7. Three Worlds: Global Enemies

Anti-Communist Global Imaginary

So far, I have argued that nuclear holocaust fiction established the unity of the world and spy fiction introduced the idea that, in order to protect this unity, the world of democracy had to be constitutively split between the normal world of publicity and the clandestine world of sovereign violence. If we now turn our attention to popular political novels of the period, we find that the ideological figure of the enemy fulfilled a similar function in that it contributed to the definition of the external limits of this world.¹ To be more precise, in the case of the enemy we can speak of two related functions. As we have already seen in earlier chapters (and this is probably the best-known aspect of Cold War enmity), on the domestic front the enemy introduced the idea of the subversive simulacrum of the normal. On this level, Communism appeared as a threat to the very principle of representation, since it made increasingly more difficult to tell friend and foe apart. At the same time, however, on the level of foreign policy the enemy was also responsible for establishing a peculiar “global imaginary,” the threefold division of the world that defined the age of the Cold War.

Thus, the unity and the internal division of the world corresponded to a set of external limits whose structure was defined by a particular ideological configuration of total enmity. The ideological figure of the enemy was, therefore, simultaneously responsible for the articulation of a global totality and its threefold division. Due to the expansionist nature of the enemy, anti-Communist politics had to be by definition a form of global politics. It was this very same enemy, however, that prevented the unification of the globe as a totality. In this context, we can speak of “total enmity” in at least three senses. First, Cold War anti-Communism involved a radical negation of the enemy, since a possible result of the political conflict was imagined to be total annihilation (either of the enemy or the whole world). Second, this enmity structured the totality of society (since the enemy was attacking on all possible fronts). Finally, since the Cold War was a global conflict, this totality went beyond the organization of a particular society and designated the globe itself as the ultimate horizon of politics. Borrowing a term from Fredric Jameson, we could say that the “geopolitical unconscious” of early Cold War anti-Communism was driven by a necessity to define a new kind of political totality (the globe), but the only viable means of the constitution of this totality turned out to be global enmity.²

In order to understand the way this total enmity was articulated, we should recall that it was in fact a common motif of Cold War liberalism to argue that the global enmity of the Cold War can be derived from a more fundamental condition: the internal antagonisms of modernity as such. According to this logic, the two major worlds of the Cold War were simply reactions to this internal crisis produced by the contradictions of the industrial age. Arthur Schlesinger, for example, argued that the “crisis of free society has assumed the form of international collisions between democracies and the totalitarian powers; but this fact should not blind us to the fact that in its essence this crisis is internal.”³ This line of argumentation, however, suggests that the imaginary structure of this global enmity was in fact an externalization (or projection) of an internal antagonism.

The problem of this externalized antagonism also explains why the fundamental question of the Cold War political novel was the following: Why does the globe fail to become a world? This question can be interpreted in two different ways. It appears that something prevents the world (the “first world”) from fully achieving its own identity. But something also prevents the first world from becoming a global order. These two obstacles (an internal and an external obstacle) can be derived from the same instance of internal antagonism. In order to prove the last point, three logical steps need to be demonstrated: first, it has to be explained how an internal antagonism prevents a world from fully constituting itself; second, we have to show how this internal antagonism is exteriorized in an ideologically constituted form of total enmity; and, third, we need to prove that the threefold division of the globe can be derived from the fact that a supposedly global conflict does not actually constitute a remainderless totality.

Alfred Sauvy’s 1952 article, “Trois mondes, une planète” (“Three Worlds, One Planet”)—often credited for being the singular site of the invention of the term “Third World”—provides us with the necessary answers.⁴ Although the article might appear to be a mere piece of journalism, it nevertheless contains a miniature philosophy of history whose significance goes beyond the idiosyncrasies of an inspired mind. Right at the moment of its inception, the text announces the advent of the concept of the Third World in the form of a critique of contemporary world politics. The opposition inscribed in the title between the unity of a planet and the multiplicity of worlds calls attention to the fact that world politics is sustained by an empirical limit: the oneness of the planet is a mere fact and, as such, it falls outside of the domain of politics.

The problem, however, is that it is impossible to derive logically the idea of a politically united world from the mere fact of the oneness of the globe. There is no natural global political order that could respond to this fact in the form of the complete and perfect realization of its essence. Thus, while the mere fact of the oneness of the planet made world politics possible, at the same time it also formed an insurmountable obstacle. The apolitical foundation of world politics creates the terrain within which world politics takes place; but the planet remains inexorably silent when it comes to the determination of the right kind of world politics. The silence of the planet denies any guarantees and, therefore, constantly threatens to question the legitimacy of any world order. The planet and the world can never fully coincide.

If this is the presupposition encapsulated in Sauvy’s title, it is not surprising that his whole argument is framed by a set of reversals. The first and last sentences of the text give us the most memorable formulations of this philosophy. The article opens with the following sentence: “We like to speak of the existence of two worlds, a possible war between them, their coexistence, etc., often forgetting that there also exists a third world, the most important of all three, which is in fact chronologically speaking the first.”⁵ At the same time, the often-quoted conclusion of the article announces the presence (or the ghost) of a familiar historical force: “But, ultimately, this ignored, exploited, misunderstood Third World, just like the Third Estate, wants to be something.”⁶

The opening sentence declares that the least important is the most important and that the third (which is the last) is actually the first. To paraphrase: that which might appear to be an insignificant addition to a world order is actually the primary terrain of the constitution of this order and hence of vital importance. On the other hand, by formulating an analogy between the Third Estate and the Third World, the last sentence exteriorizes a conflict internal to the Western world and projects it onto the developing world: the relation of the first two worlds to the third is similar to the split that separates the three estates. Thus, the content of this projected conflict is precisely class antagonism, the bone of contention between the first and second worlds. Yet Sauvy’s language evokes not only the bourgeois revolutions of the past but also the proletarian revolutions of the future, since the Third World “wants to be something”—just as the proletariat, which has for a long time been nothing, “wants to be everything.” Sauvy calls this historical force a “mathematical fatality.”⁷

The purpose of these reversals is to formulate the historical dialectics of Cold War world politics. As Sauvy seems to argue, the relation between the first two worlds is not a simple negation but a dialectical interdependence: “Western capitalism and eastern Communism support each other. If one of them disappeared, the other would undergo an unprecedented crisis. The coexistence of the two has to be a progression toward some distant and unknown common regime. It would be enough for each to negate constantly this future reconciliation and let time and technology run their own courses.” But since this relation is defined as a “war,” the post-historical dialectics of the two worlds actually prevents historical progress: “Therefore, the evolution toward the distant and unknown regime has been halted in both of the camps, and the cause of this standstill is not solely wartime expenditures. The point is to rely on the enemy in order to fixate oneself solidly.”⁸

That is, the Cold War is a dialectic without the possibility of historical progress or, to be more precise, a dialectic in order to avoid historical change, since the ultimate purpose of Cold War enmity is to consolidate both of the warring political systems. But, as Sauvy insists, time does not stop and continues to “exercise its slow action” through the Third World: “Without this third or first world, the coexistence of the two others would not pose a big problem.… What is important for both worlds is to conquer the third or at least to have it on its own side. This is the source of all the troubles of coexistence.” Therefore, at the heart of Sauvy’s argument, we find a reversal of the classic Hegelian scheme of history: the “lands without history” are no longer to be located in the Third World. Quite to the contrary, the Cold War places the first two worlds in a post-historical (or even anti-historical) dialectic and displaces the force of history to the developing countries.

