mike davis reading the text that isnt there paranoia in the nineteenth-century novel literary...

READING THE TEXT THATISNT THERE

Paranoia in the Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Novel

Mike Davis

RoutledgeNew York & London

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Copyright 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa.Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

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ISBN 0-203-00605-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 0-415-97105-5 (hardback: alk. paper)

I wish to dedicate this book to my wife Marnia, withoutwhose intelligence and support I would understand

nothing and accomplish less, and to the brilliant formeracademic Adrienne Donald, who explained eighteenth-

century England to me in a way that made sense ofnineteenth- century America. Dr. Donald is missed; we

need more like her in academe.

Contents

Acknowledgments v

IntroductionThe Gothic Logic of Paranoia

1

Chapter 1 Wielands Transformations: The Problem of Closure in theOpening American Novel

18

Chapter 2 Hidden Significance: The Marble Faun as Post Script toSeven Gables

42

Chapter 3 Rhetorical Razors: Lurking Significance in the VexatiousCoincidence of Benito Cereno

66

Chapter 4 Literary Cloaks, Practical Jokes, and the Esophagus Hoax:Concealment, Conspiracy, and the Contrivance of History inTwain

92

Notes 130

Bibliography 161

Index 167

Acknowledgments

For his superhuman efforts as a critic, eleventh-hour editor, and mentor-disguised-as-peer, I am indebted to Bruce Simon. For their criticism, encouragement, humor, and insights, I want to thank Jeff Tucker, Rebecca Jaroff, andGavin Jones. For their guidance and support (and most of all their patience), I amgrateful to my advisors, Lee Mitchell and William Gleason. This book is the resultof a highly collaborative effort, and it is simply as a matter of con venience thatit appears under my name.

IntroductionThe Gothic Logic of Paranoia

[T]here is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations,that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simplybecause no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heatedexaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I havein mind. 1

[O]f all the fiction of the West, [the American] is most deeplyinfluenced by the gothic, is almost essentially a gothic one. 2

At its most accessible dialogic level, this book is an attempt to synthesize two ofthe more engaging and long-lived claims in American Studies: Leslie Fiedlersliterarily grounded assertion of the gothic nature of American litera ture andRichard Hofstadters historically grounded contention that the Americanpolitical arena has had, from its inception, a paranoid component. It would seemto be more useful to speak of synthesizing than of reconciling the two claimsbecause neither could be expected necessarily to preclude the other. In fact, on acertain superficial level, the two phenomena discussed by Hofstadter and Fiedler(both of them grounded in the projection of anxiety- based fantasies) almostinsist upon being related to one another. After all, one of the primarycomponents of gothic literature is its technique of taking an object of desire andprojecting it into the external world as an object of fear, 3 just as Freudstextbook contention about paranoia is that it takes a desired ho mosexual advanceand projects it into the external world as an unwanted ho mosexual attack. 4The relationship between the gothic blurring of desire/fear and the para noidblurring of desire/persecution is not without significance in this study. Itsimportance, however, is secondary. To understand what is most important aboutthe relationship, it will be helpful to clarify the stakes of the claims of Fiedlerand Hofstadter. As sweeping as Fiedlers claim may first appear, it is re ally onlya claim of intensity. He does not contend that American literature is soextraordinarily gothic as to make the gothicism of English and German lit eratureinsignificant; the gothic tradition is one that Fiedler implies and that literaryhistory shows to have been indulged in by the entire West. It is only visible,

according to Fiedler, to a greater degree in America (appearing promi nently inthe work of virtually all of the writers whom Fiedler categorizes as canonical).Hofstadter claims even less. The paranoid style that he sees in American politicsis, in his opinion, very likely as prevalent and apparent in the politics of othernations. 5 If we look at Hofstadters argument, however, we find that he is ableto do something with America that he would be hard pressed to accomplish withany other nation: he is able to trace the paranoid style back virtually to the dawnof official United States history. America may not be more paranoid than theEuropean countries with which Fiedler com pares its literature; its history ofparanoia may not run back any further than the history of paranoia in any of thenations that Hofstadter has in mind; but even if Hofstadters rhetoric belies theimportance of the claim, his argument shows us that there has been room inAmerican politics for the paranoid style for as long as there has been any suchthing as American politics.

Just as Hofstadter can trace the paranoid style in American politics all the wayback to the beginning of American politics, so can Fiedler trace the gothic backto Americas earliest writers. 6 And precisely as it is less useful to claim that theAmerican political arena is more paranoid (than other political arenas) than it isto observe that the American political arena has always been marked by theparanoid, so it is less useful to remark that the American liter ary tradition ismore gothic (than other literatures) than it is to say that it has always beengothic.

But even if American politics has always been marked by the paranoid andAmerican literature has always been marked by the gothic, does the rela tionshipbetween the gothic, the paranoid, and America require an explana tion morecomplicated than a simple recognition of and respect for chronologicalcoincidence? If America emerged at the time of the rise of the gothic novel andthe paranoid political style in Europe; and if the gothic novel and the paranoidpolitical style are still around elsewhere, then is it at all sur prising (or evenworth commenting on) that American literature has always been marked by agothic influence and the American political style has always been marked by aparanoid influence? Does any attempt to stress the impor tance of this alwaysnot run the risk of ringing rather hollow? What would we make of a claim that acertain nation founded in the 21st century was dis tinct from other nations in thatit had always had access to computers?

The primary aim of this book is to demonstrate that the relationship be tweenAmericas literary gothicism and its paranoid political style is a matter of greatercomplexity and importance than can be accounted for in terms of simplechronological coincidencethat the two are in fact directly related. In this study,we will examine the four nineteenth-century novelists (Brockden Brown,Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain) from Fiedlers list of American canonicalwriters. 7

It is a matter of convenience that the novelists under consideration herehappen to be the first four novelists mentioned by Fiedler. Far more relevant to

2 READING THE TEXT THAT ISNT THERE

this project, however, is the fact that these writers produced works that emphasize different symptoms of paranoia. Psychologists, historians and socialcritics place different values on such paranoid symptoms as megalomania, persecution, hysteria, conspiratorial fantasy and interpretive distress, but the textsunder consideration in this study will enable us to look clearly at the mainsymptom of paranoia (megalomania, as it registers itself with characters, narrators, self-consciously canonical authors, and readerships) and the four othersymptoms most frequently invoked in discussions of paranoia. 8 The paranoia inBrowns Wieland is primarily the product of Clara Wielands hysteria; theparanoia in Hawthornes The Marble Faun enables us to look at a laughably flimsyconstruct of a Catholic conspiracy; the very real conspiracy in Benito Cerenoenables us to focus on the persecution of Amasa Delano by Babo as well as amocking narrative voice; and since the most obvious genre for the interro gationof interpretive distress is the detective novel, we will conclude with anexamination of Twains overlooked A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, a bookthat parodies and imitates the English detective novel in many of the same waysthat Browns Wieland parodies and imitates the English gothic novel.

Whether we are inclined to accept Fiedlers canon or not, one purpose of thisstudy is to explore a certain relationshipuseful to think of as an evolu tionarydistillation of the paranoid from the gothicthat exists between four of the mostimportant 19th-century American novelists. This evolution, which we will studymore closely in the chapters to follow, is perhaps the most liter arily pronouncedsymptom of the paranoid style that Hofstadter examines in American politicsand should help to clarify the relationship that I posit be tween the always ofAmericas gothicism and that of its paranoid politics.

Another purpose of this study is to trace out a trajectory concerning the ever-shifting location of the site of the paranoid consciousness in the produc tions ofthe nineteenth-century writers that Fiedler (along with such seminal critics asD.H.Lawrence and Richard Chase) chose to single out as canonical. The presentstudy is not at all invested in ratifying or reifying the canonical or non-canonicalstatus of the writers under examination, but in explaining something that theyhad in common that might have been responsible for their canonization in thefirst placea trajectory that the critics who canon ized them failed to commenton explicitly, perhaps because the culture that produced those critics wasengaged in the (paranoid?) project of revealing things to itself about itselfthrough systematic concealment.

A SURVEY OF TERMS

One of the limitations of claiming that American literature is a literature of thegothic is that such a claim is not limited enough to be very useful. Gothic isone of the loosest, baggiest, and most monstrous of literary terms. What is mostproblematic about Fiedlers generalization is that at the same time that it soundsas if it is claiming everything, its lack of specificity enables it to claim very little.

