William Rodney Herring

Just a presentation paper from one of the last courses I took (after I didn't need more coursework)

The Algerine Captive is…one of the first attempts by an American novelist to depict the Islamic world, and lays bare a culture clash and diplomatic quagmire not unlike the one that obtains between the United States and Muslim nations today.
back cover to the Modern Library edition

If there’s not something timeless about the clash between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, there’s certainly something pesky and persistent about it. And whatever Royall Tyler reveals about slavery in his own country, by way of sketching a genealogy of Islam and Algiers, he simultaneously exposes the kernel of conflict between the US and Islamic nations. But let me go further: I think we miss an important point if we neglect to acknowledge that Updike Underhill’s promise to “every moment of my life” denounce “this detestable commerce” which is slavery (106) comes almost precisely midway through the book. The second half shifts from a concern about slavery to an interest in understanding the Algerines. Even if by analogy Underhill’s few reflections about his own enslavement are critiques of American slavery, the novel concludes with no reminder (much less one “every moment”) of the importance of this issue. In fact, Underhill’s commitment is “To contribute cheerfully to the support of our excellent government” (225), the same one that has legalized slavery and the slave trade. He says his “first object is union among ourselves” (226), and if Cathy Davidson reads this as a call for “inclusion,” “unity,” and “equality” (304), I read it alongside her epigraph: “He that is not for us, is against us” (233). In other words, there’s a sense in which Underhill’s ultimate platitude is a capitulation to consensus—precisely the principle that constituted slavery in the first place. Thus, instead of reading the second volume of the novel through the lens of what the first volume promises, I suggest we remember the traces from the first volume that help indicate the purpose and the problem of the second volume. Hence, we should follow the novel’s 2002 marketers who observe that there is something timely about reading this novel at present—and we should question what causes this timeliness.

…the language of the alcoran is so ineffably pure, it can never be rendered into any other tongue. To this they candidly impute the miserable, vitiated translations of the christians, who they charge with having garbled the sacred book and degraded its sublime alegories and metaphors into absurd tales.
The Algerine Captive, p. 182

As Underhill analyzes Algerine and Islamic culture in his typically-American (and according to Cathy Davidson, increasingly) pluralistic way, he remarks on similarities, but he pauses over such differences as this one about translatability. This strikes Underhill as peculiar because he’s accustomed (as perhaps are we) to thinking of language as a vehicle for transmitting meaning from a source to its recipient. It doesn’t matter what the language is, meaning can be kept in tact like packages communicated across the various Internet protocols from computer to computer. Even in a (post-)poststructuralist age, we are hesitant (or uncomfortable) to accept that meaning is not the source or condition of language, but rather the product of language (Derrida 6, 10). For this reason—because we consider meaning transmittable—we see translation as inexact but as useful nonetheless. This puts (most) Westerners very much at odds with the Algerines Underhill describes. For them, textual purity is of essence, providing us with “the only definition of fundamentalism that will really stick. Fundamentalism is a textual affair. It is an attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning. It means adhering strictly to the script. It is a fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate, as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity” (Eagleton 202-03). To the fundamentalist, freezing a text like a “dead letter” (207) seems like a way of guaranteeing the unity of meaning.

But of course, anyone who insists on the universal Truth of her meaning is threatened by those who admit polysemy. And this is precisely the problem that causes cultural misunderstanding then and now. When President Bush has insisted that our War on Terror isn’t a religious war, he’s been enacting the very problem Al Qaeda sought to eradicate. For a fundamentalist people who refuse to recognize a space outside of religion, “the question ‘Is this a religious war?’ will make no sense…or, rather, will make only the sense of a question issuing from an infidel who is by definition wrong and an enemy” (Fish 36). Put another way, “the question ‘Is this a religious war?’ is not a question about the war; it is the question that is the war” (35). The American treatment of all texts—from the Bible to the Constitution to novels to War—as more or less available for interpretation represents just the kind of secularism that a fundamentalist regard for the “sacred text” cannot abide. And any perceived attempt to weaken the sacredness of a (or the) religious text will be met with due defense.

