Let us fake out a frontier: dissent and the settler colonial imaginary in U.S. literature after 1945

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Content 1 “Let us fake out a frontier”: Dissent and the Settler Colonial Imaginary in US Literature after 1945 Alex Trimble Young University of Southern California Department of English Dissertation August 2015 2 Acknowledgments My love and thanks is first due to my family, and especially my wife, Katie. She has been my most careful reader, and, with the assistance of our dog, Myrtle and our cat, Stewart, she has put up with me throughout many late nights and early mornings of working on my project about “cowboys and Beatniks.” This dissertation research was generously funded by a number of grants and fellowships, including the University of Southern California’s Provost’s Fellowship, USC’s Beaumont Endowed PhD Fellowship, the Huntington-‐USC Institute on California and the West’s Summer Travel Grant, and the USC English Department’s summer travel grant. Portions of it were presented at the annual conferences of the American Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, and, perhaps most importantly, the Western Literature Association, where I received valuable feedback on my research as it developed. Portions of my Kerouac chapter were also published in Western American Literature’s “Younger Scholars” special issue, edited by Krista Comer. I owe a profound debt to fellow graduate students who have helped shape my writing and thought throughout my time in graduate school. The intellectual and political orientation of my research has been deeply shaped by my many conversations and collaboration with Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne. My collaboration with Erik Altenbernd has also molded the theoretical and historical underpinnings of this work. Stephen Pasqualina and Rob Raibee have provided me with vital criticism and invaluable moral support from this project’s infancy. Samantha Carrick, Lisa 3 Locascio, Chris Muniz, Patricia Nelson, Brandon Som, and Terry Winningham have been among my most important colleagues and friends as I have developed this research. I am thankful to have a broad range of faculty mentors who have challenged and supported me throughout the dissertation process. Leo Braudy, Krista Comer, Macarena Gomez-‐Barris, and David Lloyd all offered important early readings of this material. Heather James gave me encouragement, careful readings, and insights into how to frame my research for a broader audience. Joseph Boone has long been a source of vital and humorous support and critique. Lorenzo Veracini’s scholarship and transpacific friendship has been central to shaping the theoretical framing of this research. The members of my dissertation committee have been generous with their time, intelligence, and experience throughout this process. Jodi Byrd took a chance on me at the outset of this research and continues to challenge me with her writing, expansive knowledge of multiple fields, and careful readings of my work. Bill Deverell’s bemused support as I brashly organized various academic events, and his advice on my scholarship and professional development have been vital for my growth as a scholar. John Rowe’s American literature seminars were important early venues for this work’s genesis, and his thought-‐provoking readings have helped shape my work in relation to broader debates within American studies. My biggest thanks, however, go to Bill Handley, whose inspiring scholarship and tireless support as my advisor over the last six years has transformed me as an 4 intellectual and a person. Without his example and his kindness, this work would not have been possible. 5 Table of Contents Introduction: Frontier Allegory and Isopolitical Dissent in US Literature, 6-‐48 Chapter 1: From the Colorado Homestead to the Fellahin Frontier: Kerouac’s Settler Colonial Allegory of Dissent, 49-‐85 Chapter 2: The Playboys of the Last Frontier: Radical Form, Queer Community, and Frontier Allegory in the Poetics of Jack Spicer, 86-‐151 Chapter 3: Secular Frontiers: Wallace Stegner, Joan Didion, and the Regionalist Critique of the Counterculture, 155-‐219 Chapter 4: The Buffalo, the Bear, and the Indian: Frontier Allegory, Animality, and Indigeneity in the Life Writing of Oscar Zeta Acosta and N. Scott Momaday, 220-‐275 Conclusion: An Errand into the Wild[erness], 276-‐284 Works Cited, 285-‐307 6 Introduction: Frontier Allegory and Isopolitical Dissent in US Literature Figure 1: “The Frontiersman,” photograph by William Wareing I. The Liberal, the Anarchist, and “the Frontiersman” The September-‐October 1961 issue of the Evergreen Review, the influential countercultural literary magazine edited by Grove Press founder Barney Rosset, features a cover photograph by William Wareing that depicts a barely recognizable image of President John F. Kennedy. Close examination reveals that it is a photo of a dilapidated campaign poster, partially shredded off the wall behind it. The photo is entitled “The Frontiersman” (Figure 1). The cover, published months after 7 Kennedy’s inauguration and his delivery of the famous “New Frontier” speech upon his nomination for president by the Democratic Party, presents its viewers with several questions. Is the ghostly portrait a rejection of Kennedy’s “new frontier”? Or is it rather an uneasy tribute to Kennedy’s attempt to inaugurate a new national project of opening “new frontiers” that would bridge class and cultural divides, a project with which the editors of the magazine identified? What, in any case, did the simultaneously nostalgic and progressive frontier rhetoric of the Kennedy campaign have to do with the literary politics of the avant-‐garde writers whom the Evergreen Review published? Any reading of the relation among the image, its title, and the magazine it adorns is complicated by the fact that the Evergreen Review was in its own way involved with a sort of literary frontiering. Its second and most well-‐known issue, a special issue called “The San Francisco Scene,” made famous for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” was instrumental in shifting the literary attention of the nation westward. The Bay Area, an erstwhile provincial backwater whose place in American Modernism might be summed up in Gertrude Stein’s “there’s no there there” quip about her native Oakland, was heralded by the Evergreen Review as a vital scene of literary innovation for the next generation (Stein 298). In summarizing the appeal of San Francisco for writers in the issue’s introduction, Kenneth Rexroth rails against the forces that writers moved to San Francisco to escape: For ten years after the Second War there was a convergence of interest—the business community, military imperialism, political reaction, the hysterical, tear and mud drenched guilt of the ex-‐ 8 Stalinist, ex-‐Trotskyite American intellectuals, the highly organized academic and literary employment agency of the Neoantireconstructionists (sic) what might be called the meliorists of the White Citizens’ League, who were out to augment the notorious budgetary deficiency of the barbarously miseducated Southern male schoolmarm by opening jobs “up N’oth.” This ministry of all talents formed a dense crust of custom over American cultural life—more of an ice pack. (“San Francisco Letter” 5) Rexroth, a committed anarchist, performs remarkable conflation of ideologies in defining the cultural and political forces that the San Francisco scene defined itself against. Ranging from the military industrial complex to the Marxist intelligentsia to the New Critics, this “convergence of interests” constitutes not a coherent ideological position, but rather a network of ideologies that share certain sclerotic tendencies that places them in the “dense crust of custom,” the “ice pack” of rigidity holding back “the living water underneath,” the fluidity of literary innovation and of anarchic thought (“San Francisco Letter” 5). San Francisco is praised as a place where the “ice pack” isn’t quite as thick, where “laissez faire and dolce far niente” reign (6). “Poets come to San Francisco for the same reason so many Hungarians have been going to Austria lately,” Rexroth quips, improbably comparing Hungarian refugees fleeing Soviet communism to American poets fleeing “the world of poet-‐professors, Southern Colonels, and ex-‐ Leftist Social fascists” that he describes as dominating the East Coast scene (8). The “special ideology” of these San Francisco poets, as Rexroth describes them, rejects 9 class politics but is guided by “a destructive revolutionary force: They would blow up their ship of state—destroy it utterly.” For Rexroth, however, this “revolutionary” impulse is not achieved through any attempt to overthrow the state, but rather a “disaffiliation,” a figurative escape that would allow them to “stand outside, truly outside, the all corrupting influence of our predatory civilization” (8). Rexroth and the loosely affiliated network of writers influenced by him tended to allegorize their move toward an anarchist (or quasi-‐anarchist) “disaffiliation” as a frontier process. In escaping the “all corrupting influence of our predatory civilization,” these writers saw themselves as recapturing what they believed to be the emancipatory spirit of expansion, or, as Rexroth put it in his essay, “the unfulfilled promises of Song of the Open Road and Huckleberry Finn” (12). In his essay on Big Sur in “the San Francisco Scene” issue, Henry Miller likewise suggests that these young artists’ westward movement is a mode of frontiering but stresses, however, that “the point” of this movement was not spatial, but ideological: The point here is that these individuals are not concerned with undermining a vicious system but with leading their own lives on the fringe of society. It is only natural to find them gravitating toward places like Big Sur, of which there are many replicas in this vast country. We are in the habit of speaking of the “last frontier,” but wherever there are “individuals,” there will always be new frontiers. (“Big Sur and the Good Life” 45) 10 The rhetoric of this excerpt bears an uncanny resemblance to the speech that JFK would deliver only three years later in the Los Angeles Coliseum: I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. … … some would say that those struggles are all over—that all the horizons have been explored—that all the battles have been won, that there is no longer an American frontier. But I trust that no one in this vast assemblage will agree with those sentiments. For the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won—and we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier… As Richard Slotkin has argued, the frontier provided the Kennedy administration a “complexly resonant symbol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-‐tales … its central purpose was to summon the nation as a whole to undertake (or at least support) a heroic engagement against Communism and the social and economic injustices that foster it” (Gunfighter Nation 3). “The symbolism of a ‘New Frontier,’” Slotkin argues, “set the terms in which the administration would seek public consent to and participation in the counterinsurgency ‘mission’ in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean” (Gunfighter Nation 3). The excerpt of Miller’s essay above—with its imagination of a masculine aesthetic autonomy as a frontier virtue—offers an aesthetic analog to Kennedy’s political rhetoric that runs deeper than their shared vocabulary. And yet, Miller’s 11 Thoreauvian isolationism and Rexroth’s pacifist/anarchist “disaffiliation” also offer a stark contrast to the norms of the liberal welfare state that Kennedy would work to build and to the militarism he would so aggressively pursue in the name of the “New Frontier.” Miller’s essay, indeed, seems to warn explicitly against the vision of American life that Kennedy valorizes even as it celebrates the colonization of the country: “But what is it that these young men have discovered, and which, curiously enough, links them to their forebears who deserted Europe for America? That the American way of life is an illusory kind of existence, that the price demanded for the security and abundance it pretends to offer is too great” (45; emphasis mine). In Miller’s improbable vision, these latter-‐day frontiersmen are the “renegades” who will survive the “inevitable” catastrophe that would end the American way of life; it is their ingenuity that will usher in a postapocalyptic future in which “ money is absent, forgotten, wholly useless” (45). The anti-‐American and anti-‐capitalist urges that Miller identifies with frontiering are indicative of the inevitable disappointment countercultural “frontiersmen” would have with the Kennedy administration by late 1961, when the 20 th issue of the Evergreen Review, with Wareing’s cover photo, was published. The last item in the journal, in fact, expresses this discontent directly in a “letter of conscience” signed by many of the most recognizable names of the Beat Generation, including Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Ed Dorn. These writers dedicated themselves to doing “all in [their] power to preventing further aggression against the people of revolutionary Cuba,” even as many of them (most notably Ginsberg) were also involved in protesting against the norms of the Soviet 12 state (128; Morgan 402-‐403). For these writers, many of whom, like Rexroth and Miller, employed frontier allegory to describe their own political and aesthetic dissent against the norms of American liberalism, the meaning of Wareing’s cover was clear: it was not, as at least one commentator has argued since, an eerie prophecy of Kennedy’s demise, it was a condemnation of a presidency that had betrayed the values of “the frontiersman” by pursuing a counterinsurgency campaign in the name of “containment”—a spatial strategy of violence antithetical to everything the writers in the Evergreen Review saw the frontier as representing (Brower). This dissertation is a study of how six authors with a broad spectrum of political and aesthetic commitments—Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer, Wallace Stegner, Joan Didion, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and N. Scott Momaday—engage with the history and myth of the American frontier in order to allegorize their own dissent against the norms of American liberalism. The animus that motivated my research arose out of a desire to explain the remarkable political distance between Kennedy’s new frontiers and those imagined by writers such as Rexroth and Miller. How could a romantic identification with “westward expansion” animate both the politics of Kennedy and his leftist detractors? What drove so many literary authors in this period to allegorize their own aesthetic and political dissent as a sort of frontier movement? These questions are exemplary of broader quandaries familiar to the field of American studies. Between the 1970s and 1990s, questions about how frontier rhetoric served to contain ideological dissent came to the forefront of debates that 13 reshaped the field as a new generation of American studies scholars worked to break down the exceptionalist, patriarchal, and ethnocentric paradigms of the “myth and symbol school.” For these scholars, the answer to this question was unambiguous: the frontier myth is a uniquely American site of ideological consensus, and it serves to reproduce the values of American exceptionalism and liberal capitalism. 1 This consensus, in Richard Slotkin’s formulation, is not formed around an agreement vis-‐à-‐vis “the terms in which the problem of existence and social survival will be stated,” even when the parties of this consensus may “disagree sharply as to programmatic solutions” (Gunfighter Nation 82). In Sacvan Bercovitch’s words, this ideological consensus “defused all issues in debate by restricting the debate itself, symbolically and substantively, to the meaning of America” (Rites 49; emphasis in original). Any cultural production that partakes in what Bercovitch calls “the rhetoric of the errand” (a reference to Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness)—participates in a “rite of assent” or a “ritual of consensus” that transubstantiates dissent into an expression of consensus that affirms American “norms and values” (Rites 12). How scholars like Bercovitch and Slotkin arrived at this almost alchemical formulation—and how it relates to the question of the frontier specifically— requires some explanation. For both the myth and symbol school and its critics, the frontier was a central—if not the central—symbol of the American mythology. Where scholars like Slotkin, Bercovitch, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Annette 1 Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen’s 1986 edited collection Ideology and American Literature offers a good overview of the nascent new American studies critique of the myth-‐and-‐symbol school, as well as a response (in the form of a reassessment of Virgin Land) by Henry Nash Smith. 14 Kolodny differed from their myth-‐and-‐symbol-‐school predecessors was in their assessment of how the frontier came to take its prominent place in the national myth and in the political consequences of that myth. 2 Scholars associated with the myth and symbol school, drawing on the legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner, were generally united in their understanding of the frontier as a national symbol that arose out of the historical conditions of settlement—conditions imagined as an encounter between “civilization and savagery.” In this Turnerian narrative, the encounter with “virgin land” shaped “the American character” around an expansive democratic individualism. For the myth and symbol school, frontier rhetoric in literature was the paradigmatic American rhetoric of dissent, summoning the anti-‐ authoritarian values purportedly fostered by the encounter between Euro-‐American men and “the wilderness.” Many of the counternarratives presented by critics of the myth and symbol school suggest that the concept of the frontier is an ideological fabrication devoid of 2 As the literary and scholarly sources I have cited thus far indicate, the debates regarding the meaning of the frontier and frontier rhetoric during this period were almost exclusively white affairs, even when these exchanges hinged on questions of colonial and racial violence. As I discuss in my consideration of Elizabeth Cook-‐ Lynn’s critique of Wallace Stegner in Chapter 3, very few Indigenous scholars in the academy during the debates surrounding the emergence of the new western history and new American studies had very little interest in a conversation that was doing very little to engage their work. While the reemergence of the term in conversations surrounding transnational settler colonialism has brought more engagement with Indigenous scholarship, that engagement has been frought. As Jodi Byrd points out in her essay “Follow the Typical Signs: Settler Sovereignty and its Discontents,” imagining the frontier as the “site where US empire propagates itself” risks reifying the conceptions of “Indianness” that settler colonialism imposes upon the Indigenous populations it sets out to eliminate (3). In my use of the term in the analysis that follows, I attempt to hold a consideration of the frontier as a category in suspension with an analysis of the “transposable Indianness,” in Byrd’s words, that makes the frontier legible (3). 15 any heuristic value. This idea was perhaps most stridently and famously expressed by New Western historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, who dismissed the frontier as “an unsubtle idea for a subtle world” (Legacy 25). In Rites of Assent, Bercovitch offers a similar position when he argues that “the frontier,” as conceived in America, was a concept invented by “political leaders” as a means of containing dissent and facilitating expansion by endowing conquest with a quasi-‐religious significance (51). “The myth of America eliminates the very issue of transgression. From being a dividing line, ‘frontier’ became a synonym for progress. And as new Israel progressed across the continent, the Westward Movement came to provide a sort of serial enactment of the ritual of consensus” (53). To romanticize the frontier past, then, was to participate in a tradition of declension narratives that highlighted the distance between the “theory and practice of American-‐ness” by at once “lamenting a declension and celebrating a national dream” (Rites 19, 57). For Bercovitch, American studies could only free itself from the “rhetoric of the errand” by embracing “a more mundane distinction between the Old World and the New, as denoting metaphors of geography rather than the progress of humanity” and returning to “a more traditional sense of ‘frontiers,’ as signifying limits and barriers rather than new territories to conquer” (Rites 65). “What,” Bercovitch asks, might happen if “this country were to be re-‐cognized for what it was … simply goy b’goyim, just one more nation in the wilderness of this world? What would happen, in short, if ‘America’ were severed once and for all from the United States?” (Rites 65). 16 Bercovitch thus calls not only for a cultural, but also a critical shift that might imagine an American studies scholarship that would divest itself from a metaphysical conception of America by rejecting the concept of the frontier in order to draw out the parallels between the US and European nation-‐states. While Bercovitch’s critique was but one among many, it is in many ways indicative of a shift that has shaped American studies scholarship since. 3 The “transnational” or “postnational” turn in American studies across the disciplines has worked to transcend the frame of the US nation-‐state by imagining a hemispheric American studies that severs “America” as an analytic frame from the United States. The distinction between “the Old World and the New” has simultaneously been bridged by an increasing focus on American empire that draws on parallels to European imperialism. These parallel efforts have largely moved away from any consideration of the frontier in US culture at all, other than in passing referents to note its role in promoting an identification with American exceptionalism and the imperialist efforts of the US state. As I immersed myself in an archive of post-‐1945 US literary dissent at the outset of the research conducted for this dissertation, I found this model of understanding dissatisfying for two reasons. Firstly, because the radical literary 3 In his essay in the influential 2002 Futures of American Studies anthology, William V. Spanos identifies Bercovitch as an “inaugural” figure for the new American studies (387). When Bercovitch has been taken to task by critics associated with the new American studies, it has largely been for his failure to argue more stridently than he already does for the power of the “rhetoric of the errand” to contain dissent within the ideology of the US state and of capitalist political economy. See, e.g., John Carlos Rowe’scritique of Bercovitch’s reading of Emerson in At Emerson’s Tomb (9-‐ 10), and Paul Bové’s essay “Notes Toward a Politics of an ‘American’ Criticism.” 17 authors of the post-‐’45 period that relied on frontier rhetoric to animate their dissent were often—in stark contrast to the nineteenth-‐century archive that Bercovitch relies on to ground his argument in Rites of Assent, or the pop cultural archives that are foregrounded in Richard Slotkin’s work—avowedly anti-‐capitalist and anti-‐statist. That many of these figures—Rexroth and Miller surely included— have been fully absorbed into the canon of US literature, and had whatever radicality their politics offered has been contained by state liberalism, is not in question. Whatever their rhetorical investment in frontier declension narratives, however, arguing that these figures were participating in an ideological consensus that sanctions the “norms and values” of the US state requires a strong reading that elides the process whereby this interpolation takes place (Bercovitch, Rites 12). Secondly, the critical desire to dismiss the frontier as a “an unsubtle idea for a subtle world” in favor of an understanding of the United States as bound by naturalized borders akin to Europe’s seemed to me then, as it does now, to be a critical strategy that risks solidifying, rather than unsettling, the “legacy of conquest” upon which the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the United States rests. 4 The countercultural “frontiersmen” I was reading, many of whom decried US imperialism abroad, nonetheless undertook violent erasures of American Indian presence and agency in their representations of their figurative “frontiers” at home. 5 4 Erik Altenbernd and I discuss this aspect of my thinking at greater length in our article “The Significance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History.” 5 My use of the term “counterculture” in this dissertation is heavily influence by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s analysis in Resistance Through Rituals. Hall and Jefferson describe the counterculture as a “milieux” (sic), rather than a coherent ideological structure, arising out of middle-‐class youths’ disaffection with the dominant culture that involves the experimentation with “alternative institutions” 18 Miller, for instance, praises Big Sur as “the California that men dreamed of long ago,” “unspoiled, uninhabited by man;” only mentioning in passing that “the only human beings who had been here before were the Esselen Indians, a tribe of low culture which had subsisted in nomadic fashion” (“Big Sur” 38, 36). When Indians were not thus represented as inconsequential denizens of prehistory in this literature, they are imagined as romanticized figures of identification that play a role in the frontier story only insofar as they provide the frontiersman with the cultural signifiers that confirm the authenticity of his dissent and the legitimacy of his claim to the territory upon which this dissent is staged. This mode of Indian play was also, of course, central to the articulation of familiar state frontier narratives. In Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” this mode of cultural appropriation features centrally in the narrative of how the frontier shapes an exceptional American character: The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. […] Little by little he transforms the such as “new patterns of living, of family life, and even ‘un-‐careers’” (60). These institutions are, however, ultimately parasitically dependent on the capital of the class from which these youth are rebelling. Countercultural formations do encounter genuine resistance from the dominant culture, but ultimately Of the authors I consider here, Kerouac is the obvious example of the countercultural milieu. Spicer and Acosta engaged countercultural formations but are more readily identified with particular (queer and Chicano nationalist, respectively) subcultures. 19 wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. (33-‐34) The persistence of this mode of Indian play in both official narratives of American exceptionalism and narratives of anti-‐statist dissent struck me as a phenomenon that could not be explained away by an interpretive model that would recast frontiers as borders in order to see the United States as “one more nation in the wilderness of this world” (Bercovitch, Rites 65). Having grown up in northeastern Oklahoma, the contested nature of the sovereign territory of the US has always been as real to me as the road signs designating the border between the Creek and Cherokee Nations a few miles from my childhood home, or my friends who vote in national, state, and tribal elections. Critical narratives that draw an equivalency between European nation-‐states and the US, it seemed to me, risked imagining a narrative of US imperialism that begins with the invasion of the Philippines in 1898 rather than with the original colonization of the continent. A critique of US imperialism that respected the agency of American Indians and the legitimacy of tribal nations’ sovereign claims would, I realized, have to recognize a categorical difference between the modes of sovereignty enacted in Europe, and those enacted in the United States. Such a critique would not be articulated through the conceptual closure of the frontier, but rather through a more complete account of how and why the idea of the frontier has retained such an expansive appeal. 20 II. US Dissent and the Transnational Frontier This realization led me to expand my theoretical reading to engage with transnational settler colonial studies, which was emerging as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry during the early years of this dissertation’s development. 6 While the compound term “settler colonialism” emerged in the study of empire as early as the 1960s, it is only in the twenty-‐first century that a broad (although far from uncontested) consensus has emerged in the field regarding what differentiates settler colonialism from other colonial formations. This consensus has largely formed around the work of Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe, who, in his 1999 monograph Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, worked to differentiate settler colonies from the “franchise and dependent” colonies in which much postcolonial theory originated. 7 For Wolfe, “settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labor. Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenes (or replacing them on) the land” (1; emphasis in original). This distinction between a colonialism focused on territoriality rather than labor is essential to understanding settler colonialism as a unique formation, one that cannot be understood vis-‐à-‐vis a “post”-‐colonial paradigm: “Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies. The split tensing reflects the determinate feature of settler colonization. The colonizers come to stay— invasion is a structure not an event” (2). Settler colonial societies, for Wolfe, are 6 Lorenzo Veracini offers a complete account of the development of settler colonial studies as a field in “Settler Colonialism: A Career of a Concept.” 7 For a critique of Wolfe and Veracini’s conception of the field, see Corey Snelgrove et. al. “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations,” and Tim Rowse, “Indigenous Heterogeneity.” For Veracini’s response to the latter, see “Defending Settler Colonial Studies.” 21 premised on an (always unfinished) “logic of elimination” (Settler Colonialism and The Transformation … 27). In settler colonies, as opposed to colonies premised on the exploitation of labor, “it is not the colonist but the native who is superfluous” (3). The often genocidal drive to eliminate native polities that structured settler colonial projects such as those undertaken in Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States thus aimed to create “a new colonial society on an expropriated land base” (Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” 288). For Wolfe, the concept of the frontier is a crucial analytic tool for understanding the operation of the “logic of elimination” whereby settler colonies constitute their land base and their sovereign claim. The frontier constitutes, in his analysis, “the primary paradigm” of settler colonialism, a “classic binarism that counterposes two pure types (civilization vs. savagery, etc.) and admits to a myriad of variants. The reality accompanying the idea of the frontier is that of invasion” (Settler Colonialism and The Transformation …165). In Wolfe’s analysis, then, the ideology of the frontier in settler societies does not mask “one more nation in the wilderness in the world,” but rather a specific structure of domination that hinges on a binary relationship between settler and indigene. For Wolfe, “the point is not simply that the idea of the frontier was misleading. What matters is that it was a performative representation—it helped invasion to occur” (Settler Colonialism 165). The critique of settler sovereignty thus demands a critical perspective that works to uncover the role of the frontier binary in shaping the structure of settler colonialism rather than rejecting the frontier as a conceptual tool. Wolfe argues that losing site 22 of the frontier in favor of more traditional understandings of a bounded nation-‐state is to risk acquiescing to a “strategic pluralism” whereby settler societies work to reduce “the primary indigenous/settler divide to the status of one among many ethnic divisions within settler society” (Settler Colonialism 168). In large part thanks to Wolfe’s excavation of the term, the years since the publication of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology have seen a broadly interdisciplinary comparative reassessment of the frontier in settler societies around the globe. This project has necessarily pushed back against American studies orthodoxy that reads the frontier as an exceptional production of US state ideology. As legal scholar Aziz Rana bluntly phrases it, “the idea of a frontier as distinctively American obscures similar claims made by other settler societies” (11). Part of this reconceptualization of the frontier as a transnational category has been a re-‐assessment of how settler frontiers relate to their metropolitan cores. Writing about the US frontier, Wolfe notes, More often than not (and nearly always up to the wars with the Plains Indians, which did not take place until after the civil war), the agency which reduced Indian peoples to [their] abjection was not some state instrumentality but irregular, greed-‐crazed invaders who had no intention of allowing the formalities of federal law to impede their access to the riches available in, under, and on Indian soil. (“Settler Colonialism” 391) Wolfe’s observation highlights the often extralegal nature of anti-‐indigenous violence on the frontier. Scholars including Lisa Ford, Aziz Rana, and Lorenzo 23 Veracini have argued that this frontier tendency to defy the constituted order of the state extends beyond the violence of dispossession, noting that communities on the frontier of settler colonial expansion are often more “internally egalitarian and participatory” political communities than the metropolitan centers in which they originated (Rana 12). 8 Rana suggests that this settler colonial core/periphery divide fosters a broad “wariness of metropolitan social and political customs” on the settler colonial periphery (11). Veracini argues that the quasi-‐autonomous and often dissenting nature of many settler polities demands a reconsideration of the relation of settler colonialism to both the imperial state and capitalist political economy, suggesting that “an account of an ongoing drive to escape market forces should accompany established interpretive patterns centered on ‘imperialism’ and ‘settler capitalism’” (Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Introduction 61; emphasis in original). Rana argues that, perversely, it has often been the most internally egalitarian settler colonies that undertake the most aggressive campaigns of indigenous dispossession because “without territory for settlers, the ethical benefits of ‘free labor’ could not be made generally accessible. In other words, as a political necessity, settlers viewed republicanism as constitutively bound to empire and expansion” (12). To phrase the problem in a parlance that will seem uncomfortably close to the current vocabulary of the academic left, settler accounts of egalitarianism depended on access to a commons—and anti-‐Indigenous violence was what cleared Indigenous land for common access within the settler polity. 8 I discuss Veracini’s and Rana’s interventions below; Lisa Ford’s work on the relative autonomy of frontier communities can be found in Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-‐1836 (e.g. 209). 24 Veracini suggests that settler colonial displacement ought to be understood as a distinct political orientation that emerges in response to the ongoing crises of capitalism. He draws a contrast between revolutionary and settler colonial political traditions, employing a spatial metaphor to define the difference between revolutionary and settler responses to crisis. In this model revolutionary political traditions—in accordance with the metaphor the very word “revolution” implies— can be understood as a vertical relationship in which the “world is turned upside down.” A revolutionary polity addresses itself to a dominant class and its state structures, working to supersede that power with an alternative. Settler colonial traditions, on the other hand, when faced with a potentially revolutionary crisis, respond with displacement across space rather than a vertical power struggle— they “turn the world inside out.” As Veracini puts it, these “world turned inside out traditions opt out of both revolution and reaction, they change the world by changing worlds” (“Suburbia” 340). Veracini describes the frontier communities that emerge out of this process as “isopolities,” collectives that maintain a unique and ambivalent relationship to both the metropolitan state and to capitalist political economy: The sovereignty claimed by settler collectives does not focus on the state and insists on the law-‐making corporate capacity of the local community, on its self-‐constituting ability, on its competence to control the local population economy, and a subordination to the colonizing metropole that is premised on a conditional type of loyalty. (72) 25 The settler isopolity thus provided polities dissenting against the norms of the state and capitalism the ability to enact alternative forms of community without undertaking a revolutionary challenge to the metropolitan state. Essentially, scholars such as Rana and Veracini understand the settler colonial frontier as a transnational “safety valve” for dissent that releases the social pressures produced by capitalist modernity in the same way that Frederick Jackson Turner understood the American frontier as providing an “safety valve” for various crises in American national life (“The Significance of the Section” 220). Turner, however, saw in the closing of the frontier an anxious moment occasioned by an epochal shift in the progressive history of the United States. Settler colonial critiques read the foreclosure of the (internally) emancipatory possibilities of frontier expansion as a direct result of the exclusionary and violent nature of settler colonialism. Whatever anti-‐statist animated their initial replacement, frontier isopolities often resort to petitioning the state for assistance in undertaking the genocidal violence against indigenous peoples that the settlers themselves initiated but cannot independently sustain (Veracini, Settler Colonialism 58). Governmentality is never far behind the frontier, however, and neither, as Veracini and historian Gabriel Piterburg argue, are the “speculators, elevators and other ‘moneyed interests’” that would work to divest frontier sole proprietors of their newly acquired land and resources in order to return settlers to the wage relation (Piterburg and Veracini, “Wakefield, Marx…”). The utopian and exclusionary imagination of settler colonial isopolities did not offer a viable geopolitical alternative to capitalism. Piterburg and Veracini go on to argue, in a reading of Karl 26 Marx’s writing on what we now understand as settler colonialism in Capital, that “Marx understood that the availability of free land constituted an alluring and dangerous alternative to embracing a revolutionary consciousness” (forthcoming). This statement could also sum up settler colonial studies’ critique of settlerism as an emancipatory project. In lieu of a revolutionary challenge to capitalist political economy and the metropolitan state, the “world turned inside out” politics of settler colonialism undertakes a sovereign displacement that attempts to dispossess and destroy Indigenous polities in order to imagine an alternative community that inevitably succumbs to the very power structures it sought out to escape. The state’s closure of the settler frontier as a space of semi-‐autonomous self-‐ rule does not signal an end to settler colonialism, however: “invasion is a structure, not an event” (Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation … 2). As Wolfe puts it, the “post-‐frontier era” emerges when “the settler colonial logic of elimination in its crudest frontier form … was transformed into a paternalistic mode of governmentality” (“After the Frontier” 13). Just as the logic of elimination is perpetuated in the post-‐frontier era in an altered form, so too are the broader commitments to militarism and exclusion. For Aziz Rana, the contemporary United States exemplifies how the violent and exclusionary underpinnings of settler colonialism can overwhelm settler accounts of freedom in a situation he describes as “settler empire” (3): In effect, the United States orientation to the world combines some of the most problematic ideological features of the settler past without its emancipatory aspirations. It continues to view outsiders— 27 including migrants within our borders—as part of a dependent periphery, to be used for the extension of national wealth and dominance. Yet these practices have become detached from the meaningful provision of economic and political self-‐rule for Americans. (329) Rana’s analysis emphasizes that the “emancipatory aspirations” of settler colonial projects are premised on a fundamentally violent and exclusionary reality. This contradiction has inevitably led to the latter overtaking the former. III. Settler Colonial Allegories of Dissent in Post-‐1945 US Literature Settler colonial studies provided me with a compelling theoretical model whereby to understand the persistent use of frontier rhetoric to articulate political dissent in US literature. The observation that frontier displacement often originated in a reaction against the political crises of capitalism rather than in an expression of liberal consensus resonated with my readings of how “figurative frontiers” functioned in the dissenting literature of the post-‐1945 period that I was examining. Settler colonial studies’ careful attention to the ongoing history of Indigenous dispossession likewise provided me a body of scholarly work that allowed me to think about frontier rhetoric vis-‐à-‐vis the settler colonial underpinnings of “domestic” US space. For these reasons, I began to think about my archive in relation to a settler colonial imaginary rather than a national ideological consensus. This term demands some explanation. While the compound “settler colonial imaginary” has been employed loosely in the field of settler colonial studies for 28 some time, it has been most thoroughly defined by US literary scholar Tom Lynch in a recent comparative study of women’s writing in the US West and the Australian Outback. Lynch builds on psychologist Warren Coleman’s distinction between imagination (a force that “has a reality of its own and enhances our being in this world” [Coleman cited in Lynch 379]) and the imaginary (structuring fantasies that subjects cling to “with maniacal force since to give them up would expose them to unbearably painful experiences of absence or loss that may amount to a fear of annihilation” [Coleman cited in Lynch 379]). Lynch argues that settler colonialism fosters a “hegemonic discourse and symbolic system” that affirms the utopian goals of the settler project to the extent that “when the goals of the settler-‐colonial imaginary are resisted by local phenomena—climate, ecology, Indigenous people, or even anti-‐colonial critiques—the validity of such phenomena is usually denied” (380). This imaginary is sanctioned, empowered, maintained, and sometimes resisted via a constellation of integrated and recurring values, images, icons, archetypes, monuments, stories, discourses, lexicons, politics, forgettings, and expectations that, if not always identical, retain obvious resemblances in the United States and Australia. (380; emphasis mine) The caveat in Lynch’s definition that I have emphasized above draws an important distinction between the settler colonial imaginary and the rhetorical tropes through which it is constructed. The frontier has become so associated with the myth and symbol school that in many circles within US scholarship, the compound phrase 29 “frontier myth” is one of the only contexts in which the word “frontier” word ever appears. Regarding the “mythic” nature of frontier rhetoric, and the symbolic nature of the tropes that construct it, there is a remarkable consensus between the myth-‐ and-‐symbol school and its detractors. 9 Such a symbolic mode of reading collapses “the representative and semantic function of language” in such a way that imagines “an intimate unity between the image and the supersensory totality that the image suggests” (de Man 189). 10 The only evidence necessary to deem that a work of literature is subsumed within the “supersensory totality” of the national consensus, in a symbolic reading, is the presence of the images associated with “the rhetoric of the errand.” In the readings that follow, my intent is not only to replace a national totality (the national consensus) with a transnational one (the settler colonial imaginary) but also to shift our reading of frontier rhetoric from the symbolic to the allegorical register. If symbolic modes assume a romantic collapse of image and totality, the allegorical “designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the 9 Richard Slotkin, in his essay “Myth and the Production of History” gestures toward the potential of a frontier allegory that might exceed the symbolic construction of frontier myth when he argues The function of imaginative fiction (whether literary or folkloric) is to develop elaborate, and bring to conscious expression the implicit logic of the culture’s world view and sense of history, to play out more fully than life usually permits the consequences of the value system on which our mythic fantasies are based. (75) Slotkin’s own readings, however, tend to focus on those texts that reinforce the symbolic structure of the frontier myth rather than employ frontier symbology in an allegorical narrative that might question it. 10 In citing de Man here, I am interested in his precise definitions of symbol and allegory rather than in his broader epistemological claims in “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” 30 void of this temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-‐self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as the non-‐self” (de Man 207). It is precisely in allegory’s space of “temporal difference” that the most powerful frontier declension narratives—from Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “boats against the current” to Joan Didion’s Where I Was From—are articulated. Bercovitch offers a stern warning against allegorical reading because he sees it as encouraging a mode of interpretation, a sort of “beatification of the subversive” whereby an aesthetically pleasing work invariably reveals its dissenting politics in the hands of a skilled literary critic (Rites 17). The point is well taken, and my intent in arguing for an allegorical reading of frontier rhetoric is not simply to open up space between the authors I read and the settler colonial “structure of feeling” I am reading them as imbricated within. 11 Allegorical reading is just as important for understanding how the settler colonial imaginary is maintained as it is for understanding how it might be resisted. Lorenzo Veracini argues that in the “triumphant settler colonial circumstance,” the settler polity, “having tamed the surrounding ‘wilderness,’ having extinguished indigenous autonomy … has also ceased being settler colonial” (Settler Colonialism 22). This imagined supersession of settler colonial conditions, however, “is never complete,” and “a settler society is 11 In “Settler Common Sense,” Mark Rifkin offers a remarkable formulation (building on Raymond Williams) of a settler “structure of feeling” that shapes quotidian affect in settler colonial spaces (323). While Rifkin sees this structure as thoroughly grounded in state ideology, rather than the production of a transnational settler colonial political orientation, my use of the term “settler colonial imaginary” otherwise has much in common with Rifkin’s formulation of “settler common sense.” 31 always, in Derridean terms, a society ‘to come’”(Settler Colonialism 23). Such a society does not find its fullest expression in the “aesthetic absolute of the symbol” but in a rhetorical mode that—to borrow a definition of postmodern allegory from Frederic Jameson—is marked by a deferral of meaning that draws attention “to breaks and discontinuities, to the heterogeneous (not merely in works of art), to Difference rather than Identity, to gaps and holes rather than to triumphant narrative progressions, to social differentiation rather than the ‘totality’ of Society as such” (168). If settler colonial societies are, by definition, marked by a temporal deferral of meaning, it is in the conceptual gap between the tropes that constitute the settler colonial imaginary and its “supersensory totality” that settler colonialism is “sanctioned, empowered, [and] maintained” (de Man 189; Lynch 380). The structure of settler colonialism is thus in some sense—as the Puritans understood all too well—allegorical. The anxiety evinced in Turner’s claim that “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (“Significance of the Frontier” 60)—an anxiety born of the present’s inability to make manifest the promises of the past, promises that were premised on settlerism’s reliance on “free land”—is the affect endemic to, and productive of, settler colonialism. If frontier allegory is often employed to reorient a post-‐frontier settler polity toward the frontier past as a means to calling them to “new frontiers,” it can also, at crucial moments, exploit frontier allegory’s structural “breaks and discontinuities” to imagine an alternative to the settler colonial circumstance. Settlers tend to mistrust absolute political and aesthetic authority—at least when that authority is 32 exerted over them. This mistrust is productive of both the protean tenacity of settler sovereignty and its potential undoing. The tropes that constitute the settler colonial imaginary can be employed to highlight “breaks and discontinuities” between the utopian promises and violent realities of settler colonialism that cannot be sutured by a displacement to a “new frontier,” aporias in the settler imaginary that demand a revolutionary rather than an isopolitical response. Before outlining how the authors covered in this study employ frontier allegory to sanction, empower, maintain, and sometimes resist the settler colonial imaginary (Lynch 380), it is necessary to consider, in broad terms, how that imaginary accommodates and shapes dissent against the norms and values of the state. Veracini argues that “isopolitical sensitivities” persist in the post-‐frontier settler societies and are “constantly reconfigured in different settings and survive even the emergence and consolidation of a globalized international system of sovereign states after the Second World War” (Settler Colonialism 71). While Veracini focuses his analysis on the transnational bonds between Great Britain and its erstwhile settler colonies, one can see similar sensitivities at work within the United States. Their most obvious expressions in contemporary American life are found in the spectacle of right-‐wing politics, where anti-‐federal terrorists like Cliven Bundy are lauded as “patriots” and presidential contenders can advocate state secession without having their loyalty to the nation seriously questioned. National identity in the United States, so thoroughly grounded in the isopolitical sensitivities 33 of the settler colonial imaginary, has a long history of uneasily accommodating local claims of sovereignty. 12 Such sensitivities are not limited to dissenting voices on the conservative right, however. For many US literary authors writing during the Cold War from a broad array of dissenting political commitments, an isopolitical imaginary provided a political orientation that offered an escape from what they saw as the equally unappealing options posed by American liberalism and Soviet communism. Miller’s seemingly contradictory rejection of “the American way of life” in an essay calling Americans to a mode of life that would connect them “to their forebears who deserted Europe for America” perfectly encapsulates how such isopolitical dissent oriented itself toward a transnational frontier past. The significance of the frontier, for these writers, was not exclusively its national meaning, but rather the fact that the frontier offered a space of escape from metropolitan authority. Because of their identification with frontier displacement, some of these authors did move to a rural periphery within the United States (Miller relocated to Big Sur and Hunter S. Thompson to Aspen, for instance), to a postcolonial periphery on the frontiers of American global hegemony (Paul Bowles in Morocco), or simply to the cities of the West Coast of the United States. Such spatial displacements were not essential to the cultural politics of these figurative frontiersmen, however. In a crucial scene in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road illustrating the figurative nature of this frontiering, Sal Paradise contemplates a transient he dubs “the Ghost of the 12 For a more thorough account of Bundy’s extralegal seizure of the federal commons, see Christopher Ketcham’s “The Great Republican Land Heist: Cliven Bundy and the Politicians who are Plundering the West.” 34 Susquehanna” bumming along the road in Pennsylvania as he himself is returning East after his initial westward journey: I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it’s the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-‐fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. (95) “The Ghost of the Susquehanna” is one of many “bums” in On the Road that Kerouac romantically imagines as performing a volitional disaffiliation from the norms of middle-‐class American life. It is this disaffiliation, rather than his location, that allows him to be identified with the frontier past. Whether or not it involved a spatial displacement, dissent imagined as a mode of frontiering involves both a conceptual disaffiliation from the norms of the state and a claim to represent the “true” values of the settler project. Kerouac’s imagination of the “wilderness in the East” also provides a valuable springboard from which to consider how the settler colonial imaginary orients the politics of such dissent not only toward an isopolitical disaffiliation from the state, but also toward particular forms of sexual and racial oppression. While interrelated, the two issues deserve individual consideration. Kerouac’s imagination of the frontier as a space of masculine autonomy participates in a familiar mode of gendering settler colonial space in the United 35 States. Annette Kolodny’s Lay of the Land (1975) was perhaps the first study to note how both frontier narratives and post-‐1945 countercultural rhetoric (her test case being the “Battle for People’s Park” in Berkeley in 1969) rely on a sexual metaphor whereby the wilderness and Indigenous peoples are figured as feminine, and frontiersmen are figured as masculine. Indeed, the continued near-‐absence of the compound “frontierswoman” in our lexicon speaks to the persistence of this gendered construction. Kolodny’s intervention launched a critique of the masculinist and imperialist valences of frontier framing of US space by western regionalist/eco feminist critics who have worked to excavate a feminist countertradition that centers on an identification with place and local ecology. 13 Subsequent interventions emerging from American studies, however, such as Amy Kaplan’s conception of “manifest domesticity,” have emphasized the extent to which a feminized conception of the “domestication” of space played a complementary role in frontier expansion and subsequent US imperialism. Tom Lynch’s aforementioned article works to establish how women’s place-‐based narratives in the US West and in the Outback contribute to the settler colonial usurpation of indigenous space. These critiques from the settler academy have emerged in tandem with Indigenous feminist critiques emphasizing the central role of sexual violence in settler invasion. In the post-‐1945 US literary archive, allegorizing one’s dissent as a frontier displacement is an overwhelming male tendency (as the examples I have cited thus far make clear), and in this sense my readings of frontier allegories of dissent reaffirm the readings of the gendered structure of settler colonial space above. What 13 See, e.g., Krista Comer, Landscapes of The New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing. 36 my analysis will add to this tradition of critique is an examination of just how expansive and malleable the patriarchal structure of the settler colonial imaginary can be. Settler colonialism is dependent on a settler polity’s successful management of biological and social reproduction. The isopolitical structure of settler colonialism, however, allows for a much broader spectrum of reproductive practices than those associated with the norms of the liberal state: one need only consider the early history of the Mormon settler project for an example of just how simultaneously anti-‐normative and patriarchal the vanguard of settler colonial expansion can be. In Willful Subjects, theorist Sara Ahmed notes a similar dynamic at work in contemporary political and cultural vanguards, noting that, within these often masculinist formations, “freedom from norms can quickly translate into the freedom to exploit others” (171). This dynamic expresses itself in the gender politics of many of the works I examine in this study. Even a figure so thoroughly associated with the “mid-‐century misogynists” as Jack Kerouac cannot—as a bisexual and an advocate of polyamory—be construed as an exemplar of normative American gender politics (Gould, “Reading White Female”). What is equally clear is that Kerouac saw women’s agency, and particularly women’s control over their own reproductive capacities, as a threat to the mode of masculine liberation he espoused. Indeed, both Kerouac and Oscar Zeta Acosta perversely identify women with the state, imagining state norms, and particularly the institution of marriage, as a feminine conspiracy against 37 masculine autonomy. 14 The queer anarchist poet Jack Spicer, whose politics were decidedly more radical than Kerouac’s, nonetheless clung to misogynist rhetoric in his imagination of his own literary community. Joan Didion, a woman who envisioned her own writing practice as a mode of frontiering, stands as a rare exception to the rule. Despite her usurpation of this normatively masculine rhetoric and her championing of female agency, Didion expresses a deep distrust of movement feminism and regards the lesbian rights movement as a childish abdication of the responsibilities of reproductive futurity. 15 Contradictions such as those sketched above—wherein literary production challenges national norms of sexuality and gender while still being circumscribed by a broader, more amorphous patriarchal structure—constitute one of the major sites where I will work to explore how the settler colonial imaginary structures dissent against the state. In Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West, William Handley argues that there is something queer about marriage plots in frontier allegories of twentieth-‐century US literature (18). In a triumphalist narrative of westward expansion, the semi-‐“indigenized” frontiersman should 14 One of the more bizarre and telling examples of this gendering of the state is Kerouac’s sole science fiction publication, entitled “cityCityCITY,” in which he imagines a dystopian totalitarian state ruled by women holding absolute power over their subjects in a coldly rationalized global government. In a scene that is poisonously misogynist and homophobic even for Kerouac, the protagonist’s adopted father tells him that “the day women took over the central organization of the world government, wow, lookout, that was it […] you have to kowtow to a dike martinet, that’s your red wagon” (Good Blonde 193). 15 I borrow this term from Lee Edelman’s No Future as a useful heuristic device to describe the settler colonial imaginary’s investment in the figure of the child and questions of social reproduction. As Andrea Smith argues, however, Edelman’s categorical rejection of reproductive futurity is a problematic position that limits the possibilities of decolonial alternatives as well as the settler status quo (48). 