Gladiator (1) .PDF 1

European Journal of American Culture
Volume 21 Number 2
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Contributors
David Holloway teaches American Studies at the University of
Derby. His book, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, was pub-
lished 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 Murphys essays have appeared in English: the Journal of the
English Society, Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations,
Miscelnea: 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 Reviews Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for new poet of the year. His
rst full collection of poems, Elsewhere (Shoestring Press), is due in
2003.
Ridley Scotts Gladiator and the
spectacle of empire: global/local
rumblings inside the Pax Americana
Rob Wilson
Abstract
Ridley Scotts 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 ratication, 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.
We generally made them [foreigners] feel rather small, too, before we bore
down on them with Americas greatness until we crushed them. Mark
Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)
American domination the only domination from which one never recov-
ers. 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 indispens-
able 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 Scotts $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
ofce and family, forced into slavery, and set upon the agon of revenge through
the gladiator routes of Empire. Entertainment Weekly noted the movies instant
box-ofce 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 Presss blockbuster text on the wonders and perils
of neo-liberal globalization, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Empire (which
offered, as we shall invoke throughout, its own more decentred, hopeful, and
transterritorial way of reecting 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-ofce
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 pop-
cultural 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,
62 EJAC 21 (2) 6273 Intellect Ltd 2002
Keywords
Globalization
Empire
Spectacle
Sublime
Rob Wilson Literature Department, Oakes College, University of California at Santa Cruz,
Santa Cruz, California 95064 USA Email: rwilson@cats.ucsc.edu.
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 ratication, 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 worlds 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 edice
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 todays looser regime of US postmodern globalization, does
not just repeat the sovereign state forms, disciplined labour, military appara-
tus, 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 uid zones of
rhizomatic agency and indeterminate arousal, the emergent empire of neo-
liberal capitalism stands for a fundamentally new form of rule (Empire,
146). This Empire of global capitalism paradoxically feeds upon the prolifera-
tion of difference and the warped and mongrel becoming of deterritorialized,
hybrid, multiple and decentred ows. Gladiator, too, would arise, intersect
and nally capture this transnational ow. 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
deed an Empire (as the global ad campaign for the movie claims), but it
shows instead a hero who raties an empire.
For, in Gladiator, imperial ratication and moral innocence is best embod-
ied 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 paren-
thetically as Empire.
4 G.M. Tamas, On Post-
Fascism, 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-democ-
ratic 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. 3031.
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 glob-
alization of capitalist
principles,
Neoliberalism as a set
of principles rules undi-
vided across the globe:
the most successful ide-
ology in world history.
Quoted in Mark Price,
The New New Thing,
63 Ridley Scotts Gladiator and the spectacle of empire
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 master-
narrative 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 cultural-
political 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, spectacu-
lar 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 eshing out the contemporary machin-
ery of an imperial power disavowing, distracting, and sublimating (via US neo-
liberal market rationales and retro-enlightenment rhetoric) its mounting forces
and traumatic media of political, economic, and cultural domination. Gladiators
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 Pacic theatre and nostalgically demonizes the crafty
Japanese as imperial threat.
8
In Gladiator, eshed 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 splen-
dour-cum-decadence helps to ratify geo-expansion in a cut-and-paste or pas-
tiche-driven way.
9
At times, the intertextual cinematic apparatus of transhistor-
ical imagery swerves from evoking the sublime wilderness scenery and moralized
decadence of Thomas Coles Course of [American] Empire paintings from the
Manifest Destiny era to evoke the more overtly neo-fascist architectonics of Leni
Reifenstahls Triumph of the Will. As such, the lm 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 techno-
euphoric 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 US-
dominated new world order. But this is a wary achievement given the large-
scale nostalgia of Europeans for a re-unied Europe as a transnational com-
munity avowing (in Ian Angs critique of European market discourse) their
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
lm critic Nick
Browne wondered in
conversation with me
in May 2001 at the
UCLA Hong Kong
post-1997 conference,
arent such spectacles
preparing the citizen-
viewers for war, at
least as such militaris-
tic spectacles like Pearl
Harbor can be centred
inside the Bush-driven
star-wars polity of the
USA? On related mat-
ters of cultural
critique, see Nick
Browne (ed.),
Reguring American
Film Genres: Theory
and History (Berkeley:
University of California
Press), 1998.
9 As Ella Shohat and
Robert Stam describe
the clunkier eurocolo-
nial cinema
apparatus of Britain,
France, Germany and
the US as used during
the modernist era of
techno-ratied expan-
sion and imperial
belonging, Given the
geographically discon-
tinuous nature of
64 Rob Wilson
own time-honoured if quite waning sense of cultural superiority and political
control.
12
Maximuss full name, Maximus Lucius, means full light, suggest-
ing his inner ties to the Enlightenment project of the Roman Empire enacted
as duty, civilizing force, law: the civilizing enunciation of imperial subjectiv-
ity, 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 subordi-
nation 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 identied 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 con-
sciousness in Spain, the plot of Gladiator remains quite heteronormative and
liberal-pious at the core.
The movie raties home and family as the base of transnational empire and
reects 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 imper-
ial 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 its almost unavoidable, Franzoni admitted about his script, and went on
to esh out the transtemporal metaphor of empire via details of urban unrest
and media intervention.
Street gangs dominating the inner cities, politicians using the media, enter-
tainment, to control the masses, the concept that the masses can be con-
trolled in a thoughtless manner. The very idea [of media control] is becom-
ing more and more clearly American. That was a core idea of Roman poli-
tics, the idea that their voices can be corralled to sing as one is denitely
Rome after the Republic.
17
empire, cinema helped
cement both a
national and an impe-
rial sense of belonging
among many
disparate peoples, but
often along lines of
white racial
solidarity and indige-
nous othering: see
Unthinking
Eurocentrism,
Multiculturalism and
the Media, Chapter 3:
The Imperial
Imaginary,
pp. 10203.
10 Drawing uncanny
ontological
continuities between
the Roman imperial
civilizing mission and
the American post-
war domination of
liberal humanist
culture, William
Spanos Americas
Shadow: An Anatomy
of Empire
(Minneapolis:
University of
Minnesota Press,
1999) underlies some
of my wilder formula-
tions on the Pax
Americana arising
within the
Bush/Reagan/Clinton
global dispensation.
11 I should say that I
will be reguring
more globally
mediated notions of
an American-
generated 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 Denitions,
Global Deformations
of the U.S. National
Imaginary,
65 Ridley Scotts Gladiator and the spectacle of empire.
(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 Pacic 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 specta-
cles of bloodshed and agon of combat only as some kind of sublimated solicita-
tion 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 ghts, 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 enter-
tainment 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 gladiator-
ial 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 subjectiv-
ity. In Gladiator, much of this display has become high-tech graphics, merging
the human, animal, and digital forms into battling (and cheering) cyborg-citi-
zens 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-
Amerikastudien, 43
(1998), pp. 51727.
12 See Ian Angs essay in
Kuan-Hsing Chen et
al. (eds.), Trajectories.
13 A minister in
Swansea refused to
christen a womans
hefty new-born son
after Maximus Lucius,
recognizing that the
hero of Gladiator was
not a Christian (and
that the childs
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
congures Maximus
in oppositional
relation of Commodus
as tragic double, in
her insightful review
essay of Gladiator, in
Scope:
http://www.nottingha
m.ac.uk/lm/journal/
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 mas-
culinity 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
66 Rob Wilson
cles in the arena. Mass entertainment provides a visceral experience of things
you cant have, or cant 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 supe-
rior forces of the Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) as set
against the brave, recalcitrant, yet severely undermanned forces of Germania,
use reworks 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,
ames, 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 shufes imperial history around to suit its own heroic plot elevat-
ing the ctitious Maximus over male rivals in physical and moral grandeur. It
evokes shots drawing on later gurations of victorious combat like Geromes
Pollice Verso (1872) where thumbs are once again turned in the wrong direc-
tion (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 spec-
tacle 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 cir-
cuses.
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 ever-
globalizing power. Gore Vidal, novelistic chronicler of America as some huge
post-war Empire of bad faith, sexual decadence, and brutal Puritanism undergo-
ing 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
gure of modernity,
and, hence, as the
object of
[transnational] identi-
cation, 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 lm 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 lms
iconography as a
transgression of genre:
she refers here to the
lms 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.
