Geo-Aesthetics: Fascism, Globalism, and Frank Norris

A man walks into a bar. So begins the bad joke that Frank Norris plays on an aspiring painter who squanders his artistic talent amid scenes of animalistic gratification. This bar, however, is not simply some stock setting for a sordid tale about taste and creativity cheapened by poor judgment. Instead, this bar is known as the Imperial, located in downtown San Francisco at the turn of the century. Situated along the Pacific Rim, this bar alludes to the pressures created in a prototypical imaginary of globalization when aesthetics—in the guise of the would-be artist—stop in for a drink. To tell properly the joke of Vandover and the Brute, one must begin again: a man walks into a highly specific and evocatively named bar. After this point, the story becomes rather predictable, as Norris's hero-artist descends the evolutionary ladder to wind up groveling on the floor. Less predictable is the novel's ability to communicate a critical insight that is the subject of the artist's uncompleted masterpiece, a salon picture of a British cavalryman lost in the Sudan, which renders legible the deep connections between aesthetics and global vision.

This essay attempts to complete Vandover's half-finished artwork by rounding out the ideological impulses that lead the artist to the Imperial for drink and diversion in the first place. This examination explores how conceptualization of the globe as a single geo-economic unit depends on a historically specific aesthetic formalism exemplified by Norris's fiction. The contradictory nature of this project—that is, a contextual history of aesthetic formalism—captures the logic that ushers an Americanized global sensibility into being. Norris's career sits astride developments in market capitalism that led to an era of global commodities. The story of one historically specific commodity—wheat—encapsulates this transition: as Richard Hofstader reported over a half century ago, U.S. wheat farmers in the 1890s increasingly relied on world markets to export surplus grain, changing the nature of economic risk. "Agrarian depressions, formerly of local or national character, now became international, and with them came international agrarian discontent," writes Hofstader. ¹ The Epic of the Wheat is the title of Norris's trilogy, which begins in 1901 with the publication of The Octopus, a novel that does what Vandover cannot: it completes the aestheticized portrait of the global. Another contradiction emerges at precisely this point, since Norris's overblown art seems a poor example of aesthetics. Thus, this essay does not rely on The Octopus alone and instead engages other portraits of global aesthetics produced by early historians of Manifest Destiny, such philosophers of art as Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Schiller, and contemporary theorists of the global.

Worldwide Unity: Formalism as Geopolitical Art

Imperialism and empire have long been shown to have aesthetic dimensions. A recent analysis of this linkage comes from Henry Schwarz, who suggests that aesthetics offer an "attractive tool" for staging an imperial enterprise. ² In 1900, the historian Edwin Sparks adduced a similar conclusion, citing Whitman's "Passage to India" as evidence of the creative spirit that had fueled four centuries of American expansion. ³ A year later in 1901, The Octopus crossed this terrain where literature serves imperialism to convey a deeper lesson about how aesthetics facilitate the imagination and conceptualization of the globe as a single, perfect form. Turn-of-the-century globalization is an aesthetic project, which is not to say that it is beautiful but rather that globalization became a thinkable concept via certain formal properties. Meditating on the possibility of a "world culture," Immanuel Wallerstein begins by throwing out some definitions of culture, including "culture as the production of art-forms." ⁴ One critic's trash is another's treasure: this essay sifts through the "art-forms" tossed aside by Wallerstein to explore globalization as an exercise of aesthetic imagination. The formal properties of art allow economic and imperial interests to condense dispersed geographies into a...