| Emory
Elliott, "National Dreams and Rude Awakenings: The American
Myths of Isolation and Innocence"
Public Lecture Delivered at Duke University
February 28, 2003
National Dreams and Rude Awakenings:
The Global Warnings of American Fiction
I
“In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like
a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses
will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters
of the Great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it
be covertly, and by snatches. . . . [not all] readers will
discern it, for it is, mostly, insinuated to those who may
best understand it.”
This quotation from Melville’s famous
critical review, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” praises
Hawthorne for his abilities to enable his readers to see the
difference between the lies of society and the deeper human
truths that lies obscure or distort. Melville was the grandson
of a Revolutionary hero and a brother and friend to political
leaders, and in his youth he was an enthusiast for the promise
of Young America. Yet many of his works level powerful criticisms
at American domestic and international policies. In his early
books, such as Typee and Omoo, his narrators engage in frank
critiques of American capitalism and imperialism, and some
reviewers, family members, and friends were offended by those
commentaries. So Melville soon learned to cloak his political
observations in allegory and bury them in his sometime challenging
style and complex narrative structures. In his commentary
on Hawthorne, Melville openly acknowledged that serious writers
in the United States must employ covert verbal signs if they
critique social and political conditions. Now, it might seem
odd that such an evasive approach would be necessary in a
country that prides itself on Constitutional freedoms of speech
and expression, but it was such contradictions and gaps between
expressed values and actions that disturbed Melville. His
increasing cynicism regarding the unwillingness of Americans
to be self-critical and to take responsibility for their policies
and actions, especially involving the poor and disadvantaged
at home and abroad, led him to write such works as Moby Dick,
Pierre, The Piazza Tales, and The Confidence Man in which
his stinging criticisms and sweeping analyses of the flaws
and risks of American democracy are only discerned by “those
who may best understand [them].”
As a scholar of American literature, I
have long been concerned with the quarrels that so many American
writers have had with America and with the techniques they
use to expose and dissect aspects of American ideology and
culture. In my book, Revolutionary Writers, on the decades
just after the American Revolution, I argued that many American
authors between 1770 and 1840 recognized themselves to be
the first professional writers of the United States and took
it to be part of their mission to produce texts that would
enlighten as well as entertain their audiences, or to practice
what Melville would later call “the great art of telling
the truth” even in fictional narratives. There was among
those early writers a sense of responsibility, even duty,
to produce fictions of politics that would make their readers
aware of the political realities of their society and thus
to be better democratic citizens. Most of these writers, such
as Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, and Charles Brockden Brown,
soon discovered that there was little support for such efforts
among the elite and a limited audience among the general public
for the writings of intellectuals and artists who positioned
themselves as critics of those in power. Many of the wealthy
and powerful were suspicious of writers who to them appeared
to be idle and wasteful dependents upon the labor of others.
Meanwhile, farmers and merchants saw little value in taking
seriously a writer’s criticism of political and economic
leaders. While writers had the constitutional right to be
critical, the people and their leaders also had the right
to ignore them.
Thus, subsequent generations of American
writers began to develop strategies for creating narratives
with complex levels of meaning to counter the official myths
and national fictions produced by the government. To do so
requires striking a careful balance between the obscure and
the direct, for as Melville said, if the reader is going to
engage a disturbing truth that challenges a cherished national
myth, questions a leader’s authority, or undermines
comfortable assumptions, the reader should have the illusion
of having discovered the insinuated truths for her or himself.
If the reader feels that the author has imposed it, the reader
will reject the truth and the author. Even the author who
learns this delicate art of truth telling is still likely
to be discouraged by publishers, to have difficulty gaining
an audience, and to be attacked by reviewers.
There have been some exceptions to this
general principle, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and
the genre of political fiction that developed between the
1890’s and the 1930’s. Authors like Dreiser, Norris,
London, Chopin, Cather, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck were able
to find an audience although many of them did have difficulty
finding publishers and many endured editing, censorship, and
even banning of their works for allegedly offensive passages
and themes.
