6
Underhill and American Exceptionalism
Gulliver’s Travels shows us how quixotic characteristics can enable a satirical critique of national exceptionalism, a character strategy that informs our understanding of Royall Tyler’s rendering of quixotism in The Algerine Captive (1797). The Algerine Captive resembles Gulliver’s Travels most nearly in its capacity to bring national exceptionalisms into conflict for satirical purposes. By sending Gulliver off to foreign lands, Swift engages in a simple but highly effective comparative strategy, taking up international difference as a critical mirror in much the same way that authors of other quixotic narratives (Fielding, Brackenridge, Lennox, Tenney) engage their quixotes in more localized encounters with difference. Though the exceptionalist framework remains the same for quixotic narratives set primarily within national borders as for those whose quixotes venture beyond them, the latter provides the eighteenth-century author with greater freedom, in many cases, to construct an imaginary other that local readers are likely to find especially aberrant, producing in readers many of the same effects Gulliver experiences himself: anxiety, shock, wonder, and delight.
Swift clearly takes this liberty in Gulliver’s Travels, in its depiction of a series of fantastical characters and nations. Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, on the other hand, constructs as other the inhabitants of the Barbary Coast, largely through Tyler’s borrowing from other travel narratives and contemporary Barbary accounts. Both Swift and Tyler use quixotism to reflect a traumatic image of foreign cultures ironically back onto their own societies. Both writers avail themselves of a form of comic irony that situates their quixotes as absorbers of satire and its consequences, leading readers through the narrative with the awareness that they are in on the joke with the author, but the quixote is not. We can witness this commonality, for example, in Tyler’s Swiftian catalogues, which appear in moments of heightened irony, as when his narrator dramatizes the colonial pursuits of the first US “settlers,” who “crossed a boisterous ocean, penetrated a savage wilderness, encountered famine, pestilence, and Indian warfare” to secure their places in US history.1
Though Tyler draws his Algerian figures very loosely from secondhand information about an existing culture, the fact that most early US readers would not have had any firsthand (or even, necessarily, secondhand) experience of the Barbary Coast enables Tyler to color his Algerines with a fantastical quality. In so doing, Tyler also brings in elements of Don Quixote, specifically from Cervantes’s fictional account in Don Quixote of his actual enslavement in Algiers. As María Antonia Garcés has shown, Cervantes was himself an Algerine captive between 1575 and 1580, abducted, like Tyler’s quixotic protagonist, Updike Underhill, by Barbary pirates during his service in Mediterranean military campaigns against the Turks.2 Cervantes retells parts of this experience in Algiers in part 1 of Don Quixote in “the captive’s tale” (1.39.360). Tyler, who had previously reworked the Barrataria episode from part 2 of Don Quixote into a three-act play featuring Sancho Panza, The Island of Barrataria (ca. 1808–15), employs in The Algerine Captive several of Cervantes’s themes and references from “the captive’s tale” to form parts of Updike’s account of enslavement in Algiers.3 Both Tyler’s Updike and Cervantes’s captive struggle to purchase their freedom with the aid of sympathetic Algerians and fellow slaves; both reference the gruesome punishment of impalement for those caught in escape attempts; and both treat religious difference between the Algerian Muslims and the Christian captives as a means of interrogating national (and religious) loyalties and identities. Though some of these similarities are circumstantial—common not only among Don Quixote and The Algerine Captive but also among a wider range of captivity narratives—others provide more telling links between the two texts. The captivity tale predates Don Quixote within the Spanish tradition and certainly flourishes in varying forms in eighteenth-century Anglo-American traditions (“Indian” captivity narratives, Barbary narratives, slave narratives). But The Algerine Captive’s captivity-narrative elements arguably owe much to Cervantes in particular. Tyler, who had never traveled to Algiers, borrowed much of his fictional account of the Barbary Coast not only from contemporary captivity narratives but also from Cervantes’s “captive’s tale” in Don Quixote.4
In terms of its influences, The Algerine Captive draws most legibly on travel writing, the quixotic narrative tradition, the captivity narrative tradition, and the novel. Cathy Davidson has called it “broken-backed in its odd conjoining of apparently inconsistent parts,” noting that it “verges into a captivity tale . . . to register the full horror of slavery” by way of a “travelogue of the protagonist’s disconnected life.”5 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have addressed the captivity-tale elements of The Algerine Captive, arguing that the cosmopolitan inflection of the Barbary narrative best characterizes the early US novel, given the preoccupations of early US writers with questions of, as Bruce Burgett has put it, “not . . . nationality, territoriality, and citizenship,” but “civility, commerce, travel, and ethnographic description.”6 Of these acknowledged influences, the quixotic influence is most crucial for our understanding of The Algerine Captive’s pivotal ending, the conversion of protagonist Updike Underhill from globe-trotting American malcontent to “worthy FEDERAL citizen” (225). To account for Tyler’s controversial ending, and thus to reexamine the political implications of Updike’s experience in captivity, we need to read The Algerine Captive with particular attention to the bearing of Updike’s sustained quixotism on his final conversion. In so doing, we can demonstrate the role of quixotic exceptionalism in affirming the ideal of national superiority while at the same time, as does Gulliver’s Travels, calling our attention precisely to the process of creating such an exceptionalist outlook. Reading The Algerine Captive with Gulliver’s Travels in mind provides a clearer view of how English exceptionalism in the time of Swift was recapitulated as American exceptionalism in Tyler’s late eighteenth century.
