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  • Epistolary History
  • Miles Ogborn (bio)
Konstantin Dierks , In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; xviii+358 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8122-4153-2.

In the 1997 film The Postman, Kevin Costner plays the part of a drifter with a mule who wanders the post-apocalyptic landscape of north-west America in the year 2013 enacting selections from Shakespeare in return for food and shelter. He is shanghaied into the army of one of the warlords who terrorize the scattered villages that have been thrown back on their own resources to survive, but escapes and takes shelter in a long-abandoned US Mail van. There he takes the uniform from the skeleton of the driver and the sack of letters that had lain undelivered for many years, and becomes 'The Postman'. Delivering old letters, and then new ones, between the isolated settlements, he tells their writers and recipients, and then the other postal workers who take up the mantle, that he is working for the Restored Government of the United States which has been set up in Minneapolis under President Starkey. There is, of course, no such president and no government. Yet the hope of a restored national identity and the presumed security of a revived state structure invest every letter and its delivery with meaning, and provide the basis for resistance against the evil warlords. The crucial turning point in the film comes when Costner's postmen realize that their fragile postal network is self-replicating. It has developed branches and agents that they themselves were not even aware of. They become conscious that this thing has taken on a life of its own. As 'The Postman' says in a reflective speech, 'There used to be a postman on every street in America. They wore uniforms and hats just like this one. Getting a letter made you feel like you were part of something bigger than yourself. I don't think we ever really understood what they meant to us until they were gone.'1 Paired with this warm embrace from the national memory, the film ends with the postmen's act of mercy which spares the lives of their warlord enemies as the founding gesture of a new benevolent state sovereignty.

The Postman was, of course, a massive turkey. It flopped at the box office, earning back less than a quarter of the eighty million dollars spent making it. It has been cited as the beginning of the end of the big-time movie career of its star (who also directed the film), although others would give that credit to the earlier, and similar, Waterworld (1995). It seems that Kevin Costner's brand of bland heroic everyman could work in relation to baseball [End Page 253] (Field of Dreams, 1989), personal security (The Bodyguard, 1992), iconic outlaws (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991) and native Americans (Dances with Wolves, 1990), but not in making an epic tale from delivering letters, even with the obvious echoes of the Pony Express. The film itself made light of the difference between the conventions of heroism and the work of the postal service. At one point Costner's character demands entry to a fortified Oregon town declaring 'I am a representative of the United States Government authorized by restored Congress to re-establish a communication route'. The town's gun-toting sheriff demands in return, 'What does that mean in English?' And Costner replies, hesitantly, 'It means I'm your . . . postman'. However, the gap this hesitation signalled was, it seems, a step too far for cinema audiences. The mundane, everyday nature of writing and sending letters and the grand narratives of building nations, states and identities could not be reconciled on the big screen.

Yet, as Konstantin Dierks aims to show in In My Power: Letter-writing and Communications in Early America, this is precisely the task that must be undertaken. He has written a history of letter-writing, and of postal communication, in America's Atlantic world from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century which acknowledges, on the one hand, the ways in which letter-writing became so closely woven into...

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