FANTASY AMERICA

402 Pages·2009·17.27 MB·English

FANTASY AMERICA: THE UNITED STATES
AS SEEN THROUGH FRENCH AND ITALIAN EYES
by
MARK HARRIS
M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1992
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
(Programme in Comparative Literature)
We accept this thesis as conforming
to the required standard
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
April 1998
© Mark Robert Harris, 1998
In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced
degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it
freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive
copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my
department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or
publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written
permission.
The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada
DE-6 (2/88)
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Abstract
For the past two decades, scholars have been reassessing the
ways in which Western writers and intellectuals have traditionally
misrepresented the non-white world for their own ideological
purposes. Orientalism, Edward Said's ground-breaking study of the
ways in which Europeans projected their own social problems onto
the nations of the Near East in an attempt to take their minds off
the same phenomena as they occurred closer to home, was largely
responsible for this shift in emphasis. Fantasy America: The United
States as Seen Through French and Italian Eyes is an exploration of a
parallel occurrence that could easily be dubbed "Occidentalism."
More specifically, it is a study of the ways in which French and
Italian writers and filmmakers have sought to situate the New World
within an Old World context.
"Among the (More Advanced) Barbarians" (a.k.a. Chapter One)
examines the continuities and discontinuities of French travel
writing in America from the days of the Jesuits to the heyday of the
existentialists. Certain motifs and idees fixes—the uniqueness of
American racism; the "magic" of New York—are first identified and
then examined. "A Meeting of the Mafias" (Chapter Two) is more
cosmopolitan in scope, tracing the ways in which French, American,
and Italian crime fiction have historically influenced each other, as
well as the relationship of the policier to differing notions of the
nation-state. "The Ruins of Rome" (Chapter Three) demonstrates
how Italian intellectuals have looked to the United States for new
World Solutions to Old World problems. This chapter encompasses
two major sub-themes: the positive possibilities for Italy of
"Fordismo" (the American industrial model) and American literature
(which was believed to promote political, as well as cultural,
liberty). "Lurching Towards the Millennium" picks up the threads of
the first three chapters and places them in the contemporary
context of globalization, a process which threatens to replace the
hegemony of the nation state with the omnipresence of corporate
power. The cultural model of Quebec is introduced at this point as a
New World/Old World paradigm that embodies the chimerical
contradictions of a globe on the brink of a new millennium.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ii
Acknowledgements iv
Introduction 1
CHAPTER I Among the (More Advanced)
Barbarians 11
CHAPTER II Mid-Atlantic Melodrama; or, A
Meeting of the Mafias 91
CHAPTER III The Ruins of Rome 194
CHAPTER IV Slouching Towards the
Millennium 243
Conclusion 344
Bibliography 362
Appendix I Who's Afraid of Jerry Lewis? 384
Appendix II Pity for John Wayne 389
Appendix III Hypocrisy American Style 392
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Acknowledgements
As John Donne almost said, no graduate student is an island—which
is to say, this Ph.D. dissertation could not have been completed
without the aid of a great many people. First of all, I would like to
thank the Killam Foundation, the federal government, and the UBC
funding agencies for the generous financial help they provided during
the writing of this thesis. Secondly, I would like to thank my
doctoral committee for the unique and varied insights with which
they broadened and enriched my work. Dr. Marguerite Chiarenza, the
committee's chair, served as a cool and calming voice of reason
when things seemed most hopeless, as well as an eagle-eyed
proofreader. Dr. Steven Taubeneck proved equally knowledgeable
about university procedure, and made sure that I didn't wander too
far afield from my central point. Dr. Patricia Merivale's vast
erudition, meanwhile, provided me with an endless supply of
pertinent literary leads. I would also like to thank Professor George
McWhirter and the students in his translation class for their helpful
suggestions in regard to the English-language renderings of the
dissertation's appendices. Dr. Eva-Marie Kroeller's contribution
should likewise not be under-valued, since she initiated me into the
mysteries of Comparative Literature and introduced me to two
committee members. Dr. Thomas Salumets, her worthy successor as
program head, proved to be no less helpful. I would also like to thank
the library staffs of the Pacific Cinematheque and the Italian
Cultural Institute for granting me access to out-of-print texts
which would otherwise have been extremely difficult to obtain.