Updike behaves very much like a quixote throughout both of the novel’s seemingly inconsistent volumes. Though volume 2 of the The Algerine Captive—the volume that treats Updike’s captivity in Algiers—was critically dismissed by Tyler’s contemporaries as inferior to volume 1, recent critics have focused on volume 2 as the primary site of “the political implications of the whole novel.”7 However, it is volume 1, a chronicle of Updike’s travels and travails throughout the US, which introduces Updike as a quixote and sets the stage for his frequently overlooked quixotic behavior as a captive in volume 2. As Updike’s mother remarks in volume 1 after the family minister attempts to recruit young Updike into the academy, “the boy loves books” (25). Updike’s quixotic bookishness and comic fascination with Greek and Latin give rise to a string of social and professional blunders in the US, leading Wood to dub him a “classical quixote.”8
Exhibiting a marked genre-switch both formally and thematically, volume 2 affords Tyler’s captive much less freedom than volume 1 to travel the countryside in quixotic fashion. Nonetheless, the quixotic episodes of volume 1 are not wholly disconnected from the captivity saga of volume 2. Once in captivity, Updike imagines that among his “grossly illiterate” lot of fellow slaves is “a Spanish Don with forty noble names” (119). His fantasy is a thorough recapitulation of the story of Cervantes’s captive in Don Quixote, who absconds with the aid of his opulent master’s beautiful Muslim daughter, Zoraida:
I fancied my future-master’s head gardener, taking me one side, professing the warmest friendship, and telling me in confidence that he was a Spanish Don with forty noble names; that he had fallen in love with my master’s fair daughter, whose mother was a christian slave; that the young lady was equally charmed with him; that she was to rob her father of a rich casket of jewels, there being no dishonour in stealing from an infidel; jump into his arms in boy’s clothes that very night, and escape by a vessel, already provided, to his native country. I saw in imagination all of this accomplished. I saw the lady descend the rope ladder; heard the old man and his servants pursue; saw the lady carried off breathless in the arms of her knight; arrive safe in Spain; was present at the lady’s baptism into the catholic church, and at her marriage with her noble deliverer. (119)
Just as Updike reimagined the captive’s escape from slavery in Don Quixote, Tyler reimagined quixotism in Updike, whose fanciful thinking propels both his physical adventures in volume 1 and his psychological adventures in captivity in volume 2. Critical tendencies to mark the end of the “quixotic” volume 1 as the end of Updike’s quixotism have obscured the extent to which Updike remains quixotic throughout the novel, and throughout its quixotic conversion scene. Though the fragmented, seemingly inconsistent structure of The Algerine Captive has given critics difficulty in assessing its parts as a unified whole, its quixote consistently defies the structural changes imposed upon him.
Updike is discovered by a minister to be fit for a scholar, educated in Latin, Greek, and the classics, made a schoolteacher, and subsequently chased out of a number of New England locales for his classical education, pedantry, and high-mindedness. In a Gulliverian turn, he then turns practical and studies to become a physician, finding similar dissatisfaction with repressed, vulgar, and uneducated Americans first in New England and then in the US South. Frustrated, he quits the US for England and takes up a physician post aboard a slave ship, which Tyler ironically names Sympathy. Marooned on the Barbary Coast thereafter, Updike is captured and made a slave himself in Algiers. After spending much of volume 1 drifting from failed occupation to failed occupation in his native country, Updike spends volume 2 narrating his experiences as a slave and a practicing physician in Algiers.
