). The fact that Longfellow was given honorary degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge tended to reinforce this popular understanding of him as an anglophile renegade, as did the placing of his bust in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey in March 1884, within two years of his death. Yet the terms of Longfellow’s art were much more innovative than this stuffy reputation would imply, and to reconsider his significance within nineteenth-century American literature is to understand how, like Emerson, he conceived the temporal and spatial dimensions of the field not simply in relation to domestic politics or national agendas but within a more expansive transnational framework. The Song of Hiawatha is, as its title suggests, a musical performance whose lilting, trochaic tetrameters make it easy to remember (and, indeed, to parody). In terms of American folk poetry, it has some of the qualities of Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom (1662), another poem in a memorable metre—“rocking fourteeners,” as Roy Harvey Pearce called them (20)—which fully one-tenth of the population of New England in the 1660s knew by heart. Whereas Wigglesworth’s theme is the imminence of apocalyptic doom, Longfellow’s epic of pre-Columbian Indian life sets itself to possess the American continent, to reconcile and uphold the nation by binding it together through time and space. In the first part of the poem, “The Peace-Pipe,” the “Master of Life,” Gitche Manito, declares himself impatient of the “wrangling” among the various tribes: I am weary of your quarrels Weary of your wars and bloodshed, Weary of your prayers for vengeance, Of your wranglings and dissensions; All your strength is in your union, All your danger is in discord; Therefore be at peace henceforward, And as brothers live together. (205)4 4  All quotations from Longfellow’s poems are taken from Poetical Works, the complete 1904 edition of his poetry.

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The allegory of political union outlined here has an obvious relevance for the United States six years before the outbreak of civil war. Just as Whitman’s Song of Myself, published the same year, deliberately tries to encompass many different regions of the country within its broad syntactic sweep—“At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or on the Texas ranch” (45)—so Longfellow extends a conception of sentimental brotherhood backward through time, envisaging the fractious Indian tribes within a magic realm of cross-sectional concord. To read Hiawatha alongside, say, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, a cycle of poems published in 1885 representing legends of King Arthur, is to be made aware of how the absence of a conventional historical narrative in Longfellow’s poem opens up space for more reflexive elements. Tennyson’s poem proceeds through a “stately” quality—there are many references to Guinevere as “the stately Queen” (588), her “tender grace and stateliness” (589), and so on—with the regular march of Tennyson’s iambic pentameters, a metrical form that William Carlos Williams called the “medieval masterbeat” (“American Spirit” 59), providing a framework within which feudal hierarchies appear as naturalized entities. Tennyson, in other words, draws upon echoes of the English poetic tradition to lend his fictitious version of the royal realm an air of righteousness and verisimilitude. Longfellow, by contrast, constantly shifts between different levels, mixing anthropomorphism of the animal kingdom—the rabbit “Peering, peeping from his burrow” (234)—with the mythic narratives of Indian legend, as in part 17, “The Hunting of PauPuk-Keewis,” where Hiawatha’s enemy is changed into a beaver and descends to the beavers’ “wigwam” below the pond’s surface (256). Much of the recent criticism of the poem has focused on section 14, “PictureWriting,” which foregrounds the art of deciphering symbols and emphasizes how, in Angus Fletcher’s phrase, “Longfellow thinks translatively” (140), turning foreign languages into a style of idiomatic American while continuing implicitly to acknowledge their distant provenance; but the overall effect of this in Hiawatha, which Alan Trachtenberg astutely called “a pretended translation” (Shades 74), is to create something like a mirage, where the “dreamy waters” (254) of Gitche Gumee conjure up a world wavering tantalizingly between absence and illusion, past and present.5 Longfellow was an early admirer of Irving’s Sketch Book—the “first book,” he said in his “Address on the Death of Washington Irving,” to fascinate his imagination (800)—and the self-parodic mode of romantic irony that Longfellow practices here owes much to Irving’s example. Longfellow was not only the most popular poet in nineteenth-century America but also the best linguist, with fluency in an enormous range of 5 

On picture writing in Hiawatha, see V. Jackson.

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languages and the capacity imaginatively to relate his immediate American culture to a much wider range of circumstances. He was also a great enthusiast for opera—in January 1855 alone, while writing Hiawatha, he attended performances of Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani, Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni—and indeed, as Dana Gioia has observed, perhaps “the nineteenth-century poem that Hiawatha most resembles . . . is Richard Wagner’s libretto for Der Ring des Nibelungen” (88).6 Longfellow shared with Wagner an interest in the refurbishment of medieval myth, while the musical dimensions of Hiawatha, particularly its stylistic emphasis on structural repetition, are exemplified in the way the poem has been accommodated within a much wider range of later musical adaptations, from sketches in Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World (1893), to the song “Hiawatha,” the final track on Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels (1989). Longfellow was also himself personally acquainted with Franz Liszt, with whom he spent an evening in Rome in 1868. The multimedia as well as the multilingual aspects of Longfellow’s work tended to perplex the New Critics, with Newton Arvin in 1963 roundly declaring the theme of Judas Maccabaeus (1872) to be “unsuitable” for poetry (277). Trained as they were to appreciate the complexity and internal tensions of lyric poetry, critics such as Arvin found Longfellow’s long poems too somnolent, “quite without dramatic energy or spirit,” something more like “an oratorio reduced to a few brief and rather thin recitatives” (278). But the effect of an oratorio is precisely what Longfellow was striving for in Judas Maccabaeus: his poem chronicles the rebellion in 166 bce against the attempt of King Antiochus IV to impose his Greek religion on the Jews, and Longfellow wrote to Charlotte Saunders Cushman in January 1872 of how he would be “delighted” if his “tragedy . . . could be given with Handel’s music” (Letters V: 497). George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus was first performed in London in 1746, and Longfellow, as a frequenter of concerts given by the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, would have been fully conversant with this musical genre. Handel’s oratorios were also for years dismissed as insufferably statuesque and tedious before a number of revivals in the latter part of the twentieth century drew out their more humane, humorous qualities; and the same features lie dormant in Longfellow’s longer narrative poems. One of the most idiosyncratic aspects of these poems is their discursive inclination, the way they consciously set their dramatic heroes within a worldly, contingent setting. For instance, in Michael Angelo (1883), there is a deliberate turning away from transcendentalism in the way Longfellow shows the Italian artist trying to get his work done, refusing invita6 

On Longfellow and opera, see Calhoun 209–10.

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tions to dinner, dealing with the tiresome business of papal politics, and so on. There are some similarities here with the tone of Emerson’s essay on Michelangelo, written nearly fifty years earlier, which also portrayed the Italian artist’s struggle between sublime aspiration and corporeal limitation, and in this sense the garrulous, antiheroic tone of Longfellow’s poem has its own poignancy: Time rides with the old At a great pace. As travellers on swift steeds See the near landscape fly and flow behind them, While the remoter fields and dim horizons Go with them, and seem wheeling round to meet them, So in old age things near us slip away, And distant things go with us pleasantly. (811) Longfellow’s idiom here is one of deliberate anticlimax, and in this sense he has been particularly ill-served by critics such as Arvin, who complained of how the “full Titanism of Michelangelo, his demiurgic or demonic character, hardly emerges in any towering way” from the poem (279). Whereas Whitman’s poems sought to transliterate history into myth through the apotheosis of what he called in “Starting from Paumanok” a “divine average” (21), Longfellow was much more worldly in his concerns, not simply because of his own social circumstances but because an abiding concern of his works is how temporality intersects with the contours of the human imagination. Longfellow also deliberately took issue with the cultural nationalists of his own day in the Young America movement who campaigned vociferously for confining the idea of American literature to a domestic provenance. Although his 1824 essay “The Literary Spirit of Our Country” expresses “a feeling of pride in my national ancestry” (791), his persona in the tale Kavanagh (1849), a work much admired by Emerson, takes issue with the nationalistic agendas of the Young America movement by describing American literature as “not an imitation, but . . . a continuation” of English literature: [A] national literature is not the growth of a day. Centuries must contribute their dew and sunshine to it. Our own is growing slowly but surely, striking its roots downward, and its branches upward, as is natural; and I do not wish, for the sake of what some people call originality, to invert it, and try to make it grow with its roots in the air. (756)7 7  Emerson wrote on May 24, 1849 thanking Longfellow for sending him a copy of Kavanagh, saying it had “the property of persuasion” and that he had read it “with great contentment. . . . I think it the best sketch we have seen in the direction of the American Novel” (Letters VIII: 215).

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This understanding of literature as a “continuation” is commensurate with Longfellow’s interest in translation, which involves modification of existing texts rather than their invention ab nihilo. It fits as well with his interest in intertextuality, as in his Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), whose form is deliberately modeled on that of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Longfellow switches the milieu from spring in fourteenth-century South London to fall in the nineteenth-century town of Sudbury, Connecticut— indeed, he considered calling his work “The Sudbury Tales” (Calhoun 232)—but the narrative makes plentiful references back to the squires, scrolls, and chivalry of Chaucer’s time, even while spinning everything round to an American patriotic context. For example, “The Landlord’s Tale: The Rhyme of Sir Christopher” looks back to Puritan times to recount the tale of Sir Christopher Gardiner, a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, From Merry England over the sea, Who stepped upon this continent As if his august presence lent A glory for the colony. (455) Sir Christopher, who passes the time with the “roystering Morton of Merry Mount,” is said to have two wives in England and another “little lady” in Boston (455). What is striking here is how the author simultaneously evokes a Chaucerian framework and yet staunchly endorses New World values: Sir Christopher is dismissed as “only a Papist in disguise,” and, after being trapped by Indians, he is sent back to England by the Puritan governor (455). This tale, the culminating episode in Tales of a Wayside Inn, is one of two related by the landlord; his first tale, which comes immediately after the prelude, chronicles the story of Paul Revere’s ride during the revolutionary wars. The fact that Longfellow chose two overtly patriotic stories as the bookends to his collection emphasizes where the sympathies of his poetic sequence lie. Associated with this stylistic intertextuality is a skill in the aesthetics of parody or doubling. Many critics have complained that no native author appears among the sources for Hiawatha, but the basis of the poem involves not authenticity but a kind of ludic quality that deliberately conjures up what is impossible historically to represent, a picture of Indian culture in pre-Columbian times. The curious fact that the New York Times reviewed a parody of Hiawatha four days before reviewing Hiawatha itself suggests how integral is this element of comic reflexivity to the poem’s composition. Longfellow would have been acquainted theoretically with the art of doubling through his interest in German romanticism, especially the writings of Jean-Paul Richter (on whom he lectured in 1840), whose grotesquely humorous works illuminate ironic

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disjunctions between everyday facts and ideal laws. Longfellow was also, of course, well acquainted with the literary history of the Middle Ages, on which he began lecturing as early as 1832, when he was twenty-five years old; and indeed all his work, both creative and critical, involves a concerted attempt to expand the contours of American literary culture, to set it in a different relation to time and space from that imagined by the “Young America” school of literary nationalism in the antebellum period, whose patriotic impulse was subsequently taken up by Matthiessen and his followers. In 1874, toward the end of his career, Longfellow began publishing the thirty-one volumes of his Poems of Places, wideranging anthologies in translation of lyrics drawn not only from European literature but from Asia and the Arab world as well. This very multifaceted quality of Longfellow’s work has often disconcerted readers, particularly those more accustomed to literature as a form of subjective expression, a song of myself: “[t]here are,” wrote Christopher Irmscher, “so many voices that meet and merge in Longfellow’s works that, even to the author himself, it sometimes seemed they hadn’t been written by anyone in particular” (119). But the positive aesthetic qualities associated with this style of impersonality emerge most clearly in Christus, Longfellow’s epic poem about “various aspects of Christendom in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages,” finally published as a sequence in 1873.8 Part One, The Divine Tragedy, reworks Dante’s Divine Comedy into an idiom of belatedness, and its focus again is on scenes of the ordinary, on dramatically playing off Christ’s gnomic utterances against a sense of onlookers’ bewilderment. The peculiar genius of Longfellow is an eye for the comedy of the ordinary, for a Richteresque appreciation of the disjunctions between the quotidian and the marvelous. Pontius Pilate, who describes himself as operating the kind of “prudent and sagacious policy” characteristic of “Roman Governors in the Provinces,” is a typical Longfellow hero, someone full of hesitancy and worldly procrastination: I will go in, and while these Jews are wrangling, Read my Ovidius on the Art of Love. (673) Judas Iscariot, who complains of how he has never known “The love of woman or the love of children” (676), also comes across sympathetically here. Part of the point of Longfellow’s garrulous style is precisely how it fails to accord with both the conventional Puritan rhetoric of apocalypse and the strained discourses of transcendentalism. Longfellow’s Christ, in

8  Longfellow outlined his plan for Christus in a journal entry of November 8,1841. See his “Introductory Note” in Christus 7.

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fact, talks rather like Emerson in one of his lectures, mixing echoes of the Bible with aphoristic intensity: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and we hear The sound thereof, but know not whence it cometh, Nor whither it goeth. So is every one Born of the spirit! (651) In Longfellow’s poetic world, however, Christ is always surrounded by skeptics. Nicodemus responds here to Christ in an “aside”: How can these things be? He seems to speak of some vague realm of shadows, Some unsubstantial kingdom of the air! (651) Christus is thus organized structurally around a pattern of bathos, where aspirations toward transcendence necessarily enter into dialogue with the limitations of the material world. This gives Longfellow’s poem a less euphoric feeling than those of Emerson or Whitman, but it introduces a ruminative, multilayered dimension that the writing of the transcendentalists frequently lacks. The intertwining of theology with human comedy surfaces again in the second part of Longfellow’s trilogy The Golden Legend, a dramatic poem set in the thirteenth century that was originally published in 1851. A scene of black comedy is played out when Lucifer, who has cannily disguised himself as a priest, hears the confession of Prince Henry of Vautsberg: “I come to crave, O Father holy / Thy benediction on my head” (476). But there is a theological as well as a melodramatic point to this interlude, since Lucifer’s intercalation of both good and evil within his own figure serves to reject the Calvinist principle that would hold these two categories distinctly apart. As a lifelong Unitarian, Longfellow would have endorsed the view of Lucifer that “evil is only good perverted” (478), and the pertinence of this argument to The Golden Legend is underscored in its epilogue spoken by the Angel of Good Deeds, which declares that even Lucifer is “God’s Minister, / And labours for some good / By us not understood!” (527). All this allows license for a gregarious, latitudinarian account of the intersection of secular and religious history, epitomized here particularly by the representation of a miracle play on the Nativity in the third section of the poem. King Herod emerges in this masquerade as a hale and hearty fellow—“What ho! I fain would drink a can / Of the strong wine of Canaan!” (489)—and he chirpily chronicles the Massacre of the Innocents in rhyming couplets: Now at the window will I stand, While in the street the armed band

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The little children slay: The babe just born in Bethlehem Will surely slaughtered be with them, Nor live another day! (489) The play-within-a-play here throws back light on the representation of Herod in the first part of Christus, and it emphasizes the ingeniously reflexive or academic elements in Longfellow’s poetic narratives, the way these chronicles of biblical and medieval times, no less than Hiawatha, turn upon a poetic dynamic of pastiche and translation. (One might be put in mind of John Barth, another intensely reflexive writer from a hundred years later who also enjoyed a career as a university professor and whose theoretical work also came out of an academic base.) This metafictional element is underlined by Prince Henry’s puzzled articulation of invisible worlds as anthropomorphic fictions: A dim mirage, with shapes of men Long dead, and passed beyond our ken. Awe-struck we gaze, and hold our breath Till the fair pageant vanisheth, Leaving us in perplexity, And doubtful whether it has been A vision of the world unseen, Or a bright image of our own Against the sky in vapours thrown. (515) The cumulative effect of these reflexive stylistics is not only generally to interrogate the relationship of present to past but also to resituate adjacent American history within a much wider and less straightforwardly linear framework. The final part of Christus, The New England Tragedies, evokes in its prologue the projection of history as an act of selfconscious recovery, a retrospective reinterpretation: To-night we strive to read, as we may best, This city, like an ancient palimpsest . . . Rise, then, O buried city that hast been; Rise up, rebuilded in the painted scene. . . . (564) This is the art of translation aggrandized into a philosophical argument, where all understanding necessarily involves a double principle, involving a paradoxical transposition between original and copy: For as the double stars, though sundered far, Seem to the naked eye a single star, So facts of history, at a distance seen, Into one common point of light convene. (565)

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In “John Endicott,” the first of the New England Tragedies, this admission of parallax necessarily works against the more apocalyptic proclivities of Endicott, governor of the colony, whose claims to prophetic truth are mocked by the Quaker Edward Wilson. Although Endicott conceives of himself as a sublime figure, violently laying down Christ’s law and supporting the proposition of his minister that “There is no room in Christ’s triumphant army / For tolerationists” (593), Longfellow’s more worldly poem is sympathetic to the circumstances that ultimately frustrate Endicott’s separatist design. The unlikely deus ex machina in this poem turns out to be King Charles II of England, who incurs Endicott’s wrath by issuing a mandamus order forbidding the colony to persecute Quakers and instead requiring them to be returned to England, leaving Endicott to bemoan the power of the king and to look forward eagerly to a more serious “struggle” for political independence (592). The second part of this sequence, “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms,” continues this theme of intolerance by portraying the “tornado of fanaticism” (627) at the time of the Salem witchcraft trials, with Cotton Mather’s celestial typologies about the community “journeying Heavenward, / As Israel did in journeying Canaan-ward” (603–4) lambasted by Giles Corey’s wife Martha, who longs for “A gale of good sound common-sense, to blow / The fog of these delusions from his brain!” (608). One of the crucial points about Christus is the way it critiques New England exceptionalism by realigning the history of the province with that of former times and places, thus indicating how, as St. John remarks in the poem’s finale, “The world itself is old” and how within this chronologically extended scope “A thousand years in their flight / Are as a single day” (629). New England, in Longfellow’s imagination, is a continuation not only of Old England but of medieval Europe more generally, and the dogma that would insist on it as a site of purification and regeneration is, by Longfellow’s translative method, rendered null and void. “Medieval” Mound Builders and the Archaeological Imagination Longfellow’s reinscription of the past as a longue durée highlights the way in which, as Russ Castronovo has observed, “ambivalence toward national genealogy” (Fathering 4) became one of the defining features of antebellum U.S. culture. In the first seventy years of the new republic, the question of how to represent the past became a burning political issue, with evangelical understandings of the American Revolution as an apocalyptic new beginning balanced against the views of those who, like Longfellow, sought to understand the new United States within a more

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amorphous historical framework. The problem of American history was given particular pertinence by the discovery in 1808 of extensive burial mounds at the Indian town of Cahokia, near present day St. Louis, which helped excite what Gordon M. Sayre has described as “the mounds craze during the Early Republic” (228), when there was widespread interest in the mysterious roots of American civilization. There was good reason for this curiosity: recent archaeological work has suggested that the preColumbian population of the American continent at its height was significantly larger than that of Europe—about ninety million, to Europe’s sixty million (Castillo and Schweitzer 9)—with Cahokia itself having a larger population in the year 1050 ce than London (Chappell 2, 193). There remains, though, an obvious anomaly here, in that plentiful written records exist about London in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whereas no documents at all relating to American settlements at this time have survived. Reconstructions of Cahokia have shown it to be a formidable urban space, with several grand city plazas (figure 9), and speculation about why it had largely been abandoned by the year 1400 continues today: war, earthquake, climate change, or sanitation problems have all been cited as possible causes (Chappell 74). Nevertheless, the sense of an indigenous American culture existing contemporaneously with that of medieval England was something of which U.S. writers in the antebellum period were well aware. Indeed, it was the kind of thing they could hardly miss since there were thousands of these enigmatic burial mounds dotted around the landscape. Cahokia retained at the center of its enclosure a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acres and rising one hundred feet into the air, a construction that remained the tallest manmade edifice in the United States until 1867. Thomas Jefferson, who was an avid student of Indian languages, described Indian burial mounds in some detail in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), as part of his interest in identifying an authentic indigenous culture that could compete with the monuments of Europe, while Caleb Atwater was the first systematically to survey and study these mounds in 1820, for the first publication of the newly established American Antiquarian Society. Public fascination was mingled with incredulity, and during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), a forceful proponent of Indian renewal, it was generally held that the mounds must have been the product of some more sophisticated society than that of Native Americans, who were thought “incapable of the coordinated labor necessary for construction projects” (Pauketat 3). William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Prairies,” first published in 1834, gives imaginative expression to this perception of the past by describing the chronological coexistence of an ancient American civilization with that of classical Greece:

Figure 9.  Town Plan of Central Cahokia, ca. 1150. From Sally A. Kitt Chappell, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos (2002). By permission of the University of Chicago Press and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Shelfmark: E99.M6815 C55 2002. Page 53, fig. 42.

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Are they here— The dead of other days!—and did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. (119–20) Bryant characteristically attributes the destruction of this noble civilization to the advent of the “red man” and “[t]he roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce” (120). The point here, though, is not so much the historical answers Bryant finds but the questions he poses, in particular the prospect he raises of cyclic time and his projection of ancient America as a landscape not of wilderness but of “swarming cities” (120), analogous to the kind of “little Venice” (121) constructed by the beaver in the streams and rivers of modern America. Clearly, there is a sentimental aspect to these imagined affinities with earlier times—where “lovers walked, and wooed / In a forgotten language, and old tunes” (120)—but there is also a significant attempt on Bryant’s part to bridge the “savannas” of the present with a “golden age” (121) based on circumstantial evidence rather than mere poetic fancy and thus to unmask the atemporal illusions of pastoral by imagining the American West in very different historical terms, as part of a densely populated past rather than merely as an open frontier. For historian Steven Conn, the fact that Indians had a past but no legible account of it as such had the effect of dissociating Euro-American “history” from Native American “myth,” with the latter coming to constitute “history’s shadow,” an opaque force implicitly exposing the limitations and insufficiency of the country’s historical narratives (22). All this has tended to shore up the notion of America as a mythic phenomenon, one reflected in the transcendental leanings of Whitman’s “Starting from Paumanok,” which evokes a legend of origination or “starting” that links Native American tribal culture with an idea of authentic American selfhood. As Helen Carr has observed, the “‘myth of time’ most often told in the United States is that it has no past” (9), and Whitman’s insistence in this poem on radical originality—“A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching” (26)—is meshed with an absence of any specific historical concerns in his treatment of the “red aborigines” (26). However, these ahistorical assumptions found themselves increasingly under

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pressure in the middle part of the nineteenth century, when anthropology and ethnology began to emerge and develop as scientific fields of inquiry. Indians themselves were excluded at this time from U.S. citizenship, and, as Trachtenberg has written, there is a certain grim paradox in “natives of the place called America” being “not considered native to the nation” (Shades 9). Nevertheless, it was precisely this paradox of a partially dehistoricized civilization that both puzzled and intrigued white America in the antebellum period, the way in which Indian culture might be seen to operate as a kind of virtual medieval history for the new nation. Given that Indian tribes were known as separate nations until 1871—when Congress stopped making treaties with them and instead incorporated them as “wards of the state”—there is an important sense in which the prehistory of the United States involved its political dispersal among a group of other independent nations, so that to trace the historical narrative of the United States backward was also to imagine a violently different configuration for the geographical contours of the country. Inquiries into pre-Columbian America took many different forms at this time, extending from Alexander von Humboldt’s research into Native American languages, Albert Gallatin’s founding of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1842, the inauguration of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, and the pioneering anthropological work of George Catlin, Lewis Henry Morgan, and others. Obviously writers such as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne would have had only a partial, amateurish knowledge of this scientific work: Longfellow, for example, owned a copy of Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841)—a book that elegiacally portrays the Indians as “an interesting race of people, who are rapidly passing away from the face of the earth” (I, 3)—and he also used the work of anthropologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as one of his sources for Hiawatha.9 He did not, though, draw on any Native American writer and does not seem to have known either the work of Morgan, who published a historical account of the Iroquois tribe in 1851 and who was one of the leading scholarly authorities on Native American culture until the 1870s. Emerson, similarly, was familiar with Catlin’s work, and he was also personally acquainted with Daniel Wilson, who is now credited with being the first to use the word prehistory, which he did in his book The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland (1851).10 The term itself spread quickly 9  In a letter to John Gorham Palfrey, January 6, 1874, Longfellow wrote, “I have Catlin, and he is quite at your service.” (Letters V: 704). 10  Emerson mentions Catlin in a journal entry of 1846 (Journals IX: 428), though in a letter of December 17, 1844 he says he has “never read” him. Eleanor M. Tilton speculates that Emerson “may have seen [Catlin’s] paintings.” Emerson, Letters VII: 622.

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after Wilson had moved from Scotland to be professor of English history and literature at University College Toronto in 1853, and he subsequently published in 1862 his magnum opus Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and New World. Wilson was particularly attracted to the prehistory of America because he believed that its “absolute isolation” (I, xi), the absence from its landscape of those “great sources of religious and moral suasion which have given form to medieval and modern Europe” (I, x), would offer the scientist new light on the vexed question “what is man’s natural state” (I, 2). He consequently believed that, through a process of “parallax” (I, xii), the prehistory of the American continent would also reveal “a long obliterated part of Britain and Europe’s infancy” (I, xiii). Wilson’s curious form of prehistoric exceptionalism, attributing to primitive America a natural condition qualitatively different from that of ossified Europe, would doubtless have appealed to Emerson, who gave a series of lectures in Toronto in January 1860 and who subsequently welcomed Wilson as a guest at his club in Boston on December 26, 1863. Despite Emerson’s popular reputation as a proselytizer for self-reliance, there is a side to his later work, in particular, that is more concerned with fate and law rather than chance, with a deterministic prehistory rather than mere historical accident, and Emerson’s own interest in the human skull can be seen as interestingly akin to Wilson’s craniometric investigations during this era.11 There were also several more eccentric attempts around this time to reconsider the United States in relation to larger historical narratives. Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon (1830) claimed that the Indians were the descendants of the ancient Israelites, while Josiah Priest’s American Antiquities (1833) argued that “America was peopled before the flood” (iv) and that there was a crying need for the country “to awake her story from its oblivious sleep, and tell the tale of her antiquities” (38). Priest was fascinated by the burial mounds, to which he claimed to find references in the Bible, and he sought evidence from the scriptures to prove that “Americans were equal in antiquity, civilization and sciences, to the nations of Africa and Europe” (309). In the light of these kinds of conjectures, Emerson’s frequent historical analogies in his writings of the 1830s and 1840s—seeing “the barbarism and materialism of the times” as “another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism” (“The Poet” 21)— might be understood as a deliberate attempt to secularize and render in metaphorical terms what religious fundamentalists such as Priest at this time took literally: the idea of an equation between ancient history and modern America. Crucially, the very notion of history itself was up for 11 

On Wilson’s examination of human skulls, see Trigger 62–65.

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grabs in the nineteenth-century United States, something to be contested on religious, political, and aesthetic grounds. Arguments over the interpretation of history, such as the time-honored disputes between Whigs and Tories in Britain, were relatively commonplace and unexceptionable; by contrast, what was at stake in the postrevolutionary United States was the question of whether any kind of broader historical narrative could have value or meaning in relation to the truncated temporal span of the new nation. In this light, Samuel F. Haven’s Archaeology of the United States, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1856 just ten years after its founding, can be seen as a semiofficial attempt to consider the relevance of historical antecedents for the country. Haven, librarian of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1838 until 1881, solemnly goes through various theories “respecting the origin of population in the New World” (3), citing the belief that “emigration took place from Africa to America before the flood” and the idea of Indians’ being “descended from the Canaanites” (4). He even acknowledges Priest’s American Antiquities, although he dismisses the latter as “a sort of curiosity-shop of archaeological fragments, whose materials are gathered without the exercise of much discrimination . . . and apparently without inquiry into their authenticity” (41). In general, though, Haven prefers to outline hypotheses rather than to pass judgment, and his weighty volume testifies to the general sense of anxiety in antebellum America about how anteriority might be conceptualized. Haven records in detail a speech before the General Assembly of Connecticut in 1783 by Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, “upon the past, the present, and the future of the United States,” an oration that, says Haven, “gave him distinguished prominence as a curious student of American history, as well archaeological as civil and political” (27). The fact that Stiles was engaged in such an act of conscious historical renegotiation so soon after the nation’s acquisition of political independence is itself interesting, and Haven clearly sees himself as following in Stiles’s footsteps through his concern to evoke and comprehend the country’s longevity. Haven presents himself as a diligent historian investigating the factual status of “aboriginal remains” (1) in the United States, and his work cites plentiful scholarly authorities, prominent among them Schoolcraft, the key source for Longfellow’s Hiawatha, which had appeared the previous year. Haven’s conclusion, that “deductions from scientific investigations, philological and physiological, tend to prove that the American races are of great antiquity” (158–59), served the purpose at this time of institutionalizing the idea of American history and thus extending the national narrative of the United States backward, so that the country’s development in the nineteenth century could be seen not as the result of a violent rupture with

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a colonial power but as the organic result of the land’s evolution from prehistoric tribalism to mature civilization. Haven’s book was published as the eighth volume in the series “Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge”; and, writing on behalf of a federal institution that boasted the U.S. president on its masthead as “ex officio presiding officer,” Haven was attempting in the mid-1850s to render the territory of the United States historically legible and transparent, to valorize it as, quite literally, the grounds for the new nation. Yet the studied neutrality of Haven’s tone on various historical hypotheses—about the possible authenticity of “the great Island of Atlantis” (6), about the legendary occupation of the country by “Scandinavian navigators” (107), about whether the burial mounds were constructed by the Indians or by a more “exalted” civilization that the Indians themselves annihilated (135)—testifies to the inherently problematic nature of Haven’s assignment. Indeed, there is an element of the bizarre in an archaeologist writing on behalf of the Smithsonian pondering judiciously on the likelihood of “the former existence of a seat of arts and empire now buried beneath the Atlantic Ocean” (6). What this suggests is the way in which even the most sober historical narratives in antebellum America tended toward the condition of science fiction; since empirical facts were so obscure and hard to decipher, correspondingly more weight was placed on the legacies of myth, legend, and fantasy, even if Haven’s adoption of a suitably scholarly idiom served partially to distance him from such extravagances. The tone of Haven’s Archaeology is not dissimilar from that of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, published only six years earlier, which considers in similar deadpan style how seventeenthcentury New Englanders were accustomed to interpret “all meteoric appearances . . . as so many revelations from a supernatural source” (164). Hawthorne’s introductory chapter to this novel also weaves an elaborate fiction around documents of antiquity that the narrator says he plans to deposit “with the Essex Historical Society” (31), a real institution in Salem, Massachusetts, founded in 1821, nine years after the American Antiquarian Society. This characteristically antebellum combination of geohistorical rationalization and epistemological entropy also manifests itself in Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). The book starts out by flaunting very specific geographic coordinates—its very title page mentions “the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude” (41)—but then the narrative gradually slides toward a deterritorialized world where, troublingly, grids of regular maps no longer apply. There is a sardonic reference here to the westward pioneers Lewis and Clark (63)—Pym selects their journals as his reading material for the southern voyage— but there is also a demystification of the sublime states linked to heroic

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frontier expeditions, for, as he encounters what he calls the “unknown savages” (206) on the islands of the Antarctic Ocean, Pym has the sense that, as he puts it, “the whole foundations of the solid globe were suddenly rent asunder” (207). This journey beyond known cartographies is significantly linked to an inability to decipher primitive writing: in the caves on the island of Tsalal, Pym sees “indentures” that, he says, bear “some little resemblance to alphabetical characters” (225); but, in these uncharted territories, the narrator is confronted with his incapacity to comprehend ancient languages, so that these hieroglyphic fragments on the cave wall remain unfathomable. The chasm is said to be covered with a vast heap of “white arrowhead flints” (224), intimating lost Native American tribes; indeed, Edwin Fussell reads Arthur Gordon Pym specifically as a “tale of Western adventure and exploration . . . cast in the guise of a voyage to the South Pole” (150). Again, Poe’s novel suggests the ways American authors in the antebellum period were haunted by the idea of temporal and historical illegibility: the narrator compares the landscape in these barren regions to “the site of degraded Babylon,” where the “surface of the ground” is “strewn with huge tumuli, apparently the wreck of some gigantic structures of art” (230). The recognizable lineaments of spatial and temporal enclosure have dissolved into the specter of some ancient civilization, whose provenance can be glimpsed only partially. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the concern for producing literature dealing with specifically American materials led to representations of Indian history becoming more sharply politicized. As Susan Scheckel has argued, the folding of Native Americans into an “immemorial” past (8) allowed Americans to overcome the “patricidal guilt” (16) associated with the revolution by claiming that deeper forms of continuity between American people and their land had existed prior to their colonization by the British. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels appropriate Indian landscapes for these kinds of patriotic purposes, although they are all set in a specific historical period, the mid-eighteenth century, around the time of the Seven Years War between Britain and France. Cooper’s Leatherstocking sequence was published between 1823 and 1841, but public interest in the mounds and their builders reached its height slightly after this, during the 1840s and 1850s, precisely the era defined by Matthiessen as that of the “American Renaissance.” Indeed, Cornelius Mathews, a prominent member of the Young America movement and a chief editorial writer for Evert Duyckinck’s Literary World, turned to pre-Columbian America explicitly for the purposes of encouraging literary nationalism, publishing in 1839 a novel entitled Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders. Behemoth, set in the remote North American past, features an Indian named Bokulla and a giant mastodon locked in mortal combat, with the author expressing sympathy for the

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spirit of Bokulla and their people in their battle against the “boundless bulk” of the monster (19), who annihilates thousands by his very footprints. The novel is predicated on an imagined affinity with the mound builders, “that strange people who have left upon our hills and prairies so many monuments of their power” (1), and these sympathetic bonds become the basis for Mathews’s political program: “the venerable race which struggled and endured in these fair fields, ere they became our home and dwelling place, must be allowed to awaken our feelings and share our generous regards” (iii–iv). There are also many analogies in this novel with European civilizations, as Mathews makes the point that an American West encompassing not “tenantless and houseless deserts” but a “numerous population” in cities and suburbs with a “glorious variety of hill, and vale, and meadow” existed contemporaneously with the classical world (80). Of the fortifications of these mound builders, Mathews writes, “Parallel with the foundations of Rome these walls went up, far back in the calendar of time. . . . Like the lost decades of Livy, some passages are wanting to their completeness, but in what stands we may read the power, the strength, the decay, and the downfall of our own American ancients” (7). The monster itself, taken from a prototype in the book of Job, is, of course, an absurd phenomenon, although in Mathews’s juxtaposition of massively different physical sizes we have the same sense of deliberate disproportion that runs through Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where the vastly incongruous dimensions of the characters betoken a world weirdly out of joint. Indeed, the very bulk of Behemoth indicates the cataclysmic nature of the destruction about to be visited upon Bokulla’s people, as the monster devours trees and reduces the plain to a “pastureless, herbless” desert (123). There are, in other words, two distinct categories of time and space cross-referenced with each other in this novel. One is based on a normative, everyday human scale, as Mathews shows how the denizens of the West “in these pleasant regions . . . once gossiped and enjoyed life” (iv); the other revolves around an imagination of apocalypse that has become, in the wake of various forms of millennial religious rhetoric, a much more conventional part of American history. By describing the “boundlessness of those mighty meadows” of the American West as a “Map of the Infinite” (52), Mathews highlights these spatial and temporal discontinuities, since he is attempting to remap the incomprehensible past in the same way as Bokulla and his army are mapping themselves in relation to the vanishing horizon of the Western landscape. The apparent infinity of space, in other words, is translated here into an infinity of time, which appears in this American context not to be susceptible of logical sequence. This dilemma epitomizes the parallax perspectives of antebellum writers, who, in adducing genealogical conti-

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nuities with former times, were devising cartographies that could not be validated by empirical evidence and of whose hypothetical nature they were, consequently, only too well aware. Interest in requisitioning the shades of pre-Columbian culture for nationalistic purposes continued all through the 1840s. In a review article of 1845, Southern writer William Gilmore Simms, another supporter of the Young America movement, drew parallels between American Indians and much earlier tribes: the Normans in the reign of Charlemagne and the “Gaul” and “Goth” in Europe at the time of the ancient Romans (“Literature” 108). Expounding further on Indian culture, Simms went on to praise the “republican features in their society—their leagues for common defense and necessity, and the frequency of their counsels for the adjustment of subjects in common” as practices that “would have delighted Demosthenes” (“Literature” 112); according to Simms, these characteristics anticipated the growth of a republican, patriotic spirit, such as he wished to see in American literature of his own day. Mathews himself published in 1841 another work about the ancient Indians, an epic poem called Wakondah; the Master of Life, which Poe, reviewing it in Graham’s Magazine, flatly declared to be “trash . . . from beginning to end,” a poem with “no merit whatever” (Essays 824). Mathews, like Richard Alsop, has been generally neglected by conventional accounts of American literature, but it is important to bear in mind that he was very close to Duyckinck, with whom he went through high school and college, and that the latter, rightly or wrongly, considered Behemoth to be a very important work.12 It is also significant that Mathews was present at the famous picnic at David Dudley Field’s house in Stockbridge on August 5, 1850, when Hawthorne met Melville for the first time (Widmer 156); in fact, when Mathews subsequently devoted a series of lengthy articles to this picnic in the Literary World, he referred to himself in jocular spirit as “a perfect Behemoth” (Mellow 331–32). After initial spates of enthusiasm for Young America in the 1840s, Hawthorne and Melville themselves gradually lost interest in its politics around the time they began writing their longer works of fiction, but it is important to note that the idea of reclaiming the legacy of a deep historical past was very much part of the patriotic cultural agenda around this time. Indeed, the extent to which both Hawthorne and Melville might be seen not so much as apologists for U.S. liberal democracy but as metahistorians or medievalists is a question that nationalist traditions of scholarship have tended to overlook. Hawthorne and Melville, we should remember, wrote their novels at a time when the fate of the United States as a single nation was 12  On the politics of cultural nationalism within this circle, see P. Miller, Raven and the Whale 81–85. See also Mathews’s 1847 essay “Nationality in Literature.”

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still uncertain, where the latitudes and longitudes of the country had not yet been firmly established, and the trajectories of their narratives reflect some of this inchoate quality. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Question of Genealogy The ways in which Hawthorne’s own work engages overtly with genealogy, with issues of translation and transposition between past and present, hardly needs special emphasis. One of the works to which the young Hawthorne made a substantial contribution, Peter Parley’s Universal History, on the Basis of Geography (1837), is concerned explicitly to base history on geography: “History,” it explains, “is a record of events that have happened, and Geography tells you of the places where they happened. In order to understand the former, you must know something of the latter” (5). The book accordingly starts out with two maps—one of the western hemisphere, by which is meant only America, and the other of the so-called eastern hemisphere, comprising the rest of the world (xviii– xix)—and, as the narrator imagines himself traveling around the Earth by balloon, he proceeds to map global time and space in relation to each other. Similarly, Hawthorne’s historical works for children—Grandfather’s Chair, A Wonder Book, and Tanglewood Tales—are specifically interested in the question of historical genealogy and transmission, in Grandfather’s Chair the ways in which American history since 1607 has been handed down and in A Wonder Book how classical legends from Greece and Rome have been reconfigured within what the author calls “a Gothic or romantic guise” (4). Entanglement is one of the dominant themes throughout all Hawthorne’s writings. The story of Theseus and the labyrinth recounted in Tanglewood Tales, along with the narrative interludes to this book set on “Tanglewood Porch,” are consistent with the images of labyrinths and cobwebs that pervade many of Hawthorne’s other works, particularly his final “American Claimant” manuscripts, locked as they are into issues of ancestral family entanglement and incest. Hawthorne’s abiding concern with incest was also central to English medieval literature and culture since, at least until the beginning of the thirteenth century, sexual prohibitions extended to a degree unprecedented in any other society, banning all intercourse between relatives connected by consanguinity or affinity to the seventeenth degree and by compaternity to the fourth degree, laws that in effect meant that it was quite possible to commit incest—with a distant cousin, for example—without realizing it. Elizabeth Archibald has argued that the plot dynamic of incest, turning upon identity, separation, and reunion, was very popular among writers in the Middle Ages,

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with the repetitions inherent in this formula also being “a frequent technique in the structure of romance” (11, 232); and in this sense, the familial mirrors of incest might be said to form something like an enabling context for writers of medieval romance, just as they implicitly empower the style of American “romance” with which Hawthorne affiliates himself in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables.13 In Our Old Home, Hawthorne has sharp words for what he calls the “fossilized” quality of English life, talking of how the “American visitor . . . becomes sensible of the heavy air of a spot where the forefathers and fore-mothers have grown up together, intermarried, and died, through a long succession of lives, without any intermixture of new elements, till family features and character are all run in the same inevitable mould” (59). Yet this scenario of fossilization and antiquity is, of course, something to which Hawthorne returns compulsively in House of the Seven Gables and his other works set in the United States. It is as if the author here uses the image of America’s “old home” to project a division between English intermarriage and American “new elements,” although this putative dissociation of past from present, internecine feudalism from progressive democracy, is one that Hawthorne’s own fictional narratives systematically disallow. Hawthorne himself was fascinated from boyhood with Indian burial grounds—one of which was to be found at Thomas Pond, just half a mile from his mother’s house—and he frequently depicts his fictional narrators puzzling over relics of the past and wondering what to make of them.14 In the first chapter of Mosses from an Old Manse, the protagonist muses on how “in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood an Indian village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants must have drawn so large a part of their subsistence” (10), and he goes on to remark on how “[t]here is an exquisite delight . . . in picking up, for one’s self, an arrow-head that was dropt centuries ago, and has never been handled since” (11). This act of reaching out to the past is linked implicitly here to the historical writings of George Bancroft, whose ten-volume History of the United States appeared between 1834 and 1873 and who is also mentioned in this introductory chapter to Mosses (5). In The House of the Seven Gables, the gothic mansion itself is compared to a medieval edifice, a “gray, feudal castle” (10), with the map of the Pyncheon territory on which the story turns being grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and wild beasts. In relation to the problematic conjunction of past and present, there is also an intriguing passage in chapter 17 when Clifford lectures the railway conductor on how “all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending 13  14 

On Hawthorne and incest, see Crews 49–60. On Hawthorne’s boyhood fascination with mounds, see Pickard 28–29.

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spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward,” he says, “and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal” (259). This might be described as a transcendental account of history, or at least an intimation that the historical past should not be understood empirically, as something simply done and dusted, but as a phenomenon that exceeds its own chronological parameters. As Clifford puts it, “The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future” (259–60). This is the kind of redemptive view of history, common to Bancroft and other nineteenth-century romantics, that identifies it not merely with the dead weight of time past but as a living organism susceptible of being substantially transformed into an idealized future. Hawthorne’s fictions, though, waver between this apotheosized reinscription of the past and a more materialized version of history, whose dimensions remain alien, distant, and fundamentally unknowable. This kind of vacillating dynamic permeates The Scarlet Letter, whose narrator acknowledges the medieval era in his preface by pointing out how Chaucer was “a Customs-House officer in his day, as well as I” (26) and which aligns its central male characters with shadowy pasts. Chillingworth, when we first encounter him, has recently been ransomed after spending twelve months in Indian captivity—indeed, the very first time we see him, at the beginning of chapter 3, he is standing side by side with an Indian and is described as an apparent hybrid, “a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume” (60). The burden of Hawthorne’s novel is to examine anomalous cultural formations such as these and to examine what happens when they lie athwart each other. The Scarlet Letter is, of course, a book now deeply embedded within the fabric of American pedagogy, and many of the more popular, utopian readings of the novel over recent years have focused primarily on the figure of Hester Prynne as an emblem of self-reliance and pastoral regeneration, a heroine who carries with her the allegorical weight of what Lauren Berlant calls “national fantasy.” It is, however, one of the curiosities of Hawthorne’s text that it positions itself very self-consciously in relation to both time and space, looking forward and backward simultaneously, so that any given temporal or spatial perspective becomes susceptible of reversal. Geospatial rhetoric of various kinds pervades the narrative: for instance, Dimmesdale, writing his election sermon, is described as sitting “with the pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him!” (225, my italics), while there are innumerable other references to the “region,” the “margin,” “infinite space,” “the old spot,” and so on (211). Writing, in other words, becomes a form of cartography, a way of mapping out identity by circumscribing space and

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positioning characters in relation to proximate or ulterior objects, so that the narrative collapses temporal and spatial distances while also opening them up again. One moment Salem is presented as a mirror image of Elizabethan England, with Governor Bellingham modeling his mansion “after the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land” (104), while the next it appears to be a remote and isolated community, with Hester said to have her home “in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods” (199). Furthermore, through its topical preface, its fiction of a historical reconstruction and its retrospective narration, the whole of the novel is organized temporally around something like a trick time scheme whereby the far becomes near and vice versa. It is hardly surprising that many undergraduates today take the book to be a historical account of Puritan New England or that they have to be persuaded Hawthorne was living as far away from the time he was writing about as an author of today would be from the French Revolution, since this deliberate blurring of temporal boundaries is integral to Hawthorne’s aesthetic vision. Both The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun evoke phantasmagoric legends of medieval Islam as a metaphorical corollary to their textual interplay between past and present: in The Scarlet Letter, the governor’s mansion is compared to “Aladdin’s palace” (103), while in The Marble Faun, Kenyon finds the count of Monte Beni’s villa reminds him “of the hundred rooms in Blue Beard’s castle or the countless halls in some palace of the Arabian Nights” (219). The problematic nature of imagined historical affinities becomes all-consuming in the latter novel, where the projection of a direct line back to the heritage of classical Rome is constantly interrupted by the legacy of medievalism, what the book calls the “heap of broken rubbish, thrown into the great chasm between our own days and the Empire, merely to fill it up” (110). Yet this binary opposition, setting off the city’s medieval “broken rubbish” against its more pristine “classic history” (110), manifestly fails to hold as the narrative proceeds. Hawthorne’s characters become enmeshed in statuesque legends, customs, and prototypes from all periods of Roman culture, whose fate they find they cannot evade, so that the novel might almost be said to turn upon a discourse of archaeology, constantly uncovering the sediments of time so as to bring, as chapter 45 puts it, “the remoteness of a thousand years ago into the sphere of yesterday” (410). The temporal mise-en-abîme that constitutes “the Eternal City” (326) becomes for Hawthorne an image of what is the most pressing concern throughout his writing: the question of how to excavate the past and relate it meaningfully to the present and the future. There is a systematic account of archaeological activities in the latter part of The Marble Faun, a description of grappling with “earth-mounds” and “heaped-up marble and granite,” together with an

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acknowledgment of the opacities and obscurities endemic to this attempt to recover fragments of the past. The narrator here compares the tombs along the Appian Way to the pyramids, and he talks of “obelisks, with their unintelligible inscriptions, hinting at a Past infinitely more remote than history can define” (410). Susan Mizruchi wrote of Hawthorne’s novels as involving an effort on the part of their characters and narrators at an “evasion” and “denial of history” (20); but, rather than simply “defacing” historical consciousness, Hawthorne’s works open up theoretically differential chronological perspectives, where attempts to infuse history with a transcendent or teleological spirit are traversed textually by a penumbra of archaeological indecipherability.15 Archaeology, as a method of rediscovering the base material of the past, was subsequently understood by Georges Bataille as a mode of desublimation, a way of undermining more rarefied, abstract forms of idealism by exposing them to the random detritus of human matter (Ades 51), and similar kinds of tension between metaphysics and materialism permeate The Marble Faun. The specter of medieval culture consequently operated for midnineteenth-century American writers as a tantalizingly distant realm, a parallel to the relics of Indian civilization with which they were surrounded on their own continent. Medievalism is, of course, a distinctively European concept, and simply to apply the term directly to the very different circumstances of pre-Columbian civilization would be incongruous, as writers like Hawthorne (and Poe) well understood. Yet this kind of incongruity was no less apparent, if not quite so self-evident, in the ways Victorian moralists such as Augustus Pugin and John Ruskin during this same era sought to validate Gothic architecture as the ancestor of European civilization. Both cases involve the “deliberate anachronism” of an imposition of present concerns upon the past, since, as Jorge Luis Borges indicates in his celebrated fable of Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote, Victorian Gothic could never be the same as twelfth-century Gothic, even if they were identical in form (71). Ruskin himself, in fact, acknowledged this potential for systematic irregularity in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854): “Do not be afraid of incongruities,” he said, “do not think of unities of effect. Introduce your Gothic line by line and stone by stone; never mind mixing it with your present architecture; your existing houses will be none the worse for having little bits of better work fitted to them” (Linton 71). The realm of English Victorian Gothic thus involved at some level an acknowledgment of the structural incompatibilities involved in any recuperation of the past, and so, by extension, a recognition of how the idea of medieval culture was necessarily 15  For the argument that Hawthorne’s narratives operate “as a powerful critique” of the idea of history as a “rock of reality,” see J. H. Miller 108–19.

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a perspectival phenomenon, a retrospective fiction. This metahistorical element was, however, decidedly more pronounced in American literature and culture of the mid-nineteenth century, since, lacking any kind of “natural” past, antebellum writers were forced literally to reconstruct their history as they went along. One of the tasks The Marble Faun sets itself is radically to problematize the question of historical knowledge and authenticity, to consider the limits of what can be retrospectively known, and thus to interrogate the ideological assumptions involved in bland assumptions of homogeneity between past and present. In this sense, conventional associations between American medievalism and Bostonian elitism or a merely nostalgic anglophilia have tended to obscure the extent to which writers such as Hawthorne and Melville manipulated medieval temporality for complex artistic purposes. Just as Melville in Moby-Dick incorporates all the rigmarole of American whaling into the form of a Shakespearian tragedy, so a year later in Pierre (1852) he renegotiates and aesthetically internalizes the labyrinthine structures of Dante’s Inferno. This allows him provocatively to construct a novel blending modern conditions with a medieval infrastructure, to describe nineteenth-century New York as a world whose provenance owes more to fifteenth-century conceptions of sin and pain than to the booming optimism of U.S. cultural nationalism, a topic of which Melville in the 1850s was becoming increasingly weary. In 1848 he had purchased a copy of Henry Francis Cary’s translation of the Inferno, and several critics have traced Pierre’s elaborate intertextual relation to the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Melville’s protagonist is said to have “always loved Dante” (317), the poet who “had first opened to his shuddering eyes the infinite cliffs and gulfs of human mystery and misery” (54), and at one point he likens the face of Isabel to that of Francesca da Rimini, who meets Paolo and Virgil in Dante’s second circle of hell (42). Nathalia Wright has also chronicled the elaborate analogies between circles of Dante’s hell and Pierre’s “physical descent into darkness” (172), and the cumulative effect of these references is further to defamiliarize the homely, domestic landscapes with which Melville’s novel starts out, to chart a movement away from Saddle-Meadows into a more spectral realm where, as we are told at the beginning of book 9, “all objects are seen in a dubious, uncertain, and refracting light” (165).16 The corollary to this Dantean underworld is a demystification of the notion of possessing the native landscape, an idea close to the heart of the Young America movement. Melville’s novel parodies the lust for geographical exploration and imperial expansion that drove Young America by focusing instead on a loss of orientation. Book 11 opens with a di16 

On this theme, see also Giovanni.

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gression on “Free Will” being trumped by “Fixed Fate,” declaring how, “Sucked within the maelstrom, man must go round” (182); book 9 similarly cites “the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers, amid those treacherous regions” where man, by seeking “to follow the trail of truth too far . . . entirely loses the directing compass of his mind” (165). This loss of cartographic markers is directly linked here to a process of denationalization: Still wandering through the forest, his eye pursuing its ever-shifting shadowy vistas; remote from all visible haunts and traces of that strangely wilful race, who, in the sordid traffickings of clay and mud, are ever seeking to denationalize the natural heavenliness of their souls; there came into the mind of Pierre, thoughts and fancies never imbibed within the gates of towns; but only given forth by the atmosphere of primeval forests, which, with the eternal ocean, are the only unchanged general objects remaining to this day, from those that originally met the gaze of Adam. (139) The initial phrase here, “wandering through the forest,” echoes the narrator lost in a “selva oscura” in the second line of the Inferno, and this is associated with “primeval” forces that serve to “denationalize” the human spirit, thereby mocking the transcendentalist conflation of “natural heavenliness” with national identity. Melville deploys Dante, in other words, to mount a specific political critique of what he came increasingly to see as the narrow nationalistic agendas of Duyckinck and his acolytes, who had given Moby-Dick such a rough ride just a year earlier. (Pierre’s dealings with Young America are chronicled explicitly in book 17 of the novel.) The loss of spatial coherence in Pierre, then, is commensurate with its loss of temporal coherence. “This history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls,” says the narrator in book 3 (54); and later there is an extended disquisition on “Chronometricals and Horologicals” (294), as if to emphasize how the standard notion of time moving mechanically forward is no more than a conventional cultural fiction. Just as Pierre finds he can no longer map himself in relation to worldly time—“In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time, Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity” (304)—so he finds himself equally at a loss in relation to the dimensions of terrestrial space: “like a profound black gulf the open area of the quadrangle gapes beneath him” (271). Acknowledging how “the horrible allegorical meanings of the Inferno, lie not on the surface” (169), Melville uses echoes from Dante to distance his narrative from its immediate American context, so the relics of medievalism that pervade his novel create a ghostly atmosphere that serves to uproot Pierre from his terrestrial moorings:

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on his first night in New York City, for example, he finds the hack drivers “sat elevated between their two coach-lamps like shabby, discarded saints” (239). Medievalism also enters into Pierre through the way in which feudalism becomes a structural component of the narrative. The romance between Pierre and his half-sister Isabel is shadowed by the looming specter of incest, and the plot turns more generally on a family being locked incestuously into its ancestral past. There are references here to “hereditary syllables” (287) and to the “Salique law” of primogeniture (24), while two horses at Saddle-Meadows are described as being “sort of family cousins to Pierre,” acknowledging him “as the undoubted head of the house of Glendinning” and also recognizing how “they were but an inferior and subordinate branch of the Glendinnings, bound in perpetual feudal fealty to its headmost representative” (21). Though, of course, all this is said partly in jest, it underlines the way in which familial groupings in Melville’s novel are organized very differently from the way they are typically presented in sentimental fiction of the 1850s, where the bonds of sympathetic fellow feeling are supposed to represent synecdochically a state of republican harmony. Melville’s introduction of feudal genealogies thus undermines the spirit of progressive American democracy, which is further complicated at the beginning of the novel by the way he traces analogies between the ancestry of the Glendinnings and that of Indian tribes. The labyrinthine pathways of the old Glendinning family are consequently presented as a parallel to the hereditary aspects of Native American culture: “The Glendinning deeds by which their estate had so long been held, bore the cyphers of three Indian kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of those noble woods and plains” (6). To reinforce this equation between English aristocracy and the “aboriginal royalty” (10) of the Indians, an ancestor of the Old English planter family, the Randolphs, is reported here as having married Pocahontas. Although these “mighty lordships” might seem anomalous “in the heart of a republic,” says the narrator, “and however we may wonder at their thus surviving, like Indian mounds, the Revolutionary flood; yet survive and exist they do” (11). The pointed reference here to “Indian mounds” is telling, particularly since these mounds are conflated with the legacy of European aristocracy as things that appear immune to destruction. Melville, in other words, reconfigures medievalism in metaphorical terms, integrating imagery of feudal genealogies and “dark thickets” (84) resonant of Dante’s Inferno with the Indian burial mounds that were still visible throughout the American countryside during this antebellum period and using this opaque historical landscape to position his characters within a cultural framework inimical to republican values. The author of Pierre is not concerned merely to use references from Dante to associate

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nineteenth-century America with the myths and symbols of archetypal design; instead, working within a specific historical situation, he draws upon medievalism oppositionally to critique the assumptions of U.S. domestic fiction and their implicit incorporation within national narratives. Vincent J. Bertolini has written of how bachelors and fireplaces go together in the antebellum period—Pierre, like Coverdale in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, sits in front of the fire thinking about the absence of a family—and in this sense “Melville’s parodic bachelor sentimentalism” (Bertolini 22), harking back to medieval traditions of monkhood, mocks the conservative ethos of marital, heteroerotic, and procreative norms that sentimental fiction of the time upheld. Through the self-conscious manner of its Dante allusions, Pierre also devises a deliberately backwardlooking narrative that counteracts Emerson’s patriotic demand for an “original relation to the universe” (“Nature” 7) by introducing a discourse of belatedness, where any hypothesis of American exceptionalism is frustrated by the knowledge that everything here has happened previously. The novel also effectively challenges liberal discourses of free will and the assumptions of citizenship associated with it: “To think against freedom,” writes Castronovo, “is to refuse the depoliticization that is at the heart of naturalized national rights” (Necro 61). Through its analogies with medieval feudalism and the “aboriginal royalty” (10) of Native Americans, Melville’s text thus denaturalizes the patriotic boundaries of antebellum America, restoring historical density to abstract conceptions of national identity too often taken for granted. Pierre is not a medieval allegory, but it uses a medieval allegorical structure to create disjunctions between different spatial and temporal dimensions, to remap U.S. culture according to different measuring charts, and thus to resituate nineteenthcentury America within an alien topography. After the Civil War, the situation of medieval American literature changed in a number of ways. The war itself caused significant disruption in various areas of primary archaeological interest, so that many of the Indian burial mounds lost their immediate visibility; and after 1865, the increasingly expensive business of archaeology became more the prerogative of specialized professional interests and federal government.17 This meant that the focus of the American Antiquarian Society, for example, switched to the more readily accessible realm of colonial America. At the same time, the study of American writers was by the 1870s beginning to enter the classroom, with Moses Coit Tyler publishing the first History of American Literature in 1878. Whereas Longfellow in the 1840s was interested in synthesizing older literary traditions with New World perspectives, Tyler was more taken with the idea of an unsatisfactory 17 

For a further discussion of this point, see Conn 127.

