"The truly radical critique of ideology should go beyond the self-congratulatory 'social analyses' which continue to participate in the fantasy that sustains the object of their critique and to search for ways to sap the force of this underlying fantasy-frame itself."
Slavoj Zizek, "Enjoy Your Nation As Yourself!"
In chapter 2 of Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), Dr. Updike Underhill boasts that he has "fortunately discovered, pasted on the back of an old Indian deed, a manuscript which reflects great light upon my ancestor's conduct and on the transactions of those times; which according to the beneficial mode of modern historians, I shall transcribe literally." Underhill's find in itself may indeed prove valuable to the reader, as it "sheds light" upon the novel's dialogic strategy. Even as this "valuable Manuscript" provides Underhill with authority for the immediate narrative, the incidental "Indian deed" contributes to an important subtext for Tyler's irreverent captivity narrative.
PREMISE: Richard Slotkin underscores the cultural work performed by the orthodox captivity narrative: "The sufferer represents the whole, chastened body of Puritan society; and the temporary bondage of the captive to the Indian is dual paradigm--of the bondage of the soul to the flesh and to the temptations arising from original sin, and of the self-exile of the English Israel from England." In The Algerine Captive, Tyler consciously and conspicuously invokes the captivity ethos in order to destabilize its narrative conventions and ideological assumptions. If the orthodox captivity formula is unified in its attempt to conserve an American Providence then Underhill's narrative is marred by vocal slippage between piety and heresy, and generic slippage between captivity and "competing" genres, most notably the travel narrative.
Cathy Davidson contends that Tyler offers in The Algerine Captive a "much fuller critique of his society" than in the celebrated drama The Contrast (1787), but confines her assessment to the novel's treatment of slavery. And despite G. Thomas Tanselle's early suggestion that volume I is "reminiscent...of an Indian captivity narrative," most subsequent explorations of the novel's ironies (including subtle and instructive readings by Dennis, Davidson, and Engell) have not yet accounted for Tyler's subversion of the captivity narrative and the cultural work performed by that genre.
Roy Harvey Pearce, Perry Miller, and Richard Venderbeets each in their turn construe the captivity narrative as an "exhausted" genre, one which had moved from the comparative integrity of the Puritan form through nationalist propaganda to commercial corruption as the sensationalist "penny dreadful." Well over a century before, however, Royall Tyler had leveled an even more devastating critique against the captivity narrative; he dispensed with an assessment of fidelity to form, and instead questioned the viability of the captivity form itself.
In '"Epic to Novel" Mikhail Bakhtin supplies a helpful model for evaluating Tyler's disposition towards the captivity narrative. For Bakhtin the "epic" is a form which generates and conserves mythology: "The world of the epic is the national heroic past: it is a host of 'beginnings and peak times' in national history, a world of fathers and founders of families, a world of 'firsts' and 'bests.' ...the authorial position immanent in the epic and constituent of it...is the environment of the man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendent."
Although the sectarian (Puritan) captivity narrative fuses with the jeremiad, imagining a covenanted community at a "low point" in its millenarian trajectory, the genre yet projects us into a patriarchal past and secures the relationship between transcendental and historical realities. Bakhtin's "novel" on the other hand, arrays itself against the "univocal" epic. The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language. If the captivity narratives of Rowlandson and Williams represent the genre at its epic best, then The Algerine Captive conversely bares the constructive machinery by which captivity formulae generate and maintain meaning. In keeping with the image of the double-sided document Underhill finds in chapter two, The Algerine Captive as a whole reads as a deeply ironic, "multivocal" text. Updike Underhill's very name seems to imply an oscillatory identity, and throughout the course of the narrative Underhill assumes, but fails to maintain, a series of voices, ranging from orthodoxy piety to Deist toleration, from abolitionist fervor to nationalistic indignation.
Throughout volume I, Underhill persistently invokes the Underhill legacy of Indian killing (including its attendant nightmarish anxieties); the Indian captivity narrative is established at once as a pretext for the novel and as an object of critique. Although the longish volume I may appear to have little enough to do with the captivity narrative which ensues, its constant reminder of Indian-Anglo hostilities prime the reader for the development of the latter chapters. Volume II likewise evokes and disappoints readerly expectations about captivity, continuing the pattern of failed piety filial and covenantal, rather than climaxing in the sincere repentance demanded by the conventional captivity trajectory. Underhill is unable, for example, to account for his frustrating encounter with the Mollah; despite a retrospective attempt to frame the debate under the conventional captivity rubric of the triumph of Christian "Faith" over "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil," he wavers between zealous resolution and ecumenical sympathy--an equivocation which lingers throughout the remainder of the narrative. Reflecting this ideological slippage, the "captivity" genre gives way to an increasingly "touristic" travel narrative; most strikingly, the travel narrative of volume II, in Algiers, takes on the same tonal and structural characteristics of the travel narrated in volume I, which saw Underhill through various regions of the United States.
The captivity narrative provided a vital function to both the Puritan settlers and the fledgling nation; it affirmed links between the worlds of matter and spirit and fueled a national sense of millennial destiny. The foremost strategy of the captivity narrative is the construction of "others" (Indians, Catholics, and other cannibals) excluded from the covenant. Tyler was perhaps more sensitive to the mechanics of these constructions because of his own ambiguous status as a sometime Episcopal lay-preacher (who reminds his congregation of their historical oppression at the hands of the Puritans) and reluctant Federalist (whose political career was limited by his resistance to the party line). An appreciation for novelistic heteroglossia and generic self-reflexivity will enable us to more fully realize the incisive cultural critique delivered in The Algerine Captive.
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