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 ips 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 Empires 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 per-
manently 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 ratied as the Greco-Roman love
of agonistic battle and will to afrm 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),
Scotts spectacle of trained warriors is offered not so much as commodity as com-
munity 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 paradoxi-
cally circulates to empower the state and ruler at the expense of the actors and cit-
izens. Scotts 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 amplies
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 conict 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 dened 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 events con-
texts 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
20 Noting that the sen-
sational lm 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 lm
itself) raises deeper
issues of state-
sanctioned 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.
p. 40.
23 The techno-euphoric
display of US high-
tech weaponry in the
Gulf War, as global
spectacle deployed in
the sublime Patriot
missile, is discussed in
Rob Wilson, Techno-
euphoria and the
Discourse of the
American Sublime,
National Identities and
Post-Americanist
Narratives, ed. Donald
E. Pease (Durham,
NC: Duke University
Press, 1994),
pp. 20529. On
cinema as a
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 Empires 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 owing 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 organi-
zation of global ows and exchanges as Hardt and Negri claim they are
within contours of capitals decentred and non-territorial Empire (Empire,
xvxvi). For Hardt and Negri, the proletariat or collective slave class of the
global era has ipped over much more hopefully into some mongrel mixture
of Jesus multitudes, Deleuzes nomads, and Marxs 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 powers ebb and ow (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 chal-
lenges to steroid-enhanced contestants running a gauntlet of body blows and
colliding bodies.) The entertainment web site Access Atlanta captured the US
audiences 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 audi-
ence 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-domineer-
ing gaze, see also Paul
Virillo, War and
Cinema: The Logistics of
Perception (London:
Verso, 1989).
24 On the American-cen-
tred 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. 12531.
p. 128.
p. 135.
p. 135.
28 Quoted by Peter
Kemp, Delusions of
Grandeur, in his
review of Gore Vidals
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.
p. 47. See Friederich
Nietzsche, Homers
Contest.
32 David Wyatt, Five
Fires: Race,
Catastrophe, and the
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 half-
guilty, 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 tra-
ditions and local-based settings and themes to lm-makers in Britain, for
example, now being underwritten by the British Film Council. As Alexander
Walker warns, The generation [of lm-makers] weaned on Star Wars, reared
on Aliens and now embracing Gladiator has no afnities with Ken Loach or
Mike Leigh-type lms like My Name is Joe and High Hopes. These are smaller
lms 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 [todays 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 exible, 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 Pacic
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 inuence international organizations like the World Bank,
Shaping of California
(Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley,
1997), p. 155.
33 Here I agree with
Fredric Jameson that
Hollywood
metageneric works
like the Godfather tril-
ogy, Dog Day
Afternoon, and Jaws
offer both ideological
obfuscation and mys-
tery (reication) to the
audience as well as
gure forth more
utopian longings for
forms of familial,
class, transnational
collectivity. See
Reication and
Utopia in Mass
Culture, Signatures of
the Visible (New York:
Routledge, 1992),
pp. 2934.
34 My analysis here is in
no way adequate to
describe these
global/local warpings
and polycentric ows
of the Hollywood
spectacle outside the
US market and
cultural frames. In
Egypt, for example,
Gladiator is the second
biggest blockbuster
lm, ranking just
behind Titanic and
ahead of Independence
Day, suggesting the
peripheral impact of
such American medi-
ascapes and ideologies
upon global markets.
35 See Howard Horwitz
on the fears of imper-
ial 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
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 owered.
43
Deregulation and speed mount for capital, whereas increased management,
restraint, border blockage, and decreased benets 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 contempo-
rary idea of Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal US con-
stitutional 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 owing across borders, this turbo-ux, speed, insta-
bility, and chaos of creative destruction is driven, policed, and all but regulated
by the worlds last great Enlightenment regime, the United States, to quote
John Grays 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, uid, 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 ts the mongrel
peripheries into a transnational totality which secures consent to its military
machine not so much via domination and plunder as via aesthetic ratica-
tion, mediated trauma, and modes of civilian awe.
This may be what Aime Cesaire means when he warns (in the postcolo-
nial-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 ve 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. 3755. The
westerning of
Empire theme is cap-
tured in Bishop
George Berkeleys
poem from the
Enlightenment era,
America: A
Prophecy,
trumpeting its imper-
ial ratication credo,
Westward the course
of Empire takes its
way, which
ironically gave the
radical California city
of Berkeley its post-
imperial British
name. See Gray
Brechin, Imperial San
Francisco: Urban
Power, Earthly Ruin
(Berkeley: University
of California Press,
1999), pp. 28082
and 69, on the
naming of Berkeley,
California as a fulll-
ment of the westward
march of the
imperial-city dream to
the quasi-Roman
shores of the Golden
Gate Bridge to China
markets and hinter-
lands of the Pacic
Basin. In such an
American manifest-
destiny scenario, San
Francisco would
replace Washington
DC as a more
Asia/Pacic-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)
The Pax Americana Empire of global-local turbo capitalism operates under
such a post-imperialist vision of expanding horizons and proliferating differ-
ences, 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 nally no egress from the routes, arenas, and specta-
cles of Empire, however multi-centred; no pastoral exit out from modes of dom-
ination, 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 afrma-
tion of freedom, pagan transcendence, and racial solidarity among the
mongrel transnational community is not another way of ratifying the mysteri-
ous 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 todays US/ Roman Empire analogy like this:
The international sage of the United States since World War II is like a vari-
ation on the script from the movie Gladiator. We entered the arena reluc-
tantly 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. Whats more, were not even very sure where
the exit signs leading out of the Coliseum are located.
Legros 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 fteen scholars theorizing on the
rising militarism, anti-democratic potential, superpower responsibility, cul-
tural 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 Rathers favourite movie: as the US liberal newscaster
said, ominously miming the Roman Praetorian Guard on his television sign-
off, 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, Thats 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. 1617.
and has directed
fteen 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. Scotts
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 Alma-
Tadema. 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 cor-
ruption and decay.
And to do that we
found ourselves look-
ing not so much to
the scholarly histori-
cal 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
Geromes impact, see
Making, pp. 2226.
See also Paul M.
Sammon, Ridley Scott
(New York: Thunder
Mouth Press, 1999),
especially Chapters
13 on his British
training in art, com-
merce, and
postmodern image
effects for RCA, BBC,
and Apple.
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 pow-
ers 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 Pacic: From South Pacic 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 1517.
We dive & reappear in new places:
Emerson, Proust, and the nature of
memory
Michael Murphy
Abstract
Tracing a line in Proustian criticism initiated by Edmund Wilsons essay on Proust in
Axles Castle, this essay looks at the shift in Prousts writing from symbolism to
realism, romanticism to modernism. Key to this reading of In Search of Lost Time is
a reconsideration of the inuence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in particular Nature which
was itself a by-product of Emersons visit to Paris in the mid-1830s. Examining the
role played by Emerson in the development of Prousts earliest works Pleasures and
Regrets and the abandoned novel Jean Santeuil this essay continues by noting certain
correspondences between Prousts 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 Wilsons inuential essay on Proust in Axles Castle (1931). Part of the
attraction of Wilsons essay, then, is that it marks out a clear development in
Prousts writings: from Romanticism to Modernism. Such a view of Proust,
however, is not uninuenced 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 inuence 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 inuence as English and American.
1
What is
signicant about Prousts comments is that he is writing to de Billy in 1909,
only a year or so into the intense ve year rewriting of Jean Santeuil that was to
bear fruit as the rst volume of In Search of Lost Time. This was not, however,
the rst time Proust had renounced his Symbolist inheritance. As early as 1896,
in an article called Contre lobscurit, he attacked the second wave of
Symbolist writers. Words, he argued, should retain the poetry of their history
1 Quoted in Edmund
Wilson, Axles Castle:
A Study in the
Imaginative Literature
of 18701930 (New
York: Charles
Scribners Sons),
1931, p. 136.
Keywords
Proust
Emerson
Transition
Memory
Realism
Michael Murphy is award director of the MA in Writing and Reading Poetry at Liverpool Hope
University College.
and etymology. For what Nature teaches us is clarity, that the shape of every-
thing is individual and clear (see Tadi 249). It is, as Jean-Yves Tadi 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 difculty in assigning a direct inuence over Proust
than Ralph Waldo Emerson. What is more, the degree of inuence allowed
appears to be split along clear national lines. For if French critics as J.M.
Cocking has said are keen to rubbish the inuence of writers such as Ruskin
and Emerson (see Cocking xviiiixx), American-based critics such as Germaine
Bre and George Stambolian are more sure that a connection exists, though less
condent that it wasnt left behind by the time Proust abandoned the writing of
Jean Santeuil.
