“Walls” in Anglo-American Literature and Culture
2017.3.11-12
Program and Presentation abstracts
"Walls" in Anglo-American Literature and Culture
A symposium organized by the Nagoya University American Literature/Culture
Society (in the Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University)
and the Chukyo University Postcolonial/Tourism Research Group
Saturday, March 11 and Sunday, March 12, 2017
Room 406, North Wing, Liberal Arts and Sciences Building, Nagoya University
Language: English
Admission free
Day One
3/11 (Sat)
Opening Remarks
(10:00 - 10:10）
Arinori Mori (Chukyo University) and Akitoshi Nagahata (Nagoya University)
Session 1
(10:15 - 12:15）
Chair: Mark C. Weeks (Nagoya University)
1.
Yoko Tsuchiya (Aichi Bunkyo University), ”Between the Urban and the Country: Theodore
Dreiser’s American Pastoralism in A Hoosier Holiday”
2.
Rie Kawabata (Mie University), “An Impaired Ear and Walls in People's Minds in The Living
Reed: A Consideration of Disability and Cure”
3.
Kyoko Kumai (Nagoya University), ”The Wall as a Place for Hiding and Disclosing in From the
Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”
4.
Akitoshi Nagahata (Nagoya University), ”The Signs on the Invisible Wall: The Crying of Lot 49 as
a Wall Novel”
Lunch Break
Session 2
(12:15 - 13:45)
(13:45 - 15:45)
Chair: Aya Yatsugi (Matsuyama University)
1.
Minae Hosokawa (Matsuyama University), ”Piercing the Wall: Infection, Inoculation and
Hybrids”
2.
Andy Houwen (Tokyo Woman’s Christian University), “Doors in Walls: H.D.’s Trilogy (1942)”
3.
Chris J. Armstrong (Chukyo University), “The Ramparts of Quebec: Bridging the Past in Robert
Lepage’s Le Confessionnal”
4.
Alex Watson (Nagoya University), “‘Literature of the Ruins’: Breaking Down Walls in W. G.
Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (1999) and Austerlitz (2001)”
Keynote Lecture
(16:05 - 17:05)
Presenter: Chris J. Armstrong (Chukyo University)
Professor Myles Chilton (Nihon University), “Big, Beautiful Walls: Literary Study in North
America”
(17:10 - 17:30)
Photo shoot
(18:00 - 20:00)
Reception
Day Two
3/12
Session 3
(10:30 - 12:30)
Chair: Kiyofumi Sugiura (Chukyo University)
1.
Arinori Mori (Chukyo University), ”What Lies Beneath: American Cultural and Social Trauma
in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Cabin in the Wood”
2.
Bunei Kohara (Kanazawa University), “From the Repressed to the Real: The Psychological
‘Wall’ and Its Semantic Change in The Fog (1980) and The Mist (2007)”
3.
Yuri Shakouchi (Toyohashi University of Technology), “A Fake ‘Wall’ between Retrospective
Hipsters and Satire on Retro in Daniel Clowes’s Caricature”
4.
Chikako Matsushita (Nagoya University), ”Transnationalizing Gay Games”
(12:30 - 14:00)
Lunch Break
Session 4
(14:00 - 16:00)
Chair: Atsuko Honda (Fukui University)
1.
Hideo Yanagisawa (Meijo University), “Hemingway’s Wall: The Border between Life and
Death”
2.
Mark C. Weeks (Nagoya University), “Can Laughter Break through Walls of Belligerent
Untruth?”
3.
David Toohey (Nagoya University), “Reaffirming the Material Presence of Immigrants in the
Shadow of the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall”
4.