This heyday of political fiction was short-lived,
however, for the rise of the New Criticism discredited political
fiction as aesthetically inferior and pushed it to the margins
of American literary history. Clearly, part of the reason
for the rise of the New Criticism in the 1940s was a conservative
political reaction to the increasing influence in the 1930s
of radical poetry, theater, and fiction. Instead of attacking
such writing on political grounds, however, the New Critics
argued that great literature is always universal and transcendent
in meaning and thus apolitical, whereas political fictions
were beneath consideration as literature. The only works deemed
worthy of study in the college classroom and recommended to
educated readers were those with aesthetic merits that political
writing necessarily lacked. Ironically, the American authors
who were favored by the new Critics, those such as Poe, Hawthorne,
James, and Eliot were, in fact, quite political, but because
the New Criticism considered it an interpretive fallacy to
inquire about the politics of a literary work, political interpretations
were avoided. Those writers who wished to continue to produce
political fictions and have an audience had to turn again
to covert methods. Perhaps the paradigmatic scene that everyone
knows captures the democratic writer’s covert debunking
of those in power occurs in the 1939 film of The Wizard of
Oz when Dorothy’s dog, Toto goes behind the fierce visage
of the Wizard and pulls back a curtain to reveal the small
clumsy man from Kansas working levers that project illusions
and sounds to confound his subjects. The artist is in the
form of a pesky dog.
II
As we all know, there is much uncertainty in the United States
and in the world at present about the fiction of politics,
or the degree of the fictionality of “information”
that is being produced by those in the media, corporations,
government, and even accounting firms. During the 1990s, we
saw in Hollywood films a high degree of interest in the fictions
of politics. Movie send-ups, such as “Wag the Dog,”
“Dave,” “Bullworth”, and “Parador,”
based their humorous critiques on a shared public awareness
of political duplicity and media spin. More serious films
like “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present
Danger,” and “Traffic” implied that the
plots and actions of the films paralleled actual or similar
covert government activities, and most viewers recognized
that these films were not meant simply to be entertainment.
As I was leaving “Patriot Games,” I heard one
member of the audience mutter: “I have to go to the
movies to find out what my government is doing.”
Since September 11, 2001,, however, most
of the humor about such government fictions has vanished,
and filmmakers have turned to more patriotic and nostalgic
themes, a trend that actually began before 9/11with movies
such as “Saving Private Ryan,” “Pearl Harbor,”
and “The Patriot.” With the nation now at “war,”
many consider political humor and criticism of the country,
and of the government especially, to be a threat to the national
security and to a national unity that supposedly now exists.
Yet there are many features of the rhetoric coming from Washington
and opinions being broadcast by the media that would, under
less traumatic conditions, provoke considerable criticism,
even mockery. Even the use of the term “war,”
as applied to a covert and geographically dispersed conflict
against an enemy that has no national borders, lacks clarity
and feels a bit fictional. Officials release intentional rumors
and leak plans of attacks, and all parties feed the global
media and internet sites a steady stream of material in which
the information and disinformation are sometimes indistinguishable.
The relentless movement toward a war with Iraq and the obsessive
focus upon Saddam Hussein as the single villain may be motivated,
at least partly, by the need to give this dispersed struggle
a recognizable battle field and a visible demonic enemy as
a stand-in for the elusive Osama bin Laden. It may also be
motivated,as many have begun to say, by the administration’s
need to distract citizens form the dire domestic economic
situation and deteriorating social conditions that we face.
But because so many Americans remain traumatized by the events
of September 2001, a strange silence persisted among the citizenry
for over a year in regard to the legal and procedural changes
in the government brought on by the “war on terrorism.”
Only this last fall did commentators begin taking issue with
some of the actions and plans of the government. Part of the
reason for the long public silence may also be that there
hardly seemed to be time to focus on the issues surrounding
the war on terrorism before other major problems arose in
rapid succession: an alleged energy shortage that resulted
in the loss of billions of dollars in several states, especially
California; the disappearance of billions in surplus funds
from the federal treasury; the collapse of Enron and WorldCom
with revelations of corporate and accounting fraud; and the
stock market decline that has wiped out the savings and retirement
plans of countless numbers. In addition, we have had the revelations
that so many Catholic priests have been child molesters and
that their crimes were often kept secret by Church officials.
The summer of 2002 also brought serious droughts, a wave of
kidnappings and murders of young girls, and the spread of
the West Nile virus. All of these events have had a grave
effect on public confidence in authority. Many media commentators
are saying that during this year America has lost its innocence
and will never be the same.
It is evident that people are confused,
frightened, and angry, and the polls have continued to show
strong support for President Bush, and there has been little
negative public expression about escalating government surveillance,
the erosion of privacy, highly restrictive and sometimes discriminatory
immigration policies, the new controls on press coverage,
the withholding of information by the government, and about
the new limitations on free speech. Under the banner of national
security, the government has generated such threats to individual
rights that ordinary people are frightened to say or do anything
that might be construed as grounds for investigation. A few
in the legal community have raised concerns about the constitutionality
of many new policies, but only scattered news articles or
public discussions about these critical topics have taken
place.
Part of the reason for this silence and acquiescence is certainly
that many people are still in shock that such a spectacular
terrorist attack occurred on American soil. Fearful of future
attacks, they feel that the government must have the power
to take any measures to make the threat disappear. The vast
majority of American citizens want to believe that all will
soon be well, and they do not want to be told that there are
serious problems and complicated human reasons for them that
will require complex lengthy solutions. The surprising success
of the Republican Party in the November 2002 elections suggests
that voters believe that the President should have his party
fully in control of the government in order to eliminate terrorism,
in spite of the collapsed economy and rising unemployment.
In order to make sense of the degree of
bewilderment that so many people are experiencing in the United
States, it is useful to take a step back from the present
moment and to examine the historical and cultural contexts
of the current crisis. Besides the realistic fear of further
attacks, what Americans are experiencing at present is a series
of major disruptions and challenges to a belief system that
has sustained American ideology and culture since the seventeenth
century. Whether they are conscious of them or not, most Americans
have long been assured of safety and success by a system of
political myths and national narratives about what it means
to be Americans, about America’s position in the world,
and about its global mission and destiny. These ideas continue
to play a powerful role in current choices and policies. Many
of these myths were formulated in early New England: America
as the New Testament Jerusalem, the “City on the Hill”
and “the light of the world”; America as an “enclosed
garden” cultivated by God’s Chosen People who
are on a divine errand predestined by Providence; the American
garden home of the New World Adam and Eve, cleansed by crossing
the ocean or born in the New World innocent of the corruption
and evils of the Old World. Even new immigrants or the native
born who have not heard of these ideas explicitly expressed,
behave and think as though they have because they have absorbed
their meanings via the national discourse produced through
the media and popular culture, especially in films. These
myths have survived because they have been highly productive
and useful: they generate self-esteem and a spirit of self-sacrifice;
they support consensus, national unity, and confidence of
success; and they encourage an efficient form of problem solving
and conflict resolution.
In addition to inheriting these myths from the Puritans, American
society also derived a large degree of Manichean, either/or
Calvinist logic that generates binary choices: good/evil;
right/wrong; us/them; American/un-American. These tropes and
the dualistic logic in which they are embedded endured through
the eighteenth century and then, by rhetorical repetition,
became encoded in the national ideology after the Revolution.
In a democracy, where it is usually necessary for leaders
to create consensus in order to get their policies accepted,
such long-established national foundation images function
effectively in garnering support for policies and actions.
While the Revolutionary Founding Fathers were rationalists
and Deists and were wary of religion, they recognized that
to motivate the populace to support their policies, appeals
to images and ideas derived from religion and having a religious
emotional appeal helped to create consensus building. For
example, the image of America as an edenic-enclosed garden
is consistent with the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine
and thereby underwrites the persistent inclination of the
United States to withdraw into isolationism.
This sense of being able to insulate the
country from harm, as, for example, with the plans for a star
wars protective missile shield, and the sense of being innocent
and thus undeserving of the wrath of others helps to explain
both the security failures that enabled the attacks of 9/11
and the desire for immediate retaliation that followed those
events. Because of the end of the Cold War and the lack of
public discussion after the Gulf War about America’s
role in the Middle East, most Americans were completely shocked
that any nation or group would be moved to launch such a fierce
suicidal attack on United States soil.
