and consequently, we see Adams refer, again and again, to the Founders as fictional constructs. We see this in the references to the portrayal of Washington as “the best actor of presidency we have ever had” but even more so in the description of “a Character of Convention,” a phrase we should read in the most literal sense. Rush goes a step further in the comparison with the guinea, the object passed through numerous hands in the 1767 novel Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea. The point is clear: the Founders are imaginative fictions, characters in the specifically literary sense, whose circulation is essential for their constitution and whose significance in the narrative often results from narrative elements clustered around them. Narratological theory stresses this point by renaming characters “actants” to mark their structural position, an observation Adams approaches when he reflects on the “concurrence, if not a combination, of events” that links together Burr, Dayton, Miranda, Hull, and Wilkinson. This conjunction “strikes” Adams, as if he is unsure what this means, but he describes a process of overdetermination whereby characters draw semic material from the confluence of events. Here, it seems, one of the actants—perhaps Burr?—takes greater cohesion as it draws together the semiotic resources in circulation in late 1805. Instead of the usual historicist debunking (there are myths, but here are some facts that indicate the deeper truth) which reaffirms Founders Chic, Adams verges on formulating the reverse procedure: there are facts, yes, but here are some myths that indicate the deeper truth. The point, of course, is that we are not trying to get at an empirical phenomenon but rather at some very different kind of cultural manifestation, one requiring different methods and theoretical assumptions.
In this light, the very phenomenon of Founders Chic speaks to a disciplinary confusion that The Traumatic Colonel seeks to address. Rather than treating the Founders as actual agents who need to be more aggressively historicized with empirical data (true, but in a more limited sphere than often assumed), our starting point is that they are primarily imaginative, phantasmatic phenomena best explored from a broadly literary perspective—as a broad characterological drama whose plot often remains obscure. Accordingly, our approach in this work insists on a parallactic division of what we have been calling the historical and the literary. In recent theoretical work, the idea of the parallax has been most notably explored in Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View. Žižek’s immediate inspiration is the Japanese Marxist philosopher Kojin Karatani, who takes the term from Kant, who himself borrowed it from early modern astronomy. In its original formulation, “parallax” designated the change in position or direction of an object as seen from two different points: the parallax of a star or a planet was necessary for calculating its exact location. Used metaphorically, the term refers to the gap in perceptions of the same thing from different vantage points. Kant used the metaphor philosophically to denote the gap between common sense “from the standpoint of my own” and “from the point of view of others.” Hugh Henry Brackenridge, in the final volume of Modern Chivalry (1815), used the same metaphor to describe the gap between the political-theoretical differentiation of humans and animals and, from a more remote perspective, their similarities. For Karatani, the parallax view becomes the foundation for the proper form of criticism—what he calls transcritique—which is not analysis from a priori systems of thought (i.e., the application of theory) but rather a movement between two different theoretical registers—resulting in an antinomy. Philosophy proper is this transcritical reading of parallactic contexts—in Karatani’s project, a reading of Kantian philosophy alongside a seemingly incompatible Marxian political economy. Žižek expands this view of the parallax to propose it as the proper mode and orientation for cultural criticism. The parallax, understood as the constitutive rift in human perception, opens up the consideration of a host of theoretical aporia—he speaks of “an entire series of the modes of parallax in different domains of modern theory”—the most important of which is the parallax between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism.8
In the most vulgar sense, the impulse to juxtapose these two theories aims to address the gap between the interior, psychic constitution of the subject and the objective, material forces of the historical moment. It is this gap that ideology always seeks to fill, stressing the continuities between the two spheres. A parallactic analysis, by contrast, resists such closure, insisting that the analysis of these two perspectives can only proceed if initially kept distinct. To take the Founding Fathers as an illustration, the problem with Founders Chic is that it collapses the distinction between the mythical-literary and the historical-empirical, as in the attempts to find the “man in the myth.” A parallactic view of the Founders would instead emphasize their mythical stature and accept this as one perspective worthy of analysis and requiring careful juxtaposition with, say, biographical or sociopolitical details. The point is not to fold the one into the other in an effort at synthesis but to explore how the parallactic distance between the two better helps us identify what we are seeing.
For Žižek, Jacques Lacan’s neologism “extimacy” best identifies this gap. The extimacy concept aims to solve the conundrum of theorizing “a cause that is both exceptional to the social field . . . and internal to the field.”9 As Molly Anne Rothenberg describes it in The Excessive Subject, the extimate addresses the aporia separating theories of immanent and external causation in the social field. The former, for which Michel Foucault serves as the most influential example, “treats causes and effects as mutually conditioning one another within the same field.”10 The latter, exemplified by certain kinds of Marxism, finds causes external to effects. Thus, an immanent account of the Founders might find a discourse of power unfolding and accumulating around a Thomas Jefferson, while an external account might posit a social system—say, the plantocracy—as the social cause for Jefferson’s hyperbolic discursive status. The problem with each position is its failure to address the other, particularly by considering the shift of the phenomenon in question from intimate to extimate spheres. The bind becomes clear in the frustrated musings of Adams and Rush. At times, they want to stick with an immanent analysis, as when they discuss Washington’s ten talents or his theatrical abilities: he is great because he performs greatness, has great skills, and so on. At other times, they opt for an external analysis—for instance in arguing that politicians decided to elevate the Virginian for political purposes. The inadequacy of these explanations comes through in their more complex attempts at commentary, as when Adams describes the mysterious aura of Washington. In this insightful argument, it is not that admirers of Washington perceive something properly within him, nor that he is puffed up by any particular social forces, but rather that Washington names an oracular site in which certain qualities are read and then received back again and so on in a constant feedback loop. Extimacy names this process, which is neither properly external nor internal and which exists precisely because “intimate” discourses must be externalized. In contrast to intimacy, which associates subjectivity with the private, interior self, extimacy, as Mladen Dolar puts it, names “the point of exteriority in the very kernel of interiority, the point where the innermost touches the outermost, where materiality is the most intimate.”11 Such is the point of Žižek’s most fundamental claim: “the Unconscious is outside, not hidden in any unfathomable depths—or to quote the X Files motto: the truth is out there.”12
The Traumatic Colonel ventures the first steps in an extimate history of the Founders, along the lines of what Adams called “Character[s] of Convention.” What is their history? When were they created and in relation to what narratives, what other characters? Chapter 1 begins with this task, offering a basic literary history of the formation of the four major figures: Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Jefferson. The emergence of this particular constellation was slow and halting and extends from a preliminary moment in the mid-1770s to the much more significant decade from about 1796 to 1806. As we outline this argument, it will become clear that we take the literary dimensions of our argument seriously, for we are convinced that imaginative works can help us better situate and understand the formulation of the Founders. Accordingly, we follow our initial speculations on the Founders with detailed explorations of two early American novels—Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond (1799) in chapter 2 and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801) in chapter 3—as further guides to this process. Brown’s novel, we argue, predicts