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colonial history leading toward the emergence of a genuine American “spirit” around the time of the revolution, and, unsurprisingly, this version of the past became more pedagogically popular.18 The heightened patriotic atmosphere in the United States after the conclusion of the Civil War mirrored what was happening institutionally in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, when Anglo-Saxon and medieval writing were being installed at the head of the English literary canon. All this helped cement the division of the two literary traditions, with the idea of a medieval American culture becoming something that could be invoked only in extemporaneous fashion, as in Henry Adams’s disquisition on the dynamo and the virgin in 1907. In The Education of Henry Adams, the analogy between medieval mariolatry and the machine age works primarily on a formal level, suggesting an equivalence in terms of the structures of social iconography while representing the United States not as a medieval but as the quintessentially modern civilization. By the middle of the twentieth century, interest in links between preColumbian American culture and the contemporary United States had become the province of the surrealists. André Breton in 1952 claimed “it is the art of the red peoples, particularly, which gives us access today to a new system of knowledge and relation” (Tythacott 155); and this kind of emphasis on “relation,” on primitivism’s points of intersection with quotidian worlds and on ways in which Native American culture might provide a window into different systems of temporal organization, also interested other surrealist artists, from Guillaume Apollinaire to Max Ernst. But in the mid-nineteenth century, and especially in the writings of Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Melville, the idea of medieval culture was conceptually much closer to home. Widely read as they were in pre-1500 English and other European literatures, none of them instinctively believed that such writing should be construed as simply foreign or alien to U.S. interests; this latter assumption only hardened into dogma later, in the Americanist critical narratives from Tyler to Matthiessen and beyond. Discussing the prose literature of exploration and empire between 1820 and 1865, Eric Sundquist observed, “Space, the promise of a boundless future, was translated into time . . . set in a moral framework in which self-discovery and national character were synonymous” (“The Literature” 144). This is not altogether untrue, of course, but it is only half the story. What American medievalism of the antebellum period highlights is not an idea of inherent possession of the landscape but, rather, a much more extensive, unstable relationship between national identity and transnational cultures. Attempts epistemologically 18  On the institutional development of American literature in the late nineteenth century, see Vanderbilt 81–99.

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to encompass the country, in other words, went along with a simultaneous process of deterritorialization, wherein the physical and “moral” coordinates of the national domain failed to coincide. What is suggested by Arthur Gordon Pym’s abortive expedition to the Antarctic, The Marble Faun’s discursive investment in archaeology, and Emerson’s homage to Chaucer is precisely the way in which “self-discovery and national character” could not become synonymous with, or explicated by, the spatial and temporal dimensions of the American natural world. In this sense, antebellum American authors do not so much ground their work upon native soil as situate it on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement, and the challenge each individual writer faces is in mapping out a discrete location, in finding a space from which to speak.

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PART TWO

The Boundaries of the Nation

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C HAPTER 3

The Arcs of Modernism: Geography as Allegory

Postbellum Cartographies: William Dean Howells “To deprovincialize American history,” writes Thomas Bender, “we must learn to juggle the variables of time and space, to genuinely historicize both temporal and spatial relations” (9). The purpose of this chapter is to consider how the lineaments of U.S. national identity were shaped and consolidated by three wars over a span of eighty years: the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865; World War I, which the United States entered in 1917; and World War II, which ended in 1945. During this period, the United States effectively mapped itself out as a continental nation, and by 1941, the editor of Life magazine Henry Luce was confident enough in his country’s power to describe the twentieth century as “the American century” (N. Smith 5). The profound uncertainties that we saw in chapter 2 among antebellum writers about the spatial coordinates and temporal antecedents of the U.S. nation were rapidly assuaged after 1865 by a program of unification that sought not only to reconstruct the South but also to integrate the United States within a new nationalist framework. The transcontinental railroad linking the Atlantic to the Pacific coast was completed in 1869, with the standardization of time zones in 1883, a reform that established four distinct hourly blocks across the country rather than a plethora of local times, also helping facilitate the business of interstate rail travel. By 1912, all the major regions of the country were linked together by rail.1 Other commercial and technological developments—printing, photography, the telephone, department stores, and, in the early twentieth century, the radio—helped establish a culture of homogenization, where local communities could be bound together within a recognizable American idiom. All this coincided with the political desire to heal the fissures of the Civil War years by elevating Abraham Lincoln to the status of folk hero and by establishing patriotic forms of flag worship. Michael Kammen has written of this emphasis on civic pageantry as an attempt to “depoliticize” traditional affiliations for the sake of national “reconciliation” after the sectional conflicts of the 1860s (13), but it is equally likely that changes in technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century 1 

On the wider significance of the railroad, see Musich.

Figure 10.  “Map Showing the Proportion of the Foreign to the Aggregate Population,” from Francis A. Walker, Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874). Shelfmark: 300.6.t.2/1870. Reproduced with permission by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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made the “language of individualism,” as Alan Trachtenberg observes, appear to some extent “outmoded” (Incorporation 5). Russ Castronovo has described American studies as “always implicitly talking about incorporation as a mode of belonging that makes us feel at home within the workplace, the nation-state, and the world at large” (“Nation” 540); and, as Trachtenberg has demonstrated, such a process of “incorporation” was instituted on a systematic scale in the United States during the latter years of the nineteenth century. Epitomizing attempts newly to remap the nation was what John Rennie Short has called the “cartographic explosion” of atlases after the Civil War (209). The first and most influential of these was the national atlas compiled by Francis A. Walker after the national census in 1870, which was published in 1874. Walker had served as a Union officer in the Civil War before being assigned to the Office of Statistics and appointed superintendent of the Ninth Census; he was subsequently to become a professor of economics and history at Yale. Besides its invocation of all the lands between Mexico and Canada as available for U.S. exploration and settlement, what distinguishes Walker’s Atlas is an extraordinary reliance on statistical graphs and charts to codify racial habits and characteristics of what he calls “the foreign population” (“Preface” 1). Thus, his maps show the proportion of the “foreign” to the aggregate population and the density of various ethnic groups in different parts of the country (figure 10), along with their religion, place of birth, comparative death rates, and relative tendencies to blindness, deaf mutism, insanity, or idiocy. He also represents cartographically the prospect of different groups dying from particular diseases, noting how “Blacks die . . . largely of Intermittent and Remittent Fevers, because almost the entire Colored population is found within the fields where these are the prevailing forms of disease” (“Preface” 5). Conversely, writes Walker, Germans have a “decided liability” toward smallpox, Scandinavians suffer from “an extraordinary mortality from General diseases of the Febrile Group, notably measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and typhus,” while the Irish are peculiarly susceptible “to diseases of the organs of locomotion and of the urinary system, with extraordinary mortality from Bright’s disease of the kidneys” (“Relations” 4). While such analysis played upon racial stereotypes—of the hard-drinking Irish, for example—it was not so much a simple reification of national types as, in some cases, an invention of them: Walker’s enthusiastic codification of the character of Welsh people led the U.S. Immigration Service in 1875 to recognize the existence of Wales as an independent nation and thus, paradoxically, to help define it.2 In this 2  On the recognition of Wales by the U.S. Immigration Service, see D. Williams, “Welsh Atlantic,” 344.

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same year, 1875, Walker’s Atlas was awarded a medal of the First Class at the Paris Geographical Congress (Monmonier 5), and its publication greatly helped integrate geography within the realm of U.S public policy. Because, as W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied in 1903, the problem of race in the twentieth century turned largely upon the “color line” (5), we should not lose sight of the fact that in the nineteenth century the “science” of race involved, as in Walker’s charts, categorizing various white communities according to their supposedly inherited biological characteristics. Racial typification continued to be a respectable intellectual practice until World War II, and it involved identifying cultural and genetic traits that could be identified with particular groups. This created, as Matthew Frye Jacobson has observed, “contingencies of whiteness,” where there was an implicit hierarchy of racial types defined by factors other than color (Whiteness 280); but it also meant the American process of incorporation after the Civil War involved an assimilation of various mini-nations into the larger national unit, so that old countries effectively became remapped upon the terrain of the new continent. What Jacobson calls the “tenacious diasporic orientation” (Special 219) of Irish, Polish, Jewish, and other groups around the turn of the twentieth century was mirrored in religious loyalties, which, for example, made Roman Catholics in the United States largely hostile to the new liberal Italian republic and loyal to the old papal order. As Peter R. D’Agostino has written, the American Catholic Church in the nineteenth century tended to organize its parishes in America along “national” lines (58)—Irish, Italian, German, and so on—with the result that old loyalties and enmities from Europe were continued in the New World. There are, then, two apparently contradictory impulses in the United States after the Civil War. One is toward recognition of the American environment itself as a force for assimilation and national integration, with a capacity to transform Old World institutions and traditions. This was exemplified by Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 thesis “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” where he described the frontier as “the line of most rapid and effective Americanization” (2), and by other geographical works of this era such as Nathaniel Southgate Shaler’s Nature and Man in America (1891), which again stressed “organic” (2) aspects of the relationship between “climatal and social conditions” and “American man,” leading Shaler to the happy conclusion that “our race is safe upon this continent” (277). On the other hand, inherited ethnic and religious loyalties, along with what Bill Brown describes as an increasing emphasis among the very popular school of local-color writers on “fetishizing” both a specific regional “place” (89) and the “material objects” associated with it (97), encouraged forms of resistance to such

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nationalizing models. Yet it is easy enough to see, on a larger scale, how these centrifugal and centripetal tendencies were mutually complementary. John Dewey in “Americanism and Localism” (1920) argued for an attachment to the local as the best guarantee of national affiliation, while William Dean Howells in his 1912 essay “The Future of the American Novel” noted that American literature prided itself on its “decentralized” condition (347). No novel of the United States will ever be written, argued Howells, because each American writer is “bound by the accident of birth to this locality or that” (349), so that, just as in Italy or Spain, “there can be no national American fiction, but only provincial, only parochial fictions evermore” (347). Howells himself was, of course, a great proselytizer for the cause of American literature, and in his best novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), the Civil War veterans Dryfoos and Lindau enjoy reminiscing about the “exciting times” of the 1860s, reckoning, as Dryfoos puts it, that the conflict “was worth it” for “the country we’ve got now” (300). The journalist Basil March, to whom Howells attributes many of his own views, similarly describes it as “the war that helped to save us and keep us possible” (132). Although he himself avoided active service in the war, Howells published a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and in an 1880 Atlantic Monthly editorial headed “The Strong Government Idea,” Howells cited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as he noted that the Civil War, “while immensely strengthening the recognized powers of the national government, [gave] it a hold on the hearts of the people it never had before,” thus making it a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (272).3 At the same time, Howells was very interested in his own Welsh ancestry—his Welsh grandfather, so he recalled in My Literary Passions, had settled in Ohio “early in the [nineteenth] century” (3), at a time when the emigration of skilled workmen from Britain to foreign countries was illegal—and in 1895 he gave a “St. David’s Day Address” to the Welsh Society of New York, saluting Roger Williams as the “greatest of all possible Welshmen” and implicitly comparing Williams’s argument with Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s about the “freedom to worship God . . . each in his own way” with Owen Glendower’s efforts to keep “the English at bay” in the fifteenth century (D. Williams, Ethnicity 85–87). Howells also discussed the influence of his Welsh “lineage” in his autobiography Years of My Youth (5), while in Literary Friends and Acquaintances, he remarks on how, during his first visit to New England, he was “as proud of the West as I was of Wales” (27). The equivalence here is cartographic as much as metaphoric: Howells, as a native of Ohio, positions himself to the west of the U.S. eastern 3 

On Howells and the Civil War, see Rennick.

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establishment just as Wales is situated to the west of England, and in both cases, this western perspective allows space for the emergence of a dissenting, democratizing temper. More conceptually, though, Howells uses the notion of ethnic heritage to inscribe in A Hazard of New Fortunes an alternative map of U.S. federal unity. Writing at a time when nonanglophone languages and culture were in widespread use throughout the United States—the state constitution of Ohio was written bilingually in English and Welsh in the 1830s, while a bilingual state constitution was ratified in New Mexico as late as 1912—Howells seeks in Hazard to remap the national grid so that it incorporates, while not smothering, ethnic and regional differences. When Fulkerson emphasizes that the literary magazine he plans to start up with March should have a national reach “from ocean to ocean,” March suggests actually calling it From Sea to Sea, although they eventually settle upon the more prosaic title Every Other Week (4); and the representative conundrum, both for this new journal and for Howells’s novel, is how the urban center where Every Other Week is produced might act as a form of synecdoche for the nation as a whole: “There’s only one city that belongs to the whole country,” says Fulkerson, “and that’s New York” (6). Consequently, Howells deliberately expands the scope of the city in his fictional narrative, inflating the episode where the Marches hunt for an apartment in the city so that the idea of their transgressing New York’s “southern border” (44) comes to appear as risky as moving across the border to Mexico, and talking of how the Bostonian couple established in their minds “an east and west line beyond which they could not go if they wished to keep their self-respect” (47). This is not so much about property values or urban lifestyle as ways in which geography becomes redefined as mental space: Howells uses the word region in unusual ways throughout this novel—talking of how Mrs. March’s house hunting had taken her “out of the region to which she had geographically restricted herself” (52), how March in Greenwich Village “found a lingering quality of pure Americanism in the region” (268), and so on—and this is commensurate with the way Hazard projects New York City as a conglomeration of different nationalities, the United States in microcosm, where the different “regions” of the city betoken not just different groups of U.S. immigrants but also different languages and patriotic affiliations. At various points in the book, March travels to parts of the city that are unfamiliar to him, so as to witness this pattern of “foreign birth” at first hand: March never entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New York is still popularly supposed to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side travels of his what must

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strike every observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant race. If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock out-number the prepotent Celts; and March seldom found his speculation centered upon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of Italians; the blond dulness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians—fire under ice—were aspects that he identified, and that gave him abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth. (162) What is, however, noticeable about A Hazard of New Fortunes is the way the text evokes and revokes ethnic difference simultaneously. For example, describing the Italian chef Frescobaldi, Howells says, “There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional politeness cracking on the Neapolitan’s volcanic surface, and caught a glimpse of the lava fires of the cook’s nature beneath” (292). This double movement is symptomatic of the novel itself, which oscillates between the “surface” and what is “beneath,” between civic affiliation to the United States and loyalty to a deeper ethnic “nature.” The social logic here is one of disavowal, and the artistic logic involves a process of fetishization or substitution, whereby atavistic compulsions are displaced into their mannered corollaries; Howells actually uses the word fetish at one point in the novel, describing Dryfoos as “Fulkerson’s fetish” (188). As a consequence of this process of doubleness, Hazard succeeds in inscribing an America that is built around ethnic and linguistic difference, yet whose cultural logic tends toward integration and national unity. As Else Nettels remarks, Howells generally endorsed the nineteenth-century view that “national or ethnic groups are differentiated by inherited racial traits” (87) and that the signs appertaining to racial difference circulate instinctively: when he first sees Dryfoos, for instance, March observes how he “had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans; and yet March recognized him at once as German” (71). Despite such variations, the whole design of Hazard involves finding some line of perspective that these characters of different regional and ethnic provenances can share. This is why in aesthetic terms A Hazard of New Fortunes is intensely self-referential, highlighting through its portrait of the artist Angus Beaton the kinds of artistic mannerism that Howells reckons to be purely self-indulgent and so redundant in relation to the wider American social canvas. It is also why the novel is so committed to the expression of regional dialect and the foreign pronunciation of English words as a way

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of constructing a hybrid discourse where nationality and foreignness are brought into the same linguistic register.4 “What iss Amergian?” asks Lindau at one point in a speech whose form of pidgin English reflects its dispersive sentiments: “Dere iss no Ameriga anymore” (285). Multilingualism is actually an important theme in the novel, since Lindau, who knows “[f]our or five” languages (128) and is, says March, “a perfect Babel of strange tongues” (132), works as a translator for Every Other Week with the aim of bringing the best from “foreign periodicals” (131) to English readers. The novel’s plot also turns upon a bilingual incident, where at Fulkerson’s dinner party Lindau insults the American capitalist system in German, not realizing that his enemy Dryfoos, whose father was “Pennsylvany Dutch” (404), can also understand German. Marc Shell has commented on how the “German language remained a strong unofficial presence in the United States throughout the nineteenth century” (7), so it is both the implicit visibility and explicit invisibility of German (and other nonanglophone languages) that Hazard mediates. While Amy Kaplan has suggested that the establishment of social boundaries in A Hazard of New Fortunes is designed “to subdue the city’s unsettling foreign forces” and so to “control social difference and conflict” (Social 45, 53), it could perhaps be argued instead that lines of all kinds are drawn in Hazard only for the purposes of being crossed. The book’s very title introduces a discourse of chance, of haphazardness—Dryfoos, we are told, “had been lucky in stocks” (251)—which conflicts with “the scheme of Providence” (31) associated here with old Boston values. Jason Puskar has commented on how “hazard” was also a “recognizable insurance term” by the 1890s (29), and among other things Howells’s novel attempts to reconcile ethical investment with what Puskar calls a “burgeoning culture of indeterminacy” (37), as he investigates what kind of commitments might be made in a modern world that would appear to be dominated increasingly by accident. In line with this intellectual emphasis on contingency, Howells had been friendly since the late 1860s with William James, whom he had known from clubs in Boston; indeed, while Howells shared with Henry James the profession of novelist, he was always closer intellectually to Henry’s brother.5 The two Williams were always sympathetic readers of each other’s work: Howells admired as “distinctly human” William James’s Principles of Psychology, also published in 1890 (Goodman and Dawson 309), while William James himself described A Hazard of New Fortunes as “a great book,” being particularly impressed by “the entire Americanness of it” (Letters 4  For ways in which dialect was often seen as a “more disruptive presence than foreign languages” in nineteenth-century American culture, see G. Jones, Strange Talk 34. 5  On Howells and W. James, see Menand 215–16 and Arac 14–15.

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I: 298). Hazard in fact epitomizes the kind of pragmatist dimension that James was interested in, since its theory of national identity is presented in a provisional and instrumental way, as a specific response to the question of social cohesion rather than as a metaphysical truth. Thus, James’s comment in Pragmatism on how the “actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed” (27) is reflected in the ontological double strands intertwined throughout A Hazard of New Fortunes, whose narrative deliberately conjures up alternative endings and where no textual perspective is allowed to remain undisturbed by its contrary. In his review of Barrett Wendell’s Literary History of America (1901), Howells sharply criticized Wendell’s New England bias and his tendency to assume that U.S. culture was “solely of Puritan origin” (“Professor” 327). A Hazard of New Fortunes self-consciously takes as its circumference the ethnic and geographical diversity of the United States in the generation after the Civil War: Fulkerson takes to March, so he says, “because you’re a Western man; and I’m another” (3), while the Old South is given voice here by Colonel Woodburn, who describes his native region as “a country making gigantic struggles to retrieve its losses” (152). At the same time, these regional variations are superimposed upon the topography of New York, within whose “quality of foreignness” (264), as March observes, “proximity doesn’t count for much” (136) and where people of different extractions jostle up against each other rather than living, as in the more traditional organic model, within discrete communities. New York in Hazard thus encapsulates a new form of modernist geography, where the idea of affiliation becomes a matter of psychological attachment or racial conditioning rather than physical location: referring to Lindau at one point, the narrator talks of “the region of his affection” (402), as if his associative sentiments had been displaced from an external to an internal state. As Brad Evans has observed, Howells as an editor saw Sarah Orne Jewett and other writers of the local-color movement as skillfully bringing into juxtaposition different conceptions of place, so that, rather than simply describing idealized locales, local color sought to align nostalgia and modernity within a complex “transnational network” of spatial aesthetics (777). A Hazard of New Fortunes engages the same dialectic in reverse, since it positions itself within “the metropolis” (152) but then overlays New York City with surrogate regional spaces that attempt to reconstitute the city, as Fulkerson promises, as one “that belongs to the whole country” (6). It is, of course, not difficult to draw attention to aspects of the U.S. national domain omitted entirely from A Hazard of New Fortunes— African American perspectives, the Far West—but, given the novel’s ambition and the intensity of its effort to redescribe regionalism as a

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nationalist phenomenon, it is somewhat surprising the book was received so condescendingly by the American literary establishment in the twentieth century. In an 1890 letter to Howells, Mark Twain, like William James six months later, termed it a “great” book (Letters II: 630); but Richard Chase in 1957 excluded it from his “tradition” of the American novel on the grounds that Howells was a “dull and mediocre” writer (10) who abjured the “power of romance to express dark and complex truths unavailable to realism” (xi). Similarly, Miles Orvell in 1989 classified Howells as an excessively genteel writer stuck at a point only half way between “imitation” and “authenticity,” arguing that his readiness to accept “the limitations imposed by ‘good taste’” (114) impeded his capacity fully to represent modernity. The critical limitation of these approaches lies in their indictment of Howells for failing to conform to a retrospectively imposed idea of what an authentic American tradition should involve, along with a drastically dehistoricized notion of how U.S. national narratives were shaped. For Howells in the 1890s, the utopian impulse of America involved a kind of ethnic federalism rather than nationalistic exceptionalism, a capacity to align old countries with the new continent and to establish U.S. culture through a play of similarities and differences, rather than by projecting a romance of the new nation alone. As in the more explicitly utopian narrative A Traveller from Altruria, published four years after Hazard and a work that is equally analytical of the state of the republic, Howells locates the postbellum American novel in a liminal position between different languages and cultural traditions, seeing its crucial task as to make legible those points of contact and crossover where the nation might cohere. Hazard concludes with an scene of urban violence that recalls the 1886 Haymarket riot in Chicago in support of striking workers, and the more intransigent divisions of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century remain all too apparent here, in the realms of corporate finance and labor relations as much as in ethnic, regional, and language differences. Nevertheless, it was the genius of Howells in this novel to find an aesthetic style commensurate with the intricacies of his pragmatist politics and to develop a mode of realism that reflexively elucidates his country’s opacities while striving toward reconciling its many different factions. Ethnic Palimpsests, National Standards Over the past few years, there has been a concerted attempt to restore the “multilingual” dimensions of American literature, driven by the work of Werner Sollors and Marc Shell at the Longfellow Institute at Harvard and sponsored in part by the European Association for American Stud-

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ies (EAAS), which clearly has a vested interest in redescribing American literature as more than simply and exclusively an anglophone phenomenon.6 This approach is valuable, and, as the number of inhabitants of the United States for whom Spanish is a first language continues to grow in the twenty-first century toward parity with native English speakers, it may well be an opportune time to reconsider the kinds of texts that conventional histories of the subject have chosen to ignore. Yet to imagine, as does Lawrence Rosenwald, that it is merely scholarly prejudice or aberration that has prevented multilingualism becoming an integral part of the field’s institutional narratives—“ordinary ignorance, the way that Americanists are trained, and the failure up to this point of those making the case for non-Anglophone American literatures to make it persuasively and forcefully enough” (156)—is surely to overlook the complex historical pressures that, for better or worse, worked to suppress languages other than English in the period between 1865 and 1945. The consolidation and standardization of the United States after the Civil War led, for example, to the legal suppression of French in Louisiana in 1868, after which time the language could no longer be taught in the state’s secondary schools, while the establishment of monolingualism as U.S. national policy was strengthened around the time of World War I, with former president Theodore Roosevelt declaring in 1917, “We must . . . have but one language. That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence” (Shell 8). The controversial nature of Roosevelt’s agenda at the time was highlighted by the intense debates in the 1910s about how immigration and multilingualism could or should contribute to U.S. national life. In a 1914 book titled The Old World in the New, Edward Alsworth Ross, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a particular favorite of Roosevelt’s, argued that an influx of new immigrants who did not share fundamental American values was damaging to the U.S. body politic. Ross’s book is replete with national typologies—he discusses the proclivity of Slavs for wife beating, while wondering if “[p]erhaps abstractness is another trait of the Jewish mind” (159)—and he concludes that immigrants are in danger of leading the American race to “extinction” (304). Horace M. Kallen, who himself immigrated as a child from Silesia, took issue with Ross’s negative thesis in two essays published in The Nation in February 1915, but the Harvard-educated Kallen did share Ross’s assumption that the myth of “the melting-pot” (218), with its fiction of the systematic assimilation of immigrants into American society, was dead and buried. Instead of this old organicist model, Kallen was 6  EAAS helped underwrite the publication of Sollors’s anthology Multilingual America, which was designated “A Longfellow Institute Book.” Sollors, Multilingual ix.

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interested in exploring U.S. society as a domain for dual citizenship, with English as “a lingua franca, intelligible everywhere” (193), but with immigrants holding on tenaciously to “the spiritual heritage of their nationality” (217). In this sense, argued Kallen, it might be said paradoxically that “Americanization has not repressed nationality. Americanization has liberated nationality” (219). Picking up on Ross’s observation “that on Sundays Norwegian is preached in more churches in America than in Norway” (75–76), Kallen commended initiatives such as “the voting of Irish history into the curriculum of the high schools of Boston” (218). He also sought to redefine the American “Federal republic” as “a democracy of nationalities,” with a “common language” of English, but where “each nationality expresses its emotional and voluntary life in its own language, in its own inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms” (220). Kallen’s notion of a “federal republic” is not dissimilar from Howells’s invocation of a “heterogeneous commonwealth” in A Hazard of New Fortunes (162), and it advocates a different version of U.S. national identity from that we have subsequently become familiar with, one organized more around a process of cross-fertilization than around the idea of an autonomous national culture. Randolph Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America,” which appeared in Atlantic Monthly in July 1916, similarly took for granted “the failure of the ‘melting-pot’” (107) and the need for “the great American democratic experiment” to find other ways of defining “American nationalism” (117), perhaps through some form of “dual citizenship” (120). Writing seventeen months after Kallen, whom he admired (Hegeman 61), Bourne shared with the Jewish-American writer an interest in hybridity and also a reliance on the metaphor of federation. “[T]here is no distinctively American culture,” wrote Bourne (115): “What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature” (117). H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, which first appeared in 1919, made a point of emphasizing how American was a polyglot phenomenon made up of words from many tongues other than English, while the first Cambridge History of American Literature, which was issued in four volumes between 1917 and 1921, included in its final volume two chapters on “Non-English Writings” (T. Pearce 280), more than subsequent versions of the Cambridge History have done. In the 1910s, in other words, the extent to which American literature and culture should (or should not) be seen as exclusively English was a widely debated topic, with the conservative position of Roosevelt and Ross being fiercely contested by the more inclusive politics of Kallen, Bourne, and others. As Neil Smith has written, however, this “first formative moment” of globalization, between 1898 and 1919, was checked in the United States

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by a series of factors that induced America to retreat further from international engagement: the Russian Revolution, labor disquiet and perceived socialist threats at home, and later the rise of fascism in Europe. In 1919, the U.S. Senate rejected participation in the League of Nations, thereby heralding what Smith calls “a deglobalization of sorts” (454) and helping ensure that paradigms of multilingualism and dual citizenship were taken off the public agenda. The passage of the 1924 Immigration Act radically reduced entry to the United States by some 85 percent of what it had been on the eve of World War I (Kerber 737); and by the 1920s, there was a more pronounced emphasis on American literature as a nationalistic endeavor. This was shown by the establishment in 1921 of an “American Literature” section at the Modern Language Association, a group that published its collective manifesto The Reinterpretation of American Literature under the editorship of Norman Foerster in 1928, and by the inaugural issue of the journal American Literature in 1929. Whereas English literature at this time tended more frequently to be defined in relation to philological concerns, American literature positioned itself alongside the developing field of American history as the adumbration of a narrative about the emergence of a nation. Foerster’s own contribution to Reinterpretation lays emphasis on what he takes to be key national themes—the Puritan tradition, the frontier spirit, romanticism, and realism—and it pays special homage to Frederick Jackson Turner, citing Jay B. Hubbell’s observation that Turner had professionally “revolutionized the study of American history” in a way American literature had yet to match (28). Both in his frontier thesis of 1893 and in his later work on sectionalism, where he proposed that a region of the United States was in effect equivalent to the domain of a nation in Europe, Turner argued for the exceptionalist qualities of the American environment and its capacity to alter U.S. cultural experience in profound ways. While Kallen and Bourne were interested in ways of reconfiguring European countries in relation to the American continent, Foerster consequently emphasized instead the transformational qualities of what he called “physical America” (27): “In race and tradition we are fundamentally European,” concluded Foerster, “but our geography is our own, and the consequences of our geography can scarcely be exaggerated” (28). Hubbell’s essay “The Frontier” in Reinterpretation similarly stressed “the part which the frontier has played in the nationalization of our literature,” while also commending the Civil War as a turning point in the development of American literature as a distinct field: The Civil War gave a great impetus to national tendencies in all fields and did much to complete the work left incomplete by the Revolution. .  .  . By abolishing slavery and settling the question of secession, the

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War made the nation a political unit that it had never been before. . . . In antebellum days American literature was little more than an aggregation of sectional literatures; after the War it became national in a sense of the word not applicable before that time. (53–54) Hubbell’s relegation of “sectional” interests to a matter of secondary concern was reinforced in the Great Depression of the 1930s when, as Warren I. Susman notes, references to an “American way of life” first became commonplace (154). This era of burgeoning mass communication overlapped with a new culture of academic professionalization that was easily translated into popular pedagogical terms, with the nationalist focus of American literature ensuring its place even in secondary school curricula (Renker 30). Thus, the notion of the United States constituting a coherent organic unit, which had been declared anachronistic by Bourne in 1916, was given new life by anthropology and other academic activities intent on identifying some kind of transhistorical character for the nation.7 There was, of course, an acknowledgment of internal regional variations, and indeed cultural distinctions during this period were frequently articulated in geographical terms, with the “South” being widely disdained as backward and primitive and the “Midwest” equated spatially with middlebrow culture (Hegeman 134). Nevertheless, the culminating critical work of this period, F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), is characteristic of the late 1930s in its nationalistic emphasis and in its insistence on appropriating historical figures as resources for a progressive political agenda. The “rebirth” of Matthiessen’s title consequently carries a triple connotation: not only translating the English Renaissance into an American nineteenth-century equivalent, so as to boost the cultural status of the latter, but also revivifying the utopian dimensions of transcendentalism as a counterpart and correlative to the communitarian ethos of Popular Front and New Deal politics in the 1930s. In the way he seeks to collapse chronology and make all time analogous to itself, Matthiessen thus imitates discursively the Emersonian strain that he writes about. Matthiessen was, of course, also party during the interwar years to Foerster’s project of academic professionalization, particularly in the way he sought to establish writers such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville as totemic figures in the pantheon of American literature. It is, to be sure, easy enough to discuss modernism in terms of its formal characteristics and thus to see it, as Rebecca Walkowitz does, extending in a much wider temporal arc from Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie. It is also possible to question modernism’s “periodizing” characteristics 7  On the influence of academic anthropology on conceptions of American culture in the 1930s, see Hegeman 126–27, 169.

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by noting how it circulated in different ways through different parts of the world: Susan Stanford Friedman argues it is only a “Eurocentric” perspective that would identify the end point of modernism as 1945 and that, in modernism’s new global geographies, its cultural traffic continues long after this date (427). It is also true that nearly every American writer from the first half of the twentieth century is susceptible of being usefully reinterpreted from a transnational perspective. Anita Patterson has argued recently for the repositioning of Langston Hughes within “an extensive transnational literary network” encompassing André Malraux, Bertholt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, and others (94); but the same thing is largely true of any U.S. writer of this time one might name: they were all caught up in literature as a multilateral endeavor. None of this, however, changes the political pressures toward cultural homogeneity or the institutional pressures toward academic professionalization that framed the conditions within which such writers were read and understood in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Robert Frost’s comment in a copy of North of Boston inscribed to Régis Michaud in 1918 about how he was “as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art” (693) did not, of course, mean that he sought to disregard the influence upon his work of non-Americans such as Thomas Hardy or Edward Thomas; rather, Frost saw his task as to translate global and classical cultural forms into a specifically American idiom. The idiosyncrasy of this nationalistic approach lies in the way it incorporates geography itself as a mode of allegory, promoting the American environment as the source of its own intrinsic meaning and value. “Description without Place”: Stevens, Stein, and Modernist Geographies The structural dimensions of American modernism have often been obscured by a utopian critical discourse running in parallel to the utopian designs of modernism itself, which has effectively masked ways in which the latter was framed by specific social and historical conditions. Thus, Peter Gay commends modernism for its “heresy” without acknowledging how such iconoclasm was itself shaped dialectically by the pressures of totalitarian politics, Marshall Berman romantically celebrates modernism as an expression of the dematerializing “modern spirit” (313), while Harold Bloom designates Wallace Stevens the heir to forms of American poetic transcendentalism extending back through Emerson and Whitman. Yet the material condition of place is essential to many Stevens poems, even if typically the poem’s title, apparently signaling the pres-

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ence of a geographical location within a particular work, is found to be abstract or nondescriptive. This is the burden of works such as “In the Carolinas,” “Fabliau of Florida,” “Academic Discourse at Havana,” “Loneliness in Jersey City,” “Of Hartford in a Purple Light,” and many others; what these poems characteristically draw our attention to is not Jersey City or Hartford as we might recognize it in a photograph, but a more elliptical consideration of relationships between human perception and the object in space. “Description without Place” thus depicts the act of representation as nonempirical, “a sight indifferent to the eye” (343), a process that turns more on the play in our minds between “expectation” and “reality” (344).8 This poem was originally written for Phi Beta Kappa ceremonies at Harvard in 1945, when Stevens shared the platform with a former under secretary of state; and, as Alan Filreis has noted, despite its apparent exclusion of topical references, “Description without Place” in fact contextualizes the specificity of its environment through the way it seeks overtly to “depoliticize” it (58), redescribing America as an imaginative rather than merely as a flat spatial phenomenon. This also fits with Stevens’s remarks, in a letter to Henry Church just before writing this poem, on the “vital” nature of “the idea that we live in the description of the place and not in the place itself,” a conception that, as Jacqueline Vaught Brogan notes (87), may have been suggested to him by maps published in the New Republic and other journals in 1944 and 1945 envisaging various possible permutations for national frontiers in postwar Europe.9 In this sense, location itself becomes for Stevens in “Description without Place” a “golden vacancy” (339), postulating as its corollary a hypothetical Platonism within which visible scenes or shifting boundaries serve only to interrupt the point where an abstract idea of “being” (341) might be incarnated. Hollowing out the more instrumental apparatus of cartography while at the same time aligning it with the language of metaphor, “Description without Place” prides itself on the affiliation of national identity with poetic rhetoric: “The invention of a nation in a phrase” (345). What this means is that Stevens’s geographical locations tend always toward a condition of allegorization, even if the allegory appears partially obscure and the poem itself to resist a condition of complete lucidity. Frederick M. Dolan found such a process of “self-allegorization” in American culture to be typical of the “interpretative problematic” (2) contingent upon “the absence of a legitimating or reliable foundational All page references to poems by Stevens are taken from his Collected Poems. One such map of Eastern Europe in the New Republic (January 8, 1945) also noted how “Hitler’s own Germany follows the limits of the old German Empire before 1648” (Brogan 87). 8  9 

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discourse” (5), and certainly in Stevens the quest for “metaphysical allegory” (2) is intimately associated with what Dolan calls the epistemological “problem of acting without grounds” (5). “The Idea of Order at Key West” is perhaps the most obvious example of this, since the resort of Key West, Florida, is imperfectly apotheosized by the subliminally evocative connotations of the title’s two mythically resonant words, “Key” and “West”; the potential disjunction or comically incongruous nature of the relationship between spirit and landscape would be much more obvious if the poem had been called, for instance, “The Idea of Order at Brownsville, Texas.” In his Collected Poems, Stevens followed “The Idea of Order at Key West” with “The American Sublime,” and this process of ordering testifies to his desire to irradiate the geography of the United States with higher meaning. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” similarly evokes in brilliant fashion a Neoplatonic spirit playing itself out in everyday life, chronicling ways in which myth and imagination transform what this poem calls “The vulgate of experience.” Again, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” rotates on a kind of oxymoronic structure, through which geography is half suppressed but half visible, as the Connecticut citizens conduct their quotidian rituals in “the metaphysical streets of the physical town” (472). The poem thus addresses the influence of a particular environment on how a people sees, with its force deriving from the way it transliterates aesthetically “the never-ending meditation” (465) whereby geography takes on an internalized “mythological form” (466). The prismatic qualities of Stevens’s language here reflect a world in which “shade” and “solid” systematically traverse each other, and in this sense his poems are creatively haunted by things they illuminate but do not quite bring into full focus. It is precisely this tantalizing quality that makes up their environmental specificity, their sense of being, as the author proprietorially puts it in the title of another work, the “Poems of Our Climate” (193). In this sense, William Carlos Williams’s argument with Stevens about the role of place in American poetry can be seen as a disagreement about how, rather than whether, representations of geographical space should be conceptualized. Williams was particularly incensed by “Description without Place,” which he saw as a personal attack on his own poetic idiom of local attachment (Filreis 182), but Fredric Jameson aptly observes that “Stevens’ only content, from the earliest masterpieces of Harmonium all the way to the posthumous Rock, is landscape.” Jameson goes on to remark how this “culturally marked geography” is part of a “historical specificity” that Stevens seeks to “repress” in his work, for fear that it would “undermine his remarkably self-contained or autonomous aesthetic vision” (“Wallace Stevens” 11–12); but again this kind of repression is only half repression. Rather than eliminating geography, Stevens’s poems

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oscillate between a symbolic sublime and spatial contingency, between place and the difficulties of appropriating it metaphorically. Much of what Michael Bell has called “the metaphysics of Modernism” involved a dialectic between surface and depth—the Wittgensteinian conundrum of being “profoundly superficial, in understanding the limits of what could be said” (19)—and Stevens’s poetry dramatizes in aesthetic form this yearning of language for a “rock” of reality. There are times, particularly in his earlier poems—“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” or “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” for instance—where Stevens’s idiom tends more toward that of surrealism, a style characterized by Peter Nicholls as placing emphasis on the act of interpretation rather than any metaphysical vision, and, consequently, on the act of making desire “legible” (288). American modernism between the wars enjoyed a tetchy relationship with surrealism, since the latter’s determined materialism was generally antipathetic to the American quest allegorically to incarnate the native land. For example, photographer Alfred Stieglitz—whose three code words, as Wanda Corn remarked, were “American,” “soil,” and “spirit” (31)—disparaged Marcel Duchamp’s iconoclastic readymades as the work of a foreigner and temporary resident who could not be expected fully to empathize with the aspirations of the country’s new art forms. The “Map of the World” produced by the surrealists in 1929, where the size of countries was related to their cultural significance, idiosyncratically omitted the continental United States altogether, expanding Alaska and Mexico while leaving a vacant space on the map in between (figure 11); and this sense of the United States as endemically hostile to the more ironic dimensions of surrealism has distinctively shaped the ways American literature of the modernist period has been categorized. J. H. Matthews has written of how active collaboration between painters and writers was always a feature of surrealist activity (240), and it would certainly make as much sense to consider Stevens’s poems alongside the work of visual artists rather than merely in relation to the strains of gnosis or transcendentalism.10 Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) is perhaps the poem of this era that most overtly remaps the time and space of America according to a logic of parataxis, juxtaposing different aspects of the national experience so as to inscribe a surreal view of American legend whose inspiration is bound up with its manifold forms of comic incongruity.11 Crane was berated when the poem first appeared for failing to accommodate what Allen Tate ponderously called the more “objective pattern” of American cultural tradition (315), but Tate’s critique simply implies how an idealist temper, linked at some level to Christian and other religious sensibilities, 10  On the surrealist “Map of the World,” see D. Wood 183. For a relatively unconventional, more materialist discussion of Stevens in relation to the visual arts, see Altieri 321–58. 11  On The Bridge’s indebtedness to surrealism, see Giles, Hart Crane 134–62.

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Figure 11.  Surrealist “Map of the World” (1929) from Variétés magazine.

tended restrictively to circumscribe the intellectual horizons of American modernism. David Harvey describes the “heroic” phase of modernism after 1920 as “a dogged fight of the universalist against localist sensibility within the arena of cultural production” (Condition 279), but what we find in the putatively surreal narratives of Stevens and Crane are textual mediations between sublime aspiration and desublimated matter, with the poems’ local geographies working as a form of disorientation as much as apotheosis. At the time of his death in 1932, Crane was planning what he called a “blank verse tragedy of Aztec mythology” focused around “Cortes and Montezuma” (Letters 276, 390), a work that would have placed U.S. cultural history alongside that of Mexico, regarded by André Breton as the surrealist country par excellence (Wollen 88). One curious thing about Stevens and Crane is how twentieth-century critical narratives sought assiduously to bring them into line with a American romantic teleology that would associate the national idea with a spirit of place, thereby largely overlooking the more surreal dimensions through which both poets balanced off such transcendental leanings against manifestly inchoate phenomena, within which the dynamics of space retained more opaque qualities. The symbiotic equation in the 1930s between U.S. national identity and cultural geography was epitomized by the publication in 1938 of John Dos Passos’s USA, whose projection of the country as contiguous in space foregrounded the question, as Michael Denning put it, “Along what parallel can one chart a map of the continent, the nation?” (Cultural 169). Dos Passos’s specific interest in environmental determinism

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is highlighted by his epigraph to the first edition of The 42nd Parallel (1930), the first novel in the USA trilogy, where the author quotes from a book purportedly by E. W. Hodgins called American Climatology: “These general storms have been a subject of inexhaustible interest in all American meteorological research. . . . [T]hese storms follow three paths or tracks from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean of which the central tracing roughly corresponds with the 42nd parallel of latitude” (ix). Though Dos Passos gives the place and date of publication here as “Chicago, 1865,” there is in fact no evidence that Hodgins or his book ever existed; but while this epigraph may anticipate the way Dos Passos intermingles fact and fiction later in the novel, it does underline his specific interest in accommodating geographical narratives within his work.12 The dust jacket of this first edition of The 42nd Parallel similarly displayed a map of the United States marked with lines of latitude and longitude, though both epigraph and dust jacket were lost when the book was republished as part of the USA trilogy eight years later. Donald Pizer has also shown how, in an early plan for 1919, the second volume in this sequence, Dos Passos constructed a chart titled “Geography of Nineteen Nineteen,” which depicted Paris as a hub with spokes linking it to New York, Rome, Constantinople, and Alsace (97). Again, the interest here is in portraying an interdependent world, where what happens in one location simultaneously impacts the fates of others. In USA itself, there is, as Orvell put it, “a ticker-tape sameness to the lives, as they move on their plotted ups and downs across the geography of the states and Europe” (264). Dos Passos’s great theme is the new contiguity of near and far, the way in which distant events shape local contingencies; in this sense, his work takes issue directly with pastoral theories of mimesis within which enclosed communities might shut themselves away from the wider world. Dos Passos’s theory of realism, integrating as it does the techniques of popular journalism and mass culture, would not have been possible without the developments in interwar technology that disseminated radio, film, and photojournalism far and wide throughout the continent and helped define in the 1930s the idea of national values in both a corporate and a communitarian sense, as politicians of all parties began appealing to what Michael Kammen calls “vaguely formulated American traditions” (464). This sense of national identification was bolstered also by rapid developments in commercial geography, with 12  No author of this name or book of this title appears in the catalog of either the Library of Congress or the British Library, although there were several books around the time of Hodgins’s pseudowork on a similar theme: for example, Lorin Blodget’s Climatology of the United States, and of the Temperate Latitudes of the North American Continent (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857).

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trade between different sections of the country growing quickly as better lines of communication were established. Mass production of maps of the United States had begun in earnest during the 1870s, shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, with the national appetite for atlases being enhanced by the rapid growth of railroads in the 1880s; but by the early years of the twentieth century, advances in radio, telegraph, and telephone technology had fundamentally reoriented ways in which time and space in the United States were measured and understood.13 World War I also helped bring into public consciousness the idea of a world that was mutually interconnected, while the National Geographic Society, founded in 1888, had (largely through the popularity of its journal, the National Geographic) attracted one million members in the United States by 1926 (Schulten 149). The other major technological innovation of the interwar years that affected the construction of national space was air travel; after the pioneering flights of the Wright brothers in 1903, it took about a quarter of a century before passenger air travel became a regular feature of life in the United States. Transcontinental air-mail services were in place by 1920, but it was not until Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927 that aviation really caught the popular imagination, with the first scheduled transatlantic service between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts inaugurated in May 1929. By 1938, there were over three million passengers on American airlines annually. Writers of the 1920s were interested in what was sometimes called “the Aerial Age” (A. Douglas 434): Lindbergh was widely admired for what Edmund Wilson in 1927 called his “thorough mastery of a new medium, a complete, sure, and unostentatious virtuosity” (258), while the “Cape Hatteras” section of Crane’s The Bridge takes its title from the North Carolina location of the first experiments with flight by “the Wright windwrestlers” (90). However, the sense of how regular air travel, rather than aeronautical pioneering, enters into the country’s collective imagination is not really seen in American literature until The Last Tycoon, the novel left unfinished by F. Scott Fitzgerald at his death in 1940.14 The extant narrative, as told by Cecelia Brady, locates itself in terms of aviation from the beginning: “The world from an airplane I knew. Father always had us travel back and forth that way from school and college” (3). When on its way to California her plane is forced to put down in Nashville beOn the reorientation of time and space between 1880 and 1918, see Kern. Since, of course, the novel was never published in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, there have been scholarly disputes over the most appropriate title for it. Matthew J. Bruccoli, having consulted the author’s drafts and plans, makes a case for “The Love of the Last Tycoon,” but The Last Tycoon is the title this work has become most commonly known by. 13  14 

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cause of bad weather, Cecelia describes how the passengers are regarded with “watchful incredulity” by those on the ground: “In the big transcontinental planes we were the coastal rich, who casually alighted from our cloud in mid-America” (8). This anticipates the book’s themes of class, wealth, and ways in which the corporate powers of Hollywood maintain their hold on the hearts and minds of the Midwest: movie producer Monroe Stahr, the “last tycoon” of the title, says he knows what Middle America wants to see in “an hour and twenty-five minutes on the screen” (40), and there are discussions here of how much money the film Rainy Day has “grossed” in Des Moines, St. Louis, and Kansas City (35). Just as the narrative voice of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is haunted by boyhood memories of “the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad” (136–37) that lie outside the book’s New York orbit—indeed, Carraway ultimately describes Gatsby as “really a story of the West, after all” (137)—so The Last Tycoon is haunted by what Cecelia in her flight across America calls “the endless desert and . . . the table-lands” of the Midwest (18), where Hollywood pictures play in many different towns and cities and where the West Coast industry acts as repository for the dreams of the nation as a whole. This process of internal colonization is epitomized by Stahr’s remark to Kathleen Moore about geographical domination—“Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it—I always wanted one when I was a boy” (81)— and by ways in which the novel focuses on how new technologies such as telephones and dictographs are helping facilitate and disseminate the might of the Hollywood imperium. When Cecelia’s plane lands in Nashville, three of the passengers take a cab ride to the mansion of Andrew Jackson, president of the United States from 1829 to 1837, and Mitchell Breitwieser has made the intriguing suggestion that perhaps “Fitzgerald meant us to see Jackson as the first tycoon—not a businessman, but a charismatic and unorthodox Westerner who marshalled broad-spectrum appeal independently from established elites, creating in the process the economic domain in which subsequent tycoons down to Stahr would flourish” (“Jazz” 373). In this sense, The Last Tycoon might be said to encompass elegiacally the long century, from the 1830s to the 1930s, when the shape of the U.S. national domain was being created and consolidated, thereby integrating the continental country, as Stahr seeks to do, into a homogeneous and orderly state. Many of Fitzgerald’s metaphors in The Last Tycoon associate Stahr with flight—“He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings when he was young” (20)—and the plan of the novel, appropriately enough, involved Stahr ultimately being killed in an airplane accident (Bruccoli xxxiii). Yet it was one of the paradoxes of what George T. Renner in 1943 called “the Air Age” that, as well as consolidating national geog-

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raphy, aviation also served ultimately to destabilize it. Renner talked of how air travel had integrated Alaska and other distant regions more thoroughly within the U.S. national body and so helped create “‘a more perfect union’ on our continent” (121); but he also assessed the impact of “a new world geography” (1) in which, according to the charts of air navigation, Seattle was as close to Norway as was Washington DC, and Washington DC considerably closer to Moscow than to Buenos Aires. Renner’s point was that this “new world” should be seen as “monospheric” rather than “hemispheric” (22) and that, according to the logic of the polar maps used for air travel, areas of the world that seemed very distant from each other on the flat, Mercator projections were suddenly brought into alarming proximity (figure 12). The context for Renner’s intervention—it was a book “Prepared with the Coöperation of the Civil Aeronautics Administration” (iii)—was World War II, when it became important for American politicians to convince a reluctant people that its “national habit of isolationism” (157) was no longer a valid option in a situation where “ocean-based geography” was “obsolescent” (183), where no community could consider itself immune from aerial bombardment, and where traditional distinctions between civilian and soldier had consequently been weakened. Whereas Arnold Guyot in the nineteenth century—cited by Renner in his book (58)—regarded American geography in an exceptional and providential light, Renner himself reoriented the United States in relation to “routes” and zones of transit (128), arguing that Americans, who had (unlike the technologically sophisticated Germans and Japanese) always “neglected geography” (3), needed to wise up quickly to “the three-dimensional world of aviation” (2), so as not to leave the country “dangerously unprotected” (1). Frank Capra also used images of polar maps in his Why We Fight sequence of propaganda films made for the U.S. government during World War II, one of which opens with a map of the United States that pans out to become a map of the world, as if again to critique the validity of the popular isolationist sentiment: “No Foreign Entanglements.” The airplane was also used by Gertrude Stein as an emblem of modernity in her 1938 book on Pablo Picasso, where she associated “lines of cubism” with aeronautical perspectives that, so she claimed, painters such as Picasso and Georges Braque had intuited as characteristic of the “twentieth century”: But the earth seen from an airplane is something else. So the twentieth century is not the same as the nineteenth century and it is very interesting knowing that Picasso has never seen the earth from an airplane that being of the twentieth century he inevitably knew that the earth is not the same as in the nineteenth century, he knew it, he made it, inevitably

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Figure 12. “A north pole–centered map best shows relationships in an aeronautical world” from George T. Renner, Human Geography in the Air Age (1943).

he made it different, and what he made is a thing that now all the world can see. When I was in America, I for the first time travelled pretty much all the time in an airplane and when I looked at the earth, I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane. I saw there, on the earth, the mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves, I saw the simple solutions of Braque, I saw the wandering lines of Masson, yes I saw and once more I knew that a creator is contemporary, he understands what is contemporary when the contemporaries do not yet know it. . . . (533) Stein refers here to her trip back to the United States in 1934, when she took her first airplane ride to see a performance in Chicago of her opera Four Saints in Three Acts. In a 1931 essay, William Carlos Williams similarly likened Stein’s own abstract prose style to “the United States viewed

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from an airplane,” though Williams was less sympathetic to what he saw as the characteristic features of these new vistas, finding in Stein “the same senseless repetitions, the endless multiplication of toneless words” (“Work” 119). What is perhaps most crucial here is not so much the image of the airplane itself but the way Stein associates aesthetic form with historical periodization, regarding both visual and verbal art as the product of the environment from which it emanates. In a concomitant sense, Stein was temperamentally invested in war as both an emblem of modernity and a marker of temporal division. She considered the American Civil War the most important event in the nineteenth century, even going so far as to remark in Brewsie and Willie, her book about World War II veterans, that she herself “was always in my way a Civil War veteran” (778). In Wars I Have Seen (1945), Stein describes the Civil War as “the prototype of all the wars the two big wars that I have completely lived” (8), the event that brought the United States prematurely into the twentieth century through its emphasis on processes of mechanization and industrial production. Wars I Have Seen also charts the idea of war as repetition—Stein says she herself has “seen three. The Spanish–American war, the first world war, and now the second world war” (4)—and these historical repetitions match the syntactic repetitions that form the basis of her distinctive style. In her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein herself defined this mode of repetition as “insistence” (288), a process through which speech intonations always make the same word different, thereby enhancing the stress upon a continuous present; but, particularly in her late work, the sense of history as repetition, as variations on a theme, is profound. In this way, the cyclic patterns of world conflict in Wars I Have Seen appear to endorse Stein’s recursive modernist idiom: “And so there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again” (72). This book also tracks assiduously the modernizing aspects of armed conflict, describing the Boer War as “the first shot fired at the nineteenth century” (37), classifying the Spanish–American War as “completely nineteenth century” because “there was nothing but the question of sea power” (39) but describing World War II as “undoubtedly a twentieth century war” (164), in part because of its reliance on the new medium of radio as a focal point for national identification: “in this war it is the heading of the broadcast that makes national life so complete and determined” (156). President Roosevelt in February 1942 asked Americans to buy a map of the world so they would be able to follow the wartime strategy he planned to announce in his radio broadcast the following week (Schulten 204), and one of “the real most important things about war,” wrote

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Stein in Wars I Have Seen, was “the making geography come alive” (152), lending different sections of the world map a sense of urgency they tended to lack in peacetime. Another benefit of war, as far as Stein was concerned, was the way it enhanced national identification. Just as war in her view turned upon cycles of repetition, so it was part of Stein’s philosophy that nationality was immutable: “Germans are as they are and French and Greeks and Chinamen and Japs. There is nothing afterward but confirmation confirmation of what you knew, because nobody changes, they may develop but they do not change” (8). (That repetition of “confirmation” reemphasizes syntactically the sense of preordination she evokes here.) The question of “naturalization” is thus dismissed by Stein as “foolishness completely,” since “nobody not born in a country has really the ultimate feeling of that country” (131). Thus, she continues: Citizenship is a right of birth and should remain so. . . . I have lived in France the best and longest part of my life and I love France and the French but after all I am an American, and it always does come back to that I was born there, and one’s native land is one’s native land you cannot get away from it and only the native sons and daughters should be citizens of the country and that is all there is to it. (131–32) This is a troubling logic, but it is one that remains entirely consistent throughout Stein’s work. Wars I Have Seen ends with the American liberation of France on September 1, 1944, with Stein, in another paean to repetition, remarking on how it is “wonderful . . . to have been intimate and friendly and proud of two American armies in France apart only by twenty-seven years” (247). Responding to a question about whether the Americans have “changed,” she says, “no what could they change to except to be American” (249). One consequence of this essentializing logic is the way Stein redefines American geography as dissociated from mere cartographic markers. As Jessica Berman has observed, Stein’s The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936) is an “alternative geographical treatise” (177–78) that effectively rewrites works by Ellen Churchill Semple, president of the Association of American Geographers in the first years of the twentieth century, who published American History and Its Geographic Conditions and other accounts of environmental determinism.15 In her chapter “The Geography of the Civil War,” for example, Semple described the “question of slavery in the United States” as “primarily a question of climate and soil,” where 15  Semple’s classic work was originally published in 1903, but a revised and updated edition appeared in 1933, three years before Stein’s Geographical History.

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the “geographical conditions” of southern plantations were significant “factors in the formation of ethical standards” (282). Stein moves deliberately beyond this to encompass a more complex relationship between mind and matter, insisting that one can be American in France (or anywhere else) because a country becomes a state of being rather than just a physical situation, but she shares with Semple a sense of how American history is intertwined inextricably with its geography. Other short pieces by Stein from the 1920s—“Wherein the South Differs from the North,” “Wherein Iowa Differs from Kansas and Indiana”—play with binary oppositions between different geographical entities, and they testify again to Stein’s intellectual interest in group relations and family resemblances. This is exemplified also by her 1935 lecture “What Is English Literature,” where she categorizes “English literature when it is directly and completely describing the daily island life beginning with Chaucer and going on to now” as having a “complete quality of completeness” (203). For Stein, this endows English literature with a discrete identity that differentiates it entirely from what she describes as the “disconnecting” mode of American literature, which involves “breaking the paragraph down” (222). These forms of typology are commensurate as well with Stein’s interest in primitivism, in the dialectic between personality and impersonality, and in modernist artists such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Cézanne who were attempting to eliminate the inessential and to represent in their music or painting the gravity of the archetypal. Stein in her own time was widely admired as an innovative writer, with support for her work among African American writers such as Claude McKay and W.E.B. Du Bois being particularly pronounced. Her skill in recording the rhythms of African American speech, especially in works such as Three Lives, shows again her commitment to representing in fiction the force of that abstraction by which she was so excited in the visual arts: Stein, like Cézanne, wanted to classify types rather than paint surfaces. Yet this clearly serves to situate her work within a modernist framework that incorporates its own historical specificity: just as Stein was an enthusiast for the periodization of cultures, so her own work is most illuminating when properly periodized. Her association of citizenship exclusively with a “right of birth” and peremptory dismissal of the idea of “naturalization” as “foolishness” (Wars 131) brings her uncomfortably close in outlook to the Nazis, for whom national identity was similarly a blood relation, and this raises the awkward question posed by Linda Mizejewski, one she said in 1992 it had taken “forty years” for historians to ask: “not about how different the Nazi is but how similar” (32). The Nazi ideal of the sanctity of the race and intuitive blood affiliation was, in fact, a familiar part of modernist ideology, evident in different ways

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among the writings of D. H. Lawrence as well as the work of more obvious fascist fellow travelers such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.16 This is not to point accusatory fingers but merely to acknowledge how the idea of racial purity was a common and constitutive part of much modernist thinking, as Walter Benn Michaels has demonstrated in Our America, where he discusses how the “identitarianism” of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams involved a principled commitment to the idea of “the American” as a nativist point of origin (83). Stein herself, for whom German had been her first language at home, notoriously suggested in a 1934 article for the New York Times Magazine that “Hitler ought to have the [Nobel] peace prize . . . because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace” (Warrenparis 9). Perhaps, as Linda Wagner-Martin has argued, this was meant as an “ironic” suggestion (225), but Stein apparently continued to champion Hitler’s cause to the Nobel committee as late as 1938, and the disconcerting truth is that at this time Stein shared with Hitler a belief in the idea of national autonomy based on birthright. Stein herself lived untroubled in France during the years of German occupation, and in a 1940 essay, she wrote positively of the appointment as France’s chief of state of Nazi collaborator Henri Philippe Pétain, comparing him to George Washington, while urging the Atlantic Monthly to publish speeches by Pétain that she herself had translated into English. Stein also maintained a friendship with Bernard Faÿ, who headed France’s Bibliothèque Nationale during the Pétain era, and, according to Wagner-Martin, she often discussed with Faÿ “the Fűhrer’s qualities of greatness.” Indeed, even after the liberation of France, Stein wrote a legal deposition on Faÿ’s behalf, assuring the court of the “patriotic intent” of all Faÿ’s wartime activities (WagnerMartin 225, 265). It is true that Stein was also involved during the war in various resistance activities centered around the literary journal Confluences, which began publishing in Lyon in 1941. Moreover, in her last novel, Mrs. Reynolds, written between 1940 and 1942, she caricatures Adolf Hitler as Angel Harper, “a dictator” (17) who embodies the prophecy of “Saint Odile, a saint of the seventh century” and patron saint of Alsace, about “the terror in forests and mountains where the Germans shall be called the most war-like people of the earth” (33). Again, Stein curiously emulates Hitler’s own proclivity toward self-mythologization in the way she 16  On the relationship between fascism and modernism in Anglo-American literature, see Giles, Atlantic 171–244.

