10.13125/2039-6597/3247
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of space and the different layers of significance associated to it in the Image Comics series Manifest Destiny. The American frontier epic still stand as one of the vastest and most important mythological sources of the US. The frontier space is not of course limited to its geographical dimension – at least from 1893 onwards, when the “closure” of the frontier and the publication of the Turner Thesis made it a polysemic “place” in which psychological, political and social elements met and conflicted with one another. Since the definition of this space was always dependent upon ideological stances, its depiction has always oscillated between the poles of Utopia and Dystopia, blending realism, imagination and ideology. Manifest Destiny is not an exception – its spatial dimension conjugates history and mythology, while also showing the strong influence of popular culture and pulp culture’s horror and weird literature, mainly via its most famous author: H. P. Lovecraft. Through the use of some classical outlooks on the American frontier like Frederick Jackson Turner and Richard Slotkin’s theses, together with some more general contributions on the cultural and narrative meaning of space like Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, Yi-Fu Tuan’s human geography and Ruth D. Weston’s analysis of the gothic space, the essay goes through the “mindscape” projected by Manifest Destiny’s geography and addresses its symbolic and allegorical meaning. As a result, the series’ unconventional take on American mythology and its iconoclastic political agenda are thoroughly deconstructed and examined.
application/pdf
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Marco Petrelli
Between
geocriticism
Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
8
Essay
2018-07-10
2018-02-19
2018-07-10
2018-07-10
1
Marco Petrelli
2018/07/10
10.13125/2039-6597/3247
2039-6597
15
geocriticism
en
Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3247/2932
8
  Manifest Destiny: the American West
     as a Map of the Unconscious
                                Marco Petrelli


     «I take SPACE to be the central fact of every man born in America.
I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy»
(Olson 1967: 3). That is how the poet Charles Olson described the pivotal
element of American mythopoeia: immense and pitiless. His Call Me
Ishmael, however, wasn’t the first work of American criticism to pinpoint
the supposed connection between the uniqueness of the geographical
element and its settlers’ mindscape. I wrote ‘settlers’ because this paper
won’t deal with the undoubtedly strong connection that Native
Americans had (and still have) with the continent, but rather with the
impact that this apparently endless mass of land – «all that raw land that
unrolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast», as Jack
Kerouac famously wrote in the epilogue of On the Road – had on the
unprepared minds of the European settlers and their descendants, the
future ‘discoverers’ of the North American continent.
     Neither is this a paper about the well-known (should I write:
notorious?) connection between geography and ideology that Frederick
Jackson Turner put forward in his “The Significance of the Frontier in
American History”, a thesis that substantially changed the way in which
scholars approached the analysis of American society in respect to the
space it occupied. Like the authors of Manifest Destiny (and Charles
Olson), I take the impact of the landscape, and of the frontier in
particular, in shaping New Worldlings’ imagination for granted. The
aim of this paper is to analyze the way in which the doctrine of manifest
destiny is re-elaborated and presented in the homonymous comic, and
how the comic itself stands as one harsh critique of American



Between, vol. 8, n. 15 (Maggio/ May 2018)
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious



exceptionalism. In doing so, I am going to make reference to some of the
seminal studies on the role of space in creating a certain ethos (from the
already-mentioned classic work by Turner, to Richard Slotkin’s
paradigm of a “regeneration through violence”), also deploying some
considerations related to the general debate on the importance of space
in addressing the narration.
      Let’s start with some historical-political background. The “manifest
destiny” formula was arguably used for the first time by the journalist
John L. O’Sullivan in 1845 in an essay titled “Annexation”, published in
the July-August issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic
Review. In this piece, O’Sullivan called on the necessity for the US to
annex the Republic of Texas, stating that it was America’s «manifest
destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence» (1845: 5).
The blatant chauvinism of US aggressive foreign politics finds in this
sentence a perfect wording, but its roots are elsewhere, and that is
precisely the timespan covered by Manifest Destiny. As a matter of fact,
the first time that the “Providence continent” was actually trodden
through all its width, hence furnishing the US with an enormous space
ready to be filled with tall tales and legends not unsimilar to those we
can read in classical chronicles penned by Herodotus or Xenophon,
coincides with the widely-known Lewis and Clark Expedition – which
is precisely the object of the Manifest Destiny series.
      Covering the years 1804-1806, the series follows the so-called Corps
of Discovery Expedition as they cross the Louisiana Territory, and
finally reach the Pacific coast near modern Astoria, Oregon. As I wrote,
the expedition marked the first time that a US contingent touched the
Western shores, moving through a territory that, at the time, was mostly
unknown, a 19th Century ‘terra incognita’. Immediately after the
Louisiana Purchase of 1803, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned
the expedition in order to explore and map the newly-acquired land
and, most importantly with regard to the Manifest Destiny philosophy,
to establish US outposts so to grant an American presence in these
territories before other European powers could put their flags on it,
claiming possession.