2
Both admit the importance of Representative Men to Proust, par-
ticularly in the central role his ction went on to afford the artist (see
Stambolian 137; Bre 49). Proust, Bre 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 (Bre
6970). This, Bre says, [opened] up new paths in French ction, very
Emersonian ones (Bre 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
nal pages of In Search of Lost Time. What is more, I want to show how the lines
of inuence between the Old and New Worlds werent simply from east-west,
and that Europe more particularly Paris played a vital part in the develop-
ment of Emersons philosophy, a philosophy which as Charles Feidelson argued
in Symbolism and American Literature (1953) gave American writers their liter-
ary independence and broaden[ed] the possibilities of literature.
4
II
Cockings assessment must now be tempered with the acknowledgement given
Emerson by Tadi, Prousts biographer and the editor of the exhaustive four-
volume Pliade edition of la recherche du temps perdu. We might even go so far
as to say that Tadi restores Emerson not just to Prousts French-speaking
readers but to those who know him in English. For English-language biogra-
phies 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 Prousts 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 Emersons 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 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 Tadi: that on
the night he died Proust jotted down from memory a misquotation of Emersons
phrase Theres nothing so frivolous as dying.
5
2 Bre 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) acknowl-
edges its debt to Bre.
3 Not all American crit-
ics are so certain of
the inuence of
Emerson over Prousts
writings. Writing in
1925, Edith Wharton
saw Proust as occupy-
ing a central position
in a purely French
tradition, that of
Racine in his psychol-
ogy, that of
Saint-Simon in its
anecdotic and discur-
sive 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
Prousts letter to de
Billy in which he
mentions Eliot, Hardy,
Stevenson and
Emerson limits his dis-
cussion of literary
inuences to the
English writers. See
Proust and Literature:
the Novelist as Critic
(Cambridge: Harvard
University Press,
1957).
4 Charles Feidelson,
Symbolism and
75 We dive & reappear in new places
Though Tadi goes so far as to acknowledge the general inuence of
Emerson on the young Proust, he is loath to go further and investigate the pos-
sibility that Prousts novel is, in many important ways, a response not only to
Emersons philosophy but also the literary form of his essays and the particular
structures of his prose. This limitation of Tadis discussion of Emerson is all the
more interesting given, as Roger Shattuck has described it, Tadis use of
genetic criticism, an approach to literary scholarship which [studies] the evo-
lution of a work out of earlier outlines and drafts and sketches into its (presum-
ably) nal 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
Tadis 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 Shattucks
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 addi-
tions. 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 articer 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 unnished cre-
ations 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, Prousts early readers, like Emersons, 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 nal volume appeared in France), he wrote that
Prousts conclusion has not been published yet, and his admirers say that
when it comes everything Will (fall) into its place, times past will be recap-
tured and xed, 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
Tadi is right in saying that Prousts 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 inuence one
American Literature
(Chicago and London:
University of Chicago
Press, 1953), p. 4.
5 See Jean-Yves Tadi,
Marcel Proust: A
Biography, trans. by
Euan Cameron
(London: Viking,
2000), p. 777.
6 Roger Shattuck,
Prousts 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 Tadis overblown,
misconceived, and
overpriced new
Pliade edition.
7 ibid. pp. 17879.
8 Julie Ellison, Emersons
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. xxixxii.
Such an approach
opens Emersons writ-
ings to that process of
genetic criticism
favoured by Tadi. 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
76 Michael Murphy
another, that Proust has much to say about the literary love affairs of his c-
tional 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 remi-
niscent 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 neur, hoping to
come across the unexpected in previously unremarked places. Thus it is in the
context of the young Jeans widening sense of both himself and the world of lan-
guage that Proust mentions Emerson: Later on no doubt we should be
enchanted to nd 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 rst read Representative
Men, Proust was condent enough to criticize Emerson for failing to differenti-
ate sufciently deeply the various forms of translating reality.
13
Having said
this, much the same can be said for Prousts apprenticeship to Ruskin, the
importance of whom could only be fully absorbed when, like Swanns passion
for Odette, Proust had gone through all the successive stages of infatuation, dis-
cipleship, and disillusion.
14
The proof, or so Tadi sees it, of the limited inu-
ence 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 charac-
ter 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 la recherche remain relatively few. Much
more important are those subtle references to Ruskin which, in Richard
Mackseys 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 connect-
ing Emerson with those aspects of Prousts novel which are to do with the invol-
untary memory and Marcels tortuous gestation as a writer.
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 min-
istry. 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 fore-
fathers in a ship laden with a cargo of logwood, mahogany, tobacco, sugar,
coffee, beeswax [and] cheese.
most distinctly and
with the greatest felic-
ity. In consequence,
Emerson becomes
choice prey for
research and scholarly
criticism because of,
rather than in spite
of, his literary
negligence. Criticisms
task, then, is to inves-
tigate as closely as
possible the birth of
ideas and feelings, to
follow their
development, to
distinguish the crises
they pass through, to
describe their transfor-
mations ... One might
in the end maintain
that with Emerson the
work of the artist can-
not 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 rst
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 didnt
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
Emersons journal entries for the crossing and his immediate impressions
of southern Europe (the Brig Jasper docked rst 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 Emersons
mood began to change. Visiting Ferney he was pleased to note that Voltaires
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 Emersons response to Europe but was to play a deci-
sive 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 mans place in it, argues Lee Rust Brown, cannot be overesti-
mated, providing not only the inspiration but a model for Emersons rst major
publication after returning to the States, Nature in September 1836. What
Emerson saw in the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle were massive dis-
plays of mineral, plant, and animal specimens ... illustrat[ing] the classicatory
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 Musum National dHistoire Naturelle has a parallel in
Prousts description of the room in the Grand Htel 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 nd 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 redene 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 Swanns
Way, signalling a decisive shift in the narrative from Combray, Paris and child-
hood 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 atmos-
phere 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
novels presentation of Marcels 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
structure is one of
rhythm. What Forster
means by this is that
Proust stitched his
novel together from
the inside. The exam-
ple he gives is that of
Vinteuils little
phrase: There are
times when the little
phrase ... means
everything to the
reader. There are
times when it means
nothing and is forgot-
ten, and this seems to
me the function of
rhythm in ction: not
to be there all the
time like a pattern,
but by its lovely wax-
ing and waning to ll
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 Tadi, 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. 51617.
16 ibid. p. 520.
17 Lee Rust Brown, The
Emerson Museum:
Practical Romanticism
and the Pursuit of the
Whole (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard
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, stiing 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 reected 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.
Returning briey to Feidelson, we can see how the self-contained reections 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 ele-
ments 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,
6061)
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, rst, of a symbolic structure in the real world and, second, of a sym-
bolic relationship between nature and mind. (Feidelson 120)
What Proust regards as especially important about the hidden law which
inspired the upholsterers 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 shouldnt surprise us.
The world consists all too much of those invisible presences which, like the polli-
nated atmosphere at Combray, we are unable to detect until they have affected
us. Nature is one such inuence; 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 inu-
ences. 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 inspi-
ration (In Search of Lost Time, I: 463). As with the hotel room, the singular
University Press,
1997), p. 60. The
four musty old muse-
ums of palaeontology,
mineralogy, entomol-
ogy 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
lvolution.
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), pub-
lished in six volumes.
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 uctu-
ations in the one mind or unconscious law of nature that are able to reconcile
differing historical and cultural inuences 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 shermen 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 owered in a tapering spire. (In Search of Lost Time, I: 46364)
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 shermen gured by Prousts 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 uid, 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 uid it petries. It is precisely this that led Emerson to reject
the inherited rites of the Christian celebration of the Lords Supper and to afrm 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 Htel, in several all at once.
I referred earlier to the sacramental nature of Emersons 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 Emersons thought which, as I want now to suggest, should be
recognized as having played a not insignicant part in Prousts 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 inuence of
Emerson on Proust based less on fact than contingency. The parallels between
those aspects of Emersons 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 rst is
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.
80 Michael Murphy
explained by wanting to open up Tadis 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, Tadi does make some attempt to see his subject thus. Apropos the inu-
ence of Carlyle and Emerson on Proust he writes:
It is illuminating to see how one thought, through some form of transub-
stantiation, may incorporate another: how do we know, after all, that this
inuence 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 asser-
tions of aesthetic discourse, poetics or literary criticism.