Tyler’s narrator introduces his adventures by way of an ancestor, Captain John Underhill. Updike spends the first three short chapters of his account explaining the circumstances of his ancestor, as he tells us, “one of the first emigrants to New England,” who undergoes a persecution saga of his own before we get to Updike’s story (11). Captain Underhill, who “had early imbibed an ardent love of liberty, civil and religious, by his service as a soldier among the Dutch,” finds himself exiled from his Massachusetts settlement under John Winthrop because of his attitude of religious tolerance, and charged with “adultery of the heart” for gazing upon a woman who was illicitly wearing “a pair of wanton open worked gloves, slit at the thumbs and fingers, for the convenience of taking snuff” (11, 15). The banished captain resettles in New Hampshire and is elected governor there before the Massachusetts government claims jurisdiction over New Hampshire too, forcing him to relocate to Dutch-settled Albany. There he is granted a tract of land by the Dutch for his services in battles against Native Americans (20). The captain dies without capitalizing on his land grant, which sets up Updike’s future encounter with unscrupulous land speculators in Hartford who attempt to purchase and then sell Updike’s ancestral claim to the land with full knowledge that no such land, or no such title, formally exists.
The introduction of Updike’s ancestor into the narrative provides a historical context against which we can consider Updike’s experiences, then his postconversion sentiments. Like his ancestor, Updike moves from state to state in his own country, having difficulty finding a place to settle in which his ideals are taken seriously, or in which he can find tolerable acceptance. Once captured in Algiers, he struggles to reconcile his Christianity with the Muslim faith of the Algerians, as well as his naïveté with the artful traders looking to capitalize on his circumstances. As John Engell has notably pointed out: “The two great tests of Updike’s captivity, his debate with the Mollah and his dealings with the son of Abonah Ben Benjamin, parallel the adventures of his ancestor, Captain John Underhill. The Mollah, like Winthrop and his followers, tries to enslave a man to a sectarian religious hypocrisy. The young Jew, like the English Land-Speculators of the frontier, promulgates slavery for the sake of greed.”9 Tyler familiarizes readers with a narrative history of persecution in the US and abroad that repeats itself across generations from one Underhill to the next, introducing a pattern of circumstances and behavior that Updike will quixotically fail to acknowledge. As he endures escalating hardship in his travels, he increasingly romanticizes these histories of persecution, leading to a quixotic conversion scene in which his account of life in the early US becomes, seemingly, mere nationalist apologia.
Updike has been the subject of the typical quixotic conversion debate, the debate over the extent to which the end result of quixotism—whether the quixote remains quixotic or converted—reflects a critique of the quixotic mind-set itself or a critique of the society or societies the quixote inhabits or passes through. As we will see in Joseph Andrews and Modern Chivalry, quixotes often produce double-edged critiques of both quixotic behavior and the quixote’s surrounding circumstances through degrees of difference between quixote and society. The Algerine Captive’s cosmopolitan outlook modifies this critical framework by setting up layers of difference (between quixote and society, between one society and another) but demonstrating similarity among them. With a narrative strategy similar to that which Swift deploys in Gulliver’s Travels, Tyler’s narrative treats difference as a mirror, gaining critical traction by demonstrating counterintuitive and sometimes shocking commonalities between generations, characters, and societies otherwise presumed radically different. The novel’s final conversion scene, however, can lead us to mistake cross-cultural similarity for the minimization or elision of difference and thus to misread Tyler’s ending as an endorsement of nationalist unification projects in the early republic.
The Algerine Captive ends with a fairly traditional quixotic conversion scene. Updike finally escapes captivity, finding his way back home to the US. Upon landing on home soil after the harsh circumstances of his captivity, he declares that he had been “degraded as a slave, and was now advanced to a citizen of the freest country in the universe.” Once embattled in and disdainful of his US surroundings, in which he was a disrespected teacher and unsuccessful doctor, the restored Updike vows “to contribute cheerfully to the support of our excellent government, which I have learnt to adore, in schools of despotism; and thus secure to myself the enviable character of an useful physician, a good father and worthy FEDERAL citizen” (225). A straightforward reading of Updike’s closing statements suggests that he has learned the error of his ways in a sort of trial by fire and demonstrates remorse for having thought his circumstances as a US citizen so unfortunate before having been swept up and cast into the cold reality of slavery in a foreign land. Now, we might suppose, the quixote has been converted and restored, a “worthy FEDERAL citizen,” in solidarity with his nation and national government, who, in writing his memoir, hopes that his “fellow citizens may profit by [his] misfortunes” (225).
