Many people's definition of what it means to be an American closely orbits around a tightly packed sphere of vague concepts: idealized simplicity, anti-internationalism, very basic religiosity, de-ethnicized Whiteness and oceans of sentimentality but almost no melancholy of the contemplative sort (and when the human situation is considered in full, surely some amount of laughing sadness seems required).
To the extent a person strays from this behavioral template they are, maybe, something else besides an American in the usual way that label is used. .d.
---------- (Oh, Dee, its always nice to hear from you...)
The question of identity in the social and cultural sense is complex---and it was ever present. Of all the other flows and influences, the late 50s and early 60s in the US were saturated with a `new' internationalism of culture, i.e. mostly a European modernity. Obvious US contributions were jazz and the visual arts (film, painting, design, etc). The effect (from my perspective as a student) was an internationalization of cultural identity in which no single source could lay hegemonic claim or dominance, despite the also obvious fact that the US was in fact dominant.
This is a paradoxical condition where modernity seen from within a national sphere appears international and in mixed ways foreign. Yet in the international sphere each national contribution appears as that, uniquely national.
In any event that particular period, from my view was marked by a high point in the internationalization of culture. And this post-WWII phenomenon was understood in the US as a second phase, with the first coming in the post-WWI era, usually noted in art history by the 1913 Armory Show. Interestingly (as I discovered much later), Europe was going through its own angst over internationalism and modernity---echoed in Gide, Mann, and Russell's reactions to WWI. They were all of the same class, haute bourgeoisie and attempted in their own ways to re-assert at least a `national' flavor to their writing and interests. If not directly, then in the extraordinary self-consciousness of a national identity. I haven't read enough of the Italians of the period to know, but I suspect that they were also divided like the French, Germans and Brits. But more importantly, I now think (from my Strauss studies) that the rise of post-WWI fascism was intimately intertwined with the internal collapse of national identities. Since all these countries were heavily structured by economic class, the industrialized prolitariat coming back from the trenchs by the millions began to dissolve that class structure---formenting an internal crisis of each country's political economy at the same time. There are hints of all this in both Gide and Mann's journals.
Again, without any background reading at all, I also suspect that the authoritarian turns in the Russian revolution in its post-Lenin Twenties under Stalin was driven by an internal national identity crisis---threatened not just by western Euro-US power, but also by the dissolution of a uniquely Russian cast to the emerging national state (collapse of the aristocratic class and the rise of the industrial prolitariat)---while Russia simultaneously formented an internationalization of communist revolution in China and French Indochina. (You can see this in the fictionalized account of the first phase of the Chinese revolution in Malraux's Man's Fate, L'Condition Humain where many characters are not Chinese, but French, English, Russian, and Japanese). It seems that a broad examination of the early USSR with a western high cultural view needs to be written. For example, I don't think that the fact that Trotsky was probably the most western and most eridite of the core group was an accident---or that his ouster from power and eventual assassination were not intimately related to his own identity as an international figure. In other words he lived within a high international modernity, just as Marx did---and Stalin definitly did not.
In the meantime, the US underwent a large scale reactionary and oppressive phase in the Twenties under the general anti-communist, anti-union, anti-foriegn, anti-immigrant round ups. Then there were Magnolias and lynchings. An extraordinary provincialism after the WWI. Why on earth was NYC's Cotton Club done up as a log cabin, as if the goings on in the slave quarters was a cultural commentary?
[There had been eariler periods of US internationalism, which I discovered by tracing the famous American painters of the civil war era: Homer, Whistler and Eakins. They all went to France and their realism was heavily influence by Courbet. As Courbet's friend Baudelaire said they wanted to express `the heroism of modern life', which they did. It also seems to me that Baudelair's Paris Spleen shares a remarkable resemblence to Stephen Crane's later short stories. Read Baudelair's The Poor Child's Toy and Crane's An Ominous Baby to see the correspondence. Not coincidently all were contemporaries of Karl Marx...]
These are multiple levels of historical forces that I haven't seen much written about in quite the way that I would like to read and it seems to me to be a level of western history that needs to be re-examined and re-written with a heavily marxist and unapologtic cultural-analytic attitude. So far, most of the things I've read don't deal with all the levels and their simultaneity that bring life to the events and the world. Oh, well. I seriously miss writers like Andre Malraux, Arnold Hauser and Octavio Paz who attempted in various ways to sketch out the simultaneity of material and cultural forces that converge on different peoples. (Denis Redmond will mention Ardono..) I mean David Harvey and Fredric Jameson are great, but somehow they don't quite cover all the basis I want to see...
I first became aware of the tip of the iceberg (of internationalism) of this level and its vast undercarriage (of national identity) by studying early modern art history where you can see the internationalization in national schools of painting that reflect all these currents. For example, it is curious that the Russians were at the very apex of international modernity pre-WWI and the very early Twenties and completely abandoned these international modernist styles by the end of the decade. The usual explaination in the west is the authoritarian regime under Stalin and the politically correct oppression of socialist realism for the masses. But that doesn't explain why these modern works had become suddenly decadent, bourgeois and capitalist, when just a few years before they were revolutionary and anti-bourgeois. Certainly Soviet film making persisted with its modernity a few more years. Well, yet another chapter that needs a re-write. (Chris?)
I am going on this historical rant because I think we are in the middle of another such crisis in the US, as is much of Europe, and no doubt China and India---not to leave out Russia and South Africa. The French riots over the National Assembly's youth employment act has remarkable resouncence to the US Congress and its heinous immigration act. The resouncance I see is a cross current or rip tide between national identity (labor) under the pressures of an international neoliberal hegemon (capital). I know that's vague but...
[Fuck, will some one please shoot the entire US executive branch, half the US Congress, and the Supreme Court so we can get back to real life...]
Wojtek says, ``Umberto Eco argues that `hyper-real' imitation of European art (and kitsch) is the quintessence of Americanism''.
Well, at the historical moment I was referring to, US painters were not imitating European art but surmounting it through Euro ex-patriot surrealism, imported during WWII by Euro refugees. The Americans re-inventing it as the painterly gesture, i.e. abstract expressionism. Thomas Wolfe made fun of this movement in his essay, The Painted Word, but he had no idea what he was looking at, regardless of his smarmy expose of rich curators like Peggy Guggenheim. (Believe me, I wish I had a patron like her...) On this turn of the cultural historical screw it was the European painters during the 50s who imitated the American painters right on down to the Warhol's mass cultural icons as the ultimate kitsch. Meanwhile it was the Europeans who supported US jazzmen during the same period with international tours that kept them in grits and cornbread...okay, heron and gin---whatever.
As for Umberto, well he should know, since he directly appropriated the frog structuralism of Levi-Straus and Piaget as The Theory of Semiotics where you can find diagrams that are turned back into narratives by subsequent frogs Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Hyper-real imitations (that is abstract narratives without the national identity voice) are the functional mode of an international style. It isn't just the Americans...
Which brings me back to the current (too long) book I am reading at the moment, Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment (many thanks to whoever it was who suggested this book). What makes the book fascinating is precisely the same process of an internationalization of culture, in this case political philosophy, that ultimately culminated in the French Revolution---the dawn of modernity.
Among all the possible parallels between 17thC Europe and the US in the mid-20thC there is the possibility that my exposure to the Euro literary tradition was simply a consequence of the explosion of new translations available for the first time in the US in cheap paperback copies in mass distribution. My favorite publishers at the time were New Directions, Viking, and Harper Torchbook...
God I miss doing the US-Euro postmodern rant. Can we please kill the US government soon, so we can get back to discussing reality?
CG