2080 Words Later

Last week was a bit excrutiating writing-wise. My prose muscles seem to have gone cold during the flurry of moving and settling in. It's a bad day when it takes the better part of a day to crank out a painfully overwritten paragraph or two, and then just dump a few block quotes in just to pad the word count. Blech.

Yesterday, I did a combination of things that worked. Firstly, I downloaded Freedom to disable my network for 5-6 hours. One would think I could muster the discipline to shut off my wireless my own damn self, but, yes, I do require technology to act as a grown up in my stead. Then, after staring at the computer failed to magically produce I ideas, I started writing them out in longhand. Eureka! Productivity achieved.

Most importantly I think I've managed to break open the swamp in a way that more effectively ties it to the sea in terms of looking at Dred. I returned to the Allewaert essay and looked again at that passage on the first page.

"Whether this chain of sea-coast-islands is a step, or advance, which this part of our continent is now making on the Atlantic ocean,” Bartram muses, “we must leave to future ages to determine.” The advancing continent seems to confirm a present-day scholarly tendency to read the writings of eighteenth-century Anglo-European elites as contributing to the imperialistic project of continental expansion. But as Bartram moves deeper into his meditation, the continent begins to dissolve. He reminds the reader that the tide-lands “were formerly high swamps of and any southern planter could confirm that draining these coastal marshes would yield “strata of Cypress stumps and other trees” (78). Land becomes sea, and only fossils and fragments remain to testify to these marshes’ terrestrial past as the southern terrain that Bartram exhaustively details in more than four hundred pages moves toward annihilation. (Allewaert 340)

This anxiety over physical dissolution embodied in the swamp seems to echo a similar fear manifest in Dred that the insurrectionist threat represented in the swamp will envelope the entire country. The swamp both contains a whole history slave insurrection in the United States and indicates the maroons of the transatlantic world.

This is where I left off yesterday and where I begin today. Radio silence begins in about 30 minutes

Loomings

The chapter draft is officially due August 31st. Yikes! I talked to Bryan last week, and he thought it was a better idea to get the chapter done before thinking about the article which is good in terms of how I've been thinking, and bad in terms of my own anxiety. I'm going to spend this week getting organized for the writing process, get some index cards and start making more concise notes in addition to getting a bit more reading in. In terms of blogging, I'm going to try to discipline my prose. The bad thing about writing before I'm ready is I tend to meander into these incoherent and horribly overwritten paragraphs. I wonder if I'll ever get a chance to develop an elegant prose style. For the time being, if I can't be elegant, I'm going to try to clean and concise.

Instead of sectioning the chapter by text, I'm going to section it by trope: the geography of the swamp, the figure of the insurrectionist/mutineer, and ships and ocean travel. This will allow me to circle back to texts more organically instead of doing rigid and plodding juxtapositions text by text. The hope is that: A) I won't have to force the connections between the texts if I cluster them like this, and B) by keeping these three things in mind I can keep the maritime aspects front and center.

Because of my tendency to think backwards it also helps if I start with something like Dred and then reach back to her source material and work my way forward. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't have started the last chapter from Equiano and worked my way backward to Grainger. Oh well, hindsight and everything.

Dred and the Swamp Sublime

Finally got around to reading Monique Allewaert's essay "Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American Plantation Zone" which is incredibly suggestive in terms of thinking about Stowe's positioning of Dred, and through him Vesey and Turner, as heirs to the white American revolutionaries. Contact with the swamp produces subjects capable of resistance through interaction with "non-human forces" (Allewaert 341). The swamp zone in opposition with the plantation zone becomes not simply a place a refuge but a way of creating resistance.

Earlier I pointed to the swamp as Dred's swamp community as "a brief failed attempt at revolution." Reading the Allewaert essay I'm wondering if part of Stowe's dilemna lies in the way she attempts to "domesticate" the swamp. Granted, she is working from knowledge of the way these maroon communities operated but she also represents the ultimate demise of Dred's little utopia as white destruction on a fledgling black republic. In this reading Dred seems less a revolutionary and more of a colonist of a terrain viewed as un-colonizable by white settlers (343). This begs the question: does Dred's failure in part lie in the semi-permanence of the community? Stowe depicts of the population of the Great Dismal Swamp as seeming to have fewer revolutionaries than refugees, Tiff, Henry's wife, the wounded Clayton. In depicting the swamp she seems unable to imagine it as something other than an outdoor domestic space.

