Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire: global/local rumblings inside the Pax Americana (European Journal of American Culture) more

by Rob Wilson

Film Studies, Globalization, American Literature, American Studies, and Colonialism, Imperialism, Empire

European Journal of American Culture Volume 21 Number 2 The European Journal of American Culture (EJAC) is an academic, refereed journal for scholars, academics and students from many disciplines with a common involvement in the interdisciplinary study of America and American culture, drawing on a variety of approaches and encompassing the whole evolution of America. EJAC is particularly interested in articles considering the ways in which politics, history, literature, the visual arts and other areas of the humanities have increasingly engaged with cultural issues. 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Format The Journal is set with Apple Macintosh equipment and reset using Quark; it is therefore best if the use of automatic footnoting devices is avoided. Language The Journal uses standard British English. The Editor reserves the right to alter usage to this end. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the readership, jargon should be kept to a minimum. Reviewing Please contact the Reviews Editor if you are interested in reviewing for this Journal. The Editor welcomes contributions. Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor. Contributors David Holloway teaches American Studies at the University of Derby. His book, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, was published in 2002, and he is co-editor of the forthcoming American Visual Cultures. He edits and publishes a new pamphlet series, ‘Polemics: Essays in American Literary and Cultural Criticism’, and is writing a book on representations of apocalypse in American literature, thought and culture. Diane Fare recently completed her doctoral thesis on Kathy Acker at the University of Central Lancashire. She is currently preparing her thesis for publication, and lectures in American Studies and English at the University of Central Lancashire. Michael Murphy’s essays have appeared in English: the Journal of the English Society, Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, and Socialist History. His study of twentieth century poetry and exile, The Identity of Exile (Greenwich Exchange), is published in 2003. He has edited the Collected George Garrett (Trent Editions), and in 2001 he was awarded Poetry Review’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for ‘new poet of the year’. His ﬁrst full collection of poems, Elsewhere (Shoestring Press), is due in 2003. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire: global/local rumblings inside the Pax Americana Rob Wilson Keywords Globalization Empire Spectacle Sublime Abstract Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is situated and decoded not just as a representation of the Roman Empire but as a blasted allegorization of the Pax Americana itself in its modes of moral innocence, Euro-civililizational ratiﬁcation, soft hegemony, and hegemonic technologies of sublime spectacle. This essay thus interrogates global/local attachments to, and critiques of, US-dominated forms of neo-liberal globalization. 1 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Signet, 1966), p. 484; Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 60; Albright is quoted in Andrew J. Bacevich and Lawrence F. Kaplan, ‘Battle Wary’, New Republic, 25 May 1998, p. 20. 2 See Carlin Romano, ‘Loosen Up, Professor! Pop Culture Is Good For Your Scholarship’, which tracks the popcultural effect of such a movie, immediately, on book sales in Roman history and copycat genres, Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 July 2000. For the instant pop ‘novelization’ of the movie, see Dewey Gram, Gladiator (New York: Onyx Books), 2000. Also see Diana Landau (ed.), Gladiator: The Making of the Ridley Scott Epic (New York: Newmarket Press, We generally made them [foreigners] feel rather small, too, before we bore down on them with America’s greatness until we crushed them. – Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869) American domination – the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred. – Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950) If we had to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. – US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, justifying the use of cruise missiles against Iraq in February 1998.1 When Ridley Scott’s $100 million blockbuster, Gladiator, opened in May 2000, it carried its transnational audiences uncannily back to the second century AD and to the plight of a Roman general from the Spanish provinces stripped of his ofﬁce and family, forced into slavery, and set upon the agon of revenge through the gladiator routes of Empire. Entertainment Weekly noted the movie’s instant box-ofﬁce clout as imperial spectacle, but demurred, ‘Ben Hur, done that’, poking fun at the (seemingly) defunct genre of retro-Roman drag brought back from the 1950s Cold War dispensation of life-under-empire.2 Issued in the same season as Harvard University Press’s blockbuster text on the wonders and perils of neo-liberal globalization, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (which offered, as we shall invoke throughout, its own more decentred, hopeful, and transterritorial way of reﬂecting upon forces of biopolitical domination), Gladiator enacted, if it at times barely managed to critique, a sublimated spectacle of global peace, enlightened rule, architectonic power, transnational community, and bone-crunching sport under the distractions of empire.3 With the box-ofﬁce Rob Wilson Literature Department, Oakes College, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California 95064 USA Email: rwilson@cats.ucsc.edu. 62 EJAC 21 (2) 62–73 © Intellect Ltd 2002 success of Gladiator secured, Ridley Scott could say to his detractors what the Emperor Vespasian had said to those mocking his efforts to raise money to build public arenas and create works of imperial effect like the Roman Coliseum, ‘Non olet pecunia’ (Money does not stink). In this tricky moment of neo-liberal globalization, when US domination has taken on a guise of post-historical innocence and a kind of ‘post-totalitarian fascism is thriving under the capacious carapace of global capitalism’, one has to wonder if Gladiator was not, implicitly, so much a representation of the Roman Empire but a blasted allegorization of the Pax Americana itself in its neo-liberal mode of moral innocence, global ratiﬁcation, and soft hegemony.4 As John Gray has phrased the terms of this Pax Americana, in the context of his worrying over US ‘unilateralism’ and roll-back from European and Middle Eastern intervention, ‘The United States is the world’s only truly global power, its hegemony more complete than any in modern history’.5 Even an ex-hawk Asianist, Chalmers Johnson, has belatedly castigated this post-Cold War ediﬁce of ‘informal [or, better said, disavowed] empire’ he helped to build and now warns of the looming consequences of sporadic ‘blowback’ and interconnected if spatially dispersed violence on the peripheries. The US superpower, says Johnson, has created ‘an empire based on the projection of military power to every corner of the globe and on the use of American capital and markets to force global economic integration on our terms, whatever costs to others’.6 Surely, ‘imperialist globalization’ and the ideology of neo-liberalism that props it up in more sublimated forms of discourse and grand spectactorship are meeting with, if not generating from within the metabolism of global capital itself, diverse surges of resistance. But Empire, in today’s looser regime of US postmodern globalization, does not just repeat the sovereign state forms, disciplined labour, military apparatus, and binary identity politics of modern land-bound or nation-centred imperialism. In the multitudinous vision of Hardt and Negri, for whom the mass media and Internet would create new modes and more ﬂuid zones of rhizomatic agency and indeterminate arousal, the emergent empire of neoliberal capitalism stands for ‘a fundamentally new form of rule’ (Empire, 146). This Empire of global capitalism paradoxically feeds upon the proliferation of difference and the warped and mongrel becoming of deterritorialized, hybrid, multiple and decentred ﬂows. Gladiator, too, would arise, intersect and ﬁnally capture this transnational ﬂow. Hence, a key problem of this Empire is managing multiculturalism at home (inside existing nation-state frames) and on the peripheries abroad (at the transnational borders of mongrel plenitude). The plot aims to show Russell Crowe as the ‘man who deﬁed an Empire’ (as the global ad campaign for the movie claims), but it shows instead a hero who ratiﬁes an empire. For, in Gladiator, imperial ratiﬁcation and moral innocence is best embodied in the rude and homey Australian-Maori hero, Russell Crowe.7 As Maximus, he speaks a kind of pidgin-English consent to the spectacle of peripheral domination. He leads the concentric staging of the surrounding provinces of foreigners coming home to Rome to roost in some kind of World Wide Wrestling match of sadomasochistic spectacle. If wary of intervention, this global militarism is at once bloody and moral yet nostalgic for an ethos of Eurocentric superiority, imperial sovereignty, international power, and the 2000), hereafter cited parenthetically as Making. 3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), hereafter cited parenthetically as Empire. 4 G.M. Tamas, ‘On PostFascism’, Boston Review, Summer 2000, p. 43. 5 John Gray, ‘Between Dubya [George W. Bush] and the Deep Blue Sea’, The Guardian, 1 November 2000, p. 22. Gray sees Britain as the last mediator between superpower America and a Europe on the brink of ‘post-democratic federalism’ via the European Union. On the perilous presumption of assuming an American hegemony in the Middle East, see Stanley Reed, ‘Say Good-Bye to the Pax Americana’, Business Week, 7 October 2000, pp. 30–31. 6 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 7, hereafter cited parenthetically as Blowback. As Perry Anderson, editor of the New Left Review, has portrayed the American-driven globalization of capitalist principles, ‘Neoliberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history’. Quoted in Mark Price, ‘The New New Thing’, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire… 63 Lingua Franca, 11 (February 2001), p. 19. 7 April Henderson of the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz informs me that although Russell Crowe is often taken to be ‘Australian’ by the Hollywood press, he actually comes from New Zealand or Aotearoa and is proudly part-Maori, which renders him an apt ‘foreign’ subaltern of Empire. 8 As the transnational ﬁlm critic Nick Browne wondered in conversation with me in May 2001 at the UCLA Hong Kong post-1997 conference, aren’t such spectacles preparing the citizenviewers for war, at least as such militaristic spectacles like Pearl Harbor can be centred inside the Bush-driven star-wars polity of the USA? On related matters of cultural critique, see Nick Browne (ed.), Reﬁguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1998. 9 As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam describe the clunkier ‘eurocolonial’ cinema apparatus of Britain, France, Germany and the US as used during the modernist era of techno-ratiﬁed expansion and ‘imperial belonging’, ‘Given the geographically discontinuous nature of vindication of a neo-sublime aesthetic reeking of fascism. As if enacting some more digitized and literalized Hollywood version of panem et circenses, global rule here becomes the arousal of postmodern credulity towards the masternarrative of enlightened imperialism. I would also go on to claim, however, that Ridley Scott is at pains to frame and implicate the very apparatus of Hollywood-based cinema itself (as a depoliticizing spectacle) in the process of soliciting hegemonic consent to these plots, genres, and forms of culturalpolitical domination. Caught up in paradoxes of the imperial image and the military machine, Gladiator may be cinematic spectacle exposing what Hardt and Negri call ‘the legitimation of the imperial machine’ practiced (in part) by the ‘communications industries’ themselves in their neo-epic modes of global enchantment, spectacular violence, and mass circulation (Empire, 33). Gladiator, to my cross-cut way of reading, offers a skewed and unsettling use of the Hollywood epic genre. The movie offers a spectacle of global cinema ﬂeshing out the contemporary machinery of an imperial power disavowing, distracting, and sublimating (via US neoliberal market rationales and retro-enlightenment rhetoric) its mounting forces and traumatic media of political, economic, and cultural domination. Gladiator’s masculinist spectacle of war and sport is seen (via Ridley Scott et al.) as taking over local mongrel and racial peripheries (from Africa and England to Germany and Spain) with woe-and-wonder consent. The spectacular techno-effects and Southern-redneck innocence driving the more US-centred war narrative of Pearl Harbor (2001), should make us wonder about the cultural geopolitics and the global imaginary driving these war-machine spectacles even as this heroic epic all but remilitarizes the Paciﬁc theatre and nostalgically demonizes the crafty Japanese as imperial threat.8 In Gladiator, ﬂeshed out with spectacular architectural grandeur and a kind of luminous aerial assent to this imperial centre of power, Rome emerges as a site for cinematic expansion and a staging of uncanny globalization forces. Here, a spatially mobilized visuality of global vastness and imagery of imperial splendour-cum-decadence helps to ratify geo-expansion in a cut-and-paste or pastiche-driven way.9 At times, the intertextual cinematic apparatus of transhistorical imagery swerves from evoking the sublime wilderness scenery and moralized decadence of Thomas Cole’s Course of [American] Empire paintings from the Manifest Destiny era to evoke the more overtly neo-fascist architectonics of Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. As such, the ﬁlm works to create uncanny, anachronistic and disturbing analogies between American self-aggrandizement of global power and its European predecessors in Germany, Britain, and Rome. Gladiator enacts a spectacle of global power but challenges, at times, the technoeuphoric reign of the Pax Americana, and the moral and political discourses propping up such aestheticized spectacles-of-empire.10 In these cinematic modes of sublime-image spectacle like Gladiator and Pearl Harbor, the movie offers sublimated enchantments of US global power and offers up a renewed credulity towards the broader master-narrative of Euro-American enlightenment.11 In Gladiator, such a moralizing narrative of heroic policing and agonistic entertainment is presumed to underlie the USdominated new world order. But this is a wary achievement given the largescale nostalgia of Europeans for a re-uniﬁed Europe as a transnational community avowing (in Ian Ang’s critique of European market discourse) their 64 Rob Wilson own time-honoured if quite waning sense of cultural superiority and political control.12 Maximus’s full name, Maximus Lucius, means ‘full light’, suggesting his inner ties to the Enlightenment project of the Roman Empire enacted as duty, civilizing force, law: the civilizing enunciation of imperial subjectivity, civis Romanus sum.13 Maximus, also called ‘the Spaniard’ to recall his mongrel origins, offers up a hero all too willing to invoke such a discourse of enlightenment to legitimate the makings of a global empire and the subordination of local peoples (and womanhood) to the Pax Romana via conquest, integration, and war. Empire is overtly seen bringing light to the dark places of the earth via the reign of law, civil decorum, and centrist order. Hardly the foe of Empire, Maximus is only opposed to the anti-republican subversion of its global rule through a ‘warped Oedipal nightmare’ named Commodus.14 Split off from the goodly yeoman-like drives of a heroic servant of the Empire like Maximus, the bad son Commodus comes to embody some more decadent version of the Empire, one identiﬁed with Europe in its more fascist moments of domination and lurid modes of amoral excess. Fighting for his heteronormative family and to free himself from falling into the exploited slave class of the games, Maximus moves from waging just war against Germany to his own bellum justum against the state as perverted by the preening Commodus. To be sure, whatever its New Age aura of otherworldly mysticism and dream-like streams of pagan consciousness in Spain, the plot of Gladiator remains quite heteronormative and liberal-pious at the core. The movie ratiﬁes home and family as the base of transnational empire and reﬂects the fundamental desire of imperial man (in some neo-universalizing sense) for war, law, and constitutional order. Indeed, Gladiator seems intent upon ‘re-masculinizing’ post-Vietnam American male selfhood from Los Angeles to Taipei for more global and civilizational modes of market domination and geopolitical victory.15 As Carla Freccero describes it, this self-ratifying narrative of imperial spectacle in Gladiator is quite neo-conservative in its honouring and praise of righteous fathers and conscripted sons. It does this through its plot, but also its ‘spectacular display’ of power that ‘lets us believe in all those manly warrior values and tricks us into the myth of patriotic belonging’ to the imperial community of family value, manly virtue, conquest, and enlightened rule over the ‘dark places’ of the earth.16 Screenwriter David Franzoni has all too explicitly evoked the force of US and Roman historical analogies, suggesting a huge imperial subtext for his writing of Gladiator into a new-millennial text. ‘There are so many elements of ancient Rome during the period that are almost identical to America today that it’s almost unavoidable’, Franzoni admitted about his script, and went on to ﬂesh out the transtemporal metaphor of empire via details of urban unrest and media intervention. Street gangs dominating the inner cities, politicians using the media, entertainment, to control the masses, the concept that the masses can be controlled in a thoughtless manner. The very idea [of media control] is becoming more and more clearly American. That was a core idea of Roman politics, the idea that their voices can be corralled to sing as one is deﬁnitely Rome after the Republic.17 empire, cinema helped cement both a national and an imperial sense of belonging among many disparate peoples’, but often along lines of white ‘racial solidarity’ and indigenous othering: see Unthinking Eurocentrism, Multiculturalism and the Media, Chapter 3: ‘The Imperial Imaginary’, pp. 102–03. 10 Drawing uncanny ontological continuities between the Roman imperial civilizing mission and the American postwar domination of liberal humanist culture, William Spanos’ America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) underlies some of my wilder formulations on the Pax Americana arising within the Bush/Reagan/Clinton global dispensation. 11 I should say that I will be reﬁguring more globally mediated notions of an Americangenerated sublimity discussed in Rob Wilson, American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); see also, Rob Wilson, ‘The Postmodern Sublime: Local Deﬁnitions, Global Deformations of the U.S. National Imaginary’, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire…. 65 Amerikastudien, 43 (1998), pp. 517–27. 12 See Ian Ang’s essay in Kuan-Hsing Chen et al. (eds.), Trajectories. 13 A minister in Swansea refused to christen a woman’s hefty new-born son after Maximus Lucius, recognizing that the hero of Gladiator was not a Christian (and that the child’s mother had not been to church in nine months), ‘Canon Refuses to name Baby After Gladiator’, The Times, 4 November 2000, p. 3. 14 See Sara Gwenllian Jones on ‘the play of excess and lack that conﬁgures Maximus in oppositional relation of Commodus’ as tragic double, in her insightful review essay of Gladiator, in Scope: http://www.nottingha m.ac.uk/ﬁlm/journal/ﬁ lmrev/gladiator.htm. 15 Here I am evoking the analysis of ‘spectacles of war’ by Susan Jeffords and Michael Rogin et al. who saw Reagan-era movies and texts moving beyond the national doubt, trauma, and guilt of the Vietnam War to create residual forms of imperial masculinity and strong forgetting. See Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1989. Kuan-Hsing Chen argues that in spaces like Taiwan, where America has (Or a core, American idea of hegemony after World War II, Franzoni seems to imply, via the installation of globalized media, liberal politics, and market forces.) Maker of cautionary scripts on subaltern forces of American history like Citizen Cohn and Amistad, Franzoni, (like his director Ridley Scott) is writing inside/against the American empire and its uncanny spectacles of home and colony (like the mongrel Paciﬁc Rim spaces of Blade Runner), making and estranging cinematic works into retroactive and retrospective effects, but keeping ‘the dialogue contemporary, like the television [series] I, Claudius.18 Recalling the nostalgic vistas and domesticating ideology of Hollywood epics and the stark retro-moralism of works like Ben Hur, The Robe, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Quo Vadis and the slave-based resistances of Spartacus, Gladiator enacts a newer mode of global spectacle. Its plot pits the overstuffed power of the Roman Empire not only against its own consenting local agents, like Maximus the fallen general in search of moral redemption and public revenge upon illicit power, but also against various republican agents and plural citizens more broadly. These citizens of Empire under the Pax Romana enjoy the spectacles of bloodshed and agon of combat only as some kind of sublimated solicitation of their own enlistment in the cause and everyday forms of empire. Offering a ‘skewed and unsettling’ reworking of the ‘Hollywood epic genre’ from the Cold War era which posited a lone, quasi-Christian and Americanized hero (like Spartacus) against a totalitarian state of orientalized cruelty named Egypt, Babylon, or Rome, Gladiator posits its own reign of Empire as staged against the primordial setting of ‘another Europe, one that is ancient, elemental and unruly, a world of harsh environments and strange pagan deities’.19 From the time of Julius Caesar and the imperial centralization of state power under Augustus Caesar in Rome until such events were outlawed by more Christianized rulers, different emperors had used free, state-sponsored public spectacles. Games ranged from sporting events in the Circus Maximus, forms of comic theatre, horse races, exotic animal hunts and ﬁghts, and mock naval battles to outright gladiatorial combat, and served to entertain, elicit support for, if not to ratify their own power on the pulses of their amazed and terrorized populace.20 From the time of Augustus Caesar, an ‘imperial entertainment industry’ had been built up to create extravagant display and to serve the political neutralization of dissent.21 As the museum-based editors of Gladiators and Caesars write, ‘extravagance was in the very nature of gladiatorial contests. The munera (games) were a violent spectacle, a dramatic display and not least a demonstration of equipment’.22 All of this monumental display of equipment, force, battle, and conquest of strong over weak in the circus, went into a lavish enactment and sublimation of imperial power and subjectivity. In Gladiator, much of this display has become high-tech graphics, merging the human, animal, and digital forms into battling (and cheering) cyborg-citizens in the arenas and ceremonies of the Empire. Terror and awe become the sublimated means to generate a kind of implicit public consent to imperial achievement, evoking the power and legitimacy of the Empire over its awe-struck subjects. As Ridley Scott has remarked of his own epic vocabulary, Hollywood self-consciousness about genre, and his will to create sublime effects of mass-imperial transport as deployed in Gladiator (here sounding more like Longinus than the Frankfurt School), ‘Inevitably, there are comparisons in sport and movie entertainment to the Romans and their specta- 66 Rob Wilson cles in the arena. Mass entertainment provides a visceral experience of things you can’t have, or can’t do. “Escapism” is a word with bad connotations. I prefer “transported”, “elevated”, or “taken on a journey”’ (Making, 9). In Gladiator, the awesome opening battle of the huge technologically superior forces of the Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) as set against the brave, recalcitrant, yet severely undermanned forces of Germania, use ﬁreworks effects and protracted time frames to imply an analogy between the US/UN forces in the Persian Gulf in their techno-euphoric defeat of Iraq in 1991. The cyborgian effect of spectatorial disengagement is heightened (here, as throughout the movie) by digitalized insertions of bodies, weapons, animals, ﬂames, lightning, a whole trumpery of sublime expansion and sublimated aggression soliciting assent via awe, trauma, and wonder before the force and (seeming) enlightenment of global Empire.23 As in the Persian Gulf War, we at times follow the overmatched battle from the weapons’ point of view, although Scott estranges this suturing with dark tonalities and frames that freeze and cut into the sheer savagery and wild-dog quality of imperial war.24 Gladiator shufﬂes imperial history around to suit its own heroic plot elevating the ﬁctitious Maximus over male rivals in physical and moral grandeur. It evokes shots drawing on later ﬁgurations of victorious combat like Gerome’s Pollice Verso (1872) where thumbs are once again turned in the wrong direction (down instead of up), it is right to pick Commodus (who became Caesar in AD 166) as his imperial foil. The real Commodus funded, trained for, and took part in gladiatorial events himself. The passion of Commodus for gladiatorial contests was legendary, to such an extent that there were rumours that his real father was not the ascetic Marcus Aurelius (who disdained cruel spectacles in the Roman amphitheatres) but a gladiator whom his mother Faustina had loved.25 Whatever the libidinal investment of the emperors in such masculine combat of war and the allure of imperial megalomania from Caligula to Commodus, there was a depoliticizing effect often at work upon the populace. Aggression was acted out in an arena of excess whereby the masses would ‘become less agitated about political events’.26 The audience becomes avid for sensation, and delights in its apparent power acted out on display, by means of the gesture of turning thumbs up or down as some kind of collective vote of state violence. (Ironically, this recalls Siskel and Ebert voting ‘thumbs down’ in their weekly movie reviews on TV as surrogate critics for the American masses). Vicarious participation through aesthetic spectacle offers spectators the sense of being a judge with the power of life and death over the mangled participants. But, in the famous debunking of such imperial spectacles as depoliticizing events by Juvenal (in the Tenth Satire), the Roman plebs ‘now meddles no more and longs for just two things – bread and circuses’.27 In the contemporary American idiom, this would mean something like serving up more spectacular movies, MTV, and an endless supply of Big Macs and Kentucky Fried Chicken (what is called ‘hamburger imperialism’ in Taiwan). This goes down well with the town-square-like presidential debates of two centrist candidates running for imperial presidency on the stage of an everglobalizing power. Gore Vidal, novelistic chronicler of America as some huge post-war Empire of bad faith, sexual decadence, and brutal Puritanism undergoing a quasi-Roman decline, puts it like this: ‘Let TV be our Coliseum and the third-worlders our gladiators’.28 functioned inside the cultural-political psyche as imaginary desire since the Cold War era, ‘The power of the culture of US imperialism has been precisely to insert itself into the geo-colonial space by constructing itself as the imaginary ﬁgure of modernity, and, hence, as the object of [transnational] identiﬁcation’, in ‘The Club 51: On the Culture of U.S. Imperialism Question’, talk at Cultural Studies Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 2 February 2001, cited with permission. 