The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

about the Founding Fathers. This pleasure results not only from a familiarity with the Founders but also from a certain defamiliarization, as these mythical figures are made somewhat new. At the same time, however, many readers—above all, scholars—may feel a certain distaste at the continued fetishization of the elites of the past. After all, hasn’t much scholarship of the past century tried to move us away from such historiography, toward social or structural histories? Isn’t the history of the early republic to be found in histories from below, in the lives of women, workers, farmers, slaves, and Native Americans, rather than in the same old arcana of a few white, male elites? Isn’t a return to Adams’s musings about Washington and others somehow reactionary, a sign of that irritating phenomenon known as “Founders Chic”? Shouldn’t this Founders Chic be resisted?³

      We would note, first, that this combination of responses—of guilty pleasure and critical disgust, of fascination and of knowing better—perfectly characterizes the musings of Adams himself. In the letters with Rush, he simultaneously indulges in and resists the aura of the Founders. His persistent enumeration of humanizing details and secret histories, shared with Rush in order to puncture the mystique of the already mythically enhanced elites, simultaneously exposes and perpetuates their perplexing prominence. Indeed, we would argue that this particular affective combination is exactly what defines Founders Chic. Like Adams, those who succumb to Founders Chic imagine that others naively, blindly, uncritically admire and worship the Founders—whether they are the fools voting for Jefferson or the modern purchasers of a best-selling biography. But it is this complex of fascination, this desire to decipher and interpret an inexplicably compelling cultural formation, that defines the phenomenon, and to cure ourselves we must begin by acknowledging that the logic of debunking will not get us very far. As Roland Barthes realized upon completion of Mythologies, myth debunking had become a myth in itself, a classroom exercise that any student could execute with facility, but without any ultimate threat to myth itself.⁴ In short, the critique of myth is often essential to its enjoyment. Nor can we say that debunking is a later phenomenon. In the case of Founders Chic, the seemingly contrary tendency toward humanizing details, context, and “secret” histories was present from the start, an integral part of the formation of the Founders Fantasy. Thus, when contemporary hagiographies startle their readers by telling them, first, the shocking details of a Jefferson or a Franklin and, second, that lo and behold these details actually appeared in the newspapers of the time!!, they fundamentally obscure the problem. This favorite rhetorical move makes one marvel at the Founders all the more, for they seem to have become larger than life despite knowledge of their sexual histories, their racial politics, or their political maneuvers. Actually the reverse is the case: the Founders emerged as significant symbolic figures because of these biographical, semic details.⁵ We see precisely this relationship in the Adams-Rush correspondence, in which the secret histories and private details of the Founders, dished to deflate their mystique, rather amplify it instead. This phenomenon is more pertinent than ever today, when ostensibly humanizing and demythologizing biographical details preserve and renew the Founders’ mythological status.⁶

      If we want to cure ourselves of Founders Chic, then, we cannot have recourse to the details that fill the letters of Adams and Rush: they are part of the problem we need to address. Instead, we must focus on the formal insights indirectly articulated in these letters. Two related observations seem particularly important. The first is that the Founders are constituted by a carefully structured emptiness. Adams and Rush touch on this point again and again when they speak of the secrecy, silence, mystery, and intrigue that characterize such figures, when the Founders are compared to deep rivers and silent forests, or when Washington is described as a stone that fills a gap in a geometrical arch.⁷ These gaps are then restlessly filled by semic details. Adams’s list of Washington’s ten talents is exemplary of this manic overlay. And the observation that those who lauded Washington “in the highest strains” also held him in the “strongest terms of contempt” confirms that this content need not be consistent in fact or affect. Thus, vitriol, scandal, and rumor may as easily fill that empty space as heroic feats, gestures, and words. The point is that biographical details are subordinate to this fundamental structuring of the Founder figure.

      Second, and consequently, we see Adams refer, again and again, to the Founders as fictional constructs. We see this in the references to the portrayal of Washington as “the best actor of presidency we have ever had” but even more so in the description of “a Character of Convention,” a phrase we should read in the most literal sense. Rush goes a step further in the comparison with the guinea, the object passed through numerous hands in the 1767 novel Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea. The point is clear: the Founders are imaginative fictions, characters in the specifically literary sense, whose circulation is essential for their constitution and whose significance in the narrative often results from narrative elements clustered around them. Narratological theory stresses this point by renaming characters “actants” to mark their structural position, an observation Adams approaches when he reflects on the “concurrence, if not a combination, of events” that links together Burr, Dayton, Miranda, Hull, and Wilkinson. This conjunction “strikes” Adams, as if he is unsure what this means, but he describes a process of overdetermination whereby characters draw semic material from the confluence of events. Here, it seems, one of the actants—perhaps Burr?—takes greater cohesion as it draws together the semiotic resources in circulation in late 1805. Instead of the usual historicist debunking (there are myths, but here are some facts that indicate the deeper truth) which reaffirms Founders Chic, Adams verges on formulating the reverse procedure: there are facts, yes, but here are some myths that indicate the deeper truth. The point, of course, is that we are not trying to get at an empirical phenomenon but rather at some very different kind of cultural manifestation, one requiring different methods and theoretical assumptions.

      In this light, the very phenomenon of Founders Chic speaks to a disciplinary confusion that The Traumatic Colonel seeks to address. Rather than treating the Founders as actual agents who need to be more aggressively historicized with empirical data (true, but in a more limited sphere than often assumed), our starting point is that they are primarily imaginative, phantasmatic phenomena best explored from a broadly literary perspective—as a broad characterological drama whose plot often remains obscure. Accordingly, our approach in this work insists on a parallactic division of what we have been calling the historical and the literary. In recent theoretical work, the idea of the parallax has been most notably explored in Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View. Žižek’s immediate inspiration is the Japanese Marxist philosopher Kojin Karatani, who takes the term from Kant, who himself borrowed it from early modern astronomy. In its original formulation, “parallax” designated the change in position or direction of an object as seen from two different points: the parallax of a star or a planet was necessary for calculating its exact location. Used metaphorically, the term refers to the gap in perceptions of the same thing from different vantage points. Kant used the metaphor philosophically to denote the gap between common sense “from the standpoint of my own” and “from the point of view of others.” Hugh Henry Brackenridge, in the final volume of Modern Chivalry (1815), used the same metaphor to describe the gap between the political-theoretical differentiation of humans and animals and, from a more remote perspective, their similarities. For Karatani, the parallax view becomes the foundation for the proper form of criticism—what he calls transcritique—which is not analysis from a priori systems of thought (i.e., the application of theory) but rather a movement between two different theoretical registers—resulting in an antinomy. Philosophy proper is this transcritical reading of parallactic contexts—in Karatani’s project, a reading of Kantian philosophy alongside a seemingly incompatible Marxian political economy. Žižek expands this view of the parallax to propose it as the proper mode and orientation for cultural criticism. The parallax, understood as the constitutive rift in human perception, opens up the consideration of a host of theoretical aporia—he speaks of “an entire series of the modes of parallax in different domains of modern theory”—the most important of which is the parallax between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism.⁸

      In the most vulgar sense, the impulse to juxtapose these two theories aims to address the gap between the interior, psychic