Udo Nattermann, University of Indianapolis
Negotiating foreignness has been at the heart of two subgenres of American prose literature, international fiction dealing with Americans in the Old World and ethnic autobiography depicting the fate of newcomers in the United States. The former flourished between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the end of World War II, and was then followed by the latter, which focuses on forms of otherness at home. Even though these two strands of American literary production, each making up an impressive corpus of works, grapple with the problem of alterity, their relationship with one another has largely been ignored.[1] One might ask, given the identity of theme, how international fictions and ethnic autobiographies differ.
In Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic (1982), the Puerto Rican writer Edward Rivera provides an instructive answer to this question by engaging in an intertextual conversation with Mark Twain, one of the forefathers of international fiction. Rivera builds into his autobiography features that echo two of Twain's most important works, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Innocents Abroad (1869), thereby pointing out his ideological similarities and - most significantly - his differences with Twain.
Allusions to Huckleberry Finn serve Rivera as a means of placing his own narrative firmly in the tradition of American literature. In chapter 3 of Family Installments, the reader is introduced to the orphan Chuito, a modern-day Huck Finn, who initiates the book's hero, Santos Malánguez, into the world of sex. After misbehaving repeatedly, Chuito is sent to relatives, who are to turn him into a decent human being. At their home, he confronts the same ordeal which Huck Finn undergoes in the household of the Widow Douglas: he must take a bath and show good manners, and he is not allowed to gamble or smoke. In chapter 6, Rivera ridicules Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, presenting to the reader a burlesque reminiscent of the theatrics performed by Twain's "King" and "Duke." By offering his readers his own version of the adventures of a young American, Rivera puts himself on an equal footing, as it were, with Twain.
More important than Huckleberry Finn, however, is the second foil, The Innocents Abroad, which shares with Family Installments the narrator figure and his use of humor. On a basic representational level, both narratives are anatomies, which, as Percy Adams points out, often appear in the form of a burlesque travelogue with a naïve protagonist.[2] In The Innocents Abroad, several distinct voices perform the task of guiding the reader through the societies of Europe and the Mediterranean, with Twain remaining visible and audible behind the multiplicity of narrating agents. The distance between author and narrating voice opens an ironic gap, allowing Twain to be critical both of the foreign countries he visits and of the behavior of the American travelers, whose Yankee prejudices and ignorance of foreign languages render them ill-prepared for the long journey. This critical function is performed by various humorous techniques, the burlesque in particular, and it is maintained throughout the sixty-one chapters of Twain's account.
Borne out by the very title, an episodic quality also informs Rivera's Family Installments, which is narrated by the young Santos Malánguez, the bewildered and immature alter ego of the author. Like Twain, he is a guide of sorts, not for prospective tourists in the Old World in this instance, but for prospective immigrants to the United States, who might glean some insights and pieces of advice from his Memories of Growing Up Hispanic. As in The Innocents Abroad, the distance between author and narrator produces a critical space filled with humor.
These textual similarities, however, do not create similar representations of the cross-cultural encounter in the narratives, nor are the different foreign experiences of the protagonists the result of the different cultures they confront. The single most important reason for the disparate effect of foreignness on the protagonists is their respective social position, which forces them to create profoundly different literary records of their journeys. In Family Installments, Rivera sets himself against his literary ancestor. By creating a textual tension between his narrative and Twain's, Rivera achieves a critical perspective on the disparate ways in which ethnic autobiographies and international fictions examine otherness; the modes of cultural appropriation depicted and acted out in the narratives depend in a fundamental way on the social role of the central character - an observing tourist in The Innocents Abroad and a participating immigrant in Family Installments. For the former, the foreign experiences have a playful and impersonal quality; for the latter, they profoundly influence and reshape his personality. Furthermore, the respective roles of the main figures in turn determine the plot structures of the two narratives: Twain's guidebook for tourists is indebted to the romantic tradition and emphasizes conflict; Rivera's autobiography for immigrants belongs to the realistic paradigm and aims at conflict resolution.
Among the modes of cultural appropriation employed by Twain and Rivera, the most conspicuous is the burlesque, the exaggerated distortion of a high ancestral icon through use of a low style. One form of such debunking in The Innocents Abroad is exemplified by Twain's famous parody of the story of Abelard and Heloise, which has this opening: "Heloise was born seven hundred and sixty-six years ago. She may have had parents. There is no telling. She lived with her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Paris. I do not know what a canon of a cathedral is, but that is what he was. He was nothing more than a sort of a mountain howitzer, likely, because they had no heavy artillery in those days. Suffice it, then, that Heloise lived with her uncle the howitzer, and was happy."[3] Twain's willfully ignorant and irreverent retelling of the tale of a romantic love has the sole purpose of exposing the unrealistic and sentimental nature of the story.