David S. Ramsey, “Forward to the Past: Cornelius Matthew’s Behemoth: A Legend of the
Mound-Builders and America’s First Great Wall”
Closing Remarks
(16:00 - 16:10)
Mark C. Weeks (Nagoya University)
Presentation and Lecture Abstracts
Day One
3/11 (Saturday)
Session I (10:15 - 12:15)
Chair: Mark C. WEEKS
1. “Between the Urban and the Country: Theodore Dreiser’s American
Pastoralism in A Hoosier Holiday”
Yoko TSUCHIYA (Aichi Bunkyo University)
When Theodore Dreiser wrote his first novel Sister Carrie (1900), he drew on his
experiences of two metropolitan centers, Chicago and New York. They provided an
important source of material for his major novels, so that he emerged as the founder of the
American city novel. In almost all his major works, Dreiser shows us his ambivalence
toward the city. While he praises the joys of the city life and the new urban values, he is
depressed about the complications of the urbanized society. In his writing career, Dreiser’s
response to the city seems to shift from the affirmative way to the negative way. He, in his
late works, often describes the binary opposition of the urban values and the pastoral
ideals and expresses his own ideas of the American pastoralism. Such ideas became
remarkable after a turning point in the summer of 1915, when Dreiser and illustrator friend
Franklin Booth went on the automobile trip to the Hoosier state, their hometown, recorded
in A Hoosier Holiday. According to the book, the travel brought then-44-year-old Dreiser
back to his hometown for the first time in almost thirty years. In the journal of his
homecoming, we can see the figure of Dreiser who considers the urbanization of American
society confronting the walls not only between the city and the country but between his
past and his present. In my presentation, I will examine how Dreiser, in his journey to
nostalgic Midwest hometown, faces the walls between not only two different spaces but
two different times and read A Hoosier Holiday as a backing material of Dreiser’s ideas of
American pastoralism.
2. “An Impaired Ear and Walls in People's Minds in The Living Reed: A
Consideration of Disability and Cure”
Rie KAWABATA (Mie University)
Pearl S. Buck’s The Living Reed (1963) is a historical novel focusing on Korean resistance
under Japanese imperialism. Aside from historical viewpoint, however, we would notice a
subplot treating “cure.” A son with a congenital impaired ear is born in a Korean family.
While his father suggests the Western plastic surgery on his impaired ear to make the son
“perfect,” his mother dislikes Western physicians and loves the son though she feels he is
“imperfect.” Eventually the son has the surgery on his ear.
It will be generally pointed out that the mother has an invisible barrier against different
cultures and the parents obsessively discriminate against “imperfection.” However, from
the viewpoints of disability studies, we could gain further points to consider this subplot.
Certainly, it is possible to think that the son with an impaired ear does not match the
“norm,” and one might argue that the son with an impaired ear is “stigmatized.” The
“norm” and “stigma” work as invisible walls which exclude the son from the majority.
Furthermore, the parents’ different attitudes toward the surgery reflect the conflicting
arguments on “cure” and its inherent walls. In my presentation, referring to the
importance of its publication year, I will try to consider several invisible walls in the
subplot and its ironical development that the son’s lost nephew is identified by his
congenital impaired ear.
3. “The Wall as a Place for Hiding and Disclosing in From the Mixed-Up
Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”
Kyoko KUMAI (Nagoya University)
12-year old Claudia, with her 8-year old brother Jamie, runs away from home and hides in
the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two get interested in a statue allegedly
sculpted by Michelangelo, auctioned by wealthy Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Claudia
realizes that ascertaining the sculptor is the key to her self-identity. It becomes their
mission, though ultimately it was not successful. Finally, they visit Mrs. Frankweiler, who,
being intrigued by the two children and sympathizing with Claudia, allows them access to
her classified files in a room that could be secretly observed through a hole in the wall of
an adjoining closet. Here, the wall plays two roles: for the children, it is a partition that
contains and hides a treasure trove of secrets; for Mrs. Frankweiler, it serves as the place of
gaze, satisfying her voyeuristic interest. The main story is told in a letter from Mrs.
Frankweiler to her attorney: a product of Mrs. Frankweiler’s un-sexual voyeuristic interest
in the secretive adventures of the two children. The wall can be the bridge between the two
different purposes, hiding and revealing. The presenter will show how the wall is
interwoven in the main plot and framework of the narrative.
4. “The Signs on the Invisible Wall: The Crying of Lot 49 as a Wall
Novel”
Akitoshi NAGAHATA (Nagoya University)
Although there is no striking image of a physical wall in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of
Lot 49, the appearance of the images of the muted post-horn, which the protagonist Oedipa
Maas believes to be seeing, prompts us to imagine an invisible wall that excludes people
without material benefits from America’s mainstream society. The mysterious appearance
of these images, as Oedipa suspects, could be the signs of the secret network of the
“dispossessed,” but it also serves as an indicator of an unseen wall that has made them
invisible.
Imagining an invisible wall in this novel is not an act of baseless fancy, given the fact
that Pynchon refers to the thought experiment in physics that was proposed by James C.
Maxwell, a 19th-century Scottish scientist. In this thought experiment, Maxwell imagined a
sealed box with a wall inside that divides two chambers. There is a small door between the
two chambers, and a hypothetical demon, which controls the door, lets the fast gas
molecules pass from one chamber into the other by opening the door, while repelling the
slow molecules by closing it, so that one chamber will be warmed up and the other cooled.