For days after the attacks, the media interviewed people who
repeated the question “Why would anyone do this? They
must be madmen.” When people could imagine a rational
motive, it was simply that others are jealous of our freedoms
and high standard of living and thus want to destroy us. There
was little recognition that more than a few madmen in the
world were angry at the United States for many reasons and
over many years. Eventually, serious people gradually learned
some of the historical reasons for the resentment and hatred
against the United States that exists in parts of the Middle
East, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and even in Europe. Still
today, the resistance to open discussion, even in the universities,
of the complexities of the issues behind the attacks remains
strong. For example, the University of North Carolina assigned
incoming freshman to read a part of the Koran for class discussion,
and the State Legislature was so outraged that voted to deny
funds for such an anti-American project.
III
Of course, among many intellectuals and writers, the combination
in American culture of a tendency toward isolationism mentality
and the belief in American innocence have long been recognized
as sources of provincialism and geopolitical naiveté.
Writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such
as Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Wharton, Twain, and James critiqued
these and other national flaws through their fictions. In
the first half of the twentieth century, many American writers
not only continued the critique but also became expatriates
because they felt themselves alienated and their art stifled
by the puritan morality and the narrow parochialism.
Of those earlier writers, it was Henry James who considered
the problems of innocence and isolationism most thoroughly.
In my view, he also engaged these issues because of his deep
concern that the failure of American democracy, of the voters,
and those in power, to understand cultural difference and
the complexities of international relations could be a fatal
flaw for a nation that was on the threshold of having a major
role as a global economic and military power. Although dealing
on the surface with matters of courtship, marriage, and romantic
affairs, many of James’s texts are also allegories of
international diplomacy that impart lessons that may be applied
broadly to negotiations over matters of state.
Many of his works, most clearly in The American
and The Ambassadors, demonstrate persuasively the degree to
which American cultural myopia can lead to failure in personal
relations that are analogous to matters of international diplomacy.
Of course, his texts do not portray political leaders and
diplomats directly but do so allegorically by sending his
two American travelers, Christopher Newman and Lambert Strether
on missions to France that involve affairs of the heart. Newman
seeks to marry the ideal European woman to symbolize his successful
rise in business and to demonstrate his cultural sophistication
to his friends and associates in San Francisco. Strether is
commissioned by his fiancée Mrs. Newsome to return
her son, Chad, to assume the family business in Massachusetts,
for she has heard that he is in love with a French woman and
may never return. Both Americans fail in their missions primarily
because they are so preoccupied with trying nto to appear
provincial that they fail to recognize important signs and
clues that would have increased their chances of success.
Newman comes near to his goal of being granted
permission to marry Claire de Cintre when the Bellegarde family
approves their engagement. In response, Newman decides to
celebrate with a huge party to which he invites their aristocratic
friends.
Appalled by his presumption and embarrassed during the party
by his public exposure of their dire financial situation that
the engagement signals, they call off the engagement and send
Claire to a cloistered convent. Newman is stunned because
his confident anticipation of victory blinded him to the predicament
of his French adversaries and the danger of their reversal.
He forgot that in their world he remains vulnerable to their
power. Had he understood their position more deeply, which
he simply attributes to European prejudice against him as
an American, he might have moved more discreetly from engagement
to wedding day before they had reflected upon the consequences
of their agreement. Instead, his ostentatious party to which
he invites all of the friends of the Bellegardes appears designed
to announce his triumph over them. One of the many questions
that James’ text raises is to what degree American self-concepts,
values, and cultural predispositions limit them in foreign
policy and international negotiations. Newman returns home
a defeated man.
With a joke for a title, The Ambassadors,
depicts Lambert Strether’s quest to return the prodigal
Chad to America as symbolic of the game of international negotiations.
Strether fails primarily because he is so dazzled by cultural
difference and so eager to be accepted in France that he is
blind to critical facts. His most significant oversight is
his failure to recognize immediately that Chad and Contesse
de Vionnet are indeed lovers. In spite of considerable evidence,
including explicit comments by several characters, Strether
resists this knowledge for weeks.
The moment of Strether’s recognition
constitutes one of the funniest moments in American literature.
In order to rest and reflect, Strether takes a day to the
visit the countryside. As he enjoys a picturesque moment overlooking
a river, Chad and the Contesse row into his field of vision,
shocking him into the realization that they are on a lovers’
holiday.
