Learning To Be American E-Book

Rubén Peinado Abarrio

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 464

Beschreibung

Few contemporary novelists have analysed American culture with the detail that Richard Ford has done in his trilogy on Frank Bascombe: 'The Sportswriter', 'Independence Day' and 'The Lay of the Land'. A triptych on the idiosyncrasies of American society set out by one of the nation's most meticulous storytellers. This book ventures into uncharted territory, revealing how the uniquely American flavour of Frank Bascombe's novels also emerges from peculiar settings and marginal characters, who propose alternative models of identity. This work rediscovers the essence of Ford's major novelistic project, revealing it as an infinite source of insights for any reader interested in the people, myths, and narratives that construct the American self.

Leseprobe

LEARNING TO BE AMERICAN

RICHARD FORD’S FRANK BASCOMBE TRILOGYAND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NATIONAL IDENTITY

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans

http://www.uv.es/bibjcoy

DirectoraCarme Manuel

LEARNING TO BE AMERICAN

RICHARD FORD’S FRANK BASCOMBE TRILOGYAND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NATIONAL IDENTITY

Rubén Peinado Abarrio

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Learning To Be American:

Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe Trilogy

And the Construction of a National Identity

©Rubén Peinado Abarrio

1ª edición de 2014

Reservados todos los derechos Prohibidasu reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-158-1

Imagen de la portada: Sophia de Vera Höltz

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de Valènciahttp://[email protected]

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTIONRichard Ford as an American Author

CHAPTER IThe Rhetorical Construction of a National Identity in the United States

CHAPTER IIMaking the Nation: Models and Performances of Americanness in the Bascombe Novels

CHAPTER IIIA Depthless Place: Configurations of Space and Visions of Hyperreality

CHAPTER IVIn the Midst of the Crowd: Economic, Political, and Social Considerations

CONCLUSIONS

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the help of a number of people. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Esther Álvarez López, for her guidance and encouragement; Dr. Eduardo San José Vázquez, for his friendship and continuous support; Dr. Brian Duffy, for his dedication to his students and his devotion to the work of Richard Ford; Céire Broderick and Sara Prieto, for their invaluable editorial advice; and Gracia, my friends, and my mother, for everything else.

Introduction

Richard Ford as an American Author

A project of cultural identity formation has been at the center of the literature of the United States since the inception of the country itself. Authors from very different backgrounds and traditions have struggled to articulate a coherent answer to the ontological question: what does it mean to be American? For many years, the WASP United States, with its unmarked categories of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, has embodied the default national identity. In the last fifty years, though, the growing importance, autonomy, and self-representation of minority and subordinate groups–reflected by an increasing presence and prestige of Latina/o, African American, Native American, gender, or queer studies in the academia–has destabilized the prevailing vision of Americanness as Christian, white, male, and heterosexual.

The anxiety of national identity as a site of struggle in the United States is perfectly epitomized by a controversy surrounding the election and presidency of Barack Obama: while the people of the United States have elected their first African-American president–and what an astonishing feat for a country where slavery was established (and institutionalized) for several centuries on the basis of racial difference–, conspiracy theorists have impudently claimed that Obama is not a natural-born US citizen. The fact that the legitimate President of the United States has been required to issue a birth certificate because of the color of his skin suggests the need to keep working for the eradication of totalizing and essentialized visions of Americanness that exclude alternative models of US citizenship. The present analysis, which questions how national identity is constructed in the work of a relevant contemporary author, aims to participate in that challenging project.

Since literary creation helps readers understand the workings of cultural identity as a construct, certain contemporary US authors have devoted the best part of their fiction to depicting a series of phenomena that either support or question the propagation of a predominant vision of national personhood. An increasingly multicultural and globalized society, the hegemony of liberal democracy as preferred model of societal organization, or the discourse of a transnational War on Terror inevitably permeate the work of any author interested in the United States, its present and its future, its territory, people, and ideals as potential narrative elements. This book will focus on one of those authors: a US writer whose main novelistic project partakes in the search for Americanness championed by some of the country’s most celebrated literary figures, from Washington Irving to Toni Morrison, with James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, and Philip Roth also featuring. Rather than a writer born in the United States, Richard Ford (Jackson, Mississippi, 1944) can be regarded as an Americanist. He is concerned with the peculiarities of his culture, and in his oeuvre, the history, narratives, rhetoric, myths, or communities of the United States stand out as main thematic interests.

Indeed, Ford defines himself as a patriot (Stevens n.d.), and the US flavor of his work has been referred to–although not explained in detail–by critics and scholars alike (Weitch 2006; Guagliardo 2001b: x). Furthermore, Ford has edited several volumes of fiction of the United States, such as The Best American Short Stories (1990) or The Granta Book of the American Long Story (1998), which suggests an interest in promoting the creative forces of the nation. At the same time, much as he has systematically rejected oversimplifying labels that aimed to describe his fiction in terms of Southern literature, minimalism, or male fiction, he has willingly self-fashioned as an American writer (Walker 2000: 2; McQuade 1990: 76).

Before he earned a reputation within the literature of the United States, Ford’s early production followed the formulae of regional writing–the neo-Southern A Piece of My Heart (1976)–or crime fiction–the hard-boiled The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). In 1983 his “Rock Springs” is included in Bill Buford’s “Dirty Realism” issue of Granta, along with stories by Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Bobbie Ann Mason, among others. The success of the volume and the inclusion of many of the authors anthologized by Buford in Kim A. Herzinger’s essay “On the New Fiction” (1985), devoted to a trend of minimalism in the United States, meant that Ford’s works were to be recurrently labeled as ‘dirty realist’ or ‘minimalist’ for the sake of critical reductionism. Nevertheless, The Sportswriter (1986)–finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction–, whose style and contents bear little resemblance to his previous works, would become Ford’s groundbreaking novel. Set in Haddam, New Jersey, over the Easter weekend of 1983, The Sportswriter, the first Bascombe novel, was conceived as the story of a decent man. Since his divorce and the death of his elder son, Frank Bascombe has abandoned a promising literary career in order to enjoy the uncomplicated life of the sports journalist. Tragedy looms over Frank’s banal existence as he tries to develop a stronger bond with his girlfriend, Vicki Arcenault, without becoming estranged from his ex-wife and children. In the course of the weekend, the protagonist and narrator will face the suicide of another member of Frank’s refuge from loneliness, Haddam’s Divorced Men’s Club. However, a genuinely optimistic character, Frank refuses to surrender to despair.

