Kafka on the Wall

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain
Various Authors
Various Translators
Open Letter Press
Words Without Borders
231 pages
November 30, 2009


Communist dictatorship . . . had its own rationality and motives, its own aims and purposes, except that these had nothing in common with normalcy, logic as we know it, or everyday life. (Judith Sollosy, "Reflections on Péter Esterházy's Revised Edition")

The Wall in My Head is an anthology of essays, poetry, short stories, images and historical documents from former citizens of the Soviet bloc, all relating to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism. The release of both The Wall in My Head and Season of Ash, also from Open Letter Press, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of these historic events, and also, as Keith Gessen notes in his introduction, seeks to capture the tumultuous, upturned atmosphere of post-Communism, an era recently ended. "You can tell it's over because nobody wants to hear anymore about how terrible Communism was. Russians sure don't, and not just because Communism was all their fault." Like Season of Ash, The Wall in My Head depicts very recent history which nevertheless already feels distant, thanks to the radical changes that occurred in Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990s.

The writers featured in the anthology, though they come from different national, cultural, and ethnic perspectives, share many common experiences. But what I focused on the most as I read through book was the theme set up by the opening piece, a selection from Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. Kundera argues that life under Communism resembled a Kafka story, in which hapless humans are caught up in the mechanisms of a towering bureaucracy that operates under its own incomprehensible laws of unknown origin. Thus, a file buried in an office somewhere, Kundera explains, "takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast upon the screen of illusion." Land-Surveyor K. from Kafka's novel The Castle, for instance, exists only because of an obsolete, mistakenly-filed order; indeed, Kundera goes on, K. is actually the shadow of an error in the file, and therefore has no right to exist even as a shadow.

K.'s absurd situation is highly comparable to the protagonist of the allegedly true story of an engineer in Communist Prague, who is reported as having made a slanderous remark about Czechoslovakia while in London and having further stated a desire to remain in the West. No one seems willing or able to retract the false report and the poor engineer is continuously referred to one department after another. The engineer then starts to wonder if his phones are being tapped and starts to fear for his safety until he finally can't take it anymore and actually does flee the country.

But while the engineer's tale may or may not be an urban legend - a bit of sensationalized modern folklore whose seeming veracity arises from shared societal fears and anxieties - many of the collected works of The Wall in My Head deal, each in their own way, with the institutionalized irrationalities of life under Communism. Beginning with Communism's basic premise: that it represents an evolutionary endpoint, the Utopian culmination of centuries of the worker's struggle for a just society. And so, as Rousseau once put it, the oppressed proletariat must be "forced to be free." In "The Road to Bornholm," German poet Durs Grünbein describes East Berlin's atmosphere leading to the fall of the Wall:

The reason for the upsurge was a bundle of unsolvable contradictions, from the miserable future prospects for most citizens (despite their undiminished historical mission), to the stagnation of an entire society (which knew progress only as an ideology) due to the erosion of all their members' self-confidence (lauded as the development of a mature socialist personality), down to lifelong imprisonment (in order to protect the people from themselves and their misguided wants). . .

. . . The sickness hidden behind it [the Wall], a deep identity crisis, was initially masked and later, denied. Since that time, a deceptively schizoid jargon, DDR language, had been escaping through the cracks in their rigid, inbred logic. The Soviet idea was so attractive that only prison architecture could preserve it. One day Rufus stumbed on two lines by Robert Frost, which to him summed up the whole paradox of the Wall in a nutshell: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out . . .

Most organized societies, of course, have their own incongruities and aspects that seem to deviate from common sense. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a brilliant exploration of this; Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night is another. But Vonnegut and Heller were obviously writing hyperbolic satire, whereas The Wall in My Head is equal parts realism (in the fictionalized pieces) and historical documentary. Absurdity stands out even more.

In a selection from his novel Imperium, we learn from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (with some exaggeration, naturally) that the Soviet Union was so obsessed with marking its borders that factories seemed to manufacture nothing but reams and reams of barbed wire, which deteriorated quickly under the elements and was in perpetual need of replacement. As such, it was virtually impossible to find in a Soviet shop any useful metal item such as a hoe, hammer, or eating utensil. And that's not even taking into account the logistics required in constructing and maintaining these barbed wire fences, from telephone calls and telegrams, to the orders constantly coming in, to the transportation of said wire, the bureaucracy involved, and the consequent neglect of other areas of Soviet infrastructure.

Though not everything that stood out to me was literally Kafkaesque, the very dissonance often felt closely related. East German activist Peter Schneider, in his novel The Wall Jumper, tells of the family of an influential Berlin Party member who were allowed to maintain their living conditions when the Wall was built. So the otherwise straight, monolithic Wall made a sudden zigzag around their house but abutted it so closely that the children were able to jump over and enter West Berlin whenever they pleased. In "My Grandmother the Censor" Marsha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and novelist, interviews her grandmother about her post-WWII job at the Soviet Department of Control over Foreign Media, in which she was basically responsible for reading all printed materials that came into the Soviet Union from abroad and determining whether or not a given book or magazine should be banned. Sometimes, the grandmother recalled, she found that she admired certain writers, such as Harrison Salisbury from the New York Times. But to make a simple error in translation (in documents being forwarded to Stalin's office) or allow in anything deemed even the slightest bit subversive could be deadly.

I found myself wondering how these Communist Era officials thought they could possibly maintain control over such a stack of cards: an unstable structure built upon an unstable foundation. But then, according to Croatian journalist and essayist Dubravka Urgesic in "The Souvenirs of Communism," the character of life under these regimes is essentially inaccessible to the West, and for that reason, truly authentic Soviet authors never gained a foothold abroad. "Western readers did not have the feel for communist everyday life, the author's humor was not understood, the linguistic subversion left them cold, and the absurd and grotesque aspects of the totalitarian world remained opaque to them." If that is indeed the case, then I think The Wall in My Head actually comes close to recreating, in elegant and intimate detail for the Western reader, a world that literally collapsed overnight and has wholly transformed itself since.

Obviously The Wall in My Head is a very valuable primary source (I didn't even talk about the photographs and government documents embedded throughout the text) but, despite my love of history, I saw it in more literary terms. But the beauty of a multi-author work is that multiple viewpoints are presented, and I think every reader is likely to see something very different. And really, that's how reality is: everyone's perspective is unique, even when viewing basically the same thing.

Also recommended: Jáchym Topol's City Sister Silver

Click here for The Front Table's review.



This is Part I of the Vice Guide to North Korea. While certainly a far more extreme example of Communism than most of the Eastern Bloc ever was, this three-part video series is nevertheless a striking example of the Kafkaesque dictatorship. My favorite part was when the hotel staff tries to demonstrate to the host that there is indeed food in North Korea - by setting an entire empty dining room with sumptuous meals no one will ever eat. The host suspected that the same food was just brought out evening after evening. *Cue "Hotel California."*

The Crimes of Paris (A Review)

"Montmartre is the dwelling-place of the most curious collection of poets, painters, sculptors, bar-keepers, vagabonds, girls of the street, models, apaches, scoundrels in the world - the most gifted and the most degraded (and there is not always a very sharp line dividing them). Montmartre is the most remarkable mixture of gaiety, strenuous work, poetry and mockery, artistic sense and irreligion." - a 1913 Englishman on a notorious neighborhood in Paris

The publisher's description makes it sound as though Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris focuses solely on the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre on August 21, 1911. That singular instance of blasphemy against high art is indeed a major part of the Hooblers' book. But it is also only one aspect of a well-researched and highly entertaining portrayal of the city that truly defined the modernist spirit during its glorious Belle Époque ("Beautiful Era"). One critic aptly describes The Crimes of Paris as "part fast-paced thriller and part social history," and although I certainly agree, I would define it more as "surrealist history." Far from being a dry recitation of facts, The Crimes of Paris is a strikingly atmospheric work that straddles the line between non-fiction and pure storytelling, as it skillfully evokes a world of blatant immorality, heartbreaking beauty, dangerous politics, and, above all, a love of sensation.