This reading also really emblematizes Stowe's transition from being pro-emigration to pro-assimilation. On the one hand she needs to recognize slaves as potential revolutionary subjects. On the other she also needs to recognize the ways in which the fit into recognizable societal norms. This is an extension of what she did in Uncle Tom's Cabin in depicting slavery as bound up in the fabric of white domestic space. In Dred she demolishes the plantation house and displaces the population to the swamp to show the possibilities of a free community of blacks interacting if not fully assimilating with whites. This makes the swamp an even more interesting metaphor of interstiality. Not only in terms of the state of slavery in the 1850s being bound up in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, but also in terms of the changing face of abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.

I'm returning to Dred because I need start laying down the groundwork for the real writing (as opposed to the "fake" writing I'm doing here) and while I've been thinking of the shape of the chapter I really need to start thinking of how the article is going to be. Dred still seems like a good place to start and going back over some of these idea I've only glossed over before.

Lost, Dred, and the Enlightenment

I started watching Lost over the weekend to see what all the fuss is about (and to fill the gaping void left by The Wire). I can already tell that "pretty" factor is going to get to me (perfectly groomed brows and smooth armpits after being stranded for 6 days), but nitpicking aside, so far so good. I think if it was merely a survival show, I'd be bored to tears. I overdosed on books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain in my preteen years, not to mention Robinson Crusoe in grad school. Books like that tend to have a limited appeal for me, even when fascinating and well-written. Camping lost its appeal for me when I was about ten years old and really not okay with the lack of indoor plumbing. It was always difficult for me to get lost in the adventure aspect when I was vividly imagining the discomforts of roughing it. But Lost gets right into the supernatural even before we know the names of the survivors. Surviving in the wilderness is only the first step.

Both Lost and some of the reading I've been doing over the last few days have got me thinking of The Great Dismal Swamp as also Stowe's way of discussing Locke, Rousseau, and Paine in conjunction with abolition and insurrection. According Levine, one of Stowe's sources for was a book called The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) by William Cooper Nell.

In a chapter on 'The Virginia Maroons,' Nell writes, 'The Great Dismal Swamp, which likes near the Eastern shore or Virginia, and, commencing near Norfolk, stretches quite into North Carolina, contains a large colony of negroes, who originally obtained their freedom by the grace of God and their own determined energy, instead of the consent of their owners, or by the help of the Colonizatoin Society.' (Levine 161)

It's interesting to think of Stowe of setting up the Maroon community as an experiment in black self governance and revolution. The Virginia Maroon colony (we'll call it that for the time being) is a fairly old one. A 1939 article in The Journal of Negro History by Herbert Aptheker states that as early as 1672 there are reports of insurrectionist activity in the area surrounding The Great Dismal Swamp. This presents the possibility of looking at the history of the Great Dismal Swamp as presenting a mirror for the history of America's evolution from colony to republic. Granted Stowe presents Dred's colony as a brief and ultimately failed attempt at black revolution. Yet the history suggests otherwise. The community is a fairly durable one until approximately 1862.

Although Dred's little community seems to represent a temporary experiment of escaped slaves creating community even to the point of establishing trade with local sympathetic whites, it also represents maroon communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Moreover, these maroon communities enact an ethos of man in his natural state forming communities, and yet fail to achieve that crucial step of creating government. Why?

Part of the answer might be in that there is something unworkable about Enlightenment approaches to civil government for Stowe particularly Locke's ideas on rationality and property in the abolitionist context. Under the Lockian model the slaves escaping to the swamp returns them to a state of nature. The next step should be to come together in social contract to form a civil government. But that doesn't happen. In a way Dred is potentially the fanatical despot who lures slaves away only to sway them to his cause and revolt. If Stowe is doing what Levine suggests and tying Vesey, Turner, and the like to the American Revolution she's also presenting their failures, or rather the limits of that model in the context of American slavery.

