The Fusion Vat: American Literature and Culture At the End of the Twentieth Century

"I want to rearrange the stars," writer Bharati Mukherjee says in an interview for the US public television series "The World of Ideas." And indeed, in recent years the marks by which so many of us understand American lite­rature — and by which we understand the idea of America — have shifted, and they continue to shift. Even as some of the literatures of America develop a new sense of place and history, a sense of displacement and alienation are more a part of writing than ever before.

In that same interview with Mukherjee, she summons an apt image to describe the process by which American culture is continually transformed and renewed: fusion vat. New peoples, ideas and traditions come to the United States and change the culture that is already there. And, at the same time, these cultures, ideas and traditions are themselves transformed.

Mukherjee contrasts her image of a fusion vat with a traditional model historians have often used to describe American culture: a melting pot. The image of the melting pot carries with it connotations of mass immigration to the U.S. in the 19th century, a time when immigrants were expected, above all else, to assimilate to the culture they found there and to surrender what made them differ­ent. Needless to say, the contributions of cultures from around the world have shaped American culture in very important ways. The image of the fusion vat is one that is, I would argue, more appropriate to our times: it cap­tures the dynamic quality of the transformations that con­tinue to take place, the sense of technology and speed, the violent clashes of disparate elements which are so much a part of American culture — and American literature.

"American" Literature

In the centuries since the European colonization of the Americas began, literature has been part of an attempt to forge a discernible American identity. For centuries, writ­ers have implicitly and explicitly dealt with questions like, What is America? What is American literature? Writers who understood literature in terms of a European tradi­tion either tried to imitate that tradition or, working within it, to establish American voice, American themes — some­thing which set the New World apart from Europe. And more than a few American writers have been drawn back to Europe: Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound are just a few of the most well-known writers from the U. S. who returned to Europe in pursuit of its cultural heri­tage.

But America is not Europe. And, as America is forced to come to terms with its place within the cultures and histories of all of the world, so American literature comes into a new context as well. At the same time, in recent years the ability to re-examine American identity, to un­cover traditions that had been neglected as being part of a single tradition of American literature — these have given a new richness and a new breadth to what we can call American literature: Native American myths (some of which existed long before Europeans "discovered" the Americas), slave narratives, and the writing by women who were not considered important in the past have rede­fined and rejuvenated writing in truly remarkable ways.

The phrase American literature itself asks for scrutiny: does it only mean literature of the United States? North America? The Americas? Questions like the following con­tinue to reshape the meaning of the term: How much a part of Ameirican literature is Caribbean literature? What of the literature of the border regions? Literature does not know boundaries the same way politics does.

And if American literature only means literature of the United States, what can we make of writers like Bharati Mukherjee? She was born in Calcutta, India, studied at the University of Iowa, lived for a time in Canada, in the U.S. earned the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 for her story collection The Middleman and Other Stories, and now she lives and teaches in Berkeley, Cali­fornia. By her own definition, she is an American writer.

Literature /Literatures

The attempt to define a single thread of literature and claim that this — and this alone — is American literature would require undoing centuries of history, and it would require excluding scores of writers and the traditions from which they have emerged, the styles they have borrowed. But a desire to hold onto a central core of Great Books is part of a debate in American academia which has raged for years over what works of writing merit study at the university level — and part of the larger question as to what constitutes Literature. One answer, in overly simplified form, is that there is no literature, that privileging the merit of one work over the other is reactionary; instead we have only texts of equal merit. The so-called culture wars have foregrounded debates over literature and art. Within the U.S., an attempt to hold onto —- or break down — a traditional identity is a struggle visible in all levels of society. The range of influences that shape American litera­ture makes it more difficult to define in any clear way what different books are — or even a single book is. Bob Dunn, who reviews contemporary fiction for the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere, addresses this problem in discussing one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the 1980s, Toni Morrison's Beloved. Beloved, the story of a woman who, to keep her daughter from slavery in the ante-bellum South, murders her, is a mix of historical fiction, ghost tale, regionalist local detail, Faulknerian fatalism, Latin American-style "magical realism," socio­logical understanding, traditional human pathos and drama, and mythic illumination of the problem of race in America. "Ultimately," Dunn says, "the book transcends classification." In 1993 Morrison received the Nobel Prize for literature.

(Паращук В. Ю., Грицюк Л. Ф., Стівен Б. Саум.

Практичний курс англійської мови [Текст]

/ В. Ю. Паращук, Л. Ф. Грицюк, Б. Саум Стівен.

– Київ : Знання. 1999. – C. 10 – 13 с.)