Cultural life

The great art historian Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich once wrote that there is really no such thing as “art”; there are only artists. This is a useful reminder to anyone studying, much less setting out to try to define, anything as big and varied as the culture of the United States. For the culture that endures in any country is made not by vast impersonal forces or by unfolding historical necessities but by uniquely talented men and women, one-of-a-kind people doing one thing at a time—doing what they can, or must. In the United States, particularly, where there is no more a truly “established” art than an established religion—no real academies, no real official art—culture is where one finds it, and many of the most gifted artists have chosen to make their art far from the parades and rallies of worldly life.

Some of the keenest students of the American arts have even come to dislike the word culture as a catchall for the plastic and literary arts, since it is a term borrowed from anthropology, with its implication that there is any kind of seamless unity to the things that writers and poets and painters have made. The art of some of the greatest American artists and writers, after all, has been made in deliberate seclusion and has taken as its material the interior life of the mind and heart that shapes and precedes shared “national” experience. It is American art before it is the culture of the United States. Even if it is true that these habits of retreat are, in turn, themselves in part traditions, and culturally shaped, it is also true that the least illuminating way to approach the poems of Emily Dickinson or the paintings of Winslow Homer, to take only two imposing instances, is as the consequence of large-scale mass sociological phenomenon.

Still, many, perhaps even most, American culture makers have not only found themselves, as all Americans do, caught in the common life of their country—they have chosen to make the common catch their common subject. Their involvement with the problems they share with their neighbors, near and far, has given their art a common shape and often a common substance. And if one quarrel has absorbed American artists and thinkers more than any other, it has been that one between the values of a mass, democratic, popular culture and those of a refined elite culture accessible only to the few—the quarrel between “low” and “high.” From the very beginnings of American art, the “top down” model of all European civilization, with a fine art made for an elite class of patrons by a specialized class of artists, was in doubt, in part because many Americans did not want that kind of art, in part because, even if they wanted it, the social institutions—a court or a cathedral—just were not there to produce and welcome it. What came in its place was a commercial culture, a marketplace of the arts, which sometimes degraded art into mere commerce and at other times raised the common voice of the people to the level of high art.

In the 20th century, this was, in some part, a problem that science left on the doorstep of the arts. Beginning at the turn of the century, the growth of the technology of mass communications—the movies, the phonograph, radio, and eventually television—created a potential audience for stories and music and theater larger than anyone could previously have dreamed that made it possible for music and drama and pictures to reach more people than had ever been possible. People in San Francisco could look at the latest pictures or hear the latest music from New York City months, or even moments, after they were made; a great performance demanded a pilgrimage no longer than the path to a corner movie theater. High culture had come to the American living room.

But, though interest in a “democratic” culture that could compete with traditional high culture has grown in recent times, it is hardly a new preoccupation. One has only to read such 19th-century classics as Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) to be reminded of just how long, and just how keenly, Americans have asked themselves if all the stained glass and sacred music of European culture is all it is cracked up to be, and if the tall tales and Cigar-Store Indians did not have more juice and life in them for a new people in a new land. Twain’s whole example, after all, was to show that American speech as it was actually spoken was closer to Homer than imported finery was.

In this way, the new machines of mass reproduction and diffusion that fill modern times, from the daguerreotype to the World Wide Web, came not simply as a new or threatening force but also as the fulfillment of a standing American dream. Mass culture seemed to promise a democratic culture: a cultural life directed not to an aristocracy but to all men and women. It was not that the new machines produced new ideals but that the new machines made the old dreams seem suddenly a practical possibility.

The practical appearance of this dream began in a spirit of hope. Much American art at the turn of the 20th century and through the 1920s, from the paintings of Charles Sheeler to the poetry of Hart Crane, hymned the power of the new technology and the dream of a common culture. By the middle of the century, however, many people recoiled in dismay at what had happened to the American arts, high and low, and thought that these old dreams of a common, unifying culture had been irrevocably crushed. The new technology of mass communications, for the most part, seemed to have achieved not a generous democratization but a bland homogenization of culture. Many people thought that the control of culture had passed into the hands of advertisers, people who used the means of a common culture just to make a buck. It was not only that most of the new music and drama that had been made for movies and radio, and later for television, seemed shallow; it was also that the high or serious culture that had become available through the means of mass reproduction seemed to have been reduced to a string of popularized hits, which concealed the real complexity of art. Culture, made democratic, had become too easy.

