The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

American Literature

232 The Dancer and the Dance American Literature A paper delivered at the University of Damascus, Damascus, Syria, October, 2003, revised for this book I am a sort of “accidental tourist” in Syria. My wife Adelle and I are here because our son Sean, who is doing research on the nineteenth-century figure Sheikh Khalid Naqshbandi, invited us to visit. It was Sean who arranged this lecture, working through the good offices of the American Cultural Center, and it is he and his wife Kerry who are hosting us and guiding us throughout the visit. I have presented several programs dealing with Arabic poetry on my radio show, “Cover to Cover,” which originates in Berkeley, California—but I am far from being an expert on that subject. Writing of early Arabic poetry, one critic remarked, “Arabic poetry at the time of the Jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic era in Arabia) was rooted in the oral and developed within an audio-vocal culture; . . . this poetry did not come down to us in written form but was ‘anthologized’ in the memory and preserved through oral transmission . . . Two basic principles of pre-Islamic poetry were that it should be recited aloud and that the poet himself should recite his own poem.”1 In addition to this talk on American literature, you will hear a choral poem, “Overture,” recited aloud by “the poet himself”—along with his wife. The tradition of oral recitation by “the poet himself” has begun to spring up again in the United States, though for a long time a more “writerly” tradition had replaced it. As I came into poetry in the 1950s, I felt very strongly that the writerly tradition needed an infusion of oral energy. S It’s no easy task to talk about American literature and American culture in a short space. There is much, I’m sure, which you already know—and perhaps much as well about which you may be mistaken, just as Americans are often mistaken about Arab culture. More, not less, interchange between our countries is necessary: getting to know another person has many twists, turns, and surprises; getting to know another culture has even more. 232 Should I talk about rock and roll, about rap, about American Classical music, about American literature (novels and poetry but also history books, self-help books, sociological books, cook books, even comic books), about sports, about relationships between ethnic groups, about gender relationships, about American media (films, radio, television, newspapers, drama), about communications in America, about ways of travel, about the use of the Internet—about what someone called, many years ago, “the lonely crowd” of consumers or about the mass of happy consumers regularly postulated by American television programs? Should I talk about the look of American cities and the shapes of their buildings? All these things are relevant but can hardly be covered in a short period. In addition, two people may be looking at the same thing but registering it in entirely different ways. A nineteenthcentury British reviewer, faced for the first time with the astonishing verse of the American poet, Walt Whitman, remarked: “Mr. Whitman seems to believe that because the Mississippi River is long and the Missouri River is wide, every American is God.”That is of course not at all what Mr. Whitman believed, but one can understand how the reviewer arrived at his opinion. A friend told me that a literate, intelligent European—a friend of his— made a surprising remark about American literature. The European said that, while he often read American novels and poetry, he felt that they were never about anything. They were enjoyable, even very enjoyable, but at some deep level they had absolutely no subject matter. It is interesting that—in a widely-quoted remark—the creators of a popular American television program, Seinfeld, made a similar observation: they announced that Seinfeld was “about nothing.” Is it possible for anything to be about nothing? Shakespeare remarks in a resonant moment in King Lear, “Nothing will come of nothing.” Yet Western Culture insists that everything came from “nothing,” that the entire universe was created ex nihilo. I think what the European meant was that American literature often had no easily defined, obvious subject matter. This poem, “The Vampire” (1897) by the British poet Rudyard Kipling, is about the bad end people come to if they fall in love with an adventurous female: A fool there was and he made his prayer (Even as you and I...