Now on the one hand, it seems I’ve conflated Al Qaeda and the Algerines of 1790. But what I’m really suggesting is that there’s a way that America has always handled fundamentalism: with tolerance, to a point, but only so far as the tolerance is acknowledged, respected, and paid for. This tolerance has another name, “America’s ‘Civic Religion,’” and it entails

a faith (if that is the word) founded on the twin rocks of Locke’s declaration that ‘the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth’ and Jefferson’s more colloquial version of the same point: ‘It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty Gods or no Gods; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ Jefferson’s further contribution is the famous ‘Wall of Separation,’ a metaphor that has lent constitutional force to the separation of church and state, even though it is not in the Constitution. In combination, these now canonical statements give us the key distinction between the private and the public, which in turn gives us the American creed of tolerance. It goes like this: If you leave me free to believe whatever I like, I’ll leave you free to believe whatever you like, even though in our respective hearts we regard each other’s beliefs as false and ungodly. We can argue about it or privately condemn each other, but our differences of belief shouldn’t mean that we try to disenfranchise or imprison or kill each other or refrain from entering into relationships of commercial and social cooperation. (Fish 36)

In other words, the United States has a theoretically sound and longstanding basis for its tolerence of multiculturalism. If in fact it has more to do with the business of laws than the business of laws—“Capitalism has always pitched diverse forms of life promiscuously together” (Eagleton 49)—it is a tolerance nevertheless well founded.

And as Davidson demonstrates, this tolerance of diverse forms (of meaning) has a specifically textual valence. The Constitution itself is a hallmark of just this acceptance of polysemy. Despite the fact that “throughout the Convention, the delegates were in such radical disagreement over what a Constitution should do and say, …a final text was achieved” precisely because “the points of contention were linguistically—not necessarily ideologically—resolved through calculatingly ambiguous wording of the Constitution itself” (Davidson 238). Union above difference (of opinion)! Acceptance of ambiguity! Openness to textuality! The delegates can agree to unite behind terms that mean, more or less, different things. We see here the commitment to tolerance that enables Updike Underhill to attempt an even-handed description of Islam (a description noteworthy at its time, Davidson tells us, for the “favour” with which it characterized the Mollah’s persuasion [302]), even while clinging to his own faith.

But if, as Slavoj Zizek argues, “tolerant liberal multiculturalism [is] an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while practices like wife beating remain out of sight…)” (Welcome 11), this is in part because the American “civic religion” is “the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars” (Fish 37). Particulars threaten our shared public space, that space we artificially separate—secularize—so we can trade common goods with one another and ignore the fact that we disagree. In an important sense, this is a fundamentalism of its own.

Stanley Fish asked “What to do?” when faced with the conjuncture of any two incompatible systems when in the year after September 11, he defended postmodernism against various charges that it either caused the attacks or, in the face of the attacks, “loses its glib grip.”[1] He offers the following in answer:

Well, you do the only thing you can do, the only honest thing: you assert that your universal is the true one, even though your adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality—the desired public categories of condemnation—but to the fact, regrettable as it may be, that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that is false. And there you have to leave it, because the next step, the step of proving the falsenesss of their beliefs to everyone, including those in their grip, is not a step available to us as finite situated human beings. We have to live with the knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely right and that there is no generally accepted measure by which our rightness can be independently validated. (37).

The only problem is that we don’t leave it at that. Of course we don’t bomb or invade countries (Afghanistan? Iraq?) merely because their intolerance is inimical to “our way of life.” What we do is really quite worse: we offer goods and jobs that transform their modes of production.[2] What’s really hateful about Westerners is not that we are capitalistic, much less capitalism itself—capitalism is already visible in the marketplace of Underhill’s Algiers—but that we are unapologetic about it, that we don’t subordinate it to religious practices, that we in fact do the opposite, and ultimately that we, in the United States, are Constituted by the very relations it makes available. What’s more, “our” fundamentalism flies in the face of “theirs.” We could write another paper altogether about the metaphysics of presence concealed beneath the “linguistic”—but not “ideologic”—resolution of the wording of the Constitution Davidson recounts. Any recourse to a “deeper” meaning contained “beneath the words” chosen by the delegates—a privileging of the presence of the signified that permits us to play with signifiers while not changing the meaning of the text itself—is little more than the second side to the coin whose head is fundamentalism. You can cling tightly to the meaning that is the text or you can cling tightly to the meaning that is beneath the text, but either way, you’re terrified to face the fact that meaning is radically absent from the text, that absence is irremediably the condition for the text (Derrida 8-9). Were I to pursue this line of argument, I would look back at all the The Algerine Captive’s epigraphs that insist upon the value of Truth over the appearance of Truth (the classical battle between philosophy and rhetoric).[3] What else is the insistence upon historian objectivity about? In general, there’s a tremendous anxiety about truth (noted by Davidson), but Tyler repeatedly privileges its ontological status, thereby separating Truth from the representational forms it takes. This is just a fundamentalist fidelity to meaning (that is, Truth), as opposed to fundamentalism oriented toward the text.

