Pirates, Messiahs, and Movie Stars: Fictional archetype and its role in personal reinvention and the migration of culture. by Sean Eve “I’ve always practiced in life what I play on TV.” Such is the mantra of the narrator in Ignacio De Loyola Brandao’s Anonymous Celebrity, the story of a man scribbling away in a mental institution who dreams of one day murdering and replacing the famous soap opera star he physically resembles. If he is to be believed, the narrator is employed as a body double for the celebrity, taking his place on the set occasionally. He lives with the contradiction of already seeing himself as famous, while at the same time being unable to take a visible position in Brazilian society because the role he identifies with is already occupied by someone else. Like many individuals in our acutely self-­‐conscious environment, he is both attracted to the freedom and empowerment his fictional alter ego provides and unable to construct an image of himself that is sufficiently independent to allow self-­‐realization. As narrator, the story he tells is his own, but despite numerous opportunities to act, to claim love, to find a viable space to occupy, the narrator is never quite able to lay claim to the life he imagines. He wants something that he believes only others can grant him. He misunderstands the role of fiction and the ways it shapes not just individual lives, but whole societies. “Everything is held together with stories, “ noted Barry Lopez.“ That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” It’s a vision of this big little world of ours with which I completely agree. In terms of my life at least, stories have been more than a way to understand; they have marked that place just beyond the horizon where what I imagine may already be coming into existence. Stories are as far into the future as my mind has managed to go, as deep into the truth of things as I can see myself venturing on my own two feet. One of the joys of teaching (probably the reason I’ve stuck with it for more than a decade) are the stories. The people sharing them may be young, but that doesn’t obscure the richness of the stories themselves. As a global currency, they are more important than capital, even than guns. People abandon everything in pursuit of stories. They shape history on account of them, create families to extend a story’s life beyond their own. More people have died, I suspect, in the service of stories than any other single human creation In texts as old as Gilgamesh, the Iliad, or the Bible, the stories shared are already ancient, their origins no longer visible. Their message of possibility and limitation, however, marks out the human condition within a very clear set of boundaries. Eden is a walled garden, from the Avestan, pairideaza, or walled enclosure, and from the Greek, paradeisos, or enclosed park. Within its boundaries the landscape has already been shaped, outside, what we see around us already belongs to somebody else. We are confined, whichever side of the walls we find ourselves on. It’s no accident then that water, important as a boundary between nations, peoples, between states of being, is central to all these stories, and other generative narratives like Beowolf. For it is only by traversing water, symbolically leaving behind the self as politically and geographically determined, that heroism is achieved, the truth of life and death made manifest, a nation of slaves made free. Even if we never leave the garden, and there are those who can’t, it is in the pool that marks its center that we find our reflection. As it is for refugees and the economic and social migrants whose movements they shadow, home, in the vast majority of the stories that chart a discovery of self, is a place of memory and of longing, but little else. The struggle for reinvention more often than not demands relocation. From Goethe to Abe’, Dickens to Solzhenitsyn, voyages, whether imposed on us or a result of own ambitions, serve as the primary means to self-­‐discovery. Even Austen’s heroines need a little geographic as well as intellectual distance to achieve their qualified freedom. Like Kathryn Sutherland’s recent muddying of the origin of Austen’s novel’s, the stories themselves often exist in a place somewhere between myth and memory. Gilgamesh, for example, is the Akkadian version of a Sumerian epic (part history, part folklore) which is generally assumed to have been translated by “an exorcist-­‐
priest”, Sin-­leqi-­unninni, who sought to create a sense of history and authenticity for his tale by “giv(ing) his Second Millenium poem the look of his Third Millenium Sumerian forerunners ”. Similarly, Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pirates, the text most responsible for shaping our image of that decidedly more modern type of seafaring hero, is widely accepted to have been written by Daniel Defoe, who sought, as he did with his other books, Robinson Crusoe and The Plague Year, to give his fiction the veneer of historical accuracy, in this case by crediting the work to a sea captain. “Defoe is adept not only at concealing his identity but at counterfeiting the truth”, says Edward Lucie-­‐Smith, who quotes Sir Leslie Stephen as crediting Defoe with “the most amazing talent on record for telling lies.” Defoe created in the familiar image of the Pirate an icon that conflates both personal reinvention and political resistance. . . . the pirate is a potent symbol of the political and social self-­‐definition central to modern individualism. Not withstanding his knack for invention, Defoe created in the familiar image of the Pirate an icon that conflates both personal reinvention and political resistance. There isn’t space to go into it here, but the pirate is a potent symbol of the political and social self-­‐definition central to modern individualism. In a certain sense, he is in an early