American Psyche: Hyperreality!

‘Ravishing hyperrealism’? A ‘waltz of simulacra’? The ‘only remaining primitive society’? This latest installment of American Psyche discusses one of the most intriguing examples of travel writing ever penned about the American continent.

Arguably the most provocative postmodern theorist – one, indeed, who suggested that prisons exist merely to ‘conceal’ the fact that society is itself carceral – Jean Baudrillard swapped his study for the freeways of 1980s America. What followed was America, a highly ambivalent insight into the nation’s cultural landscape, a Tocquevillian account for the Reagan-era:

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.

Baudrillard was captivated by what he perceived as America’s chutzpah – its commitment to achieving Utopia – , and his remains (remarkably for a French Marxist) a largely uncondescending depiction of the nation. So while Los Angeles emerges as a neon-lit, palimpsest-like space reminiscent of “Hieronymus Bosch’s hell,” and Manhattan is a bewildering city in which “the mad have been set free,” Baudrillard is just as likely to celebrate the “magic of the freeways and the distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed”; even the nation’s kitsch ephemerality is indulged at times (51; 19; 1).

America is presented as the apotheosis of postmodern culture, a “marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts,” beguiling Baudrillard’s Old World sensibility (5). The country as it is depicted here perfectly embodies a depthlessness which, according to Frederic Jameson, characterized the late twentieth-century western world: it is a surface culture, in which the screen has become the privileged site of human interaction. Society has become marked by a profusion of simulacra in the absence of genuine origins, blurring previously held distinctions between reality and fiction, subject and object. Baudrillard defines this state as hyperreality, and uses the example of Disneyland as a fitting parallel.

America abounds with such esoteric language and confusing analogies, and it is wilfully abstruse on occasions: Las Vegas, for example, is derided as “that great whore on the other side of the desert” (3). Baudrillard’s tongue is held firmly in cheek at such moments, however, and a liberal dose of humour underpins his intellectual road-trip.

If, at times, Baudrillard’s prose appears guilty of the same sense of excess that he identifies within America, noting “the orgy of goods and services” that facilitates an increasingly cybernetic society, America contains enough flashes of perceptive observation to sustain the reader: in this state of simulacra, for instance, Baudrillard wonders “whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world” (96; 32). Baudrillard’s writing is, moreover, beautifully poetic at times. He discusses Minneapolis, “with its sweet-sounding name, its gossamer string of vowels, half-Greek, half-Cheyenne,” for instance, and the text celebrates the diverse quality of America’s landscape, which combines “the earth’s undamaged geological grandeur with a sophisticated, nuclear, orbital, computer technology” (13; 4). Such lyricism is perhaps only appropriate, an aesthetic response to a profoundly artificial age.

Following the likes of de Tocqueville, Paine, Dickens and Nabakov, Baudrillard continues a transatlantic analytic tradition, capturting the essence of the nation that native intellectuals, “shut away on their campuses, dramatically cut off from the fabulous concrete mythology developing all around them,” simply cannot (23). After all, ‘America’ as a concept is arguably as compelling to a Frenchman, Russian or Brit as it is to a Californian; the only prerequisite for Baudrillard is that, in order to do so, one must disregard presuppositions and “enter the fiction of America”, a country that remains, as the recent presidential inaugeration attests, reliably aspirational (29).

References:
“Simulacra and Simulations,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988

America. Trans. Chris Turner, New York: Verso, 1989

American Psyche: Willa Cather and the Great Plains

by Will Greaves
Willa Cather declared in 1922 that the world had split in two; My Ántonia, Cather’s elegy to the Nebraskan prairies of her childhood, evokes the memories of just what had been lost to history.

[T]he red of the grass made all of the great prairie the color of wine-stains.