23
Clearly Tadi 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 uncon-
scious 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 Tadi denies is precisely the central
mystery of Prousts 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
Emersons 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 elds of a new optimism,
24
wrote in an inuential preface to an 1894 collection of seven of Emersons
essays and came to be known as a Belgian Emerson. Prousts early admiration
for Maeterlinck is well known. Indeed, Maeterlinck was the subject of one of
Prousts dazzling pastiches, and it is to Debussys operatic version of Pellas et
Mlisande 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:
Maeterlincks LIntelligence des Fleurs (1907) is criticized in Sodom and Gomorrah
for referring to the unknowable as if he were talking about his bathroom,
while the Innite which Maeterlinck writes about is likened by Prousts narra-
tor to a 40-horse-power automobile with the brand name Mystre.
In many important ways this rejection of Maeterlinck prepares us for those
aspects of Emersons transcendental philosophy which Proust had to learn to
modify to his own singular temperament and situation. This aspect of Prousts
development, particularly as regards the inuence 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 super-
natural revelation, attempting to give a rational explanation without falling
back on religion and an after-life. What replaced vision at the core of Prousts
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 Prousts part not as a
wholesale rejection of Emerson but a modication. In doing so it is apparent that
Proust recognized certain aspects of Emersons thinking that werent picked up
23 Tadi, pp. 33940.
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. 8283.
on by his contemporaries. The Emerson who appealed to the Symbolists was a
gure 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 com-
panionship of his books ... and the life of the pastor, the citizen, the intellec-
tual, subject to a complex and delicate play of outer pressures, there are com-
plicities 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 Prousts reputation, and which
affected the initial reception of his novel.
I have commented on the fact that Emersons visit to the Jardin des Plantes
was a primary inuence when he came to write Nature. This is particularly so
when he comes to give his denition 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 innite.
29
Nothing divine
dies, he wrote. All good is eternally reproductive. The Beauty of nature re-
forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new cre-
ation.
30
Such, though expressed in very different terms, is the movement of
Prousts thought as we approach, in the novels prelude, the rst 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: 5051)
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 efcacy 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 rst 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:
26 For an analysis of
Emersons discontinu-
ous prose style, see
Ellison, pp. 16074.
27 Gonnaud, p. xxiii.
28 Emerson, Selected
Essays, p. 47.
29 Quoted in Brown,
p. 3.
Essays, p. 47.
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 subse-
quent sip only dilutes the immediacy of the rst. 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: 5455)
The parallels between Prousts cup of tea and Emersons alembic of man may
be merely coincidental. What is surely more signicant, if we can for a moment
retrace the narrators search for the origins of involuntary memory, is that this
memory of the ower-lled gardens of Combray arises from Aunt Lonies
medicinal preparation: a cup of tea made from the desiccated stems of lime-
blossom. Reading Prousts description of the tisane alongside Emersons decla-
ration 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 Emersons philo-
sophical 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 lling the
chemists bag with their spring fragrance, had perfumed the evening air.
That rosy candleglow was still their colour, but half-extinguished and dead-
ened in the diminished life which was now theirs, and which may be called
the twilight of a ower. (In Search of Lost Time, I: 60)
This movement from the winters 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 ower mirrors almost exactly Emersons descrip-
tion in Nature of his own experience of seeing a winter landscape coming again
to life through his ability to re-imagine it as art:
The leaess trees become spires of ame in the sunset ... and the stars of the
dead calices of owers, 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 characters
experience within that granular, pollinated, edible and devout world of child-
hood already discussed. This is one reason why, in Time Regained, he has Marcel
experience in quick succession a triptych of other involuntary memories: stum-
bling on an uneven agstone 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 rst day of my arrival.
What these moments do is to open up to Marcel for the rst time the full
mystery of involuntary memory along with, and justied 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). Marcels 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 innity 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 nal 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 ones 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 ash of lightning what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of
time in the pure state (In Search of Lost Time, VI: 21920, 224).
The signicance of this for Proust and his novel is that involuntary memory,
to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, must be discovered as a profane illu-
mination. 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 Emersons essay History: Apollon gardait les
troupeaux dAdmte, disent les potes; chaque homme aussi est un dieu dguis
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 rst 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:
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
Prousts mind for
some time before he
began work on In
Search of Lost Time.
Commenting in 1905
on the last paragraph
of Ruskins 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 afnities
which in spite of him-
self 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
magnicently
arranged up to this
nal 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 under-
lying unity or form.
32 Marcel Proust, Les
plaisirs et les jours,
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 verita-
ble bird of paradise in the barnyard among the turkeys and the hens ... a
radiant Apollo, recognisable always even when he guards Ademetus
ocks.
34
Read within the context of the full discovery of involuntary memory in Time
Regained, the passage takes on a power that alone it doesnt possess. Put at its
simplest, Prousts epiphany is that the power to transform ones life is immanent
in the world. Whether we ever do so may be dependent on luck. Our responsi-
bility, though, is to remain vigilant and, once granted a glimpse of those par-
adises 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 habit-
ually 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 nally
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 gured 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.
Prface par Anatole
France (Paris:
Gallimard, 1924),
p. 2. What Emerson
actually wrote is:
Apollo kept the ocks
of Admetus, said the
poets. When the Gods
come among men,
they are not known.
Proust similarly
misquoted Emersons
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 Emersons
capitalized God to
the lower case dieu.
Essays, p. 58.
34 Proust, Pleasures and
Regrets, pp. 11819.
35 In Search of Lost Time,
vol. VI, p. 222.
Reifying September 11: why the Left
hasnt lost the War on Terror
David Holloway
Abstract
The successful regulation of the rst period of the War on Terror by political, eco-
nomic and military elites has been contingent on a reifying of the contexts in which
the current crisis has come about. The rst period of the War has been reied 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 reied 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 rst 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, apocalyp-
tic 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 gurative apocalypse in many dif-
ferent 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-democ-
ratic politics. In January 2002 the British newspaper The Guardian (an essen-
tially 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 dening 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 Bushs government of tycoons and missile enthusiasts had
lost its Senate majority, while in Britain Prime Minister Blairs 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 alto-
gether different. Assessing the early political outcomes of the War on Terror the
paper quoted Tariq Ali, whose mood was despondent. Before September 11, he
Keywords
War on Terror
Post-apocalypse
Regulation
Reication
Downturn.
David Holloway teaches American Studies at the University of Derby.
said, Anglo-Saxon capitalism was in a state. Bush was virtually on the oor.
Now theyve 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 signicantly its politi-
cal and military inuence in the oil- and gas-rich territories of Central Asia, and
Bushs 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 reication
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 efcient 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 reication 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 aficted the leading capitalist economies since the late 1960s,
the return to a discredited Keynesianism in the rst permanent war economy of
the twenty-rst 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 signicance of narratives that may otherwise have seemed marginal, contin-
gent or opaque. With the meanings of American history now distilled into events
dating from September 11, 2001, current debates (including positions that prob-
lematize or repudiate the War on Terror) may become endowed with a particular
intensity and weight that might short-circuit the work of elite regulatory mecha-
nisms. 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. 14.
2 On regulation
theory, see Michel
Aglietta, A Theory of
Capitalist Regulation
(London: New Left
Books, 1979).
87 Reifying September 11: why the Left hasnt lost the War on Terror
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 chair-
man. The ACTA report announced its ndings 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 ags, college and university faculty have been the weak link in
Americas 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 ngers, 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 worlds ills even though it gave us the ideals of democracy,
human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance. Americas elite college
students, the report concluded, are graduating woefully ignorant of the founda-
tions 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 indi-
vidual 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 nd and punish
whoever was responsible for this. But as we think about it, its 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 Fishs
opinion, September 11 meant the end of postmodernist relativism. The ques-
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
88 David Holloway
tion, as Fish pointed out in the New York Times, harboured the unspoken sug-
gestion that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weak-
ened the countrys resolve. Fishs eloquent response, in which he savaged the
empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all subscribe but which all dene
differently, was itself vintage culture wars in tone. If by relativism, Fish sug-
gested, one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversarys shoes,
not in order to wear them as your own, but in order to have some understand-
ing (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 signicant 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 its a fact, which can be measured by the
pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it up. Baudrillards
remarks prompted an acid response from the novelist Mark Goldblatt, who sug-
gested that while Baudrillard has long been an object of ridicule among trained
philosophers, his inuence remains keenly felt within the cognitive Never-
Never Land of literature, art history, and sociology departments, where facts are
never objective.