THE GOTHIC LOGIC OF PARANOIA 3

And to say (as I will) that Fiedlers formulation is im proved by the substitutionof paranoid for gothic is, without further clar ification, merely to exchangeone lack of specificity for anotherfor paranoia is as loose and baggy amonster in the field of psychoanalysis as gothic is in literature. 9

The similarities between the two terms do not end with the blurring of desire(with fear or persecution). Probably more telling is the fact that both tend to defythe traditional genus-species method of definition; rather, both are routinelycategorized according to the principles outlined by Wittgensteins notion offamily resemblance, according to which certain concepts are defined by a set ofoverlapping similarities. The gothic novel is seen as a bundle of conventions,paranoia as a bundle of symptoms. A gothic can be a gothic without a dungeonor a rotting corpse or a supernatural event or a melodrama or an embeddednarrative or even a gothic building, just as a paranoiac can be a paranoiacwithout megalomania or hypochondria or a fas cination with patterns or even asense of persecution, for, as Hofstadter points out, we can be paranoid on behalfof someone else. But we associate the items from these two lists with the twocategories; we may not always find all (or even most) of the conventions/symptoms in what we call the gothic or the paranoid; but when we label things asgothic or paranoid (or encounter such labels), we do expect to be reminded of thequalities belonging to the set. In the introduction to The Coherence of GothicConventions, for instance, Sedgwick is being less cryptic than pragmatic whenshe cautions, I have not tried to say that the important Gothic conventions areall about one thing, but have tried to find different ways of showing that theseveral conventions are about, and are like, each other (6). We do have to startsomewhere, after all; and the recognition that family resemblance definitions area muddle, but nevertheless a meaningful muddle, is a start.

With that caveat in mind, we can proceed to the more precise defini tions ofthese terms that will be at work in this study. Although Sedgwicks work on thegothic is one of very few to attempt to discuss the genre at length in the abstract,her various definitions are only partially useful here; for she is invested in a morestrict application of the term than Fiedler, who excludes Hemingway alone fromhis otherwise entirely gothic American canon. For the present, it is more usefulto turn to Robert B.Heilman, one of Sedgwicks sources, for an understanding ofthe term gothic that is more consonant with Fiedlers use. Heilman sees gothicliterature as the rehabilitation of the extra rational. 10 His language isreminiscent of more familiar attempts to define the gothic, as in the formulationthat we encounter in such sources as M.H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms,according to which the term Gothic has also been extended to a type of fictionwhich lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloomand terror, represents events which are uncanny or macabre or melodramaticallyviolent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states. 11 The importance ofpsychological aberration (one possible unraveling of Heilmans extra-rational)to what is often meant by gothic is difficult to overestimate. In the case of atext such as William Godwins Caleb Williams, for instance, it is not the


concrete gothic imagery the prisons or the abusive authority figurethatremind us of the gothic im agery of Anne Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis; rather, itis the consciousness induced in the reader by the use of such imagery in the workof Radcliffe or Lewis. When we categorize Caleb Williams as gothic, we do soless because of what is specifically gothic about it than because Caleb (both ascharacter and narrator) reminds us of what we feel like when we read a gothicnovel.

In other words, the aberrant consciousness, that phrase from Abramsglossary of all places, functions quite nicely as the common denominator between the writers whom Fiedler categorizes as gothic on his own list. In each ofthe chapters that follow, we will examine the location of the primary aber rantconsciousness and explore the stakes of the shifts from one site to an other. Butfor now, we need only go so far as to recognize that Fiedlers extended use ofgothic is the use made here and throughout this study. Instead of attempting toovercome the imprecision of Fiedlers claim by nar rowing the meaning of hiskey term (gothic), I would suggest that we sub stitute a particular kind ofaberrant consciousness, the paranoid consciousness. And although paranoiacould, in other contexts, prove as un manageable as gothic, we will manage, bybreaking down its symptoms in the four chapters that follow, to discover whichsymptom is most important from a literary standpoint and what sort ofideological work the canon pro posed by Fiedler might have been doing for theAmericans who accepted it.

In one sense, the term paranoia as it is encountered in this study is meant to dothe sort of work that it does for Hofstadter: evocative work. It is a good word forevoking, as Hofstadter mentions, the qualities of suspicion, heatedexaggeration, and conspiratorial fantasy. Most importantly, as this is a literarystudy, I will be using paranoia primarily in what is arguably its most literarysense: the sense of overreadingmotivated by the megalomaniacal compul sionto read and reread a text until the consciousness doing the interpreting (ascharacter, narrator, or flesh-and-blood reader) is able to relate the text directly tohimself or herself. This paranoid hermeneutic thrives on tracing out patterns andderiving meaning from them regardless of the tenuousness of their objec tiveexistence as perceptible patterns. 12 Like Hofstadter, I must disavow all claimsof clinical [psychoanalytical] rigor; 1 3 unlike him, however, I shall trace thesense in which I use the term back to its psychoanalytical roots, privilegingmegalomanialike Freud and Lacan, though perhaps the literary manifesta tionof megalomania will enable us to account for its genesis more satisfyingly thanFreud is able to account for it in paranoid patients. 14

As mentioned earlier, one of the chief similarities between the ordinarydefinitions of gothic and paranoid is that both are presented in terms of afamily resemblance. Paranoia has long been seen as a bundle of symptoms thatrange from megalomania, hypochondria, and hallucination to delusions of persecution and the stressing of patterns, etc. Which symptom is most importantvaries not only from expert to expert, but from context to context for the same


expert. In his study of Daniel Paul Schreber (one of historys most celebratedparanoiacs), Freud cautions, I must not omit to remark at this point that I shallnot consider any theory of paranoia trustworthy unless it also covers thehypochondriacal symptoms by which that disorder is almost invariably accompanied (157; emphasis Freuds); he later illustrates that the accompaniment ofhypochondria is only almost invariable when he remarks, It will be remembered that the majority of cases of paranoia exhibit traces of megalomania, andthat megalomania can by itself constitute a paranoia (175). Alternatively, whenHofstadter speaks of paranoia, he is interested in neither hypochondria normegalomania; for him, the feeling of persecution is central (4).

Which symptom is most important to clinical cases of paranoia or his toricalepisodes of paranoia the present study will not undertake to determine. No doubtpersecution, hypochondria, and conspiratorial fantasy have a right ful place inthe conventional definitions of paranoia; indeed, to carry the comparison to thegothic one step further, we might well call them the con ventions of paranoia.And just as it is possible to write a gothic novel without the secret passagewaysthat we associate with the generic gothic novel, we can certainly speak of a non-hypochondriacal paranoia. But even though we must recognize the validity ofany number of variant definitions of paranoia, we can hardly expect them tofunction with any precision in this study. For that rea son, it is necessary tospecify the symptom of paranoia that will be most im portant in the chapters thatfollow and to clarify the consequences of that symptomatology.

For that specification, perhaps it is best to turn to Lacan, who ratifies theimportance of Freuds second choice, megalomania, 15 in his own mock ingparaphrase of the Schreberian problem: They say Im paranoid, and they saythat paranoiacs are people who refer everything to themselves. In this case they aremistaken; its not I who refer everything to myself, its he who refers everythingto me, its this God who speaks non-stop inside me. 16

Although there will be moments in the forthcoming chapters when lessimportant elements of paranoia (particularly the conspiratorial fantasy mentioned by Hofstadter) 17 will warrant special scrutiny, the most important element is always megalomania. But we must not conflate paranoia withmegalomania. The megalomaniacal impulse only becomes paranoid when itinsists on relating external phenomena directly to itself in organized ways. Toput it yet another way, paranoia will be used in the following chapters to referto the idiosyncratic hermeneutic strategy of any megalomaniacal consciousnessthat enables that consciousness to see the external world in terms of patternsradiating outward from (or zeroing in on) itself. 18

This focus on the megalomaniacal aspect of paranoia might be seen as littlemore than a matter of convenience, just as Hofstadters use of American historyis a matter of convenience (see note 5). And certainly it is convenient not to haveto quarrel with such figures as Freud and Lacan over the most im portantsymptom of paranoia. But convenience is not what dictates our set tling on thesymptom of megalomania. For the significance of that symptom, we must review


someone elses quarrel, that between Hofstadter and another historian, GordonS.Wood.

MORE RATIONAL THAN REASON ITSELF

The first section of this introduction closed with a promise of relating threethings: the gothic, the paranoid, and U.S. political history as distinct from theEuropean history with which it is so intertwined. In the second section, we sawthat one way of thinking of the gothic was as an aberrant consciousness andthat the peculiar aberration of the paranoid consciousness to be discussedhereafter is a peculiarly transformative megalomania. To spell out the implications of that second section, my contention is that Fiedlers formulationconcerning the gothic quality of American literature can be thought of as amegalomaniacal tendency (on the part of narrators, characters, orimplied readers) to see patterns that center on themselves (and on the part ofwriters to see Old World literary patterns as possible tools for the repression ofan emerging American literary voice). If we think back to Horace WalpolesManfred in The Castle of Otranto (the first gothic novel), then we can see thatthe Lacanian sense of paranoia really has not taken us very far from the gothic.But in bridging the gap between the gothic and the paranoid, we have not comemuch closer to U.S. political history.