Disclaimer: I knew I'd enjoy this book before I even read it. I adore this time period (roughly 1890-1930), especially the radical art that broke with centuries of tradition and, later on, the poignant literature that flowered in the disillusionment of the Great War (think Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and the ash heaps and razzle-dazzle of The Great Gatsby.) Just in terms of art, the Modernist era was, in the words of one my professors, the greatest burst of human creativity since the Renaissance. And it was Paris that was the epicenter of this incredible shift in Western thought, as advances science and technology were felt in all aspects of society and the arts (for example, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which posits that all time exists simultaneously, or the automobile and speed and personal mobility). The basic premise of The Crimes of Paris is that crime also evolved rapidly during the Belle Époque and criminal investigation was forced to keep up. Now today we're all used to seeing car chases in movies, the Hooblers remind us, but in 1911, "no one had yet conceived the idea of escaping a robbery via automobile." But even in a world that often sympathized with the devil (in French culture, thieves and murderers have long been celebrated as anti-heroes), brilliant detectives such as Eugène François Vidocq and Alphonse Bertillon still gained public respect thanks in no small part to their prominent place in the sensational exploits of Paris's villains.

It also comes as no surprise that Bertillon's philosophy, written on the wall of his classroom, could have come from the mind of any Modernist painter or photographer: "The eye sees in each thing only what it is looking for, and it looks for what is already an idea in the mind." (Refer to my last post, about Alfred Stieglitz.)

While the mystery of the missing Mona Lisa and the other crime narratives made for fun reading, what I enjoyed most about The Crimes of Paris was the portrait painted of a city at the height of its artistic, scientific, literary, and intellectual powers, even as it deliberately broke the boundaries of good taste in places like Montmartre's Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, beloved of the Parisian intelligentsia, that "brought incredible realism to grotesque special effects, regaling audiences with stabbings, ax murders, gouged-out eyes, torture, acid throwing, amputations, mutilation, and rape." You have the avant-garde underworld, anarchists, various murderers and miscreants, and, above all, the efforts of the oft-despised law enforcement agencies to bring order in a society were "all that is solid melts in the air." The grand result is a weird juxtaposition of the most contradictory elements, from the respectable bourgeoisie to the bomb-throwers to the most outrageous painters and poets. Paris in the Belle Époque was a weird and wonderful place and I wonder if we'll ever see anything like it again (or maybe we did at the height of the sixties in places like San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood). But by 1914, World War I had broken out and the Belle Époque had come to an end amidst the worst carnage in history (up to that point). Anyone who has seen the musical Chicago, however, knows that celebrity-criminals are hardly unique to France; nor have they ever faded into the mists of history. The Crimes of Paris is an excellent book for both the scholar and the casual reader, and the latter is sure to learn quite a bit about art, intellectual, and social history.

Note: a prominent "character" in The Crimes of Paris is a ne'er-do-well anarchist named Victor Serge. Although the Hooblers did an excellent job covering his infamous life in France, they nevertheless do not tell you his full story. By the mid-forties, World War II and the excesses of Stalinism had left Serge thoroughly disenchanted with "revolution" and political violence. By then he was living in exile in Mexico, where he was continuously hounded by Stalinist agents. It was during this time, shortly before his death, that he penned an astonishing and powerful novel called Unforgiving Years, which I couldn't recommend strongly enough. Read it.

A Fierce Discontent (An Overview)

The Progressive Era is best described, albeit in a fantastical manner, by Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887, in which protagonist Julian West is "mesmerized" one night in the present day (1887), only to wake up 117 years later. The United States he left, plagued by class conflict and other throes of industrialization, has been transformed into a grand and orderly nation where benevolent collectivism has taken the place of ruthless individualism. No longer do the poor languish in overcrowded tenements and dead-end factory jobs; nor the rich spend their days sunk in decadence and opulence. America is a middle-class paradise where universal cooperation ensures everyone the same standard of living and access to goods, leisure, and education.

Also conspicuously absent is any sense of cultural or racial diversity - the only African-American ever to appear is one of Julian's 1887 servants. Although Bellamy generally fails to give any sense of setting whatsoever (like The Da Vinci Code, Looking Backward is one of those books that are both explosively popular and head-bangingly awful), the overall impression given of the year 2000 is best described as "steamrolled." Bellamy's implication is that the main source of conflict is diversity - diversity of race, ethnicity, culture, income, and self-interest. In Bellamy's imagined future, all competing cooperations have since merged into one OmniCorp (my word), a business development with parallels in the evolution of his fictional society. Progressivism, the social movement rapidly taking form at the time of Bellamy's writing, was a wholly middle-class phenomenon that, witnessing the strife that seemed to be tearing the country apart, sought to remake farmers, the urban poor, immigrants, and the wealthy upper tenth in its own image of restraint and respectability. Describing Chautauqua, an adult education movement that combined intellectual pursuit with recreation in 1896, Henry James recalled it as "Utopia" and

[T]he realization - on a small, simple scale of course - of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order. . . You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries.

In short, he concluded, Chautauqua was a "middle-class paradise." In reality, James couldn't stand it and found that he preferred the grittiness of the real world, but to thousands of other middle-class Americans, squeezed as they were between the warring rich and poor, Chautauqua was the model for what they wanted all of America to be. Despite its broad program of reform and activism - from the control of big business to the amelioration of poverty, from a restructuring of gender relations and the disciplining of leisure and pleasure, from child labor to education - the progressives were nevertheless united by a post-millennial sense of cultural transformation. Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) covers this tumultuous time in American history when "the middle class had enough influence to start its own revolution."

Though not the sole catalyst of the Progressive movement, class conflict certainly provided one of its primary motivations. McGerr opens his books with, appropriately, the scandalous event that was Cornelia Bradley-Martin's notorious costume ball held in the winter of 1897, during what would be known until the 1930s as the "Great Depression." Bradley-Martin had hoped to eclipse Alva Vanderbilt's famous ball of 1883. What she got instead, however, was publicity of the worst sort: the press vehemently attacked her for her ostentatiousness as thousands across the country were suffering. The resulting backlash forced Cornelia and her family into voluntary exile in Europe. The Bradley-Martin affair ultimately exemplified why the progressives feared and mistrusted the upper class. The elites' emphasis on extreme individualism stood in contrast to the progressive's new ideals of "association."

