Final Draft

Ed Bull
Dr. Logan
LIT 6009 – Research Portfolio
Conference Paper


Why Updike Doesn’t Do It: How the Motives of the Protagonist of The Algerine Captive Reflect an Imperialist Reconfiguration of Identity


Introduction

The last lines of the 1797 American novel The Algerine Captive by Royall Tyler strike at modern sensibilities like a betrayal. “Let no foreign emissaries inflame us against one nation, by raking into the ashes of long extinguished enmity ... Our first object is union among ourselves,” Updike Underhill the novel’s protagonist, declares, “For to no nation besides the United States can that antient saying be more emphatically applied; BY UNITING WE STAND, BY DIVIDING WE FALL” (226). A doctor enslaved by Algerian captors for six years, Updike steps back from his experience and his earlier promise to “fly to our fellow citizens in the southern states ... conjure them, in the name of humanity, to abolish a traffic, which causes it to bleed in every pore” (106). John Gardner, in his work on the novel, notes that “it is difficult to reconcile the novel’s own early declaration of principles with its conclusion” ( 37). A reader might wonder, why does Updike, when he’s home, removed from captivity, suddenly lose the sense of inclusive brotherhood that he had just come to possess?

There is the “agreeable intelligence, that the United States were about commencing a treaty with the Dey of Algiers ... which would liberate my unhappy fellow citizens” (224-225). Maybe the empathy produced by Updike’s captivity quickly evaporates when he is redeemed. It’s not often in literary criticism that a character’s motivations are considered, but doing so in this case provides a window into a particular process of identity-creation that complicates The Algerine Captive’s abolitionist message. Tracing Updike’s coming-of-age through the novel reveals a relationship with a concrete, physical Africanist presence that parallels Updike’s search for a self. Not just an Africanist presence, but multiple, distinguishable presences that present a new configuration of identity that, temporarily, includes one Other by excluding another.

Toni Morrison wrote in her essential Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that “the fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self . . . Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence” (17). And while the presence of an African-American slave in an American context might facilitate a meditation on individual white identity, the presence of a nation of Africans, a Barbary Nation, facilitates a meditation on a national, collective white identity.

The Barbary Nations were a number of North African countries; privateers from these countries would often harass shipping routes through the nearby seas (Baepler “The Barbary Captivity ...”). Early Barbary narratives can be traced back to the accounts of Abraham Browne in the mid seventeenth century. Paul Baepler has traced the origins of the term “Barbary” to the Greek, meaning “uncivilized,” and noted Saint Augustine’s appropriation of it to describe “his fellow natives [of North Africa] who resisted Roman rule and Christianity” (Baepler “White Slaves ...” 91). The Algerine Captive came along at a height of public concern, four years after the 1793 Algerian hostage crisis, when “Barbary captvity represented public humiliation and signaled the new nation’s vulnerability in international affairs (92). In fact, Tyler published the novel before one of the actual accounts it was based on had been made public (Greeson 234). The effect of the Muslim portrayal of Barbary narratives on the American psyche was deep; though numbers of slaves had a Muslim heritage, early black abolitionists with such ties would deny any Muslim influence (Austin 12-14). Elizabeth Dillon wrote of the Algerian hostage crisis of 1793 and the Tripolitan War that followed as “important moments in early US history at which many in the US saw the nation as first challenged to assert its identity as an independent actor in the international arena” (“Slaves in Algiers ...” 422).

Benilde Montgomery noted the play Slaves in Algiers, which “opposes Algiers, a clearly delineated Muslim patriarchy, and American, remembered in pastoral terms as a ‘charming place ... where ‘virtue in either sex is the only mark of superiority’” (“White Captives ...” 620). The American slaves do not submit to their masters, and Muslim slaves, inspired, instigate an Algerian Revolutionary War—even “the Dey himself undergoes a conversion” (621). There is no better way to validate American freedom, to soothe American insecurities, than to de-contextualize and show its rightness and goodness transcendent of situation. And, there is no better validation of ideology than willful propagation—it is the Algerian presence in The Slaves of Algiers that says, through ideological submission, that yes, America is good, America is better.


