I want to try to avoid cynicism here. It is easy to look back from a post-Iraq, post-Vietnam future and laugh at the hopeful marks set down by men swept up in their times. Strong uses the word “progress” as synonymous with good, and while I would agree with him that it’s good that we don’t sell our wives at auction anymore, I hesitate to conflate the two notions. Winton does the same with “individualism.” What would Winton make of a collectivist giant like Japan? The Strong and Winton readings are interesting because of what they say about the attitudes of certain men and newly non-fungible women at the dawn of the twentieth century.
There is something quaint about the notion of “ruling the world” that giddily underlies Strong and Winton’s extracts – it’s the realm of cartoon villains and madmen. They seem too enthusiastic and anglophile to be the heirs of Hegel’s telos; one senses a beginning in their writing rather than an end. If they are prophets, they are prophets of boundless expansion and the endless desire that such growth would necessitate; in short, they are a strange type of prophet, the rare type who would ring in motion rather than rest. Of course, neither Strong nor Winton refer to themselves as prophets, certainly not as prophets of desire and excess; rather it is myself reading the future into their words.
The Spanish-American War was an incredible victory for America, but I find myself wondering not so much about the Americans, who, like Strong and Winton, seem so sure of themselves and their glorious future. I cannot help but wonder about the Spanish. How does it feel to be on the other side of the hyphen? What is left to write when you no longer have a hegemony on interpretations?
No comments:
Post a Comment