16 Carla Freccero, movie review of Gladiator for the ‘ﬁlm gang’ of KUSP radio, Santa Cruz, California, 5 May 2000, cited with permission. 17 David S. Cohen, ‘From Script to Screen: Gladiator’, Scr(i)pt, 6 (July/August 2000), p. 32. 18 David S. Cohen, ibid., p. 33. 19 Sara Gwenllian Jones tracks the ﬁlm’s iconography as a transgression of genre: she refers here to the ﬁlm’s ‘swirling, enigmatic’ music by composers Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard, as well as the ‘harsh glare [of light] bleached across geographies of uncomfortable beauty – the rock and desert of Morocco, the arid lunar landscapes of Malta’. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire…. 67 20 Noting that ‘the sensational ﬁlm Gladiator’ had aroused public interest in Roman sports and spectacles across contemporary Europe, British Museum director R.G.W. Anderson opened an exhibit on ‘Gladiators and Caesars’ in October 2000, with the moral proviso that the exhibit (like the ﬁlm itself) ‘raises deeper issues of statesanctioned violence, political control and manipulation of the masses’, Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome, Eckart Kohne, Cornelia Ewigleben, and Ralph Jackson (eds.) (London: British Museum Press, 2000), p. 6. The exhibit was based on a concept developed in art museums in Hamburg and Speyer, Germany, Spring and Summer 2000. 21 Gladiators and Caesars, p. 139. 22 Gladiators and Caesars, p. 40. 23 The techno-euphoric display of US hightech weaponry in the Gulf War, as global spectacle deployed in the ‘sublime’ Patriot missile, is discussed in Rob Wilson, ‘Technoeuphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime’, National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, ed. Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 205–29. On cinema as a To invoke the grim Debord on the socialized subjectivity of the spectacle, capitalism triumphant on such a global scale can only recognize itself in the triumph of the spectacle: some self-legitimating image of grandeur deliriously trumping liberal contradiction via aesthetic assent.29 The sublime spectacle of power becomes, for Hardt and Negri, more like the creation of a virtual space in which the outside ﬂips over into the inside, the arena of spectacle into the spectator of empire, all liberal politics ‘sublimated and de-actualized in the virtual space of the spectacle’ (Empire, 189). If the Empire’s lavish spectacle of mortal combat is threaded into a huge biopolitical theatrics of power, this is what Gopal Balakrishnan (reviewing Empire) calls ‘a media-steered system of political publicity.’ Such an Empire of decentred legitimacy can become ‘permanently vulnerable to the impact of destabilizing, marginal events that slip out of the control of those who manufacture consent’.30 The action movie here reaches back into what Nietzsche later ratiﬁed as the Greco-Roman love of agonistic battle and will to afﬁrm power and victory over defeated poets and priests, ‘the visual stimulation of seeing muscular bodies in vigorous exertion, defying death and injury’.31 Under the management of the producer-like and cynical Proximo (Oliver Reed), Scott’s spectacle of trained warriors is offered not so much as commodity as community of production and domination. Delighting in the reign of reason and law as in the display of combat and will to carnival excess, Coliseum spectacle paradoxically circulates to empower the state and ruler at the expense of the actors and citizens. Scott’s cynical emperor Commodus is played with relish by Joaquin Phoenix and framed by neo-fascist icons recalling Triumph of the Will. Commodus delights in abolishing dissent into preening hegemony and the seductions of illegality and incest. In effect, the citizen is turned into a screaming and amazed audience member, who feels himself complicit in the enjoyment of his own sublation into the blood-letting forms of the Empire, enjoying (as in the imperial sublime) the masochism of becoming disempowered citizens (if not the disembowelled subalterns) of the Empire. The Republic-upholding senator named Gracchus (Derek Jacobi) cannot undermine the amoral power of this public spectacle. Turning thumbs up or down as sign of death gives the spectator the illusion of participation and ampliﬁes the sensation of vicarious risk, here distanced as the spectacle of male combat and the agonistic triumph of strength over weakness or dissent. David Wyatt argues in Five Fires, while tracking the impact of catastrophe upon the making of California into a US border space of racial conﬂict and class antagonism as well the turn away from these damages of history into distancing aesthetics of spectacle in photography, painting, and cinema, that spectacles are more than just feats of size and luminosity. Spectacles do more than enact the sublime bombast of natural vastness and democratic empowerment. In fact, quite the contrary effect is solicited in the achievement of distance, autonomy, and awe through American spectacle. Wyatt claims, ‘Spectacle can be deﬁned as the use of form that sets out to distance its audience from the represented event [earthquakes, urban race riots, world war, colonial violence in the making of modern-day California] while mystifying that audience about the event’s contexts and possible causes’.32 But in sublime spectacle distance and irony is less the rule than is a sense of vicarious trauma, conquest, and empowerment, here meaning ‘the fantasy bribe’ of imperial collectivity and heroic aggrandizement concealed in the mass-cultural commodity form.33 68 Rob Wilson In the Hollywood epic genre, excitement traditionally overrides historical accuracy, creating an expansive cinematic space in which to create the ambiance of the Empire’s aura in all its excess of terror and wonder and to create fragmented analogies to contemporary politics. On this imperial stage of mediated power, one has to wonder if ‘the resistances, struggles and desires of the multitude’ ﬂowing forth as some kind of deterritorializing, biopolitical, and mongrelizing creativity of labour are all that ‘capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global ﬂows and exchanges’ as Hardt and Negri claim they are within contours of capital’s decentred and non-territorial Empire (Empire, xv–xvi). For Hardt and Negri, the proletariat or collective slave class of the global era has ﬂipped over much more hopefully into some mongrel mixture of Jesus’ multitudes, Deleuze’s nomads, and Marx’s labouring drones. In such a view, the movie Gladiator would in effect ‘push through empire to come out the other side’ into naming the forces of the counter-imperial multitudes and insurgencies of power’s ebb and ﬂow (Empire, 206). The movie did use scenes of ‘extremely graphic violence’ and earned an ‘R’ rating, but the violence was highly moralized and distanced, as the spectacle turned away from war and conquest into arenas of mass sport celebrating the agon of individual challenge and hand-to-hand combat. (At times it recalls a US television show from the 1990s called Gladiator which featured weekly challenges to steroid-enhanced contestants running a gauntlet of body blows and colliding bodies.) The entertainment web site Access Atlanta captured the US audience’s willing complicity in performing such spectacles of empire, turning everyday Americans into neo-Romans casting votes inside the blood-strewn and tiger-ridden Coliseum: ‘Two thousand thumbs up. Make that 200,000 if you want your verdict juiced with computer effects.’ Needless to say, the American audience can by no means stand for the world or the global as such, nor suggest the way this movie might be warped and transcoded at the moment of reception in spaces outside/against the imperial core like India or Russia.34 Would Americans do their part, again, in the shifting of the Roman Empire westward, trekking east to west across the neo-enlightened market-covered globe spreading peace, bread, and computer-enhanced circuses, hailing conquest and domination as manifest destiny?35 Scott, perhaps much more sceptical and British at core, refuses any merely aestheticizing disconnection between audience and history, spectacle and moral-political consent.36 As one CommonSense.com reviewer realized thorough the audience response felt in Los Angeles, ‘we were stunned with the realization that our international viewing audience assembled in the plush surroundings of the Loews Cineplex at Universal City in Los Angeles shared a visceral connection with the Roman crowd reveling at the spilling of human blood’.37 (This critic went on to safely distance such violence into the Roman past.) Despite such a ‘visceral connection’ to the spilling of imperial blood and the maintenance of global power which Gladiator brings into critical-complicit representation,38 perhaps Americans (sitting in their plush Hollywood seats, eating popcorn and hot dogs and cokes, distracted by the news of globalizing markets cum WTO-dissent) do not like to think of themselves as an imperial force for domination. It is hard to think of America as having become a centre of some neo-Rome, much less as the sublimated fascist state enforcing open perceptual training apparatus of modern war-making and international spectacle of the earth-domineering gaze, see also Paul Virillo, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989). 24 On the American-centred techno-mechanics of visuality and gaze in the Persian Gulf War, see Shohat and Stram on the deadly simulacrum of ‘postmodern war’, Unthinking Eurocentrism, pp. 125–31. 25 Gladiators and Caesars, p. 128. 26 Gladiators and Caesars, p. 135. 27 Gladiators and Caesars, p. 135. 28 Quoted by Peter Kemp, ‘Delusions of Grandeur’, in his review of Gore Vidal’s latest ‘US empire’ novel The Golden Age, in The Guardian, 14 October 2000, p. 47. 29 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994). See also Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 48. 30 Gopal Balakrishnan, ‘Virgilian Visions’, New Left Review, 5 (Sept./Oct. 2000), p. 147. 31 Gladiators and Caesars, p. 47. See Friederich Nietzsche, ‘Homer’s Contest’. 32 David Wyatt, Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire…. 69 Shaping of California (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 155. 33 Here I agree with Fredric Jameson that Hollywood ‘metageneric’ works like the Godfather trilogy, Dog Day Afternoon, and Jaws offer both ideological obfuscation and mystery (reiﬁcation) to the audience as well as ﬁgure forth more ‘utopian’ longings for forms of familial, class, transnational ‘collectivity’. See ‘Reiﬁcation and Utopia in Mass Culture’, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 29–34. 34 My analysis here is in no way adequate to describe these global/local warpings and polycentric ﬂows of the Hollywood spectacle outside the US market and cultural frames. In Egypt, for example, Gladiator is the second biggest ‘blockbuster’ ﬁlm, ranking just behind Titanic and ahead of Independence Day, suggesting the peripheral impact of such American mediascapes and ideologies upon global markets. 35 See Howard Horwitz on the fears of imperial repetition and European decadence that haunted visions of the so-called American Sublime in cultural producers like Thomas Cole in his Course of Empire paintings from 1833 to 1836, ‘Sublime markets upon those conscripted as labour and hinterland in this global orgy of consumption. But perhaps this Hollywood spectacle of Gladiator brought home the allure of imperial power and, instead of critique, oddly solicited a halfguilty, sublimely pleasurable, and voyeuristic consent from its cinematic effected global/ local subjects. Films like Gladiator – bigger in scale, more spectacular and techno-industrial in effect, more broadly commercial in appeal – may not just be about Empire. They may help to represent and enact the contemporary threat of ‘Americanization’ felt as force of genre: meaning the overwhelming of local traditions and local-based settings and themes to ﬁlm-makers in Britain, for example, now being underwritten by the British Film Council. As Alexander Walker warns, ‘The generation [of ﬁlm-makers] weaned on Star Wars, reared on Aliens and now embracing Gladiator has no afﬁnities with Ken Loach or Mike Leigh-type ﬁlms like My Name is Joe and High Hopes’. These are smaller ﬁlms that ‘focus on daily life and character in Britain’ instead of making a Hollywood-hip, sublime, and cool ‘genre product’ as does Ridley Scott.39 Worrying about global/local imbalances of culture after the war, Britain has moved not so far from the outraged cry of John Maynard Keynes outlining the cultural policy of the new Arts Council in 1946 – ‘Death to Hollywood’. At times, though, this cultural nationalism articulated against the reign of Hollywood genres ‘has mutated into [today’s cry of] “long live Merchant Ivory”’. That is to say, hazy costume dramas milking British literary and royal heritage into global export and tourist attraction, as the lure of blockbuster spectacles remains a longing at the ex-imperial core.40 Globalization of the political economy is by no means a fait accompli. Not even inside the ex-imperial centres of postcolonial discourse like Britain, where moralistic policies like tougher school discipline, anti-drug campaigns, and ‘standing up for the countryside’ and yeoman-farmer products of white ethnicity can try to soften the global opening. William Hague, Conservative party leader in England was doing his best to see New Labour treated with global disillusion and local contempt under the overreaching Millennium Dome in 2000. Hague nevertheless promised to ‘champion the cause of a ﬂexible, free-trading, low-tax, lightly regulated Europe – a Europe that goes with the grain of the global economy’.41 Nowadays, going with the grain of the global empire or regimes of globalization has become the regionalizing watchword of the day. New Labour is intent upon moving ‘Third Way’ Britain towards some supranational unity inside the European Union as ‘superpower’ that is nonetheless not a superstate (‘a superpower that is not a superstate’ as Tony Blair told the EU in Warsaw).42 The terms of identity may shift, but the longing for symbolic forms of collective empowerment, sense of civilizational commitment, primordial belonging, and global status still haunt the national forms, hence the imperial nostalgia here for Empire as spectacle and simulacrum. Globalization, by now generating waves of street protests and oppositional linkages between Teamster, anarchist, and Turtle at international economic meetings like APEC in Vancouver and the WTO in Seattle on the nervous Paciﬁc Rim, has begun to reveal the threat to democracy of the globalizing economy. This means more control and power with less transparency in the hands of the wealthy nations (especially the market-booming United States) who can frame and unduly inﬂuence international organizations like the World Bank, 70 Rob Wilson International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Under the neo-liberal regime of such institutions, in the wary words of Andrew Simms, ‘the anomalies and inequalities of globalization have darkly ﬂowered’.43 Deregulation and speed mount for capital, whereas increased management, restraint, border blockage, and decreased beneﬁts for labour seems to have become the neo-liberal norm on the American model. This shift from ‘European-style imperialism’ to an American-led Empire of justice, prosperity, human rights, and peace has been generated around a core ideology of neo-liberal freedom installed at the market frontiers: ‘The contemporary idea of Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project’ (Empire, 182). This is what Hardt and Negri contend in their post-Roman trajectory of imperial power to the shores of the Potomac. While neo-liberal forces push towards forging a single universal free market on the model of cybernetic capital ﬂowing across borders, this turbo-ﬂux, speed, instability, and chaos of creative destruction is driven, policed, and all but regulated by the ‘world’s last great Enlightenment regime, the United States’, to quote John Gray’s lament on the ‘false dawn’ of such capitalist globalization.44 Still, as Hardt and Negri phrase the global-local paradox of installing a multi-centred, ﬂuid, and dynamic process of globalization giving at times more dynamism and agency to the creative and mobile multitudes of the local, ‘the coming Empire is not American and the United States is not its center’ (Empire, 384). In such a paradoxical reading of US imperialism and its Cold War legacies and heritages of sub-colony inscription, the United States has not become some new Rome of territorial expansion and outright state plunder, but a huge and mixed ‘cluster of new Romes’, meaning this. Washington goes on controlling the nuclear bomb (monarchal power), New York stabs at nervously managing the speculative crisis of global markets (aristocratic power), and Hollywood is ever-generating the ‘ether’ of cultural semiotics and the spectacular software of liberal hegemony (democratic power) (Empire, 347). If ‘the indispensable instrument for maintaining the American empire is its huge military establishment’ (Blowback, 222) and costly missile-based internationalism, Gladiator helps to make this amorphous Empire palpable as a global structure of feeling. The movie ﬁts the mongrel peripheries into a transnational totality which secures consent to its military machine not so much via domination and plunder as via aesthetic ratiﬁcation, mediated trauma, and modes of civilian awe. This may be what Aime Cesaire means when he warns (in the postcolonial-nationalist contexts and techno-industrial imbalances of his uncanny Discourse on Colonialism) that ‘American domination [is] the only domination [form] from which one never recovers ... unscarred.’ In effect, Cesaire means one cannot escape becoming ‘unscarred’ by the psychic, mysterious, and spatial entanglements at the global-local border of national self-determination and the US image spectacle [see my epigraph to this essay]. Even a gladiator battle, reframed, can elide the scars of material domination and begin to make the imperial sublation of peripheral subjectivity look like (and feel to diverse audiences) like a narrative of heroic success. Fittingly enough, Gladiator was nominated for twelve Academy Awards in 2001, and won ﬁve of them, including important ones for best picture of the year and best actor, which can only amplify its global impact as an empire-haunted blockbuster. Possession, American Landscape’, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 37–55. The ‘westerning’ of Empire theme is captured in Bishop George Berkeley’s poem from the Enlightenment era, ‘America: A Prophecy’, trumpeting its imperial ratiﬁcation credo, ‘Westward the course of Empire takes its way’, which ironically gave the radical California city of Berkeley its postimperial British name. See Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 280–82 and 6–9, on the naming of Berkeley, California as a fulﬁllment of the westward march of the imperial-city dream to the quasi-Roman shores of the Golden Gate Bridge to China markets and ‘hinterlands’ of the Paciﬁc Basin. In such an American manifestdestiny scenario, San Francisco would replace Washington DC as a more Asia/Paciﬁc-oriented version of Rome. 36 Born in South Shields, England in 1937, Ridley Scott graduated from the Royal College of Art (one of his classmates was David Hockney) Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire…. 71 and has directed ﬁfteen movies since the Napoleonic-based The Duelists (1978) and meta-genre cult classics like Thelma and Louise (1991), Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), as well as over 2000 commercials. Scott’s training in art (and commerce) serves him well, as Gladiator is self-consciously generated around paintings of the Roman Empire from the Romantic era by Gerome and Lawrence AlmaTadema. As Arthur Max, the production designer for Gladiator revealingly commented, ‘We tried to bring to Gladiator a sense of the Roman Empire in decline – its greatness and at the same time its corruption and decay. And to do that we found ourselves looking not so much to the scholarly historical realm as to interpretations of Rome by certain nineteenth-century painters – classical Romantics who depicted an exotic view of Rome as they wished it to be, not as it really was’ (Making, p. 66). On Gerome’s impact, see Making, pp. 22–26. See also Paul M. Sammon, Ridley Scott (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1999), especially Chapters 1–3 on his British training in art, commerce, and postmodern image effects for RCA, BBC, and Apple. The Pax Americana Empire of global-local turbo capitalism operates under such a post-imperialist vision of expanding horizons and proliferating differences, all somehow ecstatically enlisted and conscripted into the free market of the commodity culture. But as the journey of the rude Spaniard Maximus in Gladiator shows, there is ﬁnally no egress from the routes, arenas, and spectacles of Empire, however multi-centred; no pastoral exit out from modes of domination, except in the transcendental visions of consciousness, other-worldly music, profanity, prayer, death, and dream. The mongrel forces of the local periphery are routed through the arenas of Empire, the forces of mobility, mongrel community, and freedom brought back into the ecstasy of celebration, battle, spectacle, demos, and abolishment.45 The multicultural forces of the transnational moment have been seemingly integrated and contained. When the Numidian character Juba (Djimon Housou) utters his comradely blessing over the heroic body of Maximus and buries the little ceramic statues of wife and child in the bloody sands of the Roman Coliseum saying, ‘Now we are free. We will see you again, but not yet, not yet’, one has to wonder if this afﬁrmation of ‘freedom’, pagan transcendence, and racial solidarity among the mongrel transnational community is not another way of ratifying the mysterious dominations of Empire today. Drawing attention to the movie ‘Gladiator as geopolitical metaphor’, a New York Times article quoted political-science professor Jeffrey W. Legro who worries about today’s US/ Roman Empire analogy like this: The international sage of the United States since World War II is like a variation on the script from the movie Gladiator. We entered the arena reluctantly but once inside vanquished all challengers. Now we stand alone inside the Coliseum, victorious and sword in hand but with little idea now about what to do with Rome. What’s more, we’re not even very sure where the exit signs leading out of the Coliseum are located. Legro’s prescient comment on ‘America as reluctant Empire’ theme was uttered in the context of a Working Group on Hegemony at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, composed of ﬁfteen scholars theorizing on the rising militarism, anti-democratic potential, superpower responsibility, cultural appeal, and economic sway of the United States. Coursing through the biopolitical pores of the new world order, Gladiator has by now become CBS News Anchor Dan Rather’s favourite movie: as the US liberal newscaster said, ominously miming the Roman Praetorian Guard on his television signoff, ‘Strength and honor!’46 37 See http://www.cinemasense.com/reviews/gladiator.htm. 38 As Carla Freccero phrases this form-becoming-content dynamic in her radio review of Gladiator, ‘That’s one of the messages of this movie – itself a spectacular display that does all the things it tells us that the spectacle does’. 39 Alexander Walter, ‘The Split Screen’, London Evening Standard, 5 October 2000, p. 31. 