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      Again, the westward opening was a great thrust for colonization,
encouraging another (and greater) wave of frontiersmen to settle in the
newly purchased territories and providing grounds for the US’s
colonization of the North American continent. Apart from the immense
geopolitical impact that the westward expansion had, it is necessary to
consider how the Louisiana Territory, an enormous space that at the
time was as much real as a palimpsest for imagination, gave the
American mind a fertile ground on which to construct and install some
of its most influential foundational myths. And it is precisely from here
that Chris Dingess, Matthew Roberts, Tony Akins and Owen Gieni start
to assemble their profound critique of the kind of self-celebrating,
jingoist rhetoric still championed by the US.
      As history tells us, the Lewis and Clark Expedition started from
Camp Dubois, near St. Louis, Missouri, in 1804. The city of St. Louis
retrospectively furnishes the series with its most-recurring symbol: the
Gateway Arch. The monument (also called “Gateway to the West”) was
completed in 1965 and dedicated to the American people as a symbol of
their courage and determination in conquering the West. David Dillon,
an architectural critic, called it a symbol of “boundless American
optimism” (Dillon 2001: 12C). The statement couldn’t be more
incongruous when it comes to Manifest Destiny. In fact, the arch, or
better, the arches, since the expedition bumps into a number of those
artifacts – manufactured in different materials such as grass and manure
– become in the series portals to a nightmarish dimension. Whenever the
US soldiers find one of these landmarks, they have to face the different
dangers of which the ‘terra incognita’ is full. It is commonly believed,
although largely incorrect, that ancient cartographers used to mark
unexplored and mysterious territories with the inscription: ‘HIC SUNT
LEONES’ or ‘HIC SUNT DRACONES’, a perfect exemplification of how
uncharted lands were inherently connected with life-threatening
dangers, and how imagination almost automatically worked to generate
myths out of what was beyond the mind’s grasp.




                                                                               3
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious




    The first of many ominous 'Gateway Arches' encountered by the expedition



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     Pushing the boundaries of the classical ‘zoological’ classification,
the authors of Manifest Destiny show a fervid fantasy in populating the
West with monsters. We find ‘minotaurs’ (half-bison, half-human),
carnivorous prairies, a strange race of talking birds, a huge man-eating
toad, and the flora itself that, spreading like a zombifying virus, turns
the pioneers into highly-infective, aggressive half-vegetal creatures.
About this last incarnation of the horrors of the West, it is interesting to
notice how (at least in the first issues of the series) it is the continent itself
that seems to possess some kind of will, orchestrating the many attacks
on the Lewis and Clark Expedition through a supposed ‘collective
conscience’ whose aim is to stop the men from reaching the Pacific – as
it could foresee the ravages and massacres that were to come. As a
confirmation, a character writes in his log: «Nature itself may be our
most formidable foe» (Issue 19: 1).
     Before spending some more words on this characterization of
nature as a sentient and malevolent (from the expedition’s point of view,
of course) being, I would like to re-connect this connotation to its
ideological substratum, in order to better clarify Manifest Destiny’s
desecrating critique of “The Epic of America”, as James Truslow Adams
defined it. As I made clear at the beginning, the American West has been
the repository of a large part of the US’s national mythology. The
connection between geography and ethos, or between space and
ideology, was probably pinpointed for the first time by Frederick
Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
(1893). In this famous and debated essay, the historian considered the
frontier stage of American expansion – in regard to the worldview and
social philosophy it brought along – something to be retained, at least
ideally, at all costs. Only by embracing a perennial frontier state of mind
the American people could maintain a firm grasp on progress, thus
ensuring their endurance through the centuries.
     Turner’s paradigm is obviously a mindful mix of overt optimism
and sheer nationalism, and his analysis hasn’t stood the test of time – as
a matter of fact it has been discussed, critiqued, revisited, debunked and
problematized by a great number of historic approaches that came after