Thus, the philosophical content of Sauvy’s argument could be summarized in the following terms: Sauvy tried to show that the conflict of the first two worlds is in effect the disavowal of the quintessential historical antagonism whose authentic locale is now the Third World. The Third World is revealed to be the very condition of the kind of world politics that is actualized in the conflict of the first two worlds. But the internal conflict of the Western world (class conflict) which produced these two worlds (capitalist and Communist worlds) is actually disavowed in the conflict of the Cold War, since the latter serves the purpose of the internal stabilization of both worlds. According to the logic of this disavowal, the Third World is the unimportant leftover of world politics, which is to be conquered or, at least, integrated into the logic of the dialectics of the two worlds. The problem is that the Third World cannot be reduced to this insignificant remainder: the mere existence of the Third World makes the peaceful coexistence of the two worlds impossible and therefore makes it impossible to reduce the Cold War to the anti-historical dialectics of internal stabilization. As the very condition of world politics, the Third World appears on the globe as the contemporary manifestation of the antagonism that ultimately led to the Cold War.

Sauvy’s analysis allows us to provide a schematic view of the logic behind anti-Communist global imaginary. The internal antagonism of the Western world is exteriorized in an international conflict between capitalist and Communist countries. This exteriorization functions as the institution of a particular type of world politics, which reduces the terms of history to the mutual and absolute negation of two deadly enemies. The problem, however, is that this enmity is only theoretically total. In practice, it produces a historical remnant, that part of the planet which remains external to this conflict. The conflict between total enmity and its irreducible outside, thus, produces another antagonism that interrupts the structure of global enmity that supposedly dominates the globe without any leftover. So the problem is that the “leftover” constitutes a world of its own. First, the one world is divided by an internal conflict. Then, this internal conflict is institutionalized as the conflict of two words. And, finally, the conflict of the two worlds itself is interrupted by another antagonism which creates yet another world.⁹

At the same time, we have to keep it in mind that American foreign policy during the Cold War involved two separate politics: the containment of the Communist world and the modernization of the Third World.¹⁰ The foundational opposition of modernization theory between “traditional” and “modern” societies introduces an idea of historical development (“modernization”) which leads from one extreme of the opposition to the other. But this opposition also shows that the theory is based on an idea of totality that leads us back to the split between the world and the globe. On the one hand, if societies are either traditional or modern, modernity is an attribute of social totality. If a society is modern, modernity defines every aspect of the given social order. On the other hand, if the move from traditional to modern society is a necessary historical move, every society should eventually be modern. Thus, the ultimate goal of modernization is the total modernization of the globe. The aim of modernization is to define a social totality as a “world” and then define it as the ultimate political model for the globe: it aims to identify world and globe under the category of the modern.

The basic coordinates of Cold War enmity can thus be derived from an antagonism internal to “modernity” as such. According to the basic narrative, the historical process of modernization produced a modern world (the first world), but at the same time it led to irreconcilable social antagonisms. It must be emphasized, however, that according to modernization theorists, the United States and the Soviet Union represented two alternative modes of modernity. In other words, the basic antagonism of the Cold War is internal to the logic of modernity and, thus, can be defined as a hegemonic struggle to define “modernity” itself. To put it differently, the antagonism internal to the very logic of modernity was exteriorized in the total conflict of two different types of state. But this global conflict does not yet coincide with the planet, since the logic of modernity has not yet conquered the globe. The discrepancy between the worlds of modernity and the globe, in turn, produces another world. The “leftover” can be defined as a unified world because now it is that part of the globe which lacks modernity. In other words, it is a world precisely because the lack of modernity gives it an identity. It is in this sense that we can derive the three-world division of the globe from the same antagonism: an internal split within modernity produces two opposing worlds, and the split between modernity and the rest of the globe produces a third world.

Modernism and Modernization

In the previous two chapters, we examined the way the “liberal imagination” used the ideological figures of the catastrophe and the secret. The last question that remains to be settled here is whether this anti-Communist liberal imagination was based on a global imaginary structured by Cold War enmity. If we follow the logic of our previous analyses, we can anticipate at least a partial answer. From the point of view of liberal criticism, there were two major problems with mass culture: on the one hand, mass culture literalized the ideological content of modernism; on the other hand, through this reduction, it offered to its audience only the simulacrum of the vital problems of modernity. According to the same logic, therefore, mass culture as the literal representation of global enmity can only give us the simulacrum of the antagonism at the heart of modernity. Modernism, on the other hand, is capable of turning the antagonism at the heart of modernity into a formal principle, and thereby it can provide an authentic expression of contemporary historical consciousness. It is in this sense that the universality of mass culture (as a global culture) was opposed by anti-Communist aesthetic ideology to the universality of true art (which can be derived from the universality of the human condition).

This is why we have to emphasize that anti-Communist liberalism emerged at the meeting point of aesthetic modernism and political modernization. During the fifties, the term “modern” became one of the central categories of political contestation for American anti-Communism. In fact, these political articulations assumed the form of a confrontation between the aesthetic and political meanings of “the modern.” Although the contemporary climate of opinion gave rise to a whole series of much more refined positions, the basic coordinates of this debate were predetermined by the conflict between the aesthetic and political definitions of the modern. If we wanted to formalize this discursive terrain, we could speak of a highbrow and a middlebrow consensus. While the first believed in the inherent value of modernist art and entertained an ambivalent relation to political modernization, the second tended to celebrate global modernization and completely rejected modernist aesthetics.¹¹

Cold War anti-Communism had a double investment in aesthetic modernism (defined as the apolitical aesthetic expression of human freedom) and political modernization (understood as the production of the material conditions of political freedom). In this sense, political modernization could be understood as the material condition of modernism; and modernism could be defined as the aesthetic expression of the ideological content of this material production. The problem, however, was that modernization could not be easily reconciled with modernism, which to many appeared to be precisely a critique of modernization. But if modernism was animated by an anti-modernist ideology, it was no longer an aesthetic ally of modernization, but rather the only possible escape from it.

From the point of view of cultural criticism, the problem with modernity was that it simultaneously gave rise to mass culture and modernism. The historical emergence of the “culture industry” was considered by many to be a sign of what was wrong with modernization. In the 1950s, the political value of modernism was contested by a middlebrow centrism, so this modernist politics of anti-modernization came up against serious cultural resistance—what we could call a theory of “anti-modernist modernization.” According to this position, modernism is neither an ideological expression nor a valid critique of modernization. Although modernization is not without its setbacks, it is still the only viable form of world politics. The role of art, therefore, is to formulate the ethically correct forms of global modernization. The most appropriate artistic channel for this program, according to this position, was middlebrow sentimentalism.

In order to locate the “liberal imagination” in this scheme, we have to return to our juxtaposition of Arthur Schlesinger and Lionel Trilling. First, we must keep in mind that the fundamental thesis of The Vital Center was that the political conflict of the Cold War had to be understood in terms of a tension inherent in the very logic of modernity. From the first pages of the book, Schlesinger argues that modernity is the “age of anxiety” because industrialization failed to produce adequate forms of social organization. Modernity freed the individual, but at the same time it abandoned him in an anxious state of depersonalized freedom. As Schlesinger puts it, “Modern technology created free society—but created it at the expense of the protective tissues which had bound together feudal society.”¹² The inherent failure of modernity to protect the individual from anxiety, however, does not lead Schlesinger to a full-fledged condemnation of modernity as such. Rather, it forms the basis of a critique of totalitarian politics: “Even if capitalism and Communism are both the children of the Industrial Revolution, there remain crucial differences between the USA and the USSR.”¹³ Simply put, totalitarianism is a false response to the internal contradictions of modernity.

Modern art plays a special role in this scheme because, contrary to totalitarianism, it is an authentic expression of the anxiety caused by modern freedom. As we have seen, Schlesinger explained the totalitarian attack on modernism precisely in these terms: “The paintings of Picasso, the music of Stravinsky…reflect and incite anxieties which are incompatible with the monolithic character of ‘the Soviet person.”¹⁴ In this opposition of democratic freedom and totalitarianism, modernism does not emerge as a critique of modernization. Quite to the contrary, it is actually the fullest expression of the freedom whose material conditions were produced by modernity. Although Schlesinger is aware that the history of industrialization has produced social antagonisms, the function of modernism is not to criticize these antagonisms but to uphold them as the price of freedom in face of a totalitarian challenge. While totalitarianism offers an escape from the anxiety caused by modern freedom, modernism formalizes it into an art.

The assumption behind this modernist critique of totalitarianism is that the logic of modernity is inherently global and, therefore, its tendency is toward global unification. There are at least two reasons for this globalization in Schlesinger’s work: as technological development connects the distant parts of the world, modernity threatens humanity with global ecological catastrophe. This double logic (according to which, modernity simultaneously unites the world technologically and threatens to destroy it completely) breeds ambiguity. Although modernity must be criticized for its internal contradictions, it is nevertheless the only thing that can establish a global unity under the sway of freedom. But if the genuine aesthetic expression of modern global freedom is modern art, modernism should also be understood as an inherently global art. Wherever modernization successfully establishes the material conditions of modern freedom, the authentic cultural expression of this global condition will have to be modern art.

In the chapter entitled “Freedom in the World,” Schlesinger argues that the politics of the vital center is of necessity a form of global politics: “We are condemned to think in global terms even to justify non-global politics.”¹⁵ This politics has two main components: containment and reconstruction (which is defined by Schlesinger as “the removal in non-Communist states of the conditions of want and insecurity which invite the spread of Communism”).¹⁶ But this double formula (Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan) works only in Europe. The Third World poses a special problem, because there Soviet Communism can appear to be an agent of liberation from colonial influences and a champion of racial equality. Once again, the key word is modernization: “We have, in other words, a technological dynamism to set against the political dynamism of the Russians.”¹⁷ The modernization of the Third World should produce the type of economic and social stability that effectively renders these countries immune to Communist influence. At this point, however, it becomes clear that modernization carries a double ideological burden in Schlesinger’s system. On the one hand, in the West it actually produced the historical conditions of totalitarianism (since it established freedom as an anxious state without corresponding social structures). On the other hand, in the developing countries it is supposed to produce the conditions of the resistance to totalitarianism.

This double historical burden, however, eventually leads to the necessary transcendence of the political conflicts of the Cold War. As Schlesinger argues, in spite of the fact that the Cold War makes “world government” impracticable, the larger historical logic of modernization makes it absolutely necessary. The problem is that modernization establishes the conditions of world government not in the form of a technologically interconnected world, but rather by exhausting the natural resources that formed its (natural) conditions: “Industrial society has disturbed the balance of nature, and no one can estimate the consequences.”¹⁸ Ultimately, Schlesinger seems to predict here a global ecological catastrophe that necessarily establishes the universality of the human race as the proper political subject: “In light of this epic struggle to restore man to his foundations in nature, the political conflicts which obsess us today seem puny and flickering. Unless we are soon able to make the world safe for democracy, we may commit ourselves too late to the great and final struggle to make the world safe for humanity.”¹⁹ Once modernity has established its real universality over the globe, it will be possible to reestablish premodern (natural and social) conditions on a higher postmodern level. The historical end of modernization will be its dialectical self-overcoming in an ecological (anti-modern) universality: modernization will lead to the emergence of the true universality of the “globe” over the political universalities of warring “worlds.”

This modernist politics of global anti-Communism, however, met serious resistance in the form of the contemporary middlebrow attack on modernism. One of the quintessential documents of this middlebrow aesthetics is James Michener’s “The Conscience of the Contemporary Novel” (1951).²⁰ The significance of this little manifesto of aesthetic world revolution is that it explicitly formulates an anti-modernist politics of modernization in the name of a global politics of liberalism. In other words, Michener argues that the corresponding aesthetics of liberal politics is no longer modernism (which he identifies with formal experimentation), but a reinvention of the content of literature to meet the demands of world politics. This is why Michener actually speaks of the contemporary significance of the “world novel” which, in opposition to modernism, is not concerned with formal innovation at all.²¹ According to Michener, modernism cannot produce “world novels” because it is devoid of content.

Michener historicizes the problem of modernism by contrasting the literary revolution of the 1920s with that of the 1950s. Although the modernism of the 1920s was historically necessary in that it broke away from the restrictive traditions of the nineteenth century, it stayed within the destructive phase of the revolution without being able to offer anything constructive in place of what it destroyed. As Michener suggests, two major problems followed from this failure: modernism either produced American forms with un-American content or led to unnecessary formal experiments. But, as he adds, the function of great literature is to serve as “the conscience of the world.”²² This expression demonstrates two things: first, it claims that literature takes place within a global totality (that is, literature is always world literature); but it also suggests that the function of this world literature is essentially moral. Michener claims that for this purpose formal innovation is simply unnecessary. He repeatedly speaks of the “artistic tricks and gimmicks” of modern artists and adds that “in almost every case the experiment is unnecessary, proving forcefully that our principal need these days is not for radical new forms into which stale ideas can be poured but for radically more powerful thought, expressed in the simplest practical terms.”²³ This is how the representational logic of anti-modernism is inscribed in the global anti-Communism of middlebrow populism.

Michener opposes this “unnecessary experimentation” to the “necessary knowledge” that should be produced by world literature. The ultimate function of art is to become the moral medium in which modernity comes to know itself. For Michener, the purpose of the restoration of content is to produce self-knowledge about America: “We present the anomaly of a nation assuming world leadership before it even knows itself.”²⁴ But he also insists that this national literature cannot be confined within the limits of regionalism, because the coming of age of the American novel coincides with the birth of the “world novel.”²⁵ The historical moment when America could finally become itself also marks an immediate move to another level of its historical identity: America becomes itself when it becomes the leader of the world. Therefore, American literature becomes itself when it transcends the logic of mere regional nationalism and becomes in itself a form of “world literature.”

This rejection of modernism prepares the way for a celebration of the “popular” genre of the novel. Michener’s anti-elitist attack on high art establishes the novel as the primary means of global communication: “Yet I must insist that a stupendous portion of the humane and liberal ideas which circulate to keep the conscience of the world clean are customarily circulated by novels.”²⁶ The significance of the novel is that, unlike drama and poetry, it appeals to a popular audience: “the novelist is essentially a popular artist, and as such his responsibility is very great.”²⁷ Thus when Michener calls the novelist “the poor man’s poet” and “the poor man’s dramatist,” he tries to establish the conditions of a global middlebrow populism whose primary medium is popular culture. Modernity, therefore, produced two different cultural paradigms: modernism (as the false critique of modernity through meaningless experimentation) and popular culture (as the terrain of meaningful moral communication). In this sense, Michener reverses the terms of elitist critique of mass culture: modernism is actually a mere simulacrum, since it is pure form without content. Whereas the middlebrow metaphysics of the “content” promises authentic knowledge, formalist modernism is the mere simulacrum of knowledge.²⁸

As we can see, both of the authors examined here defined liberalism as a necessarily global form of politics. In fact, it is precisely the presupposition that modernity inevitably leads to globalization that binds them together. Their differences come to the surface when they try to articulate the function of modernism in relation to the global politics of modernization: whereas Schlesinger affirmed modern art as the authentic expression of the internal antagonism of modernization, Michener argued that the logic of modernization had entered a new historical phase that moved beyond the logic of formalist experimentation. In other words, although the globalization of modernity was acknowledged to be something “real,” its cultural representation became a politically contested issue.

Necessary Knowledge

As we have seen in the previous two chapters, while the literature of atomic holocaust attempted to legitimate the necessity of certain illusions in the name of political realism, spy fiction was primarily concerned with establishing the necessary withdrawal of certain elements from the public world of democracy. In a similar fashion, the third ideological figure of our analysis, the enemy, was employed to establish the vital necessity of knowledge. In the construction of this global imaginary, however, the Third World posed a special problem as it came to mark a limit of representation. The imperative to know was so ubiquitous and so explicitly formulated in the anti-Communist literature about the Third World that we do not need to spend much time establishing its mere existence. Rather, the question we need to raise concerns the way the limits of this knowledge were theorized. For the problem appeared to be that although accurate knowledge of the Third World was crucial in the fight against Soviet imperialism, the radical cultural alterity of the region threatened to completely undermine this project.

