The Future of the American/Bourgeois Self

The Business of America: The Cultural Production of a Post-War Nation. By Graham Thompson. London: Pluto Press, 2004. 189 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paperback).

Graham Thompson, who teaches American literature at the University of Nottingham, has written an intriguing and informative study of how novels in the United States have changed from the 1940s to the present. His overview is also, for me, a very frustrating one.

The first section of the book is titled "White Male Literary Culture." Here he draws on the scholarship of Richard Godden's Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer, Emily Stipes Watts's The Businessman in American Literature, and Dana Nelson's National Manhood.¹ He divides this section into three chapters: "Errands in the Post-War/Cold War Jungle," "Entropy, Postmodernism, and Global Systems," and "Postnational Recovery Narrative and Beyond." His focus is on what he sees as a paradoxical critique of American business culture by the white male novelists whose work he analyzes in these three chapters. He argues that they all support the principle of individualism that they see as the essential foundation of American national identity. They also see business institutions robbing American citizens (white males) of their autonomy. He borrows the term "agency panic" from Timothy Melley's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America to evoke the ways in which these literary artists have felt trapped since the 1940s.² The paradox of this outlook, for Thompson, is that businessmen in the United States agree with the novelists that individualism is the essence of national identity. The writers' outlook, therefore, supports "the ideological interests of business by creating citizens loyal to a myth of the nation rather than politically active class groups" (8). Here my frustration begins because we know that the novel is a bourgeois art form. We also know that between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the bourgeoisie in Western Europe constructed state-of-nature anthropology that assumed the existence of an essential, rational male individual who did not get his authentic identity from the complex cultures in which he found himself trapped. The promise of this transnational bourgeois culture as expressed, for example, in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) was that a modern world was coming into being through the process of a negative revolution. The complex institutions of the medieval and other traditional cultures would not be replaced by a new set of complex institutions. In the modern world, the male individual would be autonomous. But, of course, the middle classes did engage in positive revolutions as they constructed a new world of complex institutions. And in all bourgeois nations, not just the United States, they have expressed their discontent with their creations down to the present.

When Thompson, therefore, looks at major white male novelists throughout the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth century, he does not relate their critiques of business institutions and their support of individualism to this larger pattern of transnational bourgeois culture. He merely reports that they saw an exceptional American nation in which it was possible for an individual to achieve perfect independence. For him, they also saw businessmen constructing powerful institutions that robbed white male citizens of their independence. After Thompson describes how these canonical writers accepted the responsibility of defending an authentic, natural American nation against the artful, alien America being built by businessmen, he does not consider the possibility that major novelists in Western European nations also were protesting the growth of business institutions. He writes, then, as if American male authors were unique in the modern world when they constructed "recovery narratives" in which the essential nation would be restored to its national simplicity.

Thompson sees a similar pattern of "recovery narratives" in the new academic area of American studies that was constructed in the 1930s, a pattern that, for him, borrowing from Gene Wise's analysis, began to...