The Star-Spangled Novel

The poet Derek Walcott has written, “Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation,” a claim that our essential, individual identities depend upon our ability to view ourselves as a people. If so, then We the People require a tale that in a plausible way describes and dramatizes our origins. Without it, we will separate ourselves first from our antecedents and then from one another, and, like a deracinated family, We the People will perish. In Walcott’s words, we will be nothing. If we do not agree on whence we came--in other words, if that tale of our origins has not been established consensually among us--then we cannot agree on where we must go nor can we mark how far we may have wandered from our true path. Other than to sustain a fantasy, a lonely orphan’s wish for the family he never had, there will be no point to our ongoing attempts at unity.

It has become increasingly clear, especially in the work of our late 20th and early 21st century storytellers, that Americans possess not one story of our beginnings but many. This, however, is not necessarily a thing to be desired. We tell ourselves Euro-American origin-tales, African-American, Native-American, Asian-American, Latino-American and so on. Our stories of beginnings multiply, like the months dedicated by presidential proclamation to the special interests of one or another newly visible constituency (women, poets, people with incurable illnesses); and like the designated months, our multiple origin-stories compete with one another. In the Americas, and in North America in particular, for nearly half a millennium, inasmuch as we have tolerated and actually encouraged dueling origin-tales, we have deprived, confused and, to some degree, like a family with no remembered roots, disenfranchised ourselves. We have refused to tell ourselves a single believable story of our origins that will connect the Euro-American tale directly to the African-American, the African-American to the Latino-American and so on. Instead, we’ve allowed competing tales to stand against one another, to struggle if not for permanent predominance then for temporary preeminence, so that these days, for instance, if one is of Euro-American descent, because of the prevailing economics of communication and other forms of institutionalized racism, it’s all too easy to wall off and effectively ghettoize the African-American or Native-American or Asian-American story, diminishing them thereby and denying their application to one’s personal and political history. One feels freed to ignore their moral demands and their legitimate claims upon one’s deepest attention. On the other hand and by the same token, if one is of African- American descent or Native-American and so on, one is invited to believe that in telling one’s own part of the story one has told the whole of it. As if a single chapter of our national epic, a mere episode, could be substituted for the whole without first being contextualized by the grand democratic American literary project itself and its Homeric originators, Whitman and Twain.

The end result of this ongoing multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural duel has been an incompletely told tale of origins that, if allowed to stand as the story, the whole story and nothing but the story, is a lie, for we are undeniably a single, creolized people--not separate Native-, African-, European-, Latin- or Asian-descended peoples. Which is to say that our true story does not commence, Chapter One does not open, until we begin to mix; and we begin mixing very early in the 17th century, when Africans and Europeans together make their first landfall in the Americas, there to be greeted warily by the natives in their canoes just offshore and on the beaches, from Newfoundland in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south.

Publishers and film and television producers, the official disseminators of story, are all guilty of reinforcing this long-ongoing process of making high-walled narrative ghettos. Fiction writers and screenwriters and film directors are guilty also--not because of sly, insidious intent (though it surely does not hurt the financial interests of the infotainment industrialists, the Disneys, News Corps and Time Warners, and the storytellers themselves, to have both the producers and consumers of information and entertainment broken up into small, noncommunicative, mistrustful colonies of the righteous and the saved: atomization of the marketplace, after all, allows the marketeers to target specific consumer groups with deadly aim). But by and large, American storytellers, we whose work deliberately goes toward the making of America’s origin-myths, have all too often allowed ourselves to tell at best only a small part of the story, with our reticence, with our reluctance to tell the whole story, reinforced on the one side by guilt, historical ignorance and simple denial and on the other by legitimate anger and illegitimate exclusion from the means of communication, and on both sides by simple, natural self-absorption--writers writing about what they “know,” readers reading about what’s familiar.

