America, post-Utopia: Body, Landscape, and National Fantasy in Hawthorne's Native Land

LAUREN BERLANT America, post-Utopia: Body, Landscape, and National Fantasy in Hawthorne's Native Land A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along could violate them. The riddle is not solved by such turns of speech, but merely formulated differently. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte We must not voodoo the people. . . . Individual experience, because it is national and because it is a link in the chain of national existence, ceases to be individual, limited, and shrunken and is enabled to open out into the truth of the nation and of the world. Frantz Fanon, "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness" In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx develops an aesthetic of revolution that explains the political content of mass movements by their relation to symbolic forms. He does not simply read the content-logic of the forms themselves—so that the "meaning" of a metaphor like "the nation is a woman" does not reside primarily in the way "woman" expresses national qualities. Rather, Marx evaluates the techniques through which a movement formulates or articulates itself. "Bourgeois revolutions," he writes, "... storm quickly from success to success; Arizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 4, Winter 19Í Copyright © 1989 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 004-1610 Hawthorne's Native Land? 5 their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit. . . . There, the pharase [goes] beyond the content" (Marx 19, 18). In the case of bourgeois revolutions, the overpresence of spectacle indicates the poverty of the movement's political self-conception: the public is asked to "believe" that these ecstatic images "express" the political subjectivity of the movement. But to Marx what's primarily significant is the delirium that accompanies the production and deployment of bourgeois images, and less whatever political fantasy is contained in the images themselves. So too, when Marx addresses the "riddle" of national vulnerability by conjoining the image of the nation with a new image, that of woman, he does not aim to express the problem of national unconsciousness through an evaluation of the conditions offemale vulnerability . He does not claim to "solve" the national riddle by looking to woman; he reformulates the question in order to refine the question itself. Marx's use of gender to formulate the national question emphasizes the need to evaluate the riddled relations between political forms and the subjective conditions of historical experience. My aim in this essay is to reformulate Marx's concern with the mutual implication of language and subjectivity by theorizing specifically the conditions under which national identity takes shape within the individual who finds her/himself a national "citizen." To provide this analysis of national consciousness I will refer to the formation and operation of what I call the "National Symbolic"—the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space performs, and also refers to, the "law" in which the accident of birth within a geographic/ political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectivelyheld history.1 Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity that attains the status of natural law, a birthright. This pseudo-genetic condition not only affects profoundly the citizen's subjective experience of her/his political rights, but also of civil life, private life, the life of the body itself. Modern citizens are born in nations and are taught to perceive the nation as an intimate quality of identity, as intimate and inevitable as biologically-rooted affiliations through gender or the family.2 National subjects are taught to value certain abstract meanings as a part of their Lauren Beríant intrinsic relation to themselves and to the collectivity of the national terrain; there is said to be a common national "character."' Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote at a time in America when literary culture was doing much of the work of staging such a collectivity, both to provide for the people a National Symbolic, the common language of a common space, and to shore up the shaky state apparatus, which as yet had no cultural referent whose expression it could...