As a consequence, many intellectuals and artists around the end of World War II began to try to construct new kinds of elite “high” culture, art that would be deliberately difficult—and to many people it seemed that this new work was merely difficult. Much of the new art and dance seemed puzzling and deliberately obscure. Difficult art happened, above all, in New York City. During World War II, New York had seen an influx of avant-garde artists escaping Adolf Hitler’s Europe, including the painters Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, and Joan Miró, as well as the composer Igor Stravinsky. They imported many of the ideals of the European avant-garde, particularly the belief that art should always be difficult and “ahead of its time.” (It is a paradox that the avant-garde movement in Europe had begun, in the late 19th century, in rebellion against what its advocates thought were the oppressive and stifling standards of high, official culture in Europe and that it had often looked to American mass culture for inspiration.) In the United States, however, the practice of avant-garde art became a way for artists and intellectuals to isolate themselves from what they thought was the cheapening of standards.

And yet this counterculture had, by the 1960s, become in large American cities an official culture of its own. For many intellectuals around 1960, this gloomy situation seemed to be all too permanent. One could choose between an undemanding low culture and an austere but isolated high culture. For much of the century, scholars of culture saw these two worlds—the public world of popular culture and the private world of modern art—as irreconcilable antagonists and thought that American culture was defined by the abyss between them.

As the century and its obsessions closed, however, more and more scholars came to see in the most enduring inventions of American culture patterns of cyclical renewal between high and low. And as scholars have studied particular cases instead of abstract ideas, it has become apparent that the contrast between high and low has often been overdrawn. Instead of a simple opposition between popular culture and elite culture, it is possible to recognize in the prolix and varied forms of popular culture innovations and inspirations that have enlivened the most original high American culture—and to then see how the inventions of high culture circulate back into the street, in a spiraling, creative flow. In the astonishing achievements of the American jazz musicians, who took the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway musical and inflected them with their own improvisational genius; in the works of great choreographers like Paul Taylor and George Balanchine, who found in tap dances and marches and ballroom bebop new kinds of movement that they then incorporated into the language of high dance; in the “dream boxes” of the American avant-garde artist Joseph Cornell, who took for his material the mundane goods of Woolworth’s and the department store and used them as private symbols in surreal dioramas: in the work of all of these artists, and so many more, we see the same kind of inspiring dialogue between the austere discipline of avant-garde art and the enlivening touch of the vernacular.

This argument has been so widely resolved, in fact, that, in the decades bracketing the turn of the 21st century, the old central and shaping American debate between high and low has been in part replaced by a new and, for the moment, still more clamorous argument. It might be said that if the old debate was between high and low, this one is between the “center” and the “margins.” The argument between high and low was what gave the modern era its special savour. A new generation of critics and artists, defining themselves as “postmodern,” have argued passionately that the real central issue of culture is the “construction” of cultural values, whether high or low, and that these values reflect less enduring truth and beauty, or even authentic popular taste, than the prejudices of professors. Since culture has mostly been made by white males praising dead white males to other white males in classrooms, they argue, the resulting view of American culture has been made unduly pale, masculine, and lifeless. It is not only the art of African Americans and other minorities that has been unfairly excluded from the canon of what is read, seen, and taught, these scholars argue, often with more passion than evidence; it is also the work of anonymous artists, particularly women, that has been “marginalized” or treated as trivial. This argument can conclude with a rational, undeniable demand that more attention be paid to obscure and neglected writers and artists, or it can take the strong and often irrational form that all aesthetic values are merely prejudices enforced by power. If the old debate between high and low asked if real values could rise from humble beginnings, the new debate about American culture asks if true value, as opposed to mere power, exists at all.

Literature

Because the most articulate artists are, by definition, writers, most of the arguments about what culture is and ought to do have been about what literature is and ought to do—and this can skew our perception of American culture a little, because the most memorable American art has not always appeared in books and novels and stories and plays. In part, perhaps, this is because writing was the first art form to undergo a revolution of mass technology; books were being printed in thousands of copies, while one still had to make a pilgrimage to hear a symphony or see a painting. The basic dispute between mass experience and individual experience has been therefore perhaps less keenly felt as an everyday fact in writing in the 20th and 21st centuries than it has been in other art forms. Still, writers have seen and recorded this quarrel as a feature of the world around them, and the evolution of American writing in the past 50 years has shown some of the same basic patterns that can be found in painting and dance and the theater.

In the United States after World War II, many writers, in opposition to what they perceived as the bland flattening out of cultural life, made their subject all the things that set Americans apart from one another. Although for many Americans, ethnic and even religious differences had become increasingly less important as the century moved on—holiday rather than everyday material—many writers after World War II seized on these differences to achieve a detached point of view on American life. Beginning in the 1940s and ’50s, three groups in particular seemed to be “outsider-insiders” who could bring a special vision to fiction: Southerners, Jews, and African Americans.