40 Stefan Collini, ‘Culture Inc.’, supplement to The Guardian, 28 October 2000, pp. 16–17. 72 Rob Wilson 41 Andrew Sparrow, ‘Labour Arrogant and Divided, says Hague’, Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2000, p. 9. 42 Ian Black and Nicholas Watt, ‘Blair Calls for Euro “Superpower”’, The Guardian, 7 October 2000, p. 1. 43 Andrew Simms, ‘Tempering Minority Rule’ [by the Group of Seven]’, The Guardian, 30 October 2000, p. 25. 44 Quoted in Corey Robin, ‘The Ex-Cons: Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left!’, Lingua Franca, 11 (February 2001), p. 28. 45 This may be the gloomiest analysis of ‘local’ forces I have ever offered. For a reading of global-local dialectics that gives much more weight to the resistant and innovative powers of the situated local and peripheral sites within and against transnational capitalism, see Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds.), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); and Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Paciﬁc: From ‘South Paciﬁc’ to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 46 See Kurt M. Campbell, ‘The Last Superpower Ponders Its Next Move’, New York Times, 10 February 2001: A 15–17. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire…. 73 ‘We dive & reappear in new places’: Emerson, Proust, and the nature of memory Michael Murphy Keywords Proust Emerson Transition Memory Realism Abstract Tracing a line in Proustian criticism initiated by Edmund Wilson’s essay on Proust in Axle’s Castle, this essay looks at the shift in Proust’s writing from symbolism to realism, romanticism to modernism. Key to this reading of In Search of Lost Time is a reconsideration of the inﬂuence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in particular Nature which was itself a by-product of Emerson’s visit to Paris in the mid-1830s. Examining the role played by Emerson in the development of Proust’s earliest works – Pleasures and Regrets and the abandoned novel Jean Santeuil – this essay continues by noting certain correspondences between Proust’s treatment of the theme of memory and the Emersonian idea of ‘transition’. That Proust began as a disciple of Symbolism before remaking himself as the successor to the naturalist project of objectively depicting the world of society and attempting – like Flaubert, Stendhal, Zola and Balzac, his predecessors in the French novel – to set his characters against the backdrop of the social and political events of his day has been a mainstay of Proustian criticism since Edmund Wilson’s inﬂuential essay on Proust in Axle’s Castle (1931). Part of the attraction of Wilson’s essay, then, is that it marks out a clear development in Proust’s writings: from Romanticism to Modernism. Such a view of Proust, however, is not uninﬂuenced by which side of the Atlantic one reads him. Wilson was American. The trajectory he marks out for Proust therefore makes literary-historical sense in that it accommodates the inﬂuence of writers and artists from the States. After all, it can hardly be a coincidence that the writers whom Wilson mentions in relation to Proust at the close of his essay are all American: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder and Dorothy Parker. In doing so, Wilson is perhaps simply developing a chain of association initiated by Proust himself when, in a letter to Robert de Billy, he declared that, ‘It is strange that, in the most widely different departments, from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an inﬂuence as English and American.’1 What is signiﬁcant about Proust’s comments is that he is writing to de Billy in 1909, only a year or so into the intense ﬁve year rewriting of Jean Santeuil that was to bear fruit as the ﬁrst volume of In Search of Lost Time. This was not, however, the ﬁrst time Proust had renounced his Symbolist inheritance. As early as 1896, in an article called ‘Contre l’obscurité’, he attacked the second wave of Symbolist writers. Words, he argued, should retain the poetry of their history Michael Murphy is award director of the MA in Writing and Reading Poetry at Liverpool Hope University College. 1 Quoted in Edmund Wilson, Axle’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 1931, p. 136. 74 EJAC 21 (2) 74–85 © Intellect Ltd 2002 and etymology. For what Nature teaches us is clarity, that ‘the shape of everything is individual and clear’ (see Tadié 249). It is, as Jean-Yves Tadié has said, a ‘crucial landmark in the genealogy of his ideas’. Of that Anglo-American list of writers mentioned in the letter to de Billy, none has given critics more difﬁculty in assigning a direct inﬂuence over Proust than Ralph Waldo Emerson. What is more, the degree of inﬂuence allowed appears to be split along clear national lines. For if French critics – as J.M. Cocking has said – are keen to rubbish the inﬂuence of writers such as Ruskin and Emerson (see Cocking xviii–ixx), American-based critics such as Germaine Brée and George Stambolian are more sure that a connection exists, though less conﬁdent that it wasn’t left behind by the time Proust abandoned the writing of Jean Santeuil.2 Both admit the importance of Representative Men to Proust, particularly in the central role his ﬁction went on to afford the artist (see Stambolian 137; Brée 49). ‘Proust,’ Brée writes, ‘like Emerson, seems to have thought of humanity as one man slowly coming into being through millions of individuals, a man whose essential and distinct being is non-material, a being that he designates as “esprit” and that Emerson spoke of as the “oversoul”’ (Brée 69–70). This, Brée says, ‘[opened] up new paths in French ﬁction, very Emersonian ones’ (Brée 58).3 What I want to suggest here, however, is that Emerson and aspects of Symbolist poetics remained important to Proust, and that their presence can be discerned not only during the ‘prentice years’ of Jean Santeuil but right into the ﬁnal pages of In Search of Lost Time. What is more, I want to show how the lines of inﬂuence between the Old and New Worlds weren’t simply from east-west, and that Europe – more particularly Paris – played a vital part in the development of Emerson’s philosophy, a philosophy which as Charles Feidelson argued in Symbolism and American Literature (1953) gave American writers their ‘literary independence’ and ‘broaden[ed] the possibilities of literature’.4 2 Brée was Vilas Professor of French at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin. His main contribution to Proustian studies is The World of Marcel Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967). Stambolian was a postgraduate student at Wisconsin and his Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972) acknowledges its debt to Brée. 3 Not all American critics are so certain of the inﬂuence of Emerson over Proust’s writings. Writing in 1925, Edith Wharton saw Proust as occupying a central position in a purely French tradition, ‘that of Racine in his psychology, that of Saint-Simon in its anecdotic and discursive illustration’, from The Writing of Fiction quoted in Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 309. And Walter A. Strauss, though he quotes Proust’s letter to de Billy in which he mentions Eliot, Hardy, Stevenson and Emerson limits his discussion of literary inﬂuences to the English writers. See Proust and Literature: the Novelist as Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). 4 Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and II Cocking’s assessment must now be tempered with the acknowledgement given Emerson by Tadié, Proust’s biographer and the editor of the exhaustive fourvolume Pléiade edition of À la recherche du temps perdu. We might even go so far as to say that Tadié restores Emerson not just to Proust’s French-speaking readers but to those who know him in English. For English-language biographies of Proust have been no less eager to discuss Emerson than those French critics lambasted by Cocking. He is overlooked by both Richard H. Barker (1954) and Ronald Hayman (1990), and given scant regard by Painter in the revised and enlarged edition of his long-revered biography (1996). Even Proust’s most recent biographer, the American William C. Carter (2000), is content to simply restate the known facts: that Les plaisirs et les jours, a collection of stories and essays published when Proust was 25, includes a number of epigraphs taken from Emerson’s Essays in American Philosophy; that Emerson is mentioned in the abandoned novel Jean Santeuil; and that later in his life, when fully immersed in the labour of writing of À la recherche, Proust was to maintain that the authors who had the greatest hold over him were English and American, among them Emerson. Perhaps the most telling anecdote is only mentioned by Tadié: that on the night he died Proust jotted down from memory a misquotation of Emerson’s phrase ‘There’s nothing so frivolous as dying’.5 ‘We dive & reappear in new places’… 75 American Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 4. 5 See Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Biography, trans. by Euan Cameron (London: Viking, 2000), p. 777. 6 Roger Shattuck, Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2000), p. 178. Shattuck devotes some nine pages to a refutation of Tadié’s ‘overblown, misconceived, and overpriced new Pléiade edition’. 7 ibid. pp. 178–79. 8 Julie Ellison, Emerson’s Romantic Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 160. 9 Maurice Gonnaud, An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans. by Lawrence Rosenwald (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. xxi–xxii. Such an approach opens Emerson’s writings to that process of ‘genetic criticism’ favoured by Tadié. For all their differences, the comparison with Proust is instructive. Gonnaud writes: ‘[T]he journal in which [Emerson] noted his ideas in bulk, day after day, is currently considered his most valuable work, or in any case that in which the artist expresses himself Though Tadié goes so far as to acknowledge the general inﬂuence of Emerson on the young Proust, he is loath to go further and investigate the possibility that Proust’s novel is, in many important ways, a response not only to Emerson’s philosophy but also the literary form of his essays and the particular structures of his prose. This limitation of Tadié’s discussion of Emerson is all the more interesting given, as Roger Shattuck has described it, Tadié’s use of ‘genetic criticism’, an approach to literary scholarship which ‘[studies] the evolution of a work out of earlier outlines and drafts and sketches into its (presumably) ﬁnal state.6 Though Shattuck is perhaps a little too eager to discount the value of such an analysis – one, I would argue, which we see at its best in Tadié’s moving and eloquent discussion of the varying drafts of the last sentence of Time Regained – what I want to pursue here is the fact that Shattuck’s description of an author for whom ‘genetic criticism’ is valid, Montaigne, and the reasons he gives, brings us close to the working methods of Emerson [see n. 9] and, in turn, Proust. ‘An author like Montaigne,’ Shattuck writes, ‘lends himself beautifully to [genetic criticism]. He himself published the second and third editions of his Essays, which incorporate the earlier versions interspersed with extended additions. Up to a point, he kept everything and rejected nothing’.7 Such also is the case with Emerson, whose compositional method has been described by Julie Ellison as ‘a patently “synthetic” process’ and an ‘assemblage of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries’.8 Maurice Gonnaud puts it slightly differently, emphasizing the point that ‘to compose, to construct was [for Emerson] to tarnish the freshness of his inspiration, to substitute lies for spontaneity’.9 Though Proust was too much the conscious artiﬁcer for such a description to be fully applicable, nevertheless we will recognize in it something of the author who constructed his great work from the fragments of earlier unﬁnished creations and who kept adding and inserting paragraphs and whole pages into the galley proofs of In Search of Lost Time as they arrived from the printers. What is more, Proust’s early readers, like Emerson’s, found the novel, published as it was over a fourteen-year period, rambling.10 For though he was a huge admirer of the novel, ranking Proust alongside Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as the three giants of the modern novel, E.M. Forster no doubt spoke for many when, in the spring of 1927 (the year the ﬁnal volume appeared in France), he wrote that Proust’s conclusion has not been published yet, and his admirers say that when it comes everything Will (fall) into its place, times past will be recaptured and ﬁxed, we shall have a perfect whole. I do not believe this ... The work seems to me a progressive rather than an aesthetic confession, for with the elaboration of Albertine the author is getting tired. Bits of news may await us, but it will be surprising if we have to revise our opinion of the whole book. The book is chaotic, ill-constructed, it has and will have no external shape.11 Tadié is right in saying that Proust’s infatuation with Emerson was strongest while he was still a young man. Jean Santeuil is in some small part a record of this. And while we should not be surprised, in an author so astute about the processes of reading and writing, and the ways in which they inﬂuence one 76 Michael Murphy another, that Proust has much to say about the literary ‘love affairs’ of his ﬁctional protagonists, what is perhaps more surprising, and is doubly worth noting here, is the part played in this by Emerson. ‘When we were young,’ Proust writes about the young Jean (and by inference all budding writers), ‘there was always one especial book which we carried with us to the Park, and read with a passion which no other book could ever quite supplant.’12 It is an experience which Proust describes in a remarkably sensuous, even erotic, language reminiscent of that used to describe what Swann and Marcel experience in their love affairs with Odette and Albertine respectively: ‘Its physical enchantment was one with the story that we loved, with the pleasure it gave us when in the shady arbours of the Park, hidden away so as not to be interrupted ... holding it in our hands and looking at its pages, we never, in our mind, separated its contents from the softness of its thin pages, from its lovely smell’ (Jean Santeuil, 377). There remains, however, something onanistic about the relationship described by Proust. Such intensity and isolation cannot last. What must replace the ‘sanctity’ of the one prized book of childhood is a kind of promiscuity, one which sees the adult reader pursuing his pleasures like the ﬂâneur, hoping to come across the unexpected in previously unremarked places. Thus it is in the context of the young Jean’s widening sense of both himself and the world of language that Proust mentions Emerson: ‘Later on no doubt we should be enchanted to ﬁnd in some manuscript, in some newspaper instalment, a passage from George Eliot or from Emerson which we had not previously seen’ (ibid.) By 1902, some eight years after the 23-year-old had ﬁrst read Representative Men, Proust was conﬁdent enough to criticize Emerson for failing to ‘differentiate sufﬁciently deeply the various forms of translating’ reality.13 Having said this, much the same can be said for Proust’s ‘apprenticeship’ to Ruskin, the importance of whom could only be fully absorbed when, like Swann’s passion for Odette, Proust had gone through ‘all the successive stages of infatuation, discipleship, and disillusion’.14 The proof, or so Tadié sees it, of the limited inﬂuence of Emerson over the mature Proust is that his name is mentioned only once in the novel. What kind of proof this is, though, when the central character is himself only called by his name twice is altogether less clear. Similarly, while no critic would seek to minimize the importance of Ruskin to Proust, direct references to the Englishman in À la recherche remain relatively few. Much more important are those subtle references to Ruskin which, in Richard Macksey’s words, ‘constitute an important pattern in the fabric of [In Search of Lost Time]’. Just such an approach, I want to suggest, can be taken in connecting Emerson with those aspects of Proust’s novel which are to do with the involuntary memory and Marcel’s tortuous gestation as a writer. most distinctly and with the greatest felicity. In consequence, Emerson becomes choice prey for research and scholarly criticism because of, rather than in spite of, his literary negligence. Criticism’s task, then, is to investigate as closely as possible the birth of ideas and feelings, to follow their development, to distinguish the crises they pass through, to describe their transformations ... One might in the end maintain that with Emerson the work of the artist cannot be distinguished from the totality of his written utterances, and correspondingly that the enterprise of critical interpretation cannot be accomplished except by integrating into an adequate structure every sentence and verse he wrote’ (ibid. p. xxii). 10 The novel appeared in France between 1913 and 1927. The ﬁrst English translation between 1922 and 1932. 11 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 146. This is not to say that Forster didn’t greatly admire Proust, who he saw as having analysed ‘the modern consciousness’ more successfully than any other contemporary writer (p. 26). Rather, the point Forster is making about In Search of Lost Time is that its governing II In October 1832, at the age of 29, Emerson resigned his ministry from the Unitarian Second Church in Boston. ‘I have sometimes thought,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.’15 The irony is that, in October that year, in search of a renewed sense of vocation, he sailed from Boston for the Old World of his forefathers in a ship laden with a cargo of ‘logwood, mahogany, tobacco, sugar, coffee, beeswax [and] cheese’. ‘We dive & reappear in new places’… 77 structure is one of rhythm. What Forster means by this is that Proust ‘stitched’ his novel together ‘from the inside’. The example he gives is that of Vinteuil’s ‘little phrase’: ‘There are times when the little phrase ... means everything to the reader. There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in ﬁction: not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to ﬁll us with surprise and freshness and hope’ (p. 148). 12 Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. by Gerard Hopkins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955), p. 377. 13 Tadié, p. 345. 14 Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin, trans. and ed. by Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe, with an Introduction by Richard Macksey (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. xvii. 15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Prose and Poetry, 2nd edition, (New York: Rinehart Editions, 1969), pp. 516–17. 16 ibid. p. 520. 17 Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Emerson’s journal entries for the crossing and his immediate impressions of southern Europe (the Brig Jasper docked ﬁrst in Malta) are vivid testimony to his acute sense of alienation in relation to his changed environment, his altered relationship with religion and God and, most importantly for the future author of the Essays, with regard to himself. As he travelled north Emerson’s mood began to change. Visiting Ferney he was pleased to note that Voltaire’s rooms were ‘modest and pleasing’ and that portraits of Franklin and Washington were hung there. However, it was his arrival in Paris and his visit to the ‘Cabinet of Natural History in the Garden of Plants’ which marked a sea-change not only in Emerson’s response to Europe but was to play a decisive part in his future career. ‘The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever,’ the Journal records for July 13, 1833. ‘Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer ... I say continually “I will be a naturalist”’.16 The importance of this explosion of renewed feeling for the world and man’s place in it, argues Lee Rust Brown, cannot be overestimated, providing not only the inspiration but a model for Emerson’s ﬁrst major publication after returning to the States, Nature in September 1836. What Emerson saw in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle were ‘massive displays of mineral, plant, and animal specimens ... illustrat[ing] the classiﬁcatory models of individual naturalists’ including Lamarck, Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire. Faced, as Brown comments, ‘with this startling combination of multiplicity and “reduction to a few laws”, Emerson found the occasion...sacramental’ [my italics].17 It is a word to which we will return. Tenuous as the connection might seem, the importance of this conjugation of subject and object as experienced by Emerson when looking at the various cabinets contained in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle has a parallel in Proust’s description of the room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage at Balbec where the young Marcel travels with his grandmother. Furthermore, it is a merging of subject and object in the act of perception that is central to what Feidelson has to say about Symbolism: ‘the philosophy of symbolism ... is an attempt to ﬁnd a point of departure outside the premises of dualism – not so much an attempt to solve the “old problems of knowledge” as an effort to redeﬁne the process of knowing in such a manner that the problem never arises’ (Feidelson 50). The description of the hotel room at Balbec opens the third part of Swann’s Way, signalling a decisive shift in the narrative from Combray, Paris and childhood to the wider world of adolescence: Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an atmosphere granular, pollinated, edible and devout, than my room... at Balbec. (In Search of Lost Time, I: 461)18 The description of Combray is important. For all the idyllic aspects of the novel’s presentation of Marcel’s childhood the narrator is clearly signalling in those adjectives ‘granular, pollinated, edible and devout’19 an atmosphere at once dangerous to the health of an asthmatic (the onset of which illness had prevented Marcel from travelling to Venice) and steeped in a religiosity which 78 Michael Murphy Emerson, as we know, saw as perpetuating the ‘dead forms of our forefathers’. Balbec, though, offers an altogether different world, characterized not by the close-knit, stiﬂing conformities of a bourgeois upbringing but by multiplicity, art and the unconscious: The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration in different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law of nature which he had not perhaps foreseen, was reﬂected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so that the walls were lined with a frieze of sea-scapes, interrupted only by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves. University Press, 1997), p. 60. The ‘four musty old museums’ of palaeontology, mineralogy, entomology and paleobotany (as they are unceremoniously described in the Rough Guide to Paris) were superseded in 1994 by the opening of the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution. 18 All quotations from In Search of Lost Time refer to the translation by C.K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996), published in six volumes. 19 All quotations from Proust in English are taken from In Search of Lost Time, translated by C.K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996), published in six volumes. Returning brieﬂy to Feidelson, we can see how the self-contained reﬂections of the seascape within the glass-fronted cases is analogous to what he has to say about the relationship between verba and res in the Symbolist text, particularly poetry: In poetry we feel no compulsion to refer outside language itself. A poem delivers a version of the world: it is the world for the moment. ... The elements of a metaphor have meaning only by virtue of the whole which they create by their interaction: a metaphor presents parts that do not fully exist until the whole which they produce comes into existence’. (Feidelson 57, 60–61) And such a relationship, Feidelson goes on to argue, is grounded in Emerson: When Emerson says that the ‘perception of symbols’ enables man to see both ‘the poetic construction of things’ and ‘the primary relation of mind and matter’, and that this same perception normally creates ‘the whole apparatus of poetic expression’, he is identifying poetry with symbolism, symbolism with a mode of perception, and symbolic perception with the vision, ﬁrst, of a symbolic structure in the real world and, second, of a symbolic relationship between nature and mind. (Feidelson 120) What Proust regards as especially important about the ‘hidden law’ which inspired the upholsterer’s achievement is that it took place unconsciously. In a novel so concerned with the unconscious self – or, rather, with those moments when the unconscious is brought to consciousness – this shouldn’t surprise us. The world consists all too much of those invisible presences which, like the pollinated atmosphere at Combray, we are unable to detect until they have affected us. Nature is one such inﬂuence; culture, in the form of religion, another. Yet another is history, without which, Emerson says, human existence is inexplicable. For the young Marcel, Balbec exists at the interstices between these various inﬂuences. Discussing his proposed visit with Swann, the older man tells him of the church there: ‘built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still half Romanesque, [it] is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman Gothic, and so singular that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration’ (In Search of Lost Time, I: 463). As with the hotel room, the ‘singular’ ‘We dive & reappear in new places’… 79 20 ‘History’ in Selected Essays, p. 149. 21 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, & American Literary Modernism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 24. 