Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film

Ana Manzanas, Jesús Benito Sanchez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136824883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

This book examines the spatial morphologies represented in a wide range of contemporary ethnic American literary and cinematic works. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre's theorization of space as a living organism, Edward Soja's writings on the postmetropolis, Marc Augé's notion of the non-place, Manuel Castells' space of flows, and Michel de Certeau's theories of walking as a practice, the volume extends previous theorizations by examining how spatial uses, appropriations, strictures, ruptures, and reconfigurations function in literary texts and films that represent inhabitants of racial-ethnic borderlands and migrational U.S. cities. The authors argue for the necessity of an alternative poetics of place that makes room for those who move beyond the spaces of traditional visibility—displaced and homeless people, undocumented workers, hybrid and/or marginalized populations rendered invisible by the cultural elite, yet often disciplined by agents of surveillance. Building upon Doreen Massey's conceptualization of liminal space as a sphere in which narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate, this study recasts spatial paradigms to insert an array of emergent geographies of invisibility that the volume traverses via the analysis of works by Chuck Palahniuk, Helena Viramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alejandro Morales, and Li-Young Lee, among others, and films such as Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor, Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu's Babel.

1	Chiastic Spaces

AMBIGUOUS SYMBOLS

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

—Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

On June 20, 1782, our forefathers adopted as our national emblem the bald eagle, or the “American eagle” as it was called, a fine looking bird, but one hardly worthy of the distinction. Its carrion-feeding habits, its timid and cowardly behavior, and its predatory attacks on the smaller and weaker osprey hardly inspire respect and certainly do not exemplify the best in American character. The golden eagle is a far nobler bird, but it is not strictly American. The wild turkey was suggested, but such a vain and pompous fowl would have been a worse choice. Eagles have always been looked upon as emblems of power and valor, so our national bird may still be admired by those who are not familiar with its habits.

—Arthur Cleveland Bent,
Life Histories of North American Birds of Prey

[H]ospitality has in the last century emerged as an increasingly important topos for questions of ethics. What is at stake in this renewed interest is not merely a nostalgic longing for a lost sense of social harmony, but rather a concern with the specific conflicts and contradictions it states: between unnamable alterity and legal identity, between infinite debt and economics, between ethics and ontology.

—Tracy McNulty, The Hostess

In his unfinished novel America, Franz Kafka introduces Karl Rossman, a “poor boy of sixteen,” standing on a liner slowly approaching New York Harbor. Like a ceremonial welcome, a burst of sunshine illuminates the Statue of Liberty so that the young boy sees it in a new light. In its glimmer, the solid beacon of America seems invested with ambivalence, and the arm rises up as if stretching aloft bearing a sword (2005, 12) rather than the customary torch or lamp Emma Lazarus rhapsodized. For French writer Georges Perec, being an immigrant might be summed up in that visual confusion: to see a sword where the sculptor had put a torch, and not to be wrong. This juxtaposition of symbols is indeed very akin to Kafka’s customary estrangement of the immediate, of the solid and the apparently one-dimensional. It also responds to the contradictory quality of American symbols. For, as Perec comments, when the celebrated verses by Emma Lazarus were being engraved at the foot of the statue, thus lighting up the way of the tired masses, the homeless and the dispossessed, a whole series of laws were being passed to control that endless flow of migrants arriving from southern Italy, Central Europe, and Russia. The golden door easily morphed into the back door that required immediate eviction (Perec 2006, 97).

