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In other words, Howells anticipates frequently Nora’s despair that we have replaced “real environments of memory” (by which he means the groups and institutions that naturally and effortlessly passed down the collective memory of the nation-state) with “sites of memory,” historical practices and tangible artifacts which have lost their meaning, becoming simple reinventions of what we can no longer genuinely experience (2)—what Jean Baudrillard calls “simulations” or, as Frederic Jameson puts it, the “vast collection of images, a multitudinous simulacrum” that has usurped “ ‘real’ history” (20–21). However, while Howells often writes withering attacks of the potentially dangerous ramifications associated with America’s stunted sense of history, thus illustrating what thinkers like Jameson and Baudrillard would point out generations later, his late work increasingly questions the notion that any “real” access to the past actually exists—whether we have ever been able “to seek History” by any other way than “pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (Jameson 28). Much of Howells’s late work suggests that the transmission of the past has always been mediated in one way or another, has always shared more in common with fiction that with “real” history.
Nonetheless, Nora’s sense of supercession is illustrative of Howells’s America if we look at the variety of activities in which the nation’s citizens participated throughout the nineteenth century; endeavors that reveal an attempt to lessen the mnemonic anxiety and identity crisis that accompanied the powerful forces of modernization, as well as to slow the pace of inevitable change or to protect outmoded ideologies and social structures. Lauren Berlant calls this “the National Symbolic,” the various discursive practices that “transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively held history” (20). Studying the years between 1870 and 1915, historian Michael Kammen claims that one cannot help but be awed “by the nation’s arsenal of memory devices and by the astonishing diversity of its stockpile” (94). These “memory devices” used to construct the National Symbolic include a flurry of scholarly work on authors considered the cornerstones of Western civilization, such as Dante, Homer, Virgil, and Goethe;2 a surging publication of personal recollection and autobiographies from public figures;3 a boom in the construction of monuments and memorials;4 a noticeable expansion of scholarship on American folklore;5