All our stories, Euro-, African-, Native-, etc., tend nowadays to be journalistic rather than mythic, made more for a miniseries than in the conscious creation of a truthful national memory. We Euro-American storytellers have for the most part insisted that the story of our origins is an East-to-West story, told either as a multi-generational immigration-and-assimilation family saga or else as a celebration of Manifest Destiny and the tragic triumph of neo-European civilization over the wilderness of the New World: It’s either “Goodbye, Columbus” or “On the Road.” Loss of innocence is its major theme, (male) adolescence its characteristic locale. The themes of guilt and expiation, crime and punishment, however, usually characterize the lives of adults, and thus for African-Americans the main model has been the slave narrative, from Frederick Douglass’ autobiography to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” In this version of our origins, we’re given a mostly South-to-North story of physical and spiritual triumph over dehumanizing oppression, with the struggle to survive fueled to a considerable degree by a vision of a stolen African pastorale: The roots of the blues are made into the blues of the roots. And if the Euro-American version of our origins at its best is ironic, as, given its attention to adolescence, it probably needs to be, and the African American, because of its celebration of heroic endurance, is transcendental, the Native-American, with its longing for Eden, is elegiac. For Native-American storytellers, the chosen people are the children of Nature; their mother is the American continent herself, and their father is the eternal sky above. The chapter of the story that opens with the arrival of the Europeans and Africans is, in their telling, not the first chapter but so often the last. It is the story, therefore, not of Creation but of the Fall; the loss is not of innocence but of paradise. Latino- and Asian-Americans, their tiles more recently cemented into the American mosaic than the others’, are in the process of composing and disseminating their origin stories, too. And mostly they’re following the same parochial paths laid down by the rest of us, paths just as narrow as ours, just as separate, without beginning, and leading nowhere. The themes and locales, perhaps as a result of our postmodern, technologically flattened culture, seem more specific to recent social and political history than to their ancestors’ 18th- and 19th-century American origins, more faithful to contemporary demographics than to the historical imagination; and thus they seem to respond more to the cultural priorities and agendas expressed by network news, talk-show hosts and party politicians than to those expressed by Whitman and Twain.

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I don’t mean to criticize the contemporary tellers of these tales, many of whom--William Kennedy, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rudolfo Anaya--are powerful, deep writers. The point here is that none of their stories alone is sufficient unto itself as an American story of origins. Not the most recently told Latino- and Asian- American stories or the old Euro- or African- American or any other hyphenated story of our origins. Although all the tales borrow from one another, structurally and in terms of specific geography and history, they nonetheless make themselves essential to the tellers and the people whose origins they purport to describe by means not of what they share with one another but of their difference from one another. And it’s not merely coincidental that these days, whenever we’re met (or described) by the terms Euro-American, Asian-American, African-American, etc., we’re eager and able to locate with ease and a certain self-satisfaction what and who is denoted by the word to the left of the hyphen. But if asked to say what or who is denoted by the word to the right of the hyphen, we usually fall into irritated confusion.

What or who is an American, anyhow? To answer that question, which is the only truly self-identifying question to which every American must address him- or herself, one normally would turn to one’s national story of origins--just as the Greeks, ancient and modern alike, turn to the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” the Romans to the “Aeneid,” the French to the story of Jeanne d’Arc, the English to the Arthurian legend, the Norse to the sagas and the Jews to the Ark of the Covenant, the Captivity and the Return. And so on throughout the world. It’s as if everyone but the Americans knows that a people, like a family, without a plausible story that describes and dramatizes its origins, will perish; and, alas, for this reason alone many peoples have, and families, too. It could indeed happen here, and if American fiction of the last half-century--with a few significant exceptions--is any indicator, then the People may have already perished. The exceptions give one hope that it hasn’t, however, and that our Homeric tales, our cycle of sagas and legends, can yet be told, retold, embellished, and elaborated upon, can finally be braided together into a single strand that will lie coiled in our collective imagination, an autochthonous myth by which we can reliably set our ethical and metaphysical compasses.