                                                                                    5
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious



it, most notably by the historians belonging to the “New Western
History” current.
      The myth of the “Garden of the World”, an explosive version of the
pastoral vision that developed on the eastern coast (and especially in
Virginia), maintains the latter’s utopian nature and strong religious
slant. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that was Thomas Jefferson
himself that ordered the Lewis and Clark expedition – his Notes on the
State of Virginia, written in 1785, is a milestone of American ruralism, and
a key text to understand American pastoralism in general. A now-classic
study on the western frontier, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land,
underlines the connection between the original Virginian Edenic ideal
and its western counterpart through the mediation of President
Jefferson. «The importance of the Lewis and Clarke expedition», writes
Nash Smith, «lay on the level of imagination: it was drama, it was the
enactment of a myth that embodied the future. It gave tangible
substance to what had been merely an idea» (Nash Smith 1950: 18).
Working to undermine rather than to epitomize this myth, Manifest
Destiny gives shape and depth to its authors’ iconoclastic take on the
frontier’s ideological legacy and its mythological assets.
      Nothing less than a vanguard in charge of ‘seizing’ the continent’s
geography in order to claim it, the expedition was also hidden beneath
the make-believe mask of a scientific exploration. As it is made clear by
President Jefferson himself, (Issue 24: 19) there is a “war” going on, and
the expedition’s mission is far from being a peaceful one. «Without
blood there is no prosperity […]» says Captain Helm (a character I am
going to discuss later on), and only the side willing to spill innocent
blood «shall win the war and rule the land» (ibid.: 20). Although
mapping and naturalistic classification were not the main concern of the
corps, the series heightens this aspect by showing an overenthusiastic
Lewis as he names the newly discovered species (a true American Adam
descending through hell), meticulously stores plant and flower
specimens and generally devotes all his attention to the strange new
world he passes through. «Too much focus can be dangerous» (Issue 31:
18) says the always practical Clark to a daydreaming Lewis as the latter
is absorbed by the study of the mysterious and ominous arches.


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Ironically, this pronouncement is a perfect meta-comment on the series
itself: Manifest Destiny’s sometimes pedantic attention to Louisiana’s
strange and horrific biosphere1 is but a hint to go over the surface of
things by stripping the myth of its glorifying aura. Lewis’s obsessive
nomenclatural patina can’t really hide what is beneath: a landscape of
horror, death and fear upon which American democracy laid the
foundation for its myths.
      The idea of a ‘landscape of fear’ is particularly apt in describing the
series’ locale due to some plain references to H. P. Lovecraft scattered
through the issues2 – also, in the afterword to the first issue, “This book
is weird and I blame my mom and dad” (Issue 1: 25), writer Chris
Dingess plainly inscribes the series into the framework of “weird
fiction”, a label that Lovecraft himself used and popularized. What we
discover as we follow the expedition’s path, is that the arches/portals
connect our world with an extraterrestrial dimension in which gods
more ancient, more powerful and definitely crueler than our own, are
lurking, waiting to wreak havoc on Earth. It doesn’t get more
Lovecraftian than this, I guess. This fearful geography also evokes the
title of a very interesting book by the human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
called, of course, Landscapes of Fear. Going through the different ways in
which primitive societies have lived their places and times, Yi-Fu Tuan
shows how «the farther [a tribe or a generic group of people] move away

          1
              As a proof of this ‘scientific’ outlook, the bound volumes of the
     series bear titles like Flora & Fauna, Amphibia & Insecta, Chiroptera &
     Carniformaves.
            2
              The connection between the idea of a ‘landscape of fear’ and
     Lovecraft’s cosmology is not done at random. In an interview with
     author John Higgs (link in sitography), Alan Moore talks about his
     Providence and Lovecraft’s unconventional cosmological view. The
     suggestion that Lovecraft’s work as a whole is sustained by a landscape
     of fear is Moore’s, or at least, I heard it from him for the first time. I found
     it to be a brilliant definition and used it ever since. I later found a similar
     argument in Moore’s introduction of Leslie S. Klinger’s The New
     Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. The formula is of course also inspired by Yi-Fu
     Tuan’s Landscapes of Fear, a book I refer to later on in the essay.