38 marry an eastern woman who is the picture of urbane domesticity, signaling the birth of a nation both authentically American and representative of European civilization. Such uncomplicated unions, however, rarely occur, even in the popular Westerns where one might expect such constructions to predominate. While my archive is not as heavily invested in marriage plots as the novels in Handley’s study are, it is equally concerned with the problem of settler social reproduction—and equally troubled by an inability to imagine a mode whereby the putative freedoms of settlerism might be passed on to future generations. It is this amorphous drive to reproduce an expansive yet exclusionary settler polity, rather than any attachment to any particular normative institution, that defines the outer limit of the settler colonial imaginary’s investment in the patriarchy. In the allegorical gap between the frontier past and the settler colonial present, the authors covered in this study both pioneer new forms of patriarchal oppression and highlight contradictions that critique patriarchal gender relations as a constitutive element of the false promise of settler colonialism. Kerouac’s imagination of the “wilderness of the East” also yields important clues to how the settler colonial imaginary orients dissent vis-‐à-‐vis race and indigeneity. Kerouac, despite a life-‐long commitment to non-‐violence, glamorizes George Washington’s role as “a wildbuck Indian fighter.” This formulation celebrates both frontier violence and a phenomenon I will describe as “settler indigenization.” 16 Like many familiar frontier protagonists, Washington is 16 I borrow this term from Veracini’s use of it to describe the trajectory of settler population economy (Settler Colonialism 21-‐23). My use of the term, with its focus 39 romanticized as both a killer of Indians and (to recall Turner’s formulation) a frontiersman who has been stripped of “the garments of civilization” and arrayed in “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” The works examined in this study are rife with such representations that celebrate historical violence against Indigenous people, or that erase them from history entirely; they are equally marked by representations of Indigenous culture as a laudable object for settler appropriation. The question of white appropriation of Indigenous culture has been central to the field of Native American studies from its inception. Scholars like Rayna Green, Shari Huhndorf, Philip J Deloria, and Circe Sturm have made especially critical contributions to a picture of a broad spectrum of practices whereby settlers work to authenticate their own sense of belonging by laying claim to Indigenous being. In the archive I consider, the gestures whereby settler authors imagine their own “indigenization”—such as Gary Snyder’s “white shamanism” or Jack Spicer’s spurious claims to Blackfoot heritage—often read, at first blush, as expressions of empathy or solidarity with Indigenous culture. 17 These gestures, however, which rarely actually engage Indigenous subjects and never offer real solidarity with Indigenous political struggles, have more in common with the mode of appropriation Jodi Byrd describes in The Transit of Empire, whereby “the left intellectual … steps forward to ventriloquize the speaking Indian by transforming the becoming-‐ into replacing Indian” (Transit 16). The Indian, in these formations, on narrative and cultural performance, however, has been developed largely through my discussion and collaboration with Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne. 17 Late in his career, Jack Spicer began spurious identifying himself to be of Blackfoot heritage (CL 165). For more on Snyder’s “white shamanism,” see Timothy Gray, Gary Snyder and The Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community (275). 40 becomes an object of identification for the dissenting settler writer seeking to critique state norms. The motivation in this identification is not, however, a genuine solidarity with Indigenous struggle, but rather an attempt to usurp the rhetorical space of indigeneity as a position of critique. In other words, this mode of settler indigenization is an isopolitical rather than decolonial strategy. This desire to become/replace the Indian is one that is so central to the identities of many dissenting American writers during the post-‐’45 period that it structures their identification with non-‐Indian racialized groups. In Norman Mailer’s infamous essay “The White Negro,” this transposition is clearly at work. In exhorting his fellow white hipsters to imitate the “primitive” lifeways of African Americans, Mailer declares that “one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-‐nilly to conform if one is to succeed” (339). This passage contains many of the hallmarks of isopolitical dissent that I have outlined thus far: a rejection of the normative life proscribed by the nation as politically oppressive, coupled with a celebration of an “escape,” allegorized as a frontier displacement. Mailer’s hipster frontiersmen, however, are operating on a new rhetorical frontier: instead of becoming Indian, Mailer wants dissenting whites to become Black. He finds the wilderness in which he hopes to distance himself from the state in the subaltern spaces of Black life. Mailer’s rhetoric has obvious antecedents in the long tradition of blackface minstrelsy. 18 That being said, the sense in which Mailer and other white 18 Eric Lott describes blackface minstrelsy as a mode of cultural appropriation much different than the one I am calling “settler indigenization.” For Lott, the parodic affect of minstrelsy is essential to its function (Love and Theft 4): “settler 41 countercultural figures of his period rely on frontier tropes to describe their appropriation of, and immersion in, Black culture has been largely neglected. In a recent piece considering the role of the frontier in critiques of settler colonialism, Jodi Byrd argues that understanding the frontier as the leading edge of settler colonialism is a fallacy. Before one can imagine a frontier as a site of settler liberation, one must imagine indigeneity as a degraded category of humanity, conflated with territory and made up of bodies that do not bear the rights of subjects; instead they are treated as objects upon which settlers’ fantasies of liberation might be projected rather than viewed as bearers of agency. As she puts it, writing on the US context, “US empire propagates itself at the site of a transposable Indianness rather than through a forever relocatable frontier” (“Follow the Typical Signs” 3). In the readings of frontier allegory that follow, I work to foreground representations of Indians, attend to the absences where Indians have been willfully erased, and track the imposition of “transposable Indianness” on non-‐ native subjects in order to demonstrate how the settler colonial imaginary exerts itself (to modify a phrase of Philip Deloria) in unexpected places. In scholarly work over the last decade on settler colonialism and comparative racialization, the emphasis has fallen squarely on an effort to parse out indigeneity from race. This effort has largely been motivated by a desire to prevent an understanding of race that privileges a “white/black binary” from eclipsing the specificities of Indigenous oppression. Recently, however, a burgeoning exchange indigenization” on the other hand, is often invested with a mode of gravity and pathos that works in a much different register . As I discuss in further detail in Chapter 3, however, the two modes of white performance are often interrelated. 42 between Indigenous studies and Black studies scholars has turned its attention to outlining how, though distinct, settler colonialism and anti-‐black racism are mutually supporting structures of oppression. 19 By foregrounding the process whereby “settler indigenization” serves as a script employed by dissenting and putatively anti-‐racist white settlers in their identifications with racialized cultures in the post-‐1945 period, this study seeks to emphasize the vital importance of Indigenous and settler colonial studies for broader conversations regarding comparative racialization. Figures like Mailer can be understood as imposing a “transposable Indianness” on African-‐Americans in order to imagine culture as a conceptual wilderness ripe for cultural colonization and Black people as figures of identification but not agency. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for interpreting how new forms of white supremacy were constituted during the years that racial liberation movements were working to dismantle the state’s formal structures of discrimination and segregation. My first chapter focuses on these questions of settler indigenization and transposable Indianness as it explores the relationship between Kerouac’s frontier allegory and his infamous descriptions of race. The drafting history of On the Road (and contrary to popular belief, there was one) reveals just how committed Kerouac was to the critique of both state liberalism and Soviet communism. Indeed, Kerouac 19 For an overview of how a wide variety of interdisciplinary scholars of race were reacting against the “white/black binary” in the late 1990s (not inconsequentially the years Wolfe was writing Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology), see Juan F. Perea’s “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The Normal Science of American Racial Thought.” For an example of recent work on settler colonialism and anti-‐blackness, see the review of this literature in Corey Snelgrove, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, and Jeff Corntassel’s “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations” (8). 43 conceived of On the Road as he was scheming to buy a “homestead” in Colorado where he hoped to found a collective ranch so that he and his friends could escape what he called the “slavery” enforced by the wage economy and the state. It was during the collapse of his homestead dream that Kerouac’s imagination turned to the figurative frontiers of racialized culture. He would come to imagine a broad range of non-‐white peoples as “the Fellahin Indians of the world” and work to incorporate elements of African-‐American, Mexican, and Asian culture into his own literary aesthetics. Kerouac’s indigenization had its limits, however, limits that his later work explores. In Dharma Bums, Kerouac offers some of his most explicit accounts of settler indigenization, but he also describes an increasing awareness of the extent to which the regulatory violence of the US nation-‐state provides an environment in which he can safely undertake his figurative frontiering. This realization, I argue, leaves Kerouac in a double bind. He set out on the road and imagined his literary career as a means to escape the regulatory power of the state, but he also realizes that he relies on the state to maintain his own privilege, a privilege he is unwilling to abdicate. This irreconcilable position haunted Kerouac throughout his descent into alcoholism and self-‐parody in his final years. The contradiction between Kerouac’s anti-‐normative sentiments and his reliance on the state is one that both his detractors and his champions—including, most notably, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—neglect. His detractors label him as a liberal partisan from the beginning, and his champions see in the early work a moment of “rhizomatic” possibility that 44 was betrayed by a late career shift. Both these positions, I suggest, fail to recognize the dynamics of isopolitical dissent at work in Kerouac’s literary politics. While poet Jack Spicer, the subject of my second chapter, shares with Kerouac a first name, his fortunes in the canon have moved in an almost opposite direction. Whereas Kerouac was initially hailed as a countercultural hero, and is now a byword for cooption, Spicer was relatively unknown for years, and is now heralded as an innovator of avant-‐garde form and radical political dissent by academics ranging from Marxist poetry critics to queer studies scholars. Spicer also shared with Kerouac, however, a tendency to allegorize his own oppositional aesthetics and politics as a frontier displacement. Spicer was an out gay poet over two decades before Stonewall, and frontier rhetoric was central to his queer identity. In what is widely acknowledged as his first great poem, “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy,” Spicer allegorizes his rejection of heterosexuality through an allegory narrating the settlement of California, and he often referred to his coterie of queer poets in Berkeley as “the playboys of the last frontier.” I relate Spicer’s early career frontier allegory to his activist work as an early member of the gay civil rights organization the Mattachine Society, where he advocated against assimilationist and racist elements within the Mattachine through strategies that reflect the isopolitical orientation of his politics. It was immediately after the failure of his engagement with the Mattachine (the East Bay Chapter he belonged to was disbanded when conservative elements gained control of the statewide organization) that Spicer developed his much lauded 45 “poetics of the outside,” his paratactic composition method that he claimed originated in a space “outside” his own subjectivity. The second book Spicer produced using this method was a long poem entitled Billy The Kid. In it, he imagined the famous frontier outlaw as a queer object of the narrator’s desire. Spicer’s mid-‐career poetry, however, also foregrounds tendencies toward misogyny, racism, and anti-‐semitism that haunted his work from the beginning. While Spicer’s critical champions have downplayed these aspects of his writing, I argue that these exclusionary tendencies are central to Spicer’s frontier framing of the “poetics of the outside.” In a consideration of his posthumously published Book of Magazine Verse, however, I suggest that Spicer—in a series of poems which contain his most nuanced allegorical engagement with the history and myth of the frontier— performs a subtle self-‐critique in which he rejects the frontier framing of much of his previous work in favor of a more revolutionary understanding of literary production and social collectivity. I conclude my consideration of Spicer by suggesting that the ongoing appeal of frontier rhetoric for queer liberation struggles cannot be wholly chalked up to “homonationalist” formations. Rather, as Spicer’s activist and literary career attest, such rhetoric and its structure of exclusion can accrue to radical communities, like Spicer’s “playboys of the last frontier,” who are otherwise committed to contesting state norms and institutions. In my third chapter, I turn to a consideration of two authors best known for their critiques of the frontier frames of the counterculture—Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner. Didion and Stegner, writing from libertarian and left liberal perspectives respectively, represented writers like Kerouac and Spicer as naïve to the truth of the 46 frontier experience by embracing a mode of frontier displacement as emancipatory. Didion excavates the frontier history of the women of her own family in order to contest the frontier metanarratives presented by both the counterculture and the New Right in California. Stegner performs a similar rejection of metanarrative in his 1972 novel Angle of Repose, which indicts both frontier and countercultural masculinity, but—thanks to a brilliant postmodern narrative frame that turns the critical eye of the reader on the novel’s curmudgeonly historian narrator—the ability to articulate any authentic historical narrative is questioned as well. Neither Didion nor Stegner, however, stress a need to redress the ongoing violence that settlement inflicts on Indigenous people in their critique of countercultural and state frontier metanarratives. Instead, they offer counternarratives of settlement that stress the pain that frontier displacement brought to bear on the settlers themselves. The postmodern epistemological doubt that marks both authors’ work, I argue, cuts both ways, allowing them (on the whole) to selectively forget inconvenient truths of settlement past and present while also lending their work a secular perspective that, at key moments, offer glimpses of decolonial possibility. In my final chapter, I consider the work of two authors who lay claim to contrasting accounts of indigeneity and offer very different engagements with frontier allegory—Oscar Zeta Acosta and N. Scott Momaday. I unpack Acosta’s affinity with both the settler counterculture and his work on behalf of Chicano nationalism through a reading of his fiction that focuses primarily on his first novel, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. In Acosta’s narration of his childhood as the son of immigrants in California’s central valley, where he grew up idolizing the cowboys 47 he was exposed to everywhere in US pop culture. This identification eventually gives way to a desire to become Indian, a category that Acosta associates with masculine autonomy. It is this desire to become Indian that leads Acosta on a road trip to Colorado, where he meets Hunter S. Thompson, and, after a protracted series of misadventures, is inspired to go to Los Angeles and join the fight to reclaim Aztlán. Building on scholarship of Mexican American settler colonialism by Nicole Guidotti-‐ Hernández and Ben Olguín, I argue that the similarities between Acosta’s narrative of “becoming Indian” and similar narratives of settler indigenization produced by the white counterculture (including those of Acosta’s friend Hunter S. Thompson) should complicate any reading of his work as an unproblematic allegory of Indigenous protest. In my reading of N. Scott Momaday’s work, I focus on two interrelated aspects of his writing: (1) his own fascination with the myth and history of the frontier, and how he uses the representation of the frontier in the tale of “becoming Indian” that unfolds across his oeuvre and (2) his nuanced development of a theory of sacred language that he develops in his early fiction and essays. Momaday’s conception of “the sacred word” does not signal a commitment to any particular or static system of religious belief, but rather a commitment to language as a force that has the potential to make and unmake a community’s relation to the world. For Momaday, Indigenous nations face no greater threat than what he identifies as the white tendency to imagine words as free-‐floating signifiers, divorced of their performative power. Stories, Momaday writes in a later essay, must be understood as “taking place” (Man Made of Words 187). 48 Momaday’s theory of sacred language provides a valuable perspective with which to return to his investment in frontier allegory, an investment that has been harshly criticized by many contemporary critics. Momaday’s engagement with frontier myth, is not, I argue, a symptom of assimilation, but rather a foregrounding of the settler colonial narrative that continues to “take place” in the United States. In a reading of The Ancient Child, I argue that Momaday’s use of frontier tropes provides a means for thinking through the frontier binary as a structuring principle of US state sovereignty in order to contest that paradigm. Momaday’s unique Indigenous appropriation of frontier rhetoric—and critique of neoliberal pluralism—provides a compelling final perspective through which to consider how literary culture in the US has both worked through and struggled against the settler colonial logic of the frontier. 49 Chapter 1 From the Colorado Homestead to the Fellahin Frontier: Kerouac’s Settler Colonial Allegory of Dissent On August 23, 1948, Jack Kerouac began his nightly journal entry by venting his frustration and guilt occasioned by the fact that his mother worked in a clothing factory—a labor that funded many of Kerouac’s adventures on the road. He universalizes her plight as representative of modern life in both the United States and the U.S.S.R.: “In Russia they slave for the state, here they slave for Expenses (sic) There’s no difference anywhere. …” (122). For Kerouac, the life of a wage laborer in the United States was no different than the “slavery” faced by those laboring for the state under Soviet totalitarianism. He traces the origin of this “slavery” to what Marxists would call the moment of primitive accumulation: “My mother and the whole human race are behaving now like peasants who have just come out of the fields and are just so dreadful tickled because they can buy baubles and doodads in stores” (123). In this curious narrative, industrialization feminizes humanity by turning peasants into shoppers. Kerouac has no solutions for humanity, but he has a specific plan for himself: As for me, the basis of my life is going to be a farm somewhere where I’ll grow some of my food, and if need be, all of it. Someday I won’t do nothing but sit under a tree while my crops are growing (after the proper labor of course)—and drink home-‐made wine, and write novels to edify with my soul, and play with my kids, and relax, and enjoy life, and goof off. … Shit on the Russians, shit on the Americans, 50 shit on them all. I’m going to live life my own “lazy no-‐good” way, that’s what I’m going to do. (123; emphases in original) Having laid out this pastoral fantasy, as much about self sufficiency as it is about the rejection of the accumulation of surplus value upon which capital depends, Kerouac makes a few remarks on his progress revising The Town and the City, comments on some desultory reading, and then, almost as an afterthought, mentions a new project: I have another project in mind—*On the Road*—which I keep thinking about: about two guys hitch-‐hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else. Also, I’m finding a new principle of writing. More later. (123) This is the first mention of On the Road in Kerouac’s journals, and it marks the beginning of the years-‐long process of drafting and revision that culminated in the novel’s publication in 1957. Kerouac’s pastoral fantasy quickly took shape not as the familiar modernist dream of an escape from history, but rather as an attempt to reclaim the mythic freedoms of the American frontier. As Kerouac was working through early drafts of On the Road, he was also dutifully absorbing the “how to” manuals on ranching in preparation for life on what he came to call his “homestead,” alongside tales of nineteenth-‐century frontier life ranging from Brewerton’s Overland with Kit Carson to Parkman’s Oregon Trail (Windblown 57). His earliest draft fragments of a novel entitled “West along the Road” and “On the Road West” read like excerpts from 51 Turner. Kerouac, whose name has become almost synonymous with the American road trip, initially imagined the end of his transcontinental journey as settlement. Kerouac’s love affair with the “American West” started as a search for a place where he could elude the powers of both the state and capitalism in order to reimagine the terms of his own productive and reproductive labor. As Kerouac labored on On the Road, he transformed his “homestead” fantasy into the frontier allegory that would structure his “road” novels. I argue that Kerouac, by allegorizing his political dissent through the rhetoric of the frontier, cannot be understood as participating in a “rite of assent” that subsumes his dissent into the very liberal ideology and middle-‐class consensus he so often decried (Bercovitch 5). 20 Kerouac’s literary work refuses to partake in the aesthetic absolute presented by the symbols and myth of the transcendentalists’ “errand into the wilderness” but rather engages with frontier rhetoric in an allegorical mode that is marked by a deferral of meaning, drawing attention “to breaks and discontinuities, to the heterogeneous (not merely in works of art), to Difference rather than Identity, to gaps and holes rather than to triumphant narrative progressions, to social differentiation rather than the ‘totality’ of Society as such” (Jameson 168). Kerouac’s frontier allegory refuses to proceed along “one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (On the Road 12), and its multivalence reflects 20 John Carlos Rowe has argued that Kerouac partakes in the “rites of assent” Bercovich critiques, suggesting his dissent can be understood as part of a “venerable liberal tradition rooted in American transcendentalism and its secularization of puritan theology” (1). Without contesting the influence of the transcendentalists (and his professor Lionel Trilling) on his work, I am suggesting that Kerouac’s ambivalent nationalism, emphatic resistance to cultural norms, and multiple denunciations of liberal ideology (e.g., Windblown 270), make it imperative to rethink Kerouac’s relationship to the liberal consensus. 52 the heterogeneous experiences with cultural and racial difference it narrates. Kerouac, paradoxically for those who associate political power oppression exclusively with “aesthetic absolutes,” revels in difference and fragmentation even as he participates in a rhetorical tradition of US empire. By suggesting that Kerouac’s frontier rhetoric cannot be understood as a reflection of the liberal consensus, my purpose is not to revive Kerouac as a model for anti-‐statist or anti-‐capitalist cultural resistance. Instead, I will argue that reading Kerouac’s frontier allegory as a settler colonial phenomenon—rather than as coterminous with US state ideology—opens the possibility of a mode of reading dissent and cooption in US literature that is not grounded in a cultural determinism that reifies the monolithic power of the “the rhetoric of the errand” even as it decries it. Frontier rhetoric is the vehicle through which Kerouac holds an undeniable impulse toward non-‐normative community and resistance to hierarchical power in suspension with his US nationalism. A close reading of Kerouac’s frontier allegory on its own terms rather than as an ipso facto reflection of the liberal consensus reveals the extent to which the more noxious elements of his literary politics, including his notorious representation of women and racialized peoples, were nonetheless operating outside the norms of the US state. Understanding how Kerouac’s frontier allegory structured his representation of difference explains how the anti-‐normative practices of the transnational cultural vanguard Kerouac influenced veer toward forms of exploitation not immediately identifiable with the norms of the liberal state. 53 For Kerouac and many of his peers, the task of countercultural literature was not to forge a representation of social conditions that could critique power: Kerouac did not imagine a revolutionary challenge to state power and capitalism so much as he attempted to elude those structures, in order to “go on being free anyway.” The isopolitical sensibilities of Kerouac’s literary politics were not, however, predicated on a spatial displacement per se. Kerouac’s new frontier was a deterritorialized performative space where the associative displacement of literary play furnishes a mode of escape from the burdens of normative subjectivity. The selective appropriation and celebration of indigenous culture is central to Kerouac’s work and that of the white countercultural literary movements he inspired. Kerouac imagined a figurative frontier, but also a “transposable Indianness.” This category was imagined by imperiously conflating the cultures of various people of color—ranging from African Americans to Mexican nationals—as “the Fellahin,” a category of “savage” humanity. 21 Oswald Spengler situated the Fellahin in his pessimistic historiography as the chaotic force that would supersede the West after its inevitable decline. Unlike Spengler, Kerouac was decidedly ambivalent about the Fellahin, believing them to be the inheritors of an apocalyptic futurity, but also “the source of mankind and the fathers of it” who were the bearers of an authenticity, the mystical “IT” that Kerouac and his fellow frontiersman had lost (On the Road 252). Like the child-‐like Indians of Turner’s narrative, the “Fellahin 21 Jodi Byrd argues that US settler colonial and imperial expansion is best understood as a process of the propagation of a transposable Indianness that transforms “those to be colonized into “Indians” through continual reiteration of pioneer logics, whether in the Pacific, the Caribbean, or the Middle East (Transit xiii). This construction of “Indianness” is a key aspect of the frontier allegories that structure Kerouac’s road novels and the Language poetry texts I examine here. 54 Indians of the world” Kerouac encounters on his journeys hold the key to the “rebirth” of the white frontiersmen but are consigned to the temporal and spatial margins of modernity (On the Road 252). 22 Further consideration of Kerouac’s correspondence and journals during the years he was drafting On the Road reveals how his fascination with “the Fellahin” developed out of a desire to imagine an alternative to the norms of liberalism. Early articulations of Kerouac’s homestead fantasy were remarkably prosaic, and free of the sort of exoticization of the Indigenous that was central to his frontier allegory in On the Road. “I need a home, a homestead, a base, a place to marry and raise children, a place to work for myself, for a living, for the others. Writing should be a secondary struggle …” (72; my emphasis). It was the autonomy that could be achieved through ranching (imagined as a form of yeomanry) that Kerouac saw as the condition necessary to sustain his creative powers: “this homestead, this ranch” would be “a footing from which I can be my childlike self forever” (91; emphasis in original). Kerouac was eventually disabused of the amusing (especially for anyone who has been near a working ranch) naiveté evinced in such passages, but only after he had invested a considerable amount of money and intellectual effort in his quest to establish his Colorado homestead. The idea that the ranch could be a space where bourgeois norms would be rejected became more prominent as Kerouac and Neal Cassady developed the idea in their correspondence. One of Cassady’s letters makes this explicit when he imagines who would live on the ranch: 22 Theorist Chandan Reddy offers a complete reading of the conflation of the Indian and the child in Turner’s narrative in Freedom with Violence (66). 55 I envision Holmes, Bill Tomson, and … one Allen G[insberg], grubbing, scrubbing to aid, for they come in as they wish. No hard and fast, naturally, rules or obligations or expectancies or any such bourgoise sic strains in our veins toward them. The nucleus of our family then […]: you, your mother, Paul, his wife and child, me, Carolyn and our offspring (and your wife?) all living, striving … (N. Cassady quoted in C. Cassady 71) For Cassady and Kerouac, the ranch became a site upon which they could imagine the happy synthesis of their homosocial literary world with their fantasies of non-‐ normative (though decidedly patriarchal) heterosexual relationships. 23 The ranch was thus envisioned as an autonomous collective rather than a space of monadic individualism. Journaling about the lessons of nineteenth-‐century frontier life for his own moment, Kerouac proclaimed that men should “have a sense of themselves that illuminates their hearts and minds with the beauty of cooperation, neighborliness, companionship. Let the revolutionaries fight with themselves in their cities …” (Windblown 74). One could hardly find a more succinct credo for a “world turned inside out” politics. Kerouac’s slow disenchantment with the homestead fantasy came only after he had spent his entire advance on his first novel, The Town and the City, to purchase a home in Lakewood, Colorado, and convinced his mother, sister, and brother-‐in-‐law to join him there. Things did not go as planned. Only a few weeks after buying the 23 This passage is discussed at length in Manuel Luis Martinez’s Countering the Counterculture. While I concur with Martinez’s reading of the sexual politics of Kerouac’s homestead as representing an attempt to elude the power of “a perceived controlling matriarchy,” it is nonetheless notable how Kerouac’s patriarchal fantasies were not shaped by recognizable norms of sexual behavior (84). 56 property, without an income and surrounded by his homesick family and realizing his literary circle is never going to materialize, Kerouac explained how his “big ideal homestead idea” was “collapsing” in a letter to John Clennan Holmes (Charters 195). After briefly lamenting his family’s lack of enthusiasm for the endeavor, he explains that his change of heart has also emerged when he realizes that the ranching life he idolizes is more myth than reality. He describes “a huge class of Western mad-‐ people” in Denver who “make allusions to ‘Roy’ and ‘Dale Evans’ (his leading lady) and ‘Trigger’ (his horse) just as we make allusions to Dostoevsky and Whittaker Chambers” (Charters 197). The strangely juxtaposed references to Russian culture and the House of Unamerican Activities Committee resonate closely with the conflict between liberalism and Soviet communism that Kerouac rejected when developing his homestead fantasy. The escape performed by the westerners he meets, however, is affected not by autonomous production, but by representation: They sit there and watch the Myth of the Gray West, on rainy days in Larimer Street movies […] . Everybody believes in Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. It’s very beautiful. Then I start thinking about the mad beret-‐characters who actually make these movies in crazy California … it’s crazy. I have come to believe now that life is not essentially but completely irrational. (Windblown 197) His homestead dream is revealed to be a simulacrum, and this Baudrillard-‐like revelation precipitates in Kerouac a loss of faith not only in the West, but in the possibility of a “rational” life, one in which he could imagine his own 57 representational labor as a “secondary struggle” enabled by a life lived on his own terms. Kerouac’s letter to Holmes crescendos in the remarkable story of how he came to observe himself represented in the “Myth of the Gray West,” an experience that sparked a moment of recognition that made it entirely clear to him that he wasn’t fit to support himself on a ranch: I rode in a rodeo. We ran around like an Indian attack, in a wild circle. I went to the movies of this rodeo to see myself ride. There I sit, in a big sombrero, like an impostor Hipster smoking a weed. Honest. All hunched over the saddle, leering at the air. There’s a close-‐up shot of me drinking from a beer bottle in the saddle. It’s ridiculous. I have been hunched over my type-‐writer since I was eleven, that’s what it is. I don’t think I’ll be a rancher. (Charters 197) Having found the image of himself as a cowboy “ridiculous,” Kerouac’s imagination turns east and toward the vagrancy with which he is more often associated. He tells Holmes, with his tongue firmly in cheek, that he plans to move back to New York City to live on a barge in the Hudson near the Fulton Fish Market and earn his living by playing harmonica (Charters 197). In many ways, Kerouac’s fantasy of vagrancy was just as abortive as his homestead dream—he never truly broke the umbilical cord his mother’s home and steady income offered him. The vagrant nevertheless overtakes the rancher as the romanticized figure of masculine autonomy in Kerouac’s correspondence and journals. This romanticization of vagrancy appears at the same moment as the 58 appearance of the desire for racial abdication that has been the focus of so many critical readings of Kerouac’s fiction (Holladay ix). Only a few days after penning the letter to Holmes above, Kerouac wrote a letter to Allen Ginsberg about his ecstatic night in “Mexican-‐Nigger Denver” that would be retold in an infamous scene in On the Road (Charters 209). The homosocial thrust of Kerouac’s ranch fantasy was also intensified by this turn in Kerouac’s thought: the world of the vagrant in Kerouac’s fiction was not predominantly, but exclusively, male. The breakdown of Kerouac’s homestead dream also marked the end of his belief in his writing as a “secondary struggle” that could be underwritten by a life of autonomous labor. With the failure of Kerouac’s homestead dream, language itself became the new frontier. His revelation about the “complete irrationality” of the world, occasioned by his realization that there was no longer any material reality behind the “strange Grey Myth of the West” portrayed on film, relates directly to the formal turn his writing would take with the development of “Spontaneous Prose” when the Wolfean style of The Town and the City would give way to the expansive Jazz-‐inflected style of his mid-‐career work. Readings of Kerouac’s frontier allegory tend to focus either on its formal and epistemological dimensions or on the racial and gender politics inherent to it. Critic Marco Abel, reading On the Road through the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, argues that Kerouac uses westward movement to allegorize the dynamics of an innovative prose style that extends beyond the merely representational to offer new possibilities for “rhizomatic” assemblages that could 59 transform our calcified understandings of community. 24 In defending his methodology, Abel argues that “instead of asking, ‘How has Kerouac represented gender or race relations in his fiction?’ we need to ask ‘What kind of gender, race, or class relationships has he invented?’ or, ‘How does Kerouac’s rendering of these issues differ from others (at the time)?’” (246). Critic Manuel Luis Martinez, on the other hand, argues that Kerouac’s frontier allegory partakes in representational injustices that cannot be ignored. Martinez reads On the Road as a “modern Western” that works to “lay claim to a frontierland” in which Kerouac and his male companions can “live without constraint of a perceived controlling matriarchy. Their liminal status is confirmed through the marginalization gained through appropriation of ethnic identity” (84). For Martinez, Kerouac’s attempt to imagine a “liminal … and thus resistant” identity is problematized not only by its sexism and racism, but also by Kerouac’s “isolationist and individualist stance” inherited from a tradition of mythic frontier individualism, that “short circuited direct forms of political participation” (77). In this reading, Kerouac’s “isolationism” maps easily onto the sort of business-‐minded individualism praised by leading thinkers of the postwar American corporate culture (76). Both readings are initially compelling but ultimately unsatisfying. Abel downplays the extent to which Kerouac’s work hardly presents a desirable alternative to the norms of his day even if it does invent new modes of mediating racial and gender difference. Martinez exaggerates Kerouac’s tendency toward 24 I offer a more complete reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s romanticization of settler colonialism, and Kerouac’s influence on them, in “Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies.” 60 individualism in order to draw an overly easy comparison between Kerouac and the theorists of corporate capitalism. A more complete reading of Kerouac’s frontier allegory necessarily considers how Kerouac holds the impulse toward non-‐ normative community and resistance to hierarchical power in suspension with his troubling racial and gender politics. On the Road is the essential text for reading Kerouac’s frontier rhetoric and has undoubtedly been the novel that has received the most critical attention for its representational politics. A less often read text, Dharma Bums also extends Kerouac’s frontier allegory in new directions and proves a crucial site for unpacking Kerouac’s representation of difference. Dharma Bums’ tepid critical reception, often attributed to stylistic faults (Gifford and Lee 244), should also be understood as speaking to how the contradictions inherent to the settler colonial politics of Kerouac’s allegorical writing practice come to the fore in this text as nowhere else in Kerouac’s body of work. On the Road chronicles its protagonist Sal’s disenchantment with the myth of the West as an “aesthetic absolute” even as it narrates his embrace of frontier allegory (Jameson 167). The novel begins, famously, with an idealization of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady as a Western hero: as Sal Paradise starts planning his journey west in search of Moriarity, he imagines Moriarty as a symbol of western authenticity: “My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-‐ hipped, blue-‐eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a side-‐burned hero of the snowy West.” (4). Even in this first reference to “Westness,” however, there is a hint of irony in the retrospective narration: Dean is compared to a man (Gene Autry) who 61 never worked a day in his adult life as a cowboy but instead made a fortune imitating cowboys on film and television. As this moment of irony would suggest, Sal finds his search for western authenticity to be more difficult than he imagined, and realizes his initial dream of westering was misconceived. He begins by “poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron” and dreaming of “one long red line called Route 6” (11). Sal soon realizes that his dream of hitchhiking Route 6 all the way across the continent is impossible and that he had over-‐determined his dream of escape: “It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (12). The notion of westering as a linear process, which Sal dreams up reading “books about the pioneers,” is abandoned in favor of a more peripatetic mode of travel. It is in this aspect of Kerouac’s narrative that Marco Abel locates the parallels with Deleuzian rhizomatics: “It is precisely the physical following and aesthetic mapping of the various roads and routes—or Deleuzean lines of flight—that characterize the entire narrative. From the beginning, On The Road produces the road narrative as rhizomatic” (230). In abandoning the idea of linear travel, however, Sal does not give up on the idea of the West, even when he witnesses its vulgar commodification during “Wild West Week” in Cheyenne: “I was amazed, and at the same time I felt it was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition” (30). Sal’s failure to find the sense of authentic 62 “westness” he is seeking in places like Cheyenne leads him eventually to deterritorialize his notion of westness altogether when he is inspired by the aforementioned “Ghost of the Susquehanna,” whom he meets hitchhiking in Pennsylvania (95). The “Ghost of the Susquehanna” passage clearly illuminates the stakes in Sal’s pursuit of “westness:” Sal is not looking for a particular locale; his journey west is about seeking out the masculine forms of freedom embodied by the frontier heroes he read about in those “books about the pioneers.” 25 Sal gives up on his dreams of linear westward migration he reads about in frontier histories that imagine the end of the frontier as the bounded nation. Sal’s critique of the national myth relating to the closing of the frontier finds further expression in his selective critique of frontier violence. While he has no problem valorizing the “wildbuck Indian-‐fighter” George Washington (and as Martinez notes, he often fantasized about violence directed toward Mexicans in his correspondence with Cassady and Burroughs [83]), he lampoons a barracks guard he works with in San Francisco— “who rigged himself out like a Texas Ranger of old” (60)—and expresses disgust when he finds himself being asked (and unable) to exert a violent, masculine authority on behalf of his employers to keep a lid on the antics of some drunken sailors: “It was like a Western movie: the time had come to assert myself” (58). For 25 This passage inspires Marco Abel to a commentary that embodies the potential exceptionalist pitfall of reading frontier narratives through Deleuze and Guattari. Abel claims this passage demonstrates that “it took Sal a full-‐blown cross-‐country trip to arrive at this recognition that emerges for him only as a result of having (been) affected (by) the deterritorializing forces of the American earth” (242; parentheses in the original). The rhetoric of this passage is exemplary of Abel’s strangely autochthonic invocations of the “rhizomatic structure of the American Earth,” a formulation he takes as a given throughout his article (236). 63 Kerouac, the violence that opens frontiers is romantic while the violence that closes them is anathema. Sal finds his modern-‐day “wilderness” not in a Turnerian encounter with nature, but through acts of class and racial abdication that take him into social spaces previously off-‐limits to him and middle-‐class white friends. In On the Road, the skid rows and jazz clubs of America—and finally the highways and brothels of Mexico—are reimagined as a “wilderness” in which white men can realize a freedom denied to them by the strictures of the conventional lives they are rejecting. Kerouac’s protagonists are “the frontiersm[e]n in the Wild West of American night life” that Mailer praises (in a rhetoric that feels as Deleuzian as it is Turnerian) for rejecting the life of “a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-‐nilly to conform if one is to succeed” (339). The “line of flight” that takes Sal out of the arborescent “tissues of American society” takes him into subaltern social spaces that he reimagines as a wilderness. It is in these spaces that Kerouac seeks out the autonomy that he could not find through his attempt at homesteading. Kerouac’s representation of this social frontier is not presented in wholly romantic terms. In a scene clearly inspired by the experience in the movie theatre in Denver related to Holmes in the letter cited above, Kerouac relates the psychic toll his figurative frontiering takes. While crashing in an all-‐night movie theatre in Detroit, Sal and Dean take in a double feature on repeat: The picture was Singing Cowboy Eddie Dean and his gallant white horse Bloop [...]; number two double-‐feature film was George Raft, 64 Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul. We saw both of these things six times each during the night. We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Grey Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience. (220) The “horrible osmotic experience” in which the myth of the cowboy West is intermixed with the myth of the exotic Orient, an experience that Sal claims has determined all of his subsequent actions (including, presumably, the narration of On the Road), occurs simultaneously with Sal’s most “beat” moment, as he finds himself surrounded by Detroit’s criminal underclass and fantasizing about being swept out with the trash and reborn out of a “rubbish womb” (On the Road 221). As Robert Holton observes, As in Marx, the language of filth and garbage overlaps from the literal to the social here and elsewhere in descriptions of those who keep to no specific class but gather together on the lumpen social margins. … Unlike Marx, however, Kerouac finds elements of explicit regeneration in this realm of abjection. (65) Holton reads real revolutionary potential in the radical heterogeneity of Kerouac’s class and racial abdication: “The search for ‘the ragged promised land’ is, in a sense, ultimately a search for a space on history’s other side” (73). The fact that Holton quotes one of Sal’s descriptions of Los Angeles out of context (“the ragged promised 65 land, the fantastic end of America”) to describe Kerouac’s own search for radical alterity suggests some of the issues at play in interpreting the “horrible osmotic experience” that Sal lives in the theatre. The frontier myth is not reaffirmed in this scene in any recognizable form. Sal recognizes with horror that “the strange Grey Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East” are discourses that are producing his own subjectivity. In the moment of realizing his own contamination by the “horrible osmotic experience” of subject formation via mass media in post-‐ war America, Sal’s equation of frontier idealism with class and cultural abdication (the search for the “ragged promised land”) is transformed into a Blakean vision of a lost America. Sal’s conflation of the myths of East and West immediately proceeds his despair over “the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, the actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road” (228). The movie house scene, as Holton suggests, narrates Sal’s rebirth into a social margin increasingly distant from middle-‐class norms. If it is a scene of frontier regeneration, it can hardly be understood as one that reflects the liberal consensus. The exoticized East and the romanticized West are violently juxtaposed and dialectically synthesized on the terrain of the “lumpen social margins,” the new representational wilderness where Sal seeks out a new identity. From this new perspective, Sal’s imagination of his Western hero undergoes a final transformation. In a description that feels as if it is riffing off of John Gast’s iconic painting American Progress, Sal imagines Dean’s journey westward toward Denver: 66 Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw this huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. [...] Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed Westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive.” (232-‐ 33) Here Dean is figured as the horrific, violent underside of the spirit of Manifest Destiny as imagined in Gast’s painting. In Sal’s fully developed vision of westering, America’s divine hero brings destruction, not progress, in his wake as he moves with cyclical repetition and frantic speed over an American landscape that is not a virgin land, but a grotesquely sexualized continent. The “sideburned hero of the snowy West” is reimagined as a ghostly figure of destruction as Sal uncannily takes on the perspective of the Indian, watching the frontiersman approach (On the Road 4). In this terrifying guise, Dean is nonetheless a figure of identification. This representation of Dean as an irresistible figure of destruction foreshadows the transnational settler/Indigenous encounter that Kerouac stages in On the Road’s penultimate section. When Dean arrives in Denver, Sal follows him 67 into Mexico, where, as critic Rachel Ligairi notes, Sal and Dean’s very ignorance, as well as their status as (relatively) economically privileged foreigners initially allows them to see in the Mexicans they meet a projection of their fantasies of Indigenous difference (153). The romance of Sal’s frontier allegory is revived in the narration of his journey through the mountains of Mexico, where he and his American traveling companions encounter a people who Sal declares “the essential strain of the basic primitive … unmistakably Indians … they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it” (252). Sal imagines these Indians not only as fathers of humanity but as the inheritors of humanity’s apocalyptic future: “For when the destruction comes to the world of ‘history’ and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where Adam was suckled and taught to know” (252). 26 As Sal and company progress farther into the mountains (“high on the highest peak, as great as any Rocky Mountain peak”) they encounter “Indians” along 26 In his article “Kerouac among the Fellahin: On the Road to the Postmodern,” Robert Holton analyzes Kerouac’s indebtedness to Spengler’s Decline of the West in a reading in which he argues that In Kerouac’s Beat classic On the Road there is, on one hand, the expression of a radical desire to challenge the existing social order through a foregrounding of the conventions and limitations of racial identity; and, on the other hand, there is a misrecognition of those conventions and limitations so profound as to justify the claim that ultimately On the Road legitimates as much as it challenges the master narratives that postmodernism seeks to undo. (266) While this article does not address the relationship of On the Road to the frontier themes explored in my analysis, it covers some of the same concerns about Kerouac’s racial politics and the postmodern thinkers (including, in a brief reading, Deleuze and Guattari) whom Kerouac inspired (267). 68 the road who “began to be extremely weird. They were a nation in themselves, mountain Indians, shut off from everything else but the Pan-‐American Highway” (267). These Indians, selling rock crystals along the newly constructed transcontinental trade route, inspire Sal to mystical visions, as if they hold the secret to the “IT” that he has been searching for: “Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity. […] They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving face of Jesus” (268). Sal’s projection is suspended, however, when the Indians begin to speak: “When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves.” Sal and Dean attribute the Indians’ unfortunate locutional abilities to the penetration of the very highway they are traveling on: “They’ve only recently learned to sell these crystals, since the highway was built about ten years back—up until that time this entire nation must have been silent!” (269; emphasis in the original). After this questionable anthropological assessment, Sal watches Dean trade his wristwatch to one of the Indian children. As Dean is concluding the transaction, Sal fixes him in a momentary tableau: “He stood among them with his ragged face to the sky, looking for the next and highest and final pass, and seemed like the Prophet that had come among them” (269). As Dean and Sal leave, the “Indians” chase after their car for as long as they can keep up. “Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file. […] Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later, and see the same procession …” (Turner 39). Stand at an unnamed pass in the Sierra Madre a century after that, and, according to Kerouac, you will witness the same process. Just as 69 Turner imagines Indians as “savages” whose historical significance was defined by the role they played in transforming the European into the American frontiersman, so Kerouac imagines the Mexicans he encounters as a screen upon which he can project his own mystical fantasies. In Kerouac’s narrative, they represent an authentic past (“the source of mankind and the fathers of it”; “the tender and forgiving face of Jesus”) and an apocalyptic future (“the apocalypse of the Fellahin”), but as soon as they take on agency through speech, they are rendered absurd, mere children in the thrall of the frontiersman/prophet who ushers them into history with the barter of his wristwatch. Mexico becomes the mythic frontier where, as the young Turner once put it, the wilderness presents the Indian to the frontiersman like “untutored children to wonder at his goods and call him master” (Turner cited in Klein 135). Through a process Patrick Wolfe calls “repressive authenticity,” the authentic being of the Indigenous subject is represented by Kerouac as always already absent, whereas living Indigenous peoples are portrayed as having been compromised and fated to assimilate into settler society on the settlers’ terms. 27 For Kerouac, the authentic ethnic Other is the imagined Indian on the other side of what Leslie Fiedler called the “endlessly retreating frontier of innocence” that Kerouac pursues beyond the boundaries of both region and nation (Love and Death 27). In this climactic moment, in which “settler indigenization” is imagined as a permanent trajectory of desire, Kerouac also imagines a future without the US state brought about by the “Apocalypse of the Fellahin,” after which “people will stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as the caves of Bali” (252). The future of 27 For more on “repressive authenticity,” see the chapter of the same name in Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (163-‐214). 