Each group had a sense of uncertainty, mixed emotions, and stifled aspirations that lent a questioning counterpoint to the general chorus of affirmation in American life. The Southerners—William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor most particularly—thought that a noble tradition of defeat and failure had been part of the fabric of Southern life since the Civil War. At a time when “official” American culture often insisted that the American story was one of endless triumphs and optimism, they told stories of tragic fate. Jewish writers—most prominently Chicago novelist Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in l976, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth—found in the “golden exile” of Jews in the United States a juxtaposition of surface affluence with deeper unease and perplexity that seemed to many of their fellow Americans to offer a common predicament in a heightened form. At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar dealt impressively with the experience of immigrants in the United States.

Among the immigrant writers who explored the intersection of their old and new cultures at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st were Cuban American writer Oscar Hijuelos, Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid, Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, Indian-born novelist and short-story writer Bharati Mukherjee, and Asian American writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Ha Jin.

For African Americans, of course, the promise of American life had in many respects never been fulfilled. “What happens to a dream deferred,” the poet Langston Hughes asked, and many African American writers attempted to answer that question, variously, through stories that mingled pride, perplexity, and rage. African American literature achieved one of the few unquestioned masterpieces of late 20th-century American fiction writing in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (l952). Later two African American women, Toni Morrison (the first African American female to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; 1993), and Alice Walker, published some of the most important post-World War II American fiction.

The rise of feminism as a political movement gave many women a sense that their experience too is richly and importantly outside the mainstream; since at least the 1960s, there has been an explosion of women’s fiction, including the much-admired work of Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, Ann Beattie, Gail Godwin, and Alison Lurie.

Perhaps precisely because so many novelists sought to make their fiction from experiences that were deliberately imagined as marginal, set aside from the general condition of American life, many other writers had the sense that fiction, and particularly the novel, might not any longer be the best way to try to record American life. For many writers the novel seemed to have become above all a form of private, interior expression and could no longer keep up with the extravagant oddities of the United States. Many gifted writers took up journalism with some of the passion for perfection of style that had once been reserved for fiction. The exemplars of this form of poetic journalism included the masters of The New Yorker magazine, most notably A.J. Liebling, whose books included The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a study of an election in Louisiana, as well as Joseph Mitchell, who in his books The Bottom of the Harbour (1944) and Joe Gould’s Secret (1942) offered dark and perplexing accounts of the life of the American metropolis. The dream of combining real facts and lyrical fire also achieved a masterpiece in the poet James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (l941; with photographs by Walker Evans), an account of sharecropper life in the South that is a landmark in the struggle for fact writing that would have the beauty and permanence of poetry.

As the century continued, this genre of imaginative nonfiction (sometimes called the documentary novel or the nonfiction novel) continued to evolve and took on many different forms. In the writing of Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Neil Sheehan, and Truman Capote, all among Liebling’s and Mitchell’s successors at The New Yorker, this new form continued to seek a tone of subdued and even amused understatement. Tom Wolfe, whose influential books included The Right Stuff (1979), an account of the early days of the American space program, and Norman Mailer, whose books included Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), a ruminative piece about the Republican and Democratic national conventions in l968, deliberately took on huge public subjects and subjected them to the insights (and, many people thought, the idiosyncratic whims) of a personal sensibility. During the 1990s autobiography became the focus for a number of accomplished novelists, including Frank McCourt, Anne Roiphe, and Dave Eggers. At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, massive, ambitious novels were published by David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1996) and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, 2001; Freedom, 2010).

As the nonfiction novel often pursued extremes of grandiosity and hyperbole, the American short story assumed a previously unexpected importance in the life of American writing; the short story became the voice of private vision and private lives. The short story, with its natural insistence on the unique moment and the infrangible glimpse of something private and fragile, had a new prominence. The rise of the American short story is bracketed by two remarkable books: J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) and Raymond Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Salinger inspired a generation by imagining that the serious search for a spiritual life could be reconciled with an art of gaiety and charm; Carver confirmed in the next generation their sense of a loss of spirituality in an art of taciturn reserve and cloaked emotions.

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Carver, who died in 1988, and the great novelist and man of letters John Updike, who died in 2009, were perhaps the last undisputed masters of literature in the high American sense that emerged with Ernest Hemingway and Faulkner. Yet in no area of the American arts, perhaps, have the claims of the marginal to take their place at the centre of the table been so fruitful, subtle, or varied as in literature. Perhaps because writing is inescapably personal, the trap of turning art into mere ideology has been most deftly avoided in its realm. This can be seen in the dramatically expanded horizons of the feminist and minority writers whose work first appeared in the 1970s and ’80s, including the Chinese American Amy Tan. A new freedom to write about human erotic experience previously considered strange or even deviant shaped much new writing, from the comic obsessive novels of Nicholson Baker through the work of those short-story writers and novelists, including Edmund White and David Leavitt, who have made art out of previously repressed and unnarrated areas of homoerotic experience. Literature is above all the narrative medium of the arts, the one that still best relates What Happened to Me, and American literature, at least, has only been enriched by new “mes” and new narratives. (See also American literature.)

Adam Gopnik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica