The white oriental

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 67, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 363-393

  Szalay, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950549220     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-2006-004     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (New York: Jove, 1988), 51. Hereafter cited as MC
2. Greil Marcus, The Manchurian Candidate (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 15, 40
3. For an account of the film's distribution history see J. Hoberman, Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New, 2003)
4. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1965)
5. Feeling betrayed by John McCain's equivocal participation on the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, the US Veteran Dispatch revealed in 1992 that many vets referred to McCain as the "Manchurian Candidate": all that time spent in a Vietnamese prison must have done something to him. Four years later a voter asked McCain why, contrary to the intentions he had expressed earlier, he had decided to run for president. The senator did not miss a beat: "I was sitting in a room with Angela Lansbury [and] turned over a Queen of Diamonds." Watching "George Bush the Younger" do all of his acting "on cue," Jerry Klein wondered in 2000: "Who's been the really hypnotically-programmed, brainwashed lackey over the past few decades? Was Bush, Sr., placed there to make sure that the dummy Reagan stayed on script? Is Cheney there to make sure Bush, Jr., does the same?" Railing against "the network of businessmen, agents, and gangsters that links Bill Clinton to China's Communist dictatorship" in 1996, David Horrowitz declared Clinton a "Manchurian Candidate" in an essay by this title. In 2001 George Stephanopoulos added, "When Nixon needed to think, he picked up a legal pad and wrote outlines. Reagan composed outlines. Clinton played solitaire" (Marcus, 44, 60, 16, 12)
6. Richard Condon, And Then We Moved to Rossenarra; or, The Art of Emigrating (New York: Dial, 1973), 6. Hereafter cited as AE
7. Paul Potter, A Name for Ourselves: Feelings about Authentic Identity, Love, Intuitive Politics, Us (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 45
8. On the relationship of Potter's term the system to the New Left see Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, "Introduction: Paul Potter and the Cultural Turn," in "Countercultural Capital: Essays on the Sixties from Some Who Weren't There," ed. Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, special issue, Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 2 (2005): 209-20
9. Daniel Bell, The Radical Right: "The New American Right" Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 40
10. Louis Menand, introduction to The Manchurian Candidate (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2003), viii. The present essay benefited from a generous reading by Menand
11. Jack Kerouac, The Dhanna Bums (New York: Penguin, 1986), 97
12. Richard Condon, Some Angry Angel: A Mid-Century Faerie Tale (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960), 106
13. Norman Mailer, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster," in Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959), 340
14. See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
15. Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 154
16. Kenner credits Ernest Fenollosa with the decisive formulation of this Ars Poetica
17. Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 93. Many of Davidson's claims concerning Beat orientalism apply quite well to Condon. Central to Davidson's account is the role that fantasies of Asians play in mediating Western homosociality; in orientalist narratives, Asians and Asian Americans serve as screens onto which American men displace their queer panic and polymorphous perversity
18. Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing, and The Joy of Writing: Two Essays (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra, 1973), 7, 21
19. John Clellon Holmes, "This Is the Beat Generation," New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952
20. Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues (New York: Grove, 1959), 65
21. For an account of the Beat relationship to religion see Stephen Prothero, "On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest," Harvard Theological Review 84 (1991): 205-22
22. Alan Watts, This Is It, and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 85
23. Reacting to this kind of stance, Slavoj Žižek holds Zen in large part accountable, if not for fascism generally, then for "the spirit of utter discipline and militaristic expansion" embraced by the Japanese military before and during the Second World War (The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003], 27)
24. Watts's "Beat Zen, Square Zen, Zen" is in part a review of The Dharma Bums and of a " 'beat' mentality" that is "something much more extensive and vague than the hipster life of New York and San Francisco": "It is a younger generation's nonpar-ticipation in 'the American Way of Life,' a revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather than objective achievement. It contrasts with the 'square' and other-directed mentality of beguilement by social convention, unaware of the cor-relativity of right and wrong, of the mutual necessity of capitalism and communism to each other's existence, of the inner identity of puritanism and lechery, or of, say, the alliance of church lobbies and organized crime to maintain laws against gambling" (This Is It, 92)
25. Alan Watts, Zen and the Beat Way (Boston: Tuttle, 1997), 12
26. Drugs worked just as well, for they served Condon as a way of figuring the principle of dependency and addiction that connected citizen to state. But drugs also, more broadly, offered an objective correlative for a locus of agency that, as we see with Shaw, Condon could not otherwise accurately represent. As Watts puts it in his discussion of the relationship between Zen and Christianity, "Both have posed problems as to the vicious circle of seeking self-surrender or of 'free associating on purpose' or of accepting one's conflicts to escape from them, and to anyone who knows anything about either Christianity or psychotherapy these are very serious problems. The interest of Chinese Zen" is its ability to "deal with these problems in a most direct and stimulating way" (This Is It, 108)
27. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Galsby (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 45-46. Thanks go to Katherine Mack for pointing this out
28. See Hugh Kenner's account of Fitzgerald in A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 20-49. Also relevant is Kenner's sense that The Great Gatsby expressed Fitzgerald's desire to "write the unwritten great Catholic novel . . . of the United States" (48)
29. The quoted phrase, which refers to poetry, is cited in W. K. Wimsatt Jr., The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 81
30. For an account of what it meant to a prose writer, such as Ernest Hemingway, see my New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 75-119
31. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 35, 14
32. Creating a narrative voice able to move between family history and more purely imaginative acts of racial identification, Fitzgerald situates himself between Buchanan and Gatsby. This characterization offers a slightly different version of what Robert Seguin calls The Great Gatsby's "Utopian fusion of High and Low in all the cultural and social senses of those terms" - its nostalgic searching for a " 'classless' narrative register." Seguin means the phrase to refer to Tom Outland and Gatsby, not to Carraway ("Ressentiment and the Social Poetics of The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald Reads Cather," Modern Fiction Studies 46 [2000]: 923)
33. Playing Indian was an attractive activity to 1920s modernists because Native Americans had no true state and were imagined always as on the verge of extinction. Playing Indian during the 1950s, Philip J. Deloria points out, offered suburban weekend warriors a chance to commune with nature and experience a way of life more harmonious than their own (Playing Indian [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999]). Playing Chinese during the 1950s was another matter entirely. Certainly, this game would not have sat well with Sonny Barger and his Hell's Angels - jingoistic, working-class whites committed to seeing themselves as vanishing Native American - or with William F. Buckleyjr., committed to keeping Dartmouth's Indian mascot from vanishing as well