Monday, April 27, 2009

one nation, undivided by history

Let me begin with this:

"This is the American utopian promise: by disrupting the subject's local affiliations and self-centeredness, national identity confers on the collective subject and indivisible and immortal body, and vice versa."(Berlant 49)

Alexander noted in his post that he believed himself to be the only student who had to prepare for reading Berlant's The Anatomy of National Fantasy by first reading Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, but he was wrong. I, too, had never read the novel. Somehow in my otherwise very thorough high school and collegiate education, I managed to avoid it. I thought this a blessing; I'd heard terrible things. Much to my surprise I found I enjoyed it very much, and that even better, I connected to it in a way that I hadn't for most of the readings in this class. So while Berlant's writing seemed obtuse and frustrating to no end, my strong connection enabled me to power through, and for once, gain understanding with a piece of theoretical writing.

While reading the novel (rather hurriedly), I had a sense of something under the surface, that Hawthorne was trying to tell us something about ourselves. I think that Berlant hits it on the head when talks about the American amnesia that afflicts most of us who are under the thrall of the National Symbolic, as she calls it. Like many of the previous posts, I too thought that the Statue of Liberty was the perfect symbol for which Berlant to rest her argument. In the novel, Hawthorne presents us with protagonists whose enemy seems to be their own villainy and sense of guilt, but by the end, you realize that Hawthorne is saying something much different. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale toil under the oppression of their sins for seven years, but the novel ends with their freedom. Their Puritan community had used Hester for all this time as a symbol of what not to be, or as Berlant notes, "the penal machine is a sign of social positivity as collective identity is generated by the scaffold's operation" (59). The whole novel is built around a community who gains its sense of the National Symbolic in a series of negations: don't do this, don't be that, or else. On a more simple level, Hester acts as a deterrent, and as a reminder of their own positive identity as a community of saints (of which Dimmesdale represents their hypocrisy in thinking themselves so above Hester). Adultery is bad, we are not adulterers, thus, we are good.

The ending of the novel aims to historically reconfigure, almost to reclaim, a sense of national identity, one that is not built upon blind nationalism and persecution of the dissending (like Hester and her symbolic spawn), but is instead built upon a critical consciousness. Hester, Pearl, and Arthur find absolution in freedom from the system that takes their sin and defines their whole lives by it, while the rest of the sinning population (who have the good fortune not to get caught) gets away with it. Berlant writes:

"But because this formal transfiguration of citizens into the juridico-utopian public sphere slights the scene of everyday life relations and consciousness, that scene ultimately provides the material for a counter-memory among 'the people' which is individual, familial, collective, and historical: the libidinous ground on which Hawthorne's critical nationalism is founded." (98)

The revelation of Arthur Dimmesdale's private shame, both within the novel's story and the framework of the novel in relation to its readers, the American public, provides an instance of clarity and contradiction within an otherwise unified and "perfect" system of obeisance. Berlant argues that without this sort of story in our national consciousness, we become a nation of blind nationalists, seeking solace in the "immortal body" of our fantasy and never questioning both its foundations and its secrets, which our lost to our amnesiac minds. I think this is why stories are so important to all cultures, so that they can wake us up and reclaim individual stories and differences outside of the "appropriate" symbolic consciousness.

While reading her section on the Statue of Liberty, I also couldn't help recalling the end scene of the 1986 animated film An American Tail. The film features Fievel the Jewish Russian mouse whose family has immigrated to the United States for a land of freedom, hope, and no cats. Of course, they learn by the end that no place is that perfect and that utopia they were dreaming of is literally a "no-place." The mouse family sought to escape the harshness of their everyday life in Russia, only to find that nothing much is different in America. The final scene of the film features Fievel reuniting with his family, having vanquished the enemy, and the brand new Statue of Liberty has just been constructed. If that isn't a perfect representation of that immortal body she represents, then I'm reading it wrong. Just watch it for yourself, you'll see what I mean:



-Ashley

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