The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1980 (21. évfolyam, 80. szám)

THE BUDAPEST AMERICAN STUDIES CONFERENCE - Mottram, Eric: Fears of Invasion in American Culture

THE BUDAPEST AMERICAN STUDIES CONFERENCE X29 promotes paranoias. The period of black­­humour novelists and comedians in the 1950s and 1960s updated a long inheritance —for example, in the paranoid style of William S. Burroughs’ novels, and the cele­brated figure of Colonel Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s film, Dr. Strangelove (1964), with his obsession that American “precious bodily fluids” were being drained off by enemy forces. Davis also shows how American colonists imaged Catholic Europe as a conspiracy against liberty in the New World. But by 1790, the Jesuits had been replaced by the atheists of French Revolution “illuminism.” In 1802, Abraham Bishop published a Jeffersonian tirade against the Hamiltonian power elite entitled Proofs of a Conspiracy Against Christianity, and the Government of the United States: the work was both anti-Jewish and anti planned economy. In the year of the founding of the re­public, 1776, the Illuminati were founded in Bavaria as an anti-clerical organization to convert the human race to reason. The paranoid response in New York and Phila­delphia was extraordinary. That Charles Brockden Brown was fascinated by forms of invasion is clear from his writings between 1798 and 1803—he uses the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, ventriloquial seduc­tion, and Jedidiah Morse’s crusade against the Illuminati’s alleged invasion of America. Brown’s Ormond is a member of an inter­national organization to destroy existing social order. Ludloe is a similar figure. William Dunlap, America’s first prolific playwright, noted in his diary that Brown “has taken up the scheme of the Illuminati.” Not only did Brown discuss his obsession in magazine articles, but in Jane Talbot (1801), one character is enthralled by the Illuminati and, in a manuscript fragment, one character is a member of an organization dedicated to rational reform rather in the manner of B. F. Skinner’s reforms in his behaviorist novel Walden Two in 1948, a work dedicated to educational dictatorship. 9 In Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, the Philadel­phia yellow fever epidemic of 179 3 is fused into the procedures of Thomas Welbeck, forger, murderer, seducer, a man of sophis­ticated rationalism and diabolic skills—a plot system which tested humanitarian val­ues and was to have a long life in American fiction, from the detective games of Poe and Twain and the twentieth-century mas­ters, to the epic paranoid works of William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Norman Mailer. The basis is there in Brown’s Edgar Huntly of 1799: “Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy, which they are for the most part able to trace to some incident which befell them in their early years.” But for the rest, Huntly is drawn into a world of invisible threat. Brown generally opted for strong leader­ship in a world of subterfuge and partial disclosure. In 1803, in an anonymous pamphlet, he alleged a French plot to con­trol New Orleans, foster black slave revolts, and incite Indians against whites. His aim was to cause the expulsion of all foreigners —his contribution to Federalist propaganda against Jeffersonian internationalism. And in a further pamphlet, Brown declared: “Fate has manifestly decreed that America must belong to the English name and race.” America’s need for cheap labour within white supremacy is infused with beliefs in the alleged inferiority of blacks or any people who had to be used by the system. It was required that useful inferiors be bad or impure or dark or dirty, and thereby associated with disease, sexuality, diabolic threat and the need for conversion and suppression: the puritan legacy, in fact. Negroes and Jews could be signs for the night side of life, a corruption of light and the natural authority of white, the god­father. One of Americas most popular fan­tasy writers, H. P. Lovecraft, generated some of his most insidious fictions and articles from fear of what he called “the organic things—Italo-Semitic- Mongoloid— inhabiting that awful cesspool (which) could

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