[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Brady Harrison
Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2004
238 pp., $34.95 hc
Robert Bennett
English
MSU-Bozeman
The tragic events of September 11th and the subsequent War on Terror have dramatically increased public interest both in the general issue of empire and in the specific role that the United States has played in imperial history. Not since the Vietnam War has America's dark imperialist underside been so intensely scrutinized. In recent issues of The Montana Professor, dozens of books have been reviewed that discuss America's complex relationship to empire, and even these reviews only begin to explore the rapidly proliferating literature on American imperialism.
In Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature, Brady Harrison adds a fascinating new perspective to this conversation. Instead of simply depicting American-style imperialism as some kind of late-night, B-movie rerun of the British Raj, Harrison reinterprets the United States' relationship to empire with great subtlety and nuance. While Harrison clearly describes the United States as an empire that seeks to extend its sphere of influence beyond its territorial boundaries, he argues that American-style imperialism makes use of a wide range of economic, cultural, political, and military strategies whose ultimate objective is not simply territorial occupation. Moreover, Harrison adds that American imperial history has generally been motivated by a complex mixture of democratic idealism and imperialistic Realpolitik. For Harrison, this unstable combination of democratic ideals with economic and geopolitical exploitation tends to spiral downwards over time into various quagmires and defeat, but Agent of Empire largely steers clear of black and white extremes, preferring instead to depict the American empire in diverse shades of gray.
Unlike many theorists of empire, however, Harrison does not marshal an army of convoluted philosophical abstractions to construct an all-encompassing history of empire from Rome to Baghdad. Instead his jargon-free analysis focuses on a single and relatively minor piece of the imperial puzzle: an early and somewhat bumbling American filibuster named William Walker who "keeps resurfacing" in American culture as a kind of imperial "ghost that cannot quite be forgotten" (5). In particular, Harrison argues that narratives about Walker's life play a central role in the development of the "mercenary adventure tale," one of the "most important, if understudied, narrative paradigms in the literatures of American imperialism" (5). As Harrison charts the emergence and evolution of American mercenary romances about Walker, he demonstrates how these cultural texts plot a complex and cautionary tale about the United States' deeply ambivalent and often contradictory experiences with empire building.
Born in Tennessee in 1824, Walker lived a restless life, studying medicine and law and traveling through Europe before becoming a journalist and editor. Shortly after the death of his betrothed in 1849, he undertook a series of rather ill-defined, if not ineptly mismanaged, imperial adventures. In 1853, he invaded Northern Mexico and declared himself the "president of a republic [Sonora] that did not exist in a territory he did not control" before his ragtag army was eventually driven back to the United States (7). The next year, he invaded Nicaragua with an army of fifty-eight men, captured Grenada, and through a "series of negotiations, deceptions, secret financial deals, and executions" established himself as the nation's "de facto dictator" until Central American armies and mercenaries funded by Cornelius Vanderbilt deposed him (8). In 1860, he attempted yet another invasion of Central America which, after various miscalculations, resulted in his capture and execution on a Honduran beach.
Taking Walker's life as an "exemplum of the American imperial self," Harrison argues that writers and filmmakers repeatedly retell Walker's story as a "means to explore the American empire and the American imperial self" (3, 25). At the same time that Harrison focuses specifically on Walker, he also explores how various writers connect Walker's life in different ways to diverse events and figures in American imperial history, ranging from the "Young America" movement, Manifest Destiny, and Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders to the United Fruit Company, the Vietnam War, and Oliver North. Methodologically, Harrison's book resembles one of Joseph Cornell's eclectic boxes: it is delightfully diminutive in scope, yet simultaneously rich in nuance and complexity.