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displaces her narrative from a political to an archetypal level, concluding in the epilogue, “There is nothing historical about this book except the state of mind” (267). It is not at all the intention here to suggest that Stein was in any simple sense a Nazi sympathizer, but she herself recognized how the fascist movement overlapped in complicated and at times confusing ways with modernist agendas; and one of the most disturbing things about the outbreak of war as far as she was concerned was how it appeared to signal the end of the larger modernist project, since the popularizing impulse of fascism had clearly ratcheted up the stakes of nativism to an untenable, and indeed horrific, level. From our safely retrospective perspective, of course, it is bizarre to think of Stein, a Jew and a lesbian, as having any kind of intellectual affinity with the Nazi regime, but this simply testifies to our incapacity to appreciate the obdurately alien quality of early twentieth-century modernism. Later in the same New York Times article where she championed Hitler, Stein remarked on how she favored a relaxation of “the stringent immigration laws in America today” so as to admit “the stimulation of new blood,” although, entirely characteristically, she also said there “is no reason why we should not select our immigrants with greater care, nor why we should not bar certain peoples and preserve the color line, for instance” (Warrenparis 23). Andreas Huyssen has written of the “depoliticization” of modernism in the United States after World War II so as to realign it with the “conservative liberalism” of those times (169), and the highly partial critical reception of Stein’s work after her death in 1946 demonstrates precisely this kind of institutional process at work. The sanitizing and commodification of modernism during the 1950s, the eagerness to canonize works of art and celebrate them for their qualities of formal innovation, have served to obscure ways in which the avant-garde aspects of modernism were interwoven with radical visions of “social and political transformation,” in Huyssen’s phrase (169), that became deeply unpalatable, and indeed publicly off limits, after 1945. The project of French existentialism in the late 1940s was designed specifically to repudiate the modes of preordination locked into Stein’s rejection of identity as a volitional construction, and this foreshadowed the more general sense of rupture through which modernist ethics and aesthetics quickly became eviscerated after the collapse of fascism. This is not to deny Stein’s technical brilliance or the power of her artistic imagination but to suggest that her stylistic logic of essentialism needs to be understood intellectually as a historical phenomenon, rather like (for example) Immanuel Kant’s egotistical sublime. As Zygmunt Bauman has written, the idea of “modernity” was predicated on a general notion of the rationality and integrity of nations (56), and in this sense modernity and racism effectively helped make each other possible. What

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T. J. Clark has called the “purism” of the modernist imagination (407) is reflected in Stein’s impulse to strip away layers of superfluity and to represent the object in its most essential, pure form. Unlike the surrealists, for whom race was a contingent external marker, Stein conceived of race as a form of metaphysical identity and geography itself as an allegory of nationalism. Displacing the geography of the United States from its cartographic parameters, Stein embedded it instead within a psychology of nativism. Hence, to talk, as Jessica Berman does, of Stein’s “nomadic cosmopolitanism” and to link her “inscription” of community (197) with Homi K. Bhabha’s argument about the construction of nationalism as a narrative process (3) appear misleadingly anachronistic, a way of trying sentimentally to bring Stein into conformity with post-1945 liberal assumptions. The hardness and opacity of Stein’s work do not really allow scope for multicultural hybridity, and the same thing is true to a greater or lesser extent of many American writers in the period between 1865 and 1945, who were intent on establishing the contours of the newly reconstructed nation. For Howells in the years after the sectional fissures of the U.S. Civil War, as for Stevens and Fitzgerald writing in the shadow of World War I, the intellectual challenge of being an American writer involved finding ways to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of national space within an allegorical circumference where the geography of the nation would embody its redemptive spirit.

C HAPTER 4

Suburb, Network, Homeland: National Space and the Rhetoric of Broadcasting

“Voice of America”: Roth, Morrison, DeLillo In the second half of the twentieth century, the conceptual visibility of space within American culture changed considerably, with Edward W. Soja in Postmodern Geographies (1989) arguing for “the reassertion of a critical spatial perspective in contemporary social theory” (2). The contribution of geographers such as Soja and David Harvey was to restore what Harvey called a “geographical materialism” (Condition 359) to sublimated forms of institutional cartography, thereby revealing ways in which modernist notions of hermeneutic and topographic centers, which were particularly prevalent between the world wars, encompassed hierarchical claims about authority that their purported transcendence of spatial dimensions tended silently to occlude.1 Such hierarchies had formed a basis for the idealization of the city as a privileged site for modern art and architecture in the 1920s and, conversely, the representation of the American Midwest as banal and culturally stifling in the work of Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and countless other writers. It also fed into the idea, common in the 1950s and 1960s, of the suburb as a bastion of conformity existing in a culturally subordinate relationship to the intellectually vibrant metropolis (Jurca 3–6). However, taking their cue from Foucault’s admission in 1976 that space had heretofore been “treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile”—unlike time, said Foucault, which had been seen intellectually as “richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (70)—a new generation of cultural geographers in the last decades of the twentieth century set about restoring the spatial dynamics inherent within American culture, understanding such dynamics to be a conceptual correlative to the more general transition from a modern to a postmodern state. The purpose of this chapter is to trace how these spatial dimensions have been represented in a cluster of famous U.S. authors born within five years of each other—Toni Morrison in 1931, John Updike in 1932, Philip Roth in 1933, Don DeLillo in 1936—and to contrast this with the perspectives of a younger generation, in particular 1  On the way in which American geopolitical power in the twentieth century defined itself through more abstract forms of geography, see N. Smith 17.

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those of David Foster Wallace (born 1962) and Dave Eggers (born 1970). I shall use the evolution of electronic networks—radio, television, and Internet—to chart how these various writers have positioned themselves differently in relation to national space. The emphasis on a need for social and cultural cartography, what Fredric Jameson referred to as an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” (Postmodernism 54), has become so familiar in recent years that Marjorie Perloff accused Jameson’s matrix of “late capitalism” of being a merely “axiomatic” model, operating as reductively for contemporary analysis of postmodern culture as did the “Great Chain of Being” for Renaissance studies during the 1950s (“Empiricism” 126). There is, of course, always a danger of excessively mechanistic frameworks, and Perloff was right to be skeptical about the value of such broad categories as “closure” or “spatialization” to distinguish modern from postmodern art (“Modernist” 172). At the same time, Eudora Welty’s assertion, in her 1955 lecture “Place in Fiction,” that “fiction depends for its life on place” and that writing is the least likely of all the arts “to cut the cord that binds it to its source” (783), appeared thoroughly dated by the end of the twentieth century. Welty’s notion that “place has enshrined the spirit” (787) was predicated on the notion of what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in 1974 called a special “affective bond between people and place or setting” or “topophilia” (4). The preface to the second edition of Tuan’s book starts with an account of himself as a Chinese immigrant arriving in California to start graduate student life at Berkeley and coming across the sun rising over Death Valley National Monument, a scene “of such unearthly beauty that I felt transported to a supernal realm and yet, paradoxically, also at home, as though I had returned after a long absence” (xi). This is to attribute to place a putatively spiritual and mythic dimension and also one grounded firmly in anthropocentric perspectives: Tuan argues that “[a]ll human beings share common perceptions, a common world, by virtue of possessing similar organs” (5), and he remarks upon “the uniqueness of the human world insofar as this derives from man’s perceptual equipment” (6). To insist on the “spirit” of place, however, is radically to dissociate geography from its material base and fold it within a design of humanist transcendence. When the geography program at Harvard was terminated in 1948, the university’s president James Conant expressed his view that, because of its vulgar emphasis on the amorphous nature of terrestrial space, “geography is not a university subject” (Livingstone 311); and it was this kind of intellectual condescension that led to the marginalization of geography among liberal humanists of this era. Subsequent resistance to such elitism, in the shape of a reassertion of spatial particularity and local knowledge, has also often taken quite predictable forms, as when

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Karen Halttunen, president of the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2005, called for ASA members to set aside the “dazzlingly incomprehensible vocabularies” of high geographic theory (12) and instead “plunge into the groundwork of making and remaking place alongside our neighbors” (8). One question this altogether occludes, however, is who exactly are “our neighbors” and whether such categories are determined merely by physical adjacency or species kindred. In this sense, the folksiness of Halttunen’s program serves merely to conceal its own theoretical specificity, its grounding in a different historical model of community, one more rooted in those organicist values characteristic of the interwar period. Discussing the architecture of an age of information, one they see as dominated by the medium of television, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have remarked on how the utopian designs of early modernism now appear “no less historical than that of the Renaissance” (16); similarly, the communitarian national idiom of early twentieth-century America, predicated on a transparent correlation between the local and the national, has found itself increasingly under pressure from the “interstitial spaces” of an alternative “transnational imaginary,” where the relation between location and community is necessarily more oblique and refractive.2 None of this is meant to glide over the heterogeneous nature of space or to deny the ways in which globalization has been experienced differently and inflected crucially by region, gender, and other factors. It is, however, to recognize that all local geography is now shaped by some form of global connectivity (or by its absence) and that American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been struggling to articulate the changed, interdependent nature of the relationship between place and planet.3 Harvey, we will recall, dates the demise of the “Fordist” regime from 1973 (Condition 145), but the anxieties associated with the development of an alternative kind of national community based on electronic networks rather than physical space can be traced back to the time of World War II. The “Voice of America” (VOA), the official radio and television service of the U.S. federal government, began broadcasting in 1942 under the aegis of the Office of War Information, with news programs aimed particularly at Japan and the South Pacific and at those areas in Europe and North Africa occupied by Axis powers. It continued under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Information Agency to broadcast radio programs in Russian during the cold war, and from the 1980s onward it added television programs, transmitting to Cuba and elsewhere. The VOA developed in its first decade against a backdrop of McCarthyite anticommunism, with President Truman in 1950 calling for a “Campaign of 2  3 

On this theme, see Wilson, “Introduction” 6–7. On geography and gender, see Massey; on place and global connectivity, see Heise.

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Truth” to counteract the Soviet Union’s “big lie”; and under the terms of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, the VOA was forbidden to broadcast directly to the American homeland, with the avowed aim of protecting the public from propaganda actions by its own government. Memories of Nazi Germany’s publicity machines were still fresh in the late 1940s, and it was this, as much as paranoia about the communist state apparatus, that made the U.S. federal government so wary about becoming associated with the production of propaganda at this time (Heil 48–49). However, this cordon sanitaire protecting the VOA from being relayed to U.S. citizens was based on the classic liberal assumption that to be immune from explicitly manufacturing propaganda was also to be exempt from the dissemination of ideology. In fact, the VOA itself quickly became what David F. Krugler has called “the nation’s ideological arm of anticommunism” (1), while the minds of supposedly free-thinking citizens at home were also shaped surreptitiously by the new power of electronic media. Just as the BBC helped build up the sense of national identity in the U.K. during the twentieth century, so American national values were inculcated by the broadcasting networks of CBS, NBC, and ABC, where the question of active government involvement in program content was of less significance than the perceived need to bind audiences into a symbiotic complicity for commercial and advertising purposes. The astonishing growth in the power of television to shape American life is a phenomenon that burgeoned after World War II: in 1950, only 9 percent of American homes had a television set, but by 1960 that figure was 90 percent, with the statistically “average” American, according to Lynn Spiegel, watching as much as five hours of TV each day (“Suburban” 188). The hegemony of the networks reigned unchallenged until the late 1970s, when Home Box Office (HBO) took advantage of new satellite technology to establish subscription TV on a nationwide basis, after which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began licensing hundreds of new cable and satellite stations. Cable News Network (CNN) was launched on 1 June 1980, and the music channel MTV on 1 August 1981. Whereas in 1980 the three main networks could command 92 percent of the viewing population, by 1988 that figure had dwindled to 67 percent, and it has continued to decline steadily in subsequent years (J. Miller 169). In the second half of the twentieth century, then, the landscape of American broadcasting evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the sway of network corporations to one in which the incremental fragmentation of the increasingly global media market posed a challenge to the rhetoric of national space. American fiction of this period followed a similar trajectory, expressing both a desire to speak on behalf of “America” and also an anxiety about the purported scope of national synecdoche, the assumptions that would align the voice of a narrator with the authentic voice of a nation. The manifold con-

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tradictions associated with this liberal ideology of network America are acted out in extraordinary fashion in the fiction of Philip Roth, particularly in his later novels, which seek overtly to reimagine different phases of twentieth-century American history and where the tensions between liberal agency and social programming are flaunted in a frequently grotesque manner. Roth’s fiction strives continually to speak on behalf of “America,” whether in chronicling the McCarthy era in I Married a Communist (1998) or by setting the controversies of political correctness that surround Coleman Silk in The Human Stain (2000) against the backdrop of revelations about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Silk in the latter novel is a dean at Athena College who inadvertently refers to black students as “spooks” (6), leading to his being ousted from the college, despite the fact that he himself originally came from a black family in New Jersey, a family that, thanks to his white complexion, he was able to disown in the 1950s. The novel moves toward suggesting that a certain visceral quality in human matters of race (and sexuality) is normal; thus, American college students are said to be unable to face up to classical tragedy because they cannot reconcile themselves to the idea of “horrible, elemental imperfection” (242), so they are implicitly blind to the significance of the book’s epigraph, from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, about “the rite of purification” (vii) in an unclean world. In the enclosed space of this small college town, the constraints of political correctness and “appropriate” behavior (153) lead to Silk being victimized within a ritualistic process of social ostracism, “the venerable human dream of a situation in which one man can embody evil” (307). What is most characteristic of Roth’s later work, however, is the way this moral theme is extended specifically into an interrogation of U.S. national values. The narrator in The Human Stain disparages what “the Europeans unhistorically call American Puritanism” (153)—insisting that it is also linked to what H. L. Mencken called “boobism” or virtue mongering—and the novel accommodates itself finally to Roth’s familiar category of spoilt pastoral, both evoking and revoking the specter of a transcendent American innocence. In this sense, The Human Stain’s critique of the American “fantasy of purity” (242) echoes the castigation of a “Holy Protestant Empire” (39) in the much earlier novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). The Human Stain is in many ways an exemplary postmodern fiction, one that rotates narrative perspectives, denies formal closure, and insists, through the voice of its narrator Nathan Zuckerman, on the inherent “confusion of a human biography,” the discrepancy between particularity and rationalization that reminds him “why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong” (22). This is commensurate with the book’s epistemological interrogation of sequences of cause and effect: “how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made. . . . [O]n the other hand, how acciden-

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tal fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do” (125). These positions, which Coleman Silk broods over after meeting by chance his former lover Steena in New York, are, in a philosophical sense, mutually exclusive: destiny operates according to either a logic of necessity or a logic of contingency, but it can hardly do both at the same time. Yet the novel’s very refusal to adjudicate between these antithetical positions commends it to Ross Posnock, who celebrates Roth’s “improvised modes of self-unmaking” (194), his appropriation of an American tradition of fluid pragmatism extending from Ralph Ellison through Henry James back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Concomitantly, The Human Stain assiduously tracks its own contrarian precursors, starting with a reference on the first page to “New England’s harsh beginnings” (1) and concluding by paying homage explicitly to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau, as the eulogist at Silk’s funeral associates him “with the American individualist’s resistance to the coercions of a censorious community” (310). But what is structurally most excruciating about Roth’s late fiction, making it lurch at times toward a self-lacerating form of black comedy, is the author’s compulsion to chart his quarrel with nationalist iconography in recursively nationalist terms. The final image in The Human Stain, of “a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America” (361), is a twisted version of American pastoral but also, implicitly, a vindication of it. Coleman Silk’s sister also recalls nostalgically in this last chapter how it used to be “traditional” at high school graduations to receive “a copy of the Constitution of the United States” but how this practice, like that of “reading the old classics,” has fallen by the wayside (329), while Coleman himself vituperatively describes the college students of the 1990s as “far and away the dumbest generation in American history” (192). These kinds of jeremiad speak to the paradoxical condition, common in Roth’s elegiac version of cultural nationalism, where a dissenting voice in itself becomes the guarantor of “traditional” national values. For Roth, then, the virtues of cultural nonconformity become a way of keeping alive the old spirit of American exceptionalism. In The Dying Animal (2001), the ageing roué David Kepesh pays tribute to Thomas Morton, the “merry miscegenator out at Merry Mount” (59) whose licentious revels angered the New England Puritan community in the 1650s, and he says “it’s Morton’s whose face should be carved in Mount Rushmore” (62). The very titles of the novels American Pastoral (1997) and The Plot Against America (2004) imply—as Wai Chee Dimock remarked of the adjective “American” in general—“a kind of scholarly unilateralism” (3), involving a fixation upon the question of what such a national term might signify, and it is this problem of defining “America” to which

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Roth’s late work obsessively refers. The advent of radio was credited by commentators in the 1920s with helping create a homogeneous national community by blurring class boundaries and other divisions across the United States, and The Plot Against America, which imagines the antisemitic Charles Lindbergh becoming U.S. president in 1941, is saturated in the medium of radio: we read here about the “anti-Semitic virulence” (7) of “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin (264), Lindbergh himself speaking on “network radio” (12), the fictional Roth family listening to live radio coverage of the 1940 Republican Convention from Philadelphia, and so on. The central form of resistance to Lindbergh’s presidency also emerges from a radio star, Walter Winchell—“America’s best-known Jew after Albert Einstein” (19)—who heroically uses his media position to excoriate Lindbergh, before he is removed from the airwaves on the grounds that his broadcasts are “unethical” and designed merely to “inflame and frighten his fellow Jews” (240–41). Winchell thereupon announces his own candidacy for president, braving violence in Detroit— headquarters of Coughlin and the equally anti-semitic Henry Ford—until he is murdered in Kentucky while addressing an open-air rally in October 1942, with his own demise, appropriately enough, being announced to the nation on radio during a game in the baseball World Series. Winchell in real life was indeed an outspoken critic of the Nazis, a popular NBC radio correspondent in the 1930s, and a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roth’s “counterfactual” fiction, hypothesizing what might have happened if the Nazis had gained political influence in the United States, makes for an intriguing work of fiction in its own right. The extreme peculiarity of the book, though, derives not from its moral or political stance but from its insistence on reifying a particular ideological version of “America.” The narrator talks of his “incomparable American childhood” (301), and the location of his familial memories is positioned here as quite literally “incomparable,” as an exceptional realm that transcends all comparison. “America” thus emerges as a realm of mythic freedom, with the prejudices of “the Irish working class” in Newark represented as fundamentally alien to its spirit (9). It is true that the fictional narrator of The Plot Against America should not be conflated unproblematically with the voice of the author himself, and Roth’s earlier novel American Pastoral specifically foregrounds the theme of ethnic tensions between Jews and Catholics in postwar New Jersey through its portrayal of Seymour Levov’s marriage to a Catholic girl with a taste for rosary beads and statues of “little baby Jesus in the manger” (393), a union that causes ructions within their respective families. Nevertheless, the Roth family trip to Washington DC in The Plot Against America appears designed to appropriate and commandeer American patriotic values, as the family in 1941 tours the U.S. Capitol—“the very heart

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of American history” (58)—visits the Lincoln Memorial, and pays homage to the Gettysburg Address. All these icons of U.S. nationalism are supposed to bolster a narrative of America as foundationally wedded to a mythic domain of freedom: “a patriotic paradise, the American garden of Eden spread before us, and we stood huddled together there, the family expelled” (66). This is an exclusionary version of identity politics, where the idea of America is linked inextricably to a certain kind of ethnic authenticity: “for me,” the author observed in 1988, “being a Jew and being an American are indistinguishable, the one identity bound up and given shape by the other” (Brent 46). Such an equation enables the author sharply to distinguish the United States from Europe, with The Plot Against America describing Europe as “a continent where there was a thousand-year history of anti-Semitism deeply rooted in the common people” (324). It also accounts for Roth’s compulsion throughout his work to return to World War II as a way dialectically to define “American” values of emancipation, as in Exit Ghost (2007), which reverts finally to the aged figure of Amy Bellette, the lover of Nathan Zuckerman’s literary hero E. I. Lonoff, in order to give its narrative of America an ultimate coherence. Zuckerman describes Bellette as being “like any number of other Jewish children of her era born in Europe instead of in America, who’d miraculously escaped death during World War Two” (188–89), and the trajectory of his narrative is designed to associate the constitutional ethos of America with resistance to the Holocaust. Roth keeps returning to World War II, in other words, precisely so that he can continue to define a transcendent idea of America set against the toils of European degradation and corruption. In this light, The Plot Against America could also be understood reflexively as a defense of American exceptionalism, an acerbic critique of foreign attempts to plot or conspire against the essential national spirit. The jacket photograph of Roth by Nancy Crampton in the novel’s first edition is set against the background of a large street map of Newark that hangs on the wall of the author’s apartment in New York (figure 13). On the novel’s jacket, the map appears to spring from the head of the author, as if to indicate Roth’s protective sense of how this particular America, his America, is under threat. From any sociological point of view, as Walter Benn Michaels has observed (Trouble 58), it would be absurd to suggest that anti-semitism—rather than, say, racism or poverty—was the central fault line in the twentieth-century U.S. body politic; nor, of course, does Roth’s binary opposition between American promise and European corruption do justice to the mixed conditions endemic to historical situations and interwoven systematically within the American state. By contrast, what we are presented with in Roth’s work is a mythologized version of America centered on the postwar liberal idiom of individualism and moral responsibility, where qualities of verbal dexterity

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Figure 13. Portrait of Philip Roth by Nancy Crampton. Jacket illustration to Philip Roth, The Plot against America (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). © Nancy Crampton.

associated with the medium of radio can act as a bulwark against what the author has castigated as the “insanity” and “idiocy” of television culture (“Writing” 177). In I Married a Communist, the hero, Ira Ringold, having been taught by his high school teacher to value critical thinking, embarks upon a career as a radio actor in the 1950s, where he finds himself imitating Abraham Lincoln, reenacting the Lincoln–Douglas debates on slavery, and reciting the Gettysburg Address. Just as World War II is said here to confirm “the reality of the myth of a national character” (38), so the transmission of radio broadcasts allows Ringold to act as an embodiment of patriotic values on the national airwaves: “You flood into

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history and history floods into you. You flood into America and America floods into you. And all by virtue of . . . sitting by the radio in 1945” (39). While ostensibly disdaining mass culture as dehumanizing, therefore, Roth’s fiction internalizes the rhetoric of a voice of America to structure national narratives in a way that is entirely commensurate ideologically with the evolution of network broadcasting in the middle part of the twentieth century, when the country found itself bound synchronically into a common language. Discussions of the growth of television in the years after World War II have tended to coalesce around the familiar figure of the jeremiad, warning of the weakened sense of neighborhood and fragmentation of urban centers as people instead sought virtual community in their own living rooms.4 The new phenomenon of television quickly became associated with the simultaneous growth of suburbia, starting from the construction of 17,000 identical houses at Levittown, New York, in 1947, and most of the early intellectual discourses around suburbia tended to be similarly disdainful, criticizing these enclosed environments for their obsessive concerns with security issues and, not infrequently, their racism. Over time, however, the postwar pattern of suburbia as a bastion of the white middle classes became more variegated, as the stereotyped oppositions—black urban jungle versus bland white suburb—were superseded by a more dispersed topography of the “technoburbs.” Here the familiar spatial organization of an urban center surrounded by domestic margins began to give way to a new configuration, in which the provision of businesses and services was increasingly decentered. These were the peripheral zones celebrated in Joel Garreau’s 1991 treatise Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, and indeed by the mid-1990s, suburb-to-suburb commutes comprised some 40 percent of the total daily journeys to work in the United States, with the more traditional cycle of suburb to city accounting for just 20 percent (Beuka 239). The crucial point, as Margaret Morse has observed, is the way in which “freeways, malls, and television” were “posed as interrelated and mutually reinforcing systems,” vectors or circuits rather than specific locations, something that shifted the emphasis from Welty’s “spirit” of place toward the recognition of locality in terms of a more modular, interchangeable “material culture” (“Ontology” 194, 200). Blurring traditional boundaries between public and private worlds, television, like the freeway and the mall, opened up a speculative space that differentiated itself from the constraints of physical location, thus exposing the American public not only to the omnivorous appetites of commercial advertising but also, as Joshua Meyrowitz noted, introducing it to more points of comparison across different geographical 4 

For an example of this genre, see K. Jackson.

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regions. Television fostered a tendency to see personal problems in terms of group dynamics, while also helping slough off the spatial and hierarchical aspects of supposedly knowing one’s “place” (7). It thereby boosted and promoted a more generalized culture of equal rights that was itself interwoven with the consumerist idiom of popular television. The lamentation of FCC chair Newton Minow in 1961 that American television was a “vast wasteland” (Spiegel, Welcome 115) should, therefore, be qualified by a recognition not only of its more progressive aspects but also of ways in which many American writers in the second half of the twentieth century felt compelled to situate their texts in relation to its hegemonic cultural status. As Cecelia Tichi has observed, many of the intellectual reactions to television were linked simplistically to cold war anxieties about the perils of conformity and a centralized state of “totalitarianism” (110): thus, Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums (1958) is appalled at the thought of each suburban American living room “with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time” (39). There has not, though, been sufficient exploration of how television technology itself has been imbricated within the national narrative or how it inflected the aesthetic orientation of late-twentiethcentury writers. Toni Morrison, for example, rarely acknowledges television explicitly in her fiction, most of which is set historically in the pretelevision era, but as a public intellectual—and someone who, as a senior editor for Random House, accumulated many years of professional experience in the U.S. information industry—she always positions her work to enable it to intervene effectively within national networks. On the first page of Playing in the Dark, her attempt to redescribe the literary canon of the United States by incorporating its missing racial dimension, Morrison talks of her desire “to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World” (3). Drawing cultural maps in the postmodern era involves addressing questions of circulation as well as representation, and in 1993, Morrison edited a collection of essays on the Clarence Thomas affair, when the 1991 confirmation hearing of George H. W. Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court was interrupted by Anita Hill’s claims of sexual harassment. Morrison’s introduction to this volume stressed the way in which narratives of history were at stake: “as is almost always the case,” she wrote, “the site of the exorcism of critical national issues was situated in the miasma of black life and inscribed on the bodies of black people” (x). The Thomas hearings gained national prominence by being shown gavel to gavel on the cable television stations C-SPAN and Courtroom Television Network, with extended coverage also on CNN. PBS (Public Service Broadcasting)

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also relayed the bulk of the hearings, although only brief excerpts were shown on the news programs broadcast by traditional network channels. The new technology of cable television thus threw a remorseless spotlight upon the hapless Thomas, subjecting him to the kind of forensic public scrutiny that, in an earlier era of edited highlights, would have seemed much more distant to the general viewing population. Thomas’s trial in the nation’s living room, as it were, formed a curious analogy to Morrison’s own public-relations projects, such as her collaborations with daytime talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, who recommended Morrison’s novels Song of Solomon, Paradise, and The Bluest Eye as selections on her TV “book club,” thereby boosting sales of these novels by several hundredfold. In each case, the author herself appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss her books with Winfrey and guests, and this suggests how Morrison’s works are designed deliberately to function on many different levels, with popular sentiment and metaphorical distance being strategically intermixed. Just as Robert Frost in the 1950s used his frequent appearances on radio to lend his poetry a charm and accessibility that could easily get lost in the classroom world of New Critical analysis, so Morrison has internalized the structures of broadcast media within her fiction. This serves not only to ensure their maximum impact but also to reflect her sense, shared with academic advocates of the New Historicism in the 1980s and 1990s, of how the past is a blank page and how history itself can be given coherence only within mediated narrative forms. Morrison is drawn to television because of both its cultural power and its ontological depthlessness, its capacity radically to reconfigure the mythologies through which Americans explain their world to themselves. The engagement of Don DeLillo with TV culture is much more overt but also, in terms of a U.S. national imaginary, more problematic. DeLillo’s fiction is, of course, replete with the icons of mass culture: the television advertisement for Toyota Celica, for example, seems to form “part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant” in the 1985 novel White Noise (155), whose original title, in homage to the multinational electronics corporation, was “Panasonic.” In Underworld (1997), the ambition to give voice to America is signaled in the novel’s striking first sentence: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful” (11). The nostalgia here for communal rituals of baseball is interwoven with memories of how the 1951 World Series was broadcast to the American public—people are described as “smuggling radios into boardrooms” to keep up with the play (27)—and this in turn is linked to network television programs of the 1950s such as The Honeymooners, which form part of the culture of “binding touch” invoked in the novel’s concluding paragraph (827). As Tony Tanner observed in The American Mystery, the word connection is “used to exhaustion in

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Underworld” (208); and these connections work through time as well as space, with Nick Shay and his mother, having been displaced from New York to Arizona, continuing to watch reruns of The Honeymooners in scenes that deliberately echo the book’s prologue (103). At the same time, the compulsive communitarianism of Underworld is set off, as so often in DeLillo, against a larger architectonic structure: a framework of death, conspiracy, or, in this case, medievalism, as indicated by section headings such as “The Triumph of Death” and “The Cloud of Unknowing,” within whose austere aegis an alternative mode of inscrutability comes to haunt the modern world. The character Brian Glassic, for instance, remaps contemporary landscapes according to medieval cartographies, describing a “neat clean minimall” along Interstate 10, “where the map begins to go white,” as “[l]ike some medieval town with the castle smack at the center” (109). Underworld has been accused by Emily Apter of epitomizing “the new national form of the novel” at the end of the twentieth century in the way it organizes itself “as a relatively intractable literary monoculture that travels through the world, absorbing difference” (“On Oneworldness” 383, 374). Apter’s argument is that the invocation of brand names and other kinds of late capitalist paraphernalia serves effectively to construct a rhetoric of paranoia, “a narrative prototype of oneworldness that doubles as the nation-form of the late-century American novel” (“On Oneworldness” 384). What this overlooks, though, is the shadow side of Underworld (and of DeLillo’s fiction generally), the ways in which his universalist systems always tend to falter at the edges, troubled by phenomena they cannot quite encompass. In Underworld, Nick Shay, typical Jesuit that he is, likes the way history does not “run loose” in his new home of Arizona, whose careful temporal commodifications “in museums and plazas and memorial parks” (86) are directly contrasted with a more amorphous world of dispersal: “The rest was geography, all space and light and shadow and unspeakable hanging heat.” Nevertheless, the novel itself cannot entirely endorse the way Shay compresses and collapses temporal perspectives, and indeed the crosscurrents within the text between time and space, history and geography, are crucial to the book’s construction. The teleology of temporality, patriotically binding the nation within an arc of sacramental continuity, is thus contrasted with a spatial “shadow,” whose negative dimensions are more difficult to encompass. Among other things, Underworld charts the passage from an America dominated by the centripetal structures of network television to one organized more around the centrifugal forms of cable TV—there is a reference here to “the superstation in Atlanta,” WTBS (269)—and also around the more diffuse circuits of global finance and the Internet. Apter may be right to conclude that Underworld makes no gesture toward the kind of

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“literary transnationalism” associated with “the plurilingual dissemination of codes, genres, styles, or ideas across the borders of time and territorial sovereignty” (“On Oneworldness” 374); but DeLillo is concerned here to articulate a different kind of transnationalism, one grounded in more somber fashion upon the elegiac if puzzled acknowledgment of how the national community as a coherent signifying structure is coming under erasure. Despite the book’s nostalgic tone, its last section, “Das Kapital,” links the social and economic fate of America to events in remote locations such as Kazakhstan, as it chronicles the circulations of “[f]oreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media” (785). Similarly, in his post9/11 novel Falling Man (2007), radical-activist-turned-art-dealer Martin Ridner mutters to himself, “I don’t know this America anymore. I don’t recognize it. . . . There’s an empty space where America used to be” (193). According to Frank Lentricchia, one of the ways DeLillo distinguished his earlier work from the “domestic” school of “new regionalism” (2–3) was by addressing wider issues of the “institutional, structural, or collective” nature of society (4); but the problem that confronts his later fiction is an inherent incompatibility between the mimetic and explanatory status of institutional narratives predicated on the recapitulation of a “voice of America.” Simply to describe America, as Underworld and Falling Man both recognize, is not necessarily to elucidate it. The author’s own response to 9/11 was one primarily of patriotic bewilderment—“Our tradition of free expression and our justice system’s provisions for the rights of the accused can only seem an offense to men bent on suicidal terror” (“In the Ruins” 34)—and the version of transnationalism that emerges in his fiction is based not upon any kind of benevolent form of polyglotism but upon the trauma of deterritorialization, as manifested through a fatalistic series of aporias, where the “empty space” between embodiment and estrangement appears ever more menacing. Lost in Space: John Updike The question of national synecdoche, the extent to which his narratives might speak for “America” rather than just on behalf of a regional or class fraction of the country, is a central theme in John Updike’s works of fiction. Highly self-conscious about his place within an American literary tradition, Updike in his novels A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and S engages intertextually with Nathaniel Hawthorne so as to rewrite The Scarlet Letter from alternative points of view—that of the minister and the husband as well as the adulteress. Similarly, in an essay on Walt Whitman, Updike celebrates the poet’s capacity to assign “real things

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. . . the sacred status that in former times was granted to mysteries,” concluding, “If there is a distinctive ‘American realism,’ its metaphysics are Whitman’s” (“Whitman’s” 117).5 This emphasis on realism endowed with a metaphysical dimension chimes with Updike’s 1968 Paris Review interview, where he insisted on the veracity of his work, pointing out that in each of his books “a precise year is given and a President reigns” and arguing that his “fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more history in it than history books” (Plath 37). This “history” is consistently refracted in Updike’s fiction through the mass media: he wrote in 1991 of how “[t]elevision has so interpenetrated our daily lives we are no more shy of it than of the family cat” (“Being on TV” 32), and his novels are punctuated by a media apparatus that operates much like the chorus in Greek drama. Just to take one example of this, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) ends up savoring in delicious detail how a siege of biblical fundamentalists in Colorado is covered by all the TV network news stations: “of the three network anchors Teddy preferred Brokaw; he was the youngest, and though he swallowed a lot of his words he seemed to suffer with the news most sincerely” (490). At the same time, as a Protestant with strong links to the New England tradition, a devotee of the austere Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (Plath 31), Updike always retains a dissenting skepticism about the oppressive nature of the communal media, a wariness about the power of its iconography, a concern about how its tentacles threaten the life of individual “spirit.” Rabbit Run (1960), the first in Updike’s tetralogy featuring Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, embraces both realism and its American form of “metaphysics” that Updike traced back to Whitman’s legacy. “[W]hat we need,” Updike told one interviewer, “is a greater respect for reality, its secrecy, its music. Too many people are studying maps and not enough are visiting places” (“One Big Interview” 503). Rabbit Run seeks accordingly to undercut such estranged perspectives by having Rabbit disdain the use of cartographic assistance on his manic car journey from Pennsylvania to West Virginia and back. The garage attendant, who is able to provide only a road map of New York state, tells Rabbit, “The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you go there,” to which the protagonist pointedly replies, “I don’t think so” (25). On one level, this is the existentialist prescription familiar from intellectual culture of the 1950s, whereby movement itself precedes any specific destination; but the putative autonomy of Rabbit’s embattled spirit finds itself circumscribed, as Updike’s novel proceeds, by a more abstract sense of the “map” of the country as “a net, all those red lines and blue lines and stars, a net he is somewhere caught in.” In this context, one of the key 5 

On Updike’s intertextual relation to Hawthorne, see Schiff.

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issues for Updike’s unlettered hero is the legibility of his environment. He makes a blithe assumption about the reciprocity of local and national— “He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same” (29)—and listening to news of President Dwight Eisenhower on the ubiquitous car radio reinforces Rabbit’s sense of always orienting himself in relation to American patriotic values. But, as always with Updike, the conceptual edges here get blurred: region and nation, like material and spiritual, never quite coincide with each other. The final scene in Rabbit’s hometown—Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania—addresses these geographical questions directly, but it answers them only ambiguously, as if diffracting this material environment through a dark cloud of unknowing redolent of Karl Barth’s theology: “Why was he set down here, why in this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas?” (229). In an essay reviewing the art exhibition American Sublime, Updike recalled how the abstract expressionist painters after World War II evoked a discourse of the sublime, but he also noted how this “episode was understandably brief, from 1943 to about 1960; we cannot take the sublime as a daily dose” (Still Looking 45). Rabbit Run, set in 1959, is poised between these competing pressures of sublimity and materialism, since the hero’s pugnacious spirit—Ruth, his lover, tells Rabbit that she admires him because he hasn’t “given up. In your stupid way you’re still fighting” (76)—is balanced against a suffocating sense of domesticity, epitomized for Harry by his wife Janice’s predilection for soap operas and “the sight of that easy chair turned to face the television” (80). But rather than being tied merely to a sociological critique, Updike’s religious dimension transposes this view of the media world into an interrogation of man’s corporeal estate. When Ruth calls Harry a “poor soul” (89), the casual remark carries a distinct theological resonance; similarly, in the question posed to Harry by the clergyman Eccles—“What do you think it’s like for other young couples? In what way do you think you’re exceptional?” (87; my italics)—we glimpse the way in which Updike’s precise form of realism is shadowed by a theoretical inquiry into the limits of American exceptionalism. In Rabbit Redux, set ten years later in 1969, the cultural landscape is permeated not only by news images of the war in Vietnam but also by frequent mentions of popular television shows of the time, such as The Bill Cosby Show and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In; indeed, even the black nationalist Skeeter, a devotee of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, joins Rabbit, his son Nelson, and his new lover Jill to watch Laugh-In (239). Lynn Spiegel has argued that programs such as Laugh-In, which ran from 1968 to 1973 and was at the top of the Nielsen ratings for its first two seasons, helped collapse the traditional high/low divide in the art world by validating commercial culture itself as

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a new popular “form of art” that combined an “authentically expressive” avant-garde idiom with the knockabout pleasures of American vaudeville (Welcome 288). Updike never enjoyed a temperamental affinity with pop art, once describing Andy Warhol as the “wan apostle of surface and nullity,” whose “heritage is all around us, whenever reality feels like television snow” (Still Looking 214); nevertheless, part of the charm and probity of Updike’s fiction lies in its principled lack of closure, in the aesthetic space it leaves for cultural crosscurrents on which the author refused to impose any judgmental order: “I feel that to be a person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situation,” remarked Updike in 1968 (Plath 34). Thus, in Rabbit Redux, Harry finds himself the object of a larger dialectical process, displaced to the margins of his own world as changes in technology and the appearance of computers make his job as a linotyper in a printing firm redundant. The toils of work, sex, and mass entertainment are all touched in this novel by a breath of contemptus mundi, with the image of “television aerials raking the same four o’clock garbage from the sky” (199) betokening again a metaphysics of realism, where the human community is positioned uneasily within a larger ontological frame. For Updike, then, television, like the human body, is a given fact, a necessary even if frustrating emblem of humanity’s incarceration in geographical space. Geography becomes increasingly visible in the third novel of the Rabbit sequence, Rabbit Is Rich, published in 1981 but set during the final year of the Jimmy Carter administration in 1979. Here the early impact of globalization on the American automobile industry manifests itself in the Japanese buyout of Springer Motors, which has now become “one of the two Toyota agencies in the Brewer area” (4). “How did the Japanese ever get to Brewer?” Harry asks himself (370): “When I first went to work for Springer in ’63 we sold nothing but second-hand American models, you never saw a foreign car this far in from the coast” (27). Harry explains this narrative of globalization to himself in televisual terms; thinking back to the earlier years in Mt. Judge when he and Nelson “used to watch Lost in Space together on the gray sofa” (181), he now finds “in middle age the world comes upon him like images on a set with one thing wrong with it” (73). The television series Lost in Space, which followed the adventures of an American astronaut family shipwrecked after trying to reach a distant star system, aired for three seasons on CBS between 1965 and 1968; yet while Janice’s mother voraciously consumes popular TV programs, particularly sitcoms such as All in the Family and The Jeffersons, Harry finds himself increasingly perplexed by the way these discourses of television have effectively redescribed what he thinks of as “star-spangled space” (232). Whereas, for example, Philadelphia used to be “a distant place where no one dared visit,” he now broods on how “television has pulled it closer, put its muggy murders and poli-

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tics right next door” (211). Just as the dynamics of globalization have spatially compressed the automobile industry, rendering Harry subservient to a Japanese conglomerate, so even in Pennsylvania he finds his sense of spatial location increasingly disoriented by the electronic media. Nelson is actually majoring in geography at Kent State University, leading his father to exclaim, “Geography! That’s something they teach you in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography” (123). Like Harvard president James Conant in 1948, Harry reckons geography not to be a suitable subject for the American adult mind; but the narrative trajectory of Rabbit Is Rich undermines such cold war assumptions, revealing how things customarily on the periphery of a liberal humanist American vision are beginning to loom larger. Besides the global economy, there is a notably early and prescient reference in this novel to global warming: when they visit the Caribbean, Harry sees that Ronnie Harrison “uses shaving cream, Gillette Foamy, out of a pressure can, the kind that’s eating up the ozone so our children will fry” (411). Their Caribbean vacation also raises the specter of racial difference, a phenomenon that not only haunts Harry as a representative of the white middle classes—“These blacks down here silkier than American blacks, blacker, their bodies moving to a softer beat” (396)—but that also, as Jay Prosser has observed, contributed to Updike’s relative “decline” in academic circles toward the end of his writing career, as the American literary canon evolved in a more overtly multicultural direction (579). In this sense, Harry Angstrom’s uneasy awareness of his own cultural displacement might be seen as analogous to Updike’s own institutional displacement by figures such as Toni Morrison. Skin color, which remains a repressed element in Updike’s writing not least because of the author’s condition of psoriasis that he addresses in his memoir Self-Consciousness, is granted in Morrison’s Beloved a symbolic significance, a centrality to national consciousness, to which Updike can respond only obliquely. This is why Updike is forced to kill off his hero at the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), where Rabbit dies prematurely of heart failure in October 1989 at the age of 56. Harry is, as Updike put it, someone who “has lived his adult life in the context of the cold war” (“Why Rabbit” 25)—“without the Cold War,” says Rabbit in this final novel, “what’s the point of being an American?” (442)—and with the impending fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, there is consequently less rationale for Rabbit’s existence. By the end of Rabbit at Rest, the hero has become exhausted and bewildered by a world that has moved on. He is rebuked by a visiting Toyota executive for still having no “black” employee at the car lot (388), and he finds his instinctive attachment to time-honored sources of broadcasting authority such as the CBS news program 60 Minutes—“Rabbit has never gotten over the idea that the news is going to mean something

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to him” (232)—coming increasingly under threat, as the nation’s media landscape modulates into multiple channels of cable and satellite: “channel-surfing, kids call it” (55). In his state of “semi-retirement” (44), Rabbit has taken to spending part of the year in Florida, and the geographical contrasts between Brewer, “a territory bred into their bones” (250) and the “virtually impenetrable Florida swamplands” (95) reinforce this sense of a fragmentation of national landscapes. Whereas Brewer for Harry is replete with historical significance, the city of Deleon in Florida, where he and Janice are said to have purchased a condominium in 1984, is much more of a puzzle. Named after a Spanish explorer and boasting an emollient civic ethic of multiculturalism—there is a mural at the airport of “bearded Spaniards in armor” exchanging “obscure gifts with nearly naked Indians” (157)—it nevertheless offers none of those spatial markers with which Harry has always been familiar: [L]ife down here is confined to the narrow paths you make. To Winn Dixie, to the Loew’s cineplex and the shops in the Palmetto Pall Mall, to the doctor’s, to the pro shop and back. Between these paths there’s somehow nothing, a lot of identical palm trees and cactus and thirsty lawn and empty sunshine. In Pennsylvania, at least in Diamond County, everything has been paved solid by memory and in any direction you go you’ve already been there. (88) Florida in this sense appears to Harry like a spatial extension of the media landscape of cable and satellite, a labyrinthine environment where familiar hierarchical distinctions between center and margin have been obliterated. When Rabbit takes his granddaughter out on a yacht that then capsizes, Judy sings theme tunes from television commercials to keep up her spirits, as though this diffuse media world has become allencompassing; indeed, Harry later concludes that Judy’s “talk is a little like her excited channel-flipping” and that she is “confusing her own classroom with classroom shows she has seen on television” (333). Yet this is not merely Jean Baudrillard’s world of the hyperaesthetic simulacrum, for when Harry is in hospital he watches his own body on a video screen over the bed, the “Rabbit Angstrom Show” as he sardonically calls it (271), as though he has become the unwilling star of his own TV sitcom. The point is that Rabbit’s body is being dragged toward an undifferentiated state of death, with the apparatus of the entertainment and medical industries conspiring to treat him as a merely physical entity, “disposable meat” as he himself puts it (18), rather than as a creature endowed, as he would prefer to imagine, with grace and spirit. There are, then, several alternative metanarratives running through the Rabbit tetralogy. One is a rhetoric of the sublime, predicated on cold war assumptions of American exceptionalism; another is the discourse

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of globalization, linked to the incorporation of the United States within a homogenized international marketplace. These metanarratives intersect with each other in fractious and contesting ways, and the self-consciousness of Rabbit at Rest in particular about how its own trajectory relates to the course of U.S. history is exemplified not only by the Independence Day parade, in which Rabbit as “walking flag” (368) plays the role of Uncle Sam, but also by the hero’s newfound interest in reading history books: he quotes from Barbara Tuchman’s study of the American Revolution, The First Salute, while also commending Thomas Edison as an “amazingly great American” (97).6 As the tetralogy goes on, it becomes more concerned about achieving perspective, both temporal and spatial, on the U.S. national experience. Updike himself said immediately after the publication of Rabbit at Rest that, while basing his fictional city of Brewer on Reading, Pennsylvania, he had somehow “got the geography all scrambled up” in its reinscription, whereas in this final novel “it’s less vague—the area, at last, in my taking leave of it, began to make sense” (“Why Rabbit” 24). This suggests again how the representation of geographic space becomes increasingly important as the Rabbit tetralogy proceeds. The coda to the series, “Rabbit Remembered” (2000), also encompasses a strong sense of the changing urban landscape of Brewer, as reviewed by Rabbit’s children on a drive around the city on New Year’s Eve, 1999. They notice how the “open farmer’s market” (350) has given way to a “glass-enclosed mall” (351), with these changes in topography designed to epitomize the landscape’s new spatial patterns on the verge of the twenty-first century. One of the inferences to be drawn from the Rabbit sequence is that American writers do not necessarily have to locate any part of their works overseas to write about globalization. Updike, who died in 2009, set a couple of his novels outside the United States—The Coup (1978) and Brazil (1994)—but in both cases, the foreign country is clearly projected through Western eyes. In general, Updike was less persuasive on political systems per se than on ways in which the ramifications of politics are translated into experiential, domestic terms. Terrorist (2006) works best not in its direct representation of Islamic revolutionaries but in its elegiac evocation of a more general sense of loss, as humanist high school advisor Jack Levy struggles to come to terms with an electronic generation where ear-plugged “[s]tudents present themselves to their counselor like a succession of CDs” (35). Levy laments the loss of old civic space and how people talk in the library or the cinema as if they were in their own living room, since it appears “television has made people at home now everywhere” (124). Levy’s frustration with this world of video games and 6 

On the metahistorical dimension to Rabbit at Rest, see Vargo 73.

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telemarketing has brought him into a state of secret complicity with the jihadist Ahmad, since they both believe that “the whole neighbourhood could do with a good bomb” (32); however, despite his disdain for the “so-called electronic revolution” (121), Levy himself is not above occasionally watching “the History Channel” on cable TV (122). Levy also sees the threat of Arab terrorism as being a less direct threat to the United States than the economics of outsourcing, which he believes to be gutting the manufacturing heart of the country: “it’s the Japanese and Chinese and Mexicans and Guatemalans and those others in low-wage platforms who are doing us in, putting our workforce out of work” (138). This sense of a newly vulnerable U.S. body politic also haunts the character of Owen Mackenzie in Villages (2004), who is similarly concerned with the permeability of American national borders that once used to be much more clearly demarcated. Grappling with the loose connections of the Internet in an electronic environment where the local travel agency has been “fatally undermined by the World Trade Center disaster and subsequent airline economics” (51), Mackenzie feels his old secure sense of living in a “national village” has gone for good (318). Thinking back to his earlier days living in a small Connecticut town, he contrasts this with his current home in the Massachusetts community of Haskell’s Crossing, a space that remains to his mind obdurately “unmapped” (309). Mackenzie here draws a telling analogy between this twenty-first-century topography and the inchoate geographical state of America in the sixteenth century, as if the period of U.S. national order were a relatively brief interlude between the volatile landscapes of the prenational period and the amorphous, equally threatening world of global America: Driving or walking in Middle Falls, then, gave Owen the happiness of orientation, of his position being plotted on a specific cartography, of being somewhere. There are fewer and fewer somewheres in America, and more and more anywheres, strung out along numbered highways. Even those who live along the highway do not always know its number. Though Owen has lived, driving and walking, in Haskells Crossing longer than at any other address, it remains unmapped in his mind, or mapped as vaguely as the Americas were in the sixteenth century, a set of named harbours and approximate coastlines enclosing wild hopes of El Dorado as well as many infidel savages to be exterminated. (309) The MTV Generation: Wallace and Eggers The nostalgia of Updike’s characters for a “national village” characterizes the way in which nation-states, although they continue to exert powerful influences over the media apparatus, are also finding their old assump-

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tions of centralized hegemony liable to challenge within a new global disposition at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Fear of Small Numbers, Appadurai writes of “grassroots globalization, globalization from below” (x–xi) as a form of political resistance on issues such as “human rights, poverty . . . ecological justice, gender equity” and other concerns that cross “national boundaries” (131). According to Hardt and Negri, cable television, like the much smaller phenomenon of free radio in an earlier era, is part of an expanding logic of “multitude” in the information world, a logic with the potential to break the power of monopolies that historically have been in the grip of transnational media corporations as well as nation-states. Such a stranglehold has effectively stymied discussion of issues not susceptible of being addressed or ameliorated through conventional forms of domestic politics. Hence, argue Hardt and Negri, the radical potential of new media is linked to its potential for instantaneous communication, for bypassing the tiresome bureaucratic codes that were associated, socially and politically, with the authorization of representation under these self-perpetuating regimes of corporate hegemony (Multitude 163, 282).7 Television’s capacity to scramble the familiar lineaments of space— through “talking to you” direct from Berlin, Moscow, and so on—has been matched by its reconfiguration of temporal codes, its illusion of always existing in the present moment, of always being “live,” even in its fictional narratives. Whereas the aesthetic structure of film has always tended toward hermeneutic resolution and closure, with the implication that the events portrayed happened only once, television’s discourse of “flow,” its way of returning compulsively in series and serials to habitual locations and situations, has had the effect of eschewing final endings in favor of an aesthetics of immediacy, based on the illusion that what the audience is actually seeing is happening here and now.8 Television exploited its status as a supposedly transparent window on the world to endow its news programs with awesome cultural power—to such an extent that, by the end of the twentieth century, the manipulation of media images was considered a key component of political success—and also to incorporate its fictional narratives within a benevolent loop, within which Americans avidly consumed shows that gave a smart, informed gloss to conventional values. By the standards of literature, film, or theater, audiences for “quality” television drama have been stunning: for 7  For a utopian prognosis of these developments, see Grossman. The approach of Hardt and Negri is more measured. 8  For the classic account of TV “flow,” see R. Williams, Television. For a more specific argument about how TV uses the ideological implications of a “live” appearance to overcome various contradictions between flow and fragmentation, see Feuer 16.

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instance, ER, a medical drama series set in a Chicago hospital broadcast by NBC from 1994 to 2009, regularly attracted audiences of 35 million (McCabe 216). Given a Broadway theater’s typical capacity of 1,500 for a stage play, to match this figure for a single night’s TV viewing would require a full house in the theater every night for sixty-five years. The traditional liberal humanist insistence on dismissing television as a “wasteland” has, however, led to an odd partition between literature and television within the American academic world. Scholarly attitudes toward the poetry of John Ashbery offer an insight into how this damaging cultural prejudice has operated. Ashbery accepted in 2007 the role of “poet laureate” for MTV, an agreement to allow excerpts from his poems to appear in various promotional spots on the cable TV channel and its Web site (Ryzik 1). This intermingling of high and low culture is entirely commensurate with Ashbery’s intellectual project, going back to his days in Paris writing about surrealist art, and such interest in hybridity also manifests itself in his later poetic panegyrics to popular TV culture. We see this, for example, in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” (1975), where the cartoon hero complains in language comically appropriate to a duck about “quack” phrenology (31), and in the prose poem “Description of a Masque” (1984), which similarly embraces memories of bygone television programs: “There were old clips from Lucy, Lassie and The Waltons; there was Walter Cronkite bidding us an urgent good evening years ago” (28). It is also consistent with Ashbery’s interest in how the human mind interfaces with technology in all its forms: in a 1981 interview, he mentioned how “I always answer the telephone when I’m writing, and it very often helps me with what I happen to be writing” (Sommer 15). But literary criticism of Ashbery’s work has tended to disregard the way his texts caress material surfaces and to stress only their infinite reflexivity, their belated forms of romanticism, while implicitly disdaining their simultaneous engagement with popular culture as incorrigibly vulgar. Harold Bloom’s attempts to install an American literary canon centered only on the righteous power of the creative imagination have led to a situation in which readings of Ashbery have been radically dematerialized, with the Emersonian side of him valorized and the Daffy Duck side correspondingly downplayed. This is not, of course, to suggest Ashbery only embodies MTV values, but his poetry represents a complicated intermingling of high and low art, with the aesthetics of immediacy and simultaneity that are integral to televisual media influencing the shape of his work in important ways. Writers of a younger generation have tended to write more directly about the manner in which a new cartography of the electronic media has reconfigured American coordinates of space. One of the characteristics of David Foster Wallace’s work is the way in which it flattens out the old

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binary opposition between city and suburb, center and margin, replacing it with a new model of the digital network within which access to information becomes equalized and normalized. Wallace thus envisages American geographic space as a level playing field where the mass media operate in all zones simultaneously. His most famous articulation of this position comes in his 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which has been seen as a kind of manifesto for his generation of fiction writers, enjoying the same kind of status as did John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) in an earlier era. In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace argues that American writers under forty have been conditioned to a world in which the ubiquity of television is a plain fact. Within this world of “electric signal” (51), stratification operates more by “generation” than according to the old tenets of “regions” or “ethnicity” (65); young Americans bond more easily according to which TV programs they have shared rather than according to Eudora Welty’s sense of loyalty to a particular “place.” In contrast to the curmudgeonly liberal humanism of Saul Bellow, who complained in 1963 of how “the public nonsense of television . . . threatens to turn our brains to farina within our heads” (29), Wallace suggests that the six hours of “TV-training” undertaken daily by the average American “influences the whole psychology of one’s relation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes” (53–54). For Wallace, then, television is emblematic of a fundamental change in the nature of human consciousness. Its ubiquity is mirrored by other developments in information technology as well as in scientific fields such as biology and genetics, all of which permeate his fiction to such an extent that the liberal humanist centers of gravity that structured the worlds of Bellow and Updike now seem but a distant cultural memory. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, was not a proselytizing or didactic writer, but his texts reflect a condition of confusion where the human sensibility is left uncertain about its epistemological status. In a digital universe, as cyborgs and machines become ever more powerful, the categorical distinction between human and nonhuman conversely becomes ever less self-evident. In a 2004 essay about the Maine Lobster Festival, for example, Wallace contemplates the festivities from the lobsters’ point of view, questioning the received wisdom that they cannot “feel” anything and wondering whether the lobsters’ apparently desperate attempts to avoid being submerged alive in boiling water should not raise uncomfortable questions about the implicit power structures coded into traditional ideas of human authority: “is it not possible,” he asks in “Consider the Lobster,” “that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments?” (253). This quizzical problematizing of traditional divisions between

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human and nonhuman raises in Wallace’s work the question of “posthumanism,” a concept that, according to N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman, emerges from a situation in which “material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns” (13). Hayles thereby locates computation, rather than possessive individualism or biological organism, as the ground of being. Posthumanism, as she emphasizes, does not mean the end of the human or of humanity; rather, it takes issue more specifically with humanism, with comfortable liberal assumptions about the sovereignty of the human subject. If the emergence of postmodernism can be attributed contextually to the aftermath of World War II, when the collapse of grand modernist narratives centered on a utopian state paved the way for the liberal agendas of multiculturalism and diversity, the provenance of posthumanism can be traced to more specific concerns around the mid-1980s about the extent to which a politics of human identity might ontologically be differentiated from other categories of scientific and biological existence.9 Such anxieties were impelled partly by rapid developments in information technology during the last quarter of the twentieth century: the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 8080, was released in 1975, with this market developing exponentially after the first appearance of the IBM PC in 1981. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), which declared that by the “mythic time” of “the late twentieth century . . . we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (150), was one of the first academic attempts to map out theoretically this revised relationship between mind and matter. Wallace himself graduated from Amherst College in the same year as “A Cyborg Manifesto” was published, and his writing developed under the intellectual sign of posthumanism. This engagement with posthumanism on a conceptual level led Wallace to demystify the figure of the author and to downplay the direct significance of biography to artistic creation. He was more interested in the way a writer typifies and embodies his or her culture than in the supposedly exceptional qualities of literary genius: in a review of Edwin Williamson’s life of Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, Wallace writes acerbically about how biographers have a vested interest in aggrandizing the lives of writers rather than their works (“Borges”). In this sense, Wallace shared with radical posthumanists such as Hayles and Haraway an intellectual skepticism about the efficacy of the liberal imagination and humanist centers of gravity. But, rather than allowing his characters simply to become swamped by mass culture, Wallace’s fiction seeks to construct a more affective version of posthumanism where the kind of flattened postmodern vistas familiar from, say, the works of DeLillo are crossed with a 9 

On this theme, see Sollors, “Ethnic Modernism” 74.