This chapter pursues this conceptual twist in a variety of symbolic premises that initially might not seem to have much in common: namely, Hawthorne’s “Custom-House,” Ellis Island, and contemporary detention centers. The three locations sustain the ethical and creative choices that Walter, the protagonist of McCarthy’s movie The Visitor, faces when his new friend, a young Syrian named Tarek, is interned in a detention center, the kind of physical and symbolic place where ambiguity terminates, at least initially. In order to triangulate these apparently unrelated “premises,” we depart from Robert Davidson’s argument that the appearance of new spatial demarcations insinuates both the possible rearrangement of spatial constellations and the taking of new bearings based on unused or overlooked beacons that actuate both the past and the future (2006, 3). For our purposes here the detention center provides the new coordinates that allow for a possible realignment of places that, thus relocated, contribute to interpellate the past and the present. Ellis Island, the detention center, and the customhouse configure a spatial and conceptual triangulation where the torch and the sword vie for power and control. If Ellis Island was the stage of an accelerated micro-melting pot where immigrants were put on an assembly line and came out as Americans, it is possible to look at contemporary detention centers as one stage of a reverse melting pot. Walter, uneasily—if passively—located in his private “customhouse” at the opening of the movie, will respond to the challenge posed by Tarek’s arrest with determination, with a brave, if muted, “I will” (1978, 29) that echoes that of Hawthorne’s narrator.

As he witnesses the process of depersonalization and relocation of his friend, Walter, a professor of Middle Eastern politics, will bear witness to the doubleness implicit in America’s most cherished symbols, the bald eagle. It is no other than Nathaniel Hawthorne that in his description of the customhouse in his native Salem dwells on what he determines “the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl” (1978, 8), the American icon par excellence. The bald eagle’s cowardly behavior and predatory attacks make the fowl hardly worthy of the distinction, as Arthur Cleveland Bent noted in 1937. The eagle systematically steals food from the industrious osprey and sails away with the spoils, the naturalist explains. A similar behavior has been observed in the nest. The bald eagle, Bent claims, is an “arrant coward, leaving the nest as the intruder approaches . . . or perching on a distant tree to watch the proceedings.” As to the alleged fierceness of the American symbol, Bent claims that it has been greatly exaggerated, for they are mild-tempered birds and often make gentle and devoted pets when raised in captivity; they simply require an astonishing amount of food. Bent describes the unmistakable majesty of the fowl, “with its pure-white head and tail and its dark brown body; the head conspicuous at a great distance, especially against a dark background,” yet contrasts its magnificent posture with its voice, which, the naturalist explains, “seems to me to be ridiculously weak and insignificant, more of a squeal than a scream, quite unbecoming a bird of its size and strength” (1937).

Taken out of its natural habitat and transformed into a national emblem, however, the eagle has forsaken its timid behavior and is accompanied by imposing paraphernalia. Hawthorne’s narrator describes the eagle hovering over the entrance of a portico, bearing a shield before her breast and a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. The fierceness of her beak and eye, the narrator remarks, and the “general truculency of her attitude” (1978, 8) threaten mischief to prospective comers and warn against intruding on the premises she so protectively overshadows. Despite these warning signals, the narrator notes,

many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,—oftener soon than late—is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a ranking wound from her barbed arrows. (1978, 8)¹

Thunderbolts and barbed arrows undercut whatever possible snugness one finds in the eagle’s feathered bosom. The truculence that the narrator attributes to the fowl takes us back to the vision of the torch turned into sword. Whatever timid welcome she may bestow on those daring to intrude on the “premises she overshadows with her wings,” its intemperance will sooner rather than later push her to evict those who come under its shelter. For the wings mark not the scope of her protection, but rather (or also) the extent of her controlling and supervising gaze.

The infirmity of her moral character made Benjamin Franklin express his doubts about the propriety of the eagle as the symbol of America in a letter to his daughter Sarah Bache:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country; he is a Bird of bad moral Character; he does not get his Living honestly; you may have seen him perch’d on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing-Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him. With all this Injustice he is never in good Case; but, like those among Men who live by Sharping and Robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank Coward; the little Kingbird, not bigger than a Sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the Kingbirds from our country. (1987, 1088)

In view of the shortcomings of the eagle as a patriotic emblem of the new country, and its disposition to plunder, Franklin makes his own modest proposal as to what kind of bird could be representative of the American character: “[T]he Turk’y is in comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America. Eagles have been found in all Countries, but the Turk’y was peculiar to ours . . . He is, though a little vain & silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on” (1987, 1088). At this liminal stage where the symbols of America are being discussed,² Franklin praises the turkey for its courageous tameness, its respectability, and its symbolic Americanness. His deficiencies do not prevent him from being on his guard against the threat of exterior invasion—a real threat that literally endangers the contour and the concept of the United States as an independent nation, not the alleged menace presented by those other hungry masses that, in trying to reach asylum under the wing of the jealous eagle, are intimidated with thunderbolts and barbed arrows.