It is not enough, however, simply to bridge the gap. We began by acknowledging the near simultaneity of the rise of the gothic novel, paranoidpolitical projects, and official U.S. history. One important reason for turning, atthis point, to Gordon Woods revision of Hofstadters argument is that Wood notonly contends for the importance of the simultaneous rise of para noid thinkingand official U.S. history, but manages, through the historiciza tion of the relativecognitive validity of paranoid thought in Europe and America, to account for apeculiar fetishization of the paranoid on the part of American politics. 19

Wood begins with an assumption shared by historians, psychoanalysts, andliterary critics alike. For despite the variety of opinions concerning whatconstitutes paranoia, everyone seems to be in perfect agreement as to when itwas first constituted. As Wood observes,

By the eighteenth century conspiracy was not simply a means of explaining how rulers were deposed; it had become a common means of explaining how rulers and other directing political events really operated. Yet atthis very moment when the world was outrunning mans capacity toexplain it in personal terms, in terms of the passions and schemes of theindividuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves ontheir ability to do just that. The widespread resort to conspiratorial interpretations grew out of this contradiction. 20

Quite simply, paranoia is the enfant terrible of the enlightenment. 21


But to understand the crux of Woods argument, we must push this ge nealogyone step furthertoward the recognition that if paranoia is the enfant terrible ofthe enlightenment, then America is the enlightenments favorite son. Or at leastthis was the light in which many Americans chose to see their land of democracy,founded (at least rhetorically) on such abstract principles as lib erty and equality.Here the differences between the stances of Wood and Hofstadter become clear.For Hofstadter, American paranoia is simply one paranoia among many to bestudied. But for Wood, paranoia flourishes in American politics to an extent thatit could not flourish in Europe. The reason for the difference, in his opinion, isthe French Revolution:

The French Revolution, more than any other single event, changed theconsciousness of Europe. The Revolution was simply too convulsive andtoo sprawling, involving the participation of too many masses of people, tobe easily confined within the conventional personalistic and rational isticmodes of explanation. For the most sensitive European intellectuals, theRevolution became the cataclysm that shattered once for all the tra ditionalmoral affinity between cause and effect, motives and behavior. That theactions of liberal, enlightened, and well-intentioned men could producesuch horror, terror, and chaos, that so much promise could re sult in somuch tragedy, became, said Shelley, the master theme of the epoch inwhich we live. (431)

Perhaps because of the greatness of their geographical distance (or the paucity oftheir critical distance) from France, late 18th- and early 19th-century Americanstended not to see the French Revolution as too convulsive and too sprawling tobe accounted for by conspiracies, and all too eagerly embraced the views of anexpelled French Jesuit, Abb Barruel, according to whom:

Everything in the French Revolution, even the most dreadful of crimes,was foreseen, contemplated, contrived, resolved upon, decreed; thateverything was the consequence of the most profound villainy, and wasprepared and produced by those men who alone held the leading threads ofconspiracies long before woven in the secret societies, and who knew howto choose and to hasten the favorable moments for their schemes. (quotedin Hofstadter, 12)

Barruel attributed the conspiracy to anti-Christians, Freemasons, and Illuminati;and even though, as Hofstadter points out, it is uncertain whether any member ofthe Illuminati ever came to America, many Americans were quick to conclude(with characteristic megalomania) that the Illuminati had finished with Franceand were setting their sights on the United States (Hofstadter, 123). This fearregistered itself on the American political stage in many ways, most notably inthe formation of the anti- Masonic political party. According to Wood, American


voters were more sus ceptible to paranoid fantasies about conspiratorialmanipulation of governmental affairs than were Europeans.

In support of his claim, Wood points out that Barruels conspiracy theorieswere far better received in America than in his native France and accounts for thedifference in terms of Americas fetishization of enlighten ment principles andvalues: late eighteenth-century Americans did not ex perience thistransformation in consciousness [the move away from the totalizing hermeneuticstrategies of the enlightenment] as rapidly and to the same extent as Europeans(432). This difference is perhaps the single most satisfying way of accounting forthe difference that Fiedler perceives be tween American literature and otherliteratures of the West. 22 As we shall see in the next section, gothic literature,whether perceived as an anti-en lightenment or an ultra-enlightenment product, isinvariably tied to the en lightenment. And if America can be said, as Wood claims,to have lingered in the enlightenment, then there can be nothing surprising aboutthe per sistently gothic quality of its literature as remarked upon by Fiedler.

THE ARCHITECTONICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT:GOTHIC STRUCTURES AND PANOPTICONS

Although the gothic is doubtless appreciated in the literary community as theonly literary genre to be named for an architectural style; and although we are alldoubtless familiar with Foucaults work on the panopticon, paranoia, andenlightenment, the literary community has failed to appreciate the impor tance ofthe architectural relationship between the fictive panopticon and the fictions thatoccur within gothic confines. A brief review of the implications of thisarchitectural-literary phenomenon will not only help us to put the Americangothic in its proper literary-historical place, but to appreciate the ways in whichthe megalomaniacal impulse to perceive patterns centering on oneself can beseen as integral to the structure of the American gothic.

Whether it is more apt to contend that paranoia is a metaphor for theenlightenment or that the enlightenment is a metaphor for paranoia I cannot say.What Foucault tells us, however, is that Jeremy Benthams panopticon is aptenough as a metaphor for both. The differing ways in which the English gothicnovel reacted to the panopticon over the course of the latter half of the 18thcentury are suggestive of the change in consciousness that Wood de scribes as anti-enlightenment/European; and the ways in which American gothicism tended toreturn to (rather than react against) the panopticon sug gest that the differencebetween the American and the European reaction to the French Revolution (thedifference between putting people in charge of history and putting history incharge of people) 23 is echoed in the American approach to the gothic novel.

The panopticon is an almost magical structure in that it makes paranoia bothpossible and productive 24 for large numbers of people. The whole purpose ofthe panopticon is to inculcate paranoia in its inhabitants, to make each in matebelieve himself to be the center of attention. The paranoiacs suspicion that he is


always being watched is simultaneously the boon and the bane of his megalomania; he is a cynosure, and therefore a person of importance; but cynosurecomes at the price of a loss of privacy. It is obvious, writes Bentham,

that the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes ofthe person who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the pur poseof the establishment have been attained. Ideal perfection, if that were theobject, would require that each person should actually be in thatpredicament during every instant of time. This being impossible, the nextthing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to be lieve asmuch, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he shouldconceive himself to be so. (34)

The inmates of Benthams panopticon are to be encouraged to take what wouldordinarily qualify as precisely the sort of imaginative leap that Hofstadterassociates with paranoia. 25 It is not a matter of whether they can prove that theyare being watched; it is a matter of whether anyone can prove that they are not.Typically, the imaginative leap in a paranoid argument can be traced to themoment in which the paranoiac makes an assertion and then shifts the burden ofproof from himself to anyone inclined to dispute the as sertion. Though the claimof persecution by Catholics, for example, is likely, eventually, to give way to theadducing of bits of idiosyncratically relevant ev idence, the best evidence that theparanoiac has for his position is everyone elses inability to prove that he is notbeing persecuted by Catholics. And in the absence of a compelling reason totrust the Freemasons, it is safe, from the paranoid point of view, to assume thatthey are in league with the Catholics. 26

Miran Bozovic puts it simply: What is then staged in the panopticon is theillusion of constant surveillance. Thus, discipline is internalized (167). Thepanopticon is effective to the extent that it replaces the flimsy no tion ofconscience with a more concrete, productive, and manipulable para noia. Hencethe major effect of the Panopticon, writes Foucault:

to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility thatassures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that thesurveillance is permanent in its effect, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exer ciseunnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine forcreating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person whoexercises it. (200)

The more persuaded the inmates of the panopticon are that they are beingwatched, the less necessary it is to watch them. The panopticon realizes perfection as soon as every inmate believes he is being watched all the time when infact none of them are ever being watched at all. The buildings de velopment (like


the development of the gothic novel) is a more organic and interactive affair thanits construction; its growth is in fact the measure of its reconstruction of itsinhabitants. The efficacy of the panopticon is quan tifiably related to the amountof time that it takes to reduce its inmates to a state of paranoid delusion. 27

But the panopticon, as Foucault makes clear, must not be under stood as adream building: It is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its idealform; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must berepresented as a pure architectural and optical system (Discipline, 205). Thepanopticon, then, can be thought of as the architectural centerpiece of theenlightenment. The inspection-house is not only the house of light, but the housethat light built. 28

But the panopticon exists in tension with another sort of architecture, thegloomier and clumsier architecture of the gothic. Gothic literature, as is the casewith the literature of the panopticon, is profoundly related to the enlight enment.Gothic novels are variously post-enlightenment, anti-enlightenment, and ultra-enlightenment; but more often than not, as we shall see most dra matically inBrockden Brown (of the American gothicists) the gothic structures for whichthese novels are named prove only to be panopticons in disguise.

Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto (1764), the godparent of all gothicnovels, is a rigorously anti-enlightenment project. Causality is not only elided,but defied. When a huge helmet falls out of the sky, killing the son of the villain-hero Manfred, explanation is neither offered nor sought for. 29 And the absoluteabsence of a correlation between intention and effect is empha sized by theceaseless misfirings of Manfreds dynastic designs.

But Anne Radcliffes revivification of the gothic novel some thirty years later(during the upheaval of France, as Wood would doubtless be quick to point out)is clearly inflected by the sense that there can be no return from theenlightenment. Progress is possible; but the way back to a non-causal, non-rational world is barred. In Radcliffes explained supernatural system (the hallmark of her work), ghosts are never the explanation for events, not even whenthey would seem to be the most reasonable explanation; people simply do notdisappear into thin air, no matter how difficult it is to have them disappear intosomething else. Despite the winding corridors and crazy stairways of the gothicbuildings in which she locates her narratives, Radcliffes characters manage tobear an astonishing resemblance to Benthams inspector or his in mates. Secretcorridors and peepholes abound. For Radcliffe, even a reversion to pre-enlightenment architecture does not prevent the literal architectural re alization(in a somewhat stunted form) of Benthams Panopticon. 3 0 Already, the uses towhich the gothic is being put in England can be seen to be shift ing over time.Before we move on to an examination of the trajectory of the American gothicnovel, it will be useful to trace out the shifts that appeared in the various Englishrepresentatives of the genre, if only for highlighting the differences in thedevelopment of the gothic on either side of the Atlantic.


Just as Radcliffes work suggests that there can be no going back from theenlightenment, so it proved that there could be no return (within the gothicmode) from Radcliffes explained supernaturalism. When Matthew Lewis triedto recapture the anti-enlightenment flavor of Walpoles Otranto, it wasimpossible for him to make his way to the pre-Radcliffean unexplainedsupernatural. Although he succeeds, in The Monk, in sustaining the supernat uralqualities of the supernatural characters (ghosts, demons, etc.), he does notsucceed at leaving them unexplained. The need to account for things runsthrough the work. The efficacy of a magic potion is accounted for in terms of itshaving been demonically concocted; Ambrosio is persecuted not by fate but bySatan; discernible intentions lead directly to effects. The supernatural, thoughexplained in supernatural terms, is explained nevertheless. Nothing happens forno reason; even the supernatural is thick with causality. 31

Although these novels, to return to Woods point about the French Revolution,were written as symptoms of the enlightenment, they soon came to be read (inEurope at least) as critiques of it, along with the dozens of gothic novels writtenat the dawn of the nineteenth century. According to Wood, however, theAmerican reaction to the French Revolution differed so greatly from that ofEurope as to prevent American readers from perceiving anything critical ofenlightenment in gothic novels. Not only was the American nation itself virtuallydevoid of gothic architecture; it was ideologically devoid of a need for the returnto the gothic. In America, the panopticon did not have to exist in tension with thegothic castle (as in Walpole) or in fusion with it (as in Radcliffe); it could anddid displace the gothic architecture of the gothic novel entirely. 32 And whereasthe central structure of the English gothic novel remained an actual gothicbuilding, the structure of the American gothic be came the metaphoricalequivalent of the panopticon: paranoia.

In Lewis The Monk, for instance, the individually corrupt Ambrosioimprisons the innocent Bianca in his monastery; but in The Marble Faun,Hawthornes narrator nonchalantly posits an elaborate Catholic conspiracy inorder to explain Hildas absence from the final chapters of the text. In Lewis work,the gothic element is the confinement itself; for Hawthorne it is the mechanismbehind the confinement. Perhaps even more significantly, the most outrageousmoment in Browns Wieland (the spontaneous combustion of the patriarch)occurs not in some dank and sequestered corner of a castle, but in the open, airyspace of a neoclassic temple. And if we are to accept the possibility (as Wielandhimself seems to) that Wielands combustion is a form of divine retribution forhis having failed to follow through on the duty he felt to convert NativeAmericans to Christianity, then it is absolutely a moment of an all-seeingauthority figure (God) using his own structure (the temple) as an arena ofdiscipline.


OTHER ORDERS BEHIND THE VISIBLE

[P]aranoia itself, as the psychoanalytic definitions of the conditionindi cate, is essentially a crisis in interpretation. The classicsymptoms of paranoia, in other words, involve making false sense ofthe world. [T]he paranoiac looks behind the ostensible meaningof language to an alternative one. At the heart of paranoia, then, is abattle to understand/impose meaning. (Bran, 446)

But what induces the reader (or what induced the implied reader of the nineteenth century) to buy Hawthornes Catholic conspiracy against Hilda? How dosuch paranoid narratives sell themselves? The important thing to remem ber isthat paranoia is, quite literally, a narrative project if only because it is productiveof fictions that are perceived (and that perceive themselves) as re alities. The factthat the very lack of evidence for a conspiracy is inevitably in terpreted by aparanoiac as evidence of the alleged conspirators skill at concealing theconspiracy indicates what is most novel-like about paranoia for the paranoiac:the assertion of a plot is sufficient to supply the place of plot. But whereas novelsare sustained assertions of plots that isolate themselves in the suspension ofdisbelief, a paranoiacs conspiracies are sustained assertions of plots thatintegrate themselves into reality by suspending any need for re ality. Thistendency to supply plot simply through bare assertion could almost qualify as therunning gag of paranoia if only paranoiacs could laugh at it along with everyoneelse. From the paranoid point of view, paranoid narra tives are not generated exnihilo; rather, they are seen as readings of the text of the universe. The text has tobe read and reread in order to be perfectly related to the paranoid consciousnessthat reads it (much in the same way that Amasa Delano reads and rereads theevents on the San Dominicknot with insistent reference to his ownmegalomania, but with obsessive reference to a megalo maniacal worldviewaccording to which certain power relations obtain be tween whites and blacks).As Hostadter tells us, the advocate of the paranoid style is the person whobelieves that history is a conspiracy (29), that close reading is always at themercy of closer writing and that the discovery of seemingly concealed messagesin literary texts or historical documents more generallymay be our way ofplaying into the hands of our ancestors. To expose one conspiracy is to run therisk of drawing attention away from another. This can be done unintentionally,for even a paranoiac of the best intentions may be duped into discovering adecoy-conspiracy. But a resolute paranoiac can never be dis tracted by suchdecoys for long. The best paranoiacs are characterized by con stant revision;their conclusions may remain the same; but the ways in which they reach themshift almost immediately after their discovery Put another way, even though thepoint of the project of reading never changes, the project of reading never stops.For the paranoiac, the difference between text and reading is simply a matter oftime. Each reading of the text exists only to serve as the text for the subsequent


reading. The assumption of the paranoiac is that the truth, whatever it is, is obscure.It is never on the surface, always beneath it. And whenever a reading of a text isproduced, it cannot be long before the reading comes to be regarded as tooobvious, too superficial to be true.

As Leo Bersani points out with a phrase from Pynchon, paranoiais thereflex of seeking other orders behind the visible (181). Bersani very productively associates paranoia with interpretive distress (179); for my pur poses,however, it is perhaps more useful to think of paranoia as the distress caused byinterpretive overproduction, an overproduction that relates itself in an endlesslyrepeating cycle to the Pynchonesque reflex of seeking other or ders behind thevisible. Put another way, paranoia is less interpretive distress that meta-interpretive distress; the problem for the paranoiac is that there is rarely anydifficulty in finding the other orders that are sought behind the vis ible; oncefound, however, these orders are themselves visible (if not to others, then to theparanoiac). And the act of bringing an interpretation to the sur face is the act thatnecessitates putting it aside for yet another interpretation. The interpretation is nolonger regarded as an interpretation, but as a patently visible order that mustitself be interpreted. To overread a text is only to take a step in the direction ofparanoia; paranoid potential is only fully realized when one overreads readingson the way to overreading overreadings. As Schreber says, The thinking-it-over-thought denoted something perhaps also known to psychologists: it oftenleads a person to turn his will power in the opposite direction or at least change itfrom that which at first he may have felt inclined to follow, but which on furtherconsideration automatically causes doubts (Memoirs, 141). Lacan moves towarda literary model in com menting on this paranoid impulse: I would go evenfurtherthe delusional, as he climbs the scale of delusions, becomesincreasingly sure of things that he regards as more and more unreal.Moreover, the discursive products char acteristic of the register of paranoiausually blossom into literary productions, in the sense in which literary simplymeans sheets of paper covered with writ ing (77). And Bersani himselfcompletes the chain by moving past literature to literary theory for furtherelaboration of the point: The theoreticians dis trust of theorythe sense thatwhat theory seeks to signify is hidden some where behind itrepeats theparanoids distrust of the visible (181).

As Schreber and Lacan attest, the paranoid impulse is to automatically doubtand reread. Once an interpretation has been found and the finding of it hastransformed the finders sensibility of the interpretation from one of discov eryinto one of casual observation, the possibilities for interpreting the interpre tationare limitless. One possibility is that the appearance constructed by theinterpretive faculty of the paranoiac is itself an illusion imposed on the paranoiacfrom without, that the clues which led to such and such a reading of a certaintext, the components which built themselves into whatever image the paranoiacsees, were deliberately planted by someone whose existence it is impossible tover ify, someone whose desire is to throw the reader off the track, to lead us


down a path to a false but superficially satisfying conclusion that masks oropposes or un dermines the underlying principles and objectives of the text. Theonly evidence of the existence of such a force or person is what the paranoiacsees as the overly neat way in which the clues or decoys or traces fit together inorder to give an im pression which is distrusted simply because of theassumptions that whatever is discovered is obvious and that there is alwayssomething behind the obvious. The process goes on until all the discoveries andall of the clues that led to them can be related to some single, unifying principle.33

What we shall see in the chapters that follow is that the first four novel ists inFiedlers gothic canon (for reasons about which we can speculate in theconclusion) seem to have been embraced by those who took charge of the canonizing process in accordance with this penchant for revisionism and overreading. The paranoia itself is gradually squeezed out of the narratives andemptied into other literary sites further and further removed from the narra tives,such as the narrative persona, the author, and the reader. The paranoia is alwaysthere; it is almost certainly always doing the same thing; 34 but like a trueparanoiac, it refuses to reach the same conclusion in the same way; it re fuses toprivilege the text over the reading. The paranoid literary project is not onlyengaged with paranoia, but pursues that engagement in a paranoid fash ion, afashion of interpretive distress that leads to endlessly nuanced revisions, afashion that never tires of seeking other orders behind the visible.

THE REVISIONARY TRAJECTORYIn the first chapter, I examine the declaration of literary independence that isBrockden Browns Wieland and the ways in which he inscribes England (andparticularly its gothic conventions) as the source of a hostile literary traditionintended to stifle a burgeoning American literature. The Englishliterary conventions are out to get America; and Brown demonstrates, in the problematic final chapter of his first novel, what will happen to American litera tureif it allows those conventions to overtake its heroes and heroines. Although hisargument is that an entire national literature is at risk, the stakes within the bookare limited to the character-narrator of Clara Wieland.

In the second chapter, I examine the slightly larger conspiracy that oc cupiesHawthorne in The Marble Faun. In this case, the hostile forces are no longer themere literary conventions of the English gothic novel, but the lit eral realizationof those conventions. It isnt simply that the gothic mode calls for CatholicEurope to be out to get the lily-white heroines of Anglo-America; the gothicmode has been abandoned; and it is now represented as historical fact thatCatholic Europe is out to do what the gothic novels always claimed it was out todo. Once again, our heroine is at stake; but we are directed to read her out of herplight not by turning away from the literary conventions that Brown had alreadyurged us to abandon, but by turning to another set of conventions that Hawthorne


had helped to construct. 35 As is typical of para noia, everything is at stake; andthe forces in league against our heroine are mind-bogglingly multifarious andpowerful; but what is typical about the paranoia of The Marble Faun is itsproposition that we can read our heroine out of her problem, a problem thatothers would probably regard our para noia as having read her into in the firstplace.

Importantly, in Browns Wieland, the paranoia of the narrative is located in theunreliable narrator-heroine Clara Wieland. In The Marble Faun, it shifts to afairly reliable narrator (unnamed) who is sympathetic to the hero ine (Hilda). Inboth cases, it is firmly entrenched in the text (though we can see it moving awayfrom the characters with whom it is most directly con cerned). In my thirdchapter, I examine what is probably the most remarkable instance of paranoiathat saturates various levels of the narrative that pretends to contain it: MelvillesBenito Cereno. The misdirected paranoia of Amasa Delano, the (anti-) hero, is ofcourse incontestable. But there are other para noias in the narrative that aregenerative of, generated by, or even unrelated to his own fitful paranoia.Whereas the Catholic conspiracy of The Marble Faun is a laughable flight offancy on Hawthornes part, the conspiracy against Delano has the distinction ofbeing historically based. He has every reason to think that Cereno is out to gethim, just as Babo has every reason to suppose that Cereno is out to expose theplot of the slaves, and just as Cereno has every reason to suppose that he will endup being killed by one side or the other. What is most problematic aboutMelvilles tale, however, is the artful way in which his narrator refuses to directthe readers sympathies to one camp or the other, the way that the narrative voicemocks Delano for being gullible and for being suspicious. More than thereluctant Cereno and the scheming Babo, the one who is out to get Delano is theteller of his tale.

And then we come to Twain, whose most obviously paranoid moments areconfined, for the most part, to his lesser known works. Since sleuths aresupposed to detect conspiracies, perhaps it is unfair to cry paranoia, in response to all of Twains detective fiction, but a careful assessment of Twains ADouble-Barreled Detective Story (in which Twain takes it upon himself to killoff Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes) will demonstrate that the mostimportant plot in the story is not the one that baffles Holmes, but the one directed against the reader by the author. Twain does not locate paranoia in thedeluded consciousness of a character or the xenophobic consciousness of aparticipating narrator or the mocking consciousness of a disembodied narra tor.Twain flings the conspiracy out of the text and into the world. He con spiresagainst his readers and asks them to conspire against one another. He assuresthose that will not conspire that they have already been conspired against, thatthe joke is on them because of human helplessness generally in the face of ahistory that has been carefully concocted to direct us to conclu sions that wemust reject and revise simply because of their obviousness. It isnt enough toeschew English literary conventions or to construct our own literary conventions


or to defy those conventions, once constructed, as the mocking constraints thatthey are. The best we can hope to do is to force the conventions to work againstthemselves, to embrace the conventions of the English detective novel for thepurpose of playing a practical joke on the greatest of all English detectives,Sherlock Holmes himself.

Hofstadter unpacks his contention that the paranoiac sees history itself as aconspiracy by explaining that the distinguishing thing about the paranoid styleis not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, butthat they regard a vast or gigantic conspiracy as the motive force in historicalevents (29). Is there something that we can see in Fiedlers canon that hehimself did not see, some paranoid project that exists between his choices ofcanonical figures as well as within their individual productions? Do we desirehistory or fear it? Do we pretend to desire it only because we see it as an attack?Is American history a visi ble order behind which our literature dares to peek?And can all of this really have started at the dawn of the nineteenth century? Inorder to answer those questions, perhaps we should remember what we gain bycategorizing history as an almost sentient and malicious force, particularly whenwe recall that Americas official his tory is a virtual history-lessness even thoughits unofficial history is one that many Americans are only too eager to forget.Perhaps our literary paranoia is a product of our innocence, but perhaps it ismore precisely the product of our desire to be lieve in our own innocence. Let ussee.


Chapter OneWielands Transformations: The Problem ofClosure in the Opening American Novel

Wieland appears everywhere to be converting itself, explicitly orimplic itly, into images of its own literary procedure. 1

Consciousness itself is the malady. 2

WHERE TO BEGIN

The place to start is not necessarily the beginning. And Charles Brockden BrownsWieland, though invoked by many canonical studies as the first American novel,2 is not the beginning. It is neither the first novel written in America nor the first

novel written by an American author. One purpose of this chapter, however, is toexamine the importance of ascribing to this novel a primacy that it does nothave. But it is even more important to recognize that although there are manyways in which Wieland cannot be spoken of as first, there is one way in which itmust be; for Wieland is a first-person narra tive. And the first-person is the firststop on this paranoid journey. As the in troduction indicated, the organizingprinciple of this study is not so much the degree or intensity of paranoia that weencounter in various nineteenth-cen tury American texts, but in the gradualshifting of sites for the paranoid mode of consciousness. And though we shallcome to see that Browns Wieland is a paranoid project inasmuch as the narrativeseems to be out to get Clara Wieland, that paranoid modality shall prove to beless important than the fact that the story is not only about Clara, but is told byher. 3

None of this is meant to suggest that the location of a paranoid con sciousnessin a first-person character/narrator was an innovation of Charles BrockdenBrownsor even that it is a distinctively nineteenth-century American practice.We know, of course, that Brown quite consciously lifts this device from WilliamGodwins Caleb Williams. But what he does with this de viceparticularly inthe closing chapter of his narrative, a chapter that has so troubled so many criticsis to raise the stakes of paranoia in narrative. Like Caleb Williams, ClaraWieland is the mouthpiece for the articulation of the plot that has been formedagainst her. But unlike Godwin, Brown uses the plot against Clara to point out

the ways in which plot has functioned in the English novel and the ways in whichit might function differently in an American tale. Indeed, we might say thatWielands subtitle, The Transformation, An American Tale, spells out its narrativeproject. For Browns project, as we shall see, is to transform Godwins paranoiddevice in order to tell an American tale. But more than that, as I will argue(particularly in re gard to Wielands bizarre final chapter), Browns project is toshow his American readers the ways in which American literature must fail if itdoes not manage to transform the devices that it appropriates from the literatureof England, a literature that the text and narrator of Wielandperhaps paranoiacallyboth seem to regard as out to get American literature, out to prevent Browns American Tale from running its natural course.