immigrant, sacrificing citizenship in his own country in favor of a new nation state beyond the reach of colonial authority. He is also an early example, in the case of mutiny, of unionization, employees banding together to demand better work conditions and a greater share of the profits. Democracy, the freeing of slaves, even the political emancipation of women is manifested to a certain degree in the societies pirates created for themselves, particularly in the America’s at the start of the Eighteenth Century. Also, like migrants and others seeking reinvention, the pirates shaped themselves in the image of already existing iconography. Bellamy, Blackbeard, and Vane didn’t start their pirate society from scratch. They had a role model in Henry Avery, a “pirate king” who was said to have led his crewmen from oppression between the decks to a life of unimaginable luxury in a pirate kingdom of their own. Avery’s feats….had become legendary by the time they were young men. His adventures inspired plays and novels, historians and newspaper writers, and ultimately, the Golden Age pirates themselves. (Woodard 8-­‐9) This complex interweaving of fiction and fact speaks of the important role stories play in the evolution of individual and social redefinition. The Privateers who helped the British challenge the Spanish empire and ultimately create their own become in another generation buccaneers who reject British authority and ultimately evolve into pirates who anticipate through their encampments across the Americas the democracy realized in national form almost a century later. This ‘history’ is largely contained in fictional accounts, in renderings that were attractive because of their mix of the sensational and the familiar. I have chosen this and other traditions that blend history and fiction, because many of the stories that are most compelling to us have multiple origins and, though they claim a certain level of historical or cultural legitimacy, aren’t as much attempts to render past events as to extract meaning from them, much in the way our cognitive processes substitute symbolism for specific physical memories. I don’t think it’s a question of real life being less dramatic than fiction. Rather, in order to have maximum impact and mnemonic power, stories need to take advantage of associative systems already in place, images and iconic narrative components that resonate as completely as possible with the rest of our associative mental architecture.. Gerald Edelman in Neural Darwinism offers a useful model here, looking at how the “primary repertoire”, the microbiological architecture of the brain formed in utero , is altered by experience and culture into the “secondary repertoire”, whose groups of associated neurons or “maps”, both increase our cognitive efficiency and reflect the norms, expectations, and images of our culture. More than simple preferences , these social conventions are hard wired into the way we think. Neurons not stimulated as part of these groups die off, existing associative shortcuts becoming more and more dominant over time. Cultural systems of signification, whether linguistic, visual, or tactile, mirror this intensification, in a condition of cultural and biological reinforcement that is dangerously close to intellectual determinism. These forces can be harnessed as effectively by an individual as by a writer angling for a particular emotional or associative response. We can achieve the maximum impact by associating ourselves, albeit with some differentiating characteristics, with iconic individuals or typologies which possess the cultural and emotional resonances we wish to have credited to ourselves. These embodiments can be as modest as the young female factory workers of New York at the turn of the Century from 19th to 20th, wearing a piece or two of the latest fashion as a symbol of their middle class aspirations. (See Hatcher). (Their young admirers were often equally well suited in their version of what you might expect from a character in the early chapters of a Carnegie dime novel.) Or they can be as ambitious as Napoleon cloaking himself in the ermine of imperial prestige. Jesus, for instance, makes his life a literal enactment of prophecy. He associates himself with the symbolism of theTanakh such that he becomes for many the embodiment of text, the word quite literally made flesh. Having lived with an individual for many years who eventually came to identify himself with the historical Buddha, I have some insight into the messianic as pathology, but we are interested not just in individual discovery here but cultural transformation. Jesus’s claim to prophetic embodiment becomes more consequential after the establishment of Christianity as state religion in much of the late Roman world. It’s unlikely, for instance, that Dante would have been led through hell by Virgil if not for the willingness of medieval scholars to read the 4th Ecologue as prophecy. Jesus, thus, makes his way into the pastoral landscape of the Roman poet retroactively, just as Dante does. The idealized landscape, capturing both memory and aspiration, stands as a precursor to the mortuary journey that turns up in all the narratives we have explored so far. This journey, which is as far off the map as anyone can go, offers a site for the transmission of meaning and personal reinvention. The individual’s disappearance, as with any shamanic journey, conceals his transformations in religious mystery. Dante, Jesus, Gilgamesh, return looking the same but are transformed inside by their brush with the absolute. As with Hanuhpu and Xblanque in the Mayan Popul Vu, those who venture to the underworld return with others’ heads, others’ skins, the fictional allegorizing of history, of lineage, producing a model of ideological co-­‐
option of the radically alienated, or just alien. “The individual has become intrinsic to the story, binding elements of it together within his own individual presence. The symbolic and the personal are inseparable.” Dante’s conversion of life to text is an inversion of Jesus’ own journey, the equation reversed by the political rather than the metaphysical resolution of the narrative subtext. Jesus the writer is on a collision course with Jesus the enactor of prophecy, a division that will lead to some of the principle schisms in the church. What matters from our point of view, however, is that stories precede this life, just as innumerable stories extend from it. The individual has become intrinsic to the story, binding elements of it together within his own individual presence. The symbolic and the personal are inseparable: Jesus’s story of execution confounds death, just as Dante’s poem, written in exile, becomes the primary vehicle for Florentine history. Of course, those who wish to achieve historical stature need to choose fictions that have an appropriate scale. The rest of us, who may simply be looking to get by, can choose from an equally familiar but less dramatic set of stories, ones that include family perhaps, or professional achievement. It’s funny how uncomfortable our modern individualistic society is with notions of fate, even when we, like the gods are granted avatars. The greatest crime may not be acknowledgement of the determinate patterns of self-­‐realization, but the refusal to challenge and transform them through individual embodiment, or to accept their utility within both a psychological and bureaucratic frame of reference. As Lenny Bruce remarks, speaking of his life before he became a professional comic: a uniform is an important means to instant acceptance. A man is no longer just a man; he is part of an institution – milkman, postman, diaper man – he has conquered the suspicion of being a stranger by acquiring a kind of official anonymity. He is associated with a definite mission. Certainly the uniform, whether martial or countercultural, bridges the personal and the social. For an immigrant, conquering this “suspicion of being a stranger” may be one of the most important steps he or she takes to a new state of belonging. Being connected by recognizable purpose may feel too confining in a society such as ours, which is losing faith in Weber’s bureaucratic dream, but the terms and nature of our employment also provide, in our business-­‐minded age, some of the most familiar and available mythologies for us to inhabit. “In the minds of young people,” says a commentator on modern China, “ work is already not just for making a contribution to society or for supporting oneself, but is the process by which to perfect and develop oneself”(Link). There is a reason the right to employment is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Employment is important not only for practical financial reasons, but also as a means to a recognizable identity in our mobile, often unfamiliar world, particularly for those individuals whose prior cultural experience might make recognition and co-­‐option of existing social vocabularies difficult. It also establishes a mechanism of interrelation that replaces existing social protocols with a new commercial dynamic. Timothy Levitch points out the complex needs accommodated by these behaviors in his history of Wall Street. The Mythological gesture that gave birth to this land was a transaction. It is an exchange of mutual fictions rather than of true feeling…While handing someone a dollar bill, we are necessarily entering his personal space, but keeping ourselves at arm’s distance. We all need a hug and even want to get close to each other, but we’re afraid. …The Transaction develops from this contradiction. Anyone is invited into our immediate periphery as long as they have a constructive, profitable reason to be there. The term ‘immediate periphery’ seems useful here, the preponderance of manners, of scripted behavior and social convention, both concealing and enabling presence, the veneer of commerce supplying the mystery that religion once controlled. “Who are these people who seem so mastered by their pain?” asks Dante in the Third Canto of The Inferno, to which Virgil replies, “ The wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise.” This provides a rather apt description of the modern employee. From Gogol to Kafka, to Phillip Roth, employment is at least as much a threat to identity as a mechanism for its fulfillment. It is both the gift and curse of stories, that the ones we tell to grant ourselves freedoms also assign to us limits. They allow us dreams, but insist we accept the terms of waking life. Like the epic figures we shadow, we cannot entirely escape home. This division is manifest in the hyphenated nature of modern American identity. We are Native Americans, African-­‐Americans, Chinese, Loatian, Lebanese-­‐
Americans. This split makes visible the ambivalence we feel towards the price of reinvention, the gift of self-­‐discovery provided by Lacan’s mirror giving way to the irresolution of Merleau-­‐Ponty’s hyper-­‐dialectics of the self. We want to become in the individual sense, but we do not want to give up that totalizing narcissism that defined our understanding of the world before we recognized ourselves in our reflection. As an immigrant myself, I have some insight into the cost of these transpositions. For you die when you leave your country. You become someone more of your choosing, which is wonderful, but you do it as the consequence of your death. As a dear friend described when looking down at Chicago for the first time from an airplane that was bringing him from India at the age of six, “I’m fucked.” I’m not sure what the Malayalam for that is, but I think it captures the terror in any immigrant’s heart. “It isn’t only starlets who head to Hollywood, ask the factory girls in Manila, the