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Friends and strangers - French-American relations - Critical Essay
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by John Engle
As the child of an emblematic eighteenth-century revolution, a one-time superpower proprietor of a global commercial empire, and a notoriously monolingual nation-state that considers itself both apart from and the center of the world, France shares much with the United States, though it has always been the differences that intrigue and irritate. Like tourists with their oohing and umbrage, politicians play these opposing responses out in a Manichean shadow theater of televised embraces and mean asides. The reality of the French-American relationship is far more complex than this binary formulation, however, if only because both parties bring such finely honed complexes of superiority and inferiority to it, each shiftingly sure and unsure about whether to lecture to or learn from the other. On one side, au hasard, French admiration for that American can-do grin and appealing creative energy, then distrust of the individualistic work obsession and the conformity of the puritan and the consumer. On the other, American envy of the French so fashionably dark in their refined intelligence or bathed in a sunny sidewalk-cafe love of the moment, then irritation with their rudeness, cowardice, caprice. Etc. The Married Man in Edmund White's recent novel comes also to represent this twinned allure and annoyance: "He loved Julien--and he certainly resented him." In the broadest cultural sense the French-American relationship has always been that of juxtaposed magnets, capable of surprising, mysterious pulses of attraction and repulsion across a charged field of difference.
While this special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature will naturally address the extremes of this cultural Left and Right Bank, its real subject is, of course, le Pont des Arts that connects them. Beginning well before the First World War American writers moved in number to France, wrote and set stories there, understood and misunderstood it, took inspiration from its living writers and august literary tradition. Some escaped an America of political, racial, and sexual restraint; some found truths intuited but repressed at home confirmed in the foreign environment and shaped their distinctive American voices in the free, cosmopolitan air of Paris. Though today France's importance on the world's intellectual and artistic stage has arguably diminished, the relation with France and its culture figured--often significantly, at times decisively--in America's contributions to major literary and critical currents of the twentieth century: the modernist revolution, the creation and dissemination of the existential vision, postwar African-American writing, the beat movement, poststructuralism. Willa Cather recruited George Sand to the cause of Midwestern regionalism. Fleeing a "mass of dolts," Ezra Pound baptized a new movement imagisme and set one of its most memorable achievements in the Paris metro. John Ashbery took up residence in Paris and immersed himself in a French surrealism that was to determine the very nature of the New York school.
Two hundred years earlier, against a background of accord on certain Enlightenment principles and France's role as distant tuteur to the American sapling, the young nation sent its greatest writer off as the first American minister to Paris, but we cannot talk about a significant French-American literary relationship until at least the next century. The struggling former colonies that signed an end to their revolution on today's rue Jacob would need first to forge an identity on their own rough and active terms. Cultivated and flourishing, a free man in Paris, Thomas Jefferson would finally return to Washington, there to symbolically enact the grafting to inherited European values of new American realities by doubling the nation's size through its purchase from France of the Louisiana Territory. The central elements of what we now identify as the American character were profoundly shaped by the ten decades to follow: the profitable, manifestly destined, genocidal march west through that territory; a nation divided over race and nearly destroyed; an immigrant-powered industrial revolution that would make America by 1900 the world's leading producer of steel and wealth, and the dominant power for the coming century.
Throughout this period, as American literature underwent its throes of self-creation, its authors turned toward France and French culture in ways that nearly always speak tellingly about their own work. Depicting, discussing, disagreeing with the other, they define themselves--and the French were an intimidating other: Old World-weighty with tradition and high culture, artistically nimble in a nineteenth century of impressionism, Balzac's social realism, le symbolisme of Baudelaire and Mallarme. To such dominant figures as Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain, bristlingly defensive about American democracy, the French were less the revolutionaries who lionized Thomas Paine than those who, imprisoning him for his later opposition to the Terror, were imprisoned still in outmoded conceptions. Barging the Duke and Dauphin into Huck's utopia of two, Twain targeted Continental social inequality and savaged the decadent pomposity of its vestigial aristocracies. The antihistorical Emerson too resisted the Old World, or for that matter the Old. While his romanticism resembled Wordsworth's early bliss before "France on top of the golden hours," he insisted upon an American rather than a French repudiation of the past, at its heart stood, broad shouldered as any Whitman, a fundamental frontier irreverence before all inherited standards, conceiving of imitation as suicide and the poet as an "emperor in his own right."
