August 8, 2012: Not That Innocent

[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the third in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the double-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.

I haven’t done an exhaustive survey or anything, but it seems to me that most social or political satire is both directed at a particular target and driven by an earnest embrace of some alternative idea. Take perhaps the most famous satirical work of all time, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729): seems to be suggesting that the solution to the problems of Irish poverty and hunger is to eat Irish babies; is really satirizing English bigotry toward the Irish; and so is genuinely (if of course very subtly) pro-Irish instead. Similarly, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) satirizes virtually every aspect of war (even a war as seemingly noble as World War II) while sympathizing quite overtly and poignantly with its soldier protagonists; Heller’s satire would to my mind be entirely unsuccessful if we didn’t come to care about those soldiers. Certainly there are satirical voices which take on all comers (The Onion comes to mind), but for the most part, I’d say that social satire needs the accompanying earnest advocacy to function.

Mark Twain’s most famous character, Huck Finn, proves that point quite precisely: Huck is painfully earnest, almost always unable to recognize humor at all (for example), and it is through that earnest perspective that Twain creates his satires of numerous aspects of antebellum (and postbellum) Southern and American society. But Twain’s first book, the travelogue Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869, revised from 1867 newspaper pieces), is much more confusingly and crucially all-encompassing in its satirizing. At first glance Twain seems to be satirizing the reverent tone and attitude of typical travelogues, and thus too the Old World cultures which demand such reverence; but at the same time, his American travelers, including the author himself, come in for just as much ridicule, most especially for their ignorance of these other cultures and their tendency toward pro-American provincialism. If both communities are ultimately, equally foolish and silly, though, it’s fair to ask whether the satire has a point.

Innocents is unquestionably a messy and sprawling book (reflecting at least in part its origins in those many different newspaper pieces), but I’d argue that its satire is in fact pointed precisely in its multi-directionality. After all, one of the central goals of any satirist must be to create discomfort, to force an audience out of any and all comfort zones and into the space where established narratives or norms are challenged and made literally laughable. While Heller’s book (for example) certainly does so when it comes to any and all pro-war narratives, it might at the same time make already anti-war readers more comfortable, reinforce their existing views and ideas. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (again, having an earnest point can make the satire of other points more successful), but there’s something to be said for a satire that doesn’t let any of us get too comfortable in where we are or what we believe. And that’s doubly true for a travel satire—whether we think home is always the best or are just constantly searching for somewhere better, we’re likely to be over-simplifying both places, and Twain’s book forces us to push beyond those simplifications and continue our journey in a more complex perspective.

Next Americans abroad tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?

8/8 Memory Day nominee: Bob Smith, the physician and longtime alcoholic whose founding of Alcoholics Anonymous has not only helped many millions of Americans, but has helped change our cultural attitudes toward addiction.

August 7, 2012: Quiet but Dangerous

[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. This is the second in the series. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the controversial British novel that captures the too-often-minimized dark side of America abroad.

One of the toughest things about bridging the gap between academic and public American Studies scholarship is the fact that in many ways academics and the public can seem to have entirely different understandings of American history. Take 20^th century foreign policy, for example. It seems to me that the popular narrative focuses almost entirely on the wars, and on the best intentions or goals behind them; while the less triumphant efforts in Korea and Vietnam can’t be elided from that narrative, they can for example be contextualized as part of the Cold War, and thus still linked to sympathetic and even inspiring ideals (the spread of democracy, containing communism, and so on). An academic narrative, on the other hand, might focus instead on the broader and much less easily idealized spread of US intervention and influence throughout the 20^th century: highlighting Nicaragua alongside World War I, Guatemala alongside the Korean War, the Dominican Republic alongside Vietnam, and so on. In this analysis, while America might have had some good intentions around the world, it has for at least a century been all too willing to pursue any and all means (including much more shadowy and even illegal ones) to achieve its international objectives.

Obviously (to anybody who has read this blog or knows me, at least) I’m in favor not of revision so much as of addition, of expanding and complicating and strengthening our national and public narratives as much as possible, including as much of the history and story as we can, engaging as fully as we’re able with all the events and details. What we do with the expanded narratives, how we interpret and analyze them, what meaning we make of them for the present and future, are entirely and crucially open questions—but they can’t be answered in any meaningful way if they aren’t proceeded by that process of addition. Just as obviously, I hope and think that scholarly writing—such as, you know, on blogs—can contribute to that process. But the truth is that creative and artistic works can do so as well, and with an intimacy and immediacy and ability to speak to their audience that certainly distinguish them from even the most compelling works of scholarship. And when it comes to these questions of American foreign policy and interventions, of their best intentions and their far more complex and often much darker sides, I don’t know of any better or more revealing work than a British novel, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955).

Greene’s novel, based in large part on his experiences as a war correspondent in French Indochina in the prior few years, is many things: a somewhat conventional love triangle; a pseudo-autobiographical narrative of a middle-aged British war correspondent (Thomas Fowler); an interesting sociological depiction of early 1950s Vietnam. But its most famous and controversial element is the title character, an idealistic yet shady young American diplomat named Alden Pyle; Pyle seems genuinely to want the best for Vietnam, yet (spoilers ahead!) later in the novel is willing to explode a car bomb (and kill many civilians) in order to push the country in the direction he prefers. In Greene’s fictional world, the British journalist then conspires to assassinate the American diplomat, and perhaps helps save Vietnam from further such actions; in reality, on the other hand, America took over from France and Britain as the dominant international presence in Vietnam, and the next two decades are, well, history. And while Greene’s novel thus has a great deal to say about its particular setting and issues, those focal points can at the same time help us engage with more than a century of sometimes quiet but always significant American foreign interventions.

Next Americans abroad tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?

8/7 Memory Day nominee: Ralph Bunche, the pioneering political scientist and mediator whose efforts in Palestine earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, one of many signal achievements in his inspiring life.

August 6, 2012: Two Talented, Troubling Americans

[This week we’re hosting a Chinese exchange student as part of a program at the boys’ elementary school, so I thought I’d return the favor and focus in the week’s series on interesting representations of Americans abroad. First up is a repeat of a post from this time last year. Your responses, and other suggestions and nominations, very welcome for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On two very complex and important 20^th century American characters.

Writing about Matt Damon in yesterday’s post got me thinking about what I consider his two best film performances, both as reflections of his truly remarkable range and just as two impressively complex and rich character creations: Tom Ripley, the con artist protagonist of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); and Jason Bourne, the fugitive former-assassin protagonist of The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). There’s plenty that could be said about each of these films, including the very impressive supporting casts (Jude Law has never been as good as he is in Ripley and the Bourne films almost made me like Julia Stiles, to cite two particularly impressive examples); similarly, each character was created by an interesting and underrated late 20^th-century American novelist whose works still have a great deal to offer in their own right (Ripley appeared in four novels by Patricia Highsmith, whose ground-breaking psychological thrillers also included Strangers on a Train [1951]; Bourne in three novels by Robert Ludlum, whose dense espionage thrillers without question inspired future bestsellers such as Tom Clancy). But for this blog, what’s most interesting about both Ripley and Bourne is how much they connect to and yet complicate and critique dominant American narratives.

Tom Ripley, at least in the film’s representation of him (while I’ve read both Highsmith and Ludlum, it was a while ago and for this post I’m going with my much clearer memories of the films; I’ll also be spoiling those films a good bit, so feel free to stop here if you haven’t seen ‘em!), has a great deal in common with one of the most iconic American fictional (in every sense) characters: Jay Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Ripley is born into poverty but will do whatever it takes to become wealthy, successful, and (perhaps most importantly) accepted by the most elite and upper-crust of his countrymen; also like Gatsby, Ripley is most talented precisely at performance, at inhabiting every aspect of the character and world he is continually creating. While both men’s stories end with a great deal of death and destruction, it’s certainly true that Ripley is a far more overt cause of that chaos than Gatsby; Ripley, in short, is willing to murder in order to keep up his performances, while Gatsby’s undeniable culpability lies more in his various forms of cheating (financial, adulterous) and his sins of omission. Yet you could make a convincing case that Gatsby is nearly as reprehensible as Ripley, and that the main difference lies in the fact that we see Gatsby through the eyes of Fitzgerald’s novelist-narrator Nick Carraway, a man who both falls under Gatsby’s charm and who (to an extent) shares Gatsby’s culpability in the novel’s final events; our vision of Ripley, unmediated by such a narrating voice, makes it easier to judge his most heinous actions for the atrocities that they really are. And as destructive as both men’s ambitions and desires ultimately are, it would also be important to keep in mind how fully they line up with some of America’s defining narratives, most especially the self-made man and the prominent place he occupies in the American Dream.

Jason Bourne’s American connections (again, in the film version of the character) are in many ways much more explicitly contemporary, more directly in conversation with national narratives and realities post-9/11. The series’ engagement with those contemporary and political issues has been present since the first film but was ramped up in each subsequent sequel; the villain played by the great David Strathairn in Ultimatum represents a particularly clear stand-in for American “war on terror” policies and practices and their logical yet terrifying endpoints. Moreover, both Bourne’s complicity in those extremes and horrors and his gradual but absolutely determined extrication of himself and his prior identity from them can be read across the three films as a powerful argument for how the nation as well can and must leave behind what we’ve become in the decade since 9/11. Yet on another level Bourne connects to a centuries-old and archetypal American hero, the kind of character described by literary critic R.W.B. Lewis as “the American Adam”: these Adamic heroes, who originated as many American literary images did with James Fenimore Cooper (and specifically with his recurring hero Natty Bumppo), seem to exist as innocent and largely self-made“new men,” outside of (or at least not ultimately bound by) the limits of history and society. Bourne is not the first character who can be said to reveal the fundamental flaws in and even impossibility of such an Adamic identity—Lewis rightly notes that Gatsby can be read in precisely that way—but he is a particularly compelling case: an Adamic hero who comes to realize that he has been instead an anti-hero, and must fight to escape and destroy that anti-heroic identity and the myths that come with it.

Both Ripley and the Bourne films are great entertainments on their own terms, but as with all of the best art, they also echo and engage with and amplify ongoing narratives and images, with our ideas about who we are and with what those stories often leave out or gloss over. And that’s a very impressive talent for sure. Next Americans abroad tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses or suggestions of works about Americans abroad?

8/6 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two 20^th century figures who took Americans to places they had never been before, Matthew Henson and Lucille Ball.

August 4-5, 2012: Crowd-Sourcing American Siblings

[This American Studier’s sister turns 30 this week—which makes this American Studier feel really old, but that’s another story—and in honor of that occasion I’m featuring a series on interesting American siblings. Today’s is the latest crowd-sourced post, featuring responses and ideas from various fellow American Studiers. Add yours below!]

Matt Goguen nominates the Baldwin brothers, Alec, Daniel, William and Stephen Baldwin, who are perhaps especially interesting in their very different political perspectives.

Irene Martyniuk thinks about sports siblings, wondering what leads to their shared successes: “Does raw talent run in families or do they tend to practice more because they are siblings? Some have the same body types, so it makes sense, but others, like the Williams sisters, are quite different, but are still crazy successful.” And later in the week Irene responds to the James brothers post by mentioning another pair of close, different, but also entirely interconnected siblings: the Hardy boys.

Jeff Renye shares this great site on the Grimke sisters and the Philadelphia abolitionist event.

Next series starts on Monday,

Ben

PS. Interesting American siblings you’d highlight? Other responses to the week’s posts?

8/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two unique and very talented 20^th century American artists and voices, Louis Armstrong and Robert Hayden.

8/5 Memory Day nominees: Another tie, this one between two pioneers without whom American history (as a discipline and as a narrative) would be significantly different, Mary Ritter Beard and Neil Armstrong.  

August 3, 2012: Wholly American

[This American Studier’s sister turns 30 this week—which makes this American Studier feel really old, but that’s another story—and in honor of that occasion I’m featuring a series on interesting American siblings. Please share your own ideas and suggestions for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the half-siblings who connect to both the worst and the best of contemporary America.

Given the amount of time I spend reading, thinking, and writing about contemporary political issues and debates and narratives—not in this space necessarily, but on my Facebook page for sure, and in many other aspects of my life—it’d be unquestionably hypocritical of me to complain about the over-politicization of, well, everything in 21^st century American life. And I likewise know too much about the political battles in our past to argue for some idyllic golden age when everybody just got along. But on the other hand, I do believe that a variety of factors—24-hour news cycles, cable news, the internet, and other new media chief among them—have brought us to a somewhat unprecedented point, where virtually everything and everybody can and usually do become fodder for political battles. And one of the most convincing arguments for that idea would have to be politicization of numerous members of President Obama’s extended family.

Obviously siblings and other family members have been part of politics for a good while—just ask Billy Carter—but in most of those cases the family members were explicitly connected to (and even part of, in Billy’s case) the politician’s administration. For Obama, on the other hand, all of his living relatives are extended family in the most literal sense—the half-sister that is his mother’s daughter by her Indonesian second husband, for example; the half-siblings that are his father’s children by his Kenyan second wife, for another—and his relationships with them are (if present at all) partial and fragmented, not at all part of his administration or life in Washington, and extremely complex. So when these distant and complex relationships are used as political fodder, as they have been far too many times in the last four years, it can’t help but feel like one of the worst sides of our contemporary politics and society—the way in which fraught and difficult questions without easy answers or simple narratives are not only not treated as such, but are instead reduced to just another case of whose narrative can win over public opinion, no matter how far it may be from any meaningful truth.