Even those who have called attention to quixotic influence in The Algerine Captive have largely ignored or minimized Updike’s quixotism as it relates to his final conversion. A number of critics have shown fundamental disagreement over how to read Updike’s experiences in captivity and subsequent quixotic conversion, a testament, perhaps, to Tyler’s artful awareness and subversion of his own authorship. As Edward Larkin notes, Tyler was “a once staunch Federalist who famously and unsuccessfully courted John Adams’ daughter,” a figure whose political orientation has left his novel open to political allegory critiques not unlike those so frequently applied to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.10 Nonetheless, Davidson prudently urges us to consider that, though Tyler himself was a Federalist, he was considered relatively moderate and evenhanded in both his personal and political life.11 Wood cautions further against “the tendency to over-identify Updike with his Federalist creator Royall Tyler.”12 The potential for misreading Tyler’s novel by overassociating Tyler’s Federalist politics with those of his narrator is considerable.
In a reading of The Algerine Captive that frequently aligns Updike’s politics with Tyler’s, Larry Dennis suggests that Updike is indeed changed by his experiences as an Algerine slave. For Dennis, Updike’s sense of the redemptive potency of his “inherent romantic qualities[ ] is cruelly shattered by the squalor and wretchedness of the real situation” in Algiers. In such a reading, then, slavery in Algiers is a pivot point for Updike toward what might be understood as “successful” quixotic conversion, as well as a buildup toward Updike’s comments in the final conversion scene, in which, for Dennis, “there is no distance . . . between the persona’s perspective and the real author’s.”13 In other words, Updike’s conversion is the primary means by which Tyler emphasizes the importance of national solidarity. Without aligning Updike’s politics with Tyler’s so directly, Davidson has taken a similar view on Updike’s conversion, claiming that “for Underhill, to travel is to see different things, but, more importantly, to sojourn for six years in Algiers is to see things differently. The protagonist learns much from his captivity.” Additional scholars have taken up the view that Updike undergoes a serious transformation in captivity and thus that we should read Updike’s final narrations as representative of Tyler’s “republican values of individual responsibility, individual conscience, and individual action within and for the good of the commonwealth.”14 Wood suggests that the “upbeat mood and Quixotic undertones of Underhill’s American quest are swiftly dissipated in the face of the diabolical slave trade he encounters along the Ivory Coast.”15 Similarly, Joseph Schopp writes that Updike “shows that his own captivity has taught him the lesson of the ‘inalienable birth-right of man.’ ”16
Each of these readings adheres to what Stephen Shapiro calls a “nationalist imaginary” preoccupation, for which the assumed novelistic aim is to address anxieties over national identity and (dis)unity amid the instability of the early republic.17 A “nationalist imaginary” reading presupposes that if Updike is truly reformed and converted after enslavement in Algiers, this is the case because the quixotic dissatisfaction with his own nation that led him into greater trouble abroad is unacceptable for those invested in metanarratives of unification and nationalization in the early US. Accordingly, Updike’s quixotism must be “dissipated”: the quixote must be reeducated and converted, through harsh treatment on foreign soil, from disaffected and defected critic to penitent patriot, a “worthy FEDERAL citizen.”
Contrarily, others have read Updike’s changes after captivity primarily as rhetorical ones, unsupported by Updike’s actions. The naïve rambler who expects better of his own country finds his medical abilities respected for the first time as a physician, although still a slave, in Algiers. He remains as gullible as ever throughout his captivity as well, believing in self-interested frauds who claim to be able to deliver him to freedom. And in his poignant exchange with the Algerian Mollah, who offers to make him a free citizen of Algiers in exchange for religious conversion, Updike, like Gulliver before the Brobdingnagian king, retains his quixotic (religious) idealism, even as he fails to justify his Christian faith coherently to the Mollah, and even as he is cast back into slavery. Observing these factors, John Engell reads irony in the constancy of Updike’s worldview as a “free” US citizen and a slave in Algiers, understanding Updike’s seeming inability to surrender his idealism as Tyler’s means of commenting at a distance on various modes of “slavery” in the US republic:
The lessons of The Algerine Captive are at once more harsh and more subtle than previous critics have noted. Were the United States to be made of “worthy FEDERAL citizens” like Updike Underhill, the country would quickly descend into slavery, taking the very path followed, quite innocently, by Tyler’s narrator. Readers, if they are to be true worthy citizens, must, like Captain Underhill and Benjamin Franklin, gauge the limits of human goodness and the potential of human depravity. . . . They must see that the American citizen of 1797 or of any age can, by staying at home, become an Algerine Captive.18
Engell points us to a counterintuitive comparison of US and Algerian forms of oppression, understanding the central problem of The Algerine Captive as one of rigid insularity, or Updike’s inability to move beyond his single-mindedness to address observably exigent problems. Engel understands Updike’s conversion scene as ironic because Updike has demonstrably failed to learn from his experiences by the novel’s end; yet the role that quixotism plays in Updike’s naïve constancy goes unregistered in the critical interventions of Engell and others. Edward Watts, who identifies the “genre-switch” of Updike’s conversion scene not as quixotic, but as “resembl[ing] a sermon in which the homily is republican,” has similarly found Updike’s conversion scene evident of “Tyler’s irony” in closing with a protagonist who “teaches imitation, not freedom.”19 Watts similarly shies away from any discussion of the quixotic and its significant influence on Tyler’s novel, specifically on Updike’s imitative behavior. Though these critics reject certain versions of the “nationalist imaginary” preoccupation by arguing that Updike’s newfound prudence and nationalism after being enslaved are not a genuine, Federalist push for national unity but instead an ironic jab at discourses of lockstep unification or a somber warning against nationalistic single-mindedness, these readings nonetheless recapitulate the “nationalist imaginary” construction by assuming the primacy of questions of US citizenship and nationality in Tyler’s novel. However, The Algerine Captive actually assumes a much more global scope of concerns and influence, particularly via its quixotic influences, which call our attention not so much to the “local” categories of citizenship and national identity as to the potency of quixotic imitation beyond nationality and across national borders.