But you must be asking: what does this have to do with The Algerine Captive, what indeed has happened to that text in my paper? What I’m suggesting is that everything I’ve sketched above is already present in the memoirs of Updike Underhill. Consider the tolerance offered here:

I would not bring the sacred volume of our faith in any comparative view with the alcoran of Mahomet; but I cannot help noticing it as extraordinary, that the Mahometan should abominate the christian on account of his faith, and the christian detest the Mussulman for his creed; when the koran of the former acknowledges the divinity of the christian Messias, and the bible of the latter commands us to love our enemies. If each would follow the obvious dictates of his own scripture, he would cease to hate, abominate, and destroy the other. (183)

On first glance, this is a liberal reading of the Other's religion. Underhill recognizes the similarities (shared faith) between the religions (and what’s not unimportant here is Underhill’s featuring of the Mollah’s claim that one’s environment shapes one’s faith [130]), and he above all intends to locate a possibility for peaceable coexistence of the two mutually exclusive sets of beliefs. But we must notice the crucial manner in which Underhill manages to obtain coexistence: because Islamic doctrine acknowledges the divinity of the Christian God, Mahometans shouldn’t hate Christians; because Christian doctrine teaches tolerance for one’s enemies, Christians shouldn’t hate Muslims. But notice the comparative sacrifices made by each religion. Islam must admit the essential truth of Christianity; Christianity must admit the truth of itself—which is just another way of saying that Christianity must admit the error of Islam (otherwise, it makes no sense to call Muslims “enemies”). But the “error” of Islam is that it cannot veer from the text and admit that Christianity may be right, too. To “acknowledge the divinity of the christian Messias” is not to accept Christians or Christianity. According the Koran, there’s a clear distinction between the two religions, and according to the Koran, acceptance of one does not include acceptance of the other. “THERE IS ONE GOD, AND MAHOMET IS HIS PROPHET” (193) is one unified statement, inseparable. To believe any part is to believe the whole, and only in America—in a non- (or less) fundamentalist relation to the text—can one choose to believe the first half and refuse to believe the second—and have this division of the statement not involve one in heresy.[4] For fundamentalists, the comma is not meant to indicate a break in the text where choices can be made.

However, Underhill’s “we can tolerate you if you admit we’re right” attitude appears in volume one as he trains for his profession. Following a young blind man’s persuasive argument that seeing is the least important sense because the others (smell, touch, and taste, at least) are at some level predicated on materiality and are thus more verifiable and less separable from an individual, Underhill and his “preceptor” proceed to operate “successfully” on the young man’s eyes. Presumably the young man didn’t fully comprehend his unenlightened condition, living in the dark as he was, until he “awakened to a new world of sensation and light” (40). The upshot of this physician’s intervention for society is that the “usefulness” of the young man is “restored” by the doctor (42). So okay: light carries the day; it is better to see than to be blind. But the troubling condition for this argument is that its persuasion is carried by force: only by causing the Other to see it our way can we actually persuade them of the truth of our position. But such forceful persuasion is only justifiable (if then) if we believe in (and, importantly, also have access to) some metaphysically present Truth. Given that the value of “seeing things our way” is that we’ll “make use of you,” recourse to such a Truth seems dubious. Yet does the exercise of such force not reveal precisely this belief about Truth’s ontology? Is it not at least more generous to view the Underhill/American manner of forceful intervention as sincerely based on a belief in the rightness of “our way,” rather than in the arbitrary application of force for its own sake? Undoubtedly, Underhill’s position is: It’s better to be able to see (the error of your ways), and I’ll show you; just look: can’t you see it now?