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more traditional investment in human emotion and sentiment. Yet such representations of sentiment in Wallace are not merely backward-looking or nostalgic; instead, he takes the psychological fragmentation endemic to posthumanist cultural landscapes as a fait accompli, while traversing this terrain with a wide variety of philosophical references, thereby expanding the posthumanist idea beyond the narrow technocratic circle of the “Cyborg Manifesto” and showing how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a posthumanist sensibility has filtered into the everyday consciousness of American life. Wallace himself mastered many different types of language, both technocratic and colloquial, and a capacity to bring these different worlds into easy juxtaposition and commerce is apparent now as one of the remarkable qualities throughout his body of writing. He grew up in Philo, Illinois, where his father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and in 1980 he went to Amherst College, majoring in philosophy with (unusually for fiction writers) a specialization in math and logic. Five years later, he entered an MFA program at the University of Arizona and then published his first novel, The Broom of the System, in 1987. In 1990, he moved back to Illinois to teach writing at Illinois State University, publishing in the same year a nonfiction work on hiphop culture with his old Amherst friend Mark Costello. (Although Wallace was generally acerbic about academic prose, he was also entirely conversant with its conventions and practices, and indeed he spent the last years of his life at Pomona College in California as Disney Professor of Creative Writing, holding an endowed chair established by Walt Disney’s nephew.) Wallace’s major novel, Infinite Jest, over a thousand pages long, appeared in 1996, and he also published several collections of short stories: Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Oblivion (2004). In addition, he wrote a number of long nonfiction articles for Harper’s and other magazines, some of which were collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). Many of Wallace’s stories take issue explicitly with the reflexive dimensions of postmodernism, seeking to use human perspectives to subvert a culture of corporate images in which the legends of TV advertising have become naturalized. “Little Expressionless Animals,” set in California in 1986, deliberately makes use of (and acknowledges) Ashbery’s long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” as it describes the mechanical routines of Jeopardy contestants in a world where television itself has become anthropomorphized: “‘A special grand prize chosen just for you,’ says the television” (31). This is a cultural milieu within which reflexivity, so far from being a daring intellectual strategy, has now become merely a corporate pastime. This leads the human characters who are adrift in this sea of commercialism to try to retain an idea of human otherness as

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a means of resisting incorporation into imperial forms of homogeneity: Julie, one of the Jeopardy contestants, says that “the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover’s mask” (32). Similarly, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” argues with norms of postmodernism by intertextually rewriting Barth’s 1968 story, “Lost in the Funhouse.” Wallace’s story takes its epigraph from Barth, “For whom is the Funhouse fun?” (232), but then parodically recasts this as “For whom is the Funhouse a house?” (259). Set in Collision, Illinois, “Westward the Course of Empire” chronicles the reunion of everyone who has ever taken part in a McDonald’s TV commercial, but the burden of Wallace’s narrative is that central Illinois is in fact not a funhouse, not an enclosed, ludic space; on the contrary, “it’s the most disclosed, open space you could ever fear to see” (242). The theoretical impulse here is, as Marshall Boswell aptly described it, “a metafictional critique of metafiction” (207). Wallace’s story suggests that Barth’s notion of ironic reflexivity has become thoroughly institutionalized, as much of a syndicated brand as McDonald’s itself, and that a counternarrative that would reject such reductive commodification involves an element of emotional risk: “What you’re scared of has always been what moved you” (349). On one level, then, there is a sense in which “Westward the Course of Empire” exemplifies a familiar strain of American pastoral. This movement westward epitomizes a paradigmatic shift from corruption into authenticity; indeed, the story that immediately precedes “Westward” in Girl with Curious Hair, “Everything is Green,” embodies precisely this kind of pastoralist minimalism, predicated on an ethic of purification and regeneration: “Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch” (230). Many of the American authors Wallace admired—Walt Whitman, William James, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck—were similarly concerned to project this kind of pastoral imagination at earlier stages of U.S. civilization, and from this perspective, the originality of Wallace’s work might be said to reside in the way it reconvenes traditional forms of American cultural idealism within a radically alien technological environment.10 In a 1993 interview conducted by Larry McCaffery, Wallace observed that while Barth, Robert Coover, and Vladimir Nabokov were “indispensable for their times” (146), by the 1990s their kind of postmodern irony had become so commonplace within the culture at large that any kind of innovative art needed to push in another direction: “Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself,” he said, “open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naïve or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something” (148–49).

10 

For Wallace’s favorite authors, see the interview with L. Miller.

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While such validation of common sentiment at the expense of desiccated formal constructions would not have displeased Emerson or Whitman, the unusual aspect of Wallace’s writing is the way he starts stylistically from the repetitive strains of television culture and then works his way back through those systems of accumulation to explore specters of alterity. “Westward the Course of Empire” chronicles the activities of “a generation whose eyes have moved fish-like to the sides of its head, forward vision usurped by a numb need to survive the now” (304). Wallace’s characters, bombarded by electronic signals, instinctively crave the safe havens of the familiar; in “Westward,” for example, Tom Sternberg is said to be particularly attached to the episodes of Hawaii 5–0 “he already knows” (270). This allows the author to develop stylistically a texture of “minimalism” (305), analogous formally to the musical language of composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich—both mentioned in this story (306)—where the dynamics of repetition create a powerful, indeed mesmerizing aesthetic structure, one in which no simple “outside” is readily available. Rather than allowing his characters an estranged perspective on the degradations of commercial culture, in the manner of Saul Bellow, Wallace positions his dramatis personae as caught up inexorably within the belly of the beast. Just as Whitman dramatized the new industrial landscapes of nineteenth-century America as the condition of the people that he spoke for, so Wallace poetically transforms the new digital landscapes of the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Within this orbit, for Wallace as for Whitman, the possibility of transcendence emerges not through trying to flee from science but by assimilating and transforming it within imaginative forms. Part of Wallace’s rejection of liberal humanism, then, involves the movement beyond a straightforwardly oppositional critical perspective. In many of his nonfiction pieces for Harper’s and other magazines—such as his 1996 account of a luxury sea cruise, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”—Wallace foregrounds his role as someone being paid for his reportage and, therefore, as a compromised observer. Similarly, there is a splendid comic scene in Infinite Jest where a graduate student reads Dialectic of Enlightenment, the negative account of American popular culture by Frankfurt School theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, while The Partridge Family plays on television in the background (450). “I’ve always thought of myself as a realist,” said Wallace of TV culture in a 1996 interview; “it’s just the texture of the world I live in” (L. Miller). But this abjuration of a privileged authorial perspective differentiates him sharply from what he calls the antecedent “Me Generation” characterized by writers such as Roth and Updike (“Certainly” 54). In an amusing review of Updike’s 1997 novel Toward the End of Time, Wallace undertakes a statistical breakdown of the book, which

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is set in Massachusetts in 2020 after a Sino–American war has supposedly killed millions and ended U.S. central government: “Total number of pages about the Sino–American war—causes, duration, casualties—0.75. Total number of pages about Turnbull’s home, plus fauna, weather, and how his ocean view looks in different seasons—86” (“Certainly” 55–56). He continues in this vein, comparing Updike’s interest in Mexico’s repossession of the American Southwest (0.1 pages) to his hero’s feelings about his penis (7.5 pages) and golf (15 pages). Wallace’s point is that Updike’s work became increasingly narcissistic, ostentatiously concerned with the state of America but really much more centered on the preoccupations of his fictional alter egos. Updike himself returned the compliment in 1998 by accusing Wallace and his ilk of writing bulbous, unreadable fiction: “Our so-called age of information,” he wrote, “has bred an impulse to stuff a novel so full of data that it can hardly waddle” (More Matter 317). These personal antagonisms mark distinct generational differences about how the electronic world should be conceptualized. Rather than beginning, like Updike, with familiar human perspectives and then trying (often uneasily) to make inferences about larger social and political contexts, Wallace starts with abstraction and then uses the human element to subvert rigid technocratic patterns. This, perhaps, testifies to the benefit of his academic background in math, logic, and philosophy: he wrote a general history of mathematics, Everything and More (2003), which reveals a sophisticated understanding of how various numerical systems and their particular models of infinity have been constructed through the ages, from Greek and Arabic times onward, while Infinite Jest also plays knowingly with the idea of infinity as a rhetorical trope with wider applications beyond pure science. Equally important in terms of this proclivity toward abstraction is Wallace’s proficiency as a junior tennis player: at the age of fourteen, he was ranked seventeenth in the U.S. Tennis Association’s Western Section, and in his essay “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” he writes about his childhood career as a “near-great tennis player” (3). He notes that as a Midwesterner he had “grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force,” and he finds an analogy between the fixed parameters of the tennis court, 78 foot by 27 foot, and the rectangular shapes of the Midwestern states, remarking also on the sense of psychic continuity involved in the move from tennis to math in his late teens. Infinite Jest is set partly in a tennis academy, where young players are put through all kinds of exhausting training routines in an attempt to help them make it to the “show,” as they colloquially call the professional tennis circuit. The depersonalizing repetitions associated with these tennis routines turn the vagaries of human life into what Infinite Jest describes as a form of “autopilot ritual” (965).

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The grueling aspects for the reader of Infinite Jest (1,079 pages, including ninety-six pages of footnotes) consequently mirror the novel’s somber depiction of American culture as a spiral of obsessions and compulsions, a labyrinthine system from which there is no escape. Tennis, described here as “an essentially tragic enterprise” (84), thus becomes a metonymic emblem of these larger constraints: “You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits made the game possible in the first place” (84). The narrative of Infinite Jest is therefore organized around what the Boston group of Alcoholics Anonymous recognizes as “an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life” (291); although the American “system is founded on your individual’s freedom to pursue his own individual desires” (423), the text itself portrays a world of fiber-optic pulses and media saturation, a world where “[t]the point of repetition is there is no point” (118). The excess of adjectives and pop-culture neologisms in Wallace’s quirky prose—“disgusting marshmallowy Rice Krispie things” (594)—testifies to a landscape where every object has become commodified and commercially overdetermined, as if refracted through the prism of television advertising. This subjects the characters in Infinite Jest to a landscape of depression and “anhedonia,” defined here as “a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content” (693). These abstractions, related as they are to a failure to connect with human emotions, can also be seen as commensurate with the abstract languages of information technology, oscillating in binary fashion between nought and one, which it is the brilliance of Wallace’s fiction to represent experientially, from (as it were) the inside. A character in the story “Here and There” claims her boyfriend wants “to be the first really great poet of technology” (155), and that, to some degree, would appear to have been Wallace’s own ambition as well. Nevertheless, Infinite Jest ultimately declines to position the human and the abstract as antithetical categories, recognizing that “to be human . . . is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone” (694), and forthrightly rejecting “that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naiveté are mutually exclusive” (695). (The polemical qualities of Wallace’s nonfiction essays intrude into the moralizing narrative voice of Infinite Jest as well.) The force field of Wallace’s fiction turns stylistically on the interface between the human and the machine, between spirit and technology, and this allows Wallace’s narratives to establish an intriguing dialectic between a discourse of dehumanization, one that defamiliarizes the human body and represents it cartographically, and an affection for more traditional forms of identity. In the story “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” for example, the hero maps out strategies for sexual seduction and the perpetration of fetishistic practices, which are all acted out to the musical strains of György Ligeti; again, there is

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an edgy interplay between mind and matter, consciousness and corporeal incarnation. Consequently, while most of Wallace’s stories take American mass culture as their donnée; the author completely disowns the method he attributed to Bret Easton Ellis of simply representing characters by listing brand names, of cynically reflecting a banal and cliché-ridden world through narrative clichés. Wallace went on record as saying he believed this kind of writing to be merely “fraudulent” and that, on the contrary, “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (McCaffery, “Interview” 131). Yet, to be a human being in Wallace’s world is not simply to relapse into a sclerotic humanism; instead, it is to search for fragments of authentic personality amid the razzmatazz of scientific jargon and hiphop slang, so that a novel such as Infinite Jest might be said to involve a putative humanization of the digital sensibility. One classic story in this mold is “My Appearance,” from Girl with Curious Hair. It revolves around an actress’s appearance on David Letterman’s late-night TV chat show and the ways in which she disconcerts her host by being honest about her age, her career, about how she did television commercials “for nothing” (196) in order to get her name before the public again. Rather than simply being “sincere-seeming” (182), in the characteristic manner of network television, Edilyn seeks to resist incorporation into the world of “the ironic ’80s’ true Angel of Death, Mr. D. Letterman”—as Wallace describes the celebrity in his essay on television (“E Unibus” 62)—and thus to reclaim her own distinct sense of worth. The language in which Edilyn subsequently contemplates her answers to Letterman in “My Appearance” is resolutely Emersonian: “Months later, after I’d come through something by being in its center, survived in the stillness created by great disturbance from which I, as cause, was exempt, I’d be struck all over again by what a real and simply right thing it was for a person in such a place to say” (200–201). The glancing reference here to Emerson’s essay “Circles,” with its ethic of self-centering, suggests how, for all his digital posthumanism, the author’s assumptions about moral value are actually rooted in familiar forms of American romanticism. We see this again in “E Unibus Pluram,” when he paradoxically bears witness to the “truly heroic . . . Emersonian” capacity of television actors to maintain their sense of authenticity in a world of “cameras and lenses and men with clipboards” (25). This interrogation of how ethical standards play themselves out in a radically alien environment is also apparent in “Tense Present,” the long essay he wrote for Harper’s in 2001 on the role of language in society. (As Wallace mentions in this piece, his mother was a community college teacher of English, so this is an issue he quite literally grew up with.) Wallace outlines here the familiar battle lines between “Prescriptivists,” who think there are correct uses of language, and “Descriptivists,” who believe we should simply accept the evolution of language as it emerges. He himself seeks a middle

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position but points firmly to the kind of confusion that a “misplaced modifier” can create within a social group, and he goes on to suggest it is more “considerate” (44) to follow the rules of standard written English “just as it’s more ‘considerate’ to de-slob your home before entertaining guests or to brush your teeth before picking up a date” (48–49). The idea, again, is that everyone is immersed in a social system of language, just as we are within time and space; Wallace cites here Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, with its model of a contingent language community, as the basis for his argument about a “community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people” (47).11 Wittgenstein also features prominently in The Broom of the System, where an old woman in a nursing home, Leonore Beadsman, is said to have studied with the philosopher at Cambridge. Leonore, like her academic master, believes that everything is a language problem—“Being constituted equalled being clogged with linguistic sediment” (73)—and the presence in this story of Vlad the Impaler, a talking cockatiel who effectively imitates and parodies language systems, reinforces the novel’s sense that “there’s no such thing as . . . extra-linguistic anything” (121). The governor of Ohio here is said to believe that his state is losing its identity, “getting to be one big suburb and industrial park and mall,” with the citizens “forgetting the way this state was hewn out of the wilderness”; accordingly, he plans to develop as “a point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio” a Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D. for short (53– 54). This speaks, of course, to the fictional nature of domestic mythologies, but it also indicates an interest on Wallace’s part in how communities rhetorically define themselves, a concern that reemerges in “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All,” his remarkable essay on the Illinois State Fair as a community ritual. Wallace spoke of his discomfort at the cultural hegemony enjoyed by both coasts, even though 90 percent of the population of the United States lives between them, and much of his work in the 1990s explored ways in which the American Midwest was always more complex than modernist stereotypes about “Main Street” would have us believe. Like David Lynch, whose films he admired and wrote about (“David Lynch”), Wallace probes in his work the strange and unstable aspects of small-town life in Middle America. Part of this strangeness involves the difficulty of defining a distinct region or territory in a situation where the country itself has become subsumed within multinational systems. Mr. Bloehmer in The Broom of the System aptly describes “the Midwest” as “a place that both is and isn’t”: 11  In his 1993 interview with McCaffery, Wallace said, “We’re in language. . . . [I]t’s not that language is us, but we’re still in it, inescapably, the same way we’re in like Kant’s space-time” (144).

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How to begin to come to some understanding of one’s place in a system, when one is part of an area that exists in such a troubling relation to the rest of the world, a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes, radically, all the time? (142–43) Later in the novel, Dr. Curtis Jay metaphorically equates therapy with a process of locating the self in relation to a normative grid or pattern: A tea-bag in hot liquid strikes this psychologist as a perfect archetypal image for the disorienting and disrupting influence of a weak-membraned hygiene-identity network on the associations of distinct networks in relation to which it does, must, understand itself. (343) The aptly named Fieldbinder similarly sees the self as “at the node of a fan-shaped network of emotions, dispositions, extensions of that feeling and thinking self” (351). The points of interface between self and other are highlighted here as crucial nodes of intersection that allow the self to map its place in the world. Bloehmer describes the human skin as a critical boundary between internal and external realms, going on to remark how the residents of the Shaker Heights nursing home have found outside forces puncturing their skin to such an extent that it is “no longer a viable boundary” (365). Identity, in this formulation, is the property of a properly functioning machine that can recognize and negotiate its home boundaries while simultaneously positioning itself in relation to larger spheres. In a situation where politics, medicine, and religion (with its fundraising TV channels and its 1–800 numbers) have become part of this consumerist cycle, the challenge for Wallace’s characters, as Sven Birkerts observed, is to come to terms with the energies of “decentering” and networking that new information technologies have released into the country’s midst (113). One response to this environment in Wallace’s writing takes the form of mordant satire. The story “Mister Squishy” describes sardonically a market-research company organized around focus groups, media campaigns, and cable television stations, where “Make a Difference” has become simply a slogan in low-budget advertising (48). “The Suffering Channel” similarly charts life among the interns of Style, a magazine based in New York but owned by a German conglomerate that controls 40 percent of all U.S. trade publishing. Yet, this issue of corporate ownership also takes on eerie ontological dimensions here, with Style magazine’s offices being set in the offices of the World Trade Center in July 2001. There are a few indirect references to 9/11, “the tragedy by which Style would enter history two months hence” (245), scattered within the text: for example, we are told of Ellen Bactrian at one point that “she had ten

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weeks to live” (326). This lends Wallace’s narrative, albeit in an oblique and understated way, a structure of overarching dramatic irony, where the reader gradually becomes aware of the characters being caught up in labyrinthine systems of which they necessarily remain largely unaware. Zadie Smith described it as characteristic of Wallace’s generation of writers that they amalgamate a bright surface world of corporate images and media savvy with underlying anxieties about accident, catastrophe, and death (xv), and it is exactly this blend of knowingness and insecurity that galvanizes Wallace’s writing. In “The View from Mrs Thompson’s,” his account of watching the events of 9/11 unfold on a friend’s television set in Bloomington, Illinois, there is a strong sense of how the global necessarily impacts the local, of how distant events invade the community centered around the small Protestant church in Bloomington with which Wallace here declares an affinity.12 This kind of collision between the mundane and the ghoulish, the domestic and the surreal, also manifests itself in “Oblivion,” the piece that gives Wallace’s 2004 collection of short stories its title. Here the narrator, who serves as “Assistant Systems Supervisor” (194) in an unnamed insurance company, agrees to come with his wife to the Darling Sleep Clinic because of their problems sharing a bed at night, and as part of the treatment he is filmed asleep, with the clinic producing sleep-pattern charts that he compares to the cashflow graphs he scrutinizes by day. The narrator is troubled by seeing his own face asleep, “not a face I in any way recognized or ‘knew’” (236); but this transposition of human personalities into anonymous shapes and figures remains, disconcertingly, a latent potential in Wallace’s fiction. In this sense, the “oblivion” of the title suggests not only a loss of consciousness but also a loss of territorial security and self-definition. The coruscating brilliance of Wallace’s posthumanist style involves finding objective correlatives for this American experience of dislocation, in order to describe how globalization works not just as a distant political theory but something that impacts the hearts and minds of the national community. One of the characters in “The Suffering Channel” feels himself to be “not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped area of space itself” (313); and it is precisely this sense of a disturbing interplay between metaphysical presence and absence that haunts Wallace’s fiction. Whereas earlier writers such as Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover used the ironic depthlessness of postmodernism to hollow out modernist claims to central authority, Wallace turns this irony back on the postmodern condition itself, establishing what Marshall Boswell has called a “complex structure of doubled self-reflexivity” (96) where the ironization of irony leaves scope for tantalizing glimpses of authentic 12  “Most of the people I know well enough to ask if I can come over and watch their TV are members of my church.” Wallace, “View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” 135.

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presence. In this sense, Wallace can be understood as in some ways quite a traditional American writer, one with affiliations to a tradition of Midwestern realism as well as the kind of metaphysics of presence that permeate the work of Emerson and Thoreau; and if he was a posthumanist, he might be classified as a sentimental posthumanist, a writer for whom the legacies of human spirit still carry a cathectic charge. Such residual presence does not, of course, involve the representation in Wallace’s texts of unfractured consciousness but, rather, something like a phenomenological awareness of the fluid processes involved in the creation and destruction of meaning in the world. In his essay “Art and Space,” Martin Heidegger described the idea of locality as paradoxically intertwined with erasure—“clearing-away brings forth locality preparing for dwelling” (5)—and Wallace’s own sense of the relationship between the human and the spatial, between place and placelessness, involved similar forms of double-crossing. Such a notion emerges explicitly in the story “Here and There,” where the narrator counters the idea of corporate homogeneity by suggesting that “Maine is different from, fundamentally other than both Boston and Bloomington” (156); the question, not so easy as it seems, is how “here” can be distinguished from “there.” In this way, Wallace’s fiction speaks to a new kind of American regionalism, one reliant less upon the distinct properties immanent within any given place than upon the cartographies relating “here” and “there” to all-encompassing global networks. Whereas Wallace’s technomorphic fiction mediates the dynamics of globalization in a self-consciously academic and theoretical fashion, Dave Eggers, another fiction writer who has internalized the aesthetics of global media, began his career by taking a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, where his “old school teachers” trained him to take “facts very seriously.” In 1998, he founded an independent publishing house in San Francisco that started McSweeney’s, a quarterly literary journal to which Wallace, among many other celebrated writers, contributed. Eggers thus came to fiction relatively late, publishing his first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in 2000. However, the true “genius” of this work is to have updated the stylistic idiom of New Journalism for the television age. Fiction inspired by New Journalism, as pioneered by Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer in the 1960s, sought to enliven the often stale conventions of prose fiction by embracing within it vivid factual narratives more typically associated with journalistic reportage, and A Heartbreaking Work, which chronicles the death of the narrator’s parents and his efforts to bring up his younger brother singlehandedly, similarly prides itself on its authenticity: indeed, the front cover proclaims the book is “based on a true story.” As we know from the work of Paul John Eakin and other critical studies of autobiography, all confessional narrative, from Rousseau onward,

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is necessarily a retrospective fiction in one form or another. What is interesting about A Heartbreaking Work, though, is the way it seeks to authenticate its own story by repositioning it as the common property of an entire generation. Eggers deliberately reorients publishing conventions, spoofing the copyright page and so on, to reinforce an urgent sense that this narrative both exceeds the conventional boundaries of fiction and is universally applicable: “This can be about you! You and your pals” (xxv). Eggers’s innovative mode of realism, in other words, lies in its aesthetic of interchangeability, the way it presents the narrator as “the common multiplier for 47 million” (236), using the image of a “lattice” (237) to evoke the connective tissue that binds his contemporaries together; and, like Wallace, he persistently evokes cultural memories of television as the fulcrum upon which these common experiences turn. After the loss of his parents, the narrator in A Heartbreaking Work talks of recreating a surrogate family environment through TV simulation—“I am making our lives a music video, a game show on Nickelodeon, lots of quick cuts, crazy camera angles, fun, fun, fun!” (88)—and there are innumerable references here to specific television programs: Blind Date, 21 Jump Street, The A-Team, Flipper, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Veronica’s Closet, The West Wing, The Simpsons, and so on. There is also an extended scene where the hero auditions for MTV’s “seminal program” The Real World, a reality TV series following the lives of a group of cohabiting young people, which is said to be filming its next season in San Francisco: Everyone’s seen the show. We all despise it, are enthralled by it, morbidly curious. . . . [I]s it because in it we recognize so much that is maddeningly familiar? Maybe this is indeed us. Watching the show is like listening to one’s voice on tape: it’s real of course, but however mellifluous and articulate you hear your own words, once they’re sent through this machine and are given back to you, they’re high-pitched, nasal, horrifying. (167) On one level, The Real World functions reflexively as a metonym of Eggers’s characteristic style of televisual realism, where his own family environment mirrors the surrogate family portrayed on the reality TV show. As we have seen, television aesthetics are predicated on the illusion of relaying live action, and Eggers reproduces this idiom by transferring his narrative into the slipstream of a present tense, where the crossovers between human consciousness and the “breezy frivolity” of “limitless cable TV” (108) are both highlighted and counterpointed: in Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, described as a “corrective appendix” to the novel (Mistakes 5), the narrator talks about “my brain’s 24-hour worst-casescenario cable channel” (Mistakes 17), as though he were envisaging the events unfolding around him as a plotline from television. On another

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level, though, this electronic community of sentiment serves to validate rather than ironize the integrity of the narrator’s emotions. In this theoretically informed appendix, Eggers cites as one of his literary models Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, where nostalgic recollection is intercut with McCarthy’s own acerbic demystification of the flawed nature of such recollections; but in a still more abstruse section within Mistakes titled “Irony and Its Malcontents,” Eggers employs a selfdeprecatingly small typeface to challenge theoretically the validity of an application of irony to all “contemporary cultural production” by “agéd arbiters” (Mistakes 33). The author’s point is that life is much more of a continuum, a mixed bag—as he says, “we don’t label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days” (Mistakes 35), so why our art?—and that austerely to categorize messy human emotions within a rigidly ironic framework is ultimately to be reductive and demeaning, “akin to the toocommon citing of ‘the Midwest’ as the regional impediment to all national social progress (when we all know the ‘Midwest’ is ten miles outside of any city)” (Mistakes 33). Like Wallace, then, Eggers seeks to validate the power of human sentiment, and again like Wallace he links this sentiment both with the much-maligned Midwest and with the kind of affective popular culture associated with a mass media that became the common property of the MTV generation. Rather than representing the Midwest as a specific geographic region of the United States, Eggers conceptualizes it as a democratic zone defined by its distance from prestigious urban centers and by its openness to the circulation of electronic sentiment. The appendix to A Heartbreaking Work specifically declares that “[t]rue community cannot be political,” and it argues not for any instrumental form of collectivism but for the “warmth of other people, their electricity” (Mistakes 29). Eggers makes a point in this novel of playing up his Irish Catholic background, and the communitarian strand in his work generally stems more from a desire to connect with a secularized version of universal consciousness, urbi et orbi, rather than from any sectional or national politics. Like many of his contemporaries, Eggers is more invested in the global politics of environmentalism than in the predictable routines of U.S. party politics, and his short story “Your Mother and I” entertains the fantasy of inducing George Soros to buy the Amazon rainforest in order to preserve it for the planet. Eggers’s remarkable 2006 novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, extends this concern with global politics by ventriloquizing the voice of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war who comes to live in Atlanta. Prefaced by a map of Sudan and Ethiopia (v), What Is the What seeks deliberately to raise awareness about social and economic conditions in Africa, and again it does so through a modified form of New Journalism, whereby the real life story of Valentino is recast in fictional

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form. Eggers admitted that he experienced considerable difficulty in finding the right modus operandi for this book—“whether it would be fiction or nonfiction. After about eighteen months of struggle with it, we settled on a fictionalized autobiography, in Valentino’s voice” (“Interview”). Yet the powerful effect of this hybrid form lies in its insistence on its own authenticity, the way it implicitly peels back its own layers of artifice to convey a powerful illusion of historicity. Just as A Heartbreaking Work validates its presentation of human sentiment by erasing the boundaries between real life and television, so What Is the What dramatizes a sense of political urgency by linking the novel to its own Web site (where the real-life story is continually being updated) and by pointedly donating all the profits from the book to the Sudanese community. All this presupposes a very different notion of authorship from that which we associate with Roth or Updike and also a very different understanding of the scope of “American Literature.” Rather than deferring to the traditional mystique of the author, Eggers’s work prefers to position the writer as an amanuensis of the global community, a correlative to the universal celebrity enjoyed by Princess Diana, whose death is symptomatically honored in What Is the What: “It seemed the whole world knew this person named Diana, and if the world knew her, the connection between the peoples of the earth was tighter than I had imagined” (409). When he moves to the United States, Valentino finds himself living in the city that is also the headquarters of CNN—a coincidence highlighted when, thanks to the patronage of Ted Turner, the refugees of the “Lost Boys” foundation in Atlanta celebrate their collective birthdays at the CNN Center (154). All this testifies again to Eggers’s attempt to write an ostensibly transnational novel, one where the Sudanese immigrants to the United States construct a virtual community among themselves through e-mail and where the fates of Africa and America are inextricably linked together by the specters of international politics—Valentino talks of “the web of money and power and oil that made our suffering possible” (390)—as well as by the tentacles of the global media. It would, of course, be easy enough to relate What Is the What to more conventional narratives of U.S. immigrant literature: Valentino hails the “kaleidoscopic possibilities” (437) of America, claiming that to live in the United States is to be “blessed” (461), since, despite 9/11, the country offers “lives of opportunity and ease” (469) by comparison with the situation for his compatriots in Sudan. His panegyric here to the Statue of Liberty, “startling and far more beautiful than I thought possible” (316), also emphasizes the traditionalist element in the novel, whereby America is presented as a natural force for good in the world. But it would be reductive entirely to conflate this globalized perspective with the state of narcissism—a narcissism both of individual writers and of U.S. culture in general—that typified invocations of a “voice of America” in the sec-

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ond half of the twentieth century. For Eggers in the twenty-first century, human rights themselves have become a global commodity, circulating alongside electronic entertainment networks, and his own serious work on behalf of nonprofit organizations in San Francisco is of a piece with his ethical aspirations to introduce into his fiction a planetary spirit.13 To relocate American literature within a planetary context is not just to disturb the customary demarcation of its territory but also to challenge the conventional epistemological framework upon which such territorial claims are grounded. Just as the “polymorphous” (161) information systems of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” disrupt assumptions of “organic holism” (178) by introducing confusion about the parameters of mind and body, so the posthumanist aspects of Wallace and Eggers subvert timehonored assertions of American pastoral, the blithe understanding of the protected American landscape as inherently redemptive and regenerative, and introduce in its place a universalist dimension that renders the relation between human beings and their location much more opaque. One of Eggers’s stories, “After I Was Thrown in the River and before I Drowned,” is narrated by a dog, lending the story a spirit of alterity, a vaguely otherworldly air, the same kind of ontological displacement of human consciousness hypothesized in Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster.” As with Haraway’s exploration of animal vision in her Companion Species Manifesto, itself a companion to her “Cyborg Manifesto,” the permutations and negotiations among different levels of consciousness—machine/ human/animal—introduce a kind of negative theology, where what we do not (and cannot) know becomes just as important as what we are able to recognize.14 In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway explicitly takes issue with the nationalistic and anthropocentric forms of pastoral celebrated by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (and subsequently endorsed by Roth in works such as American Pastoral) when she asserts, “A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden” (180). Instead, Haraway argues in The Companion Species Manifesto, all “connection” is “situated” and “partial” (49): “I believe that all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation” (50). Otherness-in-relation would be a more accurate description of how the fictions of Wallace and Eggers relate to the external world than more conventional notions of territorial appropriation, regional loyalty, or national ownership. Situating their narratives on the boundaries of the human and nonhuman, Wallace and Eggers describe 13  On the globalization of human-rights discourse, see Rodowick 14. In 2002, Eggers opened 826 Valencia, a writing lab for young people located in the Mission District of San Francisco, which now has branches across the United States. 14  On how a “principle of uncertainty” and “an order of the indecipherable” are associated with animals, see Baudrillard, “The Animals” 129–30.

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a world where the “virtual . . . leaks into actual,” rendering the older cognitive maps based on three-dimensional Euclidean geometry anachronistic.15 To subvert conventional assumptions of American pastoral, however, is by no means also simply to dissolve the phenomenological concept of home. One of the most striking things about American writers in the MTV generation is the way they are concerned to draw ethical extensions and connections between themselves and others without referring these processes of mediation back, as did writers in the earlier part of the twentieth century so compulsively, to a national form of belonging. The humanist narrative that would discount global media as a form of dehumanization, then, cannot properly account for the implications of this transition in American literature from a national to a postnational environment, nor can it accommodate the complexity of the MTV generation’s engagement with alien dimensions.16 One reason Roth’s later novels have been so successful in critical terms is that they make reassuringly familiar assumptions about the scope of national synecdoche, the ways in which a liberal subject might operate as an emblem of the national body as a whole. By contrast, the studiously dialectical patterns of Updike’s novels turn upon an agnostic invocation of unresolved states of tension, evoking a residual form of national allegory that is always on the verge of imploding. In the work of Wallace and Eggers, this national metanarrative is dissolved into a different kind of ecosystem, one organized around the global flow of information, where ethical affinities are grounded not in direct relations to territory or patrimony but in more circuitous ways. The evolution of broadcasting in the United States, marking the transition from a rhetoric bound into the circumference of national space to one encompassing a global marketplace, can be seen as both an agent of and a correlative to these shifts in literary consciousness; consequently, novelists such as Updike, Wallace, and Eggers have internalized within their fiction the discourses of television, thereby circumventing the intellectual standoff between literature and the mass media that held sway during the early years of the cold war. Developing from the rigidly spatialized notion of suburbs positioned in a subordinate relation to the metropolis during the postwar era, through the hydra-headed expansion of electronic media that characterized the 1980s and 1990s, the American conception of a “homeland” in the global twenty-first century embraces the paradoxes of a post-9/11 state, where the phenomenological attachment to home is enfolded within a homeland exposed to radically different technological conditions, whose perimeters can never again be entirely self-regulating.

“It is the edge of virtual, where it leaks into actual, that counts.” Massumi 43. For an argument about “the debilitating effects of globalization on . . . the field of literary studies,” see O’Hara viii. 15  16 

PART TH RE E

Spatial Longitudes

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C HAPTER 5

Hemispheric Parallax: South America and the American South

Rotating Perspectives: Bartram, Simms, Martí Having outlined the different historical conditions that have framed the formation of American literature, the aim of this book’s third section is to exemplify how the contours of this field have changed over time by examining the shifting geospatial dynamics associated with two specific areas of the contemporary United States: the South and the Pacific Northwest. These historical and geographical dimensions are intertwined, since to expand the temporal map of American literature is also implicitly to problematize its traditional segmentations of space, the ways in which certain parts of the U.S. domain have become institutionally attached to particular academic agendas. If slavery was the American South’s own “peculiar institution,” as John C. Calhoun and others argued proprietorially in the nineteenth century, then the latter-day institution of “southern studies” might be thought of as hardly less peculiar in the way it has sought to follow the ill-starred Confederacy by drawing a line around the rebel states and attributing specific cultural characteristics to this mythical “region.” While the U.S. Civil War inevitably lent a certain gravitas to such classifications of regional difference, it has also, as Edward L. Ayers remarked, resulted in Americans growing “far too comfortable with the Civil War, lulled into assuming its inevitability and its outcome” (78). The very idea of a “house divided” implies a nation riven by sectional issues, one that needed a purifying, apocalyptic conflict to set it on the path toward reconstruction and a state of regenerated unity. This is why, as Philip Fisher observed, the main focus of American Studies in the late 1980s, under the aegis of New Historicism, switched from the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s to “the Civil War over slavery” in the 1860s, since the latter became a locus classicus against which those divisions within the U.S. nation-state that most concerned the New Americanists— most notably, around questions of race and “freedom” (“Introduction” xv)—could be correlated. To read the Civil War as this kind of fundamental formative event, however, is implicitly to anchor the meaning of the U.S. national idea at the expense of overlooking ways in which the boundaries of the American

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South have mutated in all kinds of ways from the sixteenth century onward. In describing how conceptions of regions evolve and vary over time, Peter J. Katzenstein has pointed as an example to the “Greater Caribbean” region, or plantation America, an area economically integrated by the slave trade that stretched from north east Brazil to Maryland, a region recognized as powerful and important between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries but that no longer exists in these terms today (11–12). Similarly, Anna Brickhouse has discussed how the Confederacy postulated the idea of a “slaveholding empire” extending “beyond the territorial borders of the nation” to encompass Cuba, the Caribbean, and “the southern hemisphere in its entirety” (7), while Stephanie LeMenager has commented on how “throughout the 1850s Southerners imagined themselves leaving the Union to join a more profitable Caribbean Empire” (87). The “Map Showing the Comparative Area of the Northern and Southern States” published by Harper’s Weekly in February 1861 visibly juxtaposed the “Bahama Lands” with the American South, as if to imply the proximity, both geographic and political, of these rebel states to islands still under the British Crown that had been populated by loyalists and their slaves after the American Revolution (figure 14). The point, quite simply, is that maps can be drawn in many different ways and that the cartographies of any given “region” reflect not so much any essential homology of terrain or climate, as traditional geographers liked to imagine, but the shifting structures of power relations. As Tara McPherson has suggested, southern studies in its twentieth-century manifestation was largely a legacy of slavery and the Civil War, a way of reifying divisions between the U.S. South and North through systematic forms of nostalgia that sought to “preserve” intellectually the contours of this eviscerated region (9). The plantation mansions that sprang up in the postbellum period, like the legend of the frontier West that emerged around the same time, formed a mythological counterpoint to drastically changing historical circumstances. In the case of the South, this enduring fable of the Confederacy crystallized a continuing political resistance to the imperial designs of nineteenth-century liberalism, as exemplified in the universalist prescription of Henry B. Stanton, first president of the American AntiSlavery Society, who at the world Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 proposed a resolution calling for a world literature that would be antislavery in its principles and properly sentimental in its mode of address. Cultural prestige usually follows military might, and the triumph of the Union served subsequently to establish the principles of American “freedom” as a social and ethical norm, one later to be imposed forcibly on other countries in Latin America and Asia that were just as skeptical as the Confederacy about its inherent virtues.

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Figure 14.  “Map Showing the Comparitive Area of the Northern and Southern States east of the Rocky Mountains.” Harper’s Weekly, 23 February 1861. Shelfmark: 300.263.t.1/5. 23 Feb 1861, page 24. Reproduced with permission by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

To add an extended temporal dimension to the American South, then, is also to modify its spatial lineaments. To see the South as a site of cultural encounter across history is to open up space for consideration of sixteenth-century Spanish explorers to the New World as well as Florida’s anomalous significance in the formation of American literary culture. Florida encompasses the most southerly zone in the continental United States, with the southernmost city, Key West, positioned ninety miles from Cuba at a latitude of 24.55 degrees north; yet, as if to exemplify the discrepancy between regionalist myth and geography, Florida was largely excluded from southern studies in the 1920s and 1930s on the grounds that it had not been part of the original 1781 Confederacy. As Michael O’Brien has observed, the Spanish influence in Florida during the nineteenth century meant that it was often considered “something of a remote orphan,” not part of the “intellectual life” of the South (20). The self-replicating circle through which Confederate opposition to the Union was

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displaced into opposition to liberal modernity among the southern-studies community in the early twentieth century ensured that the importance of this Spanish cultural heritage continued to be overlooked, although it does feature prominently in Leslie Marmon Silko’s alternative chronology of American culture in Almanac of the Dead, which describes how “Florida, a Spanish territory, is ‘annexed’ by the U.S. to wipe out nests of hostile Indians and runaway slaves who use Florida as a base camp for guerrilla raids on plantations across the border” (745). More recently, Shelley Streeby has emphasized the crucial significance of the U.S—Mexican War of the 1840s as a site for “a post-nationalist American Studies,” a corrective to the exclusive focus on the national state that has characterized the “numerous” treatments of the Civil War in U.S. scholarship and popular culture (166). In this sense, Lois Parkinson Zamora’s view that the “cultural syncretism” and “bifocalism” of “New World Baroque,” with its idiom of creolization and métissage, is altogether “foreign to U.S. cultural history” involves an excessively narrow assumption about what “U.S. cultural history” consists of (Inordinate xv–xvi). To disentangle the American South both spatially and temporally from the moribund institutional narratives that have circumscribed this “region” is to reposition it within a more fluid, expansive circumference. To some extent, the South has always functioned within the American cultural imaginary as a hypothetical realm, a space to counter the supposed hegemony of the North. Edgar Allan Poe took refuge in Baltimore in the 1840s to fire broadsides against the “Frogpondians,” as he derogatorily nicknamed the transcendentalists, while Missouri native T. S. Eliot, in his review of the first Cambridge History of American Literature in 1919, criticized the book’s excessive emphasis on the New England Puritan legacy, saying this effectively made it “a history not of American but of Boston literature” (236). This notion of the South as an oppositional realm, a conceptual laboratory within which the encrusted assumptions of the North might be unraveled, can be traced back to the writings of Pennsylvania Quaker naturalist William Bartram, whose father, John Bartram, was appointed botanist royal in America by King George III in 1765. William first visited the American South in the company of his father, and he returned on his own in 1773 for what he called a “southern excursion” (33) of four years, whose findings he published in 1791 as Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida.1 Casting himself as a “philosophical pilgrim” (Slaughter 167), a role he combined with an ascetic distaste for the accumulation of worldly possessions, Bartram scientifically refrains in this book from commenting 1  Unless otherwise stated, all page references to Bartram’s works are taken from his Travels and Other Writings (Library of America).

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directly on political issues; for example, he records the date of his departure from Charleston as “April 22d, 1776” (256), but he makes no comment on the insurrectionary turbulence that was fermenting around this time. Instead, Bartram focuses on “Indian tumuli” (76) and other traces of ancient settlements, along with the legacies of French and Spanish civilizations, all of which adds to his sense of a labyrinthine, multilayered landscape. Crossover and hybridity are key characteristics of this strange natural world: in his Travels in Georgia and Florida, Bartram reports on how “about half a mile from Savanah River . . . the Indians & Surveyers marked a Line Tree, GR. on one side for our King and the Indian Mark on the other side” (453). Similarly, in what he calls “the blooming realms of Florida” (215), Bartram is struck by the landscape’s spirit of excess: the abundance of fruitful “Orange Groves” (215); the “beautifull Lake of Water, visited by an incredible number of wild Fowl” (464); the “multitudes of Alegators or Crocadiles which are of vast size & extremely voracious,” and how it “is scarcely credible what an immense number of Fish these monsters destroy” (473). For Bartram, Florida represents an extreme condition that tests the boundaries of known nature: encountering “a most dreadful Hurricane,” he talks of how he “beheld with astonishment and Terror the strength & fury of this Storm” (501). Some readers of Bartram’s Travels, such as Douglas Anderson, have found political subtexts in the way the author parallels revolutionary violence by portraying a natural world “constantly at war” (6); but, even so, the burden of Bartram’s narrative involves deflecting or reframing political conflicts, so that the War of Independence is seen within a larger cycle of appropriation and dispossession on the American continent. In this sense, as M. Allewaert has observed, Bartram is more concerned to “dissolve” established territorial configurations (340), to consider ways in which the American South stretches ecologically across the archipelago of an “eighteenth-century plantation zone” (341), rather than to uphold any supposed integrity of the nation-state. Bartram consequently portrays this natural landscape as endemically resistant to unified, federalist designs. In his “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” he remarks how “[t]he same spirit that dictated to Montesquieu the idea of a rational government, seems to superintend and guide the Indians”: that is, how “[e]very town and village is to be considered as an independent nation” (536). In mapping out the Indian Creek towns, both ancient and modern, Bartram similarly implies how this cultural landscape is too dense and multistoried to be easily accommodated within any one nationalist framework. He also comments on how “the late governor of West Florida” is now governor of the Bahamas (348), as if to emphasize the close connections between mainland America and the Caribbean and

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to suggest how the concentric circles of the American South extend in many different directions. All this endows Bartram’s descriptions of the South with a chimerical quality, a sense that the maps might be drawn in many different ways, with any specific form of delineation appearing merely provisional. Like his contemporary J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Bartram deploys pastoral scenes to interrogate relations between nature and civilization; but, unlike Crèvecoeur’s tendency toward agrarian rationalism, Bartram’s style turns upon an axis of the picturesque and its demystification, where a “visionary scene” (155) disappears the closer an observer gets to it. East Florida, for example, is presented by Bartram in markedly trompe l’oeil fashion, as if it were a trick landscape: This amazing and delightful scene, though real, appears at first but as a piece of excellent painting; there seems no medium; you imagine the picture to be within a few inches of your eyes, and that you may without the least difficulty touch any one of the fish, or put your finger upon the crocodile’s eye, when it is really twenty or thirty feet under water.   And although this paradise of fish may seem to exhibit a just representation of the peaceable and happy state of nature which existed before the fall, yet in reality it is a mere representation. (151) What is peculiar here is the way in which the empirical world is displaced into an aesthetic formation. Despite his credentials as a botanist, Bartram chooses to frame the American South within a narrative trajectory where the balance between the observer’s projection and the object’s integrity remains unstable, so that the “imagination,” as Bartram puts it, “remains flattered and dubious” (156). This becomes, in other words, an inherently self-reflexive landscape, evanescent even as it is evoked: the narrator describes how “a distant view” of pine groves gives them “the appearance of the mountainous swell of the ocean immediately after a tempest; but yet, as we approach them, they insensibly disappear, and seem to be lost” (155). On one level, this can be seen as commensurate with the aesthetics of sensibility that were fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century, as in the poetry of Thomas Gray or William Cowper that seeks self-consciously to correlate mental fancy with an alienating state of nature, and “Anecdotes of an American Crow,” where Bartram recounts anthropomorphically his friendship with a crow called “Tom” (575), reveals the more playful, fanciful aspects of his interest in the crossing of categories. In his travel narratives, however, this disquisition on reflexivity works within a more hard-edged material context, as the Enlightenment environmentalist shows experimentally how difficult this landscape is to reduce to any distinctive system of classification. By emphasizing excess rather than typological order, the longue durée

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of Indian time rather than the contingencies of contemporary politics, Bartram reconstitutes the American South within a series of vanishing horizons, whose phantasmagoric quality testifies to his sense of the region’s inherently elusive nature. Until the early nineteenth century, the most recognizable regional division in U.S. politics was that between Easterners and Westerners, equating roughly to the Federalist and Jeffersonian parties respectively. In 1816, as David Moltke-Hansen notes, the American South did not exist on any map as a distinct area, except for campaign-theater maps from the Revolutionary War (8–9). However, after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the forced displacement of Creeks and Cherokees—with thousands of Virginians, Carolinians, and Georgians flooding in to supplant them—led to the South developing a clearer sense of its own regional identity, and by the mid-1830s, it had become a widely used location and allegiance. This relatively new notion of regional autonomy within the United States also served to vitiate the lingering British tendency to think of the parts of mainland America and the Caribbean that produced staple crops as their “plantation colonies,” though William Gilmore Simms, a fervent champion of the emerging American South, advocated the creation of a southern empire stretching as far as the West Indies, a sweep that would, in effect, have constituted a mirror image of this old imperial plantation zone. Simms himself is one of the strangest figures in the annals of American literature, someone whose fate exemplifies Bernard Bailyn’s caution against the tendency among historians to construct the past retrospectively and to ignore all the “initial uncertainties” and “original ambiguities” associated with any given situation (6). Bailyn urges scholars instead to pay “close attention to the losers . . . and to contingencies and accidents” (15); and no major American writer has been more of a loser, both literally and metaphorically, than Simms. A highly prolific author, he began publishing in the 1830s a sequence of six novels focusing on the contribution of the South to the War of Independence, something he believed had been generally underestimated, and he also wrote nonfictional treatises on the history and geography of South Carolina, where he lived for many years. As we saw in chapter 2, Simms became associated in the 1840s with the Young America movement, writing in his 1846 essay “Americanism in Literature,” “We have our own national mission to perform—a mission commensurate to the extent of our country” (3). In this essay, he sharply critiques American writers, saying most of them might just as well be Europeans, and he argues patriotically that such blurring of boundaries serves “to denationalize the American mind” and “to enslave the national heart” (2). Such sentiments would have stood the South Carolinian in good stead with the mid-nineteenth-century proselytizers

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for a national literature, and indeed during the 1840s and 1850s Simms was on friendly terms with characters such as Cornelius Mathews and Evert Duyckinck. He contributed to the Duyckinck brothers’ Cyclopaedia of American Literature and also attracted favorable notice from Edgar Allan Poe, who in 1844 described Simms as, apart from Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne, “immeasurably the best writer of fiction in America,” someone with “more vigor, more imagination, more movement and more general capacity than all our novelists (save Cooper) combined” (Essays 1342). During the latter part of the 1850s, however, as sectional attitudes within the United States hardened in the buildup to the Civil War, Simms, whose own father had owned a plantation in Mississippi, began to appear increasingly as the spokesman for a partisan point of view. He also rendered himself increasingly vulnerable in the national literary marketplace by his vociferous support for the southern cause. Simms contributed an essay to a Pro-Slavery Argument volume of 1852—the other essays were by Thomas R. Dew, president of the College of William and Mary; James H. Hammond, later U.S. senator for South Carolina; and William Harper, chancellor of the University of South Carolina—and he insisted in another essay four years later that “to be national in literature, one must needs be sectional. . . . [H]e who shall depict one section faithfully, has made his proper and sufficient contribution to the great work of national illustration” (Guilds xvii). In this same year, 1856, Simms undertook a lecture tour to the northern states, a campaign originally designed to counter the claim by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner that South Carolina lacked scholarship and education; however, Simms found northerners unable at this point to listen patiently to a southern apologist, and the tour had to be abandoned. When The Cassique of Kiawah, often thought of as Simms’s best novel, was published in 1859, it was initially received enthusiastically, but this was soon followed by neglect, especially after the Civil War, by which time Simms’s work appeared to be no more than the reliquary for a futile and defeated cause. He died in 1870 and was subsequently omitted entirely from F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, since his proslavery views were clearly incompatible with Matthiessen’s vision of what American democratic culture in what he called “the optative mood” (3) should look like. The Cassique of Kiawah, set in 1684, is the last in a trilogy of historical novels chronicling events in the Carolinas and Florida during the seventeenth century. Simms was a careful reader of William Bartram, taking extensive notes on Bartram’s depictions of Native American civilizations (Guilds xix), and The Cassique portrays interrelations among Native Americans, English, Floridian Spanish, and Cubans: Charleston’s cultural links with Havana and with the Caribbean are strongly emphasized

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here. Words such as region, locality, and territory are used innumerable times in the opening chapter of The Cassique—“the whole region a wild empire in which the redman still winds his way,” for instance (5)—and the novel’s representation of provinces in perpetual flux, with multiple passages linking different centers of gravity, testifies to Simms’s desire to inscribe an alternative version of the American relationship between regionalism and federalism, one based more upon the principles of confederacy and local diversity. The geography in The Cassique thus gives physical expression to the novel’s ideology, with the “rude, wild, irregular state of its topography” (381) correlating with what Simms takes to be the political creed of decentralization, where the different races comprise “an amalgam of nations” (14). What the author is doing, in effect, is using his representation of an “irregular” natural world to authorize and mythologize his sense of inherent racial difference, something also accordant with a doctrine of local specificity, the notion that “ideas which will grow here, in this wild country . . . are the natural ideas of such a country, and can hardly take root anywhere else” (172). Toward the end of the novel, musing on the apparent “strangeness” of an Indian boy’s capacity to communicate with a fawn, the “cassique” of the title, Edward Berkeley, explains this phenomenon to himself by saying, “It belongs to the race! There is a nature which the great God of the universe designs for each several place and people” (453). What such a philosophy legitimates, of course, is a doctrine of racial determinism and segregation. Indeed, The Cassique of Kiawah today makes for a most uncomfortable read—far more so than, say, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which represents slavery through purifying narratives of catharsis and atonement. What Simms’s multivalent fiction does, by contrast, is to convey a more dangerous sense of how slavery had thoroughly entered into the imaginative life of the antebellum South. Indeed, The Cassique of Kiawah’s plot turns upon what is conceived to be Edward Berkeley’s naïveté about human nature (especially the Indian menace), as opposed to the more realistic stance of his brother, Henry Calvert, who chastises Edward for “the habit of indulging in your passion of philanthropy” (494). The book contains all kinds of oblique (and not so oblique) barbs at New England abolitionists, as Henry tells Edward at the end, “you must abandon all your wild notions of philanthropy. You will never reform or refine the savage” (527). This is a world where liberal principles are stood on their head and slavery is taken for granted: in another Simms novel, Eutaw, there is a telling aside about how the author “need not say” that “the negro ’Bram,” an “escaped fugitive,” is “delighted to regain his master” (385). It is also a world where miscegenation is regarded with abhorrence: The Cassique describes the “mulatto” as “the cross of white upon negro blood,” with the “male mulatto” having “the cunning of the negro,

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without his loyalty, or strength, or even courage” (364). For all the instinctive impulses of twenty-first-century readers to look away from sentiments such as these, it is surely the case that the narratives of a famous mulatto such as Frederick Douglass emerge more powerfully when set intertextually against the writing of Simms, who was, of course, Douglass’s exact contemporary. Given the way American literary scholarship has evolved, Douglass’s rise to canonical prominence has involved creating space for him among a group of white northern liberals he was well disposed toward in any case, whereas his true antagonists in the 1850s, the writers in response to whom his indomitable creative energies really flared, were not abolitionist fellow travelers such as Emerson or Thoreau but fabricators of powerful rival worlds such as Simms. Simms’s imaginative version of the American South, then, involves alternative narratives about the region’s history and political geography, assumptions that were crushed by the Union forces in the early 1860s and subsequently expurgated from American literary history. The Cassique of Kiawah might be understood in one sense as a doppelgänger of The Scarlet Letter: just as Hawthorne’s novel of nine years earlier seeks to inscribe Puritan New England as an antecedent point of reference for sectional reconciliation within the new United States, so Simms in The Cassique attempts to mythologize a seventeenth-century world of multiple, autonomous regions—stretching from Jamaica and Barbados across to Florida, Virginia, and the Carolinas—as a legitimate precursor and prehistory to the nineteenth-century Confederacy.2 The delineation here of an ontologically mixed landscape, along with the perennial suspicion of abstract reason as a form of mere rationalization—Mrs. Perkins Anderson, a doyenne of Charleston society, insists “upon the legitimacy of the Passions, as asserting Nature, in opposition to the mere arbitrary laws of Society” (290)—also engenders the kind of provocative formal mixture of romance and realism that is characteristic of Simms’s work. As Anne M. Blythe remarked, “the genteel tradition in American criticism . . . has always been most uncomfortable with Simms” (39), not only because of his treatment of slavery but also because he is so good at portraying the driving force of sexual lust across conventional social boundaries. In The Cassique, Zulieme, the Spanish “spoiled beauty” (21), is said to have “the loose, familiar habits of her race” (40); and yet her relationship with Calvert exemplifies the author’s more general thesis about the limitations of “reason,” upon whose “dignity and grandeur” people are apt “to prattle, with wondrous self-complacency,” thereby overlooking the driving force of “our fancies or our passions” (273).

2 

On “diversity as consensus” in The Scarlet Letter, see Bercovitch, Rites of Assent 216.

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After the outcome of the Civil War had dissolved the Confederacy and consolidated the outline of the continental United States as we know it today, the shape of U.S. national identity quickly became naturalized. For Henry James in The American Scene (1907), the claim of the “‘old’ South” (297) to its own independent nation organized around “the interests of slave-produced cotton” appeared “almost comic” (275), as “artlessly perverse” in its glorification of provincial “isolation” as the fetishistic rituals of “lone and primitive islanders” (276). Yet James balances this picture of the “old” South against the new South of “fantastic Florida” (322), a world of boarders, electric launches, and “the hotel spirit . . . exhaling modernity at every pore” (339); and just as James in the North allows his reveries of Harvard Yard and Washington Square to be disturbed by “the common element” of recent Italian immigrants (90), so in Florida he finds his “very sense of the American character” (331) qualified by the ubiquitous “memory of the Spanish occupation” (338) and the concurrent “impression of History all yet to be made” (340). For James, then, Florida, with its palm trees represented surreally as “so many rows of puzzled philosophers” (332), throws an extended question mark over historical dimensions of the American scene, representing as it does a fluid, inchoate world that cannot readily be subsumed into any preexisting American “type” (45). Throughout the nineteenth century, William Cullen Bryant and various other writers had drawn attention to the Spanish heritage in Florida and other parts of the United States; but after the Civil War had established the political and cultural hegemony of the North, the Confederate conception of Florida as a relatively autonomous realm, such as we see it imagined in Simms’s fiction, was no longer viable.3 Whereas Simms as a historical novelist looked back in time to imagine an alternative set of spatial boundaries for the nation, writers at the end of the nineteenth century were facing a United States that had consolidated its cartographic power base and was looking to expand its imperial scope across a wider global range. Consequently, what we find in this postbellum period is the revised power relationship between North and South being displaced formally into a series of intertextual dialogues, wherein the subordinate elements, Hispanic and otherwise, attempt self-consciously to qualify the hegemonic designs of a U.S. federal state. One example of such hemispheric bifocalism manifests itself in the work of José Martí, who was born in Havana in 1853 before moving in 1880 to New York City, where he worked as a consul for several Latin American countries. Martí also sought to mobilize the exile community in Florida to advance the cause of Cuban independence from Spanish rule, while simultaneously lobby3 

On Bryant and Florida, see Brickhouse 140.

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ing to oppose U.S. annexation of Cuba, which some American politicians of the time were advocating. Martí was killed in the Cuban uprising of 1895, and the popular image of him as a martyr for Cuban independence, what Fidel Castro in 1959 called an “apostle” of revolutionary freedom, still haunts the common view of his achievements today. Yet to categorize Martí merely in terms of a politics of anti-imperialism, as a staunch Latino opponent of U.S. power, is to flatten out his view of American culture, toward which his writings maintain a more complicated sense of ambivalence. What Kirsten Silva Gruesz has called the idea of “transamerican literary exchange” and “Latino Ghosts in the U.S. canon” (xii, 205) often works in a more complicated or spectral manner, and Martí’s work testifies to the multivalent ways in which a Spanish dimension enters subliminally into American literature through alternative religious as well as political discourses. Philip S. Foner’s preface to his edition of Martí’s writings on “American Imperialism,” for example, emphasizes the Cuban’s increasing disillusionment toward the end of his life with relationships of “capital and labor in the United States” (10), but this should not blind us to the fact that Martí’s first reactions to the United States, after his arrival in New York in January 1880, were generally positive. In the essay “Impressions of America,” he welcomes the fact that he is “at last, in a country where every one looks like his own master,” and he applauds the openness of the United States to enterprise and innovation: “A good idea finds always here a suitable, soft, grateful ground,” he writes. “You must be intelligent, that is all.” At the same time, he accuses Americans of lacking “intellectual height, and moral deepness,” of being a “splendid sick people” who are “wonderfully extended” in some ways but “childish and poor” in others (35).4 Such duality betokens not mere undecidability, but a dynamic structural contradiction that runs all the way though Martí’s representations of the United States. In a newspaper letter of 1889, for example, he talks of how Cuban exiles “admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty, but they dislike the evil conditions that, like worms in the heart, have begun in this mighty republic their work of destruction” (263–64). He consistently reveres “the Washington of legend” and the “Lincoln, for whom we Cubans wore mourning” (322); he writes in 1886 of the “redeeming” nature of the Statue of Liberty, hailing it as an “altar” to freedom (Foner, Inside 156); and he declares that he “would sculpt in porphyry the statues of the extraordinary men who forged the Constitution of the United States of America” (Ripoll 13). But for Martí, such mythologies of freedom exist concurrently with, rather than being simply 4  Unless otherwise stated, all page references to Martí’s works are taken from his Selected Writings.