So what is our story, the one we all share, regardless of how we label ourselves over on the left side of the hyphen? Do we even have a story? After long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the single defining, linked sequence of stories that all Americans, North, South and meso-, share, regardless of our racial characteristics or ethnic and cultural backgrounds, the one narrative that we all participate in, is that of the African Diaspora. This is the narrative template against which all the others can be measured, fit into, laid over or veneered onto. It doesn’t matter where in time one enters it--as Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past”--or from whose point of view it’s told. For we have all played different roles in that long, serpentine story, and, depending on our racial characteristics, sometimes we have been victim, sometimes victimizer, sometimes merely horrified, or thrilled, onlooker with something important and self-defining to lose or gain in the outcome. It doesn’t matter where it’s located. Surely by now we know that there is no town, no county, no state in America that has not been profoundly affected by the events, characters, themes and values dramatized by the story of race in America. It opens in the early 17th century, and it continues today in all the Americas and in Europe too, as a late chapter in the Tale of Empire; and in Asia, as that chapter called the Vietnam War; and in Africa itself, in the chapters that describe Liberia and Sierra Leone’s tragic, ongoing civil wars, for instance. And you don’t have to be a prophet to see that, if this is indeed the era of the American Empire, the African Diaspora is a tale with chapters that will be set worldwide, wherever there is an “American Presence,” well into the next century as well. I might go even further and say that if American culture, from McDonald’s to Disney to Nike, in all its subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations, has come to dominate the New World Order, and if there is today no truly creolized society left on this Earth--that is, no multiracial society in which power is not dispensed according to its citizens’ racial characteristics--then we might be able to speak of the universality of the African Diaspora as origin-myth. At least for the foreseeable future.

In its essential outline, it’s the story that begins in violence with capture, permanent enslavement and forced migration, passes into institutionalized racism and through emancipation rises to a first and false climax, where it undergoes sudden reversal and embittered transformation, withdraws like a wave falling back to gather force and new complexity and leads eventually in our time to a future vision not of assimilation but of creolization--a strictly American vision in whose light we are led not to the denial of racial difference or to the celebration of it either but to a vivid image of its eventual elimination as a means of group identification. Central to that story--the dialectical engine, one might say, that drives its plot--is the conflict between the crime of slavery at the beginning and the morality expressed in our sacred documents, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution; so that ultimately, for the conflict to be resolved in favor of that morality (as it must, if we are not to be a nation of criminals), race in America will be seen to have been all along nothing but a social construct. It will be no longer possible to describe a child in racial terms. To say that a child’s skin is “black” or “white” or “red” or “yellow” will be to say nothing socially meaningful about him or her. We will have become a true democracy at last, and, who knows, perhaps we can begin then to talk coherently and openly about economics and class.

We’re not there yet, unfortunately. We still have the prior story of our violent beginnings going untold and therefore unknown. The true story of any form of violence, until it’s been said from the point of view of both the victim and the perpetrator, hasn’t been told at all. From the beginning until today, the African Diaspora is as violent a tale as any on this earth, and, as James Baldwin famously observed, the story of race in America will be told, if ever, only when it’s from the point of view of a white member of a Southern lynch mob. Baldwin’s underlying point is that from the start the central theme in the American drama has been race and, therefore, violence, and that it shapes every American’s life, the victimizer’s as much as the victim’s, the native’s as much as the newly arrived immigrant’s. Only a few of our best white writers--those whose ambition was to help create a specifically American literature--have known this, and even fewer have succeeded in the attempt. William Styron, nearly alone in this among the major white novelists of his generation, tried in 1967 to contribute a chapter with his noble but (in literary terms) fatally flawed “Confessions of Nat Turner.” Unfortunately for us all, the absurd implausibility that results from the distance between the late Victorian narrative voice of the novel and the social and psychological conditions of the enslaved, early 19th-century, African-American speaker, more than any unconscious racism on the part of the author, is what brought down the wrath of African-American intellectuals, and the novel came quickly to be seen as a NO TRESPASSING sign that too many white writers coming after Styron have carefully observed. Indeed, Styron may well have conceived his novel as a sympathetic response to remarks made 14 years earlier by Ralph Ellison in his 1953 acceptance speech for the National Book Award, which he received for “Invisible Man.” Speaking of his own literary ambition, Ellison said: “A novel whose range was both broader and deeper was needed. And in my search I found myself turning to our classical nineteenth-century novelists. I felt that except for the work of William Faulkner something vital had gone out of American prose after Mark Twain. I came to believe that the writers of that period took a much greater responsibility for the condition of democracy and, indeed, their works were imaginative projections of the conflicts within the human heart which arose when the sacred principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clashed with the practical exigencies of human greed and fear, hate and love. Naturally I was attracted to these writers as a Negro. Whatever they thought of my people per se, in their imaginative economy the Negro symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysterious, underground aspect of human personality. In a sense the Negro was the gauge of the human condition as it waxed and waned in our democracy.” Toni Morrison further develops Ellison’s point in her long essay “Playing in the Dark,” especially in showing us the ways that the theme of race gets expressed in classic Euro-American literature, in which, more often than not, the African-American and prevailing attitudes toward her are present throughout our literature by means of a radically enforced absence, a self-conscious looking away, as in “Moby-Dick,” so that aspects of the African Diaspora and the violent history of race in America are shown to us the way black holes in space are revealed to astronomers, by the weird actions and inactions of the brightly lit bodies orbiting nearby.

