Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal

French Views of American Modernity: From Text to Subtext

rob kroes H H H H H H French Views of American Modernity From Text to Subtext This essay could be flippantly called a study in Occidentalism. Taking my cue from Edward Said’s seminal exploration of Orientalism as a repertoire of European representations concerning ‘‘the Orient,’’ I propose to look at ‘‘America’’ as similarly an object of the European imagination. Much like the Orient, the Occident—since way before the historical discovery of the Americas—has been a European invention. It has served as the screen for the projection of a wide range of European dreams, utopian as well as dystopian. Among the many repertoires in which ‘‘America’’ figured as the quintessential counterpoint to Europe, representing everything that Europe was not or not yet, would never be or wanted to become, modernity was one important point of reference. In spite of the many congruences among European constructions of ‘‘America,’’ irrespective of national setting, there have also been characteristically national discourses concerning ‘‘America.’’ In the following I look at one national setting and explore French views of ‘‘America,’’ seen as the site of the modern, politically and culturally. Establishing a Repertoire ‘‘America’’ and ‘‘modernity’’ are two words that when used in conjunction will most likely conjure up images of a twentieth-century America in its heyday as an industrial power, ushering in a new era of mass production and mass consumption. To the European gaze such images have o√ered the distant mirage of a Promethean technical prowess, of energy unleashed in many directions, going skyward in its high-rise architecture, going westward in its unbridled conquest of open space, going global through its penetration into new markets for mass entertainment. Nor, in the end, was this America only distant; in our century it has become a presence in Europe, seen as either threatening or liberating, opening vistas of a new world as so many versions of ‘‘the New World.’’ The sense of ‘‘the modern ,’’ so strongly centered in the late nineteenth century on bourgeois societies in Europe, now found its favorite site in America. In a Promethean 222 } rob kroes act of cultural robbery, America had taken over Europe’s leadership role in defining what modernity was all about.∞ Yet the association of modernity with America as an advanced technical civilization is not the only one that Europeans have tended to make. There are earlier views that cast America in the light of the modern, contrasting it to a Europe seen as mired in the past. Metaphors of America as having moved beyond Europe, having entered a new plane of history, may be traced back to the use of biblical prophecy by the early Puritans, yet in their secular versions at the time of the Revolution and of the early Republic they clearly echoed the Enlightenment hopes of the day in Europe. Again, though, in spite of the continuity, there was at the same time—much as in the case of the Puritans—a widespread sense, voiced loudly, that it was for Americans to realize these hopes. From early days onward, there have always been French voices contributing to a discourse that has conceived of America as a counterpoint to Europe. The contrasts that we shall focus on have played on underlying dimensions of new versus old, the future versus the past, the modern versus the antiquated. In these contrasts America has appeared in essentially three di√erent constructions. One is political, focusing on America as a successful Republican experiment; a second is humanist, focusing on ‘‘the American’’ as a ‘‘new man’’; the third is what we might call, for want of a better term, existential, focusing on America as empty space. An early French voice, heard widely at the time in many European countries, then forgotten until Americans rediscovered it more than a century later, turning it into one of their canonical definitions of American nationhood, was Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s. Born into the petite noblesse in Normandy, he had fought the British in North America under Montcalm and after the defeat of the French had moved south to take up farming in the province of New York. In his Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782, he asked the now famous question: ‘‘What, then, is the American, this new man?’’ The very choice of words is telling. The American is seen not simply as representing yet another di√erent nationality , adding to a European pattern of national di√erences. He is...