5
The authoritarian/populist attack on the American intelligentsia exemplied
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 OSullivan, the editor who
coined the phrase in 1845, famously suggested that white Americas manifest
destiny was to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free
development of our yearly multiplying millions. Once viewed as the fullment of
Americas 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 indige-
nous people. The absolutist formulation that has converted the rst 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 pop-
ulist support for the War by invoking a sense of national mission, and the con-
current (but conicting) need to placate Arab opinion within the international
coalition against terror, has turned manifest destiny into one of the more slip-
pery ideologies of the post-September 11 period. President Bushs 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/opin-
ion/15FISH.html
5 Jean Baudrillard,
Lesprit 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.national-
review.com/comment/
comment-
goldblatt121301.shtml
dered in the hijacked plane forced down over Pennsylvania. The reference to
Beamers 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 solidar-
ity 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 Americas mission was legiti-
mate 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 con-
cession 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 historys unmarked grave of discarded lies. This is civilizations
ght, 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 rst 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 inuential 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 indenite detention of non-citizens once the Attorney
General certies he has reasonable grounds to believe that an individual
endangers national security. HRW concluded that Americas 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 ram-
ications for civil liberties and internal freedom. The setting-up of American mil-
itary commissions to prosecute (and possibly execute) non-US citizens involved
in the legally undened 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 administrations populist resurrection of manifest destiny as a
rhetoric for the legitimation of War policy has also done little to dispel the sus-
picion (widely articulated in Europe, Asia and the Middle East) that since
September 11 the primary objective of the White House has been an unprece-
dented expansion of US hegemony on the world stage. In December, US
Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jones announced that when the Afghan
conict 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
Daschles 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] inuence 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
IMFs (International Monetary Funds) assistant director for monetary and
exchange affairs suggested that the interim government should abandon its cur-
rency 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 sub-
stantial public debate about American foreign policy for the rst 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 civi-
lization and savagery, but as a strategic power grab ... of epic proportions and
the rst 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 regret-
table 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 countrys right-wing paramilitary death squads, to assist in the
armys civil war against FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and
to guard Occidental Petroleums Cano Limon pipeline. The Bush administrations
new interest in Central America has also been signalled by the return to promi-
nence of several gures 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 Councils ofce 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 Cuban-
American who previously served as head of the ofce 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 inuence 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 presi-
dents commitment to rooting out terrorism in all its forms).
9
In a convoluted
manoeuvre designed to step around having Reichs appointment conrmed 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 uni-
laterally 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 Norton-
Taylor, Terror
crackdown
encourages
repression, The
Guardian, 17 January
2002, p. 4.
7 Jones quoted in
George Monbiot,
Americas 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.
what Fred Halliday has described as a new historic fusion of political and reli-
gious movements based in the Arab world and those inuenced 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 conicts
that have been exacerbated by the attack on Afghanistan.
10
The most dangerous
of these new linkages between hitherto discrete conicts is the rhetorical connec-
tion made by Saddam Hussein, between Americas nancing and arming of
Israels 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 (Americas key Arab allies in the region), would be incalculable.
11
In Pakistan, General Musharrafs 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 ghters belonging to militant
groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, both listed as terrorist orga-
nizations by the US, has heightened the likelihood of serious internal conict. In
May and June 2002 the conict 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 ramications for a dispute that Islamist
opinion has increasingly identied 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 mili-
tancy 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 decit, and in February 2002 analysts
at the French bank BNP Paribas suggested that some of Britains best-known cor-
porations, 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 condence 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 resitu-
ated within the broader and ongoing crisis of accumulation that has confronted
global capitalism since the late 1960s, and that has prompted the post-
Fordist/neo-liberal turn initiated under the Reagan/Thatcher axis of the
1980s. Taken as a global aggregate, as Robert Brenner has shown, the perfor-
mance 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 protability that has continued to defy
capitals remedies.
14
In the United States, corporate investment, traditionally a
key marker of economic condence, 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 199091 recession, the crippling debt burden on many
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. 24.
13 Jackie Ashley,
Support for a US
assault on Iraq could
rip Labour apart, The
2002, p. 20.
14 Robert Brenner, The
Economics of Global
Turbulence: A Special
Report on the World
Economy, 195098,
New Left Review, 229
(May/June 1998),
pp. 1265.
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. Bushs
return to a strategy of Keynesian crisis management after an era of budget sur-
pluses under Clinton, was conrmed by the budget the President sent to
Congress in February. The budget envisaged decits 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
worlds 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-Qaidas next move will be a
frontal assault by several heavy armoured divisions. Analysis of the gures 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 rst 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 civil-
ian 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 reication) 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
identied by Brenner and others in the neo-liberal regime of accumulation itself.
The controversy that has surrounded Ridley Scotts lm Black Hawk Down, for
example, has focused too exclusively on Scotts misrepresentation of the failed US
military mission in Somalia in 1993, and the populist myth of American martyr-
dom 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. 188202.
16 Krugman quoted in
Julian Borger, Bush
billions will revive
cold war army, The
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.
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 esh and severed limbs of American servicemen, Black Hawk Down cer-
tainly ts the post-September 11 obsession with wounds inicted on a sinless
national American body. Indeed, the lms central strategy is to sacralize the mar-
tyrdom 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 ngers, limbs and other body parts, culmi-
nating in a scene where the camera follows the hands of a medic into the shat-
tered lower body of a dying soldier, immersing the audience in the smashed
remains of the servicemans pelvis. With its epigraph from Plato, only the dead
have seen the end of war, the lm 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 univer-
salizing 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 Downs 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
sacrice of soldiers, the erce brotherhood of reghters, and the bravery and
generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of respon-
sibility 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 sacrices that may come. This rhetoric of
sacrice and endurance that has been disseminated as a new doctrine of auster-
ity 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 prot warnings that have emerged since September
11 have been directly or indirectly caused by international terrorism. In many
19 Cormac McCarthy,
Blood Meridian, or the
Evening Redness in the
West (London:
Picador, 1989),
pp. 24849.
94 David Holloway
cases, as even the conservative pro-market commentator Jeff Randall has con-
ceded, companies were already in trouble, but for some unscrupulous manage-
ments 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 erce price war and crippling nance options the company
had been forced to offer, in a marketplace where consumer condence 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 Fords European division had been undergoing
restructuring for two years prior to September 11.
This conation of the populist War on Terror with the legitimation of cap-
italist 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 eco-
nomic, are uid 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 pop-
ulist temper might rebound upon the Bush administration, as the downturn
bites, as the memory of September 11 intrudes less overtly on the daily reali-
ties 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 ones children to ade-
quate 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 pat-
terns. In the rst weeks of 2002 the American public witnessed the biggest
ever corporate bankruptcy at Enron, the fth 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 companys
collapse a quintessential fable for our time.
21
Enron is a fable for our times
partly because it exemplies in dramatic ways the specious nature of the hi-
tech boom in the late 1990s, and the failure of the much heralded post-
Fordist 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 protability 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 rst 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 tech-
nology and
post-Fordism, see Nick
Heffernan, Capital,
Class and Technology in
Contemporary American
Culture (London:
Pluto, 2000).
vulnerable to appropriation by those whose disenfranchisement within the
existing order is suddenly claried during periods of abrupt economic contrac-
tion. What is already clear is that the new permanent war economy will exac-
erbate existing class inequities in the United States. Despite Bushs pledge in
the State of the Union address that his administration would support extend-
ing unemployment benets 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
Manns contextualizing of September 11 within the totality of what he calls
global capitalisms 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 interna-
tional development strategy, with redistribution and growth its twin goals. That
commentators such as Halliday and Noam Chomsky have argued that global-
ization 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 politi-
cal and media discourse since September 11.
23
In an interview given during
February, the EUs 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 eco-
nomic growth.
24
Naomi Klein may have had Clinton and Patten in mind when
she reported from this years 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-agellating
speeches about how their greed is unsustainable, how the poor will rise up and
devour them if they dont change their ways.
25
Whereas Klein saw the new
tone of the WEF as further proof of global capitalisms ability to absorb even the
most damning and inuential of dissenting voices, we might equally surmise
that when the leaders of northern elites begin whipping and kicking globaliza-
tion from the centre it is because their hands have been forced by a new trans-
parency in the brutalism over which they preside. During a period in which
Argentinas ten years as a model of IMF restructuring has pushed the country
into the biggest defaulting on foreign debt in history, self-agellation 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-
23 See Halliday, pp. 50,
17592, and Noam
Chomsky, 911 (New
York: Seven Stories
Press, 2001),
pp. 3035, 77.
24 Michael Mann,
Globalization and
September 11, New
Left Review, 12
(November/December
2001), p. 71. Bill
Clinton, World with-
out walls, The
Guardian Saturday
Review, 26 January
2002, pp. 12. Patten
quoted in Jonathan
Freedland, Breaking
the silence, The
2002, p. 8.