In addition to limiting his analysis to a single figure, Harrison also approaches his subject matter obliquely through the prism of culture, analyzing Walker more as a literary character than as a historical figure. Instead of attempting to reconstruct Walker's own personal history, Harrison explores how Walker's life provided the "raw material" for so many "literary explorations of American imperialism" (5). For a figure largely forgotten by the American public, Walker's story is told and retold by an impressive number of writers, poets, and filmmakers, including Walker himself, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, Richard Harding Davis, O. Henry, Edgar Young, Arthur D. Howden Smith, Meritt Parmelee Allen, Ernesto Cardenal, Darwin Teilhet, Fritz Leiber, Joan Didion, Robert Houston, Alex Cox, and Albert J. Guerard. Harrison persuasively demonstrates how even a minor imperialist like Walker periodically "resurfaces in popular culture," especially when "U.S. foreign policy and interventionism heat up or meet with disaster" (196, 15).
Harrison's principal reason for analyzing Walker as a literary character is that he wants to demonstrate how cultural texts help shape both our understanding of and our attitudes toward empire. Drawing on the work of postcolonial and American Studies critics such as Edward Said and Amy Kaplan, Harrison argues that cultural texts "play key roles in the fostering of empires" because they "help assimilate readers...into the imperial project" by "naturalizing the idea of empire" and "feeding the public's desire for imperialist expansion" (84-85). Or conversely, cultural narratives can also "critique imperialism and the imperial self" by dramatizing the "human costs" of empire or depicting "imperialism as a spiritually and ethically twisted and deforming process" (189, 171). While Davis's writing did its "small part to push the nation toward war with Spain," Cox's post-Vietnam film helped undermine the logic of empire by reducing the "imperial self" to a "vicious joke, an empire-crazed, gun-toting lunatic" (80, 172). Either way, Harrison demonstrates that cultural texts make a difference by helping perform the crucial task of constructing and deconstructing imperial ideologies.
At the end of the day, however, we must ask ourselves what Harrison's Agent of Empire really says about American imperialism. How exactly do these Walker narratives depict the United States' relationship to empire? Do they see the United States as essentially and dangerously imperialist, or only reluctantly and beneficently--or at least benignly--so? Is Harrison's analysis fair and balanced, or biased and extreme? Are his readings of mercenary romances pro- or anti-American?
Ultimately, I would argue that Harrison's book does not paint any single picture of the American empire so much as it takes us on an extended tour through a vast gallery of imperial portraits, exploring how a wide range of cultural texts depict America's complex relationship to empire in diverse ways. While Ralph Waldo Emerson might have romanticized the imperial self as a "beneficent young American, dedicated to idealism and altruism," Ernesto Cardenal depicted it more ominously as a "haunting machine of subjugation and erasure" (167). Harrison praises Didion's critique of the American empire as "subtle and complex," while he criticizes Cox's film for tending more toward the "caustic" extremes of "cartoon[ish]" and "sophomoric" caricature, like a "crude, punk-influenced Michael Moore" raising an "upheld middle digit" to the Reagan era (176, 172). In perhaps the most interesting of his readings, Harrison argues that William Harding Davis's two major Walker novels, Soldiers of Fortune (1897) and Captain Macklin (1902), reflect the complex evolution of Davis's own thinking about American imperialism: while the former generally embraced the American empire with a "celebratory spirit," the latter looked "more uncertainly upon the United States' imperial project" and called into "question the virtues of American economic adventurism" (118).
Taken collectively, Harrison's careful and nuanced readings of these diverse Walker narratives develop a complex view of American imperialism. By and large Harrison's interpretations seem reasonably accurate and sympathetic to the nuances of each text. In general, he tends to find both strengths and weaknesses in each work, and in almost every case he emphasizes how these texts depict the American imperial self as fundamentally ambivalent, animated by a contradictory "push-pull of idealism and self-interest" that "twist[s] the imperial self" (49). According to Harrison, Harte's The Crusade of the Excelsior (1887) depicts the "contradictory impulses in American culture between beneficence and rapacity" (63), Davis's Macklin (1902) represents an "empire [that] has become complex" and a sense of imperialism that is "not quite so easy or quite so noble as it appeared" (134), and Cardenal's poetry balances a "black vision of the imperial self" with a "balanced, even somewhat hopeful portrayal of Americans" (168). Moreover, in each case, Harrison explains how these writers develop stylistic devices to represent this fundamental ambivalence in the American imperial self: Harte fragments Walker's contradictory personality, ascribing different aspects of his psyche to different characters, while Davis and Cardenal split their celebrations and critiques of American imperialism between separate works, using different novels or poems to explore the positive and negative dimensions of the American empire.
