Hawthorne’s Transnational Coup : Double-Crossing the Na(rra)tion

Abstract

Hawthorne’s Transnational Coup: Double-Crossing the Na(rra)tion John Dolis (bio) for Ken Dauber The idea of “America,” its “National Fantasy,” as Lauren Berlant defines it (4–5), reveals a complex network of discursive practices, a network that represses, by definition, the diachronic insofar as it represents America as something necessary, mythic, ideal, utopian—a phantasy, indeed. Puritanism installs the commonplace—still not uncommon today: America is not a common place; it is, instead, a sacred stead, the Homestead in the Sky. Transcendentalism further elaborates the ideological dimensions of this mise-en-scène: America is natural, belongs to nature itself—“nature’s nation,” nature’s very own.1 With this “turn” of events, Jacksonian democracy, taking its own time, cements the final piece of Uncle Sam in place: cross-dressed in Mother Nature’s skirt, natura naturans, America henceforth transforms, transcends itself: e pluribus unum: a plural One, integral, complete, a whole unto itself.2 America invites this mix of metaphors, the symptoms con-fused. It (always already) arrives on time; it needn’t bide its time; its history and destiny are manifest, (re)cite the same event—timely yet timeless at once. Thus progress mistakes itself, takes itself for granted: here, to call upon Kant, time falls from its hinges. Sublation knows its whereabouts. Simultaneously, “America” knows nothing of borders. It borders the sublime. Self-contained, yet uncontained, it is, by definition, exceptional, the exception to geography and politics. Bound by possibility alone, what borders it naturally belongs to it (including the Oregon Territory). It’s not by chance Thoreau remarks that “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. . . . That way the nation is moving, [End Page 35] and I may say that mankind progresses from east to west” (“Walking” 106). Thus manifest destiny rewrites the nation’s primal scene: “England” is always already repressed—its original intercourse with “America” erased—or, what politically amounts to the same, hated, rejected, the abject as such. In boundary disputes, England’s claims are fraudulent—indeed, unnatural. Hence, the development of transcendentalism, as Paul Giles observes, “should be seen as interwoven systematically with the belligerent anglophobia of this era” (“Transnationalism” 66). Emersonian idealism stages the transcendental “spatiality” of this event: the national imaginary resembles nothing if not a circle whose center, like Augustine’s God, is everywhere, its circumference nowhere (65). Such discourse is itself, of course, sublime. Thoreau, in turn, will reinvent the figure that defines America’s extent: “The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun” (“Walking” 105). All progress goes west; regression goes east: “We go eastward to realize history . . . , retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions” (106). Make no mistake, repression plays the principal role in this scenario: forgetting on purpose. Indeed, as Sam W. Haynes observes, anglophobia was shared by millions of Americans in the 1840s (117).3 In the wake of such sentiment, “America” is nothing if not current, its future open, unbounded, sublime. It’s not by accident that nature, not culture, is at work: “a subtle magnetism in Nature” seduces Thoreau toward the west (“Walking” 104). Indeed, throughout the oeuvre, there is an undercurrent of hostility toward “England”—as though England were, itself, somehow unnatural, a perversion. “America,” conversely, takes (its) place naturally. It’s not “the annals of the country” that determine the national imaginary, but rather “the natural facts” themselves, the “perennials, which are ever without date” (Thoreau, Week 219). Conflating nature and nation, Thoreau’s narrative sublimates all politics; it configures nation and narration in a single gesture that naturally affiliates both, as Giles suggests, as though “the American relation to the land were a purely natural phenomenon and the English claims merely distant and legalistic [End Page 36] . . . . In...