Since one of the most important genres of the dissemination of anti-Communist knowledge about the world was the middlebrow world-travel narrative, I will briefly examine here the way these problems appeared in two of its prime representatives: Philip Wylie’s The Innocent Ambassadors (1957) and James Michener’s The Voice of Asia (1951).²⁹ Wylie’s book explicitly theorizes unrepresentable human essence as the very source of authentic anti-Communist politics, whereas in Michener’s text we find traces of the suspicion (or, as he calls it, the “reasonable doubt”) that ultimately the Third World cannot be “known.” The juxtaposition of these authors will show us how modernization, religion, and race were brought together in an anti-Communist politics of representation. In effect, both Michener and Wylie argue for a new global politics based on the recognition of the universality of human nature. This universality performs a double role: on the one hand, it counteracts the negative effects of racism; on the other hand, it establishes a generalized “religiosity” as part of human nature. The task of modernization, thus, appears to be the establishment of the universal religion of humankind, which opposes racism and religious intolerance, as well as Communist imperialism.

The Innocent Ambassadors narrates Philip and wife “Ricky” Wylie’s actual but somewhat “fictionalized” trip around the world that took them from Florida to Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Lebanon, and Turkey. In the introduction, Wylie explicitly presents the book as an anti-Communist tract. Since Communism, “acting on the theory of permanent military stalemate, is proceeding to dismember the world,” Wylie “tried to tell what Communism is and what it is doing.”³⁰ This claim might be a bit surprising, since we never actually meet a Communist in the book. We only get to see the malicious effects of Communist propaganda. In addition, the seemingly innocent narrative is explicitly politicized in at least two senses. First, before embarking on the trip, Wylie is approached by some people from Washington, who ask him to do certain things while in Hong Kong. By dissolving the dividing line between tourist and secret agent, this mission explicitly politicizes Cold War tourism as a form of international politics: tourists become ambassadors.³¹ At the same time, however, Wylie frames the whole trip by an anti-Communist therapeutic narrative. Ever since his brother’s tragic death in Poland in 1936, Wylie had been suffering from a terrible phobia: he could not leave the country or leave for extensive trips. In spite of the official verdict that his brother committed suicide, Wylie had been convinced that his brother was murdered by Communists after their trip to Russia, because they “talked too much.” By the end of the book, Wylie is cured of this global fear of Communism (which stages a certain psychological overcoming of anti-Communist “isolationism”) and once again becomes a citizen of the world.

The fundamental thesis of the book is that Communism is a religion. In order to prove this point, Wylie examines the psychological roots of religion and effectively claims that “our overt prejudice against other races and our partly unconscious prejudice toward other religions” can be derived from the same psychic functions.³² This juxtaposition of religious intolerance and racism forms the basis of a redefinition of American foreign policy: neither Christian world conquest nor racist imperialism is a viable means of global anti-Communism. Wylie singles out John Foster Dulles as the symbol of what is wrong with America’s relations with the Third World, since on his trip he found that “our longtime, much-traveled, clarion-speaking Secretary of State was a symbol of a specific odiousness to millions everywhere we journeyed.”³³ According to Wylie, what Dulles represents gives rise to a “psychological continuation of colonialism.”³⁴ He opposes Communism and American foreign policy in terms of a religious conflict. As long as America opposes Communist dogmatism with a religious dogmatism, it cannot offer true freedom to the Third World.

The central question of Wylie’s work concerns the representability of the universal foundations of human nature. The book opens with the complaint that, unfortunately, it is always the wrong kind of people who have the means to travel around the world. Anticipating the type that later became known as the “ugly American,” Wylie dismisses these vulgar tourists in the following terms: “These people represent one kind of American success. But they do not represent America. They do not represent the knowledge in America, the understanding, the capacity for brotherhood, the willingness to learn, the widespread ability to evaluate truly or the common wish to appreciate correctly.”³⁵ To rectify the situation, as Wylie argues, the right kind of Americans should be sent abroad: “I have said that we should send young Americans abroad in great numbers. As Ricky and I found out and this book will show, it is probably the only way to win a life-or-death struggle we did not seek but cannot evade.”³⁶

In the same chapter, however, Wylie also raises the problem of representation in a technical sense when he brings up the question of tourism and photography. Tourist photography is discussed here as an inadequate form of representation, since it is merely concerned with what is immediately visible. In a sense, it is representation without knowledge: “The constant photographer at best can bring back unrelated fractions of travel. By his very assiduity, he is removed from the human environment. He has no time to become acquainted even with the people he photographs. He wants a mere picture of them—not any knowledge of who they are, what they think and feel, or how they relate themselves to him. He has to remain immune to relationships and wholes.”³⁷ Apparently, it is the very act of representation (the photographer’s assiduity) that makes authentic representation impossible as it distances the photographer from his or her subjects. The act of representation renders the immediacy of experience inaccessible: “For a picture ‘says more than thousand words’ only to those who cannot truly read, think or make friends—and have a paltry imagination, besides. A man of modest understanding, for instance, can feel what a Japanese feels; but I would like to see a photograph taken by an American in Japanese.”³⁸ The sentimental wisdom of this conclusion consists of a shift from the language of representation (a photograph taken in a particular language) to the unrepresentable and the universal language of feelings.

The foundation of this empathy, of course, is human universality, which therefore possesses its own language. As the Wylies are flying above India, Philip looks down upon the ancient land and is shocked by its strangeness: “For a time I felt as if Asia was meaningless to an Occidental: a human spawning-ground that might, in some next ten thousand years replace man—if, say, his civilized minority should blast and ray itself into extermination.”³⁹ But this apocalyptic vision of the impossibility of meaningful communication between the first and the Third World is only introduced here to show that the universality of human nature is capable of bridging the most drastic cultural differences. The idea of radical alterity dissolves in a humane universality:

For I knew, and I had to see because I knew, that those below, and the Red Chinese, men long tundra-bound and the fever-checked blacks were as other men, exactly. As ourselves—exactly. They are we:

I knew the genes, chromosomes, and the history, the anthropology, the archeology and paleontology. I could not let myself be like many of my countrymen who also know these truths, yet talk, think, persecute, praise and have their being as if what they know were unknown!⁴⁰

And this common humanity is not without its own language. This thesis finds a blatantly sentimental expression in Wylie’s reaction to the Taj Mahal. He is so moved by the experience that he breaks down and starts to cry. But, more important, a strange exchange occurs between Wylie and his Sikh guide. As Wylie puts it, “He knew”:

A nonword in the center of his dual vocabulary was perceived as the same word, phallus-written for me long ago in Massachusetts on the living parchment of a mother’s womb, where he had learned it and all men learn it but so few remember, or recognize, when they see it again in any conscious language of whatever loveliness.

So I looked back at Singh with the passive part of the look-that-understands-the-other. Then I snorted my nose to exorcise the prelanguage phrase and to restate my mundane maleness.… God is ascetic in thought, in doing aesthetic, but in being—ecstatic.⁴¹

Rejecting the religion of a John Foster Dulles, Wylie here claims this phallic, ecstatic, universal, “prelanguage” experience (mediated through the field of the aesthetic) as the essence of true religion. Since it is a “nonword” which is “the same word” for everyone (or, at least, every male subject), this experience is not completely outside language. It does precede particular languages, but it still partakes of language as its universal theological foundation.