Ford’s next book will also be given a warm reception. Rock Springs (1987) is a collection of short stories more in keeping with the marginal characters and settings that came to define ‘dirty realism’ as a loosely articulated literary movement. Five years after Wildlife (1990)–a novel of formation reminiscent of the Nick Adams stories–Ford publishes his most acclaimed book hitherto, Independence Day (1995), the follow-up to The Sportswriter. This second Bascombe novel finds Frank living in accordance with the Existence Period, a self-created philosophy of life advocating modest expectations. Now a real estate agent with a new girlfriend, Sally Caldwell, Frank plans to spend the Fourth of July weekend visiting the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame with his son, Paul Bascombe. Ford was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for this novel, considerably more expansive and less character-focused than The Sportswriter.

The three novellas of Women with Men and the short-story collection A Multitude of Sins are published in 1997 and 2002, respectively, and explore the moral consequences of male-female relationships. In 2006, Ford publishes the novel that closes his Bascombe saga, The Lay of the Land, which depicts the tribulations of Frank as a realtor on the Jersey Shore during Thanksgiving, in the wake of the tumultuous 2000 election. Having substituted the Existence Period for the Permanent Period, a cancer-stricken Frank understands that the most significant part of his existence has already been lived. In the time covered by this novel, the lengthiest of the trilogy, Frank has married Sally–who nonetheless has temporarily abandoned him to start anew with her long-lost husband–and opened his own real estate company with Mike Mahoney, his Tibetan American business associate. Finally, Ford’s last novel to date, Canada (2012), set in border towns up and down the 49th parallel, offers the childhood memories of a character whose regular existence is tragically altered by a bank robbery committed by his parents.

The basis of Richard Ford’s status within US literature lies on the Bascombe trilogy. The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land read as a triptych that encompasses two decades of life in the United States. Interestingly, several features that explain why Ford has been described as a realist, such as verisimilitude or attention to detail in the everyday life of his characters, eventually contribute to the richness of Ford’s production regarding its attention to the social configuration of the contemporary United States. The verbosity of the narrative voice and the unabridged rendition of his often elusive train of thought would prevent the use of the label ‘minimalist’ to describe these three novels, where Ford’s prose is ornamented with long sentences, a gusto for groups of several compound adjectives and an abundance of subordinate clauses.

Along a narrative project spanning more than a thousand pages, readers are confronted with the wishes, objections, likes, and dislikes of a ruminative middle-class American, a suburban womanizer in the tradition of John Cheever, Saul Bellow, or John Updike, but rendered by Ford with remarkable sympathy. From the idiosyncratic perspective held by its articulate narrator and central character, the Bascombe narrative extensively deals with questions of national interest. With the exception of Canada, no other book by Ford equals the length and density of these novels, whose protagonist has become not only Ford’s signature character, but arguably one of the most charismatic recurring presences in contemporary US fiction besides Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom or Nathan Zuckerman. However, neither Frank Bascombe as a representative US everyman nor Ford’s depiction of a national identity has been studied in depth yet. Hence it is worth asking what elements of Ford’s literary world have interested scholars before presenting my contribution to the study of his magnum opus.

Although there are several monographs devoted to different topics of study of Richard Ford’s fiction, none of them focuses on the features that make him a recognizable US author–even though they usually mention its Americanness in passing. The first two comprehensive studies appear in the year 2000, with Ford as a well-established figure of the publishing industry. The general nature of Elinor Ann Walker’s Richard Ford and Huey Guagliardo’s Perspectives on Richard Fordis suggested by their very titles. The former is the first monograph on Ford and includes analyses of his works through Women with Men. The discussion ranges from his style to the use of space and geography in his fiction, with an emphasis on the remnants of a Southern tradition as perceived in his literary world. On the other hand, Guagliardo’s book gathers nine essays and one interview exploring, on the whole, the existential quests of Ford’s heroes. Guagliardo himself edits in 2001 Conversations with Richard Ford, a collection of reviews, articles, and interviews which for the most part either ignore or superficially mention specific cultural elements of his fiction, concentrating instead on Ford’s biographical details, his linguistic concerns, or the depiction of the alienation of human beings in modern societies.

On the other hand, Brian Duffy’s Morality, Identity and Narrative in the Fiction of Richard Ford (2008) is the first monograph that examines the three Bascombe novels. Relying on Ford’s self-fashioning as a moral writer, Duffy attends to the behavior of his protagonists, focusing on the role of narrative in their search for identity. It may be noted, though, that Duffy is the Ford scholar who puts the greatest emphasis on proper cultural elements of the American experience, since he stresses the influence of US-oriented economic policies, consumerism, or political confrontation on the predicament of Ford’s characters. Finally, Josep M. Armengol applies a gender perspective to the work of Ford; Armengol’s study, Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities (2010), accounts for the depiction of manhood in the narrative world of an author at whom accusations of writing male fiction have been occasionally leveled.

Certain elements of Ford’s fiction are rather explicitly connected to a wider US narrative–e.g., Independence Day or Thanksgiving as motifs in the second and third Bascombe novels, respectively–while others may pass unnoticed–e.g., Frank’s allusions to Tocqueville or Emerson in Independence Day. I argue that through those culturally-specific aspects Richard Ford offers an underlying discourse of Americanness that contributes to the cohesion of the Bascombe trilogy. The thematic and stylistic unity of this group of novels justifies an approach that regards them as a coherent novelistic enterprise developed over three decades–incidentally, and given the nature of Frank Bascombe, it is only too convenient that the Everyman’s Library has recently published the three novels in a single volume under the title “The Bascombe Novels” (2009). The study of this trilogy leads to significant conclusions regarding the construction of cultural identities in the United States.