Updike might be considered a student of imitation as well, spending much of his narrative under the tutelage of preceptors and coming out of it at the end mimicking the life trajectory of his ancestor Captain John Underhill, who flees his native England in search of freedom and a better life only to arrive in a state of persecution. By affirming, upon his return home, a form of US nationalism based on “uniting . . . federal strength to enforce a due respect among other nations,” Updike rearticulates the US split from its “parent” country, but in the very terms of transnational self-fashioning that made the early US almost at once a liberated colony and, like its former colonizer, a colonial force (226). The different (but corresponding) stories of Updike and his progenitor Captain John Underhill fictionalize in many ways the relationship between the early US, which Shapiro rightly identifies as a “re-export republic,” fully engaged in the lucrative Atlantic economy of the late eighteenth century and growing into its ambitions as an international power, and its English parent.20 While Tyler uses lineage and ancestral influence to give Updike’s behavior and adventures a historical reference point, he simultaneously lifts Updike and his ancestor out of national (US) context, placing them instead in a cosmopolitan world of transatlantic trade and cross-cultural exchange.
We can observe the beginnings of The Algerine Captive’s global scope of concern even before we get to the narrative itself, in a telling preface written under the Updike persona after he has returned from captivity and begun to embark on the writing of his adventures. The preface concerns itself with three primary observations: first, that in the time Updike was away, the US had developed as a reading nation through increased literacy and the formation of “social libraries” for those interested in reading for pleasure rather than instruction; second, that this newfound interest in novels, romances, and travel narratives has resulted in, lamentably for Updike, the sale and consumption of books “not of our own manufacture,” that is, from overseas; and third, that because these books are foreign and fanciful, they are problematic for young US readers. As Updike warns, as though he were the author of a quixotic narrative rather than a quixote himself, “if the English Novel does not inculcate vice, it at least impresses on the young mind an erroneous idea of the world, in which she is to live. It paints the manners, customs, and habits of a strange country” (5–6).
In addition to the particularly Cervantic undertones of Updike’s preface—its allusions to the potential of European novels and romances to corrupt one’s sensibility or lead one down a dangerous path of fancy—the preface positions Updike’s own narrative in comparative terms. The preface justifies the split structure of The Algerine Captive, the first section intended to “display a portrait of New England manners, hitherto unattempted,” and the second section aimed at portraying Updike’s “captivity among the Algerines, with some notices of the manners of that ferocious race, so dreaded by commercial powers, and so little known in our country” (6–7). Updike’s positioning of his narrative account as a necessary “New England” addition both to domestic US literature and to an international literary conversation on Barbary narratives and Atlantic trade demonstrates his narrative’s global and comparative outlook, which is only reinforced by continual references to the world beyond the US and ample narrations of international travel. Where Updike’s preface takes nationalist stances, we should read these, as with his final conversion scene, with irony. As though he were one of the European novelists he addresses in his preface, Updike allures the provincial reader with tales of high-seas adventure, English hypocrisy, and orientalist ethnography, “paint[ing] the manners, customs, and habits of a strange country,” all while cautioning against the “dangerous” curiosities that compel one to pick up a European novel or board a transatlantic vessel. Always prominent in the narrative, however, is the Atlantic trade system in which the US is a crucial participant. Updike criticizes the transatlantic book trade, apprehends slavery in the US South, and gains passage to England aboard a slave ship not long after he identifies the South as “the high road to fortune” (74). As with the entrepreneurial inflection of Gulliver’s Travels, the engines of the Atlantic economy power along the plot in The Algerine Captive. Gulliver’s quixotism of travel is frequently accompanied by not-so-subtle indications that overseas travel is also a means of accumulating wealth and of bringing the goods and curiosities of foreign lands back to England for profit.
