There may indeed come a time when universities may have to fight for the privilege of intellectual freedom.
Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes
I HAVE READ somewhere that there are two responses to chaos: naming and violence. The naming is accomplished effortlessly when there is a so-called unnamed, or stripped-of-names population or geography available for the process. Otherwise one has to be content with forcible renaming. Violence is understood as an inevitable response to chaos—the untamed, the wild, the savage—as well as a beneficial one. When one conquers a land the execution of the conquest, indeed its point, is to control it by reshaping, moving, cutting it down or through. And that is understood to be the obligation of industrial and/or cultural progress. This latter encounter with chaos, unfortunately, is not limited to land, borders, natural resources. In order to effect the industrial progress it is also necessary to do violence to the people who inhabit the land—for they will resist and render themselves anarchic, part of the chaos, and in certain cases the control has included introducing new and destructive forms of hierarchy, when successful, and attempts at genocide when not.
There is a third response to chaos, which I have not read about, which is stillness. Stillness is what lies in awe, in meditation; stillness also lies in passivity and dumbfoundedness. It may be that the early Americans contemplated all three: naming, violence, and stillness. Certainly this latter surfaces (or seems to) in Emerson, Thoreau, and the observer quality of Hawthorne. It is traceable in the Puritan ethos as well. But unlike the indigenous population of America, and unlike the bulk of the populations brought to America from Africa, the American stillness was braced with, even mitigated by, pragmatism. There was always an aspect of preparing for heirs, a distant future unresponsive to the past, and the virtue of wealth as God’s bounty—which it was a sin not to accumulate. This highly materialistic “stillness” as practiced by the clerical/religious immigrants was in marked contrast to the “take only what you need and leave the land as you found it” philosophy of preindustrial societies. One of the more interesting matters in the Christian formation of public and private responsibility is the negotiation between thrift and awe; religious solace and natural exploitation; physical repression and spiritual bounty; the sacred and the profane. That negotiation persists in the tension among these three responses to chaos: naming, violence, and stillness. Although the majority of settlers in America were by no means the panicked religionists or the kind but gloomy Plymouth Rock crowd of national reverence, convenient commodification, and nostalgic delusion. I believe some 16 percent were, but that leaves 84 percent “other,” as they say on censorship forms. Yet even among that 16 percent it did not take long for that already ambivalent idea and complicitous stillness to dissipate in the wake of industrialization. With the abundant supply of free labor in the form of slaves, indentured servants, convicts, and term debtors, and of cheap labor in the form of poor immigrants fleeing from indebtedness, starvation, and death. Even as Twain privileged rural and village life, language, and humor, even as he endowed the Mississippi and the lanes and roads of nineteenth-century America with pastoral yearning, he invested in profit-making schemes himself, disastrously as it turned out, and clearly urged and enjoyed the search for gold and the cleverness of money-making schemes in his characters. And it was our retiring, transcendentalist scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote of the California gold rush that “it did not matter what immoral means were used: the function of the gold rush was to hasten the settlement and civilizing of the West.” The underscoring of civilizing is mine.
Melville, of course, was preoccupied with the counterclaims of a blossoming capitalism as it mirrored or impaled itself upon the force of nature. And along with much else, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, White-Jacket, and “Benito Cereno” address the impact of economic pressure on the “innocent,” the naïf laborer, and his “captain.” All within the context of that two-thirds of the globe that represents chaos: the sea, and which seems to illustrate most clearly all three responses: naming (charting, mapping, describing), violence (conquest, whaling, slave ship, the naval fleet, etc.), and stillness (soul searching, idle watches aboard ships that produce the most self-reflective passages). Poe responded to chaos with violence and naming. Violence in his attraction to the damned, the dying, the murderer’s mind. Naming in his insistent “scientific” footnotes, editorializing, indexing of historical and geographical data. But there was an additional element available to these writers, indeed to all Americans, for the contemplation of chaos. Nature, the “virgin” West, space, the proximity of death—all these mattered. Yet it was the availability of a domestic chaos, an invented disorder, a presumed uncivilized, savage, eternal and timeless “Other” that gives American history its peculiar and special formulation. This “Other,” as we have suggested, was the Africanistic presence. American colonialists and their heirs could and did respond to this serviceable, controllable “chaos” by naming, violence, and, very late in the day, tentatively, carefully, hesitantly, a measure of pragmatic stillness. Again it is to the literature, the writers that we turn for evidence and figurations of this meditation on dominance. There one sees stillness (in Melville, for example) in the refusal to name in order to contemplate the mystery, the message of chaos’s own inscription. In the refusal to do violence to, the refusal to conquer, to exploit. But to confront, to enter, to discover, as it were, of what this presence was or could be made.
It is in this context that I wish to read Gertrude Stein: her dedicated investigation of the interior life of this Other, and the problems of nonintervention that it presented and fell victim to. The “modernism” of which Stein is generally understood to be precursor has many forms: if we consider modernism to have as its single most consistent characteristic the merging of forms, the raveling away of borders, of frontierlessness, the mixing of media, the blending of genres, the redefinition of gender, of traditional roles, the appropriation of various and formerly separate disciplines in the service of new or conventional ones, the combination of historical periods and styles in art—then we can trace the particular ways in which American literature made that journey. In America, the first mark and fearful sign of merging, of mixing and the dissolution of what was held to be “natural” borders, was racial merging. It was the best represented, most alarming, most legislated against, and most desired foray into forbidden, unknown, dangerous territory, for it represented the slide into darkness, the outlawed and illicit; the provocative, shocking break with the familiar.
In terms of literary embraces of modernism, as is also true of the visual-arts move toward modernism, the imaginative terrain upon which this journey took place was and is in a very large measure the presence of the racial “Other.” Explicit or implicit, this presence informs in significant, compelling, and inescapable ways the shape of American literature. Ready to hand for the literary imagination it constituted both a visible and invisible mediating force. So that even, and especially, when American texts are not “about” Africanistic presences, the shadow hovers there, in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation. It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations understood their “Americanness” as an opposition to the resident black population—and still do. In fact race has become so metaphorical, and as a metaphor so much more necessary to Americanness, it rivals the old pseudoscientific and class-informed racialism we are familiar with. As a metaphor, this Africanistic presence may be something the United States can do without. For in this part of the twentieth century, if Americans are to be different, if they are to be Americans in some way that Canadians are not, that Latin Americans are not, that Britons are not, then they must be white Americans, and that distinction depends on a constantly reliable darkness. Deep within the word “American” is its association with race. (One notes that to identify someone as a South African is to say very little; we need the adjective “white” South African or “black” South African. In the States it is quite the opposite: “American” means white, and Africanistic peoples struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with hyphens and ethnicity.) The Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest its identity while coveting its license. They seemed to have merged both the wrench and the envy in their self-conscious and self-reflexive contemplation of mythological Africanism.