The main narrative project of Richard Ford appears decisively informed by cultural phenomena conducing to a vision of Americanness. The Bascombe novels develop different–and usually competing–models of national identity. Due to Frank’s representation as an everyman, an analysis suggesting the deconstruction of such ideal of standard identity–with its implied racial, gender, sexual, or class features–and questioning its validity as an eternal narrative becomes not only relevant but necessary. I contend, therefore, that a study of the question of a national character in the fiction of Richard Ford results in important considerations regarding the discourses that constitute cultural identities, a concept worth examining: is it an essential feature or a creation aimed at fulfilling the agenda of particular interest groups?

The combination of textual analysis of the three Bascombe novels through close reading of specific passages with the interdisciplinary approaches of American Studies and their attention to diverse fields and cultural practices, provide a wide perspective on how Ford’s fiction is embedded in the project of fashioning a distinctive US individuality. In other words, my analysis exposes why Richard Ford’s narrative–and particularly his most successful group of novels–has been sensed to be genuinely American.

First, I review a number of myths and narratives that have contributed to the constitution of a ‘US personality,’ such as the American Adam, the rugged individualist, or the self-made man, and the principles they entail. In accordance with postmodern and poststructuralist positions, I describe nationality as a category akin to gender, race, or class in that it is both constituted by and recreated through socially-specific performances. Likewise, I address these mythical representations as useful elements in a complex process of rhetorical construction led by hegemonic powers with specific ideological goals camouflaged as the natural development of human societies.

In the Bascombe novels, Richard Ford resorts to those visions of Americanness in order to either mirror or subvert them through the figure of his American everyman, an embodiment of a mainstream citizenry. At the same time, the social world surrounding Frank Bascombe projects alternative national identity discourses that oppose the dominant status of Ford’s narrator. Primarily, I expose cultural identity in the Bascombe novels as a performative act where citizens–consciously or not–participate. At this respect, my analysis draws upon contemporary theories of performativity in the social sciences.

In my reading of the story of Frank Bascombe, I highlight space, rather than time, as the crucial category in the American experience. The concept of space is critical on its own, but also in connection with movement, mobility, and deterritorialization as important elements in the historical and geographical formation of the country. Through the figure of his real estate broker, Richard Ford will put those concepts to work. Moreover, the theories of hyperreality of two relevant twentieth-century philosophers, Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, presented vis-à-vis the society of the United States as depicted in the Bascombe novels, reveal Richard Ford’s understanding of his country as the realization of the hyperreal land of signs and surfaces characteristic of the postmodern episteme.

Richard Ford resorts to the mechanisms of liberal democracy as prevailing model in the Western world and the ensuing tension between the individual and institutionalized power to represent the plight of his central character: a man struggling to keep his autonomy in the face of contending forces. The different effects of a postindustrial capitalist society on Frank Bascombe and a number of secondary characters indicate who benefits or suffers from the workings of (neo)liberalism, a free-market economy, and consumerism. Finally, the discussion of historically-derived societal occurrences explicitly addressed or hinted at in Ford’s fiction–from politics in the United States as a site of ruthless confrontation, to the cultural specificity of narratives of violence or sports as practices with a social function–ascertains that the entire spectrum of elements relevant to the construction of a national identity in the story of Frank Bascombe is studied in detail.

Chapter I

The Rhetorical Constructionof a National Identity in the United States

Is there an American identity? This is obviously an intricate question. First of all, the terms are far from unequivocal. In this context, the adjective ‘American’ is meant to signify ‘of or relating to the United States’ and not to the American continent at large. However, a quick look at the title of the books quoted in this section speaks volumes about the frequency with which this metonymic substitution occurs. Needless to say, the identification of the whole continent with the cultural and social features commonly associated with the United States represents a hardly innocent mechanism. Quite the contrary, it betrays a hegemonic ideology of domination much in keeping with certain North American–even the term ‘North American,’ though more specific, may be rather problematic–imperialistic attitudes that will be discussed below.

The question of what a nation is seems itself controversial to say the least. In the Introduction to his edited volume Nation and Narration, postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha defines ‘nation’ as a construction, the conglomerate of myriad narratives regarding space, race, political affiliation, or justice, among other features (1990). Bhabha acknowledges his debt to Benedict Anderson and his coined concept of “imagined communities.” In Imagined Communities (1983), Anderson characterizes the nation as an imagined political community with sovereignty and finite, clearly-established boundaries. In other words, in the mind of the members of any given nation there exists an image of communion, regardless of the fact that they will never be in direct contact with the vast majority of their fellow citizens. Indeed, no amount of actual exploitation or inequality within that community erases the sense of horizontal comradeship projected by the nation.

Due to historical and geographical factors, the process of formation of the imagined community has been particularly conflictive in the United States. As part of its relentless progress, the country has been constantly metamorphosing. From an initial lack of unity and national feeling, a series of common interests would eventually foster a desire to make the original thirteen colonies strike as one, to adopt John Adams’ famous metaphor. But after the foundation of the United States, there still remained a long and conflicting journey toward the current fifty-state, multicultural nation. A process of unification that has rivaled the territorial annexation of the areas that compose modern US is the (ongoing) process of inclusion of its inhabitants.

