Living Large and Seeing the Country

Jasper Johns added the political map of the United States to his repertoire of prosaic images a century after the high-water mark of that map's strangeness. The United States of 1961 was beginning to acknowledge what David Blight has argued in Race and Reunion (2001): that post-Civil War reconciliation—the stability and ultimate iconicity of that map, undivided—was achieved by sweeping racial injustice under the rug. Neither the Civil Rights movement, though, nor more recent claims of the nation-state's decline, have diminished the ideological force of that ubiquitous icon—its ascendancy attested by any American newspaper, from rainbow-banded weather maps to the red and blue patchworks of election coverage. Even schoolbooks' sequenced maps of U.S. growth are always the same: identical views of the North American continent, cut off near central Mexico and Hudson Bay, only with differing colored areas inside a westward-shifting line. We see the colored area as a part of the inevitable whole, for what we have grown accustomed to seeing cannot be unseen. However ironic, Johns's map paintings (unlike Andy Warhol's soup cans) did not reduce their object to kitsch. Johns never was interested in commodification, after all; as he remarked in a 1964 interview, "I'm merely concerned with looking and seeing."¹

Anne Baker's Heartless Immensity begins with the observation that antebellum Americans lacked the cognitive anchor of an iconic map; consequently, Baker argues, they had peculiar and vexed ways of "looking and seeing." With the nation's boundaries disputed and expanding—in the late 1840s, the national map changed almost annually—Ralph Waldo Emerson well could lament, in a journal entry Baker quotes, "America is formless" (p. 2). Even the likes of John O'Sullivan, coiner of the phrase "Manifest Destiny," would not have looked at an 1845 U.S. map and seen in their minds' eyes precisely the shape Americans today see in newspapers (if anything, such expansionists would have envisioned a nation that extended up the Pacific Coast to 54fl 40" and also included Cuba, if not all of Mexico). Though certainly eager to fortify a national identity, antebellum Americans did not and could not derive a collective self-image from that ubiquitous trapping of modern nationalism Jasper Johns sought to defamiliarize. Rather, Baker contends, the large and nebulous geographical constitution of the pre-Civil War United States provoked a host of anxieties about the young nation—how big is it, what does it look like, who lives in it—that scholars of antebellum culture have understood as sundry, unrelated concerns.

By examining artifacts of those anxieties, ranging from novels and explorers' journals to geography schoolbooks and the pamphlets that accompanied traveling panoramic exhibitions, Baker conjoins cultural history and literary studies in an unusually rewarding fashion. Heartless Immensity does not simply historicize literary works by Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau; it contends with historical questions for which literary analysis is a singularly apt approach. To understand the rise of U.S. nationalism, and in particular what Baker calls "a fundamental shift from republic to empire" in antebellum America's self-conception, we first must understand the problems that conditioned Americans' basic knowledge of their nation (p. 71). These problems—uncertain borders, concerns about excessive size, fears of the cultural and political influence of "untamed" land inhabited by "uncivilized" people—are essentially literary ones, this book suggests: fluctuating geography provokes rhetorical and conceptual flux, which demands the careful interpretation of multivalent signs and symbols. Baker asks, "What was it like to live in a nation whose shape and size were constantly shifting?" (p. 12). She poses nearly the same question to which Frederick Jackson Turner claimed in 1893 to know the answer, but even if Turner's famous thesis about a monolithic frontier mentality that generated a uniquely American individualism has been appropriately discredited, the question remains interesting. Baker's book does not simply follow the valuable...