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undermined by, the class wars and corporate financial interests of the 1880s that he also describes in these essays. Martí’s strategy is to work with double perspectives, to extract a quality “that fills the spirit with rejoicing,” as he puts it in his 1883 essay on the Brooklyn Bridge (143), and to run this alongside evidence of material corruption, with the result that his picture of the United States is more tricky, more complex, than it first appears. This is why some of Martí’s most stirring accounts of life in the United States are deliberately kaleidoscopic in their tone and orientation. His 1881 tribute to Coney Island evokes the “magical, caressing clarity” of the electric light in this seaside resort, claiming that “no city in the world offers a more splendid panorama than that of the beach of Gable by night” (94), while his 1888 piece “New York under Snow” describes a city metamorphosed by a massive blizzard into something apparently otherworldly. Martí’s idea of liberty consequently involves not merely social or economic concerns but a triumph of the imagination, an emancipation of the spirit, which is why he is so keen to endorse mythological emblems of America even while acknowledging the insular, self-interested nature of the country’s local politics. It is also why he tries continually to forge parallels between Cuba’s fight for liberty against Spain, its resistance to a current threat of annexation by the United States, and the American revolutionary uprising against the British in 1776. Shrugging off the debased condition of U.S. culture in the 1880s, Martí attempts to recuperate the symbolic value of America’s legendary freedom as integral to a revolutionary national consciousness. Martí’s America, then, is a chameleonic construction that remains largely inimical to positivistic analysis. José David Saldívar has suggested that Martí’s famous 1891 essay “‘Nuestra América’ marks the beginning of a new epoch of resistance to empire in the Americas” (7); but one of the problems with this assessment is that Martí’s definitions of his key terms, “our” and “America,” keep fluctuating. On one hand, this essay is suffused with the rhetoric of organicism, declaring that “[t]he form of the government must be in harmony with the country’s natural constitution” and that “government is no more than an equilibrium among the country’s natural elements” (290). Such organicism is consonant with “The Truth about the United States” (1894), where the author argues that “ideas, like trees, must grow from deep roots, and must be adapted to the soil in which they were planted in order to grow and prosper” (331), and with his 1889 speech “Mother America,” which is predicated on an extended metaphor of family, of binding the community together in a circle of “brothers” and “sons” (Foner, Our America 83). On the other hand, “Our America” explicitly dissociates race from nation, insisting that “[t]here is no racial hatred, because there are no races” (295), so that, under Martí’s gaze, definitions of “America” seem to slide be-

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tween essentialist and contingent constructions within the course of a few paragraphs. He shows a similar inconsistency in an 1889 letter on Cuba, where he attacks the common American stereotype of Cubans as “helpless” and “idle” (265) but then relapses himself into such stereotypical attitudes in the very next paragraph, when he writes, “There seems to be in the Cuban mind a happy faculty of uniting sense with earnestness and moderation with exuberance” (266). This should not be seen as mere intellectual lassitude, however, since it implies the kind of duality that becomes crucial to Martí’s enterprise, as he deliberately keeps switching around what he means by “America.” Saldívar believes Martí’s emphasis on our America serves to distinguish it from the colonial impositions of European America, but the author of “Our America” also indicates he is applying the term more specifically to Spanish America’s relationship with the United States: “The disdain of our formidable neighbor who does not know her is our America’s greatest danger” (295). To add to this multivalent quality, Martí also envisaged a complementary “United States of South America” (140), that would eventually stand as a check and bulwark to the anglocentric power of North America. In this light, Martí’s most pressing concern would appear to be not so much imperialism but, rather, globalization and deterritorialization. As someone who was himself continually traversing national frontiers and who was most at home, paradoxically, among exiles, Martí employed contradiction not as a method of subversion but as an engaged way of intimating how every situation and social organization could be looked at from a different point of view. “Our America” starts out with the bold assertion of how “[t]he prideful villager thinks his hometown contains the whole world” (288), and it is this kind of parochialism, with its assumption that current arrangements are underwritten by a force of destiny, that his work seeks always to disrupt. Mignolo describes Martí as the first to move toward “border thinking” in contemplating the local history of “the making of Latin America” (141), and the Cuban-American writer effectively rotates the continent on its axis so that Florida comes to epitomize the American North rather than the American South, thereby disrupting the “[n]ationalist ideology about language and literature” that is, as Mignolo remarks, “so pervasive that even progressive literary and cultural critics” are frequently “blind to it” (217). Martí, then, follows the idiom of Latin American modernism that was emerging at the end of the nineteenth century by taking delight in chronicling a world where, as he puts it, the “spirit is off balance”: he writes in typical modernista fashion of how there “is something of the ship in every house in a foreign land,” of how a “certain sensation of indefinable unease persists” (76). This mood of alienation as a condition of disjunction and creative tension inspires Martí’s most significant essays, and his

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style of journalism similarly involves a yoking together of heterogeneous events and categories, a strategy that is not simply a product of commercial pressures but is also symptomatic of the way his imagined world operates. As he remarks in his notebooks, “Nothing seems more right to me, or more proven, or more revealing of the deep-delving mind than Tacitus’s method of explaining great events by trivial causes. For so it is actually, and so goes the world” (77). This sense of hybridity and counterbalance is largely glossed over by Foner’s emphasis on Martí’s political writings, which, through its concentration on his more “serious” side, consequently eliminates what Foner took to be Martí’s relatively trivial material concerned with American street life and social occasions. But Martí’s oscillation between parallel worlds implies how modernism for him was not just a hermetic, formalist category, but a radical way of displacing and reimagining issues of human community and geopolitical space. For Martí, in other words, aesthetic categories cannot readily be dissociated from those of politics or philosophy. “Emerson anticipated Darwin,” remarks Martí in one of his later notebooks: “Poetry saw it first: it was anticipated in verse” (286). Martí’s implicit association of himself with Emerson here is not accidental, for “Our America” can be seen not so much as a rejoinder to Emerson’s “American Scholar” but as its corollary. As Jeffrey Belnap observed, Martí deploys in this essay “the same kind of artificial/natural binary” so beloved of canonical nineteenth-century U.S. writers (201); but he also imitates Emerson’s aphoristic tendencies, his insouciance about rational arguments and sequential paragraphs, and his embrace of a contradictory aesthetic predicated on the interchangeability of the absolute and the relative. The claim in “Our America” that “[o]ur own Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours; we need it more” (291) is characteristically Emersonian in its pragmatic appropriation of alien territory in the interests of domestic responsibilities. It also shows Emerson’s influence in its willing admission of this kind of epistemological paradox, as signaled also by Martí’s statement later in this essay: “absolute ideas, in order not to collapse over an error of form, must be expressed in relative forms” (294). Martí’s reinscription of Greece does not, then, betoken simply a rejection of “the Eurocentric reading of American history,” as Saldívar suggested (10), but rather its witting reversal. In his own essay on Emerson, published in 1882, Martí does not offer anything like an objective account of the American writer but produces a piece so empathetic, so full of aphorisms, that a mischievous reader might think it almost pastiche Emerson: Martí comes up with sonorous phrases such as “When a person has lived well, the hearse is a triumphal chariot” (116), “Must the caterpillar deny that the eagle flies?” (118), and so on. His central point in this essay is that the discovery of analogies in Emerson’s

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imagination effectively supersedes more empirical interpretations of the world as a mass of contradictions; indeed, asserts Martí, “There are no contradictions in nature, but only in the men who are unable to discern its analogies” (128). This philosophical principle justifies, in Martí’s eyes, Emerson’s tendency “to leap from one thing to another” without making “the relationship between two adjacent ideas” perfectly clear (121); it also, of course, underwrites Martí’s similar idiom of parallelism and heterogeneity. In a subsequent essay on Walt Whitman, Martí praised the American poet’s capacity for “equilibrium” (183), his evocation of a state where “[a]ll apparent oppositions and griefs are commingled in a grave and celestial spring” (186). Again, this sense of balance, a suspension between opposing forces, similarly structures Martí’s own writing. The most obvious difference between Emerson and Martí, though, lies in the latter’s willingness experientially to live out this principle of contradiction, to blend revolutionary involvement in Cuba with a life in exile. Whereas Emerson’s dualities can, finally, be subsumed under the familiar canopy of New England pragmatism, Martí’s cosmopolitan adventures impelled him toward the (hopeless) task of attempting to reconcile Cuban nationalism with modernista alienation. If the most compelling aspect of Emerson’s writing is its plausibility, its willing accommodation of Neoplatonic ideas to a politics of everyday experience, perhaps the most striking aspect of Martí’s life and work is its ultimate impossibility: his extravagant sacrifice of himself in a war when he understood little about the strategies of battle is only another version of his persistent attempt, as in “New York under Snow,” to adorn the quotidian world with a tantalizing spiritual grandeur. The end of the latter essay remarks on “a feeling of immense humility and sudden goodness, as if the hand we all must fear had rested on all men at once” (231), and Martí’s geographical displacement of America from north to south is matched by an equivalent displacement from a material to a metaphysical imaginary. This projection of parallel worlds serves to defamiliarize U.S. urban landscapes, to reconceive them within an aesthetic that owes much to Catholic styles of transubstantiation—ubiquitous, of course, within the cultures of Central and South America—where matter and spirit are seen as symbiotically intertwined. For Martí, though, this mode of transformation operates not in strictly theological terms but, as the essay on Coney Island puts it, in a figurative or “magical” manner (94). From this perspective, Martí’s intertextual rotation of Emerson might be said to respond to the material threat of U.S. imperial power by investing his adopted country in the luminous light of a transubstantial discourse that anticipates the style of magic realism, an oppositional rhetoric confounding conventional categories and threatening to scramble the philosophical as well as the spatial cartographies of the continental United States.

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Regionalism and Pseudo-geography: Hurston and Bishop What has too often been referred to unproblematically in American literary studies as southern “regionalism” in fact emerged from a specific set of circumstances in the first half of the twentieth century, with the flourishing of the regionalist movement between 1920 and 1945. The so-called new regionalists circulated manifestos in the 1920s and sponsored conferences in the 1930s as they sought to validate the legacy of folk cultures, to uphold what Donald Davidson called “organic sectionalism” as a bulwark against the baneful centralizing pressures of industrialization, internationalization, and modernity (Dorman 12). Inspired crucially by the work of Lewis Mumford, whose utopian vision The Golden Day was published in 1926, the interwar regionalist movement was based intellectually upon what Robert L. Dorman has called a “catastrophist” theory of history (84), through which cultures with once vital sources of tradition were considered to be under threat of degenerating into modernist rubbish heaps. Many discrete regions were identified by this movement, and many particular groups organized around regional centers or periodicals: a New Mexico Quarterly group, Midwestern circles at Iowa City and Lincoln, Nebraska, and so on. Numerous interwar writers and artists—Robert Frost, Georgia O’Keefe, Willa Cather, to take just a few examples—were also associated to a greater or lesser extent with this regionalist impulse. However, it was the South where regionalism made the most enduring contribution, with the Nashville-based Agrarian group’s manifesto I’ll Take My Stand appearing in 1930 and the Baton Rouge circle centering around the Southern Review, founded by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in 1935. In his 1934 essay “The Aesthetic of Regionalism,” John Crowe Ransom, part of the Agrarian movement, argued that regionalism should be seen as more “reasonable” and “natural” than the world of cosmopolitanism and free trade (47), since over time “the community slowly adapts its life to the geography of the region” (49).5 The intellectual lacunae associated with such positions hardly need special emphasis here. As Dorman observes, the cultural momentum of regionalism largely collapsed in the late 1930s under the various pressures of a Great Depression, the onset of a more centralized war economy, and the rise of radio, television, and mass consumer culture. By the 1950s, the always potential complicity of “organic sectionalism” with fascism had become explicit, with former Agrarian leader Donald Davidson acting 5  For an acerbic critique of Ransom’s “regionalist project” as predicated on “the curative possibility . . . of purity and authenticity,” see Dainotto 501, 505.

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as state chairman of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, a movement that campaigned vigorously for racial segregation. What is most significant about regionalism as far as the American South is concerned is not its intellectual sustainability as an idea but the oddly enduring power of its cultural legacy. In part, this is surely because the whole regionalist impetus fits so comfortably within a familiar conceptual framework of American exceptionalism. Frederick Jackson Turner, most famous for promulgating “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” in 1893, also published toward the end of his academic career a companion piece, “The Significance of the Section in American History”(1925), in which he argued that regional“sections”of the United States were “becoming more and more the American version of the European nation” (23). In Turner’s eyes, though, the United States was distinguished from Europe by being “a federation of sections, a union of potential nations” (37), wherein different social and economic interests coalesced for the greater good of the whole: “over an area equal to all Europe we found it possible to legislate, and we tempered asperities and avoided wars by a process of sectional give-and-take” (41). Obviously, the Civil War was the one great anomaly within Turner’s exceptionalist thesis, but his conclusion—that the United States comprised “a vast and varied Union” and a “League of Sections” rather than a Europeanstyle “League of Nations” (51)—testified to the way this dubious interwar narrative of regionalism was bolstered by patriotic forms of history bearing witness to the constitutional significance of diverse “geographic regions” (35) within the U.S. political domain. The second way in which interwar regionalism garnered long-standing cultural influence was through the way it came to represent what Barbara Ladd has called “a late-modernist critique of modernity” (1629). In this way, southern studies became a way not so much of categorizing a particular region but of gaining a metaphorical distance from U.S. centers of power and thus radically interrogating the dominant ideologies associated with the corporate interests of the North. Allen Tate, who said that if he had “stayed in the South I might have become anti-South but I became a Southerner again by going East” (Brinkmeyer 112), was perhaps the most visible of those intellectuals who actually spent little time in the South but who appropriated the area metaphorically to quarrel with what he took to be the hegemonic claims of northern liberal Protestantism. We also see such self-conscious reversals in Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men (1946), which, in chronicling the political fortunes of Louisiana Governor Willie Stark, deliberately takes issue with New England forms of etiolated idealism. Here “the Boss” Stark admonishes his attorney general, Hugh Miller, by telling him, “You want to keep your Harvard hands clean” (137); and All the King’s Men goes on to inscribe

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an alternative ontology where abstraction is disenfranchised—“If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway” (30)—and where, conversely, corruption is seen as endemic to the natural order: “It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot” (45). This leads the novel toward a philosophical critique of dualism—“if God is perfection,” says narrator Jack Burden, “and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing” (202)—and instead toward a radical model of environmentalism, which claims, in a direct echo of William Gilmore Simms, that a “thing does not grow except in its proper climate” (238). It also serves to justify the legacy of the past, with the allegorically named Burden, who is planning a PhD on antebellum history, finding himself caught up in a “monstrous conspiracy whose meaning I could not fathom” (417). Warren’s emphasis on “the pattern we are in” (351), with its correlative notion of “where you belonged and would go in the end” (286), works in this novel to demystify the American idea of pastoral regeneration, a conception explicated here in geographical terms: “West is where we all plan to go some day,” sighs Burden (270); but after his brief respite in California, he soon finds himself snarled up again in the “deep mud” (207) of Louisiana politics. What we see in Warren’s novel, then, is an attempt to use geography to elucidate philosophy, to explain the human condition in terms of a reification of place. Part of the problem with the idea of a “deep” South is the way the term evokes the kind of depth model that was itself characteristic of modernism, with its quasi-Freudian conceptions of profundity and latency. This, of course, became associated with racial demarcation and social control: place, as Houston A. Baker Jr. observed, “becomes not a matter of matter—material production and planes— but a question of symbolic production” (157). In this sense, Richard Wright’s deliberate rejection of the “place” assigned him, like Malcolm X’s classification of Mississippi as anywhere in the United States south of the Canadian border, could be seen as attempts to scramble the codes associating geographical demarcation with racial repression. Southern scholar James C. Cobb has noted how he had been accustomed since undergraduate days to regard the Mississippi Delta as “the distilled essence of the Deep South” (vii) but also how the delta’s recent exposure to “national and global economic trends” (331) has changed the place’s relation to the wider world. Yet this raises the question of whether the delta’s image of itself as what Cobb calls an “isolated, self-sustaining, ultra-southern anachronism” (329) was ever based on more than a form of geographical misrecognition, a regionalist impulse to read the landscape allegorically, as an extension of its own fantasies of political separatism. Indeed, one of the hazards associated with regionalism in general

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is its tendency frequently to operate as a form of mystification, an idealized spatial phenomenon that effectively suppresses the more contingent aspects of place. The later writings of Zora Neale Hurston are revealing in this regard because they show the African American writer positioning her work reflexively in relation to the reified contours of place and race perpetuated by mythologies of the Old South. Hurston herself was born in Alabama in 1891, but her family moved three years later to Eatonville, Florida, a small town five miles north of Orlando that she later described as the first incorporated black community in the United States. She subsequently studied at Howard University and moved in 1925 to Barnard College, where she was a research student in anthropology working under Franz Boas. It is a rather austere anthropological perspective that frames her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), where the stylistic emphasis is on a distinctly nonjudgmental authorial voice; indeed, in “Art and Such,” a 1938 evaluation of her own work for the Florida Federal Writers Project, Hurston claimed that what distinguished her own writing was “an objective point of view. The subjective view,” she went on, “was so universal that it had come to be taken for granted” (910). In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, such objectivity leads her to record the embedded psychological and sexual violence of the African American community in matter-offact ways, so that they emerge as elements in a burlesque, almost absurdist cycle where human dignity is comically neutralized. Right up until the time of her marriage to John Pearson, for example, Lucy Potts is whipped by her mother, who says, “Ah means tuh bring you down offa’ yo’ high horse” (67); likewise, the fluctuating conditions of domination and subjugation in Lucy’s twenty-year relationship with John are also mercilessly recorded. Another of Boas’s anthropology students at Columbia in the 1920s was Gilberto Freyre, who went on to make his name in Brazilian sociology with works such as The Masters and the Slaves, first published in 1933, which portrayed the plantation economy in similarly sexualized terms: Freyre depicted slavery in Brazil as part of a culture of crossbreeding and hybridity, where masters and slaves “have grown up together fraternally” and so, “rather than being mutually hostile by reason of their antagonisms . . . complement one another with their differences” (xii). Though they apparently never met, there are some parallels in the ways Hurston and Freyre treat their materials; in particular, they shared a suspicion about ways in which white abolitionist rhetoric had become institutionalized and commodified in the Anglo-American academy.6 Such disaffiliation from traditional U.S. racial demarcations is 6 

On Hurston and Freyre, see Sánchez-Eppler.

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matched in Jonah’s Gourd Vine by an equivalent geographical displacement, as John chooses to take his family south, from Alabama to Florida, saying “That’s de new country openin’ up. . . . Good times, good money, and no mules and cotton” (88). Many of the characteristics of Jonah’s Gourd Vine are redrawn three years later in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): the focus on southern dialect, folk wisdom, and the stresses of marriage and sexual violence, represented in this novel by Janie’s fight against the oppressive nature of her relationship with Tea Cake. Their Eyes Were Watching God is now the most famous of Hurston’s works, but readings of this novel became radically dehistoricized in the wake of Alice Walker’s famous essays in the late 1970s that sought to reclaim Hurston’s legacy. In “Looking for Zora,” Walker chronicles the way she impersonated Hurston’s niece and undertook a tour of Eatonville to try to find people who had known the writer personally, but this imaginary form of identification inevitably served to gloss over Hurston’s own more conservative instincts: her interest in Nietzschean versions of power, in Booker T. Washington’s insistence on a black meritocracy, and in other aspects of the Republican Party agenda, all of which were generally anathema to Walker and other civil-rights activists of the 1960s and 1970s. After being ignored entirely by the Black Arts movement during these decades, Hurston’s star had risen so far by the late 1980s that Their Eyes Were Watching God had become one of the most widely taught texts on all U.S. college campuses; yet, as Cornel West observed, the reasons for Hurston’s popularity were based on a partial and selective view of her achievement (143). Whereas Walker hailed Hurston as a precursor to her own postmodernist narratives of racial and sexual difference, Hurston’s work itself is informed historically by the more abstract dimensions of literary and cultural modernism, and she is markedly skeptical about the validity of racial identity as a categorical imperative. This suspicion about racial identity emerges most clearly in the nonfictional Tell My Horse, published in 1938, in which Hurston undertakes an anthropological study of Haiti and “Jamaica, British West Indies” (3), where she finds that 2 percent of the population is white and 98 percent a mixture of white and black. This ensures, as the author observes, radical differences between the way race is defined in the Caribbean and the United States: “The color line in Jamaica between the white Englishman and the blacks is not as sharply drawn as between the mulattoes and the blacks” (6). Whereas “the strategy of the American Negro” requires “each race to maintain its separate identity” (7), in the Caribbean such distinctions are impossible to sustain: in Jamaica, “a person may be black by birth but white by proclamation. That is, he gets himself declared

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legally white” (7). Such transposition of categories opens the door to various kinds of social hypocrisy, as Hurston acknowledges: “The Englishman keeps on being very polite and cordial to the legal whites in public, but ignores them utterly in private and social life” (8). However, such an ascription of race on a legalistic basis rather than according to the supposedly biological differences of blood also allows Hurston’s work to interrogate what her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road calls “Race Solidarity” (218), with all the stereotypes such a term implies. She recalls here how Their Eyes Were Watching God was actually written in Haiti and how she drew on her experiences in the Caribbean to point out “that skins were no measure of what was inside people” and that “none of the Race clichés meant anything any more” (235). This lack of interest in racial solidarity is usually explained simply in terms of Hurston’s political conservatism: her staunch sense of self-reliance, her suspicions of Communism, and her trust in conceptions of natural “force” derived from social science.7 It is equally likely, however, that, for all Hurston’s characteristic mockery of pompous British authorities in the West Indies, her general skepticism about the validity of racial categories in the United States also owes something to her understanding of how race works differently in the Caribbean. In this sense, part of the relational significance of the Caribbean lies in the way it complicates simplistic binary oppositions between Old World and New World, triangulating both parties through a heritage of hybridity that undermines the separatist dimensions of identity formations predicated on the integrity of nation or race. This liminal location effectively dislocates the racial polarities that have underwritten much modern American literature, and Hurston’s fascination with the Caribbean can be attributed partly to ways in which this old colonial landscape offers a specter of alterity that throws U.S. racial politics into comparative relief. Much of Hurston’s writing is thus devoted to remapping the South, to reorienting it within alternative cartographies. As a trained anthropologist, she is very attuned to the epistemological implications of perspective, and in her early essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” she writes about how she became “colored” only after moving out of Eatonville, which was an all-black town, to Jacksonville (826). She also uses the word angle a great deal in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and, as Philip Joseph has noted, she deployed spatial metaphors in a canceled section of Dust Tracks specifically to highlight her commitment to imaginative mobility and her disdain of entrenched parochialism: “I do not wish to close the frontiers of life upon my own self. . . . I do not wish to deny 7 

On Hurston’s conservatism, see Plant 20, 119.

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myself the expansion of seeking into individual capabilities and depths by living in a space whose boundaries are race and nation” (153). As an alternative to such local mapping, much of Hurston’s work deploys biblical prototypes or legends taken from classical myth to resituate contemporary conditions within alternative archetypal frameworks—a familiar enough modernist strategy, of course, as James Joyce or T. S. Eliot would acknowledge. This in turn leads Hurston openly to mock what her essay “The ‘Pet Negro’ System” calls “The Book of Dixie” (914), as she devises alternative forms of mapping that parody the self-enclosed nature of the Old South by allowing metaphorical conceits a ludicrous literal embodiment. For instance, in “Negro Mythical Places,” she describes “West Hell” as “the hottest and toughest part of that warm territory. The most desperate malefactors are the only ones condemned to West Hell, which is some miles west of regular Hell” (895). Similarly, she talks of how there are “many golden streets” in heaven, “but the two main arteries of travel are Amen Street, running north and south, which is intersected in front of the throne by Hallelujah Avenue running from the east side of Heaven to the West” (896). The point about these and other pseudo-geographies in Hurston’s writing is that they are used pointedly to demystify and deconstruct the regional mythologies of the American South by showing how they are also, in their own way, equally a form of pseudo-geography. Hurston is an example of a writer whose critical reputation has been distorted by a privileging of her early work (Their Eyes Were Watching God, in particular) over what Edward Said, following Adorno, called “late style.” Said’s On Late Style describes “artistic lateness” as involving not “harmony and resolution” but “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction” (7), of the kind that problematizes any prospect of closure. These qualities are associated with Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, which first appeared in 1948 but was not republished until 1991, long after her other works of fiction. The novel has had a most unfortunate history, marred on its first appearance by the absurd charges of pedophilia that were to drive Hurston into poverty and an early grave and subsequently dismissed by readers such as Alice Walker for what she called its “reactionary, static, shockingly misguided and timid” quality (“Zora” 89). In fact, though, it could be argued Seraph on the Suwanee is Hurston’s most compelling and in many ways her best novel, an extraordinary account of fluctuating family fortunes across various Florida landscapes. One of the reasons Walker disliked the book is that the main characters here are white, not black; Hurston, who took issue in the 1950s with what she called court orders to “make races mix,” set out deliberately in Seraph to write a novel where the Manichaean categories of racial difference no longer hold—the main character, Jim Meserve, is called “Black Irish in his ancestry” (605)—and where racial mixing in the

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Florida fishing industry is commonplace. Another reason Seraph has been unpopular is that it seeks deliberately to travesty regional distinctions, to reject explicitly the stereotypes that would pit “Yankee” against southerner: Jim says that while his “old man was sitting around reading and taking notes trying to trace up who did what in the Civil War, and my two brothers were posing around waiting for the good old times that they had heard went on before the war to come back again, I shucked out to get in touch with the New South” (782–83). Again, there is a strand of pseudogeography at work here, with the old marine hands winding Jim up as a rookie fishing captain by telling him that he has “to cross the Lick-andSpit Mountains just back of New Smyrna” in order to “meet old Bozo and fight him,” a piece of ribbing that Jim recognizes by recalling how Florida is actually “as flat as a flounder” (800–801). Leaving aside such gothic fables, Jim finds himself fascinated more by the sea’s “seemingly infinity of form” (802); and it is an equivalent sense of displacement from the socially antiquated to the serenely primitive, from ossified southern culture to a more mobile and malleable nature, that governs this narrative. The description here of the sea as “good and . . . cruel too” (906) acts as a metaphorical correlative to the central relationship between Jim and his wife Arvay, who one on level “resented her enslavement” (723) but who ultimately acquiesces in the view of her daughter, as well as of her husband, that love “ain’t nothing else but compellment” (759). This intertwining of pain and pleasure, black and white, does make, of course, for an uncomfortable reading experience, and Seraph on the Suwanee is in some ways closer to the southern tradition of William Gilmore Simms than that of Alice Walker. Janet St. Clair in 1989 critiqued the book as “marred” by “an apparent uncertainty of moral purpose” (211), a novel where the “viciousness” (204) of the main male character could be redeemed only by the “subversive undertow” (211) St. Clair thought she could detect beneath the text’s “romantic rhetoric” (201), as if to make the book pedagogically safe again for college students. It is, however, clear from her political essays of the 1940s and 1950s that Hurston was no friend of liberal progressive causes, and my purpose here is simply to point out how Seraph on the Suwanee perfectly embodies the logic of her own creative imagination, inspired as it was by modernist anthropology, skepticism about racial and regional identities, and an interest in psychological and sexual primitivism. Whereas Their Eyes Were Watching God could easily be accommodated to Walker’s postmodern imagination, Seraph on the Suwanee has a hard-edged quality that made it resistant to the more emollient designs of U.S. multiculturalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Hurston’s discomfort with the entrenched nationalist assumptions surreptitiously promoted by interwar regionalism was shared by Elizabeth

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Bishop, whose poetry goes even further in foregrounding the contingent aspects of geographical perspective so as to interrogate ways in which “American Literature,” as the field was conventionally understood in the mid-twentieth century, was silently embedded within particular territorial assumptions. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop was brought up after the death of her father by relatives in Nova Scotia, Canada. She moved in 1938 to Key West, Florida, but between 1951 and 1966, she lived in Brazil with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, before finally returning to the United States. Like Hurston, Bishop was a great admirer of the work of Gilberto Freyre, whose theories she drew on for her own 1967 study Brazil.8 Bishop described here how Brazilians “are franker than Anglo-Saxons about extramarital love, and they are tolerant of miscegenation” (10); she also acknowledged how the people, “Roman Catholics, at least in outward behavior” (10), were “culturally mixed” (84), deriving both from the Portuguese and the Moors, as well as from Indians and African slaves. As with Hurston and the Caribbean, there is a sense in which Bishop takes pleasure in the hybrid culture of Brazil precisely because it offers an alternative to the rigid racial binaries of black against white that still haunted the U.S. South at this time. Bishop directly addresses these points of convergence and divergence between U.S. and Brazilian society in “Santarém,” her 1978 poem that takes its title from a place “in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon” (185).9 Though Bishop emphasizes here the discrepancies between the two cultures, she also highlights various points of intersection, and the “conflux” of the poem’s territorial location comes to carry a larger hemispheric resonance: Two rivers full of crazy shipping—people all apparently changing their minds, embarking, disembarking, rowing clumsy dories. (After the Civil War some Southern families came here; here they could still own slaves. They left occasional blue eyes, English names, and oars. No other place, no one on all the Amazon’s four thousand miles does anything but paddle.) (186) In a letter of May 18, 1965, shortly before she returned from Brazil, Bishop contrasted her contentment in South America with her memories of Florida and the U.S. South in the 1930s and 1940s: “After living in the On Bishop and Freyre, see Harrison 167. Unless otherwise stated, page references for Bishop’s poems are taken from her Complete Poems. 8  9 

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south off and on for more than ten years you have no idea what a relief it is to live here and see people of all colors happy and natural together. (All miserably poor together, too, but even so, it is more civilized than what we have in the USA, I’m afraid)” (Goldensohn 87). Bishop’s own sense of alienation from the United States as a gay poet would have made her even more responsive to Brazil’s tolerance of “extramarital love,” and, as David R. Jarraway has observed, Bishop’s geographical displacements— from Canada to the United States to Brazil and back again—might be seen as analogous to the “spectral lesbian identity” implicit in her poetry (247). Bishop is a transgressive writer, one who crosses boundaries, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense of that term. At the same time, Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell that she did not “want to become a poet who can only write about South America” (One Art 383–84), and the subject of her work is not the exotic nature of strange places as such, but rather, as she implied in the title of her 1956 poem “Questions of Travel,” the relative perspectives inherently associated with processes of displacement. Bishop’s very first poem in her first collection, North & South (1946), is entitled “The Map,” and it presages her subsequent treatments of the relation between forms of representation and physical objects. Another poem in North & South, “Florida,” is reminiscent of Henry James’s The American Scene in the way it describes the landscape of the Gulf Coast in faintly surreal terms: “The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze / like the bills of the pelicans” (32). “Florida” also deploys Bishop’s characteristic discursive idiom of juxtaposition rather than organicism to imply how the state is something of an “add on” to the continent: The state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water, held together by mangrove roots. . . . (32) Just as Bishop characteristically links her clauses together paratactically— “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and,’” as she puts it in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (58)—so Florida is presented here as bearing a conjunctive rather than an integral relation to U.S. national territory. Its depiction as a “state full of long S-shaped birds” also foregrounds the way its cartographic “scale” gets naturalized, since the shape of the birds appears to mirror the “long” extent of Florida as its peninsula protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean (32). All this forms part of Bishop’s conscious demystification of U.S. discourses of regionalism and the coercive identities associated with them. José Martí is specifically mentioned in “Jerónimo’s House”—“I play each year / in the parade / for José Martí” (34)—and part of Bishop’s concern throughout her poetry is to rotate U.S. cultural landscapes through a

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Figure 15.  Map of the New World by Sebastian Műnster (1540), from Cosmographia (1544).

hemispheric perspective, to see what America looks like from, as it were, the other side up. This stereoscopic focus can be seen in the sequence of poems in the 1965 collection Questions of Travel—“Arrival at Santos,” dated “January, 1952” (90), and “Brazil, January 1, 1502” (91)—whose homonymic dates juxtapose the adventures of an American tourist in the 1950s with the colonial expeditions of the sixteenth century.10 Appropriately enough, the original cover for Questions of Travel reproduced a map of the New World by the sixteenth-century cartographer Sebastian Műnster (figure 15), who first published this map of America in his 1540 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia and then again in his major work Cosmographia (1544). Műnster, who left the Franciscan order in Heidelberg to become professor of Hebrew at Basel University from 1529 to 1552, was a key figure in the “new” geography of the Reformation era, and, as Matthew McLean has observed, his cartographic work is poised 10 

On Bishop and the U.S. tourist industry, see von Hallberg 81.

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between medieval and mathematical models of the cosmos, being an attempt to reconcile “a sense of God’s immanence” with the growth of “man’s empirical knowledge” (323). Műnster’s image of “Die Nűw Welt” would doubtless have appealed to Bishop because it was the first map to show North and South America connected to each other but separate from any other land mass. Indeed, the hemispheric south is Műnster’s focal point here, with Cuba and the Caribbean islands magnified in scale, North America relatively marginalized, and the whole hemispheric unit positioned between Africa and Spain to the east and “Cathay” to the west. Műnster’s map was the first to name the Pacific Ocean, “mare pacificum,” and it also specifically denominates “Terra florida,” which, in a reversal of what was to become the normal cartographic perspective in later maps, perches here awkwardly toward the top of the American continent. Such a cartographic emphasis is commensurate also with the tone of Geography III (1976), the final collection of poems published in Bishop’s lifetime, which similarly featured on its title page a globe, a surveyor’s level, and other instruments for mapping (figure 16). The premise of Geography III, evident from the extract from a nineteenth-century geography textbook that forms the collection’s epigraph, is the way in which figural cartographies create more questions than answers: What is a Map? A picture of the whole, or a part, of the Earth’s surface. What are the directions on a Map? Toward the top, North; toward the bottom, South; to the right, East; to the left, West. In what direction from the center of the picture is the Island? North. In what direction is the Volcano? The Cape? The Bay? The Lake? The Strait? The Mountains? The Isthmus? What is in the East? In the West? In the South? In the North? In the Northwest? In the Southeast? In the Northeast? In the Southwest? (157) The cascade of unresolved directions in this epigraph to Geography III points to the collection’s general theme of disorientation, of the ways in which maps, whether cartographic or metaphoric, always present distorted pictures of the world. If imperialism is linked to the way certain

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Figure 16.  Elizabeth Bishop, title page to Geography III (1976). Courtesy of Random House Group.

conventional kinds of geographic construction get calcified, the charm of Bishop’s poetry lies in its awareness of the lacunae within cartography, of the disjunctions between physical and psychic space. This self-conscious focus on loose ends and false markers impels Bishop’s poetry toward an aesthetics of surrealism, although as a devotee of control, she abhorred the idea of the mind being “broken down” that she associated with the more extreme styles of surrealist art and so was reluctant to accept this label. Nevertheless, there is a clear sense in which her work is intent on encompassing what she called in one of her letters the “surrealism of everyday life” (Suárez-Toste 146, 156). Bishop acknowledged how she read “a lot of surrealist poetry and prose” when she lived in France after graduating from college in 1934 (Costello 26), and her poetry makes references to surrealist artists such as Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico.11 Of the circus horse in “Cirque d’Hiver,” for example, she writes: “His mane and tail are straight from Chirico” (31). She also admitted in her Paris Review interview to being a great admirer of the “superb” Joseph Cornell (“The Art” 67), whose trick boxes, “cages for infinity,” are celebrated in Bishop’s poem “Objects & Apparitions”:

11 

For Bishop’s debt to Ernst, see Mullen 65–66.

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Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes my words became visible for a moment. (275–76) The phrase “cages for infinity” is oxymoronic, of course, and this poem plays knowingly with a dialectic of contradiction, where visibility and invisibility, facade and latency, become mutually constitutive. There is a view of Bishop, prevalent particularly among U.S. commentators, holding that her discursive repressions and psychological reticence were part of a larger strategy to maintain her inner freedom. Thus, for example, Thomas Travisano argues that the way “[t]he word ‘free’ appears over and over at crucial moments in her verse” testifies to ways in which Bishop “explores the right of creatures and things to exist . . . outside the observing self” and its “cultural norms” (125). This, however, would appear to be an attempt at heart to repatriate Bishop, to encompass her characteristic obliquity within a U.S. circumference where “freedom,” the self-authentication of both personal and national identity, is assumed to be a moral good. But part of the innovative aspect to Bishop’s poetry lies in the way it deliberately positions itself outside the boundaries of U.S. ideological constraints, using geographic displacement and cartographic indirection as corollaries to an interplay between psychological manifestation and latency. Unlike the American confessional poets, whose more flamboyant performances she abhorred, Bishop thrived on circumspection and strategic readjustment, on working through a pronounced sense, as she put it at the end of “Questions of Travel,” that “the choice is never wide and never free” (94). This is Joseph Cornell’s style of mise-en-abîme applied to the worlds of both geographic mapping and psychosexual identity, whose allure arises not from any prospect of ultimate emancipation (“never free”) but through perpetual realignments, from a tantalizing interplay between chimera and loss. In this sense, the Latin American perspective is integral, not incidental, to Bishop’s poetry, since she uses hemispheric displacement to complicate what “north and south” might mean and to evoke an aesthetic of “everyday surrealism” that illuminates blind spots—sexual, racial, philosophical—within the U.S. body politic in the middle years of the twentieth century. Mississippi Vulgate: Faulkner and Barthelme William Faulkner, described by Werner Sollors as “ultimately the most significant American novelist of the [twentieth] century” (“Ethnic” 72), has traditionally been regarded as an iconic southern writer because of his intense focus on a compressed and enclosed fictional territory, Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, and because of his apparently obsessive

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exploration of the psychological and historical legacies of the Civil War. More recently, though, there have been attempts to internationalize Faulkner, to explicate his texts in broader, hemispheric terms. Thus, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes told a U.S. audience that Faulkner was “both yours and ours” because his key subject, “the haunting face of defeat,” was central to both the U.S. South in relation to the U.S. North and Latin America in relation to North America more generally (Cohn 2); Colombian Gabriel García Márquez argued that, since Yoknapatawpha County has “Caribbean shores,” Faulkner should be seen as “in some sense . . . a Caribbean writer” (Zamora, Writing 33); Martinique native Edouard Glissant understood Faulkner not simply as a local chronicler of Mississippi but in the context of a plantation world stretching “from northeastern Brazil to the Caribbean to the southern United States” (Faulkner 10). Glissant pointed out how places such as Haiti and the métissage world of New Orleans remain just off-stage in the narrative of Absalom, Absalom!, threatening the white paternity of Thomas Sutpen and associating geographic “errantry . . . the thought of what is relative, the thing relayed as well as the thing related” with what in Faulkner’s world appears as a “tragic” destruction of genealogical purity (Poetics 18, 21). While such Latin American rereadings of Faulkner can open up his texts in provocative new ways, Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn are surely right to suggest that Márquez’s simple assimilation of Faulkner as a “Caribbean” writer marks an act of unwarranted appropriation (7), one that threatens to gloss over the racial specificity of the U.S. South. As Walter Benn Michaels notes, the “American rule of racial identity has generally been that one drop of black blood makes a black person,” which has effectively divided “the American population into two major categories: black and not-black” (Trouble 25–26). This rule, as we have seen from the writings of Hurston and Bishop, does not appertain to Haiti, Brazil, or other Latin American countries; yet for Faulkner, it is the axis upon which his whole creative universe turns. Thomas Sutpen in Absalom Absalom! needs to cling to racial distinctions to make his life meaningful, just as Faulkner needed to preserve the antinomies in his narratives— black versus white, north versus south—in order to preserve their epistemological coherence. Race within Faulkner’s world is thus relentlessly essentialized, as at the beginning of Light in August, where the narrative asserts impersonally, “only a negro can tell when a mule is asleep or awake” (10). The idea of Joe Christmas in this novel or Thomas Sutpen taking a relaxed attitude toward questions of racial hybridity would be as absurd as their moving out to California and taking up surfing: within the terms of Faulkner’s imaginative universe, the very nature of geographical circumscription mirrors the characters’ racked forms of psychological claustrophobia. In this sense, as Eric J. Sundquist observed,

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the tortured representations of miscegenation in Faulkner’s fiction are themselves complicit with a white racism that can only imagine racial difference in terms of a “house divided” (Faulkner 158). This is why Faulkner’s fiction perpetually reiterates itself, crisscrossing the same terrain whose homologies and repetitions, across both time and space, it compulsively charts. Faulkner was never a great elucidator of his own aesthetic practices, and the inchoate power of his writing often derives from the way it embodies these convoluted capacities in a raw state. This is the atavistic local knowledge that Ike McCaslin, the hero of “The Bear,” shares with “Old Ben,” the “old male bear” (160) in the wilderness: “There was no territory within twenty-five miles of the camp that he did not know—bayou, ridge, landmark trees, and path; he could have led anyone direct to any spot in it and brought him back” (159). For Faulkner, the South is not so much a region in the political or cultural sense but precisely the kind of soil or “territory” to which his characters relate by instinct. In The Unvanquished, there is a reference to “that cloudback region which Ringo believed was Tennessee” (67), and again the disjunction between place and its nominalist reinscription is crucial to the tenor of this story. Such an innate capacity to orient oneself within known surroundings might be seen as synecdochic of Faulkner’s world more generally, and here such instinctive territorial knowledge precedes the abstract cartographies of “region” or the anxieties of social displacement. This inevitably induces in the reader a sense of alienation, in the same way John Barrell argued that Thomas Hardy used his representations of local knowledge not to draw in but to estrange the reader, who could never enjoy the same kind of privileged empathy with location as Hardy’s fictional characters and who was, therefore, always positioned as an outsider. But in Faulkner’s case these vanishing horizons have also engendered a critical legacy intent on reconstructing and recreating his lost world, from Cleanth Brooks’s Agrarian invocation of Faulkner’s “sense of belonging to a living community” (3), to Richard Godden’s attempts to explicate Yoknapatawpha County through an analysis of ways in which the South’s social and economic changes, and in particular its complicated labor relations, mirrored the “long revolution” of U.S. national politics in the interwar years.12 “Obstinately, Faulkner maintains the enclosed place,” wrote Glissant (Faulkner 230); and critics such as Brooks and Godden uphold this discursive matrix of an “enclosed place” by their insistence on treating Faulkner’s fictional account of Mississippi as a model of the social organism.

12  Godden’s use of the phrase “long revolution” in his title indicates his methodological debt to Raymond Williams, whose book The Long Revolution was published in 1961.

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What makes Faulkner a great writer, however, is precisely the way in which the encrusted antinomies within his landscapes dissolve even as he fabricates them. As André Bleikasten illuminatingly put it, [o]xymoron, the pairing of contraries, is, as we know, one of Faulkner’s favorite figures of speech, and paradox and irony are his favorite modes of thought. . . . The point is, however, that, contrary to New Critical assumptions, there is no unifying principle under which they can be subsumed. Paradoxes, with Faulkner, insist on remaining paradoxes; they refuse to be eventually dissolved in the plenitude of the completed text. (356) This means that characters in Faulkner can relate to themselves, and to others, only in self-canceling, self-lacerating terms—as with Quentin Compson’s “I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” at the end of Absalom, Absalom! (311). Faulkner’s imagination is always most fired by the twisting of conventional categories: how the prim white woman is sexually attracted to the “negro,” how the defeated are in fact “the unvanquished.” This idiom of reduplication is also the source of Faulkner’s gothic style and of his black humor, where sexual and racial identities become mixed in excruciating, self-immolating ways. The structural paradox of Faulkner’s writing is that, though it needs a compressed and constricted notion of space to lend the narratives any kind of epistemological coherence, such space is always represented textually in self-dissolving terms. The tendency of southern studies to reify and monumentalize Faulkner, to treat Yoknapatawpha County as though it were a real place, thus tends to overlook Glissant’s incisive insight that Faulkner’s work is predicated on the notion of a “failed foundation,” of the radical “‘impossibility’ of establishing a territorial foundation” (Faulkner 121, 116). Though Faulkner is a brilliant and disturbing writer, then, his genius represents a highly idiosyncratic version of the American South under the historically specific aegis of modernism, and it would be wrong to conflate this with any larger account of regional identity. The works of Richard Ford (born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944) frequently engage in sly intertextual relationships with Faulkner: for example, Frank Bascombe, Ford’s fictional protagonist of The Sportswriter trilogy, has a last name that echoes Quentin Compson’s mother’s maiden name, “Bascomb,” while Frank’s son Ralph’s birthday in The Sportswriter occurs on the same day as Benjy’s birthday in The Sound and the Fury (Hobson 50, 53). Ford’s critique of Faulkner underscores his concern to demystify the gothic topologies that became familiar in the early twentieth-century southern novel, along with his more postmodern sense of “the South” as “not a place any more” but rather “a Belt, a business proposition” (“Walker Percy” 562). This kind of deliberate argument with Faulkner

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is also prevalent in the fiction of Frederick Barthelme: in Elroy Nights (2003), where a neighbor who complains about rubbish in the apartment building is dismissed as “Mr. Go Down Moses” (83), and in The Brothers (1993), where Del’s quasi-incestuous fling with his brother Bud’s wife Margaret effectively imitates Faulknerian family sagas from a more comic perspective, rewriting blood vendettas as pastiche. There is also a vignette in The Brothers that playfully desublimates Faulknerian aesthetics, when Del and Jen go to Polly’s Interstate Peanut and Fruit Hutch and are shown a “little house” that Polly bought in Vero Beach. When Polly snaps a switch, the whipped cream turns into flames and “tiny shrieks” emerge from the model house (144–45), as if to parody the Faulknerian rhetoric of apocalypse and barn burning. Like his brother Donald, the novelist who died in 1989, Frederick Barthelme was brought up in Houston, Texas. Whereas Donald spent most of his professional career in New York, however, Frederick took a job in 1977 teaching writing at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, and nearly all his writing is set within southern landscapes, albeit of a nontraditional kind. Just as Donald Barthelme’s work spoofs the icons of Americana, so Frederick Barthelme’s writing more specifically refracts the legends of the Old South through the prism of postmodernism: in his nonfiction work Double Down, he unequivocally castigates the “myth” of “old” Mississippi as “phony” (4), while his story “Rain Check” features a restaurant called “Red Legs,” where all the waitresses work in “antebellum drag” (232). Much more than Donald, though, Frederick incorporates into his writing a strong sense of specific places, particularly the Gulf Coast of Mississippi for which he has acknowledged “a great fondness” (R. Hall). Biloxi is portrayed in The Brothers, where fog from the Gulf of Mexico is said to be so thick that “the whole world turned solid white” (74), while from the hotel balcony the gulf itself appears like “the end of things, the point beyond which you couldn’t go” (71). As this scene implies, there is a powerful metaphysical affect within Barthelme’s mundane topographies—in the last paragraph of Painted Desert (1995), Del wonders “what we must look like from the sky” (243)—and this aesthetic of otherworldliness ensures that his novels and short stories reproduce cultural landscapes of the South with all the conventional historical and regional markers suppressed or omitted. In Painted Desert, for example, the characters visit the Texas School Book Depository in Deeley Plaza, Dallas, where John F. Kennedy was shot, but it appears to them no more than “a vacant lot. . . . There was a lighted American flag in the middle of it. There were some plaques around. It didn’t look like history to me” (95). Barthelme thus reduces the idealist dimensions of U.S. national narratives to their material components—“some architect’s idea of a Kennedy memorial—thick slabs of concrete” (100)—and in so doing,

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he highlights disjunctions between place and its allegorization, thereby deflating the tendency to apotheosize locations that is inherent within both the regionalist and nationalist consciousness of American literary culture. We see this also in Trip, a book of photographs by Susan Lipper with a commentary by Barthelme, which reproduces indeterminate, amorphous southern landscapes, as in the photo of a bathroom stall to which is tacked on the wall a still from Gone with the Wind. In place of these grand narratives, Barthelme takes delight in a modular world of shopping malls, Walmarts, and Holiday Inns, whose premises are flat and depthless rather than allegorical or metaphorical, as with the town square of “Pie Town” in Painted Desert, with its “giant pie sculpture . . . set in the middle of a fountain” (189). Barthelme was an accomplished visual artist before he became a fiction writer, with his work being exhibited in Canada and Argentina (among other locations), and his fictional landscapes tend to retain a painterly element, where the aesthetic aspect of a particular place—its shape, size, scale, and so on—is emphasized more than its location on an interpretative grid. His work also has an eye for interior decoration—for the restaurant’s carpet that is “red with a chocolate scroll pattern” in Second Marriage (122) or for the furniture in Painted Desert and “the way it was arranged in the apartment” (164)—as if it were such internal mappings that comprised the more significant cartographies of the postmodern era. (In response to Del’s jibe in the latter novel that she is a “true postmodernist,” Jen responds: “What choice?” [104]) In Elroy Nights, there is also a discussion among traveling companions about the usefulness of maps, with the “map orientated” Victor being keen to consult his maps to find out about tourist attractions and landmarks (165), but the narrator feeling profoundly that, within the anonymous Louisiana country, place does not signify in this way: “we decided to call it a night in Pelba, a tiny, low spot just off the highway. Not even a town, really” (181). In a 1988 essay on his work, “On Being Wrong,” Barthelme said that he preferred “open space” (27) in his fiction to the recycling of “big ideas,” which are “often big by reason of inflation” (26). This preference is analogous in spatial terms to his subsequent dismissal of the “entire modernist hope of a built world bettering mankind” as “a pipe dream” and his own preference for indeterminacy: I’m always thrilled by the vacantness and hollowness of the world we build for ourselves, in the spaces between buildings. . . . The allure of the parking lot, the roadside, the vacant spaces in apartment buildings, has something to do with them being untouched—they are accidental spaces, by-products of the culture that builds hard and fast and with no thought but money. These spaces are unspoiled by the “art” of architec-

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ture. For me they’re the churches of this moment. They produce the feelings associated with churches—awe, wonder, freshness, unaffectedness, clarity, fairness, lightness of being. (Oates 50) Barthelme’s invocation of “churches” here testifies to the sense, prevalent throughout his fiction, that the loss of conventional social bearings opens a path toward higher wisdom. In Painted Desert, the “gorgeous” nature of the Arizona desert landscape makes Del and Jen “feel like saints” (226), while the “twisted rocks that stood up in the desert like the last ruins of long-gone cultures” (237) open their eyes to alternative temporal and spatial perspectives. Similarly, in Elroy Nights the narrator describes himself as heading toward Gulfport on Highway 49 with the sky “clear like HD television—stunning” (11). Like his brother Donald, Frederick Barthelme was raised as a Roman Catholic, and his fiction is strewn with relics of a vernacular, sacramental Catholicism bearing witness to the natural wonder of the terrestrial world. Del in Painted Desert says that he prefers “red votive candles” and “a statue of the Blessed Virgin” to the apocalyptic rhetoric of Durrell Dobson (221); in Elroy Nights, the narrator calls himself “the last true Catholic” (115); in Bob the Gambler, Ray describes his daughter as “Saint Teresa the Little Flower” and his wife, Jewel, as a “blessing” (211), while he ends his narrative by describing a “wet street, making a pool of light to travel in, wonderful and otherworldly” (213). Such use of rain or water to evoke an “otherworldly” realm is characteristic of Barthelme: in Two against One, Edward has a shower and says he’s “washing away the sins of the day” (147). Also characteristic of his mode of perverse pilgrimage is a state of ascetic detachment from worldly encumbrance, the liberating sense of being in what Natural Selection calls “the middle of nowhere” (191), a condition that echoes philosophically the Catholic existentialism of fellow southern writer Walker Percy, who is indeed cited by name in Painted Desert (42).13 Percy’s stringently catechistic advocacy of the immanent or quotidian over the transcendent strikes a chord with Barthelme’s characters, who devotionally accommodate themselves to the ordinary and for whom “home” represents a sacramental or metaphysical affiliation rather than the provincial comforts of local or regional identity. Returning to his own “boxy place,” for example, the narrator in the story “Restraint” concludes, “I count blessings, first health and family, then friends, and finally appliances” (156). The comic accounting of home appliances as “blessings” works, as in Percy, to sanctify the proximate environment, so that the material world is not regarded merely as a shadowy reflection of 13 

On Percy’s Catholic existentialism, see Giles, American 367–75.

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some distant, transcendent state. Rather than simply reducing Mississippi to a vulgar landscape of “K-Mart fiction,” as John Aldridge imagined (39), Barthelme inscribes it instead within a more measured discourse of the vulgate, a revised version of popular Catholicism, which works to demystify and reorient the familiar contours of the U.S. South. None of this is to suggest that Barthelme’s work should be understood as that of a practicing Catholic or that his liturgical images carry any specific theological meaning. They are typically inflected by a postmodern sense of comic incongruity, as in The Brothers, where Del finds himself watching High Mass on cable TV (92). Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of this chain of images is discursively to reformulate Mississippi within quite a different kind of cultural framework, one bearing little relation to the Manichaean dualities, the harsh deterministic world of white against black, that implicitly structures Faulkner’s Southern Baptist cultural landscapes. Jackson Lears has contrasted the Protestant providential sense with a more animistic worldview that pervades other religions, where “older meanings of grace” were linked to chance rather than predestination (Something 136), a phenomenon apparent both in Native American culture and in American Catholic communities based around immigration from Ireland and Italy in the nineteenth century. It is this discourse of essence and accident, blessing and contingency, that Barthelme’s New South reflects, which is why Aldridge’s derogatory view of him as simply writing “assembly-line fiction” is much too superficial. Instead, Barthelme’s minimalism is of a more ontological nature, as he deliberately deconstructs the familiar ideology of romantic subjectivity and the reified lineaments of regional geography so as to expose his characters to the accidents of a preternatural “grace.” One way this rupture of traditional humanist shapes is signified in Barthelme is through road-traffic accidents, which occur frequently—in The Brothers, Two against One, “Rain Check,” and so on—and which suggest a fascination with the aesthetics of dismemberment. Lois Parkinson Zamora has written of how visual representations of the lives of saints, with their depiction of grisly death and a deformed body, are important in Latin American baroque art (Inordinate 177), and something of this sensibility works its way through to the images of corporeal disintegration in Barthelme’s writing. In “Rain Check,” for example, the description of a wreck on the highway—“We go through the red light, and a truck slams into the front fender of the Pontiac” (237)—is followed by Lucille’s comment on how everything “in the rain” appears “[s]o mysterious and Latin American” (239), as if the story’s mood of entropy were being linked deliberately to Latin American cultural models. Barthelme himself has obliquely acknowledged Latin American influences upon his

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writing, describing the landscape of the Gulf Coast in The Brothers as “third-worldish when the rain hit” (116) and acknowledging in a 2003 interview that he counts “the obvious Latin Americans” among his favorite authors (Oates 44). This idiom of dismemberment, or creative destruction, is also formulated through the perennial concern in Barthelme’s writing with rituals of gambling. These manifest themselves most obviously in the novel Bob the Gambler, which chronicles events in a floating casino called “Paradise” moored off Biloxi, and also in Double Down, a nonfictional account written with his brother Steven, which describes being wrongly accused of cheating at the gaming table and the legal repercussions arising from that. More than just an addict’s remorseful confession, Double Down reflects the toleration of gambling in the Barthelmes’ Catholic childhood and about the adrenaline involved in trusting to “the happy stupidity of luck” (94), in “risking loss” (100) to gain the “possibility of perfection” (73): “It’s not even really about beating money. It’s about beating logic. It’s about chance, confirming everything you knew but could make no place for in your life” (96–97). This readiness to lose might be seen as analogous to Barthelme’s predilection for car crashes, since both speak to a willing self-immolation, a belief in the capacity of the casino or the accident mysteriously to bring its protagonists into supernatural dimensions that defy rational analysis: There were times when we knew what the next card was going to be, and when the card was revealed it was precisely the card we expected. This happened far too often to be thought of as coincidence, accident, chance. This was, at least, magic. . . . We believe in magic. Magic goes on. We can’t explain it, can’t even begin to. (135) Although, of course, for the brothers such magic was not “dependable,” so that “its usefulness as a betting aid was limited” (136), the credence the brothers give here to the sustainability of magic offers important insights into the prevalence of magic realism in Barthelme’s fiction. According to Amaryll Chanady, magic (or magical) realism works stylistically to resolve the antinomy between natural and supernatural, unlike the mode of the fantastic, in which various forms of contradiction and conflict are exposed. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier drew a similar kind of distinction between the kind of surrealist juxtaposition predicated on radical disparity and the more baroque forms of opposition that enjoy dynamic spatial and conceptual relations; under the aegis of the baroque, argued Carpentier, opposition can be understood as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive (Zamora, Inordinate 146–47). Within the terms of this dialectic, the poetic idiom of Elizabeth Bishop could be said to be more involved with the fantastic or surreal, since its conjunctions and

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juxtapositions are always associated with a fundamental dissimilitude, whereas Barthelme’s style tends more toward the magic realist or baroque, under whose benign canopy God and Mammon are reconciled. Indeed, in the 1985 novel Tracer, set largely in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico coast, the daughter of Captain Mike, proprietor of Captain Mike’s Oyster Heaven, is even called “Magic” (100). While it might seem odd on the face of it to think of Barthelme as part of a Latin American cultural dynamic, it is precisely this kind of reconfiguration that a hemispheric perspective on the U.S. South can bring into focus. It is true, as Timothy Peters astutely observes, that Barthelme’s world—which says little about African Americans, crime, AIDS, or many other aspects of contemporary southern life—is as much of “an invention as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county” (178), an aestheticized representation of the Gulf Coast that correlates more with eighteenthcentury pastoral than it does with contemporary social concerns; but it is also true that in Barthelme’s alternative mythography of the American South, immersed as it is in the kind of cultural Catholicism that was entirely alien to Faulkner’s gothic universe, we find many more resemblances to the Spanish Catholic sensibilities of his hemispheric neighbors. In his 1979 essay “Mexico and the United States,” Octavio Paz starkly contrasted the English and American insistence on racial segregation (in relation primarily to Indians) with the Spanish and Mexican preference for “[c]onquest and evangelization” (361), for the inclusion and appropriation of alien cultures within a more heterogeneous social framework. If Faulkner’s South, with its Puritan obsession with racial division, speaks to the first of these imperatives, Barthelme’s South, organized around a Catholic rhetoric of transubstantiation within which spirit and matter are seen incongruously to interpenetrate each other, speaks to the second. Kirsten Silva Gruesz has written that “a new geography of American literary history” (6) would consider how the Hispanic Catholic culture of South America both fascinated and repelled many nineteenth-century U.S. writers, and a new geography of twentieth-century American literature might consider similar interrelations, even if, as in Barthelme, the discursive matrix of religion tends to operate here metaphorically rather than literally. In this sense, Zamora’s claim that “Latin American magical realists” articulate a more “dissenting” voice than U.S. magic realists seems altogether reductive (“Magical Romance” 542–43). While Barthelme’s work may not be overtly oppositional in the manner of Fuentes or Márquez, the way his writing seeks “to sidestep the made-simple versions of political and moral issues that bad writers and good TV journalists are so fond of,” as Barthelme himself put it (“On Being Wrong” 27), carries its own more subtle dissenting resonance, and the explicit parallel in Double Down between organized gambling and the U.S. justice

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system implies the kind of skepticism about domestic American values that derives from the author’s characteristically oblique, estranged perspective: “It wasn’t about guilt and innocence. It was about telling the jury a story. And whoever told the best story won” (172). Jameson described the heterogeneous nature of magic realism as formally disrupting the oppressive constraints of classic realism, with all its claims to authenticity and transparency, and, as with Martí, the effect of Barthelme’s magic realism is quizzically to rotate the U.S. cultural domain upon its hemispheric axis to see what things might look like the other way around.14 As we saw with William Bartram and William Gilmore Simms, then, the way in which the circumference of the South is described affects what is found there. The regionalism of the “deep” South involves not just a question of self-consciously local writing or the values associated with isolated communities; rather, as Hsuan L. Hsu puts it, regional affiliation is constructed “from the outside in” (38), with the shifting patterns of global alignment producing regional cartographies that change and evolve over time. Transnationalism, in this sense, is not the antithesis to regionalism but is crucial to its constitution: it is precisely the ways in which any given region configures itself in relation to the world around it that determines its internal sense of its own identity. Simms, Martí, and Bishop mapped the American South very differently from Faulkner because, working with different historical assumptions, the latitudes and longitudes of their imagined worlds did not conform to the spatial coordinates of U.S. national agendas as they became consolidated and institutionalized from the postbellum period through the middle of the twentieth century. In his foreword to The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek describes the critical method of parallax as a displacement of the object caused by a change in observational position, arguing that “one of the most effective critical procedures [is] to cross wires that do not usually touch” (ix); and this kind of hemispheric parallax in relation to the American South can help elucidate what Žižek calls the “unthought” of an object, those “disavowed presuppositions and consequences” (ix) locked into the more partial conflation of U.S. national boundaries with an established map of the world. To juxtapose South America with the American South is not to gloss over their local differences but to track the historically variable nature of their interrelationship and the complicated ways in which these domains have intersected over time.