Interestingly, Bhabha and Anderson’s approaches discard any determinism in the process of national constitution. Essentially, the nation is an abstraction, groups of people who do not know each other acting “as if they share a common substance,” as rhetoric and public culture professors Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites remark (2007: 99). But the result of this fiction is not innocuous: as Alys Eve Weinbaum reviews, according to some critical schools of thought, the nation “cohere[s] through ideological pressures that masquerade as ‘natural’ but are in fact self-interested, self-consolidating, and ultimately driven by capitalist and imperialist attitudes” (2007: 166). That nations are hardly essential entities is even more explicit when attending to the fact that a nation can be constructed retrospectively, as Garry Wills shows in his interpretation of Abraham Lincoln as the father of the narrative of July 4, 1776–instead of the passing of the Constitution–as founding moment (Wald 1995: 47). Likewise, such an anti-essentialist view would picture the inherited notions of America and the United States as the product of historical struggles won by some and lost by others.

Some considerations should be addressed to the qualified noun in the phrase ‘American identity,’ since ‘identity’ is not an easily definable term either. It appears commonly used as roughly a synonym for ‘character,’ and thus one may speak about the ‘national character’ of a particular population. For the sake of simplicity, this is mainly the usage it will receive in my work. Any modern notion of identity has necessarily to attend to the postmodern conception of the decentered and fragmented individual. In this context, Carla Kaplan understands identity as a construction, a performance, an “unending linguistic process of becoming” (2007: 125; emphasis in the original). This research project will show that ‘US identity’ is likewise a complex process integrated by different competing forces rather than a fixed essence. In accordance with this approach to the question of identity, I agree with Priscilla Wald’s useful description of national cultural identity as the “shared symbolic systems defined in relation to national frontiers–and in the terms of personhood articulated through narratives of that identity” (1995: 307).

In fact, in the context of the United States, its people and its history, it arguably makes more sense to talk about several ‘national identities’ that are performed instead of one single ‘national identity’ that is acquired and transmitted. At any rate, the realization that identity is not a natural given does not obscure the fact that people still present “a desire for identity” (Kaplan, C. 2007: 126; emphasis in the original). Indeed, this chapter will account for that urge in the inhabitants of the United States. As a matter of fact, the search for a national identity has been considered one of the features of the US character, regardless of the extent to which such identity may be different from others. It is the quest, even the recurrent obsession of thinkers and artists in the United States to define Americanness, which allegedly differentiates American culture from others.

This chapter does not aim to provide a detailed account of the history and society of the nation. Rather, it offers a series of images of America that have forged a narrative crucial to an understanding of US culture. Such images, transformed into symbols and myths, have been a recurrent source of national pride and anxiety, both fictional and real (but usually unattainable) ideals to live up to. Walter P. Metzger warns his colleagues about the risk, when writing about national character, of either relying too much on generalizations and topics, or dealing “with cultural facts and character traits as though they were freely interchangeable” (1968: 152). I will try to follow his advice. However, what really interests me is that, even though Metzger highlights the difficulties of the process, he does not deny the usefulness of defining national character. As the main body of my project will prove, Richard Ford’s narrative contributes to a tradition of fiction writers whose work is driven by the quest for American identity.

The main part of this chapter will be devoted to a review of the rhetorical creation of the American personhood as carried out by the hegemony, i.e., as white, male, native-born with Anglo-Saxon descent, and heterosexual.1 There is a clear justification for this focus. Namely, that the protagonist of the novels analyzed in this book, Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, largely responds to this mainstream symbolization of Americanness. But this does not mean that alternative versions of being American will be excluded. On the contrary, they will be referred to in order to challenge and enrich the study of the American Adam as epitomized by Frank, just like their presence in Ford’s literary world enhances its complexity and provides new perspectives on ‘What is to be American?’

E Pluribus Unum

America has been seen, first and foremost, as an idea. Literary critic and historian Leslie A. Fiedler puts it nicely when he remembers that America has existed for centuries at the same time as “the dream of Europe and a fact of history” (1960: xxii), an idea that also structures postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard’s 1986 study America. This conception echoes Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s formulation of the American identity as “a rhetorical (rather than a historical) issue,” as Sacvan Bercovitch summarizes it (1975: 132). Indeed, the United States is made up, a construction, and as such can be attacked through its symbols. The documents of the Revolutionary era–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution–, the flag, the national anthem, and several public speeches are all that unite the citizens of the nation. The deconstruction (or destruction) of this kind of symbols, either linguistic or physical–as the 9/11 terrorists clearly understood–, exposes the importance and, at the same time, the thinness of America as an idea. It is little surprise that, for Priscilla Wald, the United States is a nation founded in language. In her elegant phrasing, “America was a story that needed telling” (1995: 106). And as any student of literature would realize, the plot depends on who the narrator is.

The hegemony in charge of the creation and spreading of the rhetorical construction of the United States can be roughly identified with the WASP elite,2 a term that accounts for features of race (White), ethnicity or stock (Anglo-Saxon), and religion (Protestant). Apparently, an ‘M’ accounting for gender exclusivity in the acronym was not even necessary: ‘Male’ was understood. The WASP masternarrative is articulated around a number of myths, which, as Roland Barthes cautions, are a fiction aimed at “giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal” (1972: 142). These myths can be summed up as different incarnations of the Enlightened principles promoted by the Founding Fathers–those that have defined the United States as a nation: freedom, equality, property. Some of the myths derived from these principles are personal, individualized, such as the American Adam (no Eve in sight) or the pioneer (discovering and settling lands usually already populated), while others stem from the conjunction of the material reality of the land and a specific ideology, such as social and geographical mobility, freedom, and rugged individualism. Of course, these images do not emerge spontaneously but respond to various historical circumstances that have been used as the basis for American Exceptionalism. Although this is a controversial topic, even the most important names in a type of scholarship that has never had much prestige within American Studies acknowledge certain uniqueness in the American experience. Thus, Marxist scholar Michael Denning (1986) summarizes the main factors that, according to European Marxist philosophers, have signaled the exceptional nature of the United States: “The absence of feudalism, the free land of the frontier, the appearance of greater prosperity and mobility, the centrality of race and ethnicity, and the ideological power of ‘Americanism’” (361).