Significantly, the thunderbolt and the barbed arrows, those instruments of cutting and separation that figure prominently in the description of the gates or portals of America, can be envisioned within the context of what critic Gilbert Durand calls the realm of the immobile, the solid and rigid; the rational will to divide and separate. The torch lighting the way to the Promised Land becomes the sword that divides, separates, and promotes discontinuity (2004, 175). For the sword, like the eagle’s paraphernalia, is the key agent in what Durand calls the rituals of cutting (2004, 176); it distinguishes and purifies and, in doing so, contributes to the creation of what Durand terms “a metaphysics of the pure” (2004, 184), of the chosen and the selected. And the rituals of cutting were performed right away as the passengers of the oceanliners disembarked on Ellis Island, one of the great gates to the United States, the site that established the coordinates of the nation.

RITUALS OF CUTTING: ELLIS ISLAND

Ach! America! From the other end of the earth from where I came, America was a land of living hope, woven of dreams, aflame with longing and desire.

—Anzia Yezierska, “America and I”

The act of hospitality both embodies, and promises to resolve, a particular tension. On the one hand it is an act that constitutes identity: the identity of the host, but also that of the group, culture, or nation in whose name he acts. It is the act through which the home—and the homeland— constitutes itself in the gesture of turning to address its outside. But as an accidental encounter with what can be neither foreseen nor named, hospitality also insists on the primacy of immanent relations over identity. Hence it both allows for the constitution of identity and challenges it, but suggesting that the one can also become unhomely, unheimlich, estranged by the introduction of something foreign that threatens to contaminate or dissolve its identity.

—Tracy McNulty, The Hostess

Significantly, in The Visitor McCarthy goes back to Ellis Island and its ambiguous neighbor, the Statue of Liberty, to create a narrative of belonging. Tarek’s girlfriend tells his mother, newly arrived in New York after Tarek’s arrest, that they used to take the boat to Staten Island, from where they could see both beacons of Americanism, and that Tarek would jump up and down in exhilaration, pretending they were arriving in New York for the first time. For Tarek, as for Perec in Je suis né, the island is the site of a probable autobiography, and also the location of a potential memory that links his arrival from Syria to the thousands of arrivals that were registered at the island. It is Tarek’s way of weaving his particular “America and I,” as Yezierska would have it: an intimate bond between place and personal narrative. Tarek depersonalizes memory, the recollection of the arrival to Ellis Island, to make it part of a repeating memory that is activated every time a migrant reaches the island. As for the thousands of other migrants that reached the portal, for Tarek “America was a land of living hope, woven of dreams, aflame with longing and desire.” The memory of Ellis Island is not his own, yet it could have been. On the ferry to Staten Island, Tarek and Zainab create their own spatial practices across the sea, wrapping space and memory into a new composite. Like Georges Perec, Tarek opens up the collective memory of passing through Ellis Island, the port of entry that is inscribed into his memory of the possible. It is a memory that, as Perec remarks, concerns us and interpellates us, even if it is not our own. Yet this “fictional memory” or “auto-fiction” stays adjacent to our own and determines us as much as our personal recollections do. This memory is interpersonal and dialectical; it is not necessarily based on facts, but creates a historical residue that can be activated and appropriated. And McCarthy opens up this potential memory in at least two ways. Its repeating quality allows the director to go back in time and retroactively incorporate Walter and that other point in time when his ancestors went through a similar portal; it also allows the director to situate Ellis Island, and its attending crush of cultures and languages, vis-à-vis the detention center where Tarek ends up. If the former, as Annette Kolodny explains, represents a frontier moment in American history (1992, 13), the latter, we argue, stands as another form of frontier in the urban landscape. Yet both boundaries imply distinctive metamorphoses for the individual.