A Search for Identity (a Search for an Africanist Presence)

In volume One of The Algerine Captive, there is hardly a more apt way to describe Updike’s search for a vocation and home than what many might say of traveling young people ‘finding themselves.’ Before the novel proper begins, Updike introduces himself in a way that suggests he doesn’t know who he is, either; he first looks back, to his ancestry—an ancestor accused of “adultery of the heart”—as a means of introduction (15). Volume One of The Algerine Captive follows its clumsy, dense protagonist from a sheltered youth spent predominantly studying Greek through his misadventures as he tries on the roles of college student, teacher, country doctor, southern gentleman (“man of honour”), and so on (51). As a student, his taste for Greek “[eradicates] his love of labour” and he kills his father’s livestock, “covered it with green boughs, and laid it in the shade to putrify, in order to raise a swarm of bees, after the manner of Virgil” (29). Updike describes his removal from teaching as more joyful than his redemption from six years of slavery in Algiers (34). As a doctor, he encounters quackery; as a southern gentleman he is challenged to a duel. It’s a lighthearted read, but underneath of the whimsy, there is a confused young man coming-of-age and failing at it again and again.

Nowhere in these identity-seeking adventures is there an Africanist presence. In fact, there is no mention of race, with the exception of a reference in the story of a blind man Updike encounters during an apprenticeship to a doctor.

The blind man, apparently by virtue of his blindness, possesses great wisdom and faith. He discusses the differences between men, beginning, the “grosser difference between the Indian, the African, the Esquimeaux, and the white man” that are easily noticed by the sighted, to differences only perceptible to the blind man’s sharpened senses (40). Tyler seems to make a critique of the use of difference in human perception; as Updike’s “preceptor” cures the blind man, there is a “moment of importance” as the newly sighted man discovers whether or not his love is beautiful or ugly—conveniently, she is lovely, with an “evanescent blush,” but, regardless, there is the implication that the sense of sight is intrinsically a passer of judgment (41-42). The restoration of the blind man’s sight is described as a restoration of “life and usefulness” (42). The restoration of ability to perceive those “grosser” differences is the restoration of life itself (40).

When Updike takes his position on the ship bound for Africa, his first encounter with the Africanist presence, he finally grows into the character he is for the rest of the novel: an experienced abolitionist surgeon. It is also, in the presence of the slaves onboard the Sympathy, that Updike speaks in his strongest, language, “I pray a merciful God … that the miseries, the insults, and cruel woundings, I afterwards received, when a slave myself, may expiate for the inhumanity, I was necessitated to exercise, towards these MY BRETHREN OF THE HUMAN RACE” (96).

This assertive, gracious, and kind version of Updike at the end of Volume One is made possible by the Africanist presence. Updike convinces the crew to anchor offshore and let him treat the slaves’ illnesses and malnutrition. The captured Africans whom Updike treats are described in something like a grateful-slave-fantasy: “Their gratitude was excessive. When they recovered so far as to walk out, happy was he, who could, by picking a few berries, gathering the wild fruits of the country, or doing any menial services, manifest his affection for me” (100). Until this point, Updike was a lost, searching for definition and purpose—a blank slate, as Morrison might put it, “mute, meaningless”—and it is the presence of slaves that gives him an ideology to oppose, and the first place where he is a master of his situation, good at what he does, appreciated, even, in a fashion, worshipped (Morisson 59; Tyler 100-101).

Cathy Davidson, in her account of The Algerine Captive in her Revolution and the Word, pinpoints one of the most powerful aspects of Updike’s character development in his captivity to the Algerians:

The same man who despised his fellow Americans because they did not speak Greek can now comprehend the ‘universal language of benevolence’ . . . a captive himself, he discovers, for the first time in his life, a sense of community and finally learns the one language he really needs to know. (301)

It’s my position that Updike’s change began earlier—that his coming-of-age was facilitated by the Africanist presence on the Sympathy and the second Africanist presence, the Algerians, justified his abolitionism on a deeper level than demonstrating the cruelties of slavery. The Algerians are a new Other, displacing the first Africanist presence, and the community that Updike finds himself in as a captive includes the slave that was also captured on the island—the grateful black can now be included in Updike’s communal identity, no longer an Other, because the Algerians have taken that place.