A number of problems, however, arise from the notion of American Exceptionalism. Not the most trivial is the realization that, as George Lipsitz asserts, every nation promotes one version or another of such Exceptionalism as part of its nation-building or nation-reinforcing process. National leaders invariably partake in “attributing a unique character and destiny to the national project as a way of making actions taken in their own self-interest seem predestined, necessary, and even inevitable” (2001: 17). The very notion of a sovereign state implies an unequivocal appeal to freedom, much as freedom has constantly been described as an attribute of the US character. Moreover, Lipsitz denounces that the notion of Exceptionalism has been followed by scholars such as Leo Marx as a dogma that presumes its existence instead of proving it (2001: 72). As a matter of fact, American Exceptionalism may be a source of anxiety for the nation and its population. The deeds of God’s chosen people cannot but fall short of expectations when confronted with the always complex contingencies of history. Even the greatest Americans understood this, which led, in Marcus’s phrasing, to the national drama represented by the betrayal of the American idea–a drama that has acted at the same time as the engine of American history (2006: 11). As Marcus aptly sums it up, the United States is so big that it demands its inhabitants to do big things (2000: 107).

Apart from purely historical circumstances, a wide range of elements contribute to the formation of a national identity and its cohesion and perpetuation through time: from the constitution of a national literary canon to the promotion of spelling and grammar texts that emphasize some linguistic idiosyncrasy of the peoples of the nation, to patriotic songs or the consecration of symbols such as the flag or the national anthem. These last elements, interestingly, give the people the opportunity to ‘perform’ citizenship. At this point, it may be useful to recover ‘performance’ as an important concept in cultural studies. Two theorists whose research has partially revolved around the exploration of performativity and its limits are Judith Butler and Homi K. Bhabha. Feminist scholar Judith Butler’s study on gender as performance, Gender Trouble (1990), convincingly argues that gender is not a biologically-derived but a socially-constructed category, recreated through iteration. Although Butler’s approach has been subsequently revised and contested by a number of critics–including Butler herself–for its failing to acknowledge the complexity of power relations inherent to any act of gender performance,3Gender Trouble has remained particularly successful within the application of performativity to different areas of humanities and social sciences.4

On the other hand, the work of postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha becomes more relevant to an analysis of performance in the construction of national identities. In “Of Mimicry and Man” (1984), Bhabha makes use of ‘mimicry’ to explain the flawed colonial process of mimesis in which the colonized subject repeats the behavior of the colonizer, and in doing so, disrupts the authority of colonial discourse by–sometimes unintentionally–exposing its artificiality. Related concepts from Bhabha’s always complex interrogations of identity are the–equally valuable to this volume–notions of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘stereotype,’ which delve into the questioning of the dominant culture. Grosso modo, Bhabha describes ‘hybridity’ in a colonial context as the process through which “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (1985: 156). In other words, Bhabha’s interest is drawn to the convergence of elements from antagonistic narratives–Western and Eastern, colonizer and colonized–and its destabilizing result: the terrorizing of authority “with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery” (1985: 157; emphasis in the original). Meanwhile, Bhabha’s approach to the stereotype highlights an ambivalent and contradictory phenomenon. Although the place of the Other is fixed and unchangeable in the dominant discourse, it must be compulsively repeated so as to ensure that it remains an easily identifiable element. Thus, Bhabha’s view of stereotypes can be linked to performance in that both work through repetition.

Taking into account the nature and scope of my work, I assert that there are valid reasons to apply the principles of performativity to the study of cultural or national identity.5 Gender, race, class, and nationality are all constructions that can be performed, while gender, racial, class, or nationality acts themselves constitute the identity they are meant to express. In fact, they are almost always interconnected categories, and I would argue that gender, racial, and class roles are a fundamental part of the construction of a national identity, as my project will show.

Among the many rhetorical constructs relevant to an understating of the United States reviewed in this chapter, one of the most celebrated individual myths is the (very obviously gendered) American Adam–a new personhood that allegedly responds to the reality of the New World. Eighteenth-century French-American author Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur offered one of the first and most extensive formulations of the new man, free from the past, bred in the American continent.6 By the invisible power “of the laws and that of their industry,” Americans “are melted into a new race” destined to “cause great changes in the world.” Crèvecoeur’s formulation of the American identity finds its particularities in the fact that his American Adam is free because he works hard–but for himself: “Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; his labor is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest” (1999: 188-89; emphasis in the original). US literature is largely responsible for, and offers valuable insight into, the construction of the American Adam. Although one is tempted to assume that literary authors of the United States might have tried to depict a new American personhood, Toni Morrison is more to the point as she is specific about what that personhood comprises: “For the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man” (1992: 14-15; emphasis in the original). This restrictive conception of personhood explains why African-American activist Malcolm X identified in his country an American Nightmare instead of an American Dream (Campbell and Kean 1997: 89).

Just like the American Revolution is a product of the ideas of the Age of Reason, the consolidation of the American Adam myth takes place in the context of the eighteenth-century confidence in man. The Lockean principle of natural rights–life, liberty, and property–will be basically transplanted by Thomas Jefferson–an Enlightened American if ever there was one, Benjamin Franklin aside–into the selfevident truths stated in the Declaration of Independence. However, the supposedly egalitarian spirit of this narrative should not hide the fact that the American Revolution was integrated from top to bottom by, and it aimed to preserve the interests of, planters and merchants–even though the power of the Republic would emanate from the governed. The rights defended by the Declaration of Independence (especially ‘property’), however natural they may sound according to the Enlightened rhetoric, solely express the law of nations formulated by privileged individuals. Actually, as Priscilla Wald (1995) asserts, it is difficult to ignore “the interconnections of freedom, property, and self-ownership” that have ruled American liberal thought to the point of equating ‘being’ with ‘having’ in the articulation of US personhood (311).