25 Naomi Klein,
Masochistic
capitalists, The
2002, p. 21.
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 repro-
duce 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 contra-
dictions underpinning the rst 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 Rights 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 ques-
tion 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.
A spectacle of pain: confronting
horror in Kathy Ackers My Mother:
Demonology
Diane Fare
Abstract
This article examines Kathy Ackers My Mother: Demonology (1993), her most dif-
cult and demanding novel. It considers the motivation for, and the effects of, the com-
plexity of the narrative by focusing on three signicant areas: the gure 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 Ackers 1993 novel, My Mother: Demonology, her
most difcult and demanding text, yet a text hardly considered by critics.
1
Acker (194797) 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 lifes 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 erce 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 difcult because her work embodies so
many paradoxes.
She can of course be categorized as a postmodern writer, but the label post-
modern writer is no longer a very meaningful description of ctional practice,
more a catch-all phrase that has grown vague through common usage. To term
Ackers work post-structuralist is more accurate, but then Ackers project shares
more afnities with the modernists than the so-called postmodernists. She incor-
porates post-structuralist theory into her ction, 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 tech-
nique of defamiliarization. Ackers ction 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 difcult nature of My Mother: Demonology are
that Acker borrows heavily from European lms and literature, and her inter-
textual references are relatively obscure ones. Whilst in earlier novels Acker
appropriates the work of canonical American writers such as Nathaniel
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/ever-
man.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/r-
stolen_childhoods.html;
R.J. Ellis, Kathy Acker:
A Critical and Bio/bib-
liographical Essay, in
Post-war Literatures in
English (Groningen,
The Netherlands:
Wolters-Noordhoff,
December 1998),
pp. 117; Christopher
Kocela, A Myth
Beyond the Phallus:
Female Fetishism in
Kathy Ackers Late
Novels, in Genders, 34,
2001, http://www.gen-
ders.org/g34/g34_kocel
a.html
Keywords
Kathy Acker
Colette Peignot (Laure)
Georges Bataille
Dario Argento
Horror
Diane Fare recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Central Lancashire.
Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner,
3
in My Mother: Demonology
we encounter the Italian horror director Dario Argento and his lm Suspiria
(1977), Luis Buuels surrealist lm Lge DOr (1930), and a 1939 lm
version of Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights. Alongside these visual texts we
encounter twentieth-century literary gures: the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo,
the German Jewish poet Paul Celan, the French writer and activist known as
Laure (Colette Peignot), and Laures lover Georges Bataille. These European
gures 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 Laures writings, Argentos lms and
Buuels surrealist practice would shed light on Ackers project, or at least
outline her cultural inuences. However, these relatively obscure texts
cannot be held entirely accountable for the narrative we encounter. In
keeping with the surrealist tradition signied in this novel by the presence of
Buuel, Acker punctuates the narrative with dream sequences, but to such
an extent that it is difcult to fathom where a dream begins and ends.
Consequently, the reader is continually bewildered by the extreme fragmen-
tation and nonsensical nature of the narrative. Of course, all Ackers novels
employ a fragmented narrative, but in this novel the proliferation of dreams
conrms that Acker is determined to evade the readers 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 interpreta-
tive difculties 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 rstly on Ackers appropriation of the
life and work of Laure (Colette Peignot), and Georges Bataille. It will then
examine the appropriation of Dario Argentos 1977 horror lm Suspiria, and
interrogate the function of horror in the novel.
Laure: an appropriated life
Laure, born Colette Peignot, is a little-known French writer, philosopher, and
activist. Her nephew, Jrme Peignot, collected her short autobiography,
Story of a Little Girl, letters, poems, and essays, and the resulting crits de
Laure was rst published in 1977. An English translation, Laure: The Collected
Writings, was published by City Lights Books in 1995.
5
A brief rsum of
Laures life will shed light on Ackers 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 Buuel, and also her rst 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 cole des Langues Orientales in Paris and moved to Russia in 1930
2 Kathy Acker, William
Burroughss Realism,
in Bodies of Work
(London and New
York: Serpents Tail,
1997), p. 2.
3 Hawthornes The
Scarlet Letter is appro-
priated in Blood and
Guts in High School
(1984), Twains
Huckleberry Finn in
Empire of the Senseless
(1988), and
Faulkners Sound and
the Fury, Sanctuary,
and Pylon in In
Memoriam to Identity
(1990).
4 All Ackers novels
contain narratives of
her personal life, or,
as Glenn Harper
terms it, a primal nar-
rative. This core
narrative concerns a
young woman, some-
times called Kathy, in
a loveless but wealthy
family; her father
abandons her mother;
her step-father rapes
her; her mother, hav-
ing 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. 4445.
5 Clearly, Acker had
read an earlier
(unidentied) English
version of the text, as
My Mother was pub-
lished in 1993, and
Hannibal Lecter, My
Father (1983)
contains a short prose
piece entitled,
Translations of the
Diaries of Laure the
Schoolgirl.
99 A spectacle of pain: confronting horror in Kathy Ackers My Mother
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 Lon Bournine, a founding
member of the French Communist party. Laure worked for and nanced the
leftist journal La Critique sociale, which Bournine edited. She wrote short arti-
cles on Russian literature under the pseudonym Claude Araxe. Laure rst 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 Batailles house in Saint-
Germain, and she became seriously ill in the autumn of 1938. She died of
tuberculosis, at Batailles house, on 7 November 1938, aged 35 years.
In some respects, Ackers interest in Laure is similar to her interest in the
avant-garde gures who populate many of her novels Jean Genet, Marquis de
Sade, and Arthur Rimbaud in that, to borrow a phrase from Jeanine Herman,
Laures translator, Writing and dissolution became [their] revolt.
6
However,
Ackers 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 womans 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
Ackers 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. Laures writings reveal a woman who pas-
sionately refused to submit herself to a life of compromise and bourgeois
respectability, whilst Ackers 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 bodys imaginings actual (10), and has a
passionate desire to journey through unknown, wonderful, and ecstatic
realms (1112). As she matures this desire nds an outlet in sexual rela-
tions. 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 didnt and dont know what this desire means
other than itself (14). However, Laure is aware that As yet I hadnt asked if
there was someone named me (15, italics in original), and we glimpse here
the inner conict that will both plague Laure and permeate Ackers narra-
tive. 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 insur-
mountable conict:
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-
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.cut-
here.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 paren-
theses.
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
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
Ackers 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 Kristevas gendering of the dissi-
dent writer as male as, I would argue, does Acker herself. Kristevas under-
standing 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 subjec-
tivity 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 con-
sidered 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: isnt that another form of dissidence?
12
She does not
conate the dissident writer and the gure 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 womens 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 Kristevas
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 under-
mines the law of symbolic language, and who give[s] voice ... to the uncon-
scious, 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 contra-
dictions 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 Laures poems,
and indeed her conception of poetry, bear out this analysis. In her collection of
poems and fragments, The Sacred, Laure writes that
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.
Little Girl, p. 29, ital-
ics in original.
14 Georges Bataille and
Michel Leiris, Notes
in Laure, p. 32.
The poetic work is sacred in that it is the creation of a topical event, com-
munication experienced as nakedness. It is self-violation, baring, communi-
cation to others of a reason for living, and this reason for living shifts.
15
Laures 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 difculties involved in this project:
The sheet is smooth
smooth, smooth
one cannot save oneself
on paper
Like a drowning person
clings
to a rock
17
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 familys 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 signicant, and points to Laures status as a representative fore-
mother. Acker also speaks through Laure in My Mother, for she intertwines
her own primal narrative with Laures autobiography, thus compounding the
painful experience of female subjectivity. Ackers Laure writes in a letter to
her lover B (Bataille), The more I try to describe myself, the more I nd 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 noth-
ingness, whilst quite obviously metactional, is a familiar trope for female
identity in Ackers ction, and Laures letters expose her as a woman with a
death-drive. She recognizes that Because theres nothing, I dont 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.
Bs My Mother
Laures famous lover remains fairly anonymous in My Mother, referred to only
as B, but Batailles work, like Laures is appropriated in the novel. This appro-
priation is at once both explicit and oblique. Explicit information on the back
15 Laure, The Sacred, in
Laure, p. 45.
16 Jrme 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, ital-
ics in original. Of
course recent world
events undermine
Kristevas contention
that exile is an irreli-
gious act.
Little Girl, p. 27.
