《The-Discovery-of-What-It-Means-to-Be-an-American》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《The-Discovery-of-What-It-Means-to-Be-an-American（16页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Lesson 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 aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculia
2、r 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 exactly what it describes, not even we motley mi
3、llions 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 to find out in what way the specialness of my exp
4、erience 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 necessity to find the terms on which my experience c
5、ould 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 divorced from their origins, and it turned out to m
6、ake 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 confronted each other on Europe soil, than the fact
7、 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 never had been here, that we knew more about eac
8、h 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 a couple of years before any of this became clea
9、r 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 landscape, armed with two Bessie Smith records and
10、 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 spoken when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the
11、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 I was able to accept my role as distinguished, I
12、 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 American writer there. It is not meant, of cour
13、se, 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 is important, and the point is that an American
14、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 proving that he is just a “regular guy” that he r
15、ealizes 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, they have killed enough of them off by now to
16、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 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