Although Pynchon does not focus on the wall in this physics thought experiment, the
molecules, the dividing wall, and the demon that opens and closes the door could be read
as metaphors for dividing and merging different groups of human individuals. In this
presentation, paying attention to the metaphorical import of this thought experiment, I
would like to re-examine The Crying of Lot 49 as a wall novel.
Session 2 (13:45 - 15:45)
Chair: Aya YATSUGI
1. “Piercing
the Wall: Infection, Inoculation and Hybrids”
Minae HOSOKAWA (Matsuyama University)
Around the time of the Romantic period in England, there was a major transition in views
of the world. The Christian view in which the harmony of the world was securely
guaranteed by God was gradually encroached by a modern secularized worldview that
accepted a wider mobility of things. Conventional classification became confused. The
conceptual wall separating Christians from others in the common English outlook was
collapsing, and the humanitarian worldview gradually blurred the boundary between
races. Even the conceptual wall dividing human beings from animals became insecure.
This was when Charles Darwin’s highly anticipated theory of evolution was soon to be
published, a time when people in England recognized that the wall protecting them from
the Others was not as firm as they had thought. This recognition caused consternations
concerning the invasion of the Others, and such fears took forms in fictions. In my
presentation, I will look at the fear Edward Jenner’s cow-pox inoculation agitated in
England along with other anxieties related to the invasion of the Others and see how such
sentiments were represented in novels like The Last Man by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre
by John Polidori. In this argument, I hope to conclude by showing that currently mass
produced apocalypse movies telling of the end of humanity have their roots in the
Romantic period in England.
2. “Doors in Walls: H.D.’s Trilogy (1942)”
Andy HOUWEN (Tokyo Woman’s Christian University)
Beginning on 7 September 1940, London suffered 57 successive days and nights of
bombing by the German Luftwaffe. For the American poet H.D., the air-raids were both
terrifying and exhilarating: though she feared at any moment she ‘would be annihilated’,
she also wrote that ‘times were NEVER so exciting’. In the midst of the war’s destruction,
her poetic creativity reached new heights in Trilogy (written 1942-44).
This ambiguity of H.D.’s response to the war is typified by the central imagery of walls
in Trilogy. At times they suggest the necessity of self-preservation, such as the speaker’s
‘shell-jaws’ that ‘snap shut // at the invasion of the limitless, / ocean-weight’. As the poem
develops, however, its focus shifts from boundaries towards openings as, ‘like a ghost, /
we entered through a wall’ towards the ‘vision’ of ‘a half-burnt-out apple tree /
blossoming’. It moves towards a desire for the breaking down of barriers not only between
people and nations but between the physical and the spiritual, the profane and the fane.
This paper seeks to trace the development of this imagery through Trilogy and to draw
from it a conviction that overly reductive responses to walls are less helpful than a more
nuanced understanding that considers walls not merely as obstacles, but as also being able
to offer protection during moments of personal and social crisis.
3. “The Ramparts of Quebec: Bridging the Past in Robert Lepage’s Le
Confessionnal”
Chris J. ARMSTRONG (Chukyo University)
This essay examines Robert Lepage’s cinema debut, Le Confessionnal (1995), a film that
explores questions of personal and familial history alongside the political and social
contexts of post-Quiet Revolution Quebec. Set in Quebec City in 1989 and following the
quest of Pierre to reunite with his brother Marc and solve the mystery of his family history,
the film flashes back to “la grande noirceur,” an era of religious and political repression
under ultra-conservative strong-man Maurice Duplessis (1936-39, 1944-59). More precisely,
Pierre’s family history is narrativized by an episode from film history: Alfred Hitchcock’s
filming of the thriller I Confess in the environs of Quebec City’s Chateau Frontenac in 1952.
Within Pierre’s quest to solve the riddle of his family history, the wall of the family
home—which Pierre has purchased and is in the process of renovating on his return after a
three-year sojourn in China—becomes a symbol of the stubborn persistence of a repressive
past, as its walls refuse to give up the traces of family portraits to artist Pierre’s paint. This
essay will explore the dual cinematic spaces deployed in the film (Lepage’s and
Hitchcock’s): walls, fortifications, images of confinement, motifs of isolation and secrecy,
before turning to Lepage’s gesture of optimism by the recourse to the image of the bridge.