There's room for a bit about Haiti in here, particularly in regards to the "perpetual state of revolt" bit but I'm not quite there yet.

This probably goes without saying but I'm setting aside the whole Lacanian approach to the Maritime Imaginary in favor of re-reading some key Enlightenment texts. I'll probably end up bringing some of it back in but for the moment I think this is more productive.

Fragments

It's been a disjointed couple of days. I've been simultaneously trying to get a handle on Dred reception history and dabbling into Lacan (or rather Eagleton's interpretation of Lacan) which makes for kind of muddled reading. The Dred stuff is useful just in terms of nuts and bolts research. Of course it gives me things that seem like they should fit in somewhere but where isn't completely obvious. One of the places it's led me is to her memoir of her travels to Europe after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and before writing Dred, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands in Two Volumes (1854). In it, she devotes a whole chapter about her sojourn at Playford Hall, formerly the residence of the late Thomas Clarkson. The purpose of the chapter does little except give a brief history of Clarkson's early career lifting heavily from Clarkson's own memoirs. In terms of what it might mean for the chapter, at this point, not much save that Stowe's own awareness of the British legacies of transatlantic slavery and the early abolitionist movement. If Stowe herself is haunted by Clarkson's slave ships than the presence of empty hulks of ships makes sense.


A more interesting tidbit courtesy of Audrey Fisch is that shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England and in response to its immense popularity an anonymous text appeared called Uncle Tom in England or Proof that Black is White. This book appeared in 1852 and according to Fisch was written out alarm that Stowe's original was gaining in popularity amongst the lower classes. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it add this to my already teetering tower of reading.

The Lacan readings are interesting but I need to read more, and read slowly. My brain has never readily absorbed this kind of thing and time hasn't done me any favors. Strangely it's leading me into Althusser's work ideology. Or maybe not strangely since I've been playing fast and loose with the term in Chapter 1. But I think both in terms of the problem of literary representation and positing that something about language changes with the rise in Transatlantic trade both approaches will end up framing my thinking well. If the definition of self transforms in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and with the implementation of race slavery what you have is both the illusion on the part of the British that this vast colonial empire constitutes a whole even if they can only see it in parts, and the misrecognition of that whole for something that it is not, colonists as subjects and not as potential revolutionaries. With regards to the slave the opposite thing happens. Self becomes fragmented into parts and use-value. This makes Equiano's work all the more interesting in that he needs to reconstitute the fragmented self into a whole. A maritime imaginary is perhaps one in which both ideologies and subjectivities are reflected and refracted by oceanic crossings.

A clumsy thought experiment but better to try it out now than a month from now when I'm trying to write coherently. I also don't want to end up doing an awkward psychoanalytic reading of texts like this throughout the whole dissertation.

"There shall be no more sea"

I think the approach to Dred as a whole is going to concentrate on two things: the space of the swamp as an interstitial place caught between land and sea, and Dred as a figure where both past and present insurrectionist figures. Stowe ties Dred to the marshy areas of the south, the coast and the sea in this really amazing moment towards the end of the novel when Clayton finally speaks to Dred.

"The Lord bade me go from the habitations of men, and to seek out the desolate places of the sea, and dwell in the wreck of a ship that was forsaken for a sign of desolation unto this people. So, I went and dwelt there, and the Lord called me Amraphal, because hidden things of judgment were made known to me. And the Lord showed unto me that even as a ship which is forsaken of the waters wherein all flesh have died so shall it be with the nation of the oppressor...Every day is full of labor, but the labor goeth back again into the seas. So that travail of all generations hath gone back, till the desire of all nations shall come, and He shall come with burning and with judgment, and with great shakings; but in the end thereof shall be peace. Wherefore, it is written that in the new heavens and the new earth there shall be no more sea."

Places like the hulk of the ship, the Everglades, and the shore provide the spiritual surrounds for one "destitute of the light of philosophy." In the quote above Dred cites the shipwreck both in terms of the past and the present, the past being the legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade-- the "a sign of desolation unto this people"--, and the present, probably both the dependence of the US economy on transatlantic trade of cotton, and the prevalence of Ship of State metaphors within debates between abolitionists and pro-slavery groups. The ship, an emblem of the initial site of bondage, is now the nation on the course for wreckage.

"There shall be no more sea," is taken from Revelation 21.1, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Stowe also uses the sea to talk about slavery's persistent hold on the South. The empty hulks of the ships are specters of the past and warnings about the future. The shore and the swamp are transitory spaces where the boundaries between land and water are blurred and changeable. On the one hand there's the threat of being mired down and stuck. On the the other hand, the swamps are places of refuge. Dred, in being tied to those places also brings past and present together, in the invocations of Vesey, Turner, and the fainter echo of Brown, and the references to Toussaint( I need to look at Southerne's Oroonoko again to see if there are is anything useful there in Oroonoko's language).

Of course finding moments like these always reminds me of the overwhelming problem of this dissertation which is how to define a maritime imaginary. When I was first telling people about this project, several people immediately asked about Lacan's Imaginary. I've been resisting using Lacan because, for one, it's Lacan, and for another, I'm suspicious of letting a single theoretical application lead my work. I tend to work best when I'm working mostly from the primary material. But I've noticed some of my major keywords--fragmentation, subjectivity. and, to a certain extent, my concept of negative doppelgangers--are taking bits and pieces from Lacan. Today, I detoured into some introductory reading on the basics of the Mirror Stage thinking it might clarify things. I have a feeling I'll end up doing what I usually do. "I take my concept from Lacan's Imaginary in part by using X, Y, and Z. Where I depart is...."

Tomorrow I might start with a few close reading exercises using Lacan and see where it goes.

The White Insurrectionists

"I admit, Mr. Bradshaw, it's a very dangerous thing to get up steam, if you don't intend to let the boat go. But when the steam is high enough, let her go, say I."

"Yes, but, Miss Anne, other people don't want to say so. The fact is, we are not all of us ready to let the boat go. It's got all our property in it-- all we have to live on." (Stowe 316)

Yet another one of those great quotes that just begs to be made too much of. Dred is littered with maritime references. Slavery is akin to piracy, Clayton lacks ballast, etc. More on this stuff later.

Stowe seems to be exploring white complicity in abolition in a similar vein that she critiqued white complicity in slave-holding in Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the same way that "good" slave-holding households were ultimately no different from the Simon Legree's of the South, those who bend or ignore the law in teaching slaves to read are ultimately participating in the same kind opposition to slavery as Vesey and Turner. In both texts the law is the problem . It's a tricky tactic and one that I don't think is completely successful, but in creating Clayton a lawyer is who is bound by law to practice against his conscience Stowe reveals the way white southern moderates are also bound and potentially subject to the same laws as slaves.

Thinking about the way this book both evokes violence and suppresses it makes me how much of John Brown's ghost is haunting the text balong side the black insurrectionists. This presents an interesting point of attack regarding black and white doppelgangers in the texts I'm looking at. I mentioned earlier that Dred was an easy stand-in for black insurrectionists but he can also be a handy decoy from John Brown who was very much at large at the time of Dred's publication. One might be able to argue that at the same time that Stowe invokes the possibility for white insurrection she still makes Dred the scapegoat for anti-slavery violence.

Edited to add: John Brown invoke on page 499 of the Levine edition:

How stinging is it at such a moment to view the whole respectability of civilized society upholding and glorifying the murderer; calling his sin by soft names, and using for his defence every artifice of legal injustice! Some in our own nation have had bitter occasion to know this, for we have begun to drink the cup of trembling which for so many ages has been drank alone by the slave. Let the associates of Brown ask themselves if they cannot understand the midnight anguish of Harry!

Dred cont'd

Eureka quote of the day: 

There is always something awful in the voice of the multitude. It would seem that if the breath that a crowd breathed out together, in moments of enthusiasm, carried with it a portion of the dread and mystery of their own immortal natures. The whole area before the pulpit, and in the distant aisles of the forest, became one vast surging sea of sound, as negroes and whites, slaves and freemen, saints and sinners, slave-holders, slave-hunters, slave-traders, ministers, elders, and laymen, alike joined in the pulses of that mighty song. A flood of electrical excitement seemed to rise with it, as, with a voice of many waters the rude chant went on...(Stowe 322-323)

I really like this idea of the collective voice of the people transforming into a sea, the dark side of democracy being this enthusiasm potentially capsizing the ship of state a la Heimert. The potential of connections between these disparate groups is undermined by this enthusiasm. The shared experience eradicates differences but not in the way that would open them up veiwing commonalities. Instead all we have is this "rude chant," this blind surrender to their noise and no knowledge that their noise is just noise. 

This also highlights a problem I keep running into with this project in that sometimes the maritime imaginary is about sailor and slave narratives, sometimes it's about the space of the ship, and sometimes it's about the sea and I either need to deal with each part distinctly or push the others aside and concentrate on one. 

The more I read the more I'm thinking that this chapter should focus mainly on Dred and talk about "The Heroic Slave" and Blake less centrally which doesn't make total sense considering that Dred is the one work that doesn't deal directly with insurrection at sea. However it is a good way to test my theory that texts aren't about transatlantic slave trade nevertheless contain within them an awareness of the Middle Passage. I first thought about doing this with Uncle Tom's Cabin and talking about Tom's trip down the Mississippi as operating as an inland Middle Passage. And with Dred the constant movement of slaves, the awareness of always being in danger of sold away speak to the way in which that inter-state slave trade is forever connected to the Middle Passage. 

Of course this might all change when I'm gathering notes for Blake and "The Heroic Slave." Hopefully I'll settle on something soon. 

Is Dred the antebellum Boogey Man?

I'm rereading Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and thinking about the problem of the figure of the slave in abolitionist literature a post-revolutionary context. It's a problem I outlined in my first chapter and still haven't quite figured out how to flesh it out fully.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Dred is the say that it displays Stowe's own evolving thought processes regarding both abolition. On the one hand she writes with an eye towards addressing critiques of the figure of Uncle Tom, allowing some space for black rage in an abolitionist text. On the other, she can't quite bring herself to imagine the revolt itself, let alone the possible success of such a revolt. I'm alternating my re-reading of Dred with Bob Levine's book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the politics of Representative Identity. In chapter 4 he notes that Stowe in her appendix containing Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner she excises any mention of the fate of Turner's accomplices. In suggesting that the hammer has yet to definitively fall on the Turner Insurrection, Levine sees Stowe as "rhetorically participating in the political terror inspired by the heroic tradition of the black heroic deliverer as embodied both by [Nat] Turner and her fictional creation Dred" (Levine 174). I've never really thought of the text in this way, although if one is looking at the text as something of a corrective for Uncle Tom's Cabin it makes a certain amount of sense.

Yet I can't quite let go of this nagging feeling that there still something squeamish in Stowe's treatment of violence. Part of it is that Dred isn't just an combination of real-life conspirators Vesey and Turner, but an amalgamation of both literary and real-life figures of slave insurrection going all the way back to Behn's Oroonoko. Turner and Vesey themselves are already imbued with a certain kind of spectral dread (no pun intended) because of this longer history, both in terms of slavery, insurrection and the Haitian Revolution and the literature that accompanies them. This makes Dred almost a comfortably familiar figure upon which to foist white American anxieties regarding insurrection. Part of Melville's genius in Benito Cereno was taking this image of that tall Coramantee-like warrior and making him the decoy for the real leader, wee Babo.

Violence is probably not the thing that Stowe is squeamish about but rather the dislocation of it from familiar sites be they these maroon swamp communities or in threatening slave figures. What if Old Tiff suddenly snapped and massacred the Cripps?

These are mostly older thoughts but I'm revisiting them both as way of recapturing some of the questions that initially drew to this text. I think in the same way that Grainger struggled to reconcile the virtue of production with the evils of slavery, Stowe struggles to deal with the violence of insurrection in a way that both embraces the rights of black to rebel and yet keeps it at a distance.