Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary Hsuan L. Hsu Giles, Paul . 2002. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press. $64.95 hc. $21.95 sc. xiii + 337pp. In Virtual Americas, Paul Giles picks up where his last book—Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860—left off. The two books together demonstrate remarkable scope: Virtual Americas covers representations and refractions of British culture by authors ranging from Frederick Douglass to Thomas Pynchon. Virtual Americas explores, with immense insight and breathtaking speed, both familiar and relatively obscure texts (such as Herman Melville's Clarel and Thomas Pynchon's nonfiction essays, which, Giles notes, "because they have not yet been collected in one volume, are rarely read together as a group" (229)), as well as theoretical texts ranging from Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action to Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics. Giles studies Douglass's awakening to national consciousness during his international travels to Britain and Ireland; Melville's simultaneous mockery of British authoritarianism and American reinscriptions of British hierarchies; the way in which Henry James's "surrealist" visualizations reconfigure European values by interpreting their metaphors materially; Robert Frost's transnational displacement of nationalistic "political fetishism"(147); the perverse fetishisms that Lolita has in common with area studies; the demystification of British forms and American transcendentalism in Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath's expatriate poems; Pynchon's reconfiguration of local and American spaces in fictions refracted by British settings and characters; and, finally, the ways in which British cultural studies and American studies can interrupt one another's ideological assumptions by working as "ludic images of their opposite."(268) The speed with which Giles negotiates so many texts "dislocates" us not only from the nationalist frameworks of "area studies" but also [End Page 216] from the common tendency to identify an author with a handful of canonical works: many of the chapters span the entire careers of the authors they examine. However, the very range of Giles's work may raise eyebrows in readers skeptical of a critical framework that can generate two books published in consecutive years, which cover nearly three centuries of literature in (or, rather, "between") two national traditions. Giles's argument about the refractive mirroring that aestheticizes, refracts, dislocates, empties out, and virtualizes (the frequency with which he varies and doubles up such terms—as when he speaks of Vladimir Nabokov's "tone of inversion or detachment" (168)—seems to belie their vagueness) both British and American cultural contexts seem almost too versatile. Although his brilliant readings make his choice of authors appear quite natural, he never discusses his principles of selection. Why Melville and James, rather than Edith Wharton, or the Mark Twain of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? Why Robert Frost, and not T.S. Eliot? The flexibility of Giles's scope is even more evident in the easy way in which the book's subtitle slides between "Transnational Fictions" and "The Transatlantic Imaginary": Melville's narratives of the South Seas and the Holy Land, the "transpacific" scenarios that arise in Vineland and Frost's "Once by the Pacific," and Vladimir Nabokov's Russian origins seem to fit too easily into Giles's account of a primarily transatlantic transnationalism. This conflation of the transnational with the transatlantic is most evident in the implicit equation that Giles draws between British decadence and Cold War xenophobia: "[Frost's] style of cold war modernism in the Steeple Bush poems, predicated on the attraction and repulsion of antagonistic opposites, involves a metaphorical externalization and partial suppression of those self-consciously decadent elements that inspired his early work" (150, emphasis added). And even transatlantic influences are interpreted in constrained terms: for the most part, Giles treats only British and American writers, leaving out accounts of Southern European intertexts on the one hand and the transnational literature of the "black Atlantic" on the other. But with respect to the Anglo-American writings he takes on, Giles's individual chapters have much to offer even to those readers who find his occasional lack of geographical specificity suspect. For, in addition to his broad claim...