                                                                                     7
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious



from their settlements the more likely they are to meet nature spirits that
are maliciously rather than unintentionally harmful» (1979: 55). Of
course, a subdivision of the 19th-century US Army is certainly not a
group of Tarongans hunters (the people originally used by Tuan in the
statement above); on the contrary: the expedition uses everything
allowed by their status of technologically advanced men to bend the
environment to their will. In spite of that, if we consider Turner’s frontier
thesis again (and we must, because Manifest Destiny is aware in its
addressing it), it is necessary to remember how, according to the
historian, progressing through the wilderness meant also retrogressing
to a pre-civilized social stage. «American development has exhibited not
merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions
on a continually advancing frontier line» (Turner 1921: 2). This
regression gets clearer and clearer as the soldiers push through the
wilderness. Ranks, order and the general social balance are shattered,
and people slowly turn into ruthless brutes who would stop at nothing
when it comes to survive the “fatal environment” (in Richard Slotkin’s
words). As a result, the West becomes populated with malevolent
creatures of all sorts, giving Manifest Destiny an ‘epic’ quality similar to
that which can be found in classical odeporic literature such as the
Odyssey or the Argonautica. The convergence of Tuan’s description of
tribal fear and Turner’s social-historical de-evolution gives us the
coordinates to understand how the series uses landscape and characters
to draw a picture of American colonialism that draws as much from the
rhetorically-biased national discourse than from the kind of irrational
‘mapping’ associated with tribal cultures – or, in this (and Turner’s) case,
de-evolved ‘civilized’ men. Manifest Destiny, then, accommodates to
Turner’s classic frontier thesis, demonstrating once again its deliberate
drawing on American national mythology.
      But, for all its philological accuracy, the series is not a mirror
neutrally reflecting the image projected by nationalism. Here is where
horror breaks in, and why.
      As I wrote, Lovecraft is indeed a major influence on Manifest
Destiny’s cosmology. Apart from one’s judgment of the Providence
writer’s work, it is impossible not to recognize in him an acute observer


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of his times, an eclectic intelligence drawn equally to Greek mythology
and quantum physics. Nothing like a coherent philosophy of existence
was ever penned by Lovecraft, but his cosmic nihilism – the belief that
we inhabit a complex and ultimately unfathomable universe totally
indifferent to our presumptions of being somewhat ‘special’, the
expression of a superior will or of some inherent finalism in the order of
things – can be deducted from his letters and, of course, from the
dreadful ‘Olympus’ that populates his fiction: a mythology made of
extraterrestrial and extradimensional deities that are described as
demented or aloof, sometimes not even aware of human existence at all.
As Alan Moore writes in the introduction to Leslie S. Klinger The New
Annotated H. P. Lovecraft:


        Lovecraft came of age in an America yet to cohere as a society,
     much less as an emergent global superpower, and still beset by a
     wide plethora of terrors and anxieties. […] In this light, it is possible
     to perceive Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer
     of American dread. (Klinger 2014: 10, 11)


     Lovecraft’s landscape of fear is then the result of his bleak vision, a
cosmic indifferentism, or “cosmicism” as it has been often labeled (Cfr.
Klinger 2014: 99), through which a society’s fears and disquiet are
projected on the space that that society inhabits. If one confronts this
worldview (or better, its inner workings) with the traditional Puritan
way of perceiving American space, some similarities as well as some
important differences are to be noted.
     The Puritan vision of the wilderness was strictly tied to the cognate
ideas of the garden and the errand. New England Puritans perceived
their mission in the New World to be an «errand into a howling
wilderness, in the midst of which as God’s regenerate band they would
make a pleasure garden for Him» (Simpson 1983: 15). They were moved
by a teleological drive that ensured them the right and will to conquer
the “unholy wilderness” outside the safe limits of the new garden of
Eden sustained by their obedience to the covenant with God. It is not



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Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious



difficult to understand Lewis and Clark’s holier-than-thou attitude
towards the new land and its inhabitants if one considers the religious
rationale from which the doctrine of manifest destiny has budded.
Under this aspect, the perception of uncharted territories differs little
from Yi-Fu Tuan’s description of primitive societies’ spatial grid – the
fear of the unknown is in a way fear of what is godless. But the feeling
of being invested with a ‘sacred’ quest guaranteed these men the blind
confidence that probably buoyed the Spanish ‘conquistadores’ in the
16th Century (represented in the series by the trickster ghost
Maldonado, an evil and deceptive presence that stands as a spectral
synecdoche for all the ravages that Europeans inflicted on the American
continent). The belief that the US destiny was to spread and prevail is
indeed clear from the very beginning of the Puritan discourse on
American space, as it is clear from this sermon by Thomas Prince
delivered in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1730, in which the “dark
regions of America” are made, through Isaiah 35:8, into a land of plenty:
«The waters of the divine influence break out in the wilderness […] and
an high way now is there which is call’d the way of holiness» (cited in
Simpson 1983: 5). Although the members of the expedition are often
portrayed in the series as hot-blooded patriots and sometimes religious
fanatics, the fundamental optimism of the errand into the wilderness is
fundamentally lost, and the “enjoyment” associated to it by Samuel
Danforth (Simpson 1984: 6) is turned into a pervasive atmosphere of
fear, horror, and desperation.
      This short digression into the Puritan-pastoral roots of manifest
destiny is intended to show how, when it comes to Manifest Destiny, it
would be in a way perfunctory to interpret the large number of
monstrosities encountered by Lewis and Clark and their men only as a
re-imagination of the tribal, classical, and Puritanical disquiet towards
wilderness – as I said, the series is not a mirror uncritically reflecting a
certain set of cultural elements. In other words, one should not think of
the horrific imagery being so to speak ‘emanated’ by the ‘genius loci’ of
the unknown territories, but rather consider how Manifest Destiny’s
space is actually a mindscape projected by an uneasy conscience – the
machinery of terror is set in motion by the same drive that moved


