Demonic New World and Wilderness Land: The Making Strange of America

Abstract

The American scholar claims for himself the forgotten wastes and undisclosed lands. Like a character from Cooper, he travels from the walls and academes into the burnings of a prairie, thence to return and publish his message, discovering the horrid and yet holy measures of controls, the ways of fencing the wilds, and the singular terrors of his mind. He demands not the allegory Bunyan offered, nor the timeless locations Bunyan portrayed, but that allegory be stripped, that dream and its terror be held to place, located exactly where the scholar stands. He demands a material, measurement, place—somewhere and sometime in which to describe his crisis. He demands a particular machine, some object foreign enough, lawful enough, against which to measure himself and then destroy himself unto another life. He demands a compulsion to declare compulsion is fatal. He builds control and provides structure and works thereby his irony, tearing apart his devices, declaring his strangeness, his living out of place, his sense of himself as removed, of himself as a holy or at least as a special seer. He conflates history to the point of himself, places a local or even a world economy within himself, locates in his own psychomachia the material history of his culture. His expression of history, whatever the material or “artifact” claimed, is psychological, for the generative force, the historical explanation, is one of terror and of terror's control, of building not from innate designs or material exigencies or clashes of class or movements of world and regional economies but from the terrors of a bewilderment, from horrors to be externalized in the uniqueness of the American place—for Cotton Mather, Satan's home, the most vile and holy of deserts.