Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

by Salman Rushdie

  When the Barbarians come they’ll make the laws.

  . . .

  Why should this uneasiness begin all of a sudden,

  And confusion. How serious people’s faces have become.

  Why are all the streets and squares emptying so quickly,

  And everybody turning home again so full of thought?

  Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

  And some people have arrived from the frontier;

  They said there are no Barbarians any more.

  And now what will become of us without Barbarians?—

  Those people were some sort of a solution.

  “What will become of us without Barbarians?” J. M. Coetzee’s novel also called Waiting for the Barbarians offers a dystopic gloss on the Cavafy poem. Those who spend their time on guard, waiting for the barbarians to arrive, in the end don’t need any barbarians to come. In a dark variation on the ending of the “Conference of the Birds,” they themselves become the barbarians whose coming they so feared. And then there are no solutions.

  “Why should this uneasiness begin all of a sudden?” It’s not so long since the American frontier was a location of freedom, not unease. Not so long since Sal Paradise took off into Mexico with his pal Dean Moriarty to begin that part of his life you could call his life on the road. To re-read On the Road now is to be struck, first of all, by how well it has lasted: its prose sprightly, leaner, and less prolix than expected, its intense vision still bright. It’s a celebration of the open road, and of the open frontier as well. To cross into another language, another way of being, is to take a step toward beatitude, the worldly blessedness to which all dharma bums aspire.

  I have always mentally paired On the Road with another classic modern fable of the U.S.-Mexican border, Orson Welles’s great film Touch of Evil. The Welles picture is the dark flip-side of the Kerouac book. Like the novel, the film takes the openness of the frontier for granted: its story is made possible by the frontier’s unpoliceability. However, the movie’s bums are not of the dharma variety. Its characters are not blessed, or even seeking enlightenment. Welles’s frontier is fluid, watchful, constantly shifting focus and attention: in a word, unstable. In the famous opening take, when minute after minute passes without a cut, the inhabitants of Welles’s transit zone engage in a cryptic dance of death. The frontier’s everyday life may look banal, meaningless, and above all continuous, but it begins with the planting of a bomb and ends with the radical discontinuity of an explosion. This frontier is anonymous, denaturing; it strips humanity bare. Life, death. Not much else matters, except, maybe, alcohol. Marlene Dietrich says it best when she delivers the flawed hero’s epitaph as he floats facedown in a shallow canal: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”

  Some kind of a man. This crooked policeman had some good in him somewhere. A whore loved him, sort of. So what, he’s dead. A man steps across a line, he suffers the penalty. This man got away with it for a long time and then did not get away with it. What else is there to say? The frontier watches the come-and-go of life. It does not judge. Another man, the dead man’s antagonist, a Mexican lawman, comes to this border town with an American blonde. He, too, has crossed a line: the frontier of the skin, of racial difference. The blonde is his transgression, his crime against the natural order, in which such women are off limits to such men. She is therefore also his weakness. He is an honest man, but when his wife is attacked—drugged, framed—he stops being a lawman, puts down his badge, and becomes merely a man fighting for his woman. The frontier has stripped him of the law, of civilization. This is normal. The frontier strips you down, and then you are what you are and you do what you do. This is how it is. What does it matter what you say about people?

  The world-weariness—the word-weariness—of all this is profoundly at odds with the eager, voluble world of the Beats, and the related world of the rest of literature, in which there is nothing more important than what you say about people, except how you say it. Gravel-voiced, shoulder-shrugging Marlene Dietrich saying good-bye to dead Orson echoes and invokes an older American idea of the frontier, that laconic world where actions spoke louder than words, the Boot Hill, OK Corral, Hole-in-the-Wall, outlaw frontier of which we perhaps still think most often when we combine the words “American” and “frontier,” the westward-moving front-line, first of Natty Bumppo and later of Davy Crockett—but also of John Ford and the monosyllabic John Wayne. The West as it has come down to us is a myth of a largely pre-literate, almost pre-verbal world, a world of “kids”—Sundance, Cisco—who barely even needed names, and of “Bills”—Wild, Buffalo—for whom an epithet was enough, and at least one Bill, or Billy, who managed to be a Kid as well. Yet these men’s reputations were constructed by writers, whose names we have not remembered: fabulist Boswells to the Wild West’s desperado Johnsons, print-the-legend glamorizers who called themselves reporters. What does it matter what you say about people? Plenty, it turns out, if you’re in the legend business. The American frontier affected to despise words, but it was a landscape built of words. And it’s gone now, but the words remain. Animals, as they pass through landscape, leave their tracks behind. Stories are the tracks we leave.

  The actually existing American frontier was officially declared to have disappeared forever in 1890, when the superintendent of the census reported, “At present . . . there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” Just three years after this somewhat dry funeral oration, the Frontier Thesis was born. At a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago on July 12, 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner, the thirty-two-year-old son of a journalist and local historian from Portage, Wisconsin, delivered his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which would later be called “the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history,” and suffered the traditional fate of the pioneer: that is to say, his ideas were completely ignored. Not for long, however. His star rose rapidly, and even though he never delivered the big books based on his ideas about the frontier—books for which he nevertheless signed contracts and accepted advances—he proved a skillful academic careerist and, after being courted by colleges from Berkeley to Chicago and Cambridge, he ended up on the faculty at, if I may mention the word, Harvard.

  According to the Turner thesis,

  the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development . . . [which] has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

  Turner characterizes the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” a formulation that will not endear him to a more culturally sensitive modern audience. Less contentiously and more interestingly, he says that “at first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.” The frontier, he proposes, is the physical expression of Americanness. “The universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in th
em.” The frontier is created by this inherent Americanness, but it also creates much of what we recognize as quintessentially American. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.” And: “The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. . . . Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism.” And also: “The frontier is productive of individualism . . . [so that] the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy.”

  All this adds up to nothing less than the American character.

  To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier. The people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. . . . Movement has been [America's] dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.

  The Frontier Thesis offers a triumphalist vision of America’s coming-to-be with which it’s easy to take issue, and since Turner first presented it, almost every single one of its ideas and assumptions has been contested. Most obviously, was there ever really such a thing as a frontier of free land, a virgin territory against which pioneer America measured itself? What, then, of the conquered and even annihilated Native American tribes—even before the coming of political correctness, I found it odd to speak, in the American context, of “Indians”—who were there long before the frontier’s inexorable line began to step across their land? *33 Turner concedes that what the settlers found at the frontier was “not tabula rasa,” but his evident contempt for the displaced “savages” colors, and damages, his argument, or rather gives it a darker meaning he did not intend. “The American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.” This optimistic formulation sounds almost imperialist now. If the original inhabitants of America were trampled over and brushed aside as the frontier snaked west, then should the rest of the world, that “wider field,” now feel apprehensive of America’s intentions?

  Historians have further reasoned that the great differences between the East of the Puritans, the slavery-tainted South, and the West of gold rushes and railroads make it impossible to sustain any unified theory of frontier development—each of these is better understood as a discrete region, with its own historical dynamics. The frontier’s supposed formative effect on the American self is also disputed. The land swallowed by the frontier was by no means handed out in democratically equal parcels to the early pioneers; and as regards the formation of the American character, it was a sense of community, not of rugged individualism, that enabled much of the West to thrive, and develop toward statehood. A contemporary account suggests that

  most migrant wagon trains, for example, were composed of extended kinship networks. Moreover, as the nineteenth century wore on, the role of the federal government and large corporations grew increasingly important. Corporate investors headquartered in New York laid the railroads; government troops defeated Indian nations who refused to get out of the way of manifest destiny; even the cowboys, enshrined in popular mythology as rugged loners, were generally low-level employees of sometimes foreign-owned cattle corporations. The West has not been the land of freedom and opportunity that both Turnerian history and popular mythology would have us believe. For many women, Asians, Mexicans who suddenly found themselves residents of the United States, and, of course, Indians, the West was no promised land. *34

  So it seems that poor old Turner was a dozen ways wrong. And yet he may, like Freud, have been wrong in the right way. Medievalist historians, applying Turnerian frontier theory to the development of Europe in the Middle Ages, have found his ideas useful. The medieval European frontier, pushing outward from England into Wales and Ireland; and across central Europe; and clearing the great forests of Russia; and finally in the conflicts with Islam in the Crusader East and the Spanish Reconquista can be seen, to quote one specialist in the period, Professor C. J. Bishko of the University of Virginia, as being clearly “one frontier, a unity not in geographical contiguity but in its expression of the same deep forces of medieval dynamics and basic similarities of aims, techniques, and accomplishments.

  “The frontier,” Professor Bishko argues,

  created for history not only new lands of European culture, but new peoples—the Portuguese, the Castilians, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Great Russians, peoples who move swiftly to dominate the modern history of their respective countries. It produced a frontier literature in . . . heroic works like the Lay of Igor’s Campaign or the Poema del Cid. It created in abundance new types of medieval men and women—the frontier noble, whether he be called bogatyr, caballero, lord marcher, or knight; it produced the Military Orders which were so prominent in frontier warfare and colonization; the frontier churchman, the colonizing bishop or abbot, the missionary, the priest of the lonely frontier parish; the frontier merchant and the frontier townsman; the land speculator and colonial promoter; above all, the frontier farmer, axe-swinging, plow-guiding, or stock-trailing. These are the frontiersmen who pushed forward the edges of medieval civilization, with or without the support of their rulers; these are the men whose warlike or peaceful dealings with non-Europeans first raise for medieval thinkers the great questions of the rights of native peoples and the legitimacy of just war against them—the beginning of the controversies that in the sixteenth century were enlarged to include the Indians of the New World and led medieval-minded Spanish theologians and jurists to lay the foundations of international law and the rights of non-European man. For many medieval men, who never saw the rising royal capitals, the bustling mercantile cities, the ancient feudal domains, or the new books and universities of the medieval renaissance, the medieval frontier represented the chief best hope of life, the call to robust adventure and to the risks and rewards of courage and enterprise. And like so many things medieval, the frontier did not end in 1453, or 1492, or 1500, but passed on into the making of modern civilization. *35

  It is one of the great characteristics of frontiers to be disputed. Give me a line drawn across the world and I’ll give you an argument. We can concede the point of almost all of F. J. Turner’s adversaries’ criticisms—can agree that the frontier was differently formed and meant different things in different parts of America; that much of what went on in frontier society was more oligarchic than democratic; that the country into which it moved was “free” only in the sense that the white settlers refused to accept the previous inhabitants’ rights over the land; and that community values, corporatism, and federalism were far more important than Turner allowed—in short, we can reduce great swathes of the thesis to ashes, and still, in the midst of the smoking ruins, something substantial remains standing. The image persists of a line snaking westward across a continent, changing everything as it goes, making up a world. That line acts upon our imaginations as it acted upon the imaginations of those engaged in pushing it onward, and indeed the imaginations of those engaged in resisting its advance. In American literature from Twain to Bellow we recognize the workings of that frontier intellect whose characteristics Turner so eloquently set down, and in the dark side of modern America, in its government-hating militias and Unabombers, we recognize that dominant individualism, working for evil, whose existence he so perfectly understood. Take away the triumphalist note, and Turner’s thesis seems to foreshadow much of American history since the closing of the frontier: a history of fluctuations, in which there are periods of ener
getic engagement with the world, a pushing out of frontiers, an expansion of America’s sphere of influence, and then periods of retreat behind the fortress walls of a frontier that no longer possesses the power of movement.

  The old imperial powers, such as the British, have found it hard to adapt to their new, diminished status in the post-colonial world. For the British, their empire was a kind of transcendence, a way not only of overwhelming nations, subsuming their frontiers within the larger frontier of the pax Britannica, but also of breaking out of the frontiers of the self, casting off the reticence of England and becoming an unbuttoned, operatic people, hot and large, striding across the great stage of the world instead of the cramped boards of home. In empire’s aftermath, they have been pushed back into their box, their frontier has closed in on them like a prison, and the new opening of political and financial borders in the European Union is still viewed by them with suspicion. America, the closest thing we have to a new imperial power, is experiencing this problem in reverse; as its influence spreads across the planet, America is still battling to understand its new, post-frontier self. Beneath the surface of the American century, with its many triumphs, we may discern something unsettled, a disquiet about identity, a recurring uncertainty about the role that America should play in the world, and how it should play it.

  Time, perhaps, to propose a new thesis of the post-frontier: to assert that the emergence, in the age of mass migration, mass displacement, globalized finances and industries, of this new, permeable post-frontier is the distinguishing feature of our times, and, to use Turner’s phrase, explains our development as nothing else can. For all their permeability, the borders snaking across the world have never been of greater importance. This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines.