English Studies Forum

A Meditation Calling into Question the Regions of American Literature

Norman Weinstein

            Ever since Gertrude Stein wrote that there was “no there there” during a return trip to her childhood home in Oakland, California, her words have been distorted to imply that Oakland was a “nowhere,” a dissing along the lines of Neil Young’s “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere,” which was funny for Young, a transplanted Canadian singer, to write for an U.S. pop market, because Young had really been a Californian before he transplanted himself to California, as Stein had been really been an American in Paris long before she left the U.S., and returning to her “there is no there there,” she later clarified that the Oakland of her childhood was gone, she was commenting on her great theme, not just hers, of course, a great thread in American literature concerning place and memory, we all lose the place of our childhood, and in adulthood clutch that place, or more accurately, a complex tangled image of that place, close to our bosom, as Cather did with her Midwestern farm country, so while there is an anthology of Stein excerpts entitled Gertrude Stein’s America, a catchy title for these jingoistic days, that anthology excerpts largely what Stein was thinking about America while living in Paris, bringing to mind the recent anthology from the “Library of America” book series, they just did a witty anthology of American Writers in Paris, which is a swerve away from their original non-profit vision, perhaps because their inability to even break even lately means they need to shift their focus to European readers, because the original concept of the “Library of America” was to create reasonably priced full editions of American authors rooted in the American mainstream, and with an opus composed on U.S. soil, with the obvious exceptions of Henry James and Eliot and Stein and Pound, and and and, so then they do this Americans in Paris anthology with someone like the poet Harry Crosby, who almost no English academic has ever read seriously, but whose first books, out of print sixty years, and I don’t expect the “Library of America” to reprint them anytime soon, Crosby’s first books were prefaced by Eliot and Pound, and Crosby claimed as his homeland the Sun, literally and metaphorically, and suicided to go home to his literary homeland, as Hart Crane went ten fathoms deep to his, and when you look at a literary map of the United States, and there are lovely ones on a Library of Congress Website, www.loc.gov/exhibits/land/landover.html, “Journeys Into Literary America,” you’ll see that Jack Kerouac is liberally quoted, think of Library of Congress money promoting Kerouac’s career, encouraging some impressionable adolescent to go on the road, that is how far we’ve come since the 60s, but what is truly dazzling is that Kerouac is quoted as if he were a regional writer of multiple parts of the country simultaneously, he becomes like Whitman, he’s the bard of all of North America, particularly since Kerouac, like Neil Young, had Canadian family roots, anyway, I was sure, wouldn’t you be?, that when the Library of Congress site wanted to preface their essay on Southern regional literature that some regulation Faulkner or Welty quote would surface, but no, we get a great non-Southerner, Kerouac, whose parents spoke Quebec French, and I think this is delightful, because some of the best Southern regional writing has come from writers who never literally lived there, much as Gertrude Stein knew America so well because she left at the start of her career, and we know Henry James would never have become as famous as his brother if he hadn’t put an ocean between himself and American upper crust places, and Pound needed his fascist and renaissance Italy to get to the Idaho of his birthplace, where, believe me, since I’m writing this in Idaho, there are still some Italian fascists, though more medieval than renaissance, and Eliot needed to revisit where James sat in an England more refined than the faux French mannered drawing rooms of St. Louis, and then there’s Hemingway, who when he first arrived in Idaho, draft still cooking of For Whom the Bell Tolls, looked at Sun Valley and commented that it reminded him of Spain, all high desert, so Idaho was a great place for him to complete his novel of Spain, now in the academic English department I used to teach in, I now teach in three other departments because I began to realize I’m not this identity called an “Americanist,” even though I’m the author of a book on Stein used in American literature courses, this English department is trying to be au courant and appropriately post post modern, so a new course has been created, “Transnational Literature,” which may mean, no one may know, but may mean, that this is the study of American or other literature as it pours in and out of the political borders, maybe a textbook for this course could be Werner Sollars' An Anthology of American Literature in Translation, surely a catchy title, though my former students thought Cotton Mather was a translation from one foreign language into another and hated him, but if “transnational” American literature means anything other than a bait to catch unconventional English majors, maybe it implies an American literature always squirming outside of the geographic box of the U.S., so it would be all the Paris expatriates plus James, Eliot, Pound, Stein, though that wouldn’t be as politically correct as Gloria Anzaldua and really I think the course is really about Tex-Mex, those flavors, which is well and good, a well seasoned literary dish, though I’ll miss fresh truffles and high tea, but in the course bulletin of my university next to, wait, here’s the exact title of this course, “Cultural Exchange in Transnational Literatures,” and now I see the course focus is “multiethnic and global,” so we don’t have a problem with reconciling this with the conventional, historic, college course catalog entry of “American Literature,” except there still are curious issues, for example, since we just read about Gloria Anzaldua, suppose a student reads her in a typical American literature survey course, and finds her writing in the same bag as Sandra Cisneros, and is taught these are examples of that strain of American Literature labeled “Latina” and “Multiethnic,” just labels, but like names on restaurant menus, the label tells you roughly what to expect, so then this hypothetical student then takes the “Cultural Exchange…” course to discover that Anzaldua is really a “global writer,” a quibble you think, who cares, why can’t Anzaldua be simultaneously in the American literary canon, and be “global,” and she can be, but is that really what she is as a writer?, I might argue she is more American than global, and for the identical reason that Tex-Mex food is quintessentially a U.S. production no self-respecting Native Mexican takes seriously as real cuisine, now you could argue that cultural exchange in global literatures doesn’t result in something as ersatz as fast-food tacos, but perhaps it can and has, and we haven’t even touched thorny questions of literature in translation yet, but let’s return to the Library of Congress literary maps of American Literature Website again, what a great idea, there are all these neat regional divides, and if you teach American literature and you’re lucky, you’ll have students from every geographical region sharing their anecdotes, often inappropriately when you’re teaching Henry James and Eliot, but it will fill the hour when you teach Frost and Faulkner, that easy North-South glide, but don’t ask me what to do when you teach Dickinson, whose transnational cultural exchanges were with no place on earth, and Whitman, and, so I think these academics excited about their “global” literature, and not thrilled with literary nationalism, need to get together with academics who still think regions and nation are meaningful ways to cut the literary pie, and they need to argue in a lively manner about what constitutes a “cultural exchange,” both within and beyond national boundaries, and what does “global” literature imply, because Whitman was self-identified as both “American” and “cosmic,” but damned if he would give up his American status for a world label, a cultural exchange he’d think was short-changing him, and Melville whose real home was the sea, but settled for a crappy cramped Northeastern American sham-home, what would Melville think of being “global,” and finally I think of that great French surrealist poet Andre Breton, who loved America, bringing to mind that lovely phrase of the critic Guy Davenport’s, “the geography of the imagination,” when Breton was asked where his true home was, France or America, he said all poets, in all ages, have had only one true home, elsewhere, and this is where the discussion of regionalism in American or any other literature could begin, a map of elsewhere, unfold this, and trace a route.