[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]
On the humorous
creation that was way, way ahead of its time.
An extensive and entirely
straight-faced viral media campaign, an elaborate hoax which creates a
fictional character (a curmudgeonly historian), passes him off as a real
person, and notifies the public that he has gone missing and is being sought. A
ramping-up of that campaign as the release of said historian’s most extended
(but of course entirely fictionalized) work (a history of his native state of
New York) approaches, including equally fictional newspaper “responses” by
other (fabricated) locals who have known the historian and have information
about his whereabouts. And the deeply meta-textual and multi-level satire that
is the book itself, beginning with a straight-faced account by the (actual)
author of finding said book “in the chamber” of the historian, and publishing
it “in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind”; and continuing
into no less than three different prefaces To The Public, including one by
another fictional character (one of those who had published a newspaper notice)
about his experiences with the fictional historian.
Sounds pretty postmodern, doesn’t
it? Like a 21st-century literary equivalent to The Blair Witch Project (1999);
like, in fact, one of the new century’s most inventive and postmodern novels, Mark
Danielewski’s House of Leaves
(2000). But the book I’m talking about was published over two centuries ago, in
1809, and was authored (along with the
whole media hoax) by Washington Irving, a figure often associated instead
with some of the Early Republic’s most genteel and Anglophile images and texts.
Irving certainly deserves those associations in many ways, but a return to this
striking first major book of his, A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker,
can help us to see just how satirical and subversive our nation’s first
professional author (a somewhat debated but not inaccurate title) could be and
often was. And while the satire and subversion are most overt in the hoax and
the book’s equally fictional prefatory materials, I would argue that the whole
of the book comprises a more extended and in-depth, and certainly more
thematically and methodologically significant, effort to satirize and subvert
many of his period’s conventions of history-writing and understandings of the
world. This effort begins with Book I’s Chapter I, “Containing Divers Ingenious
Theories and Philosophic Speculations, Concerning the Creation and Population
of the World, as Connected with the History of New York,” and doesn’t let up
throughout the text’s seven Books and many centuries of world and local
history.
Those satires and subversions can
feel somewhat directly pointed at other historians and writers, and reading the
whole of the History is thus, while
fun (in an 1809 kind of way), not necessarily crucial for large numbers of 21st-century
Americans. But Irving was not done with Knickerbocker in 1809, and one of the
subsequent stories that he attributes to the character, “Rip Van Winkle” (first published
in an 1819 collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
[another fictional character]), illustrates just how fully he could turn that
satirical and subversive eye to more broadly and meaningfully American
subjects. Much of “Rip” is just funny and silly, from its opening portrait of
Rip’s extreme laziness and extremely hen-pecking wife to its folkloric,
myth-making (literally, as it leads in the story to local myths about
thunderstorms) central encounter with a dour Hendrick Hudson, his supernatural
bowling buddies, and the sleep-inducing potent potable that Rip imbibes in
their company. But Rip’s twenty-year nap coincides directly with the American
Revolution, so that the story’s images of one village and its society become
very overtly (if with no one clear point or argument) symbolic of American life
before and after the Revolution’s shifts and transformations. I’ll leave it up
to you—as I do with my students when I teach this story in my first-half
survey—to decide what you make of the story’s closing pages and images of
post-Revolution America; in any case, Irving’s story represents one of the
earliest literary attempts to grapple seriously with both the Revolution’s
effects and meanings and, most relevantly for our own (and every) era, the
nation that we were and are becoming through and after them.
Irving was one
of post-Revolutionary America’s first, and remains one of our most unique,
literary voices, and was as the viral media hoax illustrates ahead of his time
as a self-promoter and multi-layered meta-textual writer, and there’s a good
deal to be said for reading him for those reasons alone. But underneath the
fictional narrators and fictional commentators and humorous jabs at most
everything and everybody lies, especially in these early works, a commitment to
challenging and satirizing and reimagining some of our deepest beliefs and
ideas—a profoundly American project for sure. Next found footage studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?
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