22 ibid. p. 3. appeal of the church lies in its opposite quality: multiplicity. For Emerson the idea of history is intricately bound up in a belief that ‘There is one mind common to all individual men’ and that history is the record of this mind ‘illustrated by the entire series of days’.20 Likewise the church at Balbec is a record of those ﬂuctuations in the ‘one mind’ or unconscious ‘law of nature’ that are able to reconcile differing historical and cultural inﬂuences within its unique structure. Only when Marcel thus hears Swann describing the church does Balbec come to life for him as a real place existing in time and space: And that region which, until then, had seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology – and as remote from human history as the Ocean itself or the Great Bear, with its wild race of ﬁshermen for whom no more than for their whales had there been any Middle Ages – it had been a great joy to me to see it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries ... [A] reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it ﬂowered in a tapering spire. (In Search of Lost Time, I: 463–64) III As the transition from nature to culture, art is the clearest record we have of our attempt at hauling into consciousness the freight of the unconscious self. Like that ‘wild race of ﬁshermen’ ﬁgured by Proust’s narrator it hauls its cargo from out of the dumb depths of the human psyche. What distinguishes the work of art from the artefact is that the former remains ﬂuid, not simply marking the point of transition but dramatizing the very process. When it ceases to do so, when an individual work or a genre ceases to be ﬂuid it petriﬁes. It is precisely this that led Emerson to reject the inherited rites of the Christian celebration of the Lord’s Supper and to afﬁrm his belief that ‘revelation belonged not to any single theological practice or tradition but to mind itself’.21 It was also his awareness of something that Barthes was later to famously call the ‘death of the author’ which led Emerson to write in a journal entry from 1847 that ‘Every thing teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places’.22 To return, then, to the church at Balbec. What keeps it alive, both as an artwork and, for Swann, a Jew, a place of secular worship, is the fact that it partakes, in Emersonian terms, not in a single moment of cultural and historical ‘revelation’ but, like the glass walls of the Grand Hôtel, in several all at once. I referred earlier to the ‘sacramental’ nature of Emerson’s experience at the Jardin des Plantes. Coming from a man who had recently disavowed the religious beliefs of his forefathers, this is hardly surprising. What is perhaps more so is that it is this aspect of Emerson’s thought which, as I want now to suggest, should be recognized as having played a not insigniﬁcant part in Proust’s novel and the single most famous part of that novel: the madeleine dipped in the cup of tea. Before doing so, however, this is perhaps the moment at which I should admit that I have thus far been building an argument about the inﬂuence of Emerson on Proust based less on fact than contingency. The parallels between those aspects of Emerson’s journals and In Search of Lost Time I have quoted from are real enough, even though Proust could not possibly have known of their existence. There are two reasons why I have done this. The ﬁrst is 80 Michael Murphy explained by wanting to open up Tadié’s use of genetic criticism and examine Proust as a product, if I can use so clumsy a term, of his cultural times. To be fair, Tadié does make some attempt to see his subject thus. Apropos the inﬂuence of Carlyle and Emerson on Proust he writes: It is illuminating to see how one thought, through some form of transubstantiation, may incorporate another: how do we know, after all, that this inﬂuence – and not others – existed? How long did it last? What proof do we have? All too frequently, in fact, proof is replaced by the energetic assertions of aesthetic discourse, poetics or literary criticism.23 23 Tadié, pp. 339–40. 24 Quoted in W.D. Halls, Maurice Maeterlinck: A Study of His Life and Thought (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 42. 25 J.M. Cocking, Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and His Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 82–83. Clearly Tadié believes that his insistence on biography – that of the text as much as the author – brings us closer to the truth than mere criticism or convoluted poetics. What he ignores are the promptings of his own unconscious bubbling up through the strata of language. For the key word here is transubstantiation: the ‘wonderful and singular conversion’ of one substance into another. In other words, what Tadié denies is precisely the central mystery of Proust’s enterprise. With this in mind I want now to return to Emerson and that anonymously published ‘little pamphlet’, Nature, which Proust would have known. IV Emerson’s writings had a profound effect on the work of the French Symbolists, not least through the advocacy of Maurice Maeterlinck who called Emerson ‘the good, early morning shepherd of the pale green ﬁelds of a new optimism’,24 wrote in an inﬂuential preface to an 1894 collection of seven of Emerson’s essays and came to be known as ‘a Belgian Emerson’. Proust’s early admiration for Maeterlinck is well known. Indeed, Maeterlinck was the subject of one of Proust’s dazzling pastiches, and it is to Debussy’s operatic version of Pelléas et Mélisande that the narrator, ill in bed, listens repeatedly on the theatrephone. As so often with Proust, in love and literature, admiration soon turned to hostility: Maeterlinck’s L’Intelligence des Fleurs (1907) is criticized in Sodom and Gomorrah for referring to the unknowable ‘as if he were talking about his bathroom’, while the ‘Inﬁnite’ which Maeterlinck writes about is likened by Proust’s narrator to a 40-horse-power automobile with the brand name ‘Mystère’. In many important ways this rejection of Maeterlinck prepares us for those aspects of Emerson’s transcendental philosophy which Proust had to learn to modify to his own singular temperament and situation. This aspect of Proust’s development, particularly as regards the inﬂuence on his thinking of certain contemporary ideas regarding the ‘mysterious’, the ‘other’, and the transcendent as they were applied in the literature of his time, has been summarized by J.M. Cocking as meaning that he refused ‘a too-easy reliance on the idea of supernatural revelation, attempting to give a “rational” explanation without falling back on religion and an after-life’. What replaced ‘vision’ at the core of Proust’s enterprise was memory; and the Symbolist aesthetic of dreams and revelations was replaced by the ‘artistic importance of intellectual understanding’.25 As I have just said, I would see this movement on Proust’s part not as a wholesale rejection of Emerson but a modiﬁcation. In doing so it is apparent that Proust recognized certain aspects of Emerson’s thinking that weren’t picked up ‘We dive & reappear in new places’… 81 26 For an analysis of Emerson’s ‘discontinuous’ prose style, see Ellison, pp. 160–74. 27 Gonnaud, p. xxiii. 28 Emerson, Selected Essays, p. 47. 29 Quoted in Brown, p. 3. 30 Emerson, Selected Essays, p. 47. on by his contemporaries. The Emerson who appealed to the Symbolists was a ﬁgure remote from the travails of human society and seemingly indifferent to the logical expression and development of his ideas.26 But as the French scholar Maurice Gonnaud has pointed out, Emerson the man did not enjoy any such remove: ‘Between the cloistered life of the thinker and artist, living in the companionship of his books ... and the life of the pastor, the citizen, the “intellectual”, subject to a complex and delicate play of outer pressures, there are complicities more profound and more essential than is generally admitted’.27 And though we might not want to push the analogy too far, there are echoes here of his reputation as a snob and dandy that dogged Proust’s reputation, and which affected the initial reception of his novel. I have commented on the fact that Emerson’s visit to the Jardin des Plantes was a primary inﬂuence when he came to write Nature. This is particularly so when he comes to give his deﬁnition of art: ‘The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For although the works of nature are innumerable and all different [the] poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point ... Thus is Art a nature passed through the alembic of man.’28 The importance of nature for Emerson was its capacity to introduce or awaken us into ‘the present, which is inﬁnite.’29 ‘Nothing divine dies,’ he wrote. ‘All good is eternally reproductive. The Beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation’.30 Such, though expressed in very different terms, is the movement of Proust’s thought as we approach, in the novel’s prelude, the ﬁrst description and analysis of involuntary memory. The adult narrator is lying awake, unable to resurrect his memories of Combray and his childhood. The failure, as he comes to understand it, belongs to the shortcomings of voluntary memory, the ‘memory of the intellect’, which ‘shows us... nothing of the past’. The result is that Combray must remain dead. ‘Permanently dead?’ he asks. ‘Very possibly.’ The narrator then goes on to discuss the Celtic belief that: the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some ... inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day ... when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name ... Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. (In Search of Lost Time, I: 50–51) Quickly disavowing such supernatural phenomenon, he then goes on to locate the retrieval and redemption of the past not in the spiritual world but in the relationship between the material world and our own habits. It is a relationship, however, that relies not on faith nor deeds but pure chance. Having written off the efﬁcacy of voluntary memory, it is to this that the narrator returns, remembering a day in winter when his mother ‘seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take’. At ﬁrst he declines, only for chance to intervene. For no particular reason, he says, he changed his mind. His mother then sends for a ‘petites madeleines’: 82 Michael Murphy And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. Trying to understand the meaning and origin of the sensation, wanting to ‘seize and apprehend it’, he drinks a second mouthful, then a third. But each subsequent sip only dilutes the immediacy of the ﬁrst. Undaunted, the narrator decides to pursue the experience: ‘I put the cup down and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking’. Only at the point of mental exhaustion, when he is about to ‘think merely of the worries of today, and my hopes for tomorrow’, does the mystery reveal itself: And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street where her house was, rose up like a stage set ... [S]o ... Combray ... sprang into being ... from my cup of tea. (In Search of Lost Time, I: 54–55) The parallels between Proust’s cup of tea and Emerson’s ‘alembic of man’ may be merely coincidental. What is surely more signiﬁcant, if we can for a moment retrace the narrator’s search for the origins of involuntary memory, is that this memory of the ﬂower-ﬁlled gardens of Combray arises from Aunt Léonie’s ‘medicinal’ preparation: a cup of tea made from the desiccated stems of limeblossom. Reading Proust’s description of the tisane alongside Emerson’s declaration in Nature that ‘Nothing divine dies ... The Beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation’, we cannot fail to be struck by the fact that Proust has turned Emerson’s philosophical theory into artistic practice: [I]n these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy, lunar, tender gleam that lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden roses ... show[ing] me that these were indeed petals which, before ﬁlling the chemist’s bag with their spring fragrance, had perfumed the evening air. That rosy candleglow was still their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life which was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a ﬂower. (In Search of Lost Time, I: 60) This movement from the winter’s day on which his mother offers him tea and a madeleine, to the resurrection of a sun-drenched Combray, to the closing cadence of ‘the twilight of the ﬂower’ mirrors almost exactly Emerson’s description in Nature of his own experience of ‘seeing’ a winter landscape coming again to life through his ability to re-imagine it as art: ‘We dive & reappear in new places’… 83 31 ibid. p. 44. While my reading of this passage from Emerson and its relationship to Proust can only be based on supposition, there is every evidence that precisely such a structure had been present in Proust’s mind for some time before he began work on In Search of Lost Time. Commenting in 1905 on the last paragraph of Ruskin’s ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ from Sesame and Lilies, in which Ruskin brings together the diverse meanings of the word ‘sesame’ – it is a seed, a spiritual food, a magic word to open otherwise locked doors – Proust notes that ‘[Ruskin] goes from one idea to another without apparent order. But in reality the fancy that leads him follows his profound afﬁnities which in spite of himself impose on him a superior logic. So that in the end he happens to have obeyed a kind of secret plan which, unveiled at the end, imposes retrospectively on the whole a sort of order and makes it appear magniﬁcently arranged up to this ﬁnal apotheosis’ (On Reading Ruskin, p. 146). It almost goes without saying that Proust could be here providing an answer to those critics who were to see his novel as lacking any underlying unity or form. 32 Marcel Proust, Les plaisirs et les jours, The leaﬂess trees become spires of ﬂame in the sunset ... and the stars of the dead calices of ﬂowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.31 V Had Proust limited the discovery of involuntary memory to the episode with the madeleine, he would in effect have been circumscribing his central character’s experience within that ‘granular, pollinated, edible and devout’ world of childhood already discussed. This is one reason why, in Time Regained, he has Marcel experience in quick succession a triptych of other involuntary memories: stumbling on an uneven ﬂagstone outside the Prince de Guermantes’ house restores him to Venice and St Marks; the sound of a servant knocking a spoon against a plate becomes a railwayman doing ‘something to a wheel of the train while we stopped near [a] little wood’; and a napkin with which he wipes his mouth returns him to Balbec and the ‘towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face ... on the ﬁrst day of my arrival’. What these moments do is to open up to Marcel for the ﬁrst time the full mystery of involuntary memory along with, and justiﬁed by, his renewed sense of purpose and direction as a writer: ‘The happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which I had felt when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea. But if on that occasion I had put off the task of searching for the profounder causes of my emotion, this time I was determined not to resign myself to a failure to understand them’ (In Search of Lost Time, VI: 217). Marcel’s reasoning is similar to that of Emerson when he says that the role nature plays in our lives is that of awakening us to the inﬁnity of the present. Proust puts it differently, of course, but even so there is a fascinating echo between his vision of involuntary memory in the ﬁnal movement of the novel and his earliest published work. The incident of note here is one that is most often overlooked in discussions of involuntary memory: the sensation of wiping one’s mouth with a napkin. This, the narrator tells us, ‘unfolded for me – concealed within its smooth surfaces and folds – the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock. ... [T]he touch of the linen napkin... had added to the dreams of the imagination the concept of “existence” which they usually lack, and through this subterfuge had made it possible for my being to secure, to isolate, to immobilise – for a moment brief as a ﬂash of lightning – what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in the pure state’ (In Search of Lost Time, VI: 219–20, 224). The signiﬁcance of this for Proust and his novel is that involuntary memory, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, must be discovered as a ‘profane illumination’. For all the religious imagery of the novel the word God is wholly absent from In Search of Lost Time. The word, however, does appear at the head of the opening story of Pleasures and Regrets, ‘The Death of Baldassare Silvande’, courtesy of a misquotation from Emerson’s essay ‘History’: ‘Apollon gardait les troupeaux d’Admète, disent les poètes; chaque homme aussi est un dieu déguisé qui contrefait le fou’.32 As though to take Emerson at his word in Nature when he writes that ‘Nothing in nature is exhausted in its ﬁrst use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service’.33 Proust refers again to the quote in the series of short pieces called ‘Regrets, Reveries, Changing Skies’ in which he describes a walk through a farmyard: 84 Michael Murphy But what is that regally attired personage carefully picking his way among the rustic farm implements as though afraid of soiling his feet, offended by the dirt? ... And yet it is right here that the peacock spends his life, a veritable bird of paradise in the barnyard among the turkeys and the hens ... a radiant Apollo, recognisable always – even when he guards Ademetus’ ﬂocks.34 Read within the context of the full discovery of involuntary memory in Time Regained, the passage takes on a power that alone it doesn’t possess. Put at its simplest, Proust’s epiphany is that the power to transform one’s life is immanent in the world. Whether we ever do so may be dependent on luck. Our responsibility, though, is to remain vigilant and, once granted a glimpse of those paradises we have lost to time and habit, to track them to their source within our own selves: ‘But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self, which seemed – had perhaps for long years seemed – to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated’ (In Search of Lost Time, VI: 224). The task for the artist, as Swann intuited from his response to the church at Balbec, is ﬁnally granted to the narrator: ‘I should have to execute the successive parts of my work in a succession of different materials’.35 In recognizing this, Proust makes it clear that the self, as realized in the work of art, becomes one with whatever materials the artist uses. For the writer this is language; thus the movement of his characters through their lives is ﬁgured in the movement of his metaphors, joining as they do the physical world with that of the intellect, ultimately marking the way in which the involuntary recollection of the past becomes an active metamorphosis of the present. Préface par Anatole France (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), p. 2. What Emerson actually wrote is: ‘Apollo kept the ﬂocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the Gods come among men, they are not known.’ Proust similarly misquoted Emerson’s phrase when, in 1896, he wrote to his sometime lover, the composer Reynaldo Hahn, about Jean Santeuil: ‘I mean you to be ever-present in my novel, like a god in disguise whom no mortal can recognise’. See George Painter, Marcel Proust (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 193. In both cases Proust translates Emerson’s capitalized ‘God’ to the lower case ‘dieu’. 33 Emerson, Selected Essays, p. 58. 34 Proust, Pleasures and Regrets, pp. 118–19. 35 In Search of Lost Time, vol. VI, p. 222. ‘We dive & reappear in new places’… 85 Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn’t lost the War on Terror David Holloway Keywords War on Terror Post-apocalypse Regulation Reiﬁcation Downturn. Abstract The successful ‘regulation’ of the ﬁrst period of the War on Terror by political, economic and military elites has been contingent on a reifying of the contexts in which the current crisis has come about. The ﬁrst period of the War has been reiﬁed and ‘regulated’ in various ways; by the formation of a ‘post-apocalyptic’ sensibility in the US; by the dissemination of a new ‘doctrine of austerity’ and a mini-revival of Keynesian economics; and by a reassertion of older discourses of ‘national’ innocence and ‘national’ mission. Combined, these ideologies have helped legitimate both a ‘new authoritarianism’ on the domestic front of the War, and an aggressive expansion of US imperial power on the global stage. But the extent to which the meanings of the War can be reiﬁed and ‘regulated’ by elite opinion in the longer term may depend on other, established, historical trends; in particular, the coincidence of the War on Terror with the latest phase of the long downturn in US and world capitalism, whose current period suggests a developing crisis in the neo-liberal response to the earlier breakup of ‘Fordism’ in the 1970s. As the ﬁrst period of the War on Terror has passed into the symbolic realm of representation, which is to say the realm of ‘culture’ and of ideology, apocalyptic disasters of various kinds have been written in the ruins of Manhattan Island and Kabul. As well as the ending of civilian and military lives, the War on Terror has been variously described as the end of innocence, the end of the myth of American impregnability, the end of the 1990s’ hi-tech bubble economy, even the end of postmodernism, a ﬁgurative apocalypse in many different realms that some have worried might lead us yet to nuclear Armageddon and the end of the world itself. Another assumption that has been widely made is that the current emergency has been a catastrophe for Left and social-democratic politics. In January 2002 the British newspaper The Guardian (an essentially Blairite broadsheet whose deeper historical roots in the liberal-Left have been showing during its coverage of the War), caught the mood by describing September 11 as a deﬁning moment for progressive politics. During the summer of 2001, it noted, the international outlook had seemed promising for the Left. With the US and Germany in recession, and with the Japanese economy in a decade-long trough, the capitalist ‘boom’ of the 1990s had fallen apart. In America, President Bush’s ‘government of tycoons and missile enthusiasts’ had lost its Senate majority, while in Britain Prime Minister Blair’s attempt to convert the Labour party and the public to the neo-liberal Third Way ‘appeared to be struggling’. As the paper saw it, the situation after September 11 was altogether different. Assessing the early political outcomes of the War on Terror the paper quoted Tariq Ali, whose mood was despondent. Before September 11, he David Holloway teaches American Studies at the University of Derby. 86 EJAC 21 (2) 86–97 © Intellect Ltd 2002 said, ‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism was in a state. Bush was virtually on the ﬂoor. Now they’ve been able to cover it up. From every progressive point of view, September 11 has been a disaster’.1 Since its attack on Afghanistan the US has expanded signiﬁcantly its political and military inﬂuence in the oil- and gas-rich territories of Central Asia, and Bush’s approval ratings with the American public have been consistently high. But the ability of the Bush administration to determine unilaterally the future shape of world events and domestic opinion is by no means assured, and there is no reason to suppose that the early appropriation of September 11 by the Right has been or will continue to be absolute. The notional hegemony of the new ‘New Right’, and the legitimation of War policy, have been successfully ‘regulated’ (that is, legitimated and reproduced) only by an intensive reiﬁcation of the broader historical totalities in which the War on Terror has come about.2 The post-apocalyptic sensibility of recent months, a sensibility that has hardened and set in with the prospect of perpetual war, insists that we differentiate clearly between the ‘old’ world that existed before September 11 and the ‘new’ world that has arisen in its place. In the manner of all efﬁcient authoritarianisms, that is, the symbolic reifying of the ‘apocalypse’ at the World Trade Center has proceeded in part by teaching an audience how they should read their own history – a ‘history’ that now begins with a single event on a single day, a new Day of Infamy, a new Ground Zero, not just for Manhattan Island or the United States, but for world history as a whole. This drawing of a didactic line through world history, and the emptying out of history that such reiﬁcation entails, has circumscribed to a greater or lesser extent the contexts in which debates about War policy have been framed, particularly in the United States. In reality, however, the ‘new’ post-apocalyptic America exists in a continuum with the ‘old’ world order we are thought to have vacated, and the uses to which the current emergency has been put by corporate, political and military elites, have echoed to the sound of familiar contradictions and well-worn ‘regulatory’ strategies. The further development of the long global downturn that has afﬂicted the leading capitalist economies since the late 1960s, the return to a discredited Keynesianism in the ﬁrst ‘permanent war economy’ of the twenty-ﬁrst century, the anti-intellectual populism of a ‘new’ ‘100 per cent Americanism’, and the revival of a neo-McCarthyite consensus/containment culture, all situate the War on Terror within political, economic and regulatory dilemmas whose roots go deep within the ‘old,’ pre-apocalyptic world order. In this regard the reifying of September 11 and the parochial nature of the ‘new’ American populism may contain their own negations, the need to contain dissent over War policy, and to conceal the operating of contradictions within the response of elite policy-makers, serving to magnify, rather than to reduce further, the signiﬁcance of narratives that may otherwise have seemed marginal, contingent or opaque. With the meanings of American history now distilled into events dating from September 11, 2001, current debates (including positions that problematize or repudiate the War on Terror) may become endowed with a particular intensity and weight that might short-circuit the work of elite ‘regulatory’ mechanisms. Commentators around the world, including Amnesty International, the US human rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the British organization Liberty, have all described the regulation of the War as an authoritarian turn, but the implications of this new authoritarianism for the hegemony of a ‘new’ New Right in the United States are far from clear. 