The working class, meanwhile, which was also composed heavily of recent immigrants, stressed mutualism. Drawing from the biography of Rahel Golub, a Russian Jew who arrived in New York City in 1892, McGerr describes how the other women at the factory where she worked resented her productivity on the grounds that it raised the standards too high for all of them. Her family relied on her wages, and the crowded tenement where she lived afforded no privacy. Reading a Hebrew translation of David Copperfield came as a shock: "I turned to the first page of the story and read the heading of the chapter: 'I am born.' Something in these three little words appealed to me more than anything I had yet read. I could not have told why, but perhaps it was the simplicity and the intimate tone of the first person. I had not yet read anything written in the first person." A third class, the rapidly dwindling rural farmers, valued individualism just as the "upper ten" did, but, in addition to the sheer labor that went into nineteenth-century agriculture, their self-assertion was tempered by a firm belief in self-restraint, particularly with regards to consumerism. But by the 1890s, a new generation raised on farms was increasingly drawn to the excitement and temptations of urban life, raising concerns about the survival of an entire way of life. And while the poor were split along ethnic and racial lines, farmers of different crops had difficulty sympathizing with one another's predicaments, while affluent agriculturalists frequently looked down on sharecroppers and subsistence farmers.

Besides feeling caught between clashing classes, the middle class was facing issues of its own. The introduction of labor-saving devices and services (i.e. bakeries and laundries) left women with more leisure time. When combined with better educational opportunities, such as college, women found themselves with literally too much time on their hands, which led, inevitably, to reflections on their limited lot as homemakers. Husbands, meanwhile, found themselves alienated from their own families, as both long work hours and contradictory demands on their character (ruthless in the business world, gentle and kind at home) demanded a need for escape, like Julian West fleeing to his cellar in shame because he couldn't afford to build a home for his fiancée. (I'm not 100% sure, but I believe there is a similar situation in Japan today.) By the end of the 1880s, however, a "peace treaty" between the middle-class genders had been tacitly established, and which included a single standard of sexual behavior for both men and women (restraint), the rise of home economics, and a new demand for simplicity in design and consumption. The infamous Pullman Strike of 1894 finally drove home the new feelings and ideas the middle class had developed as Victorianism waned: that a formerly homogeneous nation was being pulled apart by class and culture. Traditional ideals such as individualism and limited government were now obsolete. Although Jane Addams's accomplishments were exceptional, the sentiments she articulated in her 1892 essay "The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements" were not:

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of usefulness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that make us different. They say that all men are united by needs and sympathies far more permanent and radical than anything that temporarily divides them and sets them in opposition to each other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic expression is due to the decay in ethics, that art when shut away from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is self-destructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness of youth that if they expect success from them in business or politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run, they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is only the stronger young people, however, who formulate this. Many of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation which lowered vitality and discontent. Walter Besant says they have had the vision that Peter had when he saw he great sheet let down from heaven, wherein was neither clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of humanity. It is not philanthropy nor benevolence, but a thing fuller and wider than either of these.

Though acting out of genuine concern and empathy, the "radicalized center" increasingly saw itself as the model for other Americans to emulate. If environment had the single biggest impact on character, then perhaps the focus should be on changing people's settings. Despite their broad agenda, the progressives remained united in their overall goal to make other Americans more like them. To erode ethnic and lifestyle differences, they set up settlement houses in immigrant neighborhoods that included "Americanization" classes. They even attempted to weaken farmers' individualistic values through the Country Life program, which ranged from fact-finding and agricultural research to forming "people's clubs" in an effort to ease rural isolation. But for all Progressives' talk of association supplanting individualism, the vast majority of them did not embrace socialism, even as they strongly favored the reigning-in of "big business" as part of their strategy to reform the upper class. As regulation became popular, so did working class radicalism, leading to the rise of organizations such as International Workers of the World (the "Wobblies") and the Women's Trade Union League, as well as increasing the visibility of socialism and anarchism (though the latter was more pronounced in Europe).

There was actually a whole chapter on working class radicalism and the regulation of big corporations, but it was boring and I just skimmed through it. I'm more interested in social and intellectual history.

The progressives sought to remake childhood by setting up clubs and organized sports and pushing for legislation to make school attendance mandatory and child labor illegal. They also pushed for the creation of separate juvenile courts to try young offenders. Adult behavior was another cause for concern, particularly drinking (a favorite activity among the working class), divorce, and prostitution.

For all their good intentions, however, there was a darker side to the progressives' driving need for reform and regulation (I mean, beyond the obvious "control issues"). Segregation, or "Jim Crow," was in many respects a natural development in a society that was becoming more accepting of regulation, and yet was still mired in age-old racial strife even as it grew more diverse with each passing day. The progressive buzzword "association" meant bringing together different groups of people, but certain limitations remained. Some differences simply could not be erased. While not as vehemently racist as large segments of white America were at the time, the progressives still feared social conflict. When dealing with white immigrants, farmers, and laborers, this could be averted by working to change urban and rural environments and thereby changing individuals; in the case of African-Americans, on the other hand, this meant "protecting" them from the fury of reactionary whites. The progressives openly abhorred lynching and lawless mob violence, and felt that African-Americans could best improve themselves behind a sort of "legal shield" that would also placate conservative whites. But ultimately, "[s]egregation was a failure of imagination and nerve," McGerr concludes, ". . .Willing to believe that a kind of 'paradise' might really be attainable some day, progressives showed little fear in dealing with problems of gender, class, and economy - but not of race." In Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, corruption has been eliminated by both restricting the vote to society's "honorary members" and also through simple good breeding: by the year 2000, only the "better sorts" of humanity have reproduced. This may seem contradictory coming from a man so concerned with the struggles of the poor, but in reality, much of the progressive platform was strikingly undemocratic. Although McGerr only touches on it briefly, many of the Eastern and Southern European immigrants were also believed to be "racially inferior." Matthew Fry Jacobson's book Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) discusses in detail the rise of the pseudo-science of "eugenics" which would one day deeply influence Nazi ideology.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, progressivism had become mainstream enough for former President Theodore Roosevelt to form his own National Progressive party and run for a third term. McGerr actually sees World War I as the progressives' flash of glory before collapsing forever in the social malaise that followed the War to End All Wars. Even before Americans' disillusionment with the progressives' overreaching attempts to enforce patriotism and drastically enlarge the federal government, the new forces of what McGerr calls "liberation" were undermining the progressives' optimistic faith in humanity's ability to improve. Freud, for example, helped advance new notions of the primal subconscious that defied all attempts at civilization. New pasttimes and forms of entertainment - cars, films, dancing, Coney Island - encouraged personal release and individual self-expression (particularly in the new Modernist art), both of which ran counter to the progressive program. (Ironically, McGerr notes, the progressives themselves had contributed to this new sexual openness with their public attacks on prostitution and other "vice.") Although the horrors of World War I had sounded the definite death knell for the Progressive Era, the new forces of the modernism in art, music, literature, and society would doubtlessly have defeated sooner or later even without that singular calamity.