70 the Fellahin is, for Kerouac, a post-‐American future. The path to this future, however, is one in which the Beat frontiersmen represent and the Fellahin are represented. In Rites of Assent, Bercovitch imagines the “rhetoric of the errand” as having a necessarily eschatological trajectory in which the collapse of the United States and the apocalypse are synonymous (33). In his reading of Emerson, Bercovitch notes how Emerson took an “all or nothing” approach to the American state, and in so doing imagined the state into a transcendental absolute (Emerson cited in Bercovitch 32). The end of Kerouac’s frontier allegory is the dissolution of the state and the “world of ‘history’” (252), yet this end is not imagined as a potential catastrophe but as an inevitable reckoning. For Kerouac, there is always life after “history” and its institutions. In Kerouac’s settler colonial imaginary, the state is the antagonist. The frontier frame through which Kerouac narrativizes his attempt to elude the state and the conflicts of “history” nonetheless demands that a binary between the Beat frontiersmen and the “Fellahin Indians of the world” they seek to emulate and represent is maintained. Dharma Bums never partakes in the apocalyptic tone of On the Road, but extends the narrative of settler indigenization that informs On the Road in ways that explicitly confront the relationship between Kerouac’s frontier allegory and state ideology. In Dharma Bums, the object of Sal’s homosocial obsession shifts from the hero of On the Road, Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady, “the sideburned hero of the snowy West,” to Japhy Ryder/Gary Snyder, “the big hero of the West coast,” “a kid from Eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods” (On the Road 4; Dharma Bums 301, 285). Both characters thus share a romanticized western 71 upbringing, but Moriarty embodies an uncontainable criminality, whereas Japhy tempers his frontier spirit into a political and aesthetic practice: “Being a Northwest boy with idealistic tendencies, he got interested in old-‐fashioned IWW anarchism and learned to play the guitar and sing old worker songs to go along with his Indian songs” (285). The conflation of anarchism and American Indian culture performed here is developed as the central theme in Japhy’s character. For Kerouac, Japhy’s performance of indigenization is not merely cultural, but a revolt against the state and capitalism. The following passage, a quintessential example of Kerouac’s expansive prose line, demonstrates how Japhy’s desire for indigenization relates both to his immersion in Asian culture and his anarchist tendencies. It occurs after the “yabyum” scene, in which Ray Smith (Kerouac) Ryder, and Alvah Goldbrook (Allen Ginsberg) have an orgy with Japhy’s girlfriend “Princess.” When the action concludes, Japhy waxes philosophic about the sexual openness of non-‐Western cultures: [T]here was no question of what to do about sex which is what I always liked about Oriental religion. And what I always dug about the Indians in our country … You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn’t feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was 72 to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom. That’s why I was always sympathetic to freedom movements, too, like anarchism in the Northwest …” (302) The movement toward Indigenous/Asian culture is thus situated as central to Kerouac’s conception of anarchist resistance and non-‐normative sexuality. In an influential reading of Dharma Bums, poet and critic Michael Davidson has productively labeled Kerouac’s representation of Asian cultures in Dharma Bums as “California Orientalism” (Guys Like Us 76-‐98). Davidson reads a moment when Kerouac’s narrator speaks of “guys like us […] bringing the message of the East […] down to everybody” as indicative of Kerouac’s broader tendency to imagine his engagement with Asian culture as one predicated on the “message of the East” being represented by “guys like [him]” (Guys Like Us 14). Davidson’s formulation usefully connects Kerouac’s obsession with the western United States to his appropriation of Asian cultural tropes, and stresses the extent to which Kerouac’s appropriation of Asian culture subordinated the agency of Asian subjects. It is important to note, however, that in passages like the above, Kerouac is not participating in a discourse of the exact sort that Edward Said critiques in Orientalism. Kerouac does not mark the Indian or “the Oriental” as a figure of inscrutable and irreconcilable difference (Said 222). Instead, Kerouac’s discourse operates much more like Turner’s, representing “the Orient” as a transparent cultural space, a fecund wilderness in which the “frontiersman” might be reborn. Dharma Bums can be better understood as extending the category of the “transposable Indian” to Asia rather than bringing “the Orient” home. Indeed, it is 73 the Indian rather than “the Oriental” that functions as a sort of common denominator in representations of people of color in Dharma Bums—Asians, African Americans, Arabs, and Mexicans are all associated with American Indians over the course of the novel (302, 368, 344, 300). Understanding Kerouac’s cross-‐cultural identification as modeled on settler colonial modes of indigenization rather than on European Orientalist discourses illuminates the connection between identification with non-‐Western cultures and anarchist resistance that Kerouac persistently draws in his work. The idealized portrait of the lives of Tibetan Buddhists that Japhy paints in the scene reads remarkably like Kerouac’s fantasies of life on his homestead: “All of them, men and women, they’d meditate, fast, have balls like this, go back to eating, drinking, talking, hike around” (301). Kerouac imagines Asians not merely as an exoticized Other, but as the figures he might become in order to imagine an alternative to normative American life. Amid such romanticization of “indigenized” racial Others, Kerouac continues to identify his protagonist and Japhy as frontiersmen. In one of the long conversations between Ray Smith, Alvah Goldbrook, Warren Coughlin (Philip Whalen), and Japhy Ryder, the concept of the frontier takes center stage. Japhy declares, [F]rontiersmen are always heroes and were always my real heroes and will always be. They’re constantly on the alert in the realness which might as well be real as unreal, what difference does it make, Diamond Sutra says ”Make no formed conceptions about the realness of existence nor about the unrealness of existence,” or words like that. 74 Handcuffs will get soft and billy clubs will topple over, let’s go on being free anyhow. (350) This exclamation sets off a chain of enthusiastic responses from Japhy’s interlocutors: “The President of the United States suddenly grows cross-‐eyed and floats away!” I yell. “And anchovies will turn to dust!” yells Coughlin. “The Golden gate is creaking with Sunset rust,” says Alvah. “And anchovies will turn to dust!” insists Couglin. (350) The frontiersman is doing a lot of improbable work in this passage: on the one hand, he is represented as a figure with an odd relationship to “reality”: he is “alert” in it but also recognizes his own epistemological alienation from it (“might as well be real as unreal”). This stance also ends up aligning the frontiersman with Asian cultures when his worldview is compared to the line from the Diamond Sutra. The images that follow contrast the ephemerality of state power to the imperative of “being free anyhow”—in spite of that power. Finally, after a surrealistic declaration that the US president will spontaneously relinquish his power (“The President of the United States suddenly grows cross-‐eyed and floats away!”), this ode to the frontiersman explodes into just the sort of metonymic, improvisatory, and non-‐ representational play that marks Kerouac as a key figure in the genealogy of postmodern literary form (see Holton 265-‐83 and Johnson 22-‐38). This continues until Japhy launches into the oft-‐cited “rucksack revolution” passage where he imagines a legion of Beat “frontiersmen” hitchhiking across the nation and somehow 75 instituting a new way of life (351). For Kerouac, the term “revolution” had nothing to do with the political seizure or overthrow of the state and everything to do with a peripatetic movement of an army of “solitary Bartlebies,” as Kerouac once put it, who could elude the structuring power of the state and its norms through class and racial abdication (Good Blonde 47). Absent in the description of the “Dharma bums” is, of course, the labor that was to have sustained life on Kerouac’s utopian homestead. The “rucksack revolution” is presented as a cultural movement marked by its refusal to participate in material production. The “solitary Bartlebies” of the Beat Generation are frontiersmen without the so-‐called “free land” that enabled settler colonial expansion; their paradigm is not autonomous production, but autonomous play. In Dharma Bums, that play is enacted through literary play but also through the re-‐ creation of frontier experiences through outdoor recreation. Outdoor recreation and linguistic play are presented as coterminous processes in the narrative of Japhy, Henry Morley, and Smith’s expedition to climb Matterhorn peak in the Cascades. As the three men begin their hike, Kerouac’s description focuses on the unlikely subject of non-‐morphemic communication: “From the first moment we’d met Morley he’d kept emitting sudden yodels in keeping with our venture. This was a simple ‘Yodelayhee’ but came at the oddest moments” (315). Morley and Kerouac make the beginning of the trek trading these Alpine hails until “Japhy went to fetch some more wood and we couldn’t see him for a while and Morley yelled ‘Yodelayhee’ Japhy answered back with a simple ‘Hoo’ which he said was the Indian way to call in the mountains and much nicer. So I began to yell ‘Hoo’ myself” (315). Even the most 76 spontaneous acts of linguistic play in Dharma Bums are given meaning through an allegory that imagines them as a movement from “Germanic seeds” to a rebirth effected by settler indigenization (Turner 24). Having established the allegorical trajectory of their journey, Japhy continues to lead the way in the manner of “Buck Jones, eyes to the distant horizons, like Natty Bumpo” (321). As Smith and Japhy approach the peak, Japhy’s indigenization takes center stage as Kerouac’s representations of Japhy veer into the homoerotic: “Japhy took off his pants so he could look just like an Indian, I mean stark naked, except for a jockstrap, and hiked almost a quarter mile ahead of us” (337). When Japhy reaches the peak, he releases a “beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity in the wind … his triumphant mountain-‐conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy” (341). Japhy’s tone poem on the summit effects a transformation of Smith’s consciousness: “Then suddenly everything was just like Jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-‐foot leaps” (341). The climb ends with Japhy and Smith enjoying an almost supernatural mobility across the wilderness that tested them, related in page after page of Kerouac’s expansive bop prose. Ray Smith does not sustain his ecstatic relationship with either Japhy’s anarchism or his idealization of Indianness as Dharma Bums progresses, however. Smith comes to taunt Japhy for the anti-‐social tendencies his anarchism engenders (347), and Smith’s idealization of “the Indian” runs afoul of reality during a rough hitchhiking trip in the US-‐Mexico borderlands. En route to the border, he stops in Riverside, California, to sleep near the railroad tracks. He meets a Black transient 77 who identifies himself as “part Mohawk” before warning him that sleeping out is illegal in Riverside and that the cops will rough him up if he tries. Smith gets “sore” at this remark and responds, oddly, “This ain’t India, is it” (368). Ruminating on his statement, Smith decides, “Though it was against the law … the only thing to do was do it anyway” (368) because to do otherwise would be equivalent to sitting “with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be ‘supervised’” (368). By comparing the United States to (newly post-‐) colonial India, Smith obliquely suggests that it is the U.S. nation-‐state that guarantees his right to “sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what [he] wanted” even though, as he acknowledges, these actions contravene the law. The US nation-‐ state, then, guarantees a state of exception wherein the proleptically white male sovereign individual (Smith never considers why he might have an easier time sleeping out than the Black man) can operate outside the law without threatening the law’s constitution. The paradoxical relationship to the state suggested in this passage is further emphasized when Smith makes it to South of the border, where he is given another warning about sleeping out, this time one he appreciates. When a beggar communicates to him that he would be robbed of his pack and killed were he to try to sleep out, he realizes that this “was true. I wasn’t in America any more. Either side of the border, either way you slice the baloney, a homeless man was in hot water” (371). Kerouac rails against the state while in the United States, but in Mexico he finds the absence of regulatory violence distressing when he encounters “evil Mexican Apaches” that dwell among “the gay childlike Mexicans” he crossed the 78 border to dig (394). Ultimately, Kerouac’s figurative frontiering depends on maintaining a binary between “guys like [him]” and the “Fellahin Indians of the world,” a binary that he depends on the nation-‐state to police. It is Kerouac’s own desire that his own white male cohort serve as the representatives of the Fellahin alternative to the state that ultimately brings him back to state. As David Lloyd has noted, there is an inevitable analog between a monopoly of representation of the dominant culture and the state’s monopoly of violence (Anomalous States 4). In Kerouac’s frontier allegory, the “Fellahin Indians of the world” hold the key to the authentic being that Kerouac seeks, but, again, they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Just as so many settler isopolities resisted the regulatory norms of the metropolitan state even as they eventually came to depend on the state for its capacity to bring overwhelming violence to bear against Indigenous populations, Kerouac turns back to the state in order to protect himself from the “Fellahin Indians” he claims to represent. The “evil Mexican Apaches” bring Kerouac back into the fold of the state he was literally trying to escape. He desires a stateless future, but stateless only on his own terms; this contradiction proves his undoing. As multiple critics have noted, Kerouac’s late work is haunted by his anxiety about his own ability to make his voice heard among the growing chorus of dissenting voices making themselves heard during the 1960s (Martinez 108; Davidson 94). In his last publication—an essay posthumously published in the Chicago Tribune as “After the Deluge”—Kerouac addresses himself to the impossible contradiction between his anti-‐statism and his imagination of his literary coterie as an exclusive settler vanguard. Asked to comment on his attitude toward the 79 counterculture in 1969, Kerouac opens by declaring that he’s “trying to figure out where [he is] between the established politicians and the radicals, between cops and hoods, tax collectors and vandals” (Good Blonde 181). He questions how he could possibly spawn Jerry Rubin, Mitchell Goodman, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and other warm human beings from the ghettos who say they have suffered no less than the Puerto Ricans in their barrios and the blacks in the Big and Little Harlems, and all because [he] wrote a matter-‐of-‐fact account of a true adventure on the road (hardly an agitational propaganda account) featuring an ex-‐cowhand and an ex-‐footballer driving across the continent. (181) Behind this passage’s heavy-‐handed anti-‐Semitism lies an odd disavowal of the politics of the frontier allegory of On the Road. Whereas On the Road invited its proleptically white readers to identify with people of color as a way of imagining an oppositional identity, the Jewish radicals he denounces are dismissed as frauds by virtue of that identification; On the Road is rendered apolitical with a demurral that emphasizes the very heteronormative white masculine identities that it ironizes and transforms. As the essay continues, Kerouac attacks both the “shiny hypocrisy” of the elite and the “non-‐productive parasit[ic]” qualities of “the Hippies” (182, 183), but reserves his most intense ire for the self-‐identified anarchist, “these brand new alienated radical chillun (sic)of Kropotkin and Bakunin” he once romanticized (183). He critiques the “Peking-‐oriented Castro-‐jacketed New Left” for espousing an anarchism that “extends just so far, after all […] no sense starting trouble unless you get a ‘top job’ straightening it out” (184). As with his critique of the Jewish radicals 80 above, this assessment seems a remarkable act of projection: Kerouac’s own interest in anarchy extended only so far as he could imagine “guys like [him]” maintaining a monopoly of representation. His condemnation of the pseudo-‐anarchists of the New Left crescendos in a rhapsodic question: So who cares anyhow that if it hadn’t been for western-‐style capitalism so-‐called […] or laissez-‐faire, free economic byplay, movement north, south, east and west, haggling, pricing, and the political balance of power carved into the US constitution and active thus far in the history of our government, and my perfectly recorded and legitimized coast guard papers, just one instance of arch (non-‐ anarchic) credibility in our provable system, I wouldn’t have been able to hitchhike half-‐broke thru 47 states of this Union and see the scene with my own eyes, unmolested? Who cares, Walt Whitman? (184-‐85) Here we see a remarkable reversal from the sentiments regarding the homogenizing “wage slavery” of capitalism that Kerouac had expressed just over twenty years prior: capitalism is represented in this passage as synonymous with the fluid energies of his movement in On the Road. This fluidity is described as being protected by the “arch … credibility” of the constitution, a political body which provides the defense that allows Kerouac to see the road with his “own eyes, unmolested.” The seeming non-‐sequitur invocation of the Coast Guard papers in fact speaks directly to why Kerouac needs the state: he desires the state’s defense against those who would molest him in his attempt to represent them. 81 This Hobbesian embrace of the state leads Kerouac into a notorious defense of the Vietnam War and Cold War militarization. What is less often noted, however, is that this is not a line of thought that he sustains over the course of the essay. After railing against peace protestors, asking “who’m I going to blame, the military industrial complex?” and snidely suggesting that “no national right at all be granted to the United States to defend itself against its own perimeter of enemies in its own bigger scale” (sic), Kerouac’s alcohol-‐infused prose breaks down into a sort of poem recalling the language of his own initial condemnation of the “alienated radicals” that laments political violence and his own inability to intervene against it: Warm human beings everywhere. In Flanders Field they’re piled 10 high. The Mekong, its just a long, soft river. I’ll do this, I’ll do that— You can’t fight City Hall, it keeps changing its name— Ah pooey on ‘em—you pays taxes and you passes to your grave, why study their “matters?” (187) Having thus undermined his argument by invoking the horror of state violence, Kerouac returns to the frontier allegory that animated On the Road: I think I’ll drop out—Great American Tradition—Dan’l Boone, US Grant, Mark Twain—I think I’ll go to sleep and suddenly in my deepest inadequacy nightmares wake up haunted and see everyone in the world as unconsolable orphans yelling and screaming on every side to 82 make arrangements for making a living yet all bespattered and gloomed-‐up in the nightsoil of poor body and soul all present and accounted for as some kind of sneakish, crafty gift, and all so lonered. (188) Kerouac’s response to the political crisis that he blames on “alienated radicals” inspired by On the Road is to repeat On the Road’s attempt to elude political crisis by “frontiering” in the space of those subaltern “Fellahin” bodies who have not formed themselves into a political class (“all so lonered”). Identification with their suffering is perfectly acceptable for him so long as he is representing it. Dissatisfied with his own defense of the state and its violence and the argument that emerged out of his own frontier rhetoric, the only solution he has is the only one settler colonial societies have ever consistently produced in response to social crisis: a repeated frontier movement. The despairing double bind in which Kerouac portrays himself in this essay—communicated only days before he would die of a massive intestinal hemorrhage suffered while sitting on the toilet in his mother’s home in Florida—is not merely the consequence of his alcoholism or a nationalist conservatism that emerged in his middle age. It is the culmination of Kerouac’s growing awareness of the contradictions fundamental to his own settler colonial cultural politics. Attempts to decouple the more unsavory aspects of Kerouac’s frontier allegory from its broader articulation are inevitably undertaken in an attempt to embrace a similar settler colonial mode of oppositional politics that drove a despairing Kerouac back toward the nation-‐state. In Anti-‐Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim Kerouac as an 83 important figure in the genealogy of their thought by attempting to perform just this sort of parsing. They describe Kerouac as a writer who possessed the soberest of means, who took revolutionary “flight,” but who later finds himself immersed in dreams of a great America, and then in search of his Breton ancestors of the superior race. Is this not the destiny of American literature, that of crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities?” (305) Parsing out the “Puritan” aspect of Kerouac’s work from the “revolutionary flight” of its frontiering impulse is crucial for Deleuze and Guattari’s performance of “a global, nomadic reframing in which the frontier becomes, again, Frederick Jackson Turner’s site of transformation, possibility, and mapping,” supposedly stripped of its ties to the nation-‐state (Byrd, Transit of Empire, 13). A reassessment of how we read Kerouac’s frontier allegory, then, becomes a vital intervention for a reframing of radical politics that works to overcome the settler colonial logic that informs Deleuze and Guattari and the generation of radical thinkers influenced by them. In a chapter of Dialogues II entitled “On the Superiority of Anglo-‐American Literature,” Deleuze writes in praise of Kerouac and other US authors who “create a new earth” by pursuing “the flight toward the West, the discovery that the true East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond” (37). If we read Kerouac as always already liberal simply by virtue of his Americanness and his engagement with the “rhetoric of the errand,” it is very 84 difficult to critique a reading like that offered by Deleuze, who abstracts an anti-‐ statist, “world turned inside out” politics from the putatively “Puritan territorialization” of Kerouac’s frontier allegory. By refusing to read Kerouac’s literary politics as an exceptionally American phenomenon, but rather as shaped by a transnational settler colonial imaginary, we can see the impossibility of Deleuze and Guattari’s own settler colonial fantasy. The tragic dimension of Kerouac’s frontier allegory—the pathos that emerges in the moment that he realizes that the mode of freedom he has been pursuing is underwritten by the regulatory state violence he deplores—expresses a truth about any politics that imagines itself as a “frontiering” vanguard that imagines liberation as a sort of escape. Ann Douglas, one of Kerouac’s most circumspect critical champions, offers a poetic summation of the enduring appeal of Kerouac’s fiction: In Kerouac’s novel, the continent had been strangely emptied out of the people usually caught on camera, yet it was filled with other people, people in motion, of various races and ethnicities, speaking many tongues, migrating from one place to another as seasonal laborers, wandering around as hobos and hitchhikers, meeting each other in brief but somehow lasting encounters. On the Road told me that being an American meant being “somebody else, some stranger […] [whose] whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” (10) Here Douglas captures the remarkable anti-‐normative drive that animates Kerouac’s work, but also, without direct reference to them, highlights the settler colonial premises that mediate his representation of heterogeneity. For Kerouac, North 85 American space is “strangely emptied out,” a wilderness beyond the realm of normative representation. In representing this wilderness, Kerouac transforms himself and his readers, they are “haunted” by the marginalized bodies who inhabit it, figures as spectral as the fleeing Indians in Gast’s American Progress. The tragic lesson of Kerouac’s fiction lies in its ultimate inability to imagine his disidentification with the state liberalism as anything other than an act of frontiering through which that system’s true victims and true resistors are rendered ghosts that might only speak through him. 86 Chapter 2 The Playboys of the Last Frontier: Radical Form, Queer Community, and Frontier Allegory in the Poetics of Jack Spicer I. Yeats in San Berdoo: Frontier Allegory and the Practice of the Outside In introducing a series of lectures on poetics given shortly before his death in 1965, poet Jack Spicer opened with a peculiar historical anecdote about W. B. Yeats: [Yeats] was on a train, back in, I guess it was 1918. The train was, oddly enough, going through San Bernardino to Los Angeles when his wife Georgie suddenly began to have trances, and spooks came to her.[…] [S]he started automatic writing as they were going through the orange groves between San Berdoo and Los Angeles. And Yeats didn’t know what to make of it for a while, but it was a slow train and he started getting interested, and these spooks were talking to him. […] He asked “What are you here for?” And the spooks replied, “We’re here to give metaphors for your poetry.” […] That’s something which is all English department lectures now, but it was the first thing since Blake on the business of taking poetry as coming from the outside rather than from the inside. (The House that Jack Built 5; hereafter cited as CL) Spicer develops the method of poetic “dictation” described in this story over the course of these lectures into a poetics his friend and acolyte Robin Blaser would later dub “the Practice of the Outside” in a highly influential essay of that title (113). Spicer wasn’t a spiritualist like Yeats—he used a variety of fanciful metaphors to 87 describe how he understood poetry as originating outside the subject, including, most memorably, by describing poems as being transmitted to the poet, figured as a radio transistor, by Martians (CL 29). But these considerations were always, for Spicer, explicitly figurative: as he put it later in the lectures, “Please don’t get me wrong. Martian is just a word for X. I am not saying that the little green men are coming in saucers […] going into my bedroom and helping me write poetry, and they ain’t” (CL 29). Spicer used the supernatural as a means of reminding his audience that our subjectivities and our naturalized perceptions of reality are a part of a malleable structure of language. “X” stands for the alterity that normative syntax won’t allow our minds to interpolate. Spicer’s story suggests Yeats’s poetics of dictation originated, “oddly enough,” near the terminus of Yeats’s westward journey toward the Pacific. While the connection it posits between the “practice of the Outside” and the westward movement could be dismissed as a historical accident, the story is in fact not historical at all: as poet Peter Gizzi first pointed out, the entire story is a product of Spicer’s own imagination. Yeats did, in fact, claim to have a revelation in which he began to “dictate” poems from his wife’s trance-‐speech, placing the event in 1917, but that was three years before his visit to California (Gizzi 42). Why would Spicer fabricate such a bizarre anecdote for the introduction to a lecture on his poetics? The invention is less surprising in the context of Spicer’s broader body of work. As Spicer puts it in the opening stanza of his 1958 serial poem “Billy The Kid” (one of his earliest of what he classified as his “dictation” poems), he often envisioned his poetry as a place in which he and his readers could 88 “fake out a frontier—a poem someone could hide in with a sheriff’s posse after him—a thousand miles of it if its is necessary to go a thousand miles ...” (CP 185). The poetic was, for Spicer, a frontier space in which an individual could elude the gaze of the state and imagine a queer mode of being that rejected normative identity. Spicer represented Yeats as first experiencing “the poetics of dictation” as he neared the western edge of the American continent because for Spicer, “the practice of the outside” was a poetics that was inseparable from his imagining of the frontier history of the American West. From the time of his “birth” as a poet in 1947 (his own term for describing the year he met Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan in Berkeley) until his untimely death in 1965, Spicer employed the myth of the American frontier in order to allegorize his own formally innovative poetic practice as well as his attempt to build a queer community of poets in the Bay area. By drawing attention to Spicer’s use of frontier allegory, one of my aims is to recognize his poetics as a link between the familiar political allegories presented by popular frontier narratives to the postmodern “return and revival, if not the reinvention in some unexpected form, of allegory as such” (Jameson 167). While Spicer’s poetics has rarely been described as allegory, Spicer’s poetic practice demonstrates all the hallmarks of the “allegorical transcoding” that Frederic Jameson associated with the postmodern turn away from the commitment to “the older aesthetic absolute of the Symbol” and that I outlined in my introduction (Jameson 167). Spicer’s entire oeuvre is populated with recognizable allegorical figures, ranging from Orpheus to Arthurian Knights to the aforementioned frontier outlaw. These allegorical figures do not gesture metaphorically toward a stable 89 literal or abstract level (as figures might illustrate Christ’s revelation in Christian allegory) but rather gesture metonymically toward the unfolding of Spicer’s poetic praxis itself and toward a utopian futurity for the political and poetic community Spicer was always in the process of building. Instead of offering a stable literal referent that overdetermines the allegorical figures of the poems, Spicer’s poetic acts perform an “allegorical transcoding” by “setting into active equivalency two existing codes” (Jameson 394). 28 So, following Jameson’s logic, if Spicer offers up the frontier outlaw as an allegorical figure for the queer poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, he simultaneously queers the figure of the frontier outlaw. Meaning in Spicer’s poetry is neither symbolic, waiting to be realized by a reader that might recognize in it the immediacy of the “aesthetic absolute” of transcendental meaning, nor is it allegorical in the metaphysical sense, a deferred presence waiting to be uncovered by a reader privy to the literal truth “behind” it. Instead, its maelstrom of allegorical gestures unfold in a continuous process of becoming: the queer literary community Spicer imagines is perpetually deferred yet still exerts an active presence in the poems, transforming the meaning of the very rhetorical figures employed to imagine it. 29 This coming community is “the outside,” that which is inexpressible through the symbolic and syntactical logics available in the expressive lyric, that Spicer’s allegorical poetry works to make manifest. 28 For more on Jameson’s reading of postmodern allegory and its application to avant-‐garde poetics, see Michael Golston’s remarkable reading of Clark Coolidge in “At Clark Coolidge: Allegory and the Early Works.” 29 Spicer’s imagination of queer community could be productively read through josé Muñoz’s conception of queerness in Cruising Utopia (1). 90 William Handley has argued that this mode of allegorical transcoding, so strongly associated with postmodern form, also marks western regionalist literary narratives that seek to allegorize the nation through the representation of the frontier. There is no “strict metaphoric parallelism” between region and nation in these allegorical Westerns; instead “each signifying strand is a trace of the other, writing the other line and being written by the other line simultaneously… figuring a mutually signifying relationship between region and nation” (34). Spicer’s poetics shares with the tradition of the “literary West” a mode of allegory that relies upon a “looser, more metonymic, association of interdependence” (Handley 34). In casting his anti-‐expressivist poetics as an act of “frontiering,” Spicer thus taps into a long allegorical tradition in US cultural and historiographic representation that imagines an encounter with alterity in the western “wilderness” as one in which the (inevitably white male) subject serves as a sort of “medium” for the “outside.” Turner’s frontier thesis stands as an antecedent to Spicer’s poetic frontier in a similar way that it does to Kerouac’s Fellahin frontier: just as Turner saw the wilderness as a space in which the “perennial rebirth” of “the American character” might take place, Spicer saw “the outside” as an allegorical space in which the poet could project himself (Spicer’s poet was as inevitably male as Turner’s frontiersman) in order to escape the strictures of normative American identity(“Significance of the Frontier” 32). 30 30 While there is no direct evidence that Spicer was inspired by Turner, he was no stranger to frontier historiography: in 1948, Spicer and Robin Blaser worked as research assistants for historian Roy Harvey Pearce at Berkeley while Pearce was conducting research for his lauded revisionist history of settler/Native contact, The 91 If we read Turner as imagining the Indian wilderness as a transhistorical site that would transform the frontiersman without challenging his status as a colonizer, we can analogously read Spicer’s queer poetic frontier as a cultural space in which the subjectivity of the white male is transformed without his hegemonic status being fundamentally challenged. Spicer’s poetics is certainly one that rejects normative modes of representation and subjectivity through its collage-‐like presentation of an unsettling array of language and imagery, and its ruptured syntax. As multiple critics have noted, however, this utopian formal project neither prevented Spicer from using his poetry as an organ for misogyny and anti-‐Semitism, nor did it force him to confront the historical conditions that produced his own relatively privileged subjectivity. 31 This is not, however, to say that the politics of Spicer’s frontier rhetoric can be neatly mapped onto the ideology of the Cold War United States. In both his poetry and his paratextual writing, Spicer often represented American imperialism as a nightmare produced by the closing of the frontier, paradoxically decrying the effects of westward expansion even as he expresses nostalgia for the process whereby that expansion occurred. In an interview given in 1965, Spicer quoted his father as having said “We [Californians] were not estranged from everything until the railroad took over California between 1870 and 1906.” He goes on to offer his own interpretation of his father’s statement: “It isn’t much good to have property in Marin County and have three sons killed in Korea and Vietnam and then sell out to Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization. Both Spicer and Blaser are thanked in the book’s acknowledgments (430). 31 Spicer’s tendency toward anti-‐Semitism and misogyny are productively explored by his biographers Ellingham and Killian (see especially 66, 124-‐27, 204). 92 real estate. You can’t keep a ranch with no one to ranch it. It’s demoralizing for poets to see what happens” (CL 244). The peculiar nostalgia presented by the claim that California was “estranged” by the completion of the transcontinental railroads is paradoxical, yet familiar within the context of U.S. frontier narratives. To return to the example of Turner, the frontier thesis famously posits the frontier as the dynamic site where “the fluidity of American life” was most perfectly realized, but it also expresses considerable anxiety about the closing of that frontier: like Spicer, Turner feared that the erstwhile frontiers of the American West, the once dynamic and democratic site of the encounter of diverse cultures with the “wilderness,” were in danger of becoming provincial backwaters, stripped of their historical meaning, “estranged from everything” (Turner 60). 32 For Spicer, California’s “estrangement” was not blamed on the notion that Californians were alienated from a transcendental connection to the wilderness, but rather on the fact that California had become wholly subsumed within national networks of power and global networks of capital: the sons of the Marin County rancher become the representatives and victims of American state power when they are drafted into the service of American imperialism, while the land itself is abstracted into real estate value by the capitalization of the frontier economy. This materialist inflection of Spicer’s frontier nostalgia is in some sense the flip side of 32 Spicer’s acolyte, poet George Stanley, offers some revealing comments on this aspect of Spicer’s politics in an interview given to Lewis Ellingham in 1982: “Spicer was right! This was the very period in which the final consolidation of California into the capitalist nexus, located in New York, was taking place. This was when O’Connor Moffet downtown became Macy’s” (Stanley quoted in Ellingham and Killian 118). 93 the transcendental anxieties about “American character” in Turner. Settler colonial frontiers, thanks to the ample availability of “free land” (i.e., land expropriated from Indigenous peoples) often did produce economies dominated by sole proprietorship, fostering anti-‐statist and small-‐r republican ideologies that often clash with the capitalist ideologies of the metropole. 33 For Spicer, post-‐World War II California was a world in which the republican values of the frontier had been crushed by the integration of frontier spaces into the industrial economy; California was where, in Turner’s words, the frontier nation was “thrown back upon itself” (“The Problem of the West”60). My purpose in this chapter will be to map the political valences of Spicer’s use of frontier allegory across his career, attending to both his poetry and paratextual documents such as correspondence, interviews, and lectures. Toward the end of his career, Spicer develops an increasingly self-‐conscious perspective on his own frontier rhetoric and the contradictory politics of settler colonial nostalgia, but never—as the interview excerpt above demonstrates—entirely abandons the frontier as a figure for a liberatory alternative community. When Spicer’s frontier rhetoric has been noted by critics and his fellow poets, it is almost always cited as a confirmation of Spicer’s postmodern bona fides and his commitment to resisting US power. In the final paragraphs of “The Practice of the Outside,” Blaser eulogizes his 33 In Marx’s analysis, this recalcitrance on the part of the frontier sole proprietors requires direct state intervention in order to privatize frontier real estate markets and force settlers onto a wage labor market, ultimately reinstating the labor conditions that settlers had sought to escape. Marx characterizes the paradoxical relationship between frontier sole proprietorship and industrial capitalism by suggesting that frontier sole proprietorship is “the direct antithesis” to industrial capitalism, but industrial capitalism “grows on the former’s tomb and nowhere else” (931). 94 friend by declaring him “So West A Man” (162). Poet Peter Gizzi picks up on Spicer’s identification with the West, and California in particular, in his introduction to Spicer’s collected lectures, arguing that, for Spicer, “California is America in extremis. It combines and locates his sense of limit in poetry, his questioning of grand narratives, and his sense of living out a posthumous existence in a post-‐apocalyptic, image-‐making, border culture” (201). Michael Davidson, in a reading of Spicer’s frontier rhetoric as compared to the similar rhetoric of the Beat Generation, argues that “unlike Ginsberg, who often speaks for the nation, Spicer absented himself from it” (171). In The Rhizomatic West, British Americanist Neil Campbell likewise posits Spicer’s “practice of the outside” as a particularly western cultural practice analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s celebratory reading of “the rhizomatic West” that stands as “a strategy for opening up and scrutinizing established ideologies and languages, canonical practices and texts, resilient and official mythologies” (14). More common than the attempts by critics such as Gizzi, Davidson, and to wrest Spicer’s frontier rhetoric from the rhetoric of US nationalism is a tendency to strip Spicer’s literary politics from the regional and national contexts in which he articulated them entirely. Ron Silliman’s influential reading of “the practice of the outside” in The New Sentence is indicative of this mode of Spicer criticism. Silliman reads Spicer’s “practice of the outside” as a model for the sort of politically charged formalism he and the Language poets embraced: The outside is not simply that which is received by the poem, like a parasite or a virus, but that which can never be named (“just a word for X”), because, as Noam Chomsky once observed, that which lies beyond cognitive capacity 95 cannot be spoken through cognitive capacity. To recall the final admonition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” It was Spicer’s task and accomplishment as a poet to cause this dimension to become perceptible, however fleetingly, to the reader. (The New Sentence; hereafter cited as TNS 162) […] What we cannot speak about should not be passed over in silence. It remains to be shown. (TNS 166) The paradoxical claim Silliman makes here—that the formal disruptions of Spicer’s poetry allow his readers a glimpse at a mode of being “outside” our socially constructed understanding of reality—is one that is central to the Language poets’ conception of their own politics. Silliman argues that a writing practice that foregrounds the materiality of language while suppressing referentiality can “search out the preconditions of a liberated language within the existing social fact” by inaugurating a reader-‐writer relationship that is participatory and communal rather than prescriptive (The New Sentence 17; hereafter cited as TNS). Thus, for Silliman, Spicer’s “outside” cannot be articulated or understood in relation to other discourses by the reader, but merely reverentially identified as productive of an alternative set of possibilities that can only be “seen” through the experience of the poem itself. 34 34 Silliman’s near-‐mystical rhetoric regarding the autonomous potentiality embodied in Spicer’s poetics is echoed in other readings of Spicer by the Language poets and their critical allies. Consider, for instance, this formulation by Jed Rasula, that considers Spicer’s investment in the Orpheus myth: The poems explore the captivation and enchantment of message by language. In terms of the Orphic myth Spicer was so attracted to, Spicer/Orpheus leads Eurydice/message up out of Hades, and on glancing back loses her in the 96 Critic David Lloyd addressed this paradox in an early critique of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, writing that Language poetry hopes “to figure a text which is autonomous in itself the utopian autonomy which is its end” (“Limits” 165). Lloyd argues that this insistence on poetic autonomy unintentionally betrays their goal of a poetry that would encourage a participatory relationship between writer and reader: The reclaimed autonomy of writer-‐writing, which falls on the side of the subject insofar as its autonomy is predicated upon nondetermination by conditions, at times even falls back on that frontiersman imperialism which has always been the fascinating lure of Amerika. [sic] […] The ultimate fantasy of indeterminacy is [the] total availability of goods distributed through the network which makes everything possible: “Be all you can be” is the natural war cry of the militarist economy. (“Limits” 165) While Lloyd’s quip relating the utopian aspirations of Language poetics to those of Manifest Destiny is deeply colored by the heat of the early critical debates surrounding the emergence of Language poetry in the 1980s, the connection between “frontiersman imperialism” and the “ultimate fantasy of indeterminacy” of Language poetics cannot be dismissed as spurious when considered in the light of the Language poets’ acknowledged debt to Spicer. indiscriminate play of signification which constitutes the underworld of the personal. I’m not sure what Spicer meant by message, but I take it in the sense in which one might speak of messages in dreams: a constellation of unmistakable meaning(s) in no way resembling a telegram-‐message. A distinct Otherness. An irreducibility. (54) 97 I argue that the aspiration toward “utopian autonomy … predicated by a nondetermination by conditions” that marks the literary politics of the Language poets finds an antecedent in the politics of Spicer’s frontier allegory. Spicer’s most celebrated formal achievements—his “dictation” method and his conception of the serial poem—emerged when, in a time of personal and political crisis, he imagined his poetic praxis as a frontier where something akin to “the fluidity of American life” (in Turner’s words) could be regenerated. Despite the promise of freedom that it celebrated, however, Spicer’s literary frontier, like Turner’s historical one, was imaged as an exclusive terrain, and this troubling aspect of Spicer’s literary politics haunts any reading that would imagine a “utopian autonomy” in his poetry. By reading Spicer’s poems in the context of the settler colonial tradition that so often inspired it, my aim is not to suggest that they should be read as entirely produced by historical conditions rather than wholly autonomous from them. Indeed, as I will argue, Spicer’s last two books of poetry perform a remarkable self-‐critique of his own literary frontiering. Through a consideration of how Spicer works both through and against the settler colonial imaginary, I hope to demonstrate how his frontier allegory stands as a poignant example of a poet’s struggle to confront and transform his own historical moment and all the failures and triumphs that that struggle entails. II. The Mad Cartographer: “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy” as Frontier Allegory Spicer’s complex engagement with frontier allegory is on full display in one of his earliest poems and most-‐read poems: “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” This poem has 98 oft been noted for both its decisive formal and biographical significance in Spicer’s development. Not only is it one of the first of Spicer’s poems that gives intimations of his later poems’ formal complexity, but it was also written in the aftermath of his first and only known heterosexual love affair. What has yet to be fully explored in the literature is the unlikely biographical context that makes this poem an “allegorical transcoding” not only of “poetic and sexual spaces,” as critic Daniel Katz has noted (25), but also with the historical and mythical spaces of the US West. While the exact time of the composition of “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy” is unknown, it was inspired by events that took place in 1949, the year after Spicer met poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan in Berkeley and began his career as a poet in earnest. In a singularly unlikely collision of literary biography and California history, this was the year during which Spicer was dating fellow Berkeley graduate student Catherine Mulholland, the granddaughter of William Mulholland, the notorious engineer who masterminded the Los Angeles aqueduct, enabling the explosive growth of Los Angeles during the twentieth century (Ellingham and Killian 25-‐29). The two met when Spicer took a swipe at Catherine’s grandfather— presumably for his notorious role in the shady water rights deals that created the Los Angeles Aqueduct at the expense of free-‐holding farmers in the Owens Valley. Mulholland related the incident to Spicer’s biographer Lewis Ellingham in an interview decades later: [T]he first time I ever met Jack Spicer, he asked me, “Are you one of the Mulhollands?” He was very LA, Jack was, and so was I, so we both understood the question, and when I said “yes”, he replied “I always 99 wondered what one of them would look like.” He then began to bait me, and as I had long since learned how to deal with that and at the same time argue for the family honor … why, Jack laid off, even admitted that he didn’t really know the whole story, had only read one book, etc., and our friendship began—right there on Telegraph Avenue after a philology class in Wheeler Hall. (Interview) Mulholland and Spicer’s relationship was premised, from the beginning, on Spicer moderating his own objections to the domestication of western space. This granddaughter of one of the most famous “tamers” of the West exerted a powerful hold on Spicer—he started dating her despite the fact that he had come out as gay to his circle of male friends at Berkeley two years previously. His attraction for Mulholland is especially compelling because Spicer frequently cast his early childhood as a relationship between a rebellious father—who supposedly moved to Los Angeles to participate in Wobbly political agitation—and a conservative mother, who “domesticated” her husband into the a quotidian career as a hotel manager and the breadwinner for a nuclear family (Ellingham and Killian 1-‐2). The relationship between Mulholland and Spicer was quite serious. He visited the Mulholland family ranch and impressed Catherine’s parents; there was talk of marriage. It all fell apart when the relationship was consummated. It was Spicer’s first sexual experience with a man or a woman, and he was intensely ashamed of his performance and physical awkwardness. After losing his virginity to her, Spicer broke things off with Mulholland, foreswore future heterosexual relationships, entered psychotherapy, and started writing “Psychoanalysis: An 100 Elegy” (Ellingham and Killian 25). Recent research by poet and Spicer scholar Kevin Killian in the archives of the Oakland chapter of the Mattachine Society, in which Spicer was an active member, reveals how central his relationship with Mulholland was for Spicer’s conception of his own queer identity. Spicer claimed it was the relationship that confirmed for him that he had made the right decision in coming out (Killian 30). These biographical themes get transcoded with frontier tropes in the poem itself, which is staged as a conversation between a patient and a psychoanalyst. When probed about what he is thinking about, the analysand of the poem responds with sexualized images of the California landscape: What are you thinking about? I am thinking of early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water. Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and Manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard ... (CP 31) As the poem continues, it moves from this meditation on an eroticized landscape to an explicit figuration of the female lover as California, imagined cartographically: I am thinking that she is very much like California, When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways traveling up and down her skin 101 Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. (CP 31) but in its final stanzas, this identification is troubled: What are you thinking? I am thinking how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding. What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever. (CP 32-‐33) Here the speaker’s dream of masculine possession of the woman and the land is revealed as an imperial delusion. The lover in the poem is allegorically identified with the western landscape, the “virgin land” of the American continent in a gesture of the sort diagnosed by Annette Kolodny in The Lay of the Land (4). This identification unfolds until it becomes inevitably entwined with the rhetoric of nation building (when the images of flora become the imagery of roadmaps, etc.). 102 When the “mad cartographer” finally sees that his representation of the land is actually a screen hiding him from the land he wishes to possess, the female lover becomes the victim—“The damned maps” that finally “burn” had been inscribed upon her body. And yet, in the moment that his imperial dream is abandoned, the cartographer seems to achieve a genuine possession of the land itself, stripped of its political signifiers, when he finally “possesses/the sweet thick earth.” The final line, however, in suggesting that the poem could go on forever, implies that this conclusion is not an attainable goal. In fact, the “authentic” connection with the earth the image of the “sweet thick earth” implies cannot help but remind the reader of the beginning of the poem, which was likewise dominated by ecological imagery: the speaker, having realized the end point of his desire is, in fact, the antithesis to the object he had hoped to possess, ends up suspended in the articulation of his desire for both the woman and the “virgin land,” a poet reciting a “poem that could go on for ever.” In this odd sense of suspension that dominates the conclusion of “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy” we can begin to grasp how the “transcoding” of the frontier myth and poetic indeterminacy operates Spicer’s work: poetry is figured as a sort of endless elegy, a mode of communication that gestures toward but never attains its lost object, in this case the freedoms of the erstwhile western wilderness. Furthermore, reading the poem through its autobiographical context offers a fascinating inroads into understanding how Spicer related his own queer sexuality to his poetic practice through frontier nostalgia. The poem enacts a rejection of the psychoanalytic process of narrating one’s own interiority in order to reclaim a 103 “functional” heteronormative identity. Instead of grounding his desires for the unnamed female lover, whom we may productively read as Catherine, as related to experiences in his own past, he roots them in his affective identification with the “unspoiled” California landscape. As this metaphor of lover as California is extended, the relationship with the lover is rejected not because of some identitarian embrace of homosexuality, but because the poet’s vision inevitably “domesticates” and forecloses the very freedoms and potentialities that the landscape represented. The poem’s imagining of a poem that “goes on forever,” that rejects closure, is also an embrace of a desire that cannot be contained by the normative structures (“the damned maps”) meant to contain it. The queer freedom one is left with in the “poem that could go forever,” however, is one that comes at the expense of the woman figured in the poem: Spicer, like his contemporary Leslie Fiedler, imagines the frontier of queer possibility as an exclusively male terrain. While many critics have read “the sweet thick earth” as a figure for homosexual desire (Katz 29), what has not been noted, and what is arguably more germane to the understanding of Spicer’s allegorical poetic practice, is that the image transcodes homosexual desire, a poetic practice that resists closure and a suspension of the frontier dialectic. Homosexuality and the poetic become the figurative frontier where an endlessly regenerative space of masculine freedom, decoupled from the “civilizing” teleology of historical westward expansion, is imagined. 104 II. The Queen of the Mad Frontier: Anti-‐Expressivism and Queer Community in Spicer’s Correspondence and Activist Practice During the years following the events that inspired “Psychoanalysis” in 1949 and the publication of “Billy The Kid” in 1958, Spicer increasingly employed frontier rhetoric as he worked to shape the queer and literary communities of the Bay Area, but frontier themes do not appear in his poetry of this period with the sort of sustained focus found in either “Psychoanalysis” or many of his later serial poems. These years were difficult ones for Spicer personally—when he lost his job in the linguistics department at Berkeley in 1950 after refusing to sign the infamous University of California Faculty Loyalty Oath, Spicer took a job at the University of Minnesota, where he spent a lonely term that left him depressed and poetically unproductive. Upon return to the Bay Area, Spicer turned his attention to politics, directing much of his efforts in 1953 toward his activism within the East Bay chapter of the recently formed Mattachine Society. The East Bay chapter of the Mattachine was dissolved by conservative elements within the Mattachine society due to the radical views of its membership (an action inspired in no small part by Spicer’s agitation). Shortly thereafter, in an attempt to reinvigorate his literary production, Spicer moved to New York and Boston where he lived from 1955 to 1956. These years proved similarly frustrating for him poetically, but served to solidify the connection between his politics, his literary practice, and his identity as a Westerner. While, in poems like “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy,” Spicer employs pastoral frontier imagery to allegorize his own queer desire, it is during this middle 105 period, largely in response to the failure of his activism within the Mattachine Society, that Spicer develops the frontier as an allegory for a much more nuanced conception of queer political community, an allegory that emerged in its most fully developed form in Billy The Kid. Spicer famously worked to blur the lines between his literary, personal, and political lives, and his correspondence and the records of his activist work during this period form a vital archive for understanding the formal breakthrough that Spicer achieved with his celebrated “dictated” serial poems. 35 This archive has not, however, up to this point, been explored to the extent that it can be regarding the connections between Spicer’s activist practice and poetics. While the Language poets’ readings of Spicer, influenced by Marxist formalism, have given much attention to how his modes of poetic representation can be construed as offering alternative models of political representation, they have not, by and large, taken up the question of how Spicer’s most focused attempt at political representation during this period engaged with, and perhaps informed, the same issues of identity and representation he explores through his experiments in radical poetic form. 36 Conversely, poet and independent scholar Kevin Killian’s recent work in this archive largely focuses its readings of Spicer’s poetry on its explicitly homosexual content and on how Spicer in those poems thought through the role of the homosexual in 35 Daniel Katz pithily articulates the necessity of incorporating Spicer’s correspondence into a consideration of his oeuvre: “His love for the letter as form, his desire that poems and letters each work as the other, testify to this: the catastrophe of his life must also be read as part of the work” (8). 36 See, again, Rasula’s “Spicer’s Orpheus” and Silliman’s “Spicer’s Language.” 106 society. 37 My contention is that Spicer’s activism in the Mattachine provides an insight into his literary politics that extends beyond its direct considerations of homosexual identity. Spicer worked to make the Mattachine an organization that could represent the political concerns of a broad coalition of individuals on the local and national stage while still respecting alterity within that coalition: he quickly found that goal to be impossible. Understanding Spicer’s activism and ultimate failure within the Mattachine thus sheds invaluable light on Spicer’s often perplexing experiments in poetic form: just as he had in his political life, Spicer, as a poet, worked to envision a non-‐normative form through which a pluralist mode of life could be represented. While the frontier would become a vital trope through which Spicer sought to articulate this vision, to understand how this allegory emerged, it is first necessary to develop an understanding of Spicer’s politics leading up to his engagement with the Mattachine. When Spicer arrived at Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1945, the campus was rife with leftist political activism of all stripes, ranging from “a strong socialist party, various factions of Stalinists, Trotskyists, anarchists, and pacifists … all, [Spicer] noted ironically, at war with each other.” While he consorted with members of all these groups, Spicer found himself most attracted to the anti-‐statist “Libertarian Circle” in San Francisco, the group of “philosophical anarchists” led by Kenneth Rexroth (Ellingham and Killian 11). It was here that Spicer began his lifelong friendship (and rivalry) with Robert Duncan and where Rexroth claimed (somewhat hyperbolically) that “the ideological foundations of the San Francisco 37 Killian, “Spicer and the Mattachine,” 23-‐24. 107 Renaissance had been laid—poetry of direct speech of I to Thou, personalism, anarchism” (508). Despite Rexroth’s claim, Spicer’s politics never fully embraced anarchism, but rather seemed to vacillate between something approaching anarchism and something closer to Marxism. Poet George Stanley, a Spicer acolyte, summed up this ambivalence neatly in an interview with Lewis Ellingham: Jack believed in decentralization, he was a kind of anarchist in that way. I remember him saying ‘it would be good if every little place had its own government that was quite different from every other place’s government: San Francisco, San Mateo, Oakland, lots of little tiny principalities, he liked that idea. But then, he also had a streak in him, what you might call kind of a Marxist animus, one based upon ... ultimately upon hatred and revenge against these capitalists. And so we used to have these arguments about, you know, “if we have a revolution, then the revolutionary party will create a tyranny that’s even worse than the one that preceded it” and at one point I remember Jack saying “it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. At least we would have won [...]” Spicer took his own political views, characterized by the peculiar blend of radical democratic and revolutionary leftist sentiment on display in Stanley’s assessment, very personally and often as a point of family pride, often referencing his father’s supposed membership in the Wobblies when discussing politics (Ellingham and Killian 1). 