One of the founders of the “new historicism,” a way of reading that looked at the way books were formed by and formed the world in which they were written, Stephen Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor. This appeared in his essay “The Inevitable Pit” in The London Review of Books.
Greenblatt’s grandparents immigrated to America in the 1890s from Lithuania, possibly in response to a Russian plan to draft Jewish men into the military for long periods. In this passage, he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson in an 1839 essay: “In nature, every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energising spirit.”
“The coming only is sacred”: my grandparents would never have assented to this proposition, even at the moment they turned away from the past and climbed the gangplank onto the steamship, for they were committed to the ancient commandments of the God of Israel.
But when they entered the New World, they encountered a social order whose attitude towards commitments like theirs was not so much rooted hatred as indifference shading into contempt, impatience and boundless restlessness. . . .
The passage goes on in “a proto-Nietzschean vein”: “The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing.”
But it is not Vilna’s Ponary Hills [where the Germans murdered Vilna’s Jews], piled high with corpses, that Emerson’s heated rhetoric is anticipating here: rather, it is full-fledged American enterprise capitalism, consigning traditional modes of living to the trash heap in order to make way for new modes that will themselves soon be obsolete.
“See the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics,” Emerson exclaims, “fortifications, by gunpowder, roads and canals, by railways, sails, by steam, steam by electricity.” . . . Far from expressing regret, Emerson embraces the destruction of the old as an essential element in the thrilling realisation of human freedom.
Reflecting in a brilliant new book on this Emersonian vision and the economic order it celebrates [Still the New World], Philip Fisher argues that democratic social space in America depends on and fosters what he calls “a culture of abstraction” atomistic, unbounded and transparent.
The United States lacks virtually all of those elements that, to European thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, were the preconditions of nationhood: Americans are not a Volk; there is no single unifying environment or climate; and the population did not share a set of culture heroes — the equivalent of Luther, Bach, Goethe and Beethoven in the German struggle for unification — around whom a national identity could be fashioned.
Instead, with its waves of immigration, Fisher suggests, America is a culture of creative destruction, where the thickness of traditional ethnic, religious, linguistic or historical communities is replaced by the deliberate thinness of an interchangeable and uniform world of mass-produced objects, desires and pleasures.
In assimilating to the culture of the New World, immigrants like my grandparents did not submit to the traditional rituals and stories of another, dominant group: no one made them set foot in a church, bow down to graven images, recite the mythic creation stories of alien peoples, erect a Christmas tree in their living room or eat tref.
But the material world in which they participated was a national culture whose immense transforming power over their lives derived precisely from its refusal of the local and the particular. This refusal was, of course, hugely to the advantage of the new arrivals, because in effect it made everyone an immigrant.
‘By choosing to have no tradition,” Fisher writes, “no deep and permanent stories, no old songs, no traditional dances and ceremonies, a democratic culture, aided by the dynamic of technology and what we now call entertainment, proceeded to level in every generation the playing field between the natives and the newly arrived.”
At the same time and for the same reason, American culture had far more enzymatic power to break down my grandparents’ Eastern European Jewish identity than the Tsar’s Army could ever have had. To the extent that they migrated to America in order to preserve their traditions, my grandparents made a spectacular mistake, akin to moving to Guadalcanal to escape World War Two.
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