Playing in the Dark

[Dave Monroe]

>From Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and
the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992]), Ch. 2, "Romancing
the Shadow," pp. 31-59 ...

   "Young America distinguished itself by, and
understood itself to be, pressing toward a future of
freedom, a kind of human dignity believed
unprecedented in the world.  A whole tradition of
'universal' yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled
phrase, 'the American Dream.' [...] it is just as
important to know what these people were rushing from
as it is to know what they were hastening to.  If the
New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality
that whetted the appetite for them?  And how did that
reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?
   "The flight from the Old World to the New is
generally seen to be a flight from oppression and
limitation to freedom and possibility.  Although, in
fact, the escape was sometimes an escape from
license--from a society perceived to be unacceptably
permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined--for those
fleeing for reasons other than religious ones,
constraint and limitation impelled this journey.  All
the Old World offered these immigrants was poverty,
prison, social ostracism, and, not infrequently,
death.  There was of course a clerical, scholarly
group of immigrants who came seeking the adventure
possible in founding a colony for, rather than
against, one or another mother country or fatherland. 
And of course there were the merchants, who came for
cash.
   "Whatever the reasons, the attraction was of the
'clean slate' variety, a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity not only to be born again but to be born
in new clothes, as it were.  This new setting would
provide new rainments of self.[...]  In the New World
there was the vision of a limitless future, made more
gleaming by the constraint, dissatisfaction, and
turmoil left behind.  It was a promise genuinely
promising.  With luck and endurance once could
discover freedom; find a way to make God's law
manifest; or end up rich as a prince.  The desire for
freedom is preceeded by oppression; a yearning for
God's law is born of the detestation of human license
and corruption; the glamor of riches is in thrall to
poverty, hunger, and debt.
   "There was very much more in the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries to make the trip worth the
risk.  The habit of genuflection would be replaced by
the thrill of command.  Power--control of one's own
destiny--would replace the powerlessness felt before
the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution. 
One could move from discipline and punishment to
disciplining and punishing [...].  One could be
released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into
a kind of history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be
inscribed.  Much was to be written there: noble
impulses were made into law and appropriated for a
national tradition; base ones, learned and elaborated
in the rejected and rejecting homeland, were also made
into law and appropriated for tradition.
   "The body of literature produced by the young
nation is one way it inscribed its transactions with
these fears, forces, and hopes.  And it is difficult
to read the literature of young America without being
struck by how antithetical it is to our modern
rendition of the American Dream.[...]  For a people
who made much of their 'newness'--their potential,
freedom, and innocence--it is striking how dour, how
troubled, how frightened and haunted our early
founding literature truly is." (pp. 33-5)

Cf. ...

   "Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America
her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the
metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in
the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on
West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written
down, nor ever, by the majority of mankind, seen, --
serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes,
for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise,
Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's
Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next
Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd
and tied back in, back to the Net-Work of Points
already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into
the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to
declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities
that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away
from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by
one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that
is our home, and our Despair." (M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345)

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html

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