One of the most compelling eulogies of the new man America was destined to breed is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar.” This essay becomes a celebration of everything new and fresh, of endless imagination, freedom from the past and communion with nature, and at the same time, a condemnation of old ideas and received, mediated knowledge. Emerson’s spirit will be evoked by Walt Whitman, one of many US poets inspired by Transcendentalist thought. In his poem “Song of Myself,” he advises, “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand …. nor look through the eyes of the dead …. nor feed on the spectres in books” (1986: 26). It is the ideal of the American Scholar that John Jay Chapman seems to have in mind in his description of the tension between independent thought and the pressure of the opinion of the collective, graphically described as the “familiar moral terrorism of any majority, even a majority of two persons against one” (Ricks and Vance 1992: 360). This assertion sounds, of course, like an instance of an American phenomenon widely criticized by other nineteenth-century artists and philosophers like Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau: the mob–i.e., the group of people who lose their individuality when they act as a crowd.

As a prevention against the dehumanized mob, the rhetoric of the United States offers the figure of the American as the quintessential self-reliant citizen. In “The Conservation of Races,” African-American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois defines an American as someone reared “under the individualistic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the laissez-faire philosophy of Adam Smith” (2006: 6). Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatly mythologized presidents of the nation, advocated that true Americans did not vow blind allegiance to one or the other political affiliation, but they stood with what was “RIGHT” (therefore linking Americanness with a superior moral quality) (Wald 1995: 51). That inherent rightness of the individual had been asserted in the previous decade by Henry David Thoreau, who praised the person as a moral agent: “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right” (1993: 281). Leslie Fiedler may be referring to this thought when he links the United States with the myth of “The Good Bad Boy” as epitomized by the likes of Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, or Sal Paradise/Jack Kerouac: a young white male “crude and unruly in his beginnings, but endowed by his creator with an instinctive sense of what is right” (1960: 268).7 Actually, this higher discerning quality allegedly found in the American may be linked with American pragmatism. More of a practice than a proper philosophy, pragmatism stems from the commonlaw way of thinking described by conservative historian Daniel Boorstin, and privileges the wisdom provided by individual cases over any strong theoretical principle. The basic tenets of such a procedure are, along with an enlightened public policy, reason and natural justice, qualities that apparently abounded in the North American subcontinent (Boorstin 1965: 41-42).

As with many of the aspects, myths and ideals discussed in this chapter, there have been two sides to individualism in the United States. Sociologist Nathan Glazer (1992) identifies, on the one hand, individualism as selfishness and eagerness for power; and on the other hand, as the self-reliance and independence from government control epitomized by the pioneer spirit (293). Among an array of American myths, Daniel Boorstin signals “the loner moving west across the land” as the most idiosyncratic (1965: 51). The indisputable power of this image discloses its origin. Individualism flourished in an ideal context: the Romantic ethos of the democratic period, as expressed by the authors related to the movement that pushed individualism to the extreme: Transcendentalism. Often considered the only philosophical movement ever created in the United States, Transcendentalism was unequivocally optimistic in its principles. Although more movement than philosophy for some critics, Transcendentalism and the ideas it promoted are reflected in the works of some of the most important literary authors of the United States. In the words of professor Lawrence Buell, it contributed, in the post-Puritan, post-pioneer, utilitarian US, to a better climate for literature and the arts, defending a non-dogmatic experimentalism in which proficiency in traditional forms of expression was not as important as artistic energy and innovation (2006: xviii).

Transcendentalism, which derives from Unitarianism, defended the innocence of the soul and the intrinsic perfectibility of the world–as long as there is a context of liberty. In the United States, this optimism reached its peak in the 1850s, a decade that witnessed the flourishing of a myriad of reforming movements and social causes like the emancipation of slaves or the women’s rights movement–especially in New England, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, or Margaret Fuller, among others, were born. In his Introduction to one of the novels that better captured the period, Henry James’ The Bostonians, R.D. Gooder proverbially describes Transcendentalism as “puritanism with the devil left out” (1984: xiv). Thoreau and Emerson insisted on the importance of self-regeneration rather than political action as the key to the improvement of society (Diggins 1992: 459). It is little wonder that one of the most-often quoted essays written by Transcendentalism’s key figure, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is titled “Self-Reliance”–an important feature of the American Way of Life. In this text, Emerson shows a non-conformist spirit akin to the one discernible in “The American Scholar.” As the title suggests, he praises “the great man... who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (1951: 38). The self-reliant American, in a word, represents an attempt to escape the complacency of the community and a eulogy of self-sufficiency much in keeping with Transcendentalists’ radical individualism.

Paradoxical though it may seem, the nation has tended to emulate the allegedly individualistic character of its citizens. As a result, the United States is self-fashioned as a nation isolated from world politics.8 The Monroe Doctrine, established by Quincy Adams in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, stated that European powers could no longer interfere with the American continent. Interestingly, the US preserved through this policy its independence from European affairs while it ensured the rest of the American continent as its area of interest. ‘America for the Americans’ was the motto that epitomized this position. This doctrine and its consequences have been criticized as a thinly disguised imperialistic attitude.9 Although imperialism may apparently be against the origins and principles of the foundation of the United States, Alys Eve Weinbaum argues that “nation-building and imperialism ought to be seen as closely and historically allied” since both are focused on a “continuing reorganization of space, bodies and identities” (2007: 165). Imperialistic tendencies give rise to a problematic “complicity between the good life at home and criminal behavior elsewhere in the world” (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 193). Similarly, George Lipsitz denounces that Western world consumers–with US citizens at the head–enjoy lower prices because of the exploitation of workers in El Salvador, China or Bangladesh (2001: 13).