This is why the ultimate objective of the “necessary knowledge” instituted by the anti-Communist imperative to know does not really produce a lot of new knowledge. Essentially, it is constituted by the recognition within the strange and the new of what we already knew. This point is well illustrated by Wylie’s first exposure to Tokyo, which turns out to be a strange experience precisely because at first it is devoid of all strangeness: “I did not feel it alien.”⁴² Wylie is almost disappointed by this familiarity: “though fascinated, bemused—I could not find much sensation of the bizarre.”⁴³ But, ultimately, this lack of strangeness is revealed to be the surprise of the universal: “It doesn’t take great differences to create a sense of foreignness for most tourists, I guess.… But what continually surprises me about foreign cities—Paris, Rostov-om-Don, or Tokyo—is the similarity of ways and cityscapes.” In fact, Wylie explicitly renounces the “shock of otherness” in favor of what we could call the “shock of sameness”: “What now impresses me is the universality of human ends and means and being.”⁴⁴ Significantly, however, Wylie experiences the most shocking experience of otherness through what is supposedly familiar to him, “Frank Llyod Wright’s earthquake-proof Imperial Hotel”: “A contemporary architect (however much Mr. Wright would resent the adjective) would be horrified by the waste space within; but the Imperial is very comfortable; and I was amused that my image of the Imperial as an American product was so inaccurate—that its reality was more strange to me than the strangeness of downtown Tokyo.”⁴⁵

We can, therefore, see that for Wylie the “beyond” of representation is a universal human nature whose necessary yet impossible representation is the foundation of successful anti-Communism. The wrong kind of anti-Communism, as we have seen, is based on the disavowal of this universal foundation through a religious racism. When this “unknown known” penetrates conscious, everyday human experience, the possibility of a universal language appears, if ever so fleetingly, on the horizon. Furthermore, we also know that the mode of existence of this universal foundation is the surprise of the familiar as it disturbs the experience of the foreign. When the same appears in the foreign, the uncanny strangeness of the universal is revealed. This is why the foundation of anti-Communist global tolerance is not the “shock of otherness” but the “shock of sameness.” The right kind of politics of representation will need to establish a terrain within which “the shock of sameness” can emerge as a universal experience.

A very similar set of problems is addressed in Michener’s works as well. As a matter of fact, the very title of his book The Voice of Asia clearly announces its preoccupation with issues of representation. The central proposition of the book is that Asia had been traditionally misrepresented, since Americans did not listen to the true voice of Asia. To rectify this situation, Michener set out on a trip through Japan, Korea, Formosa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Indo-China, Burma, and Pakistan, and conducted 120 interviews with a wide range of people. This excavation of Asia’s authentic voice from below the rubble of false representations, however, serves the same ideological purpose that we have been examining so far: the true voice of Asia promises authentic knowledge. Once again, this knowledge is simply necessary, and its foundation is universal human nature. Michener explicitly speaks of his project in terms of knowledge: “I learned mostly how much I didn’t know. America should have some of its ablest young men doing for months and years what I did for some days. For unless we know Asia we will never gain the wisdom to make right decisions at the right time. And unless we start making some right decisions, Asia will become by default our implacable enemy.”⁴⁶

Michener’s political program can, then, be described in the following terms: his self-imposed task is to establish a field of representation within which a particular object (“the voice of Asia”) can successfully appear. This distinction between the establishment of a field within which an object can appear and the act of appearance itself is significant, since Michener does not conceive of his own activity as a “description” of an object, but rather as an active way of allowing the object to appear. The “voice of Asia” can appear to provide authentic knowledge only if the proper conditions of Asia’s self-representations are successfully established. The act of representation is defined here as the establishment of a transparent medium of self-representation.

But one of the most compelling images of the book complicates this formula by staging the “silence of Asia” as the only authentic source of knowledge. Apparently, even authentic self-representation has a negative foundation, because an authentic knowledge of Asia should also include those elements that are incapable of self-representation:

When I think of India I think of the Kashmiri Gate.… There was a young woman who haunted this gate and in some ways she spoke for India.… And…I could never forget that she was India, too. For she was naked. She was completely naked and once I saw a policeman gently advise her that she really must go home and put some clothes on. She pulled away and walked on through the Kashmiri Gate where the conquerors had marched. She was about twenty-two, most attractive in appearance, very wild-eyed. She carried a few filthy belongings in a rotting cloth and was either a madwoman or someone protesting the bitterly high price of cloth. We looked at each other whenever we passed and she seemed to be a living protest. Actually she was merely a naked woman walking through the Kashmiri Gate. No one thought to arrest her. There is much in India that no American can understand.⁴⁷

The most memorable act of this naked woman is her silence, yet “in some ways she spoke for India.” The message of the aneċe appears to be that the voice of Asia is dependent on this silence: that which speaks most authentically is actually what does not speak at all, for no representation of India can ever be fully authentic without her. Michener’s text oscillates between a desire to invest her with allegorical meaning and the opposing tendency to reduce her nakedness to its literal content. This dual movement (allegorizing the negative foundation of representation at the same time as reducing it to one single element of representation) establishes a political tension between the voice and the silence of Asia. To the degree that her silence becomes a site of protest, there might actually be a tension internal to the voice of Asia that prevents it from achieving authentic self-representation. Although authentic self-representation is supposedly provided by the voice, the silences that punctuate the voice can undermine its performance.

Michener, however, has another lesson to learn in Asia from naked women. This time the act of self-representation is combined with the act of representing America. What Michener tries to show here is that the necessary knowledge about Asia is riddled by equally necessary doubts. In an early chapter of the book, entitled “Reasonable Doubts at a Strip Tease,” Michener’s text encounters the problem of the simulacrum as a political question.⁴⁸ But what promises to be a pleasant experience of cultural exchange actually turns out to be a rather disturbing lesson: “I have heard of men who encountered varied experiences at a strip tease, but I believe I am the first who ever learned a political lesson at one.”⁴⁹ What makes this lesson political? Just the fact that Michener understands that the “voice of Asia” is not simply an organic expression of a pre-given “Asian” identity but a performance. And if the voice of Asia is not speaking directly from the heart of Asia, the knowledge produced by this voice can be easily consumed by terrible doubts.

In fact, the very first sentence of the chapter initiates a paranoid logic that threatens to undermine the very possibility of authentic knowledge: “The American occupation of Japan has been so successful that any reasonable human being suspects it can’t all be true. Inevitably one gets the sinking feeling in his stomach that the whole thing must be a gigantic farce played by clever antagonists.” The ultimate logical consequence of this “reasonable doubt” is the complete loss of certainty: “What proof have we that the Japanese are truly our friends? None. We have no proof at all.”⁵⁰ From this point on, Japanese friendship is a mere performance, a front, or a simulacrum.

Ultimately, Michener’s political lesson concerns the modernization of Japan. His primary concern is the simultaneous exportation of American-style modernization and mass culture. Michener’s objective here is to respond to an Englishwoman “who knew Japan well [and who] has described our occupation as the imposition by young barbarians of a barren culture upon one of the oldest continuing cultures in the world.”⁵¹ Michener is quick to admit that mass culture is not inherently valuable, but he insists that modernization had a positive effect on Japanese history: “1. Liberation of women. 2. A new concept of where authority to govern rests. 3. Better land distribution. 4. Revision of the Emperor’s status. 5. Rationalized manufacturing procedures.”⁵² This separation of the positive effects of modernization from the negative influence of mass culture is the core of the political lesson that Michener learned at the strip tease: “What does seem wrong is to demand credit for other trivial changes which more often than not were either misguided or downright ridiculous. There is no inherent merit to popcorn, American candy bars, new-style movies or jitterbugging. I am thinking especially of that strip tease I saw at Christmas.”⁵³ For what emerges here is that through simultaneously exporting modernization and mass culture, America provided the Japanese with a language to criticize the American occupation and American-style modernization.