Clara Wielands narrative is tainted throughout by her hysteria, but herhysteria proves more coherent than the literary conventions of the sentimentalEnglish novel, conventions that stranglefor they do not merely constrain thefinal chapter of Browns novel. Although hysteria is not always associated withparanoia, the two are frequently encountered alongside one another (just asparanoia is often encountered alongside megalomania and a tendency to seepatterns where others see coincidence or nothing at all). Pioneering psychia tristEmil Kraepelin 4 sees hysteria as an integral component of paranoia, and ClaraWielands hysterical narration of Wieland does eventually reduce itself to aparanoid ranteven though her brother really is out to get her.

V-LAND, WE-LAND, VY-LAND, WHY-LAND?

The problem of Browns first novel begins with the pronunciation of its title:Wieland. 5 That title implicitly asks us to consider what happens to a Europeanname, even the name of a relatively famous German poet, 6 when it is transplanted to America. One particular mispronunciation of the title (Why land?)raises the question of whether the changes that a single name is apt to undergoare symptomatic of larger changes one might expect to see wrought in Europeansand their respective cultural practices (e.g. German poetry) as the result of theirtransatlantic emigrations.

Though geographically removed from Europe, America is obviously tied toEuropean traditions, traditions that are aesthetically as well asideologically charged. There is a sense in which the American Revolution can beseen as anti-European, a severing of European (and particularly English) ties; butthere is also a sense (perhaps best articulated by Edmund Burke) in whichAmerican independence stands as a testament to the ideological maturation ofEnglands socio-political heritage. And if Americas declaration of independence can be seen, from a political vantage point, as a simultaneous repudiation of England and an out-Englishing of the English, then the aestheticquestion faced by the burgeoning republic can be seen in terms of a choice between developing the European artistic traditions that still tied America to theOld World and repudiating those traditions in favor of a self-consciously na

WIELANDS TRANSFORMATIONS 19

tionalistic and rigorously un-derivative aesthetic, a declaration of literary andartistic independence meant to underscore American separatism.

Browns selection of a title (a European name) that was almost certain to bemispronounced by a substantial portion of the American readership to which hisnovel was directed is our first alert to the possibility that Browns project, inWieland, is to attempt to answer the aesthetic question raised by Americaspolitical independence. To elaborate on an earlier point, the novels full title,Wieland; or the Transformation, an American Tale seems to respond to thataesthetic question with almost mathematical precision by moving fromsomething distinctively European (the name Wieland) through the idea oftransformation (the potential of mispronunciation) to the notion of the American.

My argument, in other words, begins with an examination of the possi bilitythat Browns first novel is about writing the first significant American novel. 7Wieland draws on and reshapes the European novel, 8 particularly the gothicnovels of England and Germany. But it mimics the devices of European novelswithout engaging in the debate between them. For instance, even though Brownwas writing in the heyday of the dispute between the two foremost gothicists ofthe time, Ann Radcliffe (the rationalist) and M.G.Lewis (the su pernaturalist), 9Brown considered William Godwin his most important influ enceand this at atime when the aberrant consciousness (as it is found in Godwins CalebWilliams, for example) was yet to be recognized as the primary element of gothicfiction. 10 By taking Godwins book as his model, Brown was able to writesomething between a gothic novel and the Godwinian novel of ideas, i.e. tocontribute to the European literary tradition through the transfor mative processof merging two pre-existing strands of that tradition. 11

In this chapter, we will need to examine the ways in which that merger oc cursboth intra- and inter-textually from Wielands beginning (its title) through thebulk of its body (from Theodore Wielands spontaneous combustion to thehomicidal rampage of his son). But in our conclusion (which willconcern Browns conclusion) we shall have to move from the intra- and inter-textual to the meta-textual, i.e. to the ways in which Wieland ceases to function asa self- contained (albeit allusive) narrative to an awareness of itself as a paradigmfor narrative (specifically for American narrative), a paradigm forged out ofother paradigms, but independent and critical of those paradigms.

That one of those paradigms is best represented by the paranoid narra tive ofGodwins Caleb Williams is relevant on two levels. The first level, which isspecific to this chapter on Brown, concerns an understanding of Brownsseemingly unnecessary final chapter as a sort of paranoid account of the way inwhich American literature might be conspired against by the European lit eraturesfrom which it is derived; the second level, which is more integral to my study asa whole, concerns the importance of Browns decision to put this strangelymetaphorical literary argument into the mouth of his hysterical (and justifiablyparanoid) narrator/heroine, Clara Wieland. Before we can appreci ate theimportance of Browns choosing Clara to be the mouthpiece of meta textual


paranoia in the final chapter, however, we must first come to understand why itis not only productive, but warranted and reasonable, to view that chapter in theparanoid light that I intend to cast on it.

Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds forcefully articulates the critical consensusconcerning the novels conclusion when she says that Wieland does not evenend in the usual sense: it does not conclude with an explanation of the foregoing, nor does it provide a key to the novel as a whole that would unify thepreceding chaotic impressions. It simply stops. 12 Through an examination ofWielands engagement with its own historical and literary milieu, particularly itspreoccupation with the literary productions of Browns contemporaries, itbecomes plain that the critical consensus is both anticipated and answered by thevery conclusion that it calls into question. The conclusion of the novel, whenread in the proper context (the context of the rest of the novel as well as thenovels own literary context), becomes, in Hinds own parlance, the key notonly to Clara Wielands narrative, but to an understanding of Browns place withregard to his authorship of that narrative. We can see how the text of the novelcan only make sense of itself by stepping out of itself, how it in sists upon beingabandoned by the reader in order to contain the reader (and upon being containedby its circumstances, particularly the circumstances of a newborn America andan as yet unborn American literature, in order to present itself as self-contained).As a novel whose self-referentiality can be measured primarily in terms of itsintertextuality, Wieland is a peculiarly in teresting metafiction 13 and ourawareness of it as such is perhaps the most useful way we have of accounting forits superficially curious position in the tradition of the American novel.

A MATTER OF CONTEXT

Wieland is an aggressively intertextual book. It imitates the English gothic novelseemingly with the sole purpose of deviating from the formula. And yet, Wielandis not repetition with a difference, but a tacit recognition of the fact thatrepetition makes its own difference, that the duplication and reduplica tion ofcertain predictable patterns in varying contexts alters the signification of thosepatternsand that, in the right context, repetition without any su perficialdifference can turn the patterns against themselves. 14

In an extended passage on the itinerant element incidental to the recov ery ofseemingly pristine and/or authoritative texts, Browns Clara Wieland (who,despite her German name, shares the initials of Godwins Caleb Williams 15 )dramatically allegorizes the problem of text and context:

[M]y brother and Pleyel were bandying quotations and syllogisms. Thepoint discussed was the merit of [Ciceros] oration for Cluentius, as descriptive, first, of the genius of the speaker; and, secondly, of the mannersof the times. The controversy was suddenly diverted into a new chan nelby a misquotation. Pleyel accused his companion of saying pollicea tur


when he should have said polliceretur . Nothing would decide thecontest, but an appeal to the volume. My brother was returning to thehouse for this purpose, when a servant met him with a letter from MajorStuart. He immediately returned to read it in our company.

[The] letter contained a description of a waterfall on the Monongahela. Asudden gust of rain falling, we were compelled to re move to the house[where we] engaged in sprightly conversation. The letter lately receivednaturally suggested the topic. A parallel was drawn between the cataractthere described, and one which Pleyel had discov ered among the Alps ofGlarus. In the state of the former, some particu lar was mentioned, the truthof which was questionable. To settle the dispute which thence arose, it wasproposed to have recourse to the let ter. My brotherdetermined to go insearch for it.