21 Laure, Poems and
Texts after the
summer of 1936, in
The Sacred, p. 74.
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 Ackers novel is signalled before the rst pages are
turned.
22
It is evident that Batailles theoretical work on erotic desire informs
Ackers ction, but we nd in the title of Ackers My Mother an allusion to a
relatively unknown novel by Bataille, also named My Mother. Batailles short
text, discovered after his death, was completed posthumously by critics who
assembled notes left by Bataille. As in her appropriation of Laures writings,
Acker refrains from subversion. Batailles 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 inno-
cent victim of his tyrannical father. However, with the fathers 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 dont want your love unless you
know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
24
His mother nally commits suicide, but not before engaging in an act of incest
with her son the nal 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 novels nal 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
Batailles novel vio-
lates 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.
Ackers My Mother similarly presents us with a subversive vision of the
Sacred Mother, but the appropriation of Batailles novel is not straightforward.
As stated, the mothers story, in Batailles text, is narrated by her son we
only have access to her unmediated voice in two letters. However, in Ackers
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 Batailles text is absent in
Ackers novel, which prioritizes the mother-father relationship. The relationship
is nevertheless a textually incestuous one the mother of Batailles text
becomes the lover of Bataille in Ackers text. The extremities of heterosexual
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. 1621.
28 Laure (Colette
Peignot) was not a
mother, but at the
beginning of Ackers
novel, an unidentied
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 unin-
teresting, and she
became far more
interested in Laures
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.cut-
here.com/ackerint.ht
ml
union depicted in both Batailles and Ackers ction narrativize Batailles theo-
retical work on desire, death and the erotic, which sheds some light on Ackers
portrayal of Laures conicting desires. Bataille argues that Love expresses a
need for sacrice: 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 con-
icting desire to lose themselves in each other while also desiring to nd them-
selves, 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 Batailles 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 Ackers novel is horror. Acker explicitly signals her concern
with horror in the third section of the novel, through her dedication to the
Italian horror-lm 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-lm critic, argues that the true
subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civiliza-
tion represses or oppresses,
32
and this clearly calls attention to the genres
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, con-
fronted, and/or often appeased in the horror lm. Whilst Ackers 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 repres-
sion/oppression. In My Mother though, Ackers interest in the horror genre
manifests itself in a specic manner through her appropriation of Argentos
1977 horror lm Suspiria,
33
and we need to contemplate reasons for Ackers
interest in this particular lm.
There are many reasons why Acker should incorporate Argentos work
into her ction, not least because she considered herself a fan. Despite the fact
that since 1970 Argento has written, or co-written, and directed eight horror
lms, scholarship on horror has failed to pay much attention to his work. In
part, this is due to the fact that his lms are difcult to obtain, and are
Italian-produced (and his early lms are Italian-language), but perhaps also
because his lms 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 Argentos work:
29 Bataille, The College
of Sociology, in The
College of Sociology
19379, ed. Denis
Holler, trans. Betsy
Wing, (Minneapolis:
University of
Minnesota Press,
1988), pp. 33738.
30 ibid., p. 339.
31 The analysis of horror
in this section draws
exclusively on lm
theory. The reasons
for this are that Acker
appropriates a horror
lm, not a novel, and
the issue of spectator-
ship 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 Evermans
Internet article alerted
me to the specic lm
appropriated by
Acker. Cited at
http://acker.thehub.co
m.au/ackademy/ever-
man.html
104 Diane Fare
The work of Dario Argento is one of twisted logic, rhapsodic violence, styl-
ized 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: Argentos camera is alternately enthralled and
repelled by ripe esh and blood-drenched fantasy.
34
It is not difcult 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 char-
acter of horror,
35
refusing to adhere to the conventions of genre lm whereby
the viewer knows what to expect, and is not disappointed. He achieves this
primarily in two specic 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 lm
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, identies 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 Argentos lms, but the viewer does not necessarily sense a
clear, sadistic, male threat due to the ambiguity of the gaze.
37
This is ren-
dered explicit through the lms emphasis on the eye itself; a feature that will
prove signicant 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 char-
acters, alongside transvestites, bisexuals, and androgynous women can be iden-
tied in Argentos lms. The effect of this then, combined with the uncertainty
of perception, is that:
All traditional positions, former points of identication, are thrown into ques-
tion, and any strict sense of otherness, always important to the horror lm,
thereby becomes diffused as binary distinctions lose their applicability.
39
Thus, binary oppositions such as male/female, self/other, hero/victim, heterosex-
ual/homosexual are rendered unstable, and it proves difcult to clearly locate
what the other might be. Argentos work deviates from the norm in its prob-
lematization of conventional generic devices.
Thus far, it is at least possible to offer reasons as to Ackers interest in
Argento: Twisted logic, rhapsodic violence, stylized excess, inversion, formal
imbalance;
40
many of these terms could quite easily apply to the ction of
Acker. But is there any particular reason why Acker chooses to appropriate
Suspiria? To very briey explain the plot, the lm 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
34 Maitland McDonagh,
Broken
Mirrors/Broken Minds:
The Dark Dreams of
Dario Argento, Film
Quarterly, vol. XLI, no.
2 (Winter 198788),
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.
friends house by an unseen murderer. Suzy is convinced that all is not well at
the school. She mysteriously falls ill, and is conned to her bed. Her friend
Sara, a fellow student, is also suspicious, because the murdered girl had
attempted to conde 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 foot-
steps 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 Saras
fate. She recalls mention of a man, and succeeds in locating him. This man
turns out to be Saras 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 re, 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 nds 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 ed
the building on that rst 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 nally 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 lm into her novel, and more sig-
nicantly, why? As discussed above, Argentos confounding of generic conven-
tions, and problematization of the relations between gender and power, no
doubt help explain Ackers 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 Ackers novel is submerged within Laures narra-
tive, as she recalls her school days,
41
and is interspersed with narrative pas-
sages which are unrelated to the lm. However confusing this may appear,
Argentos lm is identiable; the opening scene is related quite faithfully, as is
the murder of the student Pat.
Of particular interest though is Ackers critical rewriting of a scene gur-
ing maggots. In one scene in the lm 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 arent the
sources of disease (56). Through this latter statement Acker succeeds in
raising an issue which Argento only alludes to here; namely, female sexual-
41 This section is surreal,
and is one of a num-
ber of occasions
where Laure recalls
her school days. These
recollections are con-
fused, often presented
as dream sequences,
and the narrative fre-
quently digresses.
Furthermore,
although Laure is
ostensibly the
narrator, the
narrative appears to
give way to other
voices.
106 Diane Fare
ity. Ackers alignment of female sexuality and disease is interesting because it
recalls classic horrors guring of the sexually active female. Acker recognizes
this construction of the female in horror and manipulates Argentos scene so
the issue of female sexuality specically as dangerous is foregrounded.
The female body we encounter in Ackers rewriting of this scene is of course
abject, and undoubtedly one reason for Ackers turn toward the horror lm
in this novel is because the horror lm is an illustration of the work of abjec-
tion. As Barbara Creed points out, the horror lm 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 esh.
42
The visual impact of such images of abjection helps
explain Ackers turn toward visual culture, specically the horror lm, in this
novel. With regards to Suspiria, the retelling of the lm continues, with key
scenes related, and minor changes made, until the nal scene is faithfully
described. Yet, more important than charting Ackers retelling of Suspiria is
to offer reasons for the appropriation.
Firstly, the setting of Argentos lm has signicance for Acker. Schools,
specically girls schools, gure frequently in Ackers ction, and can be inter-
preted in two ways: they are sites of sexual experimentation, as girls, for the
rst time, explore their own, and each others, bodies. Acker signals this early
in Chapter 3 of My Mother through her reference to Radley Metzgers lm of
the book Thrse 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
gured as positive; a liberating stage in the development of a young girls sex-
uality. However, the school is simultaneously depicted as a site of institutional
power; the space of the school connes and constricts the female body, and
therefore identity. In Chapter 1 of the novel, Laure declares:
Id do anything to nd 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 bodys imaginings actual. (10)
However, she also recognizes her lack of power due to her status as young female:
And I knew that I couldnt 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 couldnt ght 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 Ackers ction, are taught that they are outside the accepted
(253), and so the resulting sense of self is that Im only an object (81). Laure
comments that, In my rst 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
42 Barbara Creed,
Kristeva, Femininity,
Abjection, in The
Horror Reader, ed. Ken
Gelder, (London and
New York: Routledge,
2000), p. 66.
deviation (52), and so are not deemed rational, and consequently are posi-
tioned as other subject to the rational humans (males) control. Laure rec-
ognizes this, and the link between the body and identity, when she states:
I cant nd out who I am. I know nothing about my body. Whenever
theres 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).