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Lovecraft’s approach to the fantastic. In the wake of the great American
gothic heritage, and in accord with what David Punter writes in The
Literature of Terror Volume 2: The Modern Gothic, the series exhibits «a
process of cultural self-analysis, and the images which it throws up
become the dream-figures of a troubled social group, troubled now by
international as much as national developments» (Punter 2013: 205, italics
mine). In their depicting an unwelcoming, violent and ruthless
geography, the authors of Manifest Destiny are creating a complex
allegory of US colonization, showing off its intrinsic monstrosity
through the comic’s fantastic and horrific distortions.
       Quite explicitly, the series puts at the end of the journey through
the West a last ‘Gateway Arch’ standing right in front of the Pacific
Ocean – and more stunning than any of the others, to the point that a
character exclaims: «We were rewarded for our exploration a vision of
such beauty it cemented any belief in a Christian God that this journey
had weakened» (Issue 22: 14). It is not Lewis and Clark who get there at
first, but a previous, lost expedition (I am going to refer to them as the
Helm-Flewelling expedition from now on) whose numbers are
gruesomely cut down by monsters, cannibalism and madness – just like
the official Corps of Discovery the series is mainly focused upon – and
whose only survivor will indirectly persuade Jefferson to kick off the
expedition by bringing back from the West the skull of a ‘sasquatch’. It
is the Spanish ghost Maldonado who tricks the remaining members of
this expedition into reaching the arch, and the mention of a rejuvenated
faith in God is indeed more than a hint at the role that religion had in
presenting Western colonialism as an ersatz cultural dogma. But the last
arch is, like the others, a portal to an abominable dimension, and the
horror it discloses is the authors’ strongest and clearest dig at American
expansion (until now, I need to add, because the series is still ongoing).
When the portal-arch opens, the remaining two famished members of
the Helm-Flewelling expedition are faced with the appalling vision of
an extradimensional god in the form of a monstrous, giant, eagle-like
creature surrounded by hellish fire – «This is your destiny. This is
Navath» (Issue 22: 15) says Maldonado. The extraterrestrial god (more
powerful than God himself, it seems) is soon revealed to be a sadistic


                                                                              11
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious




     Navath, America's Manifest Destiny




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and bloodthirsty entity who forces the two men to fight themselves to
death in order to find a true ‘survivor’. Of course, the eagle looks and
the fact that this malevolent deity is standing at the westernmost point
reached by the expedition is not casual at all. Navath substitutes the
noble-looking national bird with a fiery monster; or rather, standing as
the ‘non plus ultra’ of the American dream of expansion, strips this
symbol down to its naked core of unadulterated violence.
      Let’s go back to Frederick Jackson Turner. The spatial logic of the
frontier as described by the historian posits that the westward
movement is to be identified with the advancement of democracy. The
fallacy of this logic was already recognized by Henry Nash Smith in
Virgin Land, in which he wrote:


        In associating democracy with free land he [Turner] had
     inevitably linked it also with the idea of nature as a source of
     spiritual values. […] Since democracy for him was related to the
     idea of nature and seemed to have no logical relation to civilization,
     the conclusion implied by his system was that postfrontier
     American society contained no force tending toward democracy.
     (Nash Smith 1950: 257-258)


If democracy as Turner defines it needs nature3 to put down roots, one
could imagine the frontier as a kind of wave (an analogy used by Turner
himself) in which the crest signals the point where the democratic
process is more actively in action, being everything that stands behind
it progressively more civilized, and so more detached from nature, as
far as one moves back from the outer edge. The frontier ridge is the

          3
            Although Turner believed in the regenerative power of nature, I
     think that the kind of relationship with the environment that he had in
     mind was close to what Leo Marx, in relation to the American pastoral,
     called “middle state” (Cfr. The Machine in the Garden), and not a
     Hobbesian “State of Nature”, being the latter more similar to the kind of
     social and spiritual anarchy usually linked to completely untamed
     wilderness.