108 Spicer’s engagements with the left came to a head in 1950, during the aforementioned loyalty oath controversy. Spicer followed a faculty mentor, Ernst Kantorowicz, in refusing to sign the anti-‐communist pledge and was not rehired by UC Berkeley in the fall 1950 term. Spicer took on work as a research assistant in linguistics at the University of Minnesota, where he spent nearly two miserable years before returning to Berkeley, which had since modified its loyalty oath, excising references to communism. Upon his return, he immediately joined a Trotskyist group with Robin Blaser but soon abandoned it when he and Robin Blaser were kicked out after making a joke at a meeting (Ellingham and Killian 46). Humor seemed to define Spicer’s engagement with the Berkeley left during these years: in one of his most vaunted stunts, he organized an intermural football team called “The Unpopular Front,” brought together explicitly to beat the “Students for Wallace” team which was, at least according to Spicer’s friend Sam Hardin, a communist front. Much to Spicer’s delight, his team was able to accomplish this goal in its only game (Ellingham and Killian 30). As anecdotes such as these suggest, Spicer was never able to commit himself in any meaningful way to the task of political organizing during his early years at Berkeley, despite his passion for leftist politics. Spicer’s attitude toward political organization changed substantially when he became involved with the Mattachine, however. The meticulous minutes of the East Bay Chapter, in combination with the correspondence of Gerard Brissette (who was elected the chapter’s first area chair), offer a fascinating glimpse into Spicer’s evolving political sensibilities as he played a part in the meetings of the East Bay Chapter, the statewide convention of 1953, and 109 the bitter dispute which eventually led to the dissolution of the East Bay Chapter by the Mattachine’s leadership. While archival evidence of Spicer’s participation in the East Bay Chapter meetings doesn’t appear until the meeting of April 20, 1953, the chapter, from its inception, was keenly aware of the necessity to maintain a fine balance between solidarity and respect for difference within the coalition. Ken Burns (of the Mattachine’s LA-‐based leadership) wrote Gerry Brissette in the early days of the East Bay Chapter, responding to Brissette’s anxieties about this issue in a paradoxical series of statements that is typical of the East Bay Chapter’s image of itself at the time: “The organization should be bigger than any individual. This, of course, is not to say that the individual is not the most important part of the organization. However, we are working for the group as a whole.” Burns’s anxiety was produced by the fact that The East Bay Chapter proved an especially contentious group—in no small part thanks to Spicer’s contributions. As early as the chapter’s second meeting on April 6, 1953, it was clear that they were less than thrilled by the Mattachine’s centralized power structure, which, at the time, concentrated power in the hands of five of the original founders, the so-‐called “Fifth Order,” all of whom lived in Los Angeles. As the minutes of that meeting put it, “We reserve the right not to have a fifth order. We reserve the right to be an autonomous group. (The feeling generally was that a fifth order system intimated dictatorial rule.)” Even as the group spoke up for local autonomy, the East Bay chapter also seemed to endorse a general attempt to balance solidarity and difference, as this particularly poetic statement from the conclusion of the minutes of their second 110 meeting attests: “All were in accordance with the general aims and purposes and quite eager to contribute their own potentialities. ... Our organization is loose at present, but the general thought of the actively interested is of unification.” In fact, however, the “loose organization” of the East Bay Chapter was to continue until its veritable dissolution in late 1953. The amorphous nature of the group seemed to be Brissette’s primary concern in his correspondence with the LA leadership: in an April 26 letter, he goes so far as to bemoan his own election as area chairman as premature and blames a coalition of Spicer and his allies for electing a slate of representatives over-‐hastily: What I had in mind was a high level discussion group in which I could get to know better the leaders of the area, so that we could work together in better understanding and evolve the highly qualified Mattachine leaders I dream of. But unfortunately, under the influence of Paul and his friend, Jack Spicer, the meeting went far beyond any of my modest expectations, so that by the time the smoke had cleared, the group had elected an Area Council into existence with me as its chairman. The following months saw a continued and often futile attempt by Brissette to mediate between the LA leadership’s desire to “evolve” “highly qualified Mattachine leaders” and the chapter, often egged on by Spicer, who was happy to “[contribute] their own potentialities” however they saw fit. Their meetings were a strange combination of grassroots political organizing and, as Robin Blaser put it, something “strikingly like present-‐day group therapy” (cited in Ellingham and Killian 48). 111 Ellingham and Killian argue “the Mattachine offered Spicer a base of identity politics—a human face—that Spicer missed in his other radical connections” (47). A close examination of Spicer’s contribution to the East Bay chapter meetings, however, reveals that what seemed to animate Spicer most about the Mattachine’s unusual blend of the personal and the political was not that it “grounded” his politics in an authentic human identity, but rather it allowed him to pursue a more radical mode of politics precisely because the early Mattachine did not try to “ground” its community in a normative model of human identity. Instead, the Mattachine offered Spicer a space in which he could explore a radical politics that was not dominated by the notion that liberation required the sort of prescriptive attempt at class formation that Spicer and Blaser witnessed in the Trotskyist club. While, as publications chair of the chapter, Spicer was helping to distribute One magazine and other literature advocating for the homosexual’s essential assimilability into the mainstream culture, he was advocating within Mattachine meetings for an understanding of homosexuality that did not see sexual orientation as a static marker of identity, but rather a socially malleable phenomenon. As Killian notes in “Spicer and the Mattachine,” and the meeting minutes of the East Bay Chapter make even more explicit, Spicer advocated vigorously against the building consensus within the chapter that gay men should embrace their homosexuality as their essential identity as early in life as possible, instead arguing that the Mattachine should work to promote the notion that humans are essentially bisexual and that both heterosexuals and homosexuals are socially conditioned to prefer one sex over the other (35). Killian notes Spicer’s dubious historical analysis in 112 advancing this argument in the May 6 discussion group meeting, where the meeting minutes note that Spicer argued that he “believes children should be shaped toward bisexuality. Ex: Hawaii: in old days absolutely free of prejudice.” While the last claim is obviously absurd, the notion that the homo/hetero binary and its attendant prejudice is a product of European modernity rather than an essential feature of human society is one that has been borne out in contemporary postcolonial and Indigenous studies critiques of queer theory, such as Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs and Mark Rifkin’s When Did the Indians Become Straight? Spicer often advocated, as an alternative to an obsession with the issue of the homosexual’s relation to the mainstream, the question of the relationship between “in groups and out groups” within the Mattachine, rejecting the almost Marxist rhetoric of class formation advocated by many in the Mattachine leadership with a more pluralist conception of the Mattachine community. Whereas Brissette’s correspondence to the leadership often complains about the “queens” who he felt didn’t understand the broader goals of the Mattachine’s supposedly better educated leadership (Letter to Baynard), Spicer spoke up for building a community that would seek to integrate “with the homosexual culture first, our relations with those who are belles, butches, etc.” Spicer is also the only recorded advocate in the chapter for the active recruitment of racial minorities into the East Bay chapter. For the Mattachine leadership, the task of political organizing was about forging a normative “Mattachine character” that could properly represent “the homosexual” on the national stage, even if that meant a mode of political engagement that 113 refused—or at least indefinitely deferred—solidarity with other minorities and political causes (Brissette to Rowland, May 6). This abstract rift that was developing following the 1953 convention between the East Bay chapter and the leadership over the nature of community was coterminous with a much more concrete and immediate rift developing thanks to anti-‐communist agitation spearheaded by a member of the San Francisco chapter named David Finn. Finn had threatened, at the constitutional convention, to “turn over the names of all in attendance if the convention failed to reject the ‘communistic’ principles of the old leadership” (D’Emilio 85). Finn’s point of view gained increasing support within the more assimilationist San Francisco chapter, until tensions came to a head at an area council meeting at which Spicer requested Brissette call for Finn’s immediate ouster from the society. The dispute over Finn’s involvement ended acrimoniously, with the majority of the East Bay chapter— including Spicer and Brissette—resigning en masse and under pressure (Killian 31). Ironically enough (since he never identified as a communist), Spicer’s experiment in organized political activism was thwarted by the same anti-‐communist paranoia that took him away from Berkeley three years earlier. A final consideration of one of Spicer’s most prominent (and humorous) conflicts with the Mattachine leadership serves as a convenient segue into a consideration of how Spicer’s political activism within the Mattachine Society translated into poetic practice after his resignation. As publications chair of the East Bay chapter, Spicer proposed that, instead of contributing to One (the Mattachine publication that now lends its name to the National Gay and Lesbian Archives), he 114 start a new publication, local to the Bay Area, called Two. This brought on a swift rebuttal from the LA leadership. Chuck Rowland, writing to Brissette, asks [The idea of Two] seems utterly mad to me (with, perhaps, Three in Seattle, Four in Denver, Five in New York, Sixty-‐nine in Dallas) ... the staff of One has performed a magnificent service in promoting the first publication of its kind in the U.S., and to issue another in competition with it seems to me the most unfortunate things that could happen. However serious Spicer was about Two, he was certainly serious about the form of political organization it suggested: for Spicer, a serially organized Mattachine— decentralized yet still linked in a network—was clearly not “the worst thing that could happen.” For Spicer, solidarity did not have to mean a hierarchical structure and unified representation, but rather could be imagined more metonymically. This political commitment to a social organization that respected alterity and fostered solidarity without imposing a singular identity on its subjects translated into Spicer’s poetics over the course of the next year, as he went to work on After Lorca. Writing to Robin Blaser in 1957, Spicer reflected back on this period and the shift that occurred in his writing: Halfway through After Lorca I discovered I was writing a series of poems and individual criticism by anyone suddenly became less important […] there is no single poem […] Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can. (cited in Ellingham and Blaser 106) 115 Spicer would expand this thinking in his book of poetry Admonitions, addressing Blaser again: […] There is really no single poem. That is why all my stuff from the past […] looks foul to me. The poems belong nowhere. They are one-‐night stands filled (the best of them) with their own emotions, but pointing nowhere, as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath […] . Admire them if you like. They are beautiful but dumb. (CP 163) While commentators have noted the formally iconoclastic nature of these striking formulations, insofar as they force us to think differently about the relationship between poems, what has not been acknowledged is the extent to which these poetic formulations cleave so closely to Spicer’s political thinking during his engagement with the Mattachine. 38 Just as Spicer rejected the notion that One should serve as a singular voice for the organization, he rejects the idea that the lyric can or should serve as a paean to the (supposedly) unified and singular subject. This critical shift in Spicer’s poetics occurred contemporaneously with his increasingly strident declarations of his own western regionalism. It was Spicer’s stint away from California in the wake of his resignation from the Mattachine that seems to have spurred his interest in representing his poetic community as a cohesive movement with an identity firmly rooted in the West and its frontier past. It was in Boston, writing in collaboration with Blaser, that Spicer conceived of the memoir entitled “The Playboys of the Last Frontier” that was intended to describe 38 See, for instance, Rasula 73. 116 the years of poetic collaboration he spent in Berkeley with Blaser and Robert Duncan in Berkeley and San Francisco, 1946 – 1955. This memoir, which was alternatively titled “Gunmen of the Last Frontier,” was abandoned (like many of Spicer’s prose projects) in its earliest stages, but its evocative titles are exemplary of the odd blend of camp and sincerity with which Spicer and his circle self-‐ represented as “frontiersmen.” In Spicer’s correspondence of this period, this affective identification with the frontier and the West pervades his letters to his West Coast poet friends and is intermingled with the idiosyncratic vocabulary that he would later employ in both his poems and lectures to describe his poetic method. Writing to Allan Joyce from New York in July 1955, Spicer offers the following thoughts on his new city: New York is both better and worse than I suspected it would be. I hoped it would be frightening and it just isn’t. The people seem so damnably innocent like the Americans that Henry James writes about. I hadn’t realized how old California was. All the Westerners here know each other, even if they didn’t there, and form an exotic foreign population. We are like Jews I think. But I suppose you know about this already. Like most primitive cultures, New York has no feeling for nonsense. Wit is as far as they can go. That is what I miss the most, other than you, and what is slowly pulling my identity apart. No one speaks Martian, no one insults people arbitrarily, there is, to put it 117 most simply and leave it, no violence of the mind and of the heart, no one screams in the elevator. Of the many oddities of this passage, perhaps the most striking is the temporal and cultural inversion whereby New York becomes “primitive” and California becomes “old,” upending the familiar Turnernian, progressive understanding of the development of the United States moving along an East-‐to-‐West trajectory (from “old” New York to the “virgin land” of the West). This inversion is further complicated by the fact that it is “old” California that people perceive as full of nonsense (always a positive characteristic for the avant-‐gardist Spicer), with “a violence of the mind and of the heart;” whereas it is in “primitive” New York that people have the urbane wit of Henry James characters. This unfamiliar vision of America is further complicated by Spicer’s claim that Westerners are like “an exotic foreign population” in New York. For Turner, moving westward, the frontier becomes “more and more American” as it moves farther from “the influence of old Europe,” but every region, including the East Coast, “still partakes of [the] frontier characteristics” that were fostered during original settlement (“Significance of the Frontier,” 34). For Spicer the difference between East and West Coast seems more categorical: the difference between residents of “the last frontier” of California and New Yorkers is not one of degree, but of kind: the New Yorkers are not simply “less American,” they are like citizens of another country. If Spicer inverts the trajectory of the East to West development and rejects the national horizon of significance found in Turner’s frontier narrative, he embraces an analogous mode of frontier romance. In a letter from Boston to his 118 friend and Mattachine activist Myrsam Wixman, Spicer elaborated on his animus for the East Coast: All the people I want to come back to are doomed people—people who will not accept the roles that God offers them—not doomed because they are Westerners but Westerners because they’re doomed. New York is the only true reality. History someday will teach us that. You may not understand this part of it, being concerned with local problems, doomed problems—like how you live and how your heart manages to exist—but I have been among the hews of time and civilization. I have seen the emperor of Byzantium and wanted to spit in his face. It all comes down to this, honey. Nobody out here has a heart or a sleeping bag. Everybody knows where things are supposed to go and so there’s no need for them. Your Bohemia (the SF-‐Berkeley Heart and Sleeping Bag Bohemia) is the last Bohemia the world will ever see. After that will merely be Chinamen and advertising. Here New York as Byzantium is pitted against the “Heart and Sleeping Bag Bohemia” of the West Coast; New York may be the “one true reality,” but it is the nightmare that Spicer seeks to escape by returning to a West where romantic reenactments of frontier mobility carried out through outdoor recreation are still close to the heart. Spicer’s American tragedy pits an idealized frontier past against an inexorably advancing modernity, and as the ugly slur at the end of this passage indicates, Spicer saw “Eastern” modernity as a betrayal of his own ethno-‐cultural values. This 119 peculiar brand of chauvinism seems to have been one shared by many members of Spicer’s poetic and activist circles. An exchange between Spicer and Wixman in 1955 yields a pointed example of how the frontier myth served to allegorize a vision of an exclusionist queer community. After receiving an LP of the soundtrack of the Disney film from Spicer as gift, Wixman writes Spicer: [I] have just heard for the first time that “Duvid Crockett” [sic] which you have left me. It’s very good. By the way, I’ve made up my own version, the first verse of which follows: Born in a privy in Tennessee Started jackin’ off when he was only three! Became passive anal at the age of four Went down to Nashville, workin’ as a whore. Davy, Davy Crockett Queen of the Mad Frontier! [...] Beardless still at thirty-‐three Went up to New York, kinda on a spree Walked into Times Square an’ ‘fore he knew Got picked up by a wealthy ole Jew. Davy, Davy Crockett Hustler without a peer! 120 While Wixman’s appropriation of frontier rhetoric is self-‐evidently campy and is employed to parody the “science” that attempted to pathologize homosexuality, it also serves to enforce a model of queer community predicated on a mode of Western American masculinity that defined itself against Jewishness and East Coast urbanity. This ugly sentiment is also reflected in Blaser and Spicer’s scant notes for “Playboys of the Last Frontier,” in which they include “Sorry, no Jews” in a list of characteristics of the Berkeley Renaissance. It does not take much of an analogic leap to understand one reason why Spicer found the frontier a powerful mobilizing allegory for countercultural community following his resignation from the Mattachine Society. Whereas the Mattachine had been hierarchically organized, Spicer had a vision of a “networked” assemblage of local collectivities under the aegis of a broader organization to which they held only “a conditional type of loyalty,” to borrow Veracini’s description of a settler isopolity (72). George Stanley’s characterization of Spicer’s commitment to both “decentralization … lots of little principalities” and to a broader anti-‐capitalist struggle maps directly onto settler isopolitical imaginings of “a single political community across separate jurisdictions” that Veracini outlines (Settler Colonialism 70). Spicer and his circle would eventually embrace the settler colonial metaphor quite directly: several of his friends and acolytes moved to Vancouver, where, as poet George Stanley puts it in an interview with Lewis Ellingham, “Robin [Blaser], and then Stan [Persky], and then myself went off to Vancouver and so we—I think we are kind of like the colonists who went off to found the colonies somewhere. You 121 know, in the American imperialistic sense.” These poets and Spicer referred to their artistic community as a “Pacific Republic” or “Pacific nation.” Poet Stan Persky, also in conversation with Ellingham, said of the “Pacific Nation” that “we knew it was a mystical nation—but nonetheless we believed it had a reality. That this particular geographic space was coherent. … From Northern California through to British Columbia, including British Columbia.” Veracini notes that “isopolitical sensitivities” are “constantly reconfigured in different settings and survive even the emergence and consolidation of a globalized international sovereign states and survive even the emergence and consolidation of a globalized international system of sovereign states after the Second World War” (71). While Spicer’s formation of a transnational literary community is certainly a quixotic example of this phenomenon, it is nonetheless a striking example of the settler colonial political tradition that Veracini outlines. 39 The emancipatory imagination of the settler colonial political tradition that inspired Spicer and his circle emerged, of course, “precisely in the context of slavery and native expropriation,” as legal scholar Aziz Rana puts it (14). Just as the imagining of settler colonial alternatives to capitalist or state oppression accepted 39 Examples of Spicer’s “isopolitical sensibilities” abound in his correspondence. Take, for instance, this moment in a 1954 letter to Graham Macintosh: It will be easy to recruit an organization of California nationalists. California was once an independent nation and the bear flag that used to represent it can still be seen on some flagpoles. When California is again free, her young men will be free of conscription by the US government, her population will be free of fears of the atom bomb (both Russian and the US will be trying to woo her, like Yugoslavia, and will send her great gifts of food and money) and, although I hate to think of Goodwin Knight as our first president, she will have, in a few years, a reasonable and peaceful government. 122 as a matter of course the Indigenous dispossession and the oppression of racialized exogenous labor that made such an “escape” possible, Spicer and his poetic circle often seemed blithely unaware of the contradictions engendered by the contrast between their radical politics and the casual misogyny, anti-‐Semitism, and racism that inflected both their interpersonal relationships and their writing. Many of the aspects of Spicer’s poetics that are most often celebrated, including his “dictation” method and his serial lyrics, however, emerged in the context of this period in which he came to embrace the settler colonial isopolity as an exemplary form of political community. III. Seriality, Dictation, and the Settler Colonial Imaginary in Billy The Kid An analysis of Spicer’s engagement with frontier tropes in Billy The Kid to the end of his career reveals how Spicer’s formal radicalism—so often celebrated for its critique of bourgeois subjectivity and the normative American identity—demands to be read in the context of his engagement with settler colonial forms of political community. The figure of the frontier outlaw speaks to Spicer’s dream of a politics both oppositional and separatist, yet also representative of a broader polity. Billy the Kid was, of course, celebrated widely in American pop culture during Spicer’s lifetime as a figure of frontier masculinity. For Spicer, who had braved the very real threat of state violence by virtue of his involvement with the Mattachine (and indeed simply by his living as an out gay man in mid-‐twentieth century America), 123 Billy also spoke to his position as a liminal figure in the American polity, subject to the sovereign violence of the state yet denied the rights of a normative citizen. 40 Billy The Kid was the second of Spicer’s serial poems, following close on the heels of After Lorca, but Spicer saw Billy The Kid as one of his most important works: he urged Donald Allen to anthologize it in the New American Poetry rather than the selections from Imaginary Elegies that were chosen instead (Spicer to Allen 1958). A closer look at the opening lyric in this serial poem gives a clear sense of how, in the words of Jed Rasula, “the distinct otherness” that Spicer’s poetry delivers from “the underworld of the personal” (54) is figured as an imagined frontier that offers an alternative to the hell of Cold War America: I The radio that told me about the death of Billy the Kid (And the day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky) Let us fake out a frontier— a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff’s posse after him— a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles— a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary 40 Giorgio Agamben discusses the outlaw as a paradigmatic figure existing on the “threshold of indistinction” of sovereignty in Homo Sacer (105). The figure of the frontier outlaw, however, troubles Agamben’s formulation considerably. The frontier, as Erik Altenbernd and I have argued (building on the work of Mark Rifkin and Patrick Wolfe), constitutes a space of sovereign exception where the law-‐ making violence of settlers, often acting independently of the state, brings Indigenous peoples into the sovereign ban of the settler nomos (“A Terrible Beauty” 25). In Walter Noble Burns’s The Saga of Billy the Kid, one of Spicer’s primary sources for his book, Billy is represented as both an Indian killer and a fugitive of the state (61). This paradoxical position is mirrored in the simultaneously oppositional and exclusionary nature of Spicer’s isopolitical vision of queer separatism. 124 magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people. Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radio That told me about the death of Billy the Kid The day a hot summer day. The roads dusty in the summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are going. The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face. (CP 185) The assassination of Billy The Kid by the Sheriff Pat Garrett is, of course, a story of the closing of the frontier that has been retold ad infinitum in American pop culture. 41 Spicer, however, figures Billy, both in this serial poem and in a lyric called “For Billy,” as a queer figure (CP 162, 186). The Kid also carries a materialist valence for Spicer: In the film The Left-‐Handed Gun and Walter Noble Burns’s popular (non)history The Saga of Billy the Kid, Spicer’s primary sources for the Billy the Kid myth, Billy is figured as a defender of a small-‐time rancher who is murdered by the representatives of a corrupt businessman. Carrying with it these resonances, the poem opens with Spicer narrating how, in his “radio transmitter” metaphor, he came to write about the death of Billy the Kid. The second line sets the scene of this 41 Though it largely neglects Spicer’s work, Stephen Tatum’s Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881-‐1981 (1982) still stands as the definitive work on the many identities of Billy The Kid in US culture. 125 death, repeating the invocation of summer associated with the western landscape in “Psychoanalysis.” He then turns to an alternative to this symbolic closing of the frontier, a possibility opened by poetry. The next five lines begin to open up the poetic as a space that transcends the bounded, domesticated spaces of Cold War America, in which one would be able to elude state sovereignty and the commodification of landscape effected by capitalism. As the poem progresses into the indented stanza, it returns momentarily to an image of a Dantean hell, “torture gardens,” juxtaposed against an image of the commodification of post-‐frontier America, “scenic railways.” As the stanza continues, it becomes clear that part of the appeal of the new frontier Spicer is “faking out” is that its roads “are going somewhere” beyond the horizon—the historical possibilities of westward expansion, of constituting new forms of freedom, are still accessible in the poem. It is in the form of this imagined frontier that the poetic act is imagined as a means of transcending static identity itself—“in all that distance, who could recognize his face.” As the anti-‐Semitic image Spicer uses to denigrate capitalism and East Coast urbanity indicates, however, there is a deep contradiction at the heart of the liberation from normative identity imagined by Spicer’s poem. If, as Silliman suggests, the “practice of the outside” opens for us a mode of knowing outside our normative “cognitive capacity” (166), these same poems also suggest the promise of the authentic, autochthonic connection to the land that, in anti-‐Semitic discourse, the Jew inherently lacks and that settler colonial discourse continually attempts to produce. As critic Michael Snediker points out, the image of the “Jew in The 126 Amethyst Pajamas” works to exclude both Jews and a certain brand of urbane gay men from Spicer’s vision of frontier freedom (180). This self-‐hating aspect of this anti-‐Semitic moment is indicative of broader trends in Spicer’s often baffling vacillation between bigotry and solidarity toward Jews expressed in his writing. In an undated letter to Allen Joyce from the 1955-‐1956 period, in which he addresses Joyce as a latter-‐day queer Natty Bumpo, a “Mohican, or, the last of the Red Hot Mamas,” Spicer notes that “neither Jews nor homosexuals are really Americans (we, in the West, have almost learned to be)…” Here, as elsewhere, Spicer seems to express some solidarity with Jewishness only to pull the rug out from under that solidarity immediately: here “western” homosexuals have, like Turner’s frontiersmen, learned to be American by virtue of their presence on an erstwhile frontier. Jews remain for Spicer the exogenous Other for whom acceptance by the settler polity is impossible. This explicit moment of exclusion is articulated not only in the poem’s first section, but also in one of its most prose-‐like and self-‐conscious narrative moments; to partake in the aesthetic experience of the poem’s syntactical ruptures and serial form that follow, a reader must first accept the terms the poem sets forth for admission to this poetic frontier. The remaining nine sections of Billy The Kid present their readers with a multivalent series of meditations on aesthetic representation, identity, queer desire, and death, bound together by recurring images of the poem’s eponymous outlaw hero. The poem repeatedly returns to metatextual reminders of the poem’s status as representation and thus the figurative nature of Spicer’s poetic “frontier:” His gun 127 does not shoot real bullets his death Being done is unimportant. Being done In those flat colors Not a collage A binding together, a Memory. (CP 186) In this moment, the reader is reminded of both Billy’s status as a mythic character in such a way that both deflates and raises the stakes of the poem’s imagining of a figurative frontier. On the one hand, this literary space where “Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people” is not one that bears any direct relation to the violence of the historical frontier or any sort of contemporary violent radicalism. On the other, it is a space where the historical Billy’s “death/Being done is unimportant.” Spicer’s poetic frontier, then, becomes a space where the oppositional identities of Billy the Kid, as articulated by the multiple popular-‐fictional accounts to which Spicer alludes throughout the poem, live on. The poem also insists—despite its collage-‐like form— that it aspires to a greater significance than collage. While it comes, as its first line insists, “from the outside,” its status is that of a “memory” in which the connections between disjunctive parts mean more (they are “a binding together”) than a collage’s juxtapositions. Billy The Kid, then, posits itself not as lyric expression or as the aleatory experiments of the avant-‐garde, but rather the recuperation of a memory that exceeds the subjective experience of the poet. 128 One might reasonably ask whether or not this celebrated example of the “poetics of the outside” works outside of or within the political unconscious of the settler colonial imaginary, even as it pushes beyond the limits of lyric subjectivity. The final section of Billy articulates the queer subtext of the poem in its most direct form and thus voices Spicer’s most direct revision of Billy the Kid as an “archetype” of the settler colonial imaginary: X. Billy The Kid I love you Billy The Kid I back anything you say And there was the desert And the mouth of the river Billy The Kid (In spite of your death notices) There is honey in the groin Billy (CP 191) The pathos of these lines is generated by their attempt to renege on the poem’s earlier insistence on its status as aesthetic representation. Whereas, throughout the poem, the speaker has insisted on the “fake” qualities of both the violence that Billy carries out and the landscape he traverses, here both the landscape and the threat of violence implied by the genre Western line “I back anything you say” are presented as simple declaratives within a verse that seems to conjure Billy through its 129 “incantatory” repetitions (Snediker 190). This conjuring is not “the customary magic” of the familiar narratives that claim to represent the “authentic” Billy the Kid, but rather works to animate a vision of an oppositional queer personhood whose ineffable nature could animate queer desire. As critic Michael Snediker eloquently argues, “Billy The Kid … ends as a paean to an unfamiliarly singular serial love not undone by, but drawn from the multiplicities emerging from personality, and vice versa” (191). Spicer’s poem certainly posited what was, at the time, a singular vision of queer personhood, but Spicer was not alone among his contemporaries in unmasking the latent homosexual content of familiar frontier narratives and repurposing it to imagine a new and emancipatory “queer frontier” for American literature. Leslie Fiedler’s1948 article “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” and his 1968 monograph The Return of the Vanishing American famously posited that the “the old, old fable of the White outcast and the noble Red Man joined together against home and mother, against the female world of civilization” could provide the form for a future of queer, psychedelic narratives that could rescue American culture from the always, for Fiedler, feminine world of “civilized” modernity (Return 177). With this critical narrative, “as misogynist as homophilic,” as historian Kerwin Klein aptly describes it, “Fiedler had queered the frontier and made it the nation’s future” (258). In many ways the frontier of Billy The Kid, while it does not feature the sort of trans-‐cultural homosexual relationship that forms the center of the archetypal narrative Fiedler describes, it does, in Fiedler’s colorful and problematic language, feature “a territory unconquered, and uninhabited by 130 palefaces, the bearers of ‘civilization,’ the cadres of imperialist reason” into which “certain psychotics, a handful of ‘schizophrenics,’ have moved on ahead of the rest us […] interested not in claiming the New World for any Old God, King, or Country, but in becoming New Men” (Return of the Vanishing American, 185). In his effort to “fake out a frontier” that is both “a memory” and a model for a prospective escape from normative identity, Spicer performs the work of “transmut[ing] memory into madness, dead legend into living hallucination” that defined the queer representational temporality of the “New Westerns” that Fiedler celebrated (176). Fiedler’s literary politics have been taken to task by Klein and others for their Eurocentrism and their tendency to reproduce of the familiar trope of the “Vanishing American” (Klein 257-‐61). Spicer’s poetics, however—despite the direct parallels between Fiedler’s “psychedelic” or “schizophrenic” frontier and Spicer’s “mad” frontier—have not been subjected to a similar critique. Spicer’s frontier nostalgia, like Fiedler’s, is premised on the notion that any authentic Indigenous alternative to Euro-‐American modernity has been erased; the frontier is “fake” because, as Spicer’s letters make clear, he sees Euro-‐American civilization as “the only true reality.” Spicer’s elaborate frontier allegory transmutes the memory of the frontier into the “madness” of Billy The Kid as a countercultural challenge to that reality, but this alchemy is performed only for and by the elect western men that meet Spicer’s ethnic and cultural criterion for inclusion. Had Spicer’s poetic production stopped with Billy The Kid, it might have been easy enough to classify his literary production as firmly grounded within the settler colonial imaginary, even as it worked to undermine heteronormative identity and 131 hierarchical power within his own community. Spicer’s Billy The Kid is a poem in which “the fluidity of American life” finds one of its most radical expressions without challenging the historical conditions that enabled that mode of freedom to express itself. Spicer’s late poetry, however, takes its frontier allegory in a startling new direction while also questioning the formal tenets of Spicer’s “practice of the outside.” The relationship between this representational and formal self-‐critique in his last two works, Language and The Book of Magazine Verse, suggest the possibility that these two celebrated texts mark a rupture in Spicer’s literary politics on par with his initial turn to the serial lyric in the years leading up to the publication of Billy The Kid. III. A Log Cabin into Which all of Western Civilization Can Cower: Frontier Rhetoric and Self-‐critique in Language and The Book of Magazine Verse In his last two books, both published in the year of his death (1965), Spicer returns to frontier allegory with an amplified sense of urgency, and an emerging awareness of the contradictions that marked his first acts of poetic pioneering. The poems in both Language and The Book of Magazine Verse interweave images of the frontier into an elaborate tapestry of allegorical figures as Spicer reflects on his own poetics and the community they have created while displaying an increasing awareness of the ambiguous position this imagined community inhabits vis-‐à-‐vis the discourses of power it seeks to resist. The opening poem of Language, entitled “Thing Language”—one of Spicer’s most often anthologized poems—obliquely sets 132 the scene for this revision through its conceit. Its first section is the following short lyric: This ocean, humiliating in its disguises Tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean Does not mean to be listened to. A drop Or crash of water. It means Nothing. It Is bread and butter Pepper and salt. The death That young men hope for. Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. (CP 373) These lines might be productively compared to another lyric address that ponders the ocean with a particular anxiety—Whitman’s eleven-‐line poem “Facing West from California’s Shores.” Whitman’s lyric presents a celebratory meditation on the heliotropic movement of empire only to end on an anxious parenthetical: “Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, / (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)” (145). The anxious affect of Whitman’s poem is highly dependent on place: the Pacific, the telos of Manifest Destiny, offers up no triumphant conclusion, revealing itself as potentially meaningless. Spicer’s lyric offers a more generalizable anxiety about the ability of poetry (or even language 133 itself) to convey meaning: “No one listens to poetry. The Ocean / Does not mean to be listened to.” In another poem that Spicer wrote in 1965, “Ten Poems for Downbeat,” he produces a connection between the specific anxiety of Whitman’s poem and that presented in “Thing Language:” I wish I were like an ocean, loud, lovable, and with a window. It is not my ocean. It was called the Pacific By various conquerors that never hurt it. It makes its noises surfacing while I and everybody make mine (CP 424) The ocean of “Thing Language,” then, is “humiliating in its [semantic] disguises:” when imagined as “the Pacific” by conquerors, it produces the kind of humiliating disappointment that Whitman imagines in his poem. The ocean itself, however, is ultimately “tougher than anything”; the conquerors “never hurt it.” 42 In the most uncanny rupture in “Thing Language,” the ocean is metaphorically compared to “Bread and butter / Pepper and salt. The death / That young men hope for.” The romantic image of the Pacific as the endpoint of a young man’s dream (“Go West, young man …”) is revealed as meaningless by the utterly arbitrary comparisons that precede it. 42 Ron Silliman—who insists Language should be read as an entirely autonomous project from Book of Magazine Verse—reads these lines as “terms whose connotative frames do not overlap” (151) reinforcing his reading of “Thing Language” as demonstrative of what he interprets to be the key feature of Spicer’s poetics: “the failure (or refusal) of an idea or image to add up (or reduce down) to any single entity” (TNS 149). 134 “Thing Language” has been memorialized by the Language poets as a key moment in the genealogy of their effort to imagine a poetic praxis that highlighted the materiality of language itself (language as thing) (see, e.g., TNS 149-‐51). While this poem does perform a radical questioning of the metaphorical axis of language as such, it does so in the context of a more specific questioning of the notion of Spicer’s frontier rhetoric and the poetics of dictation that occurs over the course of Spicer’s final two books. The metaphorical meaning that Spicer questions is the meaning produced by the allegorical trajectory of his own work. Of all the lyrics in Language, the fifth section of his serial poem “Love Poems” articulates this self-‐critique most directly. In the preceding section of this poem, Spicer rails against the “tired wisdoms” of critical thought propagated by the academy. After a conclusion that celebrates overcoming such received knowledge, he transitions to the fifth lyric in the series: Which explains poetry. Distances Impossible to be measured or walked over. A band of faggots (fasces) cannot be built into a log-‐cabin into which all Western Civilization can cower. And look at the stars, and books, and other people’s magic diligently. Distance, Einstein said, goes around in circles. This Is the opposite of a party or a social gathering. It does not give much distance to go on. As 135 In the beaches of California It does not give me much to go on. The tidal swell Particle and wave Wave and particle Distances. (CP 384) With the first two sentences, we once again find ourselves in the poem that “goes a thousand miles,” a poetic space imagined as the “virgin land” of the American continent. With the enjambment at the end of the second line, however, things quickly change: “a band of faggots” at first reads as an ironic reference to Spicer’s poetic community in San Francisco (he often uses that slur as an ironic self-‐ identifier), but its meaning is immediately transformed by the modifying parenthetical “(fasces)” in the next line. The fasces activates the non-‐pejorative meaning of faggot (a fasces being a band of sticks), but also references an unstable signifier of political power: the fasces originated as a symbol of power in Republican Rome, but its significance was perpetuated during the imperial period; it has been minted on US coins and served as the premier symbol for the twentieth-‐century Italian political movement from which its name was derived—fascism. The continuation of the sentence thus produces two contradictory but specific readings. The “log cabin into which all of Western civilization can cower” reads most obviously as a mocking reference to the Turnerian historiography that would imagine the pioneer (metonymically referred to here by the log cabin) as representing the vanguard of progress, a repository for the values of Western 136 civilization. The ambiguity lies in the play on the sentence’s subject: is it political power that cannot build the log cabin, or is it the coterie of gay men? The ambiguity in the play between “band of faggots” and “fasces” dramatizes Spicer’s own anxiety that, in imagining the poetic as the frontier, he is producing a poetry “in which all Western civilization can cower” rather than one that admits the “outside,” i.e., one that can “look at stars, and books, and other people’s magic diligently.” The dubious paraphrase of Einsteinian physics that follows again echoes the Turnerian anxiety of a “Nation thrown back upon itself” in which the boundless distance beyond the frontier is found to be circumscribed by both the physical limits of the continent and the metaphorical limits of the national economy. The final lines of the poem return to the image of the Pacific, in which “wave and particle” intermingle; the telos of westward expansion is confirmed as the site where distance is turned back on itself and the poet is left “with not much to go on.” Ron Silliman insists against a “mythic” tendency of reading The Book of Magazine Verse as the culminating achievement of Spicer’s career, and his warning has been echoed by critics since (Katz 168 n. 4). While this cautionary injunction is useful insofar as it prevents a romantic reading that would assess Spicer’s last book as his most profound achievement simply by virtue of the fact that it was written days before his untimely death, it is also convenient for Silliman’s reading insofar as The Book of Magazine Verse is where Spicer most directly questions the aspects of his own literary politics that Silliman champions. “Ten Poems for Downbeat,” the last serial poem in the volume, directly troubles Spicer’s own schema for the 137 “poetics of the outside” as laid out in his Vancouver lectures. At one point the poem states, If this is dictation, it is driving Me wild. […] The poem begins to mirror itself. The identity of the poet gets more obvious. (CP 423) The poet is no longer simply the “radio transmitter” that delivers the message of alterity; the historical conditions of his own identity prove impossible to transcend. This direct critique of his own poetics is carried out in tandem with his most forceful questioning of his notion of the poetic as a frontier. The first poem in the series opens with a line from a nineteenth-‐century American folk song about westward expansion: “The dog wagged his tail and looked wonderfully sad” Poets in America with nothing to believe in except maybe the ships in Gloucester Harbor or the snow fall. “Don’t you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike, She crossed the big mountains with her lover Ike.” No sense In crossing a mountain with nobody living in it. No sense In fighting their fires. West Coast is something nobody with sense would understand. We 138 Crossed them mountains, eating each other sometimes—or the Heathen Chinee Building a railway. We are a coast people There is nothing but the ocean out beyond us. We grasp The first thing coming. (CP 421) “Sweet Betsy from Pike” is a ballad of westward migration that stands in stark contrast to the masculine literary frontier of Billy The Kid. Betsy confounds the role that the western migration story generally reserves for women, that of the domesticating wife (Kaplan 23-‐51)—she helps Ike ward off an Indian attack on the way, convinces him to continue when he wants to give up, and, finally, causes him to divorce her because she flirts with the many eligible miners she finds in gold rush California. The poem begins with the paradoxical image of Betsy and Ike’s dog’s reaction after the wagon train runs out of food on the Great Plains juxtaposed against East Coast poets (the targets here are fairly obviously Charles Olson for his “ships / in Gloucester Harbor” and Robert Frost for his New England snow), who are poetically starved, celebrating the provincial features of New England life. After referencing the song again, and proclaiming the senselessness of westward migration, the poem moves into a more straightforwardly declarative mode, claiming “West Coast is something no one with sense would understand.” The line, a direct echo from Spicer’s letters, claims that the ability to escape the “common sense” of normative American identity is geographically determined—you have to see the telos of American expansionism to “understand” its senselessness. The cannibalistic image and reference to Bret Harte’s poem “Plain Language of Truthful 139 James” that follows is, as Michael Davidson notes in his reading of Spicer’s poem, a reference to the violence of the frontier myth, but it is also a violent image of assimilation (The San Francisco Renaissance, 167). 43 The last three lines suggest a description of Spicer’s poetic method (in the radio transmitter metaphor, the poet “grasps the first thing coming” from the airwaves), but also lends it a touch of pathos: The “coast people” at the western edge of the continent are left, like Betsy at the end of the song, taking what they can get after realizing the “senselessness” of westward expansion. More so than any of the previous poems in which Spicer employs frontier tropes, the “Ten Poems for Downbeat” meditate upon the sense in which Spicer realizes his own “practice of the outside” does not produce a poetics that transcends identity in the radical sense that he had originally imagined possible. The “senselessness” of California is not unambivalently celebrated, but rather considered, with the ominous repetition of “No sense,” in the context of disquieting images of the historical violence of westward expansion and its aftermath. The railway—which, in the previously cited interview given in 1965, Spicer presents as a catalyst for California’s integration into the national economy— follows hot on the heels of Betsy’s pioneering journey. 43 The magazine reference in the title, DownBeat, also subtly echoes this theme. DownBeat is, of course, the iconic Jazz magazine. Originally a small-‐scale and politically radical publication, by the late fifties and early sixties it was much more mainstream, bringing once underground African American jazz movements to a broader (largely white) audience. In 1961, the editor made the controversial decision to stop running photos on the cover in favor of the illustrations of the then-‐ well-‐known Jazz illustrator David Stone Martin, who depicted African American musicians in his highly abstracted drawings for the cover which rendered their racial features ambiguous after the magazine was threatened (“About Down Beat”). 140 As the “Poems for Downbeat” proceed, still ruminating on California as the site that reveals the senselessness of Westward expansion, they move away from the collage-‐like form of the first poem and toward a more coherent mode of direct address. The ninth poem in the series begins by addressing how Spicer’s poetic community itself has become imbricated in the networks of power it sought to escape: They’ve (the leaders of our country) have (sic) become involved in a network of lies. We (the poets) have also become in [sic] a network of lies by opposing them. The B.A.R. which Stan said he shot is no longer used for the course. Something lighter more easy to handle and more automatic. What we kill them with or they kill us with (maybe a squirrel rifle) isn’t important. What is important is what we don’t kill each other with And a loving hand reaches a loving hand. The rest of it is Power, guns, bullets. (CP 425) The contrast to “Billy The Kid,” where the poem was imagined as a space “where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people,” is marked. This poem operates around a subtle inversion of Spicer’s previous use of the frontier allegory. The “B.A.R.” (Browning Automatic Rifle—a military machine gun) is associated with 141 “Stan” (Spicer’s poet friend Stan Persky, who served in the Navy), and the “squirrel rifle” (a symbol of frontier self-‐reliance) is put in the hands of the “leaders of our country” who are killing “the poets.” The pathos of the last line reads as more than a sentimental retreat from politics when you consider that, to borrow a memorable line from Ron Silliman, when Spicer started his career as an openly gay poet, “the number of male American poets out of the closet consisted of Robert Duncan” (“Review”). For Spicer love is always a politically radical act, and one that he fears is being left by the wayside by the increasingly rhetorically militant politics of his poetic community. The last poem in “Ten Poems for Downbeat” is addressed to Allen Ginsberg, who was, by 1965, an international celebrity who had just made headlines by being crowned “King of May” during May Day celebrations in Prague. Ginsberg was, in a very direct way, the product of the community of gay San Francisco poets Spicer had played a central role in creating: Ginsberg gave his first reading of “Howl” at Spicer’s “Gallery Six” in North Beach (Ellingham and Killian 61). Spicer begins the poem with an equivocal identification with his famous contemporary: At least we both know how shitty the world is. You wearing a Beard as a mask to disguise it. I wearing my tired smile. I Don’t see how you do it. One hundred thousand university Students marching with you. Toward A necessity which is not love but is a name. King of May. A title not chosen for dancing. The police Civil but obstinate. If they’d attacked 142 The kind of love (not sex but love), you gave the one hundred thousand students I’d have been very glad. And loved the policemen. Why Fight the combine of your heart and my heart or anybody’s heart. People are starving. (CP 426) The startlingly direct address condemns Ginsberg’s demagoguery as “A necessity which is not love but a name,” a false love that is in fact the “necessity,” of a “named” political community, organized around a sovereign, the “King of May.” The danger of such a defined political community is, for Spicer, that it creates oppositions, that it fights “the combine of your heart and my heart or anybody’s heart.” Yet there is a strange sense in which, even in this rejection of the countercultural political community he played no small role in establishing, Spicer re-‐inscribes elements of the frontier rhetoric that were so important to defining that community. This image of interpersonal melding, combined with the last sentence hearkens back strangely to the image of assimilation/cannibalism of the first poem in the series in which “We / Crossed them mountains, eating each other sometimes.” It also echoes a line in the seventh poem in the series, in which the beaches of the Pacific are described as those “we’ve starved on. Or loved on” (CP 424). Spicer seems to recognize that it is his dream of an affective community in which identities are fluid and “we grasp the first thing coming” that has succumbed to “a necessity that is not love but a name.” Spicer recognizes in his own rejection lyric expression the possibility of a countercultural literature that might dissociate itself entirely from an affect that exceeds language (a poetry “that is not love but a name” is contrasted against the 143 importance of “a loving hand reach[ing] a loving hand”) and thereby risk constituting a new mode of normativity. Spicer recognizes the danger of the countercultural frontier becoming, to borrow Marx’s metaphor, a grave upon which new forms of domination can grow. Conclusion: Jack Spicer and the Queer Frontier Spicer’s frontier rhetoric left a profound mark on the generation of California poets inspired by him. His immediate circle almost all published books somehow engaging with frontier allegory—George Stanley’s The Pony Express Riders/Tete Rouge, Ron Primack’s For the Late Horace Bell of the Los Angeles Rangers, and Richard Brautigan’s Octopus Frontier constituting some of the most prominent examples. What is perhaps more surprising, however, is how Spicer’s imagining of queer countercultural community as frontier isopolity has been mirrored in the rhetoric of queer political struggles in the United States. In 1970, only five years after Spicer’s death, a small group of Bay Area gay rights activists came together to agitate for the establishment of a separatist “settlement” of Alpine County, California, a locality that, at that time, had less than five hundred residents. The ostensible plan was for “The Alpine Liberation Front” to create a gay and lesbian majority in the county, thus establishing the country’s first gay-‐friendly local government. As one can see from this recruitment poster [Figure 1], the project leaned heavily on frontier rhetoric even as it sought to create a space antithetical to the norms of American society. The Alpine Liberation Front, which at its height had several hundred members and the attention of queer activists throughout California, 144 eventually called off their planned occupation after a rift developed in the California gay and lesbian activist community centering around the fact that the few hundred residents of Alpine County, whom their settlement would be disenfranchising, were in fact Washo Indians, who had occupied that corner of the Sierra Nevada for generations. Thus, this quixotic act of queer pioneering was cut short by the admirable realization that seeking out an actual frontier for settlement would only end up perpetuating familiar modes of oppression (Hobson 124–27). The tendency to rhetorically equate queer liberation with settler colonial expansion, however, persists, even in the most high profile political struggles. In 2008, the Human Rights Campaign advertised its “no on Prop. 8” effort with posters that urged voters to “Manifest Equality” [Figure 2]. Academic queer activism has also been prone to adopt this rhetoric. In 1995, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives hosted a conference at the University of Southern California entitled “Queer Frontiers” that marked an early occasion at which the term “queer” was used as a field-‐defining signifier (Boone vii). In his introduction to the eponymous edited volume inspired by the conference entitled “Go West,” Joseph Boone makes an argument for the queer appropriation of frontier tropes an act that should be understood as untethered from the imperial origins of frontier rhetoric: To some readers the injunction to “Go West,” given the imperialist underpinnings of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that spurred the relentless westward migration of the United States during the previous century, may seem a less-‐than-‐promising trope with which to espouse a queer politics. But my initial inspiration to use this 145 phrase originated in neither U.S. politics nor the mythos of the Old West as the “final frontier,” but rather in a gay video bar ... in which I first viewed the Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 music video version of the 1978 Village People disco hit “Go West.” The meanings that attach to words or phrases—as the contemporary use of the word queer illustrates— are not only subject to change but sometimes to radical revision, as the saying “Go West” has proved in its various transformations: from patriotic rallying cry for westward expansion evoking covered wagons and Indian war parties in American lore; to a paean to ecstatic gay “liberation” when parlayed into the insistent disco beat of the Village People song; to the Pet Shop Boys’ synthesized pop anthem, in which the original song’s appeal to various clichés of the old/new American West (the macho cowboy; San Francisco as gay mecca) is rescripted as a transglobal ode to queer possibility. (4-‐5) Boone’s invocation of “queer frontiers” is echoed, in altered forms, in current academic discourse regarding queer anarchy. Recently, Jack Halberstam has embraced the term “the wild” as a figure for emancipatory politics. In his recent introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, Halberstam figures resistance in a remarkably Spicerean fashion as a yearning for “a wild place that is not simply the left over space that limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces its own unregulated wildness […] a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us” (6-‐7). 146 As I hope my readings of Spicer’s poetry have made clear, I believe it is much harder to extricate any oppositional politics from the settler colonial tropes it employs than such queer appropriations of frontier tropes would suggest. We might, in fact, draw an only slightly tongue-‐in-‐cheek parallel between Spicer’s literary frontiering, with its “appeal to various clichés of the old/new American West” and the original Village People performance of “Go West” [Figure 3]; the Language poets’ adaptation of Spicer’s “practice of the outside” might likewise be compared to the Petshop Boys’ “transglobal ode to queer possibility” [Figure 4] or Halberstam’s embrace of “the wild.” 44 While the latter examples strip the former of their immediately recognizable indebtedness to the rhetoric of US settler colonialism, all four examples, to paraphrase Lloyd, posit a mode of liberation that celebrates possibility without confronting the historical conditions that make that possibility possible for an elect few. By suggesting that Spicer’s frontier allegory is grounded in the settler colonial imaginary, I do not intend to suggest it should be read as an example of “homonormative” or “homonationalist” rhetoric, to employ the terms coined by Jasbir Puar (xxvii). Spicer’s frontier was not imagined as a space where a positive gay identity could be embraced within the framework of the American nation state, but rather as a queer space—albeit an exclusive one—in which categorical identity, even homosexual identity, could be rejected. Instead of embracing the binary logic 44 Several contemporary queer readings of Spicer have focused on how a camp aesthetic distances him from the sources of his collage-‐like poems (Imbriglio 99; Damon 144). Unlike these readers, I do not read the campy aspects of Spicer’s engagement with frontier rhetoric as an implicit critique that exceeds the more sincere aspects of his frontier nostalgia. 