If Obama’s half-siblings thus represent some of our worst current trends, though, they can also exemplify some of the best of American identity and community. I’ve written before here about Obama’s first and best book, Dreams from My Father, and in that post I mentioned the book’s complex and compelling engagement with the cross-cultural identities of not only Obama’s parents and himself, but also of two particular half-siblings with whom Obama has grown somewhat close: Auma and Roy. In many ways, all three of them, Obama and these two half-siblings, have inherited the book’s titular dreams from their father Barack, and all three have both struggled with their resulting mixed American identities and found their own peace with who they are and what their heritage has contributed and where they go from there. If anything, as Obama himself recognizes and articulates eloquently in the book, Auma and Roy represent a 21^st century cross-cultural American identity and community even more fully than does he, embody the newest generation of this unifying, complex, and vital national experience. So we should in fact include these Obama half-siblings in our national narratives, but for the best and most communal, not the worst and most divisive, reasons.

Crowd-sourced post on the week’s topics and on any other interesting American siblings this weekend, so I’d love to hear your thoughts and nominees!

Ben

PS. You know what to do! Last chance before the weekend post!

8/3 Memory Day nominee: John Scopes, the Tennessee schoolteacher whose teaching of evolution—and more exactly whose willingness to take a stand in defense of that teaching—helped change the course of American education, law, and history, and inspired many cultural representations.

August 2, 2012: Two Small Boys

[This American Studier’s sister turns 30 this week—which makes this American Studier feel really old, but that’s another story—and in honor of that occasion I’m featuring a series on interesting American siblings. Please share your own ideas and suggestions for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the influential and inspiring relationship between America’s most talented pair of brothers.

Of all the topics I’ve researched, pondered, and analyzed over the last five years, I don’t think I’ve spent anywhere near as much time thinking about any one of them (or maybe even all of them combined) compared to the relationship between two close (in age and every other sense) brothers. Aidan and Kyle are 15.5 months apart (I know I should just say 16, but no, those two additional weeks count!), and as far as I can tell, few if any aspects of their young lives (at least until Aidan leaves for college) are going to be untouched by that fact, and by the complex interconnections it has already produced and continues to produce. Obviously I have my fondest hopes for what that will mean (exemplified right now by the way they hold hands as they run into summer camp together in the morning) and my scariest worries about it (illustrated by their seeming inability to go more than half an hour without hitting each other), but no matter what, this is clearly going to be a defining relationship and influence in each of their lives.

I’m not trying to put too much pressure on the boys, but you know who else were born almost exactly 15.5 months apart? William and Henry James, the brothers whose influences and talents extended into virtually every aspect of late 19^th and early 20^th century American and British society and culture. Perhaps the older William’s far-reaching investigations into medicine, psychology, philosophy, and religion impacted more conversations and communities than did the younger Henry’s work as an author of fiction, drama, travel writing, literary criticism, and autobiographies; but just as those branches of the sciences and social sciences would not have been the same without William’s impacts, so too were American and English literature and culture profoundly impacted by Henry’s works and ideas, style and themes. While I have no doubt that the brothers would gladly have quarreled over whose legacy was more significant, probably while at the same time making the case for each other’s importance, the truth is that the combination is more impressive, and more accurate to their collective legacies, than the competition.

Perhaps the most overt and poignant tribute to that brotherly combination was written by Henry himself, in the opening chapters of his memoir A Small Boy and Others (1913). William had died a few years earlier, in 1910, and while any memoir is likely produced by a number of psychological factors, there’s no question that his brother was heavily on Henry’s mind as he wrote this one. The opening chapter, in fact, begins this way: “In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense of some of the others.” It’s not at all clear at this point, nor for many chapters, whether the titular small boy is Henry or William; and since the text continues to focus on the pair of them for many more chapters (indeed more than half of the chapters), it could with just as much accuracy be titled Two Small Boys. Boys whose lives and legacies would likewise always and compellingly be interconnected.

Final siblings tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Next to last chance to respond or highlight other siblings and be part of the crowd-sourced post!

8/2 Memory Day nominee: James Baldwin, one of America’s most unique, multi-talented, eloquent, and uncategorizable writers, cultural figures, activists, and icons.