In both of these texts, James gives us a
comic form of American loss of innocence. Both characters
seem to learn important lessons from their failures, but James
leaves us to wonder if either is capable of actually altering
their consciousness or perceptions as a result of their new
knowledge or if they would just repeat their mistakes if given
a second chance.
IV
One of the most interesting things about the myth of American
innocence is how many times America has lost its innocence
only somehow to find it again. Many events have occasioned
proclamations about the end of American innocence with announcements
that the country will never be the same. Such occasions have
been the Civil War; the assassination of Lincoln; the impeachment
of Andrew Johnson; the Teapot Dome scandal; the Spanish American
War; WW I; the Black Sox World Series scandal in 1919; the
Great Depression; WW II; Hiroshima; the McCarthy hearings;
the Kennedy Assignation; the Viet Nam War; Watergate; the
Clinton impeachment hearings; the voting scandal in Florida
in 2000; and the tragic events of 9/11/01. Some really negative
types, such as American Studies scholars, want to go even
further back in American history and proclaim that American
innocence ended when slavery was included in the Constitution
and when women’s rights were excluded from it. Others
find the death of American innocence in the Salem Witch Trials;
the massacre of the Pequot people at Mystic, Connecticut in
1636; the persecution of Anne Hutchinson, and even in the
arrival of Columbus in 1492.
While Melville’s The Confidence-Man:
His Masquerade may be the most philosophical and satirical
deconstruction of the performance of American Innocence, many
American writers have attempted to tweak or to demolish the
myth of innocence, from Charles Brockden Brown with his duplicitous
characters of Arthur Mervyn and Carwin the Biloquist; to Twain’s
Tom Sawyer and Hank Morgan; and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.
Recently, Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, Roth, and Hong Kingston
have given us examples of American characters whose stories
show the ironic complexity, if not the impossibility, of an
American innocence.
In spite of the efforts of these writers, however, the myth
of American Innocence remains a vital and energizing force
in the culture as well as a distorting and blinding one. The
two best known studies of American innocence over the last
several decades remain R.W.B. Lewis’ The American Adam:
Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century
(1955) and Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence: Studies
in the Contemporary American Novel (1961). In their works,
both Lewis and Hassan considered the dramatic rise of immigration
and the demographic changes that occurred during the decades
they studied to be important in breathing new life into the
myth of American innocence. Such large waves of immigration
also reinforce the tendency toward isolation as those who
have left difficult times elsewhere in the world are often
inclined to focus on their new situation and turn away from
global problems.
During the last thirty years, there has again been a tremendous
rise in the numbers of immigrants, but this time the immigrants
have come from countries that represent a broader global diversity.
Instead of being mostly from Europe, many have come from the
Pacific Rim and Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle
East, and Africa, in addition to considerable numbers from
Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. While there have also
been in these decades waves of religious revivalism and of
ethnic nationalism, environmentalism, and anti-government
sentiments, there has emerged no recognizable shared philosophy
of the kind that Lewis attributed to Transcendentalism or
Hassan to European existentialism. One of the effects of 9/11
is that it rallied people around a cause and thereby made
many new immigrants feel more connected to an America that
the government claimed to be united against evildoers.
At the same time, the rapid development
of technology, the entertainment and news media, sports and
leisure activities, and the obsessive concern with money and
material goods has led individuals and communities to be narrowly
focused upon their own particular interests and pleasures
and generally unaware of the values that they share with others
and their connections to global communities. Social and political
concerns are atomized into small local groups with the internet
providing an easy but private and hidden means of “getting
together.” The works of Don DeLillo and Raymond Carver
have been especially effective at capturing the sense of millions
of American households and individuals living with a constant
sense of disorientation and disconnection. This has been more
often the rule with the months since 9/11 being the exception.
In the last few decades, in place of heroes and anti-heroes,
we find lonely, bewildered individuals who mostly feel ridiculous
and irrelevant to their jobs, families, and societies. So
where are we to look for modern and post-modern critiques
of the themes of isolationism and lost innocence since 1945?
