Another exhilarating paper from the Boston Review:
On the Idea of Europe
Second thoughts on the drive for cultural unity, from a once-devout Europhile.
Lindsay Waters
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any of them.
--Mahatma Gandhi
It is remarkable that our people have their intellectual culture from one country, and their duties from another. Our books are European. . . . We are sent to a feudal school to learn democracy. A gulf yawns for the young American between his education and his work. . . . This false state of things is newly in a way to be corrected. America is beginning to assert itself to the senses and to the imagination of her children, and Europe is receding to some degree.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thus Emerson in 1844, but I tell you that when I grew up in Chicago over a hundred years later, "this false state of things" had not been entirely corrected. The World's Greatest Newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, and the city's elite university, the University of Chicago, were given a European veil, gotten up in Gothic. My grandfather, P. T. Dolan, was a commissioner on the Chicago Stock Yards. Grace and P. T. had lace curtains on their windows, and I naturally craved to visit the tapestries at Cluny. Like Dickens's Pip, I had great expectations, and they were called "Europe." Like so many children of the University of Chicago--Saul Bellow, George Steiner, Susan Sontag, to name some of the illustrious--I aspired not just to know Europe but to be part of it.
So I got the education of every half-educated, 19th-century European, studied in Italy, put myself on a quoting basis with Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Manzoni, Leopardi, Milton, and Coleridge, and have made it my business (literally) to provide young Americans with European books. As an editor at University of Minnesota Press, I started the Theory and History of Literature series: My list included Paul de Man, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Klaus Theweleit, Peter Sloterdijk, and Georges Bataille. I wanted to make the point that all this European stuff had really landed. And I have continued in the same vein at Harvard University Press: Just this season we have embarked on publishing some 3,000-plus pages of Walter Benjamin.
Not that my colleagues and I have been complete patsies, operating on the principle "the more European, the better." (You know the idea: American social scientists may be worth listening to, but on cultural matters better wait for some distinguished British critic to weigh in!) But still, lots of European imports.
Recently, however, something has happened. I find myself drawn to Nashville and to Nanjing, and tired of Tuscany, Provence, and the Upstairs/Downstairs-Masterpiece-Theatre-of-the-Mind routine. And not just tired, but worried by a dangerous idea I have been hearing that has forced me to rethink my own Europhilia: none other than the idea of Europe.
[snip]
bostonreview.mit.edu |
