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SPENGLER
Why Americans can't laugh at American culture
Laughing at one's own cultural quirks is one of the grand themes of European literature, from Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote to Luis Bunuel's Viridiana, from Fernando de Roja's La Celestina to Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. Sadly, Americans cannot laugh at their own culture. That deficiency, in fact, is the defining trait of American culture, omitted from my November 18 essay (What is American culture?) With the help of the readers of Asia Times Online, I now can demonstrate this fact experimentally. I am grateful to the readers who wrote to denounce the essay as "a disappointing screed", "classist piffle", a "black mark on the rest of the articles on your site", "trash", "garbage", "condescending", "plain silly", "boorish", and so forth. They have proven that in the matter of culture, Americans cannot take a joke.
To be precise, the problem is not that Americans do not like to laugh at their own culture, but that they cannot, whether they wish to or not. At first glance that seems out of character. As individuals, Americans will laugh at themselves all day long. So much do they love self-deprecating humor that few politicians attain high office without a knack for it. "I sure hope you guys are Republicans," Reagan told the surgeons as they wheeled him into the operating room after John Hinckley shot him. Nevertheless, they cannot laugh at their culture. Consider American humor in general: a tell-tale trait of it is the absence of "American" jokes, that is, jokes about Americans as such. Americans tell ethnic jokes, regional jokes, or generic jokes. But there are no characteristically American jokes, for the simple reason that there are no American characteristics.
By contrast, jokes that other nations tell about themselves refer to cultural characteristics whose instant recognition makes them funny. For example:
Australia: Lassitude. A brewery worker drowns in a beer vat. The shop steward breaks the sad news to his wife, who asks, "Did he suffer much?" "I don't think so. He got out to go to the loo four times."
Spain: Honor. A member of the minor nobility in Spain is dying. His confessor asks, "Would you like to confess your sins?" "I have no sins." "Then would you like to forgive your enemies?" "I have no enemies. I killed them all."
Arabia: Megalomania. A man goes to the caliph and announces that he is God. "Careful what you say," warns the caliph, "A man came to me last year claiming to be a prophet and I put him to death." "It is well you did so," the lunatic replies, "for I did not send him."
France: Pretension. "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo." (Jean Cocteau).
Scandinavia: Taciturnity. After drinking for hours in silence, Sven says to Ole, "Skol." Ole replies, "Did you come here to drink or to talk?"
England: Diffidence. An Englishmen comes home and discovers his wife in bed with his best friend. "I have to do this, Nigel," says the cuckold, "but whatever possessed you?"
Ireland: Drinking (anything involving a leprechaun and a pint of Guinness will do).
To the contrary, not being American is the premise of the most characteristically "American" jokes. For example: The Lone Ranger (a Western sort of knight errant) and Tonto (his faithful American Indian companion) ride through a deep valley, when suddenly an army of hostile Apaches appears on the ridges above them. "Kimosavee, looks like we're in trouble," says the Ranger. Tonto replies: "What do you mean 'we', paleface?" Americans cannot laugh at their "culture" because they do not quite know what it is. They laugh at themselves as individuals, but cannot laugh at themselves as a people. One cannot laugh at what one cannot define, and definition is the essence of humor; it is the flash of unexpected recognition that evokes laughter. In post-modern usage, humor is essentialist, or to say the same thing, post-modernism is humorless.
Trivial as these examples may seem, I will explain later why precisely the same criteria apply to high culture. Bear with me for a few paragraphs. Lampooning T S Eliot's resume of English culture, I listed some irritating features of American life as a reductio ad absurdum on November 18. As Asia Times Online readers protested, it was quite unfair to reduce American culture to weak tea, oak-flavored chardonnay, driving slowly in the fast lane, shopping malls, and so forth. Reading over their remonstrations, however, it is striking how little they agree among themselves as to what American culture might be. Of course I was "wrong". But what is right? The question would not even come up in other countries. Ask an Englishman who epitomizes his culture, and without hesitation he will reply: "Shakespeare." From other Europeans one will hear Goethe, Dante, Pushkin, Hugo, Ibsen, Cervantes, and so forth.
But who defines American culture? Is it Herman Melville and his white whale, which so impressed Joe Nichols? Richard Einhorn of New York believes that Annie Hall compares favorably with Moliere. Will Hawkes of New York invokes Noam Chomsky's claim that memorization of baseball statistics demonstrates a high degree of intelligence. A Mr Liebman of North Carolina prefers Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, as well as mystery writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They agree with each other no more than they do with me. Let us begin with American 1978 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Saul Bellow of Chicago. Bellow, not incidentally, is a denizen of the Straussian inner sanctum at the University of Chicago (his novel Ravenstein portrays his friend the late Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss' best-known popularizer). But Bellow has done much more than impress the Swedish Academy. England's cleverest writer of fiction, Martin Amis, hails Bellow as "the supreme American novelist" in the December issue of Atlantic Monthly. In fact, Amis takes us straight to the heart of the matter at hand. The American novel is "dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow," Amis writes. "It transpired that there was something uniquely riveting about the conflict between the Jewish sensibility and the temptations - the inevitabilities - of materialist America. As one Bellow narrator puts it, 'At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life'. The archaic rule is somber, blood-bound, guilt-torn, renunciatory, and transcendental; the facts of life are atomized, unreflecting, and unclean."