toy makers in China’s South. In a very real sense, the young Chinese woman who migrates to the city in search of a new life is following a familiar heroic journey.” In ways like this, the immigrant experience has changed very little in the last hundred years. And to be part of that story, a distinctly American one, feels like an honor. It binds you to people in ways you’d never expect. It isn’t only starlets who head to Hollywood, ask the factory girls in Manila, the toy makers in China’s South. In a very real sense, the young Chinese woman who migrates to the city in search of a new life is following a familiar heroic journey, leaving family and all that she has known behind in search of her place in a story she has only glimpsed through films or television, in snap shots offered by people who have taken the journey themselves or letters addressed to those left behind. And like the would-­‐be actress in the Hollywood cliché, she will be preyed upon by the unscrupulous. She will suffer regrets whatever she does, and loss. For there is no way to escape being divided within oneself between the expectations of the future and the demands of the past. The young workers of China treasure their visits home at New Year holidays above anything else in the calendar. Similarly, the young women who worked and died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the centennial of which we are commemorating in this colloquium, had every expectation that after a few years of work they would return to domestic life and the familiar constraints, poverty, and demands that came along with their community positions. We often forget that even in the period of greatest immigration into New York and other American cities, almost a third of the millions who flooded in would eventually take the same boats home. And I don’t want to romanticize their struggles. As Danesh Bhura and Anastasia Mastrogiani tell us in their study of the psychological consequences of globalization, “the rapid flow of capital, people, goods, images and ideologies pulls the world together in a tight net that sometimes strangles the individuals it liberates.” The women who made New York a manufacturing capital, like the young women in Asia who are now creating the same opportunities for their own countries, succeeded because of their vulnerability -­‐ their needs and cultural dislocation fostering the development of predatory labor markets. “Post-­‐
structuralist thinking,” Harriet Bradley warns, “with its view of reality as linguistically framed and constructed has turned attention away from material analysis.” She reminds us of the need to address class and gender as “both social constructs and sets of lived relations,” here defined as “relationships involving different access to social resources and power…different existential locations.” I take her point, but where structural positioning limits self-­‐determination and systemic change is unachievable, the only recourse the individual has is to fantasy and displacement. The internal is something the materialist viewpoint finds hard to quantify; on the most basic level, however, what many migrants are seeking is little more than a context that offers them the hopefulness to dream. What continues to strike me is how even those who are denied direct access to urban life or the transformative potential of modern employment seek some limited connection to the larger cultural narratives they perceive around them. Cindy Fan and Youquin Huang in their fascinating study of recent Chinese brides found that woman who were “constrained by institutional positions, rural origins, and low education and status, shutting them out from cities and the urban labor market… pursue(d) migration by marriage into rural areas in more developed regions.” Unable to escape agricultural labor or rural society, these women got as close as they could to the origin of the story, if not all the way to Mecca or to Bethlehem. How do we measure their progress? Migration to the cities is picking up speed. Across the world millions are streaming into capitals and provincial centers, drawn by the urban capacity for personal reinvention. The city is the modern underworld. “If there is to be a new urbanism” says Rem Koohaas,” it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence, it will be the staging of uncertainty, it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential.” The city itself has taken on the mobility and tenuousness of its occupants, the miles of shanty towns that compose the modern dystopias of Lagos or Dhaka filled with the dreams of millions and millions who are fighting through hope and suffering, stories and street smarts, to come into being. Their dreams may seem modest, looking at young migrants caught between the restrictions of home and the withering demands of the workplace, but on their decisions, theirs more than any others, rests the future of national power and the shape of industrial geography. While we fret about the fate of nations, these streams of willing workers are making national boundaries irrelevant, obsolete. And if you really think about it, they always have. For history seems to follow its refugees, its misfits -­‐ the thread of invention, of new ways of being, a story of dispossession. Thrown from history, they grab at the future. Denied a place in the world they have known, they make themselves a capital, like the Aztecs or the Venetians, out of a pestilent swamp. And in the midst of this struggle, they build a city, a country, an idea, a place of stubborn memory and idealized future, unwanted children making the world spin. Works Cited Aligheiri, Dante. Inferno, Trans. John D. Sinclair. New York : Oxford University Press, 1961. Bruce, Lenny. How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. New York: Fireside Book, 1992.
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