“Besides, again, it was not part of my disguise, which I’d myself become convinced by. I was there to write nonfiction, ostensibly cultural reportage on the cranes, something about migration and the diaspora, border states, not art criticism, and certainly not the poems littering my little green notebook.” – Jed Munson, 21.
In the London Review of Books, Eric Foner reviews historian Richard Slotkin’s new assessment of US history, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. Adding Slotkin to the slew of historians who have examined the centrality of myth-making to US historiography, Foner writes, “I vividly recall Richard Hofstadter’s remark in a graduate seminar at Columbia University that Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ was the only truly original idea ever developed by a historian of the United States.”
Originality and myth-making seem contradictory, and Foner even suggests that, in Slotkin’s assessment, most US historians are invested in “identifying the origins of the current moment, not charting a path to an uncertain future.”
I am increasingly invested in the idea that mass media is a more productive reflection of collective memory than the work of historians, despite the obvious necessity of archival research. This month, I read two two books that attest to two different forms of collective memory.
First: Jed Munson’s Commentary on the Birds, from the always good Rescue Press, is about the art installations, TV shows, and ecologies related to the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south. Munson reflects on his own biracial identity in a bifurcated space where history is filtered through geographic boundaries. He writes that “the DMZ builds imaginations of Korea. It makes imaginable not only a Korea without it, but also other Koreas with other DMZs, views into other worlds” (65). The DMZ is not just a historical myth-making tool that organizes the past into presentist camps, but an allowance of imagination. It invites counterfactual history that I simply do not see in US collective memory, in which America must follow the path it has followed, and any imagined deviation is implicit treason.
Second: The French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette legendarily maintained that his chosen genre was “the great moral literature of our time.” In his 1977 pulp novel Fatale, an unnamed woman rides a train to a small coastal village, embeds herself into the town’s fishing industrial elites, and waits for the inevitable tensions to emerge, to exploit for profit. In Manchette’s world, crime is a necessary output of history. French national myths are less apparent than they are in, say, the works of Victor Hugo, but localized history is necessary in creating the conditions the novel’s main character can exploit.
Third: My view is limited, but I think that history is deliberately left out of US culture, in a marked departure from other cultural media. Munson writes at length about a South Korean television show, Crash Landing on You, about a South Korean woman who ridiculously lands in the DMZ and falls in love with her North Korean captor. Manchette’s femme fatale rips morality from an otherwise quiet fishing village, to the point that one local official exclaims desperately, “We are choirboys compared with our ancestors” (87). History does not shape the plots in contemporary US fiction the way it does in so many other canons. When US fiction utilizes history, it is almost always military history. This includes Westerns, and even those should be understood in the context of the Cold War and the Space Race. Most war fiction centers victories in Europe, rather than defeats in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. My country cycles through national myths so often, I think, because tradition itself is an unstable concept, decided in the moment in which someone deploys it. What is and is not traditional, or foundational or mythic, depends entirely on who needs to use history to achieve present ends.
As far as national myths go, World War Two lingers more pervasively in US culture than the Revolution, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, or the conquest of the frontier that Slotkin and his predecessors value so much. World War Two has metabolized into mainstream US culture at an intractable level, infiltrating video games, cinema, and electoral myths about “the good fight.”
Like a lot of millennials, I became interested in history because of the influence of Band of Brothers contextualizing America as a global military power. World War Two is by no means the beginning of that presence, nor was Easy Company’s experience ubiquitous, but World War Two serves as such a loud nexus between old European and nascent American imperial institutions that it provided me with two doorways. One led to the Cold War, the other led to the Great War.
I am interested in Slotkin’s views of US history, but I am still skeptical of any historiography that centers myth-making. Mythology and history are strange bedfellows, and any effort to pair the two without a material perspective (like Manchette’s) or a geographic realism (like Munson’s) seems doomed from the start.
My sense is that for a lot of Americans, the Second World War was a moment of national unity paired with an unchallenged series of victories, both globally and locally. If mass media remains a marker of collective memory, the success of Oppenheimer is a testament to historical memory about US global relevance, but the film’s box office success also suggests an interest in an actual, critical interrogation of what this country actually is. To be fair, actuality is not the realm of literature, but it serves, nonetheless, as an operable means of discussing US history in real, material terms.
Manchette, Jean-Patrick. Fatale. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Editions Gallimard, 2011.
Keene Short 