147 that would force us to imagine Spicer’s frontier allegory as either a radical rejection of its settler colonial origins (as both postmodern and celebratory queer readings of Spicer seem to suggest), or as symptomatic of the ideological interpolation of queer bodies into the US imperial project, we should recognize in Spicer’s poetic frontiering a contradictory yet powerful allegory that articulates a vision for a radically inclusive politics even as it re-‐inscribed certain specific aspects of the power structures it sought to oppose. As Spicer’s late poetry reveals, he himself came to see the limitations of this project. In a moment when the scholarly consensus on avant-‐garde poetics tends to equate anti-‐expressive poetics with anti-‐ hegemonic politics as a matter of course and queer anarchism is being theorized through the rhetoric of the settler colonial frontier, recognizing the Janus-‐faced politics at the heart of the modes of freedom imagined in Spicer’s poetics is an important step in the project of contextualizing our readings of American avant-‐ garde poetry within the discourses of power and resistance that its poetic praxis seeks to transform. 148 Illustrations Figure 1: Publicity Flier, c. 1970. 149 Figure 2: “Manifest Equality” Poster, c. 2008. 150 Figure 3: The Village People, “Go West” Music Video Still, 1979 151 Figure 4: Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” Music Video Still, 1993 152 Chapter 3 Secular Frontiers: Wallace Stegner, Joan Didion, and the Regionalist Critique of the Counterculture I. Introduction: Indigeneity in Didion and Stegner’s Regionalism In Run River, Joan Didion’s protagonist Lily reflects back on the protracted collapse of her family of erstwhile pioneers and declares her family’s frontier story “had been above all a history of accidents—of moving on and accidents” (263). The vision of western history Didion presents in this quotation has been productive for western regionalist literary scholars as they have worked to decouple western identity from the frontier metanarratives that represented the West as what Wallace Stegner famously called a “geography of hope.” 45 While no one could contest the notion that the settlement of the West produced a heterogeneity of often disastrous effects that few settlers foresaw, it is worth considering how such a radical denial of historical causation must read from the perspective of those for whom the history of “westward expansion” must seem anything but a “history of accidents.” If America’s settler colonial project failed to deliver on the utopian promises of its positive dimension—i.e., “Manifest Destiny” did not produce a Jeffersonian paradise of democratic yeomanry—the negative dimension of that project, the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples for the purposes of establishing a terrain whereon such settler desires might be pursued, succeeded to a 45 This moment is cited by Krista Comer (Landscapes 76) and is central to William Handley’s reading of Didion and Stegner in Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West (197). 153 catastrophic extent. Critiques like Didion’s work to discredit frontier nostalgia as a productive political allegory by emphasizing contingency rather than design as the driving force of frontier history. In so doing, however, they also risk foreclosing the possibility of a history that could highlight the ongoing deleterious effects of settler colonialism on those who reside on “the other side of the frontier” and those who were never intended to share in the “geography of hope.” My purpose in this chapter will be to restore the place of indigeneity in a consideration of Didion’s and Stegner’s respective critiques of the political uses of frontier allegory—especially those of the counterculture. These critiques are deceptively radical, calling into question the epistemological foundations of the authority of history and of the ethical subject (Handley 222-‐23). Didion’s and Stegner’s anti-‐foundationalist critiques of “Manifest Destiny,” however, focus on the tolls of frontier mobility on the settler community itself, arguing that historical metanarratives have had a corrosive effect on settlers’ relation to the land, and to each other. To the extent that Didion and Stegner present alternative narratives of settlement, their stories of westward expansion are narratives of settler loss, a loss of the potential for human community abandoned to frontier mobility and the loss of the “Edenic” western landscapes that the process of settlement defiled. While both acknowledge the violence of the frontier past, they gesture only obliquely toward the ongoing suppression of Indigenous sovereignty that allows settlers to imagine the American West as a potential site of belonging. Considering Didion’s and Stegner’s work in the context of the ongoing history of Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the western United States offers a perspective on the political 154 possibilities and limits of the postmodern critiques of historical metanarrative and the ethical subject that reverberates far beyond the particular contexts in which Didion and Stegner articulated them. Didion and Stegner have become central figures in the canon of western American literature as it has been shaped by western regionalist critics since the rise of the New Western History in the 1980s. 46 Their canonical status has come in no small part thanks to their respective literary efforts to redress the Turnerian framing of American history and literary studies. For both Didion and Stegner, this critique was not undertaken simply to make an abstract point about historiographic representation. The history and myth of westward expansion, which proves such fertile allegorical ground for Kerouac and Spicer, served as the figurative ground whereon Didion and Stegner worked to contest what they saw as the potentially oppressive bent of the 1960s counterculture’s utopian politics. In response to the frontier metatnarratives of the 1960s counterculture, Didion and Stegner posited two very different, yet equally anxious, literary visions of a West that could neither 46 Since being labeled the “Dean of Western American letters” (as he was, much to his discomfort, christened by the New York Times) in 1981, Stegner’s work has had a remarkable durability in academic debates over the history and culture of the West (Fradkin 278). He is cited favorably as a “precedent to wisdom” by champions of the New Western History like Patricia Nelson Limerick (Limerick, “Precedents” 25) and by literary scholars engaged in what would come to be labeled the “postwestern” critique of the New Western History (Robinson, “Clio Bereft of Calliope,” 91). While facing criticism from feminist postwestern critic Krista Comer (“Exceptionalism”) and Indigenous scholar Elizabeth Cook-‐Lynn (see below), this criticism has had little effect on his continued centrality to the field of western American literature. Didion did not occupy as central a role in the debates of the 1980s and early 1990s, but her star has risen considerably in the twentieth century and is featured in Krista Comer’s Landscapes of the New West (69-‐87) and William Handley’s Marriage, Violence and the Literary West, two of postwestern literary scholarship’s field-‐ defining monographs. 155 be understood as the telos of Manifest Destiny”nor as the landscape of a “new frontier.” While neither writer is known as postmodern, recent western regionalist criticism has convincingly argued that both authors, while purportedly “realist” in persuasion, imagine a literary West in which “myth” is not debunked by an alternative historical metanarrative, but instead through a postmodern questioning of the very possibility of articulating such an authentic historical metanarrative. 47 These visions of the West—which many western regionalists critics now call “postwestern”—imagine a western regional identity that is decoupled from national metanarratives of empire or essentialist definitions of place. 48 Writing on postwestern criticism, Nina Baym notes a paradox in postwestern theorization that could just as easily be applied to Didion and Stegner. Despite, Baym claims, postwestern critics’ tendency to embrace “an advanced postmodernism” in their critique of western history, they insist, sometimes against their own inclinations, that western stories have some connection to places that really exist. To the extent that postmodernism denies the category of the real altogether, they cannot follow; they are western. All of them can be thought about therefore as implicit interrogations of the use of postmodernism to place-‐grounded projects. (819; original emphasis) Didion and Stegner evince a similar ambivalence that balances identification with place against a radical doubt about the claims of history. For both writers, the 47 See, e.g., Forrest Robinson’s “Cleo Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History,” 90-‐93. 48 For a definition of “postwestern,” see Susan Kollins’ Postwestern Cultures (ix-‐xix) or Krista Comer’s “Exceptionalism, Other Wests, Critical Regionalism” (160). 156 ecological tolls of settlement on the landscapes of the West are an irreparable fact, and both writers often ground their critiques of metanarrative in a desire for a futurity that could put settlers into right relation with the West as a place. Didion and Stegner’s postwestern regionalisms stand as two of the most compelling and influential critiques of countercultural frontier nostalgia. While I concur with the many postmodern literary authors and theorists alike who see in the 1960s counterculture antecedents to the aesthetic and epistemological interventions of postmodernism, Stegner and Didion are fascinating anomalies in this genealogy insofar as they pit postmodern aesthetic and epistemological strategies against the politics of the sixties counterculture. 49 If they differed from their countercultural contemporaries on political issues ranging from sexuality to drug use, they anticipate the aesthetic and epistemological strategies their countercultural peers would adopt when the “Summer of Love” was giving way to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 50 These parallels are suggestive of broader political 49 For an example of work reading the counterculture as an antecedent to the postmodern, see Robert Holton’s “Kerouac among the Fellahin: On the Road to the Postmodern.” 50 In the climactic moment of Thompson’s best-‐known novel, his protagonist offers a meditation on the failure of the countercultural “revolution” that reads the failure of the counterculture as a sort of failed frontier movement: History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened … There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning … And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of the inevitable victory of the forces of Old and Evil. Our energy would simply prevail. 157 continuities. These continuities emerge when one considers the political stakes in question not through the familiar binaries of left/right, or “old left”/”new left,” but rather through the settler/Indigenous binary lurking behind every debate over the representation of the frontier. Stegner’s and Didion’s regionalist, place-‐based critiques of frontier nostalgia tend to either erase or speak for American Indians in their representations of the frontier past and of the 1960s—a tendency they share with the countercultural narratives they critique. II. Wallace Stegner, Elizabeth Cook-‐Lynn, and Regionalist Resistance to Indigenous Sovereignty An attempt to restore Stegner to the settler/Indigenous dynamics of his time must necessarily consider what was perhaps the most heated controversy that ever erupted between western regionalist literature and Native American scholarship— that surrounding Dakota Sioux scholar Elizabeth Cook-‐Lynn’s essay “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner” (1996). In this short piece, Cook-‐Lynn accuses Stegner of being an author who misrepresents the history of settler invasion and Indigenous resistance, and in so doing “successfully contributes to the politics of possession and There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave … So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. (68) Like Turner, Thompson invites his readers to a mountainous vantage point to survey the “successive waves” of American progress as they roll across the continent—but in Thompson’s telling the movement is both inversed (rolling east from San Francisco) and failed—something went wrong for the countercultural frontiersmen, something that can be witnessed in Las Vegas. 158 dispossession” (40). Cook-‐Lynn’s argument hinges on two overarching claims. First, she suggests that Stegner endorses a Turnerian periodization of western history by invoking a “fondly remembered colonial past” that “sort of stopped at 1890,” thus disavowing the ongoing survival of Native peoples (29). Secondly, she argues that Stegner “claims indigenousness” by “set[ting] down the new myths and stories of those newcomers stepping off boats and, in the process, continues the personalization of history and setting that is so dear to the hearts of the so-‐called regional American writers” (3). The reception of this essay and the eponymous collection it was published in was remarkable in its affective intensity, even considering the stridency of Cook-‐Lynn’s own argument. 51 Detractors of Cook-‐ Lynn’s essay have defensible points insofar as Cook-‐Lynn, by identifying Stegner directly with Manifest Destiny and the periodization of Turnerian historiography, fails to acknowledge Stegner’s decrial of the genocidal aims of westward expansion or his critique of triumphalist frontier history. The defensive responses by western regionalists, however, have either ignored, or taken extreme umbrage to, Cook-‐ Lynn’s second, and more cogent argument that Stegner asserts his own indigeneity to place, “a claim to identity” that “needs only acclamation” (Cook-‐Lynn 40). 51 Publisher’s Weekly dismissed it as “fraught with animosity … bitter and overwrought,” while Ruth Bayard Smith, reviewing it in the New York Times, castigated Cook-‐Lynn for her “angry and unyielding” tone and “circumscribed perceptions.” Reviewing the book for the Western Historical Quarterly, western regionalist literary critic Forrest Robinson dismisses her argument as a “hopelessly one-‐sided account of American History” that makes many claims that are “demonstrably absurd” (406). The derision towards Cook-‐Lynn has persisted in western regionalist circles. Critic Chris Robertson opened his 2006 review of Cook-‐ Lynn’s Notebooks for Western American Literature by saying “Readers and teachers of western American literature know Elizabeth Cook-‐Lynn as a Sioux writer who sees ‘everything in the world through the prism of the theft of the Black Hills’” (192). 159 The most vitriolic among these responses, an essay predictably titled “Why I Can’t Read Elizabeth Cook-‐Lynn” by Stegner’s authorized biographer, Jackson J. Benson, provides a valuable object for understanding Stegner’s legacy and the lingering (though far from total) impasse between Indigenous studies and western American literary studies. 52 In an argument that resorts to familiar conservative accusations of “reverse racism,” Benson demonstrates how a destabilization of normative claims to place can serve to solidify de facto settler claims to belonging: God did not put Indians down in the middle of North America and tell them This (sic) is your land; no one else can live here. If Cook-‐Lynn wants Stegner to go back to Norway, one might ask her to go back to Siberia-‐Mongolia. What happened to the American Indians, as regrettable and tragic as it may have been, was not unique in human history. And what happened is not, as Cook-‐Lynn suggests, equivalent to either Apartheid in South Africa or the Holocaust in Europe. (71) The absurd equivalencies Benson draws by invoking the land-‐bridge theory allow him to issue the statement of regret for the colonial violence (firmly sequestered in the past) that, he claims is “not unique” yet certainly not equivalent to the historical injustices he invokes. In his animus toward Cook-‐Lynn, Benson ends up directly 52 Despite the disapprobation of Indigenous public intellectuals like Cook-‐Lynn, many Indigenous literary scholars have enjoyed a productive exchange with the field of western regionalism, most notably, perhaps, Gerald Vizenor and Louis Owens, who both found the Western Literature Association to be a productive venue for scholarly exchange. For an example of how contemporary Indigenous studies has resisted the paradigms of postwestern regionalism, see Gregory Wright’s review of Nathaniel Lewis’s Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. The accusations of parochialism that color many of these critiques are ironic, given that they are issued in defense of a man who was calling for a renewed identification with place often derided as provincial. 160 contradicting the man he his trying to defend. In Wolf Willow, Cook-‐Lynn’s primary text in her essay, Stegner himself states, “No one who has studied Western history can claim the Nazis invented genocide” (73-‐74)—a fact that ironically, both Benson and Cook-‐Lynn overlook. 53 While Stegner never engages in the antagonism that animates Benson’s essay, his rhetoric nonetheless suggests Cook-‐Lynn’s reading of his politics of place is apt. In the opening of his oft-‐cited essay “A Sense of Place,” Stegner writes, Once, as George Stewart reminded us in Names on The Land, the continent stretched away westward without names. It had no places in it until people had named them, and worn the names smooth with use. The fact that Daniel Boone killed a bear at a certain spot in Kentucky did not make it a place. It began to be one, though, when he remembered the spot as Bear Run, and other people picked up the name and called their settlement by it, and when the settlement became a landmark or destination for travelers, and when children had worn paths through its woods to schoolhouse or swimming hole. … No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or memory. (203) 53 My intention is not to overblow the political significance of this statement: as Jodi Byrd has argued, such “discourses of competing genocide” too often serve to construct “moral equivalencies” that serve to obscure rather than highlight the injustices of particular genocidal histories while reaffirming the moral authority of the speaking subject making the comparison (“Living my Native Life” 313). It is remarkable, however, that Stegner makes the very historical comparison that Cook-Lynn implies that he is unable to make and that Benson explicitly declares illegitimate (71). The competing claims regarding comparative genocide serve to elide the specificity of Stegner’s own settler colonial politics. 161 Here Stegner makes a claim on place that writes Indigenous peoples entirely out of history (“the continent stretched away Westward without names”) while also making a rather radical critique of historical representation. Settlers’ “sense of place” is not dependent on the fact that Daniel Boone killed a bear at a particular spot” (and here one cannot help but metonymically extend this example to relate to the humans Boone was famed for killing on the frontier) but rather on the “history, ballads, yarns, legends, and memory” produced about that place. Given that this “claim to identity” that “needs only acclamation” defines Stegner’s “sense of place,” settler critics can hardly judge Cook-‐Lynn harshly for not appreciating the nuances of Stegner’s critique of frontier history. By her own admission, her reading of Stegner “is minimally undertaken, and then only to remind [herself] that literature can and does contribute to the politics of possession and dispossession” (40). The true force of Cook-‐Lynn’s critique emerges in the moments where she points out that Stegner’s rather postmodern attitude toward historical representation is not incompatible with a politics of Indigenous erasure and dispossession. Stegner’s imagination of settler sense of place as an affect legitimated solely by discourse, rather than constituted through historical violence, effectively silences Indigenous decrials of the ongoing injustice that subordinates Indigenous claims to sovereignty and “sense of place” to those of settlers. 54 54 Stegner’s “Sense of Place” might productively be considered against Mark Rifkin’s recent essay “Settler Common Sense,” in which Rifkin considers how settler sovereignty enables a settler “structure of feeling” that allows a sense of belonging that does not identify as nationalist but is nevertheless enabled by state sovereignty (322). 162 The sense in which Stegner’s “acclamation” of an affective bond with place is at odds with Indigenous sovereignty is especially apparent in his foreword to photographer Ed Beyler’s book Alcatraz: The Rock (1988). This otherwise unremarkable short essay is significant for its consideration of the place of Indigeneity in Stegner’s politics because Alcatraz was the scene of the nineteen-‐ month occupation between 1969 and 1971 by “The Indians of All Tribes” that marked one of the first national media spectacles staged by the Red Power Movement. 55 Stegner begins his foreword by describing Alcatraz as it was first imagined by Europeans, noting that “it was one of the first places seen and named by Don Juan Manuel de Ayala when he felt his way into uncharted San Francisco Bay in August, 1775” (vii). While thus eliding Alcatraz’s pre-‐contact place in Indigenous understandings of the “uncharted” San Francisco Bay, Stegner does mention the Indigenous occupation of 1971-‐1972 as a point of contrast against which he articulates a thesis grounded in his own sense of the island’s place. Stegner concludes a list of the island’s various uses in the post-‐contact era by mentioning that “from 1969 to 1971 [Alcatraz] was occupied by activist Indians and held as a hostage against native treaty claims. But it was never intended to be a resort or a Pan-‐Indian school or the headquarters of anything. Certainly it was never created to be a health spa. It feels and has always felt like a fortress or prison” (vii). Stegner’s transhistorical claim about the “feel” of Alcatraz as a place (“it feels and has always felt like …”) enables his breezy dismissal of the demands of the occupiers— 55 The Occupation of Alcatraz was an event widely interpreted as marking the beginning of the “Red Power” movement; for more on the occupation and its significance, see Troy Johnson’s The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz: Red Power and Self-‐Determination. 163 who claimed (quite reasonably) to be acting in accordance with existing treaty rights rather than holding Alcatraz “hostage” against treaty claims. 56 Stegner portrays the federal government’s use of the isolated island as a prison—a prison that held, in its earliest years of operation, a group of Hopi men resisting federal assimilation policies—as reflecting an ontological truth about the nature of the place (Lamb 10). It was no accident that Beyler’s book of photographs was released less than two years after Alcatraz Island was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service, creating a site of memorialization that would in many ways embody the certainty with which Stegner acclaims and memorializes the island’s intended use. While pieces like these highlight Stegner’s occasional tendency to celebrate a settler “sense of place” that “needs only acclimation,” the anti-‐historical impulse reflected in such moments exists side-‐by-‐side with expressions of commitment to a historically determined regional identity in Stegner’s broader body of work. As Krista Comer argues in a recent critical appraisal of Stegner’s reception in the field of western literary studies, Stegner is widely regarded as a proponent of an “ethics of place” for whom “history served as [a] weapon against a nostalgic discourse of Old Western myth” (“Exceptionalism” 161). His writing continues to do real work toward unsettling settler identifications with the myth of a distant western past that “stopped in 1890.” In a 1967 essay, “History, Myth, and the Western Writer,” Stegner decried “millions of Westerners, old and new,” who “have no sense of a personal and 56 In their occupation of Alcatraz, the “Indians of All Tribes” referenced a clause in a treaty signed with the Sioux in 1968 which gave the Sioux usage rights on unused federal land. This claim is fully explained by Johnson in The American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz (17). 164 possessed past, no sense of any continuity between the real western past which has been mythicized almost out of recognizability and a real Western present that seems as cut off and pointless as a merry-‐go-‐round that can’t be stopped” (199). If Stegner often participated in a rhetoric of settler possession of place, he also urged a possession of history, however tenuous, that would force settlers to take responsibility for the continuities between their lives and the historical violence that the mythic West either romanticized or erased. This aspect of Stegner’s attitude toward indigineity and western history are on full display in his 1945 co-‐authored Look magazine volume celebrating what we would now call multicultural pluralism, One Nation. As Patricia Nelson Limerick has noted (25), however, the chapter on Native Americans in One Nation, entitled the “Least-‐Known American: Re-‐birth of the American Indian,” presents a problematic moment in a volume that is remarkable for its forceful denunciation of segregation and its imagination of a multicultural nation at a time when such ideas put Stegner and his co-‐authors on the radical margin of white liberalism. At its worst, the “Least-‐ Known American” relies on familiar paternalistic tropes to imagine new paths to assimilation. One caption of an image of two young boys playing beside a teepee asks readers, “How does the reservation world, living primitively, demoralized by the dole, fit itself into the nation in self-‐respecting terms?” (158). In stark contradiction to moments like this, however, the chapter also offers a sustained critique of assimilation as a goal of US policy, noting that “while we were forgetting that Indians still existed, or trying to ‘Americanize’ the remnants, they suffered almost as much from our indifference and our charity as they did earlier from our 165 Manifest Destiny” (141). The chapter also works to debunk the myth of the “vanishing race” (141) and concludes by praising New Deal policies aimed at improving reservation life without pursuing a policy of “forced Americanization” (143). The final paragraph of One Nation stands in stark contrast to the picture of Stegner that Cook-‐Lynn paints: “If we continue the present policy of dealing fairly with the Indians, helping them to help themselves, advising but not coercing, we can quit worrying about the possible permanence of the reservations and the Indians as an unassimilable minority. The Indians will take care of themselves” (143). The irony of this statement is that it was written during the years that the federal government was crafting the policies that would, with the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953, inaugurate the “termination era” of Indian policy—a catastrophe for Indian Country about which Stegner was strangely reticent. Considered in the context of this history, and in the context of Stegner’s other writings on Indians, One Nation does not serve as a cipher through which Stegner’s attitude toward Indigenous peoples might be interpreted (as many of Stegner’s champions have treated it) but rather stands as one piece in a deeply contradictory whole. 57 As the equivalency he draws between “history, ballads, yarns, legends, or memory” in “Sense of Place” reveals, Stegner was never willing to invest a total faith in the debunking power of history. His secular attitude toward historical authority, somewhat paradoxically, empowered both his unilateral acclimations of a “sense of place” and his secular skepticism regarding any claims on history and place, 57 See, e.g., Benson (65) and Robinson (“Review” 405). 166 including his own. Taken in the context of Stegner’s broader body of work, the conditional in the sentence “If I am native to any place, I am native to this” in Wolf Willow carries a more unsettling valence than either Cook-‐Lynn or her western regionalist detractors credit to it (20; emphasis mine). III. Settler Masculinity and the Authority of Critique in Angle of Repose The tension between Stegner’s pervasive doubt in historical metanarrative and his commitment to settler “sense of place” are on full display in a fascinating and unlikely correspondence he undertook with Gary Snyder in late 1967 and early 1968. Their exchange was initiated due to a pointed comment Stegner made in a 1967 Saturday Review piece on California politics in which he (rather presciently) warned that “it will be tragic if social order and stability are imposed by the Raffertys, the Reagans, and the lockjaw right of Orange County” (“California: The Experimental Society” 154) He goes on to paint Snyder as the Scylla to Reagan’s Charybdis: “It could be equally unfortunate if the Gary Snyders succeed in their aim of leaving not one value of the old order standing.” After two rather heated letters in which he conceded his hyperbole, Stegner offered the following olive branch to Snyder: Come by some time, and let me stand up for Greco-‐Roman stoicism against, or maybe in addition to, the Buddha. I doubt that I will ever be persuaded that much comes to us from the Indo-‐European cowboy culture; that seems to me an effaced palimpsest. I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling 167 ever since. I am never going to succeed, fully, because there is no way, so far as I can tell, to remove the human animal from the impressions of the society he was born to. Whatever that society is, it is what makes his values, or most of them, from the time he is slapped into his first yowl while dangling by the feet from a rubber glove, to the time when he lies on that last bed and looks the farthest he has ever looked in his life. (259) The slippage of the term “cowboy culture” in this passage reveals a subtle ambivalence in Stegner’s critique of both the counterculture and of the “frontier” values of his own upbringing. While the letter from Snyder to which Stegner is responding is, unfortunately, still held in Snyder’s private archive (Fradkin 342 n. 120), the context suggests that the notion of an “Indo-‐European cowboy culture” is a citation of Snyder’s letter, presumably some formulation intended to help Stegner relate to Snyder’s fascination with Buddhism. 58 Stegner rejects Synder’s unlikely attempt to fuse his Beat-‐generation orientalism with the romance of the cowboy only to make his own claim on “cowboy culture,” a claim that feels like an older western writer asserting his authentic masculinity over a younger one, even as Stegner hastens to add that he has been trying to get that culture “out of his thinking and feeling ever since.” As Stegner proceeds to explain his failure to rid himself of his cowboy origins, he seems to be simultaneously expressing an odd sort of solidarity with the “Indo-‐European cowboy” Snyder even as he jabs Snyder one 58 Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us offers a fascinating reading of the Beats’ Orientalism that ties it closely to their interest in the frontier history of the US West (76-‐98). 168 more time for thinking he could truly escape the influence of the “Grecco-‐Roman” tradition. “Cowboy culture” thus stands as a signifier that points both toward the rejection of tradition that Stegner is so wary of in Snyder’s Eastern mysticism, and toward the western American tradition that Stegner himself claims will always color his own subjectivity. Snyder chose not to continue the conversation, simply scrawling “no use in answering” on the envelope before consigning the letter to the drawer (Fradkin 155). The exchange seems to have made a lasting impression on Stegner, however: only a few years later, he would include a scurrilous quotation attributed to Gary Snyder in Angle of Repose, casting Snyder as a utopian huckster propagandizing for a commune in the Sierra Nevada. The strange ambivalence toward both the cowboy culture of the frontier past and the cowboy (counter)culture of the 1960s that marks Stegner’s letter to Snyder expresses itself in Stegner’s representation of Lyman Ward, the less-‐than-‐reliable historian (and fierce critic of the counterculture) who narrates Angle of Repose. In Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West, William Handley outlines the basic contours of the allegory that emerges from Lyman Ward’s narration of his grandmother Susan’s life on the western frontier, in which “the past becomes the allegory of the present, reflecting on Lyman’s marriage, but also the social upheavals of the 1960s (215). Lyman’s attempt to narrate the story of his grandparents’ marriage is thwarted by his own misogyny, which “marks the limits of his search” into his grandmother’s subjectivity, preventing him from either narrating her desires or seeing the extent of his grandfather Oliver’s faults. As the 169 novel progresses, it becomes clear to the reader that the lacunae in Lyman’s narration of his grandparents’ relationship (especially surrounding Susan’s sexuality, Oliver’s alcoholism, and his disregard for his wife’s desires) are produced by Lyman’s inability to confront his own complicity in the dissolution of his marriage. Handley reads this ambiguous conclusion to the marriage allegory ramifying outward as a commentary on the 1960s counterculture because Lyman’s error is mirrored in the rhetoric of the idealistic Larry Rasmussen and his fellow hippies. Handley argues that if Stegner is a conservative, his “conservatism is of a different order […] since it is suspicious of all forms of resolution, whether Larry Rasmussen’s manifesto (‘NOW, THEREFORE’) or Lyman’s resolve not to forgive (‘To hell with her’)” (222). Further examination of Stegner’s allegory and his representation of Larry Rasmussen allows us, I believe, to make an even stronger claim about the politics of Stegner’s “suspicion of all modes of resolution.” As Lyman’s attempt to satisfactorily resolve his narrative unravels in the final section of the novel, Angle of Repose reveals that both Larry and Lyman’s narrative authority is grounded in the same specifically settler colonial and violent mode of masculinity. While examples of how this form of masculine authority structures Lyman’s narrative abound, perhaps none is more pointed than the repeated appearance of the western relics that Lyman hangs above his writing desk: On the wall before my face is something my grandmother used to have hanging there all through my childhood: a broad leather belt, a wooden-‐handled cavalry revolver of the Civil War period, a bowie 170 knife, and a pair of Mexican spurs with 4-‐inch rowels. The minute I found them in a box I put them right back where they used to be. (7) This catalog of “primitive and masculine trophies,” the sign under which Susan Ward lived and Lyman constructs his narrative, could not be presented as more phallic without steering the novel into the realm of genre-‐Western kitsch. These symbols of western violence and masculinity are also tinged with an element of racial and colonial oppression: we later learn that the pistol was a trophy taken from a fallen Confederate officer; the Bowie knife calls to mind the violent exploits against Mexicans carried out by the man who lent the knife its name. It is these objects, also, that come to represent the stakes of Lyman’s research into his grandmother Susan’s life: “did she hang these Western objects in her sight as a reminder, as an acknowledgement of something that had happened to her? I think perhaps she did” (8). Susan, in the gendered imaginary of the frontier marriage allegory, should have represented the “civilizing” feminine influence that would eventually “tame” the primitive masculinity of the frontiersman. For all of Susan’s “civilizing” qualities that Lyman admires, her space continues to be defined by these reminders of frontier violence. These objects form a link between Lyman and his grandfather, but they also give him comfort in his rivalry with Larry Rasmussen that intensifies as Lyman becomes increasingly proprietary over his secretary Shelly, Larry’s partner. When Lyman ruminates on how his life would change if Shelly took him up on his offer of living in the spare room of the Zodiac Cottage, he imagines himself “reaching for his horse pistol every time the house creaks. The thought of having that speed freak 171 prowling around in my woods and spying on us doesn’t thrill me” (156). In other moments, however, Lyman associates Larry with Oliver’s penchant for ridiculous symbols of frontier masculinity. Questioning Oliver’s decision to send Susan “a bundle of raw beaver pelts and an elk head the size of a good-‐sized woodshed” as gifts, Lyman suggests that “it’s as nutty as Shelly Rasmussen’s nutty husband sending her twenty-‐four canaries. … It’s like that horse pistol up there … he wanted to be something she resisted” (200). Larry thus becomes both threatened by, and obliquely associated with, the symbols to which Lyman anxiously clings as the final assurance of his own western masculinity. This association with Lyman’s talismans of the frontier is not the only way in which Larry is constructed as a frontier figure, however. His mode of dress—which makes him out as an almost unmistakable parody of a young Gary Snyder (189)— marks him as a liminal figure who transverses the line between “savagery and civilization” that Lyman is so anxious to maintain. Larry, like Snyder, is playing Indian, but in so doing he is playing pioneer: before he came West he was “a nice clean boy from upstate New York” (152), but the West “strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin” (Turner 33). 59 Despite his restless wanderings, he seems to be looking for a place to settle, and identifies with something in the high sierra country around Grass Valley: “This is a 59 My reading of countercultural Indian play has been deeply influenced by Phillip J. Deloria’s interpretation of this phenomenon in Playing Indian, where he notes that the counterculture’s Indian play, while often performed in the context of anti-‐statist protest, in fact located the counterculture in a long tradition of American national identification (154-‐80). This performance not only, as Deloria argues, gave “meaning to Americans lost in a (post)modern freefall” (7) but also served as an act of settler indigenization whereby the counterculture reaffirmed their own sense of belonging to US territory even as they challenged the authority of the US state. 172 place, this isn’t just anywheresville. This is a place where a man could live” (190). This desire for settlement finally expresses itself in the commune, an overt reenactment of the frontiersman’s occupation of “free land,” in order to realize a new mode of community. In representing Larry’s desire for a “sense of place,” Stegner seems to obliquely recognize in his own preoccupation with place a continuity with the restless, placeless mobility he critiqued in both the frontier-‐era West and in the counterculture. If these aspects of Larry’s character reveal that he shares something of Lyman’s latent frontier nostalgia, other moments demonstrate that he also shares (or perhaps even exceeds) Lyman’s pervasive misogyny. While Lyman’s prurient obsession with Larry and Shelly’s untraditional sex life makes him an incredibly unreliable narrator on this point, Shelly herself reports, with attempted casualness, that Larry “threatened to cut [her] throat” while taking Benzadrine (155). We cannot afford to dismiss such a threat, reported in the novel of a man whose own addiction-‐addled father murdered a woman (Fradkin 94-‐95), as easily as Shelley does. Colored by the knowledge of this threat, the representation of Larry and Shelly’s sexual liberation—especially Shelly’s description of a “gang bang” (272)— begins to make it look as though the liberation in this relationship is, to say the least, a little one-‐sided. One could apply critic Krista Comer’s quip about Didion’s critique of the sexual politics of the counterculture just as easily to this moment in Angle of Repose—for Stegner as for Didion, “nobody is winning the sexual revolution, but women are losing it harder than men” (82). 173 The idealization of frontier masculinity which provides the historical continuity that connects all three marriage plots in Angle of Repose is directly confronted in the dream sequence of the novel’s final section. Stegner sets the scene for Lyman’s dream-‐encounter with his ex-‐wife with a specifically postmodern allusion, describing Lyman’s perceptions as reminiscent of something out of Robbe-‐ Grillet, then specifically references a film for which Robbe-‐Grillet wrote the screenplay—The Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (553). The famously disjunctive plot of this film hinges on a man’s attempt to convince a woman that they had a sexual encounter in the past in order to convince her that the affair should be renewed. This film—in which an attempt to exert male authority by narrating the past is complicated by a proliferation of representational points of view—becomes the lens through which we view the politics of Stegner’s conclusion. In the dream-‐encounter with Ellen, Lyman’s loss of control over both his ability to narrate and his own surreally priapic body begins to climax at the moment the sign of his phallogocentric authority (Derrida’s neologism does not seem inapropos here) and his “sense of place” are questioned: gesturing toward the knife, gun, and spurs on the wall, Ellen asks “What’s this? Local color?” The sign under which Lyman has been constructing his history is thus even more clearly linked to his western masculinity. Furthermore, it is Lyman’s attempted explanation of the importance of the relics in the discussion that follows that leads him to articulate his own wounded sense of masculine entitlement in a way that even he comes to see as ridiculous when he opines that Ellen’s “real mistake was that she never appreciated him enough until it was too late” (551). The perverse climax of Lyman’s dream of a 174 breakdown, in which Shelly and Ellen are co-‐conspirators in wresting control away from him, culminates in a sort of failed insemination in which Lyman’s urination into a catheter comes to replace ejaculation at the moment when all three of the women whose lives he has attempted to represent elude his grasp. The surreal final image of the dream sequence reinforces the sense that a gendered impulse to violence has colored all of Lyman’s labors of love: “Closer and larger grew her eyes until, blurred by proximity, inches from his own, they were the eyes that a lover or a strangler would have seen, bending to his work” (555). Through its masterful ending, Angle of Repose exploits its narrative structure in order to implicate both the countercultural figures like Larry and cultural conservatives like Lyman in a frontier nostalgia grounded in violent masculine authority. Its critique of frontier nostalgia is not articulated through “an ethics of place” that pits a “centering identity and historicist method” against frontier myth, but rather through a questioning of the West as “coherent and unitary space” with a narrativizable history (Comer, “Exceptionalism” 160). The only consistent symbols of western authenticity that this transnational fiction presents are the phallic relics that come to represent the violence that underwrites the false authority of historical narrative itself. Lyman uses the term “Angle of Repose” to describe the uneasy détente that sustained Susan and Oliver’s marriage, but in this unique take on a familiar allegorical marriage plot, the term also comes to describe the uneasy balance between the (“masculine”) violence of settlement and the (“feminine”) civility it was meant to usher in with the closing of the frontier and the beginning of the nation. 175 The conclusion of Angle of Repose leaves Lyman with no way to reproduce the uneasy balance of his grandparents’ marriage in his own, leaving him to ponder the possibility of renouncing his own violent masculine authority. In so doing, it asks its settler readers to question whether the ethics and politics are due for a similar reckoning. IV. Wallace Stegner, Secularism, and the Politics of Decolonization How can we reconcile a work like Angle of Repose, which would seem to destabilize any celebrations of settler colonialism in the US West, with those moments in Stegner’s oeuvre (many, like “A Sense of Place,” written years after Angle of Repose) that so uncritically enable a politics of Indigenous erasure and settler belonging? A compelling answer emerges through a comparison of two texts, one from the early years of his career and the second near the end, in which Stegner directly addresses the relationship between epistemology and politics. The first is an essay Stegner wrote for the National Public Radio series This I Believe in 1952, during the early years of his time at Stanford. In it, Stegner makes a brief yet eloquent case for his own secularism, beginning by addressing his relationship to religious faith: In all honesty, what I believe is neither inspirational nor evangelical. Passionate faith I am suspicious of because it hangs witches and burns heretics, and generally I am more in sympathy with the witches and heretics than with the sectarians who hang and burn them. I fear immoderate zeal, Christian, Muslim, Communist, or whatever, because it restricts the range of human understanding and the wise 176 reconciliation of human differences, and creates an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand. (“Everything Potent”) Rather than pitting his own faith in scientific rationality against the “backwardness” of religious faith, Stegner grounds his objections to “zealotry” on the inability of “passionate faith” to respect difference. Stegner extends this line of thought in a paragraph on “conscience” and cultural difference: All this is to say that I believe in conscience, not as something implanted by divine act, but as something learned from infancy from the tradition and society which has bred us. The outward forms of virtue will vary greatly from nation to nation; a Chinese scholar of the old school, or an Indian raised on the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, has a conscience that will differ from mine. But in the essential outlines of what constitutes human decency we vary amazingly little. The Chinese and the Indian know as well as I do what kindness is, what generosity is, what fortitude is. They can define justice quite as accurately. It is only when they and I are blinded by tribal and denominational narrowness that we insist upon our differences and can recognize goodness only in the robes of our own crowd. This formulation of conscience is far from the transcendent logic of a Kantian or the mysticism of an Emersonian. For Stegner, there are no political or ethical values that transcend their cultural specificity. Despite the differences in conscience produced by culture, however, there is enough commonality in human experience to allow us 177 to translate across “tribal and denominational” differences. Stegner concludes with a celebratory reflection on his own obligations of conscience: But I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world’s millions, I am also born more obligated. There is no mistaking a Kiplingesque gesture in Stegner’s reference to his “responsibility” to the “world’s millions.” At the very least, this statement—with its combination of masculine and patriotic pride alongside putative humility—reads as symptomatic of the condition that N. Scott Momaday (then a PhD candidate in the Stanford English Department, where Stegner was teaching) diagnosed in his 1963 essay “The Morality of Indian Hating,” where he suggests that “the contemporary white American is willing to assume responsibility for the Indian—he is willing to take on the burdens of oppressed people everywhere—but he is decidedly unwilling to divest himself of the false assumptions which impede his good intentions”. (Man Made of Words 71). By labeling the parochialism he hopes to transcend as “tribal or denominational narrowness,” Stegner also neatly associates the nationalist antagonisms produced by modernity with both religion and pre-‐modern forms of social organization. Despite such pretensions, however, there is a sense in which Stegner’s politics of difference expresses a self-‐realization that countercultural figures like 178 Kerouac and Spicer—with their unthinking misogyny and problematic claims to racial abdication—never do. Stegner recognizes himself as a subject of privilege, a privilege that has been granted to him by contingency (he was “born luckier”) rather than by the world-‐historic racial determinism that inflects Kipling’s infamous poem for Theodore Roosevelt. Against the historical backdrop of the white counterculture’s indigenist romanticism, the virulent racism of “the lockjaw right of Orange County,” and mainstream postwar liberalism’s universalism, Stegner’s anti-‐ foundationalist reading of cultural value and his own privilege could be interpreted as a relatively promising alternative. The history of American liberalism is rife, however, with examples of how such politico-‐ethical positions have been marshaled into a politics that has done more to bolster the settler colonial foundations of US nationalism than to challenge them. 60 In his late work, Richard Rorty offers a rejection of foundationalist epistemology similar to Stegner’s only to advocate for a political pragmatism that embraces US patriotism and centrist liberalism. As critic Bruce Robbins puts it, “Rorty didn’t much like so-‐called identity politics, but at the national scale he himself was an unabashed practitioner. ‘America’ … had become for him the one true vehicle of hope, a virtual synonym of the project of social justice” (“On Richard Rorty”). On the subject of Indigenous sovereignty Rorty is myopic. He holds up Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead as one of his exemplary bad objects of the doomed pessimism of the “cultural left,” concluding a cursory reading of the novel by soberly warning that reading Silko, one could come away thinking that “the 60 Eric Lott outlines this strain of political thought, centered around Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, in “Boomer Liberalism: When the New Left Was Old.” 179 two-‐hundred-‐year history of the United States—indeed, the history of European and American peoples since the Enlightenment—has been pervaded by hypocrisy and self-‐deception” (Achieving 7). Stegner’s attempt to balance an anti-‐foundationalist approach to political value and his perceived obligation to “the world’s millions” with his “terrible pride” in his own nationality reflects his own investment in a pragmatic liberalism that suffers from some of the same limits of vision that mark Rorty’s argument. If Stegner anticipated the work of thinkers like Rorty by wedding an anti-‐ foundationalist epistemology to a pragmatic and moderate liberalism at the beginning of his career, however, his thinking on the nation did not follow the increasingly nationalist trajectory of Rorty’s. In 1990, only three years before his death, Stegner was invited to reflect back on the “obligations” discussed in the above paragraph by an interviewer for the Paris Review who asked him, “What new obligations and responsibilities do you feel confronting you now? Or are there any?” (“Art of Fiction”). The final sentences in his response (and the entire interview) speak to the increasing unease with nationalist identification, an unease that marked so much of his late work: The only things I owe to myself, I owe to my notions of justice. But I owe a great deal, in the way not only of obligation but of tenderness, to my family and my friends. Chekhov said he worked all his life to get the slave out of himself. I guess I feel my obligation is to get the selfishness and greed, which often translates as the Americanism, out 180 of myself. I want to be a citizen of the culture, of the best the culture stands for, not of a nation or a party or an economic system. 61 If Rorty’s putative politics of empathy led him to embrace American nationalism as the only means toward progress, Stegner’s sense of obligation leads him to an increasing unease with the United States, the Democratic Party, and capitalism in general. In counterpoising these rejected affiliations against the ambiguous invocation of “the culture,” Stegner gestures toward a movement similar to that he discussed in the letter to Snyder quoted earlier, in which he says, “I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since.” If the “cowboy culture” is analogous to the American values of “selfishness and greed” that Stegner is striving to “get out of,” “the culture” he invokes here seems to be a cosmopolitan conception of cultural tradition that is not circumscribed by “tribal or denominational narrowness.” By seeking to be “a citizen of the culture,” Stegner seeks an identification that would allow him to put his own values and cultural traditions in relation to others’, an identification that would allow him to position “stoicism” “alongside the Buddha” (Selected Letters 259). Stegner’s anti-‐foundationalism led him, in moments like this, to question his most fundamental regional and national loyalties, even as elsewhere he employed regionalist and nationalist rhetoric to advocate for an environmentally sustainable politics of place, and to combat what he saw as the corrosive politics of both right-‐ wing and countercultural frontier metanarratives. His writing is marked not by a 61 In Landscapes of the New West, Krista Comer notes how Stegner similarly began to repudiate his own description of the West as the “geography of hope” in his later years (45). 181 Rortyan irony so much as by a profound unease with the very identifications that defined his intellectual life. Stegner, however, rarely directed this unease toward a politics that might redress the settler colonial foundations of his own “sense of place.” While he does decry the genocidal nature of nineteenth-‐century frontier expansion, his rejection of the frontier logic of both the counterculture and the right is based largely in an ecologically inflected politics of place that rejects the dialectic between civilization and wilderness. While Stegner might be troubled by the “selfishness” inherent to his American identity, and, in Angle of Repose, hints at a fundamental violence underwriting both the “frontier” politics of the counterculture and his own Western regionalist politics of place, he still grounded much of his public intellectual work in a regional identity available only to settlers. As essays such as “Sense of Place” make clear, Stegner’s critique of the frontier was largely a critique of frontier mobility aimed at imagining a more ecologically sustainable and communalist mode of settlement. Stegner was, more often than not, willing to elide contemporary Indigenous claims to sovereignty and belonging in order to imagine alternative modes of settler identification with the land. It is this aspect of Stegner’s work that the defensive hagiographies of so many western regionalists have been utterly unwilling to reckon with. Reading the compromised qualities of Stegner’s intellectual work through the lens of his secularism, however, makes rejecting his powerful critique of America’s frontier identity outright in the name of an ideological purity an equally problematic position. In a 2014 essay reflecting on the continuing dependence of settler colonial 182 studies on frontier binaries, Jodi Byrd cautions that “the Manichean allegories that continue to inform settler colonial studies are indicative of the persistence the frontier has in disciplining the field and reflects some of the Hegelian dialectics that remain operationalized within critical theory” (3). While noting that such models can be provisionally useful in providing “scholars the means to draw the sometimes necessarily hard Manichean differentiations that separate settler from native,” Byrd suggests that ultimately the epistemological violence inherent to binary logic runs contrary to the southeastern Indigenous cosmology of her own Chickasaw Nation that recognizes “right relations between and among” and privileges “fluidity over rigidity, and rigidity over master narrative” (3). While hardly a proponent of secularism per se, Byrd suggests decolonial politics should work to undermine, rather than invert, the binary logic of settler colonialism. 62 Putting Stegner’s work into “right relation” with the Indigenous sovereignty struggles he often refused to recognize requires a refusal to either laud or critique him as the “Dean of Western American letters.” By recognizing in Stegner’s intellectual and literary work a critique of American settlerism that was powerful yet flawed rather than grounded in regional authenticity, we are acting in accordance with Stegner’s own secular worldview. Cook-‐Lynn’s essay, despite it’s focus on the “hard Manichean differentiations” that separate her politics from Stegner’s, subtly suggests that she hopes for a 62 In “Cities of Refuge: Indigenous Cosmopolitan Writers and the International Imaginary,” Sean Kicummah Teuton makes a point very similar to Byrd’s regarding the danger of Manichean binaries in Indigenous nationalism but invokes the secular cosmopolitan tradition directly by relating the Cherokee intellectual and diplomatic tradition to the work of thinkers such as Anthony Appiah. 183 decolonial future in which Indigenous peoples and settlers could imagine “right relations between and among.” In a moment of circumspection that exceeds anything achieved by Stegner’s more ardent defenders, Cook-‐Lynn hints at what such a reassessment of Stegner might look like: Perhaps we can weep for all Americans who were and are merely passing through. But that does not mean we can excuse them for believing that American Indians, too, are or were merely passing through, a mere phase of history to be disclaimed or forgotten, or worse yet, nostalgically lamented. (39) While Cook-‐Lynn empathizes with the alienation of frontier mobility that Stegner’s writing dramatizes, she also takes Stegner to task for imagining that “as America rises, the Sioux Nation expires” (38). In opposition to this binary understanding of sovereignty, the logic underlying a “claim to identity” that “needs only acclamation,” Cook-‐Lynn proposes abandoning this “characteristic[ally] European feature of the modern historical outlook” in favor of an alternative possibility for American identity. She argues that “Americanisms … are supposed to be ‘new-‐worldisms,’ setting off innovations of all kinds and allowing for the possibility that there are living resources in indigenous societies” (38). In other words, recognizing the ongoing sovereignty of Indigenous nations must be a pre-‐condition for a non-‐Native American identity that could be grounded in anything other than the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. Readings of Stegner that return his work to what Edward Said called “the dense fabric of secular life” offer the possibility of considering his critique of frontier 184 identity, however messy and compromised it might be, as an important moment in the genealogy of self-‐critiques of settlerism (Said cited in Robbins, “Secularism” 27). By abjuring the utopian frontier nostalgia of the white countercultural left (not to mention the white-‐supremacist frontier nostalgia of the neoconservative right), Stegner opened the door for a critique of settler identity that could be premised on a recognition of privilege and the attendant commitment to combat the conditions that produced that privilege. For those engaged with the western regionalist tradition, for whom Stegner stands as an important figure in the development of our own awareness of the human and ecological costs of settler colonialism in the United States, it is necessary to recognize his critique as incomplete and at times complicit with the eliminatory logic of settlerism that he elsewhere decried. To recognize Stegner’s inability to engage with the struggles of his Indigenous contemporaries is only to recognize what Stegner himself acknowledged: that, in this secular world of ours, intellectual work must submit to no transcendent authority, canonical, regional, or otherwise. 