                                                                                  13
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious



zenith of democratization, transforming the chaotic wilderness into a
“striated” (in Deleuzian terms) space ready to be overflowed by US
civilization. Following these dynamics, it is possible to imagine the
western coast as the ultimate democratic space, an idea already
ironically expressed by Joan Didion who, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
wrote: «things had better work here, because here, beneath that
immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent» (1968: 225).
      The overturn staged by Manifest Destiny is then total. The height of
the American destiny comes to coincide with an entity of unspeakable
evil: cruel, ruthless and spiteful. As I wrote before, the extradimensional
god forces Helm and Flewelling to fight themselves to death, as he is
looking for the strongest survivor. The “dominant individualism” that
according to Turner could be bent to work “for good or for evil” (Turner
1921: 37) seems to be directed exclusively towards the latter in the series.
It is as if, in reaching the westernmost point, American character is not
as much as heightened by the hardships endured, but ultimately
stripped down to its real dimension: an implacable, grisly
individualism. D. H. Lawrence’s words on the essential American soul
being “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” are on point here.
      If the fact that the acme of manifest destiny appears to be a symbol
of cosmic horror shouldn’t be enough to state the series’ argument,
shortly after the deadly fight we witness another quite transparent
scene. Captain Helm (the chosen survivor) is walking back to
Washington to deliver Navath’s message. The man is starving and half-
crazed, talking to his former companion’s severed head as he carries it
tied to his body like a satchel. In a desperate attempt to stay alive– «I do
what I must to survive», he says, and, in a crescendo: «I will rob a bird
of flight to survive», «I will destroy beauty to survive» (Issue 23: 8-9) –
Helm strangles a bald eagle and devours it alive to the delight of
Flewelling’s severed head, who exclaims: «God bless America! Well
done, Captain» (ibid: 9). The ferocious irony of this scene is self-evident.
The symbolic shift between the monstrous, eagle-like Navath and the
actual bald eagle is a clear hint at the deformation of the American ethos
into a ruthless ideology of dominance. An ideology that, pushed to the
extreme, consumes itself.


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      Helm will return to Jefferson and tell him about the western ‘terra
damnata’, prompting the president to organize the Lewis and Clark
expedition, but the man’s mind will never recover from the horrors he
witnessed, leaving him forever in the mouth of madness (another clear
Lovecraftian motif). It should now be clear that in Manifest Destiny
violence is never a necessary evil through which the higher values of
American democracy are asserted – there is nothing regenerative in
what the soldier did or suffered, and the same goes with the members
of the Corps of Discovery, whose regression to a more primitive state is
not coincident with a return to a more innocent social state, but rather a
descent into barbarism and insanity. Both Slotkin’s and Turner’s
paradigms are denied here, since violence isn’t by any means justified
by an ennobling myth, and the regression from Europe-influenced ways
of life, a step that Turner deemed necessary for the birth of the true
American character, isn’t followed by the affirmation of newborn
‘Übermenschen’. By missing this step, the characters in Manifest Destiny
are permanently stuck in a subhuman condition of bestiality and
nihilism. Lewis and Clark’s catabasis isn’t paired with a resurgence back
to the stars. As I said the series is still ongoing, but at the moment it is
practically impossible to distinguish the members of the expedition from
the brainless monsters that surround them – with the possible exception
of few men, they have alienated any sympathy that the reader could
have felt for them.
      Throughout the story, the space in which the characters move is
always a mirror of their psychological and moral journey, acting at least
in one occasion (the ‘fog’ episode in issues 26-31) as an actual projection
of their fears and remorse for their past misdeeds. It won’t be an
exaggeration to think of the West as it is depicted in the series as another
‘character’, actively participating in the story and contributing to its
unraveling. The space evoked by the authors shows both fantastic and
realistic elements carefully blended together. The Corps’ itinerary is
carefully reproduced on the map, as are some real landmarks that the
expedition passes on its way west, like the hamlet of La Charrette and
Fort Mandan (built in 1804 by Lewis and Clark’s men and located in
modern-day North Dakota). This quality makes the Louisiana Territory


                                                                                15
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious



in Manifest Destiny a ‘real and imagined’ place, built as much on
historical research as on sheer fantasy, thus actively and continuously
interacting with the characters.
      The definition is not mine of course, but it is taken from Edward
Soja’s Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined
Spaces (where the adjectives “real” and “imagined” are actually
hyphenated into a single, integral quality), a very important study in
sociospatiality that could be used to further investigate Manifest
Destiny’s geographical dynamics. Some fundamental distinctions need
to be made, though. It is not my intention here to go deep into Soja’s
theories, nor to systematically apply the thirdspace construct to the
series’ real and fictional space. My mention of Soja is but a moment of
transition to theoretically frame Manifest Destiny’s West in more accurate
terms. The geographer’s intent was not only to apply a different system
of thought to the study of space through the suggestion of a “cumulative
trialectics” between spatiality, historicality and sociality (already
established by Henry Lefebvre in his The Production of Space), but also to
inject spatial studies with radically progressive ethics. Thirdspace,
mediated also by postcolonial thinkers such as Homi K. Bhabha and
Edward Said, is «radically open to additional otherness, to a continuing
expansion of spatial knowledge» (Soja 1996: 61), and so, also an
undoubtedly optimistic encouragement to an endless re-negotiation of
cultural and identity values. Through thirdspace we are fostered to
reconsider the relations between a cultural monolith and everything that
moves on its peripheral boundaries, simultaneously taking into account
the centripetal and the centrifugal in the creation of a fluid super-system
whose pivotal element is inclusiveness. Although Manifest Destiny
demonstrates to be painfully aware of the need to reconsider spatial
knowledge to reach a higher level of cultural conscience, it is impossible
to consider it as an artistic rendition of Soja’s thought. Quite the
opposite, in fact: through the Lewis and Clark expedition, one is faced
with a synecdoche of the ruthless advance of the whole American war
machine. As an example, let’s consider the Corps’ encounter with a
strange race of talking birds: the Fezron. After teaming up with this
weird tribe to fight a common enemy (the predatory, head-hunting


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                                           Between, vol. 8, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



Vameter), the soldiers wait for them to be sound asleep before
slaughtering every single Fezron in cold blood, fearing that they could
be of some danger to the future American settlers. This scene, a
particularly repulsive one in a comic full of gore, is a quite
straightforward allegory of how Native Americans were systematically
exterminated and removed from their land in order to make space for
the expanding nation. Unmistakable iconographic references leave no
doubt about the political intent of this narrative arch, so much that a
reader (who shall here remain anonymous) complained with the authors
about what he felt to be an unnecessary politicization of the series. He
probably didn’t read between the lines before, as this had not been the
first time that Manifest Destiny more or less directly addressed what has
been silenced by the nationalistic rhetoric associated with the West.
     Everything in Manifest Destiny goes in the direction of dystopia and
apocalypse. Soja’s paradigm may furnish the grounds upon which the
series’ spatial and cultural awareness are grounded, but the authors
consciously decided to turn everything in the worst possible scenario.
This kind of operation is closer to another theoretical dimension, that of
James R. Giles’ “fourthspace”. The critic coined this term in relation to
the novels of Cormac McCarthy, another ambiguous rhapsodist of the
American west, whose Blood Meridian, an epic and unbearably violent
book, was undoubtedly an influence on Manifest Destiny’s atmosphere.
In an essay published in the volume of Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical
Views dedicated to Cormac McCarthy, Giles takes Soja’s thirdspace
premises and overturns its outcome into what he labels “fourthspace”,
an imagined landscape «existing in a condition somewhat similar to, but
ultimately extremely unlike, Edward W. Soja’s thirdspace» (Giles 2009:
109). «Fourthspace», he writes, «merges the material, the metaphoric or
linguistic, and the psychological or subconscious, and only the darkest
forms of freedom, the most horrific possibilities, result from the merger»
(ibid.). The authors’ deep-seated skepticism towards the overblown
national rhetoric infiltrates the imperialist discourse like a virus and turn
it against itself, creating a horror-ridden historiographic metafiction
whose function is to debunk the frontier mythology forever nestled into
the American mind.


                                                                                17
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious



     Manifest Destiny situates itself in the grain of the artistic expressions
of disbelief towards this naïve (but not at all innocent) metanarrative,
and it chooses to do so eminently through the way in which space is
described, depicted and lived by the characters. If H. P. Lovecraft
established an antecedent in terms of the cosmic-pessimistic worldview
exhibited by the series, the construction of the narrative space owes
much to the same dynamics that Ruth D. Weston associated to the gothic
space in relation to Eudora Welty’s novels. The connection between a
disenchanted reaction to Turner’s original thesis and Welty’s use of the
gothic space as a consistent technique in her oeuvre was first highlighted
by Lisa K. Miller in an essay titled The Dark Side of Our Frontier Heritage,
in which the critic analyzed the use of the frontier thesis in Welty’s The
Robber Bridegroom. One of the leading figures in modern American
gothic fiction, Welty graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where
Frederick Jackson Turner’s influence and legacy as a former tenured
professor were still strong during the time that the writer spent there.
Weston takes this brilliant hint to connect the borderland environments
often used by Welty with the ambience associated with traditional
gothic settings like prisons, dungeons and cathedrals. In her analysis,
she equals gothic space to a narrative technique actively participating in
the creation of plot, and defines it as:


           A general awareness of a psychological or parapsychological
      realm that impinges upon the everyday world of actuality. The
      gothic space is a complex and unpredictable setting that heightens
      the exposed nature of the human being who is trapped there. [It]
      engender[s] anxiety, dread, and the sense that escape is not
      possible. (Weston 1994: 19)4




      4
       It is worth noticing how Weston’s definition echoes Lovecraft’s own
description of weird fiction’s aura: “A certain atmosphere of breathless and
unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces […] a malign and particular
suspension or defeat of th[e] fixed laws of Nature” (Lovecraft 1973: 15).