A second form of burlesque frequently employed in The Innocents Abroad is what one might call cultural hybridization. Twain imagines a Roman newspaper clipping on the performances in the Colosseum (221 - 24), the work of a street commissioner and the goings-on in a theatre in Pompeii (259 - 60, 262 - 63), and a slave market report in Constantinople (290 - 91), and in each case he describes foreign societies in terms of contemporary American culture, using the energetic slang of go-getter journalism. The status of an allegedly higher culture of the past is thus called into question by dressing it in the common clothes of America.
The decisive feature of Twain's burlesque as a mode of comprehending the foreign is its curious counter-productivity. As it fails to enlighten the reader about foreign places and paradoxically provides him with information about America, the burlesque asserts Twain's authorial power over the objects of his ridicule. The foreign is not understood, but kept at a distance by the employment of humor as a kind of shield.
Like Twain, Rivera uses the burlesque to describe the international encounter, ridiculing both home- and host-society, but with an entirely different result. The first confrontation between Puerto Rican and American culture occurs when Santos's father and uncle, Ger·n and Mito, turn entrepreneurs trying to earn a living by opening a small store, which becomes an economic disaster for the already impoverished brothers. Rivera describes their desperate struggle for survival in terms of an American business venture: to finance the little shop, Ger·n and Mito "attempt to hustle an outside investor"; since they accept from their customers only cash payments, the brothers are accused by the townsfolk of being "out to defraud the public with their cash-and-carry operation"; and their playing of the guitar outside the store is regarded as a "public-relations gimmick."[4]
Another clash of cultures takes place at Santos's First Communion, where the presumably joyful act of receiving the host assumes the quality of a nightmare. Santos feels intimidated by the Irish-American nuns and an Italian-American classmate, who threaten the insecure recent immigrant with physical punishment. In this episode, Puerto Rico and America represent different forms of Catholicism, which collide in Rivera's depiction of the Mass as low comedy. A third major burlesque in the narrative targets Shakespeare. When Brother O'Leary assigns Julius Caesar in eighth grade, Santos and his friends misconstrue their teacher's intentions as an attack on their very identity. Here is one of Santos's misreadings of Shakespeare: "There was a spelling error there: 'need' should have been 'kneel,' and the rest of it was antique crap. 'Kneel not, gentle Portia,' my foot! If I ever saw Mami kneeling for a favor from Papi - she'd never do that, but just suppose - I'd denounce them both in straight language, right on the spot, and walk out of the house. The boathouse in the black and Puerto Rican section of Central Park was better than a house where that kind of shit took place" (129). The pupils regard the behavior of the Roman characters as an insult to Puerto Rican values, even as an expression of sexual perversion, and the Elizabethan language as an arrogant assumption of class superiority. The result is that Shakespeare, a symbol of Anglo-American civilization, is debased by the comments of ignorant Hispanic boys.
This and the other burlesques work both ways, making fun of Puerto Rican and American culture, just as Twain ridicules the societies of the Old World and the New. But Rivera's strategy does not allow him to enjoy his authorial control over the objects of his humor, for his hero and alter ego does not have the privilege of being indifferent about the butt of the joke. Santos must study the difficult Shakespearean text lest he get a low grade; he must conform to the demands of the nuns lest he be severely punished; and his father, when opening a grocery store, risks his very survival. Put differently, what for Twain is a theoretical game of words, the luxury of poking fun at oneself and others, is for Santos a matter of practical consequences. In Family Installments, the burlesque does not function as a shield protecting the traveler from the foreign; on the contrary, the humor foregrounds the limits of individual power: as an immigrant, one must adjust to life in the new country and accept its rules. In short, Twain's appropriation of Old World culture is static, leaving him and the foreign objects of his curiosity unchanged; Rivera/Santos's appropriation, on the other hand, is dialectical, resulting in various acts of assimilation.