63 63 One of the more fascinating ways in which Stegner’s secularism manifests itself is in his approach to the idea of ecological belonging. While Stegner is deeply mistrustful of transcendental authority, he is very cognizant of the immanent authority our natural environment has over us. In this sense, he works at a remove from the tradition of European secular humanism that Edward Said is often accused of working within in his work on secularism (Robbins, “Secularism” 27). While Stegner’s ecological ethics in many ways decenters the human in an ecological sense, he refuses the romanticism of “deep ecology” and other approaches that claim an ability to speak for an entire ecosystem. For Stegner, the human is phenomenologically and affectively privileged even as the human is acknowledged to be a node in a broader ecological network rather than a self-‐determined category. As he puts it in “A Sense of Place,” The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own 185 V. “Wagon-‐Train Morality”: Joan Didion’s Frontier Pragmatism Secular doubt weaves its way through Stegner’s work as a subtle complement to his public political commitments. In Joan Didion’s writing, a more forceful secularism stands as her signature trait. In her oft-‐read 1965 essay, “On Morality,” she relates her secular doubt to her family’s frontier heritage and her deep mistrust of countercultural movement politics. This essay was written at the bequest of The American Scholar, and its publication venue sets the stage for the essay’s steadfast refusal of the transcendentalism so strongly associated with the Ralph Waldo Emerson address after which the journal was named. 64 A consideration of the essay’s first paragraph, however, demonstrates how paradoxically Emersonian it is in method, despite its rejection of “the primacy of personal conscience” (We Tell Ourselves Stories 122; hereafter cited as CNF): As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119°. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, because The American Scholar asked me to, in some abstract human eyes. I know that it wasn’t created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what the members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. (201) 64 I owe this insight directly to my conversations with William Handley. 186 way about “morality,” a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular. Here are some particulars … (120) Despite her insistence on phenomenological particulars rather than transcendental abstractions, there is a clear sense in which Didion positions herself, here, as the quintessential Emersonian intellectual, thinking simultaneously (and paradoxically) in public and in the wilderness, allowing her thought to be guided not by received wisdom but by the experience of nature. The nature Didion experiences is, of course, notably different than the “tranquil landscape” of New England that inspired Emerson’s transcendental revelries (Emerson 23). Didion’s wilderness, which imposes itself in spite of her technological attempt to keep it at bay, is a “country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter” (121), a space that, in Didion’s imagination, threatens not only one’s survival but also the operation of reason and the integrity of subjectivity itself. The particulars that occupy Didion as the narrative progresses concern a single car accident that occurred in the desert that night, the details of which are relayed to her by the nurse who had driven the girlfriend of the driver (who was killed at the scene) 185 miles to the nearest hospital. The nurse leaves her husband with the body until the coroner arrives, because “‘you can’t just leave a body on the highway. … It’s immoral’” (120). Didion notes that the nurse’s usage of the word “morality” “was one instance in which [she] did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific” (120). 187 Didion goes on to suggest that such a morality, grounded in particulars, was implanted in her by her family of erstwhile pioneers, a “wagon train morality,” implanted into her during childhood by “graphic litanies of the grief awaiting those who failed in their loyalties to each other. The Donner-‐Reed Party, starving in the Sierra snows, all the ephemera of civilization gone save that one vestigial taboo, the provision that no one should eat his own blood kin. The Jayhawkers, who quarreled and separated not far from where I am tonight” (120-‐21). Against the transcendental logic of Manifest Destiny, Didion presents a very different sort of frontier ethic, a morality that elsewhere she identifies as a distinctly gendered view on the frontier experience that she inherits from the women of her family (CNF 956). Westward migration engrained in the women in Didion’s family an enduring commitment to “blood kin,” “a code that has as its point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good” (CNF 121). This is an outlook that Didion embraces completely: for Didion, the wagon-‐train morality tales presented in the story of the Jayhawkers and the Donner Party “still suggest the only kind of ‘morality’ that seems to me to have any but the most potentially mendacious meaning” (121). It is this morality that still underlies the actions of her fellow travelers in Death Valley, “people whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason” (121). Didion’s wagon-‐train morality, with its rejection of national metanarrative in favor of the petits récits relayed in her “particulars,” its embrace of an affective “loyalty to those we love” instead of a duty to a rational, Kantian “ideal good,” speaks not only to postmodern epistemology, but to many contemporary scholarly sensibilities. Let us consider, 188 however, a few particulars that are omitted from Didion’s account of life and morality in Death Valley. Death Valley has been occupied since time immemorial by the Timbisha Shoshone people, significant numbers of whom still lived in the area when Death Valley National Monument (DVNM) was established in 1933. 65 The first superintendent of DVNM, John R. White, saw the Timbisha Shoshone as impeding his vision for the park as a contiguous wilderness and began his effort to eliminate their presence in DVNM by regulating the number of livestock that Indians in the park could own, eventually banning the presence of livestock in DVNM outright. After a series of protracted legal battles, however, and with the aid of a then-‐ supportive Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), several individual members of the (then-‐ unrecognized) Timbisha Shoshone tribe were able to wrest title to their land from the National Park Service (NPS). In addition, the NPS and the BIA jointly funded the building, with Civilian Conservation Corps Labor, of what was bizarrely called “a Colony of Indians” near Furnace Creek, to consist of housing and a commercial laundry facility (meant to service the Furnace Creek tourist facilities and provide the Indians with employment). The Timbisha Shoshone lived in an uneasy détente with the NPS until the series of post-‐World-‐War-‐II policies of what is now known as the “termination era.” 65 The synopsis of the history of the Timbisha Shoshone’s struggles with the federal government that follows is drawn from Steven Crum’s “A Tripartite State of Affairs: The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1933-‐1994.” Crum’s scholarship provides not only an invaluable history of the Timbisha Shoshone and Death Valley National Park but also serves as a fascinating testament to the anti-‐Indigenous politics that has for too long underwritten the “wilderness ethic” of western American bioregionalism. 189 Termination policies aimed at liquidating tribal land bases held in federal trust, moving Indians to “urban relocation centers,” and eliminating BIA services for Indians on reservations. These policies had a particularly devastating effect on the Timbisha Shoshone. Despite the fact that they were still, at this point, not federally recognized as a tribe, their small, non-‐contiguous land base, only some of which was held in federal trust, was nonetheless targeted by termination policies. Squeezed between a now-‐hostile BIA and an NPS that was eager to establish in Death Valley the uninhabited wilderness that they had always wanted, the Timbisha Shoshone lost over 1,000 acres of land to the federal government over the course of the 1950s. Having successfully eliminated all Native title within the park, in 1957 the NPS turned its attention to the Indians in the “colony” at Furnace Creek. While it had been pressuring individual Indian families to leave the colony for nearly a decade, in 1957 the NPS formalized these practices in the “Death Valley Indian Village Policy.” This policy declared the Timbisha Shoshone living in the park to be no longer wards of the federal government, required them to pay rent on their homes, and stipulated that homes in the village should be destroyed when a family moved out or was evicted (the policy also stipulated that any family who fell two months behind on payments would be summarily evicted). As it happens, these eliminatory policies generated significant resistance from the Timbisha Shoshone. In 1963, only two years before Didion found herself in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, protests from the Timbisha Shoshone resulted in a revised agreement with the NPS. This agreement— negotiated with administrators of the Department of the Interior under the 190 leadership of Stewart Udall—lowered the annual rent to a nominal $1 per year but reinforced the Timbisha Shoshone’s status as non-‐wards, despite the fact that they had never been officially designated as “terminated” by the BIA. The 1963 agreement signaled a turning point for the Timbisha Shoshone; over the following four decades they engaged in in a protracted struggle that resulted in their federal recognition as a tribe in 1982 (the first tribe recognized under the Federal Acknowledgement Policy) and the establishment of their contemporary reservation—the only such reservation within the boundaries of a National Park— established in 2000 by the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act. The first clause in “On Morality,” “as it happens,” appears in Joan Didion’s collected nonfiction with an uncanny frequency, its almost incantatory repetition serving as an insistent reminder that the narratives she relays are only episodes in a “history of accidents” (e.g., CNF 53, 56, 93, 120, 221). As I intimated in my introduction to this chapter, the history of the settlement of the US West is much more difficult to read as a “history of accidents” when it is read without effacing the place of the Indigenous people for whom the phrase “wagon-‐train morality” sounds at least as ominous as the “primacy of personal conscience.” Contrasting Didion’s experience of Death Valley as a sublime and empty landscape to the Timbisha Shoshone’s experience of the same space as a homeland occupied by relentlessly and arbitrarily oppressive state apparatuses clearly dramatizes this point. In “On Morality,” the existential dilemma Didion presents her readers depends on her position as an individual caught between an unforgiving wilderness and a bankrupt metaphysics. Down the street from the motel room where Didion 191 writes, at the Faith Community Church, there is a “prayer sing” being held, an event that allegorizes, for Didion, the “monstrous perversion to which any idea can come” (122). She fears that “if I were to hear those dying voices, those Midwestern voices drawn to this lunar country for some unimaginable atavistic rites, rock of ages cleft for me, I think I would lose my own reason” (122). Didion, a lifelong student of Anglican liturgy (Year of Magical Thinking 189), would have known the hymn well: Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee; Let the water and the blood, From Thy wounded side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Safe from wrath and make me pure Tradition has it that the hymn’s lyricist, Presbyterian minister Reverend Augustus Montague Toplady, penned it on the back of a playing card while taking shelter in a large rock formation when he was caught alone in a storm in the (then) wilderness of Cornwall, England (Brown and Butterworth 138-‐139). If these Midwestern Christians have enacted a belated westward migration with a faith that they would find their own redemption within the “lunar landscape” of Death Valley, Didion reenacts her own frontier experience in her room where she writes, “Every now and then I imagine I hear a rattlesnake, but my husband says it is a faucet, a paper rustling in the wind. Then he stands by his window, and plays a flashlight over the dry wash outside” (122). Didion writes from a space where the faith in wilderness as refuge is “unimaginable and atavistic” and the wilderness itself is so “ominous 192 and terrible” as to hold a “sinister hysteria in the air.” (121, 122). If the “prayer sing” presents Didion with an “unimaginable” faith, the “terrible” wilderness provides her a terrain on which her fears are imagined. The familiar gender roles enacted in the image of Didion’s husband on the threshold of a (temporary) domestic space shining his light into the dark desert to protect his wife from her imagined fears allegorize the ethical action dictated by “wagon-‐train morality.” “Except on the most primitive level—our loyalties to those we love—what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience” (122)? The answer to this question is necessarily complicated by the presence of the Other, and perhaps that is why Didion so assiduously avoids any mention of the Native American presence in Death Valley. She needn’t have looked as far as the Timbisha village at Furnace Creek had she wanted to include such particulars: the unnamed town in which she was staying, Tecopa, was named after a Shoshone chief, and the adjacent town is called simply “Shoshone.” 66 There is no room for the presence of a people for whom “Death Valley” was not a “lunar landscape” so unknowable as to be described as “antimatter.” For Didion, affective bonds are forged in our struggle against a hostile natural environment. For all that “On Morality” works to break down the Manichean binary of “good” and “evil”, it works just as hard to maintain the Turnerian binary between the settler and the wilderness. 67 66 My claim that Tecopa was the town Didion was writing from is deduced from the fact that there is still a “Faith Community Church” there, that there was a bar there during the 1960s called “The Snake Pit,” and that it is also near the point where the “Jayhawkers” began their infamous shortcut. 67 The only mention of frontier violence in the essay curiously serves to reinforce the notion that the violence of westward expansion emerged primarily from settlers’ betrayal of each other. In a list of the many murderers whom she imagines 193 If the pragmatic ethics of Didion’s “wagon-‐train morality” require the erasure of the Indigenous, there is also a sense in which they require the erasure of the agency of the Other altogether. The three primary examples Didion marshals to explicate the particulars of “wagon-‐train morality”—the story of the nurse leaving her husband with the body on the highway, the divers searching the cave pools for the lost swimmers, and the story of the Donner party—all involve the ethical obligations of the living to the dead. 68 By narrating ethical encounters wherein the Other is not only always already a fellow settler, but always already dead, Didion is able to strip out the complexities that necessarily attend to such encounters in order to draw clear distinctions between the pragmatic “wagon-‐train morality” she embraces and the transcendental “ethic of conscience” she rejects. This erasure of the agency of the Other proves crucial in setting up the final rhetorical move of the essay, wherein “wagon-‐train morality” is generalized outward on the politics of the nation. Didion concedes that “of course we all want to believe something […] And of course it is alright to do that, it is how, immemorially, things have gotten done” (123). She follows this stridently pragmatist assessment of must have been guided by the justification “I followed my own conscience,” Didion includes “the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.” The massacre of the Fancher-‐Baker party, a group of non-‐Mormon settlers bound for California, at Mountain Meadows in Southern Utah was organized and perpetrated by a group of Mormon vigilantes, along with a few Paiute recruits. The Mormons involved disguised themselves as Indians so as to lay the blame entirely on the Paiutes, though they were responsible for organizing the slaughter. For a complete account of the incident, see Juanita Brooks’ The Mountain Meadows Massacre. 68 Victor Li has noted that a similar tendency within theoretical and literary imaginings of the subaltern, which tend to portray subaltern resistance as ending in death, thus transforming “struggling, uncertain actors into symbols of counter-‐ hegemonic resistance and alterity” (280). In the works of postcolonial theory Li analyzes, and in “On Morality,” the death of the Other paradoxically emerges out of the writer’s insistence on respecting the alterity of the Other. 194 political commitment by warning of the limits of this type of belief: “It is all right only so long as we remember that the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer on anyone any ipso facto virtue” (124). The essay concludes on as trenchant a Didionesque warning as one could find: Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there. (124) On the one hand, Didion’s position might seem a promising counterpoint to the political violence that haunted the 1960s. The tone is remarkable, however, considering that, in the immediate context of 1965, the “somethings” that those who had been manning the “picket lines” and writing the “brave signatures in The New York Times” most wanted were the passage of civil rights legislation and the end of the Vietnam War. In a 1977 interview, Didion addressed her stance on political protest and its relation to her “Western frontier ethic” directly: I have an aversion to social action because it usually means social regulation. It meant interference, rules, doing what other people wanted me to do. The ethic I was raised in was specifically a Western frontier ethic. That means being left alone and leaving others alone 195 […]. The politics I personally want are anarchic. Throw out the laws. Tear it down. Start all over. This is very romantic because it presumes that, left to their own devices, people would do good things for one another. I doubt that that’s true. But I would like to believe it. (Didion in Sara Davidson 15) Didion’s aversion to movement politics, and her carefully hedged endorsement of anarchy, all speak to one unspoken fact—that for a subject in Didion’s position, to be apolitical (Didion avers, disingenuously, that she is “hardly ever conscious of the issues” when asked if she votes), is to be “left alone” and to “leave others alone” (15) The self-‐determined individual subject stands as the inviolable center of her politics. Didion’s attribution of her own belief in anarchism to her “Western frontier ethic” in many ways explains how she arrived in this position. In his 2013 article “Settler Common Sense,” Mark Rifkin reads in Thoreau’s (quasi) anarchism an ethic that “emerges out of, and indexes, everyday forms of state feeling shaped by state policy but not directly contiguous with it” (323). In imagining the frontier as a space where one can “[be] alone and [leave] others alone,” a space wherein one could “throw out the laws,” “tear it down,” “start over,” Didion demonstrates the workings of a similar “settler common sense,” insofar as she represents the “Western frontier” that produces an ethic of anarchistic autonomy rather than as a space produced by a systemic violence that, when not perpetrated by the state, still served the state. 69 As her skeptical caveat regarding her endorsement of anarchy reveals, however, she has very little faith in her own live-‐and-‐let-‐live anarchism, in the 69 See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” for more on the relation of frontier lawlessness to genocide (392). 196 possibility of an “outside” that could produce a desirable alternative to the status quo. Didion’s imagining of her own politics thus remains resolutely spectatorial. Nevertheless, her ambivalence, and the signature irony, which gives it voice, are underwritten by the discursive production of a space wherein she can imagine herself as absent from the violence of political commitment. Didion’s representation of Death Valley assiduously avoids the discourse of transcendental autonomy of Thoreau’s Walden, but it does, thanks to its elimination of the valley’s Indigenous inhabitants, offer a negative space for the articulation of critique. Between the rattlesnakes in the wash and the Rock of Ages, Didion fakes out a precarious frontier, an imagined “outside” from which she can critique the coercive metanarratives of the nation-‐state and the counterculture without being implicated in either. VI. The Indian and the Child in “Slouching toward Bethlehem” Understanding how Didion employs the erasure of the Indigenous to structure her critique in “On Morality” offers a vital perspective on what is perhaps the single best known critique of the 1960s counterculture ever written—Didion’s “Slouching toward Bethlehem” (1967). This exploration of the Haight-‐Ashbury on the eve of the “Summer of Love” positions Didion as navigating a space of anomie where “the best lack all conviction / and the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats cited in CNF 3). Like the washes of Death Valley, the streets of the Haight present a space that seems to threaten not only “the games that had held the society together,” but also, and more fundamentally, “primary loyalties” to “blood kin” (CNF 197 67, 121). Indeed, it is the idea of the family that provides the stable referent against which the actions of the “flower children” are judged. The figure of the child in “Slouching” allegorizes the forms of reproductive futurity that Didion reads the “atomization” of the 1960s as having foreclosed. On the one hand, the hippies are dismissed as “children with mandalas on their foreheads,” their naiveté, here symbolized by their consumerist Orientalism, indicative of what Didion reads as a sort of arrested development (CNF 8). On the other, it is the image of the neglected child at the end of the essay that famously jolts Didion’s narrative voice out of its ironic distance. The specter of a failed reproductive futurity haunts the essay from the very beginning, marking a limit to the secular doubt that otherwise holds Didion back from making ethical or political judgments. The essay’s second paragraph concludes a meditation on the national mood in 1967 by saying that “all that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up” (CNF 67). The botched or illegal abortion serves as a central trauma for Didion’s protagonists in her first two novels (Run River 157, Play It As It Lays 80), and it serves as a political metaphor in many of her essays, but never are the stakes of her obsession with abortion made more clear than in this gruesome image: for Didion the aborted fetus is comparable to the national body politic, and the “missing children” who populate the Haight are the undead subjects of this miscarriage of social reproduction. 198 Alongside this unmistakable allegorical frame that represents the “missing children” of the Haight as figures for a “more general” rupture that threatens the futurity of the nation, Didion subtly interweaves a frontier allegory. The hippies are represented as both the “abortion” of American society and as latter-‐day frontiersmen, reenacting encounters with “savagery.” This historical allegory, evoking the frontier past to narrate the present, undercuts the rupture narrative that constitutes the essay’s primary narrative thrust. Lorenzo Veracini has argued that, unlike their colonial analogs, settler colonial narratives are often conceived as linear: the goal of settler colonialism is not to sustain a colonial relationship marked by calcified difference, but to realize an new society on Indigenous territory by eliminating Indigenous autonomy entirely. The failure of settler colonial projects to supersede their fundamental conflicts and imagine a “settled” futurity leads to a peculiarly contradictory relationship to the frontier past, however. As Veracini puts it, “‘demi-‐savages’ and ‘horrible colonials’ lurk behind all representations of regenerated frontier manhood (unshaved barbarians are a recurring concern of settler colonial imaginative traditions)” (Settler Colonialism 23). While Didion isn’t particularly concerned with the unorthodox shaving habits of the hippies, “Slouching toward Bethlehem” does turn away from the memorializations of the frontier Didion performs in other essays. Instead, Didion’s critique of the counterculture dwells on frontier nostalgia as a pernicious phenomenon, and one associated with retrograde gender roles, regressive forms of “going Native,” and a fundamental disregard for the responsibilities of childrearing and the futurity of the nation. The frontier allegory that haunts “Slouching toward Bethlehem” thus 199 suggests that the “fragmentation” of culture that Didion finds in the Haight has not been produced by a historical rupture that occurs “after World War II” (126), but rather by the contradictions of the settler project itself. “Slouching toward Bethlehem” further dramatizes the tension between Didion’s commitment to her own frontier identity and her latent fear of white Americans going Native by casting the “children” of the Haight-‐Ashbury as simultaneously an “abortion” of American society and the inheritors of the very frontier identity she sees as central to the American character. Didion’s dispassionate and archly ironic descriptions of the hippies’ drug use and attempts at non-‐normative sexual relationships paint a scathing picture of a country in which “at some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing” (93). This critique largely hinges on the inability of the hippies’ lifestyle experiments to transcend the fundamentally patriarchal, racist, and religious values that underlie the “straight” lifestyles they are rejecting. The hippies’ inadvertent conservatism is represented via descriptions that emphasize the hippies’ reenactment of familiar modes of frontier mobility and cultural appropriation. Through this conflation of frontier traits and the normative worldviews that Didion describes as antithetical in “On Morality,” Didion obliquely suggests that the frontier values that ground her own critique of the post-‐1945 “atomization” of American culture might themselves prove a “center [that] cannot hold” (Yeats quoted in CNF 3). The hippies’ insidious conservatism is subtly revealed as a product of frontier values in the evocative name of the first character Didion introduces—an 200 LSD dealer named Deadeye, who is “trying to set up this groovy religious group— ‘Teenage Evangelism’” (69). His pseudonym, on the one hand, conjures a vision of a genre Western outlaw or lawman with a knack for violence; on the other, it gestures toward the dangerous vapidity of his evangelism. This man who “has a clear evangelistic gaze and the reasonable rhetoric of a car salesman” is “exhibit A” of the “social hemorrhaging” Didion has come to San Francisco to diagnose, but this latter day frontiersman is also referred to as “society’s model product” (CNF 82). Contradictorily, “Deadeye” stands as the evidence of both the failure of an idealized social reproduction and the successful reproduction of a product that we might be better off without. Didion’s descriptions of the hippies’ peripatetic global wanderings reaffirm that if their refusal of the postwar norms of professional and family life is a break from the normative values of the present, this refusal represents a continuity with older frontier values. Some of her description of the hippies’ restless mobility might be easily mistaken for passages in Stegner criticizing the rootlessness of the frontier: “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins” (CNF 67). All of the people Didion encounters in the Haight seem to be there only temporarily, and almost all of them have plans for a future that involves establishing a new settlement: “Max and Sharon plan to leave for Africa and India, where they can live off the land. ‘I got this little trust fund, see,’ Max says, ‘which is useful in that it tells cops and border patrols I’m O.K., but living off the land is the thing … we gotta get out somewhere and live organically’” (75). The irony of Max’s desire to “live organically” on his parents’ dime cuts two 201 ways. On the one hand, it can be immediately read as signifying his inauthenticity: In comparison to a “genuine” pioneer, Max is nothing but a prototype of the independently wealthy would-‐be class-‐and-‐culture abdicator now derided as the “Trustafarian.” On the other, coming from an author who has often written trenchant critiques of the “independent” western settlers’ reliance on federal capital, Max’s hypocrisy places him in a long settler tradition. In addition to the dream of “living off the land” in vague locations beyond the borders of the United States, the hippies Didion describes also fantasize about starting a commune at a very specific location in California—the Malakoff Diggings in the Sierra Nevada. This site—now preserved as a state park—is an artificial canyon created by a large-‐scale hydraulic gold mining operation that caused one of the most massive environmental disasters in US history. The significance of the site would not have been lost on Didion, whose family may very well have been adversely affected by the catastrophic flooding that the mine caused in the Sacramento Valley. Max is interested in going to the site because “he thinks it would be a groove to take acid in the diggings” (70). The image of the hippy unthinkingly tripping in the almost postapocalyptic landscape created by the extractive economy of the frontier almost perfectly allegorizes Didion’s take on the hippies’ back-‐to-‐the-‐ land fantasies: they are reenacting a process that’s unfolding and catastrophic consequences they have failed to comprehend. The hippies Didion describes are also marked as frontier figures by their “playing Indian.” Whereas Indigenous presence is erased in the essays I have considered thus far, in “Slouching toward Bethlehem” the Indian is represented 202 everywhere, largely through the cultural appropriations and anecdotes of the hippies. While characters everywhere are described as dressed in various “Indian” accessories, Indians also play a crucial role in the backstories of the hippies’ alternative lifestyles. The character Max was introduced to his drug habit when he encountered “an Indian kid who was doing a don’t. Then every weekend I could get loose I’d hitchhike seven hundred miles to Brownsville, Texas, so I could cop peyote” (70). The “Indian kid” in this story plays a familiar role, awakening the mystical and “savage” libidinal energies of the white frontiersman, this time by enabling his drug habit. A stranger form of “going Native” appears in Didion’s description of how one woman, Barbara, came to embrace what the hippies call “the woman’s trip:” “[Barbara] and Tom had gone somewhere to live with the Indians, and although she first found it hard to be shunted off with the women and never to enter into any of the men’s talk, she soon got the point. ‘That was where the trip was, she says’” (86). Didion then launches into a critique of “the woman’s trip” in what stands as one of her few overt expressions of solidarity with feminist movement politics: Whenever I hear about the women’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-‐says-‐lovin’-‐like-‐something-‐from-‐the-‐oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara. (87) In contrasting the values of Friedan’s second-‐wave feminism to the lifestyles of those on “the woman’s trip,” Didion presents these hippy women as acting in bad faith against their putatively oppositional values. This bad faith is inaugurated by 203 their contact with the implicitly “retrograde” lifestyles of the Indigenous women they romanticized. If, in Turner’s account, appropriation of Indigenous cultural symbols and modes of production was part of what endowed the “frontiersman” with the “American character,” in Didion’s description of the hippies’ encounters with Indigenous peoples, this productive mode of “playing Indian” gives way to a more threatening mode of “going Native” that undermines the “civilizing” gains of progressive politics. 70 In so doing, she taps into a long tradition of settler representations of the frontiersman that tap into a deep anxiety—perhaps most familiarly embodied in the character of Ethan (John Wayne) in John Ford’s The Searchers (1954)—regarding the consequences of contact with Indigenous peoples. Contrary to Turner’s sanguine account, in this frontier tale, the colonist does not “master the wilderness” but is instead mastered by it, tainted by the unassimilable affective life of “the savage.” The theme of “going Native” takes center stage in the climax of “Slouching” as Didion observes the performance of a mime troupe associated with the “Diggers” anarchist collective in the Panhandle one Sunday afternoon. The mime troupe is dressed in blackface, wearing signs that say things like, “HOW MANY TIMES YOU BEEN RAPED, YOU LOVE FREAKS?” and “WHO STOLE CHUCK BERRY’S MUSIC?” and distributing flyers that warned of a coming reckoning for the hippies: 70 In one of the most widely known critical unpackings of the term “going Native,” Shari Huhndorf’s Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination uses it to describe an immersive form of the cross-‐cultural appropriations that, like those Deloria covers in Playing Indian, “reinforce the racial hierarchies [they claim] to destabilize” (3). My use of the phrase here is aiming to capture something rather different—the settler fear that contact with Natives would lead to a regression rather than a regeneration of the settler subject (Veracini, Settler Colonialism 23). 204 this summer thousands of un-‐white un-‐suburban boppers are going to want to know why you’ve given up what they can’t get […] & how you get away with it & how come you not a faggot with hair so long & they want haight street one way or the other. IF YOU DON’T KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY. (95) This strange attempt to radicalize the politics of the Haight by asking the hippies to question their own acts of class and cultural abdication runs afoul when the blackface Diggers are confronted by a group of African American men who question the premises of the Diggers’ anti-‐statist cultural politics: “Nobody stole Chuck Berry’s music, man,” says another Negro who has been studying the signs. Chuck Berry’s music belongs to everybody. “Yeh?” A girl in blackface says. “Everybody who?” “Why,” he says, confused. “Everybody. In America.” “In America.” The blackface girl shrieks. “Listen to him talk about America.” (95) As the confrontation between the blackface mimes and the Black men escalates, Didion canvasses the crowd to ask what they think of the spectacle. She finally finds a seventeen-‐year-‐old she describes as a “little girl” who identifies it as “something groovy they call street theatre.” When pressed as to its political content, “she 205 remembered a couple of words from somewhere. ‘Maybe it’s some John Birch thing’” (96). 71 Didion’s critique of the racial politics of the Diggers is not as simple as this punch line would suggest. While the episode articulates a brilliant take down of the insidious conservatism that emerges from the white counterculture’s eagerness to speak for oppressed populations they are unwilling to listen to, it also attacks the Diggers’ anti-‐statist radicalism at a more fundamental level. Read as an allegorical narrative about the “social hemorrhaging” of the nation, Didion’s reportage suggests that not only is the vaguely leftist anarchism of the hippies as ignorant as the reactionary conservatism of the John Birch Society, but that this politics is reflective of a desire to abjure subjectivity itself. The total disconnect between the Diggers’ vision of racial antagonism and the inclusive nationalism of the Black men they confront suggests that the Diggers’ blackface minstrelsy, like the various acts of “going Native” described earlier, has nothing to do with cross-‐cultural solidarity and everything to do with a desire to embody a wholly imagined “savagery,” an affective state wherein one could finally transcend any and all psychological limits to the free 71 The racial politics of the use of blackface by the San Francisco Mime Troupe are not quite as simple as Didion’s representation would suggest. While there is no way of knowing the cast members that Didion encountered in Golden Gate park on the particular Sunday in question, the show that was being performed—“A Minstrel Show: Or Civil Rights in A Cracker Barrel” was originally staged as a collaboration between three white performers and three black performers in blackface who interacted with a white interlocutor (Davis and Landau 26). The play awkwardly uses the genre of the minstrel show to condemn the white counterculture for its unacknowledged racism, as Didion’s essay implies, but its original cast and creators were far more self-‐aware of the inflammatory nature of their material than are the mimes Didion portrays (27). While Didion’s essay does not address the race of the blackface performers explicitly, their implicit whiteness (in the context of Didion’s general tendency to identify people of color in her work) serves to exaggerate the political vacuity and racism of the performance. 206 play of one’s desires. 72 This attempt to break free of the vague set of psychological constraints that Didion, mocking the lingo of the hippies, refers to as “the old middle-‐class Freudian hang ups,” seems to be the central concern of the residents of the Haight and the driving force behind their blackface minstrelsy and playing Indian (CNF 69). For Didion, this attempt to overcome one’s “Freudian hang ups” marks the fatal flaw of the hippies’ politics. If “Slouching” perfectly skewers the mode of cross-‐ cultural frontiering that we see articulated in the work of Kerouac and Mailer, it does so in the service of a critique of the hippies’ attempts to reject aspects of their identity that we might today call normative but that Didion defends as natural. Didion employs this mode of critique to scathing effect in her controversial 1972 essay on the women’s movement, in which she suggest that feminists’ claims of discrimination actually represent “an aversion […] to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children …” (CNF 262). Here, as in “Slouching,” Didion critiques a political movement by deriding those who participate in it as children who are denying the realities of adulthood. Didion imposes heteronormative limits on the affective dimensions of women’s lives. That she singles out the “accounts of lesbian relationships” in second-‐wave feminist literature as particularly childish gives a clear sense of what, for Didion, the stakes of “adulthood” are (CNF 262). The final episode narrated in “Slouching toward Bethlehem” offers a vision of failed reproductive futurity that Didion employs to illustrate her vision of the 72 In Playing Indian, Deloria, without conflating the practices, also notes how countercultural performances of African American identity (as exemplified in the extreme by blackface performance) shared many characteristics with Indian play (132). 207 unspeakable limits of the counterculture’s refusal of adult responsibilities. In a piece that showcases her seemingly effortless ironic insights, Didion finally encounters a scene that leaves her speechless when she meets Susan, a five-‐year-‐old whose mother has been dosing her with acid and peyote for a year in a program her mother describes as “High Kindergarten.” Didion starts “to ask her if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get high” but “falter[s] at the key words” (96). The essay concludes as one of the children in “High Kindergarten” chews on an electric wire as his parents’ occupy themselves trying to retrieve a piece of hash that has fallen under the floorboards of the flophouse where they live. This moment of unspeakable affect retrospectively structures the allegorical narrative that “Slouching toward Bethlehem” presents. Didion’s horror at the futurity foreclosed by the abuse and neglect of the children in “High Kindergarten” allegorically figures her horror at the possibility of a “spring of brave hopes and national promise” being foreclosed by the “social hemorrhaging” of the late 1960s (CNF 67). That Didion’s nation-‐as-‐family allegory, like the allegories presented in the other essays collected in Slouching toward Bethlehem, offers a narrowly circumscribed view of the heterogeneous social upheavals of the 1960s is a point that would be banal if it was not so rarely articulated. The essays collected in Slouching toward Bethlehem are marketed as “the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties” (amazon.com; emphasis mine). Their omissions, however, are not limited to the erasure of Indians from Death Valley— the Black spokesmen for national unity in the title essay are the only people of color identified as such who speak in the entire collection. The Vietnam War protest 208 movement, so central to the politics of the “Human Be-‐In,” is never mentioned in “Slouching” and is alluded to only obliquely in other essays. If California in general, and the Bay Area in particular—with its confluence of struggles including the gay and lesbian rights movement, the rise of the Black Panthers, anti-‐Vietnam War agitation, and the nascent Red Power movement—did in some sense provide a fertile site for interpreting the social antagonisms of the nation in the late sixties, it was not these aspects of California that interested Didion. For Didion, California was the site of national allegorical significance precisely because it was where Anglo-‐ America imagined the metaphorical limit of its frontier identity. The failed families of the Haight have “abdicated their responsibilities” and “breached their primary loyalties” to each other in the same way that the Donner Party had (CNF 34). In this sense, Didion—who is so often remembered as the counterculture’s harshest critic—in fact sees in the plight of the counterculture a reflection of the travails of her own family. One young man she encounters in the Haight tells her that he “has the idea that California is the beginning of the end.” “‘I feel it’s insane […] There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you can expect that it’s going to happen” (76). This anxiety of this brief passage resonates with the rhetoric of Turner’s “nation turned back on itself,” Spicer’s “West Coast is something no one with sense would understand”, but also that of Didion herself, who worries “that things had better work here, because here […] is where we run out of continent” (CNF 131). For Didion, the counterculture’s farcical reenactments of frontiering—playing Indian, going “back to the land,” and undertaking aimless transcontinental journeys—are all 209 symptomatic of the existential dread that she herself feels regarding her own family’s inability to reproduce any other ethic than the restless, get-‐rich-‐quick frontier individualism that spurred the transformation of the Sacramento Valley from an agrarian community into a technological hub of the military industrial complex. The hippies’ unspeakable failure to fulfill their obligation to their children is the failure of the settler nation to supersede its frontier conflicts, to cathect erstwhile frontiers into a reproducible “home.” For Didion, neither Indigenous peoples, nor the other people of color that the hippies exoticized, play anything but a background part in a national drama that is defined by white America’s struggle with its own troubling frontier history and unfulfilled utopian futurity. The counterculture’s Indian play is not troubling because it enacts yet another chapter in a long history of attempts at “settler indigenization” at the expense of actually existing Indians. The counterculture’s appropriation of putative Indianness, whether expressed in the adoption of outmoded gender roles or the religious use of psychedelics, is troubling because it signals settlers’ failure to triumph over the anti-‐modern habits of Indianness, a failure to “master the wilderness.” VII. Didion’s Indigenous Sublime While Indians in Slouching toward Bethlehem are either erased or appear as synecdochal signifiers of the anomic “wilderness,” the collection does offer a single moment in which Didion offers a more sustained consideration of the role Indians played in the frontier history of her own family. This moment comes in Didion’s 1961 essay “On Self-‐Respect,” in which she muses on people who display “a certain 210 toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues” (111). Didion identifies “self-‐respect”—a concept which maps easily onto the “adult” sense of responsibility that Didion accuses the counterculture of lacking—as something that “our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about.” Her first example of that generation’s self-‐respect comes from an unlikely source: “It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt” (111). By so abruptly juxtaposing the experience of the pioneers on the California frontier with that of a pith-‐helmeted British imperialist in the Sudan, Didion would seem to be anticipating the critique of transnational American studies. As the remainder of the passage reveals, however, if Didion is being anti-‐exceptionalist by putting Turnerian vocabulary (note the familiar relationship between “character” and “free land” mapped out here) into conversation with European imperialism, she is hardly being critical: In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-‐year-‐ old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting 211 further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee. In some form or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt […] They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do they know the odds. (111-‐12) The mother referenced in Narcissa’s account is Didion’s great-‐great-‐great-‐ grandmother, who had just survived her transcontinental crossing, a significant portion of which was undertaken with the Donner party (CNF 953). Didion revisits this anecdote in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From, and makes it clear that the Mother’s remark was a prelude to an act of threatened violence: upon being alerted to the presence of the Indians in the house, the father “got his pistols and asked the Indians to go outside to see him shoot” (995). After a brief demonstration, the Indians dispersed. The passage in “On Self-‐Respect” performs a remarkable collapse of masculine and feminine, foreign and domestic, in order to associate the remark of her ancestor with the exploits of a British officer who, guided by his own religious convictions and against the wishes of his own government, held a British imperial stronghold against Islamicist insurgent forces through a nearly two year siege before he was finally overrun and killed. The author of “On Morality” reads Gordon’s violent religiosity not as a fatal character flaw, but as emblematic of the “willingness to take responsibility for one’s 212 own life” that her pioneer ancestors also embodied. Indians and Islamicists may “always”: be “part of the donnee,” but the role they play is not that of the Other who the subject must avoid undermining through the “insidious ethic of conscience.” Instead they represent the affective life that ethical subjects, whether guided by a “wagon-‐train morality” or otherwise, must define themselves against. In Toward a Global Idea of Race, theorist Denise da Silva addresses the pervasive racial violence that exists in uneasy suspension with contemporary globalism’s putative commitment to a postmodern pluralism that, like Didion’s “wagon-‐train morality,” seeks to imagine an ethic that suppresses the exclusionary logic of the transcendent subject. 73 For da Silva, the “death of the subject” “did not result in his complete annihilation” (xxii). While the idea of the subject as the bearer of a singular universalized reason might be on the way out, the “post enlightenment version” of the subject persists with “an exclusive ethical attribute, namely, self-‐ determination” (xiii). To imagine—as Didion is keen to do, both in “On Morality” and in “On Self-‐Respect”—that “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own 73 Recent interventions in Indigenous studies by scholars such as Joann Barker and Jodi Byrd have warned strongly against the too-‐easy conflation of race-‐based and Indigenous struggles (Barker 3-‐7; Byrd, Transit xxv-‐xxvi). While racialization has been an oppressive strategy of power employed against Indigenous polities by settler society’s globally, thinking Indigenous sovereignty struggles exclusively through the rubric of race risks facilitating settler efforts to subsume those struggles into the multicultural nation, and, more insidiously, bolstering the logic of “blood quantum” whereby Indigenous polities are perpetually reduced by racial “dilution.” By citing da Silva—and indeed by relating Didion’s representation of Indians to her representation of African Americans—my goal is not to conflate Indigenous oppression with racial oppression, but rather to highlight a particular sense in which settler representations racialize Indigenous peoples. Da Silva addresses how her theory of race might relate to the frontier and to American Indian sovereignty struggles at greater length in her chapter on U.S. liberalism in Toward a Global Idea of Race (205-‐207). 213 life” is to imagine oneself in opposition to others who cannot take such responsibility, who are determined by exterior conditions (CNF 111). In da Silva’s account, which ranges from a broad array of Enlightenment thinkers forward into poststructuralist theorization, this imagining requires a “violent gesture” of will that “presupposes and postulates that the elimination of its ‘others’ is necessary” for the realization of the subject’s self-‐determination (xiii). It is in this theoretical gesture that she locates “the racial” as a constitutive element of post-‐Enlightenment thought. The narrative content of “On Self-‐Respect” could hardly offer a more straight-‐ forward example of the relationship between “the self-‐determined subject and its outer-‐determined others, the ones whose minds are subjected to their natural … conditions” that da Silva outlines (xiii; emphasis in original). Didion posits racial violence as the exemplary act of will through which the subject can “have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth” in spite of the “death and dirt,” the odds, the impersonal market forces. Indians are represented solely as the embodiment of those “natural conditions” which must be resisted in order to maintain the integrity of one’s character (CNF 112). The paradox of “On Self-‐Respect,” however, is the extent to which Didion’s professed admiration for the self-‐respecting imperialists and pioneers of the nineteenth century departs from her own self-‐presentation. The candid recounting of her own struggles with mental instability and debilitating migraines in Didion’s personal essays represents her as having more in common with the person “living without self-‐respect,” lying “awake at night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of 214 commission and omission” (110). Furthermore, the sublime (in the Burkean sense) qualities of Didion’s prose emerge precisely at the moments at which an anxious affectability of her character, her ever-‐present sense of the possible dissolution of the self, emerges: “particularly out here tonight, in this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter” (CNF 121). The tension between her admiration for ethical self-‐determination and her anxious vulnerability is on full display in Where I Was From, a work in which Didion sets out to redress what she calls “the pernicious nostalgia” of her early writings on California’s history (CNF 736). In the recounting of her own family’s history that frames the portraits of California life in this text, Didion casts explicit doubt on the air of nostalgia that is only obliquely questioned in early essays like “On Going Home.” In so doing, Didion represents her own family’s history through a surprisingly Marxian historical lens, at one point noting ruefully that the farmers of the Sacramento Valley in the period of time that she romanticized in “On Going Home” were in fact only “temporary chips in the greater game of capital formation” (986). Such observations add up into a work that interprets the anomie of the 1960s as a quality of life that had, in one form or another, always haunted the settlers of the United States. She begins her narrative with a few family remembrances of her “great-‐great-‐great-‐great-‐great-‐grandmother Elizabeth Scott,” who was born in 1766 in colonial Virginia and married at age 16 to “Old Colonel Ben Hardin, the hero of so many Indian wars,” with whom she migrated to a frontier settlement in modern-‐day Arkansas. Elizabeth is remembered, in Didion’s family lore, to “have hidden in a cave with her children (there were said to have been eleven, only eight of which got 215 recorded) during Indian fighting” and to have been a woman with “bright blue eyes and sick headaches” (956). Didion follows Elizabeth Hardin’s line on their transgenerational journey westward, noting how the “sick headaches” (migraines) accompanied the women in her family on their journey westward and became more pronounced in those who were born in California. Didion finishes her genealogical description by noting the following: These women in my family would seem to have been pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew. They could shoot and they could handle stock and when their children outgrew their shoes they could learn from the Indians how to make moccasins […] These were women, these women in my family, without much time for second thoughts, without much inclination toward equivocation, and later, when there was time or inclination, there developed a tendency, which I came to see as endemic, toward slight and major derangements, apparently eccentric pronouncements, opaque bewilderment and moves to places not on the schedule. (955-‐56) Didion’s encomium for her pioneer ancestors is here expressed with an equivocation that one does not find in “On Self-‐Respect.” While these women are described as, in one sense, perfectly self-‐determined (“given to breaking clean with everyone and everything”), this quality is paradoxically produced by lives governed by necessity, lives that do not offer the possibility for self-‐reflection (and thus do not offer the freedom of true ethical self-‐determination). When those women’s lives are 216 at least putatively freed from that necessity, when they have “time for second thoughts,” the integrity of their subjectivity seems to erode. This account of Didion’s family history is also distinguished from those in Slouching toward Bethlehem by the prominent place Indians play in the story. Indians both enable and threaten the “breaking clean” enacted by these women and their children, teaching (as in Turner’s account) invaluable skills for self-‐reliance in the wilderness but also violently breaching the integrity of the domestic space. At the center of this narrative is the account of Narcissa Cornwall quoted in “On Self-‐ Respect.” It is quoted in Where I Was From at length, abruptly introduced and without commentary. It is remarkable enough to consider here in its entirety: We were about ten miles from the Umpqua River and the Indians living there would come and spend the greater part of the day. There was one who spoke English, and he told Mother the Rogue River Indians were coming to kill us. Mother told them that if they troubled us, in the Spring the Bostons (the Indian name for the white people) would come out and kill them all off. Whether this had any effect or not I don’t’ know, but anyway they did not kill us. But we always thought they would come one day for that purpose. One day Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was filling with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it […] As soon as Father noticed them he got up and got his pistols and asked the Indians to go out and see him shoot. They followed him out, but kept at a distance. The pistols were a great curiosity to them. I doubt if they had ever 217 seen any before. As soon as they were all out of the cabin Mother barred the door and would not let them in when they got on their ponies and road away. They never returned to trouble us any more. (954-‐55) Narcissa’s tale (one can not help but think Didion’s fascination with the episode results in part from the temptingly allegorical name of her ancestor who recounts it) involves familiar tropes of frontier narratives as well as an uncanny quality. The Indians, presented with a familiar credulousness, are at the same time almost unbelievably spectral in their ability to enter the home unnoticed. The total lack of description and the fact that the mother’s remark that identifies the Indians remains unwritten seems to emphasize their inability to be interpolated. The episode takes on added significance when one considers its historical context: the year after the encounter in the Cornwall family’s cabin, a series of settler massacres and Native reprisals in Southern Oregon would launch the Rogue River Indian War, resulting in hundreds of deaths and resolving in the restriction of the Rogue River tribes on a reservation. 74 In this moment of contact, the threat of violence literally shuts the door on other modes of interaction. In an essay contemplating similar representations of the victims of “the relentless violence of colonialism as a modality of primitive accumulation” in a much different spatial context—Ireland during the time of the famine (coincidentally the very years that the Cornwalls were living in Southern Oregon)—theorist David 74 For an overview of the history of the Rogue River war and its effects on Indigenous nations in Oregon, see E.A. Schwartz, The Rogue River War and Its Aftermath, 1850-‐1980. 218 Lloyd considers a set of representational oddities that haunts colonialists’ representations of the victims of colonial violence. In a reading of multiple firsthand accounts of English travelers and settlers’ encounters with the victims of the famine, Lloyd notes that these encounters are often staged at the threshold of a domestic space in which the spectral indigent Irish threaten to breach (“The Indigent Sublime” 159). The liminal space of the threshold mediates the peculiar psychology of the encounters described. A potential moment of recognition in fact manifests a moment of non-‐recognition that “antithetically dissolves the distance on which the integrity of the observing subject depends, leading to panic and dread. Simultaneously failing to perceive the other as a subject and yet feeling the vertigo of dissolving and merging with that other, the observer confronts the precariousness of subjecthood itself” (“The Indigent Sublime” 163-‐64). Lloyd characterizes the aesthetics of these moments as the “indigent sublime.” This sublimity, more Burkean than Kantian, does not reaffirm the integrity of the subject in the apprehension of the incomprehensible, but rather threatens the dissolution of the observing subject itself at “the boundary that marks the division between the human and the nonhuman within the human” (163). These encounters attempt to resolve into an “act of distancing” that ultimately fails, “the boundary between the spectator and the still human object seems constantly to dissolve, with profoundly disturbing, haunting effects” (163). It does not require much of an analogic leap to see a similar aesthetic, an “Indigenous sublime,” at work in Narcissa’s account, and in the “haunting effects” that linger in Didion’s reproduction of it. The spectral Indians that appear in the 219 cabin are treated with an uneasy blend of human hospitality and the threat of inhuman violence when they are “invited outside” to watch the father shoot pistols that could at any minute be aimed at them; they were barred from the interior and they “never returned to trouble” the settlers again, yet Didion warns us that this is not so, that Indians are still part of the donnee “in one guise or another” (CNF 111). The Cornwalls’ encounter with the Indians along Cabin Creek is thus posed as a sort of primal scene through which the other inhuman forces constantly threaten to dissolve the integrity of the subject in Didion’s work. Whether “the rattlesnakes in the wash” in Death Valley or the children in “High Kindergarten” in the Haight-‐Ashbury, Didion’s encounters with the figures of anomie are frequently represented through frontier allegories. These allegories ask Didion’s readers to interpret the persistent sense of the “precariousness of subjecthood itself” that pervades her writing through her own identification as a child of the frontier. Didion never represents the violence of the frontier in the context of the sort of ethical critique within which Wallace Stegner framed the genocidal violence of nineteenth-‐century westward expansion. Instead, Didion paints dispassionate portraits of the precarity of the settler subject itself, a subject imagined as having been produced by the violent conflict with the Indigenous other and the non-‐human world. It is Didion’s very identification with her own “frontier heritage” that allows her writing to dramatize to such devastating effect the violence that constituted and continues to constitute the putative self-‐determination of the “American character.” 