1 Andy Beckett, ‘Did the Left lose the war?’, The Guardian, G2, 17 January 2002, pp. 1–4. 2 On ‘regulation theory’, see Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: New Left Books, 1979). Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn’t lost the War on Terror 87 3 Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can be Done About It (Washington DC: The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 2001). http://www.goacta.org /Reports/defciv.pdf That those who have spoken out against the new authoritarianism have been broadly voices from the political and intellectual liberal/Left has not been surprising: certainly not to the political and intellectual Right, whose regulation of the War has been conducted, in part, by reviving again the ‘culture wars’ debates from the earlier Republican ascendancy, and the earlier permanent war economy, of the Reagan era. The new front was opened as early as November 2001, in a report issued by The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a right-wing pressure group based in Washington DC that monitors the (left) political content of courses taught at American universities, and that boasts Lynne Cheney (wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney) as its founding ‘chairman’. The ACTA report announced its ﬁndings in its title – ‘Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can be Done About It’. Following September 11, ACTA noted, ‘Americans across the country responded with anger, patriotism, and support of military intervention ... and citizens have rallied behind the President wholeheartedly. Not so in academe. Even as many institutions enhanced security and many students exhibited American ﬂags, college and university faculty have been the weak link in America’s response to the attack’. There was, said the report, ‘a shocking divide between academe and the public at large’, while some academics had ‘even pointed accusatory ﬁngers, not at the terrorists, but at America itself’. ACTA then broadened its assessment of the War on Terror into a generalized attack on the US education system as a whole, lambasting American educators for having ‘increasingly suggested that Western civilization is the primary source of the world’s ills – even though it gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance’. America’s elite college students, the report concluded, ‘are graduating woefully ignorant of the foundations of Western civilization as well as American history and its founding’. The report was scathing in its condemnation of universities that, ‘Instead of ensuring that students understand the unique contributions of American and Western civilization ... are rushing to add courses on Islamic and Asian cultures’. It quoted a speech Lynne Cheney had made during October 2001, in which she suggested that to add new classes on Islam to university curricula in the current climate implied ‘that the events of September 11 were our fault, that it was our failure ... that led to so many deaths and so much destruction’. The ACTA report concluded with a list of more than one hundred statements made by individual academics or by those attending meetings at American universities, some of them unattributed, all of them shorn of the broader arguments or contexts in which they were originally couched. Among the statements condemned by the report were the following: ‘Imagine the real suffering and grief of people in other countries. The best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror’. ‘There is a terrible and understandable desire to ﬁnd and punish whoever was responsible for this. But as we think about it, it’s very important for Americans to think about our own history, what we did in World War II to Japanese citizens by interning them’. One speaker at a college meeting was quoted as saying merely ‘We are complicit’.3 This nostalgic reviving by the Right of the ‘culture wars’ fought out during Reaganomics and the decaying years of the Cold War was further highlighted by the case of the reporter who rang Stanley Fish, to ask whether, in Fish’s opinion, September 11 meant ‘the end of postmodernist relativism’. The ques- 88 David Holloway tion, as Fish pointed out in the New York Times, harboured the unspoken suggestion ‘that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country’s resolve’. Fish’s eloquent response, in which he savaged ‘the empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all subscribe but which all deﬁne differently’, was itself vintage ‘culture wars’ in tone. If by relativism, Fish suggested, ‘one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own, but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end, because it is simply another name for serious thought’.4 This old ‘culture wars’ debate about what does and does not constitute ‘serious thought’ has already formed a signiﬁcant battle line in the regulation of the War on Terror. Jean Baudrillard, whose comments in Le Monde were issued with the studied insouciance of a man whose work has called into question the very possibility of ethical judgement or taste, inferred from the reaction to September 11 that the US had anticipated, and had perhaps even desired, the carnage of the attacks. ‘That we dreamed of this event’, Baudrillard wrote, ‘that everyone without exception dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction of any power become so hegemonic, is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience. And yet it’s a fact, which can be measured by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up’. Baudrillard’s remarks prompted an acid response from the novelist Mark Goldblatt, who suggested that while Baudrillard has long been ‘an object of ridicule among trained philosophers’, his inﬂuence remains keenly felt ‘within the cognitive NeverNever Land of literature, art history, and sociology departments, where facts are never objective’.5 The authoritarian/populist attack on the American intelligentsia exempliﬁed by ACTA and the indicting of Stanley Fish has been underscored by the rhetorics of patriotism and ‘consensus’ that have galvanized the sense of a new ‘national mission’ in the world. One of the more notable moves made in the symbolic appropriation of September 11 by the populist Right, indeed, has been the resurrection of that older rhetoric of American mission traditionally referred to as the doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’. John Louis O’Sullivan, the editor who coined the phrase in 1845, famously suggested that white America’s ‘manifest destiny’ was ‘to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. Once viewed as the fulﬁlment of America’s democratic design, manifest destiny has more recently been seen as an ideology used to legitimate the political and economic penetration of those parts of the North American continent already occupied by a ‘savage’ indigenous people. The absolutist formulation that has converted the ﬁrst period of the War on Terror into a new ‘national’ struggle against ‘savagery’ has at times closely echoed the language of manifest destiny. Indeed, the effort to rally populist support for the War by invoking a sense of ‘national mission’, and the concurrent (but conﬂicting) need to placate Arab opinion within the international coalition against terror, has turned manifest destiny into one of the more slippery ideologies of the post-September 11 period. President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress and the American people on September 20, for example, was a model exercise in the rallying of populist opinion. The address began with a welcome to Lisa Beamer, the widow of one of the passengers mur- 4 Stanley Fish, ‘Condemnation Without Absolutes’, New York Times, 15 October 2001, http://www.nytimes.c om/2001/10/15/opinion/15FISH.html 5 Jean Baudrillard, ‘L’esprit du terrorisme’, [‘The spirit of terrorism’], Le Monde, 2 November 2001, http://www.lemonde.fr /imprimer_article/0,60 63,239354,00.html; Mark Goldblatt, ‘French Toast: America Wanted Sept. 11’, National Review online, 13 December 2001, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/ commentgoldblatt121301.shtml Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn’t lost the War on Terror 89 dered in the hijacked plane forced down over Pennsylvania. The reference to Beamer’s presence in the gallery grounded the address affectively within the wounds of a tragedy that was simultaneously individual, familial and national. Bush then alluded to the citizens from 80 different nations who died on September 11. Here, what appeared to be a statement of American solidarity with the dead of other countries actually became a statement about the solidarity of the rest of the world with the United States, as Bush introduced Prime Minister Blair, who ‘has crossed an ocean to show his unity of purpose with America’. Having thus assured his audience that America’s ‘mission’ was legitimate and universal, the speech then attempted to distance the White House from accusations of ‘crusading’ against Islam, describing al-Qaida as ‘a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics’. By the close of the speech, however, this concession to Arab opinion had been subsumed once more within a broader logic of providential right, with the Islamic world restructured for consumption by the American public as internally split between those who are friends of a universal civilization, and those who are merely contingent agents of a localized barbarism that belongs in ‘history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies’. ‘This is civilization’s ﬁght’, Bush said. ‘Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them’. The symbolic representation of War policy in the rhetoric of manifest destiny has been successful in galvanizing populist support for the Bush Doctrine during the ﬁrst period of the War on Terror. But the declaration of a ‘civilized’ war on ‘savagery’ has also provided a stick with which critics of American foreign policy, and inﬂuential pressure groups such as HRW, have been able to beat the Bush administration. In January 2002, a 660-page report issued by HRW was scathing in its description of the USA Patriot Act, the emergency legislation passed by Congress in October 2001 in the wake of the terrorist attacks. The Act allows for the indeﬁnite detention of ‘non-citizens’ once the Attorney General certiﬁes he has ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that an individual endangers national security. HRW concluded that America’s response to September 11 had encouraged its allies to pursue draconian policies that would ultimately fuel terrorism rather than defeat it, and that would have serious ramiﬁcations for civil liberties and internal freedom. The setting-up of American military commissions to prosecute (and possibly execute) non-US citizens involved in the legally undeﬁned crime of ‘international terrorism’ was described by HRW as an affront to international law and international fair trial standards. The executive director of HRW, Kenneth Roth, compared the powers taken by the US State to tribunals ‘set up by a tinpot tyrant to get rid of his political enemies’. The Bush administration’s populist resurrection of manifest destiny as a rhetoric for the legitimation of War policy has also done little to dispel the suspicion (widely articulated in Europe, Asia and the Middle East) that since September 11 the primary objective of the White House has been an unprecedented expansion of US hegemony on the world stage. In December, US Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jones announced that ‘when the Afghan conﬂict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region’. On a trip through the former Soviet republics in January, meanwhile, US Senate majority leader Tom Daschle told Uzbek leaders that the US presence was ‘not simply in the immediate term’. Commenting on 90 David Holloway Daschle’s long-term plans, a representative of the Kazakstan government said ‘It is clear that the continuing war in Afghanistan is no more than a veil for the US to establish political dominance in the region. The war on terrorism is only a pretext for extending [US] inﬂuence over our energy resources’.6 In Afghanistan itself, the American companies Chase Energy and Caspian Energy Consulting have been lobbying to construct an oil pipeline through the country (leader of the interim Afghan government, Hamid Karzai, was formerly employed as a consultant to the US oil company Unocal), and in January the IMF’s (International Monetary Fund’s) assistant director for monetary and exchange affairs suggested that the interim government should abandon its currency and adopt the US dollar instead! At present the US military is active in more areas concurrently than at any time since World War II, including parts of Central Asia where America has historically had no presence at all, and in Europe representation of War policy in the mass media has opened up a substantial public debate about American foreign policy for the ﬁrst time since the Vietnam War. As early as January 2002, indeed, the liberal broadsheet press in Britain was describing the War on Terror not as an epic struggle between civilization and savagery, but as ‘a strategic power grab ... of epic proportions’ and ‘the ﬁrst shot in a new imperial war’.7 The ‘new’ American imperialism has also begun to assert itself closer to home, notably in the Philippines where the US already has a long and regrettable past, and in Columbia. In February, Bush asked Congress to vote $98 million to the Colombian army, who commentators have suggested retain close ties with the country’s right-wing paramilitary death squads, to assist in the army’s civil war against FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and to guard Occidental Petroleum’s Cano Limon pipeline. The Bush administration’s new interest in Central America has also been signalled by the return to prominence of several ﬁgures discredited by their involvement in US activity in the region during the 1980s and 1990s.8 These men include Elliott Abrams, who has two convictions in 1991 for misleading Congress over the Iran-Contra affair, and who is now director of the National Security Council’s ofﬁce for democracy and human rights. They also include John Negroponte, who as US ambassador to Honduras was accused of turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by the State against the Honduran Left, and who is now US ambassador to the United Nations. Also returning to prominence is Otto Reich, an anti-Castro CubanAmerican who previously served as head of the ofﬁce of public diplomacy within the State department, and who reported directly to Oliver North. Reich has been linked with the convicted terrorist Orlando Bosch, for whom, it is alleged, Reich used his inﬂuence to try to secure an American visa. (Bosch, who was jailed in Venezuela in 1976 for bombing a Cubana airliner, and who had previously been jailed for terrorist offences in Miami, is now wanted for extradition by a number of countries, but lives in the US ‘apparently untroubled by the current president’s commitment to rooting out terrorism in all its forms’).9 In a convoluted manoeuvre designed to step around having Reich’s appointment conﬁrmed by the Senate, a procedure that would have meant exposing Reich to questioning by the Senate foreign relations committee, Bush has made Reich his assistant secretary of state at the bureau for Western hemisphere affairs. But the ability of the US to maintain international stability or determine unilaterally the future shape of world events is far from guaranteed. Confronted with 6 Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch World Report 2002, January 2002, http://www.hrw.org/ wr2k2/; Roth quoted in Richard NortonTaylor, ‘Terror crackdown “encourages repression”’, The Guardian, 17 January 2002, p. 4. 7 Jones quoted in George Monbiot, ‘America’s imperial war’, The Guardian, 12 February, 2002, p. 17. Daschle, and Kazak representative, quoted in Edward Helmore, ‘Anger grows as US bases spread’, The Observer, 20 January 2002, p. 19. 8 Monbiot, p. 12. Simon Tisdall, ‘Reaching the parts other empires could not reach’, The Guardian, 16 January 2002, p. 18. 9 As detailed in Duncan Campbell, ‘Friends of Terrorism’, The Guardian, 8 February 2002, p. 19. Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn’t lost the War on Terror 91 10 ibid. 11 Fred Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World. September 11, 2001: Causes and Consequences (London: Saqi Books, 2002). 12 See Anon (editorial), ‘Will the US invade Iraq ?’, Socialism Today, 64 (April 2002), pp. 2–4. 13 Jackie Ashley, ‘Support for a US assault on Iraq could rip Labour apart’, The Guardian, 27 February 2002, p. 20. 14 Robert Brenner, ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 1950–98’, New Left Review, 229 (May/June 1998), pp. 1–265. what Fred Halliday has described as a new historic fusion of political and religious movements based in the Arab world and those inﬂuenced by South Asian Islamism, the immediate and long-term success of the new imperialism will partly depend upon the extent to which the US is able to contain pre-existing conﬂicts that have been exacerbated by the attack on Afghanistan.10 The most dangerous of these new linkages between hitherto discrete conﬂicts is the rhetorical connection made by Saddam Hussein, between America’s ﬁnancing and arming of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and the US-led blockade of Iraq (a policy that has singularly failed to destabilize Saddam while causing the deaths of one million Iraqi civilians since the end of the Gulf War). Without an end to the escalating violence in Israel and the occupied territories, the potential outcomes of any new American attack on Saddam, which include the possibility of Iraq attacking Israel as well as mass internal revolt against the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia (America’s key Arab allies in the region), would be incalculable.11 In Pakistan, General Musharraf’s suppression of terrorist groups operating in the contested territory of Kashmir has generated internal hostility to his regime, while the return from Afghanistan of pro-Taliban ﬁghters belonging to militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, both listed as terrorist organizations by the US, has heightened the likelihood of serious internal conﬂict. In May and June 2002 the conﬂict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, given the potential for serious instability in Pakistan, an American attack on Iraq may have catastrophic ramiﬁcations for a dispute that Islamist opinion has increasingly identiﬁed with a new ‘pan-Islamist’ cause. Neither can the United States count on the support of its principal European ally, Britain, for renewed military action against Saddam. During a time of revived union militancy in Britain the Labour government is struggling to contain growing public disquiet about its domestic agenda. Public health-care and public transport remain in a state of crisis, stock-market instability is wiping out pension funds, in 2001 Britain ran up its largest ever trade deﬁcit, and in February 2002 analysts at the French bank BNP Paribas suggested that some of Britain’s best-known corporations, including ICI, Unilever, British Airways, BT, Hanson and Eurotunnel, were vulnerable to bankruptcy before 2004. Serious differences of opinion exist in the Labour party regarding American War policy, and with public conﬁdence in the Blair regime diminishing The Guardian warned in February that British support for an American attack on Iraq ‘could rip Labour apart’.12 In order to test the limits of the notional new New Right hegemony in the United States, the present political and military emergency must also be resituated within the broader and ongoing crisis of accumulation that has confronted global capitalism since the late 1960s, and that has prompted the ‘postFordist’/’neo-liberal’ turn initiated under the Reagan/Thatcher axis of the 1980s. Taken as a global aggregate, as Robert Brenner has shown, the performance of the leading capitalist economies has been successively worse during each decade since the 1960s, and the War on Terror has coincided with the latest phase in this ongoing crisis in proﬁtability that has continued to defy capital’s remedies.14 In the United States, corporate investment, traditionally a key marker of economic conﬁdence, fell dramatically as long ago as the second quarter of 2000, and with default rates on US corporate bonds now outstripping levels seen during the 1990–91 recession, the crippling debt burden on many 92 David Holloway American companies has become a source of major concern.15 In January 2002, in the latest dire warning about the health of the US economy, an economist at Morgan Stanley, Stephen Roach, predicted a ‘double-dip’ recession in the US, with any initial recovery being followed by another sharp contraction. Bush’s return to a strategy of Keynesian crisis management after an era of budget surpluses under Clinton, was conﬁrmed by the budget the President sent to Congress in February. The budget envisaged deﬁcits of $106 billion in 2002, $80 billion in 2003, and $14 billion in 2004, much of which will be generated by huge increases in military spending. In February, Bush announced the biggest increase in US military spending in 20 years, on a rising curve that will begin with a $36 billion increase in 2002 and a $48 billion increase in 2003. Although the US is already currently responsible for around 40 per cent of the world’s total military expenditure, the plans envisage that by 2007 total military spending will be 20 per cent higher than the annual average throughout the Cold War. Analyses of the budget increases for 2003, however, suggest that little of the spending will be targeted at combating international terrorism. Liberal economist Paul Krugman notes that ‘The military build-up seems to have little to do with the actual threat, unless you think that al-Qaida’s next move will be a frontal assault by several heavy armoured divisions’. Analysis of the ﬁgures by Dan Plesch, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, has suggested that the hi-tech procurements announced by Bush in February are ‘mostly irrelevant’ when the enemy is international terrorism.16 The rationale for such a colossal expansion of military spending is clear enough, however, if we consider the attacks on the US and Afghanistan within a broader totality of unfolding political and economic trends. The ﬁrst period of the War on Terror, as Fred Halliday has noted, has initiated a ‘shift from the certainties of neo-liberal market policies to the intervention of Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development states (OECD), above all the USA, in their economies’.17 This latest militarization of American society (a shift in the regime of accumulation that has been accompanied in the mode of regulation by the new authoritarianism of civilian life alluded to above) has brought with it, as Mike Davis puts it, ‘a powerful Keynesian multiplier’18 – what we might call an extension of Keynesian crisis management back outwards into the global spaces of American capitalism, in the form of hi-tech military violence and acceptable collateral damage. In this regard the Bush Doctrine resembles nothing so much as a resurrection of the old Fordist war economy of the 1940s and 1950s, whose function was to stabilize a fragile post-war American market while driving (militarily, politically, economically) a new hegemony of the US in the international arena. In assessing the cultural and ideological regulation (that is, the reiﬁcation) of the post-apocalyptic American scene, it is therefore important to articulate the War on Terror in conjunction with other contemporaneous factors; not just the political and military limits of the new imperialism discussed above, but also the implosion of the late 1990s hi-tech bubble economy, the political fallout of the so-called ‘Enron effect’, and the broad-based regulation of the crisis tendencies identiﬁed by Brenner and others in the neo-liberal regime of accumulation itself. The controversy that has surrounded Ridley Scott’s ﬁlm Black Hawk Down, for example, has focused too exclusively on Scott’s misrepresentation of the failed US military mission in Somalia in 1993, and the populist myth of American martyrdom the movie has participated in and helped reproduce. In its repudiation of the 15 Jeff Randall, ‘Earthquake in the Global Economy’, Jenny Baxter and Malcolm Downing (eds.), The Day that Shook the World: Understanding September 11 (London: BBC, 2001), pp. 188–202. 16 Krugman quoted in Julian Borger, ‘Bush billions will revive cold war army’, The Guardian, 6 February 2002, p. 13. Plesch quoted in Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy, ‘Armed to the teeth’, The Observer, 10 February 2002, p. 17. 17 Halliday, p. 33. 18 Mike Davis, ‘The Flames of New York’, New Left Review, 12 (November/December 2001), p. 45. Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn’t lost the War on Terror 93 19 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (London: Picador, 1989), pp. 248–49. United Nations, in its expulsion of the prehistory of the 1993 disaster from the narrative it constructs, and in camerawork that holds the gaze insistently on the exploded ﬂesh and severed limbs of American servicemen, Black Hawk Down certainly ﬁts the post-September 11 obsession with wounds inﬂicted on a ‘sinless’ national American body. Indeed, the ﬁlm’s central strategy is to sacralize the martyrdom of the US military in Somalia, through an incremental deepening of the wounds held up for our inspection. First a sprained wrist, then a bleeding nose. Then bullet wounds. Then the loss of ﬁngers, limbs and other body parts, culminating in a scene where the camera follows the hands of a medic into the shattered lower body of a dying soldier, immersing the audience in the smashed remains of the serviceman’s pelvis. With its epigraph from Plato, ‘only the dead have seen the end of war’, the ﬁlm elevates this martial wound-culture onto a metaphysical plane where, as the novelist Cormac McCarthy once put it, ‘It makes no difference what men think of war’ because war was ‘always here’, because war is all that there is, because ‘war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence’.19 Reifying the recent history of American military violence by universalizing military violence per se, casting perpetual war as the very essence of the ‘human condition’, Black Hawk Down thus confers a full metaphysical legitimacy on the revival of Keynesian militarization that has shaped American War policy since September 11. Scripted and produced before the attacks on America and Afghanistan, Black Hawk Down had already acquired a certain notoriety during production as a statement of the notionally ‘isolationist’ (or at least unilateralist) temper of the new New Right. But as an ideological script that was released into cinemas after the attacks, and that has intervened in the regulation of the current crises in their totality, Black Hawk Down’s sacralizing of US military wounds speaks as much to the economic interventionism of the war on recession, as it does to the political unilateralism of the War on Terror. On three separate occasions during the State of the Union address in January, indeed, Bush linked the War on Terror with the war on the economic downturn and, in his plea for a remodelled American citizenship grounded in a new culture of limits, the President pointedly fused military and economic tropes. Following September 11, the President said, ‘We were reminded that we are citizens, with obligations to each other, to our country, and to history. We began to think less of the goods we can accumulate, and more about the good we can do ... In the sacriﬁce of soldiers, the ﬁerce brotherhood of ﬁreﬁghters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self.’ In the address to the nation on October 7 in which he announced the launch of air strikes against Afghanistan, Bush noted that ‘In the months ahead our patience will be one of our strengths – patience with the long waits that will result from tighter security; patience and understanding that it will take time to achieve our goals; patience in all the sacriﬁces that may come’. This rhetoric of sacriﬁce and endurance that has been disseminated as a new doctrine of austerity has as its overt referent the further death and destruction that may be visited upon American citizens in the coming months. But the announcement of a new culture of limits has also been propitious for political and economic elites, for whom Osama bin Laden has already proved a powerful ideological asset. By no means all of the hundreds of proﬁt warnings that have emerged since September 11 have been directly or indirectly caused by ‘international terrorism’. In many 94 David Holloway cases, as even the conservative pro-market commentator Jeff Randall has conceded, ‘companies were already in trouble, but for some unscrupulous managements the opportunity to defray blame for poor performance was too good to resist’. For many ‘badly managed companies’, he added, ‘the shock of September 11 has provided credible cover to slip out gloomy news and invent excuses for directors’ mistakes’.20 The 35,000 job losses imposed on American workers by the Ford Motor Company in January 2002 were routinely attributed by economic commentators to the ﬁerce price war and crippling ﬁnance options the company had been ‘forced’ to offer, in a marketplace where ‘consumer conﬁdence’ had been shattered by the events of September 11. Media coverage of the sackings, however, also noted that Ford had recently suffered stiff competition from other producers in the US, that the company needed to reduce its annual production of cars by up to one million because of chronic overcapacity (that is, overproduction) in the global car-market, and that Ford’s European division had been undergoing ‘restructuring’ for two years prior to September 11. This conﬂation of the populist War on Terror with the legitimation of capitalist ‘restructuring’ has made the announcement of a new austerity a vital component of the broader authoritarian politics that have arisen in the United States since September 11. But the current crises, political, military and economic, are ﬂuid and dialectical in nature, and the point at which the new austerity and the new populism converge may also be the point at which they eventually diverge. One wonders, for example, to what extent the new populist temper might rebound upon the Bush administration, as the downturn bites, as the memory of September 11 intrudes less overtly on the daily realities of labour and leisure, and as the forms that austerity takes become more grubby and banal. The mass redundancy of American workers, the defaulting on mortgages, rents or credit plans, the need to feed one’s children to adequate nutritional levels while on welfare, and the vanishing of pension funds as the bubble economy implodes, will all introduce forms of austerity to American workers that may not be easily regulated by existing ideological patterns. In the ﬁrst weeks of 2002 the American public witnessed the biggest ever corporate bankruptcy at Enron, the ﬁfth largest at the telecoms company Global Crossing, and the largest ever retail collapse at Kmart. Enron has been described as the ‘ultimate bubble company’, the ‘living embodiment of the fundamentalist management beliefs that took hold in the 1990s’, neo-liberal capital in something approaching its purest corporate form, the company’s collapse ‘a quintessential fable for our time’.21 Enron is a fable for our times partly because it exempliﬁes in dramatic ways the specious nature of the hitech ‘boom’ in the late 1990s, and the failure of the much heralded ‘postFordist’ revolution in information technologies/industries to resolve the chronic instabilities of late capitalist accumulation.22 But the Enron affair also expresses a concomitant crisis in the mode of regulation, its narrative of ruined lives and huge executive rake-offs clarifying once more the inequities of the neo-liberal ‘solution’ to the crisis of Fordism during the 1970s; a ‘solution’ that has bent social relations comprehensively to the will of the market, and that has addressed the proﬁtability crisis by driving down wages and working conditions decade on decade. If his administration is unable to contain the ‘Enron effect’, Bush would not be the ﬁrst capitalist leader to discover that populist ideologies of national mission and ‘actually existing’ classlessness are 20 Randall, p. 200. 21 Simon Caulkin, ‘The dark side of capitalism’, The Observer, 3 February 2002, p. 8. 22 On information technology and post-Fordism, see Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture (London: Pluto, 2000). Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn’t lost the War on Terror 95 23 See Halliday, pp. 50, 175–92, and Noam Chomsky, 9–11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), pp. 30–35, 77. 24 Michael Mann, ‘Globalization and September 11’, New Left Review, 12 (November/December 2001), p. 71. Bill Clinton, ‘World without walls’, The Guardian Saturday Review, 26 January 2002, pp. 1–2. Patten quoted in Jonathan Freedland, ‘Breaking the silence’, The Guardian, 9 February 2002, p. 8. 25 Naomi Klein, ‘Masochistic capitalists’, The Guardian, 15 February 2002, p. 21. vulnerable to appropriation by those whose disenfranchisement within the existing order is suddenly clariﬁed during periods of abrupt economic contraction. What is already clear is that the new permanent war economy will exacerbate existing class inequities in the United States. Despite Bush’s pledge in the State of the Union address that his administration would ‘support extending unemployment beneﬁts and direct assistance for healthcare coverage’, the increase in military procurements will be paid for by cuts to all other federal spending programmes, including welfare, Medicaid, and urban regeneration budgets. More than half of the contiguous $1.7 trillion tax cut submitted to Congress in February, meanwhile, will appear in the pay packets of those whose annual income exceeds $200,000. If the War on Terror has illuminated once more the contradictions of the neo-liberal credo within the United States, the current crisis has also energized further the existing public debate about economic ‘globalization’, and has cast new light on the legacies of US ‘diplomacy’ during the Cold War. Michael Mann’s contextualizing of September 11 within the totality of what he calls global capitalism’s ‘ostracizing imperialism’, has shown that the War on Terror was not a necessary war. Even now, Mann suggests, the dangers that would accompany its proliferation could be avoided by ‘a more progressive international development strategy, with redistribution and growth its twin goals’. That commentators such as Halliday and Noam Chomsky have argued that ‘globalization’ had nothing to do with the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, is less important than the repeated fusion of these issues in political and media discourse since September 11.23 In an interview given during February, the EU’s Commissioner for External Affairs Chris Patten referred to September 11 as ‘the dark side of globalisation’. Even Bill Clinton, the exponent par excellence of global ‘free markets’, has labelled September 11 ‘as much a manifestation of ... globalisation and interdependence as the explosion of economic growth’.24 Naomi Klein may have had Clinton and Patten in mind when she reported from this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) that the top 1,000 corporations, capitalist world leaders and opinion-makers had spent their time ‘whipping and kicking’ the global market ‘from the centre’. Since 2000, she wrote, ‘the WEF has been transformed from a festival of shamelessness to an annual parade of public shaming, a dour capitalist S&M parlour’, where ‘Instead of gloating, the ultra-rich now attempt to outdo each other with self-ﬂagellating speeches about how their greed is unsustainable, how the poor will rise up and devour them if they don’t change their ways’.25 Whereas Klein saw the new tone of the WEF as further proof of global capitalism’s ability to absorb even the most damning and inﬂuential of dissenting voices, we might equally surmise that when the leaders of northern elites begin whipping and kicking ‘globalization’ from the centre it is because their hands have been forced by a new transparency in the brutalism over which they preside. During a period in which Argentina’s ten years as a model of IMF restructuring has pushed the country into the biggest defaulting on foreign debt in history, self-ﬂagellation at the WEF may be the surest sign yet that contradictions within the global market are approaching their fullest development, and that a concomitant breakdown in established ideological/regulatory mechanisms is simultaneously under way. For the reasons outlined above, therefore, the hegemony of the new New Right in the United States is far from assured. The political and military power- 96 David Holloway bases of the global American market may have expanded dramatically since September 11. But the ability of economic, military and political elites to reproduce their status as ruling class-strata is itself always dependent, a priori, on the plausibility of the world-view(s) they articulate, particularly so during periods of international crisis. The political/military challenges of the next period of the War on Terror, the deepening of the global downturn, the return of Keynesian crisis-management, and the new institutionalizing of protest about the effects of ‘ostracizing imperialism’, may all signal a creeping transparency in the contradictions underpinning the ﬁrst ‘permanent war economy’ of the post-apocalyptic age. The reifying of September 11 has been vital to the ‘regulation’ of the War on Terror. But with the new New Right’s ability to determine the course of domestic or global events far from certain, the legitimacy of the elite interests driving one symbolic version of the War may increasingly be called into question during the coming months, and there is no reason to suppose that the second period of the War will not see a broadening in the appeal of analysis led by the Left, in the United States just as much as in Europe. Reifying September 11: why the Left hasn’t lost the War on Terror 97 A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother: Demonology Diane Fare Keywords Kathy Acker Colette Peignot (Laure) Georges Bataille Dario Argento Horror 1 The novel is addressed in three Internet reviews and two essays: Welch Everman, ‘ABAB: Acker, Bataille, Argento, Bronte’, http://acker.thehub.co m.au/ackademy/everman.html; Mark Amerika, ‘Visions of Access’, http://www.altx.com/a merika.online/acker.rev iew.html; Stephen Pfohl, ‘Stolen Childhoods Redreamed’, http://www.ctheory.co m/rstolen_childhoods.html; R.J. Ellis, ‘Kathy Acker: A Critical and Bio/bibliographical Essay’, in Post-war Literatures in English (Groningen, The Netherlands: Wolters-Noordhoff, December 1998), pp. 1–17; Christopher Kocela, ‘A Myth Beyond the Phallus: Female Fetishism in Kathy Acker’s Late Novels’, in Genders, 34, 2001, http://www.genders.org/g34/g34_kocel a.html Abstract This article examines Kathy Acker’s My Mother: Demonology (1993), her most difﬁcult and demanding novel. It considers the motivation for, and the effects of, the complexity of the narrative by focusing on three signiﬁcant areas: the ﬁgure and work of Colette Peignot (known as Laure), a French activist and writer; the work of her lover Georges Bataille; and manifestations of horror. This article examines Kathy Acker’s 1993 novel, My Mother: Demonology, her most difﬁcult and demanding text, yet a text hardly considered by critics.1 Acker (1947–97) writes in her collection of essays, Bodies of Work (1997), that ‘Well-measured language, novels which structurally depend on the Aristotelian continuities, on any formal continuities, cannot describe, much less criticize, [American] culture’,2 and her life’s work can be seen as an attempt to narrativize this theory. Perhaps best known for her practices of plagiarism and appropriation, Acker plunders a disparate set of literary and cultural sources in order to interrogate patriarchal constructions of female sexuality and identity, and articulate a ﬁerce critique of Western society. She grossly and violently exaggerates the effects of the material structures of late twentieth-century American society, and seeks to critique gender relations, and make explicit the play between power and complicity in such relations. Attempting to categorize Acker proves difﬁcult because her work embodies so many paradoxes. She can of course be categorized as a postmodern writer, but the label ‘postmodern writer’ is no longer a very meaningful description of ﬁctional practice, more a catch-all phrase that has grown vague through common usage. To term Acker’s work post-structuralist is more accurate, but then Acker’s project shares more afﬁnities with the modernists than the so-called postmodernists. She incorporates post-structuralist theory into her ﬁction, and thematically is concerned with issues of decentralization and desire, but her resort to shock tactics as a means of exposing social hypocrisies and injustice is akin to the modernist technique of defamiliarization. Acker’s ﬁction is both postmodernist and modernist, it is nihilistic and humanistic, it is obscene and poetic; paradox is less a description of her work than a theme through it. Reasons for the particularly difﬁcult nature of My Mother: Demonology are that Acker borrows heavily from European ﬁlms and literature, and her intertextual references are relatively obscure ones. Whilst in earlier novels Acker appropriates the work of canonical American writers such as Nathaniel Diane Fare recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Central Lancashire. 98 EJAC 21 (2) 98–111 © Intellect Ltd 2002 Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner,3 in My Mother: Demonology we encounter the Italian horror director Dario Argento and his ﬁlm Suspiria (1977), Luis Buñuel’s surrealist ﬁlm L’Âge D’Or (1930), and a 1939 ﬁlm version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Alongside these visual texts we encounter twentieth-century literary ﬁgures: the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, the German Jewish poet Paul Celan, the French writer and activist known as Laure (Colette Peignot), and Laure’s lover Georges Bataille. These European ﬁgures and texts collide to produce an extremely complex novel. The comparative obscurity of many of her intertextual sources is of course a factor, as some knowledge of Laure’s writings, Argento’s ﬁlms and Buñuel’s surrealist practice would shed light on Acker’s project, or at least outline her cultural inﬂuences. However, these relatively obscure texts cannot be held entirely accountable for the narrative we encounter. In keeping with the surrealist tradition signiﬁed in this novel by the presence of Buñuel, Acker punctuates the narrative with dream sequences, but to such an extent that it is difﬁcult to fathom where a dream begins and ends. Consequently, the reader is continually bewildered by the extreme fragmentation and nonsensical nature of the narrative. Of course, all Acker’s novels employ a fragmented narrative, but in this novel the proliferation of dreams conﬁrms that Acker is determined to evade the reader’s desire for control, or at least comprehension. The novel is also very personal; alongside a familiar primal narrative of an unloving mother and absent father,4 we read of writing tours, ex-lovers, and motorcycle trips, but these are usually described in illogical dream sequences, and the absurdity of the narrative functions to distance the reader from the ‘I’ that may be Acker. Overall, the narrative is bizarre and the reading experience is a frustrating one, due to the interpretative difﬁculties faced by the reader. My Mother embraces the non-linear, surreal and fantastic quality of dreams, and hence the reader is plunged into a kaleidoscopic narrative which delights in confusion and contradiction. This article will consider the motivation for, and the effects of, the complexity that is My Mother: Demonology by focusing ﬁrstly on Acker’s appropriation of the life and work of Laure (Colette Peignot), and Georges Bataille. It will then examine the appropriation of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror ﬁlm Suspiria, and interrogate the function of horror in the novel. 2 Kathy Acker, ‘William Burroughs’s Realism’, in Bodies of Work (London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), p. 2. 3 Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is appropriated in Blood and Guts in High School (1984), Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in Empire of the Senseless (1988), and Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and Pylon in In Memoriam to Identity (1990). 4 All Acker’s novels contain narratives of her personal life, or, as Glenn Harper terms it, a primal narrative. ‘This core narrative concerns a young woman, sometimes called Kathy, in a loveless but wealthy family; her father abandons her mother; her step-father rapes her; her mother, having spent her fortune, commits suicide in a cheap hotel; and Kathy lives in poverty and becomes an artist’. Harper, ‘The Subversive Power of Sexual Difference In The Work of Kathy Acker’, Substance, 16, 1987, pp. 44–45. 5 Clearly, Acker had read an earlier (unidentiﬁed) English version of the text, as My Mother was published in 1993, and Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1983) contains a short prose piece entitled, ‘Translations of the Diaries of Laure the Schoolgirl’. Laure: an appropriated life Laure, born Colette Peignot, is a little-known French writer, philosopher, and activist. Her nephew, Jérôme Peignot, collected her short autobiography, ‘Story of a Little Girl’, letters, poems, and essays, and the resulting Écrits de Laure was ﬁrst published in 1977. An English translation, Laure: The Collected Writings, was published by City Lights Books in 1995.5 A brief résumé of Laure’s life will shed light on Acker’s interest in her. She was born in Paris in 1903 to a wealthy Catholic family and she conveys in ‘Story of a Little Girl’ how oppressive she found her bourgeois and religious upbringing. In Paris she met writers and artists, including Luis Buñuel, and also her ﬁrst lover, whose unfaithfulness led Laure to unsuccessfully attempt to shoot herself in the heart. In 1928 she travelled to Berlin and began a relationship with a German doctor and sadist, Ludwig Wartberg. Returning to Paris, she studied Russian at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris and moved to Russia in 1930 A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother… 99 6 Jeanine Herman, ‘Preface’, in Laure: The Collected Writings, trans. Jeanine Herman, (San Francisco: City Lights Books), 1995, p. vii. 7 Acker, ‘Interview with Kathy Acker’, by Lidia, Devin and Paige, cited at http://www.cuthere.com/ackerint.html 8 Laure, ‘Story of a Little Girl’, in Laure, pp. 9 and 10. 9 Acker, My Mother: Demonology (New York: Grove Press, 1993), p. 8. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses. where she became seriously ill after living among peasants in an isolated village. She was hospitalized in Moscow and her brother brought her back to Paris. In 1931 she began a relationship with Léon Bourénine, a founding member of the French Communist party. Laure worked for and ﬁnanced the leftist journal La Critique sociale, which Bourénine edited. She wrote short articles on Russian literature under the pseudonym Claude Araxe. Laure ﬁrst met Bataille in 1931, and they began their affair in 1934, and were soon living together in Saint-Germain. In 1936 Laure was involved with the leftist group Contre-Attaque, and, fascinated by the Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front, travelled to Spain. By 1938 she was living at Bataille’s house in SaintGermain, and she became seriously ill in the autumn of 1938. She died of tuberculosis, at Bataille’s house, on 7 November 1938, aged 35 years. In some respects, Acker’s interest in Laure is similar to her interest in the avant-garde ﬁgures who populate many of her novels – Jean Genet, Marquis de Sade, and Arthur Rimbaud – in that, to borrow a phrase from Jeanine Herman, Laure’s translator, ‘Writing and dissolution became [their] revolt’.6 However, Acker’s interest in Laure appears to be far more personal. She describes in an interview how ‘amazed’ she was ‘that there were so many mirrorings between a lot of this woman’s preoccupations and mine’ despite the fact that Laure lived through the 1920s and 1930s.7 Furthermore, Acker cannot have failed to note similarities in their personal circumstances. Laure describes in her childhood autobiography how she was ‘friendless’ because ‘My mother disapproved of everyone’, and so she takes refuge in the attic, where she tells herself ‘endless stories’.8 Acker’s primal narrative, involving an unloving mother and absent father, manifests a similar sense of childhood alienation. This sense of alienation does not dissipate with adulthood. Laure’s writings reveal a woman who passionately refused to submit herself to a life of compromise and bourgeois respectability, whilst Acker’s works – however much she might deny it – reveal a woman haunted by parental rejection, a woman violently articulating her sense of estrangement from her own culture. If we turn to My Mother we can examine how exactly Laure and her work function in the novel. Laure is a child who feels she ‘has been born into anger’.9 She is ‘wild to make my body’s imaginings actual’ (10), and has a passionate desire to ‘journey through unknown, wonderful, and ecstatic realms’ (11–12). As she matures this desire ﬁnds an outlet in sexual relations. Laure declares, ‘Fucking enabled me to cast off my past ... Once I had fucked, the only thing I wanted to do was to give myself entirely and absolutely to another person. I didn’t and don’t know what this desire means other than itself’ (14). However, Laure is aware that ‘As yet I hadn’t asked if there was someone named me’ (15, italics in original), and we glimpse here the inner conﬂict that will both plague Laure and permeate Acker’s narrative. Ultimately, Laure is ‘split between two desperations: to be loved by a man and to be alone so I could begin to be’ (16). In her autobiography, ‘Story of a Little Girl’, Laure (Colette Peignot) describes a similarly insurmountable conﬂict: Curiosity and then terror. Life soon managed to oscillate between these two poles: one sacred, venerated, which must be exhibited ... the other, dirty, shameful, which must not be named. Both more mysterious, more appeal- 100 Diane Fare ing, more intense than a bleak and unchanging life. Thus I would oscillate between the foul and the sublime, in the course of which real life would always be absent.10 10 Laure, ‘Story of a Little Girl’, p. 11. 11 Julia Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Individual: The Dissident’ (1977), in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 294 and 295. 12 Kristeva, p. 296. 13 Laure, ‘Story of a Little Girl’, p. 29, italics in original. 14 Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, ‘Notes’ in Laure, p. 32. We witness here an unfaltering desire to avoid a ‘bleak and unchanging life’, in the manner of Genet, de Sade, and Rimbaud; writers who not only populate Acker’s earlier works, but who are associated with the concept of dissidence which has not traditionally been attributed to women artists. I suggest that Laure is a representative dissident writer for Acker, in the vein of Genet, de Sade, and Rimbaud, and she challenges Julia Kristeva’s gendering of the dissident writer as male – as, I would argue, does Acker herself. Kristeva’s understanding of the dissident writer is ‘the writer who experiments with the limits of identity’. This writer sets out to undermine the law of symbolic language through a ‘playful language’ which is aware of ‘a new synthesis between sense, sound, gesture and colour’ – in other words, the semiotic. According to Kristeva, the subversive semiotic has the potential to ‘question particular forms of subjectivity or the unconscious’, and she calls on the dissident to: Give voice to each individual form of the unconscious, to every desire and need. Call into play the identity and/or the language of the individual and the group. Become the analyst of every kind of speech and institution considered socially impossible. Proclaim that we reveal the Impossible.11 Tellingly, Kristeva moves on from her discussion of the dissident writer to propose ‘sexual difference, women: isn’t that another form of dissidence?’12 She does not conﬂate the dissident writer and the ﬁgure of woman; the dissident writer is decidedly male. Kristeva claims that only men can represent the subversive element of the semiotic, because the symbolic can only be challenged from within, and women’s exclusion from a speaking position within the symbolic thereby prevents them from subverting it. Whilst one may agree that women are certainly marginalized in the symbolic realm, if not excluded, I contest Kristeva’s conclusion that women are incapable of representing the semiotic, and hence excluded from the position of dissident writer, and offer Laure as evidence of this. Laure is a writer who ‘experiments with the limits of identity’, who undermines the law of symbolic language, and who ‘give[s] voice ... to the unconscious, to every desire’. Her childhood autobiography reveals the extent to which she struggles with a sense of identity, as she writes: ... nothing in my life was real ... ‘Will this reality ever come?’ There had to be a reality in my image, but what was my image? I found so many contradictions in myself; my life would have to ‘build’ like a Bach fugue: a central motif ceaselessly expanded, enriched, that meets, assimilates, rejects, and then remains at once intact and changed.13 Bataille and Michel Leiris, in their notes on ‘Story of a Little Girl’, argue that we witness ‘a harsh and intoxicated search for “true life”’14, and Laure’s poems, and indeed her conception of poetry, bear out this analysis. In her collection of poems and fragments, ‘The Sacred’, Laure writes that A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother… 101 15 Laure, ‘The Sacred’, in Laure, p. 45. 16 Jérôme Peignot, ‘My Diagonal Mother’, in Laure, p. 281. 17 Laure, ‘Fragment of a Letter’, in Laure, p. 197. 18 Laure, ‘Correspondence’, in Laure, p. 109. 19 Kristeva, p. 298, italics in original. Of course recent world events undermine Kristeva’s contention that exile is an ‘irreligious act’. 20 Laure, ‘Story of a Little Girl’, p. 27. 21 Laure, ‘Poems and Texts after the summer of 1936’, in ‘The Sacred’, p. 74. The poetic work is sacred in that it is the creation of a topical event, ‘communication’ experienced as nakedness. – It is self-violation, baring, communication to others of a reason for living, and this reason for living ‘shifts’.15 Laure’s understanding of the poetic work is that which communicates, and she attempted in her work to ‘confront the untranslatable’,16 although she remained painfully aware of the difﬁculties involved in this project: The sheet is smooth smooth, smooth one cannot save oneself on paper Like a drowning person clings to a rock17 Laure committed herself, in her life and her work, to a search for ‘a reality in my image’, but she succeeded in ‘assert[ing] myself in contradiction’.18 It is possible to claim her as a dissident writer because she gives voice to her desires, tests the limits of her own identity, and rejects the language of the symbolic. Furthermore, Laure speaks the ‘language of exile’, and, as Kristeva acknowledges, ‘Exile is already in itself a form of dissidence, since it involves uprooting oneself from a family, a country or a language. More importantly, it is an irreligious act that cuts all ties’.19 Laure declares in ‘Story of a Little Girl’ how ‘One thing was stable, certain, and irrefutable: my irreligion’,20 and the anti-Catholicism thread of her work signals her self-imposed exile from her family’s faith. That Acker chooses to appropriate the life and work of Laure, but resist subversion or manipulation – a typical feature of her appropriation strategy – is highly signiﬁcant, and points to Laure’s status as a representative foremother. Acker also ‘speaks through’ Laure in My Mother, for she intertwines her own primal narrative with Laure’s autobiography, thus compounding the painful experience of female subjectivity. Acker’s Laure writes in a letter to her lover B (Bataille), ‘The more I try to describe myself, the more I ﬁnd a hole. So the more I keep saying, the less I say, and the more there is to say’ (22). This image of an increasing sense of lack, or a spiralling toward nothingness, whilst quite obviously metaﬁctional, is a familiar trope for female identity in Acker’s ﬁction, and Laure’s letters expose her as a woman with a death-drive. She recognizes that ‘Because there’s nothing, I don’t have to be trained, as females are, to want to stop existing’ (29). She informs B that ‘I always want to test everything to the point of death. Beyond’, and she sees B as a ‘death method’ (24), for the ‘violence of my passion [will] amputat[e] me for you’ (27). Laure self-destructively chose to live out her desire ‘to go farther/ever farther’,21 and Bataille proved a worthy ally. B’s My Mother Laure’s famous lover remains fairly anonymous in My Mother, referred to only as B, but Bataille’s work, like Laure’s is appropriated in the novel. This appropriation is at once both explicit and oblique. Explicit information on the back 102 Diane Fare cover of the novel informs the reader that the narrative is ‘based loosely on the relationship between Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille’, and so an intertextual aspect to Acker’s novel is signalled before the ﬁrst pages are turned.22 It is evident that Bataille’s theoretical work on erotic desire informs Acker’s ﬁction, but we ﬁnd in the title of Acker’s My Mother an allusion to a relatively unknown novel by Bataille, also named My Mother. Bataille’s short text, discovered after his death, was completed posthumously by critics who assembled notes left by Bataille. As in her appropriation of Laure’s writings, Acker refrains from subversion. Bataille’s My Mother is narrated by a young man, Pierre, who is 17 years old when his father dies. He hates his father, regarding him as a drunkard who tormented his mother, and after his death he believes that both he and his mother are now free to live a peaceful life together. Up until this point he has regarded his mother as sacred; the innocent victim of his tyrannical father. However, with the father’s death, the image of the mother is dramatically transformed, as Pierre realizes that it is his mother, not his father, who is corrupt and that his father tried desperately to prevent her descent into a life of drunkenness and corruption. This is a mother who knows no taboo, and who wants ‘to yield to my desires, to every last one of them’.23 She informs her son: What I want ... is that you love me even unto death. For my part, it is in death I love you at this very instant. But I don’t want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.24 22 This is the Grove Press edition. 23 Georges Bataille, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 62. 24 ibid., p. 33. 25 ibid., p. 50. 26 Yukio Mishima, ‘Georges Bataille and Divine Deus’, in My Mother, p. 17. 27 See Mishima for a more detailed reading of the novel, pp. 16–21. 28 Laure (Colette Peignot) was not a mother, but at the beginning of Acker’s novel, an unidentiﬁed narrator informs us that ‘My mother spoke’, before Laure herself assumes the role of narrator. Acker has explained in an interview that at the beginning of the novel she intended to use her own mother and Laure, and to combine the two, but her own mother became ‘rather uninteresting’, and she became far more interested in Laure’s work. The words ‘My mother spoke’ can be attributed to Acker then, as she refers to both her own mother and a literary foremother. See ‘Interview with Kathy Acker’, http://www.cuthere.com/ackerint.ht ml His mother ﬁnally commits suicide, but not before engaging in an act of incest with her son – the ﬁnal act of corruption. Pierre recognizes that his mother offers access to the sacred: Death, in my eyes, was no less divine than the sun, and in her crimes my mother was nearer to God than anything I had perceived through the window of the Church.25 In the novel’s ﬁnal act of incest, ‘spirituality is unveiled’.26 In other words, the seducing mother tempts her son towards God. Her desire to corrupt is a desire to awaken others to truth, the truth that is God.27 Bataille’s novel violates the image of the Sacred Mother, but her corruption is not presented as negative; on the contrary, it offers access to the sacred, and an opportunity for dissolution of the self. Acker’s My Mother similarly presents us with a subversive vision of the Sacred Mother, but the appropriation of Bataille’s novel is not straightforward. As stated, the mother’s story, in Bataille’s text, is narrated by her son – we only have access to her unmediated voice in two letters. However, in Acker’s novel, the son is displaced to the edge of the text, and at the centre is the mother herself, whose voice is revealed through her letters to B, and through her dreams.28 The exact relationship between the two texts is ambiguous; the mother-son relationship which forms the core of Bataille’s text is absent in Acker’s novel, which prioritizes the mother-father relationship. The relationship is nevertheless a textually incestuous one – the mother of Bataille’s text becomes the lover of Bataille in Acker’s text. The extremities of heterosexual A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother… 103 29 Bataille, ‘The College of Sociology’, in The College of Sociology 1937–9, ed. Denis Holler, trans. Betsy Wing, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 337–38. 30 ibid., p. 339. 31 The analysis of horror in this section draws exclusively on ﬁlm theory. The reasons for this are that Acker appropriates a horror ﬁlm, not a novel, and the issue of spectatorship is relevant to the later argument. 32 Robin Wood, quoted in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 4, italics in original. 33 Welch Everman’s Internet article alerted me to the speciﬁc ﬁlm appropriated by Acker. Cited at http://acker.thehub.co m.au/ackademy/everman.html union depicted in both Bataille’s and Acker’s ﬁction narrativize Bataille’s theoretical work on desire, death and the erotic, which sheds some light on Acker’s portrayal of Laure’s conﬂicting desires. Bataille argues that ‘Love expresses a need for sacriﬁce: Each unity must lose itself in some other that exceeds it’, and proposes that ‘human beings are never united with each other except through tears and wounds’.29 He draws an important parallel between the lovers’ conﬂicting desire to lose themselves in each other while also desiring to ﬁnd themselves, and suggests that: if the need to love and be lost is stronger in them than the concern with being found, the only outlet is in tearing, in the perversities of turbulent passion, in drama, and, if it is of a complete nature – in death.30 In engaging in ‘the perversities of turbulent passion’ though, the protagonist of My Mother, like Bataille’s corrupting mother, is constructed as monstrous. Both Bataille and Acker contest the sanctity of the Sacred Mother so revered in Western culture, in their depiction of desiring, corrupting mothers who want, as Laure states, ‘to test everything to the point of death. Beyond’ (24). A Painting of Horror A central trope of Acker’s novel is horror. Acker explicitly signals her concern with horror in the third section of the novel, through her dedication to the Italian horror-ﬁlm director, Dario Argento. This begs the question why Argento is selected, but more immediately pressing is the question, why the horror genre itself?31 Besides the fact that Acker was a fan of Argento, there are some obvious reasons why Acker should draw on the horror genre. Although this large and varied genre encompasses a number of sub-genres, it is still possible to draw some broad observations. Robin Wood, a horror-ﬁlm critic, argues that ‘the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses’,32 and this clearly calls attention to the genre’s concern with social fears and taboos. Societal anxieties about sexuality and fear of the ‘other’ in its various manifestations, can be seen to be exposed, confronted, and/or often appeased in the horror ﬁlm. Whilst Acker’s novels are not horror novels in a generic sense, we are confronted with narratives of horror, in that her concern is to expose violently that which ‘civilization represses or oppresses’ – precisely to reveal the ideological ‘reasoning’ behind such repression/oppression. In My Mother though, Acker’s interest in the horror genre manifests itself in a speciﬁc manner through her appropriation of Argento’s 1977 horror ﬁlm Suspiria,33 and we need to contemplate reasons for Acker’s interest in this particular ﬁlm. There are many reasons why Acker should incorporate Argento’s work into her ﬁction, not least because she considered herself a fan. Despite the fact that since 1970 Argento has written, or co-written, and directed eight horror ﬁlms, scholarship on horror has failed to pay much attention to his work. In part, this is due to the fact that his ﬁlms are difﬁcult to obtain, and are Italian-produced (and his early ﬁlms are Italian-language), but perhaps also because his ﬁlms frequently deny the viewer the pleasures of linear logic. Maitland McDonagh, in his article, ‘Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento’, encapsulates the frenzied nature of Argento’s work: 104 Diane Fare The work of Dario Argento is one of twisted logic, rhapsodic violence, stylized excess; it is true Twentieth-Century Gothic with all the inversion, formal imbalance, and riotous grotesquerie the term can encompass. His is a romantic vision, informed by an instinctive appreciation of the contradictory nature of erotic appeal: Argento’s camera is alternately enthralled and repelled by ripe ﬂesh and blood-drenched fantasy.34 34 Maitland McDonagh, ‘Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento’, Film Quarterly, vol. XLI, no. 2 (Winter 1987–88), p. 2. 35 Andrew Britton, quoted in Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws (London: British Film Institute, 1992), p. 9. 36 Adam Knee, ‘Gender, Genre, Argento’, in Grant, p. 213. 37 ibid., p. 219. 38 ibid., p. 224. 39 ibid., p. 226. 40 McDonagh, p. 2. It is not difﬁcult to understand why the work of Argento has failed to win the acclaim meted out to his contemporaries such as Brian de Palma and David Cronenberg, in that he undermines ‘the highly ritualised and formulaic character’ of horror,35 refusing to adhere to the conventions of genre ﬁlm whereby the viewer ‘knows’ what to expect, and is not disappointed. He achieves this primarily in two speciﬁc areas – gender and spectatorship – as ‘his work often forcefully confounds many of the generalizations about relations of gender, power, and spectatorship in the horror genre that have been put forth in ﬁlm studies’.36 For example, the killer is not always individualized, and gendered characteristics are ambiguous, as is the gaze itself. Carol Clover, in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, identiﬁes two contrasting types of gaze in horror; an ‘assaultive gaze’, and a ‘reactive gaze’, linked with the killer (masculine) and the victim (feminine) respectively. Adam Knee argues that the ‘assaultive gaze’ is foregrounded in Argento’s ﬁlms, but the viewer does not necessarily sense ‘a clear, sadistic, male threat’ due to the ambiguity of the gaze.37 This is rendered explicit through the ﬁlms’ emphasis on the eye itself; a feature that will prove signiﬁcant in later discussion of Acker. What we encounter then are ‘narratives of perceptual uncertainty’, as Knee terms them, married to ‘a context of sexual ambiguity’ in order to ‘contribute to a broader questioning of traditional notions of center, of norm’.38 Constructions such as masculinity and femininity are questioned, whilst gay and lesbian characters, alongside transvestites, bisexuals, and androgynous women can be identiﬁed in Argento’s ﬁlms. The effect of this then, combined with the uncertainty of perception, is that: All traditional positions, former points of identiﬁcation, are thrown into question, and any strict sense of ‘otherness’, always important to the horror ﬁlm, thereby becomes diffused as binary distinctions lose their applicability.39 Thus, binary oppositions such as male/female, self/other, hero/victim, heterosexual/homosexual are rendered unstable, and it proves difﬁcult to clearly locate what the ‘other’ might be. Argento’s work deviates from the norm in its problematization of conventional generic devices. Thus far, it is at least possible to offer reasons as to Acker’s interest in Argento: ‘Twisted logic, rhapsodic violence, stylized excess’, ‘inversion, formal imbalance’;40 many of these terms could quite easily apply to the ﬁction of Acker. But is there any particular reason why Acker chooses to appropriate Suspiria? To very brieﬂy explain the plot, the ﬁlm centres upon a young American girl, Suzy, who arrives in Germany to study at a famous dance academy. On the night she arrives she sees a female student running away from the school, screaming words that she cannot decipher. In a particularly gruesome scene we witness this girl and her friend being murdered in the A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother… 105 41 This section is surreal, and is one of a number of occasions where Laure recalls her school days. These recollections are confused, often presented as dream sequences, and the narrative frequently digresses. Furthermore, although Laure is ostensibly the narrator, the narrative appears to give way to other voices. friend’s house by an unseen murderer. Suzy is convinced that all is not well at the school. She mysteriously falls ill, and is conﬁned to her bed. Her friend Sara, a fellow student, is also suspicious, because the murdered girl had attempted to conﬁde in her. Sara is convinced that the dance instructors do not leave the academy at night to return home, for she hears footsteps above her bedroom leading off into unknown areas of the school. She takes it upon herself to explore the academy one night, in order to discover where the footsteps lead. Inevitably, she is murdered, again by unseen forces. The following day, Suzy is informed that Sara has left the school. Unconvinced, and now aware that she has been drugged, she takes it upon herself to discover Sara’s fate. She recalls mention of a man, and succeeds in locating him. This man turns out to be Sara’s psychiatrist, and through him she learns the history of the academy. It was founded by Helena Marcos, an alleged witch known as the Black Queen, and was a school of the occult. After Marcos died in 1905, in a ﬁre, it was reopened as a school of dance. Suzy determines to discover the truth behind the strange goings-on at the school, and that night, like Sara before her, she sets out to explore the building, and eventually ﬁnds a secret part of the building. She locates a secret door painted with irises, and at this moment remembers the words the murdered student, Pat, screamed as she ﬂed the building on that ﬁrst night; ‘secret’ and ‘iris’. Passing through that door, Suzy discovers that the dance instructors, and the associate director, Madame Blanc, are a coven of witches, and are in the process of plotting her death. Entering further into this secret place, Suzy ﬁnally discovers that the head of the coven is the immortal Helena Marcos. Marcos uses her powers to resurrect Sara, whom she instructs to kill Suzy, but Suzy manages to stab Marcos, which results in the death of the entire coven. Suzy escapes the school as it burns to the ground behind her. So how then does Acker incorporate this ﬁlm into her novel, and more signiﬁcantly, why? As discussed above, Argento’s confounding of generic conventions, and problematization of the relations between gender and power, no doubt help explain Acker’s interest in his work, but an examination of her retelling of Suspiria reveals that she does not really prioritize his focus on the gaze. The story of Suspiria in Acker’s novel is submerged within Laure’s narrative, as she recalls her school days,41 and is interspersed with narrative passages which are unrelated to the ﬁlm. However confusing this may appear, Argento’s ﬁlm is identiﬁable; the opening scene is related quite faithfully, as is the murder of the student Pat. Of particular interest though is Acker’s critical rewriting of a scene ﬁguring maggots. In one scene in the ﬁlm maggots come tumbling through the ceiling into the girls’ bedrooms; this is due to a batch of rotting meat stored in the attic. Acker, in her retelling of this scene, adds a sexual dimension. Laure describes how, ‘When I woke up, maggots were crawling out of my cunt ... The maggots were coming out of my cunt because maggots come from meat’ (54). She then suggests; ‘Maggots are dicks because they rise up, then writhe and turn funny colors. Worms rise out of red meat’ (54). Although the real source of the maggots is eventually located – the rotting meat – and thus ‘we had learned that our cunts and vaginas aren’t the sources of disease’ (56). Through this latter statement Acker succeeds in raising an issue which Argento only alludes to here; namely, female sexual- 106 Diane Fare ity. Acker’s alignment of female sexuality and disease is interesting because it recalls classic horror’s ﬁguring of the sexually active female. Acker recognizes this construction of the female in horror and manipulates Argento’s scene so the issue of female sexuality – speciﬁcally as dangerous – is foregrounded. The female body we encounter in Acker’s rewriting of this scene is of course abject, and undoubtedly one reason for Acker’s turn toward the horror ﬁlm in this novel is because the horror ﬁlm is an illustration of the work of abjection. As Barbara Creed points out, ‘the horror ﬁlm abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears and putrefying ﬂesh’.42 The visual impact of such images of abjection helps explain Acker’s turn toward visual culture, speciﬁcally the horror ﬁlm, in this novel. With regards to Suspiria, the retelling of the ﬁlm continues, with key scenes related, and minor changes made, until the ﬁnal scene is faithfully described. Yet, more important than charting Acker’s retelling of Suspiria is to offer reasons for the appropriation. Firstly, the setting of Argento’s ﬁlm has signiﬁcance for Acker. Schools, speciﬁcally girls’ schools, ﬁgure frequently in Acker’s ﬁction, and can be interpreted in two ways: they are sites of sexual experimentation, as girls, for the ﬁrst time, explore their own, and each other’s, bodies. Acker signals this early in Chapter 3 of My Mother through her reference to Radley Metzger’s ﬁlm of the book Thérèse and Isabelle, which depicts the love affair between two young schoolgirls in a French boarding school, and Laure is shown to enjoy sexual relations with other girls at school. In this sense then, the school experience is ﬁgured as positive; a liberating stage in the development of a young girl’s sexuality. However, the school is simultaneously depicted as a site of institutional power; the space of the school conﬁnes and constricts the female body, and therefore identity. In Chapter 1 of the novel, Laure declares: I’d do anything to ﬁnd out about my body, investigated the stenches arising out of trenches and armpits, the tastes in every hole. No one taught me regret. I was wild to make my body’s imaginings actual. (10) 42 Barbara Creed, ‘Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection’, in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 66. However, she also recognizes her lack of power due to her status as young female: And I knew that I couldn’t escape from my parents because I was female, not yet eighteen years old. Even if there was work for a female minor, my parents, my educators, and my society had taught me I was powerless and needed either parents or a man to survive. I couldn’t ﬁght the whole world; I only hated. (10) Sequences focusing on school days render explicit how ‘Clearly like horses, we were groomed and tethered, what is named education, without being told the purpose. For some secret end’ (190). Girls, in Acker’s ﬁction, are taught that they are ‘outside the accepted’ (253), and so the resulting sense of self is that ‘I’m only an object’ (81). Laure comments that, ‘In my ﬁrst school I had been taught that through rationality humans can know and control otherness, our histories and environments’ (54), yet girls are taught that they suffer from ‘moral, artistic, social, religious, sexual A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother… 107 43 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 203. deviation’ (52), and so are not deemed ‘rational’, and consequently are positioned as ‘other’ – subject to the rational human’s (male’s) control. Laure recognizes this, and the link between the body and identity, when she states: I can’t ﬁnd out who I am. I know nothing about my body. Whenever there’s a chance of knowing, for any of us, the government, Bush if you like, reacts to knowledge about the female body by censoring. (62) The female body is unmentionable, thus ‘I was now unmentionable’ (62). Acker’s critique of the subjugation of the female body is part of a wider theoretical debate, as Elizabeth Grosz conveys: In the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid ... a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order.43 Acker’s ﬁction concerns itself in detail with such constructions of the female body, but of relevance here is that such a construction is common in horror’s depiction of the female. We ﬁnd then that Acker appropriates a horror ﬁlm which has as its setting a school, predominantly populated by females, and in turn writes a narrative which warns of the potential horrors of ‘reality’ in such a school. Acker’s interest in horror does not end with the appropriation of the ﬁlm. In the next section, still within Chapter 3, ‘Beatrice’s Story’, we read about an artist who is attempting to paint horror. This allows Acker to move beyond the parameters of the horror genre to consider alternative cultural expressions of horror. The focus of the novel shifts abruptly with ‘Beatrice’s Story’, in that the section begins with a ﬁerce social critique of New York. We learn that the Mayor wins his ﬁrst election by promising to ‘raise New York out of economic poverty’ (90), and he fulﬁls his promise by ‘transforming the city’s real estate’ (90). Beatrice narrates with some irony the means by which this is achieved: First he made a pact between the largest bank, the real estate moguls, and himself or the law. He or the law rezoned the poorer districts, areas formerly populated by small businesses and ethnic groups, so these two kinds had to leave. Then huge warehouse spaces turned into white artists’ lofts; then rising rents forced out the few remaining Puerto Rican and black families. Where they went, no white cared. (90) This racialized gentriﬁcation of urban spaces not only leads to homelessness, and/or ghettoization, but a situation in which ‘The white artists had to become more interested in proﬁt than in art to hold on to the spaces they had gentriﬁed and from which they had excluded the poor, not poverty. Never poverty’ (91). Beatrice depicts the economic situation, and resulting artistic situation in New York, and through her, Acker draws attention to a social reality she abhors. The artist mentioned above is Beatrice’s father, and he is commissioned by the Mayor to draw a large portrait of New York, and so he determines to draw ‘the horror of New York’ (98). This however proves difﬁcult, for he fails to ‘see’ the horror. The artist explains: 108 Diane Fare I can’t see anything until I’m it. Since in my normal life I’m too habituated to horror to see it, horror must occur outside my perceptual habits for me to see it: In order for me to paint horror, I have to see the horror in myself. (98) By extension then, Acker implies that we – the readers – fail to see the horror around us, speciﬁcally the horror of current social and economic situations. The artist’s problem is one of perception; how can he ‘see’ horror if he has become habituated to it? His solution is to look within, ‘to touch or fuck horror’ (99), but I wonder if Acker asks this of the reader? Acker’s concern is not only that we have become habituated to horror, but that we fail to regard certain situations as horriﬁc in the ﬁrst instance. The task of the artist then, and of Acker, is, in the modernist tradition, one of political defamiliarization; to make people ‘see’ horror, and this is elaborated upon in the following self-reﬂexive passage: Father said, ‘A painting is simultaneously an object and mechanism. Paint, canvas, etc., compose the object ... My purpose for my making, or the object’s purpose, if objects can have purposes, is to make people see. In this case, since I’ve been commissioned to do a portrait of New York, see the horror in which they’re living. See the horror that they cause and in which they reside. In terms of the process of sight, a painting is a mirror only if identity is, too.’ Father said, ‘It might sufﬁce, but I don’t know for what, for a painting of horror to break down and through its viewers’ perceptual habits so that they can see what their minds and hearts refuse to see and what is’. (99) It is difﬁcult to read this passage as anything other than a passionate explication of the novel on the part of the author herself. In its engagement with various expressions of horror, the novel constitutes ‘a painting of horror’, and in doing so it asks the reader not only to ‘see’ the horror surrounding them, but to consider the very nature of horror. For the artist, the only way to paint horror is to violate his taboos, and so in practice this results in him resolving to paint his daughter being tortured. In a passage which has resonance with earlier discussions of the gaze, Beatrice informs us that: Father said to me, ‘I love only to paint and you. To paint horror, I must violate both. In the center of my portrait, I’ll paint the most horrible act possible being done to a ﬁctive version of you. A ﬁctive version of me will be part of the crowd around you, watcher and perpetrator. Vision, both in reference to the painter and to the viewer, will occur only for the purpose of murder’. (103) The ‘assaultive’ and ‘reactive’ gazes found in horror are represented here in the male artist and his female subject, who is objectiﬁed on the canvas. What is interesting about the artist’s intention though, is that he seeks to double the ‘assaultive’ gaze. Arguably, as an artist his masculine perception can be constructed as ‘assaultive’, in that he subjects the female model to his own interpretation of her, and in this instance ﬁgures her as tortured victim. In placing himself as a subject in the painting, however, the gaze is undoubtedly ‘assaultive’, in the sense that it is male and sadistic. A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother… 109 The ambiguities found in Argento’s ﬁlm regarding the uncertainty of perception seem to be displaced here in favour of more conventional viewing patterns. Inevitably, the artist decides that ‘To paint horror, I have to eradicate all distance between horror and me: I have to see/show my own horror, that I’m horrible’ (109), and thus in order for this to happen he needs to see his own daughter die. No longer a representation, a ‘ﬁctive version’, his daughter becomes a ‘real’ subject of horror. Bound in bandages inside a car which is about to be set alight, so the artist can paint horror, it seems signiﬁcant that the only part of the girl that is exposed are her eyes (and partially, head). During this spectacle, I suggest that the ‘assaultive’ and ‘reactive’ gazes are problematized. We view the scene from the girl’s perspective, and whilst she is clearly presented as victim, or rather potential victim, I want to contend that her gaze is active, not passive. When her father describes his initial plans to paint her as a victim of torture, as related above, he places himself in the frame of the painting as ‘watcher and perpetrator’, yet here, as the act of torture is about to take place, it is his daughter who watches him. It appears that initially the artist is unaware that the girl in the car is his daughter. As she says, ‘Somehow I knew that my father was looking, but still didn’t know who I was’ (114). There is then a certain irony about the spectacle, for the artist is ‘looking’, but cannot ‘see’. Emphasis is placed on this failure to see, until ﬁnally the girl describes ‘my father looking at me ... [until he] recognized me’ (114). Attempts to read the girl’s gaze as active now prove more difﬁcult as she asks the question ‘Has every victim chosen victimization?’ and declares, ‘Then I knew that I had, also, put myself in this limo for my father and that he was looking at me’ (114). This is highly problematic for it appears that she is now revealing a subconscious desire to play the role of victim, in order that she will be subject to another’s gaze. The fact that the holder of this gaze is an artist and her father, suggests even further her desire to subjugate herself to a position of object. We encounter here a not atypical uncomfortable situation in Acker’s ﬁction; namely that Acker dares to speak the unspeakable, which in this case is complicity in one’s own victimization. Beatrice does though manage to free herself from the car, and we may argue, frees herself from the gaze of the artist. Furthermore, we learn that her father later kills himself, which could indicate a ﬁnal attempt on Acker’s part to disavow the mastering gaze. Through this scene Acker interrogates the idea of horror, and implicitly asks what it is that constitutes horror. Is the dutiful daughter, who subconsciously submits to the will of her father, and in a broader context, the male perspective (the ‘assaultive’ gaze), a ﬁtting image of horror? Or alternatively is it truly horriﬁc that the social reality of New York proves an unsatisfactory subject for a depiction of horror? As Acker highlights issues of perspective in this section, she invites the reader to contemplate their own perception of horror. It is evident then that Argento’s ﬁlm functions as more than an explicit signiﬁer of Acker’s concern with horror. The ﬁlm functions as a springboard from which Acker contemplates the wider implications of horror and the monstrous; speciﬁcally the construction of the monstrous feminine and the monstrous mother. One could argue that it is in the ﬁgure of the monstrous mother that Acker, Laure, Bataille, and Argento merge. There are no mothers in Suspiria 110 Diane Fare as far as we know, but the female dance instructors are also ‘carers’, and thus can be read as substitute mothers for the girls at the school. When revealed to be witches, they acquire monstrous qualities, but their death at the end of the ﬁlm is surely unsatisfactory for Acker, who ﬂeetingly refers to witches throughout her novel. Their death at the hands of a young (virginal?) girl signals a restoration of order, but Acker prioritizes the status of witches as existing outside of social order, and suggests that their persecution charts ‘the history, our history, of prejudice [and] sexism’ (76). The witch is a potent symbol of female power, and thus when Laure, towards the end of the novel, declares ‘I’m now truly the witch, the one who makes the teeth grind, the eyes blink too rapidly, everything that makes another person turn away in horror’ (265), she acknowledges her potential power. In her frequent, if ﬂeeting references to witches, Acker implicitly ﬁgures Laure as witch; speciﬁcally as monstrous feminine – monstrous because her desire knows no bounds. This of course though is not a negative construction; it is an empowering one. For Acker and Bataille, their desiring, corrupting mothers do not constitute images of terror – or if they do, then it is terror that brings release. In My Mother Acker invites the reader to forge connections between apparently disparate texts, and it is possible to establish a relationship between these texts through images of monstrosity, terror, and horror. Laure, the monstrous feminine, relates her ‘terrifying’ experience of love; Bataille’s mother is a corrupting mother who seeks dissolution; and Suspiria initiates debate about cultural expressions of horror. Horror in its various manifestations underpins the dense textual and theoretical labyrinth that is Acker’s My Mother: Demonology. A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Acker’s My Mother… 111 Book Reviews David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002, 257pp., ISBN 0-8203-2320-9 Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles (eds.), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, New York: Hall, 2000, 321pp., ISBN 0-7838-0458-X In Ratner’s Star (1976), Don DeLillo’s fourth novel, a character explores the existence of a class of writers who don’t want their books to be read. ‘The friction of an audience is what drives writers crazy,’ she explains. ‘If you’re in this class, what you have to do is either not publish or make absolutely sure your work leaves (the) reader strewn along the margins.’ At the time this must have seemed a tempting metaﬁctional description of DeLillo’s own aims as a writer. His early novels, with their apparently unlikely juxtapositions – football and nuclear war, pop celebrity and brain research, pornography and fascism – seemed to deliberately defy generic expectations, and DeLillo’s indifference to traditional psychological maps meant that his characterization was often confusing to readers. If not exactly left strewn along the margins, reviewers and critics seemed a little unsure of how to square their admiration for DeLillo’s mastery of language with their suspicions of his lack of interest in conventional novelistic criteria, and so for nearly ﬁfteen years DeLillo’s work was rarely included in academic discussions, and reviewers’ praise tended to be qualiﬁed. The popular success of White Noise (1985), and Tom LeClair’s still-essential critical study, In the Loop (1987), in many ways changed this situation. The combination of a large audience of readers and the inﬂuence of LeClair’s detailed readings and exposition of DeLillo’s non-literary sources, encouraged cartographers of contemporary ﬁction to rethink their maps of modern writing, and through the 1990s DeLillo was established as one of the most important contemporary American writers. David Cowart’s Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language is the ninth English study of DeLillo’s work, and so is itself a good barometer of this rise in DeLillo’s status. In fact, so established is the ﬁeld now, that Cowart is able to begin his book by describing it as a complement and corrective to the ‘otherwise admirable book-length studies of DeLillo’, supplying a specialist account of DeLillo’s complex engagement with language. This perspective leads Cowart (as other approaches have led several earlier critics) to detect problems in the unqualiﬁed categorization of DeLillo as a postmodern writer. Although informed by the post-structuralist view of language as an arbitrary code, he argues that DeLillo’s work views this critique ambivalently, and is equally concerned with more traditional efforts to locate and evoke the deeper signiﬁcance of language’s suggestive power. Cowart has heeded the warning of Underworld’s ﬁctionalized Lenny Bruce, to ‘never underestimate the power of language’, and his readings are at their most effective when he is rigidly sticking to his thesis, unpacking etymologies, and tracing a grammar of the author’s motifs. At these moments Cowart is a perceptive critic, and the potential of his approach is perhaps best illustrated by the depth of meaning he ﬁnds in a work like Players that has otherwise received little attention from DeLillo scholars. But if Cowart’s study, with its claim that DeLillo may have begun to eclipse Pynchon, reﬂects DeLillo’s current status, the collection edited by Hugh 112 EJAC 21 (2) 112–116 © Intellect Ltd 2002 Ruppersburg and Tim Engles, gives a better impression of the shifts in that status over the last thirty years. Critical Essays on Don DeLillo does this by mixing four new essays with a selection of previous criticism that is introduced by an impressively detailed survey of DeLillo’s reception. The collection includes essays by most of the critics who have written on DeLillo at some length (Cowart is there, along with Tom LeClair, and Mark Osteen), and is representative of current trends in DeLillo scholarship inasmuch as it devotes multiple essays to novels like Underworld and White Noise, and omits Great Jones Street and Players from lengthier consideration. But if these proportions make the volume itself an accurate sample of the relative standing of DeLillo’s novels, it does also examine the roots of this hierarchy by including ﬁfty valuable pages of reviews of his work. This is a particularly useful resource because the editors have avoided the temptation to just select the most prescient or laudatory reviews, and include some negative notices, like George Will’s often-cited review of Libra. But one weakness of the collection, for DeLillo scholars, is that some of the essays selected (although interesting) have now been reprinted several times. Although the editors of the volume can’t really be blamed for this, an embryonic version of John Duvall’s essay appeared ﬁrst in Modern Fiction Studies, and has since been rewritten into his short reader’s guide to Underworld (2002). Similarly, Cowart’s essay on Americana and Peter Knight’s essay on Underworld have also now made three appearances. For this reason, the volume is perhaps of most interest to ﬁrst-time readers of DeLillo wanting a synoptic view of the issues raised by a writer who seems to be inspiring a still-growing body of critical literature. With at least two more studies of DeLillo’s ﬁction soon to be published, a DeLillo reader seeking to make sense of his work is now not so much a ﬁgure ﬂoundering in the margins, but has instead begun to resemble the beleaguered ﬁgure of Nicholas Branch from DeLillo’s Libra (1988). Branch sits in his ofﬁce and looks at the mountains of theory and speculation surrounding him: ‘Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. The ﬂoor is covered with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. . . . The stuff keeps coming’. Stephen Burn, University of Durham Christopher Hewitt, Understanding Terrorism In America: From The Klan to Al Qaeda, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, 192 pp., ISBN 0415277663 (paperback) £14.99 In this book, Hewitt sets the events of September 11 in a long-term context. At its heart lies a massive research effort to uncover terrorist events scattered across the past ﬁfty years of American history, to investigate the motives of the perpetrators and to build up a proﬁle of the American terrorist and American terrorism. The book is an important reminder that terrorism has been a feature of American life since the Second World War. The predominantly home-grown nature of that terrorism from anti-abortionists, to black radicals and white supremacists has acted to camouﬂage it from the public consciousness. Such camouﬂage has done little to make the EJAC 21 (2) Book Reviews © Intellect Ltd 2002 113 American public security-minded in the way that some European nations have become thanks to the efforts of ETA, the Red Brigade and the IRA. The author calculates that between 1954 and 2000, 661 individuals lost their lives in the United States in acts of terrorism. Even taking away the 168 lives lost in the Oklahoma City bombing the ﬁgure remains disturbingly high. Including the casualties in Oklahoma City 51.6 per cent of terrorist killings can be put at the door of right-wing, racist, groups. Hewitt offers an intriguing proﬁle of the American terrorist: predominantly 18–35 years old, a social failure and usually drawn from the middle ranks of the society which they come to hate. The Federal Bureau of Investigation may take a lead in investigating terrorist crimes but local police forces have accounted for over 40 per cent of arrests of terrorist suspects. What is also noteworthy is the scale of inﬁltration into suspect groups by security service personnel. As many as 60 FBI agents were members of the Klu Klux Klan in Mississippi in the 1960s. The total number of Klan members in Mississippi at that time was less than 500. Likewise a number of police ofﬁcers became founder members of the New York chapter of the Black Panthers. The scale of security-service penetration into the ranks of America’s terrorists is surprising, reassuring and disturbing all at the same time. Disturbing because of the old adage on the American Left that if the American Communist Party did not exist the FBI would have to invent it. Hewitt’s analysis suggests that 46.4 per cent of terrorist arrests are the result of inﬁltrators and informers, a ﬁgure that highlights the signiﬁcance of hum[an]int[elligence] in the battle against terrorism. Increasing reliance on sig[nals]int[elligence], courtesy of the National Security Agency in the 1990s, has elsewhere been ascribed as one of the chief reasons for the success of Al Qaeda on September 11. Signiﬁcantly, in view of current concerns within the Bush administration, Hewitt warns that ‘counterterrorism policy should not overemphasize weapons of mass destruction and spectacular events. Most terrorism is small-scale carried out by a handful of people or even a single individual’. As such, American terrorism may well be an extreme manifestation of certain aspects of American culture. As George Jackson, a black radical imprisoned in the 1960s, put it: ‘The symbol of the male here in North America has always been the gun, the knife, the club. Violence is extolled at every exchange: the TV, the motion pictures, the best seller lists’. From cover to cover Hewitt’s book is truly fascinating. He speaks with complete authority. His book is indeed timely and thought provoking. G.H. Bennett, University of Plymouth Christopher Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 354 pp., ISBN 0198296878 (hardback) £45.00 Sandars’ book, America’s Overseas Garrisons, charts the post-1945 development of America’s global system of military bases. Some observers have characterized this as the development of an empire by leasehold, replacing the freehold empires of Europe. In effect, it deals with the mechanics of the American security system overseas that evolved in response to European decolonization and 114 EJAC 21 (2) Book Reviews © Intellect Ltd 2002 the emergence of the Cold War. Once established, either because of their inherent usefulness or in order to deny their use to the Soviet Union the bases took on a life of their own as new missions were found to replace old ones from West Germany to the Philippines. It deals extensively with the negotiation of leases, conﬂicts with host nations and the question of legal jurisdiction. Written before September 11, 2001 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan which saw the USA take over new bases in Asia, Sandars suggests that the leasehold empire will continue in albeit reduced form. With the evolution of the global war against terror the leasehold empire, and Sandars’ book, has acquired new importance. There are one or two slips (Keelings [sic] Contemporary Archives, and the suggestion, later rectiﬁed, that British troops landed in Iceland at the outset of the war) but Sandars’ book offers a detailed history of a neglected aspect of American foreign policy and the Cold War. It is a thoughtful and detailed book and the author is to be congratulated on his handling of a subject of truly global proportions. George Kaplan, South Dakota Rodney Broome, Amerike: The Briton Who Gave America Its Name, Stroud: Sutton, 2002, 238 pp., ISBN 075092909X (hardback) £14.99 Who ‘discovered’ America is an old chestnut: was it Columbus in 1492, the Vikings, ﬁshermen from Europe, or a Chinese ﬂeet under Admiral Zheng in the 1420s? But now we can add a further element to the mythology of the development of the American continent. The central premise of Rodney Broome’s book is that America was not named after the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) who had sailed on Columbus’s third voyage to the New World. Instead, America was named after Richard Amerike a wealthy Bristol merchant and landowner involved in the lucrative trade to the Iberian Peninsula. In 1486, some six years before Columbus discovered the existence of land to the West of Europe, Amerike (Ameryk) was appointed the King’s custom ofﬁcer in Bristol. He was well known to that group of navigators, explorers and adventurers who would later chart the New World. There can be little doubt that Amerike helped to provide the ﬁnance for John Cabot’s 1497 Bristol-based expedition to North America. Sailing on the Matthew, Cabot is generally credited with the discovery of the continental landmass of America, as opposed to some of its offshore islands. Broome informs the reader that in a world of secret maps, and plagiarizing cartographers the word ‘America’ appeared on a revolutionary new map of the world in 1507. The author of the map could offer no deﬁnitive answer to the naming of the new continent, but he suggested that it might derive from the Christian name of Vespucci. The speculation of a cartographer in 1507, after sufﬁcient repetition, became the accepted narrative of how the continent derived its name and Richard Amerike’s role in the history of North America was lost in the sands of time. Is Broome’s narrative convincing? Not completely, would be the honest answer. But he does more than enough to establish the case that we cannot simply credit Vespucci as the origin of the name ‘America’, and that Amerike is EJAC 21 (2) Book Reviews © Intellect Ltd 2002 115 a credible alternative candidate. History has probably erased the evidence needed for Broome or any author to provide a deﬁnitive answer. At the end of the book the reader may want to ask themselves the question which is the more likely scenario: that America should take its name from a corruption of Vespucci’s Christian name or that Cabot should have chosen to name his discovery in honour of his wealthy patron? Broome is not an academic, but write he certainly can. This accessible book, aimed at the general market probably aims to follow in the footsteps of Sobel’s Longitude. In addition to providing some intriguing possibilities about the naming of the Americas he presents a fascinating portrait of the worlds of Columbus, Vespucci and Cabot, and of Bristol’s involvement in the exploration and development of the Terra Incognita in the West. G.H. Bennett, University of Plymouth 116 EJAC 21 (2) Book Reviews © Intellect Ltd 2002

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and the spectacle of empire: global/local rumblings inside the Pax Americana (European Journal of American Culture) more

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