Christopher Bigsby - “There Is an America. Believe Me, There Is an America”

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Oct 01, 2014
by Jonathan Elbaz
Christopher Bigsby - “There Is an America. Believe Me, There Is an America”

British novelist and academic speaks to Salzburg Global about looking for literature in the wrong places, and why "America" is sticking around

Christopher Bigsby speaks at "Defining America" session

Christopher Bigsby, part of the faculty for “Defining America: New Writing, New Voices, New Directions” is one of the world’s most respected literary analysts. His definitively-British wit and skepticism are surpassed only by his panoramic understanding of literature. He wasn't afraid to sprinkle in some darker thoughts into the discussion when he addressed the participants one morning during the session. He says that while people strive to look for something new and exciting in literature, they often push many contemporary writers to the margins because they don’t fit a certain model of relevance. He also firmly denies others’ claims that you can’t isolate America and generalize about it anymore, because oh yes… there certainly still is an America.

 

Jonathan Elbaz, Salzburg Global Seminar: Much of your lecture at the session dealt with what the literary world is missing as it searches for something new. You’ve said that people are often looking in the wrong places.

Christopher Bigsby: There’s a tendency to look at one place within literature. There is kind of the ruling orthodoxy of the moment, as there is at anytime I suppose. And it has been recently to do with transnationalism, transculturism, and so on. There are a whole list of American writers who never get mentioned because they don’t fit into that model. A number of Nobel Prize winners are filtered out because people don’t think of them as Americans, even though they’re American citizens. And Jewish writers I find get excluded. There are an enormous number of exclusions because there’s a flavor of the month, a flavor of the last few years, which has had to with transnationalism.

SGS: What else are we missing?

CB: We don’t look at genre writers or crime writers, a number of whom have been enrolled in television, something they would never have touched before. Largely because of cable, writers have had a dominant position. They’re very significant, and they’re regarding television as a place where they can tell their stories publicly. Very often they write social stories to do with the state of America and because they’re crime writers—The Wire for example—which covers homicide on the street, these come from non-fiction books, which is another area which I think we’re not looking at. Non-fiction books have been absolutely key and they’re beautifully written, and if you look at the cinema, documentaries are making a comeback.

There are people in literature who think of writers in a very restricted way so I was trying to say I think we’re slicing the cake too thin, that there are other major figures who we’re no longer looking at.

SGS: What do you think causes this restricted view of contemporary literature? 

CB: We’ve had a succession of theoretical approaches to literature, or ways of understanding literature, and they follow fast upon one another. Each one has had its own jargon and restrictive language. Every time you do that, you exclude other things, and it’s the exclusionary nature of particularly American Studies that has slightly disturbed me. And they seem in America not to realize that transnationalism is fundamental to European Americanists. After all, they’re German or Dutch and they’re British and they look trans-Atlantically at America and see a different America. They’ve been doing it for centuries, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville.

SGS: With what frame do you find academics theorizing about modern America?

CB: Because of this insistence on the transnational and the other, there is a feeling that you can no longer talk about America, that you can no longer generalize about America because it’s a series of contentions, disagreements, and tensions within the society. Yet if you move away from America and view it from Europe, there’s most certainly an America. If there’s a drone flying overhead, you don’t ask if it’s being controlled miles away by a white Anglo Saxon Protestant or by a Latina woman. It’s America. And you’re on the end of that.

There is an America. Believe me, there is an America. And it’s not like Europe. There’s never been a dominant socialist party, and there’s a reliance on religion, despite its alleged secular nature that you don’t find in many European countries. Also, it’s attitude towards armed citizenry. Somehow 89 out of 100 Swiss men have guns, amazingly they don’t end up killing each other or walking into schools shooting each other. There’s something going on there that is American.

It’s a society on the pursuit of happiness, it’s that tomorrow things are going to be better. People went to America to reinvent themselves. They didn’t go there on the hope that one day things would get worse. They went there because they believed they would get better, and they would no longer be the same person.

SGS: At this SSASA session, there’s been an interesting balance of novelists and academics, coming from very different worlds. How do you think that has affected the discussion?

CB: When we were planning the session, I said that there ought to be writers at the seminar, not just academics talking about writers, but actual living writers, moving amongst us. And there ought to be someone from the world of publishing, particularly someone who knew about the new digital revolution. You have to disrupt the way academics can isolate themselves from the actual business of writing on the one hand, publishing on the other, and I’m tempted to say reading on the other. It was to disrupt those patterns.

There’s a feeling that you have to reject the past in order for the new to be born, which is again very American. Writing is circular, you go back to earlier influences, you build on the past, but you don’t reject it. I was quoting The Crucible, which is constantly produced around the world, and it would not be if it were a museum piece. It’s staged around the world because people see it applying to now, not to 1692 and not the 1950s and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which may have been the reason for it existing in the first place. Arthur Miller once said, “I don’t write plays, I write metaphors.” And the essence of a metaphor is that you’re constantly reinterpreting it. The past is not dead, and it can be new because every time you see a play for the first time, it’s new. It’s new to you, the observer, the audience. Every time you read a book it’s new to you.

SGS: How has being at Salzburg Global Seminar affected you, and how has the discussions and the environment here influenced you?

CB: It can do one of two things. It can confirm you in what you’re doing already because you’ve found that there are other people doing that as a kind of community. The other thing is that you can be exposed to ideas that are different, and have your ideas challenged. And you can discover things are happening that you didn’t know about. I came here and met the stage designer of A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman. That changed me, because I hadn’t really thought about design very much. That changed the way I went about things. And I started attending rehearsals. As an academic, I kept myself pure, judging the text from a distance. Now for the first time, I got in there. I talked to the directors, the actors, recorded what went on rehearsals. I went to libraries and looked at earlier drafts of the same plays. And certainly it transformed things. That was kick started here at Salzburg and I think that was valuable.