Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism by Walter Benn Michaels (review)

Book Reviews199 WALTER BENN MICHAELS. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 216 p. Walter Benn Michaels' Our America is both the best of books and the worst of books. One of the major critics of late-nineteenth-century American writing, Michaels moves here into the American 1920s, a period he alternately illuminates through concise, sometimes brilliant readings of various texts and travesties through all too brief, anything but brilliant readings of the writers—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—he himself calls "major." I finished this book hoping Michaels would continue to work out his ideas about both the period addressed here and later twentieth-century American writing, but that he would try to offer more extensive and more persuasive readings of the major writers who seem to me all but libelled in this ambitious study. In some ways the virtues and limitations of Our America reverse those of Michaels' earlier study, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987). Michaels' first book is notoriously difficult to read, lacking as it does a traditional introduction, transitional summaries, and a conclusion. It's all too easy to finish this book and still wonder what the logic of naturalism is and what it has to do with the gold standard or other historical elements introduced throughout each chapter. On the other hand, all attentive readers will have benefitted from Michaels' elaborate commentary on characters such as Hawthorne's Holgrave, Norris' Vandover and Trina McTeague, Dreiser's Carrie, and Wharton's Lily Bart. In Our America, by contrast, the principal argument and crucial assumptions are nicely anticipated at the first, revisited periodically through the body of the work, and very usefully reformulated at the end during Michaels' concluding consideration of Waldo Frank's Our America (1919), the text which provided Michaels his title. And while Michaels does illuminate specific texts and authors—Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon, Hart Crane, Jean Toomer, Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, Francis Harper, Nella Larsen—he tends to treat his "major" authors so briefly and unconvincingly as to undermine his commitment to include major as well as more recently canonized writers of color within his overarching thesis. This thesis is that modernist American writing is best understood as sharing with nativism a "structural intimacy" (2), a "commitment to identity —linguistic, national, cultural, racial" (3). Indeed, Michaels' subject is what he calls "nativist modernism," anticipated in works by Page, Dixon, Lothrop Stoddard, and others, but finally realized in texts as diverse as those written by the African-American writers cited above and such modernist luminaries as Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. In all these writers of the 1920s, Michaels argues, we find "the nativist project of racializing the American" (13), for in their works racial and cultural identity is insisted upon against the claims of Americanization ("the melting pot"). Wherever Michaels takes us in this period, white and black authors alike insist on the value and centrality of "racial purity," of families defined by blood and not loyalty to an ideal or concept. Everywhere Michaels shows 200Rocky Mountain Review us the determining influence of race and culture in their more recent, anthropological senses, especially as our writers (whatever their literary merits) embrace the centrality of race in defining their sustaining values. Michaels is at his best in treating black and Native American writers for whom race was clearly a major subject. Through these brief but incisive discussions , he earns many of his generalizations about what sets the American 1920s off from the Progressive period, as he calls it. When he cites his major writers, however, Michaels offers readings for which he needed to provide much more extended explanation. At least three times he quotes Jason Compson's remark, "blood is blood," as if Jason speaks for Faulkner (6, 40, 100); on one occasion he even refers to "The Sound and the Fury's insistence that 'blood is blood' " (3); and he makes no apparent distinction between Jason's and Faulkner's views on Jews (9). Remarkably, Michaels elsewhere asserts that Quentin Compson desires incest with Caddy "as a strategy for keeping the blood uncontaminated" (12). Hemingway fares no better. His racial views are all but...