Studies of innocence, now depicted primarily in terms of naiveté,
continue to be central in American fiction. Baldwin’s
John Grimes, Bellow’s Eugene Henderson, Ellison’s
Invisible Man, Salinger’s Holden Coldfield, Percy’s
Binx Bolling, Pynchon’s Oedipa Maus, Morrison’s
Milkman Dead, Delillo’s Jack Gladney, are only a few
of the American characters who share features of initial openness
and emptiness. The political fictions of the Viet Nam War
stand apart in many ways as fictions of politics in which
the individual hero loses his innocence but also wants America
to withdraw from global entanglements that seem only to provide
disaster for all involved. So where are the fictions that
explore the politics of isolation and cultural provincialism
from a more critical position?
Unfortunately, the answer, it seems to me,
is that there are fewer now than at the end of the nineteenth
century, and again those texts by our most respected authors
that do broach this subject do so evasively. For the most
part, the dominant international political issues that have
occupied the pages of American fiction of the last sixty years
have been primarily the holocaust and its consequences and
the Cold War, with some attention to conflicts in Ireland
and Africa. The cloud of Hiroshima, the shadow of ICBMs, the
arc of the descent of the atomic warhead that signals the
beginning of the apocalypse are familiar images in cold war
texts by Hawkes, Updike, Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis, Delillo,
and Diddion.
Before 1989, there was a pervasive presence
of international tension and intrigue in works like Pynchon’s
the Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, Barth’s
Sabbatical, and Delillo’s Libra, but these texts do
not really suggest that the United States should be more culturally
aware and sophisticated in its leadership role in global politics.
More often, as in the case of Delillo’s Mao II, contemporary
texts suggest that fear and isolationism may be justified
and that attempts to mediate international conflicts are futile
and self-destructive. The figure of the paranoid author in
Mao II who overcomes his paranoia and is then lured to the
Middle East where he is murdered by terrorists.
While many postmodern texts do present the
world as a global village, the warnings we find in the works
of James, Poe, and Melville suggesting the need for Americans
to be more informed and engaged with the world are generally
absent in much postmodern fiction, or are thoroughly subordinate
to the private and personal concerns of the individual. A
case in point is Roth’s The Counterlife in which a considerable
portion of the action takes place in the Middle East and in
which the main characters, Henry and Nathan Zuckerman, struggle
with political questions about their responsibilities as American
born Jews to Israel and to the people of the Jewish Diaspora.
The text references a wide array of international events and
political figures, and the characters are deeply engaged in
debating questions concerning international involvements.
Finally, however, what emerges is the image of America as
the safe haven for immigrants who flee the long irresolvable
battles of older worlds. Nathan may travel abroad and even
live in England for a time, but the retreat to the old neighborhood
of New Jersey and to the isolation of America is what allows
time and space for personal reflection and self-examination
that is at the center of so much contemporary American fiction.
V
Unless the events of September 11 generate a shift of focus,
there is little sign that political fictions involving international
concerns are emerging. Instead, the signs point toward an
inward turn that places the focus upon more pressing domestic
issues, such as the plight of the poor and homeless, ethnic
diversity and racism, inner city gang wars, domestic abuse
and miscegenation, drug abuse, violent crime, the prison system,
and police brutality. In the political fictions that have
been appearing over the last few years, the term “American
Innocence” itself has been undergoing a change of meaning.
Many new writers are not interested in the myth of a national
innocence, but they write instead about the innocence of childhood
and tell the stories of the thousands of children whose lives
are destroyed by poverty, abuse, and indifference of a selfish,
addicted segment of American society where incarceration,
death, or both seem inevitable for too many young Americans
of color.
In my own department, two of my younger
colleagues are team teaching a course this fall entitled “African
American and Latino Prison Narratives.” The authors
and texts include Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets; Miquel
Pinero, Short Eyes; Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms; Donald
Goines, White Man’s Justice; Black Man’s Grief;
John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers; and selections by
Etheridge Knight, Jose Montoya, Raul Salina, Luis Rodriguez,
Angela Davis, Chester Himes, Hank Lewis, Iceberg Slim, Leonard
Peltier, Ruben Salizar, Darius James, and Malcolm X; and several
films, including Short Eyes, American Me; Bound by Honor,
Angola USA, and Caged Heat. The course developed because the
professors recognized how much current writing and performance
by artists of color are concerned with these subjects and
also because so many students in our diverse student body
have relatives or friends in prison and have experienced themselves
the humiliation encountered with prison officials that result
when they seek to visit their incarcerated loved ones. The
faculty and students are deeply concerned about the high rate
of incarceration among people of color compared to the white
population, and they are seeking through literature to increase
their understanding of the conditions in prison and the legal
and judicial policies that underlie them.