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With a few remarkable exceptions, like Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” most of Faulkner and, in recent years, books like Madison Smartt Bell’s “All Souls Rising,” Joyce Carol Oates’ “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart” and Richard Price’s “Clockers,” the telling of the story of the African Diaspora has been left to African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. There are many understandable reasons why this is so, and I’ve tried to point to a few in this essay, but it nonetheless seems clear that the consequences are twofold and harmful to us all. First, we have been deprived of the true sweep and power of this story, which derive from its all-inclusiveness: for it dramatizes the essential, and specifically American, political and moral meaning of every American’s life. There is no other like it. A truly democratic story, capable of functioning in our culture as a national epic, it has been made to seem of moment only to some of us; that is, only to Americans who identify themselves as African-Americans. For those of us who are not of African descent, because the African Diaspora is not, after all, viewed as our story but theirs, a second harmful consequence is that we have been allowed to shrug off the deep, connecting complexity of our ongoing culpability and witness. We are “enabled” (as they say in 12-step programs) in our guilty desire to reject any self-informing, self-identifying role for us in that story. And this in turn invites all of us hyphenated Americans to separate our historical strands one at a time from the braided destiny of a Creole Nation, leading ultimately to its unraveling and to the establishment of a mere population instead of a people.

We’re fast becoming a Balkanized cluster of small colonies of the separately saved. Already we can see white writers in America getting whiter, as it were, especially among the youngest generation of novelists and story writers, who appear increasingly to live in the literary equivalent of a racially segregated, gated community. Consider, for instance, the works of the most gifted and ambitious of the newest generation of novelists: Michael Cunningham, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace. And black writers appear to be getting blacker; even the best of them have shown an increasing tendency to preach to the choir (Toni Morrison’s last two novels, “Jazz” and “Paradise,” for instance, have higher walls around them than did the more inclusive “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon”). Maybe it’s payback time. But whatever the reason, most non-white writers--African-, Asian-, Latino- and Native alike--seem reluctant to tell stories about the rest of us; while most white writers have simply become frightened, as if it were politically incorrect, to tell stories about anyone but themselves.

Writers and readers of every cultural, ethnic and racial stripe are encouraged in this process of self-imposed ghettoization by the publishing industry and the entertainment conglomerates to whom literature is a product and readers but consumers. The more easily both product and consumer can be identified by their cultural, ethnic and racial characteristics, the more easily their buying habits can be predicted, manipulated and controlled. We can commence our resistance to that control now, however, by deliberately ending our reluctance to tell the story of our common origins--the story that, simply by means of its telling, would liberate us from our shared bloody history. If we cannot do that, we will each end up with a private racial fantasy of violence that keeps us in thrall to it and with a national literature that’s manufactured by and for the marketplace.

I take it as a given that our best and most ambitious fiction writers are those whose sense of purpose is guided by a desire to participate in the making of a national literature. My hope is that this ongoing, 200-year-old project will provide us a truly democratic literature, one that has at its center the historical and moral facts of creolization and that therefore both honors our people’s highest standards for our treatment of one another and does not in the process lie about our tragic failure to meet those standards.