4. “‘Literature of the Ruins’: Breaking Down Walls in W. G. Sebald’s
On the Natural History of Destruction (1999) and Austerlitz (2001)”
Alex WATSON (Nagoya University)
In this paper, I examine the Anglo-German writer W. G. Sebald’s sustained engagement
with the Romantic motif of ruin in his acclaimed 2001 novel Austerlitz and his 2003 essay
collection, On the Natural History of Destruction. In Austerlitz, Sebald describes the personal
crisis of the fictional architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. In Natural History, Sebald
attacks Post-War German culture for failing adequately to respond to the legacy of the
Second World War Allied air raids. As I will show, Sebald’s writing is marked by a
preoccupation with different forms of ruination: from the faded photographs he famously
interweaves within his wandering prose narratives; to his deployment of images of dying
moths and discarded postcards; to his reflections on the battle of Austerlitz (1805) and the
fallen buildings of 1940s Berlin. For Sebald, such ruins exemplify a recurrent
self-destructive process by human beings seek to construct protective walls that ultimately
collapse in on them. As I will show, Sebald thereby reactiviates the Romantic trope of ruin
as a means of uncovering overlooked truths and challenging reductive understandings of
self and society.
Keynote Lecture (16:05 - 17:05)
Presenter: Chris J. Armstrong
“Big, Beautiful Walls: Literary Study in North America”
Professor Myles Chilton (Nihon University)
In an age of anxiety about the walls President Trump is building between North American
spaces, social and ethnic identities, and indeed between fact and ‘alternative facts’, it seems
timely to reflect on the walls built around and within the study of literature in North
America. Questions over the nature of truth leads us to ask what walls off the study of
literature from other modes of textual study, particularly in a historical moment rife with
attacks on the humanities both from within and without university walls. Do any of these
walls serve us well in defining a field of inquiry, or are some of these walls undermined by
arbitrary placement or conceptual flimsiness? My presentation will offer a three-part
meditation on these questions. First, I will give a general overview of the kinds of walls
erected by the ideals that inspired higher education institutions in North America. Second,
I will narrow the focus and reflect on the kinds of walls erected by our discipline, walls
built in response to, and to further, academic specialization; and the social and cultural
effects of these walls. Finally, I want to explore how we can breach these walls, while also
keeping intact certain walls that keep our discipline healthy. The foundation of my talk
will be a general wish to further our understanding of why and how walls were built to
create the study of literature in North America, and to argue the need for literary study
within higher education.
Day Two
3/12 (Sunday)
Session 3 (10:30 - 12:30)
Chair: Kiyofumi SUGIURA
1. “What Lies Beneath: American Cultural and Social Trauma in The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Cabin in the Wood”
Arinori MORI (Chukyo University)
The aim of this paper is to do a comparative analysis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a
Tobe Hooper film in 1974, and The Cabin in the Wood, a 2012 parody of horror movies by
Drew Goddard, in regard to urban legends of the post-war United States. Both The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre and The Cabin in the Wood are “slashers”, that is, so-called genre fiction
in which monstrous manslayers victimize (mostly) young people that stray into forbidden
sanctuaries such as forlorn bleak mansions, dungeons or woods. Just as any genre fiction
follows its generic conventions, these two movies also trace a typical story line for slashers:
young victims ignore mysterious warnings and break hidden taboos, and they are finally
persecuted and/or murdered as their just deserts. This paper will focus on two points:
some cultural and social resources rooted in scary urban legends in the post-war America
(as found in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a narrative of trespassing invisible borders and
evading from confinement), and significance of the generic self-reflexiveness in the
post-9.11 horror movies (as seen in The Cabin in the Wood, a film featured by an attempted
escape into an unfathomable abyss). By emphasizing generic coherences between the
urban legends and slashers, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre foregrounds the cultural
unconscious of the post-war United States, while The Cabin in the Wood lays bare the
Real—the unrepresentable reality of the cultural trauma after 9.11—by breaching its
“generic walls.”