The logical next step in the Monroe Doctrine would be the notion of American Manifest Destiny, a blending of ideas present in the continent’s imagery since the pilgrims’ period and first articulated by John L. O’Sullivan, founding editor of Democratic Review (Boorstin 1965: 273). In a combination of American Exceptionalism and the natural right to freedom, it was established that America’s destiny–decided by God–was to expand westward. This rhetorical construction echoes Puritan minister John Winthrop’s famous formulation of the original pilgrim community as “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people... upon us” (1999: 26). A narrative alluded to by virtually every president of the United States, American Manifest Destiny found in Abraham Lincoln one of its greatest promoters: ‘Honest Abe’ acknowledged the special role of America as “the last best, hope of earth” (quoted in Carroll and Noble 1984: 222). The prophetic nature of America as a New Jerusalem was highlighted by the New England clergy and implies, in Bercovitch’s explanation, that “to be an American is to assume a prophetic identity; to have been an American is to offer a completed action that makes destiny manifest” (1975: 99, 121).

Of course, the belief in US’s self-improvement that guided the nation throughout the nineteenth century was not completely free from stains. Slavery was likely the most difficult to ignore. A seed of moral uneasiness for the country, slavery was then opposed by an increasingly large number of abolitionist associations. Moreover, the ‘peculiar institution’ represents the most salient example of the United States as a racialized nation. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986) argue that “US society is racially structured from top to bottom” (54)–an interpretation that uncovers racism as a key social mechanism aimed at maintaining the status quo (Lipsitz 2001: 78). Black people, objects of institutionalized racism in the United States, are the most obvious example of a racialized group, but not the only one. Thus, the social construction of the Indian from the time of the first New England settlers deemed Natives as evil within the specific context of economic growth and competition over land (Takaki 1993: 39). Similarly, Asian Americans were commonly considered an unassimilable ethnic group and labeled as “forever foreign” (Weinbaum 2007: 169). With these circumstances in mind, a question ensues: who is included in and excluded from the Constitution’s ‘We the People’?

As Carroll and Noble agree, “the Constitution institutionalized the political power of the white male establishment” (1984: 129). The birth of the United States as a nation ignored the status of Native Americans, Africans and their descendants, women, and subsequently, Asian Americans or Latinos/as. For instance, legal decisions like the 1854 People v. Hall case are used by Ethnic Studies professor Ronald Takaki to prove that blacks, Natives, and Chinese people shared a common marginalized racial status in the United States (1993: 206).10 Long before the large wave of late-nineteenth-century immigration from Europe, New England towns represented a prime example of exclusionary sites in America. Preaching freedom and freedom of speech was not always an easy task during the seventeenth century, as Salem pastor Roger Williams realized after being expelled to Rhode Island–a destiny shared by religious leader and advocate of Antinomianism Anne Hutchinson, who dared to question Puritans’ tendency to decide what was good and what was evil.

It is no wonder that New England communities are described by urban historian Carl Abbott as “closed corporations, freely governed by their ‘members’ but unwelcoming to outsiders” (1992: 118). This is the spirit that made possible the infamous Salem trials, which epitomized a typically American battle between freedom and fear (particularly, fear of difference). In fact, Williams and Hutchinson (like those representatives of an alternative Americanness who will be commented on below) offer a version of freedom with a notable tradition in the United States: freedom as dissent. In this same vein, the tradition of the Puritan Jeremiad implies a denunciation of social maladies. The spirit of the Revolution is indebted to this tradition. In fact, this revolutionary character may be seen as the source of the violent American experience described by social and literary commentators. Thus, according to D. H. Lawrence, the American spirit tends to rebel and fight, and in his analysis of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, he detects an idiosyncratic notion of democracy that implies violence (1951: 63). Another literary critic and historian, Leslie Fiedler, offers a similar assessment. To him, terror and violence, whose location gradually transferred from nature to society, characteristically belong to the literature of the United States. Quoting the words of author Nathaniel West, he admonishes readers that “in America violence is idiomatic, in America violence is daily” (1960: 463).

Suburban life may be the latest incarnation of the US unwelcoming spirit, a place where, journalist Bill Geist amusingly warns, “if you’re walking in your residential neighborhood and not wearing a Walkman and a jogging suit, you’re subject to suspicion. People call the cops” (2003: 154). For commentators like philosopher Horace Kallen, the exclusionary rhetoric of the hegemony in the US is radically anti-American as it ignores the democratic principles the nation is allegedly built upon. Focusing on immigrants, Kallen goes to the extent of maintaining that their presence did not transform the United States; rather, it was the nation that changed its principles so that immigrants could no longer be linked to the American Way of Life (Wald 1995: 243-44). In dealing with immigrants, this exclusionary narrative draws attention to a (constructed) common past of ‘the People’ as white in order to reinforce an exclusive national identity. The access to that common past is banned either to immigrants and non-WASP groups in general. A clear example of how that exclusionary discourse works comes from the mid-nineteenth century, when Judge Roger B. Taney resorted to Manifest Destiny rhetoric in order to assign Indian Removal a character of inevitability (Wald 1995: 43).

The exclusionary narrative within the land of the free–summarized by Lauren Berlant (1993) as “the continued and linked virulence of racism, misogyny, heterosexism, economic privilege, and politics in America” (549)–may well be the most salient of several contradictory features and competing forces in the history of the United States. I have stated above that US hegemonic forces have universalized the self by providing it with the features of the dominant class–namely, the WASP culture. This illusion of a universal national identity has been challenged by scholars and artists who belong to marginalized minority groups, such as Gloria Anzaldúa or Audre Lorde. They represent different instances of a pluralistic and multicultural view of a country of new subjectivities, speaking from marginal positions and giving voice to difference and otherness. Anzaldúa is the founder of Border Theory, which focuses on the marginal person living in between different worlds: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out.... As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me.... I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos” (2007: 102-03). Both Anzaldúa and Lorde transcend the classic opposition ‘male vs. female’ in their understanding that an analysis of social relations of power cannot ignore categories like class or sexuality.

