PARTISAN REVIEW
147
Perhaps the most intriguing question, implicit in Spender's entire
piece, is why America has to have a regular checkup, as though it were
sick, in order to be "understood." Why aren't we constantly rediscover–
ing the real England, the real France? The only other "unknown" is
China, mostly because, unlike America, it has been underexposed.
Spender's comments on the "nowness" of American life are not
entirely new, but he does relate our historical myopia to many aspects
of our cultural and political tensions today. And there is here, too, a
clue to the reason why America is thought of as an enigma: in the
picture of the country as the Utopia of the present, as distinguished
from Europe, whose Utopia lies in its past, and to extend the metaphor,
from the Communist countries which have expropriated the Utopianism
of the future. True, Europe is in a sense America's past, and its future
is
the future of the entire world. But that
is
not the same as having
a past and a future built into America's own idea of itself. And one
of the effects of not having an historical consciousness is to widen the
gap between the American myth and the American reality. Because
tradition-bound Europe basks in the past, its myth of itself is not so
easily confused with its role today. Similarly, in the Communist coun–
tries, the myths of the Eastern satellites are transparent because they are
mostly imposed on them, while those of new societies like Cuba are
clearly inherited. And as for the Soviet Union, there is even less dif–
ficulty in separating the myth from the reality because both have
hardened into a relatively rigid society and a frozen doctrine.
America, however, like a fictional character who has no live past
and only an invented future, is less bound than other societies either
by its traditions or its vision of where it should be going. As a result,
the country seems to be free to move constantly in opposite directions.
And hence the almost absurd combination of self-confident power and
self-questioning guilt, for example, both of which are made possible by
the absence of restraints normally imposed by national habits or a gov–
erning sense of political role. Where else could we see both the ex–
travagant use of power as in Vietnam and the flood of self-criticism
which has almost drowned the national will? Where else so much
af–
fluence and poverty, so much tolerance and so much racism, so much
freedom and so much control, so much order and so much chaos?
Insofar as America has any idea of the future, it is really an ex–
tension of the present, that is, a further expansion of technology–
which is actually the blueprint of the futurologists, the academicians of
the American legend. But the irony is that American technology, ra–
tionalism, "problem-solving," as Spender puts it, serve as the model
for the socialist dream in more backward countries. Socialism, Lenin
said, is Soviet power plus electrification. From this perspective, Amer–
ica appears to some people to be a revolutionary society. On the other
hand, most radicals think of this country as a conservative stronghold.
Perhaps the truth is that it is both, in constantly shifting and unpredic–
table proportions, a freaky society committed both to change and to
maintaining things as they are, keeping us guessing
all
the time, and
never satisfying either radicals or conservatives.
W. P.
