Millenary Anamorphosis: French Map, American Dream

Millenary Anamorphosis: French Map, American Dream Sanford S. Ames E UGEN WEBER, in his France, fin-de-siècle, notes that “ no other century had made so much ado about its passing,” until France, at the end of the nineteenth century. No other “passing,” that is, except that of “the world as it had been on the threshold of its thou­ sandth year,” when an eleventh-century monk recorded that “men’s souls faced perilous times, manifold signs and prodigies came to pass, and sagacious men foretold other prodigies as great still to come.” 1The millenary impatience of recent writings by one Jean Baudrillard recalls a connection Weber makes: “The discrepancy between material progress and spiritual dejection reminded me of our own times. So much was going right, even in France, as the nineteenth century ended; so much was being said to make one think that all was going wrong” (2). The site for many today of “manifold signs and prodigies,” of “material prog­ ress and spiritual dejection,” is not France, but America. Roger Shattuck calls the Eiffel Tower “the first monument of modernism” presid­ ing over the international exhibitions of 1889 and 1900 as “the tallest man-made structure in the world.” 2 For this present fin-de-siècle, the monument of postmodernism may well be the American desert, as it is for Baudrillard—for whom geologically and culturally—it already is, or will be, astride the turn of a century and of the second ten centuries. With Baudrillard, we might well ask what a fin-de-siècle poetics would be. If, as some say, we are experiencing the end of directional his­ tory, of irreversible time; if America is the first primitive society of the future, as Baudrillard suggests in Amérique, 3 then perhaps the “turn” has taken place, a millenary catastrophe is already behind us, and seem­ ingly permanent notions of periodicity are being distorted by an un­ expected conjunction of events and pressures. He writes that American Indians must have needed a lot of magic, a cruel religion, to explain the natural grandeur of the desert, to have lived in harmony with such excess. Sacrifices, he muses, must have been invented to equal the cata­ clysmic sculpture of Monument Valley, a dramatic example of what culture is and has become. It is as if, he says, erected blocks of language eroded, and meanings were born from sedimentations deposited over Vol. XXXII, No. 4 75 L ’E sprit C réateur thousands of years. So culture, destined to become a Monument Valley, is already experienced as such in America (A, 9). Baudrillard has been called “a cruel theoretical extremist.” 4He is surely a medicine man and perhaps a poet. It suffices to set foot in America for him to sense that the continent, the space, is thought itself (A, 22). Born from a seismic break with the land mass of the “old world,” Baudrillard divines in the petri­ fied crust of the pre-human, in the mineral, his vision of the cultural theme park that sidereal America has left behind. This is a rediscovery of an imagined America, after Communism’s failure to deliver the millenium that America promised, but botched. It is this geological-like overlay of endings and beginnings that catapults Baudrillard into fastforward , anticipating, preempting the future, from a transatlantic obser­ vation post. Yves Berger, in a recent interview, declared that, We are all orphans of the American dream. On its imperfections, its lacks, its ruins, com­ munism wanted to construct for tomorrow that golden age that the discovery of America, from the very second Columbus mistreated that first Indian, relegated to the past. We know the rest. It is extraordinary to think that the five-hundredth anniversary of the dis­ covery, a broken dream, is offered to us the year when Communism has everywhere (almost) crumbled, a ruined dream. When all is said and done, we still have America. It is all we have left.5 Not only is it extraordinary that the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ discovery coincides with the collapse of communism, but that the graft of French theory in America has reached a point of ecstatic...