America as Second Creation by David Nye, MIT Press, 拢19.95/$29.95, ISBN 0262140810 Reviewed by Simon Ings
EVERY tribe tells itself stories about how it came to inhabit its little parcel of Earth. Indigenous peoples invent giants from whom, they say, they are descended. Colonial immigrants invent epic battles and heroes to win them. White Americans, according to David Nye, do something else again. Their tall tales celebrate neither the spirits of the land, nor the guile and strength of the people. They are technological creation stories: stories in which America is tamed by the axe, the plough, the railroad and the mill. They are stories without heroes, told in a passive voice. They are stories that explain less how America came to be, so much as how, given the unstoppable march of technology, America could not have been otherwise.
Not stories, then, but alibis.
Advertisement
Somewhere along the line, heroism got decoupled from the White American project. In the stories it tells itself, America was tamed, not by individual heroes, but by a 鈥渇ree market鈥� 鈥� that miraculous new force of nature, which, once discovered at the end of the 18th century, swept westwards across the continent like a tsunami. That鈥檚 why, underneath the fireside tales of the US 鈥� of axes and cabins and railroads, and how the rain followed the plough 鈥� Nye detects a tradition of 鈥淎merican jeremiad鈥�, a counter-narrative of national creation in which a handful of disenfranchised heroes 鈥� from Black Elk to Henry Thoreau 鈥� must outrun this terrible natural disaster, this 鈥減rogress鈥�, as best they can. Nye traces the jeremiad tradition only as far as the works of Faulkner and Steinbeck, but we can turn it up easily enough today, especially among America鈥檚 crime writers.
If only Nye had some of the crime writer鈥檚 energy, America as Second Creation would be an important book. As it is, it is only a useful one 鈥� well imagined, meticulously researched, handsomely illustrated, and scrupulously fair. James Lee Burke and other tale-spinners of the American underbelly will swallow it whole: how the West was parcelled off to pay the national debt; how the railroads bankrupted the people; how, by removing the so-called dead hand of government, white idealists handed their country over to the charlatans and the monomaniacs.
Whether this would be Nye鈥檚 own take on his material, it is impossible to say. And perhaps this is a philistine point to make, but after 300 pages, should he not have told us what he thinks? That national traditions are things we impose upon our past; that nostalgia makes homely what was once radical; that history itself is eternally revisable 鈥� these commonplace observations weigh too heavily upon Nye, whose finicky concern for 鈥淎merican narratives鈥� suggests a man running quite needlessly from his proper subject: America.