The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American.docx

1、The Discovery of What It Means to Be an AmericanLesson 12 The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American1 “It is a complex fate to be an American,” Henry James observed, and the principal discovery an American writer makes in Europe is just how complex this fate is. Americas history, her aspiratio

2、ns, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world yesterday and today are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know

3、exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.2 I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. (Sometimes I still do.) I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted t

4、o find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them. (I was as isolated from Negroes as I was from whites, which is what happens when a Negro begins, at bottom, to believe what white people say about him.)3 In my nece

5、ssity to find the terms on which my experience could be related to that of others, Negroes and whites, writers and non-writers, I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G. I. And I found my experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris. Like me, they had been div

6、orced from their origins, and it turned out to make very little difference that the origins of white Americans were European and mine were African they were no more at home in Europe than I was.4 The fact that I was the son of a slave and they were the sons of free men meant less, by the time we con

7、fronted each other on Europe soil, than the fact that we were both searching for our separate identities. When we had found these, we seemed to be saying, why, then, we would no longer need to cling to the shame and bitterness which had divided us so long.5 It became terribly clear in Europe, as it

8、never had been here, that we knew more about each other than any European ever could. And it also became clear that, no matter where our fathers had been born, or what they had endured, the fact of Europe had formed us both, was part of our identity and part of our inheritance.6 I had been in Paris

9、a couple of years before any of this became clear to me. When it did, I like many a writer before me upon the discovery that his props have all been knocked out from under him, suffered a species of breakdown and was carried off to the mountains of Switzerland, There, in that absolutely Hiroshima la

10、ndscape, armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter I began to try to recreate the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight.7 It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spok

11、en when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the things I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, for years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a “nigger”.8 I do not think that I could have made this reconciliation here. Once

12、I was able to accept my role as distinguished, I must say, from my “place”in the extraordinary drama which is America, I was released from the illusion that I hated America.9 The story of what can happen to an American Negro writer in Europe simply illustrates, in some relief, what can happen to any

13、 American writer there. It is not meant, of course, to imply that it happens to them all, for Europe can be very crippling too; and, anyway, a writer, when he has made his first breakthrough, has simply won a crucial skirmish in a dangerous, unending and unpredictable battle still, the breakthrough

14、is important, and the point is that an American writer, in order to achieve it, very often has to leave this country.10 The American writer, in Europe, is released, first of all, from the necessity of apologizing for himself. It is not until he is released from the habit of flexing his muscles and p

15、roving that he is just a “regular guy” that he realizes how crippling this habit has been. It is not necessary for him, there, to pretend to be something he is not, for the artist does not encounter in Europe the same suspicion he encounters here. Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists

16、, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real and as persistent as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.11 Of course, the reason for Europes comparative clarity concerning the different functions of men in society is that European society has always been divided into classes

17、 in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition of intellectual activity, of letters and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this trad

18、ition does not exist in America.12 On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately). An American writer fights his way to one of the lowest run

19、gs on the American social ladder by means of pure bull-headedness and an indescribable series of odd jobs. He probably has been a “regular fellow” for much of his adult life, and it is not easy for him to step out of that lukewarm bath.13 We must, however, consider a rather serious paradox; though A

20、merican society is more mobile than Europes, it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. This has something to do, I think, with the problem of status in American life. Where everyone has status, it is also perfectly possible, after all, that no one has. It seems

21、inevitable, in any case, that a man may become uneasy as to just what his status is.14 But Europeans have lived with the idea of status for a long time. A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as of being a good actor, and in neither case feel threatened. And this means that the actor and the w

22、aiter can have a freer and more genuinely friendly relationship in Europe than they are likely to have here. The waiter does not feel, with obscure resentment, that the actor has “made it,” and the actor is not tormented by the fear that he may find himself, tomorrow, once again a waiter.15 This lac

23、k of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel almost certainly for the first time in his life that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary feeling. He feels, so to speak, his own w

24、eight, his own value.16 It is as though he suddenly came out of a dark tunnel and found himself beneath the open sky. And, in fact, in Paris, I began to see the sky for what seemed to be the first time. It was borne in on me and it did not make me feel melancholy that this sky had been there before

25、I was born and would be there when I was dead. And it was up to me, therefore, to make of my brief opportunity the most that could be made.17 I was born in New York, but have lived only in pockets of it. In Paris, I lived in all parts of the city on the Right bank and the Left, among the bourgeoisie

26、 and among les miserables, and knew all kinds of people, from pimps and prostitutes in Pigalle to Egyptian bankers in Neuilly. This may sound extremely unprincipled or even obscurely immoral: I found it healthy. I love to talk to people, all kinds of people, and almost everyone, as I hope we still k

27、now, loves a man who loves to listen.18 This perpetual dealing with people very different from myself caused a shattering in me of preconceptions I scarcely knew I held. The writer is meeting in Europe people who are not American, whose sense of reality is entirely different from his own. They may l

28、ove or hate or admire or fear or envy this country they see it, in any case, from another point of view, and this forces the writer to reconsider many things he had always taken for granted. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable.19 This freedom, like all freedom, has it

29、s dangers and its responsibilities. One day it begins to be borne in on the writer, and with great force, that he is living in Europe as an American. If he were living there as a European, he would be living on a different and far less attractive continent.20 This crucial day may be the day on which

30、 an Algerian taxi-driver tells him how it feels to be an Algerian in Paris. It may be the day on which he passes a caf terrace and catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and troubled face of Albert Camus. Or it may be the day on which someone asks him to explain Little Rock and he begins to fee

31、l that it would be simpler and, corny as the words may sound, more honorable to go to Little Rock than sit in Europe, on an American passport, trying to explain it.21 This is a personal day, a terrible day, the day to which his entire sojourn has been tending. It is the day he realizes that there ar

32、e no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself for anything in Europe, he had been preparing himself for America. In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself, with the responsibility for his development where it always was: in his own hands.22 Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him he may be forced to but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important