In a few minutes he returned.At length Pleyel said, Well, I suppose you have found the letter.No, said he. [A third argument ensues concerning a voice Wieland

heard on his way to retrieve the letter.] 16

For the characters in this scene, one argument on the verge of being settled isinterrupted by another, which, on the verge of being settled, gives way to a third.17

Browns characters (in this scene and elsewhere in Wieland and Brownsother novels) are forever pursuing authoritative texts, the recovery of which isitself responsible for removing them from the context in which the texts inquestion would be of use. 18

Moreover, as becomes clear when the references in this scene are traced out,the relationship between Browns characters and their texts is analogous to thatbetween Wieland and its readers. Texts have a way of literally captivating theirau diencesenveloping their readers and pervading their environmentsasproves to be the case when the storm breaks just as Clara and her companionshave fin ished Stuarts description of a cataract. No sooner have they finishedreading about the waterfall than water begins to fall, forcing them, ironicallyenough, to seek shelter away from the text that they are in the process of reading.Much like the Maxwell-Stuart subplot that frustrates and mystifies so many ofWielands critics, the Stuart letter resists being read, prevents itself from beingreadand yet haunts the characters conversation after they have fled from it.

But what about the reader? If Brown is setting up an analogy between readersand characters, then the reader should not only flee from one to an other ofWielands subplots, but be enveloped by the novel as well. How is this textualcaptivation accomplished? In what way does the reader mimic the characters s/heis reading about?

The last question is the wrong question, for it relies on imitative strate giesemployed by eighteenth-century English novelists, such as DeFoe, Richardson,Radcliffe, and Lewis, who shared the objective of compelling the reader to gothrough the cognitive processes of their protagonists. Brown in verts this schema


by having his characters imitate the reader. In reading Wieland, for instance,Browns reader is not reading Pro Cluentius. But by hav ing Pleyel and Wielandrecite passages from Pro Cluentius, Brown is forcing his characters to discussthe text in which they themselves appearfor fratri cide is central to Wieland aswell as Pro Cluentius, in which Cicero attempts to defend his client Cluentiusfrom the charge of murdering Oppianicus by pointing out that Oppianicus wasguilty of fratricide and observing that all forms of wickedness or crime werecomprehended in Oppianicus murder of his brother. The climax of Wieland, ofcourse, occurs as Clara analyzes her willingness to kill her brother Theodore inself-defense.

UNDERWRITING/OVERREADING

One cannot help being puzzled, therefore, by Alan Axelrods claim (in his generally useful monograph on Brown) that there is nothing in [Ciceros ProCluentius] that bears directly upon Wieland. 19 Axelrods position (thoughameliorated by his willingness to examine the metaphorical relevance of ProCluentius) can be traced to the tendencies of his critical forbears, who were curiously content (and sometimes even anxious) to dismiss the details of Brownsnovels, particularly his classical references and multi-lingual puns, as so muchhaphazard or slovenly gibberish. 20

As we might expect on the basis of the discussion of overreading in myintroduction, the fact that these trivial details and hard-to-follow allusions prove,over and over again, to bear directly on the larger narrative in which they appearis actually more relevant to the paranoia of Wieland than Carwins connectionwith the infamous Illuminati 21 or the (presumable) murder of Wieland that isdisguised as spontaneous human combustion or the conspir acy of silence againstClara when her guardian and acquaintances learn that her homicidal brother hasescaped prison and intends to murder her. We will have ample opportunity topursue the paranoid implications of secret soci eties and far-reaching cabals inHawthornes The Marble Faun; what is most interesting about Browns relianceon the Illuminati in Wieland is that he seems to use them as a red herring, onlyone of many strange choices that he makes in the course of the narrative.

Certainly Browns novels lack the traditional markers of literary mastery(characters drift in and out of the narrative and are sometimes forgotten aboutentirely; everyone seems to talk like everyone else; the mechanisms used tomove the plot ahead are often painfully contrived), but he is quite sophisticatedin his use of detail. His seemingly inexhaustible capacity for embedding meaningin the seemingly meaningless details of his narrative cries out more effectivelyfor a paranoid reading than his invocation of the Illuminati. As demonstrable ashis clumsiness in other areas is, it is equally easy to see that he pays an almostchronic attention to such details as individual word choices and allusions, 22 asindicated by his penchant for lexical (and particularly onomastic) play. I havealready pointed out the ironies and double entendres inscribed in the names of


the Theodore and Clara in Wieland. But Browns playfulness extends throughout his corpus and runs the gamut from the ironic to the polyglot to the anagrammatic. W.M.Verhoeven and William J.Scheick have pointed out that BrownsOrmond, for instance, is an account concerning an inconstant woman namedConstantia and her bizarre relationship with a French woman who uses the aliasMonrose (French for Rose Mountain). The account is delivered by an unwisewoman named Sophia to a seemingly irrelevant German named I.E. Rosenberg(Latin/German for That Is, Rose Mountain). 23 Nelson goes on to point out thatthe title character of Browns longest major novel, Arthur Mervyn, consistentlyportrays himself as an everyman figureand that his surname, when coupledwith his first initial, produces a homophonic anagram of every man(evryman). In a similar vein, Clithero Edny, the protagonist in the tale within atale of Edgar Huntly, would be the hero of the novel were it not for theimposition of a mediating narrator/hero figure (Huntly) in conjunction with his(Ednys) own inability to act in accordance with his circumstances: hence thehomophonic anagram, tend heroicly.

In an early review of Dunlaps Life of Charles Brockden Brown (which included some of Browns previously unpublished fiction), an anonymous reviewer remarks on Browns strange decisions concerning which points in histexts he wanted to underscore and which points he barely touched on:

A ludicrous importance is given to trifles; the vast mind is seen busied,amazed and anxious about incidents or intimations that are wholly inadequate to the concern they give or the effects which are traced to them, andwhich ordinary men would be ashamed to notice. What would be nothingelsewhere is every thing here. The feelings not only appear to obey theimpulse they receive and tend unerringly to their object, but in a state ofexcitement and tumult, they are excellent philosophers; they shew theminds perfect consciousness of all that is passing within; they appear toremember that they are afterwards to render an account of themselves.[Browns characters] feel as if they were very peculiar and must attract asmuch attention as they bestow upon themselves, and es pecially thatmischief must lurk in every thing which appears mysterious to them. Thenthey plunge into solitudes and heap conjectures upon conjectures aboutendless possibilities. 24

This anonymous reviewer is remarkably attuned to one of Wieland s centralconcerns, a concern that plays into and draws on its fascination with the connection between overreading and paranoia (though the reviewer uses neither term).Whether the paranoid argument is made concerning the Illuminati or Communistinfiltration of the American government, the vast mind is seen busied, amazedand anxious about incidents or intimations that are wholly inadequate to theconcern they give. This detail-oriented mentality is pres ent in all of Brownsfiction; and while it is important to see that it is a men tality that must reproduce


itself in the reader in order to be appreciated, it is perhaps more important to notethat it is there, in the voice of Clara Wieland, whether it is perceived or not (for aconspiracy of signification, a conspiracy of details need not be perceived in orderto be a conspiracy). Indeed, it is the extent to which Brown allows theinsignificant to overdeter mine the significant (the mention of a waterfall tocause water to fall)the extent to which Brown sets up and maintains an almostmystical and pseudo causal relationship between text and contextit is to thisextent that we can see a curiously intense anxiety on the part of the text ofWieland to account for itself. This anxiety is duplicated and reduplicated inWieland, occurring not only on the level of the characters and the narrator, butextra-textually (i.e. authorially) as well.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS HYSTERICALSPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION?

The connection between paranoia, conspiracy theories, and the compulsion toaccount for the most seemingly trivial phenomena has been formulatedsuccinctly by Leo Braudy: the paranoid interpretationrecapitulated the effortto create a personal pattern of meaning that could absorb, explain, andtranscendently settle accountsParanoia solved your life. 25 Like America itself, Brown was a child of the enlightenment; and the totalitarian impulse thatAdorno detects in the enlightenment project is demonstrated by Browns need toaccount for everything by accounting for the little things and allowing the littlethings to account for their larger contexts. The beauty of the paranoid assertionthat Its all a conspiracy is the word all, thanks to the invincible argumentthat anything that would tend to undermine (or even appear irrel evant to) theconspiracy is itself asserted to be an integral part of the conspir acy; thoseelements which cannot be directly incorporated into a given conspiracy theoryare not dismissed, but held up as representative of that part of the conspiracybehind which the rest is concealed.