America is not the subject of Bellow's joke; America is the "atomized" and "unreflecting" melting pot into which Bellow's hapless heroes dissolve. There is no "there" there, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland. The melting pot offers no solace. It is more like the Button-Maker's casting ladle in Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, in which Peer's soul will be melted down, leaving no trace of the original. It should be no surprise that Bellow gravitated toward Leo Strauss and his circle, Eurocentric intellectual snobs to their fingertips. After all, his literary subject is the crash of Old World sensibilities against American materialism.
"What do you mean 'we', paleface?," rejoined Tonto. Americans cannot laugh at themselves as a "we", because there is no "we" to laugh at. "American" jokes invert the problem; the punch-line depends on recognition that there is no "we" to begin with. The outsider is the premise of the characteristically "American" joke, that is, the joke that requires an American setting: Tonto, Augie March, the Scandinavian residents of Lake Woebegone or Fargo, the Clintons of Arkansas. The same genetic trait defines the Lone-Ranger-and-Tonto joke and the Nobel Prize winning novel. Americans cannot tell jokes about their own culture because there is no "there" there. It is "atomized", in Amis' word. That is why they make jokes about other cultures, in Bellow's case Jewish culture. There is no essential American to put in the joke, so they laugh at Tonto or Augie.
That is true with the best of intentions, and all intentions are not of the best. Some Americans resemble Moliere's bourgeois gentleman, who was pleased to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. These people are pleased to discover that they have had a culture all along without knowing - cinema, situation comedies, pulp magazines - and repair to the American studies department of a major university to write a doctoral dissertation. We shall leave these unfortunates to their fate. The Kulturnationen often choose as their national poet the one who makes them laugh the best at their own culture. Cervantes, whose Don Quixote lampoons Spanish chivalry, is the clearest case. Dante Alighieri invented an Inferno full of the foibles of the Italians. One also might mention in this context Gilbert and Sullivan, the lampooners of English silliness. Heinrich Heine did the same for the Germans, Ibsen for the Scandinavians, and so forth. Among the Europeans, only the French cannot laugh at their high culture, for it was a political instrument from the time of Cardinal Richelieu, as Anthony Levi has shown.
My interest in Bellow is strictly diagnostic, as the obsessions of Jewish immigrants with materialistic America never have concerned me. But Amis is correct to crown him the rightful king of American literature. Critics of an older generation, eg, the Jewish immigrants Harold Bloom and Alfred Kazin, held Walt Whitman to be the definitive American poet. They oozed with adoration for an American ideal just beyond their grasp. Bellow popped their sentimental soap-bubble, for the reading public now recognizes Bloom and Kazin as characters in a Bellow story. Woody Allen? He is a madman who thinks he is Saul Bellow.
American writers only can produce comedy (George Bush, tragic character, November 25). Mark Twain, America's most endearing writer because the least pretentious, forewarns the reader of Huckleberry Finn that he has written Don Quixote in dialect. American efforts at tragedy miscarry. Contrast two recent American reworkings of the Odyssey. The Coen brothers' film O Brother Where Art Thou? gives us a madcap Odyssey with everything in reverse; Homer's fast-talking hero is a bungling escaped convict who can do nothing right, Penelope wants to be rid of him and remarry as quickly as possible, and so forth. It is slender stuff, but delightful in its own sphere. Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain, which sets the Odysseus tale in the American Civil War, makes the skin crawl.
Irate readers of Asia Times Online will forgive me for making them experimental subjects. Not to have a national culture is both a blessing and a curse. Culture restricts our vision of the future to what we drag with us from the past. It is destiny, too often a tragic one. If we identify culture in the loosest sense with language, then we must admit that the end of nearly every culture is a miserable one. Of the 6,000 or so distinct languages spoken today, I have observed before, two become extinct every week. Whole peoples go to their death in the hopeless defense of a culture which long since should have been relegated to the libraries. America has no high culture, but it has the capacity to reinvent itself. Where is the high culture of the Europeans? Its highest expression was classical music. Asian classical musicians now comprise more than half the student body at the great American conservatories. They bear the remnants of the high culture, even while it falls into neglect in the lands of its origin.
America cannot understand the culture of other nations, because it has no culture of its own. In my November 25 essay I stated the same idea in a different way, namely, that the American tragedy is the incapacity of Americans to understand the tragedy of other peoples. Is America condemned forever to win the war and lose the peace? Will the force of American arms always roll the stone uphill like Sisyphus, while the weakness of American diplomacy always sends it crashing down again? Is there some link between this tragic pattern of American history, and the way Americans see (or fail to see) the world - that is, American culture? At stake is something far greater than Americans' preferred entertainment. For all the military power at its command, America is uniquely under-equipped to fight a civilizational, that is, a cultural war.