14 

For Jameson’s account of magic realism, see The Political Unconscious 103–50.

C HAPTER 6

Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest

Reversible Coordinates: The Epistemology of Space Writing of contemporary Italian poetry, Elettra Bedon coined the term metaregionalism (17) to describe a self-conscious manipulation of certain forms of dialect, including the deliberate “use of archaic terms and the creation of neologisms” (21) to convey a sense of the constructed rather than the authentic nature of regional identity. On analogy with metafiction, which similarly assumes a reflexive relation to conventions of novelistic realism, metaregionalism might be said to foreground the assumptions involved in traditional ascriptions of place. On one level, of course, all regionalism is necessarily metaregional, since the idea of a region can operate only by positioning itself in relation to wider space; yet the more ludic aspects of metaregionalism might be correlated with what Edward W. Soja has described as “thirdspace,” the opening up of other kinds of cartographies so as to avoid both the more positivistic emphasis of traditional maps and the top-heavy superstructures of social-science theory. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s description in The Production of Space of a cultural politics whereby “the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space” (38) and taking account also of Lefebvre’s acknowledged debt to surrealists such as André Breton, Soja postulated the idea of “trialectics” as a way of allowing scope within flat geographical representation for issues of the Other and the marginalized (Thirdspace 61). Soja’s alternative geography is commensurate as well with what Sara Blair has described as “the ‘strange effects’ of space—its simultaneity, its encryptations, its dynamism and repressions” (556)—forces that emerge most powerfully in the misprisions of space projected by fictive, imaginative texts. All spatial awareness involves the internalization of illusion of one kind or another, so that to adumbrate a regional map of American literature is merely to consider how these different forms of misrecognition have become institutionalized: which geographies have become normalized and why. The notion that literary regionalism is simply an old-fashioned phenomenon has been advanced not only by novelists such as Richard Ford, who has objected to all the stereotypes that have accumulated around reifications of the “South” or the “Midwest” (Padget 381), but also by

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contemporary critical theorists: Fredric Jameson wrote in Postmodernism of how “place in the United States today no longer exists, or, more precisely, it exists at a much feebler level, surcharged by all kinds of other more powerful but also more abstract spaces” (127). He subsequently described “neoregionalism” as a sentimental “flight from the realities of late capitalism, a compensatory ideology, in a situation in which regions (like ethnic groups) have been fundamentally wiped out—reduced, standardized, commodified, atomized, or rationalized” (Seeds 148). Jameson’s point is that “critical regionalism” as a mode of distance or resistance tends necessarily to overestimate the significance of its own indigenous culture and to underestimate the structural gravity of macroeconomics, the ways in which regions are shaped by forces outside their orbit. Such wholesale abstractions of place, however, risk eliding what Kenneth Frampton has called the “tactile” range of “sensory perceptions . . . registered by the labile body” (28), those experiences that, as Blair observed, have the effect of twisting any specific lived environment into emotionally contorted shapes. J. E. Malpas has written about “the place-bound character of human life and thought” (14), the ways in which human memories are “nested” within particular locations (101), so that any notion of “objective” space will involve a “debilitating” blindness (44) to ways in which a given terrain must always be folded within a “process of triangulation” (41) that is “intrinsically perspectival” (50). Linking his conception of “the necessary intersubjectivity of place” (153) to Marcel Proust and William Wordsworth, as well as to the Australian aboriginal tradition, Malpas argues that all maps necessarily employ an “allocentric frame” (58) through which an idea of location is made legible. In philosophical terms, there is an important distinction to be made between Malpas’s inherently perspectival idiom and the Kantian imperative that would understand self-positioning as a form of identity. In “Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space” (1768), Immanuel Kant declared that “the basis of which we form our concept of directions in space, derives from the relation of these intersecting planes to our bodies” (366); and in “What Is Orientation in Thinking?”(1786), he reinforced this subjugation of spatial dimensions by remarking on how “in spite of all the objective data in the sky, I orientate myself geographically purely by means of a subjective distinction” (239). This is the doctrine, familiar in American literature through the transcendentalist writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, under whose aegis the self is positioned at a central point of the compass, with space becoming its external correlative and, by extension, the United States being located subliminally as the focal point of the globe. (Many discussions of U.S. “imperialism” in the twenty-first century have overlooked how the nation’s rhetoric of global circumference is

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linked in significant ways to more theoretical notions of self-centeredness that emerged two hundred years earlier.) In Malpas’s more reflexive version of romanticism, however, the representation of place involves a more doubled-up (or metaregional) aspect, where space is both a bounded and an open region within which a set of interconnected elements can be located. Since such landscapes are created through juxtaposition and displacement, at the interface between mental configuration and corporeal embodiment, they incorporate a quality not so much of transcendence but of what David Simpson in Situatedness called a state of provisional location, one that preserves “the tension we experience between being in control and out of control” (20). While Simpson related this tension specifically to the confused conditions surrounding “the subjectification of individuals” (15) in a post-Fordist world of “short-term contracts” (231), where people take refuge in the idea of their particular “situation” because it seems to offer them some prospect of clarity and agency they are actually being denied, this general thesis of misrecognition might be applied more generally to the problem of how people relate to place in the twenty-first century. Rather than simply being eviscerated, as Jameson imagined, place has found itself transposed into ever more surreal shapes, as a cerebral phenomenon whose intersections with the material world cut in many different directions. In this regard, the Pacific Northwest represents an illuminating test case for several reasons. First, as Susan Kollin observed in her essay “North and Northwest,” this “region” itself has “remained largely undertheorized in studies of American literary history” (414)—unlike the South, or indeed unlike the West itself, whose mythologies of Eden and the frontier have been widely analyzed and deconstructed.1 Second, the term Northwest itself, which has fluctuated and evolved over the course of American history—the “Northwest Ordinance” of 1787, for example, referred to land in what is now the U.S. Midwest—speaks to a circumscription of territory according to a variable set of criteria, some of them (as we shall see in the delineations of “Ecotopia” or “Cascadia”) entirely fictional. Today, as Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura note, the borders of the Pacific Northwest’s hypothetical domain most commonly encompass the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, although some other definitions include Montana, Wyoming, northern California, or Alaska (4). Indeed, the geographical integrity of this region as a cultural formation is intriguingly complicated by the situation of Alaska, bought by the United States from Russia in 1867 as the nation’s last substantial land purchase. As Kollin remarks, Alaska itself geographically ceases to be in the West at the point where its Aleutian Islands cross over the international date 1 

On California and Eden, see, for example, Wyatt.

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line at the meridian of 180 degrees and “become East” (“North” 430), even though for political purposes they keep Alaskan rather than Russian time. Similarly, the historical affiliation of Seattle with Alaska—dating from the Yukon Gold Rush in the 1890s, when the city became what Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes calls a “jumping-off point” for the northern frontier (270)—has ensured a peculiar kind of topography for the Pacific Northwest, where geographical materialism and cultural mythology are often violently at cross-purposes. Douglas Coupland has written of how Seattle “sees itself as being a spit away from Alaska,” while the neighboring city of Vancouver, 120 miles further north across the Canadian border, conversely prides itself on being “the warmest place in Canada, a sort of colder, rainier Malibu” (City 123). Such paradoxes emphasize again the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest, the ways in which its very inscription as a region serves to elucidate the fraught and contested relation between text and place in American literature. One more fundamental reason for the ontological instability of the Pacific Northwest is its particular geological infrastructure, whose volcanoes and earthquakes make for a landscape always liable to rupture and sudden change. Scientists have surmised that an earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale, the strongest to hit North America over the past five hundred years, took place in the Cascadian subduction zone in January 1700, an event that caused huge landslides and effectively reshaped the landscape around the Columbia River Gorge. The Juan de Fuca plate that underlies the Pacific Ocean, from Vancouver Island to northern California, exposes the Pacific Northwest to the risk of more infrequent but potentially more devastating earthquakes than those that routinely strike southern California, and this, added to the historic accretions of Native American settlements that continue to populate the region, gives a sense of the white man’s civilization here being merely a temporary phenomenon. The fact that the Northwest lacks any written records from before 1800, with the only eyewitness accounts of the 1700 earthquake appearing in Indian legends, lends the region a peculiarly foreshortened sense of history, anomalous even within an American context, with the result that predictions of its future have as much purchase on the region’s collective imagination as the more enigmatic circumstances of its actual past. After the legal incorporation of Pacific Northwest states into the U.S. national body in the second half of the nineteenth century—Oregon in 1859, Montana and Washington in 1889, Idaho and Wyoming in 1890— the region was renowned mainly for its remoteness from the centers of American civilization. Henry James, who paid a brief visit to his nephew Ned James in Seattle in 1905, was, according to Ned, “bored by the west, by the ‘slobber of noises’ which we call our language, by the stream of vacant stupid faces on the streets and everywhere the ‘big ogre of business’”

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(Edel 296). However, Vernon Louis Parrington, who moved from Oklahoma to the University of Washington in 1908 and whose three-volume Main Currents in American Thought (1927–30) was written in Seattle, drew self-consciously on this oppositional regional perspective to clear a space for American literature as an expression of what his book calls “the Utopia that was to be erected in the free spaces of America” (Colonial vii). Labor movements flourished in the Pacific Northwest around the turn of the twentieth century, with the Populist Party enjoying substantial support in Washington state; moreover, as Schwantes has observed, the “Wobblies,” the Industrial Workers of the World, appeared “more at home in the region than elsewhere” (340), and they helped organize the first general strike in a U.S. city, which took place in Seattle in 1919. Parrington’s epic work of scholarship consequently attempts to harness this progressive sentiment, aligning what he takes to be the spirit of American literature with the idea of a “democratic renaissance” and celebrating Jack London, for example, as someone “well aware of the shortcomings of our industrial order” (Beginnings 368): Parrington called London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild “a study in atavism, brilliant, poetic, set against a wild Alaska background” (Beginnings 352). The Seattle critic’s own work, which privileges a frontier spirit by describing how in Puritan times “[t]he foundations of a later America were laid in vigorous polemics, and the rough stone was plentifully mortared with idealism” (Colonial vii), is imbued with a similar kind of masculine, pioneering ethos. Parrington’s systematic neglect of black writing and slave narratives was of its time, of course, but also of its place.2 The Pacific Northwest had strong links in the nineteenth century with the U.S. South, with some southern sympathizers in the Northwest even talking openly of seceding from the Union to form a Pacific republic. Official policy was to prohibit slavery but also to exclude African Americans from legal residence; and in the twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan successfully exploited the region’s populist sympathies to protect the interests of white labor. After the Civil War, the Oregon state legislature had declined to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited any restriction of suffrage based on race or color, and indeed this constitutional amendment was not formally accepted in Oregon until 1959. As we shall see, it is characteristic of the Pacific Northwest that its more visible signs of ethnic conflict and controversy have been focused around involvement with Asia and issues relating to Chinese and Japanese immigration, rather than, as more frequently in the southern U.S. states, relations with Hispanics or African Americans.

2 

On Parrington’s “failure to address black American writers,” see Reising 162.

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The industrial development of the region, based primarily for many years around the extraction and provision of raw materials and mineral wealth for the rest of the country, served initially to position all the American West in what Stephen Tatum has called a relation of “internal colonialism” to the rest of the United States (11). The growth of the railroads and the invention of refrigerated cars during the last years of the nineteenth century helped open up markets as distant as Chicago for Northwest beef; and in 1919 (1932), the second part of his USA trilogy, John Dos Passos makes a point of incorporating Seattle within his nationalist plan, not just because of its geographical extremity but also because of the city’s commitment to political activism and its hospitality toward the Wobblies. Dos Passos chronicles here the adventures of a “young Swede named Hillstrom,” who renames himself Joe Hill, moves West, reads “Marx and the I.W.W. Preamble,” and becomes a folk hero amid the “cookshacks” and “flophouses” of the country, where they sing Joe Hill’s songs “in the county jails of the State of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho . . . forming the structure of the new society within the jails of the old” (USA 684–85). The rapid growth of the automobile industry in the 1920s and 1930s and of transcontinental air travel after World War II also played important parts in integrating this expansive Pacific Northwest within a U.S. territorial domain. Boeing, headquartered in Seattle, was responsible for one-in-six jobs in Washington state by the end of the cold war in 1988; and from the middle part of the twentieth century, both the situation of this industrial armory and the relative proximity of the Pacific Northwest to Korea helped turn what had previously been thought of as an isolated area into a potential military frontline. As Jonathan Raban noted in an essay on how the United States had responded to the threat of international terror after 9/11, Seattle “is uneasily conscious that it’s the nearest metropolitan city in the US to Pyongyang, and thoughts of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities are more prone to disturb Seattle’s sleep than that of cities on the Atlantic coast” (12). Oregon was in fact the only part of the U.S. mainland to suffer direct attack during World War II, when Japanese fire balloons killed six people and set a forest alight near the town of Brookings—an incident remarked on in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) and also in Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971)—while in April 1954 Spokane, in eastern Washington, became the first American city to evacuate its downtown area in a civil-defense drill. Nevertheless, the pastoral nostalgia incumbent upon this region’s lingering mystique of geographical isolation also had the effect during the twentieth century of bolstering the apparatus of American exceptionalism, as though the country’s natural formations were a metaphysical guarantee of U.S. identity. In this sense, Pacific Northwest pastoral oper-

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ated as the correlative to cold war epic, a symbiotic and symbolic manifestation of national values. William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice between 1939 and 1975, who was brought up in eastern Washington and attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, was an outspoken advocate of environmental issues, writing in My Wilderness (1960) of the Pacific West generally as an ultimate source of American democratic traditions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Nash 248–49). Similarly, Theodore Roethke, who taught at the University of Washington and whose influence was what Robin Skelton has called a “dominant feature” of the local poetry scene for many years (xiv), created within the Neoplatonic symmetries of his verse an aesthetic correlative to what he measured as the abstract harmony of nature, where everything was, as his poem “The Rose” puts it, in “its true place” (203). Roethke’s student Richard Hugo, who after a spell as an industrial writer for Boeing went on to be director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, assimilates within his poetry more of an intimation of the violence implicit within rugged mountainous landscapes, but there is an equal sense in Hugo’s work of both proprietorship—“We’ve been long in this country and we know the tongue,” as he puts it in “Listen, Ripley” (262)—and of patriotism. His poem “Topographical Map,” from the 1975 collection aptly entitled What Thou Lovest Well Remains American, equates the frontier spirit with a perpetual, albeit painful, mode of renewal: The original settlers left no record but tears. They wept on earth where it counts. They pointed a vague hand west and we took it from there, and here’s where we are. (268) Gavin Jones has argued that, unlike ethnicity or gender, the question of poverty has been largely neglected as a “critical discourse in the study of American literature and culture” (American xiii) because it would threaten to undermine those assumptions of freedom and universality that underpin a liberal market economy. While this may be true for most of the United States, it does not hold good for the literature of the Pacific Northwest, where the very forces of poverty and rootlessness tend to betoken indigenous forms of authenticity. For Raymond Carver, born in Clatskanie, Oregon, and brought up in Yakima, Washington, the interchangeable nature of western logging towns evokes a world where life is cheap and the language laconic. Carver has acknowledged his sense of affinity with an American “underclass”—“They’re my people” (O’Connell 81)— and, writing in “My Father’s Life” of how his father migrated from Arkansas to Washington in 1934, he drily demystified the utopian trope of westering by remarking, “I don’t know whether he was pursuing a dream when he went out to Washington. I doubt it. I don’t think he dreamed

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much. I believe he was simply looking for steady work at decent pay” (13). Carver’s own stories similarly thrive on an idiom of black humor, where rarefied dreams are dissolved comically into gruesome material realities. In “Feathers,” for example, Olla’s father diligently embarks on a plan of self-improvement that involves reading the encyclopedia from A to Z, a project that takes him four years, only to find his life cut suddenly short when his fellow loggers drop a tree on him. (Nor is this merely a literary device: statistically, according to Schwantes, during this period one in a hundred workers in the Pacific Northwest timber-felling industry died every year, with fully one-sixth suffering a debilitating injury [490].) As if to correlate this melancholy event with a larger way of the world, the narrator of “Feathers” chronicles the demise of his friends’ pet peacock in equally terse fashion: “He flew into his tree one night and that was it for him. He didn’t come down. Old age, maybe, Bud says. Then the owls took over” (307). Carver has acknowledged a debt to Ernest Hemingway—one of his lyric poems is entitled “Poem for Hemingway and W. C. Williams”—and there is in his own work a Hemingwayesque emphasis on sparse minimalist style as a means to eliminate worldly clutter: Carver’s poem ends with a visionary apotheosis of “the fading trees / & fields & light, / upstream” (114). This pastoral ethos of radical simplification is also associated specifically with Pacific Northwest landscapes in Ken Kesey’s classic novel Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), where an East/West dialectic is as integral to the structure of the narrative as is the North/South dialectic in Absalom, Absalom! Just as Quentin Compson in William Faulkner’s novel looks back on Mississippi from his student exile at Harvard, so Leland in Sometimes a Great Notion is dragged back from graduate studies at Yale to help with the family logging business in Oregon, with his bus journey west giving him a sense of moving “back, through time” as well as space (97). The Oregon landscape appears here as alluring, but also as overpowering and “volatile” (28)—the river is described as being “like a glistening bird of prey” (155)—and all this is contrasted continually with manners and customs “back East.” Kesey self-consciously links the fortunes of his Stamper family with the epic foundation of this society by associating them with the westward movement of pioneers to this “bountiful land” in the nineteenth century (11), but various social tensions disrupt this idyll, notably labor problems in the logging industry that are blamed on Floyd Evenwrite, described as the grandson of a Northwesterner who had been “a big man in the very start of the movement, in the IWW, the Wobblies” (381). Kesey’s novel is situated firmly in the cold war era of the 1950s, with Leland’s half-brother Hank harboring uncomfortable memories of recent military service in Korea, where he

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has helped make “America safe from the Commies” (160), an experience that has made him more determined to take no nonsense from radical operatives closer to home. Hank says that he is his “own patriot,” that he would willingly fight for the United States against “Russia,” or indeed for Oregon against California (371); and this politics of attachment, where local integrity is intertwined with national loyalties, accords with Leland’s description of the Oregon country as a land “where Twain could trade rats and capture beetles, a chunk of wild beautiful insane America that Kerouac could have dug a good six or seven novels’ worth” (236). In this sense, the sibling rivalry between Leland and Hank, between East Coast and West Coast values, is easily resolved by the author within a national narrative wherein the half-brothers, no less than the nation’s opposing shores, are revealed ultimately as mutually constitutive, as part of the same extended family. Rather like Jack Kerouac presenting his crosscountry voyage in On the Road as the guarantee of an American spirit of freedom, Kesey appropriates the pastoral landscapes of the Pacific Northwest as the mythic embodiment of a rhetoric of emancipation connected to older American trajectories of exodus and settlement, where, as his novel puts it, “the movement was always west” (26). Kesey’s strategies of nationalist incorporation are different in kind from a counterdiscourse emerging toward the end of the twentieth century that sought imaginatively to dissolve the bonds of federal union altogether. One popular manifestation of this was Ernest Callenbach’s work of science fiction Ecotopia (1975), which envisages Washington, Oregon, and northern California seceding from the rest of the United States and establishing itself as a “stable-state” ecological system (14), where the working week is reduced to twenty hours and where private cars are banned. Callenbach’s “prequel,” Ecotopia Emerging (1981), traces the political rise to power of the Survivalist Party, describing as a turning point on the path to secession the decision of Pacific Northwest state governments to impose a 100 percent gasoline tax, whereupon the motor corporations complained to the Supreme Court that “the new law was an unconstitutional interference with interstate commerce: automobiles made in Detroit were being penalized in the Northwest” (203). Callenbach ingeniously relates this to the 1856 Dred Scott case that helped spark the Civil War, calling the automobile “a ‘peculiar institution’ at least as important in the nation’s life as slavery had been” (204). However implausible the general scenario here, Callenbach’s imaginative projection of what Ecotopia calls “a balkanized continent” (151) and its prequel’s sense of how “in its vastness, the country never became altogether one organism” (23) creatively position the Pacific Northwest as the epitome of an America where the national narrative no longer holds undisputed sway.

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Callenbach’s topography of Ecotopia, albeit extended geographically through British Columbia and Alaska, was also reproduced by Joel Garreau in The Nine Nations of North America (1981), which sought more straightforwardly to make the point that different regions within the United States have such different characteristics they might each be understood as a “nation within a nation” (ix). More systematically, cultural geographers such as Carl Abbott have described recently how social and economic power in the West has largely been transferred from rural to urban areas, so that Kesey’s mythology of a “wild” West has been superseded by the development of urban centers more wired to global networks than to their own territorial hinterlands. Such a notion that “‘city-states’ rather than nations are the real engines of contemporary economies,” as Abbott put it (193), led in the 1980s to the proposition of another hypothetical domain, “Cascadia,” made up of five U.S. northwestern states—Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska—and two Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Alberta. Coordinated through the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER), it has defined its mission as to facilitate “the economies of the Pacific Northwest region and respond to the challenges of the global marketplace,” with its organizers claiming that Cascadia, if judged in comparison to national economies, would enjoy the tenth largest GNP in the world.3 In particular, Seattle’s emergence in the 1990s as a base for multinational corporations—Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and so on—was impelled partly by the rotation of U.S. economic interests away from their traditional focus on Europe and more toward the Pacific Rim. To position the United States within a Pacific matrix is to disturb its familiar contours of integrated national identity, through which the “West” operated as a pastoral ancillary to the more developed “East.” As Rob Wilson remarked in Reimagining the American Pacific, the rotation of east and west across a transpacific axis also involves problematizing the traditional premises of American exceptionalism, predicated as they are on categorical differences between an “old world” of Europe and a “new world” of America (ix). To reimagine American literature transpacifically is thus potentially to redescribe the shape of the subject, to approach it from what is, both literally and metaphorically, an opposite direction. Orient and Orientation: Snyder, Le Guin, Brautigan Among the first writers to represent the Pacific Rim as a discrete region was Gary Snyder, who was born in San Francisco in 1930 and moved with his family to Portland, Oregon, when he was twelve. Snyder wrote 3 

On Cascadia, see Gibbins 164. On Seattle in the 1990s, see Lyons.

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in an appendix to his collection of poems Mountains and Rivers without End of how he was “introduced to the high snow peaks of the Pacific Northwest when I was thirteen and had climbed a number of summits even before I was twenty,” adding how he “was forever changed by that place of rock and sky” (153). Snyder studied anthropology and literature at Reed College in Portland and was also attracted by East Asian landscape paintings that he saw regularly at the Seattle Art Museum. Eschewing English and other European cultural traditions, which he said “meant nothing” to him (“East West” 92), Snyder set out to integrate within his work the outlook of Buddhism, with its focus on the interpenetration of all creation and its corresponding sense of “the superstitions of nationalism and the state” as positively “dangerous” (Earth 34). After a spell as a graduate student in the East Asian Languages Department at Berkeley, Snyder lived in Japan between 1956 and 1970 before returning to northern California, and his writing systematically rejects “the JudaeoChristian worldview” that would see “planet earth” as merely a “stage” for human drama, with “trees and animals” cast merely as peripheral “props” (Turtle 103). As Wai Chee Dimock has observed, Snyder’s displacement of U.S. territorial boundaries, his reconfiguration of domestic space through transnational circuits between America and Asia, is consonant with his assimilation of the United States into the longue durée of “geological time” (177). To extrapolate temporal dimensions from the lifespan of trees or mountains is also implicitly to demystify cultural or political constructions of place, and Snyder has written frequently of the importance of identifying what he calls a more “natural nation” (O’Connell 317), whose physical characteristics traverse “the arbitrary and often violently imposed boundaries of emerging national states” (“The Place” 37). Within his own specific habitat, he defines the “natural region” not through geographic mapping but the prevalence of the douglas fir, “the definitive tree of the Pacific Northwest,” whose “northern limit is around the Skeena River in British Columbia” and whose southern limit “is about the same as that of salmon, which do not run south of the Big Sur River” (“The Place” 37–38). Rejecting what he calls the abstract “systems theory” of globalization, Snyder argues instead for a more “decentralist” conception of “planetary” thinking, which would acknowledge “diversity” and “the reciprocity of things” (“East West” 117, 120). This leads him to understand landscapes “multidimensionally, rather than as a straight line” (“East West” 103), while strenuously resisting the reduction of “specific plants and animals” to mere “objects and commodities” (“Etiquette” 18). Indeed, Snyder defines his “life project” as one of “proposing the possibility of speaking from the nonhuman to the human” (O’Connell 320).

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Although Snyder is an effective proselytizer, part of the fascination of his poems lies in the way they suggest potential frictions between philosophy and its embodiment, along with the ambiguities inherent within the author’s own doctrines of reciprocal interaction. Many of Snyder’s works involve lines of force converging from opposite directions. In “The Wilderness,” from Turtle Island, he writes of the “attitude of humility” with which Pueblo Indians conduct their hunting rituals, so as to achieve a measure of empathy with their prey: “The feeling is that you are not hunting the deer, the deer is coming to you” (109). In Mountains and Rivers without End, these processes of global revolution, the loops and cycles of Earth, are rehoused within imagery drawn from the built environment, as in “Night Highway 99,” where the freeway journey south from Mount Vernon through Seattle and Portland to San Francisco mirrors emblematically both the flow of the river and the endless scroll of Buddhist art prefacing this volume. Snyder seeks poetically, in other words, for oddball juxtapositions, for ways in which doctrines of recycling and regeneration manifest themselves in quotidian life. In “Bubbs Creek Haircut,” from this same collection, he cites local thrift shops— “Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul, / Salvation Army up the coast” (34)—as another example of how such circulation of commodities manifests itself, and he punningly associates the name of the Goodwill thrift shop with the “purity of the mountains and goodwills” integral to the life of this region (38). There are in these poems elements of self-deprecating humor, linked to metaphors of estrangement, where natural and human worlds appear to collide in incongruous ways. Another poem in this collection mixes organic and mechanistic by referring metaphorically to a “Sea / of Information” (98), while “Arctic Midnight Twilight,” located “at the roof of the planet, the warp / of the longitudes gathered” (93), recapitulates a “Koyukon riddle”: “It really snowed hard in opposite directions on my head. who am I?” (95) It is, of course, not difficult to explain this riddle in geographical terms: as the lines of longitude converge at the North Pole, so east and west change places. But this question “who am I?” is more than rhetorical, since it speaks to the air of puzzlement, the language of aporia, that permeates Snyder’s best work. This is the source of the fascination in Snyder’s poetry with mapping, particularly with those places where human mapping falls into disrepair. Such dissolution ensures that the edge of Snyder’s poetry involves not so much an essential revelation of nature as a focus on the paradoxical sites

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of its unravelling, those moments when the ecology of the natural world pushes against the accustomed limits of human convention. Despite his commitment to bioregions, Snyder is also intrigued by the metaphorical sport of latitudes and longitudes through which different places on the globe are brought into alignment with each other: he writes in Earth House Hold of how Sawa-no-se Island “is latitude 29° 36’, which puts it on a level roughly with the Canary Islands, Cairo, Chihuahua, Persepolis and Lhasa” (136). As Nick Selby has observed, the collection Turtle Island, drawing upon the old Indian name for the American continent, is also haunted by a sense of the “troublesomeness” of its own geographical inscriptions, the difficulties of rightly reading the land (43). Leslie Marmon Silko, in fact, has accused Snyder of appropriating Native American myths for his own purposes while ignoring the depredation to Indian communities wrought by his white ancestors (Gray 275); but it is also important to acknowledge how this recognition of misprision, of the necessary disjunction between language and object, forms a constituent part of Snyder’s poetry. More generally, Yunte Huang has complained of how representations of Asia in the U.S. cultural imaginary tend always to involve “the desire to translate the cultural experience of the other into our own terms” (146); but, again, part of Snyder’s charm involves an implicit recognition of the limits of his own poetic anthropomorphism. By saying he wants to reflect in his writing how “a pine tree would want to be written about, from inside” (O’Connell 314), Snyder not only makes a political point but also acknowledges ludically the ultimate impossibility of achieving his goal. In this sense, it is arguable that the more fluid, unstable aspects of Snyder’s poetry present a more vivid picture of his “natural region,” and the ironies associated with it, than his somewhat flatter rhetoric on behalf of environmental causes. Snyder, who served for several years in California as a member of Governor Jerry Brown’s Arts Council, is a skilled political operator who has done valuable work in raising environmental awareness, although his diatribes against “the mass market and supermarket universities” and his conviction that “now there are too many human beings” and that the world’s population should be cut in half (Earth 91, 36) signal his affiliation with the more authoritarian side of Green politics. Snyder’s advocacy in his environmental manifesto “Four Changes” of “the concept of a steady-state economy” (Turtle 91) clearly helped shape the fictional scenario of Ecotopia, published six years later; but the totalitarian shape of Callenbach’s utopia, extrapolated from a particular interpretation of the state of nature, carries as its corollary a degree of political intolerance to which Snyder’s more dogmatic apologetics are also prone. For all his acknowledgment of natural “diversity,” Snyder’s world is predicated ultimately on an austere, essentialist, and indeed religious

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understanding of how cosmic designs diverge fundamentally from the more artificial constraints of U.S. national culture. As we saw with the U.S. South, the propensity of writers to insist on features endemic to any specific locality is matched only by the capacity of that territory to alter its discursive characteristics over time. What is different about the Pacific Northwest, though, is its relative lack of recorded history—certainly by comparison with the South or the eastern seaboard—and, concomitantly, its tendency to transpose alternative scenarios from a historically evolving past into a hypothetical or virtual future. Ursula Le Guin, born in Berkeley in 1929 and resident since 1951 in Portland, shares with Snyder an interest in anthropology as the science of how society’s rituals function; indeed, her own father, Alfred Kroeber, was a prominent academic anthropologist. For Le Guin, science fiction crucially involves the drawing of alternate maps, the reconfiguration of planetary shapes. Her novel The Dispossessed (1974) starts off with two hemispheric maps of the twin planets Annares and Urras, and the narrative works itself out according to an explicit logic of paradox, where truth emerges from the interpenetration of apparent contraries in time and space: “Our earth is their Moon,” says a scientist on Urras; “our Moon is their earth” (37). The novel follows the fortunes of the scientist Shevek, whose work on how time moves in cycles encounters opposition on his home planet of Annares, where the socialist-minded community is still committed to a positivistic conception of how time moves in a linear sequence; but the form of Le Guin’s narrative, where the chapters move backward and forward in time and space, implicitly endorses Shevek’s “simultaneity” hypothesis, his notion that atoms move in cyclic motion and that past and future are therefore both implicit within the present. Shevek describes Tir, a playwright on Annares, as “a born artist . . . a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who’s got to turn everything upside down and inside out” (270); and Le Guin’s own principles of composition involve precisely this kind of remapping, the displacement of a visible world into its latent corollary. In the first chapter of The Dispossessed, Shevek experiences a vision of the planet Annares within larger space, and his capacity to see both inside and outside, both “concave” and “convex,” anticipates the “principles of simultaneity” which inform the larger structure of this novel: What was he seeing, then? The stone plain was no longer plane but hollow, like a huge bowl full of sunlight. As he watched in wonder it grew shallower, spilling out its light. All at once a line broke across it, abstract, geometric, the perfect section of a circle. Beyond that arc was blackness. This blackness reversed the whole picture, made it negative. The real, the stone part of it was no longer concave and full of light but

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convex, reflecting, rejecting light. It was not a plain or a bowl but a sphere, a ball of white stone falling down in blackness, falling away. It was his world. (9) Jameson has called Le Guin “one of the most important contemporary American writers (and not only of SF and fantasy)” precisely because of this kind of capacity to imagine the world in radically different shapes (Archaeologies 13). Le Guin herself has acknowledged the significance of the women’s movement in the 1960s to the development of her work: as she has said, both feminism and science fiction pose the question “Well, what if it isn’t the way it is now?” (O’Connell 24). Perhaps her most celebrated exploration of a world where gender differences have been remapped is The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), where the bisexual society of Gethen finds itself unable to mobilize for war and where the alien Mr. Ai reports to astonished Gethenians that on other planets “whether one’s born male or female” is “the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one’s life” (191). Yet the “ambisexuality” (72) of Gethenians is only one aspect of this alternative world. Thinking of how hard it is to “read” his friend Estraven’s face, the narrator asks, “Can one read a cat’s face, a seal’s, an otter’s?” (12). Darko Suvin has described the method of science fiction in general as one of “cognitive estrangement” (372), and the force of Le Guin’s imaginative universe is predicated on a world where traditional human means of recognition do not apply. On the planet Winter, all forms of mapping work differently: dials read counterclockwise, calendar years are counted backward from the present (so that it is always Year One), while “Season is not a hemispheric effect but a global one, a result of the elliptoid orbit” (174). The most obvious effect of all this is to defamiliarize familiar customs, to expose the operation of clocks and calendars on planet Earth as merely an arbitrary phenomenon. Yet there is also a more specific point of reference here: the rivalries between the countries of “Orgoreyn” and “Karhide” in The Left Hand of Darkness have been related by Patrick Parrinder to “Le Guin’s home state of Oregon and its neighbour Idaho” (63), while Estraven’s immersion in “the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself” (185) and his devotion to the rituals of the planet’s ancient mythology of Handdara—“Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished” (201)—reflect the author’s investment in a natural world whose forms are still inchoate. Always Coming Home (1985) projects a future utopian society “a long, long time from now in Northern California” (xiii), but its tribal patterns and organization are based clearly on the Native American past. Indeed, it is one of the characteristics of Le Guin’s work to take local landscapes and refract them imaginatively, so that what Always Coming Home calls “the great, bell-curved Hill of

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Possibility” (4) tends to emerge from a transposition of current spatiotemporal dimensions, drawing upon what Le Guin herself has referred to as “the uses of an alternate geography” (“Magical” 7). As Jameson notes, Native American social forms are “always Le Guin’s Utopian ideal” (Archaeologies 96), and the environment of Always Coming Home, where earthquakes have redrawn the landscape and mountains have fallen, can be seen as an imaginative reorganization of her own home territory. In this sense, as Le Guin said in 2006, “Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy” (“Magical” 7). The “people of the Valley” in Always Coming Home are said to like drawing maps—“They evidently enjoyed laying out and looking at the spatial relationships of place and objects they knew well”—and the use of these maps as “less guides than talismans” (450) permeates Le Guin’s alternative cartographic project. The title page of Always Coming Home specifies “Maps drawn by the Author,” and throughout her work there is a compulsive tendency to reorient the world. For example, one of the maps here of the town of Sinshan (178) is drawn with north at the bottom (figure 17). In The Lathe of Heaven (1971), whose scenario involves extrapolating the local geography of Portland into a twenty-first-century future after the “Greenhouse Effect” (6) has gripped the planet, these “alternate universes” (47), conjunctions of new and “old reality,” are said to have “a curiously shocking effect. . . . [L]ike surrealism, it seemed to make sense and didn’t, or seemed not to make sense and did” (84). Intellectually, though, Le Guin is committed not as much to surrealism or iconoclasm as to, like her scientist Shevek in The Dispossessed, forms of transcendent unity. Besides the Native American and, in Jameson’s words, “strongly pacifistic” tenor of her work (Archaeologies 274), there is also an interest in mystical Taoism, in what her novel set on the planet Winter calls the pattern of “yin and yang” where “Light is the left hand of darkness” (217). Blue Moon over Thurman Street, a celebration of the neighborhood in Portland where she has lived for many years, reads evolutions in urban architecture in the light of the Bhagavad Gīta, “which in its austere tenderness acknowledges all chance and change, including them in stillness” (10), while this book also synecdochically extends its appreciation of the local community into an embrace of U.S. nationhood as a whole: “The West Coast is certainly a different place from the Eastern Seaboard,” she writes, “but all you have to do is leave the United States to realize how genuinely they are one country, and for all their splendid differences, one community” (6–7). Just as Snyder’s poetry is more multidimensional and elusive than his polemical prose, so Le Guin’s fictional projections of alternative worlds might be seen as more provocative than her ultimate faith in harmonious circumference and closure, although there is a clear corollary between Le Guin’s confidence in the concentric

Figure 17.  Ursula K. Le Guin’s map of the town of Sinshan in Always Coming Home (1985). Reproduced with permission by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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circles of local and national identity and Shevek’s conviction that temporal conceptions of sequency and simultaneity are fundamentally consonant with each other: “There was no more exile. He had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid” (232). Whereas Snyder’s commitment is to a primary version of nature that underlies and precedes human civilization, Le Guin’s emphasis is more on social customs and codes of behavior, how what is “natural” is interpreted differently from one world to the next. In Turtle Island, Snyder mentions Richard Brautigan as one of those who in 1969 read and offered suggestions for his environmental manifesto “Four Changes” (91), and Brautigan, who was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935 and brought up largely in Oregon, has (like Snyder) become popularly associated with the West Coast counterculture of the 1960s. The cover of his best-known work, Trout Fishing in America (1967), features a photograph of the author posing in front of a statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco, where Brautigan spent most of his adult life. Trout Fishing systematically parodies the dominant mythologies of the U.S. eastern establishment, intertextually transposing American cultural icons such as Franklin, Hemingway, and Thoreau in the interests of projecting an alternative pastoral vision.4 As Tony Tanner first pointed out, Brautigan’s parody of John Talbot’s epigraph in Moby-Dick—Melville’s Talbot “at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, / Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, / November 1st, 1836”; Brautigan’s “at the Age of Eighteen / Had His Ass Shot Off / In a Honky-Tonk / November 1st, 1936”— exemplifies the heavily allusive nature of Brautigan’s irony, the way it flourishes through turning things around the other way (City 414). This art of transposition is also evident in his first published novel A Confederate General at Big Sur (1964), where the apparatus of secession associated with the U.S. Civil War has been relocated to the West Coast, with “Big Sur” proposed as “the twelfth member of the Confederate States of America” (15). Citing Whitman’s “Bivouac on a Mountain Side”—“The numerous camp-fires scatter’d near and far, some away up on the mountain” (129)—Brautigan’s narrator describes the “American Civil War” as “the last good time this country ever had” (147). Again, his challenge to iconic national values is based on geographical premises: there is a strong emphasis throughout this book on the Pacific Ocean—“the sun was plying its ancient Egyptian trade toward the end of the sky, the beginning of the Pacific” (96)—and a conscious attempt to reorient American national myths through Western perspectives. Much of the critical discussion of Brautigan’s work in the last decades of the twentieth century attempted to associate him with what 4 

On Brautigan’s transvaluation of U.S. national values, see Stull.

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John Cooley called an “American tradition of stylistic innovation” (413) linked to a Thoreauvian pastoral aesthetic based on principles of libertarian freedom; Tanner, for instance, described Trout Fishing as “a book which floats effortlessly free of all categories” (City 410). This, however, is to interpret Brautigan exclusively as a countercultural American writer, stressing his iconoclastic relation to traditional Anglo-American literary forms but placing less emphasis on the radical geographical consciousness at the heart of his fiction. In fact, Brautigan’s work starts from an intense grounding in the memory of particular places: his story “1/3, 1/3, 1/3” harks back to being “about seventeen and made lonely and strange by that Pacific Northwest of so many years ago, that dark, rainy land of 1952” (10); “The Ghost Children of Tacoma” recalls how World War II was experienced by children seeking “imaginary enemies” (55) in Washington state; “The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon” recounts Uncle Jarv’s sending a postcard from a rural post office adorned with a large nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe, remarking on how “She just as well could have been a photograph of mountains and trees” (76). Similarly, in “A Short History of Oregon,” the narrator recalls hitchhiking in the Oregon back country on his way to hunt deer and being gazed upon by kids “huddled together in silence on the porch” of a “house-shack” (87–88). This story concludes with one of Brautigan’s typically dark refusals of allegorical significance: “I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this” (88). Such withdrawal from larger teleological narratives might in some ways be said to be characteristic of the pastoral mode in general. But whereas, for example, the focus of John Steinbeck in Cannery Row—another West Coast fiction of pastoral retreat—is on how biological organisms effectively inscribe an alternative kind of philosophical consciousness, Brautigan’s peculiar genius is to leave his objects empty and enigmatic, while regarding American landscapes generally with something like a Zen detachment. Brautigan’s writing thus specializes not so much in a force of opposition but in hollowing out master narratives, in refracting American domestic scenarios through a language that owes less to Thoreau than to the Japanese idiom of haiku. Brautigan acknowledged the influence of haiku on his work as far back as A Confederate General, where one of the chapters is titled “The Wilderness Alligator Haiku” (112), but this propensity became more marked later in his career, particularly after his marriage to Akiko Yoshimura in 1977. Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel, published in 1976, works through odd juxtapositions—“He wondered if there had ever been a Country and Western song written about loving a Japanese woman. He didn’t think so” (176)—while The Tokyo–Montana Express (1980), crosscutting its scene as it does between Japan and the Pacific Northwest, reorients American mythic landscapes

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in relation to miniaturist Zen forms. Though The Tokyo–Montana Express evokes legends of the American West such as Pat Garrett and Jesse James, it does so only to signify their absence, “a Western myth gone like the buffalo with nothing to assume its place” (126). Rather than the purposeful continuity of national narrative, Brautigan proposes an aesthetic of fragmentation, signaled here by the breaks in Joseph Francl’s diary— “very beautiful like long poetic pauses where you can hear the innocence of eternity” (6)—and, on a larger scale, by imagery of Earth’s rupture, which sets the narrator’s “mind ringing like a sunken bell at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean during a great earthquake tearing cracks in the ocean floor” (35). The earthquake and tsunami zone that Japan shares with the American West Coast thus becomes an emblem of the fractured state of Brautigan’s textual world. The narrator of Tokyo–Montana Express reports how he spends “a lot of my life interested in little things, tiny portions of reality like a pinch of spice in a very complicated recipe that takes days to cook” (188); and this displacement of sequential narrative into what Kathryn Hume calls “the compressed simplicity of haiku” (89) constitutes the most radical aspect of Brautigan’s literary style. His phrases, such as “The kittens liked to play with string under the blue sky” (128), seek to subvert the representational structure of familiar cultural maps by dissolving allegory into phenomenology. In this sense, the transnational aspect of The Tokyo–Montana Express, where the chapters are described as “stations” (vii) on a circuit linking North America with Asia, betokens the structure of transposition that shapes all Brautigan’s fiction. Just as A Confederate General reworks the nineteenth-century U.S. Civil War between North and South into a twentieth-century conflict between East and West, so The Tokyo–Montana Express resituates the Pacific Northwest as a country that lies, paradoxically, to the east of Japan. Brautigan’s metaregional remapping is thus of a piece with his metafictional demystification of U.S. cultural institutions, and what Harvey Leavitt has referred to as his “jigsaw puzzle art” (18) involves a reconfiguration of geographical narratives and spatial assumptions into literary forms, a conscious travesty of the regular atlas of America. Virtual Canadas: Gibson and Coupland Appadurai’s observation that “the area-studies tradition has probably grown too comfortable with its own maps of the world” (Modernity 17) could thus be said to be corroborated by the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest, where maps have always been more volatile and virtualized than naturalized or calcified. Moreover, the northern bound-

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ary between the United States and Canada effectively complicates the region’s relation to area studies in other ways. This boundary, which was the subject of bitter dispute between the U.S. and Britain until 1846, has more recently been opened up in ways designed to facilitate hemispheric traffic, initially through the 1991 Canadian–U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) and then the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the latter linking on a tripartite basis Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Yet, as Claudia Sadowski-Smith notes, while there has been a great deal of recent scholarly work on the U.S.–Mexico border, “[c]ontemporary inter-American scholarship has . . . all but ignored Canada and its boundary with the United States,” something that is all the more curious since the boundary line itself extends for five thousand miles and has been called the “world’s largest undefended border” (119).5 One obvious explanation for this comparative neglect is that Canadians, by contrast with the more ethnically marked Mexicans, are not generally considered a threat to U.S. domestic security. Yet there are many less visible differences between the two countries, in areas of social policy as well as historically and constitutionally, and to consider the Pacific Northwest as a region that cuts across national formations is to raise illuminating questions about ways in which Canada and the United States mutually misrecognize each other. Aihwa Ong, for instance, cited Chinese complaints about the “insularity” of San Francisco in comparison to Vancouver, which has always been more oriented toward Asia and hospitable toward the notion of “flexible citizenship” (105). There is a sense in which the increasing cultural influence of Asia in the Pacific Northwest might be understood partly as a consequence of movements south across the Canadian border, since, in the nineteenth century, Chinese emigrants who were barred from legal admission into the United States were permitted entry into Canada, from where they could easily move down across the American border. As we will see in the work of William Gibson, this pattern of Asian immigration being recirculated hemispherically has also been replicated on a broader cultural scale in more recent times. It would also be true to say that considering Canada in relation to U.S. culture would help qualify the now-too-conventional emphasis of Canadian studies on a postcolonial framework and on what Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards have called “wilderness and nordicity as defining characteristics of Canadian identity” (7). Vancouver’s position within Cascadia is very different from imperial Canada’s old rural horizons, yet Vancouver native Douglas Coupland has observed 5  On the disputed nature of the Canadian border in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Giles, Atlantic 71–111. For a recent treatment of cultural relations between Canada and the U.S., see R. Adams.

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on looking through a high school reunion book that while “dozens and dozens of classmates had married Americans from Washington, Oregon and California . . . only a small number had connected in any way to the east.” Coupland sees this as evidence that “Vancouverites” have more in common with “West Coast Americans” than with East Coast Canadians (City 106), and it reinforces a perception that any twenty-first-century remapping of American literature needs to traverse the northern as well as the southern U.S. border. Although “psychogeographically” he now identifies himself “with greater Vancouver more than I do with the rest of Canada,” William Gibson was in fact born in the United States, in South Carolina. He was brought up during the cold war in what he later described as a “really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virginia,” before escaping to Toronto in 1968 to discover an alternative hippie culture and, in the midst of the Vietnam conflict, to avoid the draft. In 1972, he moved to Vancouver, where he completed a degree in English at the University of British Columbia and where he has lived ever since. Gibson has said that he likes Canada because it “feels like a twenty-first century country” that is “set up to run on steady immigration,” one that “negotiates and does business” rather than seeking to consolidate its own “power” and “ideology.” He has also described himself as being happiest in “radically multicultural big cities—as far as you can get from monoculture,” in places “where people are generally not even of recognizable derivations” (Newitz). Although he is widely regarded as a futurist writer, it would be more accurate to say that Gibson uses the apparatus of science fiction to, as he himself put it, “illuminate the moment, make the moment accessible.” Arguing that most people live in their minds about ten years before the historical point in time they have actually reached and that we all tend to be “more comfortable with an earlier version of who we were” (Neale), Gibson seeks to position his writing at a cusp where assumptions accumulated from the past run up against the shock of a barely recognizable present. Much of the sinister appeal of Gibson’s fiction derives from provocative notions of the dissolution of spatial and temporal cartographies, the idea, as Laney puts it in All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), “that history, along with geography, was dead” (165). Within this world of cyberspace and multinational corporations, nation-states are seen merely as nostalgic phenomena, while all alternative bohemian spaces have been obliterated. This allows Gibson scope for both technological ingenuity (in this novel, for example, sunglasses with an inbuilt phone and AM-FM radio) and grotesque comedy: when Rydell asks Selwyn Tong, a notary public of Kowloon, how to achieve a “straight exit” from their cyberspace meeting, Tong blandly advises him to “[c]lick on my face” (77). There is a liminal

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posthumanism here, where both men and (especially) women are reduced to automata and also an iconoclastic delight in how the traditional lineaments of the world are changing. In Virtual Light (1993), where Japan is said recently to have colonized New Zealand, Skinner has a large collection of old copies of the National Geographic magazine, and he enjoys reminiscing over them: Skinner liked maps. Some of the National Geographics had maps folded into them, and all the countries were big, single blobs of color from one side to the other. And there hadn’t been nearly as many of them. There’d been countries big as anything: Canada, USSR, Brazil. Now there were lots of little ones where those had been. Skinner said America had gone that route without admitting it. Even California had all been one big state, once. (71–72) Apart from the systematic fragmentation of national identity outlined here, the partition of California is a recurrent motif in Gibson’s fiction. It is found in his first published story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (1977), which features a “chaotic New Secessionist regime” in San Francisco (54), and also in All Tomorrow’s Parties, where Rydell describes San Francisco and Los Angeles as “more like different planets than different cities” and nostalgically recalls “watching the partition ceremonies on CNN” some years previously (84). The fracturing of the West Coast into different cultural and political zones is, as we have seen, a theme of Pacific Northwest writing, from Callenbach’s Ecotopia to Snyder’s natural bioregion. Although Gibson relates the supersession of human geography to futurist forms of technology—describing a messenger girl in Virtual Light as “one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography” (85)—he paradoxically shares with other writers of this particular region an interest in how regular maps might be virtualized and reconfigured. There is a typically pointed piece of black comedy at the end of Virtual Light, where Yamazaki has a yard sale to dispose of his old compact discs, china mug, and, tellingly, a “dampswollen copy of The Columbia Literary History of the United States.” The national narrative that would canonize a homegrown version of American literature appears as outdated as the old copies of National Geographic, and it is fit only for being put out to pasture: “It all went, finally,” reports Gibson’s narrator, “except for the literary history, which was badly mildewed” (292).6 6  Noting that this Columbia Literary History included a pioneering piece by Larry McCaffery on cyberpunk, which discussed Neuromancer among other works, Takayuki Tatsumi reads this allusion in Virtual Light “as a self-referential device typical of metafiction, by which the author criticizes ironically even the literary historical discourse of

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It is important to recognize, then, that Gibson’s projection of cyberspace in Neuromancer (1984) as “consensual hallucination” (67) is, like his orbital community of Freeside in this novel, all done with mirrors: the main shopping street in Freeside has “red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls” (172). Gibson, who did not himself visit Japan until 1988, claims he prepared for writing Neuromancer by observing “Japanese tourists” in Vancouver and that he got the street names for his fictional Chiba City “from a Japan Air Lines calendar” (McCaffery, Storming 285); and even if this is not literally true, it speaks to ways in which his fiction imaginatively refracts everyday landscapes in the world around him. Neuromancer, like most science fiction, is not in fact particularly accurate as prophecy—this purportedly twenty-firstcentury world appears never to have heard of cell phones or e-mail, for instance—but, in its evocation of the “neon forest” (43) where Case can operate as a “cyberspace cowboy” (11), it effectively takes metaphors from the American West and transposes them into an alien setting. The central concern of Gibson’s writing is thus not as much forecasting the future as, in a more general sense, how time and space are remapped. In the opening scene set in London in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), history is said to represent “the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age” (11). In a 2007 interview, Gibson described history itself as a form of “speculative” fiction, adding, “History changes. If I could know one thing about the world a hundred years from now . . . I think I’d want their history of our time, because not only would it tell me a lot of things that I can’t know about our time, but it would tell me everything I needed to know about their time, like what they’re willing to believe” (Nissley). The mutation of the past is also the premise informing The Difference Engine (1990), a brilliant work cowritten by Gibson and Bruce Sterling that remaps an alternate history of England in the nineteenth century, where, after a popular revolt against the Duke of Wellington, the Industrial Radical Party has come to power, with Lord Byron as prime minister. Just as Neuromancer projects the present through the future, so The Difference Engine treats the present through reconfiguring the past, rejecting traditional forms of Victorian liberal humanism in favor of a catastrophe theory of history, where change is driven by technological disruption rather than the reconciliation of opposing interests.7 The novel works through an intertextual reworking of Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, demoting cyberpunk” (122). It seems likely, however, that Gibson’s irony here is directed equally at the institutional format of the national literary history. 7  For The Difference Engine’s rejection of “Victorian literary humanism,” see Sussman 13.

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Disraeli himself to the status of a metropolitan gossip columnist, and it portrays the British Empire as having consolidated its political and global power through the development of Charles Babbage’s early version of the computer, an analytical engine that was in fact designed in the 1820s but never completed. And just as The Difference Engine inscribes an alternative version of British history that takes its cue from Oliver Cromwell, whose statue presides over postrevolutionary London, so it fashions alternative global geographies. This is a world where North America has remained politically fragmented, where Texas and California have constituted their own autonomous republics, and where, under the sway of the British Empire, the Canadian city of Victoria has become a “flourishing metropolis,” while Vancouver itself is still a “coastal village” (289). One of the central characters in the novel, the geologist Edward Malloy, is said to have made his greatest scientific contribution in 1865 by discovering “continental drift” (288), and this theme of the seismic shifting of space resonates also through Gibson’s other novels, as in Idoru (1996), where a massive earthquake has caused Japan’s urban maps to be redrawn. Gibson has suggested that computers in his books “are simply a metaphor for human memory: I’m interested in the hows and whys of memory, the way it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision”; and, as Dani Cavallaro has observed, the larger significance of “cyberpunk” lies in the way it “challenges the humanist commitment to the colonizing logic of the archive by undermining the possibility of organizing information and memories in any permanent or systematic way” (Cavallaro 204, 207). Despite, then, his investment in what Pattern Recognition calls a “postgeographic” (6) world of transnational corporations and urban sprawl, Gibson’s work remains subliminally attached to the unstable landscapes of the Pacific Rim, whose cultural lineaments remain susceptible to radical change. The heroine in Idoru, Chia McKenzie, comes from the Pacific Northwest—in an echo of Gary Snyder’s formative experience, she even remembers seeing “Japanese prints . . . on a school trip to the museum in Seattle” (97)—and she is friendly with “the Sandbenders,” a “commune, down on the Oregon coast” (89) that specializes in innovative computer software. In Virtual Light, the ramshackle alternative community living underneath a San Francisco bridge is also treated sympathetically, with Michael Beehler suggesting that the acquisitive property company in this novel, ironically called the Sunflower Corporation, “recalls Ginsberg’s romantic nostalgia for a nature lost among the locomotive debris of a 1950s San Francisco” (85). Rydell in Virtual Light says that downtown San Francisco gives him “a sense . . . of Being somewhere. Somewhere in particular,” whereas Los Angeles by contrast gives him a feeling of being “cut loose in a grid of light that just spilled out to the edge of everything”

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(106). Vancouver itself is also described in the short story “The Winter Market” as an “alternate continuum” (162), what Paul Delany has called a site of “residual organicism” (188) that appears to resist those abstractions of space endemic to the incursions of multinational corporations. It is precisely at this point of transition between embodiment and displacement, sedimented space and its reflexive reorientation, that Gibson’s imaginative world situates itself. In his foreword to Phantom Shanghai, a book of photographs of the Chinese city by Canadian photographer Greg Girard, Gibson says that such scenes of urban transformation are the landscapes he has most dreamed about: “Liminal. Images at the threshold. The dividing line. Something slicing across accretions of cultural memory like Buñuel’s razor” (“Terminal” 9). The analogy with Luis Buñuel is interesting because, as with the film director who also moved from his country of birth (Spain) to citizenship elsewhere (Mexico), Gibson is attracted aesthetically to a point of transition where old cultural formations are hollowed out, twisted parodically into startling new shapes. In this spectral sense, the title of Spook Country (2006) refers to “spooks” as slang for ghosts as well as for spies. Gibson’s novel, set in the year it was published and with plentiful references to 9/11, is haunted by memories of the cold war and the era of James Bond, of the good old days when government intelligence agencies were able to guarantee the safety of the United States, which is where most of the narrative is set. The novel is organized conceptually around the possibility of reorganizations of space arising from an apparent merger of virtual and empirical reality: one character remarks upon how “We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. . . . We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened” (65), while freelance journalist Hollis Henry writes about “various things artists were finding to do with longitude, latitude, and the Internet” (20–21). In this world of brand names and information loops, access and perspective become more urgent than actual position, with the symbiotic intertwining of virtual and actual space being mirrored by a putative intertwining of physical and the metaphysical: thus, the cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York is described as a “crossroads, intersection of the human and the divine” (90). This element of mysticism, linked to the question of the hidden significance of invisible forces, is also associated here with the setting of the novel’s final scene in Vancouver, described by the expatriate Cuban smuggler Tito as the “edge of America” and a city that made him feel “as though he had come to the edge of the world” (276). The representation of Vancouver thus interposes a recognizable location, a site of alterity and transcendence, within this more brutal world of systematic intelligence codes and corporate logos.

