U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 3, Spring 2003: Special Conference Edition

African American Responses to Crime in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia

James Campbell
© James Campbell. All Rights Reserved

In August 1852, a slave named Isaac Simms appeared before the mayor of Richmond charged with throwing stones at the house of Joseph Signiardo, a white Italian immigrant. Mayor William Lambert found Simms guilty and sentenced him to receive thirty-nine lashes at the public whipping post. [1] The following month, Simms again found himself under investigation, this time by a quorum of black deacons from the First African Baptist Church to whom it had been reported that he had been fighting with his wife. The deacons determined that the evidence upheld the accusation and ruled Simms should be excluded from membership of the church. [2] Neither of the offences committed by Isaac Simms in the summer of 1852 was exceptional in its own right; cases of damaging property and domestic violence occurred frequently in late-antebellum Richmond. Nonetheless, it is highly significant that the church records made no mention of Simms’s encounter with the municipal justice system and, more significantly, that although the fight between Simms and his wife violated state law as well as ecclesiastical codes, there is no evidence that Simms ever appeared before a lay magistrate on an assault charge. Had he done so his case would not have been unusual, as in 1852 alone seven slave men and one free black man were found guilty in the Mayor’s Court of domestic violence and many more were convicted of fighting. [3] What is more, in at least three of these cases there is evidence to suggest that the black, female victim herself had instigated the prosecution. Isaac Simms’s wife evidently chose not to follow the example of the black women who reported their husbands to white authorities, yet her alternative course of action was itself far from unique. On the contrary, African American victims of crime routinely sought justice and protection in African Baptist church courts in the mid-nineteenth century.

Social and legal historians of the Old South have largely neglected the events that occurred at the pre-trial stage of the criminal prosecution process and in the region’s lower criminal courts. [4] This represents a significant omission in the historiography of Southern criminal justice, as it was in the immediate aftermath of crimes being committed, long before suspects were put on trial, that slaves and free blacks could exercise most influence over the judicial process. [5] Acknowledging the diversity of black interaction with legal processes has important implications for understanding the relationship between African Americans and the law in the antebellum South. A. Leon Higginbotham and Anne F. Jacobs have argued that one of the key underlying precepts of the law of slavery was the powerlessness of enslaved people. [6] The development of a secondary system of justice that denied black defendants basic due process protections including trial by jury, the right of appeal and the right to testify against whites, as well as subjecting them to stricter criminal laws and harsher judicial punishments than whites, gave legal sanction to the notion of black racial inferiority that permeated Southern society. [7]

However, as plaintiffs in cases involving other African Americans, blacks in Richmond demonstrated that, at times, they were not just subject to the law but active participants in legal processes. It is therefore evident that in this specific urban locale the precept of black legal powerlessness does not adequately describe the complex relationship between slavery, race and the judicial process. In antebellum Richmond, the development of an urban-industrial slave society resulted in a relationship between African Americans and the law that was distinct from that found in much of the rural South. As was common in urban areas throughout the South, large sections of Richmond’s black community lived in varying states of quasi-freedom. By the mid-nineteenth century, Richmond was one of the largest Southern cities as well as the foremost industrial centre in the slave states. In response to the labour demands of manufacturers and industrialists who were disinclined to purchase large numbers of slaves to man their operations because of the economic investment required and the problems of slave management, thousands of white slaveholders hired out enslaved workers to labour in the tobacco factories and iron works that lined the banks of the James River. Some of these hired slaves earned cash for additional labour performed when the day’s set-tasks were completed and others lived away from their owners and hirers, often in neighbourhoods populated by free blacks and impoverished white immigrants. [8]

In this urban context, as historians including Marianne B. Sheldon and Stephen Elliot Tripp have argued, ‘there was more extensive intrusion of administrative and judicial machinery into the master-slave relationship’ to compensate for the breakdown in paternalistic relations between whites and blacks brought about by the rhythms and demographics of the black community in the city. [9] In most instances, the role of the municipal justice system was to control and discipline African Americans. As the cases involving Isaac Simms demonstrate, however, African American victims were at times able to act with an unusual degree of autonomy that could profoundly affect the fate of criminal suspects. Most importantly, slaves and free blacks could seek justice in two very different institutional settings: the Mayor’s Court and the African Baptist Churches. By contrasting the experiences of black victims in these venues, this article will argue that African Americans were not only subject to the repressive functions of the law, but were also active agents who exercised discretionary influence over the course and outcome of criminal cases in at least two distinct ways. First, in spite of the discrimination they faced at every stage of the judicial process, slaves and free blacks reported crimes, instigated prosecutions and appeared as witnesses in criminal investigations that protected their person and property. Second, on many occasions black victims bypassed the municipal courts altogether and sought an alternative form of justice in the black controlled environment of the African Baptist churches. In these ways, African Americans resisted the precept of black powerlessness and racial inferiority and set limits on the legal hegemony of the slaveholding elite. [10]

African American Victims and the Richmond Mayor’s Court

The Mayor’s Court was the initial arena of judicial examination for all suspected criminals in Richmond and each year hundreds of African Americans appeared before the mayor as defendants. Although there are no extant official records of the proceedings of the Mayor’s Court, evidence of magistrates’ rulings is contained in a docket book kept by Mayor Joseph Tate between 1836 and 1839 and the daily court reports published in the Richmond Daily Dispatch from 1852. Throughout the antebellum period, Richmond mayors treated black defendants in a swift and summary manner and with little regard for common law due process. Moreover, both slaves and free persons of colour were consistently more likely than white defendants to be convicted. In 1838 for example, African Americans were more than ten percent more likely to be convicted of assault and stealing than whites, and by 1860 this figure had more than doubled so that, on the eve of the Civil War, over ninety percent of African Americans, but just fifty-six percent of whites accused of stealing were convicted in the Mayor’s court. [11] The most probable explanation for this temporal shift was the heightened sectional tension of the late antebellum years and, more specifically, the increased fear of rebellious slave behaviour that this engendered in the urban white community. This fear was reflected further in the increasingly harsh punishments inflicted on African Americans convicts at the end of the antebellum period. In 1838, less than fifteen percent of slaves convicted of non-felonious stealing were sentenced to the maximum penalty of thirty-nine lashes but, by the early-1850s, more than seventy-five percent were so punished. [12]

Qualitative evidence from cases involving enslaved and free black defendants in the Mayor’s Court supports the contention that examinations of African American defendants were characterised by a lack of concern with legal due process and rules of evidence. Maria Ann Fortune, a free black woman arraigned for stealing a counterpane sheet, a frying pan and a skillet from Sterling Logan was sentenced to ten lashes despite the fact that ‘the evidence did not directly implicate her’, while the slave Archy Page received twenty lashes for transporting stolen goods on the basis of evidence ‘amounting almost to proof’ and his having ‘always borne a doubtful character’. The slave Reuben received ten lashes simply for being in possession of ‘a piece of leather not accounted for and supposed to be stolen’ and Daniel Batley, a slave arrested in possession of bacon that was supposed to be stolen was ordered twenty-five lashes, ‘[t]he accused failing to prove his innocence of the charge’. [13] The burden of proof in these cases rested with the enslaved defendants rather than the white prosecutors. As slaves were not permitted to own property and because whites generally believed that African Americans were naturally inclined to stealing, the court assumed that black defendants charged with theft were guilty until proven innocent. [14]

However, even as the municipal courts subjected black defendants to a swift, summary and discriminatory form of justice, slaves and free blacks appropriated legal processes as one of the means by which they responded to criminal attacks on their person and property. I have analysed the race of defendants and victims in every Mayor’s Court case that was heard in three sample years: 1838, 1852 and 1860. There is every reason to believe that the docket book and newspaper reports recorded all of the cases that came before the Mayor’s Court. [15] However, the reports in these cases do not always provide a racial description of the victim, and although in the majority of cases the implication was that the victim was white, it should not be assumed that this was necessarily the case. As such, the number of recorded cases in which the victim was positively identified as black should be interpreted as a minimum figure.

The overwhelming majority of cases involving black victims that were brought to the attention of the mayor concerned violent assaults that were committed by free and enslaved African Americans. In 1838, the accused was charged with a violent crime in twenty-five out of the twenty-seven cases that involved African Americans as both victims and defendants. The remaining two defendants were charged with stealing. A similar pattern was evident in 1852 when only twelve African Americans were accused of property crimes against black victims while sixty-one slaves and free blacks were charged with violent crimes committed against other blacks. Little had changed by 1860 when thirty-three blacks were charged with perpetrating violent assaults on other African Americans and only nine were examined for stealing the property of a slave or a free black. [16]

It was rare that white defendants were investigated in relation to crimes involving African American victims and the number of white on black crimes reported to the mayor declined during the antebellum period. Again, this was probably symptomatic of increasing racial and sectional tensions in Richmond. In 1838, white men appeared as defendants in almost forty percent of cases in which the victim was black. What is more, three-quarters of these cases resulted in the conviction of the white defendant. [17] A significant shift had occurred by the 1850s. In 1852, white men were defendants in only twelve of the ninety cases in which the victim was positively identified as African American, although the conviction rate in these cases was, at seventy-five percent, the same as it had been in 1838. [18]

The available court records only hint at the events that brought cases involving black victims to the attention of white legal authorities, and it is consequently difficult to assess accurately the significance of African American agency at this early stage of the prosecution process. It is important, therefore, to distinguish between blacks as victims and as complainants in Mayor’s Court cases, as it is probable that many crimes committed against African Americans were reported not by the black victim, but by white police officers or slaveholders who were not concerned with securing justice for the enslaved. Although Richmond’s police provisions remained limited in the decade before the Civil War, the police played a far more important role in the administration of criminal justice in the city than in the rural South and the main intention of police instigated prosecutions was to demonstrate and reinforce the power that white authorities could exert over all aspects of African American conduct [19]. By the late-1850s, the streets of Richmond were patrolled by eight police officers during daylight hours and forty night watchmen. Significantly, however, most of the individuals arrested as a result of police vigilance were charged with victimless offences such as drunk and disorderly conduct or violations of municipal ordinances. [20]

When police officers arrested individuals suspected of more serious crimes against person and property, they relied heavily on the cooperation of victims and witnesses. The evidence is limited, but it was not unknown for African Americans to assist police officers in making arrests. The events that led to the apprehension of James Meredith, a free black man who attempted to steal a hog from the slave Patrick Wingfield, are illustrative. One evening Richard Singleton, also a slave, spotted Meredith acting suspiciously in the vicinity of Wingfield’s yard. Singleton alerted Wingfield and together the two slaves watched Meredith’s actions from a nearby stable. When Meredith leapt upon one of the hogs, the slaves pounced on him and tied him up until the nightwatch arrived to take him into custody. [21] These slaves were apparently willing to use legal avenues to protect their property without the encouragement of their owners and in spite of the discrimination that they would endure in the courtroom on account of their race.

Although slaves could not appear as complainants in Mayor’s Court cases, therefore, they were still able to exert considerable influence over the prosecution process. Indeed, with so many slaves hired out in Richmond, the owners of enslaved victims might not even know that a crime had been committed against their slaves until the matter came to court. A case of domestic violence involving an enslaved married couple suggests that prosecutions involving enslaved victims were not always rooted in slaveholder interests, but concerned issues internal to the black community. Although slaves could not legally marry, it was not uncommon for the Dispatch to refer to an enslaved female victim as the wife of the accused. In January 1852, Henry Robertson was charged with cursing and abusing his wife Caroline Robertson, an accusation that he did not deny, but sought to excuse on the grounds that Caroline had been sleeping with other ‘gmmen of color’. [22] Although Henry’s owner, Mr. Drew, was referred to in court, there is nothing to indicate that any whites were instrumental in bringing this case before the mayor and, most significantly, no reference is made to Caroline’s owner or any other individual who may have acted as a complainant on her behalf. Perhaps the mayor was unaware or unconcerned by the issues of legal procedure, not to mention social and racial order, raised by one slave bringing legal action against another. Alternatively, it might have been the case that despite the implication of the article, Caroline was, in fact, a free woman of colour rather than a slave. Finally, the mayor may not have been satisfied that a legally valid complaint could be made in this case and it could have been for this reason that he took the unusual decision to dismiss the case on the condition that Henry refrain from visiting his wife in the future.

Evidence from other cases involving slave victims indicates that in certain circumstances slaveholders appeared as complainants and the role of the enslaved victim was limited to providing testimony on which the prosecution could base its case. John H. Mettert, for example, took out a warrant against Dick, a slave, on the oath of his slave Bob who claimed that Dick had beaten him with a large stick. On another occasion, P. Ralston charged James A. Gaines with beating his slave Sam and on the basis of Sam’s testimony Gaines was sentenced to thirty lashes. [23] It is rarely possible to determine whether the slaves on whose oaths convictions were secured instigated complaints themselves or were coerced into giving evidence by their owners. It is also difficult to understand why slaveholders would make complaints on behalf of their slaves in cases of minor assaults. Thomas Morris has argued that ‘violence among slaves rarely ever became the concern of the law as it did not threaten the system’ [24] and other historians have concluded that when cases involving enslaved victims did come to court it was because of the threat to slaveholder interests inherent in incidents of violent slave abuse. [25] As these interests were not threatened in the vast majority of cases that came before Richmond’s mayor, it is likely that slaves themselves were far more instrumental in bringing about legal proceedings to protect their person than historians have allowed.

In contrast to slaves, free blacks were able to make complaints to the mayor independently and they referred all manner of criminal matters to the municipal courts. Catherine Hope charged two free black men, James Scott and William Quarles, with stoning her house and breaking windows. When the mayor heard the case, however, three other free black women challenged Hope’s story and testified that Quarles and Scott were at Maria Sullivan’s house at the time the crime was allegedly committed. Mayor Tate ruled that the evidence was too doubtful and dismissed the accused. [26] The legal proceedings instigated by Harriet Cross against the white baker Charles Strittain, however, were more successful. Cross accused Strittain of disorderly conduct at her house and Strittain was held to surety to keep the peace in part because the complaint was sustained by the evidence of Burwell Jinkins, the First Officer of the Night Watch. [27]

James D. Rice has argued that black complainants who sought justice in white courts in antebellum Maryland were motivated by concerns that were ‘pragmatic and short term: suppressing forms of misbehavior, such as homicide and theft, that were unacceptable to black and white alike.’ It was rarely the case, however, that prosecutions that served the interests of individual black plaintiffs were of wider benefit to the black community and Rice argues that black complainants in fact perpetuated the Southern system of race relations as a whole, albeit inadvertently. [28] As most prosecutions instigated by African Americans incriminated slaves and free blacks, they were interpreted by slaveholders as evidence that African Americans were prone to violence and theft and suggested that the black community was internally divided and in need of strict white governance. In many of these cases it is probable that without the decision of the black victim to prosecute, the alleged offence would never have come to the attention of white society and in this manner black plaintiffs served something of a police function for the white community. Finally, the paucity of black prosecutions involving white defendants and the reliance on white testimony to bring complaints and secure convictions reaffirmed the significant limitations on African Americans’s use of the law.

Short term pragmatism and self-interest motivated many black prosecutors in antebellum Richmond yet, as Jon Christian Suggs has shown in an analysis of law in slave narratives, African American attitudes towards the law in the Old South were not shaped solely by short term interests and acquiescence to white dominance in the courtroom, but were instead characterised by ‘a complex welter of hope, cynicism, trust, and clear-eyed, even ironic, understanding’. [29] A free black storekeeper who was interviewed in Richmond by a northern reporter in the 1850s encapsulated these attitudes when he complained that if a white man stole goods from his store, he would have ‘no legal remedy’ unless another white man witnessed the offence and even then ‘fear of the municipal lash’ might restrain him from entering a proper complaint. [30]

African Americans who appeared in criminal courts as complainants did not take the decision to prosecute lightly then, yet when they did report offences to the mayor they not only submitted to white authority, but also simultaneously asserted their right to legal protection thereby redressing and challenging the white ideal of black passivity towards the law. Indeed, free African Americans in particular were well versed in the operation of the law and vigorously asserted the few legal privileges to which they were entitled. Most notably, free black defendants employed defence lawyers and appealed unfavourable verdicts to the Hustings Court, a process that had become so common by the final antebellum decade, that an exacerbated newspaper reporter condemned the ‘indefatigable efforts’ of the lawyers in defence of African Americans, and claimed that ‘[t]he idea of cross-examinations and arguments by counsel in such cases as these, is perfectly ridiculous’. [31] Affording legal rights to black defendants in trivial cases appeared to white contemporaries to be quite unnecessary and even unseemly. It wasted court time, gave blacks a degree of legal protection that equated them with white defendants and undermined the crime control functions of the court. Similarly, when African American victims appeared in criminal courts and made accusations that they had been assaulted or had their property stolen, they invoked legal procedures that, while flexible, could never be bent to suit white slaveholder interests to the same extent that black-white social relations outside of the courtroom could be conducted on terms dictated by white society.

African Americans’s access to the criminal courts could never have undermined Southern slavery; the law always repressed blacks in the Old South far more than it protected them and offered them justice. Nonetheless, as victims and complainants in criminal cases, African Americans demonstrated that the ideal of black submissiveness and docility before the law that pervaded Southern legal codes, was in practice undermined by the very nature of law as ‘an unwieldy, imperfect tool&[that]&proved difficult for any single group to control completely’. [32] The law was required to treat slaves as persons in order to hold them culpable for criminal actions, but the logic of this requirement meant that the courts were also accessible to African Americans as victims of crime. By the very act of appearing as complainants and victims in criminal cases, blacks ‘discredited the essential philosophical idea on which slavery rested’ and forced white society to recognise their claims to humanity and the protection of the law. [33]

Criminal Examinations in the First African Baptist Church

The First African Baptist Church was established in 1841 and the church building was, perhaps deliberately, constructed next to the city jail on the corner of Broad and Fourteenth Streets. The Church initially comprised over one thousand congregants, a figure that increased throughout the antebellum era as more than four hundred new slave members were received from elsewhere in Virginia by 1859. [34] In total, 4,600 African Americans were members of one of the four African Baptist churches that had been established in the city by the eve of the Civil War and approximately one-third of Richmond’s adult black population was therefore subject to Baptist discipline. [35] The minutes of the First African Baptist Church contain frequent references to slaves and free blacks accused of a variety of crimes ranging from intemperance and bigamy to theft, fighting and murder and suggest that a remarkably formal set of procedural regulations was adhered to in the investigation and examination of church members.

There were undoubtedly substantial limitations to the operation of ecclesiastical justice and there is evidence that some slaves and free blacks were sceptical of the extent to which the African Baptist churches could serve the interests of the black community. Henry ‘Box’ Brown offered a particularly scathing critique following his escape from slavery. Brown argued that whites had permitted the establishment of the First African Baptist Church as a means of countering the problem of slave runaways by ensuring that slaves had ‘a strong motive to remain where they were’. Furthermore, by continually requiring African American church members to pay additional sums towards the eventual purchase of the church building without ever enabling them to obtain complete ownership of the property, Brown claimed that whites hoped to deprive slaves of the small sums of money that they could earn in the city and that could have been used to finance their escape from bondage. Henry Brown also maintained that the white pastor of the First African Baptist Church, Robert Ryland, ‘was a zealous supporter of the slave-holders’ cause’ and ‘was not ashamed to invoke the authority of heaven in support of the slave degrading laws’. [36]

In addition to Henry Brown’s criticisms, the church courts also faced more practical problems in their attempts to resolve criminal matters. In the first place, slaves and free blacks who were not members of one of Richmond’s four African churches could not seek justice in the ecclesiastical setting. More significantly still, even those Baptists who saw in the religious tribunals the potential for a limited form of self-regulation on the part of the black community would have recognised that exclusion from church membership – the sole disciplinary sanction available to the ecclesiastical tribunals – could only be imposed on church members and that it held little meaning outside of the church community and, furthermore, could be contradicted by the judgment of a secular court investigating the same case.

Even accounting for these qualifications, however, there is evidence that church discipline played a particularly significant role in the self-regulation of the black community. The church courts functioned very much as an alternative to the municipal criminal justice system. They reflected a distinct value system that enshrined what in statute law and, in most cases, the church members investigated by ecclesiastical committees were suspected of criminal offences that had not been brought to the attention of white authorities. As Marie Tyler-McGraw and Gregg D. Kimball have recognised, ‘[t]he church provided a spiritual context in which blacks could assess themselves by standards entirely different from those imposed on them by the dominant white culture in Virginia’. [37]

In the same month that Isaac Simms was investigated for fighting with his wife, a free woman named Fanny Randall was excluded from the First African Baptist Church for the serious offence of stabbing. Like Simms, she was apparently never brought before the mayor of Richmond to be examined on this charge. This suggests that Fanny’s victim either chose not to report the attack to a magistrate or that the offence was not considered serious enough by white judicial officers to warrant a criminal prosecution. In either case it appears likely that the victim was black as it is improbable that a white victim would have considered reporting the offence to African American church deacons without also bringing the matter to the attention of the mayor.

A number of factors might have prompted this black victim to seek justice in the First African Baptist church rather than a secular court of law. In the first place, Fanny Randall’s victim may have been intimidated by the thought of approaching white officers and taking her case through the municipal court system. It was less daunting for a victim to appear before a committee of church deacons with whom she worshipped on a regular basis than to submit to an inquisition by a magistrate. [38] Alternatively, the victim may have believed that the corporal punishment Fanny would suffer if found guilty by the mayor was out of proportion to the severity of the crime. It is even possible that Fanny Randall’s victim may specifically have wanted her assailant excluded from the church, as she understood that in the context of Richmond’s black community and Fanny’s religious convictions this would be a particularly chastening sanction, more likely than a public whipping imposed by the mayor to reform Fanny from her violent ways.

Implicit in all of these possibilities is the suggestion of an alternative black value system that was not reflected in the provisions of Virginia’s criminal laws. [39] The particular significance of this distinct standard of morality was clearly evident in the examination of Robert Johnson and John Trice. These two African American men were reported to the church for visiting the circus and reprimanded by the deacons for immoral conduct on the grounds that attending a circus conflicted with the dictates of their religion. It is unclear whether Johnson and Trice were slaves or free persons of colour but, in either case, the moral concerns that were paramount to the deacons would not have been a consideration in a lay court. [40] Instead, the white authorities would have recorded a verdict based on whether the accused had authority to be at the circus in the form of a pass from their owner or a register of their status as free blacks. As all African Americans had their freedom of movement limited by the pass laws, it is improbable that any slave or free black would have reported violations of these laws to the mayor.

The criminal investigations and trials conducted by the First African Baptist Church reflected the influence of Anglo-American legal norms and one of the reasons that slaves and free blacks turned to the church courts was in order to secure the legal protections that were extended to whites but routinely denied to blacks in secular courtrooms. The role of the white pastor in this process is not entirely clear, but the constitution of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Richmond’s third African Baptist church, established in 1858, suggests that the pastor was not required to be present at disciplinary hearings and that the black deacons exercised complete control over the proceedings. At least seven deacons had to be in attendance to form a quorum over which the pastor or any member of the church committee could preside. [41] When the slave Peter Kelly was brought before the church on a charge of bigamy, a committee made up of no less than twenty-seven black deacons determined his guilt, evidence of a system that stood in stark contrast to the autocratic judgments passed by the mayor. Indeed, the Baptist examinations can be seen as comparable to the jury trials that Virginia state law reserved for white defendants. It seems that many church members were proud of their examining system and, much as the high standard of legal oratory displayed by white trial lawyers was remarked upon in the press, the minutes of the First African Baptist Church noted the debating skills of black litigants. Again, the Kelly case serves as a good example as the church minutes noted that ‘the case was ably argued’. [42] Therefore, although it is significant that African Americans relied on the African Baptist churches to examine and punish suspected criminals, it is apparent that the nature of this reliance was influenced in part by the obstacles that confronted blacks as both accusers and defendants in white courts and the racially discriminatory practices that these courts employed.

The manner in which the black churches investigated criminal allegations was not only based on Anglo-American legal procedures but also on established Baptist practices that operated in white churches. The minutes of the First Baptist Church suggest that that institution served a comparable purpose in regulating the conduct of its members as did the African Baptist churches and, furthermore, that its examinations were based on a similar system of investigation and committee report, followed by a vote of the members of the church council. [43] However, there were important differences between the crime control functions of Richmond’s black and white churches, especially with regard to the type of offences that were examined. As a means of responding to crime, the First Baptist Church was far less significant within the white community than the African Baptist Church was among slaves and free persons of colour. In purely numerical terms, fewer cases were brought before the First Baptist Church for adjudication. In the nine-year period covering November 1851 to November 1860 for which records are available, only twenty-three church members were investigated for behaviour that might have been classed as criminal in a court of law. Eighteen of these cases involved drunkenness or retailing ardent spirits and there was only one charge of violent crime and one of stealing investigated. [44]

The African Baptist Church investigated a very different selection of criminal offences. In the year 1852 alone, at least twenty-two black church members, including seventeen slaves, were examined for behaviour that the law considered criminal. Fourteen of the twenty-two were charged with violent crime, six with drunkenness or disorderly conduct and one each with gambling and theft. Furthermore, although there were no cases of adultery brought before the white First Baptist Church, incidents of marital infidelity were heard by the African Baptist churches on a regular basis. The contrast between the types of cases investigated by the black and white churches is striking and indicates the unique role of the African churches in shaping African American responses to crime in antebellum Richmond and as a force for order and justice within the black community. That the African churches performed such functions is somewhat ironic given that white contemporaries in Richmond commonly depicted organised black religion as a root cause of African American criminality and disorder. The Dispatch, for example, often drew attention to slaves examined in the Mayor’s Court who were church members and claimed that ‘[n]early every negro detected in stealing, is a member of some one of the African Churches’. [45] Similarly, Mayor Joseph Tate noted with astonishment in the late-1830s, that Edmund Taylor, a slave convicted of stealing, ‘is or was a Baptist Preacher’ and that George Washington, another slave thief, ‘says he has belonged to the Baptist Church for 5 years!’. [46]

In Roll, Jordan, Roll, Eugene Genovese argued that in the Old South African Americans turned to their masters or other white men for protection, because they recognised their powerlessness before the law and ‘knew that the law protected them little and could not readily be enforced even in that little’. In this manner, slaves were driven deeper into an acceptance of paternalism, a development that Genovese presented as evidence of the hegemonic power of the law in the Old South. [47] However, in the urban-industrial context of late-antebellum Richmond, where thousands of slaves were hired out and lived away from their masters in a state of quasi-freedom and as part of a vibrant black community, African Americans routinely relied on the courts to protect their person and property. They reported crimes to their masters, the police, and the mayor and instigated prosecutions against suspected black and, on occasion, white criminals. However, black victims were never entirely dependent on the law or on their masters or other whites to protect their person and property, but could instead rely on the institutional mechanisms of the black community. Most notably, Richmond’s African Baptist Churches facilitated the establishment and regulation of an African American moral economy that was largely independent of the concerns and constraints of white society. In this way, African Americans in Richmond demonstrated that they were subject to ‘multiple subordinations”to white society, the criminal law, the church and the black community. [48] While it is not possible to deny the repressive functions of the law in the Old South, the responses of black victims of crime illustrate that there were limitations to white legal hegemony in Southern slave society.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Daily Dispatch, 16 August 1852.

[2] Isaac Simms’s wife (whose name does not appear in the records) was not investigated by the First African Baptist Church implying either that she was not a church member or that the charge of ‘fighting’ was used loosely in this case to describe what was, in fact, an assault perpetrated by Simms on his wife.

[3] James Sidbury found that ‘[f]ree black women sometimes took their mates to court in search of physical protection’ as early as the late-eighteenth century. Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 238.

[4] An important exception is Arthur F. Howington, What Sayeth the Law: The Treatment of Slave and Free Blacks in the State and Local Courts of Tennessee (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986), 98-115. A number of historians have examined local criminal trial court records. See, for example, Michael S. Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 139-45; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19^th-Century American South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 74-75.

[5] Historians of criminal justice in England have recognized the influence of victims at the pre-trial stage of the judicial process. See, for example, Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740-1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Robert B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660-1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jennifer Davis, ‘A Poor Man’s System of Justice: The London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, The Historical Journal 27 (1984), 325.

[6] A. Leon Higginbotham and Anne F. Jacobs, ‘The ‘Law Only as Enemy’: The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia’, North Carolina Law Review 70 (1992), 975.

[7] During the course of the antebellum period, the criminal laws of Virginia were increasingly based on race rather than free or enslaved status. In 1833, legislation decreed that free blacks charged with felonies would be tried without a jury in the same oyer and terminer courts as slaves and, by the late-1850s, free black convicts could be punished by being sold into slavery.

[8] On slave-hiring, employment and living arrangements in antebellum Richmond, see Rodney D. Green, ‘Industrial Transition in the Land of Chattel Slavery: Richmond, Virginia, 1820-60’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 241; Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 38-43, 48-54; Gregg Kimball, American City, Southern Place (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 27-30; Midori Takagi, Rearing Wolves to our own Destruction (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 37, 78.

[9] Marianne B. Sheldon, ‘Black-White Relations in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1820’, Journal of Southern History 45 (1979), 30; Stephen Eliot Tripp, Yankee Town, Southern City: Race and Class Relations in Civil War Lynchburg (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 20-21. See also Marie Tyler-McGraw and Gregg D. Kimball, In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia (The Valentine Museum, Richmond, 1988), 23.

[10] Two excellent depictions of responses to crime in the rural South that provide an important point of contrast with Richmond, are Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1991), 33-41; Michael Wayne, Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9-18.

[11] In 1838, 101 of 133 (76%) African American defendants were convicted of stealing compared with 14 of 22 (64%) whites. The comparable figures for stealing convictions in 1860 were 123 of 135 blacks (91%) and 38 of 67 whites (57%).

[12] Ten of 68 slaves were sentenced to 39 lashes for non-felonious stealing in 1838 and 55 of 73 in 1852. Figures are not available for 1860 as, although the Dispatch specified when slaves were sentenced to corporal punishment, it rarely recorded the precise number of lashes to be inflicted.

[13] Daily Dispatch, 28 August 1852; 13 February 1852; 15 February 1853; Mayor’s Court Docket Book, 8 September 1837. Michael S. Hindus makes a similar point in relation to black crime in antebellum South Carolina. See Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 142.

[14] On whites’s belief that African Americans were naturally inclined to theft, see Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 599.

[15] A total of 3,611 cases were heard in these three sample years. It is reasonable to assume that the Dispatch recorded every case heard by the mayor as the court reports were a feature of every edition of the newspaper and commonly recorded the most trivial of cases. Furthermore, on days when there were no cases to report, the court reporter filled his columns with congratulatory commentaries on the paucity of crime in the city. See Dispatch, 18 November 1859.

[16] As the Dispatch did not always record the race of the victim, these figures should be interpreted as minimums. Twelve of 28 free blacks and 21 of 38 slaves accused of violence in 1860 were alleged to have attacked African Americans.

[17] Sixteen white men were charged with assaulting nine slaves in 1838 and twelve were convicted. Of these twelve, ten were jailed or held to bail to keep the peace and two others were sent on to the Hustings Court for further investigation. Mayor’s Court Docket Book (MCDB), 1 January, 4 April, 4 June, 24 July, 30 July, 27 October, 19 November, 23 November, 22 December 1838.

[18] For cases involving white defendants and black victims see Dispatch, 10 January, 8 March, 19 March, 15 June, 22 June, 1 July, 3 July, 5 August, 31 August, 18 October, 4 December, 14 December 1852.

[19] Policing remained a function of the community throughout much of the South during the antebellum period and all whites were empowered with police powers to watch, catch and beat black slaves and, for the most part, free persons of colour. By the mid nineteenth-century, however, most Southern cities had more elaborate police forces with hierarchical command structures, uniforms, elected officers and increasing access to modern technologies such as the telegraph to aid in the fight against crime. See Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols. Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001), 4; James Douglas Rice, ‘Crime and Punishment in Frederick County and Maryland, 1748-1837: A Study in Culture, Society, and Law’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, 1994), 138; Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City. New Orleans, 1805-1889 (Louisiana University Press, Baton Rouge, 1996), 6; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 83.

[20] Daily Dispatch, 11 January 1855.

[21] Commonwealth v. James Meredith, Richmond Hustings Court Ended Causes, September 1845.

[22] Dispatch, 16 January 1852.

[23] MCDB, Case of Dick, a slave, 21 December 1836; Case of James A. Gaines, 5 April 1837.

[24] Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 299.

[25] Andrew Fede, ‘Legitimized Violent Slave Abuse in the American South, 1619-1865’ American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985), 150.

[26] MCDB, Case of James Scott and William Quarles, 16 January and 20 January 1836.

[27] MCDB, Case of Charles Strittain, 16 July 1836.

[28] James D. Rice, ‘Crime and Punishment in Frederick County and Maryland, 1748-1837’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1994), 441.

[29] Jon-Christian Suggs, Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 26.

[30] John R. McKivigan, ed., The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, By James Redpath (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 29.

[31] Daily Dispatch, 30 September 1852.

[32] Laura F. Edwards, ‘Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South’, Journal of Southern History 65 November (1999), 741.

[33] Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 47. On legal treatment of slaves as person and property see Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 247; Mark V. Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 37-40. Ariela J. Gross, Double Character. Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3.

[34] Gregg D. Kimball, American City, Southern Place, 70-71.

[35] John T. O’Brien, ‘Factory, Church, and Community: Blacks in Antebellum Richmond’, Journal of Southern History 44:4 (1978), 527.

[36] Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself: Electronic Edition, University of North Carolina, 1999 <http://docsouth.unc.edu/brownbox/brownbox.html>, accessed 12 January, 2002, 30-32.

[37] Marie Tyler-McGraw and Gregg D. Kimball, In Bondage and Freedom, 36.

[38] See John R. McKivigan, ed., The Roving Editor, 29-30.

[39] Historians have found evidence that slaves had distinct moral standards. For example, slaves who stole from their masters justified their actions as taking rather than stealing. See Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 322.

[40] Minutes of the First African Baptist Church, 3 March 1844.

[41] Minutes of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, July 18, 1858.

[42] Minutes of the First African Baptist Church, January 1842.

[43] See in particular the examination of Henry Keeling, First Baptist Church Richmond City Minute Book, 10 April and 4 May 1853.

[44] The other offences that were examined included unchristian conduct and swearing.

[45] Daily Dispatch, 3 September 1858.

[46] MCDB, 5 February, 21 September 1838.

[47] Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 30, 49.

[48] This idea is based on Erin Moore’s work on men’s hegemonic control of public disputing forums: ‘The juxtaposition of village councils and state courts means that Muslim women ‘find themselves in positions of multiple subordinations and at the same time in conflicting alliances’ with and against the state, with and against the local Muslim caste, with and against the religious leaders who have the voice to fight the state’. See Susan F. Hirsch and Mindie Lazarus-Black, Contested States Law Hegemony and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 1994), 15-16.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 3, Spring 2003: Special Conference Edition

Norman Mailer and Pop: Totalitarianism and mass culture in The Naked and the Dead

Scott Duguid
© Scott Duguid. All Rights Reserved

When Norman Mailer went to serve as a rifleman in the Pacific theatre during World War II, he went with the specific intention of writing the definitive novel of the conflict.The resulting work, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948 and was an immediate critical and commercial success. At the age of 25, Mailer was famous, and the result was an identity crisis that has fuelled his literary imagination ever since. Taking its cue from the social realist novels of the twenties and thirties, most notably those of John Dos Passos, the novel provided sustenance for a reading public hungry for naturalistic detail about the conflict. Just as readers of Moby Dick invariably learn a quantity of arcane whaling lore, Mailer’s first novel documents the minutiae of army life in documentary detail. From a certain critical perspective, the novel has become definitive of its author. So authoritative was its early fame that Mailer is frequently regarded as a direct descendant of the social realists that so decisively influenced the novel. The novel emulates, but does not represent a significant stylistic advance from those novelists Mailer devoured at Harvard in the late thirties/early forties, including Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell; its innovation was rather, as Diana Trilling saw it, that it brought to a ‘familiar subject the informing view of a new and radically altered generation’. [1]

From a more recent perspective, The Naked and the Dead seems even more entrenched in the style of its predecessors; but perhaps we are better placed than Trilling was to locate what was developing from this ‘informing view’. The dominant realism of The Naked and the Dead must be acknowledged, but the main purpose of this paper will be to read against it to examine how it anticipates certain emergent trends that might come under a broad rubric of the ‘postmodern’. Two separate critical frameworks present themselves. The first is that The Naked and the Dead is frequently regarded as a novel with a direct anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian political thesis. In this, it was very much in the mood of the immediate post-war and early Cold War literary and intellectual environment (for example, George Orwell was among the admirers of the work). Further, as Nigel Leigh has noted, Mailer’s novel reflected a pervasive fear on the AmericanLeft of a home-spun American fascism, a fear most acutely if not accurately expressed by Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, backed by Mailer in the 1948 election finally won by Truman. [2] The second framework that presents itself is that The Naked and the Dead arrives at a median point in the development of the American novel. Mailer’s novel falls quite uneasily between two literary generations, concomitant with a re-appraisal of the category of the novel itself, as well as an epistemological and aesthetic crisis for art in the round. This crisis, lucidly examined by Fredric Jameson in the essay ‘‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’’ (1994), usually marks the beginnings of postmodernism in the sixties. Although Mailer was a product of the earlier literary and intellectual generation, it is this decade and milieu that coincides with his own most creatively fertile period.

What I want to do is more than reassess the oeuvre of one particular writer by an appeal to an examination of genre, although this is in part desirable. The central contention of this paper is that the historical political argument of The Naked and the Dead is inseparable from a discussion of its own internal aesthetics and external emergent cultural forms and styles, specifically that of Pop Art.The paper will begin by offering a brief account of certain critical readings of Mailer’s first novel, and in particular, how critics have assessed its apparently anti-fascist stance. It will then proceed to extend this critical history by a close reading of the novel’s ending, which deviates stylistically from the prevalent texture of naturalism. Does this foreshadow a postmodern aesthetics, or does it position itself with a negative assessment of mass culture evident in the writings of the Frankfurt School and post-war New York intellectuals?

The action of The Naked and the Dead takes place on an entirely fictitious island in the Pacific called Anopopei.Aside from interspersed ‘Time Capsule’ episodes, where we see portraits of the soldiers’ civilian lives, the novel is about Americans far from home, threatened by a largely invisible Japanese ‘other’ and a hostile natural environment. Anopopei is nevertheless a divided America in miniature, where distinctions of class, ethnicity, religion and geography are not so much erased, as repressed. The sadistic hierarchy of the military, embodied in the proto-fascist General Cummings, is not only an allegory of a nation crippled by an experience of Depression, but also the vision of a potentially fascist future. The novel’s plot vacillates between two estranged and incommensurable spheres: those of the enlisted men and the officers. This early novel was naively but consciously Marxist, and its enlisted men are profoundly alienated from the officer class, and effectively from the products of their own military ‘labour’.

For most commentators, the ideological centre of the novel consists in the scenes between the quasi-fascist General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn. Cummings is very much the author of the Anopopei campaign; his insistence is that the army should be rigidly controlled by means of a ‘fear ladder’ [3], and he also acts as a prophet of a home-spun popular American fascism. This conflict between Cummings and Hearn is usually read as a sophisticated engagement between totalitarianism and liberalism. Their scenes are compelling as ideological debate, but more than that are a sustained literary study in the use of top-down power and sadism. Considerable dramatic energy is expended in these passages, and Cummings’ totalistic power is seemingly affirmed by the final humiliation and death of Hearn, an inexperienced officer sent out on the abortive reconnaissance mission that constitutes the novel’s final section. However, the campaign is finally won not by Cummings’ strategic brilliance, but through the inadvertent actions of the bureaucratic Major Dalleson in Cummings’ absence. Much of the novel’s narrative power dissipates with this failure of the will to power; the terrifying fascist future, it seems, was already anachronistic. As Michael K. Glenday notes, ‘Mailer’s conclusion dramatises his view that the political future belongs not to dangerous mystics like Cummings, but rather to the system’s slaves, men like Major Dalleson […] it was Dalleson, not Cummings, who epitomised the safe mediocrity of American decline’. [4] Cummings’s disproportionate, and eventually dissipated, dramatic energy leaves us with a conclusion that several critics have regarded as anti-climactic. Donald Pizer deals with this fall off by arguing that: ‘The Naked and the Dead is naturalistic fiction rather than fiction modeled on Shakespearean tragedy, and in naturalism the symmetry of high tragedy – of a fall to death – is often replaced by the anti-climax of mixed and ambivalent conclusions’. [5] There will be more to say about the tragic, but useful as Pizer’s analysis is it seems insufficient to simply appeal to the exigencies of genre and mode.

Many readings of the novel emphasise that the novel is about the fragility of personality and the human subject in the context of a vast technological social machine. Nevertheless, one paradox that the novel posits is that Cummings contains transcendental energies, which countermand such a reading. Glenday writes that, ‘For all that must be said against the fascist disposition of Cummings or Croft, both men possess qualities which fly in the face of machine mentality’. [6] This contradiction Joseph Wenke sees as saying something fundamental about totalitarianism: ‘Though a totalitarian movement may well have its origins in a powerful and charismatic personality committed to risk-taking as a means of achieving power, totalitarian institutions gravitate inexorably toward a consolidation of power and an elimination of personality’. [7] This is consistent with the heterogeneous theory of personality that Georges Bataille espouses in his essay ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’.For Bataille, totalising or fascistic institutions, most notably at the level of the nation state, are profoundly homogeneous in their forms of expression (which is to say rigid and uniform).Nevertheless, homogeneous society secures its coherence by the expulsion of heterogeneous elements, whether in the form of higher elements such as leaders, or lower social elements, the example Bataille uses being India’s ‘untouchable’ lower castes.(Bataille’s argument depends upon the double meaning of sacer – sacred and impure – that was conventional in early twentieth century social anthropology).Bataille’s analysis of the structure of the army has application for The Naked and the Dead:

The glory of the chief essentially constitutes a sort of affective pole opposed to the nature of the soldiers. Even independently of their horrible occupation, the soldiers belong as a rule to a vile segment of the population […] But even the elimination of enlistments from the lower classes would fail to change the deeper structure of the army; this structure would continue to base affective organisation upon the social infamy of the soldiers. Human beings incorporated into the army are but negated elements, negated with a kind of rage (a sadism) manifest in the tone of each command, negated by the parade, by the uniform, and by the geometric regularity of cadenced movements. The chief, insofar as he is imperative, is the incarnation of this violent negation. His intimate nature, the nature of his glory, is constituted by an imperative act that annuls the wretched populace (which constitutes the army) as such. [8]

Essential to Bataille’s point is that the homogeneous core of the army need not derive from an inherently homogeneous lower class. In fact, Mailer’s novel emphatically illustrates this thesis in a specifically American context, at the nexus of class and race. It is not just that middle-class New Yorker’s are fighting beside rural Southerner’s, but also that Hispanics are fighting next to Jews, intellectuals next to drifters. The homogeneous is not the communal, since the novel seems to imply that America’s communal experience of Depression leading into World War has only savagely exacerbated social and racial division; any equality the novel presents is only an equality of abjection. However, Mailer suggests a possible resistance to the ‘geometric regularity’ of social control lies in the enlistments’s coarse obscene language and earthy sexuality, which he associates with a bottom-up American democratic freedom. The question then might be: does The Naked and the Dead fulfil a function of the humanistic novel, and succeed in individuating its men as a form of resistance to the social model of a Cummings? Cummings himself suggests not:

In the army the idea of individual personality is just a hindrance. Sure, there are differences among men in any particular Army unit, but they invariably cancel each other out, and what you’re left with is a value rating. Such and such a company is good or poor, effective or ineffective for such or such a mission. I work with grosser techniques, common denominator techniques. (140)

As Bataille writes, ‘the mass that constitutes the army passes from a depleted and ruined existence to a purified geometric order’. [9] Cummings is an agent of this depersonalising, unifying principle. Yet, as several critics have noted, Cummings embodies a contrary principle, of a charismatic, transcendental self.Leigh writes that Cummings has a ‘basic originality, the fact that Cummings cannot be reduced to a particular system’, and it is this originality ‘which so impresses Hearn’. [10] For Bataille, the heterogeneous fascist leader is precisely irreducible and inassimilable.

Yet, Mailer is evidently interested in exploring the limitations of the totalising will to power that Cummings seems to embody. What might this limitation be? Several critics have held that the novel displays a universe where human agency is profoundly delimited by chance. Joseph Wenke writes that Cummings ‘has difficulty countermanding the lethargy of the troops, and at the end of the book he is forced to admit that he really cannot force ‘the circuits of chance’, that, in fact, the battle for Anopopei has been won without him’. [11] Glenday is more explicit: ‘Chance, in the shape of Major Dalleson, defeats’ Cummings [12].These views seem to support a naturalist and determinist reading of The Naked and the Dead.And surely this is a real confusion in the novel, since chance really does play a decisive role in the action. Croft’s mission to scale Mt. Anaka is finally thwarted not by internal class struggle amongst the men, or by the Japanese enemy, but by a disturbed hornets’s nest. But there are other factors operating in Anopopei, which might complicate any view that prescribes Dalleson as a representative of the arbitrary. In a much misquoted passage, Cummings contemplates that:

For a moment he almost admitted that he had very little of perhaps nothing to do with this victory, or indeed any victory – it had been accomplished by a random play of luck larded into a casual net of factors too large, too vague, for him to comprehend [my italics] (536).

The powerlessness of the (here fascist) agent, then, is only partially to do with chance. It also has to do with what is referred to as the postmodern sublime. That which is unrepresentable is no longer to be found in nature or in the universe, but rather in a combination of systematic factors: military, technological, economic, and indeed naturalistic in this instance. In a persuasive analysis of Mailer’s book on the moon landings, Of A Fire on the Moon (1970), Joseph Tabbi defines the postmodern sublime as referring to ‘networks of power and corporate control beyond the comprehension of any single mind or imagination’ [13], words that directly recall Cummings. Leigh’s reading of The Naked and the Dead succinctly defines the novel’s major debate:

The Naked and the Dead’s conflict with itself embodies a current debate within the social sciences between those who perceive power as exercised by agents, and those who see it as the result of structural factors. In other words, The Naked and the Dead is poised between voluntaristic and structuralist conceptions of the world […]

Cummings and Croft are effectively alienated from the military system and the political future. Mailer realizes that Major Dalleson, the organization man, is in ascendance […] The image the novel leaves us with therefore is Dalleson’s inane obeisance to structuralistic power [14]

It is certainly the case that Mailer’s work, from the very beginning and to this day, is preoccupied with a ‘great men’ theory of the historical process, but this visionary stance lies in debate with just this obverse ‘structuralist’ view.It is a commonplace of postmodern theory, particularly that of Lyotard, that one feature of the postmodern is a diminishment of the allure of authority figures, and especially political leaders (concomitant perhaps with the so-called crisis of subjectivity and the death of the author). Although postmodernism is increasingly credited with its own sublime, it seems apparent that writers such as Bataille explicitly, and Mailer implicitly, are charting precisely an historical loss of the sublime, which might in part explain The Naked and the Dead’s disavowal of the tragic. The swamp of sensuous, sublime historical energies is being drained by profoundly non-sensuous set of capitalist relations (which is one reason why both writers look back to primitive, pre-modern epistemologies).Indeed, several critics have noticed a secret admiration and endorsement of the fascistic energies of Cummings (and Sergeant Croft) in Mailer’s novel, which directly belies its declared anti-fascist position.

Mailer is in this sense a kind of novelistic historian, but his preoccupations have tended to be more broadly intellectual, and in particular aesthetic. As is well known, authority in the post-war period has seemed to be in decline in literature and art as well as politics. One might perhaps characterise the later Mailer as a variety of Lawrentian modernist, who grants art and the fecundity of sublime imagination an extraordinarily redemptive social role. This is beginning to be superseded culturally by a morally neutral postmodernism (although he does not use the term) that is beginning to place image ahead of inner imagination, to radically displace notions of transcendental truth, to blur the distinction between high/low art, and to undermine a humanistic conception of the modern novel. Resistance to this cultural erosion of identity is to be found in obscenity, sexuality, art, and high literary style.Already in this first novel, we can glimpse a deep umbilical relation of aesthetics and politics. Leigh is correct in saying that ‘The image the novel leaves us with therefore is Dalleson’s inane obeisance to structuralistic power’, but few critics examine this conclusion’s eccentric style. The very final pages of the book see Dalleson, after the mop-up of the Anopopei campaign, devising a schedule for a training program, ‘the part of military life that the Major found most congenial’ (538-539):

At this moment he got his idea. He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with the co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, ‘Give me the co-ordinates.’

Goddam, what an idea! The Major chuckled out of sheer pleasure. It would make those troopers wake up and pay some attention in map class.

But where was he going to get a life-sized photograph? […]

Dalleson scratched his head. He could write a letter to Army Headquarter, Special Services. They probably wouldn’t have Grable, but any pin-up girl would do. That was it. He’d write Army. And in the meantime he might send a letter to the War Department Training Aids Section. They were out for improvements like that. The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea at last. He clenched his fists with excitement.

Hot Dog! (539-540)

Here, in this odd comic ending, the dominant and claustrophobic texture of naturalism seems to unpeel at the corners. Instead, this passage seems to anticipate the grotesque black humour of the comic novels of the nineteen-sixties. Glenday does note that this conclusion anticipates Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in its comic tone [15], and in the sixties Mailer is beginning to praise the ‘moral surrealism’ [16] of writers such as Heller, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern. In his own work, Mailer’s proclivity for the grotesque was being displayed as early as his second novel Barbary Shore (1951) and the short story ‘The Man Who Studied Yoga’ (1952).The Naked and the Dead owes much to Dos Passos, but the shift of mode at the novel’s conclusion in turn owes much to Dos Passos’s contemporary Nathanael West, a demonstrable though rarely cited influence on Mailer. Recent criticism on West, most notably by Rita Bernard, has attempted to explain West’s estrangement from the thirties literary canon by arguing that his work focuses not on the milieu of labour and production that the social realists were charting, but on the contrary to an emergent consumerism [17]. Once seen as high modernist, West’s satirical works are now frequently regarded as anticipating the postmodern comic novel of the sixties and Pop Art.

Fig1. Betty Grable: http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/betty001.jpg

The contention here is that this apparently formal question has direct relevance to The Naked and the Dead’s historical argument. Why does The Naked and the Dead conclude with such a Hollywood ending? Dalleson’s girlie-picture map of Betty Grable is not an inappropriate image for a novel on World War II. During the war, Grable was one of the most readily identifiable entertainers in the world, and particularly well known to men in the armed forces for whom she was an ubiquitous pin-up. Mailer’s inclusion of an image from mass culture must then, be understood in the intellectual context of the 1940s. The Frankfurt School is of course most closely associated with a critique of mass culture, but this had a particular domestic context for Americans. The emergence of the New York intellectual, dating approximately from the Partisan Review’s restart in 1937 with a new anti-Stalinist but initially still socialist agenda, was concomitant with a comprehensively negative assessment of mass culture. This stance on mass culture was replicated by even the most dissident intellectuals. According to Andrew Ross, ‘Mailer, [C. Wright] Mills, [Irving] Howe, and others largely agreed with the picture which the Frankfurt School provided of a populace of dopes, dupes, and robots mechanically delivered into passivity and conformity by the monolithic channels of the mass media and the culture industries’. [18] Although Ross undoubtedly overstates the direct influence of the Frankfurt School (at this point based in Columbia University) on the New York intellectuals, who had come to a similar conclusion on the subject largely on their own, it is accurate to suggest that Mailer shared this assessment particularly strongly at this early stage in his career, although he himself, a young, unpublished, and politically naïve author, had few direct links to the intellectual establishment. (His propulsion to fame would modify this state of affairs somewhat). Mailer never abandoned his perception of the negative effects of mass culture, but his later celebration of Hip culture in his essay ‘The White Negro’ (1957) would perhaps mark a break from the prevailing view of ‘serious’ American intellectuals. Further, his later engagement with postmodernism became far closer to that of Susan Sontag, whose 1964 ‘Notes on Camp’ [19], an essay that seems to have deeply influenced Mailer’s writings on aesthetics, would voice ample reservations about the cultural forms it also celebrated.

Fig2. Hommage á Chrysler Corporation: http://www.infoloop.org/catalogue/57.06.html

Certainly there was a qualified enthusiasm on Mailer’s part for Pop Art, and in particular Andy Warhol, who prompted Mailer’s experiments in film in the late sixties. If he did not share what has often been considered Pop’s morally and politically neutral celebration of mass culture, the imagery he would evoke frequently bears comparison with Pop’s concerns. Like Warhol, Mailer was fascinated by the phenomenon of fame, and constructed his own distinct cultural iconography of figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon, and Muhammad Ali, among others. Further, early Pop Art works by Richard Hamilton, such as Hommage á Chrysler Corporation and Hers is a Lush Situation (both 1957) noted, in David MacCarthy’s words, ‘the formal parallels between automobile and female form’ [20]. Mailer himself noted these formal connections in a piece entitled ‘A Note on Comparative Pornography’, published at around the same time as Hamilton’s work:

Talk of pornography ought to begin at the modern root: advertising. Ten years ago the advertisements sold the girl with the car – the not altogether unfair connection of the unconscious mind was that the owner of a new convertible was on the way to getting a new girl. Today the girl means less than the machine. A car is sold not because it will help one to get a girl, but because it already is a girl. The leather of its seats is worked to a near-skin, the colour is lipstick-pink, or a blonde’s pale-green, the tail-lights are cloacal, the rear is split like the cheeks of a drum majorette. [21]

Its possible to see in Dalleson’s Betty Grable map, a piece of proto-Pop Art that anticipates the sexual iconography of Hamilton, Warhol, and Peter Blake.As a novel fundamentally preoccupied with masculinity, The Naked and the Dead closes with one of its few female images. Mass culture, of course, has often been constructed as feminine, in contradistinction either to a masculine, rugged and politically serious social realism on one hand, or on the other to an aesthetically serious high art, unsullied by commerce and dominated by the man of genius in command of sublime creative power. Fredric Jameson has suggested that the ‘end of art’ debates of the 1960s did not indicate that art itself was ending, but rather that there was a radical shift in the function of art from the sublime to the beautiful. (According to this high-Hegelian argument, theory would fill the gap). [22] The specific gender associations of these aesthetic categories are well known (although Jameson does not raise them), and it is reasonable to infer that what Playboy magazine called ‘the womanization of America’ [23] has something to do with mass culture as well as the emerging feminist movement.

One of Mailer’s more obvious preoccupations in the novel is with male sexuality, and particularly sexuality in transition. (A controversial aspect of the novel was its employment of four-letter words, which at this point were still not tolerated by publishers or the public. An oddity of the novel is that the word ‘fug’ replaces the word ‘fuck’ throughout). The defining sexual event of the period was the publication of the Kinsey Report (full title Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male) in 1948. The Kinsey report, one of the key American documents of the century, collated an extraordinary quantity of statistical data on male sexual practise. The Naked and the Dead was the big book of that year, but that was just a novel; the publication of the Kinsey Report had implications that were seismic in comparison. Nevertheless, according to Clifford Maskovsky, who served with Mailer during the war, Mailer had conducted his own Kinsey Report in miniature while serving in the Pacific. [24] Mailer, armed with yellow notepad, discreetly and systematically surveyed his fellow soldiers about their sexual behaviour, although he was probably wise to restrict the enquiry to their heterosexual relations.The Naked and the Dead, then, was timely in its realistic portrayal of sexual material. Betty Grable’s iconic image (an estimated five million copies of her famous over the shoulder photo were distributed to servicemen during the war [25]) alluded to a more playful, innocent sexuality. Famously, she claimed to be ‘strictly an enlisted man’s girl’, [26] a statement playing to the notion of the rude good humour of the common soldier, in distinction to the aloof sterility of the officer class. [27]

Is it possible, then, to read Mailer’s Betty Grable map as a class-political celebration of proletarian sexuality? Finally, The Naked and the Dead negates this thesis, since the mass-produced, mass culture image is manipulated and controlled by the very administrative officer class which the image ostensibly mocks. Although The Naked and the Dead seems to retain a residual commitment to Popular Front rhetoric, it marks a decisive break from the populism of a Steinbeck and the other Depression-era social realists. Adorno and Horkheimer coined the term ‘culture industry’ in order to divest the term mass culture of its potential folk or populist meanings. The argument goes that mass culture is totalitarian precisely in this capacity to ‘enlist’ citizens to a particular set of practices of consumption. In an ‘Impolite Interview’ with the Realist magazine’s Paul Krassner in 1962, Mailer again found an appropriate metaphor for mass culture in military life. The strain between his populism and cultural pessimism is again, clearly evident:

And you’re not drafted – your eye is not drafted when you turn on that TV set? To assume that people are getting what they want through the mass media also assumes that the men and women who direct the mass media know something about the people. But they don’t know anything about the people. That’s why I gave you the example of the Army. The Private exists in a world which is hermetically alienated from the larger aims of the Generals who are planning the higher strategy of the war. [28]

Mailer’s appraisal of mass culture would gain considerably in sophistication and he would break decisively from the Partisan Review’s orthodox line. Nevertheless, this assessment remained negative, and we see in his first novel the outline of a broad engagement with cultural arguments. The Naked and the Dead rhetorically charts a shift from fascist rule to the hegemony of the cultural fetish. Its conclusion points tentatively but resolutely to what Adorno and Horkheimer call the ‘liquidation of tragedy’ [29], and to a demonstrably emergent postmodern absolutism where energies, political and sexual, are appropriated, negated, and harnessed.What is not clear is the extent to which Mailer’s later revisions of stance provide an adequate model of resistance to this gloomy picture.

University of Edinburgh

Notes

[1] Diana Trilling, ‘The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer’ (1962). Reprinted in Robert F. Lucid, Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown, 1971), 115.

[2] Nigel Leigh, Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer (London: MacMillan, 1990), 5-6.

[3] Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (London: Allan Wingate, 1952), 136. Citations are hereafter bracketed in the text.

[4] Michael K. Glenday, Norman Mailer (London: MacMillan, 1995), 47.

[5] Donald Pizer, Twentieth-Century Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 107.

[6] Glenday, 54.

[7] Joseph Wenke, Mailer’s America (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987), 9-10.

[8] Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 150.

[9] Bataille, 150.

[10] Leigh, 22.

[11] Wenke, 33.

[12] Glenday, 55.

[13] Tabbi, Joseph, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 30.

[14] Leigh, 22, 29.

[15] Glenday, 50.

[16] Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (Panther, 1979), 71.

[17] Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Jonathan Veitch, American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), and Thomas Strychachz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[18] Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 1989), 52.

[19] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967), 275-292.

[20] David McCarthy, Pop Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32.

[21] Advertisements for Myself (London: Panther, 1968), 350-351.

[22] See Jameson’s ‘’End of Art’ or End of History’?’ (1994) in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (London: Verson, 1998), 73-92. Andreas Huyssens discusses the association of mass culture with the feminine in chapters 3 and 4 of After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: MacMillan, 1988).

[23] The phrase is Philip Wylie’s, who coined the term in the September 1958 issue of Playboy. Mailer sat as panellist on a Playboy colloquium published in the June 1962 issue, where he discussed the ‘the womanization of America’. Extracts from Mailer’s replies to the colloquium are published in the essay collection Cannibals and Christians. Josh Cohen makes a similar point about Mailer’s association of mass culture with the feminine in chapter two of his Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (London: Pluto Press, 1998).

[24] Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (Penguin, 1986), 74-75.

[25] Doug Warren, Betty Grable: The Reluctant Movie Queen (Robson, 1982), 79.

[26] Internet Movie Database biography. http://us.imdb.com/Bio?Grable,%20Betty.

[27] It’s worth observing that Mailer’s novel prosecutes this sexual-class rhetoric through the implicit homosexuality he ascribes to Cummings. This is of course an old trope of class politics, dating since at least the French Revolution. In a piece entitled ‘The Homosexual Villain’ written for the gay magazine ‘One’ (reprinted in Advertisements for Myself) in 1955, Mailer partially repented the association between fascism and homosexuality (although it nevertheless seems to have remained in his writing).

[28] Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (Penguin, 1964), 141-142.

[29] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), 154.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 3, Spring 2003: Special Conference Edition

Epic Aspirations for the Great American Novel: John Updike’s Song of America

Catherine Morley
© Catherine Morley. All Rights Reserved

It’s a certain burden, this American-ness. If you come from a small nation you don’t have that. I feel sometimes that an American artist must feel like a baseball player or something – a member of a team writing American history.
Willem de Kooning

As Rome herself, by long unwearied toil,
Glean’d the fair produce of each foreign soil;
From all her wide dominion’s various parts
Borrow’d their laws, their usages, their arts;
Imported knowledge from each adverse zone,
And made the wisdom of the world her own:
Thy patient spirit thus, from every Bard
Whose mental riches won thy just regard,
Drew various treasure: which thy skill refin’d
And in the fabric of thy verse combin’d.
William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry, 1782

the Great American Novel is not extinct like the Dodo, but mythical like the Hippogriff
Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, 1903

John Updike has been heralded as the writer of middle America, both poet and historian, a novelist who speaks eloquently to and of the American national consciousness. For Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) Updike’s name was set alongside the term Great American Novel and the author was celebrated for his poetic rendering of the American psyche in the midst of the twentieth century. However, such classifications, in their implicit singularity, belie the multifarious nature of Updike’s ouevre and the social world of his art. The America of the Rabbit Angstrom series is, after all, a continent composed of a multitude of identities and ethnicities, rather than a country. Of a nation as radically diverse as Amish Pennsylvania and the sun-bleached Florida coast to which the protagonist flees, can one, with assurance, speak of a certain, identifiable, ‘American-ness’? If not, then it is also impossible to engage with the term and the myth of the Great American Novel, which in its annual resurgence has become somewhat hackneyed and clichéd. My intention here is to reconsider the dominant characteristics of the so-called Great American Novel by providing an inclusive, trans-Atlantic frame in which to view the Rabbit Angstrom series of novels. By focusing upon Updike’s engagement with the motifs and tropes of the European Epic, I hope to gesture toward a break with the deficient term Great American Novel (from here on after referred to as the GAN) and, by implication, examine Updike’s prose beyond his assignation as the bard of American middle-class domesticity. This, of course, is not to say I reject those critiques that focus upon this aspect of Updike’s work. Rather, I wish to underscore the near-sighted nature of such generic and national specificities by highlighting the inescapable influence of the European Epic upon such great American literary achievements as Rabbit Angstrom.

Given the polyphonic breadth of Updike’s fiction and his idiosyncratic proclivity for historical recuperation, the title of Epic over the GAN seems more fitting. Historical recuperation as a deterministic feature of the Epic has long been acknowledged by epicists and classical critics alike. Paul Merchant has described the genre as a chronicling ‘book of the tribe’ while Ezra Pound reads it as a poem containing history. [1] Bearing such classifications in mind, one can firmly posit Updike’s engagement with the details of the past (moreover, his attention toward these particulars as richly multifaceted) as working within the Epic tradition. However, it is not simply Updike’s patent penchant for historical recreation, which places him within this ambitious milieu. Nor, indeed, is it the sheer scale of his endeavour – intended in 1960 as a short novella the Rabbit Angstrom series has grown to encompass decades and occupy more than 1,500 pages of text. That which classifies Updike as a contemporary epicist is not simply his assimilation of the genre but this very absorption, combined with a modification of its features, to facilitate its relevance to contemporary America. Through a conscious engagement with Joyce’s modernist Epic (which I here elucidate), Updike takes on the genre’s historical and stylistic tradition– its reflexivity and adaptability as well as its characteristics and themes. In many ways, Updike is as much concerned with the foundation and history of the American people as Joyce was with the forging of an Irish consciousness and Virgil was with the establishment of Rome. Therefore, not unlike his Irish and, by implication, Latin precursor, Updike, in the creation of the national Epic, seeks to incorporate the formative features of the very nation within his art.Rabbit Angstrom as naturalistic American Epic envelops the literature of American Individualism many of the characteristics of European Modernism and, consequently, the conventions of Greek and Roman Epic. The composition of a ‘song’ of America thus incorporates the songs of those that have fashioned the nation. Furthermore, Updike demonstrates the inescapable influence of ancestry and European forms on the literature of the so-called ‘New World.’

Updike’s systematic fusion of precise historical detail with fictional textures betrays the ingredients of a prose Epic. Despite its traditionally perceived status as a long narrative poem composed in language of an elevated style, concerning the ideals of a hero and utilising various conventions, the form has evolved within American literature into a prose phenomenon. According to John McWilliams’s study The American Epic: Transforming A Genre, 1770-1860, a new form of Epic was required for a new nation:

Just as Virgil and Milton contributed to the epic tradition by changing it, so an Epic for the New World had to be something other than a Virgilian, Homeric or Miltonic poem. Once histories and novels became the dominant literary forms of the 1820s and 1830s, the American Epic was far more likely to be written in prose, and probably would not be valued by a wide reading public unless it were written in prose. [2]

Further to its prose composition, the case for Rabbit Angstrom as Epic is strengthened by the evolution of the genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Homeric Epic focused upon ‘exterior achievement [and] great and heroic deeds by great men,’ more recent attempts at the genre have emphasised interior action, meditation and contemplation (for example, Ulysses and Moby Dick) with adventures scaled down to human dimensions. [3] But, Updike’s generational tale is also vast in scope, spanning five decades and integrating events of national magnitude. Thus, fitting with Merchant’s assessment of the genre as a ‘book of the tribe, chronicle and storybook’ in its combination of the fictive and the historical. [4] If the Epic, at least in its American manifestation, originated in a need for an established and recorded history, Updike’s series is significant not only by virtue of the density of historical record but also in the gradual investment of an historical consciousness within Rabbit himself. This interpenetration of fiction (based on the American mythology of individualism) and the provision of an historical texture, again, suggest generic characteristics associated with the European supreme poetic form, which merged myth and history.

As A.J. Boyle argued in his influential essay ‘The Canonic Text: Virgil’s Aeneid,’ the Epic, from the very first translation of Homer’s Odusseia by Andronicus Livius, has formulated itself as a palimpsestic text, deriving much of its significance from the rewriting of earlier accomplishments. [5] This is true of the genre in its early Roman expressions, which were composed largely in the modification and rewriting of previous Greek texts. From the Roman period to the present, this tendency toward imitative reproduction has endured. Medieval, Renaissance and even contemporary Epic is firmly fixed in this influential pattern forged by Virgil (one need only to recall Joyce’s Ulysses and its requisition of Homer’s Odusseia as evidence). The William Hayley verse that opens this article, however, not only outlines the multi-textual nature of Epic but also illuminates the intrinsic eclecticism of Empire. This forces one to reassess the genre as an ambitious, cross cultural vision of a universal humanity rather than simply the tale of the founding of a singular nation. Virgil’s epic, in its absorption of the Homeric quest, is, thus, an Epic of a multi-dimensional Empire. Moreover, the Virgilian text as a commentary upon the foundation of the Roman Empire casts a long shadow of association between the Epic as a literary genre and the ideals of the imperial dream. The Virgilian Epic is not eulogistic in a manner which may be attributed to Homer or, indeed, his own Latin predecessors but, rather, was reformed as a critical dialectic of ideas about the foundation of nationhood, with a concern for historical origins. Epic (à la Virgil) became the social and political commentary we associate with a writer as prolific and stylistically adaptive as Updike, focused upon historical reclamation, political interrogation and textual integration. By engaging with the Virgilian text as the exemplar of epic writing (and as a model for Updike) one is, thus, confronted primarily with a political genre, concerned with the establishment of the state and populace, attentive to political and historical issues of national identity and expansionism. Just as Virgil came to assess critically the ideals of imperialism in the Aeneid, Updike, in the Rabbit Angstrom series, presents a non-didactic discourse on the nature of the American state and citizenship.

Bearing this in mind, the quest for Epic is a more suitable designation of Updike’s enterprise (or at least that assigned him) for his fiction, in its historical scope and its sundry array of characters and personages, offers an elaborate and politically insightful vision of the world’s current hegemonic nation. Previous contenders for the title of the GAN such as Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales (1823-1841) and, more recently, DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), bear none of the narrative panegyrics one would expect the GAN to represent. All impart the disparate and miscellaneous aspects of American life and rather than celebrate the tenets of American civilisation and the American frontier, they question the very nature of cultural refinement and explore epistemological issues regarding both the universal and individual nature of human existence. Certainly, the core narrative of each of these contenders is the Homerically inspired heroic quest, the journey across a harsh and difficult landscape, which at every point illuminates the diminutive nature of the human in the face of a vast terrain.‘Heroes’ such as Ishmael, Natty Bumpo and even the infinitesimal Rabbit Angstrom, seemingly content in their existence, are forced to interrogate both the nature of self and nation as they embark upon a journey/quest for enlightenment. Updike’s narrative, as Epic, critically expounds rather than extols the realities of contemporary American power (see especially Rabbit, Run, 1960) and the American dream of individualism and exceptionalism (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit is Rich).Rabbit Angstrom examines the relationship between the American national image and its realities, representing the effect of the public world of nation with its imperial achievement on human values and human history.

Thus, at this preliminary juncture it is important to recognise that the decision to compose Epic was/is rarely viewed as solely a poetic undertaking. Virgil’s engagement with the facts of history in the formulation of a dialectic on the establishment of the state necessitated an interchange with Homer. However, as opposed to Homer and his own antecedents Virgil administered the socially and politically critical nature of the genre. From the outset, the Epic has been characterised by its transformative qualities and receptivity to change. According to Boyle, the once panegyric Epic was revolutionised, ‘by overtly using mythical discourse as political discourse … he made it difficult … for mythological epic to be apolitical.’ [6] This merging of the mythological and the political, thus, re-characterises the genre as a politico-historical mode, composed to make the past of immediate relevance to the present. This rendering of the past is engaged to elucidate the politics and social mores of contemporaneity, offering insights into the mechanics of everyday life. Virgil composed the Aeneid as a carmen heroum – ‘large scale, narrative, heroic poetry, concerned with the deeds of heroes and/or the history of a nation.’ [7] Updike’s engagement with the myth of American individualism pitched against the history and politics of the United States from 1959-2000 affords a remarkable comparative resemblance in terms of authorial motivation and generic composition.

Updike’s tightly-woven historical thread most resolutely associates the fictional series with the factual domain of national character. When we first encounter the young ex-basketball star in 1959, the issues that dominate Rabbit Angstrom’s life are, indeed, those of the day – the Korean War, the rapidly developing system of labyrinthine highways, the permeation of television into everyday life, and the escape of the Dalai Lama to India. In the 1960s, hippies, drugs, sexual experimentation, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and the moon landing infiltrate not only the national consciousness but also the protagonist’s home. The 1970s bring with them the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the Gasoline Crisis, President Jimmy Carter’s crisis of confidence, and the impending Japanese invasion of the American economy. In 1989, the end of the Cold War, the mid-air explosion of Pan-Am 747 over Lockerbie, America’s foreign debt, the rise of feminism and the AIDS epidemic each loom largely in the personal and national psyches of Updike’s protagonists. In 1999, Updike marries Rabbit’s various sexual promiscuities (as well as his ability to avoid being made accountable for them) with those of former president Bill Clinton in evoking the disquiet and discontent amongst Americans in the wake of the Lewisnsky-Jones accusations that arose toward the end of the Clinton administration.

Throughout each decade the public events of the day infiltrate the very individual life of the ‘hero,’ the tensions of the nation become, both implicitly and explicitly, those of the loyal citizen (in spite of his many failures and crises of confidence, Rabbit is a devoted believer in the institutions of the nation). For example, throughout his life Rabbit identifies with a number of US presidents. In the 1970s, (Rabbit is Rich) Rabbit suffers a similar crisis of confidence as then president Jimmy Carter (although Rabbit’s confidence involves his waning sexual potency). In 1989, he even begins to jog in emulation of George Bush. Most striking, however, is his parade performance as Uncle Sam in Rabbit at Rest – a vast yet crumbling symbol of the American nation in the midst of a national crisis of identity (the end of the Cold War and the invasion of former enemy Japan’s electronic merchandise upon the US economy). At all times, throughout the series, the national is evident – often foregrounded, and, in many ways, Rabbit is the product, not of Updike, but of these larger forces of history. One might even conjecture that Rabbit is, in fact, a symbol of the post-war nation itself:his youth and innocence, that of the quiet and tranquil Eisenhower presidency, and his adolescence the hedonistic and experimental America of the 1960s. Mid-life crisis and disillusionment with self-identity come with the gasoline crisis of the late 1970s. Rabbit’s death befalls with the ultimate shock to post-war US identity – the end of the Cold War. It is evident, thus, dealing with the history of the nation and the mythology of individualism in his treatment of the hero, that Updike is engaging with the Virgilian inspired carmen heroum, aspiring to the epical in his juxtaposition of the individual and the nation, myth and history.

Especially effective in underscoring the historical (and indeed, textual) reclamation of the Rabbit Angstrom series are the strategically placed news items in each of the Rabbit texts, which disclose the dominant ideological discourse of the period. As Harry makes his first flight from home, in Rabbit, Run, the radio filters a series of advertisement for 1950s consumer gadgets in between the musical features. It is the news of the day, however, which explicitly renders the formative features of the hero:

President Eisenhower and prime Minister Harold Macmillan begin a series of talks in Gettysburg, Tibetans battle Chinese Communists in Lhasa, the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of this remote and backward land, are unknown, a $250,000 trust fund has been left to a Park Avenue maid, Spring scheduled to arrive tomorrow. [8]

Later in this first novel and later in his life (shortly before his death in Rabbit at Rest) Harry wonders what it would be like to be the Dalai Lama. Frequently throughout the original text, Harry is placed upon a similar platform as the Eastern leader. Just as the Dalai Lama makes his journey southwards toward India rather than moving in an easterly direction (into the domain of the Communists), Rabbit makes the first of his escapes southwards through the biblically inspired Amish towns of Paradise, Intercourse and Bird-In-Hand. Not unlike the leader of the ‘remote and backward’ Tibet, Rabbit’s flight from home involves a quest for spiritual and emotional freedom. Also, evident and pervasive throughout the news report is the threat of Communism. Although the McCarthy witch hunts had dominated the earlier part of the decade, the fear of an outside Communist presence remained at the heart of 1950s American politics through to the latter part of the decade. The Eisenhower-Macmillan talks were, in fact, organised to reach an agreement regarding the containment of Nikita Khrushchev’s USSR. Therefore, Rabbit draws affinities with the Eastern spiritualist on the level of a perceived shared ‘enemy.’The mention of Gettysburg, naturally, evokes a further foundational historical level – the 1863 address by Lincoln which sought the promotion of equality and the ‘new birth of freedom,’ the principles of democracy upon which the nation was established. Quite ingeniously, in a single reel of historical footage, Updike portrays the spirit of an American decade: the threat of Communism both from Russia and within, the impending decline into the spiritual decadence of the 1960s with the growth of consumerism, and the foundational decrees of a nation which permeate every aspect of the individual life.

Given the particular polyphonic nature of Rabbit Angstrom, the application of the Epic as a palimpsestic, cross-fertilised form (bearing the marks of numerous generations’ myths and stories) is especially pertinent. Indeed, that which generates the meaning and force of the series is its relationship to and integration of other texts (both fictional and historical), most especially its allusions to Homer, Virgil and Joyce. [9] That which is, at once, remarkable about the Rabbit series is its evocation and transmission of the prevailing American national mood and concerns over five decades, through four generations of Angstroms (Ma and Pa Angstrom, Rabbit, Nelson and Judy). Thus, in many ways it would seem that Updike has assumed a position akin to that of an Homeric epicist – assembler of generational tales and anxieties, creating a richly imbued mosaic of historical, fictional and often fantastical threads. Furthermore, Updike’s ability to infuse a pungent oral quality to his rendering of the national mood and character at a particular point in the previous half-century (with astonishing accuracy and insight), in a way, integrates and emulates the oral nature of the Homeric Epic.

This intertextual resonance brings us back to the idea of Epic as intrinsically associated with the rhetoric of imperialism and consolidation of Empire. Virgil’s recapitulation of Homer’s Iliad in singing of ‘arms and the man who first from Troy’s shores came’ is, in a way, an imperial act. The Roman epicist commandeers and colonises the earlier Greek text. This formal mimesis, however, is designed to delineate the moral and political implications of imperialism. Furthermore, it outlines the necessary interaction of coloniser and colonised. The Hellenisation of Rome between 250 and 100BC not only subjugated but also offered Rome access to its culture and arts. Thus, in the words of Horace:

Captive Greece captured her savage conquerer
And brought culture to rustic Latium. [10]

This essential immersion and interaction of competing cultures in the formulation of a national and artistic identity is certainly evident in the formulation of an Epic for the United States. Spectres of European forebears haunt much of the fictional outpouring of American writers. Even the fiction of Updike bears resonance of the writer’s Dutch lineage (more notable than Rabbit Angstrom is In the Beauty of the Lilies). Consequently, the American quest for the supreme work of fiction resembles that of the artist trapped within the colonised space. For example, one might look to Joyce’s aspiration to forge the consciousness of the Irish people in Ulysses – a consciousness free of the cadences and afflictions, which marked Ireland’s colonial identity. Yet, to do so, Joyce (writing in English) was obliged to embrace the Greek tradition of Homer’s Odusseia and remained unable (and unwilling) to escape the looming spectre of Shakespeare. Similarly, the case may be posited in terms of those writers of the Harlem Renaissance who sought a literature of their own yet often were caught within the language, rhythms and inflections of the perceived dominant white voice. The alternative, in both instances, was not to reject completely what had in fact performed a formative role in the establishment of their art, but to engage and negotiate with that which had gone before. In the case of Updike, the author engages not only the age-old themes, motifs and forms of Virgil, Homer and Joyce but also those of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville and Sinclair Lewis in attempting to create something distinctly American, something bearing threads of old rendered anew (which, in many ways, characterises a nation founded by Old World Europeans). Thus, the polymorphic identity of Updike’s text may be perceived, in fact, to be a reflection of the author’s perception of America (that is, as a character of multiple and shifting identities) and American art as a whole.

Updike’s engagement with those ‘dead writers and poets who went before him’ is, of course, more than an exercise in demonstrating the inescapable nature of the past or, indeed, utilised in the illumination of the far-reaching tentacles of colonialism. [11] Intertextual reference generates much of Rabbit Angstrom’s meaning and connotative strength, especially its allusions to Homer, Virgil and Joyce. But, this intertextual weaving, as has been conjectured throughout this chapter, is nothing new to Epic. Although little is known of the precise origins of the Homer’s Odusseia and Iliad they are believed not to be the work of a single poet, rather part of a rich and diverse oral tradition. Eventually this opulent and diverse mosaic of generational songs, stories and poems came to be gathered and written down (and perhaps, according to Knox, not even written by a single person). [12] Virgil rewrites Homer in his ambition to unite the Iliad and the Odusseia in a larger, all-encompassing work. From the outset, Virgil subverted Epic expectations by reversing the order of the Homeric Epics. [13] This reversal is cardinal to recent and contemporary experimentation with the genre. The Odusseia deals with the humane and moral world of Odysseus, presenting a more morally pensive hero than the one-dimensional heroic warrior of the Iliad. Thus, Books one to six of the Aeneid narrate the wanderings of the lonely hero in search of a homeland and an identity. Aeneas reveals himself not to be the archetypal man of empire, a more Odyssean than Iliadic hero: vulnerable, sensitive, reflective and uncertain of the future yet driven by an inner yearning to successfully make the journey from Troy to Italy. Books seven to twelve relate a more Iliadic Aeneas, a warrior driven only by the quest for Empire’s expansion.

Updike’s contemporary Epic has, to some extent maintained, this thread. The first book of the Rabbit series introduces the individuality and personality of the young Harry Angstrom as he roams southward through the Pennsylvanian countryside. Propelled by an internal longing to uncover something of the nature of reality and his existence, the first book of the series offers little historical sub-text, narrating, instead, the wanderings of a disillusioned ex-basketball hero. The experiences of Virgil’s Aeneas result in a development of self-perception and a realisation of the human costs of imperial ambition. For Updike’s ‘hero’ such insights are never realised and the individual fails to reach any enlightened state of acuity. Thus, as Virgil both incorporates and destabilises the original Homeric Epic, Updike encompasses this feature of subversion but takes it still a step further in presenting the predicament of a twentieth century hero. A dialectic (of sorts) occurs but the protagonist never reaches the heights of intellectual, political or historical enlightenment. Virgil’s inversion presents an interesting comparison in the case of the Rabbit Angstrom series, for the protagonist with which we are presented in the first(Rabbit, Run) and second books (Rabbit Redux), though not quite antithetical, are certainly dissimilar. A change has occurred in Rabbit, just as a change in Aeneas occurs in Book seven of the Aeneid when he becomes a man of the public.Rabbit Redux (1971) is perhaps the most historically saturated of the Rabbit books. So much in fact, that we are given very little insights into Harry’s psychological mechanisms. He is presented, first and foremost, as an entity moulded by the political and social forces around him. Ten years older and no longer the contemplative young man of the 1950s who sought to understand the forces that governed his existence, Harry has become a loyal government supporter and an advocate of the Vietnam War. At every turn throughout the second book the national is foregrounded: drugs, hippies, sexual experimentation, the moon landing and the Civil Rights Movement all concurrently infiltrate the Angstrom living room and the narrative itself. Rabbit’s observation is extended outward and he moves from the private sphere to the public domain, from personal motivation and reflection to representative of the national. If Rabbit, Run was a novel about the struggle for self-knowledge and individual growth, Rabbit Redux is about emotional degeneration and the loss of personal identity. As the series progresses personal identity becomes further lost in this degenerative vortex and subsumed by the state.

There is, thus, more than narrative point in Updike’s decision to present a hero whose identity fuses increasingly with that of the state. The reader is invited to construe this tendency as part of Updike’s Epic discourse. The movement of Harry Angstrom from private to public man, as outlined, is both a continuation of the Epic code laid down by Virgil and an inversion of the earlier Homeric convention. Joyce also attended to such inversions, presenting a hero who is manifestly a private man of intellectual cast of mind but whose interactions with the public world stifle such lofty aspirations as self-improvement. Updike appears, thus, to be working within a long tradition of revolutionary epicists, striving towards variation and modification. It seems that the re-forming of the genre constitutes Updike’s methodology in creating an American Epic. By taking his own version of the genre a step further than Virgil takes in his movement from poetry to prose, Updike’s Epic is more despondent in its vision of humanity. Rabbit Angstrom represents a hero who, unlike Aeneas, is doomed to perpetually wander aimlessly in the veil of ignorance indoctrinated by state ideology and national forces larger than the individual will. Updike overthrows the notion of American individualism and the Virgilian/Homeric optimism in humanity. The contemporary epic (both Joycean and American) therefore continues with the critical strain of Virgil but offers little hope for humanity in the face of large-scale politico-ideological forces. Whilst Aeneas is a hero who fails to remember his private moral creed of Books one to six, Rabbit Angstrom never manages to articulate a personal ethos in the first place.

Within the Epic tradition and certainly within the contemporary American Epic intertextuality has come to function as a convention. Indeed, as previously stressed, it has been intrinsic to the genre since its inception. Part of this code is Rabbit Angstrom’s numerous allusions to both Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) and Joyce’s epic of the same year Ulysses. Of the Lewis text Updike himself has admitted:

When I came to read Babbitt, it was because its central character’s name rhymed with that of a fictional character of my own. The parallels astonished me – the bondage to one’s father-in-law’s business, the baffled love for one’s son, the dips into low life, and the scared skid home. [14]

Again, textual polyphony emerges as the listed parallels are not only evident in the Updike series, but may also be attributed to Ulysses. Certainly, the befuddled love of a son and the passage homeward are Joycean (as well as Homeric and Virgilian). In fact, one might establish an intertextual chain based on Updike’s own observations on the earlier American text:

For the next seven chapters and ninety pages, the author follows Babbitt through his rounds, returning him to the sleeping porch and enclosing his unconscious form within another omniscient overview of the city. The mock-epic note and the absurdist diurnal inventory are so strikingly reminiscent of another novel published in 1922, Joyce’s Ulysses, that one wonders if Lewis, in his wide reading, had encountered any of the Little Review excerpts. He was not above borrowing tricks from the avant-garde. [15]

Thus, we may establish a pattern: Updike engaging with Lewis and Joyce, Lewis engaging with Joyce and Joyce engaging with Homer’s Odusseia and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (as well as many other texts such as the New Testament, travel literature, philosophical exegesis, and so on). As a palimpsest, Rabbit Angstrom sits atop Babbitt, Ulysses, Hamlet, the Bible, the Aeneid and the Odusseia. All texts eventually allude (implicitly or explicitly) back to the Odusseia but it is Joyce’s ‘epic of the body’ in which past, present and future renderings of the genre meet at moments of intense imaginative vision which haunts the Updike series, almost invisible but ever present.

The shadow of the inept yet yearning Leopold Bloom as he wanders through the streets of Dublin precedes Rabbit on each of his journeys (through Pennsylvania in Rabbit, Run to his final southerly flight to Valhalla Villas, the palace of bliss for the souls of slain heroes, in Rabbit at Rest). Rabbit walks around Brewer with distorted television messages in his head in the same way that Bloom walks around Dublin turning advertising jingles in his head. Both are, rather ironically, assigned the names of animals: Leopold the rather tame lion and Harry the domesticated Rabbit, an infinitesimal ray of light (Angstrom) – both individuals lost and insignificant amongst the nation’s masses. Joyce’s term ‘epic of the body’ is taken on board literally by Updike as his character celebrates his own body and journeys deeper and deeper into the bodies of women with each decade’s instalment of his sexual dalliances. Further to this, Updike’s experimentation with the linotype in Rabbit Redux bears more than a passing resemblance to the Aeolus section of Ulysses in which the reader is presented with various newspaper headlines, column titles and advertising jingles which punctuate the narrative. Both Rabbit (in Rabbit Redux) and Bloom are employed to work for the news print trade, a device each epicist employs to illuminate the infiltration of the media in contemporary life and, indeed, the contemporary text. The all-pervasive news linotype not only affords Rabbit his day-to-day livelihood but also permeates his existence by documenting the events of his life. Joyce adopts a similar technique in demonstrating the media divestment of individuality ‘in the heart of the Hibernian Metropolis’ by using a series of newspaper headlines to illuminate the reality of a public centred modernity, which refers to the ‘hero’ as L. Boom. Further allusions to Joyce include the Janice-Molly soliloquy in Rabbit Redux, the association of male creative fertility and female reproductive fertility in Rabbit, Run (see ‘Oxen of the Sun’), and the journey home which microcosmically parallels the life-long journey toward death. Throughout the series, Updike uses the earlier text of Joyce, thematically and stylistically, to enrich the texture of his narrative, initiating a whole series of analogies between the wandering Jew and the American dreamer, which relay both the opacity and the particularity of a modern life.

Updike’s fictional engagement with the elapsed past and his preoccupation with historical and textual recuperabilty is both a formal and a generic aspect of his writing. His engagement with specific events is designed not merely to document historically but to attempt to reach a synthesis of the various social, political and cultural phenomena, which dominate the American psyche at a particular moment in time. By creating the American Epic as a palimpsest, both style and content merge and historical/textual reclamation is as rich and diverse as the America Updike seeks to encapsulate – a continent, indeed an Empire, which contains multitudes. The contest for the Great American Novel no longer dominates the fictional outpouring of the United States’ most culturally significant writers. America has inherited Rome’s sense of the Epic as its supreme literary genre. Thus, the Epic has transformed itself, formally and temporally, to resume its task of critically surveying the western world’s current hegemonic culture.

Oxford Brookes University

Notes

[1] Merchant, Paul, The Epic (London: Methuen, 1971), 3.

[2] John McWilliams, The American Epic: Transforming a Genre 1770-1860 (Cambridge, CUP, 1989), 6.

[3] ibid., 6.

[4] Paul Merchant, The Epic, 3.

[5] This is the core argument of A. J. Boyle’s 1993 essay ‘The Canonic Text: Virgil’s Aeneid’ from Roman Epic (London: Routledge, 1993), 79-107, to which I am greatly indebted for the formulation of this article.

[6] ibid., 2.

[7] ibid., 6.

[8] John Updike, Rabbit, Run (London: Penguin Books, 1960), 31.

[9] The use of the word ‘texts’ in the case of Updike is obviously intended to transcend the usual understanding of the term to incorporate radio and television news-reel reports, newspaper and magazine article, and advertisements from both print and television media.

[10] Horace, Epistles,(2.1.156-7).

[11] A. J. Boyle, Roman Epic (London: Routledge, 1993), 2.

[12] See Bernard Knox, ‘Introduction to the Odyssey’, The Odyssey, (London: Penguin, 1999).

[13] Boyle attends to this Virgilian inversion extensively in ibid., 95.

[14] John Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999), 239.

[15] ibid., 237.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 3, Spring 2003: Special Conference Edition

The American West through an Apocalyptic Lens: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Elizabeth Rosen
© Elizabeth Rosen. All Rights Reserved

Let [no one] suppose that an Indian campaign is a picnic. If he goes out on such business he must go prepared to ride his forty or fifty miles a day, go sometimes on half rations, sleep on the ground with small covering, roast, sweat, freeze, and make the acquaintance of such vermin or reptiles as may flourish in the vicinity of his couch; and finally, be ready to fight Sitting Bull or Satan when the trouble begins, for God and the United States hate non-combatants. [1]
Journalist, John Finerty, 1876

John Finerty’s statement, recounted in his book about his experiences as a journalist accompanying the U.S. Army on the Indian campaigns of the mid-19th century, reminds us of just how pervasive and official the rhetoric was which identified Native Americans with agents of the devil.It is here that I start my paper because I think that Cormac McCarthy is also acutely aware of this association, and that such references influenced the way he approached his first western, Blood Meridian.

Blood Meridian, too, recounts an Indian campaign of a sort.Set in the contested Coahuila-Texas and Sonaran provinces in 1849 during the age of Manifest Destiny, Blood Meridian follows its fourteen year old protagonist, known only as ‘kid,’ from the Tennessee hills through Freedonia and Nacogdoches to Bexar. Here he is recruited by the racist Captain White, whose aim is possibly to take back the territory which has been returned to Mexico in the Guadalupe-Hildago treaty following the war, but definitely to take revenge against what he calls a ‘race of degenerates.’[2] The kid’s tenure with White is abruptly cut short when the group is attacked by Apaches and those who are not murdered are dispersed.It is at this point that the kid becomes part of a second ‘hunting’ group, joining a fierce-looking band of Indian hunters headed by a man named Glanton.The remainder of the novel recounts the kid’s experiences as part of this gang, the violence they inflict and endure themselves as they move across the Mexican desert towards California, and his strange interaction with gang-member judge Holden.The story concludes when the kid, now a grown man some thirty years later, meets his own violent end.

In his novel, McCarthy has overlaid frontier history – in this case, the story of John Glanton’s Scalp Hunters – with the apocalyptic paradigm, and the effect of this strategy is that he gives the reader not just a revisionist frontier history, but a revisionist version of the apocalyptic myth, as well.

John Glanton did exist.He fought in the Mexican War, and supposedly became an Indian hunter in retaliation for the murder of his fiancée during an Indian raid. Glanton’s gang of renegades were notorious, and McCarthy has his protagonist join Glanton’s gang as they are riding out of Chihuahua City, having been hired by the governor to go out and kill the Indians terrorizing the Mexican colonists.

McCarthy has only ever given one interview. In it he talks very little about Blood Meridian, but we can discern, by default, where he took the bulk of his plot from, since there is only one historical mention of the man ‘judge’ Holden who is pivotal in the novel. [3] That document is General Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: the Recollections of a Rogue which details, among other things, his time in Glanton’s Gang.Reading Chamberlain’s description of Holden, one can easily see why McCarthy might have become fascinated with this character.Chamberlain describes him as both the best educated man in northern Mexico and an unparalleled villain with a streak of cowardice:

The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size called ‘Judge’ Holden of Texas.Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression.His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas;…Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball.He was ‘plum centre’ with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward.Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone when he had the advantage in strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible.I hated him at first sight and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did. [4]

As we read Chamberlain’s account of his experiences with Holden it becomes clear that Holden is also unscrupulous, violent, and more than a little spooky.

In his interview, McCarthy makes the following comment:

There is no such thing as life without bloodshed … the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom.Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous. [5]

Combined with McCarthy’s interest in the Myth of the West, we begin to see the elements that led to his apocalyptic interpretation of the frontier.Hence, there are two things this paper aims to explore: how the historic fact alters the apocalyptic paradigm, and how the apocalyptic paradigm alters our historical perspective.

The story of Apocalypse is fundamentally a religious one in which God plays the main character.In it, God battles and defeats the returned Antichrist, destroys the wicked unbelievers, along with the world as we know it, and rewards the true believers with a new Heaven on Earth called New Jerusalem.Reduced to its bare essentials, then, there are three ideas that are fundamental to Apocalypse: God, Judgement, and New Jerusalem.

This presents a challenge to secular writers.How do you tell a secular story with God as the main character?What does New Jerusalem look like to postmodern eyes?Do we even still believe in notions of judgement and reward for the good?Increasingly in the past century neither we have not or our eschatological fiction, while becoming ever better at describing the End, has often neglected the other pivotal part of the Apocalyptic story, New Jerusalem, so that one might say that we have plenty of End-time fiction, but less apocalyptic fiction.But, keeping in mind that the Greek root of eschatology means ‘furtherest’ or ‘uttermost’, there seems no better setting for an apocalyptic story than the frontier.

One of the things we might expect in a postmodern Apocalyptic story is ambiguity and plurality, and we get both in Blood Meridian.One of the first places we encounter this is in the conflation of roles which Holden occupies, for he seems to be God, Satan, and prophet all in one.Nonetheless, he has all the aspects we associate with deities.His learnedness makes him as good as omniscient in this wild setting, but the kid senses an additional extrasensory knowing, noting how the judge turns his horse to watch him leave Nacogdoches, smiling at him as he goes.Later the judge will tell the kid, ‘I recognized you when I first saw you’ and the reader understands that this recognition is not merely a physical one (p. 328).

In terms of omnipotence, Holden repeatedly escapes deadly situations that destroy the other mortals in the novel, whether that is being marooned in the desert or attacked by Indians.In one particularly eerie scene in the desert, the kid, who is an excellent marksman, shoots at Holden, and McCarthy writes that ‘the sands jump behind the judge’ as if the bullets have passed right through him (p. 288).

However, it’s really the element of omnipresence that makes Holden seem otherworldly.Time and time again, Holden appears in places he could not possibly have had time to get to.The first time this happens is the kid’s initial contact with him in Nacogdoches, where Holden has started a riot at a tent revival.As soon as the melee starts, the kid escapes from the tent to the local saloon, only to discover the judge is already at the bar.Gang-member and ex-priest Tobin recounts another of these mysterious manifestations, describing how Glanton’s gang, pursued by Indians deep into a desolate area, came upon Holden ‘in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see. Just perched on this rock like a man waitin for a coach.’

Then about the meridian of that day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self.Aye and there was no rock, just the one.Irving said he’d brung it with him….He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now….And there he set.No horse.Just him and his legs crossed, smilin as we rode up.Like he’d been expectin us….He didnt even have a canteen.It was like…You couldnt tell where he’d come from (p. 124).

This image of a smiling Buddha-like figure sitting calmly on a rock is one of several allusions to the god-like appearance of Holden.Others, such as when Holden steps through fire, or sits naked on a wall during a raging storm ‘declaiming in the old epic mode,’ associate him further with deities and prophets (p. 118).

His sobriquet, ‘judge,’ indicates this function, but the kid raises the pertinent question: ‘What’s he a judge of?’ (p. 135). In fact, this question is asked three times in a row, like an echo.The answer comes later in a delirious dream the kid has in which he imagines Holden looking down at him. In his eyes he

could read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a thing already accomplished (p. 310).

Like any apocalyptic god, Holden is the judge of men, and in his opinion at least, man is a bit uppity.Like the residents of Babel, they aspire beyond their place, and the judge makes this clear, warning,

For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe (p. 146).

Holden has the habit of sketching the things he comes across in the gang’s travels, whether botanical samples or artefacts of extinct Indian culture, but it is only the man-made artefacts that Holden destroys, rubbing out ancient rock paintings, or tossing pottery shards into the fire. [6] Questioned about this, Holden answers,

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent….This is my claim,” he says, identifying the earth around him, “And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life….In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation” (pp. 148-149).

Asked what he will do with his notes and sketches, Holden says it is ‘his intention to expunge them from the memory of man’(p. 140). As a deity, Holden is more like Shiva the Destroyer than Christ the Redeemer.He is a walking memento mori, reminding us at every turn the ludicrousness of our thoughts of permanence or control.

But notions of good and evil are ambivalent at best in the postmodern sensibility, so it is not just the wicked who are struck down in this version of apocalypse.Evil and good, implies McCarthy, are meaningless designations in a setting where death comes haphazardly and life is preserved as much by luck as by practical, hard-eyed decisions.More than this, the author calls into question whether such designations can ultimately even be made in a world of rapidly shifting alliances and changing circumstances.To shoot your wounded riding companion in the head may seem murderous in the drawing rooms back East (or alternatively in the comfortable chair of the reader), but calling such an act evil is simplistic in a world where the reality is that your wounded companion, caught by the Apaches, or the Scalp Hunters masquerading as Apaches, will be hung by his heels over a fire so that his brain boils in his head. [7]

Thus far, then, we can identify both a deity and judgement in McCarthy’s novel, and we can recognise, as well, how each of these elements have been revised to be relevant and plausible for a reader influenced by postmodern sensibilities.What, though, about New Jerusalem?

Typically, it is this idea of New Jerusalem which seems the hardest to translate to secular and postmodern writing.In part, we might trace this difficulty to a steadily growing pessimism that begins post-World War I and reaches a kind of zenith with the Holocaust and the invention of atomic weapons. [8] The despair these and other events inaugurated in the Western world of letters does not bode well for a concept such as New Jerusalem, which is predicated on hope.We could also speculate that the notion of heaven itself comes under pressure starting with the Victorian age. The increasing reliance on empirical sciences to explain the universe raises some difficult questions regarding Heaven and New Jerusalem.Heaven used to be ‘up there,’ but modern science has shown us that what is actually ‘up there’ is more a question for quantum physicists than religious preachers. [9] Heaven then, like the soul, must undergo some significant re-visioning as science becomes more adept at looking deeper into the mind, body, and stuff of universal origins.Add to those factors the ambivalence and ambiguity of postmodernism, and readers are well within their rights to wonder if New Jerusalem as a concept can plausibly be portrayed at all. [10]

However, it is with his reinterpretation of New Jerusalem that McCarthy seems most to have revised both the apocalyptic paradigm and the Western genre.McCarthy is fully aware of the intricacies of the Myth of the West and the debate about how it has been used to define American identity, so it is here that he plays upon both the idea of the frontier and the pivotal role that the Myth of the West has had in defining national identity.

According to this myth, there is only one direction that this new heaven on earth can exist and it is to the west where the hope of a new, uncorrupted life is seated.We remember Thoreau’s essay ‘Walking’ which articulated this idea, claiming that mankind progresses from east to west:‘We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.’[11] Blood Meridian undermines this myth when McCarthy reverses the idea entirely.Man does not progress as he goes west, quite the contrary: no matter how far west the kid goes, the violence, the randomness of death and destruction, remains a constant.History is realised through a westward motion, not an eastward one, in this novel: Holden retraces the steps of mankind using artefact and geology as guides and is heard more than once holding forth on the subject of history:

It is not necessary that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts – to the extent that they can be readily made to do so – should find a repository in the witness of some third party (p. 85).

New Jerusalem is going to be radical in McCarthy’s novel.In this version of Apocalypse, New Jerusalem is not a place, but a new way of seeing and understanding.The world which is destroyed is the old optimistic and mythic view of the West as the ‘land of beginning again,’ the chance of a better life. This is the worldview of the traditional western in which Right triumphs in the end, where the protagonist survives confrontation and suffering either to occupy a moral and privileged position finally or to undergo a redemptive transformation.

McCarthy sets the reader up for this traditional western ending when he has the kid ask the bonepicker boys whether they like meanness and because the kid has questioned meanness so little in the novel, it’s impossible not to read an implication in this question that meanness is not something to be liked (p. 319). But, McCarthy reverses the reader’s expectation just pages later when the kid actually kills one of these boys. And he uses this strategy to even greater effect when the kid makes his first offer of protectorship to the lone survivor of a massacre he happens upon in the desert.

He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships.He told her that he would convey her to a safe place, some party of her countrypeople who would welcome her and that she should join them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die (p. 315).

When this old woman turns out to be a mummified corpse, McCarthy signals the futility of this kind of identification with the whole of the human family.

New Jerusalem, then, is the new understanding of universal order which judge Holden enunciates in the final pages of the novel, the same idea which McCarthy has voiced in his interview: that you give up your soul and your freedom if you invest yourself in the notion of harmony among men [12]. This is a radical undermining of traditional ideas about Heaven, where harmony is the whole point.And to seal the coffin on the traditional notions of both New Jerusalem and the Western novel, McCarthy ends with the unknowing kid going into an outhouse and into the murderous arms of the judge who awaits him there, so that even after all he has lived through, this kid will not get to ride off into an optimistic sunset.In fact, the novel’s subtitle, ‘the evening redness in the west,’ and the repeated references to the blood red sunsets would seem to signal that many things other than the day are ending in this story, not least of which might be the traditional Western.

I do not mean to suggest here that McCarthy has done something unique in replacing the western hero with the violent amoral characters of Blood Meridian.The traditional western hero was already metamorphosing four decades ago as the western genre matured and changed with the times.Western scholars have tracked the gradual transformation of the traditional Hero into a cynical, troubled Antihero more in accordance with the turbulent Sixties and Seventies, and then into the amoral Antihero of the Eighties, ‘representing the last stage in the breakdown of the genre’s conventions and principles’ where ‘the amoral western [strips] away all vestiges of moral dimensions, its antiheroes winning out solely because they are more cold-bloodedly vicious and treacherous than their opponents.’[13]

McCarthy is as well aware of this evolving western protagonist as he is of the Myth of the West.It is not the carefully crafted amoral tone of the narration or demeanour of the characters which is unique in this novel so much as it is that McCarthy has identified a useful and appropriate match in combining the Apocalyptic and Western myths [14].

Calling westerns ‘myth in action,’ Jeffrey Wallmann describes how westerns rely on oppositions for their power, noting ‘the duality most often associated with westerns is the conflict between good and evil … In stark black and white, the forces of good confront the forces of evil in a contest of wills – of free will, the innate power to choose one or the other, with wickedness ultimately vanquished.’ [15]

Put a white hat on Christ and a black one on the Antichrist and we see that the western as a genre is a close cousin to the Book of Revelation.In a 1961 article for The Nation, John Williams posited that this elemental struggle in westerns mesmerises Americans, not because of the Myth of the West, but because it appeals to our Puritan roots:‘Beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves, and the crashing stagecoaches there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.’[16] Richard Slotkin addresses this issue of the purification of violence in his book Gunfighter Nation.

What is distinctly “American” is not necessarily the amount or kind of violence that characterizes our history but the mythic significance we have assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced, the forms of symbolic violence we imagine or invent and the political uses to which we put that symbolism. [17]

McCarthy understands how violence has been used in the traditional western, as indeed in the Book of Revelation, to signify something about justice and injustice, morality and immorality.His aim seems to be to debunk this idea that violence signifies anything beyond itself, that those who commit it act in a just manner and that those who suffer it, are deserving of their fates. [18] But if it’s not just the villains who are the victims of violence, if the heroes don’t always use violence fairly in westerns, as Blood Meridian seems to indicate, the implication is that the same is true for the original myth of righteous violence in the Book of Revelation.The suggestion implicit in the analogy is that the Book of Revelation and its myth of righteous justice deserves the same critical, perhaps cynical, eye that the traditional western does.

McCarthy allies himself with fellow author Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s ideas about ‘primary realism,’ which argue that:

man’s beliefs must accommodate both the brute force of nature and the affirmation of nature … the brutality and indifference which so impressed the naturalist, as well as the empathy and meaning which so impressed the romanticist. [19]

Hence, in a passage that appropriately enough echoes Nietzsche, Holden tells the kid:

As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question, those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers…. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at least that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance (p. 331).

Finally, if McCarthy has used the western to rework traditional notions of Apocalypse, his use of the apocalyptic paradigm has implications for western history as well.Part of the appeal of the apocalyptic story is its oppositional structure: Good vs. Evil, Justice vs. Injustice.The duality in the myth is comforting in its clarity: there is no grey area to confuse us.By applying this paradigm to a historical era that is far more complex, McCarthy asks that his readers pay attention to the ‘reality’ of the frontier in a way they might not otherwise.Wallmann notes in his study of the Western genre that to remember reality is to destroy myth. [20] There is no moment of Blood Meridian in which the reader is not aware that the characters and events simply cannot be forced into the easy opposition of good or evil.All men are equally vicious and violent in this novel. And all violent men are capable of moments of mercy and compassion, as well. In the end, the constant scraping of the ‘real’ against the duality of the apocalyptic paradigm encourages the reader to consider how problematic it is to apply this simplistic perspective to our historical past, and in doing so, also makes us reconsider both America’s apocalyptic origins and its rhetorical tradition of interpreting historical events through this lens of good and evil.

University College London

Notes

[1] John Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, Introduction by Oliver Knight(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 80-1.

[2] Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (London: Picador, 1989), 34. Subsequent page references will refer to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

[3] John Sepich’s book, Notes on Blood Meridian (Louisville: Bellarmine College Press, 1993) documents all the historical references in McCarthy’s novel.

[4] Samuel E. Chamberlain, My Confession: the Recollections of a Rogue, Introduction and postscript by Roger Butterfield (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), 271-2.

[5] Richard B. Woodward, ‘Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction’, The New York Times, April 19, 1992. Magazine. Lexus-Nexus online. (Nov. 2, 2002)

[6] In actuality, it was Chamberlain, not Holden, who had the habit of sketching.

[7] Peckinpah’s film The Wild Bunch has a scene depicting exactly this scenario.

[8] For a more complete discussion of how the atomic bomb in particular affected American culture and letters, see Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

[9] Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang trace the changing ideas about Heaven in their book Heaven: A History, 2^nd Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

[10] Thomas Pynchon’s work is sometimes held up as an example of a postmodern writer whose writing is apocalyptic, but it seems to me that New Jerusalem is missing from his work, as well.A novel such as Gravity’s Rainbow, which is focused on entropy, portrays the running-down of the world, but no new world afterwards, so would be a good example of an eschatological, but not apocalyptic, work.

[11] Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, The Atlantic Monthly, June, (1862).http://ecotopia.org/ehof/thoreau/walking.html (Nov. 12, 2002).

[12] McCarthy foreshadows this theme with his three epigraphs, particularly in choosing Jacob Boehme, who elsewhere has written: ‘In nature one thing has always been set against another, so that one is the enemy of the other, and yet not to that end that it is its enemy, but rather that one moves the other in struggle, and reveals the other in itself.’

[13] Jeffrey Wallmann, The Western: Parables of the American Dream (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1999), 168.

[14] McCarthy seems to challenge even the idea that the amoral hero is new by choosing John Glanton as one of his pivotal figures, since Glanton himself engaged in an amoral switch of allegiances during his lifetime.Glanton served underColonel James Fannin in the Texas Army and was one of the few Americans who escaped execution at the hands of Mexican General D. José Urrea at Goliad. The mass execution of prisoners who had voluntarily surrendered – 330 were killed – outraged Americans, and Urrea became known as the Butcher of Fannin’s Command. After the war, however, Glanton entered the service of Urrea as an Indian fighter.

[15] Jeffrey Wallmann, The Western, 30.

[16] John Williams, “The ‘Western’: Definition of the Myth”, The Nation, 193:17, (Nov. 18, 1961), 401-6.

[17] Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 13.

[18] Western writer Vardis Fisher notes that western ‘history’ is largely myth, rather than factual, in his essay with Opal Laurel Holmes, ‘Fact or Fiction: The Blend of History and Legend’ collected in The Western: A collection of Critical Essays, Ed. James K. Folsom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979), 95-110.This means that McCarthy is debunking a simulated history of the west, as well as a real Myth of the West.

[19] Max Westbrook, ‘The Western Esthetic’, in Critical Essays on the Western American Novel, Ed. William T. Pilkington (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980), 76.

[20] Jeffrey Wallmann, The Western, 150.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 3, Spring 2003: Special Conference Edition

Toni Morrison and the Magical Re-Visioning of Space

Sara Upstone
© Sara Upstone. All Rights Reserved

This paper aims to engage with the work of Toni Morrison from within the critical context of what may loosely be termed postcolonial studies. This in itself needs some qualification, as it is in some ways problematic to view the American nation as postcolonial. For although America ceased to be colonial in 1776, it has gone on to become one of the most influential neo-colonial powers in the modern world. The definition of the American nation as postcolonial raises problems for postcolonial approaches to the nation since postcolonial studies are concerned primarily with issues of the peripheral. Indeed, America is clearly not a peripheral nation either geographically or ideologically and its colonial policy has in some ways continued through aggressive territorial expansion and an economic strength that allows America to exert powerfully its influence. It is for this reason that critics such as Timothy Powell, when tracing the concept of America as a postcolonial nation, highlights the conceptual fluidity of the term postcolonialism. Powell notes that while some critics see writers such as Emerson and Melville as trying to carve out a new American voice that may be seen in itself as postcolonial, other critics point to ethnic groups still colonized from within America. For example, African and Hispanic Americans would exemplify the postcolonial subject as it is they who face the continued legacy of colonial practices of prejudice and segregation. [1] This does not mean that American writers cannot be included within discussions on postcolonialism. Indeed, the special nature of their position in the world means they must be confronted whenever we use the term postcolonialism, suggesting that its easy, catch-all status is a gross over-simplification. Further, we cannot simply use the term as a trope for concepts such as marginality, otherness, and difference.

This paper argues that Toni Morrison’s novels may be seen as clearly postcolonial. For not only do they come from an American writer who may be seen to be following in the tradition of figures who are postcolonial in the purely historical sense (and also possibly in the sense of a new post-1776 American literature), they also come from an African-American writer who engages with how colonial power has been perpetuated in the exploitation of black Americans. In addition, Morrison addresses how this exploitation is an important part of the perception of America as a neo-colonial nation today. In this way, Morrison may be seen to effectively interrogate both America’s colonial past, and also its neo-colonial present, a linkage of history with the contemporary which may in many ways be responsible for her massive popular success.

Indeed, it is for one half of this strategy, namely her interaction with history, that Morrison has been most clearly identified as a writer of particular cultural significance. Yet it is not that aspect of her work that I would like to focus on here, but rather on a far less discussed facet of her writing, that is Morrison’s use of space as a category that both accompanies her critique of history and, at times, provides relief from the official discourses that such history is associated with. The spatial, be it the study of nations at one end of the spectrum, or everyday household containers at the other, has been the focus of increasing critical attention in recent years. We need only note Michel Foucault’s proclamation that ‘the present epoch will be above all else the epoch of space’ [2] to confirm its central place in current thinking. Increasingly, we find texts devoted to spatial analysis without a continual referencing of time as a factor which ‘has causal priority’ [3] but where, instead, Grossberg’s desire for ‘space itself to become a philosophical project’ [4] has been fulfilled: in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift’s Mapping the Subject, Marcus Doel’s Poststructuralist Geographies, Edward Soja’s Thirdspace and Postmetropolis, David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope. [5] Moreover, it is not a preoccupation that has passed by postcolonial theory, and we may see in the postcolonial novel an active attempt to use space in creative and original ways. Indeed, this paper would suggest that it is in the category of the spatial that we may find some of the most important resistances to the continued impact of colonisation. Just as there is a colonial linear time, so there is an equally pervasive colonial space of similar linearity and rigidity, a space most comprehensively outlined by J.K. Noyes who defines the colonial space as one that is tabular, gridded and Euclidean, ‘a space which relies upon a strategy of totalization’ [6] and overwrites the spatial characteristics developed by the autochthonous cultures it conquers, as it ‘supplants any experiential forms which preceded it’. [7] Therefore, just as there is a unique presentation of history in the postcolonial novel that acts as a corrective to colonial time, so there is also a postcolonial presentation of space that may answer back to its colonial predecessor.

By creating a new concept of space, the postcolonial novel may subvert the way by which colonialism relies upon the use of territory and mapping to support its enterprise, a strategy that is ironic in the fact that it is a method of resistance that may mean taking something positive from the very site of oppression. This is not to deny the violence of colonial spaces, but rather to attempt to seize that which is negative in order to subvert its significance. Thus I turn your attention to Bill Ashcroft’s recent book On Post-Colonial Futures in which he emphasises exactly such a transformation of space and its significance. [8] Writing on the Caribbean Sugar Plantation, Ashcroft describes it the site of ‘the most traumatized and disrupted colonial populations’, the very epitome in many ways of colonial violence. [9] Yet he also says that it is the site of what he terms ‘the most revolutionary cultural developments.’ [10] This is not only in spite of colonialism, a vibrant Creole culture that prevailed despite malnutrition, brutality and disease, but also because of it, the sense that the forms of cultural resistance built up as a response to exploitation are the bedrock of the vitality of the Caribbean. Similarly, Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has referred to the ‘heart in the wound’ [11], a process of re-discovering a wealth of experience and cultural diversity obscured by the negative attributes of colonialism, a wealth that preceded colonisation but also came about as those colonised reacted creatively to their circumstances. Yet it is also something that we may associate directly with African-American responses. bell hooks, for example, has explicitly invoked the spatial by claiming the margin as a site of resistance, a reconfiguring of negative space that affirms Ashcroft’s argument. For hooks, situating the postcolonial within colonial space is a political act as the ex-centric location becomes not just the margin as a site of territorial loss but also the ‘margin as a space of radical openness’ [12] that provides the postcolonial commentator a unique view on the world and thus a unique critique of its practices. These ‘spaces where we begin the process of re-vision’ [13] are, in contrast to the colonial, filled with ‘multiple voices’ [14], postcolonial spaces where oppression has been marvellously transformed into resistance offering ‘the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine new alternatives, new worlds.’ [15]

For Toni Morrison, it is her use of magical-realist narrative, I would argue, that fulfils this potential. By magical-realism, I do not mean to suggest that Morrison is a writer of fantastic literature. Rather, I mean to emphasise the way in which her work presents us with a heightened presentation of reality; a heightened presentation that serves the postcolonial re-visioning of space because, as Wendy Faris has noted, the magical-realist text is one that questions received notions about space, time and identity, as it acts to ‘delineate sacred enclosures […] and then allow these sacred spaces to leak their magical narrative waters over the rest of the text and the world it describes.’ [16] Magical-realism undermines the spatial homogeneity of conventional realism with a new space of hybridity and flux, in the same way that the postcolonial novel acts to undermine the colonial space that such realism is predicated on. Perhaps the most obvious example of such a strategy in Morrison’s work is the presentation of the domestic space in Beloved. For 124 Bluestone Road truly is a magical-realist space, a house marvellously haunted by a chaotic possession that allows it to become a vehicle that transports its inhabitants beyond their immediate histories. Metonymic qualities see the house at times stand for the slave ship of the middle passage, its sounds described by Morrison as echoing ‘the sounds in the body of a ship’ [17], in what is a common strategy of post-colonial magical-realism, what Stephen Slemon has referred to as, ‘transformational regionalism so that the site of the text, though described in familiar and local terms, is metonymic of the postcolonial culture as a whole.’[18] Instead of simply an 1873 house in a Cincinnati street, we are instead transported to the personal and denied collective histories of slaves, as their own voices leak unmediated through the home’s walls, Beloved’s recalling, ‘nothing to breathe down here and no room to move in’ [19]. It is ‘larger than the people who lived there. Something more than Beloved.’ [20]

Yet 124 Bluestone Road is the most heavily discussed of all Morrison’s spaces, and if we are to establish the fact that a postcolonial, transformative, and magical space is at work in Morrison’s novels, then we must look in detail at the qualities of the other spaces that proliferate in her novels. In terms of domestic space, it is important that the dwelling in Tar Baby functions in a way that strongly foreshadows the spatial re-visioning of 124 Bluestone Road. Like 124 Bluestone Road, the house of L’Arbe de la Croix that forms the spatial focus in Tar Baby, is a house that is both reflective of colonial patterns and yet ultimately undermining of them. It is colonial in its architecture and location, a 1970s house existing in the shadow of French colonial administration identified by ‘French colonial taxes’ [21] and ‘administration buildings’ [22], and also in its domestic practices and the attitudes of its inhabitants. It retains house servants in a process reminiscent of Phyllis Palmer’s argument that ‘after emancipation the imagery of service remained intact’ [23], and that servitude was ‘nothing less than slavery.’ [24] Yet, ultimately, Morrison’s narrative inverts such a structure as it is the servants of the house that come to assert themselves, questioning and defiling both the physical and mental boundaries set up by the employer and invading those spaces most valued by the landowner. The newcomer, named ‘Son’, makes such a process explicit, waking the house, hiding in its closets, to discover its least-explored corners in a way that its mistress Margaret has never done so that he ‘grew to know the house well’ [25] until ‘It became his, sort of. A nighttime possession.’ [26] Morrison gives the house a life and identity of its own which gives it the capacity for such monumental change, no longer closed to the outside world as the wilderness creeps in through its walls and, indeed, such an alteration is woven into the very structure of Morrison’s narrative. Thus, just as we find the use of metonym and personification of the house in Beloved, so here we again find a house personified, ‘a house of shadows.’ [27] Simile, too, features heavily in the representation. It is a house ‘both closed and wide open. Like an ear it resists easy penetration but cannot brace for attack’ [28], a place where ‘fog came […] in wisps sometimes, like the hair of maiden aunts. Hair so pale and thin it went unnoticed until masses of it gathered around the house and threw back one’s own reflection from the windows’ [29], allowing its inhabitants to see themselves with new vision.

Such a strategy strikes at the heart of its colonial counterpart. As Anne McClintock has noted, the domestic space in colonial discourse would so often function as a metaphor for the colony, so that ‘imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of domestic space’ [30], even at the level of the mass marketing of particular household items:

Both the cult of domesticity and the new imperialism found in soap an exemplary mediating form. The emergent middle class values – monogamy (“clean” sex, which has value), industrial capital (“clean” money, which has value), Christianity (“being washed in the blood of the lamb”), class control (“cleansing the great unwashed”) and the imperial civilising mission (washing and clothing the savage”) – could all be marvellously embodied in a single household commodity.[31]

Thus for postcolonial critics, to ‘domesticate’ is not only to form the home, but also to be involved in a discourse of order that echoes colonial division of space at the level of the nation. For Nathaniel Mackey, ‘what place means in American poetics is most often the quality of not having been wholly domesticated or mapped’ [32], so that the colonial mapping is parallel to its domestication, and what the postcolonial novel charts is the spaces that have so far resisted these enterprises. When Morrison replaces metaphor with simile, she gives us, instead of the colonial home, a space imbued with an independent significance of its own, a space that may be like something else but is never a simple cipher. It has a power of its own that makes it valid in its own right, truly a re-presentation.

If we focus upon the many other uses of space beyond the domestic that Morrison employs throughout her novels, then we can see that such a strategy is an important motif across the author’s fiction, tying her closely to the postcolonial novel’s project of revising the colonial presentation of space. It is not only the home that is revised in Beloved. If we take movements across space such as journeys, then we find that they too are revised. For the journey, like the home, is revealed to contain a sense of instability, like the home a chaos or fluidity. Once again, such a space denies colonial authority as the linear space of order and control comes to be represented in historical accounts of movement and in the policing of borders as limiting spaces. Toni Morrison takes a real slave narrative, that of Margaret Garner, as her basis for the central character Sethe’s journey to freedom. Yet she makes it a journey that is continually repeated and altered through remembrance, doubly displaced as not only her own remembering of the journey, but also her daughter’s remembrance of its original telling, in order to distance the movement from its original form. In this way she reminds us of the narratives written during slavery that were both colonial and, continuing after 1776, neo-colonial, but she then also reworks their significance, inserting an ambiguity into their telling that means the journey can no longer be fixed, defined or mapped with any certainty. The movements of slavery are captured in a form that emphasises the unpredictable and the personal. Consciously changing the Margaret Garner slave account, Morrison strategically alters the fugitive slave woman’s companions, removing Sethe’s husband from the journey even though Margaret Garner travelled with her husband, in order to create an explicitly gendered experience. [33] The fact that it is Sethe’s story rather than those of the males surrounding her that becomes prominent, indeed is the very voice for their stories, subverts powerfully the assertion that ‘the masculine heroic discourse of discovery is not available to women.’ [34] Moreover, with the inclusion instead of Amy Denver, a white woman, as Sethe’s accomplice, the narrative also acts to overwrite an opposition of slave against master with the union of white and African-American women. Beloved refuses the binary opposition of colonised and coloniser that would define the slave as ‘other’ in favour of more problematic characterisations, as we find a gradual wearing away as the movement continues that turns Amy’s awareness of ‘a nigger’ [35] into tenderness and ‘good hands.’ [36]

What is of particular interest in such a reversal is its ability to go beyond rejecting the colonial and highlighting exploitation, towards suggesting positive future possibilities for the postcolonial citizen. In Beloved this means that Sethe’s journey, a slave journey re-visioned by Morrison’s narrative, is no longer only a trauma, but also a political defiance, refusing to die on what she refers to as the ‘wrong side of the river’ when such rivers are integral to the boundaries of a United States of colonial and neo-colonial inequality, ‘very important in the creation of colonial, state and county boundaries in the United States.’ [37] The emphasis on power has shifted, away from the power of the colonist, towards the power of the individual to enact resistance, an assertion of ‘the individual and collective agency demonstrated by seemingly “powerless” players on the global stage.’ [38] We are no longer reading an echo of the past. Instead, I would argue, Morrison is invoking what Anuradha Needham has termed the postcolonial ‘re-play’ [39]: the use of a well-known narrative to conjure particular images in the mind of the reader, images which are then subverted and overturned rather than supported, ‘displacing, unsettling, or interrogating.’ [40] For Sethe’s journey is no longer the story of a victim, as we might expect, but rather of the creative strategies of a survivor. Indeed, following on from the metonymic transformation of 124 Bluestone Road, what Beloved herself represents is another version of this traveller. The ‘traveller’ of the Middle Passage ‘disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her’ [41], as Beloved gives her a movement, makes her a journeywoman, walking silently ‘they ought to have heard her tread, but they didn’t’ [42], ‘a loneliness that can be rocked […] this motion, unlike a ship’s […] a loneliness that roams’ [43] as Sethe’s ancestors in Beloved lose their lives to the water and are yet are also born out of it – ‘they fall into the sea […] I come out of the water.’ [44] However much Beloved is ‘not a story to pass on’ [45], this silent movement will secure her remembrance, will ensure that her name is remembered and that her story is re-inscribed, drawing its own trace on the landscape, even as it seemingly disappears, re-played in the movement of others just as Beloved herself embodies a re-play:

the rustle of a skirt […] the knuckles brushing a cheek […] Down by the streams in the back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out again and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there. […] Beloved. [46]

Moreover, Morrison’s other novels strongly substantiate the fact that such a spatial strategy is being enacted. In Song of Solomon, for example, movement through space both signifies oppression and at the same time opens a doorway to new possibilities for resistance. The central character Milkman’s journey from the Midwest into the South is a painful awakening to his past, and yet it is important that we note that it is an awakening nevertheless. Thus at its beginning Milkman’s journey is a reproduction of the characteristics of the colonial journey. It is an adventure towards buried treasure, a kind of El Dorado’s gold, that provides reminders of the colonial expedition: Milkman journeying into the unknown, exoticising the characters he meets, and initially mapping his territory in the same way as the colonist as meaning nothing more than the physical landmarks that will lead him towards riches. Thus ‘he watched signs – the names of towns that lay twenty-two miles ahead, seventeen miles to the east, five miles to the northeast. And the names of junctions, counties, crossings, bridges, stations, tunnels, mountains rivers, creeks, landings, parks and lookout points’ [47], measuring his space. However, in a perfect example of ‘re-play’, the journey quickly alters to undermine the very narrative it initially appears to construct. Airplane flight gives Milkman a distorted view of reality—‘it was not possible to believe he had ever made a mistake’ [48]—which is continued on the ground: watching names on the bus only to find when he alights that ‘there were no street signs anywhere’ [49], so that the mapped space has been replaced by a space that cannot be mapped. Instead of the cartographic spaces of the colonial, Milkman finds instead those places implicit in the oppression of African-Americans but overwritten and denied: ‘you can’t walk it, that’s for sure. Buses go there? Trains? No. Well, not very near’ [50], a ‘winding path (which they called a road).’ [51] Moreover, just as for the other experiences of space we have focused on, there is a nexus to resistance that is enabled by such transformation. At the end of his journey, like the ‘flying African children […] those Africans they brought over here as slaves could fly. A lot of them flew back to Africa’. [52] Milkman finds that he too can literally ride the air and, in doing so, can reverse the Middle Passage in an important act of self-assertion. Invoking music as a powerful gateway that undermines a journey based on sight, foreshadowed at the novel’s opening as Mr Smith ‘heard the music, and leaped on into the air’ [53] the meaning of the negro spiritual ‘Solomon done fly’ awakens Milkman to ‘his interest in his own people […] growing’ [54], to find his own epiphany, his own conclusion to the journey, not in treasure but in divine awakening. It is the spiritual that Ronald Segal has emphasised as central to slave resistance, the dream of freedom that expresses flight to a space without territory:

Sometimes I feel like
A eagle in de air
Spread my wings an’
Fly, fly, fly. [55]

Milkman is no longer repeating a colonial journey, but creating his own in counterpoint – a journey not of containment, but of free movement – and, in doing so, he provides a powerful alternative to the violent resistance he is so nearly immersed in, a replacement of the colonial desire to order space with a postcolonial expression of its fluidity. The physical journey only serves to facilitate a mental progress that is infinitely more powerful, Morrison’s own epigraph: ‘the fathers may soar’ and, as a result, ‘the children may know their names.’ [56]

The most powerful evidence for such transformation, however, is that it extends to the most intimate space of the individual’s body, which is itself spatialised by Morrison so that it can never be ultimately held in the service of any power. Milkman’s flight, of course, is an engagement with such freedom, emphasised by the fact that Milkman does not gain economic wealth but, in gaining spiritual riches, appears to lose everything, as ‘he was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared’ [57]: even his body. It may be seen more clearly in one particular incident in Beloved, that of Paul D’s escape from the chain gang. Paul D dances limbo to freedom, ‘Down through the mud under the bars, blind groping.’ [58] Such an act reflects Wilson Harris’s definition of limbo as an African ritual used by the slave on the slave-ship in order to fold space, where, spider-like, ‘the limbo dancer moves under a bar which is gradually lowered until only a mere slit of space, it seems, remains […] so that a re-trace of the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas and the West Indies is not to be equated with a uniform sum’ [59], and may be seen as an enactment by Morrison of a magical-realist strategy that undermines the Euclidean and geometrical space relied upon by colonial mapping. Indeed, in this case, it subverts the colonial system of punishment as well; a system that puts men behind bars based on a rationalist knowledge of the human body, but is outdone by the capacity of the individual to transcend these limits. Yet it is Morrison’s female characters who perhaps express this power most effectively as they spatialise their bodies against not only colonial representation, but also its extension through patriarchy. In Morrison’s most recent novel, Paradise, the isolated women of the convent successfully escape their physical forms as they are constructed by the community around them, denigrated and abused. The forces that threaten them are defined by a bodily absolutism, a subverted ‘colorism’ [60] where there is ‘a new separation: light-skinned against black.’ [61] In opposition, the women instead create an abstract space which can no longer be touched by such forces, as the body is transferred:

Consolata told each to undress and lie down. In flattering light under Consolata’s soft vision they did as they were told. How should we lie? However you feel […] When each found the position she could tolerate on the cold, uncompromising floor, Consolata walked around her and painted the body’s silhouette. [62]

In a displaced somatography, lying on the floor and drawing round themselves to create a self-portrait that may also be seen as a re-birth, the women draw their broken dreams on their bodies. Through art, the women painfully remember the abuse, ‘pain from a stranger’s penis and a mother’s rivalry.’[63] Yet they then transcend this to approach the magical, creating surrealist visions of themselves, ‘a crooked fluffy mouth […] Two long fangs.’ [64] They become not ‘nobodies’ but, in an important distinction and linguistic subversion, ‘No bodies. Nothing’ [65], as they ‘took other shapes and disappeared into the air.’ [66] Here Morrison may be seen to ally herself not only to the postcolonial re-visioning of space, but also to poststructuralist spatial theory, where bodies become Deleuzian ‘intensities’ [67] that are sheer energy, constantly transforming, rather that limited by the constraints of identity. Such performativity reclaims the most ultimate space, and sends the message that, despite violence against the body being central to any imperial endeavour, the individuals themselves become a territory that can never be wholly conquered. Indeed, what such a reading reveals is the intensely poststructuralist nature of all of Morrison’s spaces, the ‘reading and re-reading […] Infinite infinities folded into each event of space’ [68] and ‘scattering footprints and pathways’ [69] that may be seen in her revision of narrative journeys, the ‘whirling vapour’ [70] that may be seen in her presentation of the chaotic and multi-layered home. It is a combination that suggests that poststructuralism may be more than the nihilist free-play it is so often seen as; that it may instead suggest very real strategies for very real oppressions.

These are just a few examples of what is a widespread treatment of space within Morrison’s novels – we might also discuss, for example, the clearing in Beloved, or the city in Jazz – and I do not think we should underestimate the importance of such a process. For, while Morrison’s characters may be unable to effectively challenge colonial and neo-colonial practice at the level of the nation of the United States, and indeed the nation itself is rarely mentioned explicitly in her novels, what they can always do is engage with strategies of resistance at these more personal levels. In this way, there is always a small, intimate experience of space that signals the potential for survival, the sense in which the African-American spirit is never crushed by violence and restriction, but continues to resist at the most basic levels. We have a reversal of scales here that makes the seemingly smallest space become the largest in terms of its significance, as it becomes the body, the home, or personal movement – and not the nation – that is the space where negotiations of power are ultimately played out. Of course, Morrison’s treatment of space raises many questions, most notably whether her positive visions fail to fully account for the power of larger spaces such as the nation, and the difficulty of forming any personal response in the wake of official discourses of power. Moreover, while a novel such as Paradise helps us to envisage how such assertion of the self may envelop a whole community, it is difficult to know how such action might succeed when traditional resistance movements have failed. Rather it seems that they may only serve as a precursor to such movements, strategies that keep the individual spirit alive to be ready for those struggles to change legislation that can ultimately only be conducted at the level of the state or nation. Despite such questions, Morrison’s magical narratives suggest not only that we should place more importance on space, but also the spaces we pay attention to as sites of political deliberation may also be in need of some revision.

Birkbeck College, University of London

Notes

[1] Timothy Powell, ‘Postcolonial Theory in an American Context: A Reading of Martin Delany’s Blake’, in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 347-365.

[2] Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, 22.

[3] Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 18.

[4] Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Space and Globalization in Cultural Studies’, in The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1995), 179.

[5] Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, eds, Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Marcus Doel, Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Edward Soja, Thirdspace (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Postmetropolis (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

[6] J.K. Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884-1915 (Switzerland: Harwood, 1992), 129.

[7] Colonial Space, 87.

[8] Bill Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures (London and New York: Continuum, 2001).

[9] On Post-Colonial Futures, 73.

[10] On Post-Colonial Futures, 73.

[11] Wilson Harris, Keynote Address, British Braids Conference (Brunel University, 19/04/01).

[12] bell hooks, Yearning (London: Turnaround, 1991), 145.

[13] Yearning, 145.

[14] Yearning, 146.

[15] Yearning, 150.

[16] Wendy Faris, ‘Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 174.

[17] Toni Morrison, ‘The Opening Sentences of Beloved’, in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ed. Barbara Solomon (New York: G.K. Hall and Co, 1998), 92.

[18] Stephen Slemon, ‘Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse’, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 411.

[19] Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 1997; 1987), 75.

[20] Beloved, 270.

[21] Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (London: Vintage, 1997; 1981), 51.

[22] Tar Baby, 296.

[23] Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 6.

[24] Domesticity and Dirt, 72.

[25] Tar Baby, 138.

[26] Tar Baby, 138-139.

[27] Tar Baby, 237.

[28] Tar Baby, my emphasis, 40.

[29] Tar Baby, my emphasis, 60.

[30] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 17.

[31] Imperial Leather, 208.

[32] Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 164.

[33] See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ‘ “Margaret Garner”: A Cincinnati Story’, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 32 (1991), 417-440.

[34] Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 213.

[35] Beloved, 32.

[36] Beloved, 76.

[37] Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics ( London: Reaktion Books, 1997),134.

[38] Sallie Westwood, and Annie Phizacklea, Trans-nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 16.

[39] Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Using the Master’s Tools: Resistance and Literature of the African and South Asian Diasporas (Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 2000), 53.

[40] Using the Master’s Tools, 61.

[41] Beloved, 274.

[42] Beloved, 100.

[43] Beloved, 274.

[44] Beloved, 211,213.

[45] Beloved, 274 etc.

[46] Beloved, 275.

[47] Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Hertfordshire: Triad/Panther, 1980; 1977), 222.

[48] Song of Solomon, 222.

[49] Song of Solomon, 230.

[50] Song of Solomon, 260.

[51] Song of Solomon, 287.

[52] Song of Solomon, 321-322.

[53] Song of Solomon, 15.

[54] Song of Solomon, 293.

[55] Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa (New York: Noonday, 1995), 68.

[56] Song of Solomon, 6.

[57] Song of Solomon, 277.

[58] Beloved, 110.

[59] Wilson Harris, ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Andrew Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 157. It should be noted that the folding of space in 124 Bluestone Road may also be equated with such a practice, as it too again involves a folding of space: interestingly, one that brings us back to the slave experience in which Harris bases his theory.

[60] Katharina Gutmann, Celebrating the Senses: An Analysis of the Sensual in Toni Morrison’s Fiction (Tubingen: Francke, 2000), 45.

[61] Toni Morrison, Paradise (London: Vintage, 1999), 194.

[62] Paradise, 263.

[63] Paradise, 264.

[64] Paradise, 265.

[65] Paradise, 292.

[66] Paradise, 296.

[67] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (London: Athlone, 1988), 157.

[68] Marcus Doel, Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 3.

[69] Poststructuralist Geographies, 133.

[70] Poststructuralist Geographies, 11.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 3, Spring 2003: Special Conference Edition

‘The Unutterable Entertainments of Paradise’: The Landscape and Waste in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace

Ben Williamson
© Ben Williamson. All Rights Reserved

Terms such as wilderness, desert, and wasteland present some interesting semantic issues. In much American literature each one has been used to describe the landscape. In Don DeLillo’s Underworld the ‘waste business’ is envisioned as the ‘construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza … only twenty-five times bigger’, with ‘the towers of the World Trade Center … visible in the distance … a poetic balance between that idea and this one’. DeLillo’s wasteland is an ‘impressive and distressing’ [1] symbol of an urban metabolism both consuming and dumping its waste conspicuously. David Foster Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, features a garbage dump—a wasteland—that is larger still: it entirely fills New England, and is so toxic that it has spawned ‘rapacious feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism’ [2]. The result, in the former and latter instances respectively, is of unwanted domestic pets and babies put out in the trash. This paper will consider the blurring in distinctions in definitions of American landscape, exploring first Puritan typologies of wilderness, landscape and providence, before proceeding to examine how these persist in David Foster Wallace’s representation of consumer culture waste.

Puritanism is a highly contested theological and critical field, and arguably interpretation of its tenets is clouded considerably by influential studies which themselves locate, or even construct, the hermeneutic framework by which Puritan writers are read. This paper examines three central Puritan concepts, exploring most crucially how John Calvin’s typological hermeneutics, that typology is the ‘handwriting of God’ [3], have been deployed in the writing of William Bradford, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Typology, at its roots, is the ‘establishment of historical connexions between certain events, persons or things in the Old Testament [the type] and similar events, persons or things in the New Testament [the antitype]’. [4] Many New Testament writers themselves practised such typology. Within the Puritan framework, typology is evident in historical exegeses, wherein events are interpreted according to their ‘shadow’ in the Old Testament Scriptures, and also in the interpretation of ‘remarkable providences’ evident in nature and the land. The theory of predestination—that some are elected to Heaven and others passed over—is also important, especially here in relation to Puritan eschatology. Much Puritan thought is pervaded by millennial angst and a sense of impending apocalypse, and is concerned with the study of the final events of human history. The prophecies of the Book of Revelation, it was believed, would soon be realised, and only the ‘chosen remnant’ would experience eternal bliss in Heaven.

William Bradford (1590-1657) was of course one of the earliest Puritans to arrive in New England, aboard the Mayflower in 1620, and writes of a new England ‘wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men … the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue’. [5] For Bradford, America appeared wild and overrun with the savagery of both nature, and man and beast upon it. Subsequent settlers however configure this landscape as barren and arid. Edward Johnson (1598-1672) writes of the immigration of ‘the seed of man and beast to sow this yet untilled wilderness’ [6]. The American landscape is in fact rendered as the antitype to the type of the Biblical Wilderness to the south and east of Palestine—referring especially to those barren, desolate areas in which the Israelites wandered before entering the Promised Land; a type which underpinned much of the Puritan errand into the wilderness.

In Cotton Mather’s 1702 vision of the history of the Puritan settlement of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, the landscape is defined as an Indian wilderness that ‘His divine Providence hath irradiated’:

our Lord Jesus Christ carried some thousands of reformers into the retirements of an American desert on purpose that … he might there, to them first, and then by them, give a specimen of many good things which he would have his churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto. [7]

In Mather’s typology, the pre-Puritan landscape has been constructed as a Heathen ‘outer darkness’ that the providence of God, in bringing his Pilgrims to America bearing ‘golden candlesticks’, has irradiated in order to allow a new beginning—’here hath arisen light in darkness’. Elsewhere in Magnalia, William Bradford himself is singled out as a biblical analogue, or antitype, of Moses, the ‘leader of a People in a Wilderness’. [8] Mather’s vision of this history ignores the wildness and the horror that Bradford observed some seventy years earlier, and focuses instead on typologies of divine Providence, since ‘of all history it must be confessed that the palm is to be given unto church history, wherein the dignity, the suavity, and the utility of the subject is transcendent’. [9] Nature, in other words, concedes to the rule of the church. The original savage, natural horror of the wilderness had been anaesthetised, and rendered rather as an evil Biblical desert which the Puritan seed had begun to transform into a new Promised Land. Indeed, the wilderness itself was often regarded as the dwelling place of Satan, and many Puritan expeditions against the Indians were justified by ascribing to them Satanic influences. [10]

Primarily a conservative exegete reading history according to the ‘instituted scheme of type and antitype’, or the ‘Shadows of Good Things to Come’ as interpreted from the Scriptures, Mather also ‘attempted a reconciliation of the scriptural and natural’ [11], which is to be found more clearly in the texts of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Edwards’ ‘Miscellany 1069’ and his document Images and Shadows of Divine Things set his stall:

The things of the ceremonial law are not the only things, whereby God designedly shadowed forth spiritual things … very much the wisdom of God in the creation appears, in his so ordering things natural, that they livelily represent things divine and spiritual… [12]

… the whole outward creation, which is but shadows of His being, is so made as to represent spiritual things…. Spiritual things are the crown and glory, the head and soul, the very end, the alpha and omega of all other works. So what therefore can be more agreeable to wisdom than that they should be so made as to shadow them forth. And we know that this is according to God’s method, which His wisdom has chosen in other matters. [13]

Edwards argues that God has made the inferior, material world in imitation of the superior, spiritual one, ‘on purpose to have a resemblance and shadow of them’ [14]; thus it is that Edwards understands much of nature as the antitype of Heaven, whilst shying away from suggesting that the New World is in fact a new Heaven on Earth. Puritan writers thus increasingly read the landscape for signs of God’s wrath or pleasure, initiating the concept of what Brian Jarvis describes as ‘textualised spatiality’—a rhetorical trope that encodes geography with ‘political, economic and moral imperatives’. [15] Even William Bradford, whose Of Plymouth Plantation surveyed the hardness, bleakness and savagery of the New England landscape, provides a very different picture in Mourt’s Relation, co-authored with Edward Winslow, where the landscape and its resources are described as ‘so goodly’, ‘pleasant’, with ‘the greatest store’, and soil of ‘excellent black mould’. [16] Indeed, Bradford seems to see beyond his natural surroundings to Paradise in Heaven. As a separatist Puritan, his eschatological faith did in fact dictate that the Promised Land would not be earthly, whereas Mather and others believed they were working towards a Heaven on Earth. Nevertheless, this transcendence from the empirical is a major mark of Puritan thought, and demonstrates clearly the Puritans’s project of reforming the landscape to their own means and ends.

A great deal of David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System (published 1987), is set in a synthetic desert wilderness, known as the Great Ohio Desert, or the G.O.D.:

‘A point of savage reference … A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of … Desolation. A place for people to wander alone. To reflect … We’re going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of this state…. Ohio is a pretty white state … What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand?’ [17]

Wallace suggests jokingly the return of the Puritans’ God to the desert, but it is enabled through a rigorously corporate rhetoric and ideology. Even so, the intentions behind the G.O.D., to provide a place of desolation and for reflection, maps fairly closely upon conceptions of wilderness and desert that hearken back to Puritanism. As Cecelia Tichi points out,

[William] Bradford, as well as the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay, understood not only the negative connotations of wilderness, those pertinent to death, chaos and punishment, but the existence of positive values of contemplation, insight, self-testing, sanctuary, and the promise of human fulfilment [18]

The G.O.D. may be regarded as a haven for redemption, for individual reflection, and escape from the shopping mall-culture of late twentieth century America, but John Miller argues,

[W]e revere only a fading memory, a ghostly presence of our rural past … We have architecturally, economically, and culturally connected much of the once physically isolated countryside to urban America by the indisputable umbilical cord of commercial development [19]

The G.O.D.’s commercially developed black sand in a white state inverts Mather’s typology of the Puritans with their ‘golden candlesticks’ bringing light into the darkness. Wallace suggests that American configurations of landscape have come full-circle in a cycle of creation and re-creation, bringing false light into a falsely-conceived darkness first, and now damping that false light with industrially-produced darkness. The black desert is a symbol for this cycle of human independence from natural landscape. The characters of Broom are compelled to stamp their human autonomy all over the land, investing it with symbolic meaning and even going so far as to engineer the associations that might be made through interaction with it. Thus, while ostensibly elevating wilderness as an instrument of social redemption, they are in actual fact downplaying the natural world that co-produced their culture in the first place—just as in Puritan historiography. Conceived in Puritan rhetoric as black, America became a whitened, enlightened European outpost, a New England. Miller describes the new American landscape as ‘Egotopia’—a reflection of modern, urban narcissism—and the chapter from which the above is drawn is entitled ‘Dark Satanic Malls’, evoking the Puritan fear of Satan in the wilderness. ‘Egotopia’ accurately describes Wallace’s fictional landscapes too, for these, like the Puritans’ landscapes, have been invested with meaning generated by the ruling hegemony of culture—all those media who daily inform viewers that they will be happier once they have purchased the relevant consumer items—which are issues explored more fully in Infinite Jest.

Despite the fact that the Puritan colonies were founded on the principles of a federal covenant, under which all members, as John Winthrop famously proclaimed, were ‘knitt together in this worke as one man’ [20], still it was ruled by a ‘visible elect’, those preachers and writers, Bradford and Mather among them, who interpreted God’s will through typology and directed the labours of their fellow men. Puritanism is underpinned by the theory of predestination: that one is either a member of the elect, chosen for salvation, or preterite, passed over, or refused entry to Heaven. No Puritans could know which group they belonged to, except by interpreting natural acts as signs of God working through or against them. Prosperity and plenty were the rewards for communities who behaved and worked as if members of the elect; thunderstorms, famines and floods were interpreted as symbols of God’s wrath if communities failed to perform. The Puritan attitude which elevates the position of elect over preterite indicates that the ‘refused’ preterite were in a sense the ‘refuse’ or the ‘waste’ of the elect, theoretically as dispensable as the ‘witches’ hanged in Salem or the Indian ‘savages’ whose wilderness the Puritans had colonised. The dispensing of this ‘waste’, of the refused or the ‘refuse’ of a culture, underlines the fact that during Puritan hegemony, human behaviour, like the landscape, was encoded and textualised according to church politics. Under the rule of Puritanism, even people could be seen as ‘refuse’, according to typological interpretation of the natural world.

Wallace’s fiction explores a similar theme—the ways in which experience is encoded with what Wallace describes in an interview with Larry McCaffery as ‘heavily mediated data’. [21] Infinite Jest (published 1996) takes as one of its key concerns waste and the toxins produced by waste. Set mainly in and around Boston in a near-future consumer-culture of excess, addictions to narcotics, alcohol, adrenaline sports and entertainment are rife. A mysterious film cartridge of a movie, also entitled ‘Infinite Jest’, which is said to be so entrancing that viewers die in an ecstatic trance while watching it, is the subject of an international conspiracy. Numeric years have been replaced by advertiser-subsidised time, so that portions of the novel occur not in 2015 or so (some critics’ estimate) but in the ‘Year of the Whopper’ and the ‘Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ (an American underwear brand). The two year names themselves are indicative of Wallace’s theme, with the Burger King Whopper as symbol of the tendency of American culture towards ‘junk’, and in which the undergarment, Catherine Nichols argues, ‘presents the ideal milieu for a culture where the ‘lower stratum’ of the body is emphasised’. [22] The novel is in short, concerned with consumption and evacuation.

The 1,079 page novel presents a waste problem that has escalated beyond the bounds of Underworld’s ‘three thousand acres of mountained garbage’. [23] Instead all waste is flung out of the major cities by giant catapult into a wasteland that entirely fills ‘what used to be’ New England. [24] Wallace seems to regard the natural landscape itself as somehow ‘trashed’ by the imperatives of the city, as if it too has become waste, not least because he has seen fit to fill the Puritans’ New England with the stuff.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters’ whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable—it’s that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant outline of the anularly overfertilised forests of what used to be central Maine.

All these territories are now property of Canada [25]

Infinite Jest suggests the ways in which American wilderness has first been textualised—as exhibited through the typology and rhetoric of Bradford, Mather, and Edwards—commercialised, and then laid to waste. The original cartographic renderings of New England, of Central Maine, of Vermont, Presque Isle Maine and Loring, are all ‘what used to be’, not only recolonised by waste, but also ceded to Canada. In the articulation of ‘what used to be’ Wallace seems to echo John Miller’s statement that Americans, ‘revere only a fading memory, a ghostly presence of our rural past’. However, this ghostly presence of what used to be is itself some ungraspable entity, a textual construction whose origins may be traced back to the Puritan writers’ rhetorical constructions of the wilderness. In this way, the original savage wilderness itself has been wasted. For it has been ‘refused’, labelled Satanic, yet expropriated still for its valuable resources.

Thorstein Veblen argues in 1899’s The Theory of the Leisure Class that the ‘element of waste tends to predominate in articles of consumption … its prime purpose and chief element is conspicuous waste’. [26] In common formulations, waste tends to be physical, visible; yet what is left out or refused is equally important: it too serves a visible role in its negation. In both senses waste is a further tool of consumption, another symbol for one’s wealth and leisure. In Wallace’s America the leisure class has become almost all-pervasive, as represented symbolically by the movie said to be so entertaining that viewers would rather soil themselves than turn it off, and then die still watching it. N. Katherine Hayles describes it as ‘a failure of cleanliness that recapitulates at a personal level the international failure of the US to take care of its messes’ [27], a notion reinforced in the novel through the ceding of US land to Canada, and then filling it with the nation’s rubbish. For the US, the rubbish dump is called the Great Concavity, for it represents a site where physical waste is hidden; but for the Canadians forced to accept these territories, the dump is a Great Convexity, highly visible rather than subterranean. In dispensing with waste, it becomes a negation to the self, just as wilderness was conceived as a negation under Puritanism. In Wallace’s fiction the natural landscape represents abandonment from the aesthetic comfort of entertainment and narcotics, from the satisfactions of a consuming culture secreting its waste products from the national gaze, away from its self, but highly visible to its neighbours as a sign of its wealth. To Puritans, the natural landscape was a godless desert lacking order that only church doctrine could contain, and convert into a Garden fit for the Lord. Within both cultures this wilderness has become the place to which ‘refuse’ is banished.

In renouncing the natural landscape and the wilderness, both Puritan theology and the culture Wallace presents exhibit tendencies towards Veblen’s theory of conspicuous waste. Luisa Villa argues that, ‘renunciation is a perfectly internalized version of conspicuous waste—a sacrificial ritual aimed at establishing the victory of the self over the world by displaying the luxury of consciousness and of its impractical objects’. [28] Therefore, in renouncing worldly enjoyments and demanding instead days of humility and thanksgiving to God, the Puritan leaders and writers sought to display their spiritual wealth over the decadent Europe they had left behind, one which, as John Winthrop so famously sermonised, would be watching them as a model of Christianity. Consciousness itself in this model becomes evidence of conspicuous waste, a display of one’s primacy over the world. The Puritan practice of typology exhibits such a tendency in its assumption that Providence underpins nature itself.

The new American landscape, Wallace and John Miller seem to agree, is also one of repudiation and renunciation—it belongs no more to nature but instead to ‘unapologetic commercialism and total dedication to utility … so disconnected from nature and history that it is essentially plastic in its potential to be created and re-created anew’. [29] The twentieth century, Wallace argues, features new typologies in which sexuality and the televisual world supersede understanding of the natural physical world. In Infinite Jest, the development of video telephony demonstrates a culture in which the value of personal appearance overwhelms nature to the point that many people wear ‘full-body video-phone-masks … sort of like the headless muscleman and bathing-beauty cutouts you could stand behind … for cheap photos at the beach, only … vastly more high-tech and convincing-looking’ simply to answer calls. [30] In this case, the callers are little more than antitypes to the types they have seen on television or other media, with the media shadowing good things to come for the happy consuming people of America.

The nature of this vacancy from reality, the donning of masks to hide one’s true self has some resemblance to Mather’s perception of man:

Quid sum? Nil. Quis sum? Nullus. Sed gratia Christi,
Quod sum, quod vivo, quodque laboro, facit.
[But what am I? Nothing. Who am I? No one. But the grace of Christ makes what I am, what I live, what I do.] [31]

Puritan writers such as Mather acknowledged this human ‘emptiness’, and invested human behaviour with the motivating spirit of Christ instead. Again, this renunciation of the body as merely a receptacle of God’s will serves to reveal the visible elect’s perceived mastery over the world, and the dominance of the spiritual rather than the empirical as an emblem of wealth. Characters in Infinite Jest are similarly empty; they too are ‘nothing’ and ‘no one’ without their entertainments and their addictions—the masks they wear to enhance their lives. Thus while the pursuits of these disparate cultures are in opposition—one renouncing the pursuit of enjoyment, the other indulging catastrophically in it—they are at root connected through the notion that man is incomplete, and that the world can be mastered if one accepts the ruling doctrines of either Providential intervention or wilful consumption. In both cases, the experience of consciousness is considered wealthier through belonging either to the covenant or to a culture of capitalist consumption.

Cotton Mather’s record of the scene of William Bradford on his deathbed is in fact one very near to the catatonic bliss experienced by viewers of Wallace’s lethal movie:

he fell into an indisposition of body, which rendered him unhealthy for a whole winter; and as the spring advanced, his health yet more declined … till one day; in the night after which, the God of heaven so filled his mind with ineffable consulations, that he seemed … rapt up unto the unutterable entertainments of Paradise … and on the day following he died [32]

… all were watching the recursive loop the medical attaché had rigged on the … viewer the night before, sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed [33]

To Puritans, Paradise in Heaven was similar ‘entertainment’ to Wallace’s killer movie. In both, such entertainment is ‘unutterable’, being no less than death itself. For the Puritan imagination, death signalled the potential for salvation from this Earth; for the viewers of ‘Infinite Jest’, the movie offers the ultimate escapism from the empirical, and immersion in soothing, anaesthetic ‘happification’ [34]. The movie is, perhaps, the apocalyptic culmination of consumption and the pursuit of the American Dream, the point at which the viewer transcends the empirical and instead enters the blissful state of happiness and fulfilment. America’s inhabitants, the novel suggests, are as subject to corporate, consumer rhetoric as Puritans were to the sermons and tracts of the church, both of which distil the horror or the difficulty of the experiential into a textualised suppressant, in the process renouncing the world. The natural landscape has been supplanted in both cases by virtual landscapes whose cartography is mediated through the rhetoric of belonging. Those who do not ‘belong’ are thus banished, like refuse.

Wallace argues that the excessive consumption of America, and the resultant waste, produces toxins deadly to both man and land. The toxic dump that fills New England features giant fans blowing the fumes north, keeping them from re-entering US airspace. But, the fans cannot keep the waste out of America. A Canadian in Infinite Jest explains that,

‘It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no. Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back’ [35]

Wallace suggests not only that the US is dumping its waste conspicuously but that very same waste, which Julia Kristeva refers to as the abjected, ‘from its place of banishment … does not cease challenging its master’. [36] Wallace’s New England dump is in fact almost as terrifying as Bradford’s first sighting of the New England coast in 1620, with its ‘wild and savage hue’. Waste is treated in the dump through ‘a cycle of … waste-creation and –utilization’ […] ‘a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion’ [37], another Veblen-esque manoeuvre in which waste and fuel become one. Wallace’s wasteland is a new wilderness in which the excesses of contemporary commercialism and consumption have mutated the natural order:

‘the resultant fusion turns out so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of the surrounding ecosystem, all inhibitors to organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in every direction…. You end up with a surrounding environment so furtilely lush it’s practically unlivable.’

‘A rainforest on sterebolic anoids.’ [38]

Wallace’s wasteland challenges more than just its master. Indeed, the catapulting of waste and the toxic fusion are so timed that the dump ‘goes from overgrown to wasteland to overgrown several times a month’ [39], representing a site of fertility as well as decay, in addition to a mutation of the temporal as well as the spatial.

It is in fact akin to Henri Lefebvre’s description of the mundus in The Production of Space:

a public rubbish dump. Into it were cast trash and filth of every kind, along with those condemned to death, and every newborn baby whose father declined to ‘raise’ it. … It connected the city, the space above ground … to the hidden, clandestine, subterranean spaces which were those of fertility and death … of birth and burial [40]

In Wallace own mundus, babies have indeed been dumped along with the trash, but crucially they have grown to gigantic proportions, fuelled by the wasteland. The word mundus itself has two distinct meanings, which in relation to Wallace seem interconnected. On the one hand, mundus means simply ‘the world’, but on the other, as Jean Robert explains, its etymology may be traced back to the Indoeuropean root meu-, which ‘meant originally humid, dirty liquid, and even urine, and that the inversion occurred thanks to the notion of ‘washing’ [41]. The mundus is therefore a clean and a dirty place, a place of fecundity and decay, and by association, so too the world; yet arguably it is founded on principles of waste, of soiling one’s self. In Wallace’s fictional world, the mundus is an ideal symbol for a culture that is consuming itself to death, in effect submitting to the demands of culture and finding the self both a product and a waste product:

Poor Tony flopped and gasped and pushed down inside and … felt a piece of nourishing and possibly even intoxicating meat in the back of his throat but elected not to swallow it but swallowed it anyway and was immediately sorry he did [42]

In swallowing his own tongue, Poor Tony exhibits the ways in which addiction becomes almost self-cannibalism—the corporeal submitting to the demands of the corporate body—as well as inducing speechlessness and silence. This theme is exemplified in The Broom of the System through the voracious appetite of millionaire businessman Mr Norman Bombardini, who near the beginning of the novel is merely eating multiple steaks for dinner, but who, by the end, is ‘talking with some earnestness about … consuming people’. [43] As a metaphor for the excesses of consumer culture, and a symbol of corporate greed, Bombardini demonstrates a process by which human agency becomes just food for a mass market.

Indeed, Infinite Jest’s characters frequently find themselves ‘swallowed’ by their culture, and the novel begins with an episode in which a key character, Hal Incandenza, struggling with an addiction to marijuana, finds himself unable to communicate—or, more accurately, to be heard, during an interview for college:

‘Excited, is all he gets, sometimes, an excitable kid, impressed with—‘
‘But the sounds he made.’
‘Undescribable.’
‘Like an animal.’
‘Subanimalistic noises and sounds.’
‘Nor let’s forget the gestures’ [44]

Hal is not silent (he is in fact a lexical and mathematical genius, though one with an addiction not just to marijuana, but also to the creeping about that accompanies its practise), but he cannot be heard or understood, as if he too is gagging around a swallowed tongue. If we accept Kristeva’s model that waste, the abjected, can be rubbish, trash, bodies, women, races, classes, it is crucial to recognise that Wallace’s project in Infinite Jest is to represent ‘all the unfiltered babble of the peripheral crowd’, as is explained in one of the novel’s more overtly meta-fictional episodes by avant-garde film-maker Jim Incandenza. Wallace’s concerns are for those in the margins whose stories are not heard, who counter the ruling hegemony and are as a result abjected. Wallace in fact attempts to rescue them from speechlessness, from the ‘refused’, preterite position of abjection.

The most potent symbol of this waste returning to counter the effects of a culture that emphasises the value of entertainment, of life within a virtual landscape, is the lethal movie. It’s directed by Jim Incandenza, shortly before he commits suicide by placing his head in a customised microwave oven (an apt symbol, perhaps, for the way ‘party-line entertainment’ fries the mind), whose own project is, like Wallace’s, to capture the ‘babble(/babel)’ [45] of those normally neglected from art, arguably the abjected. The movie is the subject of a Quebecois conspiracy to broadcast it publicly across America, sending the entire population into a catatonic trance and then death. It therefore represents a techno-cultural revenge strategy cultivated by the abjected, those whose lives have been nurtured in the mundus.

In fact, the movie may be described as a mundus of its own, a mundus imaginalis, to borrow Henri Corbin’s term. The mundus imaginalis, according to Corbin, is a visionary landscape, a ‘saving larger geography’ [46], existing outside of the bounds of ordinary experience, and has its roots in pre-Islamic lore. As a hermeneutic framework it has found some purchase in studies of the imagistic twentieth century, though as Ptolemy Tompkins argues,

the disembodied faces and figures that haunt our media, cinema, and most especially our cyber-worlds are no more than sad and homeless phantoms that … can do no more than beckon to us emptily…. The authentic visionary landscape nourished and strengthened those who gained momentary entrance into it because it offered not an ‘escape’ from regular human life but a larger perspective that made the burdens and disappointments of that life more bearable [47]

In Infinite Jest, Jim Incandenza admits that he made ‘Infinite Jest’ as an attempt at ‘saving’ his son Hal, recovering him from speechlessness and marginality. The movie itself is supposed to feature a twenty-minute shot of a mother figure repeating the phrase ‘I’m sorry’, as seen through a lens mimicking the vision of a young infant. The movie does not work as Incandenza planned, but is a potent symbol for both the image-addicted twentieth century, as well as a mundus imaginalis which elevates viewers beyond the disappointments and burdens of their lives—except in this case it strands them there. As a strategy seeking to rescue the peripheral crowd from marginality, the movie is a failure; but what it reinforces is the notion of toxicity on many levels within a consumer culture, particularly with reference to America’s entertainments.

These perils behind and within screens and images play a crucial role throughout Wallace’s fiction. In The Broom of the System, one character thinks he’s a talk show host, while a whole family acts out its domestic rituals in front of a television screen that itself shows an audience appreciatively applauding. More ominously, in Infinite Jest, the separatist Quebecois insurgents place vast mirrors across US highways so that drivers, travelling at night, are forced to play a ghastly game of ‘Chicken’ with themselves, one in which the outcome can only ever be tragedy. These mirror-billboards are in effect advertisements for the inexorable acceleration of American culture towards death. ‘Billboards will save the travelling public from going out of their minds,’ John Miller quotes a professor of advertising saying in the 1960s. ‘[T]housands, hundreds of thousands of highway travellers on our interstates are bored to death staring at nothing but nature … to the barren and unadorned earth’ [48]. Wallace, whose novel is concerned with the effects of commercialisation on both the ecosystem and on the human condition, reverses the principles demonstrated here. For the inhabitants of his near-future America are being entertained to death by the media, are finding their time and their ecosystems polluted by commercialism, are finding themselves the subjects in a hyperreal culture of excess, addiction and consumption, heading directly down the interstate towards collision with the effects of their own industry. The mundus imaginalis of Wallace’s culture is a communitarian one, a media-disseminated shadow that has led to human mimicry of media ideals and renunciation of the natural in pursuit of mastery of the self and the ego in the material world. Wallace, indeed, seems to share with his Puritan forebears an eschatology in which culture is drawing close to apocalyptic meltdown.

Arguably, the Puritan eschatological faith, and its associated promises of Heaven, its images of Gardens in the wilderness of America or beyond for the chosen remnant, is a mundus imaginalis, at once a world outside of this one, but also inextricably interwoven at the root with waste: a wasted wilderness renounced and refused as evil, Satanic, or unclean. By abrogating and negating wilderness, and replacing it with antitypes of the Garden or Heaven, Puritan writers elevated not only their errand but also the spiritual pursuits symbolised by the federal covenant. Likewise, to belong in Wallace’s America is to surrender to the addictions of entertainment and narcotics. The typologised and commercialised landscape is at once a soothing and virtual anaesthetic, but behind that corporate screen and rhetoric the babble/babel of American history’s peripheral crowd is fertilising in the waste.

University of the West of England, Bristol

Notes

[1] Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1998), 184, 185.

[2] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 1997), 573.

[3] Thomas M Davis, ‘The Traditions of Puritan Typology’, Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), Typology and Early American Literature (Cambridge, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 40.

[4] G.W.H Lampe, ‘The Biblical Origins and Patristic Development of Typology’. Essays in Typology. Studies in Biblical Theology, 22, Naperville, Ill, (1957), 39.

[5] William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, Graham Clarke (ed.), The American Landscape: Literary Sources and Documents (Mountfield: Helm Information Ltd, 1993), 160-61.

[6] Edward Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior, Graham Clarke (ed.), The American Landscape: Literary Sources and Documents, (Mountfield: Helm Information Ltd, 1993), 167.

[7] Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Graham Clarke (ed.), The American Landscape: Literary Sources and Documents (Mountfield: Helm Information Ltd, 1993),173-76.

[8] ibid., quoted in Mason I. Lowance, ‘Cotton Mather’s Magnalia and the Metaphors of Biblical History’, in Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), Typology and Early American Literature, 144.

[9] Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 177.

[10] Mason Lowance, ‘Cotton Mather’s Magnalia’, 146.

[11] ibid., 141-42.

[12] Jonathan Edwards, ‘Miscellany 1069’, Quoted in Mason I. Lowance, ‘Images or Shadows of Divine Things’ in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards’, in Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), Typology and Early American Literature, 215.

[13] ibid., 225-26.

[14] ibid., 228.

[15] Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 3.

[16] William Bradford & Winslow Edward, Mourt’s Relation in Cecelia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1979), 22.

[17] David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (London: Abacus, 1997), 54-55.

[18] Cecelia Tichi, New World, New Earth, 24.

[19] John Miller, Egotopia: Narcissism and the New American Landscape (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 15.

[20] John Winthrop, in Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (London: Harvard University Press, 1953), 23.

[21] Larry McCaffery, ‘An Interview with David Foster Wallace’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13, (1993), 138

[22] Catherine Nichols, ‘Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 43.1, Fall (2001), 5.

[23] Don DeLillo, Underworld, 184.

[24] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 571.

[25] ibid., 93.

[26] Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 62.

[27] Katherine N Hayles, ‘The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest’, New Literary History, 30, (1999), 687.

[28] Luisa Villa, Esperienza e memoria: Saggio su Henry James (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1989). Quoted in Donatello Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 220.

[29] John Miller, Egotopia, 17-18.

[30] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 149.

[31] Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Graham Clarke (ed.), The American Landscape, 184.

[32] Cotton Mather, in http://www.gty.org/~phil/mather.htm. 07/01/2003.

[33] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 87.

[34] ibid., 42.

[35] ibid., 233.

[36] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.

[37] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 571-72.

[38] ibid., 573.

[39] ibid., 573

[40] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Trans Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 242.

[41] Jean Robert, ‘A Sense of Place: Some Historical Symbols, Myths and Rituals of ‘Placeness’. Website www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/subjects/space/HSPACE3.PDF. 07/01/2003. Don DeLillo, Underworld, 6.

[42] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 305.

[43] David Foster Wallace, The Broom Of The System, 449.

[44] David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 14.

[45] ibid., 836, 837.

[46] Ptolemy Tompkins, ‘Recovering a Visionary Geography: Henri Corbin and the Missing Ingredient in Our Culture of Images’. Originally appeared in Lapis Magazine. On the web at: http://www.seriousseekers.com/News%20and%20Articles/article_tompkins_p_recoveringvisionary.htm. 07/01/2003

[47] ibid.

[48] John Miller, Egotopia, 106-07.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 8, Spring 2006

Unearthing Resistance: African American Cultural Artefacts in the Antebellum Period

Camilla Cox
© Camilla Cox. All Rights Reserved

In accordance with postcolonial critic and art historian Tim Barringer’s assertion that it is only ‘when the status of “art” is conferred on a body of work can it begin to generate a history’, the recent re-signification of African-American cultural artefacts from the antebellum period as such has demanded a critical revision of the tenacious belief that African and African-American slaves did not have, and could not create, a vigorous and expressive material culture. [1] Whilst the recovery of the African-American slave narrative has been central to the critical reconsideration of both African-American and American literary heritage, the cultural production of enslaved blacks has been conspicuously absent from discussions of African-American artistic endeavour and its significance as a site of identity affirmation and re-configuration. Indeed, the tendency to conceive of African-American cultural production prior to its so-called ‘revival’ during the Harlem Renaissance of the early twentieth century as either non-existent or derivational, and thus ‘inauthentic’, has both denied and obscured the conscious effort and ability of African-American slaves to forge a viable and practicable sense of self through the manipulation of, and artistic investment in, the three-dimensional objects in which black cultural production is found. Indeed, the recent archaeological excavation of plantations throughout the tidewater region of the American South has uncovered both utilitarian and decorative slave-made artefacts that suggest an artistic attempt to create a realm of autonomy from within the boundaries of their colonisation and enslavement. It is my hope that this essay will offer a glimpse into the ways in which these cultural remains of America’s past signify ‘layers of meaning beyond the objects’ specific iconographies’, thus pointing towards a reconsideration of African-American material production and the cultural resistance and self-expression that it can be seen to represent. [2]

Indeed, in recognising and giving voice to these ‘hidden histories’ embedded in the artistic endeavours of slaves, such as objects made for both utilitarian (baskets, pottery, quilts) and decorative (dress, ornamentation, sculpture) purpose, the questions of continuity and hybridity, mimicry and authenticity, and ambivalence and resistance that are inextricable from both the objects themselves and their surrounding critical discourse become particularly poignant. Indeed, the recently convergent critical triptych of American Studies, African-American Studies and Postcolonial Studies manifested in the writings of such critics as Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, and Stuart Hall, amongst others, has offered a critical framework through which to explore the debates of otherness and creolisation that I believe to be central to any understanding of the complexities at work within the object crafted by the hands of the enslaved. Thus, whilst the majority of studies that have taken the cultural production of slaves as a topic of inquiry have sought either to locate an African tradition, ‘Présence Africaine’, or to dispute its presence entirely, such an approach is both simplistic and misleading. [3] In grounding my essay within the critical paradigms promulgated by such cultural and US ‘ethnic’ studies critics and that demonstrate a postcolonial, ‘transatlantic’ and ‘identity conscious’ politics, any hermetically enclosed conception of either American Studies or the people for which it hopes to speak is denied. As such, it is from within this space of ambivalence and intersection that the cultural significance of slave artefacts can be engaged whilst problematising any oversimplification of the complexities inherent within the articulation of African-American identity and the critical sphere in which it is discussed.

A more meaningful starting point from which to consider the significance of an African presence within slave culture than those discussions that have focused primarily on whether such a presence exists and if it does, to what extent it can be deemed ‘authentic’, is anthropologist Frederik Barth’s contention that the construction of ethnic identity is the process of ‘organising cultural differences so as to create the criteria for which to include or exclude members’. [4] Whilst critic E. Franklin Frazier and his seminal text The Negro Family in the United States posited that the exportation and enslavement of over 11.5 million people from the African continent to the New World from 1619 to 1808 eradicated all cultural remains of the slaves’ African past, [5] the continuities and invocations of Africa found in slave-made artefacts remain testament to the fact that whilst Africans may have come to the United States ‘empty-handed’, they did not come ‘empty-headed’. [6] Indeed, whilst it is true that throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was no ‘African-American’ culture of which to speak but rather a heterogeneous mix of American-born blacks and various African peoples, such as the Igbo, Yoruba, Ibibo, Mende, Kpelle and Kru to mention a mere few, the very existence of a distinct African aesthetic within the cultural products and practices of slave ‘society’ implies an active attempt by this mix of American- and African-born blacks to forge both an individualised and group identity out of diverse and often incongruent elements. [7] Thus, in examining the manifestly un-Euro-American aesthetics at work in archeologically recovered cultural remnants of slave life, the processes of what anthropologist Henry John Drewal has termed ‘re-membering’, the act of ‘restructuring society and the past’ into something tangible and usable, are revealed. [8]

Indeed, the (re)location of an African aesthetic within such artefacts as slave-made pottery uncovered at former plantation sites prompts an engagement with such questions of how, and to what effect, enslaved blacks used or constructed this African ‘remembrance’ to inform an autonomous ‘ethnic’ self. Taking anthropologist George De Vos’s definition of ethnic identity as ‘a feeling that is maintained as an essential part of one’s self-definition’ that incorporates an individual’s ‘past experiences and origin to define how one characterises and expresses his or her self’ whilst using that knowledge to negotiate everyday reality, [9] it is evident that the construction of a viable identity for blacks in America relied, at least in part, on ‘staying cognitively apart’ from it. [10]

The invocation of a deliberately un-Euro American aesthetic, strikingly evident in the ‘face vessels’ excavated in South Carolina, reflects this need to assert a self premised on what Stuart Hall has characterised as both a continuity of the self and a difference from the other. [11] In accordance with Barth’s aforementioned contention that ethnic identity must, by its very existence, be premised on exclusion, the animated human-face earthernwares produced by the slaves in the Edgefield District of western South Carolina mediate this boundary ‘between interior and exterior, between self and other’ upon which a sense of personal coherence and belonging can be seen to hinge. [12] The well-documented use of two different clays in the production process, the facial physiognomy and the contrasting white of the eyes and teeth against a darker coloured form all point towards a continuance and evocation of the pottery forms of the northern Kongo region of Africa, where a proportion of South Carolinian slaves are known to have descended (see Fig.1 http://www.janesaddictions.com/effigy01.htm). [13] However, the significance here is not so much in the continuance and transference of African cultural forms from one region to another, but rather in their invocation of the displaced ‘Other’ in what Walter Benjamin has characterised as a ‘moment of danger’. [14]

Indeed, whether or not Afro-Carolinian face vessels were intended to invoke the aesthetically similar Kongo ‘power’ statuary, they are significant for their (a)historical reference to a moment outside of the boundaries of interpretation open to the coloniser. As Walter Benjamin elucidates, ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it “the way it really was”. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’. [15] Indeed, as momentous cultural and geographical displacement demanded a ‘new’ Africa in the New World, the ‘old’ Africa was, in the very process of being re-membered, a rhetorical space. ‘This is Africa’, asserts Hall, ‘necessarily “deferred”- as a spiritual, cultural and political metaphor’. [16] In this sense, to Africa’s diaspora, Africa has always signified something other than itself; rather than denoting a space of cultural veracity and African-American historicity ‘lost’ to slavery, Africa is seen as another component of the diasporic, already-creolised identities that have informed African-American existence. The metaphorical potency of the ‘homeland’ beyond the border of the colonised lies in its potential as an imagined space and usable past to, contends Edward Said, allow the ‘mind to intensify its own sense of self by dramatising the difference between what is close to it and what is far away’. [17]

The possible symbolic meanings and functions that have been attributed to the Afro-Carolinian face vessels underline this conviction in the dramatisation of cultural difference and continuity as a means of enabling slaves to transgress the boundaries of colonialist discourse. In accordance with the subversive imbedding of ‘African’ (non-white) referents or messages within the public realm of the plantation – in folktales, spirituals, or even in the acts of feigning stupidity, laziness or in the sabotage of machinery, crops and animals – it is evident that the cultural or ‘folk’ productions of slaves contained a subtext of resistance whilst simultaneously allowing concealment of this resistance because of the colonisers’ innocuous understandings of the slaves’ conduct. [18] Indeed, the excavation of the Afro-Carolinian face vessels from areas of the Underground Railroad and their small size suggest a spiritual and symbolic, as opposed to a utilitarian, significance. [19] The occurrences of holes in the pots reinforce art historian John Michael Vlach’s contention that the face vessels were used to ward away evil spirits from grave sites, thus pointing towards an ‘unofficial culture’ that underpinned and infused vitality into the attempt of African-Americans to stake out a coherent and practicable cultural space. [20]

Reinforcing this notion of an ‘unofficial culture’ as a means of subversive resistance and survival strategy is social scientist James C. Scott’s contention that in circumstances where the ‘luxury of negative reciprocity’ is denied, such as in slavery and other forms of political and social subordination, there inevitably exists a ‘hidden transcript’, a ‘critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant’. [21] The ‘African’ presence and non-Euro-American usage of slave-crafted objects such as the face vessel signify beyond their immediate context in the public sphere to a private, hidden ‘social space’ where, asserts Scott, ‘dissent to the official transcript of power relations may be voiced’. [22] Indeed, the recovery from the site of a blacksmith shop and slave quarters in Alexandria, Virginia of a late-eighteenth-century wrought-iron figure stylistically echoing the ritual figurative iron statuettes amongst the Mande peoples in Mali, similarly suggests a hidden expression of ethnic identity and resistance buried deep beneath the earthen floor from which it was excavated (see Fig. 2 http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/vafig.jpg). [23]

Subsequently, it is evident that in evoking an imaginative and spiritual world alien to the one that they were forced to inhabit, slaves invested within their work the strongest powers available to them for manipulating circumstances in their lives. [24] In similarity to the face vessels’ speculated significance as symbols of good fortune that aided healing and warded off bad spirits, the wrought-iron statuette’s literal unearthing suggests a spiritual subtext that reinforces the notion of oppositional cultural strategies deployed by enslaved blacks to negotiate their subjugation and to create a sense of self. Indeed, the recent research undertaken by archaeologist Patricia M. Samford into the excavation of West African-style ancestor shrines and subfloor pits in African-American slave quarters suggests that objects found within the floor of slave buildings may have a greater spiritual and ritual significance than has previously been thought. [25] In examining archaeological, documentary and ethnographic evidence from both Virginia and the West African societies whose descendents comprised a considerable proportion of the Virginia slave population, Samford contends that a proportion of subfloor pits, a type of archaeological feature common on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginia slave sites, functioned as ancestor shrines that originated in West Africa. Thus, it is from within these ritualised spaces, and through the objects found within them, that African-Americans were able to express symbolically the continuity of past and present. As cultural anthropologist Anthony Cohen asserts, it is this symbolic evocation of the historical self that both generates and (re)affirms the ‘cultural integrity of the community’. [26]

Interestingly, in imbuing the cultural object with meaning and significance beyond the bounds of colonial discourse, as seen above, the boundaries that delineated slave existence, such as white/black, master/slave, subject/object, were able to be redrawn symbolically. Indeed, as we have already seen, it is on the boundary between self and other in which such cultural forms and ritualised spaces were brought into existence; thus it is this boundary, and the symbolic evocation of it, through which slaves were able to meaningfully construct a community from within the confines of their bondage. Indeed, in accordance with Cohen’s assertion that ‘community… is meaningfully constructed by people through their symbolic prowess and resources’, the symbolic evocation of the boundary, the mechanism that mediates the ways in which a community is or wishes to be distinguished, is most clearly evinced by an examination of slave dress. [27]

The recent use of documentary and archaeological evidence to determine the dress and adornment choices available to and made by enslaved blacks offers an important insight into the interactions of personal identity and social display manifested within the cultural productions of African and African-American slaves. Indeed, if the ‘consciousness of community’ is ‘encapsulated in [its] perception of its boundaries’, as Cohen contends, then the overwhelming evidence that slaves bought, crafted and acquired objects relating to personal adornment and appearance implies such a process of boundary-maintenance through the creation and preservation of a common body of symbols. [28] Indeed, the fact that slaves paid attention to their dress, creating unique and non-European styles of adornment, can be witnessed both in the numerous runaway slave advertisements that document slave attire and in the studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century consumption that suggest items relating to adornment, such as ribbons, beads and fabric, were the most commonly purchased commodities amongst free and enslaved blacks. [29] In light of such information, it is evident that codes of adornment were clearly being established, symbolically constructing and reinforcing the foundations of a burgeoning African-American community.

The excavation between 1993 and 1996 of the slave quarters at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s Bedford County tobacco and wheat plantation, recovered over 100 items relating to personal adornment; in examining these archaeologically recovered objects within the context of runaway-slave advertisements, it is possible to deduce the ways in which dress was used symbolically to signify a collective, ethnic identity. From the slave quarters alone, archaeologists at the Poplar Forest site recovered 122 buttons, 2 shoe buckles, 3 small knee buckles, a buckle used to fasten underclothing or ribbons, 35 glass beads and a fragment of a gilt chain possibly from a necklace. [30] Interestingly, many of the objects were recovered from ‘the fill of a small storage pit or root cellar beneath the floor’, a detail that in light of the possible ritual significance of such pits discussed above, further points towards the attempt of African and African-American slaves to construct a symbolic community that provided a sense of coherence, meaning and identity to its members. [31]

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s assertion that ‘man is an animal suspended in the webs of significance he himself has spun’ is in accordance with the ‘webs of significance’ clearly imbedded within slave artefacts; the embellishments made to the standard issue of slave attire either by the objects described above or by the addition of pattern and colour to white ‘Negro cloth’ is testament to the creation and recreation of African-American cultural identity. [32] Indeed, the use of colour to signify beyond the non-identities endowed upon slaves is evinced throughout the runaway slave record. For example, in 1783 it is recorded that a slave known as Anthony ran away from a Virginian plantation wearing ‘his usual outside clothing … of Virginia cloth … sometimes dyed with walnut, maple and other barks’, whilst in 1770 a slave named Jamey was reported to have been wearing a ‘white Negro cloth jacket and breeches, with some blue between every seam, and particularly on the fore part of the jacket, a slip of blue in the shape of a serpent’ when he ran away from a plantation in South Carolina. [33]

The use of colour and symbol here is particularly poignant; as Jamey wove colour into the white folds of the ‘Negro cloth’ he was symbolising his disaffiliation with the dominant society and his lack of place within it. The evocation of a serpent underlines this symbolic renegotiation of boundary, recalling Cohen’s conception of the symbol as something for people to ‘“think with”’. [34] Indeed, marking the boundary between self and other, such symbols of communality provide a ‘means to make meaning’ and therefore to ‘express the particular meanings which the community has for them’. [35] Thus, the use of contrasting colours, materials and patterns which had, by the nineteenth century, become a recognisable element of slave dress, reinforces the sense that such symbolic evocations of difference allowed a reinvestment in the self through their signification of something other and beyond the discourse of their oppressors. Indeed, the use of contrasting and vivid colour and symbolic representation of form that can be seen to characterise African-American art even today shares this sense of always signifying to something beyond and other than the context in which it is made, used and displayed. Thus, from such covert and ‘hidden’ beginnings, the ‘politics of black style’ is, as critics Shane and Graham White contend, the ‘politics of metaphor, always ambiguous’, and always political, ‘because it is always indirect’. [36]

Indeed, Homi K. Bhabha’s conception of the diasporic imagination as one consistently caught between the existential quandary of being ‘neither the one nor the other’ encapsulates this ambiguity and ‘doubleness’ of self that can be seen to characterise African-American artistic expression. [37] As African and African-American slaves took the cultural fabric of their oppressors and made it something other, they were able to forge a viable ethnic identity from within this ambiguous, hybridised space. Indeed, in acknowledging African-American cultural identity as one that is inevitably ‘transatlantic’ and already-creolised, the cultural productions of African-American slaves must inevitably express the ‘multiple viewpoint’ of the Diaspora. [38] In accordance with W. E. B. Dubois’s contention that the African-American forever ‘feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; … two warring ideals in one dark body’, the notion of a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ dialogue with either (white) America or (imagined) Africa is untenable. [39] As such, the signification of ‘otherness’ in the cultural production of slaves does not so much signify a dialogue with the past but rather attempts to re-figure cultural memory in a contingent ‘“in-between” space that innovates and interrupts the performance of present’. [40]

It is this ‘politics of interruption’ that encapsulates the modes of resistance and the construction of a valid ethnic space effected within the cultural productions of slaves. Whilst the signification of ‘otherness’ either through the invocation of an ‘African’ aesthetic or a specifically non-Euro-American semiotics was prevalent in the cultural production of African-American slaves, the productions of slave artisans that were confined to a Euro-American aesthetic cannot be deemed either ‘inauthentic’ or non-representative of African-American expression. To do so, argues Gilroy, denies the inevitably syncretic and hybrid nature of African-American identity and privileges an absolutist conception of ethnicity and culture that ‘registers uncomprehending disappointment with the actual cultural choices and patterns’ of black people. [41] Such debates of authenticity continue to pervade African-American social and critical dialogue; however, in understanding that we are, as political philosopher Anthony Appiah asserts, ‘all contaminated by each other’, the question of authenticity must inevitably become displaced. [42]

The recent archaeological and critical unearthing of the works of a nineteenth-century slave artisan known as ‘Dave’ is illustrative of the cultural texts of slaves that do not necessarily invoke an ‘African’ sensibility or cultural past yet evince the same hybridity and ‘politics of interruption’ employed by those that do. As a slave working in the Edgefield district of west-central South Carolina, Dave took the unusual step of not only signing and dating his pottery, but also inscribing short poetic verses into his pieces before firing (see Fig 3. http://www.uwrf.edu/~rw66/minority/minam/afr/oxford/19.jpg). Whilst critics have been keen to tie the shape and form of his pots to his African roots, critic Aaron De Groft has conceded that Dave worked ‘largely in the Anglo-Carolinian tradition’[43] and that it ‘is only the [unusually large] scale of certain pieces and their poetic inscriptions that markedly distinguishes his work from that of other local potters’. [44] However, Dave’s position as a slave is of critical significance; his subversion of social norms through the embellishments of size and inscription suggest an equally potent ‘hidden transcript’ of self-authentication and expression underpinning his work.

Indeed, whilst De Groft has initiated the important process of critically examining the narrative content of Dave’s poetic inscription and its subversive significance, it his use of the poetic that I would like to briefly focus on here. Whilst De Groft’s analysis of the ‘veiled symbolism and hidden meanings’ that he locates within Dave’s rhyming couplets aims to counter their dismissal as mere ‘whimsical’ and ‘meaningless’ idiosyncrasies, it is significant that in the context of their production Dave could not have allowed them to be interpreted otherwise. [45] As such, the meaning or narrative content of the couplets becomes auxiliary to their form; in accordance with critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s contention that prose is dialogic and didactic whilst poetry is monologic and primarily aesthetic, [46] it is evident that Dave used the poetic not as allegorical rhetoric, but rather as a means in which to ‘foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself’. [47]

Certainly, whilst Dave’s inscriptions, such as ‘Surely this jar will hold 20/ fill it with silver then you will have plenty’ (April 8, 1858) or ‘I made this jar for cash/ Though its called lucre trash’ (Aug 27, 1857), can be interpreted as comments on the cash value of his labour, the historical and social weight of his rhetoric, the signified of his signifiers, does not appear to be his primary concern. [48] Rather, there seems to be a conscious reflection on the structure or form of his writing where the ‘effect… is to draw the attention of the reader not to an external reference, but [rather] to the very means of reference’ itself. [49] In this sense, Dave’s use of the poetic form can be seen as staking out a legitimate cultural space from which to articulate and inscribe a valid and practicable sense of self. As Dave negotiated and exercised his individuality from within the bounds of its prohibition, turning the structural forms of the dominant to his own use, he enacted Gilroy’s notion of the ‘diasporic intimacy’ that has been a ‘marked [and critical] feature of transnational black Atlantic creativity’. [50]

Subsequently, in locating the self within the symbiotic and ambiguous terrain of the Diaspora, African-American slaves were able to effect a symbolic (re)construction of their fractured, colonised lives. In investing their art with something other to enact the ‘politics of interruption’ witnessed above, enslaved blacks seeded the beginnings of an African-American ethnic identity characterised by its ability to invent, maintain and renew its boundaries, enacting what Gilroy has termed ‘the living memory of the changing same’. [51] Indeed, in conceiving of African-American ‘tradition’ not as a linear narrative from past to present, but rather as an unfinished ‘story of hybridity and intermixture’, [52] linguist Olabiyi Yai’s observation of the West African people, the Yoruba’s, notion of tradition becomes particularly poignant: “Tradition” in Yoruba is asa. Innovation is implied in the Yoruba idea of tradition. The verb sa, from which the noun asa is derived means to select, to choose, to discriminate or discern… [The] ability to reconcile opacity and difference and openness in an unending movement of metonymic engagements might explain the success and popularity of Yoruba culture in the New World… [53] Thus, in the process of discerning, choosing, selecting, appropriating and re-membering, African-Americans not only re-drew the parameters of their own existence and identity, but simultaneously re-drew those of the dominant culture that they were forced to serve.

The marginal(ised) creative endeavours of slaves remain testament to the hybrid and ambiguous nature of America’s cultural and political landscape; the centrality of white supremacy to the American experience indelibly blurs and renders redundant the borders that separate the ‘black’ experience from the ‘white’. As such, the ‘politics of interruption’ and syncretic innovation that can be seen to mark African-American art resonate beyond the borders of black particularity. In focusing on the ‘flows, exchanges and in-between elements’ that characterise both African-American and American culture, the concept of American Studies as a hermetically enclosed, unchanging same is untenable.[54] It is only in the engagement with such fields of inquiry that seek to infringe upon American Studies’ critical turf, and an interrogation of the borders that keep them apart, that will de-centre and displace American Studies from what critic George Lipsitz has termed its ‘possessive investment in whiteness’. [55] Thus, the ‘politics of interruption’ evidenced by early African-American art that both enabled an African-American identity whilst displacing America’s cognitive detachment from it, offers a critical paradigm through which to approach American Studies. It is only in the conscious and consistent ‘interruption’ and critical interrogation of American Studies that new points of recognition and spaces from which to speak can be constructed; thus it is in this act of ‘turn[ing] up new soil on old ground’ that American Studies will continue to provide an intellectual home for all those for whom ‘America’ must speak. [56]

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, ‘Introduction’, in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. by Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp.1-10 (p. 4).

[2] Barringer and Flynn, p. 3.

[3] See Melville J Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon, 1958) and Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, The African American Intellectual Heritage Series (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

[4] Cited in Garrett Fesler, ‘The Exploration of Ethnicity and the Historical Archaeological Record’, in Historical Archaeology, Identity Formation and the Interpretation of Ethnicity, ed. by Maria Franklin and Garrett Fesler (Richmond, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Research Publications, 1999), pp. 1-10 (p. 4).

[5] Frazier, pp. 7-8.

[6] Henry John Drewal, ‘Memory and Agency: Bantu and Yoruba Arts in Brazilian Culture’, in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. by Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 241-53 (p. 241).

[7] Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1990), p. 11.

[8] Drewal, p. 241.

[9] Cited in Patricia M. Samford, ‘“Strong is the bond of Kinship”: West-African Style Ancestor Shrines and Subfloor Pits on African-American Slave Quarters’, in Historical Archaeology, Identity Formation and the Interpretation of Ethnicity, ed. by Maria Franklin and Garrett Fesler (Richmond, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Research Publications, 1999) <http://research.history.org/Files/Archaeo/Ethnicity_and_Identity_For mation.pdf> [02 June 2005] pp. 71-92. (pp. 71, 72).

[10] Nigel Rapport, ‘Coming Home to a Dream: A Study of the Immigrant Discourse of “Anglo-Saxons” in Israel’, in Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, ed. by Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson (Oxford: Berg, 1998), pp. 61-84 (p. 80).

[11] Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: Community,Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 222-237 (p. 225).

[12] Jonathan Rutherford, ‘A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 9-27 (p. 24).

[13] Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 66.

[14] Cited in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 187.

[15] Cited in Gilroy, p. 187.

[16] Hall, p. 231.

[17] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 55.

[18] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1990), p. xiii.

[19] Theodore C. Landsmark, ‘Comments on African American Contributions to American Material Life’, Winterthur Portfolio, 33.4 (Winter 1998), 261-282 (p. 279).

[20] John Michael Vlach, By the Work of their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 43-4.

[21] Scott, p. xii.

[22] Scott, p. xi.

[23] Patton, p. 38.

[24] Samford, pp. 71, 72.

[25] Samford, p. 72.

[26] Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester: Routledge, 1985), p. 103.

[27] Cohen, p. 38.

[28] Cohen, p.13.

[29] A. S. Martin, ‘Buying into the World of Goods: Eighteenth Century Consumerism and the Retail Trade from London to the Virginia Frontier’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, 1993), pp. 302-09 cited in Barbara J. Heath, ‘Buttons, Beads and Buckles: Contextualising Adornment Within the Bounds of Slavery’, in Historical Archaeology, Identity Formation and the Interpretation of Ethnicity, ed. by Maria Franklin and Garrett Fesler (Richmond, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Research Publications, 1999), pp. 47-70 (p. 50).

[30] Heath, p. 51.

[31] Heath, p. 57.

[32] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.

[33] Heath, p. 54.

[34] Cohen, p. 19.

[35] Cohen, p. 19.

[36] Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Quote from publisher’s blurb, <www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_catalog.taf?_function=detail&Title_ID=235&_ UserReference AA5660A1EF8905E142E2529B> [01 June 2005]

[37] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 25.

[38] Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘The Multiple Viewpoint: Diasporic Visual Cultures’, in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. by Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-18 (p. 6).

[39] W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1965), pp. 207-390 (p. 187).

[40] Mirzoeff, p. 7.

[41] Gilroy, p. 32.

[42] Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House cited in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, ed. by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 23.

[43] Aaron De Groft, ‘Eloquent Vessels/Poetics of Power: The Heroic Stoneware of “Dave the Potter”’, Winterthur Portfolio, 33.4 (1998), 249-60. p.253.

[44] John A. Burrison in De Groft, p. 253.

[45] De Groft, p. 256.

[46] See M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Univerisity of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422.

[47] Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, 2^nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 193.

[48] De Groft, p. 258.

[49] Graham, p. 192.

[50] Gilroy, p. 16.

[51] Gilroy, p. 198.

[52] Gilroy, p. 223.

[53] Cited in Margaret Thompson Drewal, ‘Nomadic Cultural Production in the African Diaspora’, in Mirzoeff, pp. 115-142 (p. 115).

[54] Gilroy, p. 190.

[55] George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p. 3.

[56] Mae G. Henderson, ‘“Where, by the way, is this train going?”: A Case for Black (Cultural) Studies’, in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity and Literature, ed. by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), pp. 95-102 (p.101).

“Unearthing Resistance: African American Cultural Artefacts in the Antebellum Period” was the 2005 winner of the BAAS Ambassador’s Postgraduate Essay Prize.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 8, Spring 2006

‘Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there’: Vietnam Combat Literature and the Limits of Authenticity

Simon Turner
© Simon Turner. All Rights Reserved

The publication of Paul Fussell’s breakthrough critical study The Great War and Modern Memory in 1975 represents a fascinating confluence of three moments of historical conflict. An analysis of the literary heritage of the First World War written by an American veteran of the second, The Great War arrived on the publishing scene in the same year that played host to the dying stages of America’s more recent military excursion in the Far East. [1] The work is an effort to elevate the firsthand experiences of veterans (or ‘true testifiers’ in Fussell’s terms) as they are transmitted through literature into popular memory. Residing behind this relatively modest aim, however, is the assertion (implied through illustration throughout The Great War, but more forcefully presented in a 2004 interview) that ‘people who haven’t been through [combat] are unfit to write military history books because what happens in close combat is absolutely unknowable – it’s so fantastic what it does to you’. [2]

The author’s choice of terminology in this passage is telling. What Fussell is arguing for in this instance is what I would term a hierarchy of authenticity: the trauma of combat effectively elevates the veteran to the status of a cultural and historical expert with an access to truths which are always already out of the reach of the non-combatant. Moreover, Fussell compounds this divisive conception of authority by emphasising the subjectivity of those experiences: war is essentially unknowable and fantastic, runs the thread of his argument, and therefore only those who have lived through one should be granted the opportunity to record it in the interests of posterity.

A comparable, though less bullish, valorisation of the veteran’s perspective can be detected in Milton J Bates’s distinction between the opposed viewpoints of ‘the man on the hill’ and ‘the man in the valley’. [3] Where the man on the hill – the journalist, the general, the historian – is privy to a sweeping overview of the lay of the land, but never experiences any of the essential ‘truth’ of war, the man in the valley, though his experience is partial, is afforded a privileged insight into precisely those ‘unknowable’ experiences that Fussell sees as comprising the main body of the collective narrative of conflict.

Bates’s conception of the ‘man in the valley’ is compellingly similar to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s assertion, in his Letters and Papers from Prison (1953), that history should ideally be written ‘from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer’. [4] The ‘man in the valley’ who records the ‘authentic’ history of conflict – the American veteran and the ‘embedded’ journalist – is, of course, not nearly so oppressed or powerless as those against whom the war was prosecuted. However, the discourse of authenticity as it pertains to Vietnam necessitates that the ‘true testifier’ cast himself as the voiceless victim, both of the horrors of war, and the distortions of collective memory. My intention in this paper is to consider the implications of Fussell’s hierarchy of authenticity as it relates to the veteran-composed literature of Vietnam. Specifically, I will interrogate the various binary oppositions (text / film; popular memory / ‘authentic’ experience; history / fiction; old / new (postmodern) literary narratives) which form the basis of the discourse of Vietnam, as it is propagated by both authors and critics of the literature, in order to ascertain their validity and utility as terms. Finally, I will conclude with a consideration of Lewis Shiner’s ‘The War at Home’, a short science fiction story first published in the mid-1980s, as a possible model for an alternative mode of reading representations of the conflict in future.

Alfred Louvre and Jeffrey Walsh, the editors of Tell Me Lies About Vietnam (1988), discuss in their introduction the alleged mass amnesia of the American populace and publishing industry towards Vietnam. Citing the veteran-poet W. D. Ehrhart’s claim that in the ten years after the war it was virtually impossible to publish material on Vietnam, they go on to argue that, between 1975 and 1982 at least, the dominant image of the veteran was either as a psychopath (such as Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle) or as a passive and emotionally crippled victim of war (such as John Rambo in First Blood). [5] Not a great deal of this is borne out by the facts; the absence of sources for their argument, and the arbitrary choice of start and end dates for their analysis of the popular image of the veteran, are both telling. Ehrhart’s claim, in particular, smacks most resonantly of sour grapes. A brief glance at the publishing dates of the following novels and memoirs gives a very different account of the publishing environment of the time and, moreover, the climate of public reception:

The Bamboo Bed, William Eastlake (1969)

The Land of a Million Elephants, Asa Babar (1970)

Captain Blackman, John A. Williams (1972)

The Lionheads, Josiah Bunting (1972)

If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien (1973)

Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone (1974)

Parthian Shot, Loyd Little (1975)

No Bugles No Drums, Charles Durden (1976)

A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (1977)

Dispatches, Michael Herr (1978)

If some examples from this selection – such as Loyd Little’s Parthian Shot and Asa Baber’s Land of a Million Elephants – are known only by academics who specialise in the period, other authors – Tim O’Brien, Michael Herr, Philip Caputo – continue to be widely read and republished. The conception of a readership unable or unwilling to digest the war in literary terms in the 1970s is as fraudulent as the portrait of a publishing industry refusing to publish material on the conflict. The ten year moratorium on Vietnam-themed literature that Ehrhart ascribes to publishers is essentially a mythology, as effective and as misleading in intent as the muscle-headed jingoism of Rambo or Reagan-era neo-conservative attempts to rewrite the war as a noble cause gone astray. Ehrhart’s narrative of publishing silence and collective amnesia is, in short, an attempt to transpose the victimisation and marginalisation of the Vietnam veteran from the social to the cultural sphere. The greater the alleged cultural marginalisation of Vietnam’s ‘true testifiers’, the greater the perceived achievement when they do manage to garner both a publishing deal and a sympathetic readership. Long after the war, according to Ehrhart’s narrative, veteran voices remained embattled and unheard, thus distinguishing them from the general of popular cultural misrepresentations of the war and its combatant protagonists.

The assumptions residing behind these assertions about the publishing industry are elaborated by Thomas Myers in his book-length study of the literature of Vietnam, entitled Walking Point (1988). Ascribing to veteran-authors such as Tim O’Brien and Philip Caputo the status of ‘point men’ – soldiers who head a column of troops into uncharted territory, and who, in the terrain of the imagination, act as ‘the author and caretaker of a credible collective memory’– Myers argues for a consideration of these authors and their works as providing a necessary corrective to the evasions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications of popular mythology. [6] Myers, in his introduction, cites Norman Mailer’s claim in The Armies of the Night that:

history is interior – no documents can give sufficient intimation: the novel must replace history at precisely the point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historic inquiry. [7]

Myers does not go quite so far as Paul Fussell, who explicitly excludes anyone who has not experienced battle from entering into the field of historical inquiry. However, his distinction between the ‘pioneering’ personal accounts of his appointed literary ‘point men’ and the alleged shortcomings of ‘traditional’ historical narrative and popular cultural memory is equally limiting.

An irony of Myers’ scepticism towards history’s utility in relation to the Vietnam War is the adoption by a number of Vietnam authors of the paratextual trappings of non-fiction (maps, glossaries, field reports, and so on) as a means of bolstering their own claims to authentic representation. Thus, the paratextual information employed by writers such as John Del Vecchio, Josiah Bunting and Larry Heinemann is to be understood as just as vital an indication of their authenticity as their status as ‘true testifiers’ is. Moreover, aside from asserting their reliability as witnesses by employing ‘evidence’ in their fiction, the authors in question impart a ‘secret’ knowledge to their readership, which, whilst spuriously democratic in intent, helps to maintain the barrier of authenticity between author and audience. The glossary – which focuses on both official military jargon, and the fruity slang of the troops – is potentially the best example of this particular aspect of Vietnam paratexts, and can be found in a number of works, including Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters (1977), The Lionheads by Josiah Bunting (1972), and James Webb’s Fields of Fire (1979).

John M. Del Vecchio’s The 13^th Valley (1982), in particular, employs paratextual devices of verification much more extensively than any other Vietnam fiction. There are, for example, twelve maps scattered throughout the novel, as well as other techniques designed to signpost Del Vecchio’s authority as a chronicler of the Vietnam experience, including a glossary, tables of military hierarchy, a final ‘tabulation’ of the body count racked up within the novel’s pages, and a ‘brief’ history of Vietnam (which is more inclusive than perhaps necessary, running from 2879 BC to 1975, and which, moreover, lends a startlingly teleological shape to Vietnamese history, suggesting that America’s struggle to ‘contain’ Communism was in some way a culmination, the final glorious act, of Vietnam’s perpetual struggle for independence and self-government). The brief postscript to Del Vecchio’s mammoth novel, however, is extremely telling if we are to read his paratextual insertions as markers of authority and verifiability. ‘Although a novel,’ writes Del Vecchio (or, perhaps, his publisher), ‘The 13^th Valley is a real place where American soldiers fought and died in August of 1970; the author did participate in some parts of the operations upon which the story is based. During the writing of the book, copies of the U.S. Army topographic maps of the area were consulted and these became the basis of the battle maps printed along with each Significant Activity report’. [8]

Further ironies inherent in Myers’s strict segregation of allegedly opposed forms of cultural production – whereby the literature of Vietnam authors is afforded a cultural high ground where it might act as a caretaker for the nation’s collective memories, unsullied by contact with popular (mis)representation – can be ascertained when considering the complex series of interrelations that have taken place between the literary and cinematic representations of the Vietnam War. A brief and by no means comprehensive list of Vietnam authors who have dabbled in screenwriting might include: Michael Herr, who co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket (1987) with Stanley Kubrick, which was in turn based on Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short Timers (1978), as well as composing Martin Sheen’s voiceover for Apocalypse Now (1979), another literary adaptation, this time from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Ron Kovic, whose memoir Born on the Fourth of July (1984) was later filmed by Oliver Stone (himself a veteran) with Tom Cruise in the lead; and James Carabatsos who has had work adapted and has, on a number of occasions, written screenplays himself, including Hamburger Hill and Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge. Vietnam literature’s relationship with its cinematic equivalent is evidently of greater complexity than the strict binary conceptions of representation or misrepresentation that Myers asserts can allow for.

What these binary distinctions indicate is not so much an assertion of the authenticity of Vietnam narratives authored by ‘true testifiers’ as an anxiety over the possibility of authenticity itself. This is borne out by a general concern, on the part of Vietnam authors themselves, as to the utility of memorial writing. A certain degree of futility is often written into the texts. Philip Caputo, for example, opens the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War (1977) with a negative statement of intent – ‘This book does not pretend to be history’ [9] – and concludes the same preface with the admission that his work ‘ought not to be regarded as a protest’ as ‘[p]rotest arises from a belief that one can changes things or influence events’. [10] Tim O’Brien, too, in If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973) expresses a similar degree of resignation as to the usefulness of his endeavour when he asks (of himself and of his reader): ‘Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there?’ His answer is as bleak as Caputo’s renunciation of protest: ‘I think not. He can tell war stories’. [11]

O’Brien’s particular reaction to the essential futility of storytelling, is, I would contend, both instructive and problematic in relation to the culturally authoritative position which is afforded to the veteran’s perspective on conflict. A distinct trajectory can be traced throughout the writings in which O’Brien tackles the subject of Vietnam. If I Die in a Combat Zone is ostensibly a memoir, though, like all memoir, it is written with a novelistic eye for composition and narrative structure. Going After Cacciato (1978), his second novel proper after Northern Lights (1975), adopts the trappings of magic realism in its portrait of a platoon tracking an AWOL soldier all the way to Paris. It is The Things They Carried (1990) and In the Lake of the Woods (1994), however, which offer O’Brien’s most radical statements on the malleability of information and the essential impossibility of accurate knowledge. Both works push at the limits of fiction and fact, blurring them to such a degree that they become indistinguishable. Moreover, O’Brien suggests in both works that information (specifically information on the Vietnam War) is open to an almost infinite number of interpretations. Everything, and by extension nothing, that one might wish to say or write about the conflict is true. [12]

One, but by no means the only reason for Tim O’Brien’s continued popularity amongst both readers and critics is the extent to which he engages with (in fact, actively embodies) one of the key interpretative models which has come to dominate the critical reception of Vietnam literature. The postmodern concern with the discovery and perpetuation of new narrative paradigms in literature and film has proven to be a fertile ground for discussion in relation to a war which has routinely been considered a conflict requiring a new language of representation in order to contain it. Fredric Jameson, one of the leading theorists of the postmodern, tackled this subject, succinctly but suggestively, in his landmark essay ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, originally published in the New Left Review in 1984. In a perceptive, but all too brief, consideration of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Jameson ascribes the author’s postmodernism – which resides specifically at the level of his ‘linguistic innovations’ – to ‘problems of content’. Jameson claims that: ‘This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie’. [13] Elsewhere, Michael Bibby has taken Jameson to task for the vagueness and ahistoricism of his use of the term ‘postmodernism’ in this instance. [14] My own concern, however, is with the degree to which Jameson falls foul of his own argument. Earlier in the same essay, Jameson posits ‘a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach’. [15] History in the postmodern era, according to Jameson, has been reduced to a text. Specifically, history has retreated into its own textual remnants, and can only be recovered and understood through them. The character of any historical event, therefore, is determined by the aesthetic principles of the works (such as Herr’s Dispatches) which have been produced to record it. Vietnam, in short, only becomes postmodern post facto, and Jameson fails to proffer any evidence that this is other than the case.

Jameson’s take on postmodernism in relation to Vietnam War literature is spuriously democratic. Postmodern Vietnam authors such as Stephen Wright and Michael Herr, whilst gesturing towards the possibility of an infinitely malleable and interpretable historical text, continue to set up the same binaries of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ representation as their predecessors, but go further in implicating pre-postmodernist methods of literary representation as the co-conspirators of the ‘inauthentic’. The primary aesthetic of Vietnam postmodernism – the quest for more disruptive and open-ended narrative paradigms – is openly and inextricably bound up with the naked aggression of canon formation. More than this, if history is to be reduced to a text, or rather a collage of postmodern texts, then it will be subject to the same evasions and omissions as the texts themselves. The intolerance towards alternative (or older) models of historical documentation – including ‘traditional’ history itself – that recurs in the postmodernist thought and literature of Vietnam can only be damaging to understanding and empathy, creating, in place of a measured historical account, a partial and fragmentary mosaic of individuated voices.

Postmodernism in its Vietnam manifestation reveals the essential fallacy of the distinction between authentic and inauthentic representation. It is not coincidental that, as the cultural stock of firsthand accounts of the Vietnam War was on the rise, authors such as Herr, O’Brien and Stephen Wright – and their critical supporters such as Jameson and the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani – began to insist upon the essential impossibility of accurate representation. The conception of authenticity in Vietnam combat literature is by nature embattled; it can validate itself only by positioning itself in opposition to the perceived inauthenticity of official historical narrative and popular memory. Where the Reagan era saw a swing towards support for and recognition of the Vietnam veteran – with the opening of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial on the Mall, and the popularity of movies such the Rambo series representing two extremes of this cultural shift – it could be argued that the most prominent authors of this period adopted postmodernism chiefly as a defence mechanism to evade being co-opted into the dominant culture of valorisation. Certainly, postmodernism, as it has been employed by Vietnam authors, has served to reinforce rather than critique the perceived authentic perspective of the ‘true testifier’. If Jameson is correct, and a new language has necessarily been invented and adopted in order to accurately represent the war, then the terms of Vietnam literature’s discourse have remained markedly similar: authentic experience remains a sacred territory that must be protected against encroachment from all sides.

Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the sole illustration that Jameson deploys in his discussion of postmodern Vietnam literature, is useful here as a concrete example of the embattled authenticity which I have delineated above, as much of the work’s subject matter is concerned with the process of composition; it is a ‘metatext’ that openly reveals its intent through its self-reflective technique. Moreover, Dispatches, published in its entirety in 1977, but composed chiefly of articles that Herr wrote for Esquire and Rolling Stone in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, is characterised not only by self-reflection, a common component of the postmodern turn, but also self-justification. Herr does not need a Jameson or a Kakutani as a champion for his ‘linguistic innovations’ and New Journalistic tics, as he defends his own aesthetic decisions tacitly within the confines of his own writing.

This defence primarily takes the form of critiques of other modes of representation, which are either accused of actively falsifying reality, or are seen as incommensurate to the task of recording it. Herr writes of his fellow journalists, for example, that ‘it would be as impossible to know what Vietnam looked like from reading most newspaper stories [written by them] as it would be to know how it smelled’, whilst Hollywood, in the normal course of events a fertile breeding ground for war movies, had, at the time of writing, ignored Vietnam altogether due to the ‘awkward’ nature of the subject. [16] ‘[I]f people don’t even want to hear about it,’ writes Herr, cynically though truthfully, ‘you know they’re not going pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up’. (153)

Comparably ‘awkward’ is Herr’s abortive interview with General Westmoreland. The general’s opening gambit is to enquire of the author whether he is going to write a ‘humoristical’ piece for Esquire, whilst Herr’s lasting impression of one of the chief prosecutors of the Vietnam War is of ‘a man who touches a chair and says, “This is a chair,” points to a desk and says “This is a desk”’. (175) This scepticism towards the general’s ‘realist’ outlook at first appears irreconcilable with Herr’s critique of military high command as primarily a manufacturer of technical jargon, anodyne euphemisms and ‘fictional kill ratios’ (173), but the satirical undermining of Westmoreland is clarified by the author’s assertion of a basic collusion between ‘conventional journalism’ (175) on the one hand, and the combined official distortions of the government and the armed forces on the other. What results is ‘a cross-fertilization of ignorance’, an environment where words ‘had no currency left as words’, and the press ‘never found a way to report meaningfully about death’ (173) as a result of this communications breakdown.

Herr, by implication, remains exempt from this critique. Indeed, his repeated interrogation of the utility and capability of more ‘conventional’ forms of representation (or misrepresentation) are the necessary foils to Herr’s validation of his own aesthetic. The binary conception of authenticity persists. ‘Conventional journalism’ is limited, cosmetic, incapable of representing the ‘secret history’ of Vietnam, and has, in fact, been instrumental in the transformation of this ‘most obvious, undeniable history’ into something innately hidden and elusive (175), ‘hiding low under the fact-figure crossfire’ of ‘all the books and articles and white papers’ written on the subject. (46) Herr’s brand of journalism, we are led to understand, is potentially more truthful, though it is a troubling form of literary honesty that asserts that, ‘It doesn’t matter that memory distorts; every image, every sound comes back out of smoke and the smell of things burning’ (91), as it seems to implicate Herr in the same processes of historical obfuscation that he ascribes to his peers.

Like Fussell, Herr seems intent on asserting the unknowable and fantastic qualities of warfare in order to bolster his own position as an authentic witness. Much of the war is ineffable, ‘impossible to convey’ (53), which suggests that the limitation of conventional representation is only half the story: language, even Herr’s, is always already incommensurate to the task of assembling the chaos of Vietnam into a literary order. It seems appropriate, then, that Herr should place, close to the beginning of his narrative, a soldier’s recounted story, ‘as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard’. It reads, in its entirety: ‘Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened’. (13-14) This is the archetypal Vietnam narrative: utterly ‘unknowable’ and unrepresentable due to the death of its sole authentic witness. The most secret, and ostensibly authentic history, is, implicitly, the very same one which has passed beyond recall.

With these caveats towards Vietnam postmodernism in mind, I want to conclude with a brief consideration of a short piece of speculative fiction by Lewis Shiner entitled ‘The War At Home’. The story, originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1985, and anthologised as part of In the Field of Fire, a collection of science fiction and fantasy narratives of Vietnam, offers, I think, a fascinating, though troubling, counter-narrative to the rigid demarcations of experience that can be detected in other literary and critical treatments of the war. Shiner opens his narrative with a burst of jagged and kaleidoscopic prose, whose setting should be immediately recognisable:

Ten of us in the back of a Huey, assholes clenched like fists, C rations turned to snow cones in our bellies. Tracers float up at us, swollen, sizzling with orange light, like one dud firecracker after another. Ahead of us the gunships pound Landing Zone Dog with everything they have – flex guns, rockets, and .50-calibers – while the artillery screams overhead and the Air Force A1-Es strafe the clearing into kindling. We hover over the LZ in the sudden phosphorous dawn of a flare, screaming, “Land, motherfucker, land!” while the tracers close in, the shell of the copter ticking like a clock as the thumb-sized rounds go through her, ripping the steel like paper, spattering somebody’ brains across the aft bulkhead. Then falling into the knee-high grass, the air humming with bullets and stinking of swamp ooze and gasoline and human shit and blood. Spinning wildly, my finger jamming down the trigger of the M-16, not caring anymore where the bullets go. [17]

The reader is on recognisable terrain in these opening passages. However, Shiner immediately subverts expectations (albeit in a deliberately trite manner) with the revelation that these events are a dream; the protagonist wakes up sweating beside his wife, complaining of Nam flashbacks. A further reversal is engendered when the narrator’s wife reveals, in turn, that he has never visited Vietnam, much less seen combat. [18] His ’Nam flashbacks are, rather, a product of mediated collective experience: news footage, movies, photographs and literature have all impacted upon his imagination to produce all the outward effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, with none of the actual ‘authentic’ experiences to back it up.

Though Shiner’s speculative fiction operates chiefly at a metaphorical level – the protagonist’s delusions are a perfect illustration of the processes of popular or ‘prosthetic’ memory (to employ Alison Landsberg’s term) [19] – his story also succeeds as a radical critique of the binary oppositions (between image and text, memory and history, popular and literary culture) upon which, as we have seen, much of the literature and critical theory of Vietnam rests. Effectively, Fussell’s hierarchy of authenticity is abolished; the popular memory of Vietnam is as traumatic, in Shiner’s fictional world, as the events themselves. This represents a radical, though strangely logical, extrapolation of Jameson’s conflation of the historical and the textual. If history is text, then the textual afflatus of any given historical event ceases to be merely representation; it must also by definition become an enactment of those events, weighted with equal significance.

Authorial intention is, of course, notoriously difficult to infer. My own intention in this paper has been to delineate and critique what I perceive to be the self-limiting and reactionary discourse of embattled authenticity as it is manifested in the literature of Vietnam, and Shiner’s fantastical take on the postmodern imagination simply fits the schema of my discussion. Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992), which expands the autobiographical template of much Vietnam War literature to compose a mosaic of narratives detailing the neglected Vietnamese experience of the conflict, might have served equally well as an illustration. [20] What both works have in common is the suggestion that the paradigm of jealously guarded ‘authentic’ experience, the existence of which depends upon the constant reiteration of perceived ‘inauthentic’ forms of representation, is ultimately exclusionary and indefensible as a literary strategy. Where Shiner is flip and satirical, Butler is sincere in his effort to render the Vietnamese experience for a primarily American audience, yet the two narrative modes employed by both authors point towards a more inclusive literary environment, where the ‘secret history’ propagated by Herr, O’Brien and their fellow ’Nam authors, and the restrictive binary discourse upon which it depends, will no longer be the dominant mode of representation.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Susanna Ruskin, ‘Hello to all that’, Guardian (London), 31 July 2004 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/history/story/0,,1272911,00.html > [accessed 12 November 2005]

[2] Ruskin. My emphases.

[3] Cited in Mark Taylor, The Vietnam War in History, Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 28-29.

[4] Cited in Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga, trans. by Paul Wilson (London: Faber, 1988), p. 3.

[5] Tell Me Lies About Vietnam: Cultural Battles for the Meaning of the War, ed. by Alf Louvre and Jeffrey Walsh (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988), pp. 5-6.

[6] Thomas Myers, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 7-8. My emphases.

[7] Cited in Myers, p. 9.

[8] John M. Del Vecchio, The 13^th Valley (London: Sphere, 1983, @1982), p. 607.

[9] Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. xiii.

[10] Caputo, p. xxi.

[11] Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone (London: Flamingo, 2003), p. 32.

[12] Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (London: Flamingo, 1991); Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (London: Flamingo, 1995).

[13] Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (July/August 1984), 53-92 (p. 84). <http://www.newleftreview.net/IssueI142.asp?Article=03> [accessed 12 November 2005]

[14] Michael Bibby, ‘The Post-Vietnam Condition’, in The Vietnam War and Postmodernity, ed. by Michael Bibby (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp.143-172 (p. 148).

[15] Jameson, p. 71.

[16] Michael Herr, Dispatches (London: Pan Books, 1978), p. 79. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the main body of the article.

[17] Lewis Shiner, ‘The War at Home’, in In the Field of Fire, ed. by Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann (New York: Tor, 1987), pp. 325-326.

[18] Shiner, p. 326.

[19] Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

[20] Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2001).

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 8, Spring 2006

On the Use of Language in Chinese American Literature

Yan Ying
© Yan Ying. All Rights Reserved

The crucial functions of language as a means of communication, a carrier of culture, and a medium of power are always a significant part of ethnic experience and culture. The multifarious linguistic features of Chinese American literary expressions reflect the intricate linguistic situation of Chinese American existence and culture. There are roughly four categories of expressions: dominant standard American English, Pidgin English, Chinese in its various and vastly different dialects, and Pidgin Chinese, by which I refer to American-born generations’ eclectic use of Chinese. Yet the real situation can be more complicated. Gus Lee’s novel China Boy provides an interesting, if not typical, example of the linguistic disarray of a Chinese American family composed of a Chinese immigrant father, white American step-mother, two Chinese-born sisters and an American-born boy:

We sounded like elevator talk in the Tower of Babel, with a smorgasbord of Chinese dialects on the ground floor, a solid base in Songhai, a strong layer of Mandarin, and a smattering of sam yep Cantonese veneered on the top. Ascending, we found Father’s unique hybrid blend of Chinese, English, and German accents employed in his pronunciation of English. Then came Jennifer and Megan’s high English aristocratic accents—the products of Tutor Luke’s original instruction and the year of speaking Empire English in India. Of course, had we been at the fount of the tongue, in Great Britain, their speech would have represented the apex. But this was America, and Janie’s rapid grasp of American dialogue placed her just beneath the perfect enunciation of Edna, who rested at the pinnacle. My gibberish of eclectic sounds was actually not part of the structure and lay in the subbasement, in the antediluvian terrain of cave-dweller grunting. [1]

The humorous description, on the one hand, shows the heterogeneity of languages spoken by Chinese Americans as a result of the linguistic diversity of Chinese, different transnational experience, and different means of English acquisition. Mandarin is the official common speech in China; ‘Songhai’ is the transliteration of ‘Shanghai’ in Shanghai dialect; sam yep Cantonese is a sub-dialect of Cantonese spoken by early immigrants from the Sam Yep area of Canton; Father’s English is largely a result of his military training by the American military forces when he helped China fight against the Japanese invasion during the Second World War; Jennifer and Megan’s British English suggests not only the Western influence in the modernization of China but also British imperialism in India.

On the other hand, the description imagines the hierarchical relationship of the Chinese and English languages and their respective variations in American society. The hierarchy of languages, in the meantime, prescribes for their speakers a corresponding social status, with the native speaker of perfect American English ranking on the top, followed by the speaker with a good command of English, the speaker of Pidgin English coming next, and the Chinese-only speaker at the bottom. The American-born boy, confused by different forms of languages at home and in the mainly African American neighbourhood where he lives, becomes an orphan left in a pre-linguistic limbo, making unintelligible primitive noises.

The process of his acquiring a tongue of his own, I will argue, can be read as a metaphor for the struggle and dilemma Chinese American writers have faced in the representation of linguistic features of Chinese Americans. Chinese American literature in English is constructed in the English tradition, a tradition which is sharply at odds with the reality of a bilingual, multidialectal Chinese American population. In this essay, I will inquire as to how Chinese American writers reconcile the English tradition with the material conditions of Chinese Americans and their linguistic plurality, how they preserve and communicate culturally specific meanings in English, and how they employ Pidgin English, Chinese and Pidgin Chinese as an important strategy for the construction of their identity.

It is necessary to contextualize Chinese Pidgin English before we examine it as a distinctive linguistic feature in Chinese-American literature. The word ‘pidgin’ is thought to come from the Cantonese pronunciation of the English ‘business’. Pidgin English initially referred to non-standard English spoken by Chinese people, usually for business purposes in trading ports of China in the seventeenth century. Later, with the continuous invasion of foreign colonizing powers, pidgin was widely used in the treaty ports, especially in the foreign concessions, as the language of communication between foreigners and their native menials, until the disbanding of foreign settlements in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party came to power. Ashcroft et al. define pidgins as ‘languages serving as lingua franca, that is, they are used as a medium of communication between groups who have no other language in common’. [2] Whereas the definition explains the function of pidgin, it glosses over the inequality, at least in the case of Chinese Pidgin English, of the power relationship in the actual practice between two parties in which one group uses pidgin. The adoption of Pidgin English by the Chinese is based on the recognition of the power and privilege of the party who speak Standard English and do not bother to learn the native language, and the assumption of their own inferior status.

In my discussion of Chinese American culture and history, pidgin refers to the English language spoken by Chinese immigrants who have no chance of getting a formal English education and whose English is strongly accented and ungrammatical. Chinese Pidgin English is composed of a rudimentary and limited English vocabulary fitting into the spoken Chinese syntax with little regard for grammar. In Chinese, function words, prepositions and articles are often omitted and there are few pronoun forms and these are optional. Besides, verb tense in Chinese is only indicated by a few function words which are sometimes dispensable, and it does not involve any morphological change of the verb. Therefore, within the syntax of Chinese, Pidgin English seems fragmentary and illogical.

In American popular culture, there has been a long history of representing Chinese Pidgin English for its comic and often demeaning effect. Elaine H. Kim notes that the broken English spoken by the alien Chinese in American public perception is ‘characterized by high-pitched, sing-song tones, tortured syntax, the confounding of l’s and r’s, the proliferation of ee-endings, and the random omission of articles and auxiliary verbs’. [3] Her summary points out some common features of Chinese Pidgin English, yet we should note that Chinese Pidgin English itself is not a homogenized form. Especially as a spoken language, it is strongly influenced by the speaker’s dialect. Because of the heterogeneity of Chinese immigrant composition, Chinese Pidgin English differs from one group to another. In other words, Pidgin English has its own dialects. Pidgin English spoken by Cantonese, therefore, sounds different from that spoken by Shanghainese. In fact, locals of Shanghai have their own name for Pidgin English, yang-jing-bang English, named for the river which divides the British and French concessions in Shanghai. To a discerning ear, Brave Orchid, a character from Canton in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and the Joy Luck Club mothers, from different parts of China, in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club would not sound the same when they speak English, although their language might share some syntactic similarities. Nevertheless, conceived of as broken and ungrammatical, the Chinese Pidgin English spoken by the immigrant generation is taken as evidence of their intellectual as well as cultural inferiority, and perpetuates the demeaning stereotype and justifies the discrimination against them.

However, the irony is that, to Chinese immigrants, the English language is at once the language by which they are judged and of which they are dispossessed. Compared with other colonized people in colonies, Chinese immigrants in America are more compelled to use the dominant language and its culture out of both the immediate and practical need and the subjugating and homogenizing need of the mainstream society. Yet the urgent need of the language acquisition is in conflict with the actual condition of the language segregation. A major proportion of Chinese immigrants before the 1960s were from the rural, southern Chinese working class who had little or no education in China, not to mention an approach to the learning of English. Moreover, given the extreme differences between the Chinese and English linguistic systems, mastery of the language is not easy even with systematic teaching and learning, and it is all the more difficult for adult learners. When they came to America, their laborious menial work gave them neither access to informed contact with English, nor spare money or time to learn English in an educated way. Their incompetence in English, in turn, gave the white society excuses either to reject them in the job market or restrict them to a limited range of physical jobs. To the working class immigrant generation, any acquisition of English was largely the random picking-up of the words and phrases they came across. For language and cultural security, they stayed in their ethnic enclaves, the ‘Chinatowns’, which became linguistic ghettos and bred a Pidgin English that itself speaks to the life of Chinese immigrants, as shown in phrases based on the stereotypical miming, such as ‘no tickee, no washee’.

While Pidgin English is a more noticeable phenomenon among the immigrant generation, their children, affected by the linguistic situation at home and in the neighbourhood, are also likely to display a deficiency in the English language. According to the 1990 Census, ‘56 per cent of Asian Americans aged five or over did not speak English “very well” and 35 percent were “linguistically isolated”’. [4] Worries were expressed that the increasing population who could not speak English threatened the coherence and integrity of the nation, as the country might lose a common reference point that bonds all citizens. However, instead of getting assistance from the government, Chinese Americans have encountered the legal dispossession of the chances to learn English even in the 1990s. Benson Tong observes the most vexing problem within the student population of Chinese Americans is their poor English proficiency. Yet the legal decisions of the government have only exacerbated the problem:

[T]he English Fluency Act … requires the removal of limited-English proficiency (LEP) students from bilingual classrooms within two years of their entry. The law also bars funding for programs offering assistance to LEP students who have been in such programs for more than three years. [5]

While laws that have the effect of discouraging the English language acquisition have been issued, the city council of Monterey Park (the first suburban Chinatown) in Los Angeles passed an ordinance in 1986 to make English the only official language because the presence of signs in Chinese reminded the white residents that the community was no longer in their control. [6]

Chinese Americans, especially the native-born second generation, have been denied ownership of both English and Chinese. ‘Frank Chin summarizes the situation for his generation of writers in “Backtalk”: “we are a people without a native tongue”’. [7] The linguistic alienation leads to anxiety about speech and inability to use the tongue. In The Woman Warrior, for example, Maxine Hong Kingston portrays a scene in which the narrator physically and verbally abuses a quiet girl in the bathroom of a Chinese school, repeatedly forcing her to speak. The narrator demands the girl talk: ‘You do have a tongue….So use it’. [8] During the painful and protracted persecution, the girl does not utter a single meaningful word, but instead, produces ‘sobs, chokes, noises that were almost words’. [9] The description of a Chinese American child making incomprehensible pre-linguistic noises is similar to that in China Boy quoted above. While the scene has been analyzed through many different approaches, it can be interpreted as the narrator’s own fear of the dysfunction of her split tongue projected onto this quiet Chinese American girl. [10] However, as shown in these two examples, the distinctive heteroglossic feature of Chinese American literature at once owes much to and reflects tensions, suppressions and dysfunctions of the particular linguistic situation of Chinese American families. Although speaking in a different context, Judith Butler points out ‘a dual possibility’ of language that is also applicable to the linguistic situation of Chinese Americans:

[Language] can be used to assert a true and inclusive universality of persons, or it can institute a hierarchy in which only some persons are eligible to speak and others, by virtue of their exclusion from the universal point of view, cannot ‘speak’ without simultaneously deauthorizing that speech. [11]

To employ language in this sense becomes a potent and subversive act. Literary expressions of Chinese Americans can thus be seen as an act that reclaims their ownership of language and asserts their sovereignty while challenging the authorized language.

In ‘Mother Tongue’, Amy Tan recalls the different registers of English she has adopted and uses ’mother tongue’ to describe the language she uses in her writing, that is, ‘all the Englishes’ she grew up with:

the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as ‘simple’; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as ‘broken’; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as ‘watered down’; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. [12]

The usual identification of ‘mother tongue’ to describe one’s native language and a parent’s language does not hold in the linguistic situation of second-generation Chinese Americans. Knowing two languages is, in fact, ‘a special kind of double bind’ for the child of immigrant parents. [13] The mother tongue, in Tan’s definition, is not naturally acquired and monolithic, but attributed with contingent characteristics prone to circumstantial mediation and appropriation of translation. In other words, Tan herself becomes the mother of this language; it is a language of her own creation. In addition, by incorporating her mother’s sub-standard English, Tan denies the stratification of social status based on one’s English competence. Nominally English, her ‘mother tongue’ combines both English and Chinese, and otherness is thus an inherent and integral part of this form of English. The ‘other tongue’ is embedded in ‘mother tongue’. Tan’s pluralizing of ‘English’ is analogous with Ashcroft et al.’s analysis of ‘englishes’ in post-colonial writing, although Ashcroft et al. choose to put into lower-case other forms of English, implying derivation as well as subordination. Their discussion of language in post-colonial writing theorizes what Tan’s essay explains at the experiential level and aptly applies to Chinese American literature.

In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin examine the gap between the experience of place and the language available to describe it in post-colonial texts. Ashcroft et al. observe that:

this gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describe a new place, for those whose language is systematically destroyed by enslavement, and for those whose language has been rendered unprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing power. [14]

In post-colonial writing which features the hybridized nature of post-colonial experience, the gap is employed to wield ‘textual strategies’ that ‘[seize] the language of the centre and [re-place] it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place’. [15] Ashcroft et al. note two distinct processes in replacing ‘English’ with ‘englishes’, the abrogation or denial of ‘English’ and the appropriation and reconstitution of the language. As a result, this literature is always:

written out of the tension between the abrogation of the received English which speaks from the centre, and the act of appropriation which brings it under the influence of a vernacular tongue, the complex of speech habits which characterize the local language, or even the evolving and distinguishing local english of a monolingual society trying to establish its link with place. [16]

In a post-colonial context, English and its variants intersect and create separation from, comparison with and subversion of the authority and authenticity of Standard English and the imperial culture and power it represents. The language variant can thus be held to be metonymic of the culture which produces it. Ashcroft et al., in the meantime, reject the essentialist view that the adoption of the vernacular or Creole, especially untranslated words, in a post-colonial text embodies an authentic indigenous culture. Instead, the important function it has is to ‘[inscribe] difference’. [17] The language variant is itself a matter of invention and construction; so are the signs of identity and of difference. Dynamic possibilities are, therefore, available to, at once, maintain distance and otherness and appropriate the language of the centre of power. While emphasizing the constitution of meaning within the text, Ashcroft et al acknowledge that a new set of presuppositions ensuing from the interchange of cultures in the text is likely to be ‘taken as the cultural reality of the Other’. [18] By according the writer the role of ‘the first interpreter’, Ashcroft et al. preclude the reading of the post-colonial writing as an authentic record of the post-colonial experience and align the writer with the reader as they share ‘that interpretive territory’. [19] The ‘interpretive territory’ suggests a dialogic relationship between the writer and the reader, and thus allows possibilities of different interpretations and re-interpretations.

However, the designation of ‘interpretive territory’, in my view, does not automatically pre-empt the ethnographical authenticity assumed in writing as well as in reading. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s reading of Amy Tan’s works provides a pertinent example to complicate Ashcroft et al.’s theory of ‘re-placing language’ in post-colonial writing. Situated in the context of Asian American women’s narratives and Western feminism, Wong’s attempt to account for the particular success of Amy Tan points to the problematic ethnic representation and identity construction, and their relationship to the specific readership of mainstream American feminism. [20] Teasing out the various elements of Tan’s prose style and the narrative frames that are ‘temporal distancing’ and ‘authenticity-marking’, Wong critiques the ‘quasi-ethnographic Orientalist discourse’ Tan creates in submission to ‘The Persistent Allure of Orientalism’. [21] Wong bases a large part of her argument on the discussion of Tan’s solecism in her translation of and explanation for Chinese language and culture. ‘Sugar Sisterhood’ is derived from the phrase ‘sugar sister’ used by the character Winnie in Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife. Tan translates tang jie, a term from the Chinese kinship system which refers to the elder female cousin in the paternal line, into ‘sugar sister’ as a result of confusion between two Chinese homophones. [22] The term ‘sugar sisterhood’ therefore,

[designates] the kind of readership Amy Tan has acquired, especially among white women, through acts of cultural interpreting and cultural empathy that appear to possess the authority of authenticity but are often products of the American-born writer’s own heavily mediated understanding of things Chinese. [23]

While tang jie itself is not a term of endearment as Tan suggests, the translation, Wong seems to say, is emblematic of Tan’s endearment to the mainstream white sisters. Examples of the sort that are made of romanized words and other explanatory asides are plentiful, yet most of them, according to Wong, are ‘gratuitous’ details that have ‘limited, at times nonexistent, utility in structural or informational terms’. [24] They signify that the author has adopted a stance of ‘a knowledgeable cultural insider and a competent guide’, and with her ‘declarative modality’ of narration, Tan composes quasi-ethnography about the Orient that can be readily interpreted within the existent Orientalist frame. [25] In the meantime, Wong also admits the counter-Orientalist gestures in Tan’s works, as Tan was inevitably influenced by the ethnic consciousness movement of the 1960s, the era in which she grew up. Tan’s cultural mediation, in Wong’s analysis, is a source of ambiguity, offering both Orientalist and counter-Orientalist interpretative possibilities, although the former are a far more overwhelming presence.

Reading Wong’s criticism alongside Ashcroft et al.’s theory shows, that essentialist though it might be, an ethnographic mode of writing and reading can be taken as one form of interpretation. Despite many critics’ efforts to resist the reading of Tan’s novels as lessons on Chinese culture, they are repeatedly sought for, as well as lauded for, the specificity of their authentic cultural descriptions. [26] Besides, the insertion of ‘englishes’ and other languages, while opposing the normative mode of ‘English’, does not necessarily oppose the Othering upon which the colonizing discourse is premised. In short, strategies of appropriation are not always equivalent to strategies of intervention employed to reverse the denigration of the local culture and challenge the supposedly superiority of the racial and cultural model of the dominant power. What is at issue is how ethnic linguistic practice is appropriated in the English context and what is attempted in the appropriation. On the whole, Tan’s ‘mother tongue’, in Wong’s criticism, is a strategy of invention rather than intervention, claiming the ownership of the language by being complicit with, instead of subverting, the hegemony.

I agree with Wong’s interpretation of Orientalism in Amy Tan’s writing and the Amy Tan phenomenon, especially considering the demand for signs of authenticity in the mainstream book market. However, it should be pointed out that doubts about the accuracy of the second generation’s translation of their parents’ language and culture are also implied in Chinese American texts. The daughters’ ruminations on their communications, or rather lack of them, with their mothers, and their frustrations over what is lost in translation are reflective of ‘the dilemmas’ Amy Tan ‘felt growing up in a bicultural, bilingual family’. [27] In The Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei, recalls that ‘my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did’. [28] She talks to her mother, Suyuan, in English and her mother answers in Chinese. Jing-mei concludes that they ‘never really understood one another’: ‘We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more’. [29] Another character, Lena St. Clair, makes a similar observation: ‘When we were alone, my mother would speak in Chinese, saying things my father could not possibly imagine. I could understand the words perfectly, but not the meanings’. [30] The words are depleted of their full meaning in translation. What is signified does not get across in the signifying process. Leila in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone also notes the untranslatability literally and emotionally between the Chinese mother and the American daughter: ‘This wasn’t the first time I’d done something and not told, I have a whole different vocabulary of feeling in English than in Chinese, and not everything can be translated’. [31] Leila’s mother, too, ‘had a world of words that were beyond [Leila]’. [32] Ruth, in Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, only comes to know the full story of her mother through the translation of a Chinese immigrant. Her understanding of the sound gu refers to different Chinese characters with vastly different meanings: ‘old’, ‘gorge’, ‘bone’, also ‘thigh’, ‘blind’, ‘grain’, ‘merchant’. [33] The meaning in this case is dispersed and, consequently, lost in the inadequate translation by the second generation. That Chinese sounds are sometimes no more than the superficial sign of cultural difference is seen in the young Mona’s ad-libbing of Chinese in Gish Gen’s Mona in the Promised Land. Having picked up random phrases of the Shanghai dialect from her mother, Mona impresses her friends with her knowledge of Chinese, telling them, ‘Byeh fa-foon’ and ‘Shee-veh. Ji-nu’, even though these translate as ‘Stop acting crazy. Rice gruel. Soy sauce’. [34] However, apart from the second generation’s incompetence in their mothers’ tongue as a result of social and educational policies and different cultural and social contexts, the different historical references and subject positions of the two generations also lead to the transfiguration and displacement of the meaning of the language. As the following analysis of Gus Lee’s China Boy will show, for the second generation language becomes a site where culture and identity are fought over, negotiated, displaced and transformed.

Gus Lee’s novel China Boy can be read as the epitome of the second generation’s forming its voice in the struggle with a master’s tongue that mutes its articulation in the cacophony of the ethnic Babel. Thinly disguised as a novel, China Boy is Lee’s autobiography recounting his turbulent childhood experience and rites of passage in San Francisco in the 1950s. The family lives in the Panhandle, ‘the dead center of the city’ populated by poor black people. (3) The narrator Kai Ting’s father, T. K. Ting, once an outstanding Nationalist army officer in China, becomes an unsuccessful banker in America. Kai’s mother, beautiful and learned, dies early of cancer. Her death leaves the two youngest children, Janie and Kai, in unredeemable mourning for their wretched lives at the hands of their stepmother, Edna. A blond Philadelphia socialite, Edna exercises an overbearing control over the family. Deprived of love and home security, Kai, frail and once the indulged ‘Only Son’, is forced to stay in the street where he is the target of bullying. His father decides to send him to the Y.M.C.A to learn to fight, and this proves to be a transforming experience. With the help of the Y.M.C.A staff member, Kai devises a plan and finally beats the most feared bully in the gang, Big Willie. The victory gives him the courage to assume a fighting stance and utter his declaration of independence to his tyrannical white stepmother: ‘You not my Mah-mee! I ain’t fo’ yo’ pickin’ on, no mo’!’ (322) Kai delivers his two-part declaration in dual dialects, the former in Pidgin English, the latter in African American street English. While the construction of racial and ethnic masculinity in the acts of violence and assimilation is the predominant theme of the novel, I would like to focus on the ways that language, mainly Chinese, functions in this novel and announces the emergence of a unique Chinese American voice and identity. [35]

Kai’s physical vulnerability correlates to his linguistic incompetence. Together with his assertion of physical strength also emerges his confidence to deny the imposition of ‘American English’ and acquire his own language. To Kai, the death of his mother means not only the loss of mother, but also of mother tongue: ‘Our mother’s absence had caught me between languages. My Song-hai was pitiful, my Mandarin worse. My English was fractured. My Cantonese was nonexistent’. (50) Edna’s arrival worsens the situation because of her ruthless imposition of the ‘English only’ policy. Kai first of all senses her power through her ‘words—an incessant, articulate torrent of elevated vocabulary uttered with careful diction and unmistakable menace’. (73) She calls Chinese ‘barbaric speech’ and refers to Kai’s mother as ‘illiterate’, announcing that ‘we are only to speak English henceforth. Absolutely no Chinese, in any form’ and ‘there will be no breaching of this policy’. (58, 78, 77) In this legal-sounding language, which Gus Lee humorously describes as having ‘the formality of a Vatican edict’, he implies the institutional exclusion of Chinese and imposition of English from American society at large. (77) Yichin Shen notes that Edna’s knowledge of English ‘becomes a mode of surveillance, regulation, and discipline’ which she intentionally ‘turns into a disciplinary power to suppress and subjugate the linguistic and cultural other’. [36] The ‘English only’ policy has to work on the premise of the removal of the other culture which can only be expressed in the other language. Hence, no Chinese food, Chinese songs, Chinese friends, or even mention of the Chinese mother are allowed in the house. Edna’s act of cultural violence culminates in her burning of the crate which contains family memories: the photo albums, mother’s wedding gown, ‘filthy foreign books’, ‘awful Chinese pens and dirty inks’, and father’s ‘identity papers, photos and letters from war buddies, his old uniforms and Sam Browne belts’. (85) By burning the crate, Edna tries to sever the family’s links to the past and ensure her privileged position by designating the linguistic and cultural hierarchy in the house. Such an act carried out with hardly any protest from T. K. Ting, the patriarchal head of the family, can only be exercised with the given notion of the inferiority of Chinese culture and the granted supremacy and statutory authority of Edna, a white American. [37] Edna personifies the relentless cultural chauvinism and containment, and elimination of the Other in the process of forced Americanization.

Under such circumstances, Kai’s, as well as Gus Lee’s, adherence to the use of Chinese is an attempt to resist the dispossession of their mother tongue, reconstruct a lost home of security and love, and salvage a few words and phrases from the ashes of the brief and ruined culture of the family. Such an effort cannot possibly lead to a recovery of some pure and unsullied cultural condition, and such practices cannot possibly embody an authentic culture. Confusion is inevitable, and errors are abundant, especially as the Chinese, as perceived by Kai, ‘are wizards at homonyms; one word has a hundred definitions’. [38] Kai’s story is scattered with romanized and italicized words of Chinese, mostly in Shanghai dialect, the tongue of Kai’s deceased mother. Different forms of Ashcroft et al’s categorization of the existence of the Other’s language and culture in a post-colonial English text can be found in this book. Lee noticeably utilizes what Ashcroft et al. consider as ‘the most common method of inscribing alterity’—code-switching, alternating between the narrator’s narration in standard English and the dialogue of the characters in other Englishes, Chinese Pidgin English and Black English. [39]

Lee uses syntactic fusion in two forms. One is the kind of syntactic fusion described by Ashcroft et al., or Pidgin English in the Chinese American context, which fuses the lexical forms of English with the syntax of Chinese and sometimes with indication of Chinese accent, such as ‘Why no use rift?’ and ‘I know I’flaid, ‘fraid. I know I feeling, velee very, big-time…’. (248, 307) The latter example shows Kai’s conscious and strenuous effort to speak ‘correct’ English, as demanded by Edna and the society she represents, yet the syntax of Pidgin English still remains. The other form of syntactic fusion Lee uses is to marry the lexical forms of Chinese with the syntax of English in a way that I would term as ‘Pidgin Chinese’. For example, Kai comments about the people in the Y.M.C.A that they are Hun hau ren, translating word for word the English expression ‘very nice people’. (168) When Kai prays to God, he uses Songhai. While Lee renders this direct speech in Pidgin English, he leaves a couple of words in Chinese. One of them is hao dao, translated verbally from the English ‘right way’. (94) That the italicized word is followed by the explanation indicates the adult narrator’s intention in this direct transcription. Examples such as these suggest that Kai is caught between the cleaving forces of the two languages and, as a result, his confusion over what is the ‘right way’. On the one hand, he wants to cling to his mother tongue, the language of love and home, or in his own words, ‘God’s language’. (94) On the other hand, the losing of his mother tongue, together with what the mother tongue signifies, is ineluctable when the adoption of stepmother and stepmother tongue is forced upon him.

Literal translation is another method Lee employs in creating a Babel-like effect in the text. One typical example is Lee’s translation of xiansheng, a common honorific meaning ‘sir’, or ‘gentleman’, or ‘Mister’ when used with the surname. At times, Lee renders it Syensheng in a transliteration of the Shanghai dialect. Occasionally, Lee literally translates it into ‘Before Born’. The purpose for the appropriation is suggested in Uncle Shim’s speech in a gathering of the Chinatown clan elders, to which Kai is invited and placed at the centre of their ceremony:

We were all born in the nineteenth century. We are men of the past age. This little boy…is our memory…. We drink to the boy…because we have our youth back again, for a night. Ha! When would we have ever stood for a child back in the Middle Kingdom? Never! But here, we have only the memory of what a child represents to us. We ask him to remember us, and thank him for being our collective Only Son. Gambei, Before Borns! (252)

‘Before Born’ can be interpreted both as ‘born before the present’ and ‘the birth yet to come’. This deliberate rendering, though almost a mistranslation, conveys paradoxically the past, represented by these elders, which is at once moribund in its disconnection from China and reincarnation in the American present. The older generation invites and views the spectacle of its own demise and the emergence of a new generation from the ruins. Under the pressure of forced assimilation, the residue of the past can only survive and be (mis)translated in the personal memory of the ‘After Born’, the little boy Kai and the adult narrator Gus Lee. [40] Mistranslation therefore becomes the evidence, the artifice as well as the metaphor of the re-contextualization of a displaced culture.

This is more clearly reflected in Lee’s many references to the traditional Chinese system of scholarship and Confucianism in what Ashcroft et al. term as ‘glossing’ and ‘untranslated’ words, such as ‘Chien Shur’, ‘chuan yuan’, and ‘Chingsu, the Forest of Brush Pens’. [41] Uncle Shim, being a Chien Shur, tries to inculcate Kai with the notion of Chinese scholarship, especially in terms of the advancing of scholars in the three levels of imperial examination. One afternoon, he speaks to Kai’s mother, ‘See here, how do you expect your son to become a Chu-ren, a Recommended Man for Metropolitan Rank, if you do not read him the Sheng-Yu, the Sacred Edict, or the Four Treasuries, on the first and fifteenth days of every month?’ (207) To that Kai’s mother replies, ‘The entire system of Hsiu-ts’ai, of Flowering Talent, is gone. What if My Son were to study to become a Chien-sher? [sic] Who would proctor the pen? What post would he assume, when we cannot even go home?’ (208) Indeed, the imperial examination is not only non-existent in America, but was abolished in China in 1905, four decades before the family came to America. These obsolete notions that are vaguely implanted in Kai’s mind and that the adult narrator recalls incorrectly only suggest the unattainability of the alternative to the violent rite of passage Kai is forced to experience on the American land. Lee polarizes the Chinese and American conception of masculinity: for the Chinese, masculinity is measured with one’s achievement in scholarship, while for the Americans, masculinity is synonymous with muscularity. The Chinese American boy Kai will eventually arrive at the pinnacle of American masculinity, West Point, the experience of which Lee recounts in a less fragmented voice in his second semi-autobiographical novel, Honor and Duty.

Standing up to Edna in two Englishes, Pidgin English and Black English, Kai also says no to her linguistic tyranny and affirms his associations with the Chinese and African American heritage in his identity formation. Ironically, Lee expresses his gratitude towards his stepmother ‘for English’ in the acknowledgements. The writer makes use of his fluency in English, traumatic as the process is, to re-voice that censoring and forge a new composite and tellingly discontinuous voice. English is simultaneously resisted and adulterated, as effected by writings such as China Boy, which are written within and against the dominant language.

As for the Chinese language, although the mark and marketing of authenticity by including incorrect Chinese translations and explanations for Chinese culture might be deplored, we should bear in mind the institutional dispossession and linguistic environment in America, and which lead to the re-contextualization of the Chinese language and, consequently, the reconfiguration of the meaning. For second-generation Chinese Americans, the separation from the mother’s tongue and the master’s tongue signifies the process of individuation in finding their own reality and space and their own language and authority. The assemblage of Englishes therefore is not only a signifier of a radical Otherness, but also forms a space for articulating identity and difference and enables a process that governs the cultural and historical reconstitution of a Chinese American subjectivity.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Gus Lee, China Boy (London: Robert Hale, 1992), p.75. All further references will be made parenthetically within the body of the text.

[2] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 1998), p.176.

[3] Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), p.12.

[4] Edward Ashbee, American Society Today (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p.114.

[5] Benson Tong, The Chinese Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), p.138.

[6] Tong, p.114.

[7] Cited in David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 39.

[8] Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (London: Pan Books, 1981), p.160.

[9] Kingston, p.160.

[10] For example, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong interprets the quiet Chinese girl who the narrator tortures as her second self and interprets the scene as one about ‘the racial shadow’, while Anne Anlin Cheng, taking a psychoanalytical approach, reads the scene as ‘the narrator’s most manifest bout of hypochondriacal suffering’. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 86-88; Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.73.

[11] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), p.153.

[12] Amy Tan, ‘Mother Tongue’, in The Opposite of Fate (London: Flamingo, 2003), pp.271-279 (pp.278-9).

[13] Amy Tan, ‘The Language of Discretion’, in The Opposite of Fate (London: Flamingo, 2003), pp. 280-290 (p.284).

[14] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature, 2^nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), p.9.

[15] Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back, p.37.

[16] Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back, p.38.

[17] Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back, p.52.

[18] Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back, p.57.

[19] Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back, p.60.

[20] Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ‘“Sugar Sisterhood”: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon’ in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. by David Palumbo-Liu (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp.174 – 210.

[21] Wong, ‘Sugar Sisterhood’, pp.184 and 180.

[22]Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife (London: Flamingo, 1992). It is difficult to tell whether Tan’s confusion is deliberate or not. According to Wong, it is a deliberate mistranslation, while I think it is possible that such a mistranslation is due to her incompetence in Chinese.

[23] Wong, ‘Sugar Sisterhood’, p.181.

[24] Wong, ‘Sugar Sisterhood’, pp.181 and 188.

[25] Wong, ‘Sugar Sisterhood’, pp.188 and 194 – 196.

[26] While Chinese astrology, wu-hsing (the Five Elements) and feng shui have long proved scientifically unsound, and are sometimes deemed ‘superstition’ in China, Patricia L. Hamilton reads Tan’s references to these practices in The Joy Luck Club as an authentic and literal interpretation of what they mean and how instrumental they are to Chinese daily life, and a systematic employment in charting the gap and clash between Chinese mothers and their American daughters, despite the suspicions and irony Tan indicates in her works. Patricia L. Hamilton, ‘Feng Shui, Astrology, and the Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club’, MELUS 24:2 (1999), 125- 145

[27] Tan, ‘The Language of Discretion’, p.284.

[28] Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (London: Minerva, 1994), pp.33-34.

[29] Tan, The Joy Luck Club, p.37.

[30] Tan, The Joy Luck Club, p.106.

[31] Fae Ng, Bone (New York: Hyperion, 1993), p.18.

[32] Ng, p.22.

[33] Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter (London: Flamingo, 2001), p. 335.

[34] Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (London, Granta Books, 1998), pp. 5-6. Even Mona’s transliteration is not correctly rendered. These words would sound more like Vyeh fa-foon, Shee-veh and Jiang-yu.

[35] For the discussion of racial and ethnic identity and masculinity, see Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, ‘Going for the Knockout: Confronting Whiteness in Gus Lee’s China Boy’, MELUS 29:3/4 (2004) <http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk >[accessed 10 May 2005]; and Yichin Shen, ‘The Site of Domestic Violence and the Altar of Phallic Sacrifice in Gus Lee’s China Boy’, College Literature 29:2 (2002) <http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk> [accessed 10 May 2005].

[36] Shen.

[37] Ironically, this designation of the Chinese as primordial and uncivilized is also conveyed in the design of the front cover of China Boy. On the yellow background is a figure of a boy standing with his head lowered, over which is superimposed a partial side portrait of a young man with a melancholic yet determined look. The bare-footed boy wears tattered blue clothes, and half of his head is overshadowed by a cone-shaped straw hat which was usually seen in the rural areas of southern China in the past. The designer seems to ignore the fact that Kai is a Chinese American boy living in San Francisco, whose family comes from an upper-class background in Shanghai and instead imposes on Kai his own conception of a peasant-looking ‘China Boy’.

[38] Lee, p. 21. The error is most tellingly seen in Lee’s explanation of Kai’s name: ‘Kai takes eight pen strokes. It means ‘reform’, ‘educate’, ‘improve’.” (p.47-8) In fact, no Chinese character can be found that fits the pronunciation, the number of strokes and the meaning Lee describes. Other examples are the explanation for the traditional Chinese festival for the commemoration of the dead, Ching ming, as ‘shiny bright’, and the reference to ‘the Goddess of Fertility’ as ‘the Yin’. (pp. 39 and 25)

[39] Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back, p.71.

[40] ‘After Born’ is my translation of young man (housheng, 后生) in Chinese in the way Lee translates xiansheng (先生).

[41] Chien Shur (jin shi, 进士) means a successful candidate in the highest imperial examinations; chuan yuan (zhuang yuan, 状元) is the title conferred on the one who came first in the highest imperial examination, Hsiu-ts’ai (xiu cai, 秀才) and Chu-ren (ju ren, 举人)’ in the following quotations are titles respectively for the one who was a successful candidate at the county and provincial level; ‘The Forest of Brush Pens’ is ‘Hanlin, (翰林)’, meaning a member of the Imperial Academy, which Gus Lee puts right in his second novel Honor and Duty; ‘Chingsu (jing shu, 经书)’ refers collectively to Confucius classics. However, Lee’s transliteration does not follow accurately Wade-Giles system for the romanization of Chinese which he seems to adopt. Pinyin system is used in my explanation.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 8, Spring 2006

Tyranny of the Majority and Judicial Power: Using Tocqueville to Evaluate the Activism of Justice William Brennan

John McKiernan
© John McKiernan. All Rights Reserved

I. Introduction

Both Alexis de Tocqueville and former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Jr. feared the marginalization of the individual at the rise of the tyrannical majority and believed that the judiciary, when rightfully discharging its power, combats such tyranny. Yet, while they shared the same philosophical views on the nature of tyranny, they nonetheless disagreed over how the judiciary rightfully discharges its power in the struggle against the tyranny of the majority. For Tocqueville the judiciary acts according to both power and right only when it rules on questions of law raised in cases invoking the court’s role as arbiter; for him, a pro-active court which seeks out laws in order to invalidate them acts without right, enjoying a political power that makes the court an attractive ally for a tyrannical majority seeking to establish its rule. On the other hand, Justice Brennan, who sat on the Supreme Court from 1956 to 1990, envisioned a court that acts, foremost, in response to the human concerns that arise in a case brought before the court; in the Justice’s opinion, judicial activism combats the tyranny of the majority by providing justice to the individual litigant suffering under the laws and influence of the majority.

Tocqueville wrote of tyranny in the language of consolidated power. He believed that a majority that consolidates governmental power may control the collective legislative will and use such influence to smother opposing, minority interests. Should this majority come to control the judiciary, the majority could also insulate itself from reproach by the minority. Yet Tocqueville also believed that the American judiciary, by virtue of its procedural requirements, naturally combated such tyranny. Where the court acts within its proper sphere of power and right, deciding questions of law only as accidents necessary to the resolution of a case properly before the tribunal, the court combats tyranny by limiting the court’s political power. Without such political power, the political majority cannot insulate itself and its policies from minority reproach. In Tocqueville’s view the judiciary should not use its power to generally reshape law; rather it should change law only as necessary to resolve the particular case before the court. A Tocquevillian judiciary, therefore, rules passively, not actively.

Despite sharing Tocqueville’s fear about the nature of tyranny, Justice Brennan reached the opposite conclusion about how judicial power combats such tyranny. He believed that judicial activism allows the court to overcome stifling precedent and administer justice by addressing the needs of the individual litigant. Justice Brennan’s humanistic jurisprudence led him to believe that the judiciary best protected the rights of the individual against the tyranny of the majority through rulings that, while sometimes contrary to established precedent, dispensed justice and ministered to the human litigant.

Contrasting their peculiar coincidence of thought on the nature of tyranny with their divergent views on how the judiciary combats such tyranny raises questions about why and how Justice Brennan came to think that the judiciary could fight the tyranny of the majority through the judicial methods that Tocqueville believed would only promote such tyranny. The answer ultimately rests in their divergent jurisprudences regarding the nature of the judiciary.

II. The Thoughts of Tocqueville and Justice Brennan

Whatever similarities might exist between the jurisprudences of Tocqueville and Justice Brennan, one should not consider the views of the latter as the natural products of studying the former. As Evan Caminker, a former Brennan clerk and now dean of the University of Michigan Law School, has noted, despite the philosophical and structural similarities of their legal thought, Justice Brennan never read Tocqueville:

I recall that sometime during the Term, a nationally respected scholar sent the Justice a law review article analyzing in fine detail how Justice Brennan’s first amendment jurisprudence was best explained as an outgrowth of his commitment to Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of American democracy. Justice Brennan read the article carefully, and praised it highly for its insight and craft. But, he noted to me with a wry smile, there was an obvious difficulty with the thesis: he had never read de Tocqueville! [1]

Tocqueville and Justice Brennan did share the same fundamental insights with respect to the tyranny of the majority. The possibility of a despotism implemented by a political majority via control of one or more branches of the government was, for Tocqueville, one of the major potential shortcomings of the democratic social state. While the principle of popular sovereignty, properly tempered by outside forces such as the judiciary, enjoyed favorable treatment in Tocqueville’s political thought for, among other reasons, promoting intellectual equality amongst the electorate [2], he saw that it also, when unrestrained, posed a significant threat to liberty by making the political minority helpless against an omnipotent majority. [3] In Democracy in America he wrote:

What therefore is a majority taken collectively, if not an individual who has opinions and most often interests contrary to another individual that one names the minority? Now, if you accept that one man vested with omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries, why not accept the same thing for a majority? [4]

Justice Brennan adopted a similar view of the tyranny of the majority. This similarity, perhaps attributable to both Brennan’s and Tocqueville’s reverence for the jurisprudence regarding the dangers of tyranny espoused in the Federalist Papers, envisions a political majority gaining control over one or more branches of the federal government and using such control to implement a tyranny. [5] Writing for the plurality of the Court in Northern Pipeline, Justice Brennan appealed to Federalist Paper author James Madison’s thoughts on the nature of tyranny: ‘[the] accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny’. [6] Thus, both Tocqueville and Justice Brennan defined tyranny as the consolidation of power in a particular group. Yet that similar opinion stands in stark contrast to their divergent views on judicial activism.

Modern legal scholarship views judicial activism in different lights; in one view it consists of rulings on Constitutional law facially contrary to the plain language of the Constitution, while in another it includes judicial expansion of the limited and enumerated powers of the federal government. [7] For Tocqueville, but not Justice Brennan, judicial activism fundamentally consists of, the judge acting ‘outside the circle in which all peoples have agreed to enclose him’. [8] Such judicial activism involves judges ‘making rather than following the law’. [9]

One and one half centuries removed from the language of judicial activism, Tocqueville considered the possibility in Democracy in America that judges might make, rather than follow, the law. He wrote of a judiciary that makes a preemptive strike against the laws, finding an excuse to do so through an appeal to the political passions of the country. Tocqueville writes, ‘If the judge had been able to attack laws in a theoretical and general manner […] having become the champion or adversary of one party, he would have appealed to all the passions that divide the country to take part in the conflict’. [10] As I will discuss later in more detail, this position included for Tocqueville the belief that judges might use their power to shape law according to a specific political ideology, even when they enjoyed no such right to pronounce upon the law. [11]

Justice Brennan did not share Tocqueville’s understanding of judicial activism. His activism, described by Judge Gerald Lynch as a conflation of the Justice’s personal values and the values embodied by the Constitution, reveals an understanding of judicial activism contrary to the one espoused by Tocqueville. [12] Activism for Justice Brennan did not consist of judges making, as opposed to following, the law. Rather, for him, activism could include rulings that used Constitutional norms to promote his preferred policy goals. In his eulogy of the late Justice, Lynch speaks of Justice Brennan as absolutely committed to his understanding of the principles embodied by the Constitution:

The charge that Justice Brennan confused his own values with those of the Constitution does capture one piece of the truth. As far as I could see, the Justice was totally, absolutely, fervently devoted to the ideals that America and the Constitution, as he understood them, represented. He did not have the slightest doubt that America is the greatest country in the world, and that its greatness resided in institutions that were committed to freedom and equality, to human dignity, and to openness to all who chose to commit themselves to those ideals. He believed that his ideals were the ideals of the American polity, not because he thought that his beliefs ought to be imposed on the nation, but because he had been taught from an early age, in the best American immigrant tradition, to commit himself to the values that the nation professed. [13]

In this light, the Justice never issued a ruling he believed contrary to or beyond the scope of the Constitution because he believed that his values were coextensive with those protected by the Constitution. Lynch’s observation requires one caveat, however: Justice Brennan intentionally rendered his activist decisions with an eye towards reshaping policy. As Judge Richard Posner observed in his eulogy for Brennan:

The justification for Brennan’s jurisprudence, as of any activist jurisprudence Left or Right (and Brennan was more honest about his activism than most judges), must be sought in its results – in whether it has made, or is likely to make, the country better off or worse off, in the long run as well as the short run, in either a material or a spiritual sense. [14]

Yet, as Lynch makes clear, judicial rulings pronounced with an eye towards public policy and respect for Constitutional norms need not be mutually exclusive. Justice Brennan considered them completely compatible. [15]

With a foundation in both Tocqueville and Justice Brennan’s thinking on the tyranny of the majority and judicial activism, a more expansive explanation of Tocqueville’s thoughts on the issues will now facilitate framing a Tocquevillian analysis of Justice Brennan’s activism.

III. The Tyranny of the Majority

The tyranny of the majority proceeds from an enlightened democratic social state which has been corrupted by the efforts of a powerful majority. Tocqueville believed that popular sovereignty, an exercise of collective reasoning, by its nature resulted in greater enlightenment and wisdom than individual acts of deliberation; a greater number of people involved in a particular decision-making process better guarantees a wise and just decision than a judgment made by a few. [16] Popular sovereignty gives the majority great influence and power, for while the minority may abhor the policies of the majority, they nonetheless abide by the majority will because they seek, one day, to claim the majority status and enforce their own interests. [17] Self-evidently ripe for abuse, this situation presents, for Tocqueville, a ‘dire and dangerous’ future for the American democratic social state. [18] This ‘dire and disastrous’ future follows naturally from the Constitutional structure of the Congress; infatuated with the notion of majority rule, America permits a majority of its legislature to whimsically and capriciously change law. The legislative body experiences a constant state of flux, its membership changing with every election cycle. This constant shuffling of representatives creates in the legislative body a tendency to act quickly upon the goals of passing legislators. [19] This method of law-making provides the American democracy with ‘the means to follow the natural instability of its penchants in the forming of laws’. [20] In Tocqueville’s analysis, the American legislative system potentially poses two threats to a government of separated powers. First, it provides the majority with the opportunity to gain its ‘omnipotence’ by controlling the collective will of the legislature. Secondly, the majority could then insulate itself against threats to its power by bringing a powerful judiciary into line with its agenda. The journey towards this tyranny begins, in Tocqueville’s view, with a legislature governed by the passions of the moment. Such a legislature lends itself to constantly altering and overturning its own laws. In exercising its power to shape and reshape laws according to the whim of its constituency, the legislature falls into a pattern of blind obedience to the majority. This obedience, coupled with the legislative power, drives the legislature towards a dangerous omnipotence – which Tocqueville called ‘an evil and dangerous thing in itself’ [21] – under which the minority must either suffer the tyranny of the majority or physically remove itself from the majority’s jurisdiction. Further, such omnipotence naturally lends itself to tyrannical rule and drives away those who oppose such domination. Wrote Tocqueville, ‘Therefore, when I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever […] there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws’. [22]

Yet securing legislative power marks just the beginning in Tocqueville’s view, for in addition to controlling legislative power, the tyrannical majority also consolidates judicial power. Tyranny imposed by a majority exercising control over the legislature also corrupts the judiciary, encouraging judges to make arbitrary decisions that advance the platform of the majority. [23] The bench becomes a forum through which the majority insulates itself from reproach at the hands of an injured minority. Judges serve as pawns, exercising their judicial power without any concern for the right to pronounce judgment and becoming powerful and prominent servants to the tyrannical majority. [24] Posits Tocqueville:

In the United States, at the same time that the omnipotence of the majority favors the legal despotism of the legislator, it favors the arbitrariness of the magistrate as well. The majority, being an absolute master in making the law and in overseeing its execution, having equal control over those who govern and over those who are governed, regards public officials as its passive agents and willingly deposits in them the care of serving its designs. It therefore does not enter in advance into the details of their duties and hardly takes the trouble to define their rights. It treats them as a master could do to his servants if, always seeing them act under his eye, he could direct or correct their conduct at each instant. [25]

Indeed, an unrestrained judiciary does pose a great threat to the healthy democratic social state, for, given the structure of the American judiciary and the powers granted to it, the American court does enjoy extraordinary political power. This political power, were the courts to exercise their judicial powers without regard to right, could insulate the majority from the repudiation of the harmed minority and would make the judiciary a potent ally of the tyrannical majority. Yet Tocqueville did not despair at this realization for he believed that the characteristics and procedural foundations of the American court system combat the corruption of the judiciary by restricting the right of the courts to exercise their judicial powers.

IV. The Three Characteristics of the Judiciary in the United States

Describing how the Americans had preserved within the judiciary all of the characteristics normally ascribed to the bench, Tocqueville wrote of a judiciary acting within a sphere of power and right. This sphere of judicial movement encompasses three distinct principles of judicial action: arbitration, judgment of particular questions, and action only in accord with a proper complaint or appeal made to the court. [26] Action outside this sphere constitutes an improper application of judicial power, as it invades the province of the legislature and assaults the court’s inherent passivity. [27] Collectively, these characteristics establish a judiciary which is resilient to alignment with a popular political ethos and, ostensibly, make the courts combatants against the tyranny of the majority.

Arbitration, the first characteristic of the American court, refers to the authority of the court to hear parties to a dispute for which the law provides a remedy. A dispute by itself does not invoke the judicial power of the court, for it does not automatically provide the court with a question of law that demands resolution. Tocqueville seemingly adopted a principle of adjudication similar to the one embodied in art. III, § 2 of the United States Constitution, which requires a case recognized under the ‘Laws of the United States’. [28] Tocqueville explained the principle in the following way: ‘As long as a law does not give rise to a dispute, therefore, the judicial power has no occasion to occupy itself with it. The law exists, but the judicial power does not see it’. [29]

Tocqueville’s case and controversy requirement speaks only to the right, not the power, of the courts to make rulings on the laws. The court enjoys the power to pronounce upon the merits of a particular law in two ways; it may do so as a necessary consequence of deciding a certain question raised in a case, or it may do so of its own initiative, without any question of the law’s propriety being presented before the court in a case. When sitting in judgment over a case, the judge may rule, as a matter of right, upon the meaning or constitutionality of a law implicated in the dispute. In such a case, resolving the dispute necessarily requires interpretation and application of the law. Tocqueville considered such revision of the laws a proper extension of the judicial authority because the attack upon the law stems from a dispute before the court. The alteration of the law occurs accidentally, as a consequence of ruling on the merits of the case. The judge enjoys not only the power, but also the right, to attack and interpret the laws. Hence, Tocqueville argues,

When a judge, in connection with a case, attacks a law relative to that case, he extends the circle of his prerogatives, but he does not go outside it, since it was necessary in some way for him to judge the law in order to come to judge the case. [30]

More troublesome in Tocqueville’s opinion was that a judge might exercise the judicial power to attack the laws without simultaneously enjoying such a right should he decide to pronounce on the meaning or constitutionality of a law without starting from a case properly before him. In such an instance the judge would be stepping outside his sphere of action and, while ostensibly still enjoying the power to attack the laws, nonetheless lacks the right to mount such an attack because no case raised a question requiring his role as arbiter. According to Tocqueville, ‘When [a judge] pronounces on a law without starting from a case, he goes outside his sphere completely and enters that of the legislative power’. [31] Rulings of this sort constitute, in accord with the definition postulated above, Tocqueville’s notion of judicial activism. Judges here intentionally make law rather than accidentally change law by pronouncing upon a particular case.

The second Tocquevillian characteristic of the judicial power, pronouncing judgment on particular questions as opposed to general principles of law, again speaks to a judge acting within a sphere of power and right. A judge properly renders decisions on questions of law as applied to a case before the court, but abuses his authority when he pronounces upon the law as generally applied. His decision provides relief for the individual litigant appearing before his bench, not for the masses burdened under the law. A judge enjoys the power of invalidating laws generally, but only enjoys the right of invalidating laws as applied to particular circumstances of fact as argued and found in a case before the court. [32]

This does not mean that a judicial decision may not, ipso facto, properly and unequivocally invalidate a law, only that such invalidation must follow from the application of judicial precedent to future cases rather than from universal apodictic abrogation of the law. A judge’s decision invalidating a law in one case may bind tribunals to render consistent decisions in future cases. This may, in due course, properly achieve the complete impotence of the law in question. In such a case, the judge remains within his sphere of power and right. However, when the judge nullifies a law generally and without concern for the application of the law to a particular case, the hallmark of Tocqueville’s conception of judicial activism, he leaves his sphere of power and right and becomes something more than just a judge. Writes Tocqueville:

Should a judge, in deciding a particular question, destroy a general principle by the certitude people have that, each of the consequences of this same principle being struck down in the same manner, the principle becomes sterile, he remains in the natural circle of his action; but should the judge attack the general principle directly and destroy it without having a particular case in view, he goes outside the circle in which all people have agreed to enclose him: he becomes something more important, more useful perhaps than a magistrate, but he ceases to represent judicial power. [33]

The third characteristic of the judiciary, action only upon a proper invocation of the judicial power, imbues the judiciary with an inherent passivity. The court neither solicits causes of action, nor initiates proceedings on its own caprice; rather it must await complainants who call upon its authority to arbitrate a dispute recognized in law. Judicial power, for Tocqueville, ‘is without action; for it to move one must put it in motion’; a pro-active tribunal acts contrary to a structural passivity natural to the judicial power. [34] Tocqueville worried that, ‘The judicial power would in a way do violence to this passive nature if it took the initiative by itself and established itself as censor of the laws’. [35] In his view, a court that takes an active role in soliciting cases for the purpose of reshaping law abuses the power of the judicial office.

As discussed in the subsequent section, these characteristics impose structural and procedural requirements upon the judiciary which impede judicial activism, hence making the judiciary hostile to the efforts of a tyrannical majority. While the possibility exists that an activist judge could employ his judicial power in furtherance of a political agenda without regard to his right to invoke such power, the case and controversy requirement and the passive nature of the courts make this, in Tocqueville’s view, difficult to do. He believed that the structures and procedures of the judiciary make it a natural combatant to the tyranny of the majority.

V. The Judiciary as Combatants to the Tyranny of the Majority

Tocqueville finds in the American judiciary the peculiar opportunity to base decisions on the Constitution rather than just upon statute. Such convention provides the judiciary extraordinary political power, for it allows courts to contravene the legislative will by ignoring laws that seem to the court unconstitutional. Yet Tocqueville does not despair at such a system, for he also finds, in the essential characteristics of the judiciary discussed earlier, a system that diminishes the dangers that an unrestrained judiciary might pose to the healthy democratic social state by making the judiciary a combatant to the tyranny of the majority.

Armed with the right to render decisions based upon the Constitution as opposed to just statute, Tocqueville finds the court wielding extraordinary political influence and power. Such authority allows the judge to abrogate a particular application of a law and provide those whom the judge finds wronged by the law in question relief from the burdens imposed by statute. Through the doctrine of precedence, the American court could, through one ruling on the unconstitutionality of a law as applied to a particular case, initiate a tide of rulings, ‘the repeated blows of jurisprudence’, which would completely nullify the effect of the law. [36] For Tocqueville, the full effect of the judicial political power would now become evident. Such a wave of decisions would either force the legislature to rescind the law or would compel the people to alter the Constitution so as to permit the law. [37]

This system is capable of creating a judiciary complicit in the tyranny of the majority, but for the internal safeguards against such a tendency built into the judiciary by the characteristics discussed earlier. The first characteristic discussed above, the right of the judge to pronounce judgment upon a law only when a question concerning that law presents in a case, is of particular importance for Tocqueville’s analysis of how the American judiciary contributes to the tyranny of the majority. A judge who renders pro-active strikes against the actions of the legislature by nullifying laws before they present in a case forcefully establishes himself upon the political scene and aligns himself with a particular political party. [38] The champion of a specific political cause, the judge now finds himself using his authority to attack only laws hostile to his party. Such a judge will only attack the law when the power from which the law emanates abates; he will remain silent when the power supporting the law waxes. [39] This creates, for Tocqueville, an imbalance of power that renders the democratic social state particularly susceptible to a tyranny of the majority. By attacking the laws when the supporting party wanes, the judge attempts to upset the law when the law deserves the most respect. When he remains silent on a law supported by the powerful, he implicitly suffers the law. [40] In Tocqueville’s view a judge should challenge this law because the law could further the tyranny of the majority:

If the judge could only attack legislators head on, there are some times when he would fear to do it; there are others when the spirit of party would push him every day to dare it. Thus it would happen that the laws would be attacked when the power from which they emanate was weak, and that one would submit to them without murmuring when it was strong; that is to say, one would often attack the laws when it was most useful to respect them and one would respect them when it became easy to oppress in their name. [41]

However, despite the threat of a powerful judiciary becoming complicit in the tyranny of the majority, Tocqueville finds the structure of the American judiciary reassuring because it minimizes the opportunity for judges to render decisions capriciously. He takes solace in his case and controversy requirement because it permits judges to render decisions on the constitutionality of laws only when those laws implicate a question presented in the case. [42] This procedural safeguard provides theoretical relief because it makes any decisions on the constitutionality of a law an accident of the case, not a self-contained ruling capable of exploitation for political gain. A law nullified on constitutional grounds during the prosecution of a case does not enjoy the same political significance as a law nullified outside of a particular case. [43] The judge, as arbiter, must pursue a resolution of the case presented before him. If, in ruling on the merits of the case, he also finds it necessary to rule on a particular law, then the ruling on the law ‘by chance’ becomes a necessary accident to the judge fulfilling his proper role as arbiter. [44] Such a ruling enjoys limited political import because it does not intend to universally contravene the legislative will; it does so only as required to render justice in the particular case. While valuable for Tocqueville’s treatment of judicial activism, this analysis of judicial procedure as a technical safeguard against activism does not surface in Justice Brennan’s thought; in fact Justice Brennan believed that judges properly exercised their power through activist rulings in cases and controversies properly before their courts. The two men did share the same concerns about the tyranny of the majority, that it may rule without concern for the views of the minority and may employ the tools of government to insulate itself from reproach. Further, both believed that an independent judiciary may effectively combat the tyranny of the majority. Yet Justice Brennan’s jurisprudence takes on a decidedly anti-Tocquevillian flavor when it comes to his ideas about how the judiciary combats tyranny for, unlike Tocqueville, Justice Brennan believed that the judiciary best combats tyranny through activism.

VI. A Tocquevillian Analysis of Justice Brennan’s Activism

Both Tocqueville and Brennan feared a tyrannical majority, believing that an independent judiciary must prevent the majority from enjoying complete control over the government of a democratic social state. Yet despite their corresponding beliefs on this matter, the two had different understandings of both why and how the judiciary and judicial activism either promoted or hindered the tyrannical majority. Judicial activism, for Tocqueville, constituted a failure of the judiciary and facilitated the rise of the tyrannical majority. Justice Brennan, however, thought activism properly invoked the judicial power to reshape public policy in accord with values already promoted by the Constitution; he believed activism protected the individual suffering under the tyranny of the majority. Tocqueville considered judicial activism a cause of the tyranny of the majority while Justice Brennan considered it at least part of the cure.

Paul O. Carrese, a political scientist at the United States Air Force Academy, presents this philosophical conflict well when he describes Justice Brennan’s expansion of privacy rights in Eisenstadt v. Baird. Carrese writes of Justice Brennan introducing a jurisprudence that makes novel use of the Equal Protection clause and brushes over precedent to promote policy goals under the aegis of Constitutional principles. Couching Justice Brennan’s decision, and its legal progeny, in Tocquevillian language, Carrese writes that Justice Brennan’s activism employed:

…a rationalism that ignores the moral requirements and complex realities of the political communities, and a distorting abstraction from legal and moral precedent in the name of progress. The Court now mandates the moral result Tocqueville thought it would counteract, by the jurisprudential means he thought it would reject. [45]

Carrese argues that Justice Brennan’s activism combats the tyranny of the majority, a proper function of the court in Tocqueville’s view, by exercising the judicial power that Tocqueville believed would make the courts an instrument of the tyrannical majority.

So the first question becomes, why did Justice Brennan, who feared the tyranny of the majority for the same reasons Tocqueville did, come to believe that he could fight the tyranny of the majority through the very methods Tocqueville believed only promoted such tyranny? The answer to this question might lie in Justice Brennan’s humanistic jurisprudence. His theory of law embodied more than just a system of particular commands founded upon some top-down deductive schema. Rather, Justice Brennan understood that law served the human condition by responding to the needs of the people. As such, he viewed his decisions as more than just rulings based upon statute and precedent; rather the rulings were decisions ordered towards ‘the real plight of real people touched by the law’. [46] His concern for people and their condition provided Justice Brennan with a paradigm of how to rightfully use his judicial power to respond to the plight of the people.

In the Justice’s mind, one of the plights faced by the common American was the trivialization of a minority view in the face of a government dominated by a particular interest. Dissenting in Commodity Futures Trading Com. v. Schor, Justice Brennan identified this threat and spoke of how the judiciary should respond: ‘The Framers also understood that a principal benefit of the separation of the judicial power from the legislative and executive powers would be the protection of individual litigants from decision makers susceptible to majoritarian pressures’. [47] For Justice Brennan, the individual enjoys the benefits of an independent judiciary devoted to combating the influence, the tyranny, which a majority might exert over those charged with making law.

Here Justice Brennan coincidentally, as opposed to intentionally, embraced Tocqueville’s basic idea that the judiciary fights for the individual in the struggle against the tyranny of the majority. [48] The divergence between the two thinkers occurs in their thoughts on how the judicial power might combat the tyranny of the majority. Both agreed that the judicial power may defend the rights of the individual against the majority, but where Tocqueville sees judicial activism supporting the rise of tyranny, Justice Brennan sees such activism as the way that the judiciary combats such tyranny.

The explanation for this divergence is centered around two distinct understandings of the spirit of the American judiciary. For Tocqueville, the judiciary enjoyed the cloak of the American aristocracy and its love of form and precedent; its rulings were static and in accord with established law. Justice Brennan’s view of the judiciary, while giving form and precedent their proper due, nonetheless focused upon the power and, in the Justice’s view, the right to shape law in such a way that it both respected Constitutional norms and attended to the perceived needs of the human beings subject to the law.

Tocqueville’s writings on lawyers, including members of the judiciary trained as lawyers, describe a bench focused on the orderly arbitration of conflict in accord with established norms. Stare decisis provides the judge with a certain guide, a deductive schema, to employ when evaluating the questions of law raised in a particular case. [49] The judge does not advance novel interpretations of the law to achieve his desired purpose; indeed, he abhors even the thought of it. [50] For Tocqueville, the judge, by virtue of his training as a lawyer, occupies part of a ‘privileged class among persons of intelligence’ which enjoys a taste for form and order at the expense of the will of the majority and the notion of popular sovereignty. [51] Such tastes imbue judges with a spirit that ‘will be eminently conservative and will show itself as antidemocratic’. [52] This antidemocratic spirit, an aristocratic tendency towards order and tradition, stems from the elevated position that judges enjoy in society as a result of their work and training. Once in office, the judge becomes the enemy of an unbridled democracy and its dangerous tendencies towards tyranny and ultimately anarchy. [53] Tocqueville explained:

The more one reflects on what takes place in the United States, the more one feels convinced that the body of lawyers forms the most powerful and so to speak the lone counterweight to democracy in this country. In the United States one discovers without difficulty how much the spirit of the lawyer, by its qualities and, I shall say, even by its defects, is appropriate for neutralizing the vices inherent in popular government. [54]

Thus, through the court the judge covertly advances his aristocratic tastes against the unbridled and fleeting passions of the populace. [55] This tempering of the popular will, whether by advancing respect for precedent over the desire for novel change or by encouraging formal treatment of the issue instead of impulsive action, prevents the populace from using the legislature to rapidly indulge its irresistible desires. [56] Derived from an unrestrained majority, such untempered legislation is inherently unstable and lends itself to tyranny. Writes Tocqueville:

Legislative instability is an evil inherent in democratic government because it is of the nature of democracies to bring new men to power. But this evil is more or less great according to the power and the means of action granted to the legislator. In America they hand over sovereign power to the authority that makes the laws. It can indulge each of its desires rapidly and irresistibly, and every year it is given other representatives. That is to say, they have adopted precisely the combination that most favors democratic instability and that permits democracy to apply its changing will to the most important objects. [57]

This respect for precedent in Tocqueville’s analysis of the spirit of the judiciary enjoys much less weight in Justice Brennan’s jurisprudence. Justice Brennan believed that a judge should use the bench to respond to the public need. Statutory text and legal precedent deserve respect, but ultimately the judicial power exists to better the human condition. The judge and the litigant shared the same humanity and, as such, any decision rendered by the judge ultimately needs to attend to the plight of the human litigant. In Brennan’s opinion, therefore, the bench, while owing proper respect to precedent, nonetheless served a higher good by making its ultimate end the improvement of human society.

Frank Michelman, professor of law at the Harvard Law School, eloquently described Justice Brennan’s commitment to the human ends of the law in the following way:

A special strength in Justice Brennan’s thought is the resonance between his conception of his own role as judge and his dialogic theory of constitutional ends. For the Justice, the logic of democratic self-government by the people implies that every law-dispensing office is a site of critically interactive encounter. If it is the people who govern, he reasons, the relationship between official and citizen can only be ‘the relationship between one human being and another’. Accordingly, due process means to him that ‘the rulers and the ruled acknowledge their common humanity, and that official judgment always remain[s] human judgment’ informed by a reach of ‘passion’ towards a true grasp of others’ experiences of the matters at issue. [58]

In Justice Brennan’s view the bench enjoys both the power and the right to shape law in an effort to ensure justice for the individual, particularly when that individual is suffering at the hands of a tyrannical majority. Concluding his dissent in Commodity Futures Trading Com., Justice Brennan wrote of the bench as being constitutionally ordained to defend the rights of the individual against the majority:

Our Constitution unambiguously enunciates a fundamental principle — that the ‘judicial Power of the United States’ be reposed in an independent Judiciary. It is our obligation zealously to guard that independence so that […] individuals continue to be protected against decisionmakers subject to majoritarian pressures. [59]

This fundamental difference in accounts of the spirit of the American judiciary offers a satisfactory explanation for why, given their coinciding beliefs on the role of the judiciary as a combatant to the tyranny of the majority, Tocqueville and Justice Brennan adopted opposite views on how the judiciary achieves that end. For Tocqueville, the judiciary participates in the aristocratic tendencies of the American lawyer and collectively, as lawyers, exercises restraint and respect for form and tradition in order to stifle the fleeting passions of the majoritarian mob. Activism, in Tocqueville’s account, amounts to nothing more than the capricious use of judicial power, without right, to abrogate or expand upon laws in accord with whatever political pressures hold sway over the judge. Judicial activism therefore attacks the health of the democratic social state by giving the majority a powerful tool through which to shape law to fits its own agenda. Justice Brennan, however, found in the bench an opportunity to combat the tyranny of the majority by actively ministering to the human being. Activism, he believed, thwarts the tyranny of the majority; it utilizes a separate judiciary to protect the individual from the other branches of government, which could suffer under the influence of the majority of their constituency. Decisions should not just rest upon precedent, for precedent is static and cannot attend to the needs of the individual human litigant who is seeking relief from the bench.

VII. Conclusion

Tocqueville spoke of the judiciary acting within a sphere of power and right, altering laws only as accidents in the process of resolving individual cases on their merits. Procedural norms limited the political import of the judiciary by requiring passive decision-making; the non-active court could not abrogate the laws generally and therefore could not insulate the majority from reproach by the minority. Justice Brennan, however, viewed the judiciary as an instrument of government that must actively defend the rights of the individual who is harmed by the legislation enacted and the political influence of the majority. Procedure and precedent guided the judiciary, but ultimately judges must actively use their powers to respond to the needs of human beings touched by the law. Judicial activism permits the judiciary to overcome precedent and achieve the primary end of the judicial power: dispensing justice to the individual litigant.

Justice Brennan’s decidedly anti-Tocquevillian view on how the judiciary exercised its power to combat tyranny reflects the divergent views of the two thinkers on the nature of the judiciary. Tocqueville’s passive judiciary loved rules and precedent; it sought rulings consistent with prior decisions, not judicial innovation. Justice Brennan’s judiciary, while giving proper deference to precedent, responded instead to the needs of the human being presenting himself before the bench.

Harris Manchester College, Oxford

Notes

[1] Evan Caminker, ‘Profile: Morning Coffee with Justice Brennan’, Boston University Public Interest Law Journal, 7 (Winter 1998), 3-7 (p. 4).

[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 236.

[3] Tocqueville, p. 241.

[4] Tocqueville, p. 240.

[5] For Justice Brennan’s invocation of The Federalist No. 47 (James Madison) see N. Pipeline Constr. Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co., 458 U.S. 50, 58 (1982). For Tocqueville’s use of The Federalist No. 51 (Alexander Hamilton or James Madison) see Tocqueville, p. 249.

[6] N. Pipeline, 458 U.S. at 58.

[7] Lino A. Graglia, ‘The Myth of a Conservative Supreme Court: The October 2000 Term’, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 26 (Winter 2003), 281-313 (p. 281).

[8] Tocqueville, p. 94.

[9] Graglia, p. 281.

[10] Tocqueville, pp. 96-97.

[11] One might also consider the similar definition of judicial activism offered by Chief Justice John Roberts in his response to a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire following his nomination to serve as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court: ‘In our democratic system, responsibility for policy making properly rests with those branches that are responsible and responsive to the people. It was precisely because the Framers intended the judiciary to be insulated from popular political pressures that the Constitution accords judges tenure during good behavior and protection against diminution of salary. To the extent the term “judicial activism” is used to describe unjustified intrusions by the judiciary into the realm of policy making, the criticism is well- founded’. Judge John G. Roberts, Jr., ‘Questionnaire Submitted To The Senate Judiciary Committee’, 8 November 2005 <http://leahy.senate.gov/issues/SupremeCourt/SCRoberts.html> [accessed 8 November 2005] (pp. 65-66)

[12] Gerard E. Lynch, ‘In Memoriam, William J. Brennan Jr., American’, Columbia Law Review, 97 (October 1997), 1603-1608 (pp. 1604-1605).

[13] Lynch, p. 1605.

[14] Richard A. Posner, ‘In Memoriam: William J. Brennan, Jr.’, Harvard Law Review, 111 (November 1997), 9-14 (p. 12).

[15] Lynch, p. 1606.

[16] Tocqueville, p. 236.

[17] Tocqueville, p. 237.

[18] Tocqueville, p. 237.

[19] Tocqueville, p. 238.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Tocqueville, p. 241.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Tocqueville, p. 243.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Tocqueville, pp. 242-243.

[26] Tocqueville, p. 94.

[27] Ibid.

[28] The ‘case and controversy’ requirement. U.S. Const. art. III, § 2.

[29] Tocqueville, p. 94.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Tocqueville, p. 97.

[37] Tocqueville, p. 96.

[38] Tocqueville, p. 97.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Tocqueville, p. 98.

[43] Tocqueville, p. 97.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Paul O. Carrese, The Cloaking of Power: Montesquieu, Blackstone, and the Rise of Judicial Activism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 251.

[46] Caminker, p. 5.

[47] Commodity Futures Trading Com. v. Schor, 478 U.S. 833, 860 (1986). My emphasis.

[48] Recall Tocqueville viewed the judiciary as a resource available to the individual litigant suffering under a burden imposed by the law. Tocqueville, p. 94.

[49] Stare Decisis is ‘the doctrine of precedent, under which it is necessary for a court to follow earlier judicial decisions when the same points arise again in litigation’. Black’s Law Dictionary, 2^nd Pocket ed. (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co., 2001)

[50] Tocqueville, pp. 255-256.

[51] Tocqueville, p. 252.

[52] Tocqueville, p. 253

[53] Tocqueville, pp. 248-249.

[54] Tocqueville, p. 256.

[55] Tocqueville, pp. 256-257.

[56] Tocqueville, p. 238.

[57] Tocqueville, p. 238.

[58] Frank Michelman, ‘A Tribute to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.’, Harvard Law Review, 104 (November 1990), 22-33 (p. 27).

[59] Commodity Futures Trading Com. 478 U.S. at 867.