Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 38

Popular Culture Review

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Melville published in 1947, Charles Olson declares, "I take SPACE to
be the central fact to man bom in America, from Folsom cave to now."
(23) Olson elaborates:
Space has a stubborn way of sticking to Americans,
penetrating all the way in, accompanying them. It is
the exterior fact. The basic exterior act is a BRIEX3E.
Take them in order as they came: caravel, prairie
schooner, national road, railway, p lan e.. . . We must
go over spece, or we wither (11).
What has clearly happened in the last century is this: American
consciousness of the metaphysical value of space has metamorphosed
significantly from an emphasis on nature as "exterior fact" to a
preference for man-made environments, which substitute for the three
dimensions of natural space the artificial two-dimensional depthless
values of mirrored skyscrapers and signs-over-space freeway systems.
And it is this metaphysics of space writ large which is helping to
alter conventional interpretations of otherness in the contemporary
American imagination. It is a metaphysics which cannot help but re
interpret our collective meaning(s) of "se lf as we attempt to answer
yet again St. Jean de Crevecoeur's enduring question "What is an
American?" for the new century.
California State University, Bakersfield

Steven Carter

N otes
1.

For a broad discussion of this crucial distinction between the "two
narcissisms" of the American character, see Christopher Lasch, The
Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1978).

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1983.
Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988.
Byrd, William. "History of the Dividing Line." Norton Anthology of
American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym, et al. 2nd ed. 2 vols. New York:
Norton, 1985. 1285-299.