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From this angle, Jameson’s alignment in Archaeologies of the Future of Gibson’s cyberpunk merely with the “romance of finance capital” (21) can be seen as too reductive and one-dimensional. Jameson associates Neuromancer with “a mapping of the new geopolitical Imaginary” (385) that arose out of the neoconservative revolution of the 1980s; but Gibson’s fiction is more generally concerned with the disturbingly permeable nature of boundaries across different dimensions of space, as well as those between mind and matter. N. Katherine Hayles defines Gibson’s world more precisely when she talks of its invocation of a “technological nonconscious” (“Traumas” 139), where “trauma” (and comedy) result from a failure ultimately to assimilate machines to human consciousness, from a search on the part of both characters and readers for “pattern recognition,” together with a sense of disturbance resulting from an atmosphere of “murky apprehension” where all the “precisely drawn details . . . do not quite cohere into plot” (“Traumas” 143, 146). In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Gibson described Dashiell Hammett’s style of “American naturalism” as “almost surreal,” through the way Hammett “pushed all this ordinary stuff until it was different” (McCaffery, Storming 269); and Gibson’s fiction similarly turns the screw on “ordinary stuff” until its disjunctions become visible. Sometimes this takes explicitly surreal forms: Neuromancer chronicles what the novel calls “random acts of surreal violence” (75), while the character of Julius Deane in this novel, who goes to Tokyo every year to ward off the aging process by having his DNA reset, appropriately enough has a “Dali clock” hung on the wall of his office (21). Pattern Recognition describes the “loneliness of objects” in New York, with their “secret lives,” as resembling the artistic boxes of Joseph Cornell (136), while All Tomorrow’s Parties similarly draws on the surreal visual style of M. C. Escher to describe how the spheres of cyberspace duplicate themselves, “turning reflections of moving traffic into animated Escher-like fragments that fly together, mirroring one another” (178). As Margaret Morse wrote in Virtualities, the phenomenon of virtual reality is not as much about simple dematerialization as about aspects of the uncanny, those “liminal realms of transformation” where a “subjunctive” space of alterity can be explored (185). There is a visible psychedelic legacy in Gibson’s writing, an interest in alternative worlds dating from his own hippie days—indeed, he has said that the language in Neuromancer is not as much futuristic as “1969 Toronto dope dealers’ slang” (McCaffery, Storming 269). But there is also an interest in imitating surrealist aesthetic practices: Gibson deliberately uses his fictional texts as a site for the collocation of objets trouvés, “stitching together all the junk that’s floating around in my head,” as he himself put it. Like

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French surrealists such as André Breton and Louis Aragon, Gibson is a devotee of flea markets—“One of my private pleasures,” he added, “is to go to the corner Salvation Army thrift shop and look at all the junk” (Cavallaro 76)—and he has also remarked on how he likes imagining how any brand-new computer “will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop” (“My Obsession”). As we have seen, Gary Snyder also related the cycles of natural process to the recirculation of commodities in thrift shops, and this reinforces a sense that Gibson’s primary concern is not technology per se but ways in which technology is embedded in time. Visiting Tokyo in 2001, he wrote of how he was attracted to the city because “[y]ou can see more chronological strata of futuristic design in a Tokyo streetscape than anywhere else in the world. Like successive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when the newer ones start to peel” (“My Own Private Tokyo”). Again, as with Snyder linking the ecological cycles of nature to the circulation of Western interstate highways, Gibson uses the transnational loops of the Pacific Rim to inscribe an alternative version of the American cultural landscape, one subject always to radical flux and metamorphosis. Rather than merely offering a blank reflection of the exchange mechanisms of finance capital, he uses his Vancouver vantage point, facing out toward Asia, to pull the world of the United States out of its accustomed orbit. Gibson thus constructs a spectral art, one haunted by the old American order, whose surreal qualities speak to a flow of objects between different dimensions along with a mutation of the domestic world into radically different shapes. In his essay on Tokyo, Gibson recalls meeting his “fellow Vancouverite” Douglas Coupland in the Japanese city (“My Own Private Tokyo”), and he also thanks him in the acknowledgments to Pattern Recognition “for the coffee so high above Shinjuku, and for fresh insights into Tokyo generally” (357). Elsewhere Gibson paid tribute to Coupland’s sketches of Vancouver in City of Glass, which he said are “[c]losest to my sense of the place. It’s hemmed in and separated from the rest of the world by an ocean, a border, mountains. And then there’s the unknown and incomprehensible north. Vancouver sits there, insulated to some extent, but picking up influences from across the ocean and across the border” (Newitz). Unlike Gibson, Coupland himself grew up in Vancouver, though he was born in 1961 on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany and also spent a year in Honolulu and Tokyo during the mid 1980s attending the JapanAmerican Institute of Management Science. City of Glass claims Vancouver to be “the youngest city on Earth, a city almost entirely of, and only of, the twentieth century” (118), and this makes it an appropriate base for Coupland’s own works of fiction, which are largely concerned with the plastic remodeling of the environment into new cultural and

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technological forms. Vancouver’s geological situation, in the shadow of the volcano Mount Baker (situated across the U.S. border in Washington State) and with the threat of a major earthquake always looming, have also, suggests Coupland, been important formative influences on “the Vancouver psyche” (91). As with Gibson, the fiction of Coupland deals mostly with the United States, though there is a more specific regional focus to his narratives, many of which are located largely in the Pacific Northwest: Shampoo Planet (1992) in a small town in Washington State; Microserfs (1995) at the Microsoft campus outside Seattle; Miss Wyoming (2000) in Wyoming and Oregon, where the names of local shops and malls are lovingly chronicled, and so on. Indeed, in all these books, the “modular” landscapes of the West, their capacity to evolve and change, are described in a realistic idiom curiously similar in some ways to that of Raymond Carver. In Miss Wyoming, for example, the characters are said to drive “out of Cheyenne’s main bulk, and into its fringes, where the franchises weren’t so new and the older fast-food outlets were now into their second incarnations as bulk pet-food marts, storage facilities and shooting ranges” (260–61), and this is the recognizable Carver territory of the secondhand and interchangeable. For Coupland, though, these landscapes of the Pacific Northwest provide an external correlative to a world of modular expression and mutation that he associates with technological evolution. In Microserfs, for example, the narrator describes Lego as being “ontologically not unlike computers” in the way the “digital” structure of its building blocks works by “reducing the organic to the modular” (82), while in Shampoo Planet the “overhistoried countrysides” of Europe (191) are described as “backward” (93) precisely because they have too much “history” and therefore lack such a “possibility of metamorphosis” (95). By contrast, the less culturally prestigious Ridgecrest Mall in Shampoo Planet is said to enjoy the more flexible quality of light and space that has always been associated, in different mythic forms, with the frontier West.8 Coupland’s iconic novel Generation X (1991), which chronicles the loss of financial and domestic security among the young, identifies the catastrophic fissure in the U.S. economy as dating from 1974, “the year after the oil shock and the year starting from which real wages in the U.S. never grew again” (40). The novel also suggests that “where you’re from feels sort of irrelevant these days” since “everyone has the same stores in their mini-malls” (4), though such an assertion is not borne out by the geographical specificity of Coupland’s fiction, which is invested psychologically and emotionally in particular versions of home: “The 8 

On Coupland as an exponent of the “rhizomatic” West, see Campbell 269–98.

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house you lived in when you were young,” says one of the characters in Shampoo Planet, “is, like, your hard drive for life” (267). In Microserfs, there is a digitalization of the psychic economy, with conventional human character being displaced into e-mail usernames and “memory” having replaced “history,” so that “we can edit ourselves as we go along, like an on-screen document” (253). Yet Daniel’s observation here that “Gap clothing is what you wear if you want to appear like you’re from nowhere . . . clothing that allows you to erase geographical differences and be just like everybody else from anywhere else” (268) is contradicted by the novel’s transcendental aspiration, which seeks to identify how an individual spirit might fly free of such homogenized commodification. When Daniel’s mother suffers a stroke, she manages to communicate through her computer after her own human voice has failed, and this is commensurate with other quasi-mystical episodes in Coupland’s writing: in Girlfriend in a Coma (1997), where Karen falls asleep for seventeen years after a teenage house party, before waking up to report on her otherworldly dreams; in Polaroids from the Dead (1996), where the snapshots of a former era are likened to posthumous or ghostly communications; in the short story “Gettsyburg” (1994), where the narrator laments “how strange it is that we’re trapped inside our bodies for seventy-odd years and never once in all that time can we just, say, park our bodies in a cave for even a five-minute break and float free from the bonds of Earth” (144). James Annesley has dismissed these otherworldly proclivities as merely forms of New Age sentimentalism, indicative of the “tensions” in Coupland’s writing between “the illusion of transcendence” and “inescapable material realities” of the marketplace (122); but the story “In the Desert” (1994), which features an epigraph laying claim to this as “the first generation raised without religion” (161), refers specifically to “fake Zen” (193) and translates the idea of spirit into its secular simulacrum, reconfiguring “those fragments of cultural memory and information that compose the invisible information structure I consider my real home, my virtual community” (168–69). In this sense, Coupland’s aesthetic of transformation involves not religion or metaphysical dualism but rather a protoplasmic idiom of reorientation, where affective loyalties to home are reflexively displaced into a wider anthropological framework. By remapping personal affect as a sociological or generational phenomenon, Coupland evokes multiple perspectives whereby his characters live in the shadow of different but concurrent narratives. Coupland often expresses this sense of simultaneity by playing selfconsciously with optics. In Miss Wyoming, John Johnson, an ex-movie producer who has reinvented himself as a UPS messenger, recalls how he used to give his cameraman “a piece of shiny black plastic,” saying it is “something the Impressionist painters used to do. Whenever they

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were unsure of the true color of something, they’d look at its reflection in a piece of black glass. They thought that the only way they could ever see the true nature of something was to reflect it onto something dark” (310). This method of spectralization, of estranging local events by transposing them into an alien body, is commensurate as well with the global inclinations of JPod (2006), which starts out nostalgically, invoking familiar Vancouver venues such as Stanley Park, but then internalizes the language of information technology to extend its circumference outward, so as to reposition the Pacific Northwest within a global framework. This becomes in JPod both a source of anxiety—a “small town” in Oregon is said to have “got wiped out by cheaper manufacturing costs in China” (531)—but also a way of opening up new horizons. In the novel’s final scene, a fictionalized “Douglas Coupland” appears in the narrative “dressed like a 1960s TV father” (544), and he reclaims his missing laptop computer by exchanging it for his own patented “Dglobe” (D for Doug, he explains), a “beach-ball-sized globe lit from within” (548) that uses a “spherical liquid crystal screen programmed with proprietary 3-D cartographic algorithms” (550) to track continental drift and reveal the evolution of the world: Over the course of sixty seconds, I witnessed the creation of the world as the land masses dragged across long-vanished oceans. Some of them collided, some of them barely moved. South America and Africa crept away from each other. After two minutes the Dglobe showed Earth as we currently know it. And then—and then—the continents kept moving. And moving. California touched Alaska; India smashed itself into oblivion into the concertina’d ridges of the Himalayas; South America rested in the middle of the Pacific. (548) The characters in this novel continue to experiment with the Dglobe, programming it to reveal “what the Earth would look like if Antarctica melted completely” under the impact of global warming: “Florida vanished, as did much of Asia and all the planet’s coastlines” (549). Just as the character of Malloy in Gibson’s The Difference Engine is an expert on continental drift, so Coupland expands his native landscape of mutation into a more expansive statement about the plasticity of planetary evolution. In City of Glass, he suggests that in “a thousand years, Canada won’t be the same country it is now, nor will it probably be the same in five hundred, a hundred, fifty or even ten” (106); and this sense of North American landscapes as both politically and ecologically unstable, as subject to radical displacement across different generations, permeates Coupland’s fictional universe. In this sense, to approach the U.S. Pacific Northwest backward, as it were, through a transnational Canadian perspective, is to foreground aspects of radical contingency that have tended

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to be overlooked when the region was incorporated merely as the pastoral adjunct to an American national narrative whose dominant political forces were elsewhere. The narrator of Coupland’s “In the Desert” says that he “used to think mine was a Pacific Northwest accent, from where I grew up, but then I realized my accent was simply the accent of nowhere—the accent of a person who has no fixed home in their mind” (174). Rather than being associated simply with a condition of alienation or anomie, however, this kind of remapping of spatial coordinates should be equated with the remapping of temporality characteristic of Generation X, the accounting for personal narrative in terms of anthropological systems and economic cycles rather than merely individual codes of conduct. Just as Generation X displaces time from an individual to a communal concern, so Coupland’s other works reorient domestic landscapes in global terms, so that his characters belong to many different geographical zones simultaneously. In City of Glass, Coupland remarks on how “roughly one-quarter of Vancouverites speak Chinese at home” (22), while in JPod, the front door of Kam Fong’s home in Vancouver, which enjoys a “stunning” view over the city and the Pacific Ocean, is revealingly flanked by “a pair of New Zealand tree ferns” (282). In Shampoo Planet, similarly, Tyler declares his ennui with Europe by saying that he wants “to be back home and on the coast in a big glass house on the edge of the planet, on the Olympic Peninsula, say, and just look out over the water and nothing nothing else,” while his friend Kiwi concurs by saying he wants likewise “to be in a glass house on the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, with nothing in between himself and Antarctica” (95). Both these images imply a rewriting of the Western frontier in terms of global space and a desire to remap the cultural landscapes of North America within a transnational framework. It is telling that Tyler uses the word “home” here, since his view of transpacific space involves neither simple appropriation nor self-dissolution but something in between: an edgy recognition of both juxtapositions and discrepancies between near and far. Gibson thus deploys Vancouver to achieve critical distance from the behemoths of U.S. capitalism, and Coupland similarly brings his native Pacific Northwest into the wider oceanic orbit of Asia and Australasia in order to chart a generational passage away from domestic security and entitlement.

C ONCL US IO N

American Literature and the Question of Circumference

While the term American literature, as William C. Spengemann records, was first used in the 1780s, in the immediate aftermath of the country’s political separation from Great Britain (Mirror 152), the first university course in this subject was not taught until 1875, by Moses Coit Tyler at the University of Michigan (Graff 211). As noted in chapter 2, Tyler also published in 1878 the first History of American Literature, intended originally to be a “history of American literature from the earliest English settlements in this country, down to the present time” (v), although the later parts of his survey were never completed. For the chronological parameters of his first two volumes, Tyler took the years 1607 through 1765, a span that, of course, preceded the birth of the new nation. His project thus anticipated the style of prolepsis that was to become characteristic of American literary scholarship, since, in the interests of what he called “unity and completeness” (v), Tyler reread “early” American literature in order to bring it forcibly into alignment with the postrevolutionary world, so as to create discursive space for his narrative centered on an emerging “single nation” (vi). This nationalist agenda, in different guises, was also to inspire key critical works in the early part of the twentieth century, when there was a consistent attempt to explicate American arts and letters by setting them in the context of cultural conditions constitutionally different from those of Europe: we see this in V. L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1927–30), in Norman Foerster’s collection of essays The Reinterpretation of American Literature (1928), and in F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941). After 1945, these systematic mappings of American literature in relation to domestic culture were often reproduced institutionally through the academic practice of American studies, an interdisciplinary matrix predicated on what Vicente L. Rafael has described as an “integrationist logic” (98), through which a science of national identity could shed light on cultural matters. The purpose of American studies in the decades after World War II was to mediate between disciplines, examining African American traditions and issues of civil rights, for example, within a holistic framework through which the literary and historical dimensions of U.S. culture might mutually illuminate each other.

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The interface between local and global, however, cannot always reconcile itself comfortably to such narratives of liberal accommodation. In 1950, Lionel Trilling was able to write persuasively of a “liberal imagination,” through which the domestic virtues of flexibility and openmindedness would counter the deterministic dogmatism of social conditioning, a philosophy at that time popularly associated with the malevolent power of the Soviet Union. In 1955, at the height of the cold war, Louis Hartz wrote of how this kind of “irrational liberalism” (30) was an ingrained aspect of American life, “a silent quality in the national atmosphere” (226); for Hartz, this “triumphant liberalism” (176) was an allencompassing framework that made internal political conflicts between Democrat and Republican appear relatively trifling and insignificant. But there has been a significant shift from the type of liberal consensus that inspired the first flourishing of the American studies movement in the middle of the twentieth century to what David Harvey has called the kind of “neo-liberal hegemony” more prevalent at the beginning of the twentyfirst (New 96), when the sphere of domestic social and economic policy is forced increasingly to grapple with forces beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The terms of these radically altered cultural conditions have become familiar enough, at least in broad outline. Saskia Sassen, for whom “the global age launched in the 1980s” (143), has discussed the reshaping of the modern state away from assumptions about stable full employment and the preeminence of nuclear-family households toward a condition in which the mobility of international capital and the circulation of global commodities typically engender more short-term, contractual labor arrangements. The displacement of economic activity offshore, in other words, has contributed to the displacement of the factory and of state government, which during the twentieth-century “hypernational era” (140) were the key strategic sites where the structural dynamics of the Fordist regime were regulated; instead, “global cities” (54) have taken over as the crucial nexus of social process and power. The formulation in the mid-twentieth century of a national public through network media has also been supplanted by a proliferation of television (and, increasingly, Internet) outlets dominated by transnational media interests. None of this has rendered the idea of the nation redundant, of course, but it has brought about what Sassen calls “a debordering of the liberal state” (410), a process of “denationalization” (233) with which any national narrative now needs to engage. One key word here is representation, encompassing both aesthetic and political representation, categories running theoretically in parallel to each other that have been rendered equally problematic by the forces of globalization. Politically, the dilemma is, quite straightforwardly, that the most urgent issues of the day are no longer susceptible to being

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resolved within national jurisdictions, even though, as Caren Kaplan has observed, national governments have been intent on using every “tool in their bag of tricks” to stave off threats to their sovereignty (“Transporting” 39). A few political philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas have explored the possibility of “postnational” systems of governance, but in political life generally there has been a massive failure to confront these issues. Such unwillingness can certainly be explained by a natural reluctance on the part of career politicians to canvass election by addressing the limitations of their own power, but it has also contributed to an increasingly distorted process of democratic misrecognition, where lines of authorization between electoral choice and political agency have become blurred and where the relationship between the American people and their political representatives has become increasingly less transparent. From this perspective, American anxiety around the question of “homeland security” might be understood in allegorical terms, as an epitome of its concerns about global displacement more generally; to refurbish Voltaire’s Enlightenment quip about God, if al-Qaeda did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. The crucial dilemma here turns upon questions of inscrutability, on the difficulty of identifying a discrete enemy and a consequent temptation toward Manichaean displacements of one kind or another. As Sassen notes, a “lack of legibility . . . is frequently a feature of major social changes in the making” (12), and one of the most revealing aspects of U.S. discourse in the twenty-first century is the way it expands and contracts uneasily between national and transnational parameters, manifesting uncertainty about how exactly to describe its circumference. As we have seen, though, a sense of the amorphous and unstable nature of U.S. national boundaries is not a new phenomenon, merely one that got largely suppressed in the “hypernational” era, from about 1865 through to 1980, when the rhetoric of American exceptionalism reigned supreme. But, as Don H. Doyle has argued, over the longer course of American history, the idea of universalism has perhaps been more important than exceptionalism: the Declaration of Independence was based on universal ideals—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—rather than on any supposed distinctiveness of the American people, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense proposed America as an “asylum” not just for Americans but for all “mankind” (93). In this sense, to map ways in which the United States interfaces with a global matrix is to invoke a long and venerable heritage, one the liberal traditions of patriotic empathy that developed in the nineteenth century did much to obscure. Commenting on the emergence of this kind of liberalism, Ian Baucom has suggested how conceptions of shared sentiment and fellow feeling arose largely in reaction against the global system of slavery that was integral to the movement of international capital in the eighteenth and early

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nineteenth centuries: “liberalism,” he remarks, “is constitutively guilty in conscience” (238). To see the latter-day American studies movement as linked genealogically with white abolitionism would help explain its resistance to repositioning locality in relation to a wider circumference, since the abolitionists naturally viewed the apparatus of global exchange as potentially dehumanizing. These missionary aspects of American studies were unwittingly echoed in a 2002 piece by Allan M. Winkler from Miami University, who recalled teaching for a year on a Fulbright grant at the University of Nairobi: “Kenya is a developing country,” he said. “It is also a country nominally democratic, but governed by a longtime dictator. My job was to teach American history broadly defined in such a way that it was really American Studies, in an effort to encourage some sense of civic responsibility and commitment to democratic involvement” (Lenz et al. 100). But this assumption that American studies should be synonymous with “civic responsibility” and “democratic involvement” is intellectually naïve at best. It is easy to see here the heavy hand of U.S. diplomatic agencies seeking to spread their political gospel across the world, as they have done systematically since 1945; but more disturbing is the apparent willingness of Winkler to foreclose analysis by simply assuming that “civic responsibility” is a lesson Americans need to export to Kenya. Rather than interrogating associations between Africa and America, Winkler takes it for granted that American studies should by definition incorporate a certain set of enlightening values. The point here is not, of course, to disparage any given political position on its own terms. It is, though, to suggest that insisting that a commitment to liberal democracy be a prerequisite of American studies scholarship is like insisting that one has to be a committed Christian fully to understand medieval English culture. This is, in Werner Sollors’s phrase, the “claim to speak from a privileged ‘in-group vantage point’” (“Introduction” xix), a claim that, in medieval studies, used to hold sway in the days of C. S. Lewis and his acolytes but that has long since become anachronistic. When Gayatri Spivak writes about the need for “greater transnational literacy” (399), her concern is with ways in which local experiences have been at least partially determined somewhere else, with ways in which the local and the global are often obliquely intertwined. Although Spivak defines “transnationality” as an effect of the “financialization of the globe” (3), it is not necessarily the case that any narrative of globalization must therefore seek simply to eradicate local difference; instead, a critical narrative of international American studies would seek to locate precisely those junctures where the proximate and distant illuminatingly converge and diverge. Over the past hundred years or so, in the wake of Arnold Toynbee and his like, “world history” has acquired a not-undeserved reputation for being vague and amateurish, as academic historians have increasingly

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turned to specific areas of professional specialization (Geyer and Bright 1036); but, as recent work in postcolonialism has amply demonstrated, any circumscription of an area of scholarly expertise in this way necessarily risks occluding geometries of power that would spiral beyond an epistemological circumference drawn too narrowly. Looking back from 2004, Malini Johar Schueller observed that the “‘postnationalist’ agenda of the New Americanists in 1992 was to question the coherence of national identity and to demonstrate its constructedness based on an exclusion of raced and gendered others, not to broaden the field beyond the nation” (163). Since that time, however, many of the most interesting studies of American culture have engaged with points of encounter and crossover between domestic and foreign territories: Brian T. Edwards’s Morocco Bound, for example, traces the complex interconnections between U.S. and Maghreb culture in the middle years of the twentieth century, while Brent Hayes Edwards has written compellingly about the francophone aspects of black internationalism in the 1920s. More fundamentally, what such critical works imply is not only the allegorical dimension of American studies as a discursive phenomenon but also ways in which this mode of allegorization has been suppressed in the interests of advancing a naturalized version of the subject, where particular objects might emerge in an unmediated way as symbols of the national heritage. This is, of course, precisely the burden of the Whitmanian tradition. Eschewing the distractions and estrangements of allegory, Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” sought to position himself as a natural embodiment of an emerging American national consciousness, while the pedagogic imaginary of American studies in its classic forms has willingly encouraged such an apparently intuitive bond between producer and consumer: “what I assume you shall assume” (28). But as Brent Hayes Edwards notes, the whole process of linguistic translation disrupts such tautological cycles by implying a wider “process of linking or connecting across gaps—a practice we might term articulation” (11); and part of this articulation of internationalism involves a reverse projection that throws light on the forms of alienation that have always been implicit within romantic forms of nationalism, including the Whitmanian paradigm. Francophone black internationalism, in other words, effectively casts shadows on the construction of U.S. literary modernism and on the canonical apparatus of American literature itself, showing what they deliberately included or left out. To reconceive American literary studies in global terms, therefore, is not to reject the significance of spatial location or corporeal embodiment but to make place contingent. American literature has always sought to find space for itself, to locate the grounds on which the authenticity of its voice is predicated, but there have been tensions between an inherent

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partiality of perspectives and a desire to achieve the status of discursive synecdoche, to speak symbolically on behalf of the nation. For instance, in his long poem An Explanation of America, first published in 1979, Robert Pinsky puzzles over whether such a totalizing narrative explanation might still be possible; he seeks deliberately to take up the challenge of Whitman and William Carlos Williams by binding “our country like a common dream” within an idiom of the vernacular (10). But Pinsky’s trenchant expression of community values, what his poem “The Tragic Chorus” calls the idea of poetry as a “civic art” (42), finds itself perennially haunted by images of disorientation and confusion. Having served as U.S. poet laureate between 1997 and 2000, Pinsky is fully committed to the idea of poetry as a form of public discourse at the heart of democratic culture; but in “The Anniversary,” a poem commissioned by the Washington Post to mark the first anniversary of 9/11, he captures the way in which the country’s domestic systems (aeronautics, media, and so on) have been turned back upon themselves: We adore images, we like the spectacle Of speed and size, the working of prodigious Systems. So on television we watched The terrible spectacle, repetitiously gazing Until we were sick not only of the sight Of our own prodigious systems turned against us But of the very system of our watching. (19) Later in the poem, Pinsky describes Will Rogers as “a Cherokee, a survivor / Of expropriation” (19–20), thereby attempting patriotically to recuperate this traumatic sense of dislocation by rationalizing displacement as a long-standing aspect of American historical experience. Similarly, his 2006 poem “Gulf Music,” written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, attempts to explain the destruction of New Orleans by encompassing it within the longue durée of a familiar historical narrative: The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated Galveston, Texas. Some 8,000 people died. The Pearl City almost obliterated. Still the one worst Calamity in American history, Woh mallah-walla. (6) What is therefore particularly interesting about “Gulf Music,” as with Pinsky’s poetry generally, is the way it fails to accord entirely with the civic virtues that ostensibly circumscribe it. Framed as it is by jazz cadences—“Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la” (6)—“Gulf Music” deliberately evokes an element of illegibility, something that re-

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sists being incorporated within U.S. national narratives. Another work written in the wake of the Iraq war, “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” puzzles over the disturbing new icon of Guantánamo Bay, which brings to mind stories of “torture devices” and images of a “prisoner on a leash” in U.S. detention camps (5), and it is as if the “disconnected parts” of this poem’s title betoken a fractured state where old coherent patriotic narratives have imploded upon themselves. As David Simpson noted in 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, the Iraq war and the Abu Ghraib photographs that came to epitomize it heightened among Americans the sense of uncertainty “about who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ stand for” (109); those comfortable binary oppositions between “us” and “them,” integrated immigrant and hostile alien, that propped up the spirit of American exceptionalism during the cold war era have been thrown increasingly into disrepair. Pinsky himself has written evocatively about the work of Edwin Arlington Robinson, drawing attention to “the tidal forces within lyric poetry that draw it toward social reality” (Democracy 80); and if Robinson’s ghostly, enigmatic elegies testify to the way in which American pastoral poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century was haunted by the disturbances of industrialization, Pinsky’s own poetry addresses a similar dialectic at the beginning of the twenty-first century between domestic values and the more inscrutable tides of globalization. This not only gives Pinsky’s poetry a more eerie quality but also opens it up to the pressure of deterritorialization. As Deleuze and Guattari observe, citing Friedrich Engels on Honoré de Balzac, “an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate” (133), thereby allowing his texts to mediate social disturbances whatever the personal disposition of the writer himself may happen to be. Some of Pinsky’s prose writings have expressed aggressively demotic viewpoints, particularly the essay “Eros against Esperanto” where he takes issue with Martha C. Nussbaum’s case for the rights of noncitizens by arguing that her abstract views are typical of a “liberal managerial class” that overlooks the investment of “emotions” in particular places (87). Poems such as “Gulf Music,” however, more delicately and reflexively balance a nostalgic sentimentality for the securities of home against a poignant sense of their erasure. Rather than associating globalization merely with a triumph of flattened market forces and a wholesale rejection of aesthetic values, then, it would be more valuable to consider ways in which social forces of all kinds can represent illuminating lacunae within literary texts, of the kind that have always been accessible to careful critical scrutiny. What would be useful here, on analogy with Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” (Marxism 132), is a term like economic affect, which would speak to ways in which contemporary American literature translates the global

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economy into affective forms. Marjorie Perloff has expressed skepticism about the idea of “global consciousness” (“Literature” 181)—how many languages and cultures, she asks, can one possibly know?—but, again, the crucial factor here is not what we know but what we know that we do not know: the interplay, the Derridaean brisure, between circumference and its insufficiency. Aesthetic values have always worked obliquely and affectively, and a transnational reading of American literature should seek neither simply to abolish textuality or phenomenology nor to minimize the value of thick descriptions of various kinds. Rather, such a reading should demystify metaphorical maps of the world that position the U.S. at their subliminal center, a cartographic model that has too frequently assumed a normative character, and should replace them with an alternative grid in which relations between text and place are theorized more self-consciously. In intellectual terms, as Amanda Anderson has noted, there is a long tradition privileging an “ideal of critical distance” (4), stretching from eighteenth-century conceptions of cosmopolitanism through the Victorian dandy to more recent articulations of queer theory (26). With respect to American literature, though, such categories of structural alienation are often regarded as disruptive because they would appear to interfere with a constitutional romanticism that prefers to identify a subject as the source of its own integrity. We see such tensions emerging in interesting ways in the late work of Adrienne Rich, who in a foreword to her essay collection Arts of the Possible (2001) expressed discomfort with the “feverish new pace of technological change” (1) and complained of “how profit-driven economic relations filter into zones of thought and feeling” (4). Citing Karl Marx on the alienation of the senses, Rich chose explicitly to position her poetic language as a form of resistance to such a “calculus” (1), seeing it as an attempt deliberately to reclaim and give expression to the human body. What gives Rich’s poetry its frisson, though, is precisely this conflict between a drive for democratic forms of emancipation on the one hand and various threats of corruption within language and society on the other. Again, Rich looks back to Whitman as the guarantor of her assertion that poetry should be “liberatory at its core” (“Poetry” 116): Whitman’s landscapes, she remarked in 2003, “are vistas of possibility” (“Six Meditations” 263), with his commitment to an art of “collective transformation” standing in stark contrast to the congealed hierarchies of “the property- and slave-owning ‘founding fathers’” (“Six Meditations” 272, 269). But for all her invective against “the compression of media power and resources into fewer and fewer hands, during and beyond the Reagan years” (“Foreword” 3), along with her disgust at the “self-congratulatory self-promotion of capitalism as a global, transnational order, superseding governments and the very

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meaning of free elections” that she judged to be characteristic of the Clinton era (“Arts” 147), the aesthetic force of Rich’s poems lies in the way they textually embody internal dialogues that evoke a decentering and fracturing of the self by the very forces the speaker herself abhors. This is the kind of turbulence and incoherence evident throughout the “Contradictions: Tracking Poems” section of Your Native Land, Your Life (1986): Don’t let the solstice fool you: our lives will always be a stew of contradictions the worst moment of winter can come in April (83) This is not, of course, to underestimate the strength or simply to bracket off the significance of Rich’s political commitments. It is, though, to suggest how powerful has been the tradition within American literature linking what Rich called (in the title of a 1984 essay) “a politics of location” with the authenticity of a discursive subject, something also apparent within the symbiotic equation that comprises the appositional title of her book of poems: Your Native Land, Your Life. Rich’s poetry is thus torn compulsively between place and displacement, with her personal investments coming reluctantly into collision with a wider geographical consciousness: As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three times “As a woman my country is the whole world.” Tribal loyalties aside, and even if nation-states are now just pretexts used by multinational conglomerates to serve their interests, I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create. (“Notes” 64) As someone who dates individual poems assiduously and often locates them geographically—as, for example, in “Baltimore: A fragment from the Thirties” (Your Native 69)—Rich specifically endows her poetry with an open-ended quality that exposes it to temporal change, while also charging it with the dynamic of spatial relativity. Such an emphasis on geospatial perspective is made even more explicit in Rich’s long poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991), where the country’s coherence is linked directly to how the land is framed cartographically: I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural then yes let it be these are small distinctions where do we see it from is the question (6)

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Echoing both the myths of pioneers and the vision of an organically unified United States that she associates with the form of the American long poem—“An Atlas of the Difficult World” quotes intertextually from the first section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge (12)—Rich attempts self-consciously to resist the fragmentation of “this segregate republic” by invoking “something that binds / the map of this country together” (11). Rich’s poetry thus rotates upon a rhetoric of contradiction, and the richness and complexity of its internal fissures testify to ways in which “American literature” and “global remapping” can be seen as mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive, even in their reciprocal antagonisms. Traditionally, as Djelal Kadir has observed, the institutional fields of American studies and comparative literature have operated as distinct planets rotating in different orbits. As a professional comparatist, Kadir has accused Americanists of being trapped within their own nationalist soliloquy, recycling a narrative “that goes on reinforcing and naturalizing the symptomatic Americanness of American studies” (11). But it is equally important to be specific about the ideological implications of any given comparative approach and which particular aspects of its intellectual genealogy might usefully be recuperated in the interests of reorienting American literature within a global framework. The term comparative literatures was first used by Matthew Arnold in 1848, and in the hands of René Wellek and other luminaries of the mid-twentieth century, it came to be associated with what Wellek called an “ideal universality” (“Crisis” 291), a specific “reaction against the narrow nationalism” of much literary scholarship (“Crisis” 287).1 Such universalism was redescribed by Northrop Frye in the 1950s as a form of metaphysics, with Anatomy of Criticism positing a typology of genres wherein essential “humanistic and liberal” (20) values could fly free from the constraints of traditional historical “chronology,” an idea Frye dismissed disdainfully as the “[o]nly organizing principle . . . so far discovered in literature” (16). But there is a categorical distinction to be made between the universalist rhetoric of Wellek or Frye and the more recent emphasis of Jonathan Culler on how comparative methodology can exercise “a critical demystificatory force on the cultural pieties of a nation” (“Comparative” 30). Disavowing Wellek’s humanist idealism, Culler has sought to link comparativism with a more materialist impulse, a demystification of religious as well as nationalist orthodoxies. Whereas Frye and Wellek viewed nationalism and spirit as antithetical, Culler regards them as parallel discourses that are often insidiously intertwined and work implicitly to reinforce 1  On the development of comparative literature in the nineteenth century, see Wellek, Discriminations 2–3.

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each other. By seeking to compare “Christianity with other mythologies,” Culler explicitly takes up that “critique of religion” he sees as “the proudest heritage of comparative literary studies” (Framing 79–80). Because comparative literature and American literature are rarely brought into conjunction, there is also a risk of a comparative Americanist approach appearing theoretically more unusual than it might in another area of literary study. While English canonical writers such as Shakespeare have always been reread and reinterpreted in different temporal and spatial contexts—think only of the many productions of Troilus and Cressida set not during the Trojan but the Vietnam War— the legend has somehow got around that authentic understandings of U.S. writers can derive only from deep immersion in the American national scene. This is debilitating enough on its own terms, since it radically truncates the explanatory contexts within which any writer’s texts can be understood: despite her avowed loyalty to the United States, Gertrude Stein lived forty-four out of her seventy-two years in France and might more logically be understood as a French rather than American writer, just as the work of Elizabeth Bishop, who lived for fifteen years in Brazil, could be read as partially Latin American. But even more damagingly, such a claustrophobic critical circumference also serves to enclose American literature within a set of prepackaged national narratives, setting in train mythical images of the United States and validating literary works for their proximity to these spectral ideals. This again is where a comparative methodology can perform useful work, demystifying myths of American exceptionalism such as those centered enduringly on religion and immigration. Since the Pilgrim fathers sailed westward in the seventeenth century, the story has got abroad of America as a haven for religious dissidents and as a melting pot for the emigrant who is willing, as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur famously put it, to leave “behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners” (70). But this, of course, has never been the case: as Ali Behdad has observed, the image of the immigrant has formed an idealized version of the American self, while liberal discourses of immigration, deriving from the Tocqueville myth of a free and prosperous people, have always denied the material history of religion and race. In this sense, the hostility to Arab-Americans after 9/11 is entirely commensurate with the anti-Catholicism of the Know Nothing movement in the nineteenth century, the scapegoating of foreigners in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, or, even further back, the barricading of Puritan New England in the seventeenth century against those who would not conform to its biblical tenets. Despite all the popular invocations of cultural hybridity, argues Behdad, the circumference of American national narratives has always been carefully drawn to protect the country from outsiders, with the amnesiac “myth of immigrant America” (32)

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working systematically to blot out the variegated historical conditions of its formation. To reconfigure American literary studies for the twenty-first century, then, is not to understand the idea of America as inherently emancipatory, nor to outline the convergence of different disciplinary discourses so as to produce an interdisciplinary synthesis centered on an American national model. Instead, it is to bring near and far into juxtaposition, to remap the field according to a logic of parallax so as to elucidate spaces where local, national, and transnational overlap, often in potentially troublesome or even incoherent ways. Bercovitch’s argument in The American Jeremiad that “America,” in the wake of biblical typology, has traditionally conceived itself not as “a territorial definition . . . but the symbol of an ideological consensus” (161) needs to be counterpointed with Harvey’s analysis of “geographical materialism” (Condition 359), where the relative position of the United States on the world map is made plain. This is not, however, simply to disregard the anthropological density that has inspired much of the best work in American studies, nor to ignore the experience of particular places or the significance of local praxis. Richard Rorty, in Achieving Our Country (1998), wrote of “globalization” at the end of the twentieth century as a similar kind of threat to the American body politic as “industrialization was . . . at the end of the nineteenth” (84): whereas John Dewey confronted the problem of wageslavery, suggested Rorty, political philosophers in America now face the problem of a fluid global labor market. Yet Rorty’s proposed solution to this, which was to dismiss the idea of “global polity” as “useless” (98) and to focus instead on the capacities of a redistributive social justice within the traditional confines of a nation-state, may have involved simply misreading where local interests effectively lie. Contemporary economic and environmental issues may dramatically affect local conditions, but they cannot necessarily be resolved at a local level. Unlike Habermas, who has sought to explore the possibility of “postnational” forms of political agency, there is a curious sense in which Rorty might be seen as not enough of a pragmatist in the way he chose dismissively to consign global affairs to the realms of a distant, immaterial sublime. By attempting to circumscribe pragmatism and equate it specifically with a model of U.S. national culture, the risk Rorty ran was to impede the circulation of social justice of any kind, since in the twenty-first century national and transnational spaces cannot be so easily demarcated from each other. To deterritorialize American culture, then, is not to deny it territorial embodiment. Deleuze, who coined the term deterritorialization, also wrote in his last published essay, “Immanence: A Life,” about the possibilities of “a pure plane of immanence” (26), a form of “transcendental empiricism” (25) linked to “singularization” (29): “Absolute immanence

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is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject” (26). Though, of course, traces of Deleuze’s religiosity are all too evident here, my point is that to separate American narratives from narratives of America is by no means to deny them a specific sense of location or immanence. To put space into different kinds of relation is not to elide the phenomenological significance of place itself. Fredric Jameson wrote in 2002 of how “a dialectic does not yet exist that is capable of coordinating the incommensurable conceptualities of the national-literary and the international” (Singular 101); but it is precisely such “incommensurable” qualities, the incongruous convergence and divergence of discourses from near and far, that can shed new light not only on the present state of American literature and culture but also on those constantly evolving historical narratives that have comprised, at any given time, its retrospective projections of the past. The global remapping of American literature, therefore, involves drawing attention to the contingent and historically variable nature of narratives about the relation of America to the rest of the world. It also serves to remind us that American literary studies should never be centered merely on patriotic solidarity or the propagation of domestic values. The purpose of this book has not, of course, been to try to cover the field of American literature in any kind of comprehensive manner but to show how the subject has been shaped and constructed over the years by institutional formulations of various kinds. American literature is not a natural phenomenon based on national affiliation, nor a narrative whose teleology is directed inexorably toward emancipation, but a field whose perimeters expand and contract in accordance with the maps it projects and the particular atlas it is enclosed by. To draw a global map of American literature is to suggest how the subject could be configured differently, while to restore a cartographic dimension to American literary studies more generally is to highlight ways in which these maps have changed, and are continuing to change, over time.

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Index

Abbott, Carl, 232 ABC (American Broadcasting Company), 144 Abrams, Robert E., 21–22 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 213, 215, 239 Achieving Our Country (Rorty), 266 Adams, Henry, 73, 106 Adams, Rachel, 243n5 Ades, Dawn, 101 Aerial Age, 131–33 “Aesthetic of Regionalism, The” (Ransom), 199 aesthetics of extravagance: baroque, 42–43, 46, 54, 56, 186; New England and, 31–37, 42–54, 62–65; New World topographies and, 55–69; plantations and, 43–55; Restoration legacies and, 29–43 “After I Was Thrown in the River and before I Drowned” (Eggers), 179 Age of Chivalry, The (Bulfinch), 71 “Age of Fable, The” (Emerson), 75 Agrarian movement, 188, 199–200, 214 Alaska, 10, 128, 133, 225–27, 232, 253 Aldridge, John, 219 Alien and Sedition Acts, 265 All the King’s Men (Warren), 200–201 All Tomorrow’s Parties (Gibson), 244, 249 Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 19–21, 196 Alsop, Richard, 65–68, 96 Altieri, Charles, 128n10 Always Coming Home (Le Guin), 237–38 American Antiquarian Society, 92 American Antiquities (Priest), 91–92 American Anti-Slavery Society, 184 American Civil War, 1, 9–10, 231; antebellum narratives and, 79, 105–6; Confederacy and, 183–85, 191–93, 240–42; ethnic palimpsests and, 121, 123; as house divided, 183; modernism and, 111–15, 119, 121, 123, 131, 135–36, 140; postbellum cartographies and, 111–15, 119; regional difference and, 183; slavery and, 183–86, 189–93, 202, 206–7; the South and, 183–86, 189–93,

200, 206–7, 213, 227; Union and, 113, 184–85, 192, 200 American Climatology (Hodgins), 130 American Enlightenment, 31 American Geographic Society, 8 American History and Its Geographic Conditions (Semple), 136 “Americanism and Localism” (Dewey), 11, 115 “Americanism in Literature” (Simms), 189–90 American Jeremiad, The (Bercovitch), 31–32, 266 American Language, The (Mencken), 122 American literature: Augustan, 29–69; the Bible and, 7, 32, 43, 48–49, 58, 72, 84– 85, 91, 155, 205, 265–66; broadcasting and, 142–80; comparative literatures and, 264–65; deterritorialization and, 8, 12–21, 23, 25, 93, 107, 154, 196, 261, 266; exceptionalism and, 8, 11–12, 16, 18, 23–24, 31–32, 63, 86, 91, 105, 120, 123, 146, 148, 156, 159–60, 200, 228, 232, 257, 261, 265; geographical materialism and, 1, 15, 22–23, 141, 226, 266; Gothic, 73–74; medieval, 70–107; modernism and, 111–40; national identity and, 1, 5–8, 11–14, 19, 72, 103–6, 111, 119, 122, 126, 129, 137, 144, 193, 212, 232, 240, 245, 255, 259; national standards and, 120–25; new rules of engagement for, 16–17; New World Baroque and, 43, 46, 54, 56, 186; plantation regions and, 43–55, 184–90, 202, 213; Puritans and, 3, 31–37, 43, 46, 55–60, 63, 68, 71, 80–83, 100, 119, 123, 145–46, 186, 192, 221, 227, 265; question of circumference and, 255–67; transnationalism and, 13–25, 31, 40, 65, 73, 78, 106, 119, 125, 143, 154, 162, 178, 222, 233, 242, 247, 250, 253–58, 262–63, 266; use of juxtaposition in, 2, 24, 29, 37, 58, 63, 68, 95, 119, 128, 166, 184, 208–9, 220–22, 225, 234, 241, 254, 266 American Mystery, The (Tanner), 152–53

306  •  Index American Pastoral (Roth), 146–47, 179 American Renaissance (Matthiesen), 70, 74, 94, 124, 183, 190, 255 American Revolution, 86, 160, 184, 195 American Scene, The (James), 193, 208 “American Scholar, The” (Emerson), 75 American South: Agrarian movement and, 188, 199–200, 214; Barthelme and, 216–22; Bartram and, 186–90, 222; bifocalism and, 186, 193; Bishop and, 207–13, 220, 222, 265; Civil War and, 183–86, 189–93, 200, 206–7, 213, 227; Confederacy and, 183–85, 191–93, 240–42; Faulkner and, 212–16, 219, 221–22, 230; Florida and, 185–93, 196, 202–10, 221; Hurston and, 202–7, 213; James and, 193; Key West and, 127, 185, 207; Mississippi and, 212–22; mutated boundaries of, 183–84; Native Americans and, 186–91, 207, 221; plantations and, 33, 137, 184–90, 202, 213; regionalism and, 199–212; Simms and, 189–93, 222; slavery and, 183–86, 189–93, 202, 206–7; Spanish explorers and, 185–86; Union and, 113, 184–85, 192, 200 American Studies Association (ASA), 12, 143 American Sublime (art exhibition), 156 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 264 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 46 Anderson, Amanda, 262 Anderson, Douglas, 187 Anderson, Laurie, 80 “Anecdotes of an American Crow” (Bartram), 188 Anne, queen of England, 31 Annesley, James, 252 “Anniversary, The” (Pinsky), 260 antebellum narratives: Emerson and, 70, 74–78, 81, 84, 90–91, 105–7; Hawthorne and, 97–102; Longfellow and, 77–86, 90, 92, 105–6; Melville and, 102–5; Simms and, 96, 189–93 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 12–13 Anti-Slavery Convention, 184 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 106 Appadurai, Arjun, 2, 23, 162, 242 Apter, Emily, 153 Aragon, Louis, 250 Arbour, Keith, 46n4

Archaeologies of the Future (Jameson), 238, 249 Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, The (Wilson), 90 Archaeology of the United States (Haven), 92 Aristocracy (Alsop), 66 Armitage, David, 47, 51–52 Arnold, Matthew, 264 Arnoldi, Arnoldo di, 29–30 Arts of the Possible (Rich), 262 Arvin, Newton, 80 Ashbery, John, 163, 166 Association of American Geographers, 136 Atlantic Monthly journal, 115, 122, 138 “Atlas of the Difficult World, An” (Rich), 264 Atterbury, Francis, 32 Augustan American literature: Alsop and, 65–68; American Enlightenment and, 31; Byrd and, 37–43, 55, 57, 68; Caesar and, 32; clownship and, 33–34; comic narrative and, 34, 37, 39–42, 55, 59, 68; Cook and, 34–39, 42, 68–69; Dwight and, 59–65, 68–69; Mather and, 44–55, 68; New England and, 31–37, 42–54, 62–65; New World topographies and, 55–69; plantation regions and, 43–55; Puritans and, 31–37, 43, 46, 55–60, 63, 68; Restoration legacies and, 29–43; timing of conception of, 31–32; Wheatley and, 58, 68 Augustan England, 32 aviation, 131–35 Ayers, Edward L., 183 Ayres, Harry Morgan, 70 Bach, J. S., 56 Bahamas, 184, 187 Bailyn, Bernard, 57, 189 Baker, Anne, 5 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 201 Balibar, Etienne, 22–23 “Baltimore: A fragment from the Thirties” (Rich), 263–64 Balzac, Honoré de, 261 Bancroft, George, 55–56, 71, 98 Banks, Joseph, 68 Barrell, John, 214 Barth, John, 85, 164, 167 Barthelme, Donald, 174, 216 Barthelme, Frederick, 216–22

Index  •  307 Bartram, John, 186 Bartram, William, 186, 186–90, 222 Basch, Linda, 16 Baton Rouge circle, 199 Battle of New Orleans, 7 Baucom, Ian, 257–58 Baudrillard, Jean, 17, 159, 179n14 Bauer, Ralph, 37 Bauman, Zygmunt, 139 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 144 Beat writers, 12 Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, The (Paulson), 43 Bedon, Elettra, 223 Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 43 Behdad, Ali, 265–66 Behemoth: A Legend of the MoundBuilders (Mathews), 94–96 Bell, Michael, 128 Bellini, Vincenzo, 80 Bellow, Saul, 12, 164 Beloved (Morrison), 158, 191 Bender, John, 43n3 Bender, Thomas, 111 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 31–32, 54, 71–72, 192n2, 266 Berlin Wall, 14 Berman, Jessica, 136 Berman, Marshall, 125 Berryman, John, 3 Bertolini, Vincent J., 105 Beuka, Robert, 150 Bhabha, Homi K., 140 Bhagavad Gīta, 77, 238 Bible, the: Bercovitch and, 32, 266; Book of Revelation and, 32 Handel’s oratorios and, 7, 43; Hurston and, 205; Longfellow and, 84–85; Mather and, 48–49; New England and, 32, 265; Priest and, 91; Updike and, 155; Wheatley and, 58; Winthrop and, 72 bifocalism, 186, 193 Bishop, Elizabeth, 207–13, 220, 222, 265 Black Arts movement, 203 Blair, Hugh, 60 Blair, Sara, 223 Bleikasten, André, 215 Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne), 105 Bloom, Harold, 7, 125, 163 Blue Moon over Thurman Street (Le Guin), 238

Blue Ridge Mountains, 39 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 152 Boas, Franz, 202 Bob the Gambler (Barthelme), 218, 220 Boelhower, William, 5 Boggs, Colleen Glenney, 58n9 Book of Mormon, The (Smith), 91 “Border Patrol State, The” (Silko), 21 Borges, Jorge Luis, 54, 101, 165 Boswell, Marshall, 167, 174 Bourne, Randolph, 10–11, 122–23 Boyden, Michael, 70 Boyle, Robert, 50 Bradstreet, Anne, 3, 5 Bramen, Carrie Tirado, 11 Brautigan, Richard, 240–42 Brazil, 160, 184, 202, 207–9, 213, 245, 265 Brazil (Bishop), 207 Brazil (Updike), 160 Brecht, Bertholt, 125 Breitwieser, Mitchell, 54 Bremer, Francis, 72 Breton, André, 106, 223, 250 Brewsie and Willie (Stein), 135 Brickhouse, Anna, 184, 193n3 Bridge, The (Crane), 128–29, 131, 264 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Wallace), 166 Brief Relation of the State of New England (Mather), 33 Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr., 200 “British-American Belles Lettres” (Shields), 31 British Columbia, 232–33, 244 British Empire in America, The (Oldmixon), 43–44, 52 broadcasting: ABC and, 144; aesthetic of cognitive mapping and, 142; BBC and, 144; “Campaign of Truth” and, 143–44; CBS and, 144, 157–58; closure and, 142; CNN and, 144, 151, 178, 245; conformity and, 151; connection and, 152–53; C-SPAN and, 151; DeLillo and, 152–54, 165–66; Eggers and, 175–80; FCC and, 144, 151; Frost and, 152; HBO and, 144; Internet and, 18, 142, 153, 161, 256; MTV and, 144, 161–80; NBC and, 19, 144, 147, 163; Office of War Information and, 143; Oprah Winfrey and, 152; PBS and, 151; propaganda and, 144; radio and, 19,

308  •  Index broadcasting (cont’d) 111, 130–31, 135–36, 142–43, 147–52, 156, 162, 199, 244; Smith-Mundt Act and, 144; television and, 19, 142–44, 149–53, 156–80, 199, 218, 256, 260; Updike and, 154–61; Voice of America (VOA) and, 143–44; Wallace on, 163–80; WTBS and, 153 Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, 126 Brokaw, Tom, 19 Bromfield, Edward, 54 Brooks, Cleanth, 199, 214 Broom of the System, The (Wallace), 166, 172–73 Brothers, The (Barthelme), 216, 219–20 Brown, Bill, 114, 115 Brown, Denise Scott, 143 Brown, Jerry, 235 Browne, Thomas, 46, 70 Bruccoli, Matthew J., 131n14 Brückner, Martin, 7, 40–41 Bryant, William Cullen, 87, 89, 193 Buell, Lawrence, 55–56, 71 Bulfinch, Thomas, 71 Bulkly, Peter, 47 Buñuel, Luis, 248 Bureau of American Ethnology, 90 Burnham, Michelle, 33 Burton, Robert, 46 Bush, George W., 13, 17–18 Butler, Samuel, 34–36, 40 Byrd, William, II, 37–43, 55, 57, 68 Cahokia, 87 Calhoun, Charles C., 80n6, 82 Calhoun, John C., 183 California, 5, 131, 142, 201, 213; admitted to Union, 9; national space and, 9–10; Pacific Northwest and, 225–28, 231–37, 244–47, 253; Wallace and, 166 Callenbach, Ernest, 231, 245 Call of the Wild, The (London), 227 Calvinism, 5, 31, 42, 55–57, 84, 91 Cambridge History of American Literature, 31, 70, 122, 186 “Campaign of Truth,” 143–44 Campbell, Neil, 251n8 Canada, 16, 54, 113; Barthelme and, 217; Bishop and, 207–8; British Columbia and, 232–33, 244; Coupland and, 17, 226, 242–44, 250–54; Gibson and, 17, 243–54

Canadian-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), 243 Cannery Row (Steinbeck), 241 Cannon, Christopher, 72 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 82 capitalism, 12–14, 142, 224, 254, 262 Capra, Frank, 133 Caribbean, 36, 43, 158, 184, 187–90, 203–4, 207, 210, 213 Carpentier, Alejo, 220–21 Carr, Helen, 89 Carter, Jimmy, 1, 13, 157 cartography, 1, 5, 7, 20, 22, 262–63, 267; aesthetics of extravagance and, 29, 37, 40–41, 52; American South and, 184, 193, 198, 204, 208–14, 217; antebellum narrative and, 77, 94, 96, 99–10l, 103; broadcasting and, 141–80; Key West and, 127, 185, 207; metaregionalism and, 223–54; modernism and, 111, 113, 115, 126, 136, 140; Münster and, 209–10; Pacific Northwest and, 222–23, 238, 244, 253; spirit of place and, 142–43; Tuan and, 142 Carver, Raymond, 229–30, 251 Cary, Henry Francis, 102 Cassique of Kiawah, The (Simms), 190–92 Castronovo, Russ, 86, 105, 112 Cather, Willa, 11, 199 Catholics, 9, 46, 75, 114, 147, 177, 198, 207, 218–21, 265 Catlin, George, 90 Cavallaro, Dani, 247, 250 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 144, 157–58 Cecil, Robert, 52 Chanady, Amaryll, 220 Chappell, Sally A. Kitt, 87 Charles II, king of England, 32, 86 Charms of Fancy, The (Alsop), 65–68 Chase, Richard, 120 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 71, 74–75, 82, 99, 107, 137 Chauncy, Charles, 59–60 Chirico, Giorgio de, 211 Christianity: Dwight and, 59–64; Longfellow and, 83–86; national identity and, 18–29, 33–34, 49, 52, 54, 58–61, 72, 76, 129, 233, 258, 265; rationalism and, 61 Christus (Longfellow), 83–86 Church, Henry, 126

Index  •  309 City of Glass (Gibson), 250–51, 253–54 Clark, T. J., 140 Clinton, Bill, 13, 15, 145, 263 clownship, 33–34 CNN (Cable News Network), 144, 151, 178, 245 Cobb, James C., 201 Cohn, Deborah, 213 cold war, 12, 14, 17–18, 256, 261; broadcasting and, 143–44, 151, 158, 180; “Campaign of Truth” and, 143–44; McCarthyism and, 143, 145; metaregionalism and, 228–30, 244, 248; Voice of America (VOA) and, 143–44 Collins, William, 66 Columbus, Christopher, 9, 29, 42 Columbus Breaking the Egg (Hogarth), 42 comic narrative: American South and, 193, 202, 216–19; antebellum, 82; Augustan American literature and, 34, 37, 39–43, 55, 59, 68; Dwight and, 59–61; Longfellow and, 82–83; Mather and, 55, 60–61; modernism and, 127–28; national space and, 163, 168; Pacific Northwest and, 230; parody of neoclassical and, 58–59; Richter and, 82–83; structural irony and, 59–60 Common Sense (Paine), 257 Communism, 12, 143–44, 204 communitarianism, 124, 130, 143, 153, 177 Companion Species Manifesto (Haraway), 179 Conant, James, 142 “Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space” (Kant), 224 Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey), 1, 14, 129, 141, 266 Confederate General at Big Sur, A (Brautigan), 240–42 Confluences journal, 138 Congreve, William, 37 Conn, Steven, 89, 105n17 Connecticut, 42, 59, 62–66, 82, 92, 127, 161 Connecticut Wits, 59, 65–66 Conquest of Canaan, The (Dwight), 59 conservatism, 5, 14, 41, 65, 74, 105, 122, 139, 203–4, 249, 262–63 Consider the Lobster (Wallace), 164–66, 179

“Contradictions: Tracking Poems” (Rich), 263 Cook, Ebenezer, 34–39, 42, 68–69 Cook, James, 68 Cooke, Nym, 57n8 Cooley, John, 241 Cooper, James Fenimore, 21, 94, 190 Cooper’s Hill (Denham), 62 Coover, Robert, 167, 174 Corn, Wanda, 128 Cosmographia (Münster), 209–10 Costello, Mark, 166, 211 Cotton, John, 48 Country and the City, The (Williams), 72 Coup, The (Updike), 160 Coupland, Douglas, 17, 226, 242–44, 250–54 Cowper, William, 188 Crampton, Nancy, 148 Crane, Hart, 128–29, 131, 264 Crews, Frederick C., 98n13 “Crisis of Comparative Literature, The” (Wellek), 264 Cromwell, Oliver, 32, 48, 247 Crystal, David, 23 C-SPAN (Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network), 151 Cuba, 248; American South and, 184–85, 190, 210, 220; Brickhouse and, 184; Martí and, 193–98, 222; Voice of America (VOA) and, 143–44 Culler, Jonathan, 264–65 Cultural Front, The (Denning), 129 cultural issues: broadcasting and, 141–80; capitalism and, 12–14, 142, 224, 254, 262; Christianity and, 18–29, 33–34, 49, 52, 54, 58–61, 72, 76, 129, 233, 258, 265; cold war and, 12, 14, 17–18, 143, 151, 158, 180, 228–30, 244, 248, 256, 261; communitarianism and, 124, 130, 143, 153, 177; deterritorialization and, 8, 12–20, 23, 25, 93, 107, 154, 196, 261, 266; digital culture and, 17, 164, 168, 171, 251–52; dividing line and, 13, 37–38, 41, 55, 248; Ellis Island and, 10; the Enlightenment and, 8, 31, 40, 74, 168, 188, 257; ethnic groups and, 3, 11, 13, 112–20, 147–48, 164, 212, 224, 227, 229, 243; Fordist regime and, 13–15, 143; hegemony and, 3, 18–19, 23, 72, 144, 151, 162, 172, 186, 193, 200, 256; highbrow/lowbrow

