Irving's Astoria and the Forms of Enterprise

Washington Irving's Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), is usually read, when it is read at all, as a lament for an unrealized empire and a call for further US expansion. The wide-ranging text narrates John Jacob Astor's designs for a Pacific fur empire, the foundation of the American Fur Company (AFC), the two voyages—by sea and by land—that he commissioned to found a trading fort at the mouth of the Columbia River, and the eventual sale of Fort Astoria during the War of 1812 to the Montreal-based North West Company (NWC). Near the end of Astoria, Irving sounds an elegiac note: "In a word, Astoria might have realized the anticipations of Mr. Astor, so well understood and appreciated by Mr. Jefferson, in gradually becoming a commercial empire beyond the Mountains, peopled by 'free and independent Americans, and linked with us by ties of blood and interest'" (596).¹ The tension in Jefferson's words—between national identity and commercial empire—pervades Irving's text.

Critics have located Astoria among what Peter Antelyes describes as "tales of adventurous enterprise": narratives that conceived of the US as "a literary form, and American literature, the vehicle by which its boundaries were discovered, explored, expanded" (17–18). At the same time, Astoria appeared years before the Oregon Treaty and John O'Sullivan's famous coinage of "manifest destiny"; the events it recounts took place decades earlier yet. This chronology suggests that its national frame is retrospectively imposed on the political and historical situation Laura Doyle calls "inter-imperiality," the "conditions created by the violent histories of plural interacting empires and by interacting persons moving between and against empires" (160). In the years around 1810, the Columbia basin, rich in furs and distant from imperial metropoles, was less a protonational space than a "strategic inter-imperial [zone]" in which British, American, and Russian companies competed for the opportunity to profit as middlemen between Indigenous trappers and traders and global markets (163).²

While Irving's text sometimes imagines an expanding nation, it more frequently narrates a networked economic and political enterprise that is only incidentally national, with nodes including Astor's New York and Fort Astoria as well as Montreal, London, Hawaii, St. Petersburg, and Canton. Astute readers of Astoria, from the early reviewer Everett Emerson to recent critics like Stephanie LeMenager and David Watson, have pointed out how the text both invokes the rhetoric of national expansion and veers outside the nation. For LeMenager, Astoria reveals "the unexpected results of . . . commercial imperialism: racial and ethnic mixing, dislocation, even de-nationalization," and thus presents "an alternate version of US manifest destiny . . . as imperialist, commercial, and anachronistically postnational" (687, 684). Watson argues further that Astoria dramatizes two imperial logics, "territorial expansion" and "transnationally located" commerce, sometimes clashing but sometimes symbiotic: "the corporation deterritorializes the nation-state . . . while the nation-state grounds the corporation" (10, 21). Such accounts echo a broader current in Americanist literary and cultural studies that has replaced national stories with imperial stories, reframed the romance of manifest destiny as the messy and brutal work of empire, and situated US continental hegemony in the contexts of hemispheric and overseas imperial projects.³

Although Astoria, which links its era's most celebrated writer and most celebrated capitalist in an imperial narrative of epic sweep, might appear a paradigmatic text for considerations of the literary history of US empire, Irving's text has remained relatively peripheral to such accounts. It regularly elicits frustration and distaste in the manner of Hugh Egan's succinct assessment: "Astoria does not possess the unity Irving thinks it does" (266). Assembled by Irving and his nephew Pierre Munro Irving from "the various papers, letters, and journals in the possession of Mr. Astor, written by various persons who have been in his employ," including published and unpublished firsthand accounts, Astoria might fairly be described as a patchwork (Life and Letters 3:63). Indeed, the scale and shape of the AFC challenged both Astor's managerial control and Irving's narrative consolidation. Irving, Egan writes, presents Astor...