America in Literature and Film

Modernist Perceptions, Postmodernist Representations

Ahmed Elbeshlawy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138277182
• eBook ISBN: 9781317182344
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Utilizing Lacan's psychoanalytic theory and Zizek's philosophical adaption of it, this book brings into dialogue a series of modernist and postmodernist literary works, films, and critical theory that are concerned with defining America. Ahmed Elbeshlawy demonstrates that how America is perceived in certain texts reveals not only the idealization or condemnation of it, but an imago, or constructed image of the perceiver as well. In turn, texts which particularly focus on demonstrating how other texts about America communicate an untrustworthy message themselves communicate an unreliable message, inventing and reinventing a series of imagos of America. These imagos refer to both idealized and deformed images of America constructed by the perceivers of America. The first part of this book is concerned with modernist perceptions of America, and includes discussion of Adorno, Benjamin, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, as well as Emerson and Seymour Martin Lipset. The second part is dedicated to postmodernist representations of America, focusing on texts by Edward Said, Ihab Hassan, Susan Sontag, David Shambaugh and Charles W. Brooks, and films including Lars von Trier's Dogville and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.

PART I
Modernist Perceptions

Chapter 1
The Epical American Self and the Psychotic Phenomenon

“I admit that I saw in America more than America” (19)

Alexis de Tocqueville

In his essay “Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought”, James W. Ceaser argues that European thinkers “have seized on the word “America” and made it into something more than a place or country. They have converted it into a concept of philosophy and a trope of literature”. Ceaser calls this abstraction of America “metaphysical America” or “symbolic America”. His main point is to clearly distinguish between that literary creation of Europe and, in his own words, “the real America, by which I mean the country where we live, work, struggle, and pray, and where we have forged a system of government that has helped to shape the destiny of the modern world” (6–8). The second main point is the commonsensical idea that the symbol must have been created out of the reality of the country, i.e., that America was physically there before Europeans started to transform it into a symbol – a symbol, it must be made clear, that is not equivalent with the self-made image of America which has been created by Hollywood, the American mass media, or the prevalence of American commercial or cultural products.

At a closer look, however, things do not seem to be as simple as Ceaser suggests. America, as the latest comer of human civilizations, seems to have been historically preceded by its symbol. It can be argued that America existed as a certain symbolic power and a specific signifier that manifested itself strongly in the mind of Europe before it became aware of itself as a country. In his essay “A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity”, John M. Murrin writes that it was the British, “not the settlers”, who “imagined the possibility of an independent America […] the British worried about the whole because they did not understand the parts, and they reified their concerns into a totality they called America … In a word, America was Britain’s idea” (339).

It is not therefore an exaggeration to say that America was created by the word of Britain. A symbol in language was invented before the country started to be literally voiced by its own people through the Declaration of Independence, the making of the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the war for independence. Symbolic America thus seems to have been created before America as a political power came into existence, and has persisted beyond the political entity until the present. It is largely in this symbolic being of America where discourses about America’s exceptionalism seem to reside, i.e., America seems to be indeed exceptional – far beyond what is seen as its ahistoricism, its ideological foundation, and its present economic and military supremacy – by the sheer power of its symbolic presence in the consciousness of the world.

Some classic American texts about America’s exceptionalism contribute greatly in the creation and recreation of America’s imagos. In those texts the American Self assumes a kind of epic quality that is peculiar to it. It is largely in discourses of American exceptionalism, individualism and pragmatism that this epic self becomes most animated. Just as epic is based on individual heroism, canonical ideological texts, like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and “The Young American”, tend to create an American subjectivity which can only fit in a metaphysical work of art. Emerson, who paved the way to the emergence of pragmatic thought as an American public philosophy, draws an image of the American individual as a subject who is not constituted by the Other, the symbolic network, but who conversely constitutes his whole external world: “The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends” (201–2).

Reason, to Emerson, is like raw material lying there inside this epic American Self, waiting to be excavated and made use of in the furthest possible sense: “In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all”. Man – who in this case must be bearing typical American characteristics – is made the centre of the universe by the sheer power of his instincts: “If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him”. In fact, Emerson seems to believe that men and even nations never existed before the emergence of this epic American Self: “A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men”. Women seem to be excluded from this privileged disposition. America, and only America, is seen as the home of such self: “One thing is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here, here in America, is the home of man” (201–2). It is as if non-Americans are excluded from Emerson’s idea of humanity since the “home of man” seems to be nothing but America.

The point about Emerson’s text is that it seems to have been written with an overwhelming passion. Every statement in it seems to be accentuated with a kind of absolutism. It certainly demonstrates all along that its writer is a man who strongly believes in what he says. This is no more evident than when he implores God to protect American individualism against homogenization:

Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit – not to be reckoned one character – not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends – please God, ours shall not be so. (201–2)

Emerson was a man who loved the America he created as he loved himself. And in his overwhelming love and passionate reasoning, he could not see that this epical American individualism he so anxiously wanted to create, if actually bestowed on every American, would precisely result in the very homogenization he was trying to ward off. The ensuing lines speak for themselves:

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul. (201–2)

It is not difficult to see what this “nation of men”, each of which “believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul” would look like.

Underneath the discourse of American exceptionalism which seemingly can only be talked about through the power of America’s created imagos, lies a kind of disbelief that society really existed in America in historical terms. In such discourse, America seems to be able to define itself or be defined by the other only in epiclike terms. Peter Conrad, for example, explains why America and the American way of life posed a problem for Victorian novelists – Dickens is Conrad’s major example – who were not able to write a novel in America, ascetically because America’s epic quality seemed to be incompatible with Victorian novel writing:

Ever since Homer’s account of the fashioning of Achilles’ weapons, epic has been an image of industrial process. It does not imitate the decorative surfaces of things, but dramatizes their manufacture. Novels describe the leisure of society: the refinements of private life and emotional association. Epic describes the work of society: the creation of wealth which subsidizes that novelistic leisure. This is why America is such a problem for the Victorian novelists, because its obsession with work censures idleness and with it the cultivation of mental privacy which makes the novel possible. (90)

America’s industrialism, worship of work, or, the dynamism that is usually seen as peculiar to American society thus seems to derive its force from a conception – which may seem certainly odd to most people – that America is no place for social leisure. This seems to have everything to do with the view that America never experienced the stage of civilization the way other civilizations did. In his essay “Aesthetic America”, Conrad states: “Conservative critics of America proverbially say that it has passed from barbarism to decadence, bypassing the stage of civilization which ought to come between; but for the aesthetic critic, this is the wonder of it. Like a corrupt infant, it cannot wait to grow up before embracing venery” (P. Conrad 69).

Either conservatively criticizing this notion or aesthetically praising it is not the issue of the present book. The issue lies in the view that what seems to be held as the truth behind America’s dynamism is that it moved from the chaotic directly to the decadent, bypassing “the stage of civilization” which cannot be thought of but in structural terms. This short circuit accentuates the structure of the master signifier in language; America is as an incomplete symbolic being with a fundamental fracture that needs constantly to be covered up by all kinds of fantasies – of which the cinematic ones are the most common.

In his essay “American Exceptionalism – A Double-Edged Sword”, Seymour Martin Lipset puts an emphasis on ideology as to what America actually is. Such a defining idea, though quoted to serve his discourse of American exceptionalism, amounts to fantasizing the country altogether. Lipset writes:

As historian Richard Hofstadter has noted, it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one. In saying this, Hofstadter reiterated Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln’s emphases on the country’s ‘political religion’, alluding in effect to the former’s statement that becoming American was a religious, that is, ideological act. (40)

But to be ideology is to be based on fantasy and, in this case, a fantasy that dictates what being is. Lipset’s discourse of exceptionalism starts by referring to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in which, in Lipset’s words, “Tocqueville systematically compared the United States and France” (40). Being American thus seems to be about being ideologically different from the old world, and that is largely Europe more than any other place. Being American requires, more than anything else, differentiating what is American from what is European, in particular, since it is America’s European start that frequently puts America’s independent identity in doubt. It is significant enough that a discourse of exceptionalism such as Lipset’s bases itself on a text which is written by a European. Again, America gets articulated by Europe, even when it is thought to be exceptionally different from Europe.

Lipset argues that “American exceptionalism is defined by the absence of a significant socialist movement in the United States” and this is mainly due to the fact that “class has been a theoretical construct in America” (44). It is precisely the astounding ability to state that “class has been a theoretical construct in America”, and not a reality that manifested itself in the history of black Americans, Hispanics, Indians, and other American minorities, that firmly places the writer’s argument in the realm of the ideological, in other words, the fantasy of which the proper role, according to Žižek’s Lacanian analysis, is to cover up a gap in the symbolic (Sublime Object 33). In fact, stating that class has been nothing but a theoretical construct in America, again, amounts to suggesting that society never existed there. Moreover, the influence of the American Communist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World Union as resonant socialist movements in American history in the first half of the twentieth century cannot be ignored – even if they were systematically weakened and nullified. It is commonplace that some scholars tend to state that class, in its Marxian European sense, though it seems to be wooed by American labor history, never really existed in America outside theory. But this is just beside the point. The point is that this would-be absolute absence of class can never be explained except as a gap in America’s socio-symbolic network that has to be compensated for by ideological fantasies.

In other words, this ideological absolute absence from the socio-symbolic network is also absolute presence – a presence that manifests itself radically and racially in all the traumatic moments of America’s history of Native American annihilation and Black slavery and persecution.

In showing how America is “the most religious country in Christendom”, Lipset argues that the morality of the American Self is determined by its “own sense of rectitude, reflecting a personal relationship with God” (41). As freeing as it is from institutionalized religion, a “personal relationship with God” is nevertheless not exactly a trouble-free idea, for it implies replacing the mediation of culture, history and the human dimension in religion with pure linguistic correspondence with the master signifier “God”.

That such an elimination of ties with the human other of cultural exchange – being itself a reflection of the self – in favor of creating a relationship with the divine big Other is related to the psychotic phenomenon is an established discourse in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is not to suggest that Lipset’s idea of the American Self can be an instance of the psychotic. In fact, imagining a personal relationship with God and bestowing the privilege on the national self cannot be just an American peculiarity. The suggestion is rather that such an ideological discourse, in its very awareness of its phantasmal premise, can in fact help in explaining the psychotic phenomenon. The following tries to explicate Lacan’s theory of the psychosis in light of the idea of a “personal relationship with God”, as well as to illustrate how such an imagined relationship works as a mechanism by which the bits and pieces of the ideological discourse of the epical/national American self are made to fall into their right places.

In 1910, Freud wrote his “Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” in which he discusses Daniel Paul Schreber’s own account of his mental illness, which the latter published in 1903 in the form of a book entitled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. In his discussion of Freud’s analysis of the Schreber case, where Schreber’s delusional experience is owed back to the fact that he regretted not having had children, Lacan explains the difference between neurosis and psychosis by stating that:

In neurosis, inasmuch as reality is not fully rearticulated symbolically into the external world, it is in a second phase that a partial flight from reality, an incapacity to confront this secretly preserved part of reality, occurs in the subject. In psychosis, on the contrary, reality itself initially contains a hole that the world of fantasy will subsequently fill. (Psychoses 45)

It can be concluded, then, that neuroses remain inside the symbolic order, precisely because erotic relations with the other, or, that which is a reflection of the self, remain in them. In fact, Lacan says that the neurotic subject not only identifies himself in language, he loses his own being in the signifying chain; he transforms himself into a signifier and becomes language (Psychoses 155). The Neurotic phenomenon thus seems to be inherent in culture since the “normal” human subject does transform himself or herself into a signifier on daily basis. Transforming oneself into a signifier maintains the whole system of symbolic exchanges that define one’s daily life and regulate all his or her relations with the other.

By displaying a cultural code, the subject sends a message to the other, which means that he turns himself into a signifier. In all societies, people transform themselves into signifiers every day. For example, if a man completely shaves his moustache and grows his beard, most people would think that he belongs either to a certain fundamental school of Islam or to the American Amish Christian community which mainly lives in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So, by this gesture which is nothing but his sheer appearance he would be transmitting a message to the other. This is one clear example, but there are many others because all human subjects, consciously or unconsciously, display cultural codes all the time. Because, according to Lacan, “the law of man has been the law of language since the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts” (Écrits: A Selection 67), it can be argued that human culture is by definition neurotic, or, even more precisely, that neurosis is in fact the very condition of culture.

The “second phase” in which the subject becomes incapable “to confront this secretly preserved part of reality” is itself the return of the repressed which, in the case of neurosis, takes place within the signifying chain, totally determined by the symbolic sphere, no matter how concealed that repressed material can become. It can disguise itself beneath a mask, or beneath various masks, but it always “reappears in loco where it was repressed, that is, in the very midst of symbols” (Lacan, Psychoses 105). The psychotic phenomenon, on the other hand, is marked by a “hole” in reality, a gap in the subject’s symbolic order and, more importantly, it is an unbridgeable gap, a moment of total breakdown which renders the subject’s whole signifying chain an inarticulate mess. A delusion thus results from an encounter with the real, or, with that which can neither be represented by language nor does it appear in the register of the imaginary. The “second phase” in such a case, i.e., the return of the repressed in the case of the psychosis, takes place “in altero, in the imaginary, without a mask” (Psychoses 105).

The difference thus between neurosis and the psychotic phenomenon is that while neurosis is still based on an erotic relation with the other within a system of symbolic exchange, the psychotic phenomenon is marked by a fundamental impairment to that relation and, in Schreber’s case, by conceiving an imagined relation with God, the ideological big Other, or the symbolic almightiness of the Name-of-the-Father. In the psychosis, the relation with the imaginary other, with all the aggressivity that it carries, and which originates initially in the formation of the ego in the mirror stage, is essentially disrupted. Instead of symbolic exchanges within the symbolic network, the entire signifying system is reorganized/disorganized and brought into play in its totality, that is, in its ultimate representation – what Lacan calls the Name-of-the-Father. Consequently, while the discourse with the other, which is also the self, fades out, the psychotic subject contrives a discourse with the “imaginary father”, “the basis of the providential image of God” (Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 308) – a discourse that, according to Lacan, is defined by a “mobilization of the signifier as speech, ejaculatory speech that is insignificant or too significant” (Psychoses 321). One might add here: insignificant, because it does not exactly belong to the world, since it does not constitute a discourse with the other, and, too significant, because it is overloaded with the notion of a correspondence with God.

To imagine a correspondence with God, a personal correspondence with God, in which God becomes an active participant, does not plainly come about because of an overzealous religiousness. In Schreber’s case, Lacan illustrates a certain detour which starts with the lack of the signifier “being a father” and ends up at filling the lack by fantasy via the delusional way of “being the female correspondent of God” (Psychoses 77). Being a father is being a father in language since “before the name of the father, there was no father” (306). The natural father is actually nothing but that unfortunate subject who is destined to carry the heavy symbolic load of the name of the father, the castrating figure and, at the same time, the basis of the superego. This is why Lacan states that “the sum of these facts – of copulating with a woman, that she then carries something within her womb for a certain period, that this product is finally expelled – will never lead one to constitute the notion of what it is to be a father” (293)...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Approaching America
• PART I MODERNIST PERCEPTIONS
• PART II POSTMODERNIST REPRESENTATIONS
• Coda: America as an Unrealized Idea
• Works Cited
• Filmography
• Index