August 1, 2012: Sister Activism

[This American Studier’s sister turns 30 this week—which makes this American Studier feel really old, but that’s another story—and in honor of that occasion I’m featuring a series on interesting American siblings. Please share your own ideas and suggestions for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]

On the two sisters who exemplified the courage and power of American abolitionism.

As I’ve argued before in this space, it might seem from our 21^st century perspective as if it were relatively easy or at least didn’t take a great deal of courage to be an abolitionist in mid-19^th century America, but that perception would be entirely wrong. William Lloyd Garrison being dragged through the streets of Boston is only the most overt of many similar examples of just how unpopular and even hated abolitionists and abolitionism were by many Americans (from every region). Yet even within a community defined by its courage and impressiveness, certain individuals and voices can still stand out, can truly exemplify the kinds of impassioned and heroic activism that represent the best of what Americans can be and do. And within the abolitionist community, two such individuals were the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah.

Virtually every detail and stage of the sisters’ lives defines their courage. Born to a prominent Charleston, South Carolina judge and his wife, part of an established and comfortable Southern family—and thus by definition in the period a slaveholding family—both sisters by their mid-20s had come to see the institution of slavery as a moral and national disgrace, and both chose self-exile (first to Philadelphia and then to many other Northern cities) from their family and home. Told repeatedly that women could and should not speak in public, particularly not to “promiscuous” (mixed-gender) audiences, the sisters gave shared speaking engagements throughout the north nonetheless; Sarah also wrote a series of “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” to protest such gender biases. Notified that she could never return to Charleston or risk imprisonment and arrest, Angelina wrote an Appeal to the Christian Women of the South to make her case in that way. When she learned that educator and abolitionist Catherine Beecher supported colonization for freed slaves and other American blacks, Angelina wrote Letters to Catherine Beecher, calling out the colonization idea as just another kind of racism. And this all before they had lived in the North for ten years!

Perhaps a single 1838 event best sums up the sisters’ courageous activism; I’ll quote the above-linked Gilder Lehrman Institute article on it: “Two days after their wedding, Angelina and Theodore [Weld] attended the anti-slavery convention in Philadelphia. Feelings ran high in the city as rumors spread of whites and blacks parading arm in arm down city streets, and by the first evening of the event, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the convention hall. Sounds of objects being thrown against the walls reverberated inside. But Angelina Grimke rose to speak out against slavery. ‘I have seen it! I have seen it!’ she told her audience. ‘I know it has horrors that can never be described.’ Stones hit the windows, but Angelina continued. For an hour more, she held the audience’s rapt attention for the last public speech she would give. The next morning, an angry mob again surrounded the hall, and that evening, set fire to the building, ransacked the anti-slavery offices inside, and destroyed all records and books that were found.” The sisters and Weld, like Garrison and many other abolitionists, continued their efforts for many decades—but an individual moment like this can make clear both the forces against which they strove and their determination to share their voices and arguments nonetheless.

Next siblings tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Responses to this post or other sibling nominations for the crowd-sourced weekend post?Two days after their wedding, Angelina and Theodore attended the anti-slavery convention in Philadelphia. Feelings ran high in the city as rumors spread of whites and blacks parading arm in arm down city streets, and by the first evening of the event, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the convention hall. Sounds of objects being thrown against the walls reverberated inside. But Angelina Grimke rose to speak out against slavery. “I have seen it! I have seen it!” she told her audience. “I know it has horrors that can never be described.” Stones hit the windows, but Angelina continued. For an hour more, she held the audience’s rapt attention for the last public speech she would give. The next morning, an angry mob again surrounded the hall, and that evening, set fire to the building, ransacked the anti-slavery offices inside, and destroyed all records and books that were found. Two days after their wedding, Angelina and Theodore attended the anti-slavery convention in Philadelphia. Feelings ran high in the city as rumors spread of whites and blacks parading arm in arm down city streets, and by the first evening of the event, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the convention hall. Sounds of objects being thrown against the walls reverberated inside. But Angelina Grimke rose to speak out against slavery. “I have seen it! I have seen it!” she told her audience. “I know it has horrors that can never be described.” Stones hit the windows, but Angelina continued. For an hour more, she held the audience’s rapt attention for the last public speech she would give. The next morning, an angry mob again surrounded the hall, and that evening, set fire to the building, ransacked the anti-slavery offices inside, and destroyed all records and books that were found.

8/1 Memory Day nominee: Herman Melville, the iconoclastic genius who was equally adept at domestic comedy, scathing social satire, compelling psychological fiction, historical and adventure fiction, and, yes, whale tales.