So let us see what actually transpired at that notorious strip tease. What is surprising to Michener is that rather than being a pathetic imitation of American culture, the show turns out to be a subversive parody. In fact, at first, the show does appear to be a cheap imitation: “It was as unsexy as one could imagine.”⁵⁴ But things take a sudden turn when the main event of the evening, a reenactment of Gone with the Wind, is announced: “This playlet was so astonishing, so subversive and so clever that I want to report it in detail.”⁵⁵ The point is that failed Japanese imitation turns out to be a conscious critique of what is to be imitated: “It was an amazing show. All aspects of American life were ridiculed. There could have been no purpose other than to burlesque life in the South. Every cliché of the communists was dragged out, explained and posed for exhibition.”⁵⁶ After the play, the evening comes to an end with a Christmas tribute to Americans: “Then appeared a fat and perfectly repulsive young woman who started to do a violent strip tease. I had difficulties associating this with Christmas, but suddenly the orchestra explained it all. They broke rapturously into ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.’ The announcer thought it was all very moving, for he stood ramrod straight, saluting.”⁵⁷ But even this “tribute” to America is obviously a joke: “They were laughing out loud this time, and I had the strange feeling that somebody in that audience was having hell kidded out of him.”⁵⁸

Thus, the political lesson revealed at the Japanese strip tease teaches Michener to doubt the success of the American occupation, which now appears to be a mere performance. Apparently, the voice of Asia is simultaneously the source of authentic knowledge and a satiric performance. First, we have seen that the voice depends on a silence that establishes its authenticity. The self-representation of Asia cannot provide full knowledge, unless Americans know how to interrogate the silences of this voice. But Michener suspects an antagonism behind the performance. Silence becomes a “silent protest,” and the real content of the American knowledge of the world is not exclusively universal humanity, but protest and antagonism. No matter how much you know about Asia, in the end you must suspect that it is antagonistic toward America. The split between the voice and the silence, however, also introduces the possibility of deliberate deception. At the strip tease, the voice speaks the language of American mass culture. What remains explicitly unsaid, however, is the resistance to the Americanization of Japan even if the message of the show is quite obvious. This time, the voice of Asia is speaking an American language, but it still formulates Communist clichés. The reasonable doubt of global anti-Communism whispers a disturbing message in the middlebrow ear: it is not self-evident that universal humanism is capable of establishing a global community, because the universality of the human bond might be nothing but a mere simulacrum. Precisely because of its constitutive limitations, the necessary knowledge of the Third World is inherently exposed to the paranoid doubt of antagonistic misrepresentation.

Thus, the anti-Communist imperative to produce authentic middlebrow knowledge about the world was based on an explicitly theorized impossibility: universal human essence must be represented; yet it can never be fully represented. Both self-representation and the representation of the cultural other were caught in this impossibility. This complication introduced the element of doubt, which had serious consequences for the politics of modernization. What Michener discovers is that although modernization can indeed establish the material conditions of freedom, it does not necessarily ensure pro-American attitudes. In fact, modernization can also provide the language of anti-American resistance to modernization. Tortured by this terrible doubt, modernization can never be fully sure of its own success, for it cannot know for sure that its outcome was a pro-American modern society or its mere deceptive appearance.

The Importance of Being Ugly: Anti-Communist Anti-Imperialism

It is common to read William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 bestselling novel The Ugly American as a fictionalization of anti-Communist modernization theory.⁵⁹ But one of the most surprising things about The Ugly American is that the novel does not fully warrant the common usage of the term it had itself created. It is undeniable that the novel gave rise to the popular expression “the ugly American,” which denotes a peculiarly American type of arrogance that refuses to engage other cultures on their own terms. And it is also true that Lederer and Burdick’s most important objective was to criticize this kind of American attitude toward other cultures. But in the book itself, the term “ugly American” is not used in this negative sense at all. As a matter of fact, in The Ugly American the expression is used to name the only viable alternative to the politics of what we call today the “ugly American.” As a strange quirk of fate, the title of the book was immediately associated with its critical objective, and it was invested with a meaning that happens to be the exact opposite of what it carries within the text itself. Contrary to popular belief, the novel actually tries to show the importance of being ugly. The question for us, then, concerns the meaning of this “ugliness” for anti-Communist politics.

It should be immediately obvious that we are dealing with a strange combination of aesthetic and political categories: “ugliness” is an aesthetic quality (the negation of beauty) which is now applied to the politics of American foreign policy in the Third World. Upon first glance, then, the book recommends a certain aestheticization of politics that turns a negative aesthetic quality into a positive political program. In fact, we can go even further. Since the book is mostly concerned with the politics of modernization, we can also assume that this aestheticization of politics in the name of “ugliness” concerns the meaning of the “modern.”

This is why it is significant that the The Ugly American argues that the politics of modernization is incomplete without an aesthetic supplement. The text suggests that, in order to succeed, the global anti-Communism of modernization must incorporate a specific strategy of self-representation. Therefore, the meaning of this “ugliness” must be discussed in both a political and an aesthetic sense. On the level of politics, the novel suggests that the right kind of modernization should not be construed as imperialism. Borrowing a term from Walter Benn Michaels, we could even argue that The Ugly American is a quintessential example of the ideology of “anti-imperial Americanism,” the attempt to found American national identity on an anti-imperialist rhetoric.⁶⁰ John Carlos Rowe formulated the fundamental contradiction of this ideology in the following terms: “Americans’ interpretations of themselves as a people are shaped by a powerful imperial desire and a profound anti-colonial temper.”⁶¹ On the level of aesthetics, however, we find that the novel’s rejection of high modernism serves the purposes of a documentary realism that fully participates in the aestheticized politics put forth in the text. Thus, with its redefinition of “ugliness,” the novel provides the middlebrow imagination with an aesthetic ideology in which “imperial desire” and “anti-colonial temper” can be reconciled through the aestheticized politics of modernization.

The Ugly American is a series of loosely connected stories about Americans living and working in South East Asia. Most of the stories are set in the fictional country of Sarkhan, although a significant section of the book is devoted to “real” countries like Vietnam and Burma. What is common to these stories is that they all illustrate the same point: America is losing the Cold War in the Third World because of its essentially flawed philosophy of foreign diplomacy. Yet what is common to all of the characters who stand out as positive examples in the book is that they work outside the traditional institutions of “dollar diplomacy” and attempt to effect change in the Third World by direct interactions with the local people.

So it is important to point out that the “ugly American” of the book is actually one of these positive characters and not one of the irresponsible, power-hungry amateurs the book criticizes for misrepresenting America all over the world. In the two chapters, “The Ugly American” and “The Ugly American and the Ugly Sarkhanese,” we are introduced to three “ugly” characters: Homer and Emma Atkins, and the Sarkhanese man called “Jeepo.”⁶² All three of them are described as being physically ugly. When Homer Atkins first appears in the book, he is at an official meeting staring at his own hands in embarrassment, because he knows that his propositions will be turned down by the committee that he is facing. This is when we are told that “His hands always reminded him that he was an ugly man,” and that the meeting made him conscious “of his own personal ugliness.”⁶³ A few pages later, when we meet Homer’s wife, Emma, we are told quite directly that “Emma, a stout woman with freckles across her nose was, in her way, quite as ugly as her husband.”⁶⁴ Finally, when Atkins meets Jeepo, the native mechanic who is going to be his future business partner, their ugliness establishes an immediate bond between the two men: “And Jeepo was ugly. He was ugly in a rowdy, bruised, carefree way that pleased Atkins. The two men smiled at one another.”⁶⁵ Based on their common ugliness, these three characters establish a community that functions as the fundamental model of successful American-native cooperation in the Third World.

The fundamental thesis of the novel can be easily summarized: on the level of official diplomacy, Burdick and Lederer call for the professionalization of the foreign service. This professionalization involves at least three important changes. First, the Americans who represent the country abroad must be self-sacrificing, trained experts who are familiar with the languages and cultures of the countries where they are stationed. Second, a radical change of philosophy is necessary that shifts the focus of attention from “big” military and economic investments to small-scale pragmatic solutions. In other words, the book propagates a shift from the macropolitics of power to the micropolitics of everyday life. Finally, the novel also makes it clear that America needs to develop a new politics of self-representation that takes into account the psychology of the anti-imperialist resistance to modernization. Thus, what the novel effectively shows is that the politics of modernization is necessarily based on a politics of representation. Without this new politics of self-representation, modernization is destined to fail. In a certain sense, the task of this politics of representation is to establish the cultural conditions of economic modernization. The problems of modernization and representation are joined together this tightly because the novel argues that the proper form of anti-Communism in the Third World must be the kind of modernization that does not appear to be modernization.

But the truly provocative and disturbing thesis of the book is not merely that professionalization is necessary, but that “it is possible to learn from an enemy.”⁶⁶ In other words, the book calls for the conscious and deliberate imitation of the enemy: in order to fight Communism in the Third World, Americans have to act exactly the same way the Communists do, even if their ultimate objectives are radically different. If we follow Lederer and Burdick’s argument, on the level of propaganda methods Communists and anti-Communists become virtually indistinguishable. But while Communist deception tricks Third World countries into accepting totalitarianism, the conclusion of The Ugly American is that through the same methods they could also be tricked into freedom. As we can see, the philosophical foundation of this program is the strategic separation of the form of political action from its actual content.

In order to examine the problem of representation in the novel, let us start with the first American character we meet in the book who successfully blends into his environment. Father Finian, a Catholic priest, is on a personal crusade against Communism in Burma. Relying on the same split between form and content, Father Finian understood that Communism is a form of religion, only it serves the devil.⁶⁷ The structure of this discovery is decisive: it postulates that formally Communism is a simulacrum of religion, but that on the level of ideological content, it is the exact opposite of religion. To put it differently, Father Finian identifies a formal commonality that, nevertheless, gives rise to opposing contents. So Finian gathers around himself eight reliable Burmese men to educate them in the basic know-how of anti-Communism. The most important rhetorical problem for Finian, however, is to convince the Burmese men that they are not being convinced of anything. Finian wants to steer these men in the right direction in such a way that they believe that they are simply acting out their own innermost desires without any external coercion.

The “nine friends” reach the conclusion that anti-Communism is essentially a “process of persuasion”: “What we discovered…is that men are persuaded of things by the same process, whether the persuading is done by the Catholic Church, Lutherans, Communists, or democrats. A movement cannot be judged by its methods of persuasion for, short of violence, most successful movements use the same methods.”⁶⁸ Once again, Finian’s point is that on a purely formal level, politics is without an inherent value. An exclusively formal analysis of Catholic, Lutheran, Communist, or democratic politics will only show us that they all necessarily rely on the same techniques. On this level, even the deadliest enemies are undistinguishable. This point is, then, used as a justification for the imitation of the enemy. Since Communists imitate organized religion, and since all efficient political persuasion uses the same methods, it is perfectly acceptable and even necessary to fight Communists with their own tactics.

In this regard, the novel examines the same epistemological crisis that formed the basis of the domestic attacks on Communism. At home, the “masters of deceit” undermine democratic procedures by pretending to be normal members of the community. In the Third World, the Communists pretend to be nationalist liberators who disguise themselves as local civilians. Thus, the primary problem of this war is to identify the enemy: “But even more frustrating than constant defeat was the fact that at the end of three weeks of fighting, they had not once seen the enemy. The fire-fights always took place at night and were over by dawn; the enemy always slipped away, taking his dead with him; and the men felt they had participated in phantom engagements. The only thing that made it real were the dead Legionnaires.”⁶⁹ In order to render the enemy visible, however, the French should know more about the enemy. The provocative message of the text is that the only way to fight the Communists is actually to learn something new from Mao:

What Mao said to do is send a couple of agents ahead into any village in which the Communists conceivably might fight. If possible these agents should be men who come from that village. They settle down in the village and live like everyone else, except that they have a few sacks of hand grenades and a few burp guns which they keep hidden.… Whenever the Legionnaires go into a village, there are already a half-dozen of the enemy behind them. These enemy don’t wear uniforms; they don’t even dig their weapons up until the critical moment has arrived.… Imagine if you could have a half-dozen of your own men looking exactly like the Communists, operating back of their lines?⁷⁰

The concluding question (even if it is only a wish) already contains an ambiguous program in that it calls for a deliberate manipulation of appearances: if only our men could look exactly like the Communists. Mao’s instructions make it clear that Communist warfare involves a tactical misrepresentation of identity that renders Communists indistinguishable from other civilian inhabitants of the native villages. The task for anti-Communism is, thus, to familiarize oneself with these techniques and adopt them. The necessary imitation of the enemy is made clear in the novel when finally Major Monet decides “to cure our illness with the hair of the dog that bit us,” and successfully strikes at the Communists for the first time.⁷¹

But when the invisible enemy finally appears, the experience turns out to be quite shocking. In a lengthy discussion of the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the French presence in Vietnam, the authors ask a simple question: How is it possible that a modern Western army is beaten by a few home-made guns? On the day when the French evacuate Hanoi, our central characters (MacWhite, “Tex” Wolchek, and Monet) cannot help but observe the striking contrast between the departing French army and the just arriving Communist troops. The French depart as if they were celebrating a victory and put up a real military show. After the French military parade, however, the actual victors of the war enter the city:

They then saw the first regular Communist soldier arrive—an officer on a wobbling bicycle, wearing a padded suit, tennis shoes, and a tiny forage hat. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder. Trotting behind came a platoon of men dressed in a mixture of uniforms. Some merely wore breech-cloths and what looked like captured French blouses. Many of them were barefooted. Perhaps half of them had rifles.… Three of the men were actually carrying home-made rifles. Tex had the feeling that he was looking at people who were fighting a war that should have taken place three hundred years before.… They looked harmless and innocent, indeed they almost looked comical.⁷²

The most difficult thing for the soldiers to accept is that an almost comically premodern army (which should have been fighting three centuries ago) successfully defeated modern military technology. With this story, the novel tries to warn its readers about the limits of modernization. On the one hand, the episode illustrates the strength of the resistance to colonial powers. The lesson is clear: America must not appear as a colonizing power in the Third World. On the other hand, the French defeat also raises questions about the force of modernization, since the resistance to colonization found supremely effective ways to resist modern technology. In accordance with the general thesis of the novel, the text argues here that modernization is ineffective in the Third World if it is not accompanied by special strategies of self-representation. Reversing the formula of Communist deceit and infiltration, the novel claims that modernization has to imitate the tradition it aims to reform.

So, how does the problem of “ugliness” appear in this argument? In order to answer the question, we have to return to “the ugly American” of the novel. Homer Atkins faces the same problem that Father Finian had to overcome: they both know the solution, they just have to find a way to convince people to accept this solution as their own. Atkins realizes that one of the most vital necessities in Sarkhan is to get water to the hillside rice paddies. In order to help the Sarkhanese, he invents a water pump. But there are two problems he needs to solve first. He has to make sure that his modern invention can be assembled from materials already available in Sarkhan. So he comes up with the idea of propelling the pumps by bicycles. In addition, he has to make sure that the local people accept this invention as a helpful tool rather than a symbol of white oppression. To achieve this goal, he invites Jeepo, “the Ugly Sarkhanese,” to be his business partner.

The story teaches us two things about successful modernization. First, rather than being the imposition of modern technology on a traditional society from the outside, it must be an internal development. Thus, Atkins insists that none of the components of the pump can be imported from America. In other words, modernization must start as a “bricolage” of local elements. Modern conditions cannot be simply imported. The reorganization of traditional society itself should create the conditions of large-scale modernization. Eventually, the recombination of traditional elements should create the conditions of a qualitative change. The task of the modernizer is to incite the process of modernization in terms of the culture that needs to be modernized. At the same time, however, the modernizer has to be able to “sell” the modern as something desirable. In other words, the break with tradition has to be couched in terms of the very tradition it tries to reform. The modern has to be represented either as traditional or as a harmless novelty that really does not violate basic laws of the tradition.

To illustrate this point, we can also refer here to Emma Atkins’s intervention in Sarkhanese life: she introduced the broom to Sarkhan. At one point, this ugly American notices that all the old people in the village suffer from terrible back problems. After a while, she figures out that the cause of the problem is that they do not have brooms with long handles, so the old people spend their days bending over to scrape the floors clean. Emma, of course, knows the solution, but she also understands that “people don’t stop doing traditional things merely because they’re irrational.”⁷³ This fact, however, does not stop her from her modernizing mission: “But Emma wasn’t bound by centuries of tradition, and she began to look for a substitute for the short broom handle.”⁷⁴ Eventually the quest turns out to be successful, and the rest of the chapter narrates her elaborate tricks to convince the villagers to use the new tool. The important thing is that she is aware that the modern element can only be introduced into a traditional setting through a series of indirect interventions. She must modernize, but she must not appear to be modernizing. In fact, Emma’s tricks turn out to be so effective that when, years after the couple has returned to America, they receive a letter from the Sarkhanese village, the villagers still refer to the long-handled broom as a “lucky accident.” Emma’s response: “What does he mean ‘lucky accident’?…Why I looked all over for three months before I found those long reeds. That was no accident.”⁷⁵ But the point, of course, is that Emma’s project of modernization could succeed only because she deliberately represented it as a “lucky accident” and not as a direct intervention into a long-standing tradition. Although she feigns incomprehension, we know that her search for the most appropriate kind of reed was as deliberate as her misrepresentation of modernization as a lucky accident.

We can now clarify the meaning of “ugliness” in the novel. Jonathan Nashel argued that The Ugly American “was written to directly counter Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), and to refute his supposed anti-American and anti-interventionist sentiments.”⁷⁶ Two paradigms of American foreign politics emerge here: the quiet and the ugly. And while the “ugly American” is a deliberate attempt to overwrite the anti-Americanism of the “quiet American,” what is common to both paradigms is that in both cases Americans appear to be doing something in the Third World and in reality they are doing something else. Greene’s novel addresses the conflict between the old and new colonial powers in Vietnam through an allegorical love triangle involving the world-weary British journalist Thomas Fowler, the naively idealistic American foreign aid worker Alden Pyle, and the Vietnamese woman Phuong. The novel turned out to be especially offensive to American sensibilities because its basic argument appeared to be that American idealism in the Third World is at best ineffective, but at its worst, it is actually destructive. In Greene’s novel, the naively idealist politics of modernization (rather than building a new country) is turned into violent destruction. The modernizer becomes a terrorist.

The Ugly American, therefore, attempts to show that modernization is possible if America is willing to reform its overseas policies. The novel argues that modernization should not be imposed on traditional societies from the outside. Rather, the conditions of modernization have to be introduced in terms of the very culture that needs to be modernized. This is why a real “ugly American” is primarily a master of bricolage rather than the importer of Western technology. At the same time, however, the novel also argues that this modernization must not appear to be Westernization. Even if the final results supposedly serve Western interests, in order to be successful, modernization must be represented as a “lucky accident.” Unlike The Quiet American, then, Lederer and Burdick argue that the imitation of the enemy is necessary, but it does not always lead to terrorism. If modernization is successfully disguised as the inexorable pull of the history of the Third World, it will provide the only viable means of global anti-Communism.

The question of why the central characters of the novel have to be ugly thus concerns the self-representation of the modern. As we have seen, “ugliness” denotes here the necessary split between form and content: it names the possibility that a negative form can hide a positive content. Therefore, in the world of the novel “ugly” designates the modern that does not appear to be modern: successful modernization is always preceded by an act of aestheticization. And if we wanted to give a specific ideological content to modernity, we could also add: ugliness denotes the Western that does not appear to be Western. Edward Shils’s words come in handy at this point: “‘Modern’ means being western without the onus of following the West. It is the model of the West detached in some way from its geographical origins and locus.”⁷⁷ With The Ugly American, therefore, we run into the same ideological problem that Christine Klein observed in connection with the musical The King and I: “the entire narrative revolves around achieving some of the ends of imperialism through non-imperial means.”⁷⁸ This is the most disturbing ideological complication of modernization theory in general and of The Ugly American in particular.⁷⁹

Ugliness can, therefore, be interpreted on at least three different levels: the empirical, the aesthetic, and the ideological. First, ugliness appears in the novel as a meaningless empirical fact: Homer, Emma, and Jeepo happen to be ugly. The term designates a real condition which, in the course of the novel, is transformed into a “lucky accident.” But we should not underestimate the significance of the fact that Lederer and Burdick chose an aesthetic category (the negative condition of the beautiful) to name the central political concern of their text. On this level, ugliness is not just a mere fact, but a mode of appearance inscribed into a system of values. As it appears, anti-Communist politics depends on this aesthetic articulation of empirical facts. On this level, the aestheticization of the empirical provides the primary terrain within which modernization can take place. Modernization is thus fully dependent on this aesthetics. But the aesthetic value of ugliness is also immediately politicized. This is the level of the ideological inversion through which a negative aesthetic category is reformulated as a positive ideological content.⁸⁰ For the reader is led to believe that the ugly bodies of the novel hide beautiful souls, and that physical ugliness is the historical mode of appearance of its own opposite (since “beautiful Americans” supposedly posses ugly souls). The split between essence and appearance, however, is necessary, since without it no real community could have been established between Americans and Sarkhanese. In fact, this split is the very condition of a global anti-Communist community whose foundation is now revealed to be a deceitful modernization.⁸¹ In the world of the novel, ugliness is something “real” (merely given and unchangeable) that functions as the very condition of successful (self-)representation. It is, after all, merely an empirical fact that becomes the site of an ideological inscription. Therefore, through its concept of ugliness, the novel tried to name the real conditions of a global modernization that does not appear to be imperialism.

As a conclusion, we can raise the question whether The Ugly American itself is actually an “ugly” book? Does the book participate in the same political aesthetic that it so clearly defines in its pages? And if it does, what does this fact tell us about the aesthetics of middlebrow anti-Communism in general? In fact, we do not have to search too long for the first indications that the book does what it preaches: the whole narrative is framed by an introductory note and a “Factual Epilogue,” which make it abundantly clear that the documentary content of the text is necessarily mediated through an act of fictionalization. We encounter here a paradoxical drive toward documentary that can achieve its goals only if it fictionalizes its narrative. The first line of the book is this: “This book is written as fiction; but it is based on fact. The things we write about have, in essence, happened.”⁸² But as we have seen, what the narrative revealed was precisely the inherent weakness of facts. Facts are not enough. They must be supplemented by a preliminary act of aestheticization that establishes the field within which these facts can appear as effective facts. In the case of the book, the documentary can only achieve its political goals if it abandons its proper aesthetics. The book is composed with the same truth in mind: the best documentary is the right kind of fiction.

This aesthetics of ugliness, then, strikes at the very heart of the middlebrow aesthetics of the absolute priority of content over form. For it is rather difficult to take at face value the claim that content is everything and form is nothing, so the suspicion emerges that the very act of the renunciation of form might be a principle of formalization. The novel showed us something similar. In order to be effective, even the best of contents must be formalized in a particular way: as if it were not formalized at all. The ugliness of this self-effacing form is the central aesthetic force of the middlebrow. The point is not that the middlebrow is effectively without form, but rather that it formalizes itself in a way as if it were formless or at least lacked a concern for form. This is why when middlebrow formal clumsiness is considered to be a moral triumph, the formal shortcoming is not just an artistic deficiency but an ideological program. When modernists renounced the middlebrow as mere simulacrum, they claimed that the middlebrow appears to be art when it is not art at all. But the middlebrow reversed this formula: it claimed that although it might not appear to be art at all, in reality the middlebrow presents the universal content of art as such. According to this logic, the best art would be the kind that does not appear to be art at all. We could then formalize the aesthetic ideology of middlebrow anti-Communism in the following terms: its aesthetics was that of an art which did not appear to be art, and its politics was that of a global modernization which did not appear to be imperialism.