A Third Other and the Reconfiguration of Racial and National Identity Politics

In his 2003 article “White Slaves, African Masters,” Paul Baepler describes the commonalities of Barbary captivity narratives: narrators are led into slavery in a strange land and report back “much as an explorer does, noting the lay of the land, the climate, the natural resources, and particularly the manner and appearance of her barbarous captors as well as the other Africans she encounters” (93). The Algerine Captive reproduces this precisely: there are a series of chapters titled “Description of the City of Algiers,” “The Government of the Algerines,” “Revenue,” “The Dey’s Forces,” and so on for a large portion of Volume Two (163-170).

Algeria is indeed treated as an uninhabited nation, at least not inhabited by humans, or at least not inhabited by humanized humans. Paul Baepler notes in the same article the portrayal of Archibald Robbins’s African captor, in an 1815 account, as a “subhuman cannibal” (94). In The Algerine Captive, Updike relates his first captors as a collective “band of men ... with monstrous tufts of hair on their upper lips”—mustaches, but we get the decisively animalistic “tufts of hair,” not only animalistic, but “monstrous” (105). The Algerians are, in Updike’s (and Tyler’s) words, “this ferocious race” (106).

Yet the Sympathy’s captive Africans are spared this dehumanization. They are emotive, in “sobbings, groans, tears, and the most heart rending bursts of sorrow and despair,” and they grasp at whatever agency they can: refusing food with the intent to control their own deaths (98-99). And, though almost all flee from the Algerian vessel, one slave refuses Updike’s suggestion to run, preferring, in grief over the capture of his son by the Sympathy, continued slavery (104). The Africanist presence of the Algerians, then, is distinct from that of the captured Africans—one is dehumanized, the other deliberately humanized; one is powerfully foreign, the other has been, in a way, Americanized though possession and passage on the Sympathy; one is strange and requiring of exploration, the other is familiar and little-needing of explanation.

Updike is captured sleeping in his tent with “the affectionate negro at [his] feet” (104). There is hardly any further mention of the fate of the slave, as an individual, beyond sneaking food to Updike on their journey to Algeria, himself also a slave of the Algerians (106). Following that, Updike makes his promise to conjure the abolishment of slavery “in the name of humanity,” implying that slaves are included in that humanity (106). When the reader returns to the story, in Volume Two, the story is narrated in the collective “we” of the captives, including, presumably, that African slave. The presence of the Algerians has shifted the definition of identity from White / Black to American / Foreign, and created a new inclusionary fold within American collective identity for the African slave. Incidentally, not just the African slave, but any exclusionaries. In his article, “Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature,” Jared Gardner notes that Federalists and Republicans often used the Barbary pirates as a unifying call (35). By bringing black slaves into the collective Western identity, this slavery becomes an injustice, not necessarily fundamentally wrong, but a wrong done to one of our own, calling for collective action for the sake of the collective good.


The Literary Creation of Transcendent Cultural Superiority

It is a tradition in captivity narratives for the captive to maintain possession of the historical voice. Through the possession of voice, the captive maintains the role of the judge, and not defendant. For example, in Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, the captive Rowlandson digresses into judgments (often theological) of her Indian captors. Paul Baepler says, of Barbary narratives:

These texts thus create a site in which once-privileged white flesh can suddenly be whipped, maimed, coerced into labor, traded for other slaves, exchanged for money, and even killed. At the same time, the captive-narrator never loses control over the range of narrative strategies he can deploy to tell his story ... the capacity to ‘decode and recode’ the situation remains under the control of the white narrator. (93)

This power is implicit in Updike’s conversation with the Mollah that seeks to convert him to Islam. A criticism of The Algerine Captive after its first publication was its weak defense of Christianity in the face of the Mollah’s proselytizing, to which Tyler replied that he was trying to “do away with the vulgar prejudices against Islamism” (Crain). Perhaps Tyler’s intent was for Updike to “reexamine his intellectual assumptions” in his exposure to the Mollah, but the greater implication of Updike’s weak defense and stubborn, unyielding faith isn’t that the “insidious” Mollah has the upper hand, but rather that Updike has no need to defend Christianity from its inherently superior position (Davidson 301; Tyler 130). What the Mollah is offering is nothing more than “fables,” “assurance,” and “sophistry” (Tyler 136).

Updike’s possession of voice in The Algerine Captive presents a literary, unspoken argument that American culture is superior, and the foreign culture of the Other is inferior. That Updike is a slave is a set-up for cultural validation: whatever the situation, the West is judge, and the Other is defendant, and this superiority transcends such worldly concerns as who is a slave and who is a master.

Earlier, I mentioned the brief individual presence of the African slave captured by the Algerians alongside Updike, and his quick disappearance into the collective ‘we’ of Volume Two. The African slave becomes invisible in his inclusion into the Western identity, never mentioned as an individual again. His inclusion, then, is not the marriage of equals, but an assimilation made possible by a validation of transcendent cultural superiority. So, The Algerine Captive both breaks down the justifications for slavery and offers new stubborn identity politics that facilitate the subjugation that would follow.

The Removal of the Foreign Presence and a Return to Normalcy

It’s been a bit of a journey, but it’s time to get back to the original question: Why does Updike step back from his abolitionist promise? By looking at his motivations through an identity-tinted lens, we can see that it is because the foreign presence is removed by his redemption, and what was once American / Foreign has once again reverted to White / Black. Without the third other of the Algerians to create the inclusive fold within the American collective identity for black slaves, that fold vanishes.

Updike’s abolitionism, then, isn’t a complete ideology: it is an ideology based on a negative definition—a ‘no’ to slavery without an understanding of the common humanity shared by slaves, without an inclusionary and egalitarian sense of identity. Updike’s abolitionism needs slavery to maintain its existence.

And so, we can see that The Algerine Captive does deconstruct the ideological core of slavery—that slavery’s victims are an Other, ‘subhuman’ or ‘monstrous’ or otherwise not deserving or needing of freedom. But while the text breaks this down, it does so in a way that simultaneously lays the framework for the subjugation that would follow slavery, through a reconfiguration of identity that validates a transcendent cultural superiority.

Recognizing these Imperialist agendas in The Algerine Captive reminds us that there are two types of Others. There is the seen Other, like the black slaves on the Sympathy—an Other that can be deconstructed by awareness, education, and empathy. But there is also an unseen Other, which is foreign and only observed through texts and proxies, like Updike’s accounts. This unseen Other is resilient because it avoids confrontation. It’s this Other that The Algerian Captive creates, the reason why its antislavery argument can be at once so powerful and, at the same time, subversive to any sense of true common humanity.


Works Cited

Austin, Allan. African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Baepler, Paul. “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture.” Early American Literature 39.2 (2004): 217-246.

Baepler, Paul. “White Slaves, African Masters.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 Islam: Enduring Myths and Changing Realities (2003): 90-111.

Crain, Caleb. Introduction. The Algerine Captive: or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill; Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines. By Royall Tyler. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “’Slaves in Algiers:’ Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage.” American Literary History 16.3 (2004): 407-436.

Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Greeson, Jennifer. “The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 12.2 (1999): 209-248.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Montgomery, Benilde. “White Captives, African Slaves: A Drama of Abolition.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27.4 African American Culture in the Eighteenth-Century (1994): 615-630.

Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Ed. Neal Salisbery. New York: Bedford Books, 1997.

Tyler, Royall. The Algerine Captive: or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill; Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines. New York: Modern Library, 2002.