Given these observations, there remain arguments that The Algerine Captive fails to substantively engage with issues arising from US transatlantic relationships. Gesa Mackenthun, who reads the former-slave Updike’s ready-made capitulation to the notion of a free and unified US upon his return to native soil as a demonstration of the novel’s willful amnesia over US participation in slavery, argues that early US political discourse was mostly focused on domestic, rather than transatlantic or global, issues.21 In this sense Tyler’s tidy ending—through Updike’s quixotic conversion—would certainly seem to indicate that for the US in the late eighteenth century, tidying up, or smoothing over the striations of national difference and polyvocality under the banner of Updike’s “by uniting we stand, by dividing we fall” aphorism, may indeed have been more important as a domestic goal than taking on the issue of transatlantic slavery (226). But in its ancestral preoccupations and purposive discussions of difference between Algerian, US, and English literatures, customs, religions, politics, and societies, The Algerine Captive is indeed, as Armstrong and Tennenhouse suggest, cosmopolitan in its scope, engaging rather clearly with US identity as a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon.22 Mackenthun—for whom “Updike finds himself happily reconciled with his nation and family, his abolitionist designs . . . evaporated from his consciousness”—cleverly calls attention to the novel’s “double semantics of slavery,” alleging that Tyler has his narrator forget about his prior abolitionist tendencies, even after the abject experiences of being aboard a slave ship and being enslaved himself, because of domestic pressures to affirm a national discourse of unity.23 But such an interpretation, like others focused on the “nationalist imaginary,” relies on a straightforward reading of the quixotic conversion scene—a reading that, as I have suggested, is at least questionable.
Attention to The Algerine Captive’s quixotic elements helps both to illuminate and to call into question each of these “nationalist imaginary” readings, which proceed from two basic formulations. The first of these formulations is that, as Mackenthun argues, Updike turning his back on his prior abolitionist position and giving himself over to a Federalist, nationalist politics of unity at the end of the novel is to be read straightforwardly as evidence of the narrative’s willful amnesia (with regard not just to slavery, but to the rest of Updike’s unfulfilling US past as well). Taken at face value, Tyler’s wholesome ending certainly suggests as much; however, taken as quixotic conversion, it becomes clear that Updike’s closing sentiments are not reliable intimations, but quixotic formulations derived from a demonstrable pattern of quixotic behavior. The second basic formulation of “nationalist imaginary” readings is that, given the first formulation, The Algerine Captive ventures beyond US borders as a travel narrative and a captivity tale only to focus our attention back onto questions of US national identity. If, in other words, Updike’s alacrity in rejoining his native country tells us reliably that all else, including slavery, is mere afterthought in light of his full and committed reinstatement into US citizenry, then The Algerine Captive’s comparative structure and transnational narrative engagement are not genuinely comparative, but simply means of reinforcing an a priori nationalist position.
I have already mentioned that reading Updike’s final remarks as a quixotic conversion calls into question a number of straightforward “nationalist imaginary” readings. Additionally, by fashioning Updike as a quixote, Tyler gives us cause to reexamine Updike’s travels as genuinely comparative—that is, as a means of deemphasizing the nationalistic concerns that Updike parrots upon return to native soil, emphasizing instead the importance of understanding the early US as part of a larger, interconnected world. The quixotic narrative has historically taken on a similar comparative function in its migration to the early US, placing quixotes in a multitude of locales and social situations to test, as Eve Tavor Bannet has argued, the “cultural fit” of foreign customs and behaviors in societies largely shaped by “transnational codes” of behavior.24 For the early US, the quixotic narrative is somewhat like Gulliver himself: a foreign thing brought within national borders that arouses curiosity among the locals just as it finds itself prodded and tested by their difference.
The problems of unity and national identity favored by “nationalist imaginary” readings arose, then, not simply through an oppositional relationship between early US citizens and foreigners but rather through the ways various transnationally circulated behavioral codes were understood or misunderstood by “consumers” of literatures and fashions across the Atlantic. Taken this way, in light of the quixotic narrative’s considerable role in early US testing and trying-on of foreign customs and behaviors, Tyler’s “New England” account of the Barbary Coast can be understood as a legitimate comparative intervention into the Atlantic cultural economy by way of a mock-nationalistic quixote, an unworthy global citizen, who travels the world but learns little from the experience. In quixotic fashion, then, The Algerine Captive teaches us that the steadfast insularity brought about by unreflective nationalism is a significant barrier to cross-cultural understanding.
