American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film by Peter Lurie (review)

In American Obscurantism, Peter Lurie explores “an ongoing and pervasive—but also forceful—strategy of obliquity and indirection” (1) in racially “whitened” (24) accounts of American history—a tradition, he contends, marked by “notable evasions and codings around the facts of racial conflict and its concurrent presence-as-absence in American cultural history” (7). Canonical American texts, Lurie argues, wrestle with the “unsymbolizable dimension” (6) of traumatic racial conflict in acts of representation that yield, at best, “spectral” (17) forms of historical knowledge. This way of knowing the past reveals an “American propensity for visual thinking about social reality” (2) that is “obscurantist” because of the blindness of its looking and the unintelligibility of the histories it tells. Lurie illustrates this claim with a series of penetrating close readings of texts in which traumatic events—notably around slavery in the South, and Manifest Destiny in the West—that are half glimpsed or poetically implied are then re-repressed or re-encoded, sometimes in highly self-aware ways, in the formal arrangements and thematic foci of canonical literature and film.

In the broadest sense, this is not a new argument. Questions about the accessibility and transparency (or otherwise) of history, the occlusion of power, and the presence-as-absence—through their representation in culture—of marginal or subaltern identities, have shaped orthodox approaches to the humanities since at least the theoretical turn of the later twentieth century. Lurie’s work, however, significantly extends this received critical context, not least in its identification of a distinctive, and specifically racialized (white) tradition in US cultural history, a finding that broadens the discussion beyond the localized function of specific genres or representational modes. The Gothic, for example, long seen as a genre in which violent American histories are precariously un/repressed, figures in Lurie’s exegesis, but only as one cultural mode among others to which he ascribes a common evasiveness or indirection. Just as significant is the methodology American Obscurantism brings to bear on the tradition it describes. Lurie fuses key strains of poststructuralist critical theory (Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man feature prominently in the early stages of the book) with aspects of trauma and affect theory. This approach informs not only his textual analysis but also his sustained interrogation of new historicist methodologies—ways of looking critically, he suggests, that misguidedly equate representation of historical events with the actuality of events themselves, in a “conceit of knowing” (19) that renders critical practice complicit in the obscuring of other historical experience.

Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”—positioned here as self-consciously ambiguous investigations of the obscurantism he describes—Lurie jumps forward to William Faulkner’s Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! He then moves to a historicist strain in Faulkner criticism that he suggests has failed to reflect adequately both the non-identity of Southern history with the excessive, dreamlike literariness of Faulkner’s language, and the potent evocation of otherness (and thus the potential for aesthetic negation) embedded within this formal excess. Lurie then jumps forward again, with successive chapters on two classics of late twentieth-century auteur cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s horror The Shining, and the Coen brothers’ postmodern Gothic Fargo.

If these leaps across historical time may appear obtrusive or glib to some readers, it is important to note that they are entirely consistent—formally, as it were—with Lurie’s repudiation of new historicism, helping embed his skepticism about received historicist practice within the structural organization of the book itself, in the commonalities he finds at play in texts written and filmed a century and a half apart. The commonalities themselves are convincing, too, as Lurie traces thematic affinities between Faulkner’s themes of racialized haunting, hidden secrets, and paternal sin and Kubrick’s re-treading of similar ground. The famous scene in The Shining, for example...