Similarly, my appreciation extends to the helpful folks at Manhattan
Books who kept me regularly supplied with the latest French and
Italian tomes. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Carola Ackery,
who stood by me during the months following my nearly fatal
automotive accident in April, 1997. If not for her selfless care, it
would have taken much longer than it did for this dissertation to get
back on track. Consequently, it is to her that this project is
gratefully dedicated.
1
TNTRODUCTION
In the 73 volumes of The Jesuit Relations, there is one passage
that stands out from all the others. Amid endless accounts of pagan
souls lost and won, of the hardships and torments endured by Christian
missionaries in the land of the heathen, of the endless perfidies
committed by French drunks and English Protestants, there is a single
description that owes more to the fantastic tradition of Herodotus and
John Mandeville than it does to the dispassionate, hardheaded journals
of itinerant monks, merchants, soldiers and sea captains. "[Les] deux
monstres," spotted by Father Pierre Marquette, SJ, during the course of
a seventeenth-century river journey in the American Southwest, "ont
des Cornes en teste Comme des cheveils; un regard affreux, des yeux
rouges, une Barbe comme d'un tygre, le corps couuert d'ecailles, et le
queue si Longue qu'elle fait tout le tour du corps passant par dessus la
teste et retournant entre les jambes elle se termine en queue de
Poisson" (The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Vol. 59 140).
As we shall see in Chapter One, many of the Jesuits' letters to their
religious superiors were written in a style that seems to anticipate the
anthropological tone of Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes tropiques. Even so,
while reading these texts it is important to bear in mind that even the
clearest-eyed observations leave room for monsters. Proto-ethnology,
zoology, and botany are never far removed from the realm of magic and
wonder.
Fantasy America: The United States as Seen Through French and
Italian Eyes is predicated on this peculiar split in human consciousness.
2
It takes as its starting point the idea that there is an element of magical
thinking in the national perception of other societies. If French and
Italian artists and intellectuals did not impose upon the economic
colossus of the New World the same humiliating prejudices and
misrepresentations which—as Edward Said so eloquently complains in
Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism—expansionist Europe projected
onto its non-white colonies, the object of their observation was
nonetheless characterized by otherness rather than by any "genetic"
points of cultural similarity. In other words, America was always seen
as something larger than Europe or as something smaller; it could be
"inferior" or "superior". What it could not be was the same.
National history, local customs, and frustrated wishes always
impinge on collective distortions rooted in psychological projection.
Probably the only peoples immune to this cultural debility are those
whose extreme geographical isolation blinds them to the existence of
other nations and other mores.The three countries covered by this
study obviously do not fall into this exceedingly rare category, although
they do enjoy differing degrees of otherness and affinity. French and
Italian, for instance, are both Latin-based languages, while the structure
of English owes most to the ancient Germanic tongues. On the other
hand, both French and English are, in Gilles Deleuze's sense of the term,
"imperialist" languages, while Italian is not. Even so, it should not be
forgotten that Latin, the language of ancient Italy, was once the
universal tongue of the Pax Romana, and must therefore be ranked as
the Western World's first imperialist system of discourse (if—on the
basis that it was spoken mainly in Asia Minor—one does not count
Hellenic Greek).
3
As it is with language, so is it with most things. While Franco-
American sociocultural affiliations can more often be perceived than
their Italo-American counterparts, these comparisons are often
contradictory and ambiguous. For every conclusion reached, one could
have arrived at a counter-conclusion which was almost as sound. What's
more, the ties of influence and observation do not always flow in a
bilateral direction. In societies that every day grow more global and less
tribal—a description which currently encompasses all but a few isolated
communities in Africa and Asia—increasingly complex ideograms are
needed to properly explain the flow of progression/regression. In many
cases, definitive pontification exceeds even the most generous
boundaries of academic speculation. To speak on such matters is to
commit the intellectual sin of hubris.