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                                             Between, vol. 8, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



      And that is exactly how Manifest Destiny works in creating a space
that is also a mindspace explicitly directed towards a critique of the ideas
contained and connected to the philosophy that gives the series its title.
This definition reinforces once again my belief that western space is used
in the comic as a projection of the troubled unconscious of a guilty
nation, filtered and worded by that nation’s most sensitive (or
straightforwardly dissident) members. The map of the Louisiana
Territory reproduced by Manifest Destiny is but a polemic, political
pamphlet intended to demystify the rhetoric of a country built by brave
men that had God on their side and, as the fanatic preacher Pryor
jokingly declares (Issue 31: 4), loaded guns in their hands – which seems
to me an almost literal quotation of a famous American poet5 who once
bitingly declared that one doesn’t count the dead and doesn’t ask
questions when God is on your side.




     5
         I am of course referencing Bob Dylan’s With God on Our Side.



                                                                                  19
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious




                                   Works cited
Didion, Joan, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, New York, Farrar, Straus and
    Giroux, 1968.
Dillon, David, “Big Bend; Gateway Arch Remains One of America’s
    Most Inspirational Monuments”, The Dallas Morning News,
    08.08.2001: 12C.
Dingess, Chris – Roberts, Matthew – Gieni, Owen, Manifest Destiny, 1-33
    (2013-2018).
Giles, James R., “Discovering Fourthspace in Appalachia: Cormac
    McCarthy’s Outer Dark and child of God”, Bloom’s Modern Critical
    Views: Cormac McCarthy, Ed. Harold Bloom, New York, Infobase
    Publishing, 2009: 107-132.
Olson, Charles Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville, London, Johnatan
    Cape, 1967.
Klinger, Leslie S., The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, New York-London,
    Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014.
Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Oxford-Cambridge (MA),
    Blackwell, 1991.
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips, Supernatural Horror in Literature, New York,
    Dover Publications, 1973.
Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
    America, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 2000 [1964]
Miller, Lisa K., “The Dark Side of Our Frontier Heritage: Eudora Welty’s
    Use of the Turner Thesis in The Robber Bridegroom”, Notes on
    Mississippi Writers, 14 (1981): 18-26.
Nash Smith, Henry, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth,
    Cambridge (MA)-London Harvard University Press, 1950.
O’ Sullivan, John L., “Annexation”, United States Magazine and
    Democratic Review, 17.1 (1845): 5-10.
Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: Volume 2, the Modern Gothic,
    Abingdon, Oxon-New York, Routledge, 2013.
Simpson, Lewis P., The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History, Baton
    Rouge-London, Louisiana State University Press, 1983.



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                                              Between, vol. 8, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the
    American Frontier 1600-1860, Middleton (CT), Wesleyan University
    Press, 1973.
Soja, Edward, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-
    Imagined Places, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996.
Tuan, Yi-Fu, Landscapes of Fear, Minneapolis (MN), University of
    Minnesota Press, 1979.
Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History, New York,
    Henry Holt and Company, 1921.
Weston, Ruth D., Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction
    of Eudora Welty, Baton Rouge-London, Louisiana State University
    Press, 1994.



                              Sitography
“Alan Moore Talks to John Higgs About the 20th Century”, YouTube,
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpajFQECzAk&t=381s        (last
   accessed 18/02/2018)



                              The author
Marco Petrelli

     Marco Petrelli received his PhD from “Sapienza”, University of Rome in
2017 with a dissertation, titled “A Southern Mode of the Imagination: Space
and Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s Novels”. He is currently adjunct professor
of Anglo-American Literatures and Languages at the University of Catania.
His research interests include, but are not limited to, the literature and culture
of the US South, contemporary American literature, postmodernism,
geocriticism, and graphic narratives. He published articles on Cormac
McCarthy and William Faulkner.

     Email: marco.sal.petrelli@gmail.com




                                                                                   21
Marco Petrelli, Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the Unconscious




                                     The paper
Date sent: 15/03/2018
Date accepted: 30/04/2018
Date published: 30/05/2018



                      How to quote this paper
Petrelli, Marco, «Manifest Destiny: the American West as a Map of the
Unconscious», )”, Spazi tra le nuvole. Lo spazio nel fumetto, Eds. G. V. Distefano,
M.      Guglielmi,  L.     Quaquarelli,                  Between,        VIII.15   (2018),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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