2. “From the Repressed to the Real: The Psychological ‘Wall’ and Its
Semantic Change in The Fog (1980) and The Mist (2007)”
Bunei KOHARA (Kanazawa University)
In John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), glowing fog covers a town, and gruesome zombie-like
ghosts appear with hooks or knives in their hands and brutally kill the secretly selected
victims. The main characters have no choice but to run away and take refuge into the
church. The ghosts in this film effectively allegorize the function of Freudian return of the
repressed: return of the memory of the crime that was the unavoidable premise of the
establishment of a fictitious community named Antonio Bay (this repressed “memory of
the murder” breaks through “the wall” of repression and comes up to the surface, namely,
to the town’s collective “consciousness”). Also in Frank Darabont's The Mist (2007), some
unknown monstrosities appear inside impenetrable mist, attack people and corner them
into the supermarket. These two films share some features: mist or fog that can be a
passage to the other world, the monstrosities that lurk in it and the easily noticeable siege
settings (those strikingly shared by zombie films). And strangely enough, but perhaps not
by chance, the original novella of The Mist by Stephen King was published in 1980, and
exactly in the same year, the film The Fog was released (While The Mist had to wait to be
adapted into a film until 2007). In spite of these almost strange intra/extradiegetic
coincidences, The Mist is not a story of Freudian repression. It allegorizes quite vividly “the
intrusion of Lacanian Real” into “reality or an encounter with the Real. The Mist is a story
about the destruction of “the wall of reality”. This presentation, through the reading of the
deeper meanings implied in these similarities and differences, will try to clarify what
change the meaning of the “wall” against "the foreign world" has undergone between the
eighties and the noughties.
3. “A Fake ‘Wall’ between Retrospective Hipsters and Satire on Retro in
Daniel Clowes’s Caricature”
Yuri SHAKOUCH (Toyohashi University of Technology)
The subculture of American modern hipsters has become globally popular since the 1990s.
Today, we can find a lot of books, TV shows, magazines, and movies that not only praise
but also satirize hipsters. This paper argues how and why these satires, criticisms or even
hates against hipsters have inspired and formed the hipster subculture since the 1990s by
focusing on Daniel Clowes’s “MCMLXVI” collected in his comic book Caricature (1998).
“MCMLXVI” is a caricature of a man who was born in 1966 and is obsessed with the
year. He is a hipster who keenly collects old records, novels, movies, and Batman goods to
pursue the way of life before 1966. He believes the hippies who appeared after 1967 made
the world collapsed so that he hates any pop culture after 1967. He is always full of anger
and lonely since he cannot accept people around him who enjoy the modern subculture in
the 1990s.
This story shows us the absolute “wall” between the retrospective hipster and us. We,
the author and readers, make fun of him. It seems to be a satire on him. However, at the
end of the story, this satire itself positively functions as an element of the retrospective
hipster subculture. I’d like to discuss this contradictory phenomena through reference to
the notion of retro, and find out one of the factors of the hipster subculture in the 1990s.
4. “Transnationalizing Gay Games”
Chicako MATSUSHITA (Nagoya University)
The first Gay Games was held in San Francisco in 1982. It was founded by Tom Waddel,
who tried to achieve a LGBTs equivalence to the Olympic games. Since then it has been
held almost every four years, and more and more countries have participated in the event.
However, the host cities have been limited to the North America, Western Europe, and
Australia, where the LGBTs movement is prominent. In the research that I am currently
undertaking with Alisa Takashima, we have conducted a survey to find out how the Gay
Games is recognized in Japan. Based on our survey results that show the LGBTs limited
sporting opportunities in Japan, I would like to discuss how people can overcome the wall
that keeps Japanese LGBTs away from sports, as well as the wall between the western
countries and the rest the world concerning LGBTs participation in sports.
Session 4 (14:00 - 16:00)
Chair: Atsuko Honda
1. “Hemingway’s Wall: The Border between Life and Death”
Hideo YANAGISAWA (Meijo University)
Walls frequently appear in Ernest Hemingway’s works. In most cases, they are used in his
war stories, where soldiers and people hide behind walls to protect themselves from
bullets or are blindfolded and put in front of them waiting for bullets. In some cases,
however, walls appear in front of the eyes of characters who died or would die in non-war
stories, such as “Indian Camp” and “The Killers.” In the former, an Indian man with a
pregnant wife “lay with his face toward the wall,” until cutting his own throat with a razor.
In the latter, Ole Anderson, whom Nick Adams tries to help escape, “looked at the wall,”
waiting for the killers to find and shoot him.
The purpose of this paper is to suggest that walls could represent the border between life
and death in Hemingway’s works. To do this, I will deal with examples of walls from
Hemingway’s literary texts to explore their symbolism as mortality.
2. “Can Laughter Break through Walls of Belligerent Untruth?”
Mark C. WEEKS (Nagoya University)
Mark Twain famously wrote, in The Mysterious Stranger, that against “colossal humbug,”
which is to say outrageous falsehood and attempts at deception, there is “one really
effective weapon—laughter.” One of the most striking developments in the US electronic
media in recent years has been the rise of a certain popular melding of comedy and
political critique, typically identified with The Daily Show and now spreading to the major
networks’ talk shows. With the notion that certain cultures have entered a “post-truth” era
and the proliferation of claims of outright lying surrounding the new President of the
United States, it would seem that comedy has pushed further into the political realm as
part of a critical comic counteroffensive to an attack on truth, along the lines proposed by
Twain. Yet it has been argued, for example by Zizek, that the rise of popular political
comedy is in fact part of the problem, serving to both deepen the conventional political
divide and alienate large sectors of society from thoughtful political dialogue. This paper
argues that effective analysis of the unfolding situation of comedy in the political realm
requires adequate consideration of the underlying mechanisms of laughter as well as the
diverse contexts, aims and operations of humor.
3. “Reaffirming the Material Presence of Immigrants in the Shadow of
the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall”
David TOOHEY (Nagoya University)
Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s website for Border Cantos (2016) uses musical
instruments made from objects left in the border area by undocumented immigrants, such as
shoes and innertubes used for crossing rivers into the United States, for cultural performance
and replicate found object statues left by undocumented immigrants to create a new musical
instrument for performances. While Gloria Anzaldúa and Guillermo Gómez Peña have
mixed Mexican and American cultures to protest xenophobia, and Independent Media
Centers use Internet to critique nation-state categories to help immigrants (see Toohey 2016),
Border Cantos does two additional things:
1.
Adding a material aspect to the cultural and political debates on immigration by
using and/or imitating undocumented-immigrants’ found objects; and
2.
Using the Internet not only to disseminate records of performances, but also to blend
aspects of musical performance, performative art, photography, and film.
These cultural practices will be placed in context of land loss that many Central American
undocumented immigrants are fleeing and how Misrach and Galindo use the Internet to
mitigate this violence through a materialist legacy infused performance of landless, voiceless,
and even lifeless immigrants (borrowing on Marx and Engels’ idea of materialism).
4. “Forward to the Past: Cornelius Matthew’s Behemoth: A Legend of the
Mound-Builders and America’s First Great Wall”
David S. RAMSEY (Notre Dame Seishin University)
Karl Marx observed that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
While today the world frets about the ringmaster atop the GOP elephant, trampling social
advancement underfoot, and with human civilization itself paradoxically threatened by
denial of natural forces unleashed by human-centered activity, it is painfully yet amusingly
instructive to consider a little-known novel with striking parallels yet causal reversal.
In
Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders (1839), Cornelius Matthews, one of the early
19th-century’s Young America literary circle, tapped the archaeological ruins of prehistoric
America’s Mound Builder culture as well as fossils from the Ice Age to assert and establish
an independent American literary identity.
In his novel, Matthews posits the extinction of
a prehistoric race of Classically-modeled, culturally-advanced Americans whose entire
world is threatened by a rampaging mammoth, a survivor from the Ice-Age.
The great
savior of the people is their developer-in-chief, Bokulla, whose inspired vision is to build a
huge wall and trap the beast: build it, and it won’t come.
Comic relief is provided by the
cocksure character Kluckhatch, whose boastful nature and absurdly doomed-to-fail plan to
slay the beast shows a farcical imitation of the assassination of Julius Caesar.
In the same
vein, we find throughout Behemoth a sustained Rome-like ancient America, such as
Bokulla’s bison-pulled chariot, Roman legion-like phalanxes and war machines, and
phrasing that echoes Shakespeare’s Roman history plays—all of which ironically undercuts
a truly autochthonous American identity and Matthews’ nativist intent.
Earlier scholars
have observed that Matthew’s beast from the depths of time provided a model for Herman
Melville’s beast from the depths of the sea, the great white monster, Moby Dick.
Indeed,
Melville was a member of the same literary circle, but while Melville’s Ishmael survived to
tell his tale, Matthew’s ancients disappeared into extinction, along with their throw-back
pachyderm nemesis.
Echoing the Biblical flood of Noah and adumbrating Poe’s “Cask of
Amontillado,” all that remained are the fossilized bones of an enormous beast that had
been lured, entombed behind a great wall, and starved to death: “On the fortieth day
Behemoth died and left his huge bones extended on the plain like the wreck of some
mighty ship stranded there by a Deluge.”
________________________________________________________________________________
(Last updated: 2017.3.6)
Contact: Akitoshi Nagahata ([email protected]; 052-789-4702)
Arinori Mori ([email protected])