Hildegarde

So, I’ve been thinking about Cheryl’s post.

And I do think it is true that, these days, a number of Western cultures have started to think as she indicated–to assume that there is not, and should not be, a common culture that everybody ought to be part of.

But I don’t think that that’s true of the United States.  If there’s one thing the US does very well, it’s cultural pluralism, as opposed to “multiculturalism.”  We take disparate cultures and turn them into just another way of being American.

In the process, we do impart a core set of assumptions–that’s a better word than “values,” I think–that tends to hold as the default position even when people verbally and explicitly reject them.

One of these is the emphasis on the individual–what matters about  you is not your “culture,”  but you, and whatever “culture” it is that you’re supposed to be part of shouldn’t get in the way of your self-determination.

I’m continually struck by the differences between my experience of Muslim students–even Muslim students who have immigrated here, rather than been born here–and what is endlessly portrayed in the European press. 

The most impassioned defense of the rights of gay people, including the right to marry, came from a Muslim girl from Albania, and a few weeks after she’d handed in that paper, she was defending a separation of church and state so extreme it would make the ACLU blush.  A young man from a Muslim family spent one of his papers denouncing Muslim clerics who advised against the use of vaccines.  I never did figure out what it was in Islam that would forbid the use of vaccines, and I suppose it isn’t general, since that was the first and last I heard of that as a specifically Muslim issue.

For the US, I don’t think the issue is if we have a common culture that all children should learn–with the exception of a few professional grievance masers, that’s understood–but just what should be included in it.

Some things are obvious–the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, for instance.  Others make the list by the sheer weight of years and masses of audience–Poe, Dickinson, The Scarlet Letter, even Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God.”

Where things get stick is the point at which we begin to approach the present, and then there are questions that need to be answered and never are.  For that, I blame the complete idiocy of the modern university departments of English.

Let me back up here a minute to make an historical note:  back at the turn of the Twentieth century and into the Thirties, or even Forties, the first great waves of American literary critics (not reviewers) started to try to construct a framework for a peculiarly American high culture.  Yvor Winters, Cleanthe Brooks, Alan Tate, and a host of others worked hard and long to define the Americanness of American writing, especially fiction and poetry writing.

And they made a very good start.  They were, however, men of their time and place, and because of that they had a very restricted field of works to use in getting them where they wanted to go.

A lot of the books we were taught as children in school–Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, for instance, and the minor Hawthorne, like The House of Seven Gables–exist as part of the canon not so much because of their intrinsic excellence, as because they amounted to the only available material in a very thin field. 

There’s some wonderful work in that field, but there’s no really first-rate American novelist until Henry James (Melville, with the exception of Moby Dick, is much better in the novellas than in the long work), and there’s some seriously bad fiction in the mix.  Take, for instance, Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.”

But the other thing that isn’t there is any work by “minority” writers.  I’m putting the word in scare quotes for a reason.  It’s not their minority status that interests me, but their position as outsiders who had to integrate and become American.

As we march toward the 21st century, this literature of becoming is vast.  Almost every ethnic group to melt in the melting pot threw up a novelist or two to write about the life of somebody with one foot in each world and the difficulties such a person faces.

If Americans share a common culture, a very important part of that common culture is this very process of becoming American, both as individuals and as groups.  First generation immigrants look back to the old country.  Their children are pulled toward the old country by their parents and towards the new one by everything else around them.  Their children think of their “ethnic pride” mostly in terms of the great food you get every year at the Greek church street fair.

In this literature of becoming American, the African-American component is unique on two fronts:  first, because it arose among people who had already been here for generations by the time they got a literary voice; and second, because unlike all the others, it does not spend half its time denigrating the people still mired in the old culture.

If there’s a stereotypical plot for the child-of-immigrants coming-of-age  novel, it’s definitely got to do with how embarrassed we all feel when Mama and Papa act like such–well, old country hicks.  If you don’t believe me about this, go check out something like, say, Good-bye, Columbus.  Or any of the early novels of Philip Roth.

African-American literature has been singular in its concern for the people who get left behind by progress. 

I don’t mean that it’s nostalgic.  It’s not. Alice Walker has no interest in going back to living in the rural Georgia where she was grown up, and she doesn’t romanticize it.  What she does do–as does Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes, among others–is recognize that some people cannot get with the program, no matter how much they may want to.  The floodgates open, and suddenly there are places in the best colleges for people like you, jobs at the best companies, partnerships at the best lawfirms. All you have to do is be bright enough and brave enough and dedicated enough to take hold of them.

But some people are not bright enough.  Some people are not brave enough.  And some people are just not young enough.

If English departments were still doing what they should be doing–where is Yvor Winters when you need him?–there’s be work out there tracing the various becoming-American novels and short stories and comparing and contrasting them. 

As far as I know, there isn’t.

But I do know that if you asked a hundred people on the street, they’d make that particular narrative as an essential part of “American culture” that they’d expect everybody to know at least something about.

So, to get back to where I started:  I don’t think the problem in the US is that we lack commitment to a common culture.

I think it’s that we seem to have allowed “majority rules” to trump every other possible consideration, in every single area of life.

And it makes me nuts.