In order to avoid the worst of these excesses, I have decided to
limit my study of French and Italian perceptions of America to models
which at least two of the concerned parties —one of which must always
be the USA—have shared to a significant degree. For this reason, the
reader will find little or no comment on such subjects as opera, science
fiction, Renaissance painting, Impressionism, rock 'n' roll, collections of
aphorisms, Broadway musicals, book length philosophical essays,
peplumi, rhythm and blues, epic poetry, commedia dell'arte, or a
thousand other locally popular manifestations of national creativity.
Instead, I have decided to focus on three primary areas of artistic
production. Respectively, these are the travel book, the polar/policier,
and—for want of a better term—the cultural survival essay. In this
relation, American commentators are more or less silent partners.
4
Though constantly spoken of, they almost never speak of those who so
confidently define them.
"Among the (More Advanced) Barbarians," the first of Fantasy
America's four chapters, deals with French intellectual attitudes
towards the United States, from the Counter-Reformation era (when the
Jesuit Fathers first set an enduringly Gallic cultural stamp on the New
World) to the late 1960s (when aging existentialists and more youthful
poststructuralists took this newly-imperial republic to task for its
foreign and domestic policies). This was the period when virtually all
Gallic observers saw the United States as "other," regardless of the
political convictions or personal predilections of individual literary
travellers. Some of these accounts appear in the form of travel
journalism, others in the guise of fiction. All are, to a greater or lesser
extent, realistic. Readers in search of a "fantastic" New World akin to the
one depicted in J.G. Ballard's science-fiction novel, Hello America, will
surely be disappointed. For my purposes, the words "Fantasy America"
refer to certain carefully defined outsiders' "takes" on their country of
study—nothing more. By adhering to this policy, I hope to underscore
the fantastic elements which underlie the surface naturalism of the
texts and films under discussion. For reasons of topicality and source
availability, the lion's share of critical attention will be focused on post
war works of film and literature.
For historical reasons, early Italian impressions of the New World
are not included here. La Nouvelle France, after all, was once part and
parcel of the ancien regime. Because the Risorgimento was not complete
until 1870, the Italian government was never in a position to acquire
North American colonies (even if the newly "discovered"—to its long-
5
term inhabitants, it was never truly "lost"—continent was named after
the Italian mariner, Amerigo Vespucci). Whatever expansionist
impulses the brainchild of Cavour and Garibaldi might have felt during
the last decades of the nineteenth century were, of necessity, directed
towards the last few acres of Africa which were not already under
European control. In other words, French voyagers to the United States
were imbued with a vestigial proprietory interest which was to be
denied to their Italian counterparts. No matter how "other" the New
World might appear to Parisian travellers, the ubiquity of French place
names could not help but remind them of a very distant familial
relation. Conversely, the very size and success of America had to appear
on some level as a symbol of cultural defeat, an emblem of "Anglo-
Saxon" hegemony, the economic consummation of anglophone self-
aggrandizement that began with the Hundred Years' War (if the words
"Englishman" and "American" seem mutually exclusive in the White
House and Whitehall, they sound far more convergent in the Elysee
Palace).
The French intellectual elite's deep-seated suspicion of perfidious
Albion reborn as the crude but vital USA did not, however, entirely
preclude feelings of love, admiration, and curiosity. Quite the contrary.
America's vast spaces, mechanical ingenuity, democratic practices,
limitless wealth, industrial capacity, motion pictures, music, automobiles
and literature were at least as much adored as they were derided.
Above all, the new nation was a paradox. "Barbaric" though it was, this
upstart colony in some ways seemed superior to the Old World at a time
when the natural superiority of Europeans over all other peoples was
almost universally held—at least by Europeans. America was not,