Narrator Jim Burden’s unadorned metaphor establishes the deeply personal connection that Willa Cather’s characters share with the American landscape. My Ántonia offers a fictionalized account of Cather’s own childhood experiences in late nineteenth-century frontier America, and the novel is shot through with a powerful feeling of nostalgia – what James E. Miller refers to as “that quality of evoked feeling which penetrates the pages of the book” (“A Frontier Drama of Time,” 52). The very title prepares us for this: My Ántonia does not attempt an objective account of Ántonia Shimerda, but rather Jim’s own intimate reminiscences about the girl he grew up with, and their shared childhood experiences.

Written in 1918, the novel offers a later perspective of an earlier time. Cather had become deeply disillusioned in the horrific aftermath of the Great War, as well as with an increasingly mechanised and urbanised Republic. As a response, she mythologises America’s pre-industrialised past: the final chapter shows Jim and Ántonia looking at photographs from their youth, a tangible reference to this bygone era. Eschewing any real sense of plot, the anecdotal structure of My Ántonia produces a cumulative effect: the frequent allusions to formative events in Jim’s life, and the accompanying feelings of nostalgia produced by this, combine to set the novel’s wistful tone. One particular scene depicts Jim protecting himself and Ántonia from a snake by beating it away, a symbol of the inevitable loss of innocence experienced by growing up, as well, it is often suggested, as reflecting Cather’s personal rejection of heterosexual relations.

Depicting scenes from Jim’s childhood spent in the American prairies, My Ántonia also chronicles the immigrant experiences of many of the largely eastern European families who settled the Plains States during the nineteenth-century in the hope of sharing in the American Dream. Cather depicts both the overwhelming enormity, and the opportunity for cultivation, that this new landscape presented:

There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

Cather’s is a largely sympathetic portrait of these often challenging experiences, focusing on the Shimerdas, a Bohemian family who attempt to carve a new life from this raw ‘material’. Homesickness, communication problems and the vagaries of social hierarchy are all obstacles which block the path of the settlers during the novel. Yet as Miller continues, the fate of all characters, irrespective of personal circumstance, is ultimately subject to the inevitable cycle of nature: as the first section follows the often harsh impact of the shifting seasons upon the frontier, so the novel also presents a microcosm of the cultural development of society, beginning with the prairie experience in the west, and concluding with Jim’s enrollment at Harvard in the east. Yet when he revisits Ántonia at the end of the novel (and so completing the cycle), Cather privileges the enduring qualities of the frontier as the only appropriate image with which to conclude her story.

In this ambiguous conclusion, however, Ántonia has abandoned English in favour of the Bohemian language of her ancestors as she speaks with her family; hers is a future tempered by the past, and My Ántonia is a novel saturated with memories of the “precious, the incommunicable past,” a past embodied in the compelling figure of Ántonia.

American Psyche: Charles Brockden Brown and the American Wilderness

by Will Greaves

This week, American Psyche goes back to the beginning of America’s literary tradition, exploring one of the nation’s earliest frontier narratives, written by its first serious author.

Writing at the very end of the Eighteenth Century, Charles Brockden Brown employed the Gothic mode, so popular in Europe at the time, to articulate the cultural fears of the young Republic. As he powerfully asserts in his preface to Edgar Huntly (1799), however, the new American writer must reject the vogue for “Puerile superstition…Gothic castles and chimeras” found in Old World Gothic literature, instead choosing “[t]he incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness” as far more reflective of the national experience.

From the time of the earliest settlers, and in the corresponding captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson’s, the American wilderness had been imagined as a paradoxical place: on the one hand, a land of diabolic threat, teeming with ‘savage’ Native Americans that needed to be restrained; on the other, a land of opportunity, a tabula rasa on which the settlers could celebrate their new covenant with God, and establish an exceptional society. This dichotomy proved particularly fertile to Gothic interpretation, and Edgar Huntly exploits this national preoccupation to startling effect.

Within the novel, therefore, the wilderness is clearly presented as an arcane and confusing place:

It was a maze, oblique, circuitous, upward and downward… abounding with hillocks and steeps, and pits and brooks (659).

Brown was writing during an era in which notions of what it meant to be ‘American’ dominated the national discourse. As such, Huntly’s violent confrontation with the ‘Indians’ has been read by Jared Gardner as an attempt to create a national identity, one in opposition to the perceived heathen natives (“Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly’s Savage Awakening,” 1994). In the celebrated cave scene, occurring at the centre of the narrative, Huntly even appears to undergo a ‘rebirth’, surrounded by the familiar trappings of this dangerous landscape, including a savage figure, Indian weaponry, and a carnivorous wild beast.

Upon re-entering the landscape, Huntly is indeed in a New World, in which, “No marks of habitation, or culture, no traces of the footsteps of men, were discernable.” Nevertheless, as Allan Lloyd-Smith has noted in his American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (2004), Huntly’s subsequent violent subjugation of the Indians essentially exposes himself as just as barbaric as his supposed enemies; his metamorphosis in the cave has conferred a new identity on him, but this identity is in sharp contrast to the rational, enlightened figure Americans wanted for their new character.

Brown’s ambivalence towards the American landscape clearly emerges in the text, therefore, and is confirmed through his depiction of Huntly as a somnambulist: the latter’s oneiric wanderings seem to problematize the very ideal of Manifest Destiny, which had propelled much of the earliest settlers ever further into terra incognita. For whilst his somnambulism could be seen as a reflection of the almost subconscious pioneering streak which coursed through the nation, we may also read it as a metaphor for white settlers’ ignorance, as they desperately sought to expropriate the new landscape without consideration for the consequences.

In Edgar Huntly, the American wilderness is no longer the fertile blank canvas, as imagined by many of the Puritan settlers; rather, it is a place which changes them, a dangerous space which vividly symbolises the national concern over what exactly constitutes an American in this brave new world.

Edgar Huntly is available to read online here.

American Psyche: Nathanael West and the Hollywood Apocalypse

by Will Greaves

This week, American Psyche examines the role of Hollywood in inspiring one of the most apocalyptic novels in American literature: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939).

Born and raised in New York, Nathanael West displayed a distinctly lacklustre attitude towards studying whilst at school and college. He did, however, acquire a love for grotesque stories, and, after a short stint living in Paris, West later fell in with a circle of Manhattan writers including William Carlos Williams. It was after becoming a scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures in California that West would be compelled to pen perhaps the quintessential Hollywood satire.

Accompanying a number of ‘serious’ authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, into the lucrative scriptwriting profession, West’s move to California reflected the pull of one particular manifestation of the American Dream: thousands of Americans had been lured by the perceived possibilities of the west during the hardships of the 1930s, as John Steinbeck recorded in The Grapes of Wrath (released in the same year as Locust). And just as in Steinbeck’s novel, this Dream is revealed as nothing more than a delusion.

West’s novel is crowded with characters of “grotesque depravity”: Faye Greener mixes naiveté with a serious manipulative streak; desperate to succeed as an actress, she is willing to sell her innocence as an exchange. Homer Simpson (almost certainly the inspiration for Matt Groening), on the other hand, is a sterile shadow of man, ineffectual in all areas of life. Even Earle, the cowboy, is described as having a “two-dimensional shape that a talented child might have drawn”. The Day of the Locust is, clearly, populated by a series of B-movie stereotypes that suggests West’s frustrations with the illusory world he inhabited, and even, perhaps, his own guilt for contributing to this industry.

In the novel, Hollywood is a myriad of “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas […] Tudor cottages,” where even the “dressers are painted to look like pine.” In fact the only certainty amidst this simulacra of gaudy styles is the sheer artificiality of the landscape. Hollywood, an industry centred on the construction of a reality that fulfills our desires, becomes the most poignant manifestation of the corrupted Dream: deluded by the glamour of the screen, West is condemning a society that has misinterpreted this initially spiritual ideal as a desire to achieve wealth and fame. As if to emphasise this corruption, even the Californian oranges – intrinsic to Grampa Joad’s perception of the Dream in The Grapes of Wrath – lose their symbolic promise for West’s characters, being unable to “titillate their jaded palates.”

The apocalyptic and deeply ironic climax sees a crowd of fans descend into a savage mob, clamoring on top of each other, desperate to catch a glimpse of Hollywood stars at the premiere of a new film:

An ambulance siren screamed in the street. Its wailing moan started the crowd moving again and Tod was carried along in a slow, steady push […] It gathered momentum and rushed […] He held on desperately, fighting to keep from being sucked back.

West seems almost to be predicting the mass human suffering of the following decade; indeed his depiction of a society on the verge of anarchy, conveyed through a bleakly humorous writing style, seemed to tarnish the novel’s critical reception: writing to Fitzgerald, a close friend who died only a day before him, West admitted: “So far the score stands – good reviews: fifteen percent. Bad reviews: twenty-five per cent. Brutal personal attacks: sixty per cent.” America, it seems, was not yet ready for West.

The Coen brothers’ 1991 film Barton Fink offers a similarly dark satire on the scriptwriting profession in 1930s Hollywood, even including a fictionalised version of Faulkner as a raging alcoholic.

American Psyche: Gary Snyder and the Pacific Northwest

by Will Greaves
Each week, American Psyche will explore a region of the States that has become inextricably connected with one of the nation’s most famous poets, authors or playwrights. In the first installment, we look at the formative role of the Pacific Northwest in shaping Pulitzer Prize-winning Gary Snyder’s young mind.

“We’re on our way
man
out of town
go hitching down
that highway ninety-nine”

So begins Gary Snyder’s ‘Night Highway Ninety-Nine’, a poem which charts his journey through the heart of America’s Pacific Northwest in early 1956. One of the poets to ‘jam’ at the famous Six Gallery reading the year before – a night that provided the most powerful manifestation yet of the Beat Movement, as well as heralding the emergence of the nascent San Francisco Renaissance – Snyder’s work nevertheless offered a noticeably different perspective to those of his colleagues that night. Unlike Allen Ginsberg’s vitriolic condemnation of contemporary America in ‘Howl’, for instance, Snyder was rather compelled by the natural landscape and man’s place within his environment, appropriately earning the title of ‘laureate of Deep Ecology’.

Despite moving to California, and later following his love for Zen Buddhism to the Far East, Snyder’s poetics were nevertheless formed from an early life spent in the states of Washington and Oregon. At Reed College, Portland (possessing the wonderfully nonconformist motto “Communism, Atheism, Free Love”), Snyder met Lew Welch and Philip Whalen. They formed an avant-garde triumvirate, and Snyder had his first poems published in the campus literary magazine, Janus. Yet it was his experiences away from urban America – at times as a logger, a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains, and as an ethnographer spending time researching Native Americans – that resonate most strikingly in his poetry. The abstract ‘Pine Tree Tops’, for instance, acknowledges the overwhelming power of nature, within which man is merely a questioning component:

“in the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
What do we know.”

Snyder would later become an ecological activist and trained Zen monk, and this zealous spirituality is half-lauded, half-mocked in Jack Kerouac’s fictionalised account of him in the Dharma Bums. Indeed this portrayal of Snyder’s attitudes and values (not to mention his poncho, plaid shirt and jeans aesthetic) became, according to Beat critic Ann Charters, “a blueprint for the hippie culture a decade later” (The Portable Beat Reader, xxix). Laurence Ferlinghetti also playfully alluded to this temperament when identifying Snyder as the ‘Thoreau of the Beat Generation.’

Gary Snyder clearly occupies a more thoughtful and spiritually inclined counterpoint to such Beat figures as Neal Cassady. And yet ‘Night Highway Ninety-Nine’, like the classic Beat text, On The Road, is fundamentally a celebration of one of the key features of the American Dream, freedom:

“Slept under Juniper in the Siskiyou
a sleeping bag, a foot of snow
black rolled umbrella
ice slick asphalt […]
chewing froze salami”