II
But he doesn’t quite force anything on the Algerines. If anything, Underhill’s journey on the Sympathy leads him to show us how sympathetic the Algerines may be.[5] But what is the chief value of our sympathizing with them? Trade? Or diplomacy? Or are the two separate? At any rate, we neglect an important point if we miss the traces of capitalist ideology already at work in Algiers. Consider the “frequent and dreadful convulsions, in the regency of Algiers” (168). At one point, Underhill suggests that the cycle feeds itself: to fund soldiers, Deys must seize cargo-rich naval vessels, but to prevent the annihilation of war, they must sign treaties with other nations, promising not to attack their ships. But to maintain “necessary expenditures”—payments to soldiers—the Dey is inevitably “constrained frequently to declare war as a principle of self preservation” (168). Were this all, there would be little problem because of two available solutions: one, phase out the soldiers; two, continue signing and breaking treaties. Besides, because there are enough countries to go around, you wouldn’t have to break them that frequently: as one Dey tells an American ambassador, “I must…be at war with some nation, and yours must have its turn.” But that’s not quite what happens: “having established it, as a maxim, that all treaties expire with the reigning Dey, and must be renewed with his successors,” the soldiers simply depose the Dey and instate a new one. What appears as the desire for wealth is rather the desire for the practice of the acquisition itself. Were the soldiers to see the purpose for their piracy as the piracy itself, that the “annual payments, secured by treaties” in fact could provide sufficient wealth were there not raiding expeditions to finance, they would perhaps cease to live the dangerous life of pirates. Here we can consider Zizek’s analysis of ideology: “the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the consistency of the ideological form…; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request—to make us obey ideological form—are there only to conceal this fact” (Sublime Object 83). The “frequent and dreadful convulsions in the regency of Algiers” exist, precisely, for the sake of the convulsions themselves.

And in this sense, the ideology of piracy mirrors the ideology of capitalism, such that the countries of Algiers and the United States share more than they can admit—more even than either can see. Is it too weak a conclusion to ask whether the ideology of piracy and the ideology of capitalism are identical because they each function as ideology? We’re uncomfortable accepting limits to our agency, but is there not a point at which any attempt by Underhill or Tyler or America to force its ideas, its economy, its laws, its culture onto the Algerines or anyone becomes superfluous in the face of a prevailing operation of ideological practice? The inability to (yet) locate the complementarity between, say, piracy and capitalism, isn’t reason for believing The Algerine Captive expresses good will or vituperation toward the Algerines, nor that it employs their system of slavery for its own (domestic) emancipatory purposes, nor that it does anything it thinks it does. We should be wary of ends confused as means and means confused as ends, just as we should regard anyone who believes that certain means entail predictable ends with suspicion.

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1988.
Fish, Stanley. “Postmodern Warfare.” Harper’s. September, 2002.
Tyler, Royall. The Algerine Captive. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
----. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.

[1] Part of a 9/27/2001 Chicago Tribune headline.
[2] Terry Eagleton offers a reading of postmodernism as little more than a theoretical counterpart to capitalism: “Postmodernism gets off the ground when it is no longer a matter of having information about the world, but a matter of the world as information. Suddenly, anti-realism was no longer just a question of theory. How could you conceivably represent in realist terms the great invisible criss-crossing circuits of communication, the incessant buzzing to and fro of signs, which was contemporary society? …Perhaps the end of representation would come when there was nobody left to represent, or to be represented.… A left-wing subcurrent of [postmodernism] tried to reinvent more dissident ways of integrating culture into social life, but could scarcely compete with the manufacture of political spectaculars or reality TV shows. A radical assault on fixed hierarchies of value merged effortlessly with that revolutionary leveling of all values known as the marketplace” (67-68).
[3] See Chs. 14, 23, and 27 in Vol. 1 and Chs. 15, 21, 27, and 36 in Vol 2 for example.
[4] Clearly there’s opportunity for analysis of Underhill’s ultimate insistence upon unity over division here, were there but world enough and time…
[5] NO doubt it’s also to show us how we can (and that he did) sympathize with slaves, our “BRETHREN OF THE HUMAN RACE” (96).