I enjoyed reading A Fierce Discontent. Although McGerr's book is aimed at an academic audience, it is well-written, highly readable, and graced by the occasional touch of humor. It has appeal for both casual readers and scholars, and I strongly recommend it as a classroom text for undergraduates. I do, however, dispute his claim that progressivism was a purely domestic movement that had no international aims. While I'm no expert on the subject, I believe the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I was very much a progressive document. And since the modernism that threatened progressivism had its origins in Europe (and plays a major role in Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler's The Crimes of Paris, which I plan on reviewing next), I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the Progressive Movement abroad, if there was one. If it was uniquely American, then what made it so? But what I liked most was how McGerr explored the contradictions inherent to the Progressive Movement, such as segregation and the need for control, and how that contrasted with individualism so ingrained in both American culture and the recognizeably modern world that emerged with the dawn of the twentieth century. Again, this was a movement enamored with control and utopianism, and there is simply no way to sustain that kind of momentum. It certainly sheds light on popular liberalism today (the "audacity of hope"), which illustrates precisely why the study of history is so important to understanding the present.

In short: a great companion book for The Crimes of Paris, as reading the two together dramatically reveals the disparity between progressivism and modernism.

On a Troublesome, Hot-Button, Deeply Complex Classic

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be persecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. - Mark Twain, on the title page of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In the introduction of my Scribner's edition of The Great Gatsby, Matthew J. Bruccoli of the University of South Carolina refers to Fitzgerald's seminal work as the proverbial "great American novel," meaning that it is "the great work of fiction with defining American thematic qualities and that James Gatz/Jay Gatsby is the great American character." However, Bruccoli also notes that "[a]dherents of Huck Finn take issue and umbrage" with this. Although the grand phrase GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL has long been a serious cliché (despite the fact that we all still want to write one), I still think that most literate people, if asked, would narrow the contestants to either The Great Gatsby (1922) or Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The former is probably a "safer" choice, however, since the latter has been in recent decades marred by accusations of racism. Which immediately begs the deceptively obvious question: Is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a racist book or not? Or is that just too black-and-white (harhar) a question?

Most critics take issue with Jim as a character, while others find the liberal use of the word "nigger" to also be problematic. In the words of Toni Morrison, in her essay "Jim's Africanist Presence in Huckleberry Finn":

We need to explicate the ways in which specific themes, fears, forms of consciousness, and class relationships are embedded in the use of Africanist idiom: how the dialogue of black characters is construed as an alien, estranging dialect made deliberately unintelligible by spellings contrived to disfamiliarize it; how Africanist language practices are employed to evoke the tension between speech and speechlessness; how it is used to establish a cognitive world split between speech and text, to reinforce class distinctions and otherness as well as to assert privilege and power; how it serves as a marker and vehicle for illegal sexuality, fear of madness, expulsion, self-loathing.

Mark Twain allegedly based Huck's dialect on that of an African-American boy he knew, and yet Jim's speech is borderline coherent. (Jim: "I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I foun' a good place." Huck: "There was a place right about the middle of the island I'd found when I was exploring.") Morrison asks us to consider how "Africanist" language (Twain used the phrase "Missouri negro dialect") may be used as a signifier of the "other" in contrast to white "normality." And furthermore: in the context of both dialect usage and the novel's "third act" (in which Jim is imprisoned), what does Jim's presence as a character suggest? Mark Twain was very much a regional writer whose works often illustrate and satirize the features of the local culture. He even states that, when writing Huck Finn, he was very careful and deliberate in deciding each character's dialogue. In other words, Twain describes things as they are and, often, why it is ridiculous that they are the way they are. I have seen Twain exhibit racist tendencies (or what we would consider racist tendencies) in Roughing It; however, I also argued that he was merely acting as a product of his time and place. Can we make that same argument here?

In addition to dialect issues, there is also controversy surrounding the relationship between Huck and Jim, which fluctuates between one of equality and one in which Jim, a black man, defers to Huck, a white boy. For example, Jim sits patiently and allows Huck and Tom Sawyer to needlessly complicate his rescue by adding romantic flourishes Tom had read about in adventure novels. "Jim couldn't see no sense in the most of it," says Huck, "but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him; so he was satisfied, and said we would do it all just as Tom said." It's certainly hard to imagine Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, John Parker, or Abuya Suleiman Diallo ever being so lame. "Two things strike us in this novel: the apparently limitless store of love and compassion the black man has for his white friend and white masters; and his assumption that the whites are indeed what they say they are, superior and adult," says Morrison, who goes on to assert that

The humiliation that Huck and Tom subject Jim to is baroque, endless, foolish, mind-softening — and it comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white ex-convict befriended by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written: because it would not have been possible for two children to play so painfully with the life of a white man (regardless of his class, education, or fugitiveness) once he had been revealed to us as a moral adult.

One common interpretation of the ending is that Twain intends to parody the sensationalism, flamboyancy, and overblown pathos of romanticism. But even then, as Morrison argues, such proto-postmodernist intertextual "play" would not be possible if Jim were white, since American readers of the time simply could not conceive of a white man allowing two children to jeopardize the freedom he has been fighting for the entire book.

Obviously, then, Morrison and others have objected to the power dynamic between Jim and the white characters, particularly Huck. I noticed that too, but I also believe the reality was far more complex. Eugene D. Genovese's seminal 1974 book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made examines the institution of slavery from a Marxist standpoint, using Antonio Gramsci's theories of cultural hegemony to explore how rich Southern slaveholders used the seigneurial concept of familial patriarchy to make their ascendancy over slaves and "lesser" whites seem natural, necessary, and beneficial.

No class in the modern Western world could rule for long without some ability to present itself as the guardian of the interests and sentiments of those being ruled.

The idea of "hegemony," which since Gramsci has become central to Western Marxism, implies class antagonisms; but it also implies, for a given historical epoch, the ability of a particular class to contain those antagonisms on a terrain in which its legitimacy is not dangerously questioned.

In short, Genovese goes on to explain, the hegemonic class must take the interests of other classes into account in order to ethically validate itself in everyone's eyes, not just its own. Accordingly, in the antebellum South, a big-time slaveholder would often position himself as the patrone, a figure common to seignuerial societies "who simultaneously protects and abuses, nourishes and punishes." Now here is where it gets dicey: Genovese argues that black slaves, in navigating a social structure which rendered them powerless, would often identify with the master over poor whites (such as Huck). In fact, it was the slaves who invented the phrase "poor white trash." The masters, meanwhile, actively encouraged the mutual antipathy between the two groups on the grounds that it lessened the chances of a multiracial slave-impoverished white uprising. And that concern was not entirely without merit. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra, a Marxist study of the Atlantic world, describes several instances, usually in the Caribbean, in which white indentured servants and black slaves joined forces against their exploitative "betters." Once the revolt was crushed, the response was invariably to drive a wedge between black and white commoners. Interestingly, Linebaugh and Rediker assert that this was achieved by giving white laborers more status at the expense of black slaves.

Several characters in Huck Finn certainly fit the "poor white trash" stereotype even more viciously than many writers today would depict. Twain's poor whites, as well as their environment, make Jeff Foxworthy & Co. look downright urbane:

Then we went loafing around the town. The stores and houses was most all old shackly dried-up frame concerns that hadn't ever been painted. . . The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn't seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled-up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tin-ware. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at different times; and they leaned every which-way, and had gates that didn't generly have but one hinge - a leather one. Some of the fences had been whitewashed, some time or another, but the duke said it was in Clumbus's time, like enough. There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out.

All the stores was along one street. They had white-domestic awnings in front, . . . and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching - a mighty ornery lot. They generly had on yellow straw hats most as wide as an umbrella, but didn't wear no coats nor waistcoats; they called one another Bill, and Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and drawly, and used considerable many cuss-words. . .What a body was hearing amongst them, all the time was -

"Gimme a chaw'v tobacker, Hank."