Ultimately, Harrison concludes that Walker is an exemplary representative of America's complex relationship to empire because his own multi-faceted personality combined in a "single historical figure...many of the contradictory impulses in American culture; his story weaves together utopian sensibilities and land-lust, beneficence and rapacity, romanticism and industrialization, progressive politics and militarism" (13). Consequently, writers and filmmakers have used narratives about Walker to "plumb the furious, often competing energies" of American imperialism because his complicated life intermingled "many of the major currents of his day--Jacksonianism, expansionism, Young Americanism, annexationism, idealism, evolutionism, Puritanism rewritten as American exceptionalism, and more" (13). The greater objective of Harrison's project, therefore, lies less in its attempt to recover William Walker from American historical amnesia than in the sophisticated methodology that Harrison employs to develop a multi-faceted picture of the diverse and conflicting dimensions of American imperialism. At a moment when intellectual discussions of empire tend to be highly polarized and polarizing, it is refreshing to read such a nuanced analysis of the complexities of American imperialism.
But there is also a second, and more ominous, reason why Harrison finds both Walker and the mercenary romances about him to be exemplary models of American imperial history. For all of the meticulous attention that Harrison pays to the complex ambiguities of the American imperial self, his explanation of how the imperial romance has evolved as an aesthetic "form across time" concludes on a decisively cautionary note (77). Like Walker's own imperial misadventures, which ended ignominiously before a firing squad in Honduras, Harrison argues that the fate of the American "mercenary romance becomes increasingly bleak and the imperial self less and less like Emerson's benevolent young American and more and more like a murderous freak or automaton" (77). Over time, and especially from the perspective of international and post-Vietnam American writers, this narrative genre increasingly "ceases to laud American imperialism and the imperial self and begins to cast the empire and its agents as forces of violence and degradation" that ultimately come to a "bad end" (77-78). Thus, Harrison concludes that Walker is a fitting choice as the ur-model for the imperialist mercenary romance because this literary genre "finds its spirit and tenor in Walker's life and death" (77-78).
Going to great length to avoid making direct comparisons between past and present stages of American imperialism, Harrison largely leaves his readers to make their own comparisons to the present, but he does conclude by briefly suggesting that the Bush administration's post-9/11 attempts to resurrect "the imperialist course of the nation in our time" will most likely cause Walker to "resurface yet again in literature and film" (198). When this new round of Walker narratives emerges, they will inevitably make new connections between Walker's earlier freebooting and the Bush administration's current interventions in the Middle East. Unless the course of the mercenary romance begins to evolve in dramatically new directions, Harrison's analysis would predict that these new Walker tales will most likely be decisively dystopic and caustically anti-American. Like the most recent anti-imperialist Walker narratives, they will tend to say "things about American culture that many people do not want to hear," reveal the "painful truths of imperialism," and "lay bare many of the fantasies and desires for power that run beneath the rhetoric of the good neighbor and American exceptionalism" (196-97).
If and when these works appear, we as readers and viewers will have to decide whether accuracy lies with the works of art or in the assertions of the Bush Administration about this latest manifestation of American imperialism. We will have to decide, that is, whether these books and films would corrupt Emerson's idealistic sense of the youthful American imperial self, or, on the other hand, whether that idealism has not been corrupted more concretely on the ground in Iraq.
[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]