Ackers critique of the subjugation of the female body is part of a wider theoret-
ical 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 threat-
ens all order.
43
Ackers ction concerns itself in detail with such constructions of the female body,
but of relevance here is that such a construction is common in horrors depiction
of the female. We nd then that Acker appropriates a horror lm which has as its
setting a school, predominantly populated by females, and in turn writes a narra-
tive which warns of the potential horrors of reality in such a school. Ackers
interest in horror does not end with the appropriation of the lm. In the next
section, still within Chapter 3, Beatrices 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 Beatrices Story, in that the
section begins with a erce social critique of New York. We learn that the
Mayor wins his rst election by promising to raise New York out of economic
poverty (90), and he fulls his promise by transforming the citys 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 for-
merly 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 fami-
lies. Where they went, no white cared. (90)
This racialized gentrication 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 prot than in art to hold on to the spaces they had gentried
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 Beatrices 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 difcult, for he fails to see the
horror. The artist explains:
43 Elizabeth Grosz,
Volatile Bodies
(Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press,
1994), p. 203.
108 Diane Fare
I cant see anything until Im it. Since in my normal life Im 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, specically the horror of current social and economic situations.
The artists 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? Ackers concern is
not only that we have become habituated to horror, but that we fail to
regard certain situations as horric in the rst instance. The task of the artist
then, and of Acker, is, in the modernist tradition, one of political defamiliar-
ization; to make people see horror, and this is elaborated upon in the fol-
lowing self-reexive passage:
Father said, A painting is simultaneously an object and mechanism. Paint,
canvas, etc., compose the object ... My purpose for my making, or the
objects purpose, if objects can have purposes, is to make people see. In this
case, since Ive been commissioned to do a portrait of New York, see the
horror in which theyre 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 sufce, but I dont 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 difcult 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 con-
sider 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 discus-
sions 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, Ill paint the most horrible act possible being
done to a ctive version of you. A ctive 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 objectied on the canvas. What is
interesting about the artists intention though, is that he seeks to double the
assaultive gaze. Arguably, as an artist his masculine perception can be con-
structed as assaultive, in that he subjects the female model to his own inter-
pretation of her, and in this instance gures 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.
The ambiguities found in Argentos lm regarding the uncertainty of per-
ception seem to be displaced here in favour of more conventional viewing
patterns. Inevitably, the artist decides that To paint horror, I have to eradi-
cate all distance between horror and me: I have to see/show my own horror,
that Im horrible (109), and thus in order for this to happen he needs to see
his own daughter die. No longer a representation, a ctive 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 sig-
nicant that the only part of the girl that is exposed are her eyes (and par-
tially, head). During this spectacle, I suggest that the assaultive and reac-
tive gazes are problematized. We view the scene from the girls 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 didnt 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 nally the girl describes my father looking
at me ... [until he] recognized me (114). Attempts to read the girls gaze as
active now prove more difcult 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 anothers
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 Ackers
ction; namely that Acker dares to speak the unspeakable, which in this case
is complicity in ones 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 nal attempt on Ackers 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 subcon-
sciously submits to the will of her father, and in a broader context, the male
perspective (the assaultive gaze), a tting image of horror? Or alternatively
is it truly horric 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 Argentos lm functions as more than an
explicit signier of Ackers concern with horror. The lm functions as a
springboard from which Acker contemplates the wider implications of horror
and the monstrous; specically the construction of the monstrous feminine
and the monstrous mother.
One could argue that it is in the gure 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
lm is surely unsatisfactory for Acker, who eetingly 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 Im 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 eet-
ing references to witches, Acker implicitly gures Laure as witch; specically
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; Batailles 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 Ackers My Mother: Demonology.
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 Ratners Star (1976), Don DeLillos fourth novel, a character explores the exis-
tence of a class of writers who dont want their books to be read. The friction
of an audience is what drives writers crazy, she explains. If youre 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 metactional description of DeLillos 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 DeLillos indifference to tra-
ditional 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 DeLillos mastery of
language with their suspicions of his lack of interest in conventional novelistic
criteria, and so for nearly fteen years DeLillos work was rarely included in aca-
demic discussions, and reviewers praise tended to be qualied.
The popular success of White Noise (1985), and Tom LeClairs still-essential
critical study, In the Loop (1987), in many ways changed this situation. The
combination of a large audience of readers and the inuence of LeClairs detailed
readings and exposition of DeLillos non-literary sources, encouraged cartogra-
phers of contemporary ction to rethink their maps of modern writing, and
through the 1990s DeLillo was established as one of the most important con-
temporary American writers. David Cowarts Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language
is the ninth English study of DeLillos work, and so is itself a good barometer of
this rise in DeLillos status. In fact, so established is the eld 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 DeLillos complex engagement with language. This perspective leads
Cowart (as other approaches have led several earlier critics) to detect problems
in the unqualied categorization of DeLillo as a postmodern writer. Although
informed by the post-structuralist view of language as an arbitrary code, he
argues that DeLillos work views this critique ambivalently, and is equally con-
cerned with more traditional efforts to locate and evoke the deeper signicance
of languages suggestive power. Cowart has heeded the warning of Underworlds
ctionalized 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 authors 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 nds in a work like Players
that has otherwise received little attention from DeLillo scholars.
But if Cowarts study, with its claim that DeLillo may have begun to eclipse
Pynchon, reects DeLillos current status, the collection edited by Hugh
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 DeLillos 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 representa-
tive 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 DeLillos novels, it
does also examine the roots of this hierarchy by including fty 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 Wills 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 cant really be blamed for this, an embryonic
version of John Duvalls essay appeared rst in Modern Fiction Studies, and has
since been rewritten into his short readers guide to Underworld (2002).
Similarly, Cowarts essay on Americana and Peter Knights essay on Underworld
have also now made three appearances. For this reason, the volume is perhaps
of most interest to rst-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 criti-
cal literature. With at least two more studies of DeLillos ction soon to be pub-
lished, a DeLillo reader seeking to make sense of his work is now not so much a
gure oundering in the margins, but has instead begun to resemble the belea-
guered gure of Nicholas Branch from DeLillos Libra (1988). Branch sits in his
ofce 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 oor 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 fty years of American history, to investigate the motives of the
perpetrators and to build up a prole 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-abor-
tionists, to black radicals and white supremacists has acted to camouage it
from the public consciousness. Such camouage has done little to make the
113 EJAC 21 (2) Book Reviews Intellect Ltd 2002
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 gure 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 prole of the American terrorist: predominantly
1835 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 inltration 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 ofcers became
founder members of the New York chapter of the Black Panthers. The scale of
security-service penetration into the ranks of Americas 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. Hewitts analysis suggests that 46.4 per
cent of terrorist arrests are the result of inltrators and informers, a gure that
highlights the signicance of hum[an]int[elligence] in the battle against terror-
ism. 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.
Signicantly, 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 Hewitts book is truly fascinating. He speaks with com-
plete authority. His book is indeed timely and thought provoking.
G.H. Bennett, University of Plymouth
Christopher Sandars, Americas Overseas Garrisons: The
Leasehold Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 354
pp., ISBN 0198296878 (hardback) 45.00
Sandars book, Americas Overseas Garrisons, charts the post-1945 development
of Americas 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 secu-
rity system overseas that evolved in response to European decolonization and
the emergence of the Cold War. Once established, either because of their inher-
ent 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,
conicts 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 rectied, 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 (hard-
back) 14.99
Who discovered America is an old chestnut: was it Columbus in 1492, the
Vikings, shermen from Europe, or a Chinese eet under Admiral Zheng in the
1420s? But now we can add a further element to the mythology of the devel-
opment of the American continent. The central premise of Rodney Broomes
book is that America was not named after the Italian navigator Amerigo
Vespucci (14541512) who had sailed on Columbuss 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 Kings
custom ofcer 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 nance for John Cabots 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 denitive 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
sufcient repetition, became the accepted narrative of how the continent
derived its name and Richard Amerikes role in the history of North America
was lost in the sands of time.
Is Broomes 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
a credible alternative candidate. History has probably erased the evidence
needed for Broome or any author to provide a denitive 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
Vespuccis Christian name or that Cabot should have chosen to name his dis-
covery 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 Sobels
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 Bristols involvement in the exploration
and development of the Terra Incognita in the West.
G.H. Bennett, University of Plymouth

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