The explained supernatural is the method that Ann Radcliffe uses in order totranscendently settle accounts; but Brown opts for a technique that is at oncemore involuted (i.e. self-referential, metafictional) and notarized (i.e. other-referential, antifictional). Not incidentally, Radcliffes heroines are made evermore hysterical through the course of the novels in which they ap pearuntilthings are suddenly explained according to scientific or ra tional principles.In Wieland, however, Brown presents Clara as given to exaggeration and othersymptoms of hysteria from the outset of her tale. And once she reaches theapogee of hysteria, the solution occurs not through ex planation, but violence.Even though her persecution turns out not to have been in her mind, she is left ina state of hysteria even after the narrative is brought to a close and the danger ofher brother is removed. In that regard, she is less like the heroine of a Radcliffenovel than the reader of a Radcliffe novel who knows that the danger is confinedto the book but applies the sense of danger experienced while reading to such


ambient phenomena as a slam ming door or a creaking stair. It is a case ofhysterical exaggeration to apply our fears from one scenario (the book we arereading) to another (the house in which we are reading the book), and BrownsClara Wieland is hysteria run amok because she does not know what to do withher hysteria once it is no longer appropriate, once the stimulus that made itwarranted has been re moved from the equation of her life. So she ends upwriting precisely the kind of story that a reader of Radcliffe would write onceRadcliffe has successfully taken all the ghosts and demons and other things thatgo bump in the night away from the reader, the kind of frenetic (and heavilyplotted) love story that became popular with English and American readers alikein the wake of the gothic novel. In other words, if Wieland reads like two novels,it is because it is an attempt on Browns part to explore two different novelistictrajectories, the gothic trajectory that controls (but fails to contain) Claras storyand the romance trajectory that intrudes at the end as what we can perhapsinterpret most productively as an accurate projection of the tendency of theEnglish novel. The fact that the damnd mob of scribbling women about whichHawthorne complains can be seen as having inherited many of their standarddevices from an army of imitators of Radcliffe is perhaps the best demonstra tionthat the two seemingly different accounts in Wieland are not so irrec oncilableas they might initially seem. The novels emphasis on its own attempt totranscendently settle accounts is even suggested by the emphasis it places onthe importance of the various meanings of account.

The story of Claras father, for example, begins with his conversion to theCamissard faith, on account of which he leaves England for America, thinkingthat it was his duty to disseminate the truths of the gospel among theunbelieving nations (10). When he fails in this perceived assignment, he beginsto expect his death, concerning which we receive the exact account that issupplied to Clara by her maternal uncle, whose profession, conve nientlyenough, is that of a surgeon (14), and who arrives on the scene of the text justin time to witness and demystify Wielands demise, only to dis appear as soon ashe has done so. But Browns desire to justify the decision to open his novel withanything as strange as the possibility of spontaneous human combustion leaveshim dissatisfied with Wielands reading of his own death as a way of renderingaccount for his failure to live up to his own reli gious beliefs, as well as with thesurgeons opinion that it was merely an irreg ular expansion of the fluid thatimparts warmth to our heart and our blood, caused by the fatigue of thepreceding day, or flowing, by established laws, from the condition of thethoughts (19; emphasis added).

For there is a footnotemore scholarly than literarythat directs the reader toone of the journals of Florence for a case exactly parallel to Wielands (19).The note seems more attributable to Brown than to the nar rator (Clara). But inany case, it is strangely out of place, and seems to belong in Browns preface, aparagraph of which is spent apologizing for the extraor dinary and rare


phenomena of the novel (specifically Wielands combustion and Carwinsbiloquism). 26

There are too many accounts, however. Three contradictory possibilitiesconcerning Wielands combustion are simultaneously extended andsuppressed by the text. The first contradiction is between Wielands prolepticassessment of his death as divine retribution and Claras uncles assessment, anassessment which, in turn, relies for its support upon Claras articulation of it andher (or Browns) inclusion of a supporting footnote. Spontaneous combustion ispre sented as a more reasonable account of Wielands demise than divine retribution. But a third possibility, more reasonable still, the possibility of murder, issuppressed even by the vocabulary of its articulation:

My father, when he left the house, besides a loose upper vest and slippers,wore a shirt and drawers. Now he was naked; his skin throughout thegreater part of his body was scorched and bruised. His right arm exhib itedmarks as of having been struck by some heavy body. His clothes had beenremoved, and it was not immediately perceived that they were re duced toashes. His slippers and his hair were untouched. By his im perfectaccount, it appeared that while engaged in silent orisons, with thoughts fullof confusion and anxiety, a faint gleam suddenly shot athwart theapartment. His fancy immediately pictured to itself, a person bearing alamp. It seemed to come from behind. He was in the act of turning toexamine the visitant, when his right arm received a blow from a heavyclub. At the same instant, a very bright spark was seen to light upon hisclothes. This was the sum of the information which he chose to give.There was somewhat in his manner that indicated an imperfect tale. Myuncle was inclined to believe that half the truth had been suppressed. (18;emphasis added)

We would seem to be justified in thinking that either more or less than half thetruth had been suppressed; for what is most interesting about the sur geonsaccount is that it seems, instead of placing half its weight on Wielandstestimony, to dismiss that testimony entirely. How does a visitant (whether dimlyor hysterically perceived) contribute to the surgeons assessment? How does ablow upon the arma fact the truth of which, as Clara points out, cannot bedoubted (19)legitimize Claras uncles conclusion?

One must seek out the journals of Florence in order to understand how thesedetails bolster the surgeons case. David Lee Clark points out the parallelsbetween Wielands death and the spontaneous combustion of Dan G.MariaBertholi: the skin on the greater part of both bodies was scorched; in both[cases], the right arm appeared to have been struck with a club[and] not asingle hair of the head had been touched. 27 But there is nothing in the text ofWieland to provide the reader with this informa tion, only a footnote that tells thereader (in true Brownian fashion) to abandon the text that s/he is reading in order


to search out another that will make sense of it. Any reader who fails to scurryoff in the prescribed way can only be baffled by the doctors ability to reach theconclusion of sponta neous combustion in the face of the testimony that Wielandprovides. As Bernard Rosenthal points out, The reader has only the word of thevictim who essentially says a light shone, a club hit him, and a spark ignited hisclothing. A rational hypothesis would not be hard to construct. 28

But what Brown wants us to understand, whether we seek out the jour nalsfrom Florence or not, is that the surgeons argument does have a ration ale of itsown. It serves as a bizarre parody of enlightenment thought, proceeding, in itsown twisted way, from the pretence of conditionality to a strangely unwarrantedcertitude. If, as the surgeon contends, Wieland did in deed spontaneouslycombust, then it was probably a result of the condition of his thoughts, thethoughts of a man in a state of confusion and anxiety. So once we havereached the conclusion that he did spontaneously combust (that conclusion beinga trans-rational event that happens behind rather than within the conditionalargumentan event that conceals itself, in other words, behind its argument), wecan see that Wieland was in no state to un derstand (or accurately relate) thecircumstances of his death, which entitles us to dismiss the visitant that heseemed to see as a product of his fancy. This is precisely how paranoidreadings work.

Wielands death (involving tropes of light and fire) and Browns over handlingof it pose several questions. Is there something combustible aboutenlightenment? 29 Can the need to account for phenomenaall aspects of allphenomenabe made to outrun itself? To restate the problem with which thissection began (the problem with the traditional paranoid claim that Its all aconspiracy): A theory which presumes to account for everything gives itselfpermission to account for all other theories, including the theories against whichit contends. To move in opposition to traditional logical mod els, i.e. to view ourpremises in light of our conclusions rather than to reach our conclusions on thebasis of our premises, is to foreclose alternative possi bilities and explanationsbefore they have a chance to arise. And whether a man has seen the light ofreligion or works under the light of the scientific method, the conclusion(however tentatively reached by our narrator) is that his thought is what igniteshim. 30

Just as Claras meticulous account of the argument concerning Pro Cluentiusand her subsequent (though arguably consequent) elision of the de tails in theargument concerning the waterfall indicate an ontological status of accounting forphenomena (to the extent that points are either belabored or entirely disregarded),so does Browns desire to account for everything leave things curiouslyunaccounted for. Claras overstated need to validate her most provocative claimsmakes a theme of a narrators awareness of the potential for readerly skepticism;and the result is that our attention is brought to bear not upon the explanationsthat we are given, but the need, both implicitly and ex plicitly traceable toenlightenment cognitive patterns, of explanation generally.


SHOULD WE BELIEVE HER (EVEN IF SHE ASKS USNOT TO)?

My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion Whatbut ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expectedfrom the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of thesedisas ters? (147)

One of the more problematic elements of Clara Wielands narrative is its pretense that it is not the last word on her bizarre family history. It imagines it selfto be in contention with alternative narratives to which we, as readers, have noaccess. 31 This is pretense, not perversity, since the donn of the novel, as statedin the preface, is that it is an epistolary address from Clara to a small number offriends (3). 32 But despite what Mark Seltzer calls Claras repeated concernthat she is distorting events by her narration of them, 33 she insists thatCarwins (non-existent) account i

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