These scholars of an alternative Americanness try to subvert the ideological construction of the Other–from black slaves to Chicanos/as to Muslim culture–as a threat to the ‘civilization’ symbolized by the United States. Other foci of resistance would range from First Lady-to-be Abigail Adams’ modest attempts to convince her husband that the logic of Revolutionary rhetoric should also apply to women, to the political activism of W. E. B. Du Bois, who converted slaves into the ‘real’ Americans, while masters acted as the un-American who put national principles (particularly, freedom) at risk (Wald 1995: 17, 89). Abraham Lincoln’s view would be similar to that of Du Bois: an understanding of the narrative of the birth of the United States as an evolution from subjugation to liberty logically implies that slavery represents an un-American institution (Wald 1995: 50). Even some racist mores worked unintentionally toward this positive description of non-WASP groups. For example, those who considered the black population to be a tabula rasa over which whites could impose values and norms, were inadvertently evoking the symbol of America as an unwritten Paradise assigned a meaning by the pilgrims. Consequently, they were identifying blacks with America itself.

The contradictions in the construction of a national identity in the United States are many and varied. D. H. Lawrence reminds readers that the same Benjamin Franklin who sprinkled his texts with moral lessons acted immorally toward Native Americans (1951: 24-25). Thomas Jefferson, a key figure in the Age of Reason and the man who drew up the nation’s most highly rewarded document, the Declaration of Independence, asked for the extermination of Natives–unless they were “civilized” first, Ronald Takaki specifies (1993: 47)–and died in Monticello in the company of his slaves. The members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association crusaded for white supremacy (Carroll and Noble 1984: 295), while male black activists repeatedly ignored the rights of women when their sole aim was to ensure the acknowledgment of their rights as African Americans.

Regarding contradictions, Toni Morrison convincingly argues that freedom is highlighted, if not created, by slavery. As a result, it is through the Other (defined by her as ‘Africanism’) that the American self knows itself as free, desirable, powerful, historical, innocent, progressive–in a word, what the Other is not (1992: 52). This example of the process of racialization in nation-formation reveals the “historical reciprocity” between nationalism and racism commented upon by French philosopher Étienne Balibar (quoted in Weinbaum 2007: 168). With this in mind, it is easier to understand that US citizenship has been selectively granted. Apart from being a racialized term, citizenship has to be studied in relation to social categories like gender, sexuality, and class (not to mention a ‘natural right’ as property). Hence, Jefferson required of the members of the Cherokee nation that they modified their understanding of social organization and connection with the environment in order to become individual landowners. In the family units presented as the precondition to achieve citizenship, farming would be the men’s role while the women engaged in domestic labor (Wald 1995: 25). Accordingly, US citizenship depends on notions of race and class, but also of gender and sexuality, which fits Hariman and Lucaites’ description of a “heteronormative citizenship” (2007: 77), exposing at the same time the nation’s system of compulsory heterosexuality.

How has mainstream US responded to the alternative visions of the ideal American? In a nation markedly multicultural but with little cultural exchange, an assimilationist project has been the recurrent answer. The myth of America as a melting pot–a concept named after Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot–represents this urge to transform cultural diversity into a homogeneous society. The origin of the myth can be traced back to the first Dutch and Swedish settlements by the Hudson River bank, and it achieves full significance with the relentless immigration that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the first transoceanic voyage of the Pilgrims may be the prototype of the melting-pot tradition: a community changing their individuality, making themselves American and adopting a new identity around 150 years before the nation was legally conceived (Wald 1995: 249).

Assimilation has been theorized by several US presidents. According to Woodrow Wilson’s essentialist position, the ideals embodied by the nation precede the nation itself, and therefore, its inhabitants. Consequently, the principles that rule life in the United States, more important than any racial or ethnic difference, transform and absorb the new arrivals into a new individuality, a new personhood (Wald 1995: 200). Amalgamation becomes a requirement rather than an option in the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt. The ontological binary opposition he articulates forces one to either become American (i.e., embrace the WASP tradition) or face being “nothing at all” (quoted in Wald 1995: 204). However strong the melting-pot ideology was, an unprecedented arrival of immigrants, along with a constant presence of African Americans or Native Americans, inevitably threatened to render impossible the articulation of a homogeneous national identity. Accordingly, processes of social control needed to be implemented in order to fight a multicultural reality.

For instance, the concept of the traditional family, characterized by strict gender roles and reproduction, is crucial to the process of assimilation. One need only remember Jefferson’s requirements for the admission of Native Americans as US citizens: they primarily had to observe the nation’s heteronormative hierarchy. So in many respects Americanization begins at home. Ronald Takaki defends that in such a process, consumption plays a key role (1993: 300)–it is no wonder then, that in the US citizenship and ownership come hand in hand.11 Immigrants have faced legal self-creation from the implementation of the Naturalization Act of 1906 onward, with the change of their name as the ultimate proof of the performative power of language. Self-definition in the new country is granted through a series of legal procedures and requirements (Wald 1995: 248). Interestingly, this process of self-fashioning was not unique to immigrants. As Boorstin (1965) recalls, members of the transient communities moving westward were given new names on the spot, depending on a range of details–from physical to personality features. This process reinforced the idea of Americans as a people “cut off from their family past, whose very nomenclature was of their own making” (91).

All in all, despite the existence of moral blots such as slavery and the systematic exclusion of non-WASP population–circumstances that stained many a conscience and cast an ominous shadow over the virtue of the whole nation–the United States never ceased to be considered a land of optimism. In some sense, the exultant ideal of the American Scholar goes back to the Puritan tradition characterized by Sacvan Bercovitch as exalting “will above intellect, experience above theory, precept, and tradition” (1975: 21). Bercovitch defines the spirit of Emerson’s thought as hopeful and full of optimism (1975: 178-80), an attitude that will come to be identified with the nation at large. Fiedler describes America as a land in which optimism has gradually replaced orthodox Puritanism as the people’s chief effective religion (1960: xxii). Inasmuch as “tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic societies”–in film critic Robert Warshow’s argument–“America... is committed to a cheerful view of life” where happiness “becomes the chief political issue” (Ricks and Vance 1992: 259).

One of the proponents of this optimistic life stance seems to be Walt Whitman’s poetic persona, who remarks in the prose introduction to Leaves of Grass