In addition to burlesque, both authors employ - with very different results - two other forms of appropriation: one might call them linguistic and material. In The Innocents Abroad, for instance, the tourists reserve the right to give typically American names to foreign guides and foreign places (96, 346), thereby depriving them of their cultural specificity. In fact, all attempts at meeting foreigners on their own terms fail, as when the Americans try to speak French: "We stopped at the first café we came to, and entered. An old woman seated us at a table and waited for orders. The doctor said: 'Avez-vous du vin?' The dame looked perplexed. The doctor said again, with elaborate distinctness of articulation: 'Avez-vous du - vin!' The dame looked more perplexed than before. I said: 'Doctor, there is a flaw in your pronunciation somewhere. Let me try her. Madame, avez-vous du vin? It isn't any use, doctor - take the witness.' 'Madame, avez-vous du vin - ou fromage - pain - pickled pigs' feet - beurre - des œufs - du bœuf - horse-radish, sour-crout, hog and hominy - any thing, any thing in the world that can stay a Christian stomach!'" (76 - 78).
At times, the American travelers' behavior results in material dispossessions, for example, by exchanging currency at a rate favoring the Americans (42 - 43) or through the notorious relic hunting of the tourists. In Smyrna, Twain finds veins of oyster shells, which prompts him to consider setting up, in American fashion, a claim notice to secure his individual right to strip-mine the place (328); and in Athens he and his friends disregard the local laws, leave their quarantined ship at night, and steal grapes (270 - 72). In all these instances, appropriation becomes the act of one-sidedly taking something away and of asserting the superiority of the individual traveler over the host country. As Tzvetan Todorov puts it in a similar context, "unless grasping is accompanied by a full acknowledgment of the other as subject, it risks being used for purposes of exploitation, of 'taking'; knowledge will be subordinated to power."[5] Instead of bridging the gap between New and Old World cultures, Twain and his fellow-tourists create moments of tension and potential conflict.
The act of naming, a mere play for Twain and his cronies, is for Santos another important form of cultural appropriation. Throughout Family Installments, Rivera inserts Spanish words and phrases in the English text, thereby underscoring the fact that his protagonist's immigration to America entails choosing between two linguistic universes of meaning. Santos is very much aware of the significance of language, as becomes obvious in his pedantic concern for correct English pronunciation and spelling, which makes one of his friends even accuse him of being a "show-off" (264). Mastering names and naming are crucial for Santos's assimilation to American society and for his sense of self-esteem. That names are indeed more than words is also borne out by the humorous episode about the "fraudulent Malánguezes" (269), a couple named Malanga who have not paid for their furniture. When a debt collector tries to reach them by phone he accidentally contacts Santos's parents, harassing them with repeated calls. This case of mistaken identity proves yet again that naming can be a vital cultural activity for immigrants. Equally important are the family's strategies of material appropriation - for example, Gerán's stealing of electricity and his illegal collection of home relief - which have their origin in poverty, forcing the newcomers to become tricksters and defrauders. Santos's relatives do not intend to antagonize American society, but try to outlast a temporary phase of dire fnancial straits. Their need to survive contrasts with the American tourists' acts of material appropriation in The Innocents Abroad, which do not spring from such practical exigencies.
Finally, Twain and Rivera also employ a mode of cultural appropriation that concerns the protagonists' relationships to social reality in general: finding oneself in a foreign milieu requires defining one's attitudes toward the characteristics of the social environment. Twain frequently uses the strategy of generalization, that is, he tries to comprehend the foreign by placing it within the broad framework of the familiar. This often results in his flaunting of a rather abstract and cliché-ridden humanistic attitude. For example, when he falls into a reverie over the dungeons in an ancient fortress and over the horrors of excessive punishment, Twain does not provide the reader with any details about the society that built the castle and about the political struggles that led to the cruelty described: "They showed us the noisome cell where the celebrated 'Iron Mask' - that ill-starred brother of a hard-hearted king of France - was confined for a season, before he was sent to hide the strange mystery of his life from the curious in the dungeons of St. Marguerite. The place had a far greater interest for us than it could have had if we had known beyond all question who the Iron Mask was, and what his history had been, and why this most unusual punishment had been meted out to him. Mystery! That was the charm" (84).
Twain uses the occasion merely to remind us of the quick passage of time (tempus fugit) and to indulge in a general "fascination in the spot" (84). In France, Twain makes perhaps his most reckless generalization when he witnesses the notorious can-can and uses it to pass judgment on French morality (108). When humanity encroaches on him - for instance, in the Orient, where he is confronted with the way Arabs treat their horses and women (377 - 78, 382), or in Italy, where "deformity and female beards are too common" (157) - he turns away in anger and disgust. Twain's humor cannot hide that his sensibilities are hurt, that some aspects of humanity shock him too much and resist being dissolved into the all-too-human. He betrays the kind of Enlightenment humanism criticized by Hans Mayer in his study Outsiders: the indignant attitude that tends to "de-emphasize the concretely suffering individual in favor of a suffering humanity"[6] and that, as a consequence, excludes from humanity "the monsters of every provenance."[7] Thus Twain's appropriation through generalization either proves meaningless because it is too abstract or it turns inhumane because it is too restrictive, resulting in a hostile stance on his part.
