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

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

1 3 0 THE NEW HUNGARIAN QUARTERLY not by any stretch of imagination be called human.” Lovecraft used a text later noto­riously a fascist resource, Houston Cham­berlain's 1899 Foundations oj the Nineteenth Century, and persistently attacked all “ori­entals,” predicting necessary wars against the Chinese and Japanese, “in the interests of European safety”—a theme Jack London took up in his Revolution and Other Essays in 1910. Lovecraft’s popularity lies in both his exploitation of fears of an underground racial history and his projection of another idea with a powerful future—an aristocratic super-intelligent Great Race, manipulating the space-time field with legitimate power for necessary ends. In the best-selling science fiction novel Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke invented in 1953 his “Overlords,” a remedial dictatorship from outer space, taking temporary form as traditional Chris­tian devils and voicing popular indifference to ideological conflicts, the bitter nonsense of a “value-free” society. And Kurt Von­­negut’s best-selling Slaughterhouse j of 1969 presents the Tralfamadorians as space beings embodying popular fatalistic determinism. The sense of a dark under-energy of events also haunts Henry James. For him, the 1914 war was a de-historicized part of “a huge horror of blackness... the abyss of blood and darkness,” which had once erupt­ed in Lincoln’s assassination and continued in international anarchism, “the more ‘shady’ world of militant socialism,” “some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate,” to which the “Under-World” of the poor and their leaders belong. But the term “Under- World” appears in Ignatius Donnelly’s 1891 Caesar’s Column, a classic fantasy of sub­terranean insurrection, focussing on the In­ternational Brotherhood of Destruction, a “directing intelligence” of the barely con­trollable energy of dispossessed workers, the masses whose outbreak in chapter 33 is given in characteristic terms: “dark with dust and sweat, armed with the weapons of civilization, but possessing only the in­stincts of wild beasts ... all the devils are loose.” But Donnelly is as ambivalent about the necessity of revolt as Hawthorne in, for example, My Kinsman Major Molineux in 1832 and Melville in Billy Budd in 1888. In fact, the Senegalese head of Babo, glaring fixedly at the end of “Benito Cereno,” haunts the fiction of invasion and insurrection. In 1907, Jack London transformed his primitivist and labour revolt materials into The Iron Heel, in which a blond Nietzschean hero ambivalently relates to the people of the Chicago abyss—the old fears of Brown, Donnelly and James re-emerge. London’s “lords of society” are given as a wolf-pack, Darwinianly dominating the masses. The society of the Iron Heel is presented as an extraordinary amalgam of secret service men, mercenary army, counter-revolutionaries and labour slaves—an organized chaos, later familiar in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961), in which the hero, Yossarian, finds himself in “a world boiling in chaos in which everything was in its proper order.” In Thomas Pynchon’s epic of paranoia, Grav­ity’s Rainbow (1973), Van Goll re-enacts Ormond and Ludloe, as the leader who hallucinates totalitarian powers: “We move through a cosmic design of darkness and light, and in all humility, I am one of the very few who can comprehend it in toto’’—a classic manichean priestly formula, contain­ing what is probably a palpable joke at the expense of Robert Frost’s poem “Design” (1936). Jack London’s The Assassination Bureau offered another now familiar version of this self-righteous structure of tyranny: an oli­garchy in the style of later gangster systems, Mafia godfatherism, the CIA, Murder Inc., and America’s paramilitary private armies and police forces. The supposition here is that in a society on the edge of chaos, firm, secret organization is a para-governmental necessity: “learned lunatics who had made a fetish of ethics and who took the lives of

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