“西部来信”与美国的国家建构——以萨缪尔·鲍尔斯《我们的新西部》为中心的考察

“Letter from the West”and America’s nation-building:A study of Samuel Bowles’s Our New West

美国内战后,以西部见闻为主题的旅行书信在各大报纸上涌现,记者、文人和政客通过风景话语参与国家重建和文化重塑,“西部来信”在此意义上成为美国认同的一种文化载体。《共和党人报》记者萨缪尔·鲍尔斯于1865、1868年加入由联邦官员主持的两次西部之行,据此撰写的旅行书信在当时具有代表性,集结为《我们的新西部》一书。其中,关于太平洋铁路、大平原和印第安部落的叙述为经历战争创伤后的美国人提供了一个重新凝视和想象共和国的入口。首先,鲍尔斯将太平洋铁路作为联合各州的文明纽带,借助“铁路现代性”触发的与历史的“断裂”意识,促使人们遗忘过去,看向未来,并预设了一副美国“天命论”之下的“统一的帝国风景”,旨在为新的民族国家认同做铺垫。其次,作者笔下的大平原形象经历了从“大沙漠”到“大牧场”的转变,“荒地变花园”的拓殖神话有助于调动起美国人攻克“最后一块边疆”,进而征服整个北美大陆的普遍愿望,联邦在地理空间和文化象征层面的不可分割性得到了重申。最后,印第安部落在西部的迁徙和游荡被处理成一种特殊的文化景观,以佐证白人至上主义,强调盎格鲁-美利坚人天然享有美洲土地的归属权。而印白冲突在文中的夸大化所激起的种族仇恨,一方面弱化了南北分裂的历史记忆,另一方面在想象“野蛮他者”的同时界定了民族自我。经以上描写,西部被塑造成南北和解的场域、“大陆帝国”的缩影,以及上帝赋予清教徒的“应许之地”,作者以此架构起以“重聚”为核心的国家前景、国家身份和文化共同体。但这样的“新西部”传递的是征服者(白人定居者)和胜利者(北方联邦)建立的知识秩序,由此形成的报刊民族主义话语看似整合了相互冲突的地方观念,激发起一种广泛的、无差异的美利坚民族性,实则未能成为弥合分裂的利器。同时,其所宣扬的资本主义进步观、土地开发假说和文明等级论等,反而加剧了重建时期的社会动荡,透射出美国国家建构中的内在矛盾与分离危机之根源。

After the Civil War,travel letters about western sketch emerged in major newspapers.Journalists,intellectuals and politicians participated in national reconstruction and cultural reshaping through the discourse of landscape,“letters from the West”served as a cultural vehicle of American identity in this sense.As a journalist for The Republican,Samuel Bowles joined two trips to the West hosted by federal officials in 1865 and 1868,his travel letters based on these trips were representative of the time and then collected into Our New West.Among them,the accounts of the Pacific Railroad,the Great Plains and Indian tribes provide an entry point for war-torn Americans to revisit and reimagine the Republic.First,Bowles takes the Pacific Railroad as a civilized bond to unite the states,and through the“fracture”consciousness of history triggered by“railway modernity”,he urges people to forget the past and look forward to the future.And then he presupposes a“unified imperial landscape”under American Manifest Destiny,aiming to pave a way for the new national identity.Second,the author’s the image of the Great Plains changes from“great desert”to“great pasture”,and the myth of“wilderness turned into a garden”helps to arouse American’s desire to conquer the“last frontier”and thus the entire continent.The indivisibility of the Union is reaffirmed both in geographic space and cultural symbolism.Finally,the migrations and wanderings of Indian tribes in the West are treated as a particular cultural landscape to support the white supremacy and emphasize that Anglo-Americans naturally have sovereignty over the land of America.The racial hatred stirred by the exaggerated Indo-White conflict in the text,weakens the historical memory of the North-South divide on the one hand,and defines the national self while imagining the“savage other”on the other hand.The West is portrayed as a site of reconciliation between North and South,the epitome of a“continental empire”,and the God-given“Promised Land”for the Puritans.In this way,the author builds a national vision,national identity and cultural community focusing on“reunion”.But such a“New West”conveys the intellectual order established by the conquerors(white settlers)and the victors(the Union or the North),the resulting nationalist discourse in the press appears to integrate conflicting localism and stimulate an identical Americanness,but in fact cannot heal the division.At the same time,the view of capitalist progress,hypothesis of land development and the hierarchy of civilizations that it promotes exacerbated social unrest during the era of reconstruction,revealing the inherent contradictions and the origins of secession crisis in America’s nation-building.