As a factory à la Americain —one as efficient, Perec argues, as a meat plant in Chicago—Ellis Island was a dumping place where overworked functionaries stamped migrants into Americans (2006, 99); it was also a zone of “zero degree culture,” to make use of Renato Rosaldo’s term (1988, 81), where the newly arrived moved between national spaces, histories, and traditions. The island was both torch and sword, and participated in the ambiguity of the symbols described above, for it efficiently separated the chosen from the rejected, who were automatically transformed into deportable human waste. The rituals of separation were carried out mechanically, with the same keen eye one would use to detect a defective product on an assembly line (Perec 2006, 99). As Geoffrey Eugenides writes in Middlesex, immigrants would file past a line of health inspectors who looked into their eyes and ears, rubbed their scalps, and flipped their eyelids inside out. The inspectors chalked capital letters to specify various conditions. In so doing, they classified the masses and domesticated their difference under a series of standardized initials: Pg for pregnant, H for heart, C for conjunctivitis, F for favus, T for trachoma. An X meant you were out of the line (2002, 81). Those who failed the entry exam were returned unceremoniously. For them, the island was neither a crossing nor the site of a promise but, rather, a limbo of aspirations and dreams never realized, a bifurcation that never took place.

If you were allowed in, though, the passage marked the beginning of another separation, a split between the past and the present, for immigrants were severed from particular histories and beliefs. The transformation started the moment the newly arrived stepped into a YWCA tent, where they were administered American rituals, as the narrator in Mid-dlesex recounts: “[Desdemona had] gone in, shawled and kerchiefed, and had emerged fifteen minutes later in a drop-waisted dress and a floppy hat shaped like a chamber pot. Rage flamed beneath her new face powder. As part of the makeover, the YWCA ladies had cut off Desdemona’s immigrant braids” (2002, 82). Desdemona thus became the object of an accelerated metamorphosis that dissolved her individual features into the common denominator of standard Americanness. These cutting rituals transformed Ellis Island not into a site of memory, to use Pierre Norá’s term, but, rather, into a locus of emptiness (Perec 2006, 105), a peculiar non-place avant la lettre, a negative place that erases traces and roots, and subtracts from the individual those features that are deemed unnecessary, cumbersome, and unheimlich, or that simply threaten to contaminate the national identity.

THE “CUSTOM-HOUSE” EXPERIENCE

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne “The Custom-House”

If this excess was mechanically dumped into a limbo of memories at Ellis Island, Nathaniel Hawthorne talks about a different kind of cumulative memory in “The Custom-House.” It is a kind of memory that has become “customary,” excessive and rather taxing for Hawthorne’s narrator. Deeply stuck into that same soil for generations, the narrative voice is content to express his “affection,” for lack of a better word, toward Old Salem, his hometown. This feeling stems from being located in a place where his ancestors had spread deep and aged roots. His attachment, he adds, is “the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust” (1978, 10). This sense of belonging, materialized in the subtle layering of time and lives, allows him to claim a residence in Old Salem, yet this rooting in a place already marked as “old” provides not a sense of well-being but, rather, a feeling of uneasiness—or shame. The traditional pair of blood and soil conflates the narrator’s received notion of belonging to a nation, that elusive concept couched in terms such as religion, ethnicity, history, and geography.³ Yet this conglomerate proves oppressive. There is, in a way, too much memory haunting the narrator along the well-trodden paths and spatial practices of this town. Planted deep in the soil, the “race” has subsisted in rejectability, never disgraced, the narrator admits, yet never performing ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature
• Dedication
• Permissions
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Lingering on Times Square
• 1 Chiastic Spaces: Ports of Entry, Ports of Exit
• 2 The Migrational City in Chuck Palahniuk’s “Slumming: A Story by Lady Baglady” and Helena Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Café”
• 3 Unbound Cities, Concentric Circles: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange
• 4 Borderlands: Middle Spaces, Hybrid Bodies: In Memory of Alfred Arteaga
• 5 The Rhetoric of Spatial Cutting: Borders, Scars, Open Wounds
• 6 Terminal Thinking: Border Narratives, Airport Narratives, and the Logic of Detention
• 7 Conclusion: From the Great Wall to Babel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About The Authors
• Index