Past Americana

The course of empire shadows the pun behind this meditation on the scales of literary history. My title echoes Pax Americana, the period of global peace initiated by the cementing of U.S. military and economic hegemony at the end of the Second World War. That pax, however, only counts as such by limited measures. The fact that there have been no declared hostilities between the world's most powerful nation-states since Bretton Woods has the effect of minimizing their many proxy wars—and of casting popular uprisings in the Global South as violations of a postwar order that has meant peace only for some. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the modifier Americana likewise falls short. For to the extent that the United States served as the world's guarantor against international conflict for the remainder of the twentieth century, it is clear now that it did so within a tangle of economic and military self-interest, in precisely the mode of the Roman pax imperia.

But this is not to take us into tired condemnations of American empire. If, in the new isolationism of the Trump era, the Pax Americana sounds like a quaint reminder of bygone times, this neatly brings the Latin term into alignment with the colloquial meaning of the English borrowing, Americana. A neologism from the later nineteenth century, Americana describes the paper relics that symbolize a shared national past: originally signifying older books and maps, its meaning later extended to include ephemera like the signatures of famous dead statesmen or sportsmen. The gendered nouns are accurate, for the collecting of such artifacts was, during the first Gilded Age, a dominantly male pursuit not unlike a sporting competition. In the second chapter of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the rich and indolent Percy Gryce natters on to Lily Bart (at her calculated urging, as they share a seat on the train) about his conquest of other contenders in pursuit of some choice bits of Americana: "'I've got a few new things,' he said, suffused with pleasure, but lowering his voice as if he feared his fellow-passengers might be in league to despoil him."¹ He has inherited the Gryce Americana, a precious collection well known to bibliophiles whose precise contents remain meaningfully unspecified. In this usage, the objects known as Americana acquire monetary value on the basis of both their rarity and their desirability as fetish; collectors prize unique copies and first editions, referred to competitively (in Wharton's time and today) as firsts. Lily's rejection of this queerly young antiquarian—"initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation"—as a potential husband marks one of her first rebellions against the commodity culture to which she has been raised.²

It is no accident that Gryce is the possessor of American paper relics in particular. His grasping reduction of books from living receptacles of meaning to prizes in a contest seems to represent a fall from the patriotic motivations of, say, Isaiah Thomas, whose collecting impulse led him to found the American Antiquarian Society in 1812. Thomas's interest in American antiquities, from imprints to Native artifacts, helped create the material conditions for the nationalist mythmaking of the mid-nineteenth century. And while the New England filiopietism that such repositories fostered is riddled with erasures and ideological fissures—as Wharton was well aware—at least Thomas aimed to share, not to hoard, the things he identified as having a special power to enclose and transfer such collective memory. The novel implicitly mocks the dynastically named "Gryce Americana" as a form of conspicuous wealth-display stripped of communal social values. Gryce tends it in the service of a bare commodity fetishism that is morally lower, in Wharton's universe, than the naive or provincial interest in one's own country that she mocks more gently elsewhere: the kind of interest that motivated the formation of countless local, regional, and national historical societies during the nineteenth century.

If Pax Americana carries with it a sense of obliviousness to its own self-interest, so too does Americana...