As I have suggested, critics reading Updike’s comments upon his return to America have disagreed plausibly over issues of narrative distance and irony in Updike’s conversion moment; however, these readings have not taken into account the literary lineage of quixotic conversion as it relates to the global scope of The Algerine Captive’s concerns. Taking Updike as a quixote whose precepts are by definition imitative or derivative—part of a quixotic lineage—a straightforward reading of Updike’s stock, nationalistic comments at the end of the novel becomes less tenable. Even critics who read The Algerine Captive as a quixotic narrative have neglected to focus on the quixotic nature of Updike’s homecoming and conversion.
Placing The Algerine Captive rightfully within its lineage of quixotic narratives highlights Updike’s entrée into a story of his own through the idealized history of another, and thus the mimetic imperative that operates within Updike, the quixote. Beyond his itinerancy, his penchant for classical learning, his idealism, and his naïveté, Updike remains throughout the novel a fervent imitator of a fictive model of US history and identity, which is derived from and evinced in his romanticized account of his noble ancestor’s struggles. After including in his narrative the text of a letter from his ancestor explaining the circumstances of his persecution, Updike colors our impression of Captain John Underhill’s founding, proto-US society with the following quixotic apologia: “Whoever reflects upon the piety of our forefathers, the noble unrestrained ardour, with which they resisted oppression in England, relinquished the delights of their native country, crossed a boisterous ocean, penetrated a savage wilderness, encountered famine, pestilence, and Indian warfare, and transmitted to us their sentiments of independence, that love of liberty, which under God enabled us to obtain our own glorious freedom, will readily pass over those few dark spots of zeal, which clouded their rising sun” (18–19). We can observe how closely this resembles Gulliver’s utopian apology for English colonialism: “This Description, I confess, doth by no means affect the British nation, who may be an Example to the whole World for their Wisdom, Care, and Justice in planting Colonies” (275).
Traveling throughout the US, Updike draws his disdain for many of those around him from such idealized impressions of his ancestral and national histories, or, in other words, from his quixotic tendency to cling to an antiquated and romanticized model, despite having knowledge and experiences to the contrary. When Updike first takes up his post as headmaster at a country school, he vows to be “mild in [his] government, to avoid all manual correction,” expecting “by these means to secure the love and respect of [his] pupils” (31). In the spirit of early US republicanism, he believes, like Brackenridge’s Captain Farrago, in an orderly system of governance that absorbs dissent smoothly and without violence, until he is met with the cold reality of a beating by a parent after deigning himself to administer a beating of his own to a misbehaving student. When he decides to venture to the South to practice medicine, he does so conceiving of the South as “the high road to fortune,” believing southerners to be “extremely partial to the characteristic industry of their New England brethren.” He seeks, like his ancestor, the free and industrious US of national folklore. At the same time, he leaves his native New England on account of “the illiberality and ignorance” of its people, the shortcomings of New Englanders that Captain John Underhill witnessed generations prior (74). Yet it is Updike’s “New England conscience”—the idea of liberality—that later results in his astonishment over the harsh treatment of a southern slave at the hands of a highly respected parson, and eventually his disenchantment with the South (80). Nevertheless, after Updike ventures to foreign lands, he takes with him the mythical sense of US identity that he has seen disproved with his own eyes and evaluates other societies against the US ideal rather than his own experience. Shortly after leaving for London in disgust over his own country, Updike lambastes England as a place of “hereditary senators, ignorant and inattentive to the welfare of their country, and unacquainted with the geography of its foreign possessions” (86). He denounces Thomas Paine as boastful, “his bodily presence . . . both mean and contemptible” (88–90). And once aboard the slave ship Sympathy, he laments the conditions under which the slaves are kept, expressing thoughts, the ship’s captain suspects, that derive from “some yankee nonsense about humanity” (99).
Each of Updike’s criticisms of foreign societies and practices is born of a US-styled ethos of freedom, justice, and humanity that both Updike and his ancestor fail to find on home soil. He likewise continues to vaunt, while abroad, a crude brand of American exceptionalism that betrays the material truth of his reasons for leaving first New England, and then the US altogether. Once in captivity, delivered to the Algerian Mollah for his first consultation and finding the Mollah in lavish circumstances, Updike observes that “in all countries, except New England, those, whose profession it is to decry the luxuries and vanities of this world somehow or other, contrive to possess the greatest portion of them” (128). Updike keenly observes hypocrisy in the colonizing English “boasting of the GLORIOUS FREEDOM OF ENGLISHMEN” and the Algerian Mollah’s adornments, yet he fails to make comparable connections between the notion of freedom and enterprise in New England that he continually lauds and the illiberal treatment of his ancestor; or between the southern parson’s hard usage of an African slave and the Christian morality that Updike defends to the Mollah (86). Justifying the Christian Bible to the Mollah, he argues: “We have received it from our ancestors, and we have as good evidence for the truths it contains, as we have in profane history for any historical fact” (132). Like Gulliver before the Brobdingnagian king, his arguments falter, but his resolution remains. For Updike, the evidence of mythical histories trumps the evidence of experience in much the same way as, for any quixote, the evidence of histories—romances, novels, fictions, and travelogues—trumps that of physical reality.
It is crucial to bear in mind, then, that in dealing with Updike we are dealing with a quixote, one whose nationalist sentiments are inherited from those of the times of his ancestor even as, like his ancestor, his own experiences would belie such sentiments. Based on the idealized version of US life and identity that Updike borrows from his ancestral past, coupled with the contradictory realities that Updike illustrates for us throughout his travels and dealings with global difference, we can read the glaring irony in Updike’s closing remarks, and therefore the irony in Tyler’s quixotic conversion scene, as primarily a function of Updike’s quixotism. Rather than simply eliding the various forms of oppression in the US, from religious persecution to slavery, upon Updike’s return and conversion, Tyler gives us a quixote whose frequent blunders and romanticized worldview continually draw our attention to the process of elision. In giving us the parallel histories of the Underhills cast through the lens of the quixotic, The Algerine Captive reminds us not merely that “free” US citizens can be persecuted at home just as one could be in the Barbary Coast, but that the quixotic inheritance of the idealized past can be highly influential beyond national boundaries and throughout global experiences. As Tyler’s novel exhorts, knowing, or even living, a transnational history of oppression, for Updike and for the upstart US, is rarely enough to prevent history from being repeated.
The Algerine Captive’s ability to draw our attention to this process of eliding or apologizing for acknowledged problems within and between nations is comparable to that of Gulliver’s Travels to highlight the process of Gulliver’s quixotic shifts of national loyalty. Each of these narratives engages with powerful notions of national (or transnational) exceptionalism, or in both cases the quixotic tendency to read myths of nation or national identity as though they were Don Quixote’s chivalric romances. The Algerine Captive starkly conveys this mode of quixotic exceptionalism by the fact that Updike reflects on texts of his ancestral past to forge his image of a national present, such that his romanticized history becomes like a chivalric romance, with his ancestor Captain John Underhill situated as the heroic knight in a time when such mythical heroism is alleged (by Updike) to have been common among those fighting for pre-Revolution liberty.
When Armstrong and Tennenhouse emphasize the suitability of the Barbary narrative for early US writers focused on the place of the US in the wider world, they might also acknowledge that exceptionalism of the sort that Updike practices is a likely by-product of the early US novel’s tendency to “imagine a community in cosmopolitan terms.”25 In other words, the very building blocks of such cosmopolitan imaginaries, which for Armstrong and Tennenhouse are remarkably resistant to critics’ nationalization attempts, are “national” affinities and characteristics. In a world in which, as with Updike in captivity in Algiers, characters are “defined, not so much by their nation of origin, or home, as by their encounters in a world produced by the circulation of goods and peoples,” such global encounters are bound to produce exceptionalist justifications for observed differences that cannot be explained outside the framework of the nation, the “national culture,” or national identity.26 Even in Gulliver’s Travels, in which national differences are sometimes overshadowed by (and other times conflated with) typological differences among fictitious, rational, humanoid beings, exceptionalism operates centrally as a means of negotiating difference.
In Gulliver’s Travels and The Algerine Captive, quixotic exceptionalism takes the form of romantically seeking out difference only to define one’s own identity position as superior in opposition to another. Notwithstanding their thirst and opportunity for travel, and for the acquisition of novel experience and perspective, Gulliver and Updike struggle to learn much at all from their conversations, adventures, and near-death experiences. In each of these instances of quixotic exceptionalism, the quixotes ultimately struggle to find satisfaction, or to find their quixotism vindicated. Gulliver retires from his travels in a state of loneliness, spending more time in the stables conversing with his horses than with his human family. Updike, full of patriotic zeal, returns after an ironic conversion scene to the very country that drove him into the shackles of slavery abroad. Captain John Underhill’s willingness to overlook the “dark spots of zeal” in favor of the “glorious freedom” US citizenship supposedly affords him echoes in Thomas Paine’s ironized “boasting of the GLORIOUS FREEDOM” of the English, aligning English exceptionalism with American exceptionalism as related phenomena with not only a shared logic but also a shared set of narrative strategies in eighteenth-century British and US novels (18–19, 86).