2 - Inverted Frontiers

Summary

We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell

us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The claims in Fitzgerald's essay ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’ (1931) have influenced the collective memory of the 1920s as an era characterized by fashion, disaffection with orthodoxies and an American cultural nationalism propelled by the growing international status of Hollywood cinema and jazz music. After the Great War – which Fitzgerald and others termed the ‘European War’, signifying the USA's aloofness – America had emerged economically and culturally dominant. Many European states were in debt to the country across the Atlantic as a result of war loans.

These are just ‘echoes’ in 1931; the hubbub of the 1920s gave way to the deprivation of the Great Depression as a consequence of the 1929 economic crash. Fitzgerald captures the dizzying excitement of America in the 1920s, yet his mode is nostalgic and by the essay's end he acknowledges that historical events have severed the Jazz Age from his viewing position in 1931. His narration of the 1920s is a combination of confidence in the dawning of an American age and the anxiety that this confident era was ‘borrowed time’. American cultural texts produced after 1945 were also subject to profound anxieties about the longevity and solidity of American power, even if the nation's economic and cultural strength seemed unmatched.

This chapter focuses on American novels and short stories that depict the post-nuclear-war United States needing the intervention and tolerance of other nations to survive, namely Whitley Strieber and James W. Kunetka's novel Warday (1984), William Tenn's short story ‘Eastward Ho!’ (1958) and Michael Swanwick's short story ‘The Feast of Saint Janis’ (1980). These texts belong to a larger genre of speculative fiction depicting the invasion of America, some of which were discussed in the preceding chapter. Seed describes this genre as a ‘long tradition in American writing’ exploring the ‘underside of manifest destiny’ (the belief that the USA's expansion across the continent was inevitable and divinely willed) and exploiting ‘the fear of failure, defeat, and subversion’. America's global position from the 1950s to the 1980s is comparable to the British Empire's in an earlier period, and the texts analysed in this chapter can be filed alongside late-nineteenth-century British visions of future catastrophe.