220 The Buffalo, the Bear, and the Indian: Frontier Allegory, Animality and Indigeneity in the Life Writing of Oscar Zeta Acosta and N. Scott Momaday Despite their broad differences in background and politics, each of the authors I have considered thus far have all regarded the frontier binary as offering a clear point of identification. Kerouac, Spicer, Stegner, and Didion identified themselves as settlers, even when that identification was the starting point of a critique, or the initial identification in a narrative of settler indigenization. For Oscar Zeta Acosta and N. Scott Momaday, however, that easy identification with the “pioneer” was denied to them by their identification with nations whose sovereign claims were violated by Anglo settler colonization. Both authors represent their own vexed relationship with familiar frontier narratives as central to the development of their own identities and their attempts to imagine an Indigenous alternative to settler sovereignty. Momaday, in multiple interviews, cites his earliest literary influence as pulp Western writer Will James and has written on the life of Billy the Kid in multiple poetic, fictional, and non-‐fiction works (e.g., “Online Interview”). In a late essay, “Dreaming of Place,” Momaday paints a portrait of Billy that is nothing short of Emersonian in its depiction of the epic power this figure exerts over the New Mexican landscape: “There are certain people who by their sheer force of their presence seem to determine the reality of a given place. They have such complete dominion within it that it cannot be said to exist, except in relation to them” (Man 210). Elsewhere, Momaday stresses how narratives must be understood as “taking 221 place” and he presents Billy as a figure who, in his rise to legend, has achieved just this sort of conquest (Man 187). 75 Compare Momaday’s Billy to Emerson’s ecstatic celebration of Columbus’s landing in “Nature”: When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of America;—before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-‐groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelope great actions. (Emerson 45). Both passages imagine an almost metaphysical link between personality and place. For Momaday, however, this connection cannot be described as an individual transcending the specificity of his or her existence into an epic landscape. Instead, landscapes gain their specificity by virtue of the heroic personalities that define them. The examples of personalities and places that Momaday selects—Billy the Kid and Lincoln County, Georgia O’Keefe and her ranch Abiquiu, and an anonymous Ojibwa medicine man and the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota—are figures who, by virtue of their actions and artistic accomplishments, imagine a mode of being in a particular space that exceeds the personal to become a story that defines a shared experience. In this sense Momaday shares with Stegner a postmodern understanding of place as a construction of culture. For Stegner in “A Sense of 75 Momaday’s pun on taking place is also used to great effect in relating literary narrative to settler colonialism by New Zealand literary scholar Alex Calder in The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand (as evidenced by its title and subtitle). 222 Place,” this constructivist view of place is celebrated; our ability to make and remake place through language is presented as the quality that was forgotten by the hypermobile frontiersmen and that which contemporary Westerners might regain in order to imagine a more ecologically responsible relationship to the land. For Momaday in “Dreaming of Place,” however, the process whereby narratives like that of Billy the Kid take place is not represented as a palliative to the troubles of the contemporary West. The essay makes an abrupt shift in tone in its final pages, as Momaday’s attention turns from encomiums to the epic figures mentioned above to a remembrance of an encounter with his friend Drum Hadley in the old plaza of Santa Fe. Hadley is introduced matter-‐of-‐factly as “having just returned from a cattle drive in Mexico” (Man Made of Words 211). Momaday’s introduction of Hadley by way of a description of his participation in this seemingly anachronistic event masks Hadley’s unusual—and telling—background. Poet, rancher, and conservationist Hadley grew up on the East Coast as the heir to the Anheiser-‐Busch fortune, but came West to attend college in the late 1960s and thereby connected with various prominent countercultural figures, including Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg (Benke; “Poet Drummond Hadley”). Hadley distinguished himself from his Beat contemporaries, however, by actually pursuing a ranching fantasy, buying a spread near the New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico borders in 1971, where he has worked an active cattle ranch and advocated for the preservation of delicate ecosystems and ranching cultures of both sides of the US-‐Mexico border ever since (Benke). 223 In Momaday’s telling, however, Hadley is just a cowboy who shares Momaday’s passion for poetry—Momaday describes the two conversing “in trimeter and pentameter.” His only other description of Hadley is of his bearing: “Drum is surely one of the most easygoing of men, deliberate and imperturbable, essentially in possession of himself” (211). The narration of the seemingly unremarkable episode ends with a description of Hadley exchanging “nods with a man in the doorway, a drifter as far as I could tell, and no doubt an acquaintance of long standing, so much pure recognition was there in the moment at which their eyes met” (211). When Momaday asks Hadley if he had met the man before, Hadley replies, “‘I never saw him before. But he is a vaquero, a real one, and there is a look about such men.’ I pondered this, and in a moment I was nearly overcome with something like loneliness, a sense of exclusion and disaffectation. It was a strange moment for me, the moment of truth and exile, as it were. I was an Indian among cowboys” (211). This episode is essential for unpacking the essay’s broader themes of place and character. In this moment of dis-‐identification, Momaday casts the place-‐taking power of character in an entirely new light. In “The Other Question,” Homi Bhabha notes that “colonial fantasy plays a crucial part … in everyday scenes of subjectification.” Bhabha argues that colonial fantasy is not “the object of desire but its setting, not an ascription of prior identities but their production in the syntax of the scenario of racist discourse” (33, emphasis mine). He describes the colonized subject’s reaction to this “colonial desire” by citing Fanon, who argues that colonial discourse can incite “the most primitive defense reactions, such as turning against oneself, into an opposite, projection, negation …” in the colonized (Fanon cited in 224 Bhabha 33). In this place made by vaqueros and cowboys, Momaday—who, while a Kiowa rather than a citizen of a tribe Indigenous to Santa Fe, grew up largely in the Jimez Pueblo and has lived in New Mexico for years—feels not only a sense of exclusion from a group, but a sense of exile from place. While Hadley, a Euro-‐ American with no childhood ties to the region, walks the plaza “essentially in possession of himself,” Momaday experiences an alienation, a “turning against oneself” that also grants him perspective on the process of place-‐making he has been exploring throughout the essay. He enters a moment of “truth and exile.” In the final sentence of the essay, and in his collection Man Made of Words, Momaday acknowledges that he resides in a place constructed around the frontier binary, a setting defined by a “cowboys and Indians” fantasy that casts him as an exile. Momaday’s narration of the moment of shared recognition between Hadley and the anonymous vaquero speaks to one reason why a comparison of Momaday and Acosta’s writing practice is so compelling, despite these writers’ broad differences of politics and sensibility. Momaday sees himself fixed in a transnational colonial discourse in which the US-‐Mexico border is no barrier to a mode of solidarity (between cowboy and vaquero) that excludes him completely. Acosta is remembered as a figure who worked to achieve a very different form of transnational solidarity in his calls for a decolonization of Aztlán. In Acosta’s imagining of this decolonial struggle, Chicanas/os have an Indigenous claim to sovereignty over the territory that spans the southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. In this sense, my reading of Momaday’s and Acosta’s writing on the US-‐Mexico borderlands underscores one of the central arguments of this 225 dissertation: that the settler colonial imaginary and US state ideology are mutually supporting, but not identical formations. In the palimpsest of overlapping claims to sovereignty and belonging that make up the borderlands, neither Indigenous nor settler colonial solidarities are contained by state borders. The Chicano nationalist movement proves an exceptionally fraught and compelling case study for understanding how the settler colonial imaginary shapes political and literary rhetoric in the borderlands. While figures like Acosta (as I will explore in greater detail below), envisioned Chicano nationalism as an indigenist revolt against white colonialism, this indigenist approach is not characteristic of the entire movement. In The Frontiers of the Historical Imagination, Kerwin Klein notes that Chicano nationalism is marked, on the one hand, by an indigenist rhetoric that is “the frontier romance in revolt: spirit, consciousness, heritage, blood, power, destiny, all rooted in the soil, the homeland described in Aztec tradition as Aztlán, the place of origin” and, on the other, by narratives that recognize that “Mexicano culture could not pretend to an uninterrupted holism” and that explore, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, how “the new mestiza copes” with the plural nature of her heritage “by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity … [and] a plural personality.” Noting Anzaldúa’s commitment to a “composite” or hybrid identity and her claim that “the future belongs to the Mestiza,” because the future “depends on the straddling of two or more cultures,” Klein draws a provocative parallel between Anzaldúa’s conception of mestizaje and Turner’s “ascending dialectic” in the frontier thesis (Klein, Anzaldúa cited in Klein, 271). 76 76 Erik Altenbernd and I discuss this passage in greater detail in “The Significance of 226 However tenuous the parallels between the “fluidity of American life” on Turner’s frontier and the plural hybridity of Anzaldua’s borderlands, Klein’s analysis in many ways anticipated current critical Chicana/o scholarship that has taken Chicano nationalism to task for embracing a “hegemonic mestizaje” that risks effacing Indigenous nations’ claims to the territory Chicano activists imagine as Aztlán (Olguin 31). Scholars like Ben Olguin and Nicole Guidotti-‐Hernandez have argued that the indigenist rhetoric that animated the Chicano nationalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s risk effacing a history of Mexican American complicity with Anglo settler colonialism’s violence against Indigenous peoples. 77 Olguin pointedly calls for a reevaluation of “Chicana/o identity” as a category “inherently oppositional to white American settler colonialism” by calling for a distinction between “indigenist” and “Indigenous” claims (34), arguing that the former constitute claims to belonging not dissimilar from the appropriative mode of “settler indigenization” discussed in the readings of Beat Generation Indian play I discuss in chapter 1. Olguin’s critique, articulated as it is by a Chicano scholar working to redress the political orientation of his own community, must be approached with circumspection by scholars outside the Chicana/o and Native communities it the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History” (138). 77 Both Olguin and Guidotti-‐Hernandez’s examine how, in the words of Guidotti-‐ Hernandez, “the resistance/victimization dichotomy and that of mestizaje as equal to Indian may not have the same critical purchase in this historical moment as in the past and are perhaps in need of revision” (24). In articulating this revision, both focus on the role Mexican Americans played in genocidal violence against tribes native to what is now the US Southwest,and consider how the legacy of that violence is reflected in contemporary articulations of Chicana/o identity (Guidotti-‐ Hernandez 31; Olguin 33). 227 directly concerns. The questions that it raises, however, demand to be taken seriously by any critical perspective on settler colonialism. If writers like Kerouac and Spicer present clear examples of settler colonial allegories of dissent, the oppositional discourse of Chicana/o nationalism stands as a liminal case that probes the boundaries of “settler” and “Indigenous” as meaningful descriptive categories. While scholars like Olguin and Guidotti-‐Hernandez make convincing arguments regarding the complicity of Chicana/o subjects with settler colonialism, there is also no doubt that Anglo settler colonialists turned many of the same spatial and discursive strategies employed in the effort to eliminate Indigenous nations against the Mexican American subjects who once aided them in the conquest of Indigenous territory. Furthermore, as Kerouac’s representations of Mexico make clear, the distinction between Indian and Mexican remain blurry in the white settler imagination. That being the case, how can—or should—settler scholars differentiate between the Chicana/o nationalists’ claims to sovereignty and belonging from those of American Indians? Comparing Momaday’s fiction and life writing to the autobiographical novels of Oscar Zeta Acosta provide compelling texts through which to consider this question. While I am not in any way attempting to read these authors as paradigmatic representatives of either American Indian or Chicana/o resistance of the period, their unique literary responses to the racist and colonial oppression they faced nonetheless offers a valuable perspective on the divergences and parallels between Chicana/o and American Indian resistance during this period. 228 Not only was Acosta central to the literary and activist imagination of Aztlán as a space of Chicana/o resistance, but he was also close to the generation of white countercultural writers who, in the words of Acosta’s friend Hunter S. Thompson, “picked up the torch dropped by Kerouac” (Thompson cited in Martinez 310). 78 Thompson infamously cast Acosta as the ambiguously ethnic but presumed “Samoan” Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Autobiography of A Brown Buffalo, Acosta suggests that Thompson’s usage is not the first time he had been presumed “Samoan”—his ethnically ambiguous phenotype allowed white people to read him as an improbable national identity that conjures images of an American imperialism that was happening in a reassuring elsewhere. Thompson’s narrative is structured like one of the “archetypal Westerns” (in)famously outlined by Leslie Fiedler‘s Return of the Vanishing American. The plot of Fear and Loathing climaxes in the psychedelic cacophony of Las Vegas with “the confrontation … of a transplanted WASP and a radically alien other, the Indian,” but ultimately resolves in the “metamorphosis of the WASP into something neither white nor red” when the “white man” and his “radically alien other” are bound together in a “homosexual alliance against the respectable white world around them” (Return of the Vanishing American 14). 79 78 This quotation serves as an epigram for Manuel Luis Martinez’s excellent chapter on Thompson in Countering the Counterculture, which offers an overview of Thompson’s simultaneous embrace and critique of his Beat Generation forbearers and his relation to frontier narratives (118). 79 In Fiedler’s formulation, “mythologies created out of [white Americans’] meeting with and response to the Indians has proven sufficiently adaptable to describe out relationships with Negroes and Polynesians” (27; my emphasis). While Fiedler’s claim that this elision of difference is universally true in the white American imagination is contestable on any number of grounds, Fear and Loathing certainly 229 In Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, however, Acosta casts himself as the frontiersman in this familiar plot. In narrating the nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his job as a legal aid lawyer, Acosta’s first-‐person narrator imagines himself trapped in the same cowboy/Indian binary that Momaday decries in “Dreaming in Place.” Acosta reflects on how, growing up in a first-‐generation immigrant family in Riverbank, California, the term Indio/Indian functioned in his mother’s speech as an evocation of libidinal savagery. He writes that his “mother … always referred to [his] father as an ‘Indio’ when he got drunk” and told Oscar to “quit behaving like an Indian” when he was caught kissing his sister one day in the backyard. The term also functions for his mother as a marker of national difference: “when Bob refused to get up and salute the American flag, he was just another one of ‘those lazy Indians’” (86). Acosta presents “Indianness” as a category that defies state ideology and female attempts to control male bodies and desires. The self-‐evident similarities between this conception of “Indianness” and that promoted by Kerouac and other Beat writers becomes even more pronounced in Acosta’s narration of the first dream he recorded, at the bequest of his psychologist Dr. Serbin (who haunts him like a personified superego throughout the opening of Autobiography): In my first recorded dream I suddenly find myself crawling snake-‐like through the bushes toward the top of a hill […] I am on a scouting mission for the Texas Rangers. Our last fort has been under siege for partakes in a tradition (perhaps most evident in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which Fiedler reads as paradigmatic) through which the racialized Other is imagined as the Indian. 230 days. We were without food and water. All through the night we heard their savage yells and tom-‐toms. Coyotes and rattlers lurk in the underbrush. I crawl carefully, my eyes in a squint just like I learned from Tom Mix. I place my ear to the ground and listen. There are at least 100 of them on horses, just due west of the ridge. I wriggle and writhe through the wild wheat. Now I’m at the crest of a small, golden hill. I ever so quietly hang my brown, narrow eyes just an inch above the grass ... I am looking directly at black and white eagle feathers, I cannot see the faces or the heads of the wild Indians. With the grace and guts only a boy scout trained by Tom Mix and [white classmate who bullies the narrator growing up] Vernon Knecht can muster, I gently but rapidly pluck their feathers […] or symbols of bestiality, as Dr. Serbin said to me when I first reported the ancient dream to him. (86) In stark opposition to Dr. Gonzo’s role in Fear and Loathing as the “indistinguishable non-‐white other” (Return of the Vanishing American 12), in his dream narrative Acosta himself is cast as the frontier hero moving toward the confrontation with the Indian. That confrontation ends, in true Fiedlerean fashion, not with a violent conflict but with the appropriation of the sexually charged symbols of Indianness. Doctor Serbin’s interjection, suggesting that the dream’s true meaning is a desire for “bestiality,” foreshadows the embrace of animality that stands as a central trope in both Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. The fictional journeys of Acosta’s narrators in these books lead not only to 231 their own identification as “brown buffalo[s],” but to their identification of the polity they seek to represent in the reimagination of Aztlán as “cockroaches.” On the one hand, Acosta’s identification with the animal speaks to his rejection of Enlightenment norms of humanism. On the other, the conflation of the “savage” with the animal—here introduced by Doctor Serbin, but in various ways embraced by Acosta and his protagonists—is a familiar settler trope, and one that can be seen at work in the Samuel Johnson epigram of Hunter S. Thompson’s “savage journey into the heart of the American dream:” “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man” (Fear and Loathing front matter). If Acosta has become associated with the indigenist rhetoric of the “frontier romance in revolt,” his life writing represents his own movement toward that position, a struggle with the contradictions in his own identity that involved an effort to parse out a masculine, “wild,” and Mexican Indianness from a feminine, regulated, and American civility. That this story of becoming Indian has structural and tropic parallels to the white settler narratives of indigenization examined earlier in this dissertation should not, however, be read as a means to discredit Acosta’s claim on indigeneity or to denounce as illegitimate the decolonial aims of Chicano nationalism. In comparing Momaday and Acosta, it would be far too easy to succumb to the insidious tendency, in readings of settler colonial culture in the US context, to use the category “settler” to dismiss all racial and ethnic conflicts as epiphenomenal to an irreducible divide between whites and American Indians. Refusing to read Acosta as the ersatz-‐contrast to Momaday’s authentic original foregrounds important questions regarding how settlers read claims to indigeneity 232 in literature. In the post-‐frontier era, Indigenous peoples are discursively assaulted from both directions, as it were, by settler standards of “repressive authenticity” that work to delegitimize their claims and the ethnic fraudulence of “settler indigenization” that seeks to coopt those claims. 80 This situation demands from settler scholars reading Indigenous dissent an approach that avoids both the amplification of fraudulent voices and any implication that we could or should be the sole or even primary adjudicators of claims of indigeneity. Reading Indigenous narratives against familiar settler narratives of “taking place” provides one means of negotiating this fraught space. As it happens, Momaday, despite being an enrolled member of the Kiowa nation, has also faced critical attempts to de-‐legitimize his own claims to indigeneity by a settler critic, Jason Stevens, who reads his “representation of his Native American identity” as drawing “from powerful frontier archetypes that have framed the way white Americans conceive ethnicity” rather than “role play[ing] the West’s master discourse while maintaining the integrity of a Native American Heritage” (Stevens 599). In spite of the apparent absurdity of a challenge to the “integrity” of Momaday’s “Native American Heritage,” it is worth taking a moment to consider the extent to which Momaday’s claim to indigeneity differs from Acosta’s. While Acosta held mestizo Mexican heritage (his parents had emigrated), Momaday had a Kiowa father and a mother of Euro-‐American and Cherokee descent. Momaday grew up, 80 Fore more on repressive authenticity, see Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (163-‐214). Circe Sturm’s Becoming Indian offers a clear overview of the problem of ethnic fraudulence for contemporary Native communities (1-‐28). 233 and has lived as an adult, far from the ancestral or reservation lands of the Kiowa or the ancestral or national lands of the Cherokees. Acosta’s claim on indigeneity to California came only via his parents’ citizenship in the nation-‐state that ceded that territory to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe-‐Hidalgo. Acosta came to embrace an expansive Aztec Indigenous identity, whereas Momaday came to embrace his Kiowa heritage while also identifying and selectively appropriating from the cosmologies of those Native nations (particularly the Navajo and the Jimez Pueblo) he lived in as a child. The readings of Momaday and Acosta’s life writing and fiction that follow will not be embroiled in any attempt to categorically differentiate between Momaday’s and Acosta’s claims to indigeneity. Instead, by tracking how these authors both appropriate and write back against settler strategies of indigenization, I will work to illuminate how both authors exceed a rhetoric of the binary logic of the “frontier romance in revolt” by engaging with familiar settler tropes and narrative trajectories in ways that trouble the settler norms those tropes and narratives support. At crucial moments, Acosta and Momaday both work to subvert the settler colonial logic of the frontier binary, and not simply by reveling in difference and hybridity in the face of colonial discourse’s attempt to fix Indigenous subjects into stereotypes. Instead, their literary practices constitute modes of “taking place” that imagine a decolonial sociality that is not defined by the “mixedness” that Bhabha praises or by the Manichean identities of the frontier. Acosta and Momaday reject the idea—crucial to both normative conceptions of the ethnic nation-‐state and settler strategies of repressive authenticity—that Indigenous claims are contingent 234 upon ethnic purity or an unbroken cultural tradition. At the same time, both claim a “rootedness” in place that cannot be accounted for by a reading that imagines decolonial practice as the rejection of “fixity” or “arborescence.” Tracing Acosta and Momaday’s engagement with frontier tropes is a vital task for unpacking how both writers navigate this paradoxical position. In the readings that follow, I will trace how both writers narrate their own and their protagonists’ movements toward a politicized Indigenous identity, movements that they both narrate through a selective appropriation of the narrative structures and allegorical tropes of settler indigenization. II. Masculinity and the Rhetoric of Indigenizaiton in the Novels of Oscar Zeta Acosta The allegory of indigenization that Acosta conjures in his dream narrative is in many ways enacted on a broader scale in the narrative of self-‐discovery and radicalization presented in Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. In these two narratives, Acosta’s narrators stage a revolt against state liberalism and the mode of “ethnic-‐Americanism” associated with it in order to articulate a sovereignty claim that is presented as the defining issue for Chicano survival. In one of his speeches near the conclusion of Revolt, Acosta connects the violence of America’s global “frontier” to the modes of biopolitical management that Chicanos face in East Los Angeles: We may be the last generation of Chicanos if we don’t stop the war […] We are the Viet Cong of America. Tooner Flats is Mylai […] The poverty programs of Johnson, the Welfare of Roosevelt, Truman, 235 Eisenhower, and Kennedy, the New Deal and the Old Deal, The New Frontier as well as Nixon’s American Revolution […] these are further embellishments of the government’s pacification program. Therefore, there is only one solution: LAND […] We need our own government. We need our own flag and our own country. (200-‐ 201) While critiques that read the regulatory power of the welfare state as an extension of military violence are so familiar in contemporary ethnic studies that this analogy is taken as a given, it is worth considering how, in Acosta’s particular case, he arrived at it. Acosta’s resistance to liberalism emerged from personal experience with Johnson’s War on Poverty, an experience he narrates in The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo in a pointedly gendered manner. No author considered in this dissertation save Wallace Stegner (who served as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior in the Kennedy administration) was more intimately familiar with US state liberalism than Acosta. In 1967, Acosta took a job as a legal aid lawyer in Oakland, where he worked on the front lines of the “war on poverty.” While the legislative initiatives that funded Acosta’s job were inspired by Kennedy’s “new frontier,” in Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Acosta represents his work at the Legal Aid Society as anything but the masculine endeavor that Kennedy’s frontier rhetoric evoked. Autobiography, as intimated above, associates the work of the welfare state with femininity as a means of establishing the former’s meaninglessness. In the second chapter of Autobiography, the narrator Oscar 236 declares that he and his fellow legal aid attorneys “have the right motives. Our hearts are in the right place. It’s just that we aren’t competent. We haven’t the guts to really take them on. In point of fact, we aren’t lawyers, we are simply counselors of old women” (20). 81 He describes his clients, on the day he abandons his legal practice, as ‘‘five unkempt women with bloody noses and black eyes from the old man’s weekend drunk’’ (Autobiography 21). For Oscar, the work he was doing on behalf of the victims of gendered violence was a distraction from the “real” struggle for racial justice: “Doesn’t LBJ know that Watts burned in ’65? That Detroit rioted in ’66? That the Panthers started carrying guns in ’67? Am I to prevent all this with a carbon copy of a court order that compels a Negro janitor to pay child support for his nine kids?” (Autobiography 28). Acosta’s frustration with the juridical work he was doing emerged from his perception of the futility of a system that was structurally racist, but also from his perception that he was addressing intractable problems of gender, “natural” rather than political misogynistic behavior that the liberal state was attempting to regulate. In Acosta’s representation of the his time as a legal aid lawyer, not only does he represent women as the recipients of the welfare state’s aid, but as the regulatory force behind the work he is doing. Wracked by various physical and mental health problems, Oscar is only able to hold his professional life together thanks to the help of his elderly secretary, Pauline, who organizes his affairs so that he can function as a marginally effective public aid attorney. It is Pauline’s sudden death that sets the 81 To differentiate between the autobiographical narrators in Autobiography and Revolt, and in keeping with critical convention and the nomenclature Acosta deploys, I refer to the author as Acosta, the narrator of Autobiography as Oscar, and the narrator of Revolt as Zeta. 237 narrative of Autobiography in motion. Oscar shows up one morning, finds the maternal force that he had relied upon absent, and abandons to their fates the women waiting in his office seeking restraining orders against their husbands. After quitting, he heads out across San Francisco on a bender to steel himself to visit Doctor Serbin’s office, where he declares that he is quitting psychotherapy. Having divested himself of his profession and his quest for normative subjectivity, Oscar declares that he has “paid all [his] debts” and that “nothing remains but the joy of madness. Another wild Indian run amok” (42). Acosta thus represents his becoming Indian as a rejection of liberalism and a rejection of the feminine in favor of an unleashed masculinity. The hypermasculinity evinced in these scenes has obvious enough parallels in the work of the Beats. 82 Acosta works to differentiate himself from his Beat contemporaries, but in so doing reaffirms his heteromasculinist commitments: Ginsberg and those coffee houses with hungry looking guitar players never did mean shit to me. They never took their drinking seriously. And the fact of the matter is they got what was coming to them. It’s their tough luck if they ran out and got on the road with bums like Kerouac, then came back a few years later with their long hair and fucking marijuana up their asses, shouting Love and Peace and Pot. And still broke as ever. (Autobiography 18; emphasis in original) 82 For more on Acosta’s indebtedness to the Beat aesthetic (albeit with a very different reading of the political valence of that aesthetic debt), see A. Robert Lee’s “Chicanismo’s Beat Outrider” (158-‐76). 238 Oscar’s critique of the Beats hinges on their inability to prove their masculinity through drinking, their implied homosexuality (“long hair and fucking marijuana up their asses”), and their refusal of the normatively masculine sphere of production (“still as broke as ever”). While Acosta thus lays claim to a masculinity he represents as unattainable by his white countercultural peers, he also represents his becoming Indian as a transformation achieved by way of becoming white. Oscar “runs amok” straight to Ketchum, Idaho, which, he notes, is the burial place of Ernest Hemingway. As he undertakes this pilgrimage he experiments with imagining himself as different white movie stars. Picking up a beautiful white female hitchhiker, he describes his greeting by describing himself as embodying a familiar Western hero: “‘Want a ride?’ Steve McQueen says to the broad” (97). In a cowboy bar in Ketchum, a “pimply faced cowboy” asks him if he is “from around these parts.” Oscar replies, “Nah, I’m from Oklahoma” in what he describes as his “best Lee Marvin voice,” noting that, “luckily” he had on a “cowboy outfit” (102). No sooner has he ventriloquized the cowboy, however, than he starts playing Indian. The cowboy, sizing up Oscar’s complexion, asks “Cherokee?” “Nah, Blackfoot,” Lee Marvin replied. “That’s what I figured. Get lots of them up around these parts.” (97) Oscar goes on to bamboozle his interlocutors with a tale about being a chief who was travelling to Wyoming on a mission to buy buffalo, but stopped in Ketchum to pay his respects to Hemingway’s grave because he had once worked for him in Cuba. 239 While the comic episode is, on the one hand, a testament to Acosta’s ability to defy white people’s attempts to fix his identity, it also speaks to how his rejection of state liberalism followed familiar pathways of white countercultural dissent. Those pathways lead him toward the end of the narrative to Mexico, where, like Kerouac, he has a revelation in a brothel. It is there, enjoying his first sexual experience with a Mexican woman, that he declares he has become “a true son of the Indio from the mountains of Durango” (190). Oscar lives in Juarez with two Mexican sex workers until his money begins to run out, and after an altercation with the owner of the hotel in which he is staying, he is arrested. His trial is presided over by a female judge. The experience shakes his faith in his newfound identity: “Jesus H. Christ, I was being courtmartialed by a woman! In Spanish, at that!” (192). The judge accuses Oscar of being “a hippie,” fines him, and sends him back to the United States to “learn to speak [his] father’s language” (194). The liberal state, for Acosta, is universally aligned with misandry rather than racism. It is this encounter with a feminine juridical order in Mexico of the same sort he revolted against in the United States that leads Acosta to embrace a specifically Chicano nationalism. In Autobiography, Acosta presents his quarrel as not so much with white supremacy as with ideology (imagined as the production of a feminized state) itself: “I have no ideology. I have been an outlaw out of practical necessity” (76). Having been disabused of the notion that Mexico would offer him a space of escape, he crosses the border back into El Paso and calls his brother, explaining that he has “failed to find the answer to [his] search. One sonofabitch tells [him] [he] is 240 not a Mexican, and the other says [he is] not an American” (196). It is then that his brother suggests that he should seek out the Brown Berets in East Los Angeles. Acosta’s critical champions have suggested that the often absurdist and comic story of Oscar’s politicization offers more a satirical object for critique than a model for identification. Michael Hames-‐Garcia argues that Autobiography presents a narrative in which “what seems like a search for essential ethnic identity is in fact a satirical critique of the standards of authenticity often implied in such a search” (470) and that this satiric critique also offers a “critical representation” of Acosta’s protagonists’ “sexist nationalism” (475). Reading the ironic self-‐awareness in Acosta’s life writing as a de facto self-‐critique, however, neglects the sense in which irony can serve to insulate literary representations from critique rather hold them up for it. As Slavoj Zizek argues, ironic distance can become a tool “to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them” (30). One need only look as far as Hunter S. Thompson’s ironic representations of his own sexism to see this dynamic at work. The question of whether or not Autobiography exceeds its framing as a narrative of settler indigenization thus necessarily hinges on more than the perceived irony of its narrator. Parallel to his tale of becoming Indian, Acosta tells a story of becoming animal that offers the potential for just such a reading. Acosta’s narrative of becoming “the Brown Buffalo” does in many ways conform to familiar tropes that relate Indians to animals, and animality to masculine virility. Acosta identifies with the brown buffalo in moments he also identifies with 241 stereotypes of Indianness in remarks such as “firewater brings out the real brownness in this buffalo” (36). As Hames-‐Garcia notes, Acosta’s self-‐representation in Autobiography begins with masculine bodily abjection (475). During his time as a legal aid lawyer, Oscar is plagued by bleeding ulcers, a deep shame of his own weight, and years of impotence. It is only when he becomes “a wild Indian run amok” that he begins to come to terms with his own body, regaining his virility. He describes his first (marginally) successful sexual experience after leaving his legal practice as concluding with a premature ejaculation that is like “thundering across brown plains, the entire herd of buffalos […] at my rear” (65). Despite such uses, Acosta’s identification with animals evolves into a rhetoric that is not coextensive with that of his Chicano nationalism or hypermasculinity. The distinctiveness of Acosta’s animal identifications becomes most apparent in the conclusion to Autobiography, when Acosta declares that he is “a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice” (199). He explains his consensual identification as a Brown Buffalo as he fantasizes about how he will rally the Brown Berets. In a rousing imagined speech about how “Indians” like him had been stripped of their authentic spirituality by Christianity and turned into “half-‐slaves” by Anglo and Spanish colonization on either side of the border that turned them into “citizens by default,” Oscars suggests that the first thing the movement needs is a new name. We need a new identity. A name and a language all our own … So I propose that we call ourselves … what’s this, you don’t want me to attack our religion? Well, all right … I propose we call ourselves the Brown Buffalo people … No, it’s not an Indian name, for 242 Christ sake … don’t you get it? The buffalo, see? Yes, the animal that everyone slaughtered. Sure, both the cowboys and the Indians are out to get him … and, because we do have roots in our Mexican past, our Aztec ancestry, that’s where we get the brown from … (198; emphasis in original) In this formulation, Acosta imagines a consensual mode of identity for the East LA radicals that refuses both logic of a “frontier romance in revolt” and of a “hegemonic mestizaje” (Klein 271; Olguin 31). This “new identity” embraces Aztec heritage and the specificity of Mexican racialization (“that’s where we get the brown from”), but does not ground itself primarily in an “uninterrupted holism” of ethnic identity (Klein 271). Instead, the primary point of identification is the animal victim of an eliminatory violence that exceeds the terms of the mythic “cowboy and Indian” binary. In Revolt of the Cockroach People, the revolutionary sociality Acosta imagines in the conclusion of Autobiography is extended to another figure of animal abjection, “the cockroach people [...] you know, the little beasts that everybody steps on” (135). “The cockroach people” moniker is used almost interchangeably with the “brown buffalo” identification but is also pointedly more expansive: Acosta refers to “Chicanos and other cockroaches,” and even describes white allies like Robert F. Kennedy as “dream[ing] cockroach dreams” (47). In court he tells a judge that “a hippie is like a cockroach. So are the Beatniks. So are the Chicanos” (228). Hames-‐ Garcia argues that the “cockroach people” identification speaks to how 243 [Acosta] sought complementary terms that could expand the scope of his constituency beyond Chicanos. In rejecting an essentialist model of ethnic identity, Acosta retained a postpositivist realist sense of Chicano identity as a meaningful category with much in common with other similarly meaningful categories. Filipino Americans, for example, cofounded the United Farm Workers, and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of African Americans greatly influenced Chicano Movement organizations like La Raza Unida and the Brown Berets. (473) While such a reading gives a clear sense of how Acosta’s more expansive radical identifications might square with other ethnic-‐American struggles, it does not answer the key question of how these broader identifications shape Acosta’s representation of Chicano indigeneity. Despite the expansive moments of identification cited above, The Revolt of the Cockroach People works to justify a Chicano sovereign claim on the territory of Aztlán. While Chicano/a nationalism did indeed articulate itself as an intersectional struggle with many communities, one group entirely absent from Acosta’s representations of that struggle is American Indians. Acosta’s embrace of the rhetoric of Indianness is, throughout both Autobiography and Revolt, apparently contingent upon the erasure of those Indigenous polities within the borders of Aztlán for whom a sovereign claim to a colonized territory is not a recently developed strategy, but a central and historically consistent fact of their political realities. 244 The scene in which Zeta comes to embrace the creation of a sovereign territory as the “one solution” to Chicano survival offers crucial insights into how the expansive nature of Acosta’s politics relates to his failure to represent American Indians in his imagination of a sovereign Aztlán. After his loss in the race for Los Angeles County Sheriff, Acosta retreats to Acapulco, where he stays with his brother, who relates to him the story of Lopitos, a folk hero of Acapulco: “He was a little Indian. He came out of the mountains here in the state of Guerrero. He saw this mountain here that we’re standing on. It was empty. Owned by an American millionaire. He decided that the land should be used by the people” (186). Lopitos spreads the word far and wide to “the Indians and the Mexicans, the poor ones without land,” that they should “settle here on this mountain” (187). The settlers, led by Lopitos, eventually succeeded in getting the government to buy off the American owner and granting the individual settlers title (187). Zeta’s brother declares that, in the United States, “until the people, the blacks, the Chicanos, the white liberals and the white radicals” chose to “go all the way … like Lopitos,” they will not succeed in altering the status quo (188). The sense in which the Lopitos of the story goes “all the way,” is, however, remarkably Lockean in how it imagines the relation between the people and the land. The anonymous American’s ownership of the mountain is deemed illegitimate because the land “should be used by the people” (186; my italics). The resolution of the story isn’t the transformation of the economic system, or a deposing of the Mexican federal government that is complicit with American economic exploitation of the country. Instead, the resolution emerges when the government buys off the 245 American in order to transfer title to the settlers. Beliefs about use value of land and the legitimation of title played a central role in the justification of both the dispossession of American Indian tribes and of Tejano and Californio ranchers deemed to be insufficiently productive titleholders by Anglo settlers. 83 In this title dispute, the terms are reversed—the American is the unproductive titleholder in the sovereign state of Mexico—but it nonetheless hinges on a logic familiar to settler colonialism. In Settler Common Sense, Mark Rifkin notes that settler colonialism in the United States is premised on a “Lockean logic” that “privileges labor as the basis for property,” marking the admixture of labor and land as “a sacrosanct relation that precedes and exceeds the specific arrangements of any given political order” (39). Lopitos’s seizure of the American’s land in Guerrero is emancipatory, but an ideology that justifies the seizure of “empty” land in the name of a “sacrosanct relation” between labor and property is hardly one that has served the cause of Indigenous sovereignty in the broader scope of history. It is curious, then, that the rhetoric that Acosta represents Zeta and his allies employing in court and on the streets is not this economic rhetoric of use value or of redistribution. While much of their rhetoric is drawn both from a declension narrative that references a lost Aztec golden age, it is equally drawn from mythic representations of an American Indian past. In the climactic rally leading up to Zeta’s failed election as sheriff, the actor Anthony Quinn serves as the keynote speaker. Quinn introduces himself and announces that he is going to read “a little 83 For examples of how theories of allodial title were brought to bear by Anglo-‐ Americans against the Californios, see Leonard Pitt’s Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-‐speaking Californians, 1846-‐1890 (e.g., 103). 246 speech which some Indian chief gave before congress around 1790.” While presumably a referent to the Seneca Chiefs’ letter to George Washington of December 1, 1790, the text read by Quinn in the novel is apocryphal and anachronistic. 84 As he begins his speech, Zeta, listening in the crowd, says, “I do not hear the words. I don’t need to. I become lost in a trance of my own speech to the jury”—a reference to his speech in defense of the “St. Basil 21” (a fictionalized reference to the Biltmore Six), which invoked a mythic history of Aztlán and of historic Chicano identity—“which is the same speech that Quinn is now reading” (174). The speech Quinn makes, however, reads like a part written for an Indian in a Western: And now, my White Father, you would have us leave our homes on the range, in the streams where we have hunted and fished for so many moons … . And you whom we welcomed and fed, now you would enclose us in a land that is unknown to us, a land without the buffalos which we have learned to live upon … You would put us in a corner, in a corral, surrounded by wire with iron pricks, you call it a reservation … as if we were criminals or animals to be caged under lock … (175) 84 In December of 1790, the Seneca Chiefs wrote George Washington with their grievances in a letter similar in its focus to the text that Quinn reads in Revolt. It begins, “The voice of the Seneca Nation speaks to you the great Councillor (sic), in whose heart, the wise men of the thirteen fires, have placed their wisdom. It may be very small in your ears, & we therefore entreat you to hearken with attention. For we are about to speak of things which are to us very great” (“To George Washington”). 247 Quinn’s speech concludes in “an orgy of nationalism” as “solid, tight, a rabid group … the crowd melts into one consciousness and no man is alone in that madness any longer” (175). Acosta’s expansive politics of redistribution, so evident in the “Lopitos” episode and evinced throughout Autobiography and Revolt by his animalist rhetoric, valorizes a seizure of the commons that is not predicated upon ethnic essentialism, but that extends to all victims of capitalism and state violence and their allies. In imagining this revolutionary sociality, Acosta is remarkably cognizant of the dangers of the literary politics of representation. Unlike Kerouac and other Beat writers who earnestly sought to bring “the message … down to everybody” (Kerouac, Dharma Bums 430), Acosta sought, as he put it in a candid quotation to Hunter S. Thompson, “to never talk down. Hell, that trip’s been done, it’s over. The idea now is to make people think, to force them to think” (Acosta quoted in “Strange Rumblings” 225). Acosta’s self-‐parody is most strident when his autobiographical protagonists imagine themselves to be able to speak for the Vatos Locos, who had no interest in ideological representation. Despite the egalitarian and participatory nature of Acosta’s political commitments on this macro level, in imagining the specificity of Chicano oppression, Acosta consistently relies on an erasure of the specificity of the sovereign claims of American Indian nations in order to appropriate to Chicano nationalism a broad indigenist claim grounded more in Hollywood tropes of cowboys and Indians than in the complex and multilayered history of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance in the southwestern United States. In portraying his own embrace of 248 indigeneity as a narrative of masculine regeneration that embraces an Indigenous heritage quite distinct from his own in order to enable a Lockean occupation of the commons, Acosta articulates a narrative of separatist nationalism that leans heavily on a familiar settler narrative of isopolitical, rather than decolonial, liberation. III. Billy the Kid, Postmodern Form, and “The Morality of Indian Hating” in the Work of N. Scott Momaday Identification with frontier “heroes,” becoming Indian, and becoming animal: these tropes mark the life writing of N. Scott Momaday as profoundly as they do that of Oscar Zeta Acosta. While Acosta’s identification with Hollywood Western heroes has been relatively neglected in the critical conversation surrounding his work, questions regarding Momaday’s identification with frontier heroes—particularly with his representation of Billy the Kid in a cycle of pieces written for the Santa Fe New Mexican entitled “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid,” later reworked under the same title as the fantasies of the semi-‐autobiographical Kiowa and Navajo character Grey in The Ancient Child—have been central to the critical conversation surrounding his work. This often-‐heated debate has focused on foundational theoretical questions about how Momaday’s literary representations relate to the grand narrative of the frontier. In an early reading of the novel, Louis Owens, in Other Destinies, suggests that Grey’s obsession with Billy in The Ancient Child can be read as a sort of Bakhtinian gesture whereby she “wrenches the American myth … into a new context,” appropriating it into the “rich heteroglossia” of her world, one in which “the disturbing chasm between past and present, ‘civilization’ and ‘savagism’ does 249 not exist” (119). In his controversial 2001 article on Momaday and frontier myth in American Literature, Jason Stevens argues that “Momaday’s representation of his Native American identity draws from powerful frontier archetypes that have framed the way white Americans conceive ethnicity” (599). Stevens suggests, in a rather reductive reading of Owens’s application of Bakhtin, that “to argue, as Louis Owens does, that frontier figures like Billy the Kid in The Ancient Child are appropriated strictly for parody is to presume that the dimensions of Native and non-‐Native and of Indian and American are more clearly separated in Momaday’s voice than his work manifests” (600). For Stevens, the separation of “Indian and American” that Momaday’s work supposedly blurs is defined by what white anthropologists have to say about Kiowa culture (e.g., 628 n. 22). As a result of Momaday’s appropriation of frontier themes, Stevens reads Momaday’s work as defined by an irresolvable tension between a “postmodern conception of Native American identity” that understands “Kiowa-‐ness as a process rather than a state of being,” and a conception of identity that understands “ancestral identity as a motive force […] cyclically retracing its tendency back to the wild” (624). 85 In his 2005 essay 85 That Stevens leans so heavily on theorizations of ethnic identity is telling. His reading of Momaday is animated by a logic that depends on reducing Indigenous peoples from citizens of autonomous nations to ethnic subjects. Stevens’s reading operates on the premise that, in Alyosha Goldstein’s pithy summation of the racialization of Indigenous peoples, if there ever was such a thing as US colonialism, it has long since been consigned to the past and does not fundamentally matter in the present. From this perspective, a spectral colonial past persists only insofar as Indigeneity remains legible as racial difference […] Indians therefore ostensibly vanish twice: first, they are erased as sovereign peoples with rightful claims to lands on which they live or they once inhabited, and second, they disappear in the embrace of contemporary multicultural inclusion. (1078) 250 “Momaday in the Movement Years, “ Robert Warrior excoriates Stevens for his “formulation of identity,” which, Warrior says, sounds “more like the fantasies of someone whose knowledge of what it means to be a contemporary native is cursory at best” (164). Warrior suggests that “Stevens fixates on Momaday’s identity, charting what he supposes is Momaday’s inner consciousness through examining his public statements […] . Without a single reference to a work of psychology, Stevens purports to explore the depths of Momaday’s consciousness” (163, 164). The result, Warrior argues, is a methodology that resembles “an ethnic panopticon in which non-‐Native critics stand by and watch Natives struggle with their identities” (165). What unites all three of these readings is the sense that The Ancient Child occasions a crisis of interpretation centered on the stakes and possibilities of Momaday’s authorship and its relation to the grand narrative of US settler colonialism. For Owens, the presentation of “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid” within The Ancient Child overcomes the binaristic logic of the frontier by subsuming it within the heteroglossia of Momaday’s imagination; for Stevens it represents Momaday being subsumed within that frontier logic. For Warrior, the critical discussion by non-‐Native critics surrounding these issues is condemnable because it reifies models of non-‐Native critique that enforce a standard of “repressive authenticity” (Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation … 162) Warrior’s argument extends, however, to a position that 251 seems to preclude any non-‐Native reading of Momaday’s literary work that would relate it to those questions of Indigenous politics that pertain to non-‐Native allies. While noting that Warrior’s critique presents a real possibility for the failure of this analysis, I will argue that Momaday’s own work offers a theory of the politics of language distinct from the Bakhtinian, ethnographic, and Foucaultian paradigms mobilized in the readings above. Understanding Momaday’s politics of language requires stepping back from the representational questions foregrounded in considerations of The Ancient Child in order to consider moments in Momaday’s fiction and non-‐fiction in which he considers the relationship between language, identity, and place more directly. Momaday’s career spans a period in which European and Euro-‐American understandings of the representational possibilities of language were shifting dramatically. While Momaday never engages with poststructuralist theory or postmodern aesthetics directly, his work seems uncannily prescient about how dominant paradigms for understanding language were changing. Three years before Jacques Derrida declared in Dissemination that “our lexicon … is not far from being exhausted,” N. Scott Momaday made a surprisingly similar claim in his 1969 novel House Made of Dawn (65). For Momaday’s character Tosomah, however, the lexical exhaustion Derrida charts in “Plato’s Pharmacy” is a dilemma of whiteness, rather than a universal one. In addressing the congregation of the Native American Church in Los Angeles, the character Tsomah notes, In the white man’s world, language, too—and the way in which the white man thinks of it—has undergone a process of change. The white 252 man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace […] . He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language—and the Word itself—as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word. (84-‐ 85) Faced with the cacophony (to borrow a term from Jodi Byrd) produced by the lexical exhaustion of whiteness, Tosomah suggests that the Indian holds a certain advantage: “The white man deals in words, and he deals easily, with grace and sleight of hand. And in his presence, here on his own ground, you are as children, mere babes in the woods. You must not mind, for in this you have a certain advantage. A child can listen and learn. The Word is sacred to a child” (83) Tsomah’s invocation of the childlike and sacred nature of the Indigenous relationship to language has been read by many critics as a rather naïve mode of reverse stereotyping. Critics ranging from Kenneth Lincoln to Jace Weaver have suggested that Momaday embraces a religious logocentrism in response to the secular uncertainty of modernity. There is certainly no doubt that Momaday engages in a mode of logocentrism that privileges the oral tradition, and celebrates the generative power of the word. To read this gesture as either dogmatic or tied to a monolithic conception of Indigenous culture, however, would be a grave error. Reading Momaday’s conception of the sacred word against Derrida’s familiar indictment of logocentrism 253 demonstrates how Momaday departs significantly from the logocentric modes of discourse that Derrida—and poststructuralism more broadly—rejects. At the same time, Momaday’s embrace of sacred language enacts a vital critique of the mode of linguistic play with which poststructuralism has become associated. Momaday presents this effort to resist the secularization of Indigenous culture as central to the survivance (to borrow Gerald Vizenor’s well-‐known term) of Indigenous nations in the face of ongoing settler colonialism (Vizenor 1-‐44). In Tosomah’s description of white language, the word has become a commodity in which the white man “deals”; language itself has been abstracted to the point that its use value, its value “as an instrument of creation,” has been forgotten in a logic aimed only at exchange and the accumulation of surplus. In Tosomah’s description, the white man has forgotten not only the word’s capacity for creation, but also its capacity for violence: the white man may “ perish by the word” despite his dilution of it. In Transit of Empire, Byrd argues that in neoliberal multiculturalism, a similar representational logic is at work whereby “Indigenous peoples […] remain colonized as an ongoing lived experience that is not commensurate with the stories the postcolonial, pluralist multiculture wants to tell of itself.” She goes on to say that “indigenous peoples are located outside temporality and presence, even in the face of the very present and ongoing colonization of indigenous lands, resources, lives” (6). In Momaday’s work, a sacred language that recognizes the primacy of oral communication is evoked as the means whereby Indigenous peoples might tell 254 stories about themselves that restore to language the presence of the violence of colonialism and the possibilities of an alternative to it. The insistence on the power of the word to evoke such a presence seems to make Momaday’s theory of language a prime example of the “metaphysics of presence” that Derrida deconstructs. Critiquing Momaday on these grounds, however, raises familiar objections to the political effects of deconstruction. Robert Warrior is undoubtedly correct when he notes that Momaday is one of many Native intellectuals “who are regularly accused of being naïve essentialists” by settler critics who have a very real stake in deconstructing the stories Momaday and other Indigenous intellectuals are trying to tell (164). On the other hand, Momaday’s critical champions have also occasionally employed language celebrating his theory of sacred language that veers into an essentialism that Momaday himself eschews. In The Native American Renaissance, Kenneth Lincoln indulges in an analysis of Momaday’s language for which “phallogocentrism” would seem to be the only apt description, writing that, for Momaday, “words are penetrant as arrows, the finest shafts bearing marks from the mouths that shape them” (44). Lincoln is one of many critics who has seized on Momaday’s reading of the Tale of the Arrowmaker, first delivered in his address “The Man Made of Words” at the Convocation of American Indian Scholars in 1970, in order to draw a metaphoric comparison between words and the penetrative violence of arrows. Ironically, however, this is an association that Momaday himself never draws. In the story as Momaday relates it, a Kiowa man sits in his teepee making arrows, his wife by his side. As he works the arrows, he notes the shadows of a figure outside the shelter. 255 He tells his wife, “Someone is standing outside. Do not be afraid. Let us talk easily as of ordinary things.” After spending some time conversing with his wife, he continues to craft an arrow as he says, in the same conversational tone, “I know that you are there on the outside, for I can feel your eyes upon me. If you are a Kiowa, you will understand what I am saying, and you will speak your name” (10). The figure does not speak, and the arrowmaker shoots him through the heart. As Warrior has argued, the incisive violence of the tale, delivered at a convocation of Native intellectuals, should be enough to discredit any attempt to label Momaday as a quietist, writing during a time of political activism (158). But what might we learn about Momaday’s politics of language from this tale? Momaday leaves no doubt as to its importance to his thought, describing it as “a story about stories, about the efficacy of language and the power of words” but immediately hedges this claim, noting that it is a story he does “not yet understand […] in all of its consequent meanings” and that it is a story that is one of many that yields “more and more in the spirit of their time” (Man 9). Perhaps it encourages a respect for the penetrative power of “the performative utterance,” as Weaver has argued (81), but this is not the only message the tale of the arrowmaker unfolds. Language in the story functions as a Shibboleth, operating on the threshold of in-‐group and out-‐ group, of order and violence. The utterance is not equated with violence so much as it stands as the possibility of an alternative. Momaday notes that “the point of the story lies not so much in what the arrowmaker does, but in what he says—and indeed that he says it” (Man 10). The figure beyond the threshold is hailed by an individual whose own precarity is absolute—here language involves “an element of 256 risk and responsibility. In a word, it seems to say, everything is at risk” (Man 11). For Momaday, this story’s authority is grounded not in a monolithic Kiowa tradition, but in its ability to express and embody a more universal precarity of language and being that emerges from the story’s origin in the oral tradition. The story is described as a tale that “until recently” was “the private possession of a few, a tenuous link in that most ancient chain of language which we call the oral tradition […] neither more nor less durable than the human voice, and neither more nor less concerned to express the meaning of the human condition” (Man 11). It is instructive to compare Momaday’s justification of the primacy of the oral here to Derrida’s account of how the Western tradition is underwritten by “the permanence of the Platonic schema that assigns the origin and power of speech, precisely of Logos, to the paternal position” (1840). In the section of Dissemination entitled “The Father of the Logos,” Derrida reads Socrates’ account of the origin of Language in the Phaedrus, in which the Egyptian demigod Theuth invents writing and presents it to the King Thamus for judgment. Thamus, the “God-‐king,” “does not know how to write, but that ignorance or incapacity only testifies to his sovereign independence […] He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices” (1840). For Momaday, oral communication is marked by the precarity of the body; for Derrida it is the ultimate act of sovereign authority: “Logos represents what it is indebted to: the father who is also chief, capital, and good(s)” (1844). Derrida famously works to subvert the patriarchal authority of the logos by deconstructing and inverting the presumed primacy of orality over the written sign. Momaday, on the other hand, grounds his writing practice in an oral tradition not 257 beholden to the “platonic schema” of Western thought. Momaday portrays the oral tradition of the Kiowas as both predating and outliving the religious and political culture the Kiowa people developed during their century on the Great Plains. Momaday identifies his grandmother as his own “tenuous link” to the oral tradition. Rather than a bearer of a patriarchal authority, Momaday’s grandmother Aho was a woman who “bore a vision of deicide” once she had witnessed the last of the Kiowa Sun Dances in 1890 after the destruction of the great bison herds (The Way 10). Momaday writes that he “remembered her most often at prayer. She made a long, rambling prayer out of suffering and hope, having seen many things” (The Way 10). Momaday, who is not a fluent Kiowa speaker, could not understand his grandmother’s prayers, yet this prayer after deicide, beyond translatable meaning, stands as one of the most potent images of the sacred word that grounds his writing practice. This sacred mode of orality, which does not depend on the authority of a patriarchal godhead, or even of a deferred meaning, also informs Momaday’s imagination of Ko-‐Sahn, the fictional Kiowa ancestor who features in the final section of The Way to Rainy Mountain. Momaday imagines Ko-‐Sahn taking part in the Sun Dance. In her song, she evokes a familiar descriptor of her performance: play. “We have brought the earth. / Now it is time to play; / As old as I am, I still have the feeling of play” (88). In commenting on this description of the Sun Dance written from the perspective of Ko-‐Sahn, Momaday concludes with a question about Ko-‐Sahn that portrays his conception of the sacred as a form of performative play: “At times, in the quiet of the evening, I think [Ko-‐Sahn] must have wondered, 258 dreaming, who she was. Was she become in her sleep that old purveyor of the sacred earth, perhaps, that ancient one who, old as she was, still had the feeling of play” (88)? The centrality of play to Momaday’s conception of the sacred emphasized in this passage, which resonates closely with Tosomah’s invocation of the “child-‐like” Indian attitude toward the word articulated in House Made of Dawn, stands in stark contrast to the Derridean concept of “play” that still inflects understandings of the term in humanities scholarship. Many theorists have associated Derrida’s work, and particularly the idea of free play as a movement “permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin … the movement of supplementarity” with robust defenses of secular cosmopolitanism. Derrida’s association of play with “the superabundance of the signifier” likewise associates play with just the sort of dilut[ion] and multipl[ication] of the word” that Tosomah criticizes in the passage I considered earlier. Derrida’s use of the term “play” emerges in a critique of Claude Lévi-‐Strauss, the anthropologist who famously worked to describe the structure of “the savage mind.” By invoking play as central to his own Kiowa tradition’s conception of the sacred, Momaday curiously affirms Derrida’s critique of Lévi-‐Strauss’s search for an “origin or center” in Indigenous sacred practices. At the same time, Momaday’s “sacred play” is fundamentally opposed to the “superabundance of the signifier” and the correspondent logic of supplementarity that Derrida poses as an alternative to logocentrism. Derrida’s call for a “Nietzschean affirmation—the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world … without truth, without origin” is a far cry from the 259 grave call to “responsibility and risk” that Momaday issues in “The Man Made of Words” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 264; Man Made of Words 11). A consideration of Momaday’s 1963 essay “The Morality of Indian Hating” will unpack how Momaday’s conception of sacred play diverges and overlaps with Derrida’s conception of free play and will illuminate, I hope, the political stakes of this admittedly recondite comparison. As the allusive title of “The Morality of Indian Hating” would suggest, it addresses issues of the affective animus behind settler colonial violence, but also the secularization of that affect: Melville’s nineteenth-‐ century “Metaphysics of Indian Hating” has become Momaday’s twentieth-‐century “Morality of Indian Hating.” As Momaday puts it, “Superficially, a witch-‐burning psychology [gave] way to an age of philanthropy,” but behind this paternalism, white Americans continued to “be moved by the same morality which had created violence elsewhere and before” (68). “The contemporary white American,” Momaday states, is “willing to assume responsibility for the Indian—he is willing to take on the burdens of oppressed people everywhere—but he is decidedly unwilling to divest himself of the false assumptions which impede his good intentions. He is an ambiguous, even contradictory, man” (71-‐72). He quips that, “whatever else he might have been, Colonel Moredock of Illinois [Melville’s paradigmatic Indian hater in The Confidence Man] was a man who came honestly by his bias” (63). Throughout the essay, Momaday emphasizes the perfidious nature of “the particular morality […] pragmatic and malleable rather than ideal and absolute” that allows for the extreme divergence between the rhetoric of white Americans in the post-‐frontier period and the ongoing history of settler colonial violence justified by 260 the “false assumptions” white Americans refuse to interrogate. Momaday—a writer not generally inclined to political hyperbole—goes to great extremes in describing the corrosive effect this “pragmatic and malleable” morality has had on American Indians: The military campaigns which were waged on the receding frontier of the last century were less consequential by far than was the intrusion of the white man’s “civilization” upon the sanctity of the red man’s faith. The Indian can recognize and understand malice, and he can bear pain with legendary self-‐possession. What he can neither recognize nor understand is that particular atmosphere of moral and ideological ambiguity in which the white man prevails. (Man 59) By emphasizing the continuity between the violence of frontier and post-‐frontier stages of settler colonialism, Momaday anticipates by decades Patrick Wolfe’s argument that the “post-‐frontier era” emerged when “the settler colonial logic of elimination in its crudest frontier form […] was transformed into a paternalistic mode of governmentality which, though still sanctioned by state violence, came to focus on assimilation rather than rejection” (“After” 13). In this post-‐frontier stage, “for the native ideology is all there is: the zero-‐sum conflict with the settler is constituted at the level of ideology and is waged around the issue of assimilation” (Settler Colonialism 3). In this post-‐frontier war of position, multicultural pluralism becomes an ideology that effects “the reduction of the primary Indigenous/settler divide to the status of one among many ethnic divisions within settler society.” Thinking about settler attempts to assimilate Indigenous populations in the context 261 of neoliberal multiculturalism requires thinking beyond the “kill the Indian, save the man” logic of early post-‐frontier assimilation policies and toward the very sort of “pragmatic and malleable” logic that Momaday critiques—a logic that would not concern itself with destroying Indigenous culture so much as deracinating it. It is this logic that, in Momaday’s account, underlies what he calls “the subtle holocaust” affected by the intrusion of “that particular atmosphere of moral and ideological ambiguity” that decouples the word from its performative power to shape a community’s relationship to each other and to the material world. The search for the sacred that unfolds throughout Momaday’s body of work restores to language not a lost origin or center but rather to a mode of play that exceeds the “freedom with violence” (to borrow Chandan Reddy’s term) of neoliberal culture with the generative power of the word (Reddy 37). For Momaday, this means a rejection of the ironic reveling in the “superabundance of the signifier” that, for him, stands as the hallmark of white language, but also of the self-‐assured understanding of the sacred that informed Melville’s Colonel Moredock and fueled Manifest Destiny. Approaching the predominance of frontier themes in The Ancient Child with Momaday’s conception of sacred language in mind yields a reading much different from either the Bakhtinian triumph or the ethnographic failure that Owens and Stevens, respectively, describe. The Ancient Child opens with an epigram from Borges: “For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.” This line appears in the conclusion of the “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote”: 262 Defeated by reality, by Spain, Don Quixote died in his native village around 1614. He was survived only briefly by Miguel de Cervantes. For both of them, for the dreamer and the dreamed, the tissue of that whole plot consisted in the contraposition of two worlds: the unreal world of the books of chivalry and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century. Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony. Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad’s haunts or Ariosto’s vast geographies. For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end. (42) In The Ancient Child, Momaday grapples with a myth every bit as stylized as the chivalric legends Cervantes parodies in Don Quixote. Momaday, however, begins his narrative with the conviction that mythmaking is the business of a work of literature, whatever its author’s intentions. The debunking parody that animates Don Quixote does not animate The Ancient Child, but Momaday’s novel is equally concerned with “the contraposition of two worlds.” Both of the novel’s semi-‐autobiographical protagonists—the Kiowa, and child of adopted white parents, Locke Setman (Set), and the young Kiowa-‐ Navajo medicine woman Koi-‐Ehm-‐Toya, who goes by Grey—are preoccupied with images of the nineteenth-‐century frontier. Both characters, as their allegorical names imply, straddle Indigenous and settler worlds. Koi-‐Ehm-‐Toya’s name means “among the Kiowas,” and yet her chosen name Grey self-‐evidently defies Manichean 263 dualities (Conversations 201). Locke’s first name speaks to his conception of himself as a romantic individual; his last reflects his Kiowa heritage, Set being the Kiowa word for bear. The novel unfolds episodically, interweaving Set’s and Grey’s perspectives with episodes from an imagined Kiowa past and from Grey’s imagination of the life of Billy the Kid, as well as with episodes written from the perspective of their white, Kiowa, and Navajo contemporaries. Grey allegorizes her life through her imagining of the exploits of Billy the Kid; Set finds his visions of a mythological Bear the only means through which he can understand his. As in Don Quixote, the contraposition of historical worlds is not a stable one; allegorical figures are transcoded in unlikely ways as the mythic past bleeds into the present and vice versa. Grey shares a name with a nineteenth-‐century narrator, an old Kiowa woman who, in the novel’s eighth chapter, is introduced abruptly to narrate a short story about observing a group of Kiowa children running toward the woods at the edge of an encampment. Grey also imagines herself as part of Billy’s adventures, riding alongside him in some of his well-‐known exploits during the Lincoln County War. In the novel’s most controversial chapter, ominously entitled “She Must Serve Her Purpose,” Grey’s fantasy of sex with Billy, in which she initiates the encounter, transitions immediately into her rape by a white rancher, Dwight Dicks: “Then her body and soul were jolted. In an instant her intense pleasure was turned to pain, concentrated and excruciating” (96). While some critics have castigated Momaday for representing Grey as taking pleasure from her rape, the scene can also be read as her being set upon in her sleep by Dwight—prior chapters cast the Billy the Kid episodes as dream sequences (Donavan 92). In either case, the 264 disturbing effect of the scene forecloses any reading that would interpret Grey’s infatuation with the Billy the Kid legend as unproblematically empowering. In this jarring transition, the sexual encounter with the white “frontiersman” is imagined as consensual but then experienced as rape; the contraposition of Billy’s world and Grey’s in this instance demands to be read as one that reveals the horrific violence behind a romanticized myth (134). The purpose Grey must serve in the frontier narrative that attempts to shape her reality is not one of a lover, but of a victim; in the eyes of Dwight Dicks, she is nothing but the extension of the land he is leasing from her Kiowa family, his for the taking. Following the rape, however, Grey does not succumb to the role the frontier narrative demands of her; instead, she fights back, distracting Dwight long enough to bind his hands with bailing wire and pin him to the ground with a pitch fork. Having thus incapacitated her assailant, she grabs “the generous foreskin of Dwight Dicks’ flaccid penis” and, with a pair of wire cutters, “snipped the foreskin but for a quarter inch of its circumference,” telling Dwight that he will “have to complete this surgery” himself (99). This “rite of retribution” that Grey enacts is a grotesque modification of a rite of birth (circumcision) and, as such, makes her refusal of the role of the “savage” all the more clear. If, in familiar frontier narratives, the violent encounter with the feminized “savage” signifies a masculine regeneration or a “perennial rebirth,” in Momaday’s hands it is revealed to be a violence that only reproduces itself. In his reading of The Ancient Child, Louis Owens claims that “within Grey, the disturbing chasm between past and present, and between ‘civilization’ and 265 ‘savagism’ that constitutes America’s gothic self-‐image does not exist” (Other Destinies 119). While there is no doubt that within Grey’s body, the past violates the present, and the “civilized” violates “the savage,” it is precisely this slippage that makes her story so disturbing. If the post-‐frontier settler colony seeks to imagine the violence of the frontier as effectively contained by relegating it to a distant past, Grey’s body is represented in The Ancient Child as the site where “America’s gothic self-‐image” is made manifest as an ongoing violent reality. Despite the disturbing contiguity of her fantasy of Billy with her rape, Grey persists in her imagining of Billy, casting herself riding alongside Billy as he moves closer and closer to his inexorable death at the hands of Pat Garrett, and writing her fantasies in the series of poems and short prose pieces she entitles “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid.” Conceiving of this project, “it occurred to [Grey] that Billy the Kid, companion, lover, confidant, and hero of her girlhood, who had drawn her into the deepest mythic currents of the Wild West, was deserving of commemoration, hers especially […] an elegy and farewell, a ‘memorial’ … in some sense to her own childhood” (174-‐75). The Western genre is, of course, no stranger to elegy; and in this sense, Grey’s writing partakes in a familiar representational tradition of settler colonialism. In considering the relation of Grey’s memorial to settler narratives, however, it is important to maintain the specificity of Grey’s identification with Billy the Kid. While in his reading Stevens imagined Billy as comparable to a Leatherstocking figure, the outlaw, in settler narratives, just as often stands in as a sort of metonymic representative of the Indian, playing the role of the anomic figure in Western narratives that seeks to tell the story of the closing 266 of the frontier without confronting the history of genocidal anti-‐Indigenous violence (Stevens 604). 86 By writing herself into Billy’s story, Grey is in many ways re-‐ inscribing Indigenous presence into a tradition of representation that works to erase it. Furthermore, considering Grey’s “memorial” as an instantiation of Momaday’s conception of the sacred word reveals a much different relationship between frontier violence and language than that exemplified in those Westerns that function as the sort of official state discourse to which Stevens compares The Ancient Child. Richard Slotkin argues that in frontier rhetoric of the post–World War II period, the elegy for the frontier hero conjures an authentic, violent, and individualist past that is placed in contraposition against an inauthentic present governed by the representative bureaucracies of liberalism (Gunfighter Nation 13). The frontier narrative as elegy thus becomes a declension narrative that calls for a revival of the mode of violent individualism it mourns. As soon as Grey has started telling her story, however, she begins to call into question the violence at its core. Meditating on a reckless decision Billy made to retrieve a favorite rifle in the midst of a firefight, Grey decides Billy’s decision “has something to do with legend, and with the way we must think of ourselves, we cowboys and Indians, we rough riders of the world. We are lovers of violence, aren’t we? You must have loved it; your life was centered upon it” (181). Grey’s expansive first person plural here extends back to Billy, outward to all “cowboys and Indians,” and finally to all “rough riders of the world.” This reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s 86 Erik Altenbernd and I discuss this phenomenon further in “A Terrible Beauty: Settler Sovereignty and the State of Exception in Home Box Office’s Deadwood.” 267 “Rough Riders” (the First US Volunteer Cavalry), the military unit most associated with the United States’s extension of its frontier self-‐image into the global sphere, seems to anticipate the sort of critique of the Western made by Slotkin above. If Grey’s inclusion of Indians in the “we” encompassed by the “rough riders of the world” runs contrary to politically convenient understandings of the relationship between American Indians and global US imperialism, it also reflects the fact that US empire has been able to interpolate American Indian identity into its military culture. There were American Indians in Roosevelt’s unit, and American Indians today have a higher rate of military service than any other census-‐identified ethnic group (“Recognition”). Grey’s identification with Billy recognizes this bond of violence, but also imagines an alternative: When you killed Bob Olinger, I thrilled to the killing. But now it saddens me; there is such a sorrow in my heart, Billy. I think of Pat Garrett’s gun, the gun with which he shot you dead. If I could, Billy, I would take that gun out of history. I would erase it forever from human memory. And I would erase too the gun with which you killed J.W. Bell, and I would erase even Olinger’s shotgun. I would do away with all the guns in the world, I guess. What is it to pass into legend? What is it that attracted me to him? (182) Having distanced herself from Billy’s violence, Grey tries to sketch out the characteristics that attract her to him. She lights upon a certain immediacy in his character in a description that is remarkably similar (in one of Momaday’s characteristic self-‐referential moments) to Momaday’s description of Billy in 268 “Dreaming in Place:” “I have heard that certain organisms—sharks, for example— are virtually mindless, that they are creatures that act on pure instinct. So it was with this man, I believe” (183). Even as she disavows his violence, Grey recognizes in Billy a sort of animal harmony in thought, action, and environment with which she identifies. As Grey writes her story of Billy, she finds that she can enact in language the same sort of unbounded virtuosity that Billy reflects in his skill for violence. Whereas “Billy was ill at ease within the element of language. Silence was his natural habitat” (185), Grey finds in words the sort of bodily pleasure Billy finds in violence: She played with the words in her mouth, tasted them, rolled and fondled and savored them in the groove of her tongue. The words rang and rippled and tripped and rumbled in her ear. They described, quite apart from their meanings, a flow, an endless rising and falling, a soaring, a wheeling around the sun, a trembling plane of ultimate possibility, a sunrise, a sunset, an ecstasy. (178) As Grey hones her skills as a writer drafting “The Strange and True Story,” in a process compared to her learning to become a rider (185), she comes to believe that “there were no limits to the power of words. She could not say ‘this is what a word is and does; these are its possibilities, no more, no less.’” Grey’s story becomes more than an elegiac account of an authentic past than a site of generative possibility. As Owens argues in his reading, Grey does not so much reproduce an authoritative discourse as explode it with heteroglossic possibility (119). It is the act of writing 269 the story of Billy, too, that allows Grey to move beyond her obsession with the mythic West and assume her position as the medicine woman who will orchestrate Set’s transformation into the bear. With this transformation, however, and the shift in her focus from Billy to Set, Grey does not totally abandon frontier narrative for a clearly articulated Indigenous alternative, as Owens argues. In the chapter in which she ponders the act of “renunciation” as she completes the last pages of “The Strange and True Story,” she is haunted by thoughts that portray the story she is telling as more monolithic than generative: “She must be true to the story. There is one story, Grey thought, and we tell it endlessly because we must; it is the definition of our being” (217). The story of Locke Setman’s becoming animal, as Stevens argues at length, has clear parallels with William Faulkner’s invocation of the bear as a symbol of frontier masculinity. Indeed, it is hard to read the parallels between Set’s story and of familiar stories of settler indigenization as anything but over-‐determined. Set, the urbane countercultural artist, son of adopted white parents, is called away from the city into the wilderness of Oklahoma where, at a place called Cradle Creek, he meets the Indigenous woman who tells him of his destiny and provides him with the medicine that will facilitate a rebirth. These parallels to a settler indigenization narrative are not sustained as Set’s story continues, however. In one of the climactic and under-‐considered scenes of Set’s transformation, Grey delivers him to a man named “Perfecto Atole.” His strange and allegorical name sets the tone for the entire episode. The name is a reference to the traditional Mexican and New Mexican corn-‐based hot beverage, traditionally 270 (and elsewhere in The Ancient Child) associated with healing. Perfecto identifies himself to Grey as “an Indian and a cowboy” (281). He is the keeper of the bear’s paw, a sacred item that will play a central role in Set’s transformation, yet the defining characteristic of his dress is a Stetson purchased from “WHITEMAN’S BOOTS AND SADDLES, CALGARY, ALBERTA” (279). He rides a black mare named “Swastika”—a symbol present in many Native cosmologies, but also one with obvious and troubling associations with whiteness. 87 In his dialogue with Grey as they are planning the ceremony in which Perfecto will take part with Set, it is revealed that Perfecto was Grey’s first lover and that he gave her a pair of “red snakeskin” cowboy boots on the night he took her virginity (282; my emphasis). As Grey wards off Perfecto’s sexual advances in their conversation, she reveals to him that she cut off the tops of the boots (“Off. Clean. Flat off. Clip, snip, zip”) in order to make a pair of stomp dance shakers (283). The contradictory details in Perfecto’s character—culminating in the not-‐so-‐ subtle allusion to Grey’s rape, which associates him with Dwight Dicks—set up Perfecto, and the healing he is ostensibly going to enact, as a sort of pharmakon at the heart of the frontier myth: “The ‘essence’ of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it is not […] a substance. […] It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced” (Derrida, Dissemination, 125-‐26). Set’s becoming Bear is not equated with his 87 In The Swastika Symbol in Navajo Textiles, Dennis Aigner claims that the Swastika symbol in Navajo cosmology relates to a myth of a whirling log in which a man is outcast from his tribe, rolls down a river in a hollow log, before finding a new community. This would be a remarkable parallel to Momaday’s fascination with the Kiowa creation myth in which the Kiowa emerge through a hollow log. 271 becoming Indian, but enabled at the hands of a figure who resists the logic of the frontier binary altogether. The divergence of the episode from the tropic expectations of a frontier narrative only increases when the ceremony gets under way. It starts like a shootout scene from a Western, with a description that might have been lifted from Cormac McCarthy: “A dark figure was approaching from the West. It was at first a nuclear concentration of the darkness beyond, something of the night” (285). Atole has already threatened violence in a joke to Grey (“I’ve a mind to put him out of his misery, that man of yours … a hunting accident, you know?”), and his ceremony with Set begins with the intimation that it might occur (283). The dance that takes place between these two sexual rivals, however, never reaches that point. Atole, wearing the symbolically laden shakers made out of Grey’s boots, pursues Set on horseback across the meadow incessantly. He brings Set to the point of exhaustion, finally “strik[ing] him in the throat with the bear’s paw, leaving Set filled with “a rage so great there was nothing else.” But “in his uttermost humiliation something of his will’s power was unaccountably restored to him. It was as if he was purged by his own distemper” (288). Having lost this ceremonial duel, Set does not set out to seek his revenge, nor does he play the scapegoat (pharmakos) in the Navajo community where the ceremony takes place; indeed, the ceremony marks his entry into Navajo sociality, which he joins through his courtship and eventual marriage to Grey. The masculine violence upon which the “ascending dialectic” of the frontier myth and— 272 to return to the analogy to Derrida—the binaristic logic of Western thought depends is suspended when Set is “purged by his own distemper” (286). 88 It is only following what would seem to be the novel’s natural conclusion— Set and Grey’s marriage and Set’s adoption by Grey into the matrilineal Navajo society—that we are transported, in an abrupt temporal and spatial shift, to Tsoai (Devils [sic] Tower), the sacred rock tree of the Kiowa. Set is there, fasting, preparing for the transformation into the bear that has been foretold to him by Grey. In his metamorphosis, he suddenly finds himself surrounded by Kiowa children, running toward the wood at the base of Tsoai. As he bounds toward the woods with the children, he achieves both an extra-‐human unity with place, but also a profound sense of alienation: “he had no longer a human voice […] and a loneliness came upon him like death” (314). While Set’s final alienation has been read as a sign of The Ancient Child’s ultimate commitment to a frontier narrative of an individual’s regeneration in “the wild,” Momaday makes it clear that in becoming Bear—a figure Momaday elsewhere 88 In Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard argues that the Platonic pharmakon functions like the human pharmakos and leads to similar results. […] All difference in doctrines and attitudes is dissolved in violent reciprocity, is secretly undermined by the […] somewhat naïve use of pharmakon. This use polarizes the maleficent violence on a double, who is arbitrarily expelled from the philosophical community. […] Derrida’s analysis demonstrates in striking fashion a certain arbitrary violence of the philosophic process as it occurs in Plato, through the mediation of a word that is indeed appropriate since it really designates an earlier, more brutal variant of the same arbitrary violence. (296) In representing a ritual that deviates from the scapegoating structure that Girard analyzes by incorporating rather than expelling the ceremonial victim, Momaday demonstrates the sense in which his conception of the sacred word serves as an alternative to, rather than an extension of, necropolitical violence. 273 associates either with himself or with the figure of the storyteller in general—Set is not being cast out by the Kiowa people, but rather he assumes his proper place in Kiowa sociality. In an article relating Indigenous Hawaiian narratives of “becoming animal” to Giorgio Agamben’s work on the importance of policing the boundary between animal and human for Western modes of sovereignty, Jonathan Goldberg-‐ Hiller and Noenoe Silva argue that Indigenous Hawaiian narratives respond to “the violent forms of state sovereignty in which native land and culture dissolve into zones of indifference” with “a literature of body forms that moves stealthily within the Western preoccupation with human and animal.” They argue that this “shape-‐ shifting that enlivens these stories has always filled the voids and indistinctions between animal and human with what might be experienced as an ‘ontological jazz,’ a vibrant, intentional creation that can challenge some temporal and legal dynamics of indigenous repression and erasure” (435). The story of Set becoming animal, which builds on the Kiowa origin story of Devil’s Tower much more than it does on Momaday’s debt to Faulkner, works in this register. 89 The story refuses familiar settler tropes associating animality with an unleashed masculinity in order to challenge the porous boundaries separating the human and the animal upon which the “violent forms of state sovereignty” depend. The omnisciently narrated penultimate chapter declares that “who ever came after [the Kiowa] […] found the round bare patches in the grass of the meadow, the charred wood of the fires, the bones of birds and badgers and deer and dogs—and the tracks of a great bear” (309; italics in original). Set’s loss of human voice can be read 89 For Momaday’s direct narration of the story of Devil’s Tower, see The Way to Rainy Mountain (8). 274 as signifying less a complete alienation but rather an ability to transcend the “one story […] we tell […] endlessly because we must,” because “it is the definition of our beings” (217). Momaday’s reticence in interviews regarding the meaning of the ending speaks to his understanding of it as signifying the potential of a future transformation in his relationship to place and to the Kiowa that might exceed entirely our current modes of understanding. The story of Set’s transformation ends with an image of the bear “receding into shadows” (314). The verb “to recede”—one too often associated, in settler discourse, with Indians imagined to be perpetually “receding” into the past and beyond the periphery of civilization—troubles our understanding of the temporality of the scene. The temporality of the novel’s conclusion is further unsettled in the epilogue. We return to the omniscient narrator, the italics signifying a chapter about the history of the Kiowas. The first sentence leaves us, however, without a temporal reference point: “Koi-‐ehm-‐toya’s great-‐great grandson became a renowned maker of shields” (313). Koi-‐ehm-‐toya (“Among the Kiowa”) might here refer to Grey (pregnant when Set leaves her for his transformation) or to the nineteenth-‐century Kiowa narrator of the same name, who appears in two chapters early in the novel only to relate a story of a group of Kiowa children wandering into the woods at the edge of an encampment, never to be found again. This curious blending of an Indigenous past and an Indigenous futurity is perhaps further complicated by the fact that Koi-‐ehm-‐toya is also Momaday’s daughter’s name (Conversations 201). In this temporally uncertain narrative space, there is, in any case, a continuity established: 275 In his old age he dreamed of things that happened before his time. The whole history of the people was played out in a myriad points of light—each one a world and an age—that glided across the place of his dreaming. And the last of his dreams was that of children moving toward a wall of woods. They bobbed and skipped and tumbled away in the distance. He watched them for a time, and then could no longer see them. They had already entered into the trees, into the darkness. (315) The seemingly prosaic story, repeated over the course of the novel, of the children running toward the darkening forest, allegorizes the sort of continuity and futurity of Indigenous life that Momaday envisions. The children are in some sense beyond the immediate help of their elders, on their own, and yet they enter their unknown future accompanied by the bear/storyteller who must reach beyond familiar structures of representation in order to communicate. It is in this razor thin space between an irrecoverable past and an unknown future that the sacred words of Momaday’s stories take place from the physical and epistemological violence of settler colonialism. 276 Conclusion: An Errand into the Wild[erness] I opened this dissertation with a consideration of the rhetorical proximity between a speech made by a soon-‐to-‐be US president (John F. Kennedy) and an essay by an anarchist (Kenneth Rexroth) in a popular radical publication. I will conclude with a parallel comparison that demonstrates the remarkable reach of the settler colonial imaginary beyond the heteronormative white identities with which it is most often associated. In his “Yes We Can” stump speech, popularized by will.i.am’s eponymous music video, Barack Obama draws on the same rhetorical tradition that Kennedy harnesses to allegorize his own candidacy as a new frontier: For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can. 277 It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality. In Obama’s metonymic chain of affirmations, the dreams of fugitive slaves are represented as analogous to those of the settler colonists’ who, in a familiarly Turnerian euphemism, “pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness;” Kennedy’s dream of a new frontier is represented as analogous to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial justice, suffragists’ dreams of voting rights, and workers’ dreams of collective bargaining. Such frontier rhetoric has been central to Obama’s self-representation throughout his presidency, and has come to the fore in his speeches on various social justice issues. 90 Obama’s new(er) frontier, however, has, like Kennedy’s, found its fullest expression on the violent peripheries of US global hegemony. The chagrin of the countercultural “pioneers” in the Evergreen Review over Kennedy’s decision to orchestrate the Bay of Pig’s invasion is echoed today by a US Left that feels betrayed 90 In his address marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, Obama made use of several references comparing westward expansion to the struggle for civil rights, including one that, in making the only reference to an American Indian in the speech, casts American Indians as collaborators in the settler colonial project: Look at our history. We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. That’s our spirit. That’s who we are. We are Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer, women who could do as much as any man and then some. And we’re Susan B. Anthony, who shook the system until the law reflected that truth. That is our character. 278 by Obama’s extension of the drone warfare program and failure to close Guantanamo Bay. Despite administration protestations to the contrary, the identification of Osama Bin Laden with the code name “Geronimo” was no accident. The Obama administration’s frontier rhetoric has been paralleled by the reemergence of similar rhetoric on the anarchist Left. As noted in Chapter 2, Jack Halberstam has introduced “the wild” as a keyword in queer and American studies meant to designate an anarchist “outside,” an unregulated space of freedom beyond the norms and regulations of the liberal state. For Halberstam, as for Spicer and Kerouac, “the wild” is a figurative rather than geographical space of disaffiliation where alternative forms of sociality might be enacted. Halberstam’s conception of “the wild” has been developed in conversation with a loose assemblage of scholars, including Peter Coviello, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, and Tavia Nyong’o who have associated themselves with his conception of “the wild” to describe their utopian imaginings of anarchist alternatives to the state. Nyong’o came as close as any to a direct assessment of this rhetoric’s proximity to frontier rhetoric in a posting for Bully Bloggers published during the 2013 government shutdown. In this short essay, Nyong’o takes on the uncomfortable proximity between “leftwing anarchism” and “rightwing libertarianism” at a moment when many on the radical Left, including Nyong’o, were expressing an ambivalent solidarity with President Obama and the Democrats in their struggle against the right-wing Republicans who were reveling in the shutdown of various government social services. To affirm his conviction that anarchism and libertarianism “ultimately form distinct and opposed literary traditions,” Nyong’o turns to a consideration of Henry David Thoreau and what he calls Thoreau’s “queer little 279 errand into the wild.” This allusion to Perry Miller is as close as Nyong’o gets to Bercovitch, but Nyong’o’s argument vis-à-vis Thoreau offers a direct counterpoint to Bercovitch’s argument regarding the “rhetoric of the errand” constituting an ipso facto “rhetoric of consensus.” Indeed, with the emergence of Nyong’o, Halberstam, Coviello, and the other anarchist theorists as a sort of vanguard of the American Studies Association, it would seem that American studies has come full circle. Some of the most influential figures in the field have once again found in nineteenth- century American literature’s “errand into the wild[erness]” an allegory for their own radical politics. Nyong’o hastens to explain that this allegory is grounded in his reading of Thoreau as a figure who rejected the norms of white, bourgeois life that, for Bercovitch, went hand in hand with “the rhetoric of the errand.” Nyong’o argues that Thoreau’s struggle, and his, was and is pitted against the reactionary agenda, then and now, to withdraw protections from those who are seen not to matter — slaves and Mexicans then, the sick, poor, people of color and marginalized today — and to instead focus the resources of the state on the policing and imprisonment necessary to keep this drastic upward distribution of wealth from exploding into violence. Thoreau’s “queer little errand into the wild” thus becomes an allegory for Nyong’o’s struggle to imagine a mode of collectivity that would preserve the ameliorative social programs of the liberal welfare state without enacting the violence endemic to the state form. Like the dissenting writers of the Evergreen Review who identified with 280 Kennedy’s new frontier while abhorring his engagement in US militarism abroad, Nyongo’o shares with Barack Obama a tendency to allegorize struggles for social justice as a frontier movement even as he rejects the regulatory violence of the state that Obama represents. For Nyong’o, this rhetorical feat requires the same erasure of Indigenous presence that marks Obama’s use of frontier rhetoric. Mark Rifkin, in an article published weeks before Nyong’o’s post, makes a convincing case that, above and beyond the fact that Thoreau’s experiment in anarchist living took place on Indigenous land expropriated nearly within living memory of his contemporaries, Thoreau’s writing practice is circumscribed by a settler “structure of feeling” that emerges in his consistent devaluation of Indigenous life across his writings (“Settler Common Sense” 322). Recognizing Thoreau’s complicity in settler colonialism makes it much harder to hold him up as an unqualified champion of “those who are seen not to matter.” If this contemporary “errand into the wild[erness]” perpetuates the rhetorical erasure of Indigenous people, it also offers an unpromising mode of resistance vis-à- vis the state and capitalism, even for those lucky enough not to be erased from its rhetorical purview entirely. Both Nyong’o and Halberstam identify Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of “the undercommons” as analogous to the “wild beyond” they seek (Halberstam 7). Harney and Moten imagine “the undercommons” as a conceptual space of disaffiliation within the academy, a space of “fugitivity” where anti-statist radical academics can find an “outside” even working within the institutions of the state. In the United States, they claim, 281 It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. (26) If the university is still a place of refuge for thinkers in this age of adjunctification, the firing of tenured faculty for their online political speech, and the continuing assault on ethnic and Indigenous studies, it is a refuge available only to an elect few. If the undercommons is a space that is “in but not of” the university, it can only make this claim in the sense that Kerouac imagined himself to be “in but not of” the nation-state. Kerouac’s law breaking cannot be undertaken without the benevolence of the very state whose laws he flouts; the same could be said of Harney and Moten’s conception of the radical academic. The privilege to “abuse the hospitality” of the university (such that it is) is one that has not been distributed equally, even if it does occasionally accrue to those racialized, gendered, and queer bodies that do not conform to the norms of the state. Like the settler colonist who retreated to a “wild surround” to escape the oppression of the state and the wage economy, academics who imagine themselves to be “in but not of” the institution of the university by virtue of their “escape” to a conceptual undercommons may soon find that they not only failed in their attempt to find refuge, but in fact helped open new frontiers for the extension of capitalist political economy and state control. By refusing to confront the politics of the institution that these tenured radicals are both in and of (whether they acknowledge that affiliation or not), the logic of the undercommons 282 perpetuates the dynamic whereby radical academic work is shaped and contained by an institution that, under the leadership of those who are more than happy to put it to work for their own values, touts such scholarship in a deracinated form as evidence of its own diversity and tolerance. By concluding with this contemporary example of the ongoing deleterious effects of the settler colonial imaginary on radical dissent, my intention is not simply to point out the expansive power of settler colonialism as a structure. Nor is my intention, by suggesting that Nyong’o’s work is shaped in part by an isopolitical imaginary, to detract from the vital work queer of color critique is doing to contest white supremacy and heteronormativity. Indeed, recent developments in such critique also point to productive avenues whereby isopolitical dissent might be reimagined as decolonial. In Chapter 1, I noted how theorist Sara Ahmed has turned her attention to how anti-normative forms of sociality can serve to reinvent new forms of oppression. Her claim that the ““freedom from norms can quickly translate into the freedom to exploit others” reflects a broader tendency within the field to complicate the dogmatic logic whereby anti-‐normativity as such is figured as the radical horizon of queer critique (171). 91 A similar impulse can be seen in Nyong’o’s attempt to parse out leftist anarchism from conservative libertarianism. Such gestures point to the possibility of an ethics that is not circumscribed by state ideology, but is guided by a more fundamental standard of justice; they are not 91 One might think of this turn in queer studies as having an originary moment in José Muñoz’s argument for the essential relationality of queerness in Cruising Utopia (11). Muñoz’s utopianism, however, also expresses itself in a yearning for a “wild” outside that, in certain articulations, is shaped by an isopolitical rather than revolutionary political imagination (Halberstam, “Wildness, Loss, Death” 137). 283 simply a Nietzschean revolt against regulation, but rather a yearning for a mode of community that might reject the necropolitical forms of power upon which settler colonial conquest and the state sovereignty are predicated. 92 Were such theorizations to share in Momaday’s acknowledgement that our stories are not fabulations of a redemptive elsewhere, but rather that they “take place”—that our narratives have the power to shape our human and ecological relationships in the here and now—they might be articulated much differently. Instead of perpetuating the erasures that imagine a “wild beyond” or an “undercommons” where an elect polity might live out their own vision of utopia, such a theory might confront oppressive institutions directly. Instead of imagining a vanguard of pioneers on an “endlessly retreating frontier of innocence” (Fiedler, Love and Death 27), such a theory might imagine a beloved community oriented toward the non-‐violent transformation of the institutions of the state in which we are all to varying degrees complicit. 93 Such a theory might bring settlers in the United States of America to our own moment of “truth and exile,” and enable our own ability undertake the work necessary to realize with Indigenous nations a vision of our being together not defined by the violent binaries of the frontier, but by the “right relations between and among” that have always been the modest demand 92 I employ Achille Mbembe’s conception of “necropolitics” to outline the relationship between settler violence and the state in my forthcoming article “The Settler Unchained: Settler Violence and Constituent Power.” 93 For a more complete consideration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s conception of the “beloved community” and its application to radical politics, see Grace Lee Bogg’s “The Beloved Community of Dr. Martin Luther King.” 284 of decolonial thought (Momaday, Man Made of Words 211; Byrd, “Follow the Typical Signs,” 3). 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation examines how settler colonial understandings of liberation and sovereignty have inflected the articulation of dissent in post-1945 U.S. literature. A diverse array of literary iconoclasts in the post-45 period, including Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and N. Scott Momaday allegorized their own dissent against mainstream liberalism through the history and myth of the U.S. frontier. Through such figurative “frontiering,” these authors, ironically, appropriate the central symbolic narrative of U.S. nationalism in order to resist the oppression of the state and its cultural norms. These frontier allegories also constitute a vital link in an under-examined genealogy of postmodern literary aesthetics. Many of the hallmarks of postmodern form—parataxis, the celebration of spatial mobility, the ironic rejection of claims to authenticity, and the transcoding of allegory—have antecedents not only in the artistic experiments of the European avant-garde, but also in the cultural forms of America’s settler colonial past. By reading frontier allegory through transnational conceptions of the frontier, I explore the extent to which this rhetoric shapes literary politics, and the ways in which such literary pioneering has shaped activist and scholarly discourse. I argue that the use of frontier rhetoric in oppositional literature is much more than a “rite of assent” (Sacvan Bercovitch) that marks a work as an ipso facto expression of sublimated state liberalism. Drawing from the emerging field of settler colonial studies, I suggest that frontier allegory enables the authors I examine to articulate critiques of the liberal state that are nonetheless imbricated in the exclusionist and eliminatory logic of settler colonialism. ❧ My title is drawn from poet Jack Spicer’s 1958 serial poem Billy the Kid, in which Spicer exhorts his readers to “fake out a frontier,” describing this frontier as “a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff's posse after him—a thousand miles of it if it is necessary.” This evocation of frontier myth came from a writer whose identity and politics—Spicer was an out gay man, and a leftist anarchist—stood in stark contrast to the normative values of Cold War America. Spicer was part of an unlikely array of literary iconoclasts, including Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and N. Scott Momaday, who adopted frontier rhetoric to animate their dissent. Many scholars have read such acts of figurative frontiering as coded expressions of a myth of American exceptionalism. I argue that narratives of frontiering, in which a colonial periphery is imagined as a space of escape from the oppressive norms of a metropolitan state, are not discourses exclusive to, or entirely contained by, U.S. ideology. Reading frontier allegory in U.S. literature as an expression of a transnational settler colonial imaginary, my work demonstrates how even the most radical articulations of cultural dissent in the U.S. and beyond can be inflected with the eliminatory and exclusionist logic of settler colonialism. ❧ A broad range of writers in the post-1945 period imagined their innovative literary practice as akin to the experience of nineteenth-century American settlers who sought to escape market pressures or political oppression by “lighting out for new territory.” For these cultural “pioneers,” this escape was not literal but figurative: the task was to “fake out“ a literary space in which to imagine alternative modes of life. The frontier myth is not presented as an aesthetic absolute, but rather engaged as an allegorical figure whose meaning is perpetually deferred and ironized. This literary frontiering was nearly always conceived as both a formally and politically radical project. Norman Mailer neatly articulates how this formal project operated in his own work—while also pointing toward the troubling racial valences inherent to it—in his infamous 1953 essay “The White Negro,” in which he proclaims that “one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.” The plural and fluid form of what would become postmodernism emerged when artists such as Mailer abandoned the “square cells” of normative American life—and Modernist form—and moved into the “frontier” posed by the uncharted spaces of African-American life. Engaging with transnational settler colonial theory, I argue that understanding why writers like Mailer saw the “frontiersman” as an exemplar of freedom is vital to understanding the link between their formal radicalism and racial and gender politics. ❧ In my first chapter, I use a brief consideration of Mailer’s essay, and critical responses to it, as a springboard from which to examine the vexed relationships among race, literary form and frontier rhetoric in Jack Kerouac’s “road” novels. Kerouac’s identification of Westward expansion with radical form and marginalized cultures is an aspect of his writing that a surprising range of postmodern theorists and literary authors has emulated. Drawing on recent theoretical work on the multivalent and fluid forms of settler colonial expansion, I demonstrate how understanding Kerouac’s frontier allegory, and its persistent drive toward performances of “settler indigenization,” proves vital for understanding the “rhizomatic” form of Kerouac’s road novels as an expression of Kerouac’s investment in a specifically settler colonial vision of freedom. ❧ Like Kerouac, Jack Spicer imagined his own writerly practice as an act of frontiering, but also employed frontier allegory much more extensively in his representation of literary community. My second chapter focuses on frontier rhetoric in Spicer’s writing in order to examine how the settler colonial imaginary shaped the queer literary and activist countercultural communities of San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s. Spicer’s mid-career work engages in a whimsical utopian project of imagining a separatist “Pacific Republic” that would offer an escape from oppressive norms but also a return to putatively republican ideals of settler colonialism. I argue that Spicer’s politics take a final turn in his posthumously published Book of Magazine Verse, in which he casts a more critical eye on his own frontier rhetoric and his anti-subjectivist poetics, enacting a nuanced critique of the counterculture’s inability to imagine an egalitarian alternative to American liberalism. ❧ Representations of the frontier were the figurative ground upon which two well-known critics of the California counterculture, Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner, contested the politics of writers such as Kerouac and Spicer. For Didion and Stegner, writing from libertarian and left liberal perspectives respectively, the politics of the counterculture were often naïve to the ideological traps of the very history they wanted to escape. Didion excavates the frontier history of the women of her own family in order to contest the frontier metanarratives presented by both the counterculture and the New Right in California. Stegner performs a similar rejection of metanarrative in his 1972 novel Angle of Repose, which indicts both frontier and countercultural masculinity, but—thanks to a brilliant postmodern narrative frame that turns the critical eye of the reader on the novel’s curmudgeonly historian narrator—the ability to articulate any authentic historical narrative is questioned as well. Ironically, Didion and Stegner’s rejection of metanarrative prefigures similar moves made by their countercultural contemporaries. I conclude my third chapter by suggesting that this rejection of metanarrative constitutes a literary politics that, despite its more critical approach to the frontier past, risks glossing over rather than challenging the continuing injustices wrought by settler colonial processes. ❧ In my final chapter, I consider how two writers of color alternatively appropriate and parody frontier rhetoric in order to propose models of tentative solidarity with—and resistance to—the literary politics of the white counterculture. Oscar Zeta Acosta, as famous for his relationship with Hunter S. Thompson as he is for his formative role in Chicano nationalist activism, narrativized his own identity transformation against the logic of the settler/indigenous “frontier binary” in his autobiographical novel Autobiography of A Brown Buffalo. I argue that Acosta, rather than partaking in the rhetoric of a “hegemonic mestisaje” (Ben Olguin), which contemporary critical race theorists critique as a feature of Chicano nationalist cultural production, imagines a third space beyond the settler indigenous binary from which to articulate his dissent against the strictures of racial capitalism in the US. Like Acosta, Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday moves fluidly between the rhetoric of settlerism and Indigenous resistance. While he employs a diverse range of indigenous cosmologies to write back against the settler colonial logics of normative U.S. culture, these gestures are coupled with his persistent engagement with the myth of Billy The Kid, a narrative Momaday uses to imagine a tentative solidarity with the settler counterculture. I argue that Momaday’s use of frontier tropes provides a means for thinking through the frontier binary as a structuring principle of U.S. state sovereignty in order to contest that paradigm. For Momaday, the mythic frontier outlaw provides a figure that demonstrates the potentials and limitations of the frontier myth as a mobilizing allegory for radical intercultural resistance to the settler state. Momaday’s unique indigenous appropriation of frontier rhetoric—and critique of neoliberal pluralism—provides a compelling final perspective through which to consider how literary culture in the U.S. has both worked through and struggled against the settler colonial logic of the frontier.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses