Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 157This ventriloquized thought of Levov’s indirectly reveals the very
kind of ideologically charged orientation to space that Williams
critiques, with an idea of the country as a wide open space that is
separated from the noise and bustle of the city. This duality also
emerges when the “Old South” is contrasted with Newark—a juxta-
position that has interesting historical resonance, given that most of
the black employees working in Levov’s factory would have migrated
from the South in the 1950s and early 1960s. So already we begin
to see coming into view a vague nexus that links Levov, through the
process of production in his factory, to a place hundreds of miles
from the urban space of Newark. However, although the ghosts of
slavery, share-cropping, poverty, and segregation haunt the story of
this migration, they are completely effaced in Levov’s mythical pas-
toral narrative. Another important factor in Levov’s depiction of the
“open” country is the manner in which it omits the historical exis-
tence of America’s indigenous tribes, who were displaced and erad-
icated from the land while it was “cleared.” As with the case of the
impoverished blacks f leeing from a long histor y of poverty, rooted in
slavery, this portion of the nation’s history is also expunged and (in
Zuckerman’s words) “leapfrogged” over. Indeed, the vast tracts of
land he mentions while pondering upon where to build his pastoral
retreat (Maple-Wood and South Orange) are described as “frontier”
territory: an appellation that suggests emptiness and purity.
This mythical conception of the great American outdoors as a
place “untouched” by civilization—as a place previously uninhab-
ited by people deserving of the designation “civilized”—has a long
tradition in American culture, particularly in its popular literary
heritage (a conception that is of course at odds with the other more
identifiably “cosmopolitan” aspects of the American egalitarian
ideal mentioned above). Emerson’s writings provide a good example.
Citing the words of Thoreau, Emerson reasons:
In every part of Great Britain [... ] are discovered traces of the Romans,
their funeral urns, their camps, their roads, their dwellings. But New
England, at least, is not based on any Roman ruins. We [Americans]
have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of a former
civilization.^67