"Cain't - I hain't got but one chaw left. Ask Bill."

The despicable personality of the "loafers," as well as the run-down and substandard conditions they live in, soon become even more vivid:

All the streets and lanes was just mud; they warn't nothing else BUT mud - mud as black as tar and nigh about a foot deep in some places, and two or three inches deep in ALL the places. The hogs loafed and grunted around everywheres. You'd see a muddy sow and a litter of pigs come lazying along the street and whollop herself right down in the way, where folks had to walk around her, and she'd stretch out and shut her eyes and wave her ears whilst the pigs was milking her, and look as happy as if she was on salary. And pretty soon you'd hear a loafer sing out, "Hi! SO boy! sick him, Tige!" and away the sow would go, squealing most horrible, with a dog or two swinging to each ear, and three or four dozen more a-coming; and then you would see all the loafers get up and watch the thing out of sight, and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise. Then they'd settle back again till there was a dog fight. There couldn't anything wake them up all over, and make them happy all over, like a dog fight—unless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to death.

Meanwhile, though undeniably clever, the "duke" and the "king," two con men who travel with Huck and Jim, are also shockingly callous, conscienceless, and manipulative. And, of course, there is also Huck's drunken, abusive lout of a father. But all in all, Jim and the other black characters are NEVER portrayed as being this incredibly loathsome.

Twain's contempt for poor whites nevertheless seems far removed from what Genovese interpreted as a respectful, reciprocal quasi-feudal relationship that existed between them and the plantation elite. Genovese identifies four strata of middle- to lower-class whites: "solid yeoman; respectable sub-subsistence farmers who supplemented their incomes by working as day laborers; skilled and semiskilled mechanics; and dissolute, déclassé 'poor white trash.'" He then goes on, perhaps controversially, to claim that seeing "proud, free white men willingly defer to the great and powerful planters" only reinforced the slaves' ties to their masters. (However, Genovese also points to contradictions in this social arrangement in that even the most degraded whites could still participate in the political process and claim legal equality with the rich.) What this meant is that slaves ultimately respected "quality" and, as inheritors of an African "shame culture" that also encouraged aristocratic ethos and bearing, were actually proud to identify with a powerful white master, as opposed to "poor white trash." Even an otherwise racist white woman could say, when talking about a boorish schoolteacher, that she "hope[d] he might in time learn from the negroes in return for some book learning, as they are singularly gentle and courteous in their manners." In other words, the antagonism between slaves and poor whites often derived from the hegemonic influence of the plantation elite, who presented themselves as paragons of manners, lifestyle, and behavior for everyone else (including their slaves) to admire and emulate.

(You can see how Roll, Jordan, Roll can also be classified as a "troublesome, hot-button, deeply complex classic" of historiography. I'm not sure I'm buying everything Genovese's claiming, BTW.)

So how do Huck and Jim fit into this? Genovese also points out that relations between slaves and poor whites were more complex than seen at first glance. Many slaves who stole their master's goods would sell them to poor whites at drinking and gambling parties. And some poor whites who were brutal when on the slave patrol would nevertheless help a particular individual slave run away - just as Huck did. In fact, Huck's inner monologues, in which he contemplates returning Jim to Miss Watson and struggles with the "sinfulness" of aiding Jim's escape, reflect what Genovese calls the "dangerous ambivalence" that occasionally arose whenever the two groups interacted. The childlike manner Jim exhibits - another sore point for critics - may also be derived (that is, whites' belief in it) from the Southern institution of paternalism and how it presented itself on the plantation as a fundamentally familial arrangement. In trying to morally justify themselves, slaveholders liked to insist that black people (who one Georgia State Supreme Court judge referred to as "children of the sun," as contrasted to a "hardy and industrious [white] population") needed to be taken care of. Should slavery fall, they could even be exterminated! "And therein lay [other] dangerous implications," says Genovese, ones which, if Genovese is right in his characterization of the antebellum South, could go a long way in explaining the origins of the Huck-Jim partnership. The slaveholders ultimately saw themselves as authoritarian father-figures presiding over an extended plantation family. Hence: the black slaves were their "children." While this system welded blacks and whites together in a dysfunctionally intimate family bond, it was also inherently cruel in its demands for reciprocity and subjugation. "Against insubordination alone," intoned one slaveholder, "we are severe." Any acts of self-assertion or ingratitude on the part of the "children" were tantamount to treason and would be punished accordingly.

(Twain actually does satirize the Southern elite's culture of honor and family obligation in Huck Finn. The Grangerford-Shepherdson feud is simultaneously tragic and farcical, while the weepy, maudlin art and poetry of the late Emmeline Grangerford may be a parody of the overly sentimental mannerisms of the genteel Southern lady.)

In other words, if Genovese is right (and I'm not necessarily saying he is - he was only one historian, albeit a highly esteemed one), then Huck and Jim were victims of the same suffocating, two-faced, oppressively paternalistic plantation hegemony that denied women, children, and African-Americans their rightful recognition as full human beings with intelligence and capability. Even when he grew up, Huck, should he remain in the South, would always be caught, as a poor white, in the quasi-traditional web of hierarchy and obsequiousness. (Obviously, the Civil War happened, but Huck never gives any indication of an ability to tell the future.) Perhaps that is why he chooses to flee at the end of the book, preferring the life of perfect freedom, beholden to no one, instead of Aunt Sally's promises to "sivilize me."












But, as Toni Morrison points out, Huck is still not a black man. While slaves and poor whites may have regarded one another with antipathy, from the latter's perspective, at least they were not "niggers" because "freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another; the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave." Oh, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn really is a great book, Morrison concludes, but mostly in that "it stimulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom." In other words, it's Great because of the hard questions it raises about the African-American presence in American literature, especially as the specter of an oppressed population of "others" that has shaped white writers' responses to "quintessential" American themes such as individualism, social engagement, masculinity, and the contrast of innocence to darkness, death, and hell. In short: the American literary tradition may exist precisely because of the historical position of black Americans.

So . . . is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn racist or not?

Hell, I don't know. As Mark Twain would say, it's a "dark and bloody mystery" for the sages of the ages. (Actually, I suspect it may be a wholly subjective question.) But The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does need to be read.

On Roll, Jordan, Roll

Note: the following relates very strongly to a post I plan on doing in the next couple of days on Huck Finn and his trusty sidekick Jim.

It must first be established that I was unable to finish Eugene D. Genovese's seminal Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York and Toronto: Random House, 1976) due to both its prodigious length and one annoyingly persistent headache. Therefore, this review, as it covers only the first book and about half the second, is appropriately limited; whatever complaints I make may well have worked themselves out later on. That being said, having read nearly half of it, I believe that the tone and content of what I did read can safely be assumed to characterize the half that I did not. As a writer, Genovese – whose forty-year career has spanned many schools, including my alma mater the University of Rochester – is engaging if biased. While exploring slave narratives and inquiries into the workings of the plantation system, one occasionally encounters, "like a flash of lightning in a serene sky," an outburst of anger directed at those oppressive and omnipresent capitalist ruling classes. (For example: he whines about "revolutionary bourgeoisie" on page 45 and has a brief rant on the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and funeral customs on pages 201-202. On page 188, he makes a needless swipe at conservative movements.)

That is perhaps to be expected, given his background. Genovese self-identified as a Marxist and Socialist in the 1960s and openly welcomed a Viet Cong victory over American troops. Not surprisingly, the foundation for Roll, Jordan, Roll necessarily arises from this Leftist outlook. Genovese was initially inspired by the demands of Marxist anthropologist Marvin Harris for a materialistic (read: class) approach to slavery studies as an alternative to the idealism of Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins (indeed, the Marxists were some of Elkin's harshest critics, as discussed in David Bryon Davis's 1974 article "Slavery and the Post-WWII Historians"). At the same time, Harris' economic determinism, which posits the dominant force of material conditions in the molding social relations and their inevitable overriding of any other ideological or psychological factors, is ultimately ahistorical (as I've discussed before). "Marxism [has] offered a theoretical explanation for the whole of human history as well as for each particular epoch within in." Hegel, to whom Genovese frequently refers in Roll, Jordan, Roll, had developed a theory of history as an ongoing march towards ultimate truth, a veritable "World-Spirit" embodied in the separate histories of individual nations. Marx, on the other hand, substituted matter for the World-Spirit in his quest to unify everything from the Enlightenment to the French and Industrial Revolutions by invoking the rise of capitalism as the prime motivator of human events. These ideas of history as a universal story built on a base-superstructure, however, have since fallen from favor, especially in the wake of postmodernist attacks on the "meta-narrative" (i.e. Marxism) as intrinsically ideological and therefore obfuscating. Roll, Jordan, Roll, having been written in Genovese's Marxist stage, must be viewed within this overall historicist context. (You can read about this in greater detail in Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob's Telling the Truth About History.)

Elkin's Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), the groundbreaking study Genovese disputes in Roll, Jordan, Roll and other works, had set up the Latin American and North American systems of slavery as two opposing paradigms: open versus closed. The latter system, as seen in the United States, was a product of the exploitive impulse inherent to "unopposed capitalism" run amok without either the restraint of institutional safeguards or a balance of cultural and political interests. These ideal forms, Genovese contends, are "too rigid, oversimplified, and deterministic." Genovese also sought to dispute Elkin's underestimation of the slaves' capacity for resistance and subversion, the strength and integrity of their separate culture, and their preservation of the African past.

Answering Harris' call, Genovese applies the Gramsci model of hegemony, named for Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, which attempts to explain how the capitalist ruling class can portray its sociopolitical dominance as both the natural result of universal participation and as necessary for the common good. Or, as Genovese himself explains it: "The idea of 'hegemony,' which since Gramsci has become central to Western Marxism, implies class antagonism; but it also implies, for a given historical epoch, the ability of a particular class to contain those antagonisms on a terrain in which its legitimacy is not dangerously questioned." The revolutionary bourgeoisie, he goes on to argue, during its European ascendance, ideologically justified itself by juxtaposing natural law doctrines against the old feudalism. Once bourgeoisie power was established, however, it turned and resorted to positive law in order to secure itself even as it continued to utilize natural law to defend property. Of course, the same thing happened in Communist Russia; therefore, even Marxist theory must culminate in positive law, with natural law acting as an extralegal yardstick. In the antebellum South, as in all societies, law was inevitably the principle medium of ruling class hegemony. At the same time, law is also an active entity that evolves "in dialectical response to the other classes of society," including, in the Southern case, the slaves. All ruling classes are different, of course, so each must rule differently. In a system built on human property and racial subordination – the right of an individual of one race to appropriate the person and labor of an individual of another race – the planters of the South drew on the traditional land-oriented paternalism of feudalism. Paternalism, says Genovese, is especially insidious, since it inextricably links the oppressed to the oppressor.

(But if the antebellum South was essentially pre-capitalist, then wouldn't analyzing it in a Marxist framework be anachronistic? Or is am I just ignorant?)

The slave South had inherited English law in addition to elements of the Roman and Germanic communal and feudal traditions. At the same time, the West had since adopted the "revolutionary bourgeoisie" notions of private property and the transformation of labor into a disembodied commodity. The slaveholders nevertheless could not simply tack property in man onto Western ideas of property in general, which rested on the assumption of marketplace equality. The southern system thus had to become implicitly dualist: while the state exercised authority over all people, it also recognized the authority of the slaveholders over the slaves as their property. The master subsequently became a lord, the human protector to whom slaves could always turn, not unlike the medieval serfs. This was the slaveholders' hegemony. "All slave and seigneurial societies throw up the figure of the padrone," Genovese explains, "who simultaneously protects and abuses, nourishes and punishes."

Inherent to the organic society of land-based paternalism is reciprocity, the linking of all individuals and classes together in a web of duty and obligation idealized as kindness and generosity. In exchange for his protection, the slaves themselves defined a "good master" as one who provided them with adequate food, clothing, and shelter. It was common practice to refer to the "family, both black and white" and masters frequently took pride in their slaves' abilities and accomplishments the way a father would for a child. "And therein lay dangerous implications," for Southern men at this time had significant leeway with regards to the treatment of wives and children that was also informed by a rigid sense of honor. The result was a doctrine of fundamental arrogance and domination that sanctioned cruelty to wayward familial subordinates. The slaveholders themselves, however, felt that they were being kind and benevolent. But "[a]gainst insubordination alone, we are severe," one is quoted as saying. Indeed, insubordination was tantamount to treason.

These patriarchs simply felt that they fulfilling their Christian burden of caring for people who lacked the ability to care for themselves because they were children, or female, or black. Abolitionism, they charged, demanded that they abandon their responsibilities and leave these helpless beings out in the cold. Here, obviously, a powerful racism came into play. Despite the implied misogyny of such an arrangement, the planters' wives were often its staunchest advocates, seeing themselves as ministers of a softening moral influence in the lives of both their husbands and their husbands' slaves. Paternalism exerted itself across class lines as well. Nonslaveholders, who ranged from respectable yeomen to "poor white trash," still economically and financially benefited from slavery, however much the system politically and socially oppressed them as well. In return for this monetary dependence, the wealthy slaveholders dealt with local whites generously and charitably, while their slaves got to see otherwise proud, independent white men willingly submit to their masters.

Those who romanticize and therefore do not respect the laboring classes fail to recognize their commitment to law and order, Genovese asserts. An oppressive social order is always preferable to chaos; people will not put much faith into a utopian scheme they have not experienced. For that reason, not even the slaves' own charismatic preachers called for open rebellion, though the masters often suspected them of it. Black religion in America was the heir to both the life-affirming celebration of the physical world found in African spirituality, the emotionally charged Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, and the potentially political implications of Christian equality before God. The slaves' Christianity was not, however, the "proletariat" millennialism of the Quakers, Anabaptists, and other radical sects of seventeenth-century England who asserted that God was "no respecter of faces" and called for the destruction of Babylon and the building of Zion or New Jerusalem in a great and holy moment of social leveling. (See my post on The Many-Headed Hydra.) American slaves, by contrast, sought to accept what could not be helped and believed that deliverance would be a direct gift from God Himself, whom they strongly linked to Moses. The reliance of most black preachers on their masters' protection also severely circumscribed what their role, though they did develop certain modes of tone, gesture, and rhythm to indirectly communicate with their congregations. The result at the end of the day was an outlook that, though practical and realistic for the slaves' difficult circumstances, also created a vacancy of political leadership that forced African-Americans to look to whites to fulfill this position. Only with the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1950s did this finally change.

Of course, this is not all of Roll, Jordan, Roll, though it perhaps lays out the foundations for the rest of the book. I did not even cover everything found in the parts I did read, yet one can probably see where other historians might in turn dispute Genovese's work. One disgruntled Amazon.com reviewer, who identifies herself as a "JD Ph.D who teaches and researches American slavery," gave Roll, Jordan, Roll one star and slammed it as "a nice, pastoral portrayal of slaves singing while they cut 'massa's' cotton" and attacks Genovese's use of Gramsci's hegemony as "a concept that can have no meaning in a regime of physical coersion [sic]." Fellow historian David Bryon Davis characterizes Genovese's interpretation and application of paternalism as "fuzziness" and acknowledges, in anticipation of reactions like the Amazon reviewer's, that his Marxism "may no longer provide protective coloration against the charge of sentimentalizing or romanticizing slavery." Furthermore, Genovese's repeated defenses of himself against charges of racial bias seems to imply "that only radical scholars can escape the liberals' typical condescension on race."

Marxism aside, Genovese does rely heavily on primary sources, including the New Deal interviews with ex-slaves in the 1930s; nevertheless, as he himself points out, these interviewees were only children during the slave years and usually escaped its worst abuses. Walter Johnson, professor of history at New York University, wonders if it "[c]an . . . be mere coincidence that so many examples of planters expressing ostensibly "paternalist" sentiments refer to slaves who have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing?" In other words, in what contexts were slaveholders whom Genovese quotes speaking or writing? Roll, Jordan, Roll is an intriguing, thought-provoking work, yet Marxism is an inherently an ideology that advocates certain political ideas and courses of action. Roll, Jordan, Roll, then, is inevitably tainted in this manner, as it rests on purely political foundations.

Vivid History

"[They] had geared themselves for wealth, excitement, and violent combat, so they fought and played feverishly in the enervating heat, exploited the labor of white servants and black slaves, risked sudden death from mysterious diseases or the annihilation of their profits in smashing storms and buccaneering raids. The expectations the English brought with them and the physical conditions they encountered in the islands produced a hectic mode of life that had no counterpart at home or elsewhere in English experience. This is what it meant to live beyond the line."

- Historian Richard Dunn on seventeenth-century Barbados (originally quoted in Allison Games's Migration and the Origin of the English Atlantic World - now compare that to seventeenth-century Puritan New England!)

Migration and the Origin of the English Atlantic World (A Review)

Homogeneity of nationality and ethnicity do not necessarily signify a unified culture. By contrast, the English colonies of North America and the Caribbean were a veritable melting pot as regional and religious differences collided everywhere from Massachusetts to Barbados. Alison Games, an Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University who specializes in Early America, has aptly demonstrated through port records how Puritans, traveling merchants, ambitious planters, and masses of indentured servants clashed and coalesced into the seventeenth century English Atlantic world. Of the 7,507 passengers who left England through London in 1635, almost 5,000 were bound for Virginia, New England, Barbados, St. Kitts, Bermuda, and Providence, where they later reappeared in colonial records. The resulting book, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Harvard University Press: 1999) chronicles both the lives of individual colonists and the greater exodus in which they took part as they roamed the known globe seeking fortune and freedom.

The New World was only the latest option in the English tradition of relocation as part of the personal life cycle, whether for employment in agricultural or domestic service, to take up an apprenticeship, or to plunge into the busy metropolis of London in search of financial success. Beginning in 1607, Virginia was introduced as another destination for the adventurous and ambitious as the plantation system began to take root following the adoption of tobacco and the subsequent escalation of the “acquisitive and predatory drive for commodities.” Religion too became a motivating factor in 1633 as William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, began to overhaul the liturgy and doctrine of the Church of England in a manner that struck many as suspiciously Catholic – a sentiment that only deepened when Laud also started to crack down on nonconformists. In 1634 he instituted a decree that all English subjects bound for the colonies were to present proof that they did not owe taxes; all passengers below the rank of subsidy men were required to present letters from the justices of their parishes attesting their loyalty to the Church. To that end, clerks were to document the names, ages, and occupations of everyone who passed through the port of London, the busiest port in all of England. Though the goal was to prevent the escape of religious dissidents, it was mostly young male indentured servants who ventured to the New World, primarily to work at the plantations in Virginia, Bermuda, Barbados, and St. Kitts (where they composed almost 70% of the population). New England, however, more closely resembled old England as Puritans seeking to establish their “City on the Hill” and escape Laud left for the American frontier with their families.

These varying motives for leaving, as well as homegrown regional distinctions, produced an extraordinarily diverse Atlantic culture that further diverged after encounters with Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and neighboring Spanish, Dutch, and French settlements. “Indeed,” says David H. Fisher of both Puritan New England and rapacious, secular Virginia, “it would be difficult to imagine how any two fragments of the same metropolitan culture could have been any more different.” Different colonies, for example, held different standards of colonial success that plainly demonstrate the social diversity that developed in the Atlantic setting. Virginians fought for land, commodities, slaves, economic sufficiency, and the political power that accompanied such accouterments, while those on Barbados reached new heights of plutocracy, voracity, and labor exploitation. Overcrowding in the temperate Puritan Bermuda, on the other hand, drove colonists to acquire additional property elsewhere, though they did manage to come closest to replicating the Old World society they had left behind. Perhaps religious conformity would have been the ultimate triumph in New England, yet a creed unused to social and political dominance motivated myriad challenges to its authority, some serious (the Antinomian Controversy) and others relatively innocuous (internal migration other towns and other congregations). For all their dissimilarities, however, continuous movement within the Atlantic world from one colony to another meant that none of these subcultures would persist in isolation.

Driving these trends and developments, of course, were the countless individual pioneers who passed through the port of London on their way to America and the Caribbean. Reliance on primary sources is a mainstay of the historian profession, but Alison Games – who notes, interestingly, that Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World started out as her doctoral dissertation – makes extensive use of records and archives from Virginia, Barbados, Bermuda, New England, and all over old England. For example, Games cites an original register located in the Kew Public Office, as well as the Mercers’ Company Port Records of Mercer’s Hall, London. Either she was able to access these electronically (though Migration was published in 1999, still the early years of the Internet) or she definitely did some traveling. Just looking in the footnotes at the number of contemporary books and articles, already on top of the wide range of historical documents, I clearly got the impression that Games’ final product was the end result of a great deal of dedication.

That being said, however, Games is still a terribad writer. Her word use is annoyingly repetitive and her overall tone is dry. Consider the following:

Geographic mobility was not part of a conscious effort to ensure conformity in the colonies to a broader English culture. Indeed, such an effort was futile: although English people brought with them a multitude of English ways, colonial exigencies forced other patterns upon them. But frequent movement did enable colonial residents and visitors to retain contact with old England and other colonies, and for all their geographic distance, this contact enabled them to remain a part of England even as England itself was ultimately altered by its colonial holdings. In their repeated journeys from one colony to another and from the colonies to England, many of these voyagers signaled an understanding of a large and varied colonial world. . .

Merely glance at that passage and the words “England” and “colony/colonial” instantly pop out all over the place. I am sure there was a better way to rephrase it. We know, for instance, that the people she is discussing are English so she should not have to keep reminding us; likewise, synonyms for “colony” include “outpost,” “settlement,” “dependency,” “protectorate,” “territory,” and “satellite,” as well as (in this context) “frontier,” “New World,” “(North) America,” “Caribbean,” and “English Atlantic world/realm/sphere.” Luckily much of the material itself was fascinating enough to maintain the momentum, albeit rather sluggishly at times.

That being said, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World comes recommended for the sheer volume of historically significant information contained therein. Games does a fine job illuminating her findings and connecting them to the bigger picture but, though a committed scholar, she is not at all an engaging writer. For someone seeking a good but dense read, I would point instead to Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which I thoroughly enjoyed, not only because it was fascinating but also due to Mann’s pleasing sense of humor. Migration is, in other words, a book for the historian and the student of history, not the lay bibliophile with an amateur interest in Early America or England in the seventeenth century.

Mark Twain and Holmberg's Mistake

In his fascinating and eye-opening book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann discusses what he calls "Holmberg's Mistake." The name comes from Allan R. Holmberg, a researcher who lived among the Sirionó Indians of the Bolivian province Beni from 1940 to 1942. His subsequent book Nomads of the Longbow remains an iconic and highly influential work of anthropology that has also shaped the way South American Indians are viewed by the outside world. According to Holmberg, the Sirionó are "among the most culturally backward peoples of the world." He described them as a singularly wretched lot who live in constant hunger; have no clothes, domestic animals, art, or musical instruments; cannot count beyond the number three or make fire; and have nothing resembling religious belief or a coherent perception of the universe and their place in it. In short, the Sironió are essentially holdovers from the distant Stone Age, having never, in thousands of years of existence, progressed beyond cultural infancy.

Although Holmberg was a compassionate observer who persisted in his work with the Sirionó through physical hardship and ill health, his conclusions were simply and utterly wrong. In 1982, Allyn Stearman of the University of Central Florida became the first anthropologist to study the Sirionó since Holmberg and what he found was very surprising. First of all, it seemed that a wave of epidemics in the 1920s had wiped out 95% of the Sirionó population, forcing the remaining few through a "genetic bottleneck," meaning the survivors had no choice but to mate with relatives which led predictably to hereditary problems. Even before the outbreaks, the tribe had already been in conflict with impinging white cattle ranchers who, with the aid of the Bolivian military, had been throwing Sirionós into prison camps and enslaving them. In other words, the group that Holmberg had lived among was the persecuted remnant of a recently devastated culture, now in hiding and on the run. Holmberg's Mistake is actually comparable, says Charles Mann, to someone encountering a bunch of Nazi concentration camp survivors and deciding that European Jews have always been ragged and malnourished.












Not only that, but archaeological and linguistic evidence also reveals that the Sirionó are actually newcomers to the Beni area. Indeed, the previous inhabitants seem to have been quite culturally sophisticated, judging from the extensive garbage mounds (large enough for a city the size of ancient Rome), canals, causeways, and fishing weirs they left behind. Most intriguing are the islands of forest, linked by razor-straight berms in the midst of Beni's expansive plains. All these signs clearly point to the prior existence of an unknown civilization, which acts as the springboard for Mann's thesis: that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were more populous, more culturally advanced, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than previously thought by both academia and general society.

So far from being "a whole continent of patsies" who existed suspended in time until their discovery by the West, Native Americans have a rich and varied story that is only just now coming to light after decades of being viewed as ahistorical "noble savages." It is said that Europeans like to dismiss the United States as a country with no history. But whose history?

Mann, however, acknowledges that it is not entirely fair to lay too much blame on Holmberg. It has been said that humans view history as a narrative, and, being only human, that narrative is inherently biased or even ideological. Postmodernist critics like to claim that narrative and critical thinking are incompatible (although it is unclear what they would have historians do instead) and looking at the traditional historiographical mode through which Native Americans have been dealt with – as a people with no history outside of their interactions with Europeans – it is easy to see where these detractors are coming from. Holmberg was writing as a member of a culture that had traditionally oppressed the culture he was writing about, and so it was perhaps unavoidable that he came into his project with a set of prejudices already in place. I have previously discussed how it is that culture is actually a cognitive practice that defines reality itself. Simply put: we cannot help but to view the world through the lens of our views, beliefs, and biases.

The stereotype of Native Americans as impoverished and downtrodden did not begin with Holmberg: it was already in place and merely influenced how he approached his study of the Sirionó. It is encountered in Mark Twain's fictionalized 1872 memoir Roughing It, which recalls his journey to California, Nevada, and Hawaii during the Civil War years. Though never as popular as his other travelogue Innocents Abroad, Roughing It is nevertheless a very funny book and a genuine treasure trove of frontier history. As always, Twain comes across as a likeable man whose good humor persists even through disillusionment and disappointment as, one-by-one, each romantic notion of the Wild West turns out to be bunk. Which makes the instances of virulent racism all the more surprising. In chapter XIX, Twain has this to say:

It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa. Indeed, I have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood's "Uncivilized Races of Men" clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the Goshoots. I find but one people fairly open to that shameful verdict. It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa. Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all the other "Noble Red Men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other Indians; prideless beggars—for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he would not "go," any more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jack-ass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whiskey is referred to; a thin, scattering race of almost naked black children, these Goshoots are, who produce nothing at all, and have no villages, and no gatherings together into strictly defined tribal communities—a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can exhibit.

The Bushmen and our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, which-ever animal—Adam the Darwinians trace them to.

Later he expresses his grave regret to inform the reader that no "noble" Indians seem to exist:

The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man—even of the scholarly savages in the "Last of the Mohicans" . . . I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive—and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings—but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine—at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody's.

Holmberg's Mistake, Mr. Clemens, remember Holmberg.












Obviously, you cannot expect a white guy from the nineteenth century to be "politically correct." I think it's basically common knowledge that people of that era held views mainstream America now considers wholly objectionable and, for that reason, I don't think anybody is going to take Twain's depiction of the Goshoot Indians as gospel truth. But it's still interesting to read that particular chapter in light of what Mann later wrote about Holmberg and the Sirionó. As 1491 makes quite clear, the way we approach Native American history needs some serious revision. It's been an odd juxtaposition: that of the "noble savage" who exists in a state of nature and purity and that of the degraded savage doomed to poverty and ignorance. The former conception is not unlike the Victorian "Angel of the House" that placed women on a cold, lonely pedestal or the contemporary notion of the mentally disabled as unfailingly sweet innocents who exist on a higher emotional plane than us "smart people." All three of these stereotypes – the noble savage, Angel of the House, and lovable cherub with Down Syndrome – are ultimately dehumanizing and deny that Native Americans, women, and the mentally disabled are full human beings with individual personalities. But just as women were once thought of as either Eve or the Virgin Mary (virgin/whore), so too have Native Americans been either pitied as downtrodden or admired as superior and possessing of some quality lost by "civilized man." Such uncomfortable dichotomies have never done anyone any good. Are there no shades of gray?

But, as I've said, Roughing It is still a great book. Few people have captured America, in all its highs and lows, quite like Samuel Clemens.

1491 also comes strongly recommended. Because everything you thought you knew about Native American history is wrong.