310  •  Index cultural issues (cont’d) society and, 57–58; immigrants and, 10, 16, 32, 116, 121–22, 139, 142, 178, 193, 261, 265; imperialism and, 14, 25, 64, 194–96, 210–11, 224; individualism and, 31, 74, 113, 148–49, 165; jazz and, 12, 132, 260; longue durée and, 71, 86, 188–89, 233, 260; McCarthyism and, 143, 145; mass production and, 11–12; metaregionalism and, 223–54; MTV generation and, 161–70; multinationalism and, 17, 23, 152, 172, 232, 244, 248, 263; 9/11 terrorist attacks and, 17–18, 154, 173–74, 178, 180, 228, 248, 260–61, 265; pre-Columbian culture and, 77–78, 82, 87, 90, 94, 96, 101, 106; Puritans and, 3 (see also Puritans); regionalism and, 199–212; representation and, 256–57; slavery and, 20, 36, 42–43, 58, 63, 74, 123–24, 136, 149, 183–86, 189–93, 202, 206–7, 227, 231, 257, 262, 266; territorialism and, 5–9; transnationalism and, 13–25, 31, 40, 65, 73, 78, 106, 119, 125, 143, 154, 162, 178, 222, 233, 242, 247, 250, 253–58, 262–63, 266; Young America movement and, 81, 83, 94, 96, 102–3, 189 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 24 Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (Denning), 14 Cushman, Charlotte Saunders, 80 “Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway), 165–66, 179 Cyclopedia of American Literature (Duyckinck and Duyckinck), 190 D’Agostino, Peter R., 114 Dainotto, Roberto Maria, 199n5 Danforth, Samuel, 49–50 Dante Alighieri, 66, 73, 83–84, 102–5 Davidson, Donald, 199–200 Day of Doom, The (Wigglesworth), 78 Defoe, Daniel, 38 de Klerk, Frederik Willem, 14 Delany, Paul, 248 Delbanco, Andrew, 32 Deleuze, Gilles, 12–13, 23, 56, 261, 266–67 DeLillo, Don, 141, 152–54, 165–66 Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (Pinsky), 261 Denham, John, 62 Denning, Michael, 14, 129

De Prospo, R. C., 29n2, 72n2 “Description without Place” (Stevens), 126–28 Deserted Village (Goldsmith), 62 deterritorialization: American south and, 196; exceptionalism and, 8, 11–12, 16, 18, 23–24; medieval American literature and, 93, 107; national identity and, 8, 12–20, 23–25, 93, 107, 154, 196, 261, 266 Dew, Thomas R., 190 Dewey, John, 11, 115, 266 Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac), 151 Dickinson, Emily, 3 Difference Engine, The (Gibson and Sterling), 246–47, 253 digital culture, 17, 164, 168, 171, 244–49, 251–52 Dimock, Wai Chee, 233 Discourse on Some Events of the Last Century (Dwight), 61 Discriminations (Wellek), 264n1 Dispossesed, The (Le Guin), 236–37 Disraeli, Benjamin, 73, 246–47 Divine Comedy (Dante), 83, 102 “Divinity School Address, The” (Emerson), 75 Dolan, Frederick M., 126 Dominican Republic, 16 Donizetti, Gaetano, 80 Donne, John, 70 Donoghue, John, 43 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 101 Dorman, Robert L., 199 Dos Passos, John, 11–12, 129–30, 228 Double Down (Barthelme), 216, 220–22 Douglas, William O., 229 Douglass, Frederick, 156, 192 Dowling, William C., 63–64 Doyle, Don H., 257 Dred Scott case, 231 Dreiser, Theodore, 10 Dryden, John, 46, 48 Du Bois, W.E.B., 114, 137, 156 Duchamp, Marcel, 128 Dunciad (Pope), 60 Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston), 204–5 Duyckinck, Cornelius Mathews, 190 Duyckinck, Evert, 94, 190 Dvorak, Antonin, 80 Dwight, Timothy, 68–69; Christianity and, 59–64; Greenfield Hill and, 62–65;

Index  •  311 The Triumph of Infidelity and, 59–64; Travels in New England and New York and, 64–65 Dying Animal, The (Roth), 146–47 Eakin, Paul John, 175 Earth and Man, The (Guyot), 8 Earth House Hold (Snyder), 235 Eaton, Nathaniel, 47 economic affect, 261–62 economic issues: Canadian-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) and, 243; capitalism and, 12–14, 142, 224, 254, 262; Caribbean Empire and, 184; Fordist regime and, 13–15, 143; free-market system and, 14–15; gold standard and, 13–14; Great Depression and, 124, 199; International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, 14; North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and, 243; Pacific Northwest and, 229, 232; slavery and, 43; transnational rules of engagement for, 16–17; Ecotopia (Callenbach), 231–32, 245 Ecotopia Emerging (Callenbach), 231 Edel, Leon, 227 Edge City (Garreau), 150 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams), 106 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 259 Edwards, Brian T., 259 Edwards, Jonathan, 56 Edwards, Justin D., 243 Eggers, Dave, 142, 175–80 Einstein, Albert, 147 Eisenhower, Dwight, 156 Eliot, T. S., 31, 138, 186, 205 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 38, 70–71, 100 Elliott, Emory, 29 Ellis Island, 10 Ellison, Julie, 64 Ellison, Ralph, 146 Elroy Nights (Barthelme), 216–18 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 14, 31, 224; antiquarianism and, 76; Ashbery and, 163; catholic sense and, 75–76; Catlin and, 90n10; Chaucer and, 74–75; Douglass and, 192; Longfellow and, 81; Martí and, 197–98; Matthiessen and, 74, 77, 124; medieval American literature and, 70, 74–78, 81, 84, 90–91, 105–7; mod-

ernism and, 125; national identity and, 7; perception and, 8; Roth and, 146; self-reliance and, 91; Stevens and, 125; universal nature and, 75; Wallace and, 168, 171, 175 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 14–15 Engels, Friedrich, 261 English Civil War, 32–35, 38, 57 Enlightenment, the, 8, 31, 40, 74, 168, 188, 257 Ernst, Max, 106, 211 “Eros against Esperanto” (Pinsky), 261 ER (TV show), 163 ethnic groups, 3, 11, 13, 164, 259; Alien and Sedition Acts and, 265; American South and, 203 (see also American South); Calvinists and, 5, 31, 42, 55–57, 84, 91; Catholicism and, 9, 46, 75, 114, 147, 177, 198, 207, 218–21, 265; Civil War era and, 112–14, 121, 123; diasporic orientation and, 114; Du Bois and, 114; Ellis Island and, 10; federalism and, 120, 122; French language and, 121; Haymarket riot and, 120; Howells and, 115–20, 122; Hurston and, 202–7, 213; immigrants and, 10, 16, 32, 116, 121–22, 139, 142, 178, 193, 261, 265; Indian Removal Act and, 189; Jews and, 80, 83, 114, 119–22, 137–39, 147–48, 218, 263; modernism and, 113–20; Morrison and, 151–52; national standards and, 120–25; Native Americans and, 7, 19–21, 41, 87–90, 94, 104–6, 190, 219, 226, 235–38; Pacific Northwest and, 224, 227, 229, 243; Protestantism and, 9, 19, 145, 155, 174, 200, 219; Puritans and, 3, 31–37, 42, 46, 55–60, 63, 68, 71, 80–83, 100, 119, 123, 145–46, 186, 192, 221, 227, 265; Roth and, 141, 145–50; sectional interests and, 123–24; Spanish language and, 121; U.S. Immigration Service and, 113; Walker’s Statistical Atlas and, 112–14; Welsh and, 113, 115–16 Ethnicity and Cultural Authority (Williams), 115 “E Unibus Pluram” (Wallace), 164 European Association for American Studies (EAAS), 120–21 Eutaw (Simms), 191 Evans, Brad, 119 Everything and More (Wallace), 169

312  •  Index exceptionalism, 200, 257, 261, 265; antebellum narratives and, 86, 91, 105; Augustan American literature and, 31–32, 63; broadcasting and, 146, 148, 156, 159–60; deterritorialization and, 8, 11–12, 16, 18, 23–24; metaregionalism and, 228, 232; modernism and, 120, 123, 140 Exit Ghost (Roth), 148 “Experience” (Emerson), 8, 75 Explanation of America, An (Pinsky), 260 Falling Man (DeLillo), 154 Fascism, 12, 123, 138n16, 139, 199–200 Faulkner, William, 54, 212–16, 219, 221–22, 230 Faulkner (Glissant), 214–15 Faÿ, Bernard, 138 Fear of Small Numbers (Appadurai), 162 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 144, 151 Ferguson, Niall, 16, 18, 23 Ferguson, Robert, 31, 41 Feuer, Jane, 162n8 Fiedler, Leslie, 74 Field, David Dudley, 96 Filreis, Alan, 126 Fisher, Philip, 183 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 131–33, 140 Fitzmier, John R., 59 Florida, 10, 38, 126–27, 159, 185–93, 196, 202–10, 221, 253 Foerster, Norman, 123–24, 255 Foner, Philip S., 194–95 Ford, Henry, 11 Ford, Richard, 215, 223 Fordist regime, 13–15, 143 42nd Parallel, The (Dos Passos), 130 Foucault, Michel, 141 “Four Changes” (Brautigan), 240 Four Saints in Three Acts (Stein), 134 “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (Gibson), 245 Framing the Sign (Culler), 265 Franklin, Benjamin, 240 Franklin, Wayne, 40 Freneau, Philip, 66 Freyre, Gilberto, 202, 207 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 125 Frost, Robert, 11, 125, 152, 199 Frye, Northrop, 264–65 Fuentes, Carlos, 213, 221 fundamentalism, 18, 91, 155

Fussell, Edwin, 94 Fussell, Paul, 41 “Future of the American Novel, The” (Howells), 115 Gallatin, Albert, 90 Garreau, Joel, 150, 232 Gay, John, 42 Gay, Peter, 125 Generation X (Coupland), 251–52, 254 geodetic writing, 41 Geographia (Ptolemy), 209 Geographical History of America, The (Stein), 136–37 geographical materialism, 1, 15, 22–23, 141, 226, 266 geography: as allegory, 111–40; American Geographic Society and, 8; American South and, 183–222; American Studies Association (ASA) and, 143; Association of American Geographers and, 136; aviation and, 131–35; broadcasting and, 141–80; Byrd and, 37–38; Caribbean and, 36, 43, 158, 184, 187–90, 203–4, 207, 210, 213; cartographic explosion and, 113 (see also cartography); Columbus’s voyages and, 29; Conant and, 142; dividing line and, 13, 37–38, 41, 55, 248; Dos Passos and, 129–30; ethnic groups and, 113–14 (see also ethnic groups); 42nd parallel and, 11–12; Guyot and, 8–9; hemispheric symmetry and, 8–9; historicism and, 24; mass production of maps and, 131; Mather and, 52; Mercator projections and, 133; metaregionalism and, 223–54; modernism and, 125–40; Moll and, 44–45, 52–53; Morse and, 7; National Geographic Society and, 131; negative, 22–23; New World and, 8, 29, 46, 48, 55–69, 82, 92, 105–6, 114, 151, 185–86, 204, 209, 232; Paris Geographical Congress and, 113; plantation regions and, 42–55, 184–90, 202, 213; pseudo-geography and, 199–212; Ptolemy and, 29; regionalism and, 199–212; Stein and, 133–40; Stevens and, 125–29, 140; Surrealist “Map of the World” and, 128–29; Terra Incognita and, 29, 34, 38; territorialism and, 5–9; Walker’s Statistical Atlas and, 112–14; World War II era and, 135–36 Geography III (Bishop), 210–11

Index  •  313 Geography Made Easy (Morse), 7 George I, king of England, 31 George II, king of England, 31 George III, king of England, 186 Gettysburg Address, 9–10, 115, 148–49 Gibson, William, 17, 243–54 Girard, Greg, 248 Girl with Curious Hair (Wallace), 166–67, 171–72 Glendower, Owen, 115 Glissant, Edouard, 213–15 globalization, 1–2, 64, 196; broadcasting and, 143, 157–62, 174–75, 179n13, 180n16; deglobalization and, 123; digital culture and, 17, 164, 168, 171, 251–52; free-market system and, 14–15; gold standard and, 13–14; International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, 14; language and, 122; Meinig on, 2; multinationalism and, 17, 23, 152, 172, 232, 244, 248, 263; neoliberalism and, 14, 16; 9/11 terrorist attacks and, 17–18, 154, 173–74, 178, 180, 228, 248, 260–61, 265; Nixon and, 13; representation and, 256–57; transnationalism and, 13–25, 31, 40, 65, 73, 78, 106, 119, 125, 143, 154, 162, 178, 222, 233, 242, 247, 250, 253–58, 262–63, 266 global space: broadcasting and, 141–80; deterritorialization and, 8, 12–21, 23, 25, 93, 107, 154, 196, 261, 266; geographical materialism and, 1, 15, 22–23, 141, 226, 266; geography as allegory and, 111–40; metaregionalism and, 223–54; national identity and, 1, 5–8, 11–14, 19, 72, 103–6, 111, 119, 122, 126, 129, 137, 144, 193, 212, 232, 240, 245, 255, 259; spirit of place and, 142–43; transnational era and, 12–14 global warming, 22, 158, 253 Godden, Richard, 214 Goddu, Teresa, 74 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8, 74 gold, 38–39, 226 gold standard, 13–14 Golden Day, The (Mumford), 199 Golden Legend, The (Longfellow), 84–85 Goldsmith, Oliver, 62 Good News for New England (Anonymous), 33 Gore, Al, 13 Gothic, 73–74, 101–2 Gould, Philip, 58

Grandfather’s Chair (Hawthorne), 97 Grasso, Christopher, 65 Gray, Thomas, 188 Great Depression, 124, 199 Greenblatt, Stephen, 73 Greene, Jack, 37 Greenfield Hill (Dwight), 62–65 Grenada, 16 Grey, Robin, 70 Grossman, Lawrence K., 162n7 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 194, 221 Guattari, Félix, 12–13, 21, 23, 261 “Gulf Music” (Pinsky), 260–61 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 95 Gura, Philip, 37 Gustafson, Sandra M., 31 Guyot, Arnold, 8–9, 133 Habermas, Jürgen, 257, 266 Hakluyt, Richard, 51–52 Hale, J. R., 29n1 Halttunen, Karen, 143 Hammett, Dashiell, 249 Hammond, James H., 190 Handel, George Frideric, 7, 43, 80 Handel and Haydn society, 80 Haraway, Donna J., 165–66, 179 Hardt, Michael, 14–15, 162 Hardy, Thomas, 125, 214 Harlot’s Progress, A (Hogarth), 42 Harmonium (Stevens), 127 Harper, William, 190 Harper’s Weekly journal, 184 Harrington, Karl P., 66 Hartz, Louis, 256 Harvey, David, 1, 13–14, 129, 141, 256, 266 Haven, Samuel F., 92–93 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: antebellum narratives and, 70, 77, 90, 93; Chaucer and, 99; medieval American literature and, 97–102, 105–6; Melville and, 96–97; Puritans and, 100; question of genealogy and, 97–107; Roth and, 146; Simms and, 190, 192; Updike and, 154, 155n5 Hayles, N. Katherine, 165, 249 Haymarket riot, 120 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells), 115–20, 122 HBO (Home Box Office), 144 Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, A (Eggers), 175–77 Hegeman, Susan, 122, 124

314  •  Index hegemony, 3, 18–19, 23, 72, 144, 151, 162, 172, 186, 193, 200, 256 Heise, Ursula K., 143n3 Hemingway, Ernest, 138, 167, 230, 240 Hill, Anita, 151 “History” (Emerson), 76 History of American Literature (Tyler), 105–6, 255 History of the Dividing Line in the Year 1728 (Byrd), 37–38, 41 History of the United States (Bancroft), 98 Hitler, Adolf, 138–39 Hobson, Fred, 215 “Hodgins, E. W.,” 130 Hofstadter, Richard, 65 Hogarth, William, 41–42, 60 Hogarth’s Harlot (Paulson), 7 Homer, 58, 68, 91 Honeymooners, The (TV show), 152–53 Horace, 37 House of Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), 98 Howard, Leon, 65–66 Howells, William Dean, 10, 115–22 “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” (Hurston), 204 How We Became Posthuman (Wallace), 165 Hsu, Hsuan L., 222 Huang, Yunte, 235 Hubbell, Jay B., 123–24 Hudibras (Butler), 34–36, 40 Hughes, Langston, 125 Hugo, Richard, 229 humanism, 71, 219, 258, 264; Augustan, 41, 58; broadcasting and, 142, 158, 160, 163–71, 174–75, 179–80; liberalism and, 164, 168, 246; metaregionalism and, 245–47; posthumanism and, 165–66, 171, 174–75, 179, 245 Human Stain, The (Roth), 145–46 Humboldt, Alexander von, 90 Hume, David, 60 Hume, Kathryn, 242 Hurston, Zora Neale, 202–7, 213 Huyssen, Andreas, 139 IBM PC, 165 Idaho, 9, 225–26, 228, 232, 237 “Idea of Order at Key West, The” (Stevens), 127 Idoru (Gibson), 247 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 79

I’ll Take My Stand (Agrarian group), 199 I Married a Communist (Roth), 145, 149–50 immigrants, 10, 16, 32, 116, 121–22, 139, 142, 178, 193, 261, 265 imperialism, 14–15, 25, 64, 194–96, 210–11, 224 Incorporation of America, The (Trachtenberg), 9n4, 113 Indian Removal Act, 189 individualism, 31, 74, 113, 148–49, 165 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), 227–28, 230 Inferno, (Dante), 66, 102–4 Infinite Jest (Wallace), 166–71 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 14 Internet, 18, 142, 153, 161, 248, 256 In the Beauty of the Lilies (Updike), 155 “In the Desert” (Coupland), 254 Irmscher, Christopher, 83 Irving, Washington, 71, 79 isomorphic correspondences, 2 Ivison, Douglas, 243 Jackson, Andrew, 21, 87, 189 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 114 Jamaica, 14, 16, 36, 192, 203–4 James, Henry, 118, 146, 193, 208, 226–27 James, Ned, 226 James, William, 8, 11, 75, 118–20, 167 James II, king of England, 47 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 127, 142, 222, 224, 237–38, 249, 267 Japan, 227–28, 233, 241–42, 245–47, 250 Jarraway, David R., 208 jazz, 12, 132, 260 Jefferson, Thomas, 87, 189 jeremiads, 31–32, 146, 150, 266 Jews, 80, 83, 114, 119–22, 137–39, 147–48, 218, 263 Johnson, Samuel, 41 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston), 202–3 Jones, Gavin, 118n4, 229 Jonson, Ben, 70 Joseph, Philip, 204 Journals (Emerson), 77 Joyce, James, 205 JPod (Coupland), 253–54 Judas Maccabaeus (Longfellow), 80 Julius II, Pope, 76 juxtaposition, 2, 254, 266; aesthetics of extravagance and, 29, 37, 58, 63, 68;

Index  •  315 American South and, 184, 208–9, 220–22; metaregionalism and, 225, 234, 241; modernism and, 119, 128 Kadir, Djelal, 264 Kallen, Horace M., 121–23 Kammen, Michael, 71, 111, 130 Kant, Immanuel, 139, 224 Kaplan, Amy, 118 Kaplan, Caren, 13, 257 Katzenstein, Peter J., 184 Kavanagh (Longfellow), 81 Kazin, Alfred, 74 Keller, Karl, 56, 58–59 Keller, Kate, 43n3 Kerber, Linda K., 123 Kern, Stephen, 131n13 Kerouac, Jack, 151, 231 Kesey, Ken, 228, 230–31 Key West, 127, 185, 207 Klee, Paul, 211 Klein, Joe, 15 Kollin, Susan, 225–26 Kroeber, Alfred, 236 Krugler, David F., 144 Ku Klux Klan, 227 Kumar, Krishan, 72 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 29 Ladd, Barbara, 200 Lahontas, Baron de, 41 Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature (Abrams), 21–22 Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), 131–33 Lathe of Heaven, The (Le Guin), 228, 238 Lawrence, D. H., 138 Lears, T.J. Jackson, 73, 219 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 77 Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Ruskin), 101 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (Blair), 60 Lefebvre, Henri, 223 Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin), 237 Le Guin, Ursula K., 228, 236–40 Leibniz, Gottfried, 56 LeMenager, Stephanie, 184 Lenz, Günter, 258 lesbians, 139, 208, 263 Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (Catlin), 90

Levin, David, 54 Levine, Lawrence W., 57 Levitt, Peggy, 16 Lewinsky, Monica, 145 Lewis, C. S., 258 Lewis, Sinclair, 141 liberalism, 12, 14, 16, 74, 75, 96, 105, 114, 142, 144, 163, 184, 229, 246, 256–58, 261, 264–65; Roth and, 145, 148, 180; the South and, 186, 191–92, 200, 206; Stein and, 139–40; Updike and, 158, 164; Wallace and, 165, 168 liberty, 57, 178, 194–95, 229 Life magazine, 111 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 73 Light in August (Faulkner), 213–14 Lincoln, Abraham, 9–10, 111, 115, 148–49, 194 Lindbergh, Charles, 131, 147 Literary Friends and Acquaintances (Howells), 115–16 Literary History of America (Wendell), 119 “Literary Spirit of Our Country, The” (Longfellow), 81 Literary World (Duyckinck), 94 “Literature of Exhaustion, The” (Barth), 164 “Little Expressionless Animals” (Wallace), 166–67 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: antebellum narratives and, 77–86, 90, 92, 105–6; Catlin and, 90n9; Chaucer and, 82; Christianity and, 83–86; Emerson and, 81; Handel and, 80; linguistic talents of, 79–80; Matthiessen and, 78; New World perspective and, 105; Poe and, 78; popularity of, 79–80; Song of Hiawatha and, 77–82, 85, 90, 92; Wagner and, 80 Longfellow Institute, 120, 121n6 longue durée, 71, 86, 188–89, 233, 260 Lotter, Matthew, 5 Lowell, Robert, 208 Luce, Henry, 12, 111 Lutherans, 56 Lutz, Tom, 11 McCaffrey, Larry, 167, 246, 249, 245n6 McCarthy, Mary, 177 McCarthyism, 143, 145 McDonald’s (restaurants), 16 Machine in the Garden, The (Marx), 179

316  •  Index McKay, Claude, 137 McLean, Matthew, 209–10 McPherson, Tara, 184 McSweeney’s journal, 175 McWilliams, John P., 36 Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather), 44–55, 60, 68 Main Currents in American Thought (Parrington), 227, 255 Maitland, F. W., 72 Malcolm X, 201 Malpas, J. E., 224–25 Malraux, André, 125 Manifest Destiny, 5, 7–8 Manley, Michael, 14 “Map of the World” (by Surrealists), 128–29 Mapping the Global Future (report), 18–19 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne), 100–102, 107 Mardi (Melville), 5 Márquez, Gabriel García, 213, 221 Martí, José, 193–98, 208, 222 Marx, Karl, 262 Marx, Leo, 179 Marxism and Literature (Williams), 261 “Masque of the Red Death, The” (Poe), 74 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 32, 47, 72, 115 Massey, Doreen, 24 mass production, 11–12 Massumi, Brian, 180n15 Masters and the Slaves, The (Freyre), 202 Mather, Cotton: anachronistic alignments of, 54–55; Augustan American literature and, 44–57, 60, 68; Bromfield and, 54; celestial typologies of, 86; Danforth and, 49–50; Dryden and, 46, 48; Dwight and, 60; Magnalia Christi Americana and, 44–55, 60, 68; map of, 52; Oldmixon on, 44; Phips and, 48, 54; as scapegoat, 56; self-contradiction and, 46; Winship and, 53–54 Mather, Increase, 33, 37, 46, 48–49 Mather, Nathaniel, 53 Mather, Samuel, 48 Mathews, Cornelius, 94–96, 190 Matthews, Brander, 71 Matthews, J. H., 128 Matthiessen, F. O., 70, 74, 77–78, 94, 124, 255 medieval American literature: American Gothic and, 73–74; archaeological

imagination and, 86–97; Emerson and, 70, 74–78, 81, 84, 90–91, 105–7; Hawthorne and, 97–102, 105–6; Indian mound-builders and, 87–95, 100, 104–5; Longfellow and, 77–86, 90, 92, 105–6; longue durée and, 71, 86; Melville and, 102–6; old conceit and, 70–71; as oxymoron, 72; pre-Columbian culture and, 77–78, 82, 87, 90, 94, 96, 101, 106; question of genealogy and, 97–107 Meinig, D. W., 2 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill), 10 Melville, Herman, 5, 70, 124, 240; Breitwieser and, 54; Hawthorne and, 96–97; medieval American literature and, 102–6; national identity and, 102–3; Native Americans and, 105; question of genealogy and, 97–107; Roth and, 146; Young America movement and, 102–3 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (McCarthy), 177 Mencken, H. L., 70, 122, 145 metanarratives, 25, 159–60, 180 metaregionalism: Bedon and, 223; Canada and, 242–54; critical regionalism and, 224; defined, 223; metafiction and, 223; regionalism and, 223–54 Mexico, 7, 9, 15, 243 “Mexico and the United States” (Paz), 221 Meyrowitz, Joshua, 150–51 Michael Angelo (Longfellow), 80–81 Michaels, Walter Benn, 10n6, 73n3, 138, 148, 213 Michaud, Régis, 125 Microserfs (Coupland), 251–52 Mignolo, Walter D., 40, 196 Miller, J. Hillis, 101n15 Miller, L., 167n10 Miller, Perry, 31, 96n12 Milton, John, 60, 70 Minow, Newton, 151 Mississippi, 201, 212–22 Miss Wyoming (Coupland), 251–53 Mistakes We Knew We Were Making (Eggers), 176–77 “Mister Squishy” (Wallace), 173 Mitchel, Jonathan, 49 MITS Altair 8080 computer, 165 Mizejewski, Linda, 137 Mizruchi, Susan, 101 Moby-Dick (Melville), 102–3, 240

Index  •  317 “Model of Christian Charity, A” (Winthrop), 32, 71–72 modernism: ethnic palimpsests and, 120– 25; geographies and, 125–40; national standards and, 120–25; periodizing characteristics of, 124–25; postbellum cartographies and, 111, 113; selfallegorization and, 126–27; Stein and, 133–40 Modernity at Large (Appadurai), 2, 23, 242 Moll, Herman, 44–45, 52–53 Moltke-Hansen, David, 189 Mona Lisa Overdrive (Gibson), 246 Montaigne, Michel de, 7, 76 Montana, 9, 225–26, 229, 232, 241–42 Month of Sundays, A (Updike), 154 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 90 Morocco Bound (Edwards), 259 Morris, William, 73 Morrison, Toni, 141, 151–52, 158, 191 Morse, Jedediah, 7 Morse, Margaret, 150, 249 Mosses form an Old Manse (Hawthorne), 98 “Mother America” (Martí), 195 mound builders, 87–95, 100, 104–5 Mountains and Rivers without End (Snyder), 233–34 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 80 Mrs. Reynolds (Stein), 138–39 MTV (Music Television), 144, 161, 163, 176–80 Mullen, Richard, 211n11 multinationalism, 17, 23, 152, 172, 232, 244, 248, 263 Mumford, Lewis, 199 Münster, Sebastian, 209–10 “My Father’s Life” (Carver), 229–30 My Literary Passions (Howells), 115 “My Own Private Tokyo” (Gibson), 250 My Wilderness (Douglas), 229 Nabokov, Vladimir, 167 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe), 93–94 narratives: antebellum, 70–107; comic, 59–60 (see also comic narrative); global, 24; institutional, 3, 65, 121, 154, 186; jeremiads and, 31–32, 146, 150, 266; metanarratives and, 25, 159–60, 180; national, 5, 20, 24, 74, 92, 105,

120, 150–51, 216–17, 231–32, 242, 245, 254–56, 261, 265–66; pastoral, 37, 58, 62–64, 89, 99, 130, 145–47, 167, 179–80, 188, 201, 221, 228–32, 240–41, 254, 261; redistribution of horizons and, 3; retrodiction and, 2–3, 23; romanticism and, 7, 82, 123, 163, 171, 225, 262; tropes and, 25, 50, 53, 169, 229 Nation, The (journal), 121 National Geographic Society, 131 national identity, 1; American Civil War and, 183–84 (see also American Civil War); American South and, 183–222; aviation and, 131–35; bifocalism and, 186, 193; broadcasting and, 141–80; Canada and, 242–54; Christianity and, 18–29, 33–34, 49, 52, 54, 58–61, 72, 76, 129, 233, 258, 265; colonial period and, 5; connection and, 152–53; deterritorialization and, 8, 12–21, 23, 25, 93, 107, 154, 196, 261, 266; dual citizenship and, 122; early maps and, 5–7; ethnic groups and, 114, 115 (see also ethnic groups); exceptionalism and, 8, 11–12, 16, 18, 23–24, 31–32, 63, 86, 91, 105, 120, 123, 146, 148, 156, 159–60, 200, 228, 232, 257, 261, 265; exports and, 12; geography as allegory and, 111–40; hypernationalism and, 257–58; imperialism and, 14, 25, 64, 194–96, 210–11, 224; individualism and, 31, 74, 112, 148–49, 165; language and, 121–22; liberty and, 57, 178, 194–95, 229; longue durée and, 71, 86, 188–89, 233, 260; Manifest Destiny and, 5, 7–8; metaregionalism and, 223–54; national standards and, 120–25; Nazis and, 137–38; Puritans and, 31 (see also Puritans); question of circumference and, 255–67; regionalism and, 199–212; territorialism and, 5–9; transcendentalism and, 7–8, 14, 22, 74, 80–84, 89, 99, 103, 124–29, 186, 224, 252, 266–67; transnationalism and, 13–25, 31, 40, 65, 73, 78, 106, 119, 125, 143, 154, 162, 178, 222, 233, 242, 247, 250, 253–58, 262–63, 266; Young America movement and, 81, 83, 94, 96, 102–3, 189 National Intelligence Council, 18 national standardization, 120–25

318  •  Index Native Americans, 7, 19–21, 41; American South and, 186–91, 207, 219, 221; Bartram and, 187; Cahokia and, 87; Catlin and, 90; Cherokee, 187, 189; Creek, 187, 189; Florida and, 186; Indian Removal Act and, 189; Mathews and, 94–96; Melville and, 105; metaregionalism and, 226, 235–38; Mormons and, 91; mound-builders and, 87–95, 100, 104–5; pre-Columbian culture and, 77–78, 82, 87, 90, 94, 96, 101, 106 Natural Selection (Barthelme), 218 “Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy, The” (Dwight), 61 Nature and Man in America (Shaler), 114 Nazis, 137–39, 144, 147 NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 19, 144, 147, 163 Necro Citizenship (Castronovo), 105 Negri, Antonio, 14–15, 162 “Negro Mythical Places” (Hurston), 205 Nelson, Dana D., 41 neoliberalism, 14, 16 Neurda, Pablo, 125 Neuromancer (Gibson), 245n6, 246, 249 New Critics, 80, 152 New Deal, 124 New England, 8, 200, 265; Augustan American literature and, 31–37, 43–54, 62–65; Eliot and, 186; Frost and, 11; Hawthorne and, 192; Howells and, 115, 119; Mather and, 45–55; medieval American literature and, 72, 78, 85–86, 100; mindset of, 31; Oldmixon on, 44; pragmatism of, 198; Puritans and, 3 (see also Puritans); Roth and, 146; Simms and, 191–92; Updike and, 155 New England Tragedies (Longfellow), 86 New Historicism, 73, 152, 183 “New Map of North America” (Moll), 44–45 New Mexico Quarterly journal, 199 New Orleans, 7, 10, 213, 260 New Republic journal, 126 New Voyages to North-America (Lahontas), 41 New World, 8, 48, 82; Baroque aesthetics and, 42, 46, 54, 56, 186; Columbus and, 29; European loyalties and, 114; geographical impact of, 133; mapping of, 29, 151, 209; Old World hybridity and, 204, 232; original population of, 92;

perspective of, 55–69, 105–6; political establishment and, 67; Spanish explorers and, 185; topographies of, 55–69 New York Times, 82, 138, 139 Nicholls, Peter, 128 9/11 terrorist attacks, 17–18, 154, 173–74, 178, 180, 228, 248, 260–61, 265 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Simpson), 261 Nine Nations of North America, The (Garreau), 232 Nixon, Richard, 13 No Place of Grace (Lears), 73 Norbrook, David, 32 North & South (Bishop), 208 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 243 “North and Northwest” (Kollin), 225 North Carolina, 37, 40, 131, 186 Northwest Ordinance, 225 Norton, Charles Eliot, 73 nuclear proliferation, 18 “Nuestra América” (Martí), 195 Nussbaum, Martha C., 261 Oakes, Urian, 48 Oates, Nathan, 217–18 “Objects & Apparitions” (Bishop), 211–12 Oblivion (Wallace), 166, 174 O’Brien, Michael, 185 O’Connell, Nicholas, 229, 233, 237 Office of War Information, 143 O’Hara, Daniel T., 180n16 O’Keefe, Georgia, 199 Oldmixon, John, 43–44, 46, 52 Old World in the New, The (Ross), 121 One Art (Bishop), 208 “1/3, 1/3, 1/3” (Brautigan), 241 Ong, Aihwa, 243 On Late Style (Said), 205 On the Road (Kerouac), 231 Oprah Winfrey Show, The (TV show), 152 Oracles of Empire (Shields), 31 “Ordinary Evening in New Haven, An” (Stevens), 127 Oregon, 9, 225–32, 237, 240–41, 244, 247, 251, 253 organic sectionalism, 199 Orvell, Miles, 120, 130 “Our America” (Martí), 195–97 Our America (Michaels), 10n6, 138 Our Old Home (Hawthorne), 98

Index  •  319

Pacific Northwest, Alaska and, 10, 128, 133, 225–27, 232, 253; borders of, 225–26; Brautigan and, 240–42; British Columbia and, 232–33, 244; Canada and, 242–54; Cascadian subduction zone and, 226; cold war and, 228–29; Coupland and, 17, 226, 242–44, 250–54; Eden mythologies and, 225; ethnic groups and, 227; Gibson and, 17, 243–54; Idaho and, 9, 225–26, 228, 232, 237; incorporation of, 226; industrial development of, 228; Juan de Fuca plate and, 226; labor movements and, 227; Le Guin and, 228, 236–40; logging and, 230; metaregionalism and, 223–54; North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and, 243; Northwest Ordinance and, 225; Oregon and, 9, 225–32, 237, 240–41, 244, 247, 251, 253; Populist Party and, 227; Russia and, 225–26; semantics of, 225; Snyder and, 232–36, 238, 240, 245, 247, 250; Washington and, 225–29, 231–32, 240–41, 244, 251; Yukon Gold Rush and, 226 Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER), 232 Paine, Thomas, 257 Painted Desert (Barthelme), 216–18 Palfrey, John Gorham, 90n9 palimpsests, 120–25 Paradise Lost (Milton), 60 Paradise (Morrison), 152 Parallax View, The (Žižek), 222 parallelism, 256, 264; American South and, 187, 195–98, 202, 221; Augustan American literature and, 32, 39–40, 46, 48–49, 57–61, 63, 65; deterritorialization and, 1, 5, 17, 19; medieval American literature and, 70, 72, 95–96, 101, 104; modernism and, 125 Parkman, Francis, 71 Parrinder, Patrick, 237 Parrington, Vernon Louis, 65, 227, 255 Patell, Cyrus, 3 Pattern Recognition (Gibson), 17, 247, 249–50 Patterson, Anita, 125 Patterson, Lee, 73 Paulson, Ronald, 7, 41–42, 55 Paz, Octavio, 221 PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), 151

Pearce, Roy Harvey, 78 periodization, 2, 135, 137 “Periodizing the 60s” (Jameson), 2 Perloff, Marjorie, 142, 262 Pétain, Henri Philippe, 138 Peter Parley’s Universal History, on the Basis of Geography (Hawthorne), 97 Peters, Timothy, 221 “ ‘Pet Negro’ System, The” (Hurston), 205 “Philosophy of Composition, The” (Poe), 3n1 Phips, William, 48, 54 Picasso, Pablo, 133 Pickard, Samuel T., 98n14 Pierre (Melville), 102–5 Pilgrim fathers, 265 Pinsky, Robert, 260–61 Pizarro, Francisco, 48 Pizer, Donald, 130 “Place in Fiction” (Welty), 142 plantations, 137; aesthetics of extravagance and, 33, 37, 43–55; American South and, 184–90, 202, 213; Magnalia Christi Americana and, 44–55 Plato, 7 Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 151 Plot Against America, The (Roth), 146–48 Pocock, J.G.A., 57 Poe, Edgar Allen, 3, 31, 74, 78, 93–96, 101, 186, 190 “Poem for Hemingway and W. C. Williams” (Carver), 230 “Poem of Disconnected Parts” (Pinsky), 261 Poem Sacred to the Memory of George Washington, A (Alsop), 66 Poems (Waller), 32 “Poems of Our Climate, The” (Stevens), 127 Poems of Places (Longfellow), 83 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (Wheatley), 58 “Poet, The” (Emerson), 5, 8 Poetical Works (Longfellow), 78n4 Poets’ Corner (Westminster Abbey), 78 Polaroids from the Dead (Coupland), 252 political correctness, 145 Political Unconscious, The (Jameson), 222n14 politics, 263; aesthetics of extravagance and, 35–36, 47, 65; American South and, 189, 194–98, 201, 204, 214;

320  •  Index politics (cont’d) antebellum narratives and, 73–74, 78, 81, 96; broadcasting and, 148, 158, 160, 162, 165, 173, 177–78; CanadianU.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) and, 243; cold war and, 12, 14, 17–18, 143, 151, 158, 180, 228–30, 244, 248, 256, 261; Communism and, 12, 143–44, 204; cultural, 47, 223; deterritorialization and, 5, 11, 16; Fascism and, 12, 123, 138n16, 139, 199–200; Fordist regime and, 13–15, 143; identity, 148 (see also national identity); imperialism and, 14, 25, 64, 194–96, 210–11, 224; isolationism and, 133; liberalism and, 14, 16, 139, 184, 256–58; McCarthyism and, 143, 145; Manifest Destiny and, 5, 7–8; metaregionalism and, 223, 231, 235; modernism and, 120–25; neoliberalism and, 14, 16; New Deal and, 124; North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and, 243; Popular Front and, 124; Populist Party and, 227; propaganda and, 133, 144; representation and, 256–57; territorialism and, 5–9; Tories and, 73, 92; Whigs and, 43, 92. See also specific politician Pope, Alexander, 60, 62 Popular Front, 124 Populist Party, 227 Posnock, Ross, 146 posthumanism, 165–66, 171, 174–75, 179, 245 Postmodern Geographies (Soja), 141 Postmodernism (Jameson), 142, 224 “Post Offices of Eastern Oregon, The” (Brautigan), 241 Pound, Ezra, 138 poverty, 12, 148, 162, 205, 229 pragmatism, 8, 72, 75, 119–20, 146, 197–98, 266 Pragmatism (James), 119 “Prairies, The” (Bryant), 87, 89 pre-Columbian culture, 77–78, 82, 87, 90, 94, 96, 101, 106 Prehistoric Man (Wilson), 91 Pre-Raphaelites, 73 Prescott, William, 71 Priest, Josiah, 91–92 Primary Colors (Klein), 15 Principal Navigations (Hakluyt), 52 Principles of Psychology (James), 118

Production of Space, The (Lefebvre), 223 propaganda, 133, 144 Pro-Slavery Argument (Simms), 190 Protestants, 9, 19, 145, 155, 174, 200, 219 Proust, Marcel, 224 Ptolemy, 29, 209 Pugin, Augustus, 101 Puritan Origins of the American Self, The (Bercovitch), 31 Puritans, 3, 265; antebellum narratives and, 71, 80–83, 100; Augustan American literature and, 31–37, 43, 46, 55–60, 63, 68; Eliot and, 186; Faulkner and, 221; Foerster and, 123; Hawthorne and, 100, 192; Howells and, 119; Longfellow and, 82; origin myths of, 71–72; Parrington and, 227; Roth and, 145–46 Puskar, Jason, 118 Quakers, 86, 186 Questions of Travel (Bishop), 209, 212 Rabbit at Rest (Updike), 158–60 Rabbit Is Rich (Updike), 157–58 Rabbit Redux (Updike), 156–57 Rabbit Run (Updike), 155–56 radio, 19, 111, 199, 244; Frost and, 152; modernism and, 130–31, 135–36; rhetoric of broadcasting and, 142–43, 147–52, 156, 162; Voice of America (VOA) and, 143–44 “Rain Check” (Barthelme), 216, 219 Raleigh, Walter, 38 Ransom, John Crowe, 199 rationalism, 40, 56, 61, 74, 93, 119, 145, 188, 192 Raven and the Whale (Miller), 96n12 Reagan, Ronald, 12–14, 18, 262 Real World, The (TV show), 176 redistribution of horizons, 3 regionalism: American South and, 199– 212; critics of, 223–25; metaregionalism and, 223–54; Pacific Northwest and, 223–54 Reimagining the American Pacific (Wilson), 232 Reinterpretation of American Literature, The (Foerster), 123, 255 Reising, Russel J., 227n1 religion: Calvinists and, 5, 31, 42, 55–57, 84, 91; Catholics and, 9, 46, 75, 114, 147, 177, 198, 207, 218–21, 265; fun-

Index  •  321 damentalists and, 18, 91, 155; Jews and, 80, 83, 114, 119–22, 137–39, 147–48, 218, 263; Protestants and, 9, 19, 145, 155, 174, 200, 219; Puritans and, 3 (see also Puritans) Renker, Elizabeth, 124 Renner, George T., 132–33 representation (political), 9, 151, 162, 256–57 Representative Men (Emerson), 76 “Representing Emergent Literatures” (Patell), 3 Restoration legacies, 29–42 retrodiction, 2–3, 23 Revelation, Bible book of, 32 Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, The (Fussell), 41 Rich, Adrienne, 3, 262–64 Richter, Jean-Paul, 82–83 Ricouer, Paul, 2–3, 23 Ringe, Donald, 74 Rites of Assent (Bercovitch), 192n2 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 261 “Rock, The” (Stevens), 127 Roethke, Theodore, 229 Rogers, Ezekiel, 52–53 Roger’s Version (Updike), 154 romanticism, 7, 82, 123, 163, 171, 225, 262 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 135–36, 147 Roosevelt, Theodore, 121–22 Rorty, Richard, 266 Rosenwald, Lawrence, 121 Ross, Edward Alsworth, 121–22 Roth, Philip, 141, 145–50, 179 Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (TV show), 156–57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 175 Royal Society, 50, 55 Rushdie, Salman, 124 Ruskin, John, 73, 101 Russian Revolution, 123 Ruttenburg, Nancy, 57–58 Sack, Robert David, 21 “sacred parody” (Paulson), 7 Said, Edward, 24, 205 St. Clair, Janet, 206 St. John de Crévecoeur, J. Hector, 188, 265 Saldívar, José David, 195–96 “Santarém” (Bishop), 207 Sassen, Saskia, 256–57

Satan, 59–60, 84 Sayre, Gordon M., 87 Scanlan, Thomas, 32 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 93, 99–100, 154, 192 Scheckel, Susan, 94 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 90 Schueller, Malini Johar, 259 Schulten, Susan, 131, 135 Schwantes, Carlos Arnaldo, 226–27 Scott, Walter, 73 Second Marriage (Barthelme), 217 Secret History of the Line, The (Byrd), 38–40 Seeds of Time, The (Jameson), 224 Seek My Face (Updike), 19 Selby, Nick, 235 Selected Writings (Martí), 194n4 Self-Consciousness (Updike), 158 Semple, Ellen Churchill, 136 Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston), 205–6 Shakespeare, William, 70–71, 73, 102, 265 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 114 Shampoo Planet (Coupland), 251–52, 254 Shaping of America, The (Meinig), 2 Shell, Marc, 120–21 Shields, David, 31 Shields, John C., 55n6 Short, John Rennie, 113 “Short History of Oregon, A” (Brautigan), 241 “Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner), 114, 200 “Significance of the Section in American History, The” (Turner), 200 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 19–21, 186, 235 Simms, William Gilmore, 189–93, 222 Simpson, David, 225, 261 Singular Modernity, A (Jameson), 267 Situatedness (Simpson), 225 “Six Meditations” (Rich), 262 Skelton, Robin, 229 Sketch Book, The (Irving), 71, 79 Skinner, Quentin, 57 slavery, 20, 262, 266; American AntiSlavery Society and, 184; American South and, 183–86, 189–93, 202, 206–7; Anti-Slavery Convention and, 184; Augustan American literature and, 36, 43, 58, 63, 74; Baucom and, 257; Callenbach and, 231; Caribbean and, 184; Cuba and, 184; Dred Scott case

322  •  Index slavery (cont’d) and, 231; modernism and, 123–24, 136; New England and, 43; Parrington and, 227; Roth and, 149 Smith, Jon, 213 Smith, Joseph, 91 Smith, Neil, 12, 15, 111, 122–23, 141n1 Smith-Mundt Act, 144 Snyder, Gary, 232–36, 238, 240, 245, 247, 250 Soares, Lota de Macedo, 207 Soja, Edward W., 141, 223 Sollors, Werner, 120–21, 165n9, 212, 258 Sombrero Fallout (Brautigan), 241 Sometimes a Great Nation (Kesey), 228, 230 Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow), 77–82, 85, 90, 92 Song of Myself (Whitman), 79, 259 Song of Solomon (Morrison), 152 Sot-Weed Factor, The (Cook), 34–37 Sotweed Redivivus (Cook), 34–37 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 215 South Carolina, 17, 186, 189–90, 244 Southern Review journal, 199 spatialization, 142 Special Sorrows (Jacobson), 114 Spengemann, William C., 3n2, 255 Spiegel, Lynn, 144, 156–57 Spook Country (Gibson), 248 Sportswriter, The (Ford), 215 Stanton, Henry B., 184 “Starting from Paumanok” (Whitman), 89 Statistical Atlas of the United States (Walker), 112–14 Stein, Gertrude, 133–40, 265 Steinbeck, John, 167, 241 Sterling, Bruce, 246–47 Stevens, Wallace, 8, 125–29, 140 Stieglitz, Alfred, 128 Stiles, Ezra, 92 Still Looking (Updike), 156–57 Stone, Samuel, 48 Storming the Reality Studio (McCaffery), 246, 249 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 77 Strange Angels (Anderson), 80 Sudanese Civil War, 177 “Suffering Channel, The” (Wallace), 173–74 Sumner, Charles, 190 Sundquist, Eric J., 106, 213–14

S (Updike), 154 Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, A (Wallace), 166, 168–69 Susman, Warren I., 124 Swift, Jonathan, 41, 95 Sybil (Disraeli), 246–47 Tales of a Wayside Inn (Longfellow), 82 Tanglewood Tales (Hawthorne), 97–98 Tanner, Tony, 152–53, 240 Tate, Allen, 128 Tatsumi, Takayuki, 245n6 Tatum, Stephen, 228 Taylor, Edward, 3, 5 television, 19, 199, 218, 256, 260; ABC and, 144; BBC and, 144; CBS and, 144, 157–58; CNN and, 144, 151, 178, 245; C-SPAN and, 151; growth of, 144, 150; HBO and, 144; MTV and, 144, 161–80; NBC and, 19, 144, 147, 163; PBS and, 151; rhetoric of broadcasting and, 142–44, 149–53, 156–80; Voice of America (VOA) and, 143–44; Wallace on, 163–80; as “wasteland,” 151; WTBS and, 153 Television (Williams), 162n8 Tell My Horse (Hurston), 203–4 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 79 Terra Incognita, 29, 34, 38 territorialism, 5–9, 21. See also deterritorialization Terrorist (Updike), 160–61 Texas, 7, 9, 79, 127, 216, 247, 260 Thatcher, Margaret, 14 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 203–6 Thirdspace (Soja), 223 Thomas, Clarence, 151–52 Thomas, Edward, 125 Thoreau, Henry David, 5, 22, 70, 146, 175, 192, 224, 240–41 Three Lives (Stein), 137 Tichi, Cecelia, 151 Time and Narrative (Ricouer), 2–3, 23 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 265 Tokyo-Mountain Express, The (Brautigan), 241–42 Toward the End of Time (Updike), 168–69 Toynbee, Arnold, 258–59 Tracer (Barthelme), 221 Trachtenberg, Alan, 9n4, 79, 90, 113 “Tragic Chorus, The” (Pinsky), 260

Index  •  323 transcendentalism, 266–67; American South and, 186; deterritorialization and, 7–8, 14, 22; medieval American literature and, 74, 80–84, 89, 99, 103; metaregionalism and, 224, 252; modernism and, 124–29 “Trans-National America” (Bourne), 10–11, 122 transnationalism, 222; Augustan American literature and, 31, 40, 65; deterritorialization and, 13–25; medieval American literature and, 73, 78, 106; metaregionalism and, 233, 242, 247, 250, 253–54; modernism and, 119, 125; question of circumference and, 255–58, 262–63, 266; rhetoric of broadcasting and, 143, 154, 162, 178 Transnational Villagers, The (Levitt), 16 Traveller from Altruria, A (Howells), 120 Travels in New England and New York (Dwight), 64–65 Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (Bartram), 186–87 Trilling, Lionel, 256 Trip (Lipper and Barthelme), 217 Triumph of Infidelity, The (Dwight), 59–64 Trout Fishing in American (Brautigan), 240–41 Truman, Harry, 143–44 “Truth about the United States, The” (Martí), 195 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 142 Tuesday Club, 57 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 114, 123, 200 Turtle Island (Snyder), 234, 240 Tuttle, Julius Herbert, 46n4 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 31, 73, 120, 231 Two against One (Barthelme), 218–19 Tyler, Moses Coit, 105–6, 255 Underworld (DeLillo), 152–54 Unitarians, 55–56, 84 United States: Alaska and, 10, 128, 133, 225–27, 232, 253; Alien and Sedition Acts and, 265; American century and, 111; aviation and, 131–35; broadcasting and, 141–80; California, 5, 9–10, 131, 142, 166, 201, 213, 225–28, 231–37, 244–47, 253; Canadian-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) and, 243;

capitalism and, 12–14, 142, 224, 254, 262; Carter and, 1, 13, 157; Civil War of, 1, 9–10, 79, 105–6, 111–15, 119, 121, 123, 131, 135–36, 140, 183–84, 186, 190, 193, 200, 206–7, 213, 227, 231, 240–42; Clinton and, 145, 263; cold war and, 12, 14, 17–18, 143, 151, 158, 180, 228–30, 244, 248, 256, 261; as colossus, 23; Confederacy and, 183–85, 191–93, 240–42; Connecticut, 43, 59, 62–66, 82, 92, 127, 161; deterritorialization and, 8, 12–21, 23, 25, 93, 107, 154, 196, 261, 266; early maps of, 5–7; early republic of, 3–4; Ellis Island and, 10; Florida, 10, 38, 126–27, 159, 185–93, 196, 202–10, 221, 253; Fordist regime and, 13–15, 143; 42nd parallel and, 12; free-market system and, 14–15; French language and, 121; geographical boundaries of, 1; George W. Bush and, 13, 17–18; gold standard and, 13–14; hegemony and, 3, 18–19, 23, 72, 144, 151, 162, 172, 186, 193, 200, 256; Idaho, 9, 225–26, 228, 232, 237; imperialism and, 14, 25, 64, 194–96, 210–11, 224; Indian mound-builders and, 87–95, 100, 104–5; individualism and, 31, 74, 113, 148–49, 165; isolationism and, 133; Jackson and, 20, 189; Jefferson and, 189; Lincoln and, 9–10, 111, 115, 148–49, 194; longue durée and, 71, 86, 188–89, 233, 260; McCarthyism and, 143, 145; Manifest Destiny and, 5, 7–8; mass production and, 11–12; as melting pot, 10; Mississippi, 212–22; Montana, 9, 225–26, 229, 232, 241–42; national identity of, 1, 5–8, 11–14, 19, 72, 103–6, 111, 119, 122, 126, 129, 137, 144, 193, 212, 232, 240, 245, 255, 259; Native Americans and, 7, 19–20, 41, 87–90, 94, 104–6, 190, 219, 226, 235–38; New England, 3, 8, 11, 31–37, 43–54, 62–65, 72, 78, 85–86, 93, 100, 115, 119, 146, 155, 186, 191–92, 198, 200, 265; as New World, 8, 29, 46, 48, 55–69, 82, 92, 105–6, 114, 151, 185–86, 204, 209, 232; 9/11 terrorist attacks and, 17–18, 154, 173–74, 178, 180, 228, 248, 260–61, 265; North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and, 243; North Carolina, 37, 40, 131; Oregon,

324  •  Index United States (cont’d) 9, 225–32, 237, 240–41, 244, 247, 251, 253; Pacific Northwest and, 9, 17, 24, 183, 223–54; plantation regions and, 43–55, 184–90, 202, 213; pre-Columbian culture and, 77–78, 82, 87, 90, 94, 96, 101, 106; Puritans and, 3, 31–37, 42, 46, 55–60, 63, 68, 71, 80–83, 100, 119, 123, 145–46, 186, 192, 221, 227, 265; Reagan and, 12–14, 18, 262; slavery and, 20, 36, 42–43, 58, 63, 74, 123–24, 136, 149, 183–86, 189–93, 202, 206–7, 227, 231, 257, 262, 266; South Carolina, 17, 186, 189–90, 244; Spanish language and, 121; territorialism and, 5–9; Texas, 7, 9, 79, 127, 216, 247, 260; transnationalism and, 12–25, 31, 40, 65, 73, 78, 106, 119, 125, 143, 154, 162, 178, 222, 233, 242, 247, 250, 253–58, 262–63, 266; Truman and, 143–44; Union and, 112, 184–85, 192, 200, 227; Virginia, 37–40, 43, 57, 87, 189, 192, 244; War of Independence and, 187; Washington (state), 9, 225–29, 231–32, 240–41, 244, 251; World War I and, 10, 111, 121, 123, 131, 140; World War II and, 12, 17, 19, 111, 114, 133, 135, 139, 143–44, 148–50, 156, 165, 228, 241, 255; Young America movement and, 81, 83, 94, 96, 102–3, 189 Unvanquished, The (Faulkner), 214 Updike, John, 19, 74, 141, 168–69; cultural issues and, 154–61; Hawthorne and, 155n5; Rabbit tetralogy and, 155–60; realism and, 154–55; religion and, 156; spatiality and, 154–61; Whitman and, 155 USA (Dos Passos), 11–12, 129–30, 228 Uses of Variety, The (Bramen), 11 U.S. Immigration Service, 112 U.S.-Mexican War, 186 Vanderbilt, Kermit, 106n18 Vane, Henry, 32 Venturi, Robert, 143 “Vigilantius” (Mather), 46 Villages (Updike), 161 Virgil, 36, 54–55 Virginia, 37–40, 43, 57, 87, 189, 192, 244 Virgin Islands, 10 Virtualities (Morse), 249

Virtual Light (Gibson), 245, 247–48 Voice of America (VOA), 143–44 Voltaire, 59 Wagner, Richard, 80 Wagner-Martin, Linda, 138 Wakondah: the Master of Life (Mathews), 96 Wales, 113, 115–16 Walker, Alice, 203, 205, 206 Walker, Francis A., 112–14 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 124 Wallace, David Foster, 142; background of, 166; favorite authors of, 167–68; liberal humanism and, 168–69; MTV generation and, 163–80; posthumanism and, 165–66, 171, 174–75, 179; postmodernism and, 166–67; tennis and, 169; Whitman and, 167 Waller, Edmund, 32 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 18 Warham, John, 47 Warner, Michael, 53 Warner, Susan, 77 War of Independence, 187 Warren, Robert Penn, 199–201 Wars I Have Seen (Stein), 135–37 Washington, Booker T., 203 Washington, George, 75, 138 Washington, State of, 9, 225–29, 231–32, 240–41, 244, 251 Wellek, René, 264–65 Wells, Colin, 60 Welty, Eudora, 142, 150, 164 Wendell, Barrett, 119 West, Cornel, 11 “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (Wallace), 167–68 We the People of Europe? (Balibar), 22–23 “What is English Literature” (Stein), 137 What Is the What (Eggers), 177–78 What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (Hugo), 229 Wheatley, Phillis, 58, 68 “Wherein Iowa Differs from Kansas and Indiana” (Stein), 137 “Wherein the South Differs from the North” (Stein), 137 Whigs, 43, 92 Whiteness of a Different Color (Jacobson), 114 White Noise (DeLillo), 152

Index  •  325 Whitman, Walt, 5, 259–60, 262; antebellum narratives and, 70, 77, 79, 81, 84, 89; Brautigan and, 240; Martí and, 198; metaregionalism and, 224; modernism and, 124–25; Updike and, 154–55; Wallace and, 167–68 Widmer, Edward L., 96 Wigglesworth, Michael, 78 Williams, Daniel G., 113n2, 115 Williams, Raymond, 72, 162n8, 261 Williams, Roger, 48, 115 Williams, William Carlos, 11, 79, 127, 134–35, 138, 260 Williamson, Edwin, 165 Wilson, Daniel, 90–91 Wilson, Edmund, 131 Wilson, Edward, 86 Wilson, John, 55 Wilson, Rob, 143n2, 232 Winchell, Walter, 147 Windsor Forest (Pope), 62 Winfrey, Oprah, 152 Winkler, Allan M., 258 Winship, Michael, 53–54 “Winter Market, The” (Gibson), 248 Winthrop, John, 32, 43, 46, 71 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 172 Wollen, Peter, 129 Wood, Gordon S., 10n5

Woolf, Virginia, 124 Wordsworth, William, 224 World War I era, 10, 111, 121, 123, 131, 140 World War II era, 255; deterritorialization and, 12, 17, 19; metaregionalism and, 228, 241; modernism and, 111, 114, 133, 135; Nazis and, 137–39; Office of War Information and, 143; rhetoric of broadcasting and, 143–44, 148–50, 156, 165; Voice of America (VOA) and, 143–44 Wright, Louis B., 55 WTBS (cable TV channel), 153 Wycherley, William, 37 Years of My Youth (Howells), 115 Yoshimura, Akiko, 241 Young America movement, 81, 83, 94, 96, 102–3, 189 “Your Mother and I” (Eggers), 177 Your Native Land, Your Life (Rich), 263 Yukon Gold Rush, 226 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 186, 213, 219–21 Zangwill, Israel, 10 Ziff, Larzer, 47 Žižek, Slavoj, 222