If he does not resort to a vague notion of what is human, Twain might flee the intricacies of social reality altogether. This escapist tendency surfaces on occasions when he has the opportunity of depicting social reality but prefers not to, as upon the Quaker City passengers' first contact with the Old World, which occurs in the Azores: "The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy... Every thing is staid and settled, for the country was one hundred years old when Columbus discovered America... Oxen tread the wheat from the ear, after the fashion prevalent in the time of Methuselah... There is not a modern plow in the islands, or a threshing-machine" (44).
Twain obviously cites these details of Portuguese society to make only one point: that the Azores are backward. What at first glance appears to be social realism turns out to be a piece of slander; Twain quickly passes a negative judgment on a whole community and dismisses it as not progressive enough for his taste. At times he simply stops short of describing social reality, for example when he briefly speculates about the sociological reasons for the black color of the Venetian gondola, only to digress from it in order to describe the technical skill of the gondolier (180 - 81). It comes as no surprise when, at the end of The Innocents Abroad, Twain has little to say about any insights gained on the long voyage; he can offer his readers only clichés: "Travel is fatal to prejudice," and an emphatic vanitas vanitatum (531, 523). His journey has neither brought about any significant changes in him nor yielded any insights into the foreign societies through which he has traveled. Quite the opposite: for the purpose of self-assertion, he has ridiculed and taken from them; he has generalized about them without comprehending them; and at times he has simply demonstrated his lack of interest in them.
The pressures of survival as depicted in Family Installments make it unlikely that immigrants apply to everyday life in a new environment the escapist tactics that Twain uses in his encounters with the Old World. Vague generalizations about human nature and a disregard for the details of social reality, prevalent in Twain, would not only not help the Malánguez family but be outright dangerous for them. This can clearly be seen in the behavior of Gerán, whose economic and social problems of adjustment drive him ever deeper into a dream world separated from life in America. As a first-generation immigrant, he is too proud and inflexible to establish a network of acquaintances and friends who could assist each other in their struggles. He indulges in self-destructive nostalgia for his mother country and eventually quite literally falls ill with and dies of homesickness. Santos, the second-generation American, is luckier than his father, for he attends school and is thus forced into everyday social interaction with the new environment. But he also has to make choices. In parochial school, he is required to study Shakespeare, having the option not to do his homework - and many of his Puerto Rican classmates prefer this alternative - or to comply with his Irish-American teacher and prepare for an upcoming test. Santos chooses the latter. When he and his friend Panna are harassed by four African-American boys in Central Park, Santos learns that the United States is a racially segregated country compelling its citizens to decide with which ethnic group they want to be associated. In a passage rich in symbolism, Rivera has Santos walk home toward two icons of white America - "the baseball diamonds, and beyond them the mansions of Fifth Avenue" (160) - thereby turning his back on Panna, who is a very dark-skinned Puerto Rican and is easily mistaken for an American black. Again Santos opts for assimilation to mainstream American culture.
Perhaps the best proof that Santos's acts of cultural appropriation are checked by a reality principle is his grappling with the movies he watches and the literature he reads. On his walks through the city, he sometimes has the impression that his neighborhood resembles "Marlene Dietrich's prewar Berlin" (234) as depicted in Der Blaue Engel; and when one night he is stopped and questioned by the police, he perceives the incident as an episode from a movie "starring Cagney or Bogart" (235). But his difficulties in distinguishing fiction from reality give way to a clearer understanding of the value of language and books. He begins to see through the evasiveness and self-deception in his father's predilection for stale oratory and in his mother's stupefying reading of an entire multi-volume encyclopedia. When in college, he becomes wary of some of the courses he takes, dropping out of a sociology class because the jargon used in certain textbooks strikes him as obscene. Eventually, he learns to distinguish between writings that are not in tune with his sense of reality and those that are: "The shade in our dining room was so old and worn that chinks of light showed through. Like tiny stars, I thought, turning sentimental for a minute. 'Continuous as the stars that shine,' I went on, 'And twinkle on the milky way ...' English Lit. I, a survey course I'd taken, was paying off in unexpected ways" (263). Santos's interest in literature is slowly turning him into a writer, the author of Family Installments, who recognizes in Herman Melville a congenial fellow-artist. While attending his father's funeral in Puerto Rico, Santos finds himself in a situation similar to Redburn's in England, recalling from Melville's book a passage which he "reread... various times, on impulse. With an antique guidebook his [Redburn's] father had left him, Redburn tries to retrace his dead father's footsteps through the streets of Liverpool" (287). Melville's narrative satisfies Santos's craving for a literature that is true to life and capable of providing practical guidance to the reader.
Thus, Santos and Twain, the observer-participant in The Innocents Abroad, represent very different attitudes and behaviors toward alterity rooted in mutually exclusive interests. Twain's responses are those of an observing tourist: cut off from the foreigners by language barriers, resistant to change, antagonistic, and self-assertive. Santos's responses, on the other hand, are those of a participating immigrant: dialectical, assimilative, and realistic. In fact, near the end of his memoir, Rivera emphasizes rather explicitly that the attitudes of tourists and immigrants are fundamentally at odds, for when Santos talks with his family members at his father's funeral in Puerto Rico, they make derogatory comments about the tourists in the island. He and his brother Tego drink "tourist drinks," a piña colada which is "'[a] little too sweet for serious drinkers'" (290), and one of Santos's aunts repeatedly "denounce[s] the tourist hotels, the racketeers, domestic and northern, the plague of tourists" (295). Since an immigrant like Santos lives in a double bind, linked to a past he needs to reject in order to live in the present, his behavior is ineluctably ambivalent and not as one-sided as that of the tourists about whom his relatives are complaining, even though both types of travelers, immigrants and tourists, confront foreign societies and find themselves in similar situations. The travelers' responses, it turns out, are not determined by the foreign cultures (the Old World and the United States) that they encounter; rather, their self-interests and social roles control the directions of their acts of appropriation.
These forces of self-interest also exert influence on the literary characteristics of both narratives. Twain's guidebook focuses on a tourist figure, a sociological persona involved in short-term clashes with foreign foes, be they people or circumstances. The Innocents Abroad is primarily a romance, foregrounding a human type who, though claiming to undergo mind-broadening experiences, remains unchanged while moving from one moment of high drama to another. In comparison, Rivera's guidebook emphasizes the development of a character who sees himself as part of a large canvas - his extended family and its long-term changes, whose chronicler he is - and who eventually reaches a resolution to the problem of where to live and what to do with his life.[8] The hero of a realistic Bildungsroman, Santos-the-immigrant is truly becoming a new man. In short, Twain's and Rivera's narratives separate along the romance-novel axis, a difference rooted in the disparate ideologies of tourist and immigrant. The former is by definition at odds with the environment he confronts; he is self-serving and exploitative and, ultimately, because of the relative brevity of his encounter, indifferent. His journey into foreignness is filled with entertaining action and dangerous conflict, but these remain detached and abstract. In other words, the tourist as hero fits best into the romance. The immigrant is by definition conciliatory; if he were not, he would return to his homeland. He must adjust his expectations, his behaviors, his thoughts, and his feelings in order to maneuver an alien territory; he must change and develop as a social being. As a literary hero, the immigrant is a realistic figure.
In sum, Rivera accomplishes a critique of different modes of cultural appropriation - one driven by the ideology of the tourist, the other by that of the immigrant - through a critical literary appropriation of his predecessor, Twain. As an ethnic autobiography, Family Installments constitutes an act of supersession which leaves behind the romantic encounter with the Old World - that is, the subject matter of international fiction - and urges a realistic engagement with the New World.
Endnotes
[1]
The only exception, to my knowledge, is David Levin, who points out that certain international fictions and
ethnic autobiographies share the figure of the "innocent." See his "Innocents Abroad: From Mark Twain and Henry James to Baldwin,
Malamud, and Bellow," Recherches Anglaises et Américaines 18 (1985); 163-82.
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[2]
Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983) 141.
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[3]
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad; Roughing It (New York: The Library of America, 1984) 113.
Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.
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[4]
Edward Rivera, Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic (New York: Penguin, 1983) 43, 47, 48.
Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.
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[5]
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other,trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper, 1984) 132.
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[6]
Hans Mayer, Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters, trans. Denis M. Sweet (Cambridge: MIT, 1982) xvi.
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[7]
Mayer 5.
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[8]
Here my reading is at odds with that of two other critics, who argue that Santos does not assimilate to the American way of life. See Alfredo Villanueva-Collado,
"Growing Up Hispanic: Discourse and Ideology in Hunger of Memory and Family Installments," The Americas Review 16 (1988):
78; and Mara Sánchez, " Hispanic- and Anglo-American Discourse in Edward Rivera's Family Installments," American Literary
History 1 (1989): 854-55.
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