I want to conclude this paper by discussing
very briefly one of these new writers whose works are beginning
to work their way into the college literature courses partly
because they strike a chord and connect effectively with our
current students. This young writer is Abraham Rodriguez,
Jr. whose collection of stories, The Boy Without a Flag: Tales
of the South Bronx, appeared in 1992. Born in 1961, he was
thirty-one when his book appeared in 1992; he has since published
Spidertown: A Novel that appeared in 1994. These are tales
of innocence, experience and death—death that may be
either mental or physical. They focus on the lives of young
teenagers, between the ages of eleven and fourteen or fifteen,
who are on the cusp of passing from childish play and fantasy
games one day to brutal adult realities of pregnancy, childbirth,
drug addiction, crime, violence, arrest and prison the next.
The style is that of social and psychological realism, blending
street talk with elements of eloquent poetic precision and
depth. For those who have never set foot in the war zones
of the Bronx or East LA, Rodriguez takes them behind the violent
images to hear the anguished expressions of hopelessness and
the yearnings of the individuals who are trying to avoid the
fates of their parents and relatives.
In his biographical note, Rodriguez describes
himself as a Puerto Rican-American who “spends much
of his time hanging out with kids in the same South Bronx
neighborhood where he grew up.” He says that he brings
his writing to them for critique, and their responses affirm
that his stories are indeed mirror images of their own lives
and the environment in which they live: “My writing
has become more realistic and human through knowing these
kids”, he adds. “Unfortunately, more involvement
means more hurt. Some of my friends have been killed and it
hurts me very much.” His poignant stories of brutalized
innocence remind us of the existence of a hidden America –
of the inner cities, the poor rural areas, the reservations
– where thousands suffer tragic and limited lives that
are silenced by the media and are felt to be ignored by the
government.
The majority of his stories have girls and young women as
the central characters, and they illustrate how the combination
of racism, male dominance, poverty and poor schools, lead
them, against their wills, into hopeless situations. Many
find themselves to be mothers at the age of twelve or thirteen
living in squalor, abused or abandoned by their partners who
have seduced them into sex, drug addiction, and crime. Such
a young woman will usually find herself alone and unable to
earn money to care for a baby and support a drug habit. Rodriguez
gives his readers sharply realistic glimpses of the inner
lives of such young women that are rarely reported in the
news: their bitterness and regret over their mistakes, their
desires to become strong competent citizens, and their dreams
of being good mothers who could save their babies from their
own fate. We hear their anger at a father or mother who failed
to help and guide them and often whose addictions and abuse
had driven their daughters and sons away.
In spite of the overriding bleakness of
these stories, however, moments of youthful fun and friendship
elevate the narratives to the point of offering the promise
that even in the barrio, a kind of innocence may still be
possible for the fortunate children, who like Rodriguez, survive
and escape that fate that traps so many others. Clearly, many
in the community yearn to be part of the mythic American Dream
and of the Innocence in which they still believe. With the
consolation of American Studies at hand, we can rely on one
thing: our political myths of America will endure and be used
by leaders to shape the future. What we cannot know is what
that future will be. As much as I would like to see our political
fictions enlighten Americans to the need for a more complex
internationalism, the signs indicate that the desire for isolation
and yearning for the rebirth, yet again, of American Innocence.
People want the government to find a way to keep terrorists
out of America, but they want even more for America to become
the sacred utopian garden where the divine errand and the
American Dream will yet unfold. Given the current state of
affairs, we must try to awaken the country from that from
that dream to the stark realities of war, deep economic recession,
and a protracted no-win role in the Middle East that will
lonely lead to more anti-American hatred and most likely to
an escalation in terrorism against Americans. Our nineteenth
century American writers foresaw such danger and tried to
warn us.
Emory Elliott
University of California, Riverside
©2003 Emory Elliott
All Rights Reserved. |
