Previous convictions

August 19, 1997

My grandfather was a commissioner on the Chicago Stock Yards. But like Pip, I had great expectations, and they were called "Europe." Like so many children of the University of Chicago-Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag-I aspired not just to know Europe but to be part of it. So I studied in Italy, put myself on a quoting basis with Dante, Leopardi, Milton and Coleridge, and have made it my business to provide young Americans with European books-first as an editor at University of Minnesota Press and now at Harvard University Press.

Recently, however, something has happened. I find myself drawn to Nashville and to Nanjing, and tired of Tuscany and Provence. And not just tired, but worried by a dangerous idea that has forced me to rethink my own Europhilia: none other than the idea of Europe.

It started in Portugal in September 1993 at a conference organised by the EU. The meeting had been called to devise an anthology for teaching literature from Calabria to Connemara, and to sort out the differences, quite sizeable as it turned out, in methods of lecturing and grading papers. The EU, which started humbly as a common market, had begun to conceive of its unity in more cultural and spiritual terms.

My role was to comment on how I, as an American, might react to European efforts to achieve cultural unity. As a card-carrying Europhile, I was expected to bless the club that had invited me in, albeit on a guest pass. Well, I may be a Europhile, but I am also a midwesterner. I have picked corn, baled hay, driven a tractor. Like Joe Diffie, I can sing the beauty of "John Deere Green."

Already in 1989, shortly after the Berlin Wall came down, the historian Fritz Stern wrote that Mikhail Gorbachev's phrase "the common house of Europe" implicitly replaces the earlier term "the west," with its connotation that the US is a principal participant in that world. Gorbachev was actually quite explicit about it: "A serious threat is hovering over European culture. The threat emanates from an onslaught of 'mass culture' from across the Atlantic."

While I was at that meeting in Portugal in 1993 there was acute tension between US and EU officials in the build-up to the deadline for completing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt). French film director Claude Berri said that "if the Gatt deal goes through as proposed, European culture is finished." In the end the US accepted a treaty in which Europe kept barriers against certain US cultural products.

As one of those cultural products, I felt the awkwardness of my position. The setting highlighted that feeling. We were on Europe's historical margin, far from the centre of any new imperium. But Portugal now has a baby TGV (one of the key symbols of postwar Europe) running from Lisbon to Porto, and a new account of its history and heritage. After my Portuguese hosts taught me how their great achievements in exploration were based in part on lore acquired from Arab neighbours in Africa, my EU hosts scolded me for believing such old fairy tales. Did I not know the most recent French historical scholarship? The Portuguese had learned nothing about navigation from the Arabs. Enough to give pause to the most determined Europhile.

In Portugal I was also asked how an American reacted to the efforts described in Article 128 of the Maastricht treaty to bring Europe's "common cultural heritage to the fore." Had this question been put 75 years ago, American intellectuals would have welcomed the effort and eagerly inquired about how (if at all) we might join in. Throughout the 19th century and well into this century the US remained, with notable exceptions, an intellectual colony.

It is hard to remember after the global success of American jazz, blues and rock, classical Hollywood cinema and so on, that America has emerged as a global cultural power against the odds. No one would have feared American culture in 1945. America was supposed to be the economic and technological model. In those days the job of the American literati was imitation. We identified with Europe and why not?

But we are no longer so eager to fall in line. As we trace our roots to Africa and Asia as well as Europe, the distance becomes part of a new cultural entanglement, in which Europe is not the central reference point. It is not a simple rejection, certainly not the much caricatured hostility to "dead white males." Rather there is a growing self-awareness among Americans about the polyglot nature of our own culture. So if the upshot of the drive to unify European culture is to show that Europe is a single cultural entity-that the Portuguese are in because (and just so long as) they learned nothing from